The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! You have come together this Christmas, some of you from distant places, to work in the Goetheanum on some matters in the field of spiritual science. At the outset of our considerations I would like to extend to you—especially the friends who have come from afar—our heartiest Christmas greetings. What I myself, occupied as I am with the most manifold tasks, will be able to offer you at this particular time can only be indications in one or another direction. Such indications as will be offered in my lectures, and in those of others, will, we hope, result in a harmony of feeling and thinking among those gathered together here in the Goetheanum. It is also my hope that those friends who are associated with the Goetheanum and more or less permanently residing here will warmly welcome those who have come from elsewhere. Through our working, thinking and feeling together, there will develop what must be the very soul of all endeavors at the Goetheanum; namely, our perceiving and working out of the spiritual life and essence of the world.

If this ideal increasingly becomes a reality, if the efforts of individuals interested in the anthroposophical world conception flow together in true social cooperation, in mutual give and take, then there will emerge what is intended to emerge at the Goetheanum. In this spirit, I extend the heartiest welcome to those friends who have come here from afar as well as to those residing more permanently in Dornach.

The indication that I shall try to give in this lecture course will not at first sight appear to be related to the thought and feeling of Christmas, yet inwardly, I believe, they are so related. In all that is to be achieved at the Goetheanum, we are striving toward the birth of something new, toward knowledge of the spirit, toward a feeling consecrated to the spirit, toward a will sustained by the spirit. This is in a sense the birth of a super-sensible spiritual element and, in a very real way, symbolizes the Christmas thought, the birth of that spiritual Being who produced a renewal of all human evolution upon earth. Therefore, our present studies are, after all, imbued with the character of a Christmas study.

Our aim in these lectures is to establish the moment in history when the scientific mode of thinking entered mankind's development. This does not conflict with what I have just said. If you remember what I described many years ago in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age,¹ you will perceive my conviction that beneath the external trappings of scientific conceptions one can see the first beginnings of a new spirituality. My opinion, based on objective study, is that the scientific path taken by modern humanity was, if rightly understood, not erroneous but entirely proper. Moreover, if regarded in the right way, it bears within itself the seed of a new perception and a new spiritual activity of will. It is from this point of view that I would like to give these lectures. They will not aim at any kind of opposition to science. The aim and intent is instead to discover the seeds of spiritual life in the highly productive modern methods of scientific research. On many occasions I have pointed this out in various way. In lectures given at various times on various areas of natural scientific thinking,² I have given details of the path that I want to characterize in broader outline during the present lectures.

If we want to acquaint ourselves with the real meaning of scientific research in recent times and the mode of thinking that can and does underlie it, we must go back several centuries into the past. The essence of scientific thinking is easily misunderstood, if we look only at the immediate present. The actual nature of scientific research cannot be understood unless its development is traced through several centuries. We must go back to a point in time that I have often described as very significant in modern evolution; namely, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At that time, an altogether different form of thinking, which was still active through the Middle Ages, was supplanted by the dawn of the present-day mode of thought. As we look back into this dawn of the modern age, in which many memories of the past were still alive, we encounter a man in whom we can see, as it were, the whole transition from an earlier to a later form of thinking. He is Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus,³ (Nicholas of Cusa) a renowned churchman and one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was born in 1401, the son of a boatman and vinegrower in the Rhine country of Western Germany, and died in 1464, a persecuted ecclesiastic.⁴ Though he may have understood himself quite well, Cusanus was a person who is in some respects extremely difficult for a modern student to comprehend.

Cusanus received his early education in the community that has been called “The Brethren of the Common Life.”⁵ There he absorbed his earliest impressions, which were of a peculiar kind. It is clear that Nicholas already possessed a certain amount of ambition as a boy, but this was tempered by an extraordinary gift for comprehending the needs of the social life of his time. In the community of the Brethren of the Common Life, persons were gathered together who were dissatisfied with the church institutions and with the monastic and religious orders that, though within the church, were to some degree in opposition to it.

In a manner of speaking, the Brethren of the Common Life were mystical revolutionaries. They wanted to attain what they regarded as their ideal purely by intensification of a life spent in peace and human brotherhood. They rejected any rulership based on power, such as was found in a most objectionable form in the official church at that time. They did not want to become estranged from the world as were members of monastic orders. They stressed physical cleanliness; they insisted that each one should faithfully and diligently perform his duty in external life and in his profession. They did not want to withdraw from the world. In a life devoted to genuine work they only wanted to withdraw from time to time into the depths of their souls. Alongside the external reality of life, which they acknowledged fully in a practical sense, they wanted to discover the depths and inwardness of religious and spiritual feeling. Theirs was a community that above all else cultivated human qualities in an atmosphere where a certain intimacy with God and contemplation of the spirit might abide. It was in this community—at Deventer in Holland—that Cusanus was educated. The majority of the members were people who, in rather narrow circles, fulfilled their duties, and sought in their quiet chambers for God and the spiritual world.

Cusanus, on the other hand, was by nature disposed to be active in outer life and, through the strength of will springing from his knowledge, to involve himself in organizing social life. Thus Cusanus soon felt impelled to leave the intimacy of life in the brotherhood and enter the outer world. At first, he accomplished this by studying jurisprudence. It must be borne in mind, however, that at that time—the early Fifteenth Century—the various sciences were less specialized and had many more points of contact than was the case later on.

So for a while Cusanus practiced law. His was an era, however, in which chaotic factors extended into all spheres of social life. He therefore soon wearied of his law practice and had himself ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He always put his whole heart into whatever he did, and so he now became a true priest of the Papal church. He worked in this capacity in the various clerical posts assigned to him, and he was particularly active at the Council of Basle (1431–1449).⁶ There he headed a minority whose ultimate aim it was to uphold the absolute power of the Holy See.⁷ The majority, consisting for the most part of bishops and cardinals from the West, were striving after a more democratic form, so to speak, of church administration. The pope, they thought, should be subordinated to the councils. This led to a schism in the Council. Those who followed Cusanus moved the seat of the Council to the South; the others remained in Basle and set up an anti-pope.⁸ Cusanus remained firm in his defense of an absolute papacy. With a little insight it is easy to imagine the feelings that impelled Cusanus to take this stand. He must have felt that whatever emerged from a majority could at best lead only to a somewhat sublimated form of the same chaos already existing in his day. What he wanted was a firm hand that would bring about law and order, though he did want firmness permeated with insight. When he was sent to Middle Europe later on, he made good this desire by upholding consolidation of the Papal church.⁹ He was therefore, as a matter of course, destined to become a cardinal of the Papal church of that time.

As I said earlier, Nicholas probably understood himself quite well, but a latter-day observer finds him hard to understand. This becomes particularly evident when we see this defender of absolute papal power traveling from place to place and—if the words he then spoke are taken at face value—fanatically upholding the papistical Christianity of the West against the impending danger of a Turkish invasion.¹⁰ On the one hand, Cusanus (who in all likelihood had already been made a cardinal by that time) spoke in flaming words against the infidels. In vehement terms he summoned Europe to unite in resistance to the Turkish threat from Asia. On the other hand, if we study a book that Cusanus probably composed¹¹ in the very midst of his inflammatory campaigns against the Turks, we find something strange. In the first place, Cusanus preaches in the most rousing manner against the imminent danger posed by the Turks, inciting all good men to defend themselves against this peril and thus save European civilization. But then Cusanus sits down at his desk and writes a treatise on how Christians and Jews, pagans and Moslems—provided they are rightly understood—can be brought to peaceful cooperation, to the worship and recognition of the one universal God; how in Christians, Jews, Moslems and heathens there dwells a common element that need only be discovered to create peace among mankind. Thus the most conciliatory sentiments in regard to religions and denominations flow from this man's quiet private chamber, while he publicly calls for war in the most fanatical words.

This is what makes it hard to understand a man like Nicholas Cusanus. Only real insight that age can make him comprehensible but he must be viewed in the context of the inner spiritual development of his time. No criticism is intended. We only want to see the external side of this man, with the furious activity that I have described, and then to see what was living in his soul. We simply want to place the two aspects side by side.

We can best observe what took place in Cusanus's mind if we study the mood he was in while returning from a mission to Constantinople¹² on the behalf of the Holy See. His task was to work for the reconciliation of the Western and Eastern churches. On his return voyage, when he was on the ship and looking at the stars, there arose in him the fundamental thought, the basic feeling, incorporated in the book that he published in 1440 under the title De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance).¹³

What is the mood of this book? Cardinal Cusanus had, of course, long since absorbed all the spiritual knowledge current in the Middle Ages. He was well versed also in what the medieval schools of Neo-Platonism and Neo-Aristotelianism had attained. He was also quite familiar with the way Thomas Aquinas had spoken of the spiritual worlds as though it were the most normal thing for human concepts to rise from sense perception to spirit perception. In addition to his mastery of medieval theology, he had a thorough knowledge of the mathematical conceptions accessible to men of that time. He was an exceptionally good mathematician. His soul, therefore, was filled on the one side with the desire to rise through theological concepts to the world of spirit that reveals itself to man as the divine and, on the other side, with all the inner discipline, rigor and confidence that come to a man who immerses himself in mathematics. Thus he was both a fervent and an accurate thinker.

When he was crossing the sea from Constantinople to the West and looking up at the starlit sky, his twofold soul mood characterized above revolved itself in the following feeling. Thenceforth, Cusanus conceived the deity as something lying outside human knowledge. He told himself: “We can live here on earth with our knowledge, with our concepts and thoughts. By means of these we can take hold of what surrounds us in the kingdom of nature. But these concepts grow ever more lame when we direct our gaze upward to what reveals itself as the divine.”

In Scholasticism, arising from quite another viewpoint, a gap had opened up between knowledge and revelation.¹⁴ This gap now became the deepest problem of Cusanus's soul, the most intimate concern of the heart. Repeatedly he sent through this course of reasoning, repeatedly he saw how thinking extends itself over everything surrounding man in nature; how it then tries to raise itself above this realm to the divinity of thoughts; and how, there, it becomes ever more tenuous until it finally completely dissipates into nothingness as it realizes that the divine lies beyond that void into which thinking has dissipated. Only if a man has developed (apart form this life in thought) sufficient fervent love to be capable of continuing further on this path that his though has traversed, only if love gains the lead over thought, then this love can attain the realm into which knowledge gained only by thinking cannot reach.

It therefore became a matter of deep concern for Cusanus to designate the actual divine realm as the dimension before which human thought grows lame and human knowledge is dispersed into nothingness. This was his docta ignorantia, his learned ignorance. Nicholas Cusanus felt that when erudition, knowledge, assumes in the noblest sense a state of renouncing itself at the instant when it thinks to attain the spirit, then it achieves its highest form, it becomes docta ignorantia. It was in this mood that Cusanus published his De Docta Ignorantia in 1440.

Let us leave Cusanus for the moment, and look into the lonely cell of a medieval mystic who preceded Cusanus. To the extent that this man has significance for spiritual science, I described him in my book on mysticism. He is Meister Eckhart,¹⁵ a man who was declared a heretic by the official church. There are many ways to study the writings of Meister Eckhart and one can delight in the fervor of his mysticism. It is perhaps most profoundly touching if, through repeated study, the reader comes upon a fundamental mood of Eckhart's soul.

I would like to describe it as follows. Though living earlier than Cusanus, Meister Eckhart too was imbued through and through with what medieval Christian theology sought as an ascent to the divine, to the spiritual world. When we study Meister Eckhart's writings, we can recognize Thomistic shades of thought in many of his lines. But each time Meister Eckhart's soul tries to rise from theological thinking to the actual spiritual world (with which it feels united,) it ends

By saying to itself that with all this thinking and theology it cannot penetrate to its innermost essence, to the divine inner spark. It tells itself: This thinking, this theology, these ideas, give me fragments of something here, there, everywhere. But none of these are anything like the spiritual divine spark in my own inner being. Therefore, I am excluded from all thoughts, feelings, and memories that fill my soul, from all knowledge of the world that I can absorb up to the highest level. I am excluded from it all, even though I am seeking the deepest nature of my own being. I am in nothingness when I seek this essence of myself. I have searched and searched. I traveled many paths, and they brought me many ideas and feelings, and on these paths I found much. I searched for my “I,” but before ever I found it, I fell into “nothingness” in this search for the “I,” although all the kingdoms of nature urged me to the search.

So, in his search for the self, Meister Eckhart felt that he had fallen into nothingness. This feeling evoked in this medieval mystic words that profoundly touch the heart and soul. They can be paraphrased thus: “I submerge myself in God's nothingness, and am eternally, through nothingness, through nothing, an I; through nothing, I become an I. In all eternity, I must etch the I from the ‘nothingness’ of God.”¹⁶ These are powerful words. Why did this urge for “nothing,” for finding that I in nothingness, resound in the innermost chamber of this mystic's heart, when he wanted to pass from seeking the world to seeking the I? Why? If we go back into earlier times, we find that in former ages it was possible, when the soul turned its gaze inward into itself, to behold the spirit shining forth within. This was still a heritage of primeval pneumatology, of which we shall speak later on. When Thomas Aquinas, for example, peered into the soul, he found within the soul a weaving, living spiritual element. Thomas Aquinas¹⁷ and his predecessors sought the essential ego not in the soul itself but in the spiritual dwelling in the soul. They looked through the soul into the spirit, and in the spirit they found their God-given I. And they said, or could have said: I penetrate into my inmost soul, gaze into the spirit, and in the spirit I find the I.—In the meantime, however, in humanity's forward development toward the realm of freedom, men had lost the ability to find the spirit when they looked inward into themselves.

An earlier figure such as John Scotus Erigena (810–880) would not have spoken as did Meister Eckhart. He would have said: I gaze into my being. When I have traversed all the paths that led me through the kingdoms of the outer world, then I discover the spirit in my inmost soul. Thereby, I find the “I” weaving and living in the soul. I sink myself as spirit into the Divine and discover “I.”

It was, alas, human destiny that the path that was still accessible to mankind in earlier centuries was no longer open in Meister Eckhart's time. Exploring along the same avenues as John Scotus Erigena or even Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart could not sink himself into God-the-Spirit, but only into the “nothingness” of the Divine, and from this “nothing” he had to take hold of the I. This shows that mankind could no longer see the spirit in inner vision. Meister Eckhart brought the I out of the naught through the deep fervor of his heart. His successor, Nicholas Cusanus,¹⁸ admits with complete candor: All thoughts and ideas that lead us in our exploration of the world become lame, become as nothing, when we would venture into the realm of spirit. The soul has lost the power to find the spirit realm in its inner being. So Cusanus says to himself: When I experience everything that theology can give me, I am led into this naught of human thinking. I must unite myself with what dwells in this nothingness in order to at least gain in the docta ignorantia the experience of the spirit.—Then, however, such knowledge, such perception, cannot be expressed in words. Man is rendered dumb when he has reached the point at which he can experience the spirit only through the docta ignorantia.

Thus Cusanus is the man who in his own personal development experiences the end of medieval theology and is driven to the docta ignorantia. He is, however, at the same time a skillful mathematician. He has the disciplined thinking that derives from the pursuit of mathematics. But he shies away, as it were, from applying his mathematical skills to the docta ignorantia. He approaches the docta ignorantia with all kinds of mathematical symbols and formulas, but he does this timidly, diffidently. He is always conscious of the fact that these are symbols derived from mathematics. He says to himself: Mathematics is the last remnant left to me from ancient knowledge. I cannot doubt its reliability as I can doubt that of theology, because I actually experience its reliability when I apprehend mathematics with my mind.—At the same time, his disappointment with theology is so great he dares not apply his mathematical skills in the field of the docta ignorantia except in the form of symbols.

This is the end of one epoch in human thinking. In his inner mood of soul, Cusanus was almost as much of a mathematician as was Descartes later on, but he dared not try to grasp with mathematics what appeared to him in the manner he described in his Docta Ignorantia He felt as though the spirit realm had withdrawn from mankind, had vanished increasingly into the distance, and was unattainable with human knowledge. Man must become ignorant in the innermost sense in order to unite himself in love with this realm of the spirit.

This mood pervades Cusanus's Docta Ignorantia published in 1440. In the development of Western civilization, men had once believed that they confronted the spirit-realm in close perspective. But then, this spirit realm became more and more remote from those men who observed it, and finally it vanished. The book of 1440 was a frank admission that the ordinary human comprehension of that time could no longer reach the remote perspectives into which the spirit realm has withdrawn. Mathematics, the most reliable of the sciences, dared to approach only with symbolic formulas what was no longer beheld by the soul. It was as though this spirit realm, receding further and further in perspective, had disappeared from European civilization. But from the opposite direction, another realm was coming increasingly into view. This was the realm of the sense world, which European civilization was beginning to observe and like. In 1440, Nicholas Cusanus applied mathematical thinking and mathematical knowledge to the vanishing spirit realm only by a timid use of symbols; but now Nicholas Copernicus boldly and firmly applied them to the outer sense world. In 1440 the Docta Ignorantia appeared with the admission that even with mathematics one can no longer behold the spirit realm. We must conceive the spirit realm as so far removed from human perception that even mathematics can approach it only with halting symbols; this is what Nicholas Cusanus said in 1440. “Conceive of mathematics as so powerful and reliable that it can force the sense world into mathematical formulas that are scientifically understandable.” This is what Nicholas Copernicus said to European civilization in 1543. In 1543 Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies,) where the universe was depicted so boldly and rudely that it had to surrender itself to mathematical treatment.

One century lies between the two. During this century Western science was born. Earlier, it had been in an embryonic state. Whoever wants to understand what led to the birth of Western science, must understand this century that lies between the Docta Ignorantia and the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Even today, if we are to understand the true meaning of science, we must study the fructifications that occurred at that time in human soul life and the renunciations it had to experience. We must go back this far in time. If we want to have the right scientific attitude, we must begin there, and we must also briefly consider the embryonic state preceding Nicholas Cusanus. Only then can we really comprehend what science can accomplish for mankind and see how new spiritual life can blossom forth from it.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1960) (formerly published as Eleven European Mystics).
• 2 . These include the three natural scientific courses held in Stuttgart: First First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977); Second Scientific Lecture Course: Warmth Course (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1981); and Das Verhältnis der verschiedenen naturwissenschaftlichen Gebiete sur Astronomie. (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag). The relationship between natural science and spiritual science is dealt with in The Boundaries of Natural Science (Spring Valley, NY, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 3 . Nicholas Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), 1401–1464. Lawyer, churchman, philosopher, mathematician. Ordained priest between 1436–1440, Cardinal 1448. Bishop of Brixen, 1450. cf. chapter on Cusanus in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 4 . Nicholas Cusanus was made Cardinal and named Bishop of Brixen in rapid succession. Though a stranger to Brixen he was named Bishop there directly by the Pope. This led to a protracted conflict with his diocese, during which the latter gathered behind the Duke of Tirol. Cusa was ambushed by the Duke, imprisoned, and forced into accepting a demeaning agreement. The Duke was excommunicated by the Pope and attacked by the Swiss Confederation. However, he was supported by German Counts and remained intransigent. Cusa died before the Emperor could resolve the conflict. The battles around him did not rob Cusa of his peace of mind, and he developed his philosophic, mathematical and theological insights, writing fifteen of his works during the time in Brixen.
• 5 . Brethren of Common Life (also of Good Will): Founded by Gerhart Groote around 1376. Brother-houses in Holland, Northern Germany, Italy and Portugal. Brought into the Catholic Church in the Fifteenth Century. Their schools taught under the strict observance of dogma.
• 6 . Council of Basel: 1431–1449. Called by Pope Martin V on July 23, 1431, the year of his death. This was the last of four reformatory councils with the aim of ending the division in the Church. There came a new rift in the Church.
• 7 . In 1437. This summarizes a long process: Cusanus entered the Council 1432 with the task from the Archdiocese of Trier to defend their Archbishop, whom they had chosen against the will of the Pope. Through the treatise De Concordantia Catholica (On Catholic Unity) which he distributed among the Council and which contained an exceptional survey of the decisions of the Councils and Decrees of the Church, he offered the advice welcome by the majority that the Common Council was beyond the Pope. Thus, he immediately became an important figure in the Council.
  
  Later, the Council majority and the history writings accused Cusanus of having changed his conviction. But Cusanus' deep understanding was ignored, which was rooted in his attitude and which comes to expression in the following words: “When a decision is made unanimously, then one can believe that it came from the Holy Spirit. It lies not in men's power to meet somewhere, and although they are so different from each other, they are able to come to a harmonious decision. It is God's work.” (From J.M. Duex, Der Deutsche Cardinal Nicolaus Von Cusa, Regensburg 1874, Bd. 2, s. 262, which has translated some of the most important of the De Concordantia Catholica. Cusanus must have experienced at the Council that his description of the meaning of a Council was not taken with interest, and he must have faced a decision that is mentioned in the lecture.
• 8 . Pope Eugene 4th was put down and Duke Amadeus of Savoy was set up as Pope Felix 5th in 1439. His resignation in 1449 caused the disbandment of the Council.
• 9 . From 1439–1448 Cusanus acted on the order of the Pope as “Hercules of the Eugenians” as an opponent called him. He went to worldly and churchly princes as well as to the “Reichstag,” and he tried to overcome the neutrality of the Germans about the split of churches, with complete success.
• 10. At the meetings of the princes, 1454, in Nuremberg, Regensburg, and Frankfurt after the invasion of Constantinople by the Turkish, Cusanus tried to motivate the princes to a crusade. After J. Hunnyadis' victory over the Turkish Army in front of Belgrade in 1456 Cusanus organized, at the same day he received the message, a festival of thanksgiving, and he spoke the following words: “Because the lower man can only enjoy life animal-like and physical, Satan who wants to destroy the Gospels in a fine way, intended the appearance of Muhammad who knows the Gospel and the Bible, to let him give the Gospel and Bible an animal-like, sensual meaning. In this way Satan taught Muhammad knowledge to let go forth the head of Malignity, the son of Ruin, and to be an enemy of the cross of Christ.” (From a sermon, “Landaus Invocalo Dominum,” partly translated by J.M. Duex A.A.O.S. 165). Further sermons against the Turks are known from October 28, and November 5 of the same year. (E. Varisteenberge, Le Cardinal Nicolas De Cues, Paris 1920, S. 231 F, and index of sermons s. 480), but this sermon seems to be available only in Latin.
  
  Cusanus himself announced his appointment as Cardinal with a short autobiographical note in which is written: Nicolas was made Cardinal secretly by Pope Eugene (Hist. Jahrbuch der Goerrers Gesellschaft 16.S.549).
• 11. De Pace Fidei (On the Peace of the Faiths), written in September 1453. “The horrible days of Constantinople ... had caused a deep feeling of sadness in the breast of a man who once had wandered through this region, and caused him to sink into deep contemplation, and he had a vision. In this sublime state, he particularly thinks about the differences of the religions of the world, and the possibility of their harmony. This harmony is, in his opinion, a basic condition for religious peace.” (Introduction to De Pace Fidei: Nach Duex A.A.O.S. 405).
• 12. Cusanus left Basel in May 1437 together with other representatives of the minority and traveled for the minority with the legation of the Pope to Constantinople to accompany the Greek Emperor and the heads of the Eastern Church to the Union Council in Ferrara. They arrived in February 1438 in Italy.
• 13. De Docta Ignorantia (The Learned Ignorance). Three books finished in February 1440.
• 14. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 15. Meister Eckhart: Hochheim by Gotha about 1260–before 1328, Cologne. Dominican, schoolmaster, German mystic. Preached in leading posts in orders and churches; taught in Paris, Strasbourg, Cologne. Main work: Opus Tripartius. Based on Scholasticism and writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. Copies of his sermons partly went around without his control. Meister Eckhart died, accused as heretic, during the trial. See chapter, “Meister Eckhart,” in Rudolf Steiner's Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 16. These lines cannot be made clear and simple because the German text plays at length on the words Nicht and Ich.
• 17. Thomas Aquinas: Castle Roccasecca in the Neopolitan region, about 1225–1274 Cloister Fossanuova. Dominican, scholar, churchman. In Cologne, student and friend of Albertus Magnus. Advocated the spiritual reality of general concepts. He directed the theological school in Rome from 1261–1267. There the studies of the Dominican; from 1268 onwards he is teaching in Naples and France. See Rudolf Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking and Riddles of Philosophy (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 18. Nicholas Copernicus: Thorn 1473–1543 Frauenburg. Humanist, mathematician, astronomer, physician, lawyer. No publications during his life, with the exception of a translation. Finished his work on the heliocentric planetary system around 1507. Copernicus was already on his deathbed when his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published. He dedicated it to Pope Paul III. His friend and publisher introduced it as a purely hypothetical, special scientific method of calculation. It thus slipped past the censor, until the third edition was banned in 1616/17. Not until 1822 was it accepted by the Catholic Church, cf. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of Man. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).

The view of history forming the basis of these lectures may be called symptomatological What takes place in the depths of human evolution sends out waves, and these waves are the symptoms that we will try to describe and interpret. In any serious study of history, this must be the case. The processes and events occurring at any given time in the depths of evolution are so manifold and so significant that we can never do more than hint at what is going on the depths. This we do by describing the waves that are flung up. They are symptoms of what is actually taking place.

I mention this because, in order to characterize the birth of the scientific form of thinking and research I described two men, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, in my last lecture. What can be historically observed in the soul and appearance of such men I consider to be symptoms of what goes on in the depths of general human development; this is why I give such descriptions. There are in any given case only a couple of images cast up to the surface that we can intercept by looking into one or another soul. Yet, by doing this, we can describe the basic nature of successive time periods.

When I described Cusanus yesterday, my intention was to suggest how all that happened in the early fifteenth century in mankind's spiritual development, which was pressing forward to the scientific method of perception, is symptomatically revealed in his soul. Neither the knowledge that the mind can gather through the study of theology nor the precise perceptions of mathematics can lead any longer to a grasp of the spiritual world. The wealth of human knowledge, its concepts and ideas, come to a halt before that realm. The fact that one can do no more than write a “docta ignorantia” in the face of the spiritual world comes to expression in Cusanus in a remarkable way. He could go no further with the form of knowledge that, up to his time, was prevalent in human development.

As I pointed out, this soul mood was already present in Meister Eckhart. He was well versed in medieval theological knowledge. With it, he attempted to look into this own soul and to find therein the way to the divine spiritual foundations. Meister Eckhart arrived at a soul mood that I illustrated with one his sentences. He said—and he made many similar statements—“I sink myself into the naught of the divine, and out of nothing become an I in eternity.” He felt himself arriving at nothingness with traditional knowledge. Out of this nothingness, after the ancient wisdom's loss of all persuasive power he had to produce out of his own soul the assurance of his own I, and he did it by this statement.

Looking into this matter more closely, we see how a man like Meister Eckhart points to an older knowledge that has come down to him through the course of evolution. It is knowledge that still gave man something of which he could say: This lives in me, it is something divine in me, it is something. But now, in Meister Eckhart's own time, the most profound thinkers had been reduced to the admission: When I seek this something here or there, all knowledge of this something does not suffice to bring me certainty of my own being. I must proceed from the Something to the Nothing and then, in an act of creation, kindle to life the consciousness of self out of naught.

Now, I want to place another man over against these two. This other man lived 2,000 years earlier and for his time he was as characteristic as Cusanus (who followed in Meister Eckhart's footsteps) was for the fifteenth century. This backward glance into ancient times is necessary so that we can better understand the quest for knowledge that surfaced in the Fifteenth Century from the depths of the human soul. The man whom I want to speak about today is not mentioned in any history book or historical document, for these do not go back as far as the Eighth Century B.C. Yet, we can only gain information concerning the origin of science if, through spiritual science, through purely spiritual observation, we go farther back than external historical documents can take us. The man I have in mind lived about 2,000 years prior to the present period (the starting point of which I have assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century.) This man of pre-Christian times was accepted into a so-called mystery school of Southeastern Europe. There he heard everything that the teachers of the mysteries could communicate to their pupils concerning spiritual wisdom, truths concerning the spiritual beings that lived and still live in the cosmos. But the wisdom that this man received from his teachers was already more or less traditional. It was a recollection of far older visions, a recapitulation of what wise men of a much more ancient age had beheld when they directed their clairvoyant sight into the cosmic spaces whence the motions and constellations of the stars had spoken to them. To the sages of old, the universe was not the machine, the mechanical contraption that it is for men of today when they look out into space to the wise men of ancient times. The cosmic spaces were like living beings, permeating everything with spirit and speaking to them in cosmic language. They experienced themselves within the spirit of world being. They felt how this, in which they lived and moved, spoke to them, how they could direct their questions concerning the riddles of the universe to the universe itself and how, out of the widths of space, the cosmic phenomena replied to them. This is how they experienced what we, in a weak and abstract way, call “spirit” in our language. Spirit was experienced as the element that is everywhere and can be perceived from anywhere. Men perceived things that even the Greeks no longer beheld with the eye of the soul, things that had faded into a nothingness for the Greeks.

This nothingness of the Greeks, which had been filled with living content for the earliest wise men of the Post-Atlantean age,¹⁹ was named by means of words customary for that time. Translated into our language, though weakened and abstract, those words would signify “spirit.” What later became the unknown, the hidden god, was called spirit in those ages when he was known. This is the first thing to know about those ancient times.

The second thing to know is that when a man looked with his soul and spirit vision into himself, he beheld his soul. He experienced it as originating from the spirit that later on became the unknown god. The experience of the ancient sage was such that he designated the human soul with a term that would translate in our language into “spirit messenger” or simply “messenger.”

If we put into a diagram what was actually seen in those earliest times, we can say: The spirit was considered the world-embracing element, apart from which there was nothing and by which everything was permeated. This spirit, which was directly perceptible in its archetypal form, was sought and found in the human soul, inasmuch as the latter recognized itself as the messenger of this spirit. Thus the soul was referred to as the “messenger.”

If we put into a diagram what was actually seen in those earliest times, we can say: The spirit was considered the world-embracing element, apart from which there was nothing and by which everything was permeated. This spirit, which was directly perceptible in its archetypal form, was sought and found in the human soul, inasmuch as the latter recognized itself as the messenger of this spirit. Thus the soul was referred to as the “messenger.”

A third aspect was external nature with all that today is called the world of physical matter, of bodies. I said above that apart from spirit there was nothing, because spirit was perceived by direct vision everywhere in its archetypal form. It was seen in the soul, which realized the spirit's message in its own life. But the spirit was likewise recognized in what we call nature today, the world of corporeal things. Even his bodily world was looked upon as an image of the spirit.

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In those ancient times, people did not have the conceptions that we have today of the physical world. Wherever they looked, at whatever thing or form of nature, they beheld an image of the spirit, because they were still capable of seeing the spirit, a fragment of nature. Inasmuch as all other phenomena of nature were images of the spirit, the body of man too was an image of the spirit. So when this ancient man looked at himself, he recognized himself as a threefold being. In the first place, the spirit lived in him as in one of its many mansions. Man knew himself as spirit. Secondly, man experienced himself within the world as a messenger of this spirit, hence as a soul being. Thirdly, man experienced his corporeality; and by means of this body he felt himself to be an image of the spirit.²⁰ Hence, when man looked upon his own being, he perceived himself as a threefold entity of spirit, soul, and body: as spirit in his archetypal form; as soul, the messenger of god; as body, the image of the spirit.

This ancient wisdom contained no contradiction between body and soul or between nature and spirit; because one knew: Spirit is in man in its archetypal form; the soul is none other than the message transmitted by spirit; the body is the image of spirit. Likewise, no contract was felt between man and surrounding nature because one bore an image of spirit in one's own body, and the same was true of every body in external nature. Hence, an inner kinship was experienced between one's own body and those in outer nature, and nature was not felt to be different from oneself. Man felt himself at one with the whole world. He could feel this because he could behold the archetype of spirit and because the cosmic expanses spoke to him. In consequence of the universe speaking to man, science simply could not exist. Just as we today cannot build a science of external nature out of what lives in our memory, ancient man could not develop one because, whether he looked into himself or outward at nature, he beheld the same image of spirit. No contrast existed between man himself and nature, and there was none between soul and body. The correspondence of soul and body was such that, in a manner of speaking, the body was only the vessel, the artistic reproduction, of the spiritual archetype, while the soul was the mediating messenger between the two. Everything as in a state of intimate union. There could be no question of comprehending anything. We grasp and comprehend what is outside our own life. Anything that we carry within ourselves is directly experienced and need not be first comprehended.

Prior to Roman and Greek times, this wisdom born of direct perception still lived in the mysteries. The man I referred to above heard about his wisdom, but he realized that the teachers in his mystery school were speaking to him only out of a tradition preserved from earlier ages. He no longer heard anything original, anything gained by listening to the secrets of the cosmos. This man undertook long journeys and visited other mystery centers, but it was the same wherever he went. Already in the Eight Century B.C., only traditions of the ancient wisdom were preserved everywhere. The pupils learned them from the teachers, but the teachers could no longer see them, at least not in the vividness of ancient times.

But this man whom I have in mind had an unappeasable urge for certainty and knowledge. From the communications passed on to him, he gathered that once upon a time men had indeed been able to hear the harmony of the spheres from which resounded the Logos that was identical with the spiritual archetype of all things. Now, however, it was all tradition. Just as 2,000 years later Meister Eckhart, working out the traditions of his age, withdrew into his quiet monastic cell in search of the inner power source of soul and self, and at length came to say, “I sink myself into the nothingness of God, and experience in eternity, in naught, the ‘I’,”—just so, the lonely disciple of the late mysteries said to himself: “I listen to the silent universe and fetch²¹ the Logos-bearing soul out of the silence. I love the Logos because the Logos brings tidings of an unknown god.”

This was an ancient parallel to the admission of Meister Eckhart. Just as the latter immersed himself into the naught of the divine that Medieval theology had proclaimed to him and, out of this void, brought out the “I,” so that ancient sage listened to a dumb and silent world; for he could no longer hear what traditional wisdom taught him. The spirit-saturated soul had one drawn the ancient wisdom from the universe. This had not turned silent, but still he had a Logos-bearing soul. And he loved the Logos even though it was no longer the godhead of former ages, but only an image of the divine. In other words, already then, the spirit had vanished from the soul's sight. Just as Meister Eckhart later had to seek the “I” in nothingness, so at that time the soul had to be sought in the dispirited world.

Indeed, in former times the souls had the inner firmness needed to say to themselves: In the inward perception of the spirit indwelling me, I myself am something divine. But now, for direct perception, the spirit no longer inhabited the soul. No longer did the soul experience itself as the spirit's messenger, for one must know something in order to be its messenger. Now, the soul only felt itself as the bearer of the Logos, the spirit image; though this spirit image was vivid in the soul. It expressed itself in the love for this god who thus still lived in his image in the soul. But the soul no longer felt like the messenger, only the carrier, of an image of the divine spirit. One can say that a different form of knowledge arose when man looked into his inner being. The soul declined from messenger to bearer.

Soul: Bearer

Body: Force

Since the living spirit had been lost to human perception, the body no longer appeared as the image of spirit. To recognize it as such an image, one would have had to perceive the archetype. Therefore, for this later age, the body changed into something that I would like to call “force.” The concept of force emerged. The body was pictured as a complex of forces, no longer as a reproduction, an image, that bore within itself the essence of what it reproduced. The human body became a force which no longer bore the substance of the source from which it originated.

Not only the human body, but in all of nature, too, forces had to be pictured everywhere. Whereas formerly, nature in all its aspects had been an image of spirit, now it had become forces flowing out of the spirit. This, however, implied that nature began to be something more or less foreign to man. One could say that the soul had lost something since it no longer contained direct spirit awareness. Speaking crudely, I would have to say that the soul had inwardly become more tenuous, while the body, the external corporeal world, had gained in robustness. Earlier, as an image, it still possessed some resemblance to the spirit. Now it became permeated by the element of force. The complex of forces is more robust than the image in which the spiritual element is still recognizable. Hence, again speaking crudely, the corporeal world became denser while the soul became more tenuous. This is what arose in the consciousness of the men among whom lived the ancient wise man mentioned above, who listened to the silent universe and from its silence, derived the awareness that at least his soul was a Logos-bearer.

Now, a contrast that had not existed before arose between the soul, grown more tenuous, and the increased density of the corporeal world. Earlier, the unity of spirit had been perceived in all things. Now, there arose the contrast between body and soul, man and nature. Now appeared a chasm between body and soul that had not been present at all prior to the time of this old sage. Man now felt himself divided as well from nature, something that also had not been the case in the ancient times. This contrast is the central trait of all thinking in the span of time between the old sage I have mentioned and Nicholas Cusanus.

Men now struggle to comprehend the connection between, on one hand, the soul, that lacks spirit reality, and on the other hand, the body that has become dense, has turned into force, into a complex of forces.

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And men struggle to feel and experience the relationship between man and nature. But everywhere, nature is force. In that time, no conception at all existed as yet of what we call today “the laws of nature.” People did not think in terms of natural laws; everywhere and in everything they felt the forces of nature. When a man looked into his own being, he did not experience a soul that—as was the case later one—bore within itself a dim will, an almost equally dim feeling, and an abstract thinking. Instead, he experienced the soul as the bearer of the living Logos, something that was not abstract and dead, but a divine living image of God.

We must be able to picture this contrast, which remained acute until the eleventh or Twelfth century. It was quite different from the contrasts that we feel today. If we cannot vividly grasp this contrast, which was experienced by everyone in that earlier epoch, we make the same mistake as all those historians of philosophy who regard the old Greek thinker Democritus²² of the fifth century B.C. as an atomist in the modern sense, because he spoke of “atoms.” The words suggest a resemblance, but no real resemblance exists. There is great difference between modern-day atomists and Democritus. His utterances were based on the awareness of the contrast described above between man and nature, soul and body. His atoms were complexes of force and as such were contrasted with space, something a modern atomist cannot do in that manner. How could the modern atomist say what Democritus said: “Existence is not more than nothingness, fullness is not more than emptiness?” It implies that Democritus assumed empty space to possess an affinity with atom-filled space. This has meaning only within a consciousness that as yet has no idea of the modern concept of body. Therefore, it cannot speak of the atoms of a body, but only of centers of force, which, in that case, have an inner relationship to what surrounds man externally. Today's atomist cannot equate emptiness with fullness. If Democritus had viewed emptiness the way we do today, he could not have equated it with the state of being. He could do so because in this emptiness he sought the soul that was the bearer of the Logos. And though he conceived his Logos in a form of necessity, it was the Greek form of necessity, not our modern physical necessity. If we are to comprehend what goes on today, we must be able to look in the right way into the nuances of ideas and feelings of former times.

There came the time, described in the last lecture, of Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, when even awareness of the Logos indwelling the soul was lost. The ancient sage, in listening to the universe, only had to mourn the silence, but Meister Eckhart and Cusanus found the naught and had to seek the I out of nothingness. Only now, at this point, does the modern era of thinking begin. The soul now no longer contains the living Logos. Instead, when it looks into itself, it finds ideas and concepts, which finally lead to abstractions. The soul has become even more tenuous. A third phase begins. Once upon a time, in the first phase, the soul experienced the spirit's archetype within itself. It saw itself as the messenger of spirit. In the second phase, the soul inwardly experienced the living image of God in the Logos, it became the bearer of the Logos.

Now, in the third phase, the soul becomes, as it were, a vessel for ideas and concepts. These may have the certainty of mathematics, but they are only ideas and concepts. The soul experiences itself at its most tenuous, if I may put it so. Again the corporeal world increases in robustness. This is the third way in which man experiences himself. He cannot as yet give up his soul element completely, but he experiences it as the vessel for the realm of ideas. He experiences his body, on the other hand, not only as a force but as a spatial body.

Soul: Realm of Ideas

Body: Spatial Corporeality

The body has become still more robust. Man now denies the spirit altogether. Here we come to the “body” that Hobbes, Bacon,²³ and Locke spoke of. Here, we meet “body” at its densest. The soul no longer feels a kinship to it, only an abstract connection that gets worse in the course of time.

In place of the earlier concrete contrast of soul and body, man and nature, another contrast arises that leads further and further into abstraction. The soul that formerly appeared to itself as something concrete—because it experienced in itself the Logos-image of the divine—gradually transforms itself to a mere vessel of ideas. Whereas before, in the ancient spiritual age, it had felt akin to everything, it now sees itself as subject and regards everything else as object, feeling no further kinship with anything.

The earlier contrast of soul and body, man and nature, increasingly became the merely theoretical epistemological contrast between the subject that is within a person and the object without. Nature changed into the object of knowledge. It is not surprising that out of its own needs knowledge henceforth strove for the “purely objective.”

But what is this purely objective? It is no longer what nature was to the Greeks. The objective is external corporeality in which no spirit is any longer perceived. It is nature devoid of spirit, to be comprehended from without by the subject.

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Precisely because man had lost the connection with nature, he now sought a science of nature from outside. Here, we have once again reached the point where I concluded yesterday. Cusanus looked upon what should have been the divine world to him and declared that man with his knowledge must stop short before it and, if he must write about the divine world, he must write a docta ignorantia. And only faintly, in symbols taken from mathematics, did Cusanus want to retain something of what appeared thus to him as the spiritual realms.

About a hundred years after the Docta Ignorantia appeared in 1440, the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium appeared in 1543. one century later, Copernicus, with his mathematical mind, took hold of the other side, the external side of what Cusanus could not fully grasp, not even symbolically, with mathematics. Today, we see how in fact the application of this mathematical mind to nature becomes possible the moment that nature vanishes from man's immediate experience. This can be traced even in the history of language since “Nature” refers to something that is related to “being born,” whereas what we consider as nature today is only the corporeal world in which everything is dead. I mean that it is dead for us since, of course, nature contains life and spirit. But it has become lifeless for us and the most certain of conceptual systems, namely, the mathematical, is regarded as the best way to grasp it.

Thus we have before us a development that proceeds with inward regularity. In the first epoch, man beheld god and world, but god in the world and the world in god: the one-ness, unity. In the second epoch, man in fact beheld soul and body, man and nature; the soul as bearer of the living Logos, the bearer of what is not born and does not die; nature as what is born and dies. In the third phase man has ascended to the abstract contrast of subject (himself) and object ( the external world.) The object is something so robust that man no longer even attempts to throw light on it with concepts. It is experienced as something alien to man, something that is examined from outside with mathematics although mathematics cannot penetrate into the inner essence. For this reason, Cusanus applied mathematics only symbolically, and timidly at that.

The striving to develop science must therefore be pictured as emerging from earlier faculties of mankind. A time had to come when this science would appear. It had to develop the way it did. We can follow this if we focus clearly on the three phases of development that I have just described.

We see how the first phase extends to the Eighth Century B.C. to the ancient sage of Southern Europe whom I have described today. The second extends from him to Nicholas Cusanus. We find ourselves in the third phase now. The first is pneumatological, directed to the spirit in its primeval form. The second is mystical, taking the world in the broadest sense possible. The third is mathematical. Considering the significant characteristics, therefore, we trace the first phase—ancient pneumatology—as far as the ancient Southern wise man. Magical mysticism extends from there to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus. The age of mathematizing natural science proceeds from Cusanus into our own time and continues further. More on this tomorrow.

• 19. Post-Atlantean Age: cf. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline Of Occult Science (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 20. A literal translation of the transcript would read: “As body; and as body, as an image of the spirit.”
• 21. I listen to the silent universe: cf. Rudolf Steiner, Truth-Wrought Words. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1979).
• 22. Democritus: c. 460–360 B.C. From his numerous writings about philosophy, mathematics, physics, medicine, psychology, and technology, only some fragments and an index remain. The remark mentioned is a report from Aristotle, Metaphysics 1:4: “That is why they (Leucippus and Democritus) say that the non-existent exists just as much as the existent, just as emptiness is just as good as fullness, and they posit these as material causes.”
• 23. Francis Bacon: (also Francis Bacon of Verulam), London 1561–1626 Highgate. Lawyer, doctor, politician, diplomat, essayist, philosopher and humanist. The leading English government liberal, successful during 1603–1621. In these years his main work was developed. The philosophy of his age he found stuck in hopeless experiments to solve insolvable problems with Aristotelian logic. The only source of sure knowledge and abilities for him was natural science. He saw a renewal of the spiritual and economic life in this science. Principal works: Novum Organum (an inductive logic contradicting that of Aristotle (the old Organum); De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum; a Critical Encyclopedia of all Science; Sylva Sylvarum: Preliminary Announcement of Procedure and Method (this remained in preparation). His literary success was astonishing, and it greatly furthered the materialistic world view. cf. Riddles of Philosophy.

In the last two lectures I tried to indicate the point in time when the scientific outlook and manner of thinking, such as we know it today, arose in the course of time. It was pointed out yesterday that the whole character of this scientific thinking, emerging at the beginning most clearly in Copernicus’ conception of astronomy, depends on the way in which mathematical thinking was gradually related to the reality of the external world. The development of science in modern times has been greatly affected by a change—one might almost say a revolutionary change—in human perception in regard to mathematical thinking itself. We are much inclined nowadays to ascribe permanent and absolute validity to our own manner of thinking.

Nobody notices how much matters have changed. We take a certain position today in regard to mathematics and to the relationship of mathematics to reality. We assume that this is the way it has to be and that this is the correct relationship. There are debates about it from time to time, but within certain limits this is regarded as the true relationship. We forget that in a none too distant past mankind felt differently concerning mathematics. We need only recall what happened soon after the point in time that I characterized as the most important in modern spiritual life, the point when Nicholas Cusanus presented his dissertation to the world. Shortly after this, not only did Copernicus try to explain the movements of the solar system with mathematically oriented thinking of the kind to which we are accustomed today, but philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza²⁴ began to apply this mathematical thought to the whole physical and spiritual universe.

Even in such a book as his Ethics, the philosopher Spinoza placed great value on presenting his philosophical principles and postulates, if not in mathematical formulae—for actual calculations play no special part—yet in such a manner that the whole form of drawing conclusions, of deducing the later rules from earlier ones, is based on the mathematical pattern. By and by it appeared self-evident to the men of that time that in mathematics they had the right model for the attainment of inward certainty. Hence they felt that if they could express the world in thoughts arranged in the same clear-cut architectural order as in a mathematical or geometrical system, they would thereby achieve something that would have to correspond to reality. If the character of scientific thinking is to be correctly understood, it must be through the special way in which man relates to mathematics and mathematics relates to reality. Mathematics had gradually become what I would term a self-sufficient inward capacity for thinking. What do I mean by that?

The mathematics existing in the age of Descartes²⁵ and Copernicus can certainly be described more or less in the same terms as apply today. Take a modern mathematician, for example, who teaches geometry, and who uses his analytical formulas and geometrical concepts in order to comprehend some physical process. As a geometrician, this mathematician starts from the concepts of Euclidean geometry, the three-dimensional space (or merely dimensional space, if he thinks of non-Euclidean geometry.)²⁶ In three-dimensional space he distinguishes three mutually perpendicular directions that are otherwise identical. Space, I would say, is a self-sufficient form that is simply placed before one's consciousness in the manner described above without questions being raised such as: Where does this form come from? Or, Where do we get our whole geometrical system?

In view of the increasing superficiality of psychological thinking, it was only natural that man could no longer penetrate to those inner depths of soul where geometrical thought has its base. Man takes his ordinary consciousness for granted and fills this consciousness with mathematics that has been thought-out but not experienced. As an example of what is thought-out but not experienced, let us consider the three perpendicular dimensions of Euclidean space. Man would have never thought of these if he had not experienced a threefold orientation within himself. One orientation that man experiences in himself is from front to back. We need only recall how, from the external modern anatomical and physiological point of view, the intake and excretion of food, as well as other processes in the human organism, take place from front to back. The orientation of these specific processes differs from the one that prevails when, for example, I do something with my right arm and make a corresponding move with my left arm. Here, the processes are oriented left and right. Finally, in regard to the last orientation, man grows into it during earthly life. In the beginning he crawls on all fours and only gradually, stands upright, so that this last orientation flows within him from above downward and up from below.

As matters stand today, these three orientations in man are regarded very superficially. These processes—front to back, right to left or left to right, and above to below—are not inwardly experienced so much as viewed from outside. If it were possible to go back into earlier ages with true psychological insight, one would perceive that these three orientations were inward experiences for the men of that time. Today our thoughts and feelings are still halfway acknowledged as inward experiences, but he man of a bygone age had a real inner experience, for example, of the front-to-back orientation. He had not yet lost awareness of the decrease in intensity of taste sensations from front to back in the oral cavity. The qualitative experience that taste was strong on the tip of the tongue, then grew fainter and fainter as it receded from front to back, until it disappeared entirely, was once a real and concrete experience. The orientation from front to back was felt in such qualitative experiences. Our inner life is no longer as intense as it once was. Therefore, today, we no longer have experiences such as this. Likewise man today no longer has a vivid feeling for the alignment of his axis of vision in order to focus on a given point by shifting the right axis over the left. Nor does he have a full concrete awareness of what happens when, in the orientation of right-left, he relates his right arm and hand to the left arm and hand. Even less does he have a feeling that would enable him to say: The thought illuminates my head and, moving in the direction from above to below, it strikes into my heart. Such a feeling, such an experience, has been lost to man along with the loss of all inwardness of world experience. But it did once exist. Man did once experience the three perpendicular orientation of space within himself. And these three spatial orientations—right-left, front-back, and above-below—are the basis of the three-dimensional framework of space, which is only the abstraction of the immediate inner experience described above.

So what can we say when we look back at the geometry of earlier times? We can put it like this: It was obvious to a man in those ages that merely because of his being human the geometrical elements revealed themselves in his own life. By extending his own above-below, right-left, and front-back orientations, he grasped the world out of his own being.

Try to sense the tremendous difference between this mathematical feeling bound to human experience, and the bare, bleak mathematical space layout of analytical geometry, which establishes a point somewhere in abstract space, draws three coordinating axes at right angles to each other and thus isolates this thought-out space scheme from all living experience. But man has in fact torn this thought-out spatial diagram out of his own inner life. So, if we are to understand the origin of the later mathematical way of thinking that was taken over by science, if we are to correctly comprehend its self-sufficient presentation of structures, we must trace it back to the self-experienced mathematics of a bygone age. Mathematics in former times was something completely different. What was once present in a sort of dream-like experience of three-dimensionality and then became abstracted, exists today completely in the unconscious. As a matter of fact, man even now produced mathematics from his own three-dimensionality. But the way in which he derives this outline of space from his experiences of inward orientation is completely unconscious. None of this rises into consciousness except the finished spatial diagram. The same is true of all completed mathematical structures. They have all been severed from their roots. I chose the example of the space scheme, but I could just as well mention any other mathematical category taken from algebra or arithmetic. They are nothing but schemata drawn from immediate human experience and raised into abstraction.

Going back a few centuries, perhaps to the fourteenth century, and observing how people conceived of things mathematical, we find that in regard to numbers they still had an echo of inward feelings. In an age in which numbers had already become an abstract ads they are today, people would have been unable to find the names for numbers. The words designating numbers are often wonderfully characteristic. Just think of the word “two.” (zwei) It clearly expresses a real process, as when we say entzweien, “to cleave in twain.” Even more, it is related to zweifeln, “to doubt.” It is not mere imitation of an external process when the number two, zwei, is described by the word Entzweien, which indicates the disuniting, the splitting, of something formerly a whole. It is in fact something that is inwardly experienced and only then made into a scheme. It is brought up from within, just as the abstract three-dimensional space-scheme is drawn up from inside the mind.

We arrive back at an age of rich spiritual vitality that still existed in the first centuries of Christianity, as can be demonstrated by the fact that mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were considered to be almost one and the same. Mysticism, mathesis, and mathematics are one, though only in a certain connection. For a mystic of the first Christian centuries, mysticism was something that one experienced more inwardly in the soul. Mathematics was the mysticism that one experienced more outwardly with the body; for example, geometry with the body's orientations to front-and-back, right-and-left, and up-and-down. One could say that actual mysticism was soul mysticism and that mathematics, mathesis, was mysticism of the corporeality. Hence, proper mysticism was inwardly experienced in what is generally understood by this term; whereas mathesis, the other mysticism, as experienced by means of an inner experience of the body, as yet not lost.

As a matter of fact, in regard to mathematics and the mathematical method Descartes and Spinoza still had completely different feelings from what we have today. Immerse yourself in these thinkers, not superficially as in the practice today when one always wants to discover in the thinkers of old the modern concepts that have been drilled into our heads, but unselfishly, putting yourself mentally in their place. You will find that even Spinoza still retained something of a mystical attitude toward the mathematical method.

The philosophy of Spinoza differs from mysticism only in one respect. A mystic like Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler²⁷ attempts to experience the cosmic secrets more in the depths of feeling. Equally inwardly, Spinoza constructs the mysteries of the universe along mathematical, methodical lines, not specifically geometrical lines, but lines experienced mentally by mathematical methods. In regard to soul configuration and mood, there is no basic difference between the experience of Meister Eckhart's mystical method and Spinoza's mathematical one. Anyone how makes such a distinction does not really understand how Spinoza experienced his Ethics, for example, in a truly mathematical-mystical way. His philosophy still reflects the time when mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were felt as one and the same experience in the soul.

Now, you will perhaps recall how, in my book The Case for Anthroposophy,²⁸ I tried to explain the human organization in a way corresponding to modern thinking. I divided the human organization—meaning the physical one—into the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-limb system. I need not point out to you that I did not divide man into separate members placed side by side in space, although certain academic persons have accused²⁹ me of such a caricature. I made it clear that these three systems interpenetrate each other. The nerve-sense system is called the “head system” because it is centered mainly in the head, but it spreads out into the whole body. The breathing and blood rhythms of the chest system naturally extend into the head organization, and so on. The division is functional, not local. An inward grasp of this threefold membering will give you true insight into the human being.

Let us now focus on this division for a certain purpose. To begin with, let us look at the third member of the human organization, that of digestion (metabolism) and the limbs. Concentrating on the most striking aspect of this member, we see that man accomplishes the activities of external life by connecting his limbs with his inner experiences. I have characterized some of these, particularly the inward orientation experience of the three directions of space. In his external movements, in finding his orientation in the world, man's limb system achieves inward orientation in the three directions. In walking, we place ourselves in a certain manner into the experience of above-below. In much that we do with our hands or arms, we bring ourselves into the orientation of right-and-left. To the extent that speech is a movement of the aeriform in man, we even fit ourselves into direction of front-and-back, back-and-front, when we speak. Hence, in moving about in the world, we place our inward orientation into the outer world.

Let us look at the true process, rather than the merely illusionary one, in a specific mathematical case. It is an illusionary process, taking place purely in abstract schemes of thought, when I find somewhere in the universe a process in space, and I approach it as an analytical mathematician in such a way that I draw or imagine the three coordinate axes of the usual spatial system and arrange this external process into Descartes’ purely artificial space scheme.

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This is what occurs above, in the realm of thought schemes, through the nerve-sense system. One would not achieve a relationship to such a process in space if it were not for what one does with one's limbs, with one's whole body, if it were not for inserting oneself into the whole world in accordance with the inward orientation of above-below, right-left, and front-back. When I walk forward, I know that on one hand I place myself in the vertical direction in order to remain upright. I am also aware that in walking I adjust my direction to the back-to-front orientation, and when I swim and use my arms, I orient myself in right and left. I do not understand all this if I apply Descartes’ space scheme, the abstract scheme of the coordinate axes. What gives me the impression of reality in dealing with matters of space is found only when I say to myself: Up in the head, in the nerve system, an illusory image arises of something that occurs deep down in the subconscious. Here, where man cannot reach with his ordinary consciousness, something takes place between his limb system and the universe. The whole of mathematics, of geometry, is brought up out of our limb system of movement. We would not have geometry if we did not place ourselves into the world according to inward orientation. In truth, we geometrize when we lift what occurs in the subconscious into the illusory of the thought scheme. This is the reason why it appears so abstractly independent to us. But his is something that this only come about in recent times. In the age in which mathesis, mathematics, was still felt to be something close to mysticism, the mathematical relationship to all things was also viewed as something human.

Where is the human factor if I imagine an abstract point somewhere in space crossed by three perpendicular directions and then apply this scheme to a process perceived in actual space? It is completely divorced from man, something quite inhuman. This non-human element, which has appeared in recent times in mathematical thinking, was once human. But when was it human?

The actual date has already been indicated, but the inner aspect is still to be described. When was it human? It was human when man did not only experience in his movements and his inward orientation in space that he stepped forward from behind and moved in such a way that he was aware of his vertical as well as the horizontal direction, but when he also felt the blood's inward activity in all such moving about, in all such inner geometry. There is always blood activity when I move forward. Think of the blood activity present when, as an infant, I lifted myself up from the horizontal to an upright position! Behind man's movements, behind his experience of the world by virtue of movements, (which can also be, and at one time was, an inward experience) there stands the experience of the blood. Every movement, small or large, that I experience as I perform it contains its corresponding blood experience. Today blood is to us the red fluid that seeps out when we prick our skin. We can also convince ourselves intellectually of its existence. But in the age when mathematics, mathesis, was still connected with mysticism, when in a dreamy way the experience of movement was inwardly connected with that of blood, man was inwardly aware of the blood. It was one thing to follow the flow of blood through the lungs and quite another to follow it through the head. Man followed the flow of the blood in lifting his knee or his foot, and he inwardly felt and experienced himself through and through in his blood. The blood has one tinge when I raise my foot, another when I place it firmly on the ground. When I lounge around and doze lazily, the blood's nuance differs from the one it has when I let thoughts shoot through my head. The whole person can take on a different form when, in addition to the experience of movement, he has that of the blood. Try to picture vividly what I mean. Imagine that you are walking slowly, one step at a time; you begin to walk faster; you start to run, to turn yourself, to dance around. Suppose that you were doing all this, not with today's abstract consciousness, but with inward awareness: You would have a different blood experience at each stage, with the slow walking, then the increase in speed, the running, the turning, the dancing. A different nuance would be noted in each case. If you tried to draw this inner experience of movement, you would perhaps have to sketch it like this (white line.) But for each position in which you found yourself during this experience of movement, you would draw a corresponding inward blood experience (red, blue, yellow—see Figure 2)

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Of the first experience, that of movement, you would say that you have it in common with external space, because you are constantly changing your position. The second experience, which I have marked by means of the different colors, is a time experience, a sequence of inner intense experiences.

In fact, if you run in a triangle, you can have one inner experience of the blood. You will have a different one if you run in a square.

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What is outwardly quantitative and geometric, is inwardly intensely qualitative in the experience of the blood.

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It is surprising, very surprising, to discover that ancient mathematics spoke quite differently about the triangle and the square. Modern nebulous mystics describe great mysteries, but there is no great mystery here. It is only what a person would have experienced inwardly in the blood when he walked the outline of a triangle or a square, not to mention the blood experience corresponding to the pentagram. In the blood the whole of geometry becomes qualitative inward experience. We arrive back at a time when one could truly say, as Mephistopheles does in Goethe's Faust, “Blood is a very special fluid.”³⁰ This is because, inwardly experienced, the blood absorbs all geometrical forms and makes of them intense inner experiences. Thereby man learns to know himself as well. He learns to know what it means to experience a triangle, a square, a pentagram; he becomes acquainted with the projection of geometry on the blood and its experiences. This was once mysticism. Not only was mathematics, mathesis, closely related to mysticism, it was in fact the external side of movement, of the limbs, while the inward side was the blood experience. For the mystic of bygone times all of mathematics transformed itself out of a sum of spatial formations into what is experienced in the blood, into an intensely mystical rhythmic inner experience.

We can say that once upon a time man possessed a knowledge that he experienced, that he was an integral part of; and that at the point in time that I have mentioned, he lost this oneness of self with the world, this participation in the cosmic mysteries. He tore mathematics loose from his inner being. No longer did he have the experience of movement; instead, he mathematically constructed the relationships of movement outside. He no longer had the blood experience; the blood and its rhythm became something quite foreign to him. Imagine what this implies: Man tears mathematics free from his body and it becomes something abstract. He loses his understanding of the blood experience. Mathematics no longer goes inward. Picture this as a soul mood that arose at a specific time. Earlier, the soul had a different mood than later. Formerly, it sought the connection between blood experience and experience of movement; later, it completely separated them. It no longer related the mathematical and geometrical experience to its own movement. It lost the blood experience. Think of this as real history, as something that occurs in the changing moods of evolution. Verily, a man who lived in the earlier age, when mathesis was still mysticism, put his whole soul into the universe. He measured the cosmos against himself. He lived in astronomy.

Modern man inserts his system of coordinates into the universe and keeps himself out of it. Earlier, man sensed a blood experience with each geometrical figure. Modern man feels no blood experience; he loses the relationship to his own heart, where the blood experiences are centered. Is it imaginable that in the seventh or eighth century, when the soul still felt movement as a mathematical experience and blood as a mystical experience, anybody would have founded a Copernican astronomy with a system of coordinates simply inserted into the universe and totally divorced from man? No, this became possible only when a specific soul constitution arose in evolution. And after that something else became possible as well. The inward blood awareness was lost. Now the time had come to discover the movements of the blood externally through physiology and anatomy. Hence you have this change in evolution: On one hand Copernican astronomy, on the other the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey,³¹ a contemporary of Bacon and Hobbes. A world view gained by abstract mathematics cannot produce anything like the ancient Ptolemaic theory, which was essentially bound up with man and the living mathematics he experienced within himself. Now, one experiences an abstract system of coordinates starting with an arbitrary zero point. No longer do we have the inward blood experience; instead, we discover the physical circulation of the blood with the heart in the center.

The birth of science thus placed itself into the whole context of evolution in both its conscious and unconscious processes. Only in this way, out of the truly human element, can one understand what actually happened, what had to happen in recent times for science—so self-evident today—to come into being in the first place. Only thus could it even occur to anybody to conduct such investigations as led, for example, to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 24. Spinoza, Benedictus: Amsterdam 1632–1677. The Hague. Philosopher, mathematician, had Humanistic and Talmudistic training. By vocation, optician and politician. His main work Ethics with the characteristic full title Ethica Ordine Geometrica Demonstrata (Ethic Represented by Geometric Method) could only be published by his friends after his death. See Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age and Riddles of Philosophy.
• 25. René Descartes: Lat., Renatus Cartenius, Le Haye (Tourraine) 1598–1650 Stockholm. Mathematician, physicist, philosopher. Educated by the Jesuits in La Fleche, he first became a soldier and was part of some campaigns but turned away from outer life to enter into the loneliness of a striver for knowledge, living first in Paris and then for a long time in Holland. He died in Stockholm, having been called there by Queen Christine. For him, doubt of tradition, but also of all sense perception, was the starting point of his philosophy and he found in self-consciousness the security of all being (“Cogito ergo Sum”). He developed the method of analytical geometry and gave an explanation of the rainbow. Main works: Essays, 1637, in it “Discours de la Methode and Dioptiric,” “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,” 1641; “Passions de L'Ame,” 1650. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 26. Non-Euclidian geometry is a prime example of “the self-contained inner ability to think.” C. Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) discovered first that one can think more than only a geometric system. Because nobody understood this, he decided not to publish his results and to withdraw from the fruitless quarrel. Independently of Gauss in 1828 N.I. Lobatschewskij and in 1829 J. Boljai first published their solutions to the same problem. Rudolf Steiner often spoke about the meaning of this achievement, as in Wege und Ziele des geistigen Menschen in the lecture “Der Heutige Stand der Philosophie und Wissenschaft,” (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1973; GA Bibl. Nr. 125). See also: Georg Unger, Physic am Scheidewege (Dornach: 1948), pages 19–28, and Vom Bielden Physikalischer Begriffe, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 31–32 and 193–194.
• 27. Johannes Tauler: About 1300–1361 Strasbourg. Preacher and pastor, Dominican, mystic, student of Meister Eckhart. Sermons and writings in German by W. Lehmann, 1923; see also Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, the chapter “Friendship with God.”
• 28. Rudolf Steiner, The Case for Anthroposophy (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970).
• 29. In a reply to two lectures, which Walter Johannes Stein and Eugen Kolisko gave to defend two articles on “Anthroposophy as Science” in the Goettingen newspaper, Hugo Fuchs, Professor of Anatomy, spoke sarcastically of a human being with head, breast, and belly system. (From a report of the newspaper Die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus, August 1920, No. 5).
• 30. From Goethe's Faust, Part I, the scene in the Student Room with Faust and Mephisto. See Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967).
• 31. William Harvey, 1578–1658, physiologist, Professor of Anatomy, London, discoverer of the main bloodstream: De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (1628).

In the last lecture, I spoke of a former view of life from which the modern scientific view has evolved. It still combined the qualitative with the form-related or geometrical elements of mathematics, the qualitative with the quantitative. One can therefore look back at a world conception in which the triangle or another geometrical form was an inner experience no matter whether the form referred to the surface of a given body or to its path of movement. Geometrical and arithmetical forms were intensely qualitative inner experiences. For example, a triangle and a square were each conceived as emerging from a specific inward experience.

This conception could change into a different one only when men lost their awareness that everything quantitative—including mathematics—is originally experienced by man in direct connection with the universe. It changed when the point was reached where the quantitative was severed from what man experiences. We can determine this moment of separation precisely. It occurred when all concepts of space that included man himself were replaced by the schematic view of space that is customary today, according to which, from an arbitrary starting point, the three coordinates are drawn. The kind of mathematics prevalent today, by means of which man wants to dominate the so-called phenomena of nature, arose in this form only after it had been separated from the human element. Expressing it more graphically, I would say in a former age man perceived mathematics as something that he experienced within himself together with his god or gods, whereby the god ordered the world. It came as no surprise therefore to discover this mathematical order in the world. In contrast to this, to impose an arbitrary space outline or some other mathematical formula on natural phenomena—even if such abstract mathematical concepts can be identified with significant aspects in these so-called natural phenomena—is a procedure that cannot be firmly related to human experiences. Hence, it cannot be really understood and is at most simply assumed to be a fact. Therefore in reality it cannot be an object of any perception. The most that can be said of such an imposition of mathematics on natural phenomena is that what has first been mathematically thought out is then found to fit the phenomena of nature. But why this is so can no longer be discovered within this particular world perception.

Think back to the other worldview that I have previously described to you, when all corporeality was regarded as image of the spirit. One looking at a body found in it the image of spirit. One then looked back on oneself, on what—in union with one's own divine nature—one experienced as mathematics through one's own bodily constitution. As a work of art is not something obscure but is recognized as the image of the artist's ideas, so one found in corporeal nature the mathematical images of what one had experienced with one's own divine nature. The bodies of external nature were images of the divine spiritual. The instant that mathematics is separated from man and is regarded only as an attribute of bodies that are no longer seen as a reflection of spirit, in that instant agnosticism creeps into knowledge.

Take a concrete example, the first phenomenon that confronts us after the birth of scientific thinking, the Copernican system. It is not my intention today or in any of these lectures to defend either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system. I am not advocating either one. I am only speaking of the historical fact that the Copernican system has replaced the Ptolemaic. What I say today does not imply that I favor the old Ptolemaic system over the Copernican. But this must be said as a matter of history. Imagine yourself back in the age when man experienced his own orientation in space: above-below, right-left, front-back. He could experience this only in connection with the earth. He could, for example, experience the vertical orientation in himself only in relation to the direction of gravity. He experienced the other two in connection with the four compass points according to which the earth itself is oriented. All this he experienced together with the earth as he felt himself standing firmly on it. He thought of himself not just as a being that begins with the head and ends a the sole of the feet. Rather, he felt himself penetrated by the force of gravity, which had something to do with his being but did not cease at the soles of his feet. Hence, feeling himself within the nature of the gravitational force, man felt himself one with the earth. For his concrete experience, the starting point of his cosmology was thus given by the earth. Therefore he felt he Ptolemaic system to be justified.

Only when man severed himself from mathematics, only then was it possible also to sever mathematics from the earth and to found an astronomical system with its center in the sun. Man had to lose the old experience-within-himself before he could accept a system with its center outside the earth. The rise of the Copernican system is therefore intimately bound up with the transformation of civilized mankind's soul mood. The origin of modern scientific thinking cannot be separated from the general mental and soul condition, but must be viewed in context with it.

It is only natural that statements like this are considered absurd by our contemporaries, who believe in the present world view far more fervently than the sectarians of olden days believed in their dogmas. But to give the scientific mode of thinking its proper value, it must be seen as arising inevitably out of human nature and evolution. In the course of these lectures, we shall see that by doing this we are actually assigning far greater value to science than do the modern agnostics.

Thus the Copernican world conception came into being, the projection of the cosmic center from the earth to the sun. Fundamentally, the whole cosmic thought edifice of Giordano Bruno,³² who was born in 1548 and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, was already contained in the Copernican world view. It is often said that Giordano Bruno glorifies the modern view of nature, glorifies Copernicanism. One must have deep insight into the inner necessity with which this new cosmology arose if one is to have any feeling at all for the manner and tone in which Giordano Bruno speaks and writes. Then one sees that Giordano Bruno does not sound like the followers of the new view or like the stragglers of the old view. He really does not speak about the cosmos mathematically so much as lyrically. There is something musical in the way Giordano Bruno describes the modern conception of nature. Why is that? The reason is that Giordano Bruno, though he was rooted with his whole soul in a bygone world perception, told himself with his outward intellect: The way things have turned out in history, we cannot but accept the Copernican world picture. He understood the absolute necessity that had been brought about by evolution. This Copernican world view, however, was not something he had worked out for himself. It was something given to him, and which he found appropriate for his contemporaries. Belonging as he did to an older world conception, he could not help but experience inwardly what he had to perceive and accept as knowledge. He still had the faculty of inner experience, but he did not have scientific forms for it. Therefore although he described them so wonderfully, he did not follow the Copernican directions of thought in the manner of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, or Newton.³³ Instead, he tried to experience the cosmos in the old way, the way that was suitable when the world cosmos was experienced within one's being. But in order to do this, mathematics would have had to be also mysticism, inward experience, in the way I described yesterday. This it could not be for Giordano Bruno. The time for it was past. Hence, his attempt to enter the new cosmology through living experience became an experience, not of knowledge but of poetry, or at least partially so. This fact lends Giordano's works their special coloring. The atom is still a monad; in his writings, it is still something alive. The sum of cosmic laws retains a soul quality, but not because he experienced the soul in all the smallest details as did the ancient mystics, and not because he experienced the mathematical laws of the cosmos as the intentions of the spirit. No, it was because he roused himself to wonder at this new cosmology and to glorify it poetically in a pseudo-scientific form. Giordano Bruno is truly something like a connecting link between two world conceptions, the present one and the ancient one that lasted into the fifteenth century. Man today can form scarcely any idea of the latter. All cosmic aspects were then still experienced by man, who did not yet differentiate between the subject within himself and the cosmic object outside. The two were still as one; man did not speak of the three dimensions in space, sundered from the orientation within his own body and appearing as above-below, right-left, and forward-backward.

Copernicus tried to grasp astronomy with abstract mathematical ideas. On the other hand, Newton shows mathematics completely on its own. Here I do not mean single mathematical deductions, but mathematical thinking in general, entirely divorced from human experience. This sounds somewhat radical and objections could certainly be made to what I am thus describing in broad outlines, but this does not alter the essential facts. Newton is pretty much the first to approach the phenomena of nature with abstract mathematical thinking. Hence, as a kind of successor to Copernicus, Newton becomes the real founder of modern scientific thinking.

It is interesting to see in Newton's time and in the age that followed how civilized humanity is at pains to come to terms with the immense transformation in soul configuration that occurred as the old mathematical-mystical view gave way to the new mathematical-scientific style. The thinkers of the time find it difficult to come to terms with this revolutionary change. It becomes all the more evident when we look into the details, the specific problems with which some of these people wrestled. See how Newton, for instance, presents his system by trying to relate it to the mathematics that has been severed from man. We find that he postulates time, place, space, and motion. He says in effect in his Principa: I need not define place, time, space, and motion because everybody understands them.³⁴ Everybody knows what time is, what space, place, and motion are, hence these concepts, taken from common experience, can be used in my mathematical explanation of the universe. People are not always fully conscious of what they say. In life, it actually happens seldom that a person fully penetrates everything he says with his consciousness. This is true even among the greatest thinkers. Thus Newton really does not know why he takes place, time, space, and motion as his starting points and feels no need to explain or define them, whereas in all subsequent deductions he is at pains to explain and define everything. Why does he do this? The reasons is that in regard to place, time, motion, and space all cleverness and thinking avail us nothing. No matter how much we think about these concepts, we grow no wiser than we were to begin with. Their nature is such that we experience them simply through our common human nature and must take them as they come. A successor of Newton's, Bishop Berkeley,³⁵ took particular notice of this point. He was involved in philosophy more than Newton was, but Berkeley illustrates the conflicts taking place during the emergence of scientific thinking. In other respects, as we shall presently hear, he was not satisfied with Newton, but he was especially struck by the way that Newton took these concepts as his basis without any explanation, that he merely said: I start out from place, time, space, and motion; I do not define them; I take them as premises for my mathematical and scientific reflections. Berkeley agrees that one must do this. One must take these concepts in the way they are understood by the simplest person, because there they are always clear. They become unclear not in outward experience, but in the heads of metaphysicians and philosophers. Berkeley feels that when these four concepts are found in life, they are clear; but they are always obscure when found in the heads of thinkers.

It is indeed true that all thinking about these concepts is of no avail. One feels this. Therefore, Newton is only beginning to juggle mathematically when he uses these concepts to explain the world. He is juggling with ideas. This is not meant in a derogatory way; I only want to describe Newton's abilities in a telling manner. One of the concepts thus utilized by Newton is that of space. He manipulates the idea of space as perceived by the man in the street. Still, a vestige of living experience is contained therein. If, on the other hand, one pictures space in terms of Cartesian mathematics, without harboring any illusions, it makes one's brain reel. There is something undefinable about this space, with its arbitrary center of coordinates. One can, for example, speculate brilliantly (and fruitlessly) about whether Descartes’ space if finite or infinite. Ordinary awareness of space that is still connected with the human element really is not at all concerned with finiteness or infinity. It is after all quite without interest to a living world conception whether space can be pictured as finite or infinite. Therefore one can say that Newton takes the trivial idea of space just as he finds it, but then he begins to mathematize. But, due to the particular quality of thinking in his age, he already has the abstracted mathematics and geometry, and therefore he penetrates spatial phenomena and processes of nature with abstract mathematics. Thereby he sunders the natural phenomena from man. In fact, in Newton's physics we meet for the first time ideas of nature that have been completely divorced from man. Nowhere in earlier times were conceptions of nature so torn away from man as they are in Newtonian physics.

Going back to a thinker of the fourth or fifth century A.D.—though people of that period can hardly be called “thinkers,” because their inner life was far more alive than the mere life in thoughts—we would find that he held the view: “I live; I experience space along with my God, and orient myself in space up-and-down, right-left, and forward-backward, but I dwell in space together with my God. He outlines the directions and I experience them.” So it was for a thinker of the third or fourth century A.D. and even later; indeed, it only became different in the fourteenth century. Thinking geometrically about space, man did not merely draw a triangle but was conscious of the fact that, while he did this, God dwelled within him and drew along with him. His experience was qualitative; he drew the qualitative reality that God Himself had placed within him. Everywhere in the outer world, whenever mathematics was observed, the intentions of God were also observed.

By Newton's time mathematics has become abstracted. Man has forgotten that originally he received mathematics as an inspiration from God. And in this utterly abstract form, Newton now applies mathematics to the study of space. As he writes his Principia, he simply applies this abstracted mathematics, this idea of space (which he does not define,) because he has a dim feeling that nothing will be gained by trying to define it. He takes the trivial idea of space and applies his abstract mathematics to it, thus severing it from any inward experiences. This is how he speaks of the principles of nature.

Later on, interestingly enough, Newton goes somewhat deeper. This is easy to see if one is familiar with his works. Newton becomes ill at ease, as it were, when he contemplates his own view of space. He is not quite comfortable with this space, torn as it is out of man and estranged completely from the spirit. So he defines it after all, saying that space is the sensorium of God. It is most interesting that at the starting point of modern science the very person who was the first to completely mathematize and separate space from man, eventually defines space as God's sensorium,³⁶ a sort of brain or sense organ of God. Newton had torn nature asunder into space and man-who-experiences-space. Having done this, he feels inwardly uneasy when he views this abstract space, which man had formerly experienced in union with his god. Formerly, man had said to himself: What my human sensorium experiences in space, I experience together with my god. Newton becomes uneasy, now that he has torn space away form the human sensorium. He has thereby torn himself away from his permeation with the divine-spiritual. Space, with all is mathematics, was not something external. So, in later life, Newton addresses it as God's sensorium, though to begin with he had torn the whole apart, thus leaving space devoid of Spirit and God. But enough feeling remained in Newton that he could not leave this externalized space devoid of God. So he deified it again.

Scientifically, man tore himself loose from his god, and thus from the spirit; but outwardly he again postulated the same spirit. What happened here explains why a man like Goethe found it impossible³⁷ to go along with Newton on any point. Goethe's Theory of Color is one particularly characteristic point. This whole procedure of first casting out the spirit, separating it from man, was foreign to Goethe's nature. Goethe always had the feeling that man has to experience everything, even what is related to the cosmos. Even in regard to the three dimensions Goethe felt that the cosmos was only a continuation of what man had inwardly experienced. Therefore Goethe was by nature Newton's adversary.

Now let us return to Berkeley, who was somewhat younger than Newton, but still belonged to the period of conflict that accompanied the rise of the scientific way of thinking. Berkeley had no quarrel with Newton's accepting the trivial ideas of place, space, time, and motion. But he was not happy with this whole science that was emerging, and particularly not with its interpretations of natural phenomena. It was evident to him that when nature is utterly severed from man it cannot be experienced at all, and that man is deceiving himself when he imagines that he is experiencing it.

Therefore, Berkeley declared that bodies forming the external basis for sense perceptions do not really exist. Reality is spiritual through and through. The universe, as it appears to us—even where it appears in a bodily form—is but the manifestation of an all-pervading spirit. In Berkeley, these ideas appear pretty much as mere assertions, for he no longer had any trace of the old mysticism and even less of the ancient pneumatology. Except for his religious dogma, he really had no ground at all for his assertion of such all-pervading spirituality. But assert it he did, and so vigorously that all corporeality become for him no more than a revelation of the spirit. Hence it was impossible for Berkeley to say: I behold a color and there is vibrating movement back of it that I cannot see—which is what modern science justifiably states. Instead, Berkeley said: I cannot hypothetically assume that there is anything possessing any corporeal property such as vibratory movement. The basis of the physical world of phenomena must be spiritually conceived. Something spiritual is behind a color perception as its cause, which I experience in myself when I know myself as spirit. Thus Berkeley is a spiritualist in the sense in which this term is used in German philosophy.

For dogmatic reasons, but with a certain justification, Berkeley makes innumerable objections against the assumption that nature can be comprehended by mathematics that has been abstracted from direct experience. Since to Berkeley the whole cosmos was spiritual, he also viewed mathematics as having been formed together with the spirit of the cosmos. He held that we do in fact experience the intentions of the cosmic spirit insofar as they have mathematical forms, for that we cannot apply mathematical concepts in an external manner to corporeal objects.

In accordance with this point of view, Berkeley opposed what mathematics had become for both Newton and Leibnitz,³⁸ namely differential and integral calculus. Please, do not misunderstand me. Today's lecture must be fashioned in such a way that it cannot but provoke many objections in one who holds to the views prevailing today. But these objections will fade away during the ensuring lectures, if one is willing to keep an open mind. Today, however, I want to present the themes that will occupy us in a rather radical form.

Berkeley became an opponent of the whole infinitesimal calculus³⁹ to the extent that it was then known. He opposed what was beyond experience. In this regard, Berkeley's feeling for things was often more sensitive than his thoughts. He felt how, to the quantities that the mind could conceive, the emergence of infinitesimal calculus added other quantities; namely, the differentials, which attain definition only in the differential coefficient. Differentials must be conceived in such a way that they always elude our thinking, as it were. Our thinking refuses to completely permeate them. Berkeley regarded this as a loss of reality, since knowledge for him was only what could be experienced. Therefore he could not approve of mathematical ideas that produced the indetermination of the differentials.

What are we really doing when we seek differential equations for natural phenomena? We are pointing to something that eludes our possible experience. I realize, of course, that many of you cannot quite follow me on these points, but I cannot here expound the whole nature of infinitesimal calculus. I only want to draw attention to some aspects that will contribute to our study of the birth of modern science.

Modern science set out to master the natural phenomena by means of a mathematics detached from man, a mathematics no longer inwardly experienced. By adopting this abstract mathematical view and these concepts divorced from man, science arrived at a point where it could examine only the inanimate. Having taken mathematics out of the sphere of live experience, one can only apply it to what is dead. Therefore, owing to this mathematical approach, modern science is directed exclusively to the sphere of death. In the universe, death manifests itself in disintegration, in atomization, in reduction to microscopic parts—putting it simply, in a crumbling into dust. This is the direction taken by the present-day scientific attitude. With a mathematics detached from all living experience, it takes hold of everything in the cosmos that turns to dust, that atomizes. From this moment onward it becomes possible to dissipate mathematics itself into differentials. We actually kill all living forms of thought, if we try to penetrate them with any kind of differential equation, with any differential line of thought. To differentiate is to kill; to integrate is to piece the dead together again in some kind of framework, to fit the differentials together again into a whole. But they do not thereby become alive again, after having been annihilated. One ends up with dead specters, not with anything living.

This is how the whole perspective of what was opening up through infinitesimal calculus appeared to Berkeley. Had he expressed himself concretely, he might well have said: First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you fit its differentials together again in integrals, but you no longer have a world, only a copy, an illusion. With regard to its content, every integral is really an illusion, and Berkeley already felt this to be so. Therefore, differentiation really implies annihilation, while integration is the gathering up of bones and dust, so that the earlier forms of the slain beings can be pieced together again. But this does not bring them back to life; they remain no more than dead replicas.

One can say that Berkeley's sentiments were untimely. This they certainly were, for the new way of approach had to come. Anyone who would have said that infinitesimal calculus should never have been developed would have been called not a scientific thinker but a fool. On the other hand, one must realize that at the outset of this whole stream of development, feelings such as Berkeley's were understandable. He shuddered at what he thought would come from a infinitesimal study of nature and had to do with the process of birth but a study of all dying aspects in nature.

Formerly this had not been observed, nor had there been any interest in it. In earlier times, the coming-into-being, the germinating, had been studied; now, one looked at all that was fading and crumbling into dust. Man's conception was heading toward atomism, whereas previously it had tended toward the continuous, lasting aspects of things. Since life cannot exist without death and all living things must die, we must look at and understand all that is dead in the world. A science of the inanimate, the dead, had to arise. It was absolutely necessary. The time that we are speaking about was the age in which mankind was ready for such a science. But we must visualize how this went against the grain of somebody who, like Berkeley, still lived completely in the old view.

The after-effects of what came into being then are still very much with us today. We have witnessed the triumphs of just those scientific labors that made Berkeley shudder. Until they were somewhat modified through the modern theory of relativity,⁴⁰ Newton's theories reigned supreme, Goethe's revolt against them made no impression. For a true comprehension of what went on we must go back to Newton's time and see the shuddering of thinkers who still had a vivid recollection of earlier views and how they clung to feelings that resembled the former ones.

Giordano Bruno shrank from studying the dead nature that was now to be the object of study. He could not view it as dead in a purely mathematical manner of thought, so he animated the atoms into monads and imbued his mathematical thinking with poetry in order to retain it in a personal sphere. Newton at first proceeded from a purely mathematical standpoint, but then he wavered and defined space (which he has first completely divorced from man through his external mathematics) as God's sensorium. Berkeley in his turn rejected the new direction of thinking altogether and with it the whole trend towards the infinitesimal.

Today, however, we are surrounded and overwhelmed by the world view that Giordano Bruno tried to turn into poetry, that Newton felt uncomfortable about, and that Berkeley completely rejected. Do we take what Newton said—that space is a sensorium of God—seriously when we think in the accepted scientific sense today? People today like to regard as great thinkers those men who have said something or other that they approve. But if the great men also said something that they do not approve, they feel very superior and think: Unfortunately, on this point he wasn’t as enlightened as I am. Thus many people consider Lessing⁴¹ a man of great genius but make an exception for what he did toward the end of his life, when he became convinced that we go through repeated earth lives.

Just because we must in the present age come to terms with the ideas that have arisen, we must go back to their origin. Since mathematics has once and for all been detached from man, and since nature has been taken hold of by this abstract mathematics that has gradually isolated us from the whole of nature, we must now somehow manage to find ourselves in this nature. For we will not attain a coherent spiritual knowledge until we once again have found the spirit in nature.

Just as it is a matter of course that every living man will sooner or later die, so it was a matter of course that sooner or later in the course of time a conception of death had to emerge from the former life-imbued world view. Things that can only be learned from a corpse cannot be learned by a person who is unwilling to examine the corpse. Therefore certain mysteries of the world can be comprehended only if the modern scientific way of thinking is taken seriously.

Let me close with a somewhat personal remark.⁴² The scientific world view must be taken seriously, and for this reason I was never an opponent of it; on the contrary, I regarded it as something that of necessity belongs to our time. Often I had to speak out against something that a scientist, or so-called scientist, had made of the things that were discovered by unprejudiced investigation of the sphere of death. It was the misinterpretation of such scientific discoveries that I opposed. On this occasion let me state emphatically that I do not wish to be regarded as in any way an opponent of the scientific approach. I would consider it detrimental to all our anthroposophical endeavors if a false opposition were to arise between what anthroposophy seeks by way of spiritual research and what science seeks—and must of necessity seek in its field—out of the modern attitude.

I say this expressly, my dear friends, because a healthy discussion concerning the relationship between anthroposophy and science must come to pass within our movement. Anything that goes wrong in this respect can only do grave harm to anthroposophy and should be avoided.

I mention this here because recently, in preparing these lectures, I read in the anthroposophical periodical Die Drei that atomism was being studied in a way in which no progress can be made. Therefore, I want to make it clear that I consider all these polemics in Die Drei about atomism as something that only serves to stultify the relations between anthroposophy and science.

• 32. Giordano Bruno: Nola 1548–1600 Rome. Dominican, 1563–1576, a great traveler. Main works developed at the English court at the time of Elizabeth I. After he returned to Italy he was imprisoned because of heretical teachings, and was burned in Rome after 8 years in prison. See Riddles of Philosophy, and The Spiritual Guidance of Man, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 33. Isaac Newton, Sir: Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire 1642–1727 Kensington, London. Born as a dwarf-like child. Grew up on a farm and went to village and small town schools until 1661. After he was accepted at the University he was of medium talent until his “flaming” as a genius physicist, astronomer, mathematician 1663–1664. Professor in Cambridge 1669–1701, member of the Royal Society London 1662 and from 1703 until his death, its President. Main work: Law of Gravitation, Mathematically Adapted to the Law of Motion from Kepler, developed 1666, published 1687 in Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica. The idea of an infinitesimal mathematics came from Newton in 1663; three years later he had developed his differential mathematics. His Optics, 1704, put forth the division of light in color as well as emission theory.
  
  Later Newton lost all interest in physics, mathematics, and also in the destiny and consequences of his works. He turned towards chemical and alchemical experiments and studies of their old traditions. In his old age he was interested in religious-speculative studies. Before his death he compared his life with a day, in which a child is playing with sand and mussels and is not aware anymore of the cosmos at his back. Literature: J.W.N. Sullivan, Isaac Newton 1642–1727 (London 1938).
• 34. In Newton's second edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica of 1713 the definition is “But I do not define, because it is well known to all of us.”
• 35. George Berkeley: Desert Castle, Thomastown, Ireland 1685–1753 Oxford. English philosopher and Anglican missionary, Bishop from 1734. Main works: Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, 1710; Alciphron, about ethics and free thinkers, 1732; Siris, concerning metaphysical questions. See: Riddles of Philosophy.
  
  Berkeley said: “One has to do it in such a way”: e.g., as in Paragraph 113 of Principles of Human Knowledge. In the writing De Motu (From Motion) is written in Paragraph 43: “Motion, even though perceived clearly by the senses, was darkened, but not because of its own being, but far more through commentaries by learned philosophers.”
• 36. In the work Optice by Newton, which is the Latin translation of his Optics (1704), published by Samuel Clarke in 1706 and approved with additions made by Newton, the formula appears only at the end of the book at the so-called 28th Problem: “If these questions are answered in the right way, could we then not ascertain the phenomenon that there is a being, unbodily, intelligent, which can perceive the endless universe as it were with its sense organs, and which seems to look into the innermost and is surrounding it with its all-embracing presence, while that in us that is usually feeling and thinking are only handed-down pictures in which we then perceive and observe our organs?” This thought seems not only to be Newton's, but was also presented in a similar way by Henry More, the Platonist from Cambridge who was a friend of Newton.
• 37. For his polemic concerning Newton's color theory, see Rudolf Steiner, Goethe the Scientist (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950), especially the Introduction, “Goethe, Newton and the Physicists”; see also the forthcoming book, Heinrich O. Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press).
• 38. Leibnitz: Leipzig 1646–1716 Hanover. Philologist, mathematician, physicist, lawyer, statesman, priest. Mostly living at princely courts, traveling a lot. Discoverer of the Infinitesimal Calculus 1686, independently of Newton.
• 39. In his writing The Analyst (The Analyst, 1734, included in the book Writings about the Origin of Mathematics and Physics) the Table of Contents is in the form of 50 theses. No. 7, for example, is as follows: “Objections against the Secrets of Belief Which are Made Unfairly by Those who Admit Them in Science;” or No. 13: “The Rule for the Flux of Potency is Achieved through Unfair Reasoning;” and No. 22: “With the Help of a Double Mistake Analysts Come to their Truth, but not to Science, in which They do not even Know How They Came to Their Own Conclusions.” From the Polemic Dispute, which follows The Analyst, an example is: “No big name on this earth will ever cause me to take unclear things for clear ones. They think of one as if it were a crime to think one could see further than Sir Isaac Newton, even above him. I am convinced though that they speak for the feelings of many others. But there are also some ... who think and feel it unfair to copy some great man's shortcomings, and who see no crime in wanting to see further than Sir Isaac Newton, but further than the whole of mankind.”
• 40. Prepared by Mach and Lorentz, developed by Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity 1905, Common Theory of Relativity 1916. Made it necessary to revise Newton's Mechanics with the help of non-Euclidean Geometry. See also Riddles of Philosophy and Georg Unger, Von Bidden, Physicalischer Begriffe, Part 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 100–122.
• 41. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim: Kamenz/Lausitz 1729–1781 Brunswick. Dramatist, essayist, critic. Opens a new epoch in German literature and an. His last writing, “The Education of the Human Race,” (1780) finds it necessary to postulate reincarnation for the sake of the development of the human race. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 42. The reason was a controversy in the magazine Die Drei of 1921–1922, pages 1107 and 1114, as well as in the following years publication (see pages 172–330 about the reality of atoms). See Rudolf Steiner's First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977).

The isolation of man's ideas (especially his mathematical ideas) from his direct experience has proved to be the outstanding feature of the spiritual development leading to modern scientific thinking. Let us place this process once more before our mind's eye.

We were able to look back into ages past, when what man had to acquire as knowledge of the world was experienced in communion with the world. During those epochs, man inwardly did not experience his threefold orientation—up-down, left-right, front-back—in such a manner that he attributed it solely to himself. Instead, he felt himself within the universal whole; hence, his own orientations were to him synonymous with the three dimensions of space. What he pictured of knowledge to himself, he experienced jointly with the world. Therefore, with no uncertainty in his mind, he knew how to apply his concepts, his ideas, to the world. This uncertainty has only arisen along with the more recent civilization. We see it slowly finding its way into the whole of modern thought and we see science developing under this condition of uncertainty. This state of affairs must be clearly recognized.

A few examples can illustrate what we are dealing with . Take a thinker like John Locke, who lived from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. His writings show what an up-to-date thinker of his age had to say concerning the scientific world perception. John Locke⁴³ divided everything that man perceives in his physical environment into two aspects. He divided the characteristic features of bodies into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities were those that he could only attribute to the objects themselves, such as shape, position, and motion. Secondary qualities in his view were those that did not actually belong to the external corporeal things but were an effect that these objects had upon man. Examples are color, sound, and warmth. Locke stated it thus: “When I hear a sound, outside of me there is vibrating air. In a drawing, I can picture these vibrations in the air that emanate from a sound-aroused body and continue on into my ear. The shape that the waves, as they are called, possess in the vibrating air can be pictured by means of spatial forms. I can visualize their course in time—all this, belonging to the primary qualities, certainly exists in the external world, but it is silent, it is soundless. The quality of sound, a secondary quality, only arises when the vibration of the air strikes my ear, and with it arises that peculiar inner experience that I carry within me as sound. It is the same with color, which is now lumped together with light. There must be something out there in the world that is somehow of a corporeal nature and somehow possesses shape and movement. This exercises an effect on my eye and thus becomes my experience of light or color. It is the same with the other things that present themselves to my senses. The whole corporeal world must be viewed like this; we must distinguish between the primary qualities in it, which are objective, and the secondary qualities, which are subjective and are the effects of the primary qualities upon us.”

Simply put, one could say with Locke that the external world outside of man is form, position, and movement, whereas all that makes up the content of the sense world exists in truth somehow inside us. The actual content of color as a human experience is nowhere in the environment, it lives in me. The actual content of sound is nowhere to be found outside, it lives in me. The same is true of my experience of warmth or cold.

In former ages, when what had become the content of knowledge was experienced jointly with the world, one could not possibly have had this view because, as I have said, a man experienced mathematics by participating in his own bodily orientation and placing this orientation into his own movement. He experienced this, however, in communion with the world. Therefore, his own experience was sufficient reason for assuming the objectivity of position, place, and movement. Also, though in another portion of his inner life, man again had this communion with the world in regard to color, tone, and so forth. Just as the concept of movement was gained through the experience of his own movement, so the concept of color was gained through a corresponding internal experience in the blood, and this experience was then connected with whatever is warmth, color, sound, and so forth in the surrounding world. Certainly, in earlier times, man distinguished position, location, movement, and time-sequence from color, sound, and warmth, but these were distinguished as being different kinds of experiences that were undergone jointly with different kinds of existence in the objective world.

Now, in the scientific age, the determination of place, movement, position, and form ceased to be inward self-experience. Instead, they were regarded as mere hypotheses that were caused by some external reality. When the shape of a cannon is imagined, one can hardly say: This form of the cannon is actually somehow within me. Therefore its identification was directed outward and the imagined form of the cannon was related to something objective. One could not very well admit that a musket-ball was actually flying within one's brain; therefore, the hypothetically thought-out movements were attributed to something objective.

On the other hand, what one saw in the flying musket-ball, the flash by which one perceived it and the sound by which one heart it, were pushed into one's own human nature, since no other place could be found for them. Man no longer knew how he experienced them jointly with the objects; therefore, he associated them with his own being.

It actually took quite some time before those who thought along the lines of the scientific age perceived the impossibility of this arrangement. What had in fact taken place? The secondary qualities, sound, color, and warmth experience, had become, as it were, fair game in the world and, in regard to human knowledge, had to take refuge in man. But before too long, nobody had any idea of how they lived there. The experience, the self-experience, was no longer there. There was no connection with external nature, because it was not experienced anymore. Therefore these experiences were pushed into one's self. So far as knowledge was concerned, they had, as it were, disappeared inside man. Vaguely it was thought that an ether vibration out in space translated itself into form and movement, and this had an effect on the eye, and then worked on the optic nerve, and finally somehow entered the brain. Our thoughts were a means of looking around inside for whatever it was that, as an effect of the primary qualities, supposedly expressed itself in man as secondary qualities. It took a long time, as I said, before a handful of people firmly pointed out the oddity of these ideas. There is something extraordinary in what the Austrian philosopher Richard Wahle⁴⁴ wrote in his Mechanism of Thinking, though he himself did not realize the full implications of his sentence: “Nihil est in cerebro, quod non est in nervis.” (“There is nothing in the brain that is not in the nerves.” It may not be possible with the means available today to examine the nerves in every conceivable way, but even if we could we would not find sound, color, or warmth experience in them. Therefore, they must not be in the brain either. Actually, one has to admit now that they simply disappear insofar as knowledge is concerned. One examines the relationship of man to the world. Form, position, place, time, etc. are beheld as objective. Sound, warmth, experience and color vanish; they elude one.⁴⁵

Finally, in the Eighteenth Century, this led Kant⁴⁶ to say that even the space and time qualities of things cannot somehow be outside and beyond man. But there had to be some relationship between man and the world. After all, such a relationship cannot be denied if we are to have any idea of how man exists together with the world. Yet, the common experience of man's space and time relationships with the world simply did not exist anymore. Hence arose the Kantian idea: If man is to apply mathematics, for example, to the world, then it is his doing that he himself makes the world into something mathematical. He impresses the whole mathematical system upon the “things in themselves,” which themselves remain utterly unknown.—In the Nineteenth Century science chewed on this problem interminably. The basic nature of man's relation to cognition is simply this: uncertainty has entered into his relationship with the world. He does not know how to recognize in the world what he is experiencing. This uncertainty slowly crept into all of modern thinking. We see it entering bit by bit into the spiritual life of recent times.

It is interesting to place a recent example side by side with Locke's thinking. August Weismann,⁴⁷ a biologist of the Nineteenth Century, conceived the thought: in any living organism, the interplay of the organs (in lower organisms, the interaction of the parts) must be regarded as the essential thing. This leads to comprehension of how the organism lives. But in examining the organism itself, in understanding it through the interrelationship of its parts, we find no equivalent for the fact that the organism must die. If one only observes the organism, so Weismann said, one finds nothing that will explain death. In the living organism, there is absolutely nothing that leads to the idea that the organism must die. For Weismann, the only thing that demonstrates that an organism must die is the existence of a corpse. This means that the concept of death is not gained from the living organism. No feature, no characteristic, found in it indicates that dying is a part of the organism. It is only when the event occurs, when we find a corpse in the place of the living organism, that we know the organism possesses the ability to die.

But, says Weismann, there is a class of organisms where corpses are never found. These are the unicellular organisms. They only divide themselves so there are no corpses. The propagation of such beings looks like this:

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One divides into two; each of these divides into two again, and so on. There is never a corpse. Weismann therefore concludes that the unicellular beings are immortal. This is the immortality of unicellular beings that was famous in nineteenth-century biology. Why were these organisms considered immortal? Because they never produce any corpses, and because we cannot entertain the concept of death in the organic realm as long as there are no corpses. Where there is no corpse, there is no room for the concept of death. Hence, living beings that produce no corpses are immortal.

This example shows how far man has removed himself in modern times from any connection between the world and his thinking, his inner experiences. His concept of an organism is no longer such that the fact of its death can be perceived from it. This can only be deduced from the existence of something like a corpse. Certainly, if a living organism is only viewed from outside, if one cannot experience what is in it, then indeed one cannot find death in the organism and an external sign is necessary. But this only proves that in his thinking man feels himself separated from the things around him.

From the uncertainty that has entered all thinking concerning the corporeal world, from this divorce between our thoughts and our experience, let us turn back to the time when self-experience still existed. Not only did the inwardly experienced concept exist alongside the externally excogitated concept of a triangle, square, or pentagram, but there were also inwardly experienced concepts of blossoming and fading, of birth and death. This inner experience of birth and death had its gradations. When a child was seen to grow more and more animated, when its face began to express its soul, when one really entered into this growing process of the child, this could be seen as a continuation of the process of birth, albeit a less pronounced and intensive one. There were degrees in the experience of birth. When a man began to show wrinkles and grey hair and grow feeble, this was seen as a first mild degree of dying. Death itself was only the sum total of many less pronounced death experiences, if I may use such a paradox. The concepts of blossoming and decaying, of being born and dying, were inwardly alive.

These concepts were experienced in communion with the corporeal world. No line was drawn between man's self-experience and the events in nature. Without a coastline, as it were, the inner land of man merged into the ocean of the universe. Owing to this form of experience, man lived himself into the world itself. Therefore, the thinkers of earlier ages, whose ideas no longer receive proper attention from science, had to form quite different ideas concerning something like what Weismann called the “immortality of unicellular beings.” What sort of concept would an ancient thinker have formed had he had a microscope and known something about the division of unicellular organisms? He would have said: First I have the unicellular being; it divides itself into two. Somewhat imprecisely, he might have said: It atomizes itself, it divides itself; for a certain length of time, the two parts are indivisible; then they divide again. As soon as division or atomization begins, death enters in. He would not have derived death from the corpse but from atomization, from the division into parts. His train of thought would have been somewhat as follows: A being that is capable of life, that is in the process of growth, is not atomized; and when the tendency to atomization appears, the being dies. In the case of unicellular beings, he would simply have thought that the two organisms cast off by the first unicellular being were for the moment dead, but would be, so to speak, revived immediately, and so forth. With atomization, with the process of splitting, he would have linked the thought of death. If he had known about unicellular beings and had seen one split into two, he would not have thought that two new ones had come into being. On the contrary, he would have said that out of the living monad, two atoms have originated. Further, he would have said that wherever there is life, wherever one observes life, one is not dealing with atoms. But if they are found in a living being, then a proportionate part of the being is dead. Where atoms are found, there is death, there is something inorganic. This is how matters would have been judged in a former age based on living inner knowledge of the world.

All this is not clearly described in our histories of philosophy, although the discerning reader can have little doubt of it. The reason is that the thought-forms of this older philosophy are totally unlike today's thinking. Therefore anyone writing history nowadays is apt to put his own modern concepts into the minds of earlier thinkers.⁴⁸ But this is impermissible even with a man as recent as Spinoza. In his book on what he justifiably calls ethics, Spinoza follows a mathematical method but it is not mathematics in the modern sense. He expounds his philosophy in a mathematical style, joining idea to idea as a mathematician would. He still retains something of the former qualitative experience of quantitative mathematical concepts. Hence, even in contemplating the qualitative aspect of man's inner life, we can say that his style is mathematical. Today with our current concepts, it would be sheer nonsense to apply a mathematical style to psychology, let alone ethics.

If we want to understand modern thinking, we must continually recall this uncertainty, contrasting it to the certainty that existed in the past but is no longer suited to our modern outlook. In the present phase of scientific thinking, we have come to the point where this uncertainty is not only recognized but theoretical justifications have been offered for it. And example is a lecture given by the French thinker Henri Poincaré⁴⁹ in 1912 on current ideas relating to matter. He speaks of the existing controversy or debate concerning the nature of matter; whether it should be thought of as being continuous or discrete; in other words, whether one should conceive of matter as substantial essence that fills space and is nowhere really differentiated in itself, or whether substance, matter, is to be thought of as atomistic, signifying more or less empty space containing within it minute particles that by virtue of their particular interconnections form into atoms, molecules, and so forth.

Aside from what I might call a few decorative embellishments intended to justify scientific uncertainty, Poincaré's lecture comes down to this: Research and science pass through various periods. In one epoch, phenomena appear that cause the thinker to picture matter in a continuous form, making it convenient to conceive of matter this way and to focus on what shows up as continuity in the sense data. In a different period the findings point more toward the concept of matter being diffused into atoms, which are pictured as being fused together again; i.e. matter is not continuous but discrete and atomistic. Poincaré is of the opinion that always, depending on the direction that research findings take, there will be periods when thinking favors either continuity or atomism. He even speaks of an oscillation between the two in the course of scientific development. It will always be like this, he says, because the human mind has a tendency to formulate theories concerning natural phenomena in the most convenient way possible. If continuity prevails for a time, we get tired of it. (These are not Poincaré's exact words, but they are close to what he really intends.) Almost unconsciously, as it were, the human mind then comes upon other scientific findings and begins to think atomistically. It is like breathing where exhalation follows inhalation. Thus there is a constant oscillation between continuity and atomism. This merely results from a need of the human mind and according to Poincaré, says nothing about the things themselves. Whether we adopt continuity or atomism determines nothing about things themselves. It is only our attempt to come to terms with the external corporeal world.

It is hardly surprising that uncertainty should result from an age which no longer finds self-experience in harmony with what goes on in the world but regards it only as something occurring inside man. If you no longer experience a living connection with the world, you cannot experience continuity or atomism. You can only force your preconceived notions of continuity or atomism on the natural phenomena. This gradually leads to the suspicion that we formulate our theories according to our changing needs. Just as we must breath in and out, so we must, supposedly, think first continuistically for a while, then atomistically for a while. If we always thought in the same way, we would not be able to catch a breath of mental air. Thus our fatal uncertainty is confirmed and justified. Theories begin to look like arbitrary whims. We no longer live in any real connection with the world. We merely think of various ways in which we might live with the world, depending on our own subjective needs.

What would the old way of thought have said in such a case? It would have said: In an age when the leading thinkers think continuistically, they are thinking mainly of life. In one in which they think atomistically, they are thinking primarily of death, of inorganic nature, and they view even the organic in inorganic terms.

This is no longer unjustified arbitrariness. This rests on an objective relationship to things. Naturally, I can take turns in dealing with the animate and the inanimate. I can say that the very nature of the animate requires that I conceive of it continuistically, whereas the nature of the inanimate requires that I think of it atomistically. But I cannot say that this is only due to the arbitrary nature of the human mind. On the contrary, it corresponds to an objective relating of oneself to the world. For such perception, the subjective aspect is really disregarded, because one recognizes the animate in nature in continual form and the inanimate in discrete form. And if one really has to oscillate between the two forms of thought, this can be turned in an objective direction by saying that one approach is suited to the living and the other is suited to the dead. But there is no justification for making everything subjective as Poincaré does. Nor is the subjective valid for the way of perception that belonged to earlier times.

The gist of this is that in the phase of scientific thinking immediately preceding our own, there was a turn away from the animate to the inanimate; i.e., from continuity to atomism. This was entirely justified, if rightly understood. But, if we hope to objectively and truly find ourselves in the world, we must find a way out of the dead world of atomism, no matter how impressive it is as a theory. We must get back to our own nature and comprehend ourselves as living beings. Up to now, scientific development has tended in the direction of the inanimate, the atomistic. When, in the first part of the Nineteenth Century, this whole dreadful cell theory of Schleiden⁵⁰ and Schwann⁵¹ made its appearance, it did not lead to continuity but to atomism. What is more, the scientific world scarcely admitted this, nor has it to this day realized that it should admit it since atomism harmonizes with the whole scientific methodology. We were not aware that by conceiving the organism as divided up into cells, we actually atomized it in our minds, which in fact signifies killing it. The truth of the matter is that any real idea of organisms has been lost to the atomistic approach.

This is what we can learn if we compare Goethe's views on organics with those of Schleiden or the later botanists. In Goethe we find living ideas that he actually experiences. The cell is alive, so the others are really dealing with something organic, but the way they think is just as though the cells were not alive but atoms. Of course, empirical research does not always follow everything to its logical conclusion, and this cannot be done in the case of the organic world. Our comprehension of the organic world is not much aided by the actual observations resulting from the cell theory. The non-atomistic somehow finds its way in, since we have to admit that the cells are alive. But it is typical of many of today's scientific discussions that the issues become confused and there is no real clarity of thought.

• 43. John Locke: Wrington by Bristol 1632–1704 Oates, Essex. Theologian, philosopher, and physician. Because raised Protestant and Puritan, he was persecuted in England and had to flee to Holland until after the English Revolution of 1689. From 1675–1689 Locke worked with many interruptions at his main work. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Originally he had planned a critical presentation of the already recognized teaching of primary and secondary sense characteristics, but then it grew to a perception theory or world view. His Essay was published 4 times in his lifetime. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom, trans. Michael Wilson (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1964) and “Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa” in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 44. Richard Wahle: 1857–1935, Vienna, Professor of Philosophy. Only valued perceptions, imaginations, and feelings, but rejected all philosophy hitherto written as theories of cognition. The “Ego” is for him “a summary of surface-like, physiologically accompanied pieces of consciousness, which are brought into being by invisible forces.” Some writings: The Whole of Philosophy and Its End, 1894; About the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life, 1906; The Tragic Comedy of Wisdom, 1915; Development of Characters, 1928; Basics of a New Psychiatry, 1931.
• 45. See Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 4.
• 46. Immanuel Kant: 1724–1804. Lived in Koenigsberg, which he seldom left. Philosopher, scientist, mathematician. Professor in Koenigsberg 1770–1794. Critique of Pure Reason, 1781. Its popular edition Dissertation on Any Future Metaphysics, 1783, his ethic Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, aesthetic and natural theology is handled in Critique of Judgment, 1790. He wrote the first mechanical cosmology 1755. It was taken up and changed by Laplace (1796) and known as the Kant-LaPlace Theory. Rudolf Steiner's exposition on Kant's theory is found in Truth and Knowledge, The Philosophy of Freedom, and An Autobiography, ed. Paul M. Alien, 2nd ed. (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, Garber Communications, 1980).
  
  E.g. in Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic, Common Remarks”: “We wanted to say that all our opinions are nothing but the conception of the appearance; that the things we look at are not actually what we take them for, nor is their relation constituted as they appear to us, and that if we would suspend our subject or even our subjective constitution of our senses as a whole, the whole constitution, all relationships of objects in space and time, even time and space itself would disappear. They would only exist in us, not as phenomena in themselves.”
• 47. August Weismann, Frankfurt A.M. 1834–1914 Freiburg. Biologist, genetic scientist. Theory of polarity between cells (soma) and seed plasma. Determinants as heredity carriers. Writing: Studies on the Descent Theory.
• 48. Goethe's recital from Faust I, Act 1, Scene 2, “Night,” Gothic Room, Wagner and Faust:
  
  “My friend, the time of past
  Is a book with seven seals.
  What you call the Spirit of Time
  Is fundamentally the Gentleman's own spirit,
  In which the times reflect themselves.”
• 49. Henry Poincaré: Nancy 1854–1912 Paris. Author of the popular philosophical writings Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905), Science and Method (1909), and Last Thoughts (1912). The lecture in question was held by Poincaré shortly before his death in a lecture cycle Conferences de Foi et de Vie printed in Le Materialisme Actuel with M.M. Bergson, H. Poincaré, Ch. Gide, Ch. Wagner, Firm Roz, De Witt-Guizotfriedel, Gaston Rion. (Paris: 1918), page 53.
• 50. Mathias Jakob Schleiden: Hamburg 1804–1881 Frankfurt A.M. Lawyer, physician, and, mainly, biologist. Developed a cell formation theory in Contributions to Phylogenesis (1838).
• 51. Theodor Schwann: Neuss 1810–1882 Cologne, biologist. Founded the cell theory with his Microscopic Examinations of the Harmony in Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants (1839).

[See GA 259 for Rudolf Steiner's introductory words given immediately before this lecture concerning the burning of the first Goetheanum. —rsarchive.org]

In my last lecture, I said that one root of the scientific world conception lay in the fact that John Locke and other thinkers of like mind distinguished between the primary and secondary qualities of things in the surrounding world. Locke called primary everything that pertains to shape, to geometrical and numerical characteristics, to motion and to size. From these he distinguished what he called the secondary qualities, such as color, sound, and warmth. He assigned the primary qualities to the things themselves, assuming that spatial corporeal things actually existed and possessed properties such as form, motion and geometrical qualities; and he further assumed that all secondary qualities such as color, sound, etc. are only effects on the human being. Only the primary qualities are supposed to be in the external things. Something out there has size, form and motion, but is dark, silent and cold. This produces some sort of effect that expresses itself in man's experiences of sound, color and warmth.⁵²

I have also pointed out how, in this scientific age, space became an abstraction in relation to the dimensions. Man was no longer aware that the three dimensions—up-down, right-left, front-back—were concretely experienced within himself. In the scientific age, he no longer took this reality of the three dimensions into consideration. AS far as he was concerned, they arose in total abstraction. He no longer sought the intersecting point of the three dimensions where it is in fact experienced; namely, within man's own being. Instead, he looked for it somewhere in external space, wherever it might be. Thenceforth, this space framework of the three dimensions had an independent existence, but only an abstract thought-out one. This empty thought was no longer experienced as belonging to the external world as well as to man; whereas an earlier age experienced the three spatial dimensions in such a way that man knew he was experiencing them not only in himself but together with the nature of physical corporeality.

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The dimensions of space had, as it were, already been abstracted and ejected from man. They had acquired a quite abstract, inanimate character. Man had forgotten that he experiences the dimensions of space in his own being together with the external world; and the same applied to everything concerned with geometry, number, weight, etc. He no longer knew that in order to experience them in their full living reality, he had to look into his own inner being. A man like John Locke transferred the primary qualities—which are of like kind with the three dimensions of space, the latter being a sort of form or shape—into the external world only because the connection of these qualities with man's inner being was no longer known.

The others, the secondary qualities, which were actually experienced qualitatively (as color, tone, warmth, smell or taste,) now were viewed as merely the effects of the things upon man, as inward experiences. But I have pointed out that inside the physical man as well as inside the etheric man these secondary qualities can no longer be found, so that they became free-floating in a certain respect. They were no longer sought in the outer world; they were relocated into man's inner being. It was felt that so long as man did not listen to the world, did not look at it, did not direct his sense of warmth to it, the world was silent. It had primary qualities, vibrations that were formed in a certain way, but no sound; it had processes of some kind in the ether, but no color; it had some sort of processes in ponderable matter (matter that has weight)—but it had no quality of warmth. As to these experienced qualities, the scientific age was really saying that it did not know what to do with them. It did not want to look for them in the world, admitting that it was powerless to do so. They were sought for within man, but only because nobody had any better ideas. To a certain extent science investigates man's inner nature, but it does not (and perhaps cannot) go very far with this, hence it really does not take into consideration that these secondary qualities cannot be found in this inner nature. Therefore it has no pigeonhole for them. Why is this so?

Let us recall that if we really want to focus correctly on something that is related to form, space, geometry or arithmetic, we have to turn our attention to the inward life-filled activity whereby we build up the spatial element within our own organism, as we do with above-below, back-front, left-right. Therefore, we must say that if we want to discover the nature of geometry and space, if we want to get to the essence of Locke's primary qualities of corporeal things, we must look within ourselves. Otherwise, we only attain to abstractions.

In the case of the secondary qualities such as sound, color, warmth, smell and taste, man has to remember that his ego and astral body normally dwell within his physical and etheric bodies but during sleep they can also be outside the physical and etheric bodies. Just as man experiences the primary qualities, such as the three dimensions, not outside but within himself during full wakefulness, so, when he succeeds (whether through instinct or through spiritual-scientific training) in really inwardly experiencing what is to be found outside the physical and etheric bodies from the moment of falling asleep to waking up, he knows that he is really experiencing the true essence of sound, color, smell, taste, and warmth in the external world outside his own body. When, during the waking condition, man is only within himself, he cannot experience anything but picture-images of the true realities of tone, color, warmth, smell and taste. But these images correspond to soul-spirit realities, not physical-etheric ones. In spite of the fact that what we experience as sound seems to be connected with certain forms of air vibrations, just as color is connected with certain processes in the colorless external world, it still has to be recognized that both are pictures, not of anything corporeal, but of the soul-spirit element contained in the external world.

We must be able to tell ourselves: When we experience a sound, a color, a degree of warmth, we experience an image of them. But we experience them as reality, when we are outside our physical body. We can portray the facts in a drawing as follows: Man experiences the primary qualities within himself when fully awake, and projects them as images into the outer world. If he only knows them in the outer world, he has the primary qualities only in images (arrow in sketch). These images are the mathematical geometrical, and arithmetical qualities of things.

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It is different in the case of the secondary qualities. (The horizontal lines stand for the physical and etheric body of man, the red shaded area for the soul-spirit aspect, the ego and astral body.) Man experiences them outside his physical and etheric body,⁵³ and projects only the images into himself. Because the scientific age no longer saw through this, mathematical forms and numbers became something that man looked for abstractly in the outer world. The secondary qualities became something that man looked for only in himself. But because they are only images in himself, man lost them altogether as realities.

As few isolated thinkers, who still retained traditions of earlier views concerning the outer world, struggled to form conceptions that were truer to reality than those that, in the course of the scientific age, gradually emerged as the official views. Aside from Paracelsus,⁵⁴ there was, for example, van Helmont,⁵⁵ who was well aware that man's spiritual element is active when color, tone, and so forth are experienced. During the waking state, however, the spiritual is active only with the aid of the physical body. Hence it produces only an image of what is really contained in sound or color. This leads to a false description of external reality; namely, that purely mathematical-mechanistic form of motion for what is supposed to be experienced as secondary qualities in man's inner being, whereas, in accordance with their reality, their true nature, they can only be experienced outside the body. We should not be told that if we wish to comprehend the true nature of sound, for example, we ought to conduct physical experiments as to what happens in the air that carries us to the sound that we hear. Instead, we should be told that if we want to acquaint ourselves with the true nature of sound, we have to form an idea of how we really experience sound outside our physical and etheric bodies. But these are thoughts that never occurred to the men of the scientific age. They had no inclination to consider the totality of human nature, the true being of man. Therefore they did not find either mathematics or the primary qualities in this unknown human nature; and they did not find the secondary qualities in the external world, because they did not know that man belongs to it also.

I do not say that one has to be clairvoyant in order to gain the right insight into these matters, although a clairvoyant approach would certainly produce more penetrating perceptions in this area. But I do say that a healthy and open mind would lead one to place the primary qualities, everything mathematical-mechanical, into man's inner being, and to place the secondary qualities into the outer world. The thinkers no longer understand human nature. They did not know how man's corporeality is filled with spirit, or how this spirit, when it is awake in a person, must forget itself and devote itself to the body if it is to comprehend mathematics. Nor was it known that this same spirituality must take complete hold of itself and live independently of the body, outside the body, in order to come to the secondary qualities. Concerning all these matters, I say that clairvoyant perception can give greater insight, but it is not indispensable. A healthy and open mind can feel that mathematics belongs inside, while sound, color, etc. are something external.

In my notes on Goethe's scientific works⁵⁶ in the 1880's, I set forth what healthy feeling can do in this direction. I never mentioned clairvoyant knowledge, but I did show to what extent man can acknowledge the reality of color, tone, etc. without any clairvoyant perception. This has not yet been understood. The scientific age is still too deeply entangled in Locke's manner of thinking. I set it forth again, in philosophic terms, in 1911 at the Philosophic Congress in Bologna.⁵⁷ And again it was not understood. I tried to show how man's soul—spirit organization does indeed indwell and permeate the physical and etheric body during the waking state, but still remains inwardly independent. If one senses this inward independence of the soul and spirit, then on also has a feeling for what the soul and spirit have experienced during sleep about the reality of green and yellow, G and C-sharp, warm and cold, sour or sweet. But the scientific age was unwilling to go into a true knowledge of man.

This description of the primary and secondary qualities shows quite clearly how man got away from the correct feeling about himself and his connection to the world. The same thing comes out in other connections. Failing to grasp how the mathematical with its three-dimensional character dwells in man, the thinkers likewise could not understand man's spirituality. They would have had to see how man is in a position to comprehend right-left by means of the symmetrical movements of his arms and hands and other symmetrical movements. Through sensing the course taken, for example, by his food, he can experience front-back. He experiences up-down as he coordinates himself in this direction in his earliest years. If we discern this, we see how man inwardly unfolds the activity that produces the three dimensions of space. Let me point out also that the animal does not have the vertical direction in the same way as man does, since its main axis is horizontal, which is what man can experience as front-back. The abstract space framework could no longer produce anything other than mathematical, mechanistic, abstract relationships in inorganic nature. It could not develop an inward awareness of space in the animal or in man.

Thus no correct opinion could be reached in this scientific age concerning the question: How does man relate to the animal, the animal to man? What distinguishes them from one another? It was still dimly felt that there was a difference between the two, hence one looked for the distinguishing features. But nothing could be found in either man or animal that was decisive and consistent. Here is a famous example: It was asserted that man's upper jawbone, in which the upper teeth are located, was in one piece, whereas in the animal, the front teeth were located in a separate one, the inter-maxillary bone, with the actual upper jawbone on either side of them. Man, it was thought, did not possess this inter-maxillary bone. Since one could no longer find the relationship of man to animal by inner soul-spirit means, one looked for it in such external features and said that the animal had an inter-maxillary bone and man did not.

Goethe could not put into words what I have said today concerning primary and secondary qualities. But he had a healthy feeling about all these matters. He knew instinctively that the difference between man and animals must lie in the human form as a whole, not in any single feature. This is why Goethe opposed the idea that the inter-maxillary bone is missing in man. As a young man, he wrote an important article suggesting that there is an inter-maxillary bone in man as well as in the animal. He was able to prove this by showing that in the embryo the inter-maxillary bone is still clearly evident in man although in early childhood this bone fuses with the upper jaw, whereas it remains separate in the animal. Goethe did all this out of a certain instinct, and this instinct led him to say that one must not seek the difference between man and animal in details of this kind; instead, it must be sought for in the whole relation of man's form, soul, and spirit to the world.

By opposing the naturalists who held that man lacks the inter-maxillary bone Goethe brought man close to the animal. But he did this in order to bring out the true difference as regards man's essential nature. Goethe's approach out of instinctive knowledge put him in opposition to the views of orthodox science, and this opposition has remained to this day. This is why Goethe really found no successors in the scientific world. On the contrary, as a consequence of all that had developed since the Fifteenth Century in the scientific field, in the Nineteenth Century the tendency grew stronger to approximate man to the animal. The search for a difference in external details diminished with the increasing effort to equate man as nearly as possible with the animal. This tendency is reflected in what arose later on as the Darwinian idea of evolution. This found followers, while Goethe's conception did not. Some have treated Goethe as a kind of Darwinist, because all they see in him is that, through his work on the inter-maxillary bone,⁵⁸ he brought man nearer to the animal. But they fail to realize that he did this because he wanted to point out (he himself did not say so in so many words, but it is implicit in his work) that the difference between man and animal cannot be found in these external details.

Since one no longer knew anything about man, one searched for man's traits in the animal. The conclusion was that the animal traits are simply a little more developed in man. As time went by, there was no longer any inkling that even in regard to space man had a completely different position. Basically, all views of evolution that originated during the scientific age were formulated without any true knowledge of man. One did not know what to make of man, so he was simply represented as the culmination of the animal series. It was a though one said: Here are the animals; they build up to a final degree of perfection, a perfect animal; and this perfect animal is man.

My dear friends, I want to draw your attention to how matters have proceeded with a certain inner consistency in the various branches of scientific thinking since its first beginnings in the Fifteenth Century; how we picture our relation to the world on the basis of physics, of physiology, by saying: Out there is a silent and colorless world. It affects us. We fashion the colors and sounds in ourselves as experiences of the effects of the outer world.

At the same time we believe that the three dimensions of space exist outside of us in the external world. We do this, because we have lost the ability to comprehend man as a whole. We do this because our theories of animal and man do not penetrate the true nature of man. Therefore, in spite of its great achievements we can say that science owes its greatness to the fact that it has completely missed the essential nature of man. We were not really aware of the extent to which science was missing this. A few especially enthusiastic materialistic thinkers in the Nineteenth Century asserted that man cannot rightly lay claim to anything like soul and spirit because what appears as soul and spirit is only the effect of something taking place outside us in time and space. Such enthusiasts describe how light works on us; how something etheric (according to their theory) works into us through vibrations along our nerves; how the external air also continues on in breathing, etc. Summing it all up, they said that man is dependent on every rise and fall of temperature, on any malformation of his nervous system, etc. Their conclusion was that man is a creature pitifully dependent on every draft or change of pressure.

Anyone who reads such descriptions with an open mind will notice that, instead of dealing with the true nature of man, they are describing something that turns man into a nervous wreck. The right reply to such descriptions is that a man so dependent on every little draft of air is not a normal person but a neurasthenic. But they spoke of this neurasthenic as if he were typical. They left out his real nature, recognizing only what might make him into a neurasthenic. Through the peculiar character of this kind of thinking about nature, all understanding was gradually lost. This is what Goethe revolted against, though he was unable to express his insights in clearly formulated sentences.

Matters such as these must be seen as part of the great change in scientific thinking since the Fifteenth Century. Then they will throw light on what is essential in this development. I would like to put it like this: Goethe in his youth took a keen interest in what science had produced in its various domains. He studied it, he let it stimulate him, but he never agreed with everything that confronted him, because in all of it he sensed that man was left out of consideration. He had an intense feeling for man as a whole. This is why he revolted in a variety of areas against the scientific views that he saw around him. It is important to see this scientific development since the Fifteenth Century against the background of Goethe's world conception. Proceeding from a strictly historical standpoint, one can clearly perceive how the real being of man is missing in the scientific approach, missing in the physical sciences as well as in the biological.

This is a description of the scientific view, not a criticism. Let us assume that somebody says: “Here I have water. I cannot use it in this state. I separate the oxygen from hydrogen, because I need the hydrogen.” He then proceeds to do so. If I then say what he has done, this is not criticism of his conduct. I have no business to tell him he is doing something wrong and should leave the water alone. Nor is it criticism, when I saw that since the Fifteenth Century science has taken the world of living beings and separated from it the true nature of man, discarding it and retaining what this age required. It then led this dehumanized science to the triumphs that have been achieved.

It is not a criticism if something like this is said; it is only a description. The scientist of modern times needed a dehumanized nature, just as chemist needs deoxygenized hydrogen and therefore has to split water into its two components. The point is to understand that we must not constantly fall into the error of looking to science for an understanding of man.

• 52In the night from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day 1922/23 the Goetheanum burned down. It was built in ten years, with the help of various artists from many countries. This primarily wooden building, in which each surface and corner was formed artistically (see Steiner, Ways to a New Style in Architecture [London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. and New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1927]) had been designed in all details by Rudolf Steiner who also managed the construction work through all these years. From the first of January on, the activities had to be transferred into the so-called “Schreinerei,” a building that was used during the construction of the Goetheanum. For the work itself, Rudolf Steiner did not allow any interruption; the afternoon after the fire, the “Three Kings Play” was performed, as was written on the invitations of the ongoing course (see Christmas Plays from Obervfer, trans. A.C. Harwood [London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973]). Rudolf Steiner introduced it with a short address, in which he spoke the following words: “great suffering knows how to keep silent about what it is feeling ... The building that was created in ten years through the love and compassion of innumerable friends of the movement was destroyed in one night. But just today the silent suffering experiences what our friends have put in this work. Since we feel that everything we do in our movement is necessary in our present civilization, we will want to continue whatever we can in the given frame, and therefore even in this hour as the flames outside still burn and rise, although such suffering is present, still perform this play which we promised our participants in connection with our course, and which these participants expect. I also will hold the lecture I offered, here in the ‘Schreinerei’ this evening at 8:00 P.M.” (printed in Ansprachen zu den Weihnachtsspielen aus Altem Volkstum [Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974], GA Bibl. Nr. 274). The beginning of the course's lecture was then devoted to the fire, which is printed in The Younger Generation (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 53. One can find the basic reality explained in the chapter “Sleep and Death” in An Outline Of Occult Science and in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 54. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim: Einsiedein, Kanton Schwytz 1493–1541 Salzburg, Md. Ferrara, Professor in Basel. Accomplished physician, scientist, and philosopher. Wrote about chemistry, medical science, biology, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and theology. The myths about Paracelsus as goldmaker, magician, or charlatan were made up after his death and distorted the picture of his character. Most complete work published by Karl Sudhoff (fourteen volumes). See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 55. Helmont, Johann Baptist van: Brussels 1577–1644. Physician and iatrochemist. He managed the differentiation and separation of gases (hydrogen, carbon). He coined the name “gas” for the airy state.
• 56. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist. Especially see Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15.
• 57. Lecture of April 8, 1911, at the 9th International Philosophical Congress, “The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy,” in Rudolf Steiner, Esoteric Development, Spring Valley, NY: 1982), pp. 25–55.
• 58. See Steiner, Goethe the Scientist.

Continuing with yesterday's considerations concerning the inability of the scientific world conception to grasp the nature of man, we can say that in all domains of science something is missing that is also absent in the mathematical-mechanistic sphere. This sphere has been divorced from man, as if man were absent from the mathematical experience. This line of thought results in a tendency to also separate other processes in the world from man. This in its turn produces an inability to create a real bridge between man and world.

I shall discuss another consequence of this inability later on. Let us focus first of all on the basic reason why science has developed in this way. It was because we lost the power to experience inwardly something that is spoken of in Anthroposophy today and that in former times was perceived by a sort of instinctive clairvoyance. Scientific perception has lost the ability to see into man and grasp how he is composed of different elements.

Let us recall the anthroposophical idea that man is composed of four members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-organization. I need not go into detail about this formation, since you can find it all in my book Theosophy.⁵⁹ When we observe the physical body and consider the possibility of inward experiencing one's physical body—we should begin by asking: What do we experience in regard to it? We experience what I have frequently spoken about recently; namely, the right-left, up-down, and front-back directions. We experience motion, the change of place of one's own body. To some extent at least, we also experience weight in various degrees. But weight is experienced in a highly modified form. When these things were still experienced within our various members, we reflected on them a good deal; but in the scientific age, no one gives them any thought. Facts that are of monumental importance for a world comprehension are completely ignored. Take the following fact. Assume that you have to carry a person who weighs as much as you do. Imagine that you carry this person a certain distance. You will consciously experience his weight. Of course, as you walk this distance, you are carrying yourself as well. But you do not experience this in the same way. You carry your own weight through space, but you do not experience this. Awareness of one's own weight is something quite different. In old age, we are apt to say that we feel the weight of our limbs. To some extent this is connected with weight, because old age entails a certain disintegration of the organism. This in turn tears the individual members out of the inward experience and makes them independent—atomizes them, as it were—and in atomization they fall a prey to gravity. But we do not actually feel this at any given moment of our life, so this statement that we feel the weight of our limbs is really only a figure of speech. A more exact science might show that it is not purely figurative, but be that as it may, the experience of our weight does not impinge strongly on our consciousness.

This shows that we have an inherent need to obliterate certain effects that are unquestionably working within us. We obliterate them by means of opposite effects (“opposite” in the sense brought out by the analogy between man and the course of the year in my recent morning lectures.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, whether we are dealing with processes that can be experienced relatively clearly, such as the three dimensions or motion, or with less obvious ones such as those connected with weight, they are all processes that can be experienced in the physical body.

What was thus experienced in former times has since been completely divorced from man. This is most evident in the case of mathematics. The reason it is less obvious in other experiences of the physical body is that the corresponding processes in the body, such as weight or gravity, are completely extinguished for today's form of consciousness. These processes, however, were not always completely obliterated. Under the influence of the mood prevailing under the scientific world conception, people today no longer have any idea of how different man's inner awareness was in the past. True, he did not consciously carry his weight through space in former times. Instead, he had the feeling that along with this weight, there was a counterweight. When he learned something, as was the case with the neophytes in the mysteries, he learned to perceive how, while he always carried his own weight in and with himself, the counter-effect is constantly active in light. It can really be said that man felt that he had to thank the spiritual element indwelling the light for counteracting, within him, the soul-spirit element activity in gravity. In short, we can show in many ways that in older times there was no feeling that anything was completely divorced from man. Within himself, man experienced the processes and events as they occurred in nature. When he observed the fall of a stone, for example, in external nature (an event physically separated from him) he experienced the essence of movement. He experienced this by comparing it with what such a movement would be like in himself. When he saw a falling stone, he experienced something like this: “If I wanted to move in the same way, I would have to acquire a certain speed, and in a falling stone the speed differs from what I observe, for instance, in a slowly crawling creature.” He experienced the speed of the falling stone by applying his experience of movement to the observation of the falling stone. The processes of the external world that we study in physics today were in fact also viewed objectively by the man of former times, but he gained his knowledge with the aid of his own experiences in order to rediscover in the external world the processes going on within himself.

Until the beginning of the Fifteenth Century, all the conceptions of physics were pervaded by something of which one can say that it brought even the physical activities of objects close to the inner life of man. Man experienced them in unison with nature. But with the onset of the Fifteenth Century begins the divorce of the observation of such processes from man. Along with it came the severance of mathematics, a way of thinking which from then on was combined with all science. The inner experience in the physical body was totally lost. What can be termed the inner physics of man was lost. External physics was divorced from man, along with mathematics. The progress thereby achieved consisted in the objectifying of the physical. What is physical can be looked at in two ways. Staying with the example of the falling stone, it can be traced with external vision.

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To see what happened to the older world view at the dawn of the Fifteenth Century, let us look at a man in whom the transition can be observed particularly well; namely, Galileo.⁶¹ Galileo is in a sense the discoverer of the laws governing falling objects. Galileo's main aim was to determine the distance traveled in the first second by a falling body. The older world view placed the visual observation of the falling stone side by side with the inward experience of the speed needed to run at an equal pace. The inner experience was placed alongside that of the falling stone. Galileo also observed the falling stone, but he did not compare it with the inward experience. Instead, he measured the distance traveled by the stone in the first second of its fall. Since the stone falls with increasing speed, Galileo also measured the following segments of its path. He did not align this with any inward experience, but with an externally measured process that had nothing to do with man, a process that was completely divorced from man. Thus, in perception and knowledge, the physical was so completely removed from man that he was not aware that he had the physical inside him as well.

At that time, around the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, a number of thinkers who wanted to be progressive began to revolt against Aristotle,⁶² who throughout the Middle Ages had been considered the preeminent authority on science. If Aristotle's explanations of the falling stone (misunderstood in most cases today) are looked at soberly, we notice that when something is beheld in the world outside, he always points out how it would be if man himself were to undergo the same process. For him, it is not a matter of determining a given speed by measuring it, but to think of speed in such a way that it can be related to some human experience. Naturally, if you say you must achieve a particular speed, you feel that something alive, something filled with vigor, will be needed for you to do this. You feel a certain inner impetus, and the last thing you would assume is that something is pulling you in the direction you were heading. You would think that you were pushing, not that you were being pulled. This is why the force of attraction, gravity, begins to mean something only in the Seventeenth Century.

Man's idea about nature began to change radically; not just the law of falling bodies, but all the ideas of physics. Another example is the law of inertia, it is generally called. The very name reveals its origin within man. (There is a play on words here. The German term for inertia, Trägheit, really means laziness.) Inertia is something that can be inwardly felt but what has become of the law of inertia in physics under the influence of “Galileoism?” the physicist says: A body, or rather a point, on which no external influence is exercises, which is left to itself, moves through space with uniform velocity. This means that throughout all time-spans it travels the same distance in each second. If no external influence interferes, and the body has achieved a given speed per second, it travels the same distance in each succeeding second.

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It is inert. Lacking an external influence, it continues on and on without change. All the physicist does is measure the distance per second, and a body is called inert if the velocity remains constant.

There was a time when one felt differently about this and asked: How is a moving body, traveling a constant distance per second, experienced? It could be experienced by remaining on one and the same condition without ever changing one's behavior. At most, this could only be an ideal for man. He can attain this ideal of inertia only to a very small degree. But if you look at what is called inertia in ordinary life, you see that it is pretty much like doing the same thing every second of your life.

From the Fifteenth Century on, the whole orientation of the human mind was led to such a point that we can fairly say that man forgot his own inward experience. This happens first with the inner experience of the physical organism—man forgets it. What Galileo thought out and applied to matters close to man, such as the law of inertia, was not applied in a wide context. And it was indeed merely thought out, even if Galileo was dealing with things that can be observed in nature.

We know how, by placing the sun in the center instead of the earth, and by letting the planets move in circles around the sun, and by calculating the position of a given planetary body in the heavens, Copernicus produced a new cosmic system in a physical sense. This was the picture that Copernicus drew of our planetary, our solar system. And it was a picture that certainly can be drawn. Yet, this picture did not make a radical turn toward the mathematical attitude that completely divorces the external world from man. Anyone reading Copernicus's text gets the impression that Copernicus still felt the following. In the complicated lines, by means of which the earlier astronomy tried to grasp the solar system, it not only summed up the optical locations of the planets; it also had a feeling for what would be experienced if one stood amid these movements of the planets. In former ages people had a very clear idea of the epicycles the planets were thought to describe. In all this there was still a certain amount of human feeling. Just as you can understand the position of, let us say, an arm when you are painting a picture of a person because you can feel what it is like to be in such a position, so there was something alive in tracing the movement described by a planet around its fixed star. Indeed, even in Kepler's⁶³ case—perhaps especially in his case—there is still something of a human element in his calculating the orbits described by the planets.

Now Newton applies Galileo's abstracted principle to the heavenly bodies, adopting something like the Copernican view and conceiving things somewhat as follows: A central body, let us say a sun, attracts a planet in such a way that this force of attraction decreases in proportion to the square of the distance. It becomes smaller and smaller in proportion to the square, but increases in proportion to the mass of the bodies. If the attracting body has a greater mass, the force of attraction is porportionately greater.

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If the distance is greater, the force of attraction decreases, but always in such a way that if the distance is twice as great, the attraction is four times less; if it is three times as great, nine times less, and so forth. Pure measuring is instilled into the picture, which, again, is conceived as completely abstracted from man. This was not yet so with Copernicus and Kepler but with Newton, a so-called “objective” something is excogitated and there is no longer any experience, it is all mere excogitation. Lines are drawn in the direction in which one looks and forces are, as it were, imagined into them, since what one sees is not force; the force has to be dreamed up. Naturally, one says “thought up” as long as one believes in the whole business; but when one no longer has faith in it, one says, “dreamed up.”

Thus we can say that through Newton the whole abstracted physical mode of conception becomes generalized so far that is applied to the whole universe. In short, the aim is to completely forget all experience within man's physical body; to objectify what was formerly pictured as closely related to the experience of the physical body; to view it in outer space independent of the physical corporeality, although this space had first been torn out of the body experience; and to find ways to speak of space without even thinking about the human being. Through separation from the physical body, through separation of nature's phenomena from man's experience in the physical body, modern physics arises. It comes into existence along with this separation of certain processes of nature from self-experience within the physical human body (yellow in sketch). Self experience is forgotten (red in Fig. 1)

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By permeating all external phenomena with abstract mathematics, this kind of physics could not longer understand man. What had been separated from man could not be reconnected. In short, there emerges a total inability to bring science back to man.

In physical respects you do not notice this quite so much; but you do notice it if you ask: What about man's self-experience in the etheric body, in this subtle organism? Man experiences quite a bit in it. But this was separated from man even earlier and more radically. This abstraction, however, was not as successful as in physics. Let us go back to a scientist of the first Christian centuries, the physician Galen.⁶⁴ Looking at what lived in external nature and following the traditions of his time, Galen distinguished four elements—earth, water, air and fire (we would say warmth.) We see these if we look at nature. But, looking inward and focusing on the self-experience of the etheric body,⁶⁵ one asks: How do I experience these elements, the solid, the watery, the airy and the fiery in myself? Then, in those times the answer was: I experience them with my etheric body. One experienced it as inwardly felt movements of the fluids; the earth as “black gall,” the watery as “phlegm,” the airy as “pneuma” (what is taken in through the breathing process,) and warmth as “blood.” In the fluids, in what circulates in the human organism, the same thing was experienced as what was observed externally. Just as the movement of the falling stone was accompanied by an experience in the physical body, so the elements were experienced in inward processes. The metabolic process, where (so it was thought) gall, phlegm, and blood work into each other, was felt as the inner experience of one's own body, but a form of inward experience to which corresponded the external processes occurring between air, water, fire and earth.

Here, however, we did not succeed in completely forgetting all inner life and still satisfying external observation. In the case of a falling body, one could measure something; for example, the distance traveled in the first second. One arrived at a “law of inertia” by thinking of moving points that do not alter their condition of movement but maintain their speed. By attempting to eject from the inward experience something that the ancients strongly felt to be a specific inner experience; namely, the four elements, one was able to forget the inner content but one could not find in the external world any measuring system. Therefore the attempt to objectify what related to these matters, as was done in physics, remained basically unsuccessful to this day. Chemistry could have become a science that would rank alongside physics, if it had been possible to take as much of the etheric body into the external world as was accomplished in the physical body. In chemistry, however, unlike physics, we speak to this day of something rather undefined and vague, when referring to its laws.⁶⁶ What was done with physics in regard to the physical body was in fact the aim of chemistry in regard to the etheric body. Chemistry states that if substances combine chemically, and in doing so can completely alter their properties, something is naturally happening.

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But if one wants to go beyond this conception, which is certainly the simplest and most convenient, one really does not know much about this process. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen; the two must be conceived as mixed together in the water somehow but no inwardly experiencable concept can be formed of this. It is commonly explained in a very external way: hydrogen consists of atoms (or molecules if you will) and so does oxygen. These intermingle, collide, and cling to one another, and so forth. This means that, although the inner experience was forgotten, one did not find oneself in the same position as in physics, where one could measure (and increasingly physics became a matter of measuring, counting and weighing.) Instead, one could only hypothesize the inner process. In a certain respect, it has remained this way in chemistry to this day, because what is pictured as the inner nature of chemical processes is basically only something read into them by thought.

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Chemistry will attain the level of physics only when with full insight into these matters, we can again relate chemistry with man, though not, of course, with the direct experience possessed by the old instinctive clairvoyance. We will only succeed in this when we gain enough insight into physics to be able to consolidate our isolated fragments of knowledge into a world conception and bring our thoughts concerning the individual phenomena into connection with man. What happens on one side, when we forget all inner experience and concentrate on measuring externals (thus remaining stuck in the so-called “objective”) takes its revenge on the other side. It is easy enough to say that inertia is expressed by the movement of a point that travels the same distance in each succeeding second. But there is no such point. This uniform movement occurs nowhere in the domain of human observation. A moving object is always part of some relationship, and its velocity is hampered here or there. In short, what could be described as inert mass,⁶⁷ or could be reduced to the law of inertia, does not exist. If we speak of movement and cannot return to the living inner accompanying experience of it, if we cannot relate the velocity of a falling body to the way we ourselves would experience this movement, then we must indeed say that we are entirely outside the movement and must orient ourselves by the external world. If I observe a moving body (see Fig. 7) and if these are its successive positions, I must somehow perceive that this body moves. If behind it there is a stationary wall, I follow the direction of movements and tell myself that the body moves on in that direction. But what is necessary in addition is that from my own position (dark circle) I guide this observation, in other words, become aware of an inward experience. If I completely leave out the human being and orient myself only out there, then, regardless of whether the object moves or remains stationary, while the wall moves, the result will be the same. I shall no longer be able to distinguish whether the body moves in one or the wall behind it in the opposite direction. I can basically make all the calculations under either one or the other assumption.

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I lose the ability to understand a movement inwardly if I do not partake of it with my own experience. This applies, if I may say so, to many other aspects of physics. Having excluded the participating experience, I am prevented from building any kind of bridge to the objective process. If I myself am running, I certainly cannot claim that it is a matter of indifference whether I run or the ground beneath me moves in the opposite direction. But if I am watching another person moving over a given area, it makes no difference for merely external observation whether he is running or the ground beneath him is moving in the opposite direction. Our present age has actually reached the point, where we experience, if I may put it this way, the world spirit's revenge for our making everything physical abstract.

Newton was still quite certain that he could assume absolute movements, but now we can see numerous scientists trying to establish the fact that movement, the knowledge of movement, has been lost along with the inner experience of it. Such is the essence of the Theory of Relativity,⁶⁸ which is trying to pull the ground from under Newtonism. This theory of relativity is a natural historical result. It cannot help but exist today. We will not progress beyond it if we remain with those ideas that have been completely separated from the human element. If we want to understand rest or motion, we must partake in the experience. If we do not do this, then even rest and motion are only relative to one another.

• 59. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1971), pp. 1–39.
• 60. Rudolf Steiner, Man and the World of Stars: The Spiritual Communion of Mankind (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1963), pp. 141–172.
• 61. Galileo Galilei: Pisa 1564–1642 Arcetri by Florence. Discovered isochromism in pendulum, hydrostatic scales, laws of free fall, law of inertia. Numerous astronomical inventions with self-constructed telescope. An Inquisition trial resulted in a banning of the Copernican world system. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Spiritual Guidance of Man, and Laurenz Muellner's speech, “Die Bedeutung Galilei's fuer die Philosophie,” Vienna 1894. (Reprinted in Anthroposophie, 1933/34:29).
  
  His Sermons de Motu Gravium (About the Effects of Gravity) contain the results of his investigations in Pisa. They first only circulated in manuscript copies; first edition: 1854. The final version is in the Discorsi e Dimenstrazioni Mathematiche Intomo a Due Nuove Scieme, published 1638 in Leyden. Also see L. Muellner's speech.
• 62. Such opponents were Bacon, Bruno, Galilei. See Riddles of Philosophy and the speech of L. Muellner, p. 103.
• 63. Johannes Kepler: Weil der Stadt (Wuerttemberg) 1571–1630 Regensburg. Mathematician, physicist, astronomer, discoverer of the astronomical telescope. Astronomer and mathematician to three emperors. Persecuted as a Protestant. Totally exhausted through his life misery, he died prematurely at the “Reichstag” at Regensburg, where he hoped to secure his subsistence. To calculate his three laws of the motion of the planets he used the observation data of Tycho Brahe, whose follower he was at the court of Prague. On the other hand, the Copernican planetary system was the starting point for the finding of the three laws of the planets. Kepler was the first who tried to interpret the motion of the planetary orbit and moved the center of force to the sun. See The Spiritual Guidance of Man and, about the three planetary laws Das Verhaeltnis der Verschiedenen Naturwissenschaftlichen Gebiete zur Astronomie (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981), GA Bibl. Nr. 323.
• 64. Galen: Pergamon, Asia Minor 129 A.D.–199 Rome. Physician and philosopher. Studies in Pergamon and travel for study to Corinth, Smyrna, and Alexandria. Personal physician of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. His one hundred and fifty medical texts with fifteen commentaries were the basis for future medicine and pharmacology. One hundred twenty-five texts concerning philosophy, mathematics, and jurisprudence.
• 65. Rudolf Steiner, A Road to Self Knowledge: The Threshold of the Spiritual World (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975), pp. 19–27,100–106.
• 66. This is confirmed in chemical textbooks. They speak of chemistry as “a primarily empirical science.” In its laws one cannot come to mathematically definite values but to approximate numbers, whose limits are defined in tabular form. Therefore authors of chemical subject books need to add limiting explanations, such as “usually is valid,” or “generally one can say.” Chemical laws are mostly derived from physical laws, as for instance in the main theses of thermodynamics. It is thought unscientific to think otherwise than mechanically. Literature: H. Remy, Lehrbuch der Anorganischen Chemie, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1954), Volume I, pages 14–23, 37, 50, 71–73.
• 67. See Georg Unger, Vom Bilden Physicalischer Begriffe, Volume 1, pages 41–49 and 57.
• 68. See Footnote 40.

At the end of yesterday’s lecture, I tried to speak to you about the development of memory during the early school years. If we now look at the attitude regarding this matter as shown by most contemporary educational theorists, we notice a complete lack of awareness of how certain impulses during the early years of students continue to affect their later lives and how these reappear transformed. This, at any rate, is what a true knowledge of the human being reveals to us. What often happens today is that adults reach certain conclusions when they try to understand the ways of their own physical organism and psyche. Although people may not be conscious of it, they then assume that these conclusions apply also to the varying ages and stages of childhood. This attitude, however, is very misleading, because, as I pointed out, the forces that work throughout childhood development need to be recognized and supported if our education is to be sound. We must meet the inner needs of children, which is what was meant by our example of the importance of authority in the life of young children.

Imagine a man who, in his fortieth year, experiences certain vague events of the soul. External circumstances may suddenly shed light on what has arisen in his soul, and he may recognize that what is in his mind had been accepted at the age of eight or nine simply on the authority of a beloved teacher. At such a tender age, he could only entrust it to memory, since he may not have been able to comprehend it until the maturity of forty years of age. (I say this, though not many will believe my interpretation.) Children, however, cannot always wait until they are forty before understanding what they have been told at the age of eight, and this is the reason they have an inner longing for authority. When, at the age of forty, new light suddenly flashes upon what was accepted at the age of eight, simply on authority, this event brings the experience of new inner life forces, which has a refreshing effect on the whole person. New inner strength (sorely needed in later life) is developed in such a process. People are blessed with revitalizing strength for the rest of life if they have accepted a great deal of material on authority—material that, through outer circumstances, reappears as if by magic from one’s organism. Today, many people age prematurely, in both body and soul, because they are denied access to this vivifying force. Too many years have gone by since one’s memory was systematically strengthened during the early school years through appropriate and reasonable methods, based on faith and belief in the authority of an adult.

Memory training aside, there are plenty of other opportunities to cultivate children’s faculties of comprehension, as I mentioned yesterday. But between the change of teeth and puberty, it is absolutely essential for teachers to work through thoughtful and sensible methods for developing students’ memory, because without this they will be deprived of too much in later life.

If my intention were to please my listeners, I should have to speak quite differently about many things. But I wish to convey only a true knowledge of the human being as revealed by decades of anthroposophic research. Consequently, much that I have to say will sound odd when compared with current opinions. Some of my findings will be seen as old-fashioned, while others may appear avant-garde; but this is not really the point. The only thing that matters is whether what I say can stand the test of a true knowledge of the human being.

If we examine the general picture of the human being as seen by so many today, we get the feeling that it came about only through external observation. It is like trying to understand how a clock works by looking only at its exterior. We can read the time this way, and we can tell whether a watch is made of gold or silver, but we will never become a clockmaker. Today, what people call biology, physiology, or anatomy shows us only what the human being looks like externally. Human nature becomes transparent to our understanding only when we learn to penetrate the human body, soul, and spirit. Only by including these three members in our investigations can we treat people according their true nature. If we use real insight into the human being to look at a certain question much discussed lately among educators—the question of fatigue in children—we have to say this: Experiments are being made to establish the causes of fatigue in children. The results of those investigations are then used in new teaching techniques intended to reduce stress in students. This sort of thing is done all over the world, and yet the whole question is based on the wrong premise. Real knowledge of the human being would never lead to such a question in the first place. You need only consider something pointed out here during our last few meetings. Recall the strong, repeated plea that all teaching during the younger years should appeal to the rhythmic and musical element in children, which, first and foremost, works on their breathing and blood circulation.

And now I ask, can the source of fatigue ever lie in the children’s breathing and blood circulation? Can it ever arise from the middle region of the human being, the very region to which we always give special attention and treatment during the child’s school years? Never. Don’t we all breathe continuously, during both sleep and waking life, from the moment we are born until we die, without ever feeling tired of breathing? Doesn’t our blood circulate tirelessly from birth until death? Never is its flow interrupted by fatigue; if this happened, the consequences would indeed be serious. Doesn’t this show us that teachers who work from a real art of education constantly appeal to these very organs, which are never subject to fatigue? This whole question has to be considered from quite a different angle. We must formulate it differently and ask, Where are the real sources of tiredness in a human being? We find them in the head and in the limb system. We must look at these two systems if we want to understand the nature of tiredness in children, which bears a completely different character according to whether it emanates from the head or from the limbs and metabolism.

The forces working from the head downward into the rest of the human organism deposit a very fine metabolic residue that wants to permeate the whole human body with fine salt-like deposits. This process, which also affects the breathing and blood circulation, is the cause of fatigue because of the head’s direct contact with the external world and because of its arhythmic, nonmusical relationship to the outer world. The rhythms of breathing and blood circulation, on the other hand, are so strongly connected to the human organism that they retain a state of equilibrium and obey their own laws. And, in the central system, what acts like a self-contained unit is not subject to fatigue, at least not to any significant degree. It is possible, of course, to damage the inner rhythms of both children and adults through the wrong kind of treatment. But there is one thing we can be sure of: that the rhythmic system, which is of such primary importance in any true art of education, never suffers from tiredness or fatigue.

The limbs and metabolism, like the head, do get tired. You can see this by watching a snake after it has eaten. The limb and metabolic system tires, or at least becomes a source of tiredness, affecting the whole human being. Yet this form of tiredness is totally different from that of the head. The head system causes tiredness by depositing salts through a precipitation of mineral substances in the human organism. The limb and metabolic system, on the other hand, always tends to dissolve physical substances through its creation of warmth. Here, too, despite its polar opposite effect from that of the head, the cause of tiredness is found in the relative independence of this system from the inner rhythms of the human organization. This tiredness stems from the limbs’ activities in the external world and from the metabolic response to food intake. Eating and drinking usually happen at irregular intervals, since there are very few people who adhere to a strict rhythm of eating and drinking. Therefore, although both head and metabolism share the same cause of tiredness, their effects have opposite natures.

Where does all of this lead? The whole question of fatigue in students needs to be put differently. If children tire easily, we should ask, What have we done wrong? Where did we make mistakes? We have no right to assume that our teaching methods are always correct. We will never reach human nature by testing children for the number errors they make after half an hour of writing, or if we test them after a certain period of reading for their comprehension of meaningless words inserted into a text. We reach human nature only by asking the right question, which, in the case of childhood fatigue, should try to determine whether we have overburdened a child’s head or limb system. We must find methods that do not place too much strain on either of these two systems.

It would be erroneous, however, to believe that we could achieve this simply by adjusting the schedule of lessons, since gym lessons in themselves will not balance too much head work, nor will arithmetic work directly into the metabolism, though it does so indirectly. It is impossible to achieve the right balance merely by readjusting the schedule; this can be done only through an artistic presentation of lesson materials—at least during the early school years. This, in turn, means that we must appeal (as I have indicated) above all to the rhythmic system, the one system of the human being that never tires. Thus we also involve the other two systems, the head and the metabolic- limb systems, in the activity of learning. Naturally, this needs to be done correctly.

I hope that by now you realize that certain doubts about new ideas and methods of education, which are frequently expressed by those who are biased, do not apply at all to Waldorf education, because, in every sense, it is based on a true understanding of the human being. And because they also try to shed light on the soul and spiritual nature of the human being, Waldorf methods can lay the foundations for an approach that works on the whole human being.

For example, it is important to see that the human head system bears forces that penetrate the entire human organism (most strongly during childhood and decreasing during successive ages), shaping it, forming it, and giving it strength. The thought-directing capacity of the head is something that, as human beings with all our predispositions, we bring with us into this world at birth or conception. Eventually these forces assume the task of forming the entire human being. If the head were not in direct contact with the external world, and if, as a result, the inner rhythms of the human being were not disturbed all the time, then (if I may say it in this way) what has incarnated at birth in the head would be fully satisfied with the physical human organization. Human beings would flow into their physical organization, which would claim their entire being. We would be completely absorbed by it and would be unable to make any contact with the suprasensory world. Because human beings would thus be separated from the spiritual world, their inner life would become increasingly artificial and false. And, conversely, if through the limb and metabolic system human beings were not in constant touch with the external world, they would be unable to permeate with glowing warmth all that flows down from the head. We would be unable to counteract these forces, which would work toward an increasingly artificial state of perfection.

Here we have two marked polarities. The head always wants to cut us off from the spiritual world by shaping our body in a way that prevents us from gaining the right relationship to the spiritual world. The head and all that belongs to it finished developing a long time ago, during humankind’s pre-earthly existence, and the process of materialization, issuing from the head, must always be counteracted by the activities of the human metabolism and limbs, which flow upward from below. In this way, a balance is achieved in our corporeality. And between these two poles is our central system—like a self-contained organism—our rhythmic system of respiration and blood circulation. This system is like a separate world in itself, like a microcosm. But despite its relative independence, it must be protected from the extreme influences of the head, which can affect it under certain circumstances, such as when the lungs are invaded by various foreign organic processes. We can observe this in the hardening of lungs and the new growth in the lungs of those suffering from lung diseases.

As human beings, we need this polarity between the head and the metabolism. The metabolism is always trying to dissolve the hardening processes from the head, and this situation can be utilized medically. If we recognize the interplay between what descends from the head and what ascends from the metabolism, we can cure pathological symptoms in the larynx, trachea, or lungs, for example, by treating the metabolic system, even when the source of illness lies in the head system. Especially in the case of children’s diseases, spectacular results have been achieved by treating a patient’s metabolism for the symptoms of illness that appeared in the head organization. The human being is a single organic entity and must be treated accordingly. This applies to all aspects of the human being, not just in sound methods of therapy, but especially in the field of education.

If one looks at the advances in general knowledge during the last centuries, one quickly notices how little has been achieved with regard to knowledge of the human being. This is mainly because the methods of investigation consider only the physical, external aspects. It is of utmost importance that anyone involved in the art of education be able to recognize quite realistically what happens in the body, soul, and spirit of growing children, especially between the great turning point at nine and the beginning of puberty. It is essential to be able to see how the physical, soul, and spiritual forces work on and affect one another in the children we educate.

If we observe children of nine to ten with real understanding, we find that everything entering the soul is absorbed and transmuted, so that the musculature, which is permeated by forces of growth, becomes actively involved. At that point in life, the muscles always respond to and work with the soul nature of children, especially where the more intimate forces of growth are active. The inner swelling or stretching of the muscles depends mostly on the development of a child’s soul forces. The characteristic feature between the ages of ten and twelve is that the muscles have an especially intimate relationship with respiration and blood circulation. They are attuned to the central system of breathing and blood circulation. Because Waldorf education appeals so strongly to this part of a child’s being, we indirectly promote the growth and development of the child’s muscles.

Toward the twelfth year a new condition arises. The muscles no longer remain connected as intimately with the respiration and blood circulation but incline more toward the bones and adapt to the dynamics of the skeleton. The growth forces are fully engaged in the movement of limbs while walking, jumping, and grasping—indeed, in every limb activity related to the skeleton. The muscles, previously related closely to the rhythmic system, now become oriented entirely toward the skeletal system. Thus, children adapt more strongly now to the external world than they did before the twelfth year. Formerly, the muscular system was connected more directly with a child’s inner being, and the rhythmic system, because of its relative independence, played a dominant role in muscle growth. A child moved in harmony with the muscular system, and the skeleton, embedded in the muscles, was simply carried along. Now, toward the twelfth year, the situation quickly changes; the muscles begin to serve the mechanics and dynamics of the skeletal organization.

You will have gained a deep understanding of how human nature develops once you can see and understand what happens within children before the twelfth year—how the muscles simply carry the bones along and later begin to relate directly to the skeleton and, in doing so, relate also to the external world. Such insights free us from abstract, intellectual modes of investigation, which are so prevalent today and easily creep into the field of education. These insights also move educators toward a truly human approach to children. If we allow such things to work on our soul, we will never impose the sort of treatment on a child that Marsyas had to endure. Naturally, it is possible that some are frightened away when they see how transparent the human being becomes in the light of this knowledge of man. They may feel that the human soul is being dissected, but this is not the case; the anthroposophic approach is simultaneously artistic and an act of knowing. This way of looking at the human being is an art, and it is this that is needed if we want to grasp the importance of this whole period until puberty, or (as we can now describe it) the transition from an intimate affinity between the muscular system and the system of breathing and blood circulation before the twelfth year, and the subsequent relationship between the muscles and bones from the twelfth year until puberty.

Can you see now how an incarnating human being gradually adapts to the world? In very young children, the formative forces are centered in the brain and radiate from there. Then the center of activities shifts to the muscular system, and after the age of twelve a child’s being pours itself into the skeleton, so to speak. Only then are human beings ready to enter the world fully. Incarnating human beings must first penetrate the body before establishing a relationship with the external world. First, the head forces are active. Later, these forces are poured into the muscles, then into the skeletal system, and after sexual maturity is reached, adolescents are able to enter the world. Only then can they stand properly in the world.

This gradual process of incarnation needs to be considered if if we want to find the right choice and presentation of class material, especially for this age. Unfortunately, however, today’s educators hardly have a sound knowledge of the human being.

Now I must ask you to forgive me if I present you with something that may seem completely absurd to you. Often I feel compelled to do such a thing, because I have to stand up for anthroposophic truths. Contemporary physiologists, biologists, and anatomists will see what I am going to say as pure heresy, but it nevertheless represents the facts. Imagine that the human brain functions in a similar way. The nerves go from the brain to the sensory organs, the location of sense perception, which is then conducted back to the brain. Here in the brain is the central station, a human “London.” Then, imagine there are motor nerves going from the brain to the organs of movement, where they give rise to the will impulses of movement according the thoughts of the brain, which are, in some way, also part of this will activity.

When people speak or think about the human being today, they first turn their attention to the head. Although the head itself always has the tendency to push us into what is material and would want to kill us every day if it were given free rein, it has nevertheless become the focus of attention among the general public today, and this is the unhealthy aspect of our current evaluation of the human being. It is a natural consequence of our modern scientific outlook. The general idea is this: in the head is the brain, which is a kind of absolute ruler over everything we think or do. I wonder how such a theory would have been explained before the telegraph, since this invention offered such a plausible analogy to what happens in our brain.

The theory of the human nervous system was postulated only after the use of telecommunications made that analogy possible. And so the brain was compared to a telecommunication center, stationed, say, in London (Steiner drew on the blackboard). If this is the center in London, then here would be Oxford, and Dover over there. If London is the center, then we could say, Here is a line running from Oxford to London. And here in London messages coming from Oxford are switched over to Dover. Under certain circumstances, we could very well imagine it like this. Once such a theory has been invented, one can present the facts so that they seem to confirm it. Take any book on physiology, and in it you will find descriptions of how, in different experiments, nerves are cut and how various physical reactions in the human body lead to definite logical conclusions. Unless you maintain strong reservations from the beginning—after all, these things look very plausible—everything seems to fit together beautifully. The only snag here is that it does not stand up to what a penetrating knowledge of the human being has to say about it. There, it is unacceptable.

I will ignore the fact that sensory nerves and motor nerves are anatomically indistinguishable. One may be a little thicker, but their structures are not significantly different. According to anthroposophic research, they are uniform (I can indicate this only briefly, otherwise I would have to give whole lectures on anthroposophic physiology). It is absurd to say that sensory and motor nerves are different. The elements of sensation and will are omnipresent in the human soul, so everyone is free to call these either sensory or motor nerves, but they must be recognized as a single, unified entity, since there is no essential difference. The only difference is in the direction in which they function. The optic nerve (a sensory nerve) is open to light impressions on the eye, and peripheral events affect another nerve in turn, which modern physiology calls a motor nerve. If this nerve goes from the brain to the rest of the organism, its function is to perceive events during physical movement. A correct treatment of tabes dorsalis would confirm this.

It is the function of so-called motor nerves to perceive motor impulses and occurrences during physical movement, but not to initiate such impulses. Nerves, wherever they may be, are organs for transmitting impressions. Sensory nerves transmit external impressions, and motor nerves transmit internal impressions. However, there is only one kind of nerve. Only scientific materialism could have invented an analogy between nerves and a telegraph system. Only materialistic science could believe that, apart from the nerves, which transmit sense impressions during the process of perception, there must also be other nerves, whose special function is to initiate will impulses. But this is not the way it works. Will impulses originate in the soul and spiritual domain, where they begin and work directly into the metabolic-limb system, not via any other kind of nerves. Nerves that enter the metabolism and limbs transmit only the impressions of what a person is doing in response to soul and spiritual impulses. Through them we perceive the consequences of soul-spiritual will processes in the blood circulation, in the remaining metabolism, and in the movement of the limbs. These we perceive. The so-called motor nerves do not initiate physical movement, but allow us to perceive the consequences of our will impulses.

Unless we are clear about these relationships, we will not come to a proper understanding of the human being. On the other hand, if you can see the truth of what I am saying, you will also appreciate why I have to insist on making such seemingly contradictory statements, because they are instrumental in showing us how the human soul and spirit always work on the entire human being.

Until approximately the twelfth year, the effects of what was just described are found in muscular activity, which is so intensely connected with a child’s breathing and blood circulation. From the age of twelve until puberty, these are linked more to the forces at work in the skeleton. This means that, before the twelfth year, children perceive with their so-called motor nerves more what lives in muscle activity, whereas after the twelfth year their perceptivity tends more toward the processes taking place between muscles and bones.

Now consider the fact that volition is also involved in every process of thinking. When connecting (or synthesizing) certain mental images, or when separating (or analyzing) them, we also use our will forces, and you have to look for this will element in the appropriate area of the organism, into which it works from the domain of the human soul and spirit. The will forces involved in the process of thinking are connected with the organism as just described. Consequently, when entering the twelfth year, children develop the kind of thinking that, in the will nature, takes place in the bones and the dynamics of the skeleton. At this point, an important transition is taking place from the soft muscular system to the hard bony system that, as I like to put it, places itself into the world like a system of levers. And here is where the heresy lies, the paradox I have to place before you: When we think about something belonging to external, inorganic nature, we do so primarily with our skeleton. Anyone accustomed to the currently accepted ideas of physiology will most likely laugh when someone living in Dornach maintains that we think abstractly with our bones. But this is how it works. It would be more comfortable not to say this, but it must be said, since correct knowledge of the human being is needed so much today.

Thoughts in our brain are only pictures of what actually occurs during the process of thinking. The brain is only an instrument that produces passive mental images of the real processes going on during the activity of thinking. To become conscious of our thinking, we need these mental pictures. But the images that our brain reflects for us lack the inner force inherent in pure thinking; they lack the element of will. The real nature of thinking has no more to do with the brain’s mental images than a certain gentleman’s picture on a wall has to do with the man himself. We must distinguish a picture from the actual person. Similarly, the actual processes during thinking must be distinguished from the mental images derived from them. When thinking is directed toward outer physical nature, the entire human organism is involved to a certain extent, but especially the skeleton. In the twelfth year, a child’s thinking enters the realm of the skeleton. This is the signal for us to move on to a new range of subjects, leaving behind the subjects described yesterday—the plant in relation to the earth and the animal kingdom in relation to the human being.

Our awareness of what happens in the soul and spiritual domain of children must lead to the appropriate choices and lesson plans. The way the soft muscular system plays its part in relation to respiration and blood circulation indicates that children, from the tenth to twelfth years, should be introduced to plants and animals as described. These subjects relate more directly to our inner human nature than do more distant subjects such as mineralogy, dynamics, physics, and so on. Thus, as the twelfth year approaches, teaching, which previously had a mainly pictorial character and included living plants and sentient animals, should now appeal more to an intellectual grasp of inorganic nature.

Now we reach the point when young adolescents can place themselves as earthly beings into the world of dynamics and mechanics and experience their forces. Now the possibility arises for introducing them to the basic principles of physics and chemistry, which are subject to specific natural laws, and to the mineral realm. If these subjects were taught at an earlier age, we would interfere with evolving human nature and unconsciously damage healthy development in our students.

The ability to grasp historical connections—to gain an overall view of historical developments and the underlying impulses and social implications—represents the other side of the stage where students are able to comprehend the physical and mineral aspects of life. Only toward the twelfth year are they mature enough for both of these aspects. Historical ideas and impulses, which are expressed outwardly in definite historical periods and directly affect social life and forms, are like the skeleton of history, although—seen in a purely historical context—they may also be something quite different. The flesh, or muscles, so to speak, are represented by the lives of historical personages as well as by concrete historical events. Therefore, to introduce history between the tenth and the twelfth year, we must bring it as images that engender a warmth of feeling and inwardly uplift the students’ souls. This is possible through telling the children of biographical events and by characterizing certain concrete events that form a whole. But we must not introduce the abstract ideas and impulses behind certain historical eras. Students should meet these in their twelfth year, which is when they begin to take a stand in the outer world. Here again you can see how an inner development gradually extends outward. Now students are ready to grasp how historical impulses, manifesting in outer events, affect the lives of people.

It is important to realize this, because otherwise there is the danger of approaching children from an adult point of view. When educating young people, it is too easy to draw parallels to an adult study of the sciences, beginning with simpler content in physics and chemistry and moving gradually to more difficult parts. One may think that we should teach subjects at school in a similarly graduated way. But this does not accord with the nature of children. An adult may see something as the simplest of material, such as we find in the mineral kingdom and inorganic physical world, but children can grasp this only after they have penetrated the realm of their skeletal system, moving in the outer world according to the dynamics of the skeleton as though conforming to the principles of the lever.

Many today have grown accustomed to looking at almost every aspect of life as though it should belong to the domain of natural laws. We find historians who try to interpret the social phenomena of historical impulses as if they, too, should be subservient to the laws of nature. This attitude is encouraged even in childhood, when physical and chemical laws are taught before the twelfth year and before other subjects more closely allied to human life are studied in lessons. If school subjects are introduced in the wrong order, students project their own experiences and understanding of purely physical laws into the social sphere and into their understanding of history. And since this way of seeing the world has deeply penetrated educational practice, the general public is quite willing to look for natural laws in practically every area of life, so that one may no longer suggest that historical impulses originate in the spiritual world. Again, this is reflected in the current principles of education. Children are encouraged to develop a firm belief in what they have been taught in physics and chemistry, so that later on, as adults, they will maintain this limited view in their outlook as a whole.

What I have written on the blackboard comes from America: “Nature’s proceedings in social phenomena.” This phrase has become almost a slogan as an educational principle, postulating that children should be educated so that they will see the processes of society as if they were natural laws. Children are to regard events in community life as they do natural processes.

People have come to me again and again to tell me that this phrase should read differently in English, that it should read “progress of nature” or something similar. However justified their criticism may be from the perspective of language use, what matters is that this quote has become a catchphrase for a specific principle in educational science. Whatever the correct wording is, we must realize that its message needs to be corrected, and this is what I wish to do from a worldwide point of view. Correcting the wording is not good enough, for the meaning implies that we find only natural laws working through social impulses. And this is the kind of attitude that we inculcate in our children. We must begin to experience natural laws at work in the processes of nature, and higher, spiritual laws within the social sphere. But this is not happening. We ruin our students’ future worldviews when we introduce them prematurely to subjects such as chemistry, mineralogy, physics, dynamics, and so on. As I have pointed out so many times already, we have to keep an eye on the entire milieu of our culture to know where to promote the impulses of the art of education. Forgive me if I have again raised an argument against common practice, but in my opinion it is justified.

If we approach modern science with the knowledge and insight gained by following paths outlined in How to Know Higher Worlds, we get the impression that the world described by natural science—according to mineral and physical law only—is not one in which we can live as human beings of flesh and blood. Theirs is a different world altogether. When we look, with eyes opened by imaginative knowledge, at the world described by modern natural science, and when we see how Children from the Tenth to Fourteenth Years 193 their picture of the world is meant to affect people today, we do not find human beings of flesh and blood there at all. We see only walking skeletons, little bone men and bone women. Theirs is a strange world indeed.

I once made an interesting experiment. The younger people here won’t remember a certain Swiss philosopher called Vogt—known as “Fat Vogt”—a typical thinker of recent times who in the 1850s somehow managed to knock together a rough-andready materialistic world philosophy that, like a specter, still haunts many worldviews today. I tried to imagine what would happen if real flesh-and-blood human beings were to find their way into this world of walking skeletons. Any healthy person of flesh and blood could not bear to live in such a world. But what would happen, I asked myself, if someone with at least a modicum of flesh and blood were to stray into this world of walking bones? The effects of living in a world as described by a purely materialistic view, and its intentional influences on people, would make a real person suffer the worst kinds of neurasthenia and hysteria. One could never be free of all the surrounding influences. Essentially, today’s natural science describes a world where we would all become neurasthenic and hysterical. Mercifully, the world of the natural scientist is not real or the one we live in. Very different forces, undreamed of by such people, are at work in the real world. Nevertheless, we need to extricate ourselves from this falsely uniform world of illusion, from which we receive almost everything that contributes to the general civilization of today. We must reach a true and real knowledge of the human being, and only then will we be able to educate in the right way.

From what you have heard so far, you may have gotten the impression that the art of education based on anthroposophic knowledge of the human being is intended to nurture, above all, a healthy and harmonious development of the physical body of children. You may have noticed that certain questions could be seen as guidelines for our educational aims. For example, How can we help free the development of formative forces flowing from the head, affecting and shaping the young organism? How can we work in harmony with the child’s developing lungs and blood circulation during the middle years? What must we do to cultivate, in the broadest sense, the forces working throughout a child’s musculature? How do we properly support the processes of muscle growth in relation to the bones and tendons, so that young adolescents can attain the proper position in the outer world?

These questions imply that whatever we do to enhance the development of a child’s soul and spirit is directed first toward the best possible healthy and normal development of the physical body. And this is indeed the case. We consciously try to aid and foster healthy development of the physical body, because in this way the soul and spiritual nature is given the best means of unfolding freely through a child’s own resources. By doing as little harm as possible to the spiritual forces working through children, we give them the best possibility of developing in a healthy way. This is not to be done through any preconceived ideas of what a growing human being should be like. Everything we do in teaching is an attempt to create the most favorable conditions for the children’s physical health. And because we must pay attention to the soul and spiritual element as well, and because the physical must ultimately become its outer manifestation, we must also come to terms with the soul and spiritual aspect in the way best suited for the child’s healthy development.

You may ask which educational ideal such an attitude comes from; it arises from complete dedication to human freedom. And it springs from our ideal to place human beings in the world so that they can unfold individual freedom, or, at least, in such a way that physical hindrances do not prevent them from doing so.

When we emphasize the physical development of children in our education, we are especially trying to help them learn to use their physical powers and skills fully in later life. Waldorf education is based on the knowledge and confidence that life in general has the best chance of developing when allowed to develop freely and healthily. Naturally, all this has to be taken in a relative sense, which, I hope is understood.

Children who, through educational malpractice during the school years, have been prevented from breathing properly and from using their system of bones and connective tissue properly, will not grow up to become free individuals. Likewise, students whose heads have been crammed with fixed ideas and concepts deemed important for later life will not become inwardly free. Children will not grow into a free human beings unless their childhood needs, as imposed by physical development, were both understood and catered to through the appropriate educational principles and methods. Naturally, the soul and spiritual needs of children must also be recognized and met with the right educational methods. Far from leading to any kind of false or lofty idealism, anthroposophy wishes to prove itself by enabling its followers to deal with the practical problems of life between birth and death, the span of time in which we should develop the physical body in accord with the soul and spirit.

So you see that we have no influence over the development of what belongs to the realm of soul and spirit, even if we as educators wanted it. The soul and spiritual part of the human being exists in its true being only from the moment we fall asleep until the time of awaking. This means that, if we want to educate people’s soul and spirit, we must do so while they sleep. In fact, it is impossible for us to do this. Today, we encounter a strong belief that we must educate the soul and spirit and indoctrinate people with certain concepts. All we can really do is help people toward the free use of physical capabilities through the soul and spirit.

I have often said that it is impossible to deal with educational matters without fully considering the entire life situation of our time, taking into account the general milieu into which education is placed. I will refrain from introducing any extraneous matter into our considerations here, but what I want to say now definitely belongs to our theme.

News has come to us that in Eastern Europe a new pedagogy is being worked out for the benefit of those who are still recognized there, those who belong to the Radical Socialist Party. Because nothing that was acceptable prior to the Revolution is now considered correct, new educational methods are being worked out there. This is being done by purely outward means. We are told that one of the leaders in modern Russia has been commissioned to write the history of the Communist Party. The new government has given him one month to complete his task. During this month, he will also have to do some practical work at the Moscow Center. As a result of these activities, a book is to be published that will become the official model for reeducating all those being recognized as proper Russians. Another party member has been commissioned to write a history of the workers’ movement in the West and a history of international communism. While compiling his authoritative account, he, too, has been given other work to do, and after six weeks he is supposed to have this work completed. All true Soviet Russians are supposed to study this book. Forgive me, I believe that the second writer was actually given two months. A third person was commissioned to publish a theory of Marxism, and it was he who was given six weeks to deliver the book. With this book, every true Russian will become familiar with the new conditions in the East. According to these same methods, several other persons have been assigned to write new Russian literature. They have all been allotted a fixed time schedule in which to complete their orders. And they have all been told what other work they must do during the time of writing. The party member selected to write the book about Marxism has also been made coeditor of Pravda.

Why do I bring this up today? Because, basically, what is happening in Soviet Russia today is the ultimate consequence of what lives in all of us, insofar as we represent today’s civilization. People will not admit that events in Russia are merely the ultimate consequences of our own situation, taken to extremes in Eastern Europe. The absurdity of communist ideology is that it has determined and officially declared what a citizen must know; it does not ask what people can do to become real human beings who are properly integrated into the world’s fabric.

Teachers are called on to bring the utmost respect for soul and spirit to their lessons. Without this they will fail, as though they lacked the most fundamental artistic and scientific understanding. Therefore, the first prerequisite of Waldorf teachers is reverence for the soul and spiritual potential that children bring with them into the world. When facing the children, teachers must be filled with an awareness that they are dealing with innately free human beings. With this attitude, teachers can work out educational principles and methods that safeguard the children’s inborn freedom so that in later life, when they look back at their school days, they will not find any infringement on their personal freedom, not even in the later effects of their education.

To clarify the implications of these statements, we can ask ourselves, what becomes of those whose physical idiosyncrasies are not dealt with properly during childhood? Childish idiosyncrasies continue into later life, and if you wonder what sort of effect they will have when children become adults, I will answer by saying something that may seem rather odd and surprising. Peculiar physical habits in early childhood, if left untreated, degenerate and become the causes of illnesses later on. You must realize, in all seriousness, that characteristic physical tendencies in childhood, if allowed to continue unchanged, become causes of illness. Such knowledge will give you the right impulse for a proper care that in no way conflicts with the deepest respect for human freedom.

By comparison, imagine someone who, down to the deepest fibers of her being, is enthusiastic about the inner human freedom. Imagine she falls ill and must call a doctor. The doctor cures her by using the best means available today for the art of healing. Would such a person ever feel that her personal freedom had been interfered with? Never. What meets a person in this way would never impinge upon one’s inner freedom.

A similar feeling must be present in those who are engaged in the art of education. They should have the willingness and the ability to see the nature of their own calling as being similar to that of a doctor in relation to patients. Education naturally exists in its own right, and it certainly is not simply therapy in the true sense of the word. But there is a certain relationship and similarity between the work of a doctor and that of a teacher that justifies comparison.

When students leave school in their mid-teens, it is time for us to examine again whether, during their school years from the change of teeth to the coming of puberty, we have done our best to help and equip them for later life. (During the coming days, we will deal with the esthetic and moral aspects of education and look more closely at the stage of puberty. For now, we will consider the more general human aspects.) We must realize that, during their past school years, we have been dealing mainly with their ether body of formative forces, and that the soul life (of which more will be said later) was just beginning to manifest toward the approach of graduation.

We must consider the next stage, which begins with the fourteenth to fifteenth years and continues until the beginning of the twenties, a time when a young man or woman must face the task of fitting more and more into outer life. We have already seen how children gradually take hold of the body, finally incarnating right into the skeleton, and how, by doing so, they connect more and more with the external world and adapt to outer conditions. Fundamentally, this process continues until the early twenties, after which comes a very important period of life. Although, as teachers, we no longer have any direct influence over the young person at this stage, we have in fact already done a great deal in this way during the previous years, and this will become apparent during the early to the late twenties.

After leaving school, young people must train for a vocation. Now they no longer receive what come, mainly from human nature itself, but rather what has become part of the civilization we live in, at least in terms of the chosen trade or profession. Now the young person has to be adaptable to certain forms of specialization. In our Waldorf school, we try to prepare students to step into life by introducing practical crafts such as spinning and weaving to our students of fourteen and fifteen. Practical experience in such crafts is not important only for future spinners or weavers but for all those who want to be able to do whatever a situation may demand. It is nevertheless important to introduce the right activities at the right time.

What has been cultivated in a child’s ether body during early school years emerges again in the soul sphere of young people during their twenties, the time when they must enter a profession. The way they were treated at school will play a large role in whether they respond to outer conditions clumsily, reluctantly, full of inhibitions, or skillfully and with sufficient inner strength to overcome obstacles. During their twenties, young people become aware of how the experiences of their school years first went underground, as it were, while they trained for a trade or profession, only to surface again in form of capacities, such as being able to handle certain situations or fit oneself into life in the right way. Teachers who are aware of these facts will pay attention to the critical moments in their students’ lives between the change of teeth and puberty.

I have often spoken about the important turning point that appears during the ninth to tenth years. Toward the twelfth year, another important change takes place, which I have also mentioned. Children of six or seven, when entering school, are “one great sensory organ,” as I have called them. At this stage, much has already been absorbed through imitation. Children have also been occupied with the inner processes of molding and sculpting the organs, and they bring the results to school. Now, everything that teachers do with the children, until the turning point around nine, should have a formative effect, but in a way that stimulates them to participate freely and actively in this inner shaping. I indicated this with my strong appeal for an artistic approach during the introductions to reading, writing, and arithmetic. The artistic element is particularly important at this age.

All teaching during the early school years must begin with the child’s will sphere, and only gradually should it lead over toward the intellect. Those who recognize this will pay special attention to educating the child’s will. They will know that children must learn to drive out the will forces from their organism, but in the right way. To do this, their will activities must be tinged with the element of feeling. It is not enough for teachers to do different things with the children; they must also develop sympathy and antipathy according to what they are doing. And the musical element, apart from music per se, offers the best means for achieving this. Thus, as soon as children are brought to us, we ought to immerse them in the element of music, not just through singing but also by letting them make music with simple instruments. Thus, young students will not only nurture an esthetic sense, but most of all (though indirectly), they will learn how to use and control will forces in a harmonious way.

Children bring many inborn gifts to school. Inwardly they are natural sculptors, and we can draw on these gifts as well as their other hidden talents. For instance, we can let children do all kinds of things on paper with paints (even though this might be inconvenient for teachers), and in this way we introduce them to the secrets of color. It is really fascinating to observe how children relate to color when left alone to cover a white surface with various colors. What they produce in a seemingly haphazard way is not at all meaningless, but in all the blotches and smears we can detect a certain color harmony resulting from an inborn relationship to the world of color. We must be careful, however, not to let children use the solid blocks of color that are sold in children’s paint boxes, with which they are supposed to paint directly from the blocks onto paper. This has a damaging effect, even in the case of painting as art. One should paint with liquid colors already dissolved in water or some other suitable liquid. It is important, especially for children, to develop an intimate relationship with color. If we use thick paints from a palette, we do not have the same intimate relationship to color as we do when we use liquid colors from bottles.

In a painting lesson, you might say to a child, “What you have painted is really beautiful. You put red in the middle, and all the other colors around it go well with the red. Everything you painted fits well with the red in the middle. Now try to do it the other way round. Where you have red, paint blue, and then paint around it all the other colors so that they also go well with the blue in the middle.” Not only will this child be tremendously stimulated by such an exercise, but by working out a transposition of colors—possibly with help from the teacher—the child will gain a great deal toward establishing an inner relationship to the world in general.

However inconvenient it may be for the teachers, they should always encourage young students to form all sorts of shapes out of any suitable material they can lay their hands on. Of course, we should avoid letting them get unduly dirty and messy, since this can be a real nuisance. But children gain far more from these creative activities than they would by simply remaining clean and tidy. In other words, it is truly valuable for children, especially during the early years, to experience the artistic element.

Anything required of children must be induced first in a way that is appropriate to their nature. If artistic activities are introduced as described, learning other subjects becomes easier. Foreign languages, for example, will be learned with far greater ease if students have done artistic work beforehand. I already said that children should learn foreign languages at a very early age, if possible as soon as they enter school.

Nowadays, we often encounter somewhat fanatical attitudes; something that in itself is quite right and justifiable tends to become exaggerated to the point of fanatical extremism. And teaching foreign languages is no exception. Children learn their native tongue naturally, without any grammatical consciousness, and this is how it should be. And when they enter school, they should learn foreign languages in a similar way, without grammatical awareness, but now the process of learning a language is naturally more mature and conscious.

During the tenth year, at the turning point of life mentioned several times, a new situation calls for an introduction to the first fundamentals of grammar. These should be taught without any pedantry whatever. It is necessary to take this new step for the benefit of the children’s healthy development, because at this age they must make a transition from a predominantly feeling approach toward life to one in which they must develop their I-consciousness. Whatever young people do now must be done more consciously than before. Consequently, we introduce a more conscious and intellectual element into the language that students have already learned to speak, write, and read. But when doing this, we must avoid pedantic grammar exercises. Rather, we should give them stimulating practice in recognizing and applying fundamental rules. At this stage, children really need the logical support that grammar can give, so that they do not have to puzzle repeatedly over how to express themselves correctly.

We must realize that language contains two main elements that always interact with each other—an emotional, or feeling, element and an intellectual, thinking element. I would like to illustrate this with a quote from Goethe’s Faust:

Grey, dear friend, is every theory
And green the golden tree of life.

I do not expect that our you (who have come mainly from the West) should study all the commentaries on Goethe’s Faust, since there are enough to fill a library. But if you did, you would make a strange discovery. When coming to this sentence in Faust, you would most likely find a newly numbered remark at the bottom of the page (at least a four-digit number because of all the many explanations already given), and you would find a comment about the lack of logic in this sentence. Despite the poetic license granted to any reputable author (so the commentator might point out), the colors of the tree in this stanza do not make sense. A “golden tree”—could he mean an orange tree? But then, of course, it would not be green either. If it were an ordinary tree, it would not be golden. Perhaps Goethe was thinking of an artificial tree? In any case (a typical commentary would continue), a tree cannot be golden and green at the same time. Then there is the other problem of a grey theory. How can a theory be grey if it is invisible? In this way, many commentaries point out the lack of logic in this sentence.

Of course, there are other, more artistically inclined commentators who delight in the apparent lack of logic in this passage. But what is really at the bottom of it all? It is the fact that, on the one side, the emotional, feeling element of language predominates in this sentence, whereas on the other, it stresses a more thoughtful aspect of imagery. When Goethe speaks of a golden tree, he implies that we would love this tree as we love gold. The word gold here does not have an image quality but expresses the warm feeling engendered by the glow of gold. Only the feelings are portrayed. The adjective green, on the other hand, refers to an ordinary tree, such as we see in nature. This is the logic of it. With regard to the word theory, a theory is of course invisible. Yet, right or wrong, a mere word may conjure up certain feelings in some people that remind them of London fog. One can easily transfer such a feeling to theory as a concept. A pure feeling element of language is again expressed in the adjective grey.

The feeling and thinking qualities in language intermingle everywhere. In contemporary languages, much has already become crippled, but in their earlier stages, an active and creative element lived everywhere, through which the feeling and thinking qualities came into being.

As mentioned, before the age of nine, children have an entirely feeling relationship to language. Yet, unless we also introduce the thinking element in language, their self-awareness cannot develop properly, and this is why it is so important to bring them the intellectual aspect of language. This can be done by judiciously teaching grammatical rules, first in the mother tongue and then in foreign languages, whereby the rules are introduced only after children have begun to speak the language. So, according to these indications, teachers should arouse a feeling in students around the age of nine or ten that they are beginning to penetrate the language more consciously. This is how a proper grammatical sense could be cultivated in children.

By the time children reach the age of twelve, they should have developed a feeling for the beauty of language—an esthetic sense of the language. This should stimulate “beauty in speaking” in them, but without ever falling into mannerisms. After this, until the time of puberty, students should learn to appreciate the dialectical aspect of language; they should develop a faculty for convincing others through command of language. This third element of language should be introduced only when they are approaching graduation age.

To briefly summarize the aims of language teaching, children should first develop, step by step, a feeling for the correct use of language, then a sense of the beauty of language, and finally the power inherent in linguistic command. It is far more important for teachers to find their way into an approach to language teaching than to merely follow a fixed curriculum. In this way, teachers quickly discover how to introduce and deal with what is needed for the various ages. After a mostly artistic approach, in which students up to age nine are involved very actively, teachers should begin to dwell more on the descriptive element in language, but without neglecting the creative aspect. This is certainly possible if you choose the kind of syllabus I have tried to characterize during these past few days, in which the introduction of nature study leads to geography, and animals are seen in the context of humankind. The most effective way to include the descriptive element would be to appeal mainly to the children’s soul sphere rather than claiming their entire being. This should be done by clothing the lessons in a story told in a vivid, imaginative way. Likewise, at this stage of life, teachers should present historical content by giving lively accounts of human events that, in themselves, form a whole, as already indicated.

Having gone through the stage of spontaneous activity, followed by an appreciation of the descriptive element, students approaching the twelfth year are ready for what could be called an explanatory approach. Cause and effect now come into general considerations, and material can be given that stretches the powers of reasoning.

Throughout these stages, teachers should present mathematical elements in their manifold forms, in a way appropriate to the student’s age. Mathematics, as taught in arithmetic and geometry, is likely to cause particular difficulties for teachers. Before the ninth year, this is introduced in simpler forms and subsequently expanded, since children can take in a great deal if we know how to go about it. It is a fact that all mathematical material taught throughout the school years must be presented in a thoroughly artistic and imaginative way. Using all kinds of means teachers must contrive to introduce arithmetic and geometry artistically, and here, too, between the ninth and tenth years teachers must go to a descriptive method. Students must be taught how to observe angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and so on through a descriptive method. Proofs should not be introduced before the twelfth year.

A boring math teacher will achieve very little if anything at all, whereas teachers who are inspired by this subject will succeed in making it stimulating and exhilarating. After all, it is by the grace of mathematics that, fundamentally, we can experience the harmonies of ideal space. If teachers can become enthusiastic about the Pythagorean theorem or the inner harmonies between planes and solids, they bring something into lessons that has immense importance for children, even in terms of soul development. In this way, teachers counteract the elements of confusion that life presents.

You see, language could not exist without the constantly intermingling elements of thought and feeling. Again I have made an extreme statement, but if you examine various languages, you will discover how feeling and thinking are interwoven everywhere. This in itself, as well as many other factors, could easily introduce chaos into our lives were it not for the inner firmness that mathematics can give us. Those who can look more deeply into life know that many people have been saved from neurasthenia, hysteria, and worse afflictions simply by learning how to observe triangles, quadrilaterals, tetrahedra, and other geometrical realities in the right way.

Perhaps you will allow me a more personal note at this point, because it may help clarify the point I am making. I have a special love for mechanics, not simply because of its objective value, but for personal reasons. I owe this love of mechanics to one of my teachers in the Vienna High School and the enthusiasm he showed for this subject; such things live on into later life. This teacher glowed with excitement when searching for the resultants from given components. It was interesting to see the joy with which he looked for the resultants and the joy with which he would take them apart again in order to fit them back into their components. While doing this, he almost jumped and danced from one end of the blackboard to the other until, full of glee, he would finally call out the formula he had found, such as \(c^2 = a^2+ b^2\). Captivated by his findings, which he had written on the board, he would look around at his audience with a benign smile, which in itself was enough to kindle enthusiasm for analytical mechanics, a subject that hardly ever evokes such feelings in people. It is very important that mathematics, which is taught in various forms right through school, should pour out, as it were, its own special substance over all the students.

And so we can speak of the two poles in human development: the rhythmic and artistic pole and the mathematical and conceptual one. If, as indicated, young souls are worked on from within outward, students will gradually grow into the world in the right way.

At the approach of the graduation age, or mid-teens, teachers will again feel an inner need to survey the most significant moments in the development of their students during the last few years, this time in retrospect. Students entered school in class one at the age of six or seven. A few years later they are sent out into the world again and—as I indicated at the beginning of today’s lecture—it is the teacher’s aim to enable them to adapt to life in the world. When we receive young students in class one, they are like one great sense organ. Inwardly, they carry a kind of a copy of their parents and others who surround them and of society as a whole. It is our task to transform these adopted and specialized features into more general human features. We can do this by appealing, above all, to children’s middle system of breathing and blood circulation, which is not connected so much with their more personal side.

Yet, apart from the adopted features that children have unconsciously copied from their environment, they also bear their very own individual characteristics when they enter school. They are less pronounced than similar characteristics found in adults, features that we associate with melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, or choleric temperaments. Nevertheless, the children’s nature, too, is definitely colored by what could be called their temperamental disposition, so we can speak of children with melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric tendencies. It is essential for teachers to acquire a fine perception of the manifold symptoms and characteristics that arise from children’s temperamental dispositions and to find the right way of dealing with them.

Melancholic children are those who depend most strongly on the conditions of the physical body. Because of their special constitution, they tend to feel weighed down by their bodily nature. They easily become self-centered and, in general, show little interest in what is going on around them. Yet it would be wrong to think of melancholic children as simply inattentive, since this is true only with regard to their surroundings and what comes from their teachers. They are, on the other hand, very attentive to their own inner conditions, and this is the reason melancholic children tend to be so moody. Please note that what I am saying about the temperaments applies only to children whose symptoms cannot be automatically transferred to adults of the same temperament.

The relationship of phlegmatic children to their environment is one of complete, though entirely subconscious, surrender to the world at large. And since the world is so vast and full of things to which they have surrendered themselves, they show little interest in what is closer to them. Again, my remarks about this temperament refer only to children, otherwise they might be seen as a compliment to phlegmatic adults, and they are certainly not meant to be that. Making a rather sweeping statement, one could say that, if children with phlegmatic tendencies did not happen to live on earth but out in the heavenly world of the cosmos, such children would be full of the deepest interest in their surroundings. They feel at home in the periphery of the world. Phlegmatic children are open to immensity and anything that is vast and remote and does not make an immediate impact.

To a certain extent, sanguine children display the opposite characteristics of the melancholic or phlegmatic child. Young melancholics are immersed in bodily nature. Phlegmatic children are drawn outward to the spheres of infinity, because they are so strongly linked to their ether body. The ether body always inclines outward toward infinite totality; it disperses into the cosmos just a few days after death. Sanguine children live in what we call the astral, or soul, body. This member of the human being is different from the physical or ether bodies inasmuch as it is not concerned with anything temporal or spatial. It exists beyond the realm of time and space. Because of the astral body, during every moment of our lives we have an awareness of our entire life up to the present moment, although memories of earlier experiences are generally weaker than more recent ones. The astral body is instrumental mainly in directing our dreams. These, as you know, bear little relationship to the normal sequence of time. We may dream about something that happened only yesterday yet, mixed up in the dream, people may appear whom we met in early childhood. The astral body mixes up our life experiences and has no regard for the element of time and space, but in its chaotic ways it has its own dimension that is totally different from what is temporal and spatial.

Sanguine children surrender themselves to their astral body, and this becomes evident in their entire pattern of behavior. They respond to outer impressions as though what lies beyond time and space were directly transmitted to us through the outer world itself. They quickly respond to impressions without digesting them inwardly, because they do not care for the time element. They simply surrender to the astral body and make no effort to retain outer impressions. Or, again, they do not like to live in memories of earlier events. Because they pay so little attention to time, sanguine children live in and for the present moment. They express outwardly something that, in reality, is the task of the astral body in the higher worlds, and this gives sanguine children a certain superficiality.

Choleric children are most directly linked to their I-center. Their physical build shows a strong will that, permeated by the forces of their I-being, is likely to enter life aggressively.

It is truly important for teachers to cultivate a fine perception for these characteristic features of the temperaments in growing children. You must try to deal with them in a twofold way: first, by introducing a social element in the class, based on the various temperaments. When teachers get an idea of their students as a whole, they should place them in groups according to similarity of temperament. There are children of mixed temperaments, of course, and this has to be considered as well. In general, however, it has a salutary effect when children of the same temperament are seated together, for the simple reason that the temperaments rub up against each other. Melancholic children, for example, will have a neighbor who is also melancholic. They become aware of how this neighbor is suffering from all kinds of discomforts arising from the physical constitution. Melancholic students recognize similar symptoms in themselves, and the mere looks of their neighbors will have a healing effect on their own nature.

If phlegmatic children sit next to other phlegmatics, they become so bored with them that, in the end, their phlegmatic nature becomes stirred to the extent that they try to shake off their lethargy.

Sanguine children, when seated among other sanguines, recognize the way they flutter from one impression to the next, being momentarily interested in one thing and then in another, until they feel like brushing them away like flies. Experiencing their own traits in their neighbors, sanguine children become aware of the superficiality of their own temperament.

When choleric children are seated together, there will be such a constant exchange of blows that the resulting bruises they give each other will have an extraordinary healing effect on their temperament.

You must observe these things, and you will find that by introducing, through your choice of seating, a social element in the classroom, you will have a wholesome and balancing effect on each child. In this way, the teacher’s relationship to each of the temperaments will also find the appropriate expression. The second point to be kept in mind is that it would not be helpful to treat melancholic children—or any other temperament for that matter—by going against their inherent disposition. On the contrary, we should develop the habit of treating like with like. If, for instance, we forced a choleric to sit still and to be quiet, the result would be an accumulation of suppressed choler that would act like a poison in the child’s system. It simply would not work. On the other hand, if, for example, a teacher shows continued interest and understanding for the doleful moods of a melancholic child, this attitude will finally bring about a beneficial and healing effect. When dealing with phlegmatic children, outwardly we should also appear rather phlegmatic and somewhat indifferent, despite our real inner interest in the student. Sanguine children should be subjected to many quickly changing sense impressions. In this way, we increase the tendencies of their own temperament, with the result that they try to catch up with the many fleeting impressions. They will develop a stronger intensity. The sheer number of sense impressions will bring about an inner effort of self-intensification in the child.

By treating like with like, we can come to grips with the different temperaments. As for the choleric children, if conditions at school allow, it would be best to send them out into the garden during the afternoons and let them run about until they are exhausted. I would let them climb up and down the trees. When they reach a treetop, I would let them shout to a playmate sitting on top of another tree. I would let them shout at each other until they are tired. If we allow choleric children to free themselves in a natural way from pent-up choler, we exercise a healing influence on their temperament.

You will learn to work effectively as teachers by getting to know the qualities of the different temperaments. One thing is essential, however. It will do no good at all if teachers enter the classroom with a morose demeanor—one that, even in early life, leaves deep wrinkles carved on their faces. Teachers must know how to act with a tremendous sense of humor in the classroom. They must be able to become a part of everything they encounter in the classroom. Teachers must be able to let their own being flow into that of the children.

By the time students reach their mid-teens, they have already entered puberty. Teachers need to keep this very much in mind well before it actually manifests. We simply need to open our eyes to what happens in growing children, both before and during the process of sexual maturity, to appreciate how important it is to be prepared for this challenge.

We have seen in our studies that until the change of teeth children are imitators and that, while there is still no clear differentiation between organic functions and soul activities, children are inwardly given over to the soul and spiritual forces flowing down from the head, which continue work organically and permeate the whole organism. The most characteristic feature of this stage is the way those soul-spiritual forces work together with the bodily forces.

I will need to use the insights of clairvoyant consciousness to give you a clear description of what happens in young children at this stage of life—not because I think we need to form our ideas in a particular way, but it just may be the best way to understand what has been said so far.

When young children sleep, the soul and spiritual members leave the physical sheaths (just as in any adult) and re-enter at the moment of awaking. In children, however, there is still no significant difference between conscious experiences while awake and unconscious experiences during sleep. Normally, if no memories of daytime events enter the world of sleep (and this rarely happens in childhood), the sleeping life of children moves within realms far beyond the earthly sphere. From these higher worlds, active forces are drawn that then work during the waking state, from the brain down into a child’s whole organism.

During the second dentition, certain soul and spiritual forces in children are released from working entirely in the organic sphere. They begin to assume an independent, soul-spiritual quality. Between the change of teeth and puberty, thinking, feeling, and willing in children begin to work more freely. Children are no longer imitators but, through a natural feeling for authority, they develop the consciousness they need to connect with the world. This faith in adult authority is essential, because outer conditions are not enough to ensure that children connect sufficiently with the world. The way adults confront one another, whether verbally or by other means, is very different from the way children encounter adults. Children need the additional support that a sense of authority provides. Consequently, experiences while awake will enter their soulspiritual life during sleep. So, teachers have the possibility of reaching children through education between the change of teeth and puberty to the same extent that earthly experiences enter children’s sleep and replace those of the spiritual world.

With the onset of puberty, an entirely new situation begins, and emerging adolescents are essentially different from what they were prior to sexual maturity. To describe this, it may be helpful to refer back to what was said at the end of yesterday’s lecture. Until the change of teeth, it is normal for children to live entirely within the physical body. However, if this state is extended beyond its natural time, when it would no longer be normal, it results in a very melancholic temperament. During childhood it is natural to have a relationship between the soulspiritual and physical organization that characterizes an adult melancholic. Bear in mind that what is right and good for one stage of life becomes abnormal in another.

During the second dentition, certain soul-spiritual forces are liberated from previous organic activities, and they flow into what I call the body of formative forces, or ether body. This member of the human being is linked entirely to the outer world, and it is appropriate for children to live in it between the change of teeth and puberty. If, even before the change of teeth, these ether forces were excessive—that is, if the child has lived too much in the etheric sheath before the second dentition—the result is a decidedly phlegmatic temperament. However, children can have a normal and balanced relationship with the ether body, and this is absolutely essential between the seventh and the fourteenth years, between the change of teeth and puberty. Again, if this condition is carried too far into later life, a decidedly phlegmatic temperament develops in the adult.

The true birthplace of the sanguine temperament is the next member of the human being that, under normal circumstances, becomes independent during puberty. Yesterday, I called this the astral body—the member of the human being that lives beyond space and time. If, between the change of teeth and puberty, children draw too much from what should come into its own only with sexual maturity, a sanguine temperament arises. Growing human beings become inwardly mature for sanguinity only with the arrival of puberty. Thus everything in life has a normal period of time. Various abnormalities arise when something that is normal for one period of life is pushed into another. If you survey life from this point of view, you begin to understand the human being more deeply.

What really happens as children mature sexually? During the past few days we have already illuminated this somewhat. We have seen how children continue, after the change of teeth, to work inwardly with forces that have to a certain degree become liberated soul-spiritual forces. During the following stages, children incarnate via the system of breathing and blood circulation, and the tendons and the muscles grow more firmly onto the bones. They incarnate from within out, toward the human periphery, and at the time of sexual maturity young adolescents break through into the outer world. Only then do they stand fully in the world.

This dramatic development makes it imperative for teachers to approach adolescents, who have passed through sexual maturity, quite differently from the way they dealt with the children before. Basically, the previous processes, before puberty, involved emancipated soul-spiritual forces that still had nothing to do with sex in its own realm. True, boys or girls show definite predispositions toward their own sexes, but this cannot be considered sexuality as such. Sexuality develops only after the breakthrough into the external world, when a new relationship with the outer world is established. But then, at this time, something happens in the realm of an adolescent’s soul and bodily nature, and this is not unlike what occurred previously during the second dentition. During the change of teeth, forces were liberated to become active in a child’s forces of thinking, feeling, and willing, which were then directed more toward the memory. The powers of memory were then released. Now, at puberty, something else becomes available for free activity in the soul realm. These are powers that previously entered the rhythms of breathing and, subsequently, strived to introduce rhythmic qualities into the musculature and even the skeleton. This rhythmic element is now transformed into an adolescent receptiveness to the realm of creative ideas and fantasy. Fundamentally, true powers of fantasy are not born until puberty, because they come into their own only after the astral body is born. The astral body exists beyond time and space and links together past, present, and future according to its own principles, as we experience it in our dreams.

What is it that adolescents bring with them when they break through into the outer world via the skeletal system? It is what they originally brought with them from pre-earthly existence; it was gradually interwoven with their whole inner being. And now, with the onset of sexual maturity, adolescents are, as it were, cast out of the spiritual world. Without exaggerating, we can express it that strongly, because it represents the facts; with the coming of puberty, young people are cast out of the living world of spirit and thrown into the outer world, which they perceive only through the physical and ether bodies. Although adolescents are not aware of what is happening inside them, subconsciously this plays a very important role. Subconsciously, or semi-consciously, it makes adolescents compare the world they have now entered with the one they formerly held within themselves. Previously, they had not experienced the spiritual world consciously, but they nevertheless found it possible to live in harmony with it. Their inner being felt attuned to it and prepared to cooperate freely with the soul-spiritual realm. But now, conditions have changed, and the external world no longer offers such possibilities. It presents all sorts of hindrances that, in themselves, create a desire to overcome them. This, in turn, leads to a tumultuous relationship between adolescents and the surrounding world, which lasts from fourteen or fifteen until the early twenties.

This inner upheaval is bound to come, and teachers do well to be aware of it before it arrives. There may be overly sensitive people who believe that it would be better to save teenagers from this inner turmoil, only to find that they have become their greatest enemy. It would be quite incorrect to try to spare them this tempestuous time of life. It is far better to plan ahead in your educational goals, so that what you do before they reach puberty comes to help and support adolescents in their struggles of soul and spirit.

Teachers must be clear that, with the arrival of puberty, a completely different being emerges, born out of a new relationship with the world. It is no good appealing to students’ previous sense of authority; now they will demand reasons for all that is expected of them. Teachers must get into the habit of approaching a young man or woman rationally. For example, think of an adolescent boy whom the spiritual world has led into this earthly world and who now becomes rebellious because it is so different from what he expected. The adult must try to show him (and without any pedantry) that everything he meets in this world has “prehistory.” The adult must get this adolescent to see that present conditions are the consequences of what went before. You must act the part of an expert who really understands why things have come to be as they are.

From now on, you will accomplish nothing by way of authority. You have to convince adolescents through the sheer weight of your indisputable knowledge and expertise and provide waterproof reasons for everything you do or expect of them. If, at this stage, students cannot see sound reasons in the material you give them, if conditions in the world seem to make no sense to them, they begin to doubt the rightness of their earlier life. They feel they are in opposition to what they experienced during those years that, seemingly, merely led to the present, unacceptable conditions. And if, during this inner turmoil, they cannot find contact with someone who can reassure them, to some extent at least, that there are good reasons for what is happening in the world, then the inner stress may become so intolerable that they might break down altogether. This newly emerged astral body is not of this world, and these young people have been cast out of the astral world. They willingly enter this earthly world only if they can be convinced of its right to exist.

It would be a complete misunderstanding of what I have been describing to think that adolescents are the least bit aware of what is happening in them. During ordinary consciousness, this struggle arises in dim feelings from the unconscious. It surges up through blunted will impulses. It lives in the disappointment of seemingly unattainable ideals, in frustrated desires, and perhaps in a certain inner numbness to what manifests in the unreasonable events of the world.

If education is to be effective at all during this stage (which it must be for any young person willing to learn), then your teaching must be communicated in the appropriate form. It must be a preparation for the years to come—up to the early twenties and even later in life. Having suffered the wounds of life and having retaliated in their various ways, young people from fifteen to the early twenties must eventually find their way back into the world from which they were evicted during puberty. The duration of this period varies, especially during our chaotic times, which tend to prolong it even longer into adult life. Young people must feel they are accepted again and be able to renew contact with the spiritual world, for without it, life is impossible. However, should they feel any coercion from those in authority, this new link loses all meaning and value for life. If we are aware of these difficulties well before the arrival of puberty, we can make good use of the inborn longing for authority in children, bringing them to the point at which there is no longer any need for an authoritarian approach. And this stage should coincide with the coming of sexual maturity. By then, however, educators must be ready to give convincing reasons for everything they ask of their students.

Seen from a broader, spiritual perspective, we can observe the grand metamorphosis taking place in a young person during the period of sexual maturity. It is very important to realize that the whole question of sex becomes a reality only during puberty, when adolescents enter the external world as I have described it. Naturally, since everything in life is relative, this, too, must be taken as a relative truth. Nevertheless, you should realize that, until sexual maturity, children live more as generic human beings; it is not until the onset of puberty that they experience the world differently, according to whether they are men or women. This realization (which in our generally intellectual and naturalistic civilization cannot be assumed) allows real insight into the relationship between the sexes for those who work with open minds toward knowledge of the human being. It also helps them understand the problem of women’s position in society, not just during our time but also in the future.

Once you appreciate the tremendous transformation that occurs in the male organism during the change of voice (to use one example), you will be able to understand the statement that, until the age of sexual maturity, a child retains a more general human nature, one still undivided into the sexes. Similar processes occur in the female organism, but in a different area. The human voice, with its ability to moderate and form sounds and tones, is a manifestation of our general human nature. It is born from the soul-spiritual substance that works on children until puberty. Changes of pitch and register, on the other hand, which occur during this mutation, are the result of outer influences. They are forced on adolescents from outside, so to speak, and they are the ways that a boy places himself into the outer world with his innermost being. It is not just a case of the softer parts in the larynx relating more strongly to the bones, but a slight ossification of the larynx itself takes place that amounts, essentially, to a withdrawal of the larynx from the purely human inner nature toward a more earthly existence.

This act of stepping out into the world should really be seen in a much wider context than is generally the case. Usually, people think that the capacity to love, which awakens at this time, is linked directly to sexual attraction, but this is not really the whole story. The power to love, born during sexual maturity, embraces everything within an adolescent’s entire sphere. Love between the sexes is only one specific, limited aspect of love in the world. Only when we see human love in this light can we understand it correctly, and then we can also understand its task in the world.

What really happens in human beings during the process of sexual maturity? Prior to this, as children, their relationship to the world was one in which they first imitated their surroundings and then came under the power of authority. Outer influences worked on them, because at that time their inner being mainly represented what they brought with them from preearthly life. Humanity as a whole had to work on them externally, first through the principle of imitation and then through authority. Now, at puberty, having found their own way into the human race and no longer depending on outer support as a younger child does, a new feeling arises in them, along with a whole new appraisal of humankind as a whole. And this new experience of humankind represents a spiritual counterpart to the physical capacity to reproduce. Physically, they gain the ability to procreate; spiritually, they gain the ability to experience humankind as a whole.

During this new stage, the polarity between man and woman becomes quite obvious. Any realization of human potential on earth is possible only through a real understanding of the other sex by means of social interaction; and this applies to the realm of soul and spirit as well. Both men and women fully represent humankind, but in different ways. A woman sees humanity as a gift of the metaphysical worlds. Fundamentally, she sees humanity as the result of divine abundance. Unconsciously, in the depths of her soul, she holds a picture of humankind as her standard of values, and she evaluates and assesses human beings according to this standard. If these remarks are not generally accepted today, it is because our current civilization bears all the signs of a male-dominated society.

For a long time, the most powerful influences in our civilization have displayed a decidedly masculine nature. An example of this (however grotesque it may sound) may be found in Freemasonry. It is symbolic of our times that men, if they wish to keep certain matters to themselves, isolate themselves in the lodges of Freemasonry. There are also lodges in which both men and women congregate, but Freemasonry has already become blunted in these, and they no longer bear its original stamp. The constitution of Freemasonry is a specific example, but it nevertheless expresses the male-dominated character of our society. Women, too, have absorbed a great deal of the masculine element from our civilization, and because of this they actually prevent the specifically feminine element from coming into its own. This is why we so often get the impression that, in terms of inner substance and outer form, there is very little difference between the ideals and programs of the various women’s movements and those of men—even in the tone of the speeches they deliver. Obviously, these movements differ insofar as, on the one side, there are demands to safeguard women’s interests, while, on the other, the demands are on behalf of men. But, in terms of their inner substance, they are barely distinguishable.

When you take a good look at modern medicine in all its materialistic aspects, you can see how it fails to understand human nature, especially in terms of its physical elements, so that it depends on experimentation. If you observe modern medicine, you find the product of a distinctly masculine attitude, however strange this may sound to you. In fact, one could hardly find a better illustration of male thinking than in what modern medicine so blatantly reveals to us. For a man, in his innermost being, experiences humanity as something of an enigma. To him it appears unfathomable and poses endless questions whose solutions seem to lie beyond his powers. This typically masculine characteristic is expressed in all the mysterious ceremony and the dry and manly atmosphere of freemasonry. This same male tendency has permeated our culture to such an extent that, although women suffer under it, they nevertheless wish to emulate it and to make it part of their own lives.

If we speak the truth today, people tend to think that we do so merely to present contrary statements to the world. Yet the reality is often unorthodox. Therefore, if we want to speak the truth, we must put up with seeming contrary, however inconvenient this might be.

Women live more in the images they create of humanity, while men experience humanity in more wishful and enigmatic ways. To understand this, we need to be clear about a symptom that is especially significant for the art of teaching today. When people speak of love today, they seldom differentiate between the various types of love. Naturally, we can generalize the concept of love, just as one can speak about condiments in a general way. But when people speculate abstractly about certain matters and then hold forth about them, it always strikes me as if they were talking about salt, sugar, or pepper merely in terms of condiments. We only need to apply such abstractions to practical life by putting salt instead of sugar in our coffee—they are both condiments, after all—to realize such foolishness. Anyone who indulges in general speculation instead of entering the concrete realities of life commits the same folly.

The love of a woman is very different from that of a man. Her love originates in the realm of imagination and constantly makes pictures. A woman does not love a man just as he is, standing there before her in ordinary, humdrum life (forgive me, but men, after all, are not exactly the sort that a healthy imagination could fall in love with). Rather, she weaves into her love the ideal she received as a gift from heaven. A man’s love, on the other hand, is tinged with desire; it has a wishful nature. This difference needs to be noted, regardless of whether it is expressed more in an idealistic or a realistic way. Ideal love may inspire longings of an ideal quality. The instinctive and sensuous kind may be a mere product of fancy. But this fundamental difference between love as it lives in a man and as it lives in a woman is a reality. A woman’s love is steeped in imagination, and in a man’s love there is an element of desire. And because these two kinds of love are complementary, they can become harmonized in life.

Educators need to bear this in mind when faced with sexually mature students. They must realize that one can no longer bring them certain things that belong to the preadolescent stage, and that they have missed the opportunity for doing so. Therefore, to prevent a onesided attitude in later life, we must try to give to prepubescent children enough of the right material to last them through the following stages. Fortunately, coeducation, in both primary and secondary education, is increasingly accepted today, so that boys and girls work side by side and learn to cooperate later on as men and women in society. Consequently, it is especially important to heed what was just said. Through this, a contemporary phenomenon such as the women’s movement will have a truly sound and healthy basis.

If we expand these considerations by taking a worldwide perspective, we are led to the fundamental differences that exist between East and West, with Asia on one side and Europe and America on the other. This difference between East and West is far greater than any other differences we may find when comparing, say, Europe and America. Throughout Asia, there are still traces of ancient, wise civilizations. Externally, they appear completely decadent, but their wisdom nevertheless lives on like a memory. It is revered as a sacred memory, to the extent that, fundamentally, an Asian cannot really understand a European, and vice versa. Those who are under illusions about this fact will delude themselves about the world’s greatest historical secret in our time. It is a secret of special significance not only for today, but very much so for the future.

Despite its manifold complexities, life in the West has a more uniform character than life in the East. The main concern of Western people is life in this earthly civilization, a civilization that draws its ideas mostly from what happens between birth and death. The people of the East (at least in their inner religious lives) do not limit their view to the earthly time between birth and death, or life in the outer mechanical civilization. People of the West, however, do live for this earthly time, even in their religious feelings. The people of the East, on the other hand, ask themselves searching questions, such as, Why was I born into this world? Why did I enter this senseperceptible world at all? Westerners take life in the physical world more or less for granted, even if they end it by suicide. Western people take earthly life for granted, and they have developed an inner receptivity for life after death only because it would be unsatisfying and a disappointment if earthly existence were entirely wiped out.

There is a fundamental difference between these two views. Again, however, we cannot get to the bottom of this merely through abstract descriptions instead of entering life fully. The farther we move from East to West, the more we find that the Western woman, despite her outer consciousness, cherishes a longing for the spirituality of the East. The man of the West, however, presents a totally different picture. He, too, has his secret longings, but not for anything vague and misty. His longings spring from what he experiences inwardly. From cradle to grave, he is enmeshed in the activities and pressures of his civilization, but something in him longs to get away from it all. We can perceive this mood of soul in all the civilized countries around us, from the River Vistula in Eastern Europe through Germany, France, and Britain, and right across the American continent to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In all these lands, we find this attribute in common. Educators who deal with adolescents also experience this, perhaps to their despair and without recognizing the underlying causes. Only a teacher wearing blinders could possible overlook this.

During our previous meetings I mentioned that we really ought to throw away every school textbook, because only a direct and personal relationship between teachers and students should affect children. When it comes to teaching adolescents, however, every available textbook and, for that matter, almost our whole outer civilization become great sources of pain. I know that there are many who are unaware of this, because they do not go into real life with their eyes open wide enough. Here, again, in our outer civilization we find a notably lopsided masculine quality. Any book on history—whether a history of civilization or anthropology—will confirm this trend. As representatives of Western civilization, people long to escape the physical world in which they are caught up, but they lack the necessary courage to do so. People cannot find the bridge from the sensory world into the spiritual world. And so, everywhere in our civilization we find a yearning to get away from it all, and yet an inability to act accordingly.

It is hard enough to establish the right environment for teaching prepubescent children. But those who have to teach adolescents could almost feel helpless, because the means available for meeting their needs are so inadequate. This alone should kindle a real longing in such teachers for a deeper understanding of the human being. Of course, this longing may already be there in the teachers of younger children, but it is a prerequisite for anyone of sound pedagogical sense who teaches adolescents.

A woman’s nostalgia for the ways of the East and a man’s wish to be free of the bondage of Western life represent fundamental features of our time. This difference between the sexes is less apparent in preadolescent children, who still bear more general human features. Yet, as soon as we are confronted by adolescents, we meet many difficulties that arise quite concretely.

Imagine, for example, that a German literature teacher wants to recommend to her adolescent student a book that presents a German perspective of Goethe. She would really find herself in a quandary, since there are no suitable books available. If she chooses an available one, her scholar would not get the right picture of Goethe. If she chooses a biography of Goethe written by, say, Lewes, her German scholar would learn the more outward features of Goethe better than from any of the German books on the subject, but again he would not become familiar with the specifically German characteristics of Goethe. This is the situation today, for we simply do not have adequate literature for teaching adolescents. To remedy this, everything depends on women taking their proper place in culture. They should be allowed to contribute their specifically feminine qualities, but they must at the same time be careful not to introduce anything they have adopted from our maledominated civilization.

During the 1890s, I had a conversation with a German feminist. She expressed her views in radical terms, but I could not help feeling that, instead of enriching society with what only womanhood offers, she was trying to force her way into our onesidedly masculine culture by employing masculine tactics. My meaning must not be taken in a crude or biased way. I felt that I had to say to this free and uncompromising lady, “Your movement does not yet offer what the world really needs. The world does not need women who ‘wear the pants’ [forgive me, I believe in England that such a remark is unforgivably rude]. Rather, both masculine and feminine qualities make specific contributions toward the general enhancement of our society.”

As teachers, whenever we approach growing human beings, we must note the striking contrast between the prepuberty and post-puberty years. Let us take a concrete example: There is Milton’s Paradise Lost, which would be good to use in our lessons. The question is, when? Those of you who have thought through what has been said so far and have understood my remarks about the right time to introduce narrative and descriptive elements will find that this work by Milton (or epic poetry in general) would be suitable material after the tenth year. Also, Homer will be appreciated best when taught between the tenth and the fourteenth years. On the other hand, it would be premature to use Shakespeare as study material at this stage, since, in order to be ready for dramatic poetry, students must at least have entered puberty. To absorb the dramatic element at an earlier age, students would have to drive something out of themselves prematurely, which, later on, they would definitely miss.

What I tried to describe just now can be experienced vividly when, for example, you have to give history lessons to boys and girls after they enter puberty. Both masculine and feminine forces work during historical events, though in a different form than they do today. Yet all of the historical accounts available for teaching adolescents bear a decidedly masculine quality, as though they had been compiled by Epimetheus. Girls who have reached sexual maturity show little inclination toward such an approach. Boys may find it somewhat boring, but in their case it is not impossible to use this Epimethean way, which judges and holds onto what can be ascertained and established. But there is also a Promethean way of looking at history, which not only records events that occurred, but also shows their transformation into the ideas of the present time. This approach to history shows how the impulses that led the past have become the current thinking of today, and how impulses, in turn, continue to lead present time further. A Promethean way of looking at history, in particular, appeals strongly to the feminine element.

However, it would be very one-sided to teach history in the Promethean style at a girls’ school, or in an Epimethean style at a boys’ school. The minds of the young men would simply flow back into the past and become even more rigid than they are already. If the Promethean way of teaching history were to be only one applied in a girls’ school, the students would be tempted to fly off into futuristic speculations. They would always be attracted to the impulses that they happened to like naturally. We can achieve a more balanced society only if we add a historical view that bears the prophetic marks of Prometheus to the more predominant Epimethean way, which until now has been just about the only one available. Then, if both attitudes are alive in our lessons, we will at last achieve the right approach to history for students who have reached the age of sexual maturity.