The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Up to now we have tried to understand the human being from the point of view of the soul, in so far as this understanding is necessary in the education of the child. We must keep the three standpoints distinct—the standpoints of spirit, of soul and of body, and, in order to arrive at a complete anthropology, we shall study the human being from all three. The first to be taken is the psychic, or soul point of view because this is nearest to man in his ordinary life. And you will have felt that in taking sympathy and antipathy as principal concepts for the understanding of man we have been directing our attention to the soul. It will not answer our purpose if we pass straight over from the psychical to the physical, for we know, from what spiritual science has told us, that the physical can only be understood when it is looked upon as a revelation of the spiritual and also of the soul. Therefore to what we have already sketched in general lines as a study of the soul we will now add a contemplation of the human being from the point of view of spirit, and finally we shall come to a real “anthropology,” as it is now called, a consideration of the human being as he appears in the external physical world.

If you want to examine the human being effectively from any point of view you must return again and again to the separation of man's soul activities into cognition (which takes place in thought) and into feeling and willing. Up till now we have considered thinking (or cognition), feeling and willing in the light of antipathy and sympathy. Now we will study willing, feeling and cognition from the point of view of the spirit.

From the spiritual point of view, also, you will find a difference between willing, feeling and thinking-knowing. If I may speak pictorially (for the pictorial element will help us to form the right concepts): when you have knowledge through thought you must feel that in a certain way you are living in the light. You cognise, and you feel yourself with your ego right in the midst of this activity of cognition. It is as though every part, every bit of the activity which we call cognition, were there within all that your ego does; and again what your ego does is there within the activity of cognition. You are entirely in the light; you live in a fully conscious activity, if I may express myself in such a concept. And it would be bad indeed if you were not in a fully conscious activity in cognising. Suppose for a moment that you had the feeling that while you were forming a judgment something happened to your ego somewhere in the subconscious and that your judgment was the result of this process. For instance you say: “That man is a good man,” thus forming a judgment. You must be conscious that what you need in order to form this judgment—the subject “man” the predicate “is good”—are parts of a process which is clearly before you and which is permeated by the light of consciousness. If you had to assume that some demon or some mechanism of nature had tangled up the man with the “being good” while you were forming the judgment, then you would not be fully, consciously present in this act of thought, of cognition: in some part of the judgment you would be unconscious. That is the essential thing about thinking cognition, that you are present in complete consciousness in the whole warp and woof of its activity.

That is not the case in willing. You know that when you perform the simplest kind of willing, for instance walking, you are only really fully conscious in your mental picture of the walking. You know nothing of what takes place in your muscles whilst one leg moves forward after the other; nothing of what takes place in the mechanism and organism of your body. Just think of what you would have to learn of the world if you had to perform consciously all the arrangements involved when you will to walk. You would have to know exactly how much of the activity produced by your food in the muscles of your legs and other parts of your body is used up in the effort of walking. You have never reckoned out how much you use up of what your food brings to you. You know quite well that all this happens unconsciously in your bodily nature. When we “will” there is always something deeply, unconsciously present in the activity. This is not only so when we look at the nature of willing in our own organism. What we accomplish when we extend our will to the outer world, that, too, we do not by any means completely grasp with the light of consciousness.

Suppose you have here two posts set up like pillars. (See drawing.)

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Imagine you lay a third post across the top of them. Now notice carefully, please, how much fully conscious knowing activity there is in what you have done; how much fully conscious activity such as there is when you pass the judgment “a man is good,” where you are right in the midst of it with your knowledge. Distinguish, please, what is present as the activity of cognition here from that of which you know nothing although you had to do it with all your will: why these two pillars through certain forces support the beam that is lying on them? Up to now physics has only hypotheses concerning this, and if men believe that they “know” why the two pillars support the beam they are under an illusion. All the concepts that exist of cohesion, adhesion, forces of attraction and repulsion are, at bottom, only hypotheses on the part of external knowledge. We count upon these external hypotheses in our actions; we are convinced that the two posts supporting the beam will not give way if they are of a certain thickness. But we cannot understand the whole process which is connected with this, any more than we can understand the movements of our legs when we move forwards. Here, too, there is in our willing an element that does not reach into our consciousness. Willing in all its different forms has an unconscious element in it.

And feeling stands midway between willing and thinking-cognition. Feeling is also partly permeated by consciousness, and partly by an unconscious element. In this way feeling on the one hand shares the character of cognition-thinking, and on the other hand the character of feeling or felt will. What is this then really from a spiritual point of view?

You will only arrive at a true answer to this question if you can grasp the facts characterised above in the following way. In our ordinary life we speak of being awake, of the waking condition of consciousness. But we only have this waking condition of consciousness in the activity of our knowing-thinking. If therefore you want to say absolutely correctly how far a human being is awake you will be obliged to say: A human being is really only awake as long and in so far as he thinks of or knows something.

What then is the position with regard to the will? You all know the sleep condition of consciousness—you can also call it, if you like, the condition of unconsciousness—you know that what we experience while we sleep, from falling asleep until we wake, is not in our consciousness. Now it is just the same with all that passes through our will as an unconscious element. In so far as we as human beings are beings of will, we are “asleep” even when we are awake. We are always carrying about with us a sleeping human being—that is, the willing man—and he is accompanied by the waking man, by the man of cognition and thought: in so far as we are beings of will we are asleep even from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. There is always something asleep in us, namely: the inner being of will. We are no more conscious of that than we are of the processes which go on during sleep. We do not understand the human being completely unless we know that sleep plays into his waking life, in so far as he is a being of will.

Feeling stands between thinking and willing, and we may now ask: How is it with regard to consciousness in feeling? That too is midway between waking and sleeping. You know the feelings in your soul just as you know your dreams, only that you remember your dreams and have a direct experience of your feelings. But the inner mood and condition of soul which you have with regard to your feelings is just the same as you have with regard to your dreams. Whilst you are awake you are not only a waking man in that you think and know, and a sleeping man in that you will: you are also a “dreamer” in that you feel. Thus we are really immersed in three conditions of consciousness during our waking life: the waking condition in its real sense in thinking and knowing, the dreaming condition in feeling, and the sleeping condition in willing. Seen from the spiritual point of view ordinary dreamless sleep is a condition in which a man gives himself up in his whole soul being to that to which he is given up in his willing nature during his daily life. The only difference is that in real sleep we “sleep” with the whole soul being, and when we are awake we only sleep with our will. In dreaming as it is called in ordinary life we are given up with our whole being to the condition of soul which we call the “dream” and in waking life we only give ourselves up in our feeling nature to this dreaming soul condition.

If you look at the matter in this way, from the educational point of view, you will not wonder that the children differ with regard to awakeness of consciousness. For you will find that children in whom the feeling life predominates are dreamy children; if thought is not fully aroused in such children they will certainly incline to dreaminess. This must be an incentive to you to work upon such children through strong feeling. And you can reasonably hope that these strong feelings will awaken clear thought in them, for, following the rhythm of life, everything that is asleep has the tendency sometime to awaken. If we have such a child, who broods dreamily in his feeling life, and we approach him with strong feelings, after some time these feelings awaken of themselves as thoughts.

Children who brood still more and are even dull in their feeling life, will reveal specially strong tendencies in their will life. By studying these things you bring knowledge to bear on many a problem in child life. You may get a child in school who behaves like a true dullard. If you were immediately to decide “That is a weak-minded, a stupid child,” if you tested him with experimental psychology, with wonderful memory tests and all the other things which are done now in psychological pedagogical laboratories, and if you then said, “stupid child in his whole disposition; belongs to the school for the feeble-minded, or to the now popular schools for backward children,” you would be very far from understanding the real nature of the child. It may be that the child has special powers in the region of the will; he may be one of those children who, out of his choleric nature will develop active energy in his later life. But at present the will is asleep. And if the thinking cognition in the child is destined not to appear until later, then he must be treated appropriately so that in his later life he may be able to work with active energy. At first he seems to be a veritable dullard, but it may be that he is not that at all. And you must know how to awaken the will in a child of this kind. That means that you must work into his waking sleep-condition, his will, in such a way that later on—because all sleeping has a tendency to change into waking—this sleep is gradually wakened up into conscious will, a will that is perhaps very strong, only it is at present overpowered by the sleeping element. You must treat a child of this kind by building as little as possible on his powers of knowing, on his understanding, but by “hammering” in some things which will work strongly on the will, by letting him walk while he speaks. You will not have many such children, but in a case of this kind you can call the child out from the class—which will be stimulating to the other children, and educative for the child himself—and get him to say sentences and accompany his words by movements. Thus: “The (step) man (step) is (step) good (step).” In this way you combine the whole human being in the will element with the merely intellectual element in cognition, and you can gradually bring it about that the will is awakened into thought in such a child. It is not until we realise that in the waking human being we have to do with different conditions of consciousness, with waking, dreaming, and sleeping, that we are brought to a true knowledge of our task with regard to the growing child.

But now we can put this question: How is the true centre of the human being, the ego, related to these different conditions? The easiest way to arrive at a true answer to this is to postulate—what is indeed undeniable—that what we call the world, the cosmos, is a sum of activities. These activities express themselves for us in the different spheres of elemental life. We know that forces are at work in this elemental life. Life-force, for instance, is at work all around us. And between the elemental forces and life-force there is inwoven all that warmth and fire produces. Just think what an important part fire plays in our environment.

In certain parts of the world, for instance in South Italy, you only need to light a ball of paper and immediately great clouds of smoke will begin to rise out of the earth. Why does this happen? It happens because when you light the ball of paper and thus produce warmth you rarefy the air in this place, and what is usually at work in the forces under the surface of the earth becomes perceptible through the ascending smoke: the very moment you light the paper ball and throw it on the earth, you are standing in a cloud of smoke. That is an experiment that can be made by every traveler who goes into the neighbourhood of Naples. This is an example to show you that if we do not look at the world superficially we must recognise that our whole environment is permeated by forces.

Now there are also higher forces than warmth. They too are round about us. We walk among them continually in going about the world as physical men. Indeed our physical bodies are so constituted that we can endure this, though we are unaware of it in our ordinary knowledge. With our physical body we can pass through the world in this way.

With our ego, the youngest member of the human being, we could not pass through these world forces if this ego were to give itself up directly to them. This ego cannot give itself up to all that is round it and in the midst of which it is placed. This ego must still be guarded from having to pour itself out into the world forces. In course of time it will evolve so that it will be able to enter into these world forces. But it cannot do so yet. It is necessary, therefore, that in our fully awakened ego we be not forced to enter into the real world that is around us, but only into the image of that world. Hence in our thinking-cognition we have only images of the world—as already described when speaking from the point of view of the soul. Now we view it also from the point of view of spirit.

In thinking-cognition we live in images; and, in our present stage of evolution, while we live between birth and death in our fully wakened ego—it is only in images of the cosmos that we human beings can live, not yet in the real cosmos. Therefore when we are awake our body has to produce images of the cosmos for us. And then our ego dwells in these images.

Psychologists take endless trouble to define the relation between body and soul: they speak of the interplay between body and soul, of psycho-physical parallelism and many other things. All these are in reality childish concepts. For the process really at work is this: when the ego in the morning passes over into the waking condition, it enters into the body, but not into the physical processes of the body, only into the world of images, which the body creates from out of the external processes in the very depths of its being. In this way thinking-cognition is communicated to the ego.

In feeling it is different. There the ego does enter into the real body, not only into the images. But if, as it enters into the body, it were fully conscious, then (remember this is spoken now of the soul) it would literally “burn up” in the soul. If the same thing happened to you in feeling that happens to you in thinking when you penetrate with your ego into the images which your body has produced in you, you would burn up in your soul. You could not bear it. This penetration which is proper to feeling can only be experienced by you in a dreaming, dulled condition of consciousness. It is only in a dream that you can bear what really happens in your body in the process of feeling.

And what happens in willing you can only experience in a sleeping condition. You would experience something most terrible if in your ordinary life you were obliged to participate in all that happens when you will. The most terrible pain would lay hold of you if, for instance, as I have already indicated, you really had to experience how the forces brought to your organism by your food are used up in your legs when you walk. It is lucky for you that you do not experience this, or rather that you only experience it in a condition of sleep. For if you were awake it would mean the greatest pain imaginable, a fearful pain.

Hence you will understand it if I now characterise the life of the ego during what is usually called waking consciousness—which comprises: complete waking, dreaming-waking, sleeping-waking—you will understand it if I characterise what the ego actually experiences while it is living in the body in the ordinary waking condition. This ego lives in “thinking-cognition” in that it wakes up into the body; here it is fully awake. But it lives in it only in images. Hence man between birth and death lives in images only, when using his thinking-cognition unless he does such exercises as are indicated in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It.

Next the ego, in awaking, also sinks into those processes which condition feeling. In feeling life we are not fully awake, but dreaming-awake. How do we actually experience what we go through in feeling in this dream-waking condition? We actually experience it as what has been called “Inspiration,” inspired—unconsciously inspired—mental pictures. In the artist this is the centre whence rises all that comes out of the feelings into waking consciousness. There it is first worked through. There too are worked through all those “inklings,” which turn to image in waking consciousness. The “Inspirations” spoken of in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It are the same as these; only that the experience of the unconscious inspirations deep within the feeling life of every man is lifted, in these, into clarity and full consciousness.

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And when especially gifted people speak of their inspirations they really speak of that which the world has laid into their feeling life and has avowed to come into their fully awake consciousness by means of their capacities. It is a matter of world content, no less than thought content is world content. But in the life between birth and death these unconscious inspirations reflect world processes which we can only experience in dreaming, for if we experienced them otherwise our ego would burn up in these processes, or rather it would suffocate. You sometimes find suffocation setting-in in abnormal conditions. Suppose you have a nightmare. This means that the interplay between man and the outer air has come into consciousness in an abnormal way because something in this interplay is out of order. In trying to enter the ego consciousness it does not become conscious as a normal mental picture, but as a tormenting picture, as a nightmare. And just as this abnormal breathing in a nightmare is tormenting, so the breathing process as a whole would be torment if man experienced his breathing with full consciousness. He would experience it in feeling, but it would be torment to him. For this reason it is dulled, and so it is not experienced as a physical process, but only in the dreamlike feeling.

And as to the processes which take place in willing as I have already indicated to you they would mean fearful pain. So that we can add a third statement: the ego in action of the will is asleep. What a man really experiences in such action, with a greatly dimmed consciousness (a sleeping consciousness in fact), is unconscious intuitions. A human being has unconscious intuitions continually; but they live in his will. He is asleep in his will. Therefore in ordinary life he cannot call up these intuitions; it is only at auspicious moments in life that they well up. Then in a dim way the human being participates in the spiritual world.

Now there is something remarkable in the ordinary life of man. We all know the full consciousness in complete awakeness that we have in our thinking-cognition. Here we are, so to speak, in the clear light of consciousness; here we find certitude. But you know that people when thinking about the world, sometimes say: “We have intuitions.” Vague feelings emanate from these intuitions. What people then relate is often very confused, but it can also be, unconsciously, quite well-ordered. Finally when a poet speaks of his intuitions, that is entirely right for he does not produce them immediately from the region nearest to him—from the inspired representations of his feeling life—but he brings them forth, these completely unconscious intuitions, from the region of his sleeping will.

Anyone who looks deeply into these things sees that what appear as the chances of life, are governed by deep laws. For instance, when you read the second part of Goethe's “Faust” you want to study deeply how the structure of this remarkable verse could be achieved. Goethe was already old when he wrote the second part of his “Faust”—at least the greater part of it. This was how it was written: His secretary John sat at the writing table and wrote what Goethe dictated. If Goethe had had to write it down himself he would probably not have been able to produce such marvelously chiseled verses in the second part of his “Faust.” While he was dictating in his little room in Weimar, Goethe continuously walked up and down, and this walking up and down is part and parcel of the conception of the second part of “Faust.” While Goethe was producing this unconscious willed activity in walking, something of his intuitions pressed upwards and this outer motion brought to light what the other man wrote down for him on paper.

If you want to make a diagram of the life of the ego in the body it is possible to make it in the following way:

but if you do this you will not be able to make it clear why intuition, of which men speak instinctively, comes up more readily to the image knowing of every day than the inspired feeling which lies nearer to us. If you now want to draw the diagram correctly (for the above is not correct) you must draw it in the following way, and then you will be able to understand the facts more easily. For then you will say: knowing in images descends in the direction of arrow 1 into inspirations, and it comes up again out of intuitions (arrow 2). But this knowing, which is indicated by arrow 1 is the descent into the body.

And now observe yourself; you are at first quite quiet, sitting or standing, giving yourself up to thinking-cognition, to the observation of the external world. There you live in images. What further the ego experiences in the outward processes descends into the body—first into the feeling, then into the will. You do not notice what is in your feeling; neither at first do you notice what is in your will. Only, when you begin to walk, when you begin to act, what you first observe outwardly is not the feeling but the will. And then in the descent into the body and the re-ascent, which happens in the direction of arrow 2, it is nearer for intuitive willing to come to the image consciousness than for the dreaming inspired feeling. Hence you will find that people so often say: “I have a vague intuition.” In such a case what are called intuitions in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It are being confused with the superficial intuition of ordinary consciousness.

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Now you will be able to understand something of the formation of the human body. Imagine to yourself for a moment that you are walking but observing the world. Imagine to yourself that it was not your lower body that was walking with your legs, but that your head had your legs directly attached to it and that it had to walk itself. Then your observing of the world and your willing would be woven into a unity, and the result would be that you could only walk in a sleeping condition. Because your head is placed upon your shoulders and upon the remaining part of your body, it is at rest there. It is at rest, and since you only move with these other parts of your body, you carry your head. Now the head must be able to rest on the body, otherwise it could not be the organ of thinking-cognition. It must be withdrawn from the sleeping-willing; for the moment you brought it into movement, brought it out of relative rest into independent movement, it would fall asleep. It allows the body to carry out the real willing, and it lives in this body as in a carriage and allows itself to be conveyed by this carriage. And it is only because the head allows itself, as in a carriage, to be conveyed by the body, and because it acts while it is being conveyed during the resting condition, that the human being is awake in action. It is only when you see things in such connections as these that you can come to a true understanding of the form of the human body.

Your task is to gain an insight into what the human being really is. Up to now in our survey of general pedagogy we have endeavoured to comprehend this nature of man first of all from the point of view of the soul and then from that of the spirit. To-day we will continue from the latter point of view. We shall of course continually have to refer to the conceptions of pedagogy, psychology and the life of the soul, which are current in the world to-day; for in course of time you will have to read and digest the books which are published on pedagogy and psychology, as far as you have time and leisure to do so.

If we consider the human being from the point of view of the soul, we lay chief stress on discovering antipathies and sympathies within the laws which govern the world; but if we consider the human being from the spiritual point of view, we must lay the chief stress on discovering the conditions of consciousness. Now yesterday we concerned ourselves with the three conditions of consciousness which hold sway in the human being: namely, the full waking consciousness, dreaming and sleeping: and we showed how the full waking consciousness is really only present in thinking-cognition; dreaming in feeling; and sleeping in willing.

All comprehension is really a question of relating one thing to another: the only way we can comprehend things in the world is by relating them to each other. I wish to make this statement concerning method at the outset. When we place ourselves into a knowing relationship with the world, we are first of all observing. Either we observe with our senses, as we do in ordinary life, or we develop ourselves somewhat further and observe with soul and spirit, as we can do in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But spiritual observation too is “observation,” and all observation requires to be completed by our comprehension or conception. But we can only comprehend if we relate one thing to another in the universe and in our environment. You can form good conceptions of body, soul and spirit if you have the whole course of human life clearly before you. Only you must take into account that in this relating of things to each other, as I shall now explain, you have only the rudiments of comprehension. You will need to develop further the conceptions you arrive at in this manner.

For instance if you consider the child as he first comes into the world, if you observe his physical form, his movements, his expressions, his crying, his baby talk and so on—you will get a picture which is chiefly of the human body. But this picture will only be complete if you relate it to the middle age, and old age of the human being. In the middle age the human being is more predominantly soul, and in old age he is most spiritual. This last statement can easily be contended. People will certainly come and say: “But a great many old people become quite feeble-minded.” A favourite objection of materialism to those who speak of the soul and the spirit is that people get feeble-minded in old age, and, with true consistency, the materialists argue that even such a great man as Kant became feeble-minded in his old age. The statement of the materialists and the fact are quite right. Only they do not prove what they set out to prove. For even Kant, when he stood before the gate of death, was wiser than in his childhood; only in childhood his body was capable of receiving all that came out of his wisdom, and thereby it could become conscious in his physical life. But in old age the body became incapable of receiving what the spirit was giving it. The body was no longer a proper instrument for the spirit. Therefore on the physical plane Kant could no longer come to a consciousness of what lived in his spirit. In spite of the apparent force of the above-mentioned argument, then, we must be quite clear that in old age men become wise and spiritual and that they come near to the Spirits. Therefore in the case of people who, right into their old age, can preserve elasticity and life power for their spirit, we must recognise the beginnings of spiritual qualities. For there are such possibilities.

In Berlin there were once two professors. One was Michelet the disciple of Hegel, who was over ninety years old. And as he was considerably gifted he only got as far as being Honorary Professor, but although he was so old he still gave lectures Then there was another called Zeller, the historian of Greek philosophy. Compared with Michelet he was a mere boy, for he was only seventy. But everybody said how he was feeling the burden of age, how he could no longer give lectures, or, in any case, was always wishing to have them reduced. To this Michelet always said: “I can't understand Zeller; I could give lectures all day long, but Zeller, though still in his youth, is always saying that it is getting too much of a strain for him!” So you see one may find isolated examples only of what I have stated about the spirit in old age; yet it really is so.

If, on the other hand, we observe the characteristics of the human being in middle age, we shall get a first basis for our observations of the soul. For this reason, too, a man in middle life is more able, as it were, to belie the soul element. He can appear to be either soulless or very much imbued with soul. For the soul element lies within the freedom of man, even in education. The fact that many people are very soulless in middle life does not prove that middle age is not the age of the soul. If you compare the bodily nature of the child—kicking and sprawling and performing unconscious actions—with the quiet contemplative bodily nature of old age, you have on the one hand a body that shows its bodily side predominantly, in the child, and on the other hand you have a body that as it were withdraws its bodily side in old age, a body that to a certain degree belies its own bodily nature.

Now if we turn our attention more to the soul life we shall say: the human being bears within him thinking-cognition feeling and willing. When we observe a child the impression we get of the child's soul shows a close connection between willing and feeling. We might say that willing and feeling have grown together in the child. When the child kicks and tumbles about he is making movements which precisely correspond to his feelings at the moment; he is not capable of keeping his movements and his feelings separate.

With an old man the opposite is the case: thinking-cognition and feeling have grown together within him, and willing stands apart, independently. Thus human life runs its course in such a way that feeling, which is at first bound up with willing, gradually frees itself from it. And a good deal of education is concerned with this, with this freeing of the feeling from the will. Then the feeling which has been freed from willing unites itself with thinking-cognition. And this is the concern of later life. We can only prepare the child rightly for his later life if we bring about the proper release of feeling from willing; then in a later period of life as a grown man or woman he will be able to unite this released feeling with thinking-cognition, and thus be fitted for his life. Why is it that we listen to an old man, even when he is relating his life history? It is because in the course of his life he has united his personal feeling with his concepts and ideas. He is not telling us theories: he is really telling us about the feelings which he personally has been able to unite with his ideas and concepts. With the old man, who has really united his feelings with thinking-cognition, the concepts and ideas ring true; they are filled with warmth, and permeated with reality; they sound concrete and personal. Whilst with those who have ceased to develop beyond the stage of middle-aged manhood or womanhood the concepts and ideas sound theoretical, abstract, scientific. It is an essential factor of human life that the evolution of soul powers runs a certain course; for the feeling-willing of the child develops into the feeling-thinking of the old man. Human life lies between the two, and we can only give an education befitting this human life when our study of the soul includes this knowledge.

Now we must take notice that something arises straight-away whenever we begin to observe the world—indeed in all psychologies it is described as the first thing that occurs in observation of the external world; and that is sensation. When any one of our senses comes into touch with the environment, it has a sensation. We have sensations of colour, tones, warmth and cold. Thus sensation enters into our contact with our environment.

But you cannot get a true conception of sensation from the way it is described in current books on psychology. When the psychologists speak of sensation they say: in the external world a certain physical process is going on, vibrations in the light ether or waves in the air; this streams on to our sense organ and stimulates it. People speak of stimulus, and they hold to the expression they form, but will not make it comprehensible. For through the sense organ the stimulus releases sensation in our souls, the wholly qualitative sensation which is caused by the physical process (for example by the vibration of air waves in hearing). But how this comes about neither psychology nor present-day science can tell us. This is what we generally find in psychological books.

You will be brought nearer to an understanding of these things than you will by these psychological ideas, if, having insight into the nature of sensations themselves, you can yourself answer the question: to which of the soul forces is sensation really most closely related? Psychologists make light of it; they glibly connect sensation with cognition, without more ado, and say: first we have a sensation, then we perceive, then we make mental pictures, form concepts and so on. This indeed is what the process appears at first to be. But this explanation leaves out of account what the nature of sensation really is.

If we consider it with a sufficient amount of self-observation we shall recognise that sensation is really of a will nature with some element of feeling nature woven into it. It is not really related to thinking-cognition, but rather to feeling-willing or willing-feeling. It is of course impossible to be acquainted with all the countless psychologies there are in the world to-day, and I do not know how many of them have grasped anything of the relationship between sensation and willing-feeling or feeling-willing. It would not be quite exact to say that sensation is related to willing; rather it is related to willing-feeling or feeling-willing. But there is at least one psychologist, Moritz Benedikt of Vienna, who especially distinguished himself by his power of observation, and who recognised in his psychology that sensation is related to feeling.

Other psychologists certainly set very little store by this psychology of Moritz Benedikt, and it is true that there is something rather peculiar about it. Firstly, Moritz Benedikt is by vocation a criminal-anthropologist; and he proceeds to write a book on psychology. Secondly, he is a naturalist—and writes about the importance of poetic works of art in education, in fact he analyses poetic works of art to show how they can be used in education. What a dreadful thing! The man sets up to be a scientist, and actually imagines that psychologists have something to learn from the poets! And thirdly, this man is a Jewish naturalist, a scientific Jew, and he writes a book on Psychology and deliberately dedicates it to Laurenz Mullner, a priest, the Catholic philosopher of the theological faculty in the University of Vienna (for he still held this post at that time). Three frightful things, which make it quite impossible for the professional psychologists to take the man seriously. But if you were to read his books on psychology, you would find so many single apt ideas, that you would get much from them, although you would have to repudiate the structure of his psychology as a whole, his whole materialistic way of thought—for such it is indeed. You would get nothing at all from the book as a whole, but a great deal from single observations within it. Thus you must seek the best in the world wherever it is to be found. If you are a good observer of details, but are put off by the general tendency of Moritz Benedikt's work, you need therefore not necessarily repudiate the wise observations that he makes.

Thus sensation, as it appears within the human being, is willing-feeling or feeling-willing. Therefore we must say that where man's sense sphere spreads itself externally—for we bear our senses on the periphery of our body, if I may express it rather crudely—there some form of feeling-willing and willing-feeling is to be found. If we draw a diagram of the human being (and please note it is only a diagram) we have here on the outer surface, in the sphere of the senses, willing-feeling and feeling-willing. (see drawing further on) What then do we do on this surface when feeling-willing and willing-feeling is present, in so far as this surface of the body is the sphere of the senses? We perform an activity which is half-sleeping, half dreaming; we might even call it a dreaming-sleeping, a sleeping-dreaming. For we do not only sleep in the night, we are continually asleep on the periphery, on the external surface of our body, and the reason why we as human beings do not entirely comprehend our sensations, is because in these regions where the sensations are to be found we are only dreaming in sleep, or sleeping in dreams. The psychologists have no notion that what prevents them from understanding the sensations is the same thing as prevents us from bringing our dreams into clear consciousness when we wake in the morning. You see, the concepts of sleeping and dreaming have a meaning which differs entirely from that we would give them in ordinary life. All we know about sleeping in ordinary life is that when we are in bed at night we go to sleep. We have no idea that this sleeping extends much further, and that we are always sleeping on the surface of the body, although this sleeping is constantly being penetrated by dreams. These “dreams” are the sensations of the senses, before they are taken hold of by the intellect and by thinking-cognition.

You must seek out the sphere of willing and feeling in the child's senses also. This is why we insist so strongly in these lectures that while educating intellect we must also work continually on the will. For in all that the child looks at and perceives we must also cultivate will and feeling; otherwise we shall really be contradicting the child's sensations. It is only when we address an old man, a man in the evening of his life, that we can think of the sensations as having already been transformed. In the case of the old man sensation has already passed over from feeling-willing to feeling-thinking or thinking-feeling. Sensations have been somewhat changed within him. They have more of the nature of thought and have lost the restless nature of will—they have become more calm. Only in old age can we say that sensations approach the realm of concepts and ideas.

Most psychologists do not make this fine distinction in sensations. For them the sensations of old age are the same as those of the child, for sensations for them are simply sensations. That is about as logical as to say: the razor (Rasermesser) is a knife (Messer), so let us cut our meat with it, for a knife is a knife. This is taking the concept from the verbal explanation. This we should never do, but rather take the concept from the facts. We should then discover that sensation has life, that it develops, and in the child it has more of a will nature, in the old man more of an intellectual nature. Of course it is much easier to deduce everything from words; it is for this reason that we have so many people who can make definitions, some of which can have a terrible effect on you.

On one occasion I met a schoolfellow of mine, after we had for some time been separated and had gone our several ways. We had been at the same primary school together; I then went to the Grammar School (Realschule) and he to the Teachers' Training College, and what is more to a Hungarian College—and that meant something in the seventies. After some years we met and had a conversation about light. I had already learnt what could be learnt in ordinary physics, that light has something to do with ether waves, and so on. This could at least be regarded as a cause of light. My former schoolfellow then added: “We have also learnt what light is. Light is the cause of sight!” A hotchpotch of words! It is thus that concepts become mere verbal explanations. And we can imagine what sort of things the pupils were told when we learn that the gentleman in question had later to teach a large number of pupils, until at last he was pensioned off. We must get away from the words and come to the spirit of things. If we want to understand something we must not immediately think of the word each time, but we must seek the real connections. If we look up the derivation of the word Geist (spirit) in Fritz Mauthner's History of Language to discover what its original form was, we shall find it is related to Gischt (“froth” or “effervescence”) and to “gas.” These relationships do exist, but we should not get very far by simply building on them. But unfortunately this method is covertly applied to the Bible and therefore with most people, and especially present-day theologies, the Bible is less understood than any other book.

The essential thing is that we should always proceed according to facts, and not endeavour to get a conception of spirit from the derivation of the word, but by comparing the life in the body of a child with the life in the body of an old person. By means of this connecting of one fact with another we get true conception.

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And thus we can only get a true conception of sensation if we know that it is able to arise as willing-feeling or feeling-willing in the bodily periphery of the child, because compared with the more human inward side of the child's being this bodily periphery is asleep and dreaming in its sleep. Thus you are not only fully awake in thinking-cognition, but you are also only awake in the inner sphere of your body. At the periphery or surface of the body you are perpetually asleep. And further: that which takes place in the environment, or rather on the surface of the body, takes place in a similar way in the head, and increases in intensity the further we go into the human being into the blood and muscle elements. Here, too, man is asleep and also dreaming. On the surface man is asleep and dreaming, and again towards the inner part of his body he is asleep and dreaming. Therefore what is more of a soul nature, willing-feeling, feeling-willing, our life of desires and so on, remain in the inner part of our body in a dreaming sleep.

Where then are we fully awake? In the intervening zone, when we are entirely wakeful. Now you see that we are proceeding from a spiritual point of view, by applying the facts of waking and sleeping to man even in a spatial way, and by relating this to his physical form so that we can say: from a spiritual point of view the human being is so constituted that at the surface of the body and in his central organs he is asleep and can only be really awake in the intervening zone, during his life between birth and death. Now what are the organs that are specially developed in this intervening region?

Those organs, especially in the head, that we call nerves, the nerve apparatus. This nerve apparatus sends its shoots into the zone of the outer surface and also into the inner region where they again disperse as they do on the surface: and between the two there are middle zones such as the brain, the spinal cord and the solar plexus. Here we have the opportunity of being really awake. Where the nerves are most developed, there we are most awake. But the nervous system has a peculiar relationship to the spirit. It is a system of organs which through the functions of the body continually has the tendency to decay and finally to become mineral. If in a living human being you could liberate his nerve system from the rest of the gland-muscle-blood nature and bony nature—you could even leave the bony system with the nerves—then this nerve system in the living human being would already be a corpse, perpetually a corpse. In the nerve system the dying element in man is always at work. The nerve system is the only system that has no connection whatever with soul and spirit. Blood, muscles, and so on always have a direct connection with soul and spirit. The nerve system has no direct connection with these: the only way in which it has such a connection at all is by constantly leaving the human organisation, by not being present within it, because it is continually decaying. The other members are alive, and can therefore form direct connections with the soul and spirit; the nerve system is continually dying out, and is continually saying to the human being: “You can evolve because I am setting up no obstacle, because I see to it that I with my life am not there at all.” That is the peculiar thing about it. In psychology and physiology you find the following put forward; the organ that acts as a medium for sensation, thinking and the whole soul and spirit element, is the nerve system. But how does it come to be this medium? Only by continually expelling itself from life, so that it does not offer any obstacles to thinking and sensation, forms no connections with thinking and sensation, and in that place where it is it leaves the human being “empty” in favour of the soul and spirit, Actually there are hollow spaces for the spirit and soul where the nerves are. Therefore spirit and soul can enter in where these hollow spaces are. We must be grateful to the nerve system that it does not trouble about soul and spirit, and does not do all that is ascribed to it by the physiologists and psychologists. For if it did this, if for five minutes only the nerves did what the physiologists and psychologists describe them as doing, then in these five minutes we should know nothing about the world nor about ourselves; in fact we should be asleep. For the nerves would then act like those organs which bring about sleeping, which bring about feeling-willing, willing-feeling.

Indeed it is no easy matter to state the truth about physiology and psychology to-day, for people always say: “You are standing the world on its head.” The truth is that the world is already standing on its head, and we have to set it on its legs again by means of spiritual science. The physiologists say that the organs of thinking are the nerves, and especially the brain. The truth is that the brain and nerve system can only have anything to do with thinking-cognition through the fact that they are constantly shutting themselves off from the human organisation and thereby allowing thinking-cognition to develop.

Now you must attend very carefully to what I am going to say, and please bring all your powers of understanding to bear upon it. In the environment of man, where the sphere of the senses is, there are real processes at work which play their part unceasingly in the life of the world. Let us suppose that light is working upon the human being through the eye. In the eye, that is, in the sphere of the senses, a real process is at work, a physical-chemical process is taking place. This continues into the inner part of the human body, and finally indeed into that inner part where, once again, physical-chemical processes take place (the dark shading in the drawing). Now imagine that you are standing opposite an illumined surface and that rays of light are falling from this surface into your eye. There again physical-chemical processes arise, which are continued into the muscle and blood nature within the human being. In between there remains a vacant zone. In this vacant zone, which has been left empty by the nerve organ, no independent processes are developed such as that in the eye or in the inner nature of the human being; but there enters what is outside: the nature of light, the nature of colour. Thus, at the surface of our bodies where the senses are, we have material processes which are dependent on the eye, the ear, the organs which can receive warmth and so on: similar processes also take place in the inner sphere of the human being. But not in between, where the nerves spread themselves out: they leave the space free, there we can live with what is outside us. Your eye changes the light and colour. But where your nerves are, where as regards life there is only hollow space, there light and colour do not change, and you yourself are experiencing light and colour. It is only with regard to the sphere of the senses that you are separated from the external world: within, as in a shell, you yourself live with the external processes. Here you yourself become light, you become sound, the processes have free play because the nerves form no obstacle as blood and muscle do.

Now we get some feeling of how significant this is: we are awake in a part of our being which in contrast to other living parts may be described as a hollow space, whilst at the external surface and in the inner sphere we are dreaming in sleep, and sleeping in dreams. We are only fully awake in a zone which lies between the outer and inner spheres. This is true in respect to space.

But in considering the human being from a spiritual point of view we must also bring the time element of his life into relationship with waking, sleeping and dreaming. You learn something, you take it in and it passes into your full waking consciousness. Whilst you are occupying yourself with this thing and thinking about it, it is in your full waking consciousness. Then you return to your ordinary life. Other things claim your interest and attention. Now what happens to what you have just learnt, to what was occupying your attention? It begins to fall asleep; and when you remember it again, it awakens again. You will only get the right point of view about all these things when you substitute real conceptions for all the rigmarole's you read in psychology books about remembering and forgetting. What is remembering? It is the awakening of a complex of mental pictures. And what is forgetting? It is the falling asleep of the complex of mental pictures. Here you can compare real things with real experiences, here you have no mere verbal definitions. If you ponder over waking and sleeping, if you look at your own experience or another's on falling asleep, you have a real process before you. You relate forgetting, this inner soul activity, to this real process—not to any word—and you compare the two and say: forgetting is only falling asleep in another sphere, and remembering is only waking up in another sphere.

Only so can you come to a spiritual understanding of the world, by comparing realities with realities. Just as you have to compare childhood with old age to find the real relationship between body and soul, at least the elements of it, so in the same way you can compare remembering and forgetting by relating it to something real, to falling asleep and waking up.

It is this that will be so infinitely necessary to the future of mankind; that men accustom themselves to enter into reality. People think almost exclusively in words today; they do not think in real terms. How could a present-day man get at this conception of awakening which is the reality about memory? In the sphere of mere words he can hear of all kinds of ways of defining memory; but it will not occur to him to find out these things from the reality, from the thing itself.

Therefore you will understand that when people hear of something like the Threefold Organism of the State, which springs entirely out of reality and not out of abstract conceptions, they find it incomprehensible at first because they are quite unaccustomed to produce things out of reality. They do not connect any of their conceptions with getting things out of reality. And the people who do this least are the Socialist leaders in their theories; they represent the last word, the last stage of decadence in the realm of verbal explanations. These are the people who most of all believe that they understand something of reality, but when they begin to talk they make use of the veriest husks of words.

This was only an interpolation with reference to the current trend of our times. But the teacher must understand also the times in which he lives, for he has to understand the children who out of these very times are entrusted to him for their education.

We saw yesterday that we can only understand memory, the power of remembering, if we connect it with sleeping and waking, which are more open to outer observation. You will see from this that it must be our constant endeavour in our pedagogy to connect the unknown with the known, even in the formation of spiritual ideas.

You may say that sleeping and waking are actually even more obscure than remembering and forgetting, and therefore will not help much towards a comprehension of remembering and forgetting. Nevertheless, anyone who can observe carefully what man loses in disturbed sleep, can form some idea of the disturbance introduced into the soul when forgetting is not in a right relation to remembering. We know how in ordinary life if we do not sleep long enough the ego-consciousness becomes weaker and weaker, it becomes hypersensitive, too much given up to all the impressions of the outer world. Even when there is a relatively slight disturbance through sleep, or rather through lack of sleep, you can see that this is the case. Let us suppose that during one night you did not sleep well. I am supposing that your lack of sleep was not because you were particularly diligent and spent the night in working; then matters are different. But let us suppose that your sleep was disturbed by some bodily condition or by mosquitoes, in short by something more outside your soul. Then you would see that perhaps even on the next day things affect you more unpleasantly than usual. It has made you to some extent susceptible in your ego.

It is the same if we allow forgetting and remembering to play into our soul life in the wrong way. But when do we do this? When we cannot regulate our remembering and forgetting with our own will. There are very many people—and the disposition is seen even in early childhood—who doze through life. The outer things make an impression on them, and they give themselves up to these impressions, but they do not attend to them rightly; they allow the impressions to dart past them, as it were. They do not connect themselves properly with these impressions through their ego. And if they are not rightly given up to the outer world, then they also doze half asleep with regard to the mental pictures which rise up freely in them. They do not try of their own free will to call up the treasure of their mental pictures, when they are in need of it, in order properly to understand this or that; but they allow the thoughts, the mental pictures, which rise up from within to rise up of themselves. Sometimes this mental picture comes, sometimes that; but their own will has no special say in the matter. This is indeed the soul condition of many men, a condition which appears especially in this way in childhood.

It will help us to bring remembering and forgetting ever more under our control, if we know that in remembering and forgetting, conditions of sleeping and waking are playing into the waking life. How does remembering come about? It comes about in this way, that the will, in which we are asleep, takes hold of a mental picture down in the unconscious and raises it into consciousness. Just as the human ego and the astral body, when outside the physical and etheric bodies from the time of falling asleep until waking up, collect force in the spiritual world in order to refresh the physical and etheric bodies, so what is effected through the process of remembering comes from the force of the sleeping will. But the will is indeed “asleep.” and therefore you cannot give a child a direct training in the use of his will. For to try and make a child use his will, would be like admonishing him to be very good in his sleep, in order to bring this goodness into his life when he awakes again in the morning. Thus it is impossible to demand that this sleeping part, the sleeping will, should exert itself directly in single actions in order to regulate memory. What then can we do? Naturally we cannot demand that a person should by a single effort regulate his memory, but we can educate the whole man in such a way that he will develop habits in soul, body and spirit which conduce to such an exertion of the will on particular occasions. Let us look at this more in detail.

We will suppose that through our special treatment of the subject we awaken in the child a vivid interest in the animal kingdom. We shall naturally not be able to do this in a day. We must so plan our lessons that the interest we arouse for the animal world becomes greater and greater. The greater the interest such lessons arouse the more they affect the child's will; so that, when mental pictures of animals and ideas about them are required by the normally regulated memory, the will has the capacity to bring them forth from the subconscious, from the region of forgetting. Only by working through the force of habit and custom in man can you give order to his will and therewith also to his memory. In other words, you must understand how everything that awakens an intense interest in the child also contributes to a very great extent towards making his memory strong and efficient. For the power of the memory must be derived from the feeling and will and not from mere intellectual memory exercises.

But you will have seen from what I have explained that everything in the world, especially in the human world, is in a certain sense separated into different parts, and yet these parts work together. We cannot understand the human being with regard to his soul life if we do not divide the soul into thinking, or thinking-cognition, feeling and willing. But neither pure thinking-cognition, nor pure feeling, nor pure willing is ever present alone; the three always work together, weave together into a unity. And this is true of the whole human being even in the physical body.

I have pointed out to you that the human being is principally head in the head region, but that he is really all head: he is principally chest as a chest being, but he is all chest or breast-man, for the head too partakes of the chest nature, and so does the limb-man. The limb-man is principally limb-man, but really the whole human being is limb-man: for the limbs partake of the head nature and also of the chest nature: they take part, for example, in the breathing through the skin and if we want to come near to reality, especially the reality of human nature, we must be clear that all separation proceeds from unity: if we were only to recognise an abstract unity then we should learn to know nothing whatever. If we never differentiated, the whole world would remain vague, just as all cats are grey at night. Hence people who want to grasp everything in terms of abstract unities see the world grey in grey. On the other hand if we only differentiated, if we only separated, keeping everything apart, we should never come to a real knowledge: for then we should only understand the different parts, and knowledge would elude us.

Thus everything in man is partly of a knowing nature, partly of a feeling nature and partly of a willing nature. The knowing is principally knowing, but also of a feeling and willing nature; the feeling is principally feeling, but also of a knowing and willing nature: and the same is true of willing. We are now in a position to apply this to what we characterised yesterday as the sphere of the senses. In striving to understand what I am now going to bring before you, you must really lay aside all pedantry, otherwise you may perhaps find the most glaring contradiction to what I said before. But reality consists in contradictions. We do not understand reality unless we see the contradictions in the world.

The human being has altogether twelve senses. The reason that only five, six or seven senses are recognised in ordinary science, is that these five, six or seven senses are the most conspicuous, and the others which complete the twelve less conspicuous. I have often spoken of these twelve senses of the human being; we will call them to mind once more to-day. Usually people speak of the senses of hearing, warmth, sight, taste, smell, touch—and it even happens that the senses of warmth and touch are considered as one, which, in the realm of external objects would be something like regarding “smoke” and “dust” as one because they have the same-external appearance. It ought not to be necessary now to say that the senses of warmth and touch are two completely different ways in which a human being can relate himself to the world. But these are the senses differentiated by present-day psychologists with possibly the addition of the “sense of balance.” Some add yet another sense, but even so a complete physiology and psychology of the senses is not reached, because people do not observe that when a man perceives the ego of another human being he has a relationship to his environment similar to that which he has in the perception of a colour by the sense of sight.

In the present day people are inclined to mix everything up. When a man thinks of his conception of the ego, he thinks at once of his own soul-being and that usually satisfies him. Psychologists do almost the same thing. They do not consider in the least that it is one thing if I describe as “I” all that I experience as myself, the sum indeed of this experience, and that it is a completely different thing when I meet a man and through the kind of relationship I have with him describe him as an ego, an “I.” These are two quite different activities of the soul and spirit. In the first instance when I sum up the activities of my life in the comprehensive synthesis “I,” I have something purely inward; in the second instance when I meet another man and through my relationship to him discover that he too is something of the same kind as my ego, I have an activity before me which takes place in the interplay between me and the other man. Hence I must realise that the perception of my own ego within me is something different from the recognition of another man as an ego. The perception of the other ego depends upon the ego-sense just as the perception of colour depends upon the sense of sight, and the perception of sound upon the sense of hearing. The organ of seeing is open to our sight, but nature does not make it so easy for a man to see the organ which perceives the ego. But we might well use the word “to ego” (German: ichen) for the perception of other “I's” or egos as we use the word “to see” for the perception of colour. The organ for the perception of colour is external to man; the organ for the perception of egos is spread out over the whole human being and consists of a very fine substantiality, and on this account people do not talk about this “organ for perceiving the ego.” And this “organ for perceiving the ego” is a different thing from that whereby I experience my own ego. There is indeed a vast difference between the experience of my own ego and the perception of the ego in another. For the perception of the ego of another is essentially a process of knowledge, at least a process which is similar to knowledge, whereas the experience of a man's own ego is a process of will.

We have now come to the point where a pedant might feel very pleased. He might say: yesterday you said that the activities of all the senses were pre-eminently activities of the will: now you construe the ego sense and say that it is principally a sense of knowledge. But if you characterise the ego sense as I have tried to do in the new edition of my Philosophy of Freedom you will realise that this ego sense really works in a very complicated way. On what does the perception of the ego of the other man really depend? The theorists of the present day say things that are quite extraordinary. They say: you see the form of the outward man, you hear his voice, and moreover you know that you look human yourself like the other man, and that you have within you a being who thinks and feels and wills, who is thus also a man of soul and spirit. So you conclude by analogy: as there is in me a thinking, feeling and willing being, so is there also in the other man. A conclusion is drawn by analogy from myself to the other. This conclusion by analogy is simply foolishness. The inter-relationship between the one man and the other contains something quite different. When you confront another man something like the following happens. You perceive a man for a short time; he makes an impression on you. This impression disturbs you inwardly; you feel that the man, who is really a similar being to yourself, makes an impression on you like an attack. The result is that you “defend” yourself in your inner being, that you oppose yourself to this attack, that you become inwardly aggressive towards him. This feeling abates and your aggression ceases; hence he can now make another impression upon you. Then your aggressive force has time to rise again, and again you have an aggressive feeling. Once more it abates and the other makes a fresh impression upon you and so on. That is the relationship which exists when one man meets another and perceives his ego: giving yourself up to the other human being—inwardly warding him off; giving yourself up again—warding him off; sympathy—antipathy; sympathy—antipathy. I am not now speaking of the feeling life, but of what takes place in perception when you confront a man. The soul vibrates: sympathy—antipathy; sympathy—antipathy: they vibrate too. (You can read this in the new edition of Philosophy of Freedom.)

This however is not all. In that sympathy is active you sleep into the other human being; in that antipathy is active you wake up again, and so on. There is this quick alternation in vibrations between waking and sleeping when we meet another man. We owe this alternation to the organ of the ego sense. Thus this organ for the perception of the ego is organised in such a way that it apprehends the ego of another in a sleeping, not in a waking will and then quickly carries over this apprehension accomplished in sleep, to the region of knowledge, i.e., to the nervous system. Thus when we view the matter truly, the principal thing in the perception of another man is after all the will, but essentially a will which acts in a state of sleep, not waking. For we are constantly weaving moments of sleep into the act of perception of another ego. What lies between them is indeed knowledge that is immediately carried over into the domain of the nervous system. So that I can really call the perception of another a process of knowledge, but I must know that this process of knowledge is only a metamorphosis of a sleeping process of the will. Thus this sense process is really a process of the will, only we do not recognise it as such. We do not experience in conscious life all the knowledge which we experience in sleep.

As the next sense, but separated from the ego sense and from all other senses, we have to consider what I call the thought sense. The thought sense is not the sense for the perception of one's own thoughts, but for the perception of the thoughts of other men. Here too psychologists evolve most grotesque ideas. Above all, people are so very much influenced by the ideas of the connection of thought and speech that they believe that thought is always conveyed by means of speech. This is an absurdity. For with your thought sense you could perceive thoughts in external spatial gestures, just as easily as in spoken speech. Speech only mediates for the thoughts. You must perceive the thoughts in themselves through a special sense. And when the Eurythmy signs for all sounds are fully developed you need only see them done in Eurythmy to read the thoughts from the eurythmic movements, just as you take them in through hearing when they are spoken. In short, the thought sense is different from what is at work in the sense of sound for speech-sound. For next we have the sense of speech proper.

Then come the sense of hearing, the sense of warmth, the sense of sight, the sense of taste, the sense of smell and the sense of balance. We have, indeed, a sense-like consciousness that we live in balance. Through a certain inward sense like perception we relate ourselves to right and left, to forward and backward, we hold ourselves in balance so that we do not fall over. If the organ of our sense of balance is destroyed, we do fall over; we cannot then balance ourselves, any more than we can gain a contact with colour if the eye is destroyed. But not only have we a sense for the perception of balance, we have further a sense for our own movement, whereby we can tell whether we are at rest or in movement, whether our muscles are flexed or not. Thus besides the sense of balance we have the sense of movement and further still we have the sense of life, for the perception of the well-being of the body in the widest sense. Many people are indeed very dependent on this sense of life. They perceive if they have eaten too much or too little, and feel comfortable or uncomfortable accordingly, or they perceive whether they are tired or not, and again feel comfortable or uncomfortable as the case may be. In short the perception of the conditions of one's body is reflected in the sense of life.

Thus we get the table of the senses as twelve senses. The human being actually has twelve senses.

Now that we have disposed of the possibility of making pedantic objections to the knowledge character of some of the senses by recognising that this knowledge character rests in a subtle way upon the will, we can differentiate the senses yet further. First we have four senses; the sense of touch, sense of life, of movement and of balance. These senses are mainly penetrated by will activity. In the perception of movements by means of these senses the will works in. Feel how the will works into the perception of your movements, even when you carry out these movements while you are standing.

The will at rest also works into the perception of your balance. It works very strongly into the sense of life and it also works into the sense of touch, for when you touch anything it is really something taking place between your will and the environment. In short, you can say that the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life and the sense of touch are, in a limited aspect, senses of will. In the sense of touch a man sees externally that, for instance, he moves his hand when he touches anything, hence it is apparent to him that he has this sense. But it is not so apparent that he possesses the senses of life, of movement, and of balance. For since they are in special sense “will senses,” man is asleep with regard to these senses because he is asleep in his will. Indeed in most books on psychology you do not find these senses cited at all, because science itself is contentedly asleep to many things.

The next senses—sense of smell, sense of taste, sense of sight, sense of warmth—are chiefly feeling senses. It seems quite evident to ordinary consciousness that smelling and tasting are connected with feeling. This is not felt in the case of sight and warmth, and for a special reason. People do not perceive that the sense of warmth is very closely related to feeling rather they confuse it with the sense of touch. Things are wrongly confounded and wrongly differentiated. In reality the sense of touch belongs much more to the realm of will, whereas the sense of warmth is in the realm of feeling only. If people do not recognise the sense of sight as a feeling sense, it is because they have not carried out observations such as those for example, described in Goethe's Theory of Colour. There you have clearly set forth all that relates colour to feeling, and leads finally even to impulses of will. But how is it that people overlook the fact that in the sense of sight we have chiefly to do with feeling?

Actually we see things in the following way: in presenting an arrangement of colours to us, they show also the boundaries of these colours—lines and forms. But we do not usually attend to the way we actually perceive. If a man perceives a coloured circle he simply says: I see the colour, I see also the curve of the circle, the form of the circle. But there we have two completely different things looked upon as one. What you immediately perceive through the real activity of the eye apart from the other senses, is only the colour. You see the form of the circle by making use of the sense of movement in your sub-consciousness, and you make the form of the circle unconsciously in your etheric body, in your astral body, and then you raise it into knowledge. It is because the circle which you have taken in by means of your sense of movement comes up into knowledge, that what you have recognised as a circle connects itself with the colour which you perceive. Thus you call forth the form from your whole body by appealing to the sense of movement, which extends throughout your body. This matches what I have already explained to you: the human being actually executes geometrical forms in the cosmos and then raises them into knowledge.

Official science of the present day does not rise to an observation so fine as to distinguish between the seeing of colour and the perception of form with the help of the sense of movement, rather it mixes everything up. But in the future it will be impossible to educate through such confusion. For how is it possible to educate a child to use his sense of sight without knowing that the whole human being pours himself into the act of seeing by way of the sense of movement? This leads us on to another point: You are dealing with the act of seeing when you perceive coloured forms. This act of seeing, this perception of coloured forms is a complicated act. But since you are a unity you can re-unite in yourself what you have perceived in the two ways, through the eye and through the sense of movement. You would look at a red circle in a dull and blank way if you could not perceive the red in one way and the form of the circle in quite a different way. But you do not look upon it in a blank way because you look at it from two sides, the colour through the eye and the form with the help of the sense of movement, and life compels you to join the two together inwardly. There you form a judgment. And now you understand judgment as a living process in your own body, which comes about through the fact that the senses bring the world to you analysed into members. The world brings you what you experience divided into twelve separate members, and in your judgment you join the things together again because the separate parts do not want to continue as separate parts. The form of the circle is not content to remain mere form as it is to the sense of movement, neither is colour content to remain mere colour as it is perceived by the eye. The things compel you to combine them inwardly and you declare yourself to be inwardly ready to combine them. Thus the function of judgment becomes an expression of your whole being.

Now you see into the deep meaning of our connection with the world. If we had not twelve senses we should look at our environment like dullards, we should not be able to experience an inward judgment. But since we have twelve senses we have a fair number of possibilities of uniting what is separate. What the ego sense experiences we can connect with the other eleven senses, and that is true of each sense. In this way we get a large number of permutations in the combinations of the senses. Besides that, we have a great many possibilities through the fact that we can connect the ego sense for example with the thought sense and the speech sense and so on. There we see in what a mysterious way the human being is connected with the world. Through his twelve senses things are separated into their component parts, and the human being must attain the power to re-unite these component parts. In this way he participates in the inner life of the things. From this you will understand how infinitely important it is that man should be so educated that one sense should be developed with the same care as another, for then the connections between the senses, between the perceptions, will be sought quite consciously and systematically.

I have yet to add that the ego sense, thought sense, sense of hearing, and sense of speech are predominantly knowledge senses because the will in them is really sleeping will, the true sleeping will, in whose manifestations there vibrates also a cognitive activity. Thus willing, feeling and knowing are to be found even in the ego zone of man, and they live there with the help of waking and sleeping.

Let us be quite clear about this; to know the human being you must contemplate him from three points of view. When you are considering the spirit it is not enough to say, “Spirit! Spirit! Spirit!” Most people speak of spirit perpetually and are at a loss to handle what is given from the spirit. You can only handle it rightly if you treat it as conditions of consciousness. The spirit must be grasped by means of conditions of consciousness such as waking, sleeping and dreaming. The soul in man is grasped by means of sympathy and antipathy that is by means of conditions of life. These hold sway continuously in the unconscious. Actually the soul is in the astral body, life is in the etheric body, and within us there is always a correspondence between the two, so that of itself the soul comes to expression in the life conditions of the etheric body. And the body is perceived through conditions of form. Yesterday. (i.e., in another series of lectures published under the title Practical Course for Teachers) I used the spherical form for the head, the moon form for the breast and the linear form for the limbs; and we shall have more to say about the true morphology of the human body.

But we can only speak truly of the spirit if we describe how it finds expression in conditions of consciousness. We can only speak truly of the soul if we show how it lives between sympathy and antipathy, and of the body if we conceive of it in actual forms.

If you yourselves have a well developed knowledge of the growing child, permeated by your own will and feeling, then you will be able to teach and educate well. Through an educational instinct which will awaken within you, you will be able to apply the results of this will-knowledge in the different departments of your work. But this knowledge must be truly real, which means it must rest upon a true understanding of the world of facts. Now in order to come to a real knowledge of the human being we have sought to place him before our minds from the standpoint first of the soul, and then of the spirit. We must be clear that a spiritual conception of man makes it necessary for us to consider the different conditions of consciousness, and to know that, primarily, our life spiritually takes its course in waking, dreaming and sleeping; and that all the different manifestations of human life can be characterised as fully awake, dreaming or sleeping conditions. We will try once more to descend gradually from the spirit through the soul to the body, so that we have the whole human being before us and also may be able to sum these observations at the end into a kind of hygiene of the growing child.

Now, as you know, the period of life which concerns us in teaching and education is that which includes the first two decades; and this time, as we know, is further divided into three periods. Up to the change of teeth the child bears a very distinct character, shown in his wanting to be an imitative being; he wants to imitate everything he sees in his environment. From the seventh year to puberty we have to do with a child who wants to take on authority what he has to know, to feel and will. And only with puberty comes the longing in man to gain a relationship to the world through his own individual judgment. Therefore in dealing with children of primary school age we must remember that at this age they long for the sway of authority from the innermost depths of their beings. We shall educate badly if we are not in a position to hold our authority in this age.

Now what we have to do is to survey the whole life activity of the human being in a spiritual description. This activity as we have already shown from varied points of view, includes thinking-cognition on the one hand, and willing on the other; feeling lies between. Now with regard to thinking-cognition it is man's task between birth and death gradually to permeate it with logic, with all that enables him to think logically. But what you yourselves, as teachers, have to know about logic must be kept in the background. For logic is, of course, something pre-eminently scientific; it must be brought to the children only through your whole general attitude. But as teachers you will have to have a mastery of logic.

Our exercise of logic, that is, of thinking-cognition, is an activity of three members. Firstly, in our thinking-cognition we always have what is called conclusions. In ordinary life thinking is expressed in speech. If you examine the structure of speech you will find that in speaking you are continually forming conclusions. This activity of forming conclusions is the most conscious of all human activities. Man could not express himself in speech unless he were continually uttering conclusions nor could he understand what another person said to him unless he were continuously receiving conclusions. Academic logic usually dismembers conclusions, thus falsifying them at the outset, in so far as conclusions appear in ordinary life. Academic logic takes no account of the fact that we form conclusions every time we look at any one single thing. Suppose that you go to a menagerie and see a lion. What do you do first of all when you perceive the lion? First you bring what you see in the lion to your consciousness; and only by this bringing to consciousness do you gain an understanding of your perceptions of the lion. Before you went to the menagerie, in your ordinary life, you learned that beings that have the form and habits of the lion you are now looking at are “animals.” This knowledge acquired in ordinary life you bring with you into the menagerie. Then you look at the lion and find: the lion is doing just what you have learned that animals do. You connect this with what you have brought with you out of your knowledge of life and then you form the judgment: the lion is an animal. It is not until you have formed this judgment that you can understand the particular concept “lion.” The first thing you form is a conclusion; the second is a judgment; the last thing you come to in life is a concept. Of course you are not aware that you are continuously carrying out this activity; but it is only by means of this activity that you can lead a conscious life which enables you to communicate with other human beings through speech. It is commonly thought that one comes to concepts first of all. This is not true. The first thing in life is conclusions. And in reality, if when we go into the menagerie we do not exclude our perception of the lion from the rest of our experience, but bring it into line with the whole of our previous experience, then what we accomplish first in the menagerie is the drawing of a conclusion. We must be clear on this point; going into the menagerie and seeing the lion is merely a single act and it belongs to the whole of life. We did not begin living when we entered the menagerie and turned our attention to the lion. This action is linked on to our previous life, and our previous life plays into it too, and what we take out with us when we leave the menagerie will again be carried over into the rest of life. If now we consider the whole process, what is the lion first of all? He is first of all a conclusion. That is absolutely true: the lion is a conclusion. A little later, the lion is a, judgment. And a little later still, the lion is a concept.

If you open a book on logic, that is, one of the older sort, you usually find amongst the conclusions the following famous one: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal.” Caius is indeed the most famous logical personality. Now actually this splitting up of the three judgments: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal,” is only to be found in the teaching of logic. In real life these three judgments weave into one another, forming a unity, for the life in thinking-knowing is in continual flux. You make all three judgments simultaneously when you approach the man Caius. What you are thinking of him already contains these three judgments within it. That is to say: first comes the conclusion. And only after that do you form the judgment, which is here put as the conclusion: “Therefore Caius is mortal.” And the last thing you get is the individualised concept: “The mortal Caius.”

Now these three things, conclusion, judgment and concept, exist in the knowing process, that is, in the living spirit of man. What is their relation to each other in the living spirit of man?

The conclusion can only live in the living spirit of man: only there can it have a healthy life; that means: the conclusion is only completely healthy when it occurs in fully waking life. This is very important, as we shall see later.

Therefore you ruin the soul of the child if you make him commit to memory ready-made conclusions. What I am now saying—and shall work out in detail with you later—is of the most fundamental importance for your teaching. In the Waldorf School you will get children of all ages who bear the result of former teaching. The children will have been taught in conclusions, judgments and concepts, and you will soon experience the result of this. You will have to build on the knowledge that the children have already acquired, for you cannot begin at the beginning with each child. We are so placed that we cannot build our school up from the bottom but have to begin with classes of all ages. You will thus find that the children's souls have already been prepared, and in your method of teaching in the early days you will have to be very careful not to worry the children to draw ready-made conclusions out of their sum of knowledge. If these conclusions are too firmly fixed in the children's souls it is better to leave them dormant and try to appeal to the child's present life in the making of conclusions.

Judgment, also, will make its appearance, and this of course in the full waking life. But judgment can also sink into the depths of the human soul, to where the soul is dreaming. The conclusion should not sink into the dreaming soul; only the judgment can do this. Thus every judgment that we form about the world sinks down into the dreaming soul.

Now what does this really mean? What is this dreaming soul? It is more of the nature of feeling, as we have already learned. When in life we form judgments and then pass on from them and continue on our way, we carry these judgments with us through the world. But we carry them through the world in feeling. This has also the further implication that forming judgments brings about a kind of habit of soul. You will be forming the soul habits of the child by the way you teach the children to form judgments. You must be absolutely aware of this fact. For it is the sentence which expresses judgment, and with every sentence you say to a child you are contributing a further atom to the habits of that child's soul. Hence the teacher, who possesses authority, must always be conscious that what he says will become part of the habits of soul of the child.

Now, to come from judgment to concept: we must realise that when we form a concept it goes down into the profoundest depths of man's being; regarding the matter spiritually, it goes down into the sleeping soul. The concept makes its way right down into the sleeping soul, and this is that part of the soul that is constantly at work upon the body. The waking soul does not work upon the body. The dreaming soul works upon it a little; it produces what lies in its habitual gestures. But the sleeping soul works right into the very forms of the body. In forming concepts, that is in formulating the results of judgments in men, you are working right into the sleeping soul, or in other words, right into the body of the human being. Now when the human being is born, he has reached a high degree of completion as far as his body is concerned; and the soul can only develop in a finer way what has been given to the human being by the stream of inheritance. But the soul does carry out this refining work. We go about the world and we look at people. These people we meet with have quite distinct faces. What is the content of these physiognomies? They contain, amongst other things, the result of all the concepts which teachers and educators inculcated in these people during their childhood. From the face of the mature man streams out to us the content of the many concepts poured into the soul of the child; for, in forming the man's physiognomy it is with fixed concepts—among other things—that the sleeping soul has wrought. Here we see what power educational work has upon the human being. He receives his stamp right down into his very body through the forming of concepts.

The most striking phenomenon in the world to-day is that we find men with such unpronounced features. Herman Bahr in the course of a lecture in Berlin once described an experience of his in a very spirited manner. He said that even as far back as the 1890's, if you were to go to the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Essen, and walking down the street were to meet people coming out of the factories, you would have the feeling: no one of these people is different from another; I am really looking at one single person who is coming out like a picture in a duplicating machine; it is impossible to distinguish these people from one another. A very significant observation! And Herman Bahr made another observation which is also very significant. He said: when in the '90s you were invited out to dinner in Berlin you had a lady on your right and on your left hand, but you really could not distinguish them from each other, except that you knew one was on your right hand and the other on your left. Then another day you were perhaps invited somewhere else, and it might easily happen that you could not be sure: is this yesterday's lady, or the lady of the day before?

In short, a certain uniformity has come over humanity, and this is a proof that there has been no true education in the preceding years. We must learn from these things what is really necessary in the transformation of our educational life, for education has a deep and far-reaching influence on the whole cultural life of the times. Therefore we can say: at those times in life when man is not confronted with any one particular fact, his concepts are living in the unconscious.

Concepts can live in the unconscious. Judgments can only live as habits of judgment in the semi-conscious, in the dreaming life. And conclusions should really only hold sway in the fully conscious waking life. That is to say, you must take great care to talk over with the children beforehand anything that is related to conclusions, and not let them store up ready-made conclusions. They should only store up what can develop and ripen into a concept. Now how can we bring this about?

Suppose you are forming concepts, and they are dead concepts. Then you graft the corpses of concepts into the human being. You graft dead concepts right into the bodily nature of man when you implant dead concepts on him. What kind of a concept should we then give the children? It must be a living concept if man has to live with it. Man is alive, thus the concept must also be alive. If in the child's ninth or tenth year you graft into him concepts which are meant to retain their same form in him until he is thirty or forty years of age, then you will be imputing him with the corpses of concepts, for the concept will not follow the life of the human being as he grows and develops. You must give the child such concepts as are capable of change in his later life. The educator must aim at giving the child concepts which will not remain the same throughout his life, but will change as the child grows older. If you do this you will be implanting live concepts in the child. And when is it that you give him dead concepts? When you continually give the child definitions, when you say: “A lion is ...” this or that, and make him learn it by heart, then you are grafting dead concepts into him; and you are expecting that at the age of thirty he will retain these concepts in the precise form in which you are now say: the making of many definitions is death to living teaching. What then must we do? In teaching we must not make definitions but rather must endeavour to make characterisations. We characterise things when we view them from as many standpoints as possible. If in Natural History we give the children simply what is to be found, for example, in the Natural History books of the present day, then we are really only defining the animal for him. We must try in all branches of our teaching to characterise the animal from different sides showing for example how men have gradually come to know about this animal, how they have come to make use of its work, and so on. But in a reasonable curriculum this characterisation will arise of itself, if, for instance, the teacher does not merely describe consecutively, say: first the cuttlefish, and then the mouse, and finally man, each in turn, in natural-historical order—but rather places cuttlefish, mouse and man side by side and relates them with one another. The interrelationships will prove so manifold that there will result, not a definition, but a characterisation. A right kind of teaching will aim, from the outset, at characterisation rather than definition.

It is of very great importance to make it your constant and conscious aim not to destroy anything in the growing human being, but to teach and educate him in such a way that he continues to be full of life, and does not dry up and become hard and rigid. You must therefore distinguish carefully between mobile concepts which you give the child and such concepts as need undergo no change.

These concepts will give the child a kind of skeleton in his soul. Therefore you must realise that you have to give the child things which can remain with him throughout his life. You must not give him dead concepts of all the details of life—concepts which must not remain with him—rather must you give him living concepts of the details of life and of the world, concepts which will develop with him organically. But you must connect everything with man. In the child's comprehension of the world everything must finally flow together into the idea of man. This idea of man should endure. All that you give a child when you tell him a fable and apply it to man, when in natural history you connect cuttlefish and mouse with man, or when in teaching the children Morse telegraphy you arouse a feeling of the wonder of the earth as a conductor—all these are things which unite the whole world in all its details with the human being. This is something that can remain with him. But the concept “man” is only built up gradually; you cannot give the child a ready-made concept of man. But when you have built it up then it can remain. In fact it is the most beautiful thing you can give a child in school for his later life: the idea, which is as many-sided and comprehensive as possible, of man.

What is living in the human being tends to transform itself in life in a really living way. If you succeed in giving the child concepts of reverence and devotion, living concepts of all that we call the mood of prayer in the widest sense, such a conception, permeated by the mood of prayer, is then a living conception and it lasts right on into old age; and in old age it transforms itself into the capacity of blessing, of being able to impart to others what comes from a mood of prayer. I once expressed this in a public lecture in the following way: a man or woman will only be able to impart blessing in old age if he or she has learned to pray rightly as a child. If as a child one learned to pray rightly then as an old man or old woman one can bless rightly and with greatest power.

Thus to give children concepts of this kind, which have to do with the most intimate nature of man, is to equip them with living concepts; and this living element is open to change, it transforms itself, changing with the very life of man. Let us once more consider this threefold division of childhood and youth from a rather different point of view. Up to the change of teeth man has a desire to imitate; up to puberty he longs for an authority to look up to; after this time he wants to apply his own judgment to the world.

This can be expressed in another way. When the human being comes forth from the world of soul and spirit and receives the garment of his body, what is it that he really wants to do? He wants to make actual in the physical world what he has lived through in the past in the spiritual world. In certain respects the human being before the change of teeth is entirely involved in the past. He is still filled with the devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth? This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious assumption that the whole world is of a moral nature. This is not exclusively the case in souls of the present day (I have already drawn attention to this in a lecture here) but by the very fact of becoming a physical being man has the tendency at birth to proceed from the unconscious assumption that the world is moral. It is good therefore for the whole education up to the change of teeth and even beyond this age, that one should bear in mind this unconscious assumption that the world is moral. I drew your attention to this by reading you two extracts, for which I had first shown you the preparation; this preparation rested entirely on the assumption that one describes things from a moral aspect. (In the lectures Discussions with Teachers.) I tried to show in the first piece about the sheep-dog, the butcher's dog and the lap-dog how human morals can be reflected in the animal world. And in the poem about the violet, by Hoffman von Fallersleben, I aimed at giving a moral without pedantry for children up to seven or beyond; thereby working in harmony with this assumption that the world is moral. This is the greatness and sublimity in the outlook of childhood, that children are a race who believe in the morality of the world, and therefore believe that the world may be imitated. Thus the child lives in the past and is to a great extent a revealer of the pre-natal past—not of the physical past, but of the past of soul and spirit.

From the change of teeth up to the time of adolescence the child really lives continually in the present, and is interested in what is going on in the world around him. When educating we must constantly keep in mind that children of primary school age want always to live in the present. How does one live in the present? One lives in the present when one enjoys the world around one, not in an animal way, but in a human way. And indeed the child of this age wants also to enjoy the world in the lessons he receives. Therefore from the outset we must make our teaching a thing of enjoyment for the children—not animal enjoyment, but enjoyment of a higher, human kind—not something that calls forth in them antipathy and repulsion.

There have of course been various good educational experiments on these lines. But here we are faced with a certain danger, namely that this principle of making teaching a source of pleasure and enjoyment can easily deteriorate into something paltry and commonplace. This must not happen. But the only sure preventive is for the teacher and educator to be ever willing to raise himself above what is commonplace, pedantic and philistine. This he can only do if he never neglects to make a really living contact with art. For in seeking to enjoy the world in a human, and not in an animal way one proceeds from a definite assumption: namely that the world is beautiful. And from the time he changes his teeth until puberty the child really proceeds on the unconscious assumption that he shall find the world beautiful. This unconscious assumption of the child that the world is beautiful is not met by the regulations laid down for “object lessons,” regulations which are often very crude and are drawn up purely from a utilitarian point of view. But this assumption is met if one will try and immerse oneself in artistic experience so that the teaching in this period may be artistic through and through. It sometimes makes one extremely sad to read present-day books on education and to see how the good principle that education should be made into a source of joy does not come into its own because what the teacher discourses on with his pupils is inartistic and commonplace. To-day it is much in favour to conduct object lessons on the Socratic method. But the nature of the questions asked is utilitarian in the extreme instead of partaking of the beautiful. And here no demonstrations or showing of set examples will be of any help. It is not a question of instructing the teacher that he shall adopt this method or that when choosing set pieces for his object lesson. What is essential is that the teacher himself by living in art should see to it that the things he talks about to his children are artistic.

The first part of a child's life, up to the change of teeth, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is moral. The second period, from the change of teeth to adolescence, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is beautiful. And only with adolescence dawns the possibility of discovering: the world is true. Thus it is not until then that education should begin to assume a “scientific” character. Before adolescence it is not good to give a purely systematising or scientific character to education, for not until adolescence does man attain a right and inward concept of truth.

In this way you will come to see that as the child descends into this physical world out of higher worlds the Past descends with him; that when he has accomplished the change of teeth the Present plays itself out in the boy or girl of school age, and that after fourteen the human being enters a time of life when impulses of the future assert themselves in his soul. Past, present and future, and life in the midst of them, this too is planted in the growing child.

We have spoken of the nature of man from the point of view of the soul and spirit. We have at least thrown some light on these two aspects. We shall have to supplement the knowledge thus gained by uniting the point of view of the body with that of the spirit and of the soul so that we may get a complete survey of man, and may be able to pass on from this to an understanding of his external bodily nature also.

First we will recall—what must have struck us from various aspects—that the human being has different forms in the three members of his nature. We have pointed out that the head is essentially round; that the true nature of the bodily head is given in this spherical form. Next we pointed out how the chest part of man is a fragment of a sphere. Thus if we draw it diagrammatically we give the form of a sphere to the head, and a moon form to the breast—realising clearly that in this moon form a part of a sphere, a fragment of a sphere is contained. We must consequently, allow that the moon form of the chest can be completed. You will only rightly understand this central member of man's nature, the breast-form, when you regard it, too, as a sphere but as a sphere of which only one part, a moon, is visible, and the other part invisible.

From this it is perhaps apparent that in ancient times, when men had a greater capacity for seeing forms, they were not wrong in speaking of the sun as corresponding to the head, and of the moon as corresponding to the breast form. And just as when the moon is not full we see it only as a fragment of a sphere, so too we really only see in the breast form a fragment of the middle system of man. From this you can understand that the head form of man is a comparatively complete, self-enclosed thing. The head form reveals, physically, that it is a thing enclosed in itself. It is, so to speak, just what it appears. The head form is the one that conceals least of itself.

The breast part of the human being, on the other hand, conceals very much of itself. It leaves part of itself invisible. It is very important for a knowledge of man's nature to realise that a large part of the breast portion is invisible. We can say that the breast portion of man shows its bodily nature in one direction, that is, towards the back; but towards the front it passes over into the soul element. The head is altogether body; the breast portion of man is body towards the back, soul towards the front. Thus it is only in that we have our head resting on our shoulders that we carry about a real body. We consist of body and soul in so far as we separate out our breast from the visible part of the breast system and allow it to be worked upon and permeated by the soul.

Into these two members of the human being, head and breast (more obviously of course in the breast portion), the limbs are inserted. The third principle is the limb man. How can we understand the limb man? We can only understand this third member when we realise that certain parts of the spherical form remain visible, as with the breast portion, only in this case they are different parts. In the breast system a part of the periphery remains. In the limb system it is more an inner part consisting of the radii of a sphere that remains over; so that the inner parts of the sphere are inset as limbs.

We never arrive at the truth—as I have often said to you on other occasions—if we only analyse things and divide them, into parts. We must always interweave one thing with another; for this is the nature of living things. We can say: we have the limb man, which consists of the limbs. But the head also has its limbs. If you look carefully at the skull you find, for example, that attached to the skull are the bones of the upper and lower jaws. They are properly attached like limbs. Thus the skull, too, has its limbs: the upper and lower jaws which are joined to it. Only in the skull the limbs are stunted. In the other parts of man they have developed to their proper size, but in the skull they are stunted and are only a kind of bone structure. There is yet another difference:

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if you observe the limbs of the skull, that is, the upper and lower jaws, you will see that the essential thing in them is that the bone should perform its function. If you examine the limbs which are attached to our whole body, namely, when you consider the limb man proper, you find the essential fact is that they are surrounded by muscles and blood vessels. In a certain way the bones of our arms and legs, hands and feet are only inserted into our muscle and blood system. But in the upper and lower jaws—the limbs of the head—the muscles and blood vessels have shrunken. What does this mean? Muscles and blood are the organic instrument of the will, as we have already heard. Hence it is arms and legs, hands and feet that are principally developed for the will. Blood and muscles, which pre-eminently serve the will, are withdrawn, in a measure, from the limbs of the head, because what has to be developed in them is what tends to intellect, to thinking-cognition. If, then, you want to study how the will reveals itself in the outer bodily forms of the world, you must study the arms and legs, hands and feet. If you want to study how the intelligence of the world is revealed, then you must study the head, or rather the skull, as skeleton; you must see how the upper and lower jaws are attached to the head, and you must examine other parts of the head which are of a limb nature. You can regard all outer forms as revelations of what is within. And indeed you can only understand the outer forms when you look upon them as revelation of what is within.

I have always found that for most men there is a great difficulty in understanding the connection between the tubular bones of the arms and the legs and the shell-like bones of the head. Here it is particularly good for the teacher to master a conception remote from common life. And this brings us to a very, very difficult chapter, to the hardest, perhaps, of all the conceptions we have to gain in these educational lectures.

You know that Goethe was the first to turn his attention to the vertebral theory of the skull, as it is termed. What is meant by this? It means the application of the idea of metamorphosis to man and to his form. When we consider the human spinal column we perceive that one vertebra lies above another. We can take out the single vertebra, with its projections through which the spinal cord passes. Now Goethe was the first to observe (in a sheep skull, in Venice) how all head bones are transformed vertebrae. Imagine some organs puffed out and others indrawn—then you get the shell-like head bones out of the vertebral forms. This made a great impression on Goethe. It drove him to a conclusion of profound importance, namely: that the skull is a transformed, a more highly developed spinal column.

It is comparatively easy to see that the skull bones arise out of the vertebrae of the spine through transformation, through metamorphosis. It is very much harder, very difficult indeed, to see the limb bones—even the limbs of the head, the upper and lower jaws—as a metamorphosis, a transforming of the vertebral bones, or of the head bones (Goethe attempted to do this, but in an external way). Now why is this so difficult? The reason is that a tubular bone, wherever it may be, is indeed also a metamorphosis, a remodeling of a head bone, but a remodeling of a quite special nature. It is comparatively easy to think of a spinal vertebra metamorphosed into a head bone when you think of some parts of it being enlarged and some diminished. But you cannot so easily get the shell-shaped head bones out of the tubular bones of the arms and legs. To do this you have to adopt a certain procedure. You have to deal with the tubular bone of the arm or the leg as you do with a glove or stocking when you turn it inside out to put it on. Now it is comparatively easy to imagine what a glove or a stocking looks like turned inside out. But a tubular bone is not equal in all its parts; it is not so thin as to have the same form inside and out. The inside and outside are differently formed. If your stocking were of malleable material and you could give it an artistic form with all sorts of projections and indentations, and if you then turned it inside out you would no longer have the same form outside as that which would now be inside. And it is like this with the tubular bone. You must turn the inside outwards and the outside inwards and then you get the form of the head bone. Thus human limbs are not merely head bones metamorphosed, they are even more, head bones turned inside out. How does this come about? It is because the head has its centre somewhere within. It has its centre centrically, if I may put it so. Not so the breast. Its centre does not lie within the sphere. The breast has its centre very far away. (In the drawing this is only partially indicated because it would be too large if the whole were shown.) Thus the breast has its centre far away. Now where is the centre of the limb system? This brings us to the second difficulty. The limb system has its centre in the whole circumference. The centre of the limb system is a sphere; namely, the opposite of a point, the surface of a sphere. The centre is really everywhere; hence you can turn in every direction and radii ray in from all sides. They unite themselves with you.

What is in the head takes its rise in the head. What passes through the limbs unites itself within you. This is why I had to say in the other lectures that you must think of the limbs as inserted into the rest of our body. We are really a whole world, only what wants to enter into us from outside condenses at its end and becomes visible. A very minute portion of what we are becomes visible in our limbs. So that the limbs themselves are physical body, but the physical limbs are only the minutest atom of what is really in the limb system of man. Body, soul and spirit are in the limb system of man. The body is only indicated in the limbs, But in the limbs there is also a soul part; and there is within them, too, the spirit part which embraces the whole world.

Now we could also make another drawing of the human being. It could be said that man is, firstly a gigantic sphere which embraces the whole world: then a smaller sphere: and then a smallest sphere. Only the smallest sphere would be completely visible. The somewhat larger sphere would be partially visible. The largest sphere is only visible here at the end of it, where it rays in: the rest is invisible. Thus is the human form wrought by the whole world.

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And again, in the middle system, the breast system, we have the union of the head system and the limb system. When you consider the spine with the ribs attached to it you will see that it tries to close up in front. At the back the whole is enclosed; in front an attempt only is made, it does not quite succeed. The nearer the ribs are to the head the more they succeed in making the enclosure, but the further down they are the more they fail. The last ribs do not meet because here the force which comes into the limbs from the outside is working against them.

Now the Greeks still had a very clear consciousness of this connection of the human being with the macrocosm. And the Egyptians knew of it also, but in a somewhat abstract way. Hence, when you look at Egyptian or, indeed, any sculpture of antiquity you can see that this thought of the cosmos is expressed. You can only understand the works of the ancients if you know that their work was an expression of their belief: they saw the head as a small sphere, a heavenly body in miniature; and the limbs as part of a great heavenly body which presses its radii into the human form. The Greeks had a beautiful, harmonious and perfect conception of this, hence they were good sculptors. No sculptor of human form can be a master in his art to-day unless he is conscious of this connection of man with the universe. Lacking this he will only make a clumsy copy of the forms of nature.

You will know from what I have said to you that the limbs are more inclined towards the world, the head more to the individual man. To what then will the limbs especially incline? They will incline towards the world, to that world in which man moves and in which he is continually changing his position. They will be related to the movement of the world. Please understand this quite clearly: the limbs are related to the movement of the world.

In that we move about the world and perform actions we are limb men. Now what kind of task has the head with respect to the movement of the world? It rests on the shoulders, as I told you when speaking in another connection. And further, it has the task of bringing the movement of the world continuously to rest within itself. Place yourself with your spirit inside your own head; you can get a picture of how you are then placed by thinking of yourself, for a time, as sitting in a railway train; the train is moving forwards, but you are quietly sitting in it. In the same way your soul sits in your head, which quietly allows itself to be carried forwards by the limbs, and brings the movement to rest inwardly. If you have room you may even lie down in the railway carriage, you can rest—though this rest is really a deception, for you are rushing in the train (in a sleeper perhaps) across the earth. Nevertheless you have the sensation of rest. Thus the head brings to rest in you what the limbs perform in the world by way of movement. And the breast system stands betwixt them. It mediates between the movement of the outer world and what the head brings into rest.

Now, as men, our purpose is to imitate, to absorb the movement of the world into ourselves through our limbs. What do we do then? We dance. This is true dancing. Other dancing is only fragmentary dancing. All true dancing has arisen from imitating in the limbs the movement carried out by the planets, by other heavenly bodies or by the earth itself.

But now, what part do our head and breast play in this dancing, this imitation of cosmic movement in the movement of our limbs? The movements we perform in the world are stemmed or stopped, as it were, in the head and in the breast. The movements cannot continue through the breast into the head, for the head, lazy fellow, rests on the shoulders and does not let the movements reach the soul. The soul must participate in the movements while at rest, because the head rests on the shoulders. What then does the soul do? It begins to reflect from within itself the dancing movements of the limbs. When the limbs execute irregular movements the soul begins to mumble; when the limbs perform regular movements it begins to whisper: when the limbs carry out the harmonious cosmic movements of the universe, it even begins to sing. Thus the outward dancing movement is changed into song and into music within.

The physiology of the senses will never succeed in understanding sensation unless it can accept man as a cosmic being. It will always say that vibrations of the air are outside and that man perceives sounds within: how the vibrations of the air are connected with the sounds it is impossible to know. This is what you find in books on physiology and psychology—in one of them it comes at the end, in the other at the beginning, that is the only difference.

Now why is this? It comes about because those who practise psychology and physiology do not know that a man's external movements are brought to rest in the soul, and through this begin to pass over into tones. The same is also true with regard to all other sense impressions. As the organs of the head do not take part in the outer movements, they ray these outer movements back into the breast, and make them into sounds and into the other sense impressions. Here lies the origin of sensation. Here, moreover, lies the connection between the arts. The poetic, the musical arts, arise out of the plastic, the architectural arts: for what the plastic and architectural arts are without, the musical arts are within. A reflecting back of the world from within outwards—such is the nature of the musical arts. Thus does man stand amidst the universe. You experience colour as movement come to rest. You do not perceive the movement externally—just as when lying down in a train you may have the illusion of being at rest. You let the train move on its outward course. Similarly you let your body participate in the outer world in fine movements of the limbs of which you are unaware, while you perceive colours and tones inwardly. This you owe to the circumstance that you let your head, in its physical form, be carried at rest by your limb system.

I said that what I had to speak to you about to-day was indeed a difficult matter. It is particularly difficult because in this age nothing whatever is done to facilitate our understanding of these things. Care is taken that the accepted culture of our time should leave man in ignorance of such things as I have described to you to-day. What is it that comes about through our present-day education? Well, a man cannot altogether know what a stocking or a glove is like unless he turns it inside out, for otherwise he never knows the part which touches his skin. He only knows the part turned outwards. Similarly, as the result of present culture man only knows what is turned outwards. He has concepts for one half of man only; he will never understand the limbs. For the limbs have been turned inside out by the spirit.

Another way of describing our subject would be as follows: if we consider man in all his fullness, as we meet him in the world and consider him in the first place as limb man he reveals spirit, soul and body. If we consider him as breast man he reveals soul and body. If we consider him as head man he reveals body alone. The large sphere (see drawing): spirit, body, soul. The smaller sphere: body and soul. And the smallest sphere: body only.

At the council of A.D. 869 the bishops of the Catholic Church forbade humanity to know anything about the large sphere. At that time they declared it a dogma of the Catholic Church that the middle sphere and the smallest sphere alone had existence, that man consists of body and soul only, spiritual characteristics being merely a quality of the soul. One part of the soul, it was held, was of a spiritual nature. Since the year A.D. 869 for Western culture derived from Catholicism there has been no spirit. But when relationship to the spirit was abolished the relationship of man to the world was abolished also. Man has been more and more driven in upon his egotism. Hence religion itself has become more and more egotistic. And to-day we live in an age when once again, if I may say so, from a spiritual observation we must learn man's relationship to the spirit, and through it to the world.

Who is actually to blame for the materialism of natural science? It is the Roman Catholic Church which is chiefly to blame for our scientific materialism, because at the council of Constantinople in A.D. 869 it abolished the Spirit. What actually came about at that time? Consider the human head. Its development in the course of natural evolution shows to-day that it is the oldest of man's principles. The head is evolved immediately from the higher animals, and, further back again, from the lower animals. With respect to our head we are descended from the animal world. There is no denying it—the head is only a further evolved animal. If we look for the ancestry of our head we go back to the lower animals. Our breast was not joined to the head until later; it is not so animal as the head. We only received the breast in a later age. And the organs we human beings received last of all are the limbs.

These are the most human of all. They are not remodeled from animal organs, they are added later. The animal organs were formed independently from out of the cosmos and given over to the animal, and the human organs were later formed independently and united with the breast. The Catholic Church concealed the knowledge of man's relationship to the universe from him: that is to say, it concealed from him the knowledge of the true nature of his limbs; and in so doing it handed on to succeeding generations an incomplete knowledge of the breast and a complete knowledge only of the head, of the skull. Thus, materialism made the discovery that the skull is descended from the animals: and now it claims that the whole human being is descended from the animals, whereas actually the breast organs and the limb organisation were only added later. By hiding from man the nature of his limbs, and hence this relation with the world, the Catholic Church caused the later materialistic age to apply to the whole human being what only holds good for the head. The Catholic Church is really the creator of materialism in this domain of the doctrine of evolution. It is the duty of the present-day teacher of youth to know these things. For he should take an interest in all that has happened in the world. And he should know the true grounds of the things which have happened in the world.

We have tried to-day to see clearly how it is that our age has become materialistic, taking our start from something quite different, from the spherical form, the moon form and the radial form of the limbs. That is to say, we began with something seemingly quite remote in order to make clear to ourselves a tremendous fact in the history of civilisation. But a teacher above all, if he is to do anything with the human being, must be in a position to grasp the fundamentals of civilisation. These are essential to him if he is to educate rightly out of the depths of his own nature through his unconscious and subconscious relations with the child. For then he will have due regard for the structure of man; above all he will perceive in it relationships to the macrocosm. How different is the outlook which sees the human form merely as the development of some little animal or other, a more highly developed animal body. Nowadays, for the most part, though some teachers may not admit it, the teacher meets the child with the distinct idea that he is a little animal and that he has to develop this little animal just a little further than Nature has done hitherto. He will feel differently if he says to himself: here is a man, and he has connections with the whole universe; and what I do with every growing child, the way I work with him, has significance for the whole universe. We are together in the classroom: in each child is situated a centre for the whole world, for the macrocosm. This classroom is a centre—indeed many centres—for the macrocosm. Think what it means when this is felt in a living way. How the idea of the universe and its connections with the child passes into a feeling which hallows all the varied aspects of our educational work. Without such feeling about man and the universe we shall not learn to teach earnestly and truly. The moment we have such feelings they pass over to the children by underground ways.

In another connection I said how it must always fill us with wonder when we see how wires go into the earth to copper plates and how the earth carries the electricity further without wires. If you go into the school with egotistic feelings you need all kinds of wires—words—in order to make yourself understood by the children. If you have great feelings for the universe which arise from ideas such as we have discussed to-day, then an underground current will pass between you and the child. Then you will be one with the children. Herein lies something of the mysterious relationship between you and the children as a whole. Pedagogy in the true sense must be built on feelings such as this. Pedagogy must not be a science, it must be an art. And where is the art which can be learned without dwelling constantly in the feelings? But the feelings in which we must live in order to practise that great art of life, the art of education, are only kindled by contemplation of the great universe and its relationships with man.

In yesterday's lecture I treated of the bodily nature of man from the standpoint of spirit and of soul, and if you understand this survey you will readily be able to fit into it all that you need to know of the body's structure and growth. Thus, before we pass on in the remaining lectures to a description of the human body, we will throw further light on the subject from the side of soul and spirit.

You have realised that man is a threefold being, head-man, trunk man and limb man; and you saw how each of the three parts has a different relationship to the world of soul and spirit.

First let us consider the head formation of man. Yesterday we said that the head is mainly body; the chest is body and soul; and the limb man body, soul and spirit. But of course it is not an exhaustive description of the head to say that it is principally body. In actual truth things are not sharply divided from one another. Therefore we may equally well say that the head is also soul and spirit, but in a different manner from that of chest and limbs. Even at birth the head is principally body. That is to say the soul and spirit of the head have set their seal on the bodily form. The head (the first thing to evolve in the embryo) is a manifestation of what is essentially human, of the human soul and spirit. What relation has the bodily head to the soul and spirit? Because the head has reached something like completion in its bodily aspect, having evolved in former epochs through the necessary stages from animal to man, it is therefore capable of fullest physical development. The manner of the soul's relation to the head is this: at birth and throughout its earliest years the child's soul is dreaming in the head; while his spirit in the head is asleep.

Thus we find body, soul and spirit related to each other in the human head in a remarkable way. In our head nature we have a very highly developed body, a dreaming soul—truly a dreaming soul—and a spirit that is still asleep. Now we must see how we can bring this into harmony with the whole development of man. The characteristic feature of this development up to the change of teeth is that man is an imitative being. He imitates everything that he sees going on around him. He is able to do this owing to the fact that his head spirit is asleep. Hence in his head spirit he can dwell outside the head body. He can remain in the environment. For man's spirit and soul are outside his body in sleep. The child in spirit and soul, in his sleeping spirit and dreaming soul, is outside his head; he is with those who are around him. Because of this the child is an imitative being. Because of this, love goes forth from the dreaming soul towards his environment, particularly love towards his parents. Now when the child changes his teeth, and the second ones appear, this is an actual indication that the head development has reached its final stage. Even though the head as body is born complete yet it goes through a final stage of its development during the first seven years of life. The last stage culminates in the change of teeth.

What is it that is thus brought to an end? It is the moulding of the form. Man has now poured into his body all the hardening elements, all that gives him form. When we see the second teeth appear we can say that the first stage in man's intercourse with the world has come to an end. He has accomplished the formation of his body, its moulding and configuration. But whilst the head is occupied during this time in giving man his form and figure, something different is happening in the chest system.

For things are essentially different in the chest. From the very beginning, from birth, the chest is an organism both of body and soul. It is not solely body, as is the head, it is body and soul; but its spirit is still dreaming and outside of itself. When we observe a child in his early years, we see clearly that the chest organs, as contrasted with the head organs, are much more awake and more living. It would be quite wrong to look upon the human being as a chaotic conglomeration of parts.

With the limbs it is different again. Here from the first moment of life spirit, soul and body are intimately connected; they all flow into one another. Moreover it is here that the child is first fully awake, as those who have to bring up these lively, kicking little creatures in their babyhood very well know. Everything is awake, but absolutely unformed. This is the great secret of man: when he is born his head spirit is already very highly developed, but asleep. His head soul, when he is born, is very highly developed, but it only dreams. The spirit and soul have yet gradually to awaken. The limb man is indeed fully awake at birth, but unformed, undeveloped.

All we have really to do is to develop the limb man and part of the chest man. For after that it is the task of the limb man and chest man to awaken the head-man. Here we come to the true function of teaching and education. You have to develop the limb man and part of the chest man, and then let this limb man and part of the chest man awaken the other part of the chest man and the head-man. From this you will see that the child brings something of great consequence to meet you. He meets you with a perfected spirit and relatively perfected soul, which he has brought through birth. All you have to do is to develop that part of his spirit which is not yet perfect, and that part of his soul which is as yet still less perfect.

If this were not so, real education and teaching would be utterly impossible. For suppose we had to teach and educate the whole of the spirit which man brings into the world only in germ, then our stature as teachers would require to be equal to whatever the human beings in our care might become. If this were so you might as well give up teaching at once, for you could only educate people equal in brilliance and ability to yourselves. But you must of course be ready to educate people who, in some ways, are much more clever and brilliant than you are. This is only possible if in education we have to touch only one part of man, for we can educate this one part even if we are not as clever, as brilliant, perhaps not even as good, as the child potentially is. The thing we can accomplish best in our teaching is the education of the will, and part of the education of the feeling life. For we can bring what we educate through the will—that is through the limbs—and through the heart, that is through part of the chest man—to the stage of perfection we have reached ourselves. And just as a man servant (or even an alarm clock) can be trained to awaken a much cleverer man than himself, so a person much inferior in cleverness, or even in goodness, can educate someone who has greater possibilities than he. We must of course realise that we do not need to be equal to the developing human being in intellectual capacity; but as, once again, it is a question of the development of the will it is for the attainment of goodness that we must strive to the uttermost. Our pupil may become better than we are, but he will very probably not do so unless in addition to the education we give him he gets another education from the world or from other people.

I have shown you in these lectures that there lives a certain genius in language. The genius of language is truly gifted; it is cleverer than we are. We can learn a great deal from the articulation of language and the way its spirit dwells within it.

But genius is to be found in other parts of our environment as well as in language. Let us consider what we have now discovered: that the human being enters the world with a sleeping spirit and a dreaming soul, as far as his head is concerned; that hence it is necessary right from the beginning, from birth onwards, to educate him through his will, for we can only approach his sleeping head spirit by working upon his will. But if we could not approach his head spirit in some way we should inevitably have a great gap in human development. Man would be born—his head spirit would be asleep. We could not make the little child who lies kicking his legs do gymnastics, for instance, or Eurythmy. It wouldn't do. Nor can we give him a musical training as long as he can only kick his legs or yell. Neither can we bring art to him as yet. We find, as yet, no distinct bridge from the will to the sleeping spirit of the child. Later on, when we have managed to approach the child's will, we can work upon his sleeping spirit simply through the very first words we say for him to repeat.

Here we have a direct access to the will. For now what we release in the vocal organs through these first words will penetrate the sleeping head spirit as an activity of will, and will arouse it. But in the earlier years we have no direct bridge. No stream passes over from the limbs—where the will, the spirit, is awake—to the sleeping spirit of the head. Another mediator is needed here. We human educators have nothing at our disposal.

But now comes something, apart from us, which is both genius and spirit. Language indeed has its genius, but in the very earliest babyhood we cannot appeal to the spirit of language at all. But Nature has her own genius, her own spirit. If it were not so we human beings would perish, because a discontinuous education in babyhood would create a breach in our development. Here the genius of Nature intervenes and creates something which can build this bridge. Out of the limb system it produces a substance which partakes of the limb nature, as it is bound up with its development, and has something of that nature in it. This substance is milk. In woman the production of milk is connected with the upper limbs, with the arms. The milk producing organs can be said to be a continuation of the limbs, inwards. Both in the animal and human kingdoms milk is the only substance which has an inner connection with the limbs, which is, as it were, born of the limbs, and hence retains the power of the limbs within it. And as we give the child milk it works upon the sleeping spirit and awakens it—the only substance, essentially, which can do this. Here the spirit that dwells in all matter asserts itself in its rightful place. Milk bears its own spirit within it, and this spirit has the task of awakening the sleeping spirit of the child. This is no mere picture, it is a profound scientific truth that the genius in Nature, which creates the substance milk from out of secret depths, is the awakener of the human spirit in the child. We must learn to penetrate into these deep and secret relationships in the world, for only then shall we understand the wonderful laws that hold sway in the universe. Only then do we come to see what horrible ignoramuses we are when we theorise about matter as though it were some uniform mass that could be divided into atoms and molecules. Indeed it is no such thing. Matter is of such a nature, rather, that when milk, which is an integral part of it, is produced it has the inner need to awaken the sleeping human spirit. As in human beings and in animals we can speak of an inner need, namely of the force that lies at the basis of will, so can we speak of a “need” in matter generally. And if we want fully to comprehend the nature of milk we must say: when milk is produced it seeks to be the awakener of the child's human spirit. Thus everything we see around us springs to life if we regard it aright. Nor do we ever lose the relationship between man and what is in the world outside.

Thus, it is the genius of Nature herself which cares for the early years of human development. And when we educate and develop the child we are, in a certain sense, taking over the work of this genius. Through our words and actions, which the child copies, we begin to work upon the child through his will, and in so doing we continue the activity which we have left to the genius of Nature to carry out; for Nature has made use of the adult merely as a means to the process of nourishing the child with milk. From this you will perceive that Nature educates naturally; for her nourishment by milk is the first medium of education. Nature educates in a natural way. But we, as human beings, working to educate the child through language and through our actions, begin to educate in the realm of soul. For this reason it is so important to be conscious in our teaching and education that we cannot really undertake much with the head. At birth the head brings with it what it is destined to become in the world. We can awaken what is in the child, but we cannot implant a content into him.

Here we must indeed be clear that it is only certain definite things that can be brought into the physical earth existence through birth. The spiritual world has no concern with things which have come into civilisation only through external convention. For instance, the child naturally does not bring with him our conventional methods of reading and writing—I have shown this before in other connections. The spirits do not write, neither do they read. They do not read out of books, nor do they write with pens. It is only an invention of spiritualists that spirits use human language and can write. Language and writing as we know them are conventions of our civilisation. They belong to life on earth. And only when we bring this conventional reading and writing to the child, not by way of his head alone, but by way of his chest and limb systems too, can we really do him any good.

Now, of course, when the child is seven years old, he has not merely been lying in his cradle all the time, he has achieved something, he has been helping himself forward by imitating grown-up people, and he has seen to it that his head spirit is in some respects awake; then we can, of course, take advantage of this awakening to introduce reading and writing to him in a conventional way. But as soon as we do this we have a damaging effect upon the head spirit. This is why I told you that in good teaching reading and writing must only be given by way of art. The first elements of drawing, painting and music must precede it. For these work upon the limbs and chest man, and only indirectly on the head. But in time they awaken what is within the head-man. They do not misuse the head nature as we misuse it when we teach children the conventional reading and writing of to-day in a merely intellectual manner. If we first let the child draw, and then develop the written forms from its drawings, we shall be educating through the limb man up to the head-man. When, for instance, we make an “F” on the board for the children, and let them look at it and follow its form with their hands, we are then working through perception directly upon the intellect. That is the wrong way round. The right way is, as far as possible, to awaken the intellect through the will. We can only do this by passing over to intellectual education by way of artistic education. Thus, even in these early years when the child is first given into our charge, we must teach him reading and writing in an artistic way.

You must bear in mind that the child you are teaching and educating has something else to do besides what you do with him. He has all manner of things to do which only indirectly belong to your sphere of work. The child has to grow. Yes, he must grow, and while educating him you should realise that he must grow rightly. What does this mean? It means that you must not by your teaching, by your education, disturb the child's growth. You must not effect a disturbance of his growth; rather your teaching and education should only be such as is compatible with the child's growth. What I am now saying is of special significance for the primary school period. For just as up to the change of teeth there takes place the building up of forms from the head, so during the primary school period—from the change of teeth to adolescence—there takes place life-development, growth and all that goes with it. This belongs to the primary school period. This life-development which proceeds from the chest, only reaches completion with the onset of adolescence, Thus during the primary school period you have chiefly to do with the chest man. You cannot teach rightly unless you know that, while you are teaching and educating the child, he is growing and evolving through his chest organisation. Thus you are called upon to be the comrade of Nature, for Nature is developing the child through his chest organisation, through breathing, nourishment, movement, and the like. And you must become a good comrade to Nature's development. But how can you be this if you are ignorant of natural development? How can you teach if you do not know by what means you can work through the soul to retard or accelerate growth? It is within your power, to a certain extent, so to affect the healthy growth of the child, by way of the soul, that he shoots up, lanky and lean—a thing which could have bad results. Similarly it is within your power, to a certain extent, to check the child's growth in an unhealthy way, so that he will remain short and stumpy. You have this power, of course, only to a certain extent—but you have it. Thus you must have insight into the conditions of human growth. You must have this insight from the point of view of the soul and also of the body.

Now how can we gain an understanding of the growth forces from the point of view of the soul? For this we must turn to a better kind of psychology than that current to-day. This better psychology tells us that all that accelerates the growing forces of the human being, or makes him shoot up too rapidly, is related to a certain aspect of memory formation. Now, if we over-stimulate the memory, we cause the human being, within certain limits, to grow tall and thin. And if we over-stimulate his imagination and fantasy we retard his growth. Memory and imaginative fantasy have a certain secret relation to the forces of life development in man. And we must acquire the power of perceiving such a relation. For example the teacher should be able to do as follows: At the beginning of the school year he must pass his pupils through his mind in a comprehensive review; this is particularly important for those turning points of the ninth and twelfth year which I have described to you. (see Practical Course for Teachers) He must, then, hold a review, so to speak, of the bodily development of his children, and he must notice what they look like. And then at the end of the school year, or of some definite period, he must pass them once more in review and see what changes have taken place. And the result of these two reviews must be that he knows if some child or other has not grown as much as he should during that time; or perhaps another has shot up too much. Then the teacher must ask himself: How can I get the right balance between imagination and memory in the next school year, or period, so that I can counteract this irregularity?

This is why it is so important to keep the children right through their school life; why it is such a mad arrangement to pass the children on to another teacher every year. And, to look at the matter the other way round, at the beginning of the school year, or of the periods of development (seventh, ninth, twelfth year) the teacher gets to know his pupils. He gets to know those who are typically children of imagination, who transform everything in their minds, and those on the other hand who are typically children of memory, who easily notice and remember things. The teacher must get to know all this. And he does so by twice passing the children in review, as I have explained. But he must come to know whether a child threatens to grow too quickly or too slowly, not only by watching the outward physical growth, but also by means of the powers of imagination and memory themselves; for the child would be in danger of growing too fast if he had too good a memory, and too slowly if he had too much imagination. It is not enough to acknowledge the connection between body and soul in catchwords and phrases, we must be able to observe in the growing human being the working together of body, soul and spirit. Imaginative children grow differently from children endowed with a good memory.

The psychologists of to-day look upon everything as a finished product. Memory exists, and a description of it is given in the psychological book. Imagination exists; it, too, is described. But in the world of reality all things are in mutual relation to one another. And we can only come to know these mutual relations if we adjust ourselves and adapt our understanding to them. That is, we must use our power of understanding not in strict definition of everything, but in exercising mobility, so that the child can himself transform what he has acquired—transform it inwardly, in thought.

You see how the spiritual-soul element leads over of itself into the bodily element. So much so that we can say: through bodily influences, through milk, the genius of nature educates the child in his earliest years. From the change of teeth onwards it is we who educate the child by nurturing him in art in the way that is proper to him at this period. And as the end of the primary school age approaches there is another change. More and more there appear flashes of what is to come in later years, namely, the power of independent judgment, a feeling of personality, the independent impulse of will. We must meet all this by so arranging our curriculum as to make a right use of all that has to be contained in it.

When we consider the human body, we must relate it to the physical sense-world that surrounds it and maintains it, for there is a constant interplay between the physical body and the world, through which it is sustained. When we look out into the physical sense-world around us, we perceive mineral beings, plant beings, animal beings. Our physical body is related to the beings of the minerals, plants and animals. But the peculiar nature of this relationship is not immediately evident to superficial observation; we must penetrate deeply into the character of the kingdoms of nature if we are to understand this relationship.

When we regard the human being as physical body, what we first perceive is his solid bony frame and his muscles. When we penetrate further into him we perceive the circulation of the blood with the organs which belong to it. We perceive the breathing, we perceive the processes of nourishment. We see how, the organs are built up out of the most varied vascular forms—as they are called in natural science. We perceive brain and nerves, the sense organs. We have now to co-ordinate these various organs of the human being and their functions with the external world.

Let us begin with that part of the human being which at first appears to be the most perfect (we have already seen how the matter really stands), let us begin with the brain and nervous system which is closely linked with the sense organs. This part of the human organisation shows the longest earthly evolution behind it, so that it has passed beyond the form which the animal world has developed. Man has passed through the animal world, as it were, in relation to this, his head system, and he has gone beyond the animal system to the real human system—which indeed is most clearly expressed in the formation of the head.

Now we spoke yesterday of how far the formation of the head takes part in individual human evolution, how far the shape, the form of the human body proceeds from the forces which are to be found in the head. And we saw how the work of the head reaches a kind of conclusion with the change of teeth towards the seventh year. We should make clear to ourselves what really happens through the interplay between the human head, the chest organs and the limb organs. We should answer the question: what does the head really do in carrying out its work in connection with the chest-trunk system and the limb-system? It is continually forming, shaping. Our life really consists in this, that in the first seven years an intense forming force streams from the head right down into the physical form; and the head continues its aid by preserving the form, by ensouling it, by spiritualising it.

The head is involved in shaping the human form. But does the head build up our truly human shape? No, indeed it does not. You must learn to accept the view that your head is constantly trying, in secret, to make something different out of you from what you are. There are times when the head would like to shape you so that you would look like a wolf; at other times it would like to shape you so that you would look like a lamb. Then again, so that you would look like a serpent; it would like to make you into a serpent, a dragon.

All the shapes which your head really designs in you, you find spread out in nature, in the different animal forms. If you look at the animal kingdom you can say to yourself: that am I; but when the head produces the wolf form, for instance, my trunk system and my limb system constantly do me the favour of changing this wolf form into the human form. They are perpetually within themselves overcoming the animal element. They so master it as to prevent it attaining complete existence within them, they metamorphose it, they transform it. Thus the human being has a relationship to the animal world around him through the head system. But it is such that he is continually carried beyond the animal world in the creation of his body. What, then, really remains in you? You can look at a human being. Imagine that you have a man before you: you can make this interesting observation. You can say: there is the man. There is his head, and in the head a wolf is actually stirring, but it does not develop into a wolf; it is immediately dissolved by the trunk and the limbs. In the head a lamb is actually stirring; it is dissolved by the trunk and the limbs.

The animal forms are continually moving supersensibly in the human being, and are being dissolved. What would happen if there were a super-sensible photographer who could retain this process, who could preserve this process on a photographic plate, or on a series of photographic plates? What should we see on these plates? We should then see the thoughts of man. These thoughts of the human being are indeed a super-sensible correlate to that which does not come to expression in the sense-world. This continual metamorphosis out of the animal, streaming down from the head, is not expressed in the senses, but it works in man supersensibly as the process of thought. In reality this is present as a super-sensible process. Your head is not merely the lazy-bones on your shoulders, it is that which would really like to maintain you in animality. It gives you the forms of the whole animal kingdom; it would like animal kingdoms continually to arise. But by means of your trunk and your limbs you prevent a whole animal kingdom from arising through you in the course of your life: you transform this animal kingdom into your thoughts. Such is our relationship to the animal kingdom. We allow this animal kingdom to arise supersensibly within us, and then we do not allow it to come to sensible reality, but hold it back in the super-sensible. The trunk and the limbs do not allow these evolving animal forms to enter their sphere. If the head has too strong an inclination to produce something of this animal nature, the remaining organism struggles against accepting it, and then the head has to resort to migraine or to some similar head complaint in order to exterminate it again.

The trunk system is also related to our environment—not in this case, to the animal world but to the whole range of the plant kingdom. There is a mysterious connection between the trunk system of man, the chest system, and the plant world. The most important processes in the circulation of the blood, also in breathing and nourishment, all take place in the chest or trunk system. All these processes are in active interchange with what takes place outside in the physical sense-world of the plants, but in a very special way.

Let us first take the breathing. What does a man do in breathing? You know that he takes in oxygen, and through his life processes he changes oxygen into carbon dioxide by connecting it with carbon. Carbon is in the organism from the transformed foodstuffs. This carbon takes up the oxygen, and carbon dioxide gas arises through the union of the oxygen with the carbon. Now when man has the carbon dioxide within him it would be a splendid opportunity for him not to let it out, but to keep it there. And if he could free the carbon again from the oxygen, what would happen? Let us say that a man breathes in oxygen through his life processes, and allows it to form carbon dioxide by uniting with carbon; if now he were in a position to separate off the oxygen again within, and to work upon the carbon, what would then arise in the man? The plant world. The whole vegetable kingdom would suddenly grow up in man. It really could grow there.

For if you consider a plant, what does it do? Of course it does not breathe in oxygen in the same regular way as man, but it assimilates carbon dioxide. By day the plant is bent on getting carbon dioxide, it gives up oxygen. It would be bad if it did not do this; for then neither we nor the animals would have it. But the plant retains carbon, and out of this it forms starch and sugar and everything else it consists of. From this it builds up its whole organism. The plant world arises by building itself up from carbon which plants in their process of assimilation separate off from the carbon dioxide. When you look at the plant world, it is metamorphosed carbon, which is separated off by the process of assimilation, and this process corresponds to the human process of breathing. The plants also breathe to a certain extent, but it is different from the breathing process in man. The plant does breathe a little, especially in the night, but to say that plants can really breathe shows a superficial observation, and is like saying: “Here is a razor, I will cut meat with it.” The process of breathing in plants is different from the process of breathing in men and in animals, just as the razor is different from the table knife. The human process of breathing corresponds in the plants to the reverse process, that of assimilation.

From this you will understand that if you continued in yourself the process by which carbon dioxide has arisen, that is, if the oxygen could be given up again and the carbon dioxide could be transformed into carbon, as is done by nature in the world around you, then you could let the whole vegetable world grow up in you. You would have the materials for this within yourself and you could bring it about that you would suddenly blossom forth as plant world. You would disappear and the whole plant world would arise. This capacity of producing a plant world is indeed inherent in man, but he does not allow it to come to this point. His chest system has a strong inclination continually to produce the plant world. Head and limbs do not allow this to happen, they defend themselves against it. And so man drives out the carbon dioxide, and does not allow the plant kingdom to arise within himself. He allows the plant kingdom to arise out of the carbon dioxide in the outside world.

This is a remarkable interplay between the trunk-chest system and the sense physical world around us; for outside there is the kingdom of the vegetables, and the human being is continually having to prevent the process of vegetation from arising within him; if it does arise he must immediately send it out again so that he may not become a plant. Thus, in so far as the chest-trunk system is concerned, man is able to create the counter kingdom to the plant world. If you conceive the plant kingdom as positive, then man produces the negative of the plant kingdom. He produces, as it were, reversed plant kingdom.

What happens when the plant kingdom begins to behave badly in him, and head and limbs have not the power to nip it in the bud, to drive it out? Then the man becomes ill. The internal illnesses which come from the trunk system are ultimately due to this, that a man is too weak to check the plant-like growth as soon as it begins to arise within him. The moment there arises in us even a vestige of plant-like nature, the moment we fail to ensure that the plant kingdom which endeavours to grow in us shall be cast out to form its kingdom outside us—in that moment we become ill. And thus the essential nature of disease must be sought in this tendency towards plant growth in man. Naturally it is not true plants that grow, for after all the human interior is not a very pleasant surrounding for a lily. But through a weakening of the other systems of the trunk there can result a tendency towards the growth of the plant kingdom, and then man becomes ill.

Thus if we look at the whole plant world of man's environment we must say to ourselves: in a certain sense the plant kingdom presents pictures of all our illnesses. It is the wonderful secret in man's relationship to surrounding nature that not only (as we have shown on other occasions) do the plants represent pictures of his development up to adolescence, but in the plants around him, especially in so far as these plants are fruit bearing, he can see the pictures of his illnesses. This is a thing we may perhaps not like to hear, because it is natural to love the plant world aesthetically; and, when the plant unfolds in the world outside, this aesthetic attitude is justified. But the moment the plant seeks to unfold within man, the moment vegetation sets up within him, then what works outside in the many-coloured beautiful plant kingdom, works in man as the cause of illness. Medicine will become a science when it is able to show how each individual illness corresponds with some form in the plant world. Actually it is true that when man breathes out carbonic acid gas, he is, for the sake of his own existence, constantly breathing out the whole of the plant world which wants to arise in him. Hence it need not seem strange to you that when the plant begins to extend—beyond its ordinary plant nature, and produces poisons, these poisons are bound up with the processes of man's health and sickness. At the same time all this is bound up with the normal process of nourishment.

Indeed, nourishment, like the process of breathing, takes place in the chest-trunk system, at least in its initial stages, and must be considered in exactly the same way as breathing. In the processes of nourishment man also takes in substances from the world around him, but he does not leave them as they are; he changes them. He changes them with the help of the oxygen which he breathes in. As man transforms the substances taken up in nourishment, they combine with oxygen. This appears as a process of combustion, and it looks as though the human being were constantly burning within. This moreover is what natural science frequently says, that a process of combustion is going on in the human being. But it is not true. What takes place in the human being is no true process of combustion, but is a process of combustion (notice this carefully)—it is a process of combustion which lacks both beginning and end. It is merely the middle stage of the process of combustion; it lacks the beginning and end of it. The beginning and the end of the process of combustion must never take place in the human body, only the intervening part. It is destructive to the human being if the first stages of the process of combustion, such as take place in the forming of fruit, are carried on in the human organism; for instance when a man eats unripe fruit. The human being cannot carry out this initial process similar to combustion. The human being cannot endure this in himself, it makes him ill. And if he can eat a great deal of unripe fruit, like strong country people for instance, then he must be very closely related to the nature around him, for otherwise he would not be able to digest unripe apples and pears as he can the fruit which has been ripened by the sun. Thus it is only the middle process which he can carry out. In the processes of digestion the human being can only take part in the middle stage of all the combustion processes. Again, if the process is carried to its conclusion, to where, in the outer world, the ripe fruit would rot, the human being can have no part in it. Thus he cannot take part in the end stage either. He must excrete the food stuffs before this stage is reached. It is actually the case that the human being does not carry on the processes of nature as they take place around him, but he only goes through the middle part; within himself he cannot fulfil the beginning or the end.

Now we will look at something most remarkable. Consider breathing. It is the opposite to everything which takes place in the plant world around us. It is in a certain way the anti-plant kingdom. The breathing of man is the anti-plant kingdom, and it is inwardly connected with the process of nourishment which is the middle stage of the combustion process of the outer world. You see, there are two processes in our bodily chest-trunk system; this anti-plant process, which takes place through the breathing, is always at work in connection with the central portion of the other external processes. These two are constantly interrelated in their work. Here, you see, body and soul are combined. That which takes place through the breathing unites with the remaining nature processes, which however, as they take place in man, represent only the middle portion of Nature's processes. And this means that the soul life, which is the anti-plant process, unites with the humanised bodily life, namely the middle portion of the processes of Nature. Science may well search for a long time for the mutual relationship between body and soul unless it seeks it in the mysterious connection between the breath, which has become soul, and the middle part of the processes of Nature, which has become body. These processes of Nature neither arise nor decay in man. They take their rise outside him and only after he has excreted them should they decompose. Man unites himself in body with a central part only of the processes of Nature; and in the breathing processes he fills these Nature processes with soul.

Here there arises that delicate inter-weaving of processes to which the medicine and the hygiene of the future will have to devote very special attention. The hygiene of the future will have to ask: how are the different degrees of warmth interrelated in the world outside? How does warmth act when passing from a cooler place to a warmer, and vice versa? There are warmth processes at work in the external world; how does such a warmth process act in the human organism when this organism is placed into it? Man finds an interplay of air and water in the external process of vegetation. He will have to study how that works on the human being when he is placed in it, and so forth.

With regard to things of this kind the medicine of to-day has only made the very smallest beginning, scarcely even a beginning. When there is an illness the medicine of to-day sets the greatest value on finding the bacilli, the kind of bacteria which causes the illness. Then, when it has found that, it is satisfied. But it is much more important to know how it comes about that, at a particular moment of a man's life, he is prone to develop some suggestion of a vegetative process, so that the bacilli scent a comfortable place of sojourn. The important thing is to keep our bodily constitution in such a condition that it is not an agreeable hostelry for all vegetable pests; if we do this, these gentlemen will not be able to bring about too great a devastation in us.

Now there remains the question: in considering the human being physically in his relation to the outer world, what part do the bony skeleton and muscles really play in the human life process as a whole?

We now come to something which, in the science of today, is hardly regarded at all; but it is absolutely essential that you should grasp it if you want to understand the human being. Please notice what happens when you bend your arm. Through the contraction of the muscle which bends your forearm you are bringing into play a machine-like process. Imagine that it simply comes about in the following way. First of all, you have a position where upper and lower arm (or two corresponding laths or poles) lie in one and the same direction (drawing a).

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Then this position (drawing b) represents the bent arm.

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Suppose now you stretch a band (c) and then begin to roll it up. This lath here would carry out the movement indicated by the arrow in the drawing. It is a thoroughly machine-like movement. You also carry out mechanical movements of this kind when you bend your knee and when you walk. For in walking the whole mechanism of your body is brought into continuous movement, and forces are continuously at work. They are pre-eminently forces of leverage, but forces are actually at work. Imagine to yourselves that by some kind of photographic trick you could arrange that, when a man was walking, all the forces and nothing of the man, should be photographed; I mean the forces which he applies to raise his knee, to put it down again, to bring the other leg in front.

Nothing of the man would be photographed except the forces. If in the photograph you could see these forces developing, it would be a photograph of a shadow, and even in walking itself you would have a whole series of shadows. You make a great mistake if you believe that you live with your ego in your muscles and flesh. Even when you are awake you do not live with your ego in your muscles and flesh, you live with your ego principally in the shadow which you photograph in this way, in the forces used by your body when it moves. Grotesque though it may sound, when you sit down and press your back against the back of the chair, you live with your ego in the force which is developed in this pressure.

When you stand up you live in the force with which your feet press the ground. You live continually in forces. It is not in the least true that we live with our ego in our visible body. We live with our ego in forces. We only carry our visible body about with us; drag it along with us during our physical earth life until death. Even in the waking condition we live only in a force body. And what does this force body really do? It continually sets itself a peculiar task.

It is true, is it not, that when you are eating you take in all kinds of mineral substances? Even if you do not make your soup very salty, the salt is nevertheless in the food, and you are taking in mineral substance. It is necessary that you should take in mineral substance. What do you do with it? Your head cannot do much with it. Neither can your trunk-chest system. But your limb system prevents these mineral substances from taking on their own crystal forms in you. If you did not develop the forces of your limb system, then when you ate salt you would become a salt crystal. Your limb system, your skeleton and your muscular system have a constant tendency to work against the mineral formation of the earth, that is, to dissolve the minerals. The forces which dissolve the minerals in the human being come from the limb system. If a morbid disturbance goes beyond the merely vegetable process, that is, if the body has the tendency not only to allow plant life to appear, but also the process of mineral crystallisation, then a more severe, a more destructive form of illness is set up; for instance, diabetes. Then the body is not able to apply the force of the limbs which it receives from the universe to dissolve the mineral. In reality it should be constantly dissolving the mineral. If to-day men cannot master those forms of illness which arise from unhealthy mineralisation in the human body, it is largely because we cannot adequately apply the antidote which we must find in connection with the sense organs, the brain, the nerve fibres, etc. In order to overcome gout, diabetes and similar illnesses, we ought to be able to use in some form the apparent substances (* German: Scheinstoge)—I call them apparent substances advisedly—we ought to use this decaying matter, which is in the sense organs, in the brain and nerves. What is really healing for humanity in this sphere will only be reached when the relationship between man and nature has been thoroughly investigated from the point of view which I have given you to-day.

The human body is only to be explained when we know the processes that take place in it: when we know that the human being must dissolve within him the mineral, must reverse within him the plant kingdom, must raise above him, that is, must spiritualise, the animal kingdom. And all that a teacher ought to know about the evolution of the body has—as its foundation—what I have placed before you here in these anthropological, anthroposophical considerations.

The insight we have won through these lectures will enable us to understand man in his relationship to the world around him. It will enable us also to deal with the child in his relationship to the world. It is only a question of being able to apply this insight in life in the right way. We have to think of the relation of man to the outside world as twofold, for we have found that the constitution of the limb man is in complete contrast to that of the head man. We must accustom ourselves to the difficult thought that the only way to understand the forms of the limb man is to imagine the head forms turned inside out like a glove or stocking. And in this is an expression of something of great significance in the whole life of man. If we were to draw it as a diagram we might say: the head is formed as though it were pressed outwards from within, is “bulged” outwards from within. The limbs of man we can picture as pressed inwards from without through being turned inside out at the forehead. (This turning inside out is a process of great significance in the life of man.) Consider your forehead, and imagine that your inner being is striving from within outwards towards your forehead. Now on the palm of your hand or on the sole of your foot, a kind of pressure is being exercised, like the pressure on your forehead from within, only in the reverse direction. So that when you hold your hand with the palm facing outwards, or when you place the sole of your foot on the ground, there streams from without through your sole, or through your palm, what streams towards your forehead from within. This is a fact of remarkable importance. It is so very important because it enables us to see the actual disposition of the spiritual-soul element in man.

This spirit-soul element, as you now see, is a stream. The spirit-soul passes through man as a stream, as a current.

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And what is man in respect to this soul and spirit? Imagine a flowing stream of water stopped by a dam, so that it is checked and floods back on itself. So does the spirit and soul gush over in man. The human being is like a dam for the spirit and soul. They might flow through him unhindered, but he retards and keeps them back. Man causes spirit and soul to be dammed up within him. Now this process, which I have likened to a stream, is a very remarkable one. I have likened the active flow of spirit and soul through man to a stream. But actually—what is it from the point of view of the external bodily nature? It is a perpetual suction of the human being. Man confronts the external world. Spirit and soul are continuously striving to absorb him, to suck him in. This is why we continuously shed flakes and bits of ourselves. And if the spirit is not strong enough to do it we have to cut off bits of ourselves, e.g. the finger nails—because the spirit, coming from without, seeks to devour and destroy them. The spirit destroys everything, and the body checks this destructiveness of the spirit. And in man a balance must be created between the destructive spirit and soul and the continually constructive activity of the body. The chest abdomen system is inserted amidst this stream. And it is this chest abdomen system which throws itself against the destructive onset of spirit and soul, and which permeates the human being with the material substance it produces. From this you will see that the limbs of man which reach out beyond the chest abdomen system are really the most spiritual thing of all, for there is less of the substance-creating process going on in the limbs than anywhere else in man. The only thing that brings a material element into the limbs is that part of the metabolic process which is sent into the limbs by the chest abdomen system. Our limbs are spirit to a high degree, and it is the limbs which consume our body when they move.

And the task of the body is to develop in itself what is potentially in man from his birth. If the limbs move too little or move in the wrong way, they do not consume enough of the body. The abdomen chest system is then in the fortunate position—fortunate, that is, for itself—that an insufficient quantity of it is consumed by the limbs. It uses what is left over to produce surplus substantiality in man. This surplus substantiality then permeates what is native to man from his birth, that is, the bodily nature proper to him as a being born of spirit and soul. It permeates what he ought to have with something he ought not to have, with a substantiality which belongs to his earthly nature only, a substantiality having no tendency to spirit and soul in the true sense of the words: it permeates him with fat. Now when this fat is deposited in man to an abnormal extent it causes too much obstruction to the incoming consuming process of spirit and soul; with the result that the path of this spirit and soul process to the head system is made difficult. For this reason it is not right to allow children to have too much fat producing food. It causes their heads to be separated off from the soul-spiritual stream. For fat obstructs soul and spirit, and renders the head empty. It is a question of having the tact to co-operate with the child's home life and see to it that he does not get too fat. Later in life getting fat depends on all kinds of other things, also some abnormally constituted children tend to get fat because they are weak—but with normal children it is always possible to prevent excessive fat by giving a suitable diet.

We shall not, however, have the right feeling of responsibility towards these things unless we appreciate their very great significance. We must realise that if we allow the child to accumulate too much fat we are encroaching on the work of the world process. The world has a purpose to achieve in man, which it signifies by letting soul and spirit flow through him. We definitely encroach on a cosmic process if we let the child get too fat.

Now something very remarkable happens in man's head: as all spirit and soul is dammed up there it splashes back like water meeting a weir. It is like this: the spirit and soul brings matter with it, as the Mississippi brings sand, and this matter sprays back right inside the brain; thus where spirit and soul is dammed up we have streams surging one over the other. And in this beating back of the material element matter is continually perishing in the brain. And when matter, which is still permeated with life, collapses and is driven back, as I described, there then arises the nerve. Nerve comes into existence wherever matter which has been driven through life by the spirit perishes and decays within the living organism. Hence nerve is decayed matter within the living organism: life gets jammed, as it were, gets dammed up in itself, matter crumbles away and decays. Hence arise channels in all parts of the body filled with decayed matter, these are the nerves. Here spirit and soul can play back into man. Spirit and soul sprays through man along the nerves; for spirit and soul makes use of the decayed matter. It causes matter to decay, to flake off on the surface of man's body. Indeed spirit and soul will not enter man's body and permeate it until matter has died within it. The spirit and soul element in man moves within him along the nerve channels of lifeless matter.

In this way we can see how spirit and soul actually operates in man. We see it pressing upon him from outside, developing, as it does so, a devouring, consuming activity. We see it penetrating into him. We see how it is checked, how it splashes back, how it kills matter. We see how matter decays in the nerves, and how this enables the spirit and soul to make its way even to the skin, from within outwards, along the pathways of its own making. For spirit and soul cannot pass through what has organic life.

Now, how can you picture the organic, the living element? You can picture it as something that takes up spirit and soul into itself, that does not let them through. And you can picture the dead material, mineral element as something that lets the spirit and soul through. So that you can get a kind of definition for the living-organic element and a definition for the bone-nerve element, and indeed for the material-mineral element as a whole. For the living-organic element is impermeable for the spirit. The dead physical element is permeable for the spirit. “Blood is a very special fluid,” for as opaque matter is to light, so is blood to the spirit. It does not let the spirit through. It retains the spirit within it. Nerve substance is a very special substance, also. It is to spirit as transparent glass is to light. As transparent glass lets the light through, so, too, physical matter, material nerve substance lets the spirit through.

Here we have the difference between two component parts of the human being, that in him which is mineral, which is permeable to the spirit, and that in him which is more animal, more of a living organism, and which retains the spirit within him—that which causes the spirit to produce the forms which shape the organism.

From this many things follow for the treatment of the human being. For example, when a man does bodily work he moves his limbs. This means he is entirely immersed, he is swimming about in the spirit. This is not the spirit that has dammed itself up within him, this is the spirit that is outside him. If you chop wood, or if you walk—whenever you move your limbs in work of some sort—whether useful or not—you are constantly splashing about in spirit; you are concerned constantly with spirit. This is very important. And, further it is important to ask ourselves: What if we are doing spiritual work, if we are thinking or reading—how is it then? Well, this is a concern of the spirit and soul that is within us. Now it is not we who splash about in spirit with our limbs, but the spirit and soul is at work in us and continuously makes use of our bodily nature; that is, spirit and soul come to expression wholly as a bodily process within us. And here within us by means of this damming up, matter is constantly being thrown back upon itself. In spiritual work the activity of the body is excessive, in bodily work, on the other hand, the activity of the spirit is excessive. We cannot do spiritual work, work of soul and spirit, except with the continuous participation of the body. When we do bodily work the spirit and soul within us takes part only in so far as our thoughts direct our walking, or guide our work. But the spirit and soul nature takes part in it from without. We continuously work into the spirit of the world, we continuously unite ourselves with the spirit of the world when we do bodily work. Bodily work is spiritual; spiritual work is bodily, its effect is bodily upon and within man. We must understand this paradox and make it our own, namely that bodily work is spiritual and spiritual work bodily, both in man and in its effects on man. Spirit is flooding round us when do bodily work. Matter is active within us when we do spiritual work.

We must know such things, my dear friends, if we are to think with understanding about work—whether spiritual or bodily work—and about recreation and fatigue. We can only do this if we have a thorough grasp of what I have just described. For, suppose a man works too much with his limbs, that he does too much bodily work, what is the result? It brings him too much into relation with the spirit. For spirit continually floods round him when he does bodily work; consequently the spirit gains too much power over man, the spirit that comes from outside. We make ourselves too spiritual when we do too much bodily work. From without we let ourselves be made too spiritual. And it follows that we need to give ourselves up to the spirit for too long, in other words, we have to sleep too long. And too much sleep in turn promotes too much bodily activity, the bodily activity of the chest abdomen, not of the head system. This activity over-stimulates life, we become feverish, too hot. Our blood pulses in us too strongly its activity in the body cannot be assimilated, if we sleep too much. Nevertheless through excessive bodily work we produce in ourselves the desire to sleep too much.

But what about lazy people who love to sleep, and who sleep so much? Why are they like this? It is due to the fact that man can never really stop working. When a lazy person sleeps it is not because he works too little, for a lazy person has to move his legs all day long, and he flourishes his arms about, too, in some fashion or other. Even a lazy person does something. From an external point of view he really does no less than an industrious person—but he does it without sense or purpose. The industrious man turns his attention to the outside world, He introduces meaning into his activities. That is the difference. Senseless activities such as a lazy person carries on are more conducive to sleep than are activities with a purpose in them. In intelligent occupation we do not merely splash about in the spirit: if there is meaning in the movements we carry out in our work we gradually draw the spirit into us. When we stretch out our hand with a purpose we unite ourselves with the spirit; and the spirit, in its turn, does not need to work so much unconsciously in sleep, because we are working with it consciously. Thus it is not a question of whether man is active or not, for a lazy man too is active, but the question is how far man's actions have a purpose in them. To be active with a purpose—these words must sink into our minds if we would be teachers. Now when is a man active without purpose? He is active without purpose, senselessly active, when he acts only in accordance with the demands of his body. He acts with purpose when he acts in accordance with the demands of his environment and not merely in accordance with those of his own body. We must pay heed to this where the child is concerned. It is possible, on the one hand, to direct the child's outer bodily movements more and more to what is purely physical, that is, to physiological gymnastics, where we simply enquire of the body what movements shall be carried out. But we can also guide the child's outer movements so that they become purposeful movements, movements penetrated with meaning, so that the child does not merely splash about in the spirit in his movements, but follows the spirit in his aims. So we develop the bodily movements into Eurythmy. The more we make the child do purely physical gymnastics the more he will be at the mercy of excessive desire for sleep; and of an excessive tendency to fat. We must not entirely neglect the bodily side, for man must live in rhythm, but having swung over to this side we must swing back again to a kind of movement which is permeated with purpose—as in Eurythmy, where every movement expresses a sound and has a meaning—the more we can alternate gymnastics with Eurythmy the more we shall bring harmony into the need for sleeping and waking; the more, too, shall we maintain normal life in the child's will, in his relations to the outer world. That gymnastics, moreover, has become void of all sense or meaning, that we have made it into an activity that follows the body entirely, is a characteristic phenomenon of the age of materialism. And the fact that we seek to “raise” this activity to the level of sport, where the movements to be performed are derived solely from the body, and not only lack all sense and meaning, but are contrary to sense and meaning—this fact is typical of the endeavour to drag man down even beyond the level of materialistic thinking to that of brute feeling. The excessive pursuit of sport is Darwinism in practice. Theoretical Darwinism is to assert that man comes from the animals. Sport is practical Darwinism, it proclaims an ethic which leads man back again to the animal.

One must speak of these things to-day in this radical manner because the present-day teacher must understand them; for, not only must he be the teacher of those children entrusted to his care, he must also work socially, he must work back upon mankind as a whole to prevent the increasing growth of things which would tend indeed to have an animalising effect upon humanity. This is not false asceticism. It comes from the objectivity of real insight, and is as true as any other scientific knowledge.

Now what is the position with regard to spiritual work? Spiritual work, thinking, reading and so on, is always accompanied by bodily activity and by the continual decay and dying of organic matter. When we are too active in spirit and soul we have decayed organic matter within us. If we spend our entire day in learned work we have too much decayed organic matter in us by the evening, This works on in us, and disturbs restful sleep. Excessive spiritual work disturbs sleep just as excessive bodily work makes one sleep-sodden. But when we exert ourselves too much over soul-spiritual work, when, for instance, we read something difficult, and really have to think as we read (not exactly a favourite occupation nowadays), if we do too much difficult reading we fall asleep over it. Or if we listen, not to the trite platitudes of popular speakers or others who only say what we already know, but to people whose words we have to follow with our thoughts because they are telling us what we do not yet know—we get tired and sleep-sodden. It is well known that people who go to a lecture or concert because it is “the thing to do”, and do not give real thought or feeling to what is put before them, fall asleep at the first word, or the first note. Often they will sleep all through the lecture or concert which they have attended only from a sense of duty or of social obligation.

Now here again are two kinds of activity. Just as there is a difference between outward activity which has meaning and purpose and that which has no meaning, so there is a difference between the inner activity of thought and perception which goes on mechanically and that which is always accompanied by feelings. If we so carry out our work that continuous interest is combined with it, this interest and attention enlivens the activity of our breast system and prevents the nerves from decaying to an excessive degree. The more you merely skim along in your reading, the less you exert yourselves to take in what you read with really deep interest—the more you will be furthering the decay of substance within you. But the more you follow what you read with interest and warmth of feeling the more you will be furthering the blood activity, that is, that activity which keeps matter alive. And the more, too, you will be preventing mental activity from disturbing your sleep. When you have to cram for an examination you are assimilating a great deal in opposition to your interest. For if we only assimilated what aroused our interest we should not get through our examinations under modern conditions. It follows that cramming for an examination disturbs sleep and brings disorder into our normal life. This must be specially borne in mind where children are concerned. Therefore for children it is best of all, and most in accordance with an educational ideal, if we omit all cramming for examinations. That is, we should omit examinations altogether and let the school year finish as it began. As teachers we must feel it our duty to ask ourselves: why should the child undergo a test at all? I have always had him before me and I know quite well what he knows and does not know. Of course under present-day conditions this must remain an ideal for the time being. And I must beg you not to direct your rebel natures too forcibly against the outside world. Your criticism of our present-day civilisation you must turn inwards like a goad, so that you may work slowly—for we can only work slowly in these things—towards making people learn to think differently; then external social conditions will change their present form.

But you must always remember the inner connection of things. You must know that Eurythmy, external activity permeated with purpose, is a spiritualising of bodily activity, and the arousing of interest in one's teaching (provided it is genuine) is literally a bringing of life and blood into the work of the intellect.

We must bring spirit into external work, and we must bring blood into our inward, intellectual work. Think over these two sentences, and you will see that the first is of significance both in education and in social life, and that the second is of significance both in education and in hygiene.

If we regard man in the way we have done here in evolving a true art of education, his threefold bodily nature becomes evident from many aspects. We can clearly distinguish between all that belongs to the system of the head—the head formation of man, and what belongs to the formation of the chest, of the whole trunk; and these, again, we distinguish from what belongs to the limb formation. At the same time we must recognise that the limb formation is much more complicated than is usually imagined: because what is present in the limbs in germ—and is really formed, as we have seen, from without inwards—is continued right into the interior of man's being; hence we have to distinguish between what is built up from within outwards and what is pushed into the human body, so to speak, from without inwards.

If we have a picture in our minds of this threefold division of the human being, it will be particularly clear how man's head is in itself a whole human being, a whole human being raised from out the animal stage.

In the head we have the real head; but we have also the trunk, that is all that belongs to the nose; and we have the limb part, which is continued into the bodily cavity, namely, all that comprises the mouth. So we can see how the whole human being is present in the head in bodily form. Only, the chest part of the head is stunted; it is so stunted that the relation between the nose and the lung nature is no longer conspicuous. A correspondence, however, does exist between the nose and nasal passages and the lung nature. This nose is rather like a metamorphosed lung. It therefore transforms the breathing process also and makes it take on a more physical nature. Perhaps you think of the lung as less spiritual than the nose? This is a mistake. The lung is more of a work of art. It is more permeated with spirit, or at least with soul, than is the nose—which, to be sure, really pokes out in the face in the most immodest way; whereas the lung, although more soul-like than the nose, conceals its existence with more modesty.

And it is the mouth, and all that belongs with it, that is related to the metabolic system, to digestion and nourishment, and to all that is a continuation of the limb-forces into man; the mouth, indeed, cannot disguise its relationship to nourishment and to the limb nature.

Thus the head is a whole human being, only the non-head part of it is stunted: chest and lower body are also present in the head but in a stunted form.

Now when in contrast to this, we consider the limb man we find that all its outer shapes, all its outer configuration is essentially a transformation of man's two jaw bones, of the upper and lower jaw. What encloses your mouth below and above is but a stunted form of your legs and feet, and your arms and hands. Only you must think of the thing in its right position. Now you can say: If I think of my arms and hands as the upper jaw-bone, and my legs and feet as the lower jaw-bone, I have to ask: “To what are these jaw bones directed? Where do these jaws bite? Where is the mouth?” And you must answer this question as follows: It is where your upper arm is attached to your body, and where the upper part of your leg, the femur, is attached to your body. So that if you think of this as the human trunk (see drawing) you must think of the real head as somewhere outside: it opens its mouth here above (see drawing) and here below also; so that you can imagine a remarkable tendency of this invisible head that opens its jaws in the direction of your chest and your abdomen.

What then does this invisible head do? It is constantly devouring you. It opens its jaws upon you. And here the outward form is a wonderful representation of the real facts. Whereas man's proper head is a material bodily head, the head belonging to his limb-nature is a spiritual head, but one that becomes a little material so that it can continually eat the human being up. And when death comes, it has devoured him completely.

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This, truly, is the wonderful process, that our limbs are so made as constantly to be consuming us. Our organism slips continuously into the yawning jaws of our own spirituality. The spiritual perpetually demands of us a sacrificial devotion. And this sacrificial devotion is expressed even in the form of the body. We have no understanding of the human form unless we recognise the expression of this sacrifice to the spirit in the relation of the limbs to the rest of the human body. Thus we can say: the head and limb nature of man form a contrast to one another and it is the chest or trunk nature, mid-way between, that (from one aspect) maintains the balance of these opposites.

In man's chest there is in reality just as much head nature as limb nature. Limb nature and head nature are interwoven in the chest nature. The chest has a continuous upward tendency to became head, and a continuous downward tendency to fit in with the out-stretched limbs, with the outer world, in other words to become a part of the limb nature. The upper part of the chest nature has the constant tendency to become head; the lower part has the tendency to become limb man. That is to say: the upper part of the human trunk has the continual desire to become head, but it cannot do so. The other head prevents it. Therefore it produces continuously only an image of the head, something that represents so to speak, a beginning of the head formation. Can we not clearly recognise that in the upper part of the chest formation there is a suggestion of head formation? Yes, there we have the larynx, called Kehlkopf in German, from the native genius of the language, i.e., the head of the throat. The larynx is absolutely a stunted human head; a head which cannot become completely head and therefore lives out its head nature in human speech. The larynx continually makes the attempt in the air to become head; and this attempt constitutes human speech. When the larynx tries to become the uppermost part of the head we get those sounds which clearly show that they are held back by man's nature more strongly than any. When the human larynx tries to become nose it cannot, because the real nose prevents it. But it produces in the air the attempt to become nose, and this constitutes the nasal sounds. Thus in the nasal sounds the actual nose is checking the “air nose” which is seeking to arise. It is exceedingly significant how, when man speaks, he is continually making the attempt in the air to produce pieces of a head, and how these pieces of head are extended in wave-like movements which are then checked by the physically developed head.

You can now see what human speech really is. Therefore you will not be surprised that as soon as the head is more or less complete physically, i.e., towards the seventh year when the change of teeth takes place, opportunity is provided for the soul head—which is produced out of the larynx—to be permeated by a kind of skeletal system. But it must be a skeletal system of the soul. To achieve this we must now leave off developing language merely at random through imitation, and must devote our powers to the grammatical side of language. Let us be conscious that when the child comes to us in his seventh year we have to do for his soul a thing similar to that done by his body in pushing up into his organism the second teeth. Thus we shall impart power and firmness to his language (but a firmness of the soul only) by introducing grammar in a reasonable way: that is, the working of language in writing and reading. We shall get the right attitude of mind to human speaking if we know that the words man forms actually express a tendency to become head.

Now, just as the upper part of the chest system in man has the tendency to become head, so the lower part has the tendency to become limbs. And just as all that proceeds from the larynx in the form of speech is a refined head, a head formed out of air, so all that proceeds downwards from the chest nature of man to take on something of the limb organisation, is a coarsened limb nature. The outer world pushes into man, so to speak, a densified, coarsened limb nature. And once natural scientists discover the secret that a coarsened form of hands and feet, arms and legs is present in man—more of the limbs being pressed inside than remains visible outside—then indeed they will have fathomed the riddle of sex nature. And then only will man find the right tone for speaking of these things. It is no wonder therefore that the talk prevalent to-day about sex instruction is mostly meaningless. For one cannot explain well what one does not understand oneself. And contemporary science has not the least understanding for the thing I have just barely touched on in characterising the connection between the limb man and the trunk man. Just as one finds in the first years of school life that what penetrated the teeth before the age of seven is now pressing into the soul, so in the later years of schooling one finds pressing into the child's soul all that arises from the limb nature and comes to its rightful expression after puberty. This must be known.

Thus, just as the power to write and read is an expression of the teething of the soul, so all activity of imagination, all that is permeated with inner warmth is an expression of what the soul develops in the later school years, the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth years. In particular, there then appear all those capacities of the soul which can be permeated and filled with inner love, all that shows itself, namely, in the power of imagination. It is to this power of imagination that we must especially appeal in the latter part of the period between the change of teeth and puberty. We are much more justified in encouraging the child of seven to develop its own intellectuality by way of reading and writing than we are justified in neglecting to bring imagination continually into the growing power of judgment of the child of twelve. (It is from the age of twelve onwards that the power of judgment gradually develops.) We must arouse the child's imagination in all we teach him, in all the lessons he has to learn during these years; all history, all geography teaching must be steeped in imagination.

And we do really appeal to the child's imagination if, for instance, we say to him: “Now you have seen a lens, haven't you, a lens that collects the light? Now, you have such a lens in your own eye. And you know what a camera obscura is, where external objects are reproduced? Your eye is really a camera obscura, a dark room of this kind.” In a case of this sort where we show how the external world is built into the human organism through the sense organs—we are, once again, really appealing to the child's imagination. For what is built into the body is only seen in its external deadness when we take it out of the body, we cannot see it so in the living body.

Thus all the teaching, even what is given in geometry and arithmetic must consistently appeal to the imagination. We appeal to the imagination if, in dealing with plane surfaces, for instance, we endeavour (as we have been doing in our practical course) not only to make them comprehensible to the intellect, but to make them so thoroughly comprehensible that a child needs to use his imagination even in arithmetic and geometry. That is why I said yesterday (In another course of lectures to teachers) that I wondered that nobody had thought of explaining the theorem of Pythagoras in the following way. The teacher could say: “Suppose we have three children; the first has just so much powder to blow that he can make it cover the first square; the second so much that it will cover the second square; the third so much that it will just cover the little square. We shall be helping the child's imagination when we show him that the powder needed to cover the largest square is the same in quantity as that needed to cover the other two squares. Through this the child will bring his power of comprehension on the powder blown on the squares, perhaps not with mathematical accuracy, but in a form filled with imagination. He will follow the surfaces with his imagination. He will grasp the theorem of Pythagoras by means of the flying and settling powder, that would have to be blown moreover into square shapes (a thing impossible in reality of course, but calling out the exertion of imagination). He will grasp the theorem with his imagination.

Therefore in these years we should foster an intercourse alive with imagination between teacher and child. The teacher must keep alive all his subjects, steep them in imagination. The only way to do this is to permeate all that he has to teach with a willing rich in feeling. Such teaching has a wonderful influence on children in their later years.

A thing of the very greatest importance, a thing to be particularly cultivated during the later primary school years is the mutual intercourse, the complete harmony of life, between teacher and children. For this reason no one can be a good primary teacher unless he constantly endeavours to bring imagination into all his teaching; he must shape his teaching material afresh every time. For in actual fact the thing one has once worked out in an imaginative way, if given again years later in precisely the same form, is intellectually frozen up. Of necessity imagination must always be kept living, otherwise its products will became intellectually frozen.

This, in turn, throws light on what the teacher must be himself. He must never for a single moment in his life get sour. And if life is to be fruitful, two things must never meet, namely, the teaching vocation and pedantry. Should the teaching vocation ever be joined to pedantry the worst possible evil would result from this union. But I doubt if we need even imagine such an incongruity, as that teaching and pedantry have ever been united.

From this you see that there is a certain inner morality in teaching, an inner obligation, a true “categorical imperative” for the teacher. And this categorical imperative is as follows: Keep your imagination alive. And if you feel yourself getting pedantic, then say to yourself: for other people pedantry may be bad, for me it is wicked and immoral. This must be the teacher's attitude of mind. If it should not be his attitude of mind, then dear friends, the teacher would have to consider how he could gradually learn to apply what he had gained in his teaching profession to another walk of life. Of course in actual life these things cannot always come up to the ideal, but it is essential to know what the ideal is.

You will not, however, achieve the right enthusiasm for this educational morality unless you turn ever and again to fundamentals and make them part of yourself, You must know, for example, that the head itself is really a whole human being with the limbs and chest part stunted; that every limb is a whole human being only that in the limb man the head is quite stunted; and in the chest man, head and limbs are held in balance. If you have this fundamental ground, its force will bring the necessary enthusiasm into your educational morals.

The intellectual part of man is very apt to become lazy and sluggish. And it will become most intensely sluggish if it is perpetually fed with materialistic thoughts. But if it is fed with thoughts, with mental pictures, won from the spirit it will take wings. Such thoughts, however, can only come into our souls by way of imagination.

Now the second half of the nineteenth century has stormed against the introduction of imagination into teaching! In the first half of the nineteenth century there were brilliant men, men such as Schelling, for example, whose sounder thought embraced education as well. You should read the beautiful and stirring account written by Schelling of the methods of academic study—written, it is true, not about primary schools but for college life—but alive with the spirit of pedagogy of the first half of the nineteenth century. His work was attacked, in a veiled way, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when everything seeking access to man's soul by way of imagination was treated with scorn and abuse. This is because people had become cowards in what concerns the life of the soul, and because they believed that the moment they gave themselves up to imagination they would be falling into the arms of falsehood. They had not the courage to be free and independent in their thought and still to unite themselves with truth instead of falsehood. They were afraid to move freely in thought believing that if they did so they would straightway be letting falsehood into their souls. Thus in addition to the permeating of his teaching material with imagination, of which I have just spoken, the teacher must have courage for the truth. Without this courage for the truth he will find that his will in teaching will not serve him, especially when it comes to the older children. But this courage for the truth which the teacher develops must go hand in hand with a feeling of responsibility towards the truth.

The need for imagination, a sense of truth, a feeling of responsibility, these are the three forces which are the very nerves of pedagogy. And whoever will receive pedagogy into himself, let him inscribe the following as a motto for his teaching:

Imbue thyself with the power of imagination,
Have courage for the truth,
Sharpen thy feeling for responsibility of soul.

Durchdringe dich mit Phantasiefähigkeit,
habe den Mut zur Wahrheit,
schärfe dein Gefühl für seelische Verantwortlichkeit.

To these lectures I wish to provide a kind of introduction; for even in our actual teaching methods we shall have to distinguish them—with all due modesty—from the methods which have evolved in our time on quite other assumptions than those which we must make. Our methods are not different from those others just because we want capriciously something “new” or “different,” but because the tasks of our particular age will compel us to realize the course which must be taken by education itself for humanity, if it is to answer in the future to the impulses towards development predestined in the human race by the universal world order.

Above all, we shall have to be aware, in our method, that we are concerned with a certain harmonizing of the spirit and soul with the physical-body. You will not, of course, be able to use the materials of study as they have been used hitherto. You will have to use them as the means of rightly developing the soul and body forces of the individual. And so you will not be concerned with the handing down of a province of knowledge as such, but with manipulating this province of knowledge in order to develop human abilities. You will have to distinguish, above all, between the material of knowledge which is really determined by convention, by human agreement—even if it is not admitted in so many words—and the materials of knowledge which depend on an understanding of human nature in general.

Just consider superficially the actual position, in general culture, of the reading and writing which you impart to the child to-day. We read, but the art of reading has naturally developed in the course of civilization. The letter-forms which have arisen, the combination of these various letter-forms, is all a matter determined by convention. In teaching the child the present form of reading, we teach him what, apart from the place of the individual within a quite definite culture, has no significance at all for the human entity. We must be aware that other practices of our physical culture have no direct meaning for super-physical humanity, for the super-physical world at all. It is quite wrong to believe, as spiritist circles sometimes do, that spirits wrote the human writing in order to bring it into the physical world. Human writing has arisen from human activity, from human convention on the physical plane. The spirits are not in the least interested in accommodating themselves to this physical convention. Even if the intervention of the spirits is a fact, it is in the form of special translation by means of intermediary human activity; it is not a direct gesture of the spirit itself, a communication into this form of writing or reading of its living essence. The reading and writing which you teach the child are determined by convention; they have arisen within the action of the physical body.

Teaching the child arithmetic is quite another thing. You will feel that here the most important thing is not the forms of the figures, but the reality that lives in the figure-forms. And this living reality alone is of more importance to the spiritual world than the reality living in reading and writing. And if we proceed further to teach the child certain activities which we must call artistic, we enter with them into the sphere which always has eternal significance, which reaches up into the activity of the spirit and soul in man. In teaching children reading and writing we are teaching in the domain of the most exclusively physical. Our teaching is already less physical in arithmetic, and we are really teaching the soul and the spirit when we teach the child music, drawing, or anything of that kind.

Now in a rationally pursued course of study we can combine these three impulses, the super-physical in the artistic activity, the semi-super-physical in arithmetic, and the entirely physical in reading and writing, and just this combination will bring about the harmonizing of the individual. Imagine that we approach the child in this way (this lecture is merely introductory, and only aphoristic individual instances will be given): we say: “You have already seen a fish. Now just try to get a clear idea of what it looked like—this fish that you saw. If I make this for you (see drawing) it looks very like a fish. What you saw as a fish looks something like what you see there on the board. Now just imagine that you are saying the word fish. What you say when you say ‘fish’ is expressed by this sign.

“Now just try not to say ‘fish,’ but only to start saying ‘fish.’ We now try to show the child that he must only begin saying ‘fish:’ F-f-f-f. Now look, you have started now to say ‘fish;’ and now picture to yourself that people gradually came to simplify what you see there. In starting to say ‘fish,’ F-f-f-f-, you are saying, and writing for it, this sign. And people call this sign ‘f’.

“So you have learned that what you say when you say ‘fish’ begins with f and now you write that as f. You always breathe f-f-f- when you start to say fish; in this way you learn what the sign was for saying fish in the very beginning.”

When you set about appealing to the child's nature in this way, you transport the child right back into earlier civilizations, for that is when writing first arose. Later the process passed into a mere convention, so that to-day we no longer recognize the connection between the abstract letter-forms and the images which arose purely as signs from the contemplation and imitation of what was observed. All letter-forms have arisen from pictorial shapes. And now think how, when you only teach the child the convention: “You are to make an f like this!” you are teaching him something quite disconnected, and out of its context with the human setting. Writing is then dislodged from its original setting: the artistic element. Therefore we must begin, in teaching to write, with the artistic drawing of the shapes—of the sound and letter-shapes—if we want to go so far back that the child is struck by the difference in shapes. It is not enough merely to form these shapes before the child with our mouth, for that makes people what they have become to-day. In dislodging the written shape from what is now convention and showing its original source, we compass the whole being and make it something quite different from what it would be if we simply appealed to perception. So we must not only think in abstracto. We must teach art in drawing, etc.; we must impart the psychic element in teaching arithmetic, and we must teach the conventional element of reading and writing artistically; we must permeate our whole teaching with the artistic element. Consequently, from the first we shall attach great importance to cultivating the artistic element in the child. The artistic element, as is well known, has a quite exceptional influence on the will. With its help we penetrate to something connected with the whole individual, whereas what is concerned with convention only affects the head, “head-man” (kopfmensch). Consequently, we proceed by letting every child cultivate something to do with drawing and painting. Thus we begin with drawing, the drawing-painting in the simplest way. But we begin, too, with the musical element, so that the child is accustomed from the first to handle an instrument, so that the artistic feeling is awakened in him. Then he will develop, as well, the power to feel with his whole being what is otherwise merely conventional.

It is our task in the study of method always to engage the whole individual. We could not do this without focussing our attention on the development of an artistic feeling with which the individual is endowed. This will also dispose the individual later to take an interest in the whole world as far as his nature permits. The fundamental error until now has always been that people have set themselves up in the world with nothing but their heads; they have at the most dragged the rest of their bodies after them. And the result is that the other parts now follow the lead of their animal impulses and live themselves out emotionally—as we are experiencing just now in the very curious wave of emotionalism which has spread from East Europe. This has occurred because the whole individual has not been cultivated. But it is not only that the artistic element must be cultivated, too, but the whole of our teaching must be drawn from the artistic element. All method must be immersed in the artistic element. Education and teaching must become a real art. Here, too, knowledge must not be more than the underlying basis.

Therefore we first extract from the element of drawing the written forms of the letters, then the printed forms. We build up reading on drawing. In this way you will soon see that we strike a chord to which the child-like soul loves to vibrate in harmony, because the child has then not only an external interest, but because, for instance, it sees, in actual fact, the coming to expression in reading and writing of its own breath.

We shall then have to rearrange much in our teaching. You will see that what we are aiming at in reading and writing can naturally not be built up exclusively in the way just described, but we shall only be able to awaken the forces necessary to such a superstructure. For if we were to try in modern life to build up all our teaching on the process of evolving reading and writing from a setting of drawing, we should need to spend the time up to the twentieth year over it; we should never finish in the school-life. We can only carry it out, then, first of all, in principle—and must, in spite of it, pass on, but while still remaining in the artistic element. When we have drawn out isolated instances in this way for a time, we must go on to make the child understand that grown-up people, when they have these peculiar forms in front of them, discover a meaning in them. While cultivating further what the child has learnt like this from isolated instances, we pass on—no matter whether the child understands the details or not—to write out sentences. In these sentences the child will then notice forms such as he has become familiar with in the f of fish. He will then notice other forms, next to these, which we are unable to show in their original setting for lack of time. We then proceed to draw on the board what the separate letters look like in print, and one day we write a long sentence on the board and say to the child: “Now grown-ups have all this in front of them when they have developed all that we have seen to be the f in fish, etc. Then we teach the child to copy writing. We lay stress upon his feeling with his hands whatever he sees, on his not merely reading with his eye, but on his following the shape with his hands, and on his knowing that he himself can shape all that is on the board, just so. He will then not learn to read without his hand following the shapes of what he sees, of the printed letters too. Thus we succeed—which is extraordinarily important—in seeing that reading is never done with the mere eye but that the activity of the eye passes mysteriously over into the entire activity of the human limbs. The children then feel unconsciously, right down into their legs, what they would otherwise only survey with the eye. We must endeavour to interest the whole being of the child in this activity.”

Then we go the opposite way: we split up the sentence we have written down, and show the other letter-shapes which we have not yet brought out of their element; we split up and divide, by atomizing, the words, and we go from the whole to the separate parts. For example, here stands the word “head.” The child first learns to write down “head,” just painting the word as a copy. Then we split the word “head” into h-e-a-d; we bring the separate letters out of the word, and thus go from the whole to the separate parts.

We continue, in fact, throughout our teaching to pass like this from the whole to the part. We divide, for instance, a piece of paper into a number of little paper shreds. Then we count these shreds; let us suppose that there are twenty-four. Then we say to the child: “Just look, I describe these paper shreds by what I have written on the board and call them: twenty-four paper shreds. [They might be beans just as well, of course.] Now notice that. Now I take a number of paper shreds away, I put them on a little pile; I make another little heap here, and there a third, and there a fourth; now I have made four little heaps out of the twenty-four paper shreds. Now watch: I will now count them; you can't do that yet, but I can, and what is lying on that little heap I call nine paper shreds, and what is lying on the second little heap I call five paper shreds, and what is lying on the third I call seven paper shreds, and what is lying on the fourth little heap I call three paper shreds. You see, before, I had a single heap: twenty-four paper shreds; now I have four little heaps: nine, five, seven, three paper shreds. That is all the same paper. The first time, when I have it altogether, I call it twenty-four; now I have divided it into four little heaps and call it, now nine, then five, then seven, and then three paper shreds.” Now I say: “Twenty-four paper shreds are, altogether, nine and five and seven and three.” Now I have taught the child to add up. That is, I have not started from the separate addenda and formed the sum from them. That is never the way of our original primitive human nature. (I refer you for this to my Outlines of a Theory of Knowledge Belonging to the Goethean World-Conception.) But the opposite process is the way of human nature: seeing the sum first, and then dividing it up into the separate addenda, so that we must teach the child to add in the opposite way to what is usually taught; we must start with the sum and then go to the addenda. Then the child will have a better idea of what “together” means, than he has had up to now from our picking the parts up and putting them together. Our teaching will have to be distinguished from teaching hitherto by the fact that we have to teach the child in more or less the opposite way what “sum” means in contrast to the “addenda.” Then we can rely on the response of a quite different understanding from that aroused by the opposite procedure. You will actually only see the full value of this from practice. For you will see the child enter quite differently into the subject; you will notice a quite different capacity for understanding in the child, if you go the way I have described.

You can then go the opposite way and continue your arithmetic. You can say: “Now I throw these paper shreds all together again, and make two little heaps, and I call the little heap which I have left quite separate, three. How have I got this three? By taking it away from the others. When it was still all together I called it twenty-four; now I have taken three away and now I call what is left twenty-one.” In this way you introduce the idea of subtraction. That is, again, you do not start from minuend and subtrahend, but from the remainder, from what is left, and you lead from this to what the remainder came from. Here, too, you proceed the opposite way. And—as we shall see later in the method of special subjects—you can apply to the whole art of arithmetic the process of going from the whole to the part. In this connection we shall doubtless have to accustom ourselves to adhere to a quite different course of instruction. We proceed here to cultivate, at the same time as “object lessons”—which we must never neglect, but which should not be too exclusively emphasized as they seem to be to-day—the sensitiveness to authority. For we are continually saying: I call that twenty-four. I call that nine. In emphasizing, in anthroposophical lectures, the point that between seven and fourteen years of age the feeling for authority should be cultivated, that does not mean that a training is required to produce this feeling for authority, but what is necessary can flow from the very method of instruction itself. Its influence is present like an undertone; when the child listens, he says: “Aha, he calls that nine, he calls that twenty-four,” etc. He obeys voluntarily, at once. Through listening like this to the person who uses this method the child is inoculated by what expresses itself as a sensitiveness to authority. That is the secret. Any artificial training of the feeling for authority must be excluded by the method or technique itself.

Then we must be quite clear that we always want to let three things work in unison: will, feeling, and thinking. When we teach on these lines, willing, feeling, and thinking are actually working together. The point is never to pervert the willing by false means into the wrong direction, but to secure the strengthening of the will by artistic means. To this end, from the first, teaching in painting, artistic instruction, and musical training, too, should be employed.

We shall notice incidentally that particularly in the first stage of the second period of his life, the child is most susceptible to authoritative teaching in the form of art and that we then can achieve the most for him with art. He will grow as if of himself into what we desire to pass on to him, and his greatest imaginable joy will be when he puts something down on paper in drawing or even in painting, which, however, must not be confused with any merely superficial imitation. Here, too, we must remember in teaching that we must transport the child, in a sense, into earlier cultural epochs, but that we cannot proceed as though we were still in these epochs. People were different then. You will transport the child into earlier cultural epochs now with quite a different disposition of soul and spirit. So, in drawing, we shall not be bent on saying: You must copy this or that, but we show him original forms in drawing; we show him how to make one angle like this, another like that; we try to show him what a circle is, what a spiral is. We then start with self-contained form, not with whether the form imitates this or that, but we try to awaken his interest in the form itself.

You may remember the lecture in which I tried to awaken a sense of the origin of the acanthus leaf. I then explained that the idea that people imitated the leaf of the acanthus plant in the form in which it appears in legend is quite false; the truth is that the acanthus leaf simply arose from an inner impulse to form, and people felt later: That resembles nature. Nature was not copied. We shall have to bear this in mind with drawing and painting. Then at last there will be an end of the fearful error which devastates human minds so sadly. When people meet with something formed by man, they say: It is natural—it is unnatural. But a mere correct imitation is of secondary importance. Resemblance to the external world should only appear as something secondary. Rather in man should live an impulse of becoming one with growing forces of the form itself. One must have, even when drawing a nose, some inner relation with the nose-form itself, and only later does the resemblance to the nose result. The inner meaning for forms one would never be able to awaken between the age of seven and fourteen by merely copying the forms outside. But one must realize the inner creative element which can be developed between seven and fourteen. If one misses this inner creative element at such a time, it never can be retrieved. The forces active at that time die away after; later, one can get at the most a makeshift, unless a transformation of the individual occurs in what we call “initiation,” natural or unnatural.

I am now going to say something unusual, we must go back to the principles of human nature if we wish to be teachers in the true sense to-day. There are exceptions, when an individual can still recover some omitted experience. But then he must have been through a severe illness, or must have suffered some deformation or other, have broken a leg, for instance, which is then not properly set; that is, he must have suffered a certain loosening of the etheric body from the physical body. That is, of course, dangerous. If it happens through Karma it must be accepted. But we cannot treat it as a calculable quantity, or give any guarantee for public life that a person can recover some thing thus missed—not to mention other things. The development of the individual is mysterious, and the aim of instruction and education must never be concerned with the abnormal, but always with the normal. Teaching is always a social matter. The problem must always be: In what year must the development of certain forces take place, so that this development establishes the individual securely in life? So we must reckon with the fact that it is only between the seventh and fourteenth year that certain abilities can be cultivated in such a way that the individual can stand his ground in the battle of life. If these abilities are not cultivated at this time, the individual concerned will not be equal to the battle of life, but will have to succumb to it, as most people do to-day.

This ability to secure an artistic footing in the world's rush must be our gift as educators to the child. We shall then notice that it is man's nature, up to a point, to be born a “musician.” If people had the right and necessary agility they would dance with all little children, they would somehow join in the movements of all children. It is a fact that the individual is born into the world with the desire to bring his own body into a musical rhythm, into a musical relation with the world, and this inner musical capacity is most active in children in their third and fourth years. Parents can do an enormous amount, if they only take care to build less on externally induced music than on the inducement of the whole body, the dancing element. And precisely in this third and fourth year infinite results could be achieved by the permeation of the child's body with an elementary Eurhythmy. If parents would learn to engage in Eurhythmy with the child, children would be quite different from what they are. They would overcome a certain heaviness which weighs down their limbs. We all to-day have this heaviness in our limbs. It would be overcome. And there would remain in the child when the first teeth are shed the disposition for the complete musical element. The separate senses, the musically attuned ear, the plastically skilled eye, arise first from this musical disposition; what we call the musical ear, or the eye for drawing or modelling, is a specification of the whole musical individual. Consequently, we must always cherish the idea that in drawing on the artistic element we assimilate into the higher man, into the nerve-sense-being, the disposition of the entire being. You elevate feeling into an intellectual experience in utilizing either the musical element or the element of drawing or modelling. That must be done in the right way. Everything to-day is in confusion, particularly where the artistic element is being cultivated. We draw with the hands, and we model with the hands—and yet the two things are completely different. This is most striking when we introduce children to art. When we introduce children to plastic art, we must pay as much attention as possible to seeing that they follow the plastic forms with the hands. When the child feels his own forming, when he moves his hand and makes something in drawing, we can help him to follow the forms with his eye—but with the will acting through the eye. It is in no way a violation of the naivety in the child to instruct him to feel this, to feel over the form of the body with the hollow of his hand. When, for instance, he is tracing the curves of a circle, we draw his attention to the eye, and tell him that he himself makes a circle with his eye. This is absolutely in no sense a violation of the child's naivety, but it engages the interest of the whole being. Consequently, we must realize that we are transporting the lower being of the individual into the higher being, into the nerve-sense-being.

In this way we shall win a certain deep-lying sense of method which we must develop in ourselves as educators and teachers, and which we cannot transfer directly to anyone else. Imagine that we have an individual before us to teach and educate—a child. In these days the vision of the growing being is completely disappearing from education; everything is in confusion. But we must accustom ourselves to distinguish between differences in our vision of this child. We must accompany, as it were, our teaching and educating with inner sensations, with inner feelings, even with inner stirrings of the will, which are only heard, as it were, in a lower octave, and which are not brought out. We must be conscious ourselves that in the growing child there evolve gradually the ego and the astral body; the etheric body and the physical body are already there, inherited.¹ Now it is well for us to picture: The physical body and the etheric body are always particularly cultivated from the head downwards. The head radiates what really creates the physical man. If we follow the right course of education and instruction for the head, we best serve the growth-system. If we teach the child in such a way that we draw out the head-element from the whole being, the right experiences pass from his head into his limbs: the individual grows better, he learns how to walk better, etc. So we can say: the physical and etheric bodies stream downwards when we cultivate all that has relation to the higher man in a positive way. If, in teaching the child to read and write more intellectually, we have the feeling that the child, absorbing what we impart to him, comes to meet us, then this is passing from his head into the rest of his body. But the ego and the astral body are being developed from below upwards when the whole being is educated. A powerful ego sense would be awakened, for instance, if we taught the child elementary eurhythmy in the third and fourth years. The whole individual would be engaged, and a correct ego-sense would strike root in his being. And if he hears plenty of stories to rejoice over and even feel sad about, the astral body will develop from the lower individual upward. Just think back for a moment a little more intimately to your own experiences. I expect you will all have had this experience: In walking through the street and being startled by something, not only your head and your heart were startled, but in your limbs, too, you were startled and you re-lived the shock later. You will be able to agree from this experience that the surrender to something which disarticulates the feelings and the emotions, affects the whole being, not only the heart and the head.

This truth must be kept in view quite particularly by the educator and teacher. He must see that the whole being is moved. Think, then, from this point of view, of telling legends and fairy-tales, and if you have a real feeling for this, so that you convey your own mood when you tell the child stories, you will tell them so that the child re-lives with all his body what he has been told. In this way you really appeal to the child's astral body. The astral body radiates an experience into the head, to be felt there by the child. We must have the feeling that we are moving the whole child, and that only from the feelings, from the emotions we excite, must the understanding for the story come. Make it, therefore, your ideal, in telling the child fairy-tales or legends, or in drawing or painting with him, not to “explain,” or to act through concepts, but to let the whole being be stimulated, so that only afterwards when the child has gone away from you, understanding dawns on him. Try, then, to educate the ego and the astral body from below upwards, so that the head and the heart only come later. Try never to appeal in stories to the head and the understanding, but tell stories so that you evoke in the child—within limits—certain silent tremors of awe, so that you excite pleasures or sorrows which move his whole being so that these still linger and resound when the child has gone away, and only then understanding dawns on him and interest awakes in their meaning. Try to act through your whole intimacy with the children. Try not to excite interest artificially by relying on sensations, but try, by setting up an inner intimacy with the children, to let the interest grow from the child's own nature.

How can this be done with a whole class? It is comparatively easy to achieve with a single child. One only needs to love trying with him, one only needs to inspire one's work with love, to move the whole being, not only the heart and the head. With a whole class it is no harder if one is oneself moved by the subjects in question, but not only in the heart and the head. Take this example: I want to make clear to the child the continued life of the soul after death. I shall never make it clear to the child by theories, but shall only be deceiving myself. No kind of concept can make immortality mean anything to a child before fourteen. But I can say: “Just look at this butterfly's chrysalis. There is nothing inside it. The butterfly was inside it, but it has crept out.” I can show him the process, too, and it is a good thing to bring such metamorphoses before the child. Now I can draw the comparison: “Imagine you are a chrysalis like this yourself. Your soul is inside you; later it finds its way out; it will then find its way out like the butterfly from the chrysalis.” That is putting it naïvely, of course. Now you can talk about it for a long time. But if you do not believe yourself that the butterfly is like the human soul, you will not achieve much with the child through such comparison. You will not, of course, be guilty of introducing the blatant untruth that you only regard it as a man-made comparison. It is no such thing, but it is a fact of the divine ordering of the world. It is not the creation of our intellect. And if we have a right attitude to things, we learn to believe the fact that nature is full of symbols for spiritual-psychic experiences. If we become one with what we impart to the child, our action takes hold of the whole child. The loss of power to feel with the child, the belief in mere adjustment to a given ratio in which we ourselves do not believe, is responsible for the poverty of the child's education. Our own view of the facts must be such that, for instance, with the creeping out of the butterfly from the chrysalis, we introduce into the child's soul, not an arbitrary image, but an illustration, which we understand and believe to be furnished by the divine powers of the universe. The child must not understand what just passes from ear to ear, but what comes from soul to soul. If you notice this, you will go forward.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy, Occult Science.