The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The impressions I have gathered here in the school have prompted me to use the short time I can be with you to say something that emerges directly out of these impressions. After all, the fruitfulness of our activity in an institution like the Waldorf School depends, as does indeed the art of education as a whole, on the ability of the teachers to develop the attitude that will enable them to carry through their work with assurance and be active in the right way. On this occasion, therefore, I would like to speak in particular about the teachers themselves. I would like to preface what I have to say with some brief remarks I made recently in a course for teachers in England, [Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972 (14 lectures given in Ilkley, England, August 5-17, 1923).] though from a somewhat different point of view. I then shall add a few things that will enable you, if you let them work in the right way on your souls, to develop this right attitude increasingly. The question of attitude, or mood of soul, is very much connected with the art of education. You may possess an admirable mastery of the principles of teaching; you may be able to work them out with intelligence and feeling; but what we are trying to do will fall on fertile soil only if the general attitude that we take with us into the school can be made into a harmonious whole.

Man is a threefold being not only from the many points of view we often have discussed but also from those that lie a little closer to the earthly than do the higher, spiritual viewpoints. This threefoldness reveals itself quite specifically if we focus on the way in which the human being has developed his educational activity. We need not go back very far; indeed, if we went back to very ancient times our view would have to alter somewhat. We have only to go back to the Greek era in human evolution to a period that still stirs the minds of those in our Western civilization. At that period we find that the educator was really the gymnast, intent above all upon molding his pupil into maturity through his outer, physical, bodily nature. However, we shall not properly understand the Greek gymnasts, especially the earlier ones, unless we realize that they were quite as much concerned with the development of the soul and spirit as of the body. It is true that the Greeks laid stress on bodily exercises, which were all formed in an artistic sense, as the means of bringing their pupils to maturity. What is so little realized nowadays, however, is that these bodily exercises, whether dance movements or some other rhythmical or gymnastic movements, were devised in such a way that through the unfolding and expression of rhythm, measure, and the like, spiritual beings were able to draw near, beings who lived in the movements, in the rhythm and measure in which the pupil was trained. While the pupil was doing something with his arms and legs, a spiritual influence passed from the limb system, including the metabolic system, into the rhythmic and the nerve-sense systems; in this way the whole human being was developed. One therefore should not say that in Greece primary importance was attached to the cultivation of gymnastics, for this gives the impression that they were cultivated then as they are nowadays, that is, mostly in an entirely outward and physical way. In fact, with the Greeks gymnastics also included the education of soul and spirit. The Greek educator was a gymnast; he educated the body, and along with the body the soul and spirit, because he had the capacity, as if by magic, to draw down the world of soul and spirit into bodily movements. The more ancient Greek gymnasts were perfectly conscious of this. They had no desire to educate human beings in an abstract, intellectual way or to teach their pupils in the way we do today. We speak exclusively to the head, even if we do not intend to do so. The Greeks brought their pupils into movement; they brought them into movement that was in harmony with the dynamic of the spiritual and physical cosmos.

In following the course of human evolution, we find that among the Romans the art of cultivating the soul and the spirit by way of the bodily nature had been forgotten. They approached the soul directly, and education took place especially through the medium of speech, the faculty lying nearest to the soul element in ordinary life. Roman education did, in fact, draw forth from speech that which was to form their pupils; the educator thus ceased to be a gymnast and became a rhetorician. Beauty of speech was from Roman times onward the essential element in education and actually remained so throughout the Middle Ages. Beauty of speech—in the forming of words and in the consciousness that the word is being sculpturally and musically formed—has its effect on the whole human being. The most important principles of education were derived from this consciousness. The Greek had gone right back to the bodily foundation of the human being, from there drawing everything into the realm of soul and spirit. The Roman concerned himself with the middle part of man, with the sublimated expression of the rhythmic system, with the musical speech of poetry. He trusted that if speech were handled properly, this musical and sculptural-painterly speech would work downward to the bodily and upward to the spiritual. In this form of education also, intellectual training played no part, but rather special importance was attached to speaking.

Then, from the fifteenth century onward, the rhetorician as educator was gradually superseded by the professor [Doktor]. [The German Doktor does not in this context refer to a medical doctor but to a scholar with a doctoral degree.] Even teachers who have passed through only a training college nowadays are in this sense really “professors.” Hitherto, there was some justification for this; if indeed the ideal of the professor was not held in the way it once was by a teacher pf gymnastics whom I knew well. He felt extremely uncomfortable on any gymnastic apparatus but loved to get up on a platform and hold forth theoretically about gymnastics. His pupils sat crouched and bent on their benches and listened to the gymnastics lectures. This sort of thing could not have happened in any other institution, but in this training college he could get up and lecture like this once a week. He felt quite learned he felt, in fact, like a real professor. The principle that the basis of education lies not in the rhythmic system but in the head, in the nerve-sense system, became more and more prominent as humanity evolved from the fifteenth century into the modern age. Hence it is not so easy today for teachers in the Waldorf School to adhere to the principle that they should have no desire to realize this ideal of the learned professor. I do not mean this outwardly but inwardly. It is not easy, because it is a normal part of the consciousness of modern humanity to believe that something is gained by becoming “learned.” In our civilization, however, a healthy condition will be achieved only when we realize that to be “learned” in this sense is actually harmful and, far from adding anything to a human being, it takes something away from him. Though I am always delighted when someone nods intelligent assent to the sort of thing about which I have been speaking, I am also a little uncomfortable about the nodding, because people take the matter much too lightly. There is little inclination inwardly to lay aside the doctorate, even if one does not have it oneself, even if one only carries the attitude in one's general consciousness. Furthermore, the trend that has caused the earlier gymnast and rhetorician to be superseded by the professor is so much part and parcel of modern civilization that it cannot easily be eradicated. It is in education, of course, that we notice most clearly the unfortunate effects upon a person who has gone through a doctoral training; yet that which has put the professor into a leading position in education has been necessary for the entire development of intellectualism in modern culture.

We have reached a point at which we must cultivate the synthesis of these three elements of the human being, for this division into gymnast, rhetorician, and professor is yet another example of the threefoldness of human nature, and it is above all in the realm of education that this synthesis should be achieved. If we could manage things ideally, the teacher should cultivate gymnastics in the noblest sense, rhetoric in the noblest sense—with all that was associated with it in ancient times—and also the professorial element in the noblest sense. Then these three elements should be integrated into a whole. I almost shudder at having to describe so dryly what you must know in this regard and must receive in your hearts' minds [die Gesinnung], because I am afraid that it may again get distorted, as happens with so much that must be said. It must not be distorted. The teacher should simply realize that for his own art of education he needs a synthesis of the spiritualized gymnast, of the ensouled rhetorician, and thirdly of the living, evolving spiritual element [das Geistige], not the dead and abstract spiritual element.

The whole faculty of the school ought to work together to assimilate these things, to develop gymnastics in the noblest sense and also what we have in eurythmy. If you really succeed in penetrating eurythmy inwardly, you will experience for yourselves that there is an active element of soul and spirit in every eurythmic movement. Every eurythmic movement calls forth an element of soul from the deepest foundations of the human being, and every gymnastic movement, if rightly executed, calls forth in the human being a spiritual atmosphere into which the spiritual element can penetrate livingly and not in a dead, abstract way.

The rhetorical element, in the noblest sense of the word, still has a particular significance for the teacher today. No educator, in whatever sphere of education he may be engaged, should fail to do his utmost to have his own speaking approach as closely as possible the ideal of an artistic speaking. The need for cultivating speech as such should always be kept in mind. This is something that has vanished so completely from man's consciousness that in this age of intellectualism professors of rhetoric are appointed at universities mainly out of an old habit. Curtius was professor of rhetoric at Berlin University, but he was not allowed to lecture on the subject, because lectures on the art of speech were felt to be superfluous at a place of higher education. He therefore had to discharge his duty in other ways than by lecturing about rhetoric, though in his official appointment he still bore the title of professor of rhetoric. This shows how we have ceased to attach any real value to the art of speech; this is connected with our ever-increasing disregard for the artistic element as such. Today we usually think because we do not know what else to do, and that is why we have so few real thoughts. The thoughts produced in the style of our modern thinking are the worst possible. The best are those that rise up out of an individual's humanness while he is engaged in some kind of action. Those thoughts are good that evolve out of beautifully formulated speech, when, out of such beautifully formulated speaking, thoughts rebound in us. Then something from the archangel lives in our thinking through the speaking, and it is far more significant that we be able to listen to this speaking than that we develop prosaic human thinking, however cleverly we might do so. This can be achieved, however, only if we, especially those engaged in education, clearly realize how remote modern thinking is from reality, from the world. We have, of course, produced a splendid science, but the sad thing is that this science knows nothing really and that, as a result of its knowing nothing, it is driving the very life out of human culture and civilization. We need not turn into revolutionaries for this reason or go about shouting such things indiscriminately in the world; what we need is to work in the school out of this consciousness.

Not only has thinking gradually become more and more abstract, but so has everything relating to the content of the human soul. At most man is still aware that his highest soul faculties originate in sudden flashes [einfällen], and he is especially proud when something occurs to him [einfällt] in this way. Since man experiences what may be the most valuable element in his soul as severed from the universe, he becomes inwardly barren and lifeless, alienated from reality. Our musicians compose music, they write melodies and harmonies, because these happen to˃ occur to them. Certainly one might think it quite a good thing if such things occur to someone frequently ini the realm of music; but why do they occur to him? Why should some melody suddenly occur to him out of nothingness? There appears to be neither human nor cosmic reason that a melody should occur suddenly to an individual who was born in and lives in this or that time or place. Why? There is meaning in it only when one has a connection with the cosmos in experiencing a melody, when one experiences the connection with the cosmos in experiencing a melody. One need not sail away into symbolism, but the connection with the cosmos must be experienced. The melody must really be “spoken” into us by the spirit of the world; then it has meaning and does something to promote progress in the world.

A great deal of Ahrimanic influence can be found in the world today. Indeed, the evolution of the world would be impossible without it. One of the worst instances of the Ahrimanic, however, is the fact that in order to become a qualified professor a thesis has to be written; there is no real connection between writing a thesis and becoming a professor. The only connection is purely external, Ahrimanized. Such things are taken seriously in our civilization today, however, and force their way into education, because educational institutions exert their influence from above downward, and the whole mode of their organization is totally unsound. Merely to say this sort of thing gets us nowhere, except to make us unpopular and create enemies for ourselves. In working here, however, we should be fully awake to the fact that we are called to work out of different premises.

Nowadays, for example, in lectures on the physiology of nutrition, we would be told that potatoes—carbohydrates—contain so much carbon, so much oxygen, and so on; that protein contains so and so much carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen; fats so and so much nitrogen, and so on; that the various “salts” man consumes are composed of what nowadays are called the chemical elements; and finally that the amounts of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth, that man needs can be calculated. The modern theory of nutrition is arrived at in this way. It is exactly as though someone wanting to know how a watch comes into existence were first to ascertain how gold is produced up to the moment when it is delivered to the watchmaker or how the glass for the watch is produced, and so on, with other parts of the watch. Such a person insists on getting to know the parts but never on knowing what the watchmaker does with them. In all eternity he will never really know anything about the watch. He may be well informed about the glass, the hands, the materials of which the watch is made, but he knows nothing about the watch itself. The same sort of thing is true if, regarding human nutrition, a person limits himself to the knowledge that the fats are constituted of such and such chemical elements, the carbohydrates of others, and so forth. We begin to know something about nutrition only if we can enter in a living way into the fact that what we eat in a potato, for example, is related to the root. If we eat something related to the root it is quite different from consuming in flour something that is related to the seed as in rye, corn, or wheat. What really matters is not how much carbohydrate there is in a potato or a kernel of corn. Rather, if I prepare a foodstuff from seeds, from corn, this foodstuff has to be digested in the area of the human being that extends to the lymph vessels and reaches the nerve-sense system in a condition in which it can provide the foundation for thinking. When I eat a potato, which is related to the root, it is not the human digestive tract or the lymphatic system that reduces the potato to a state where it can be assimilated by the human body. No, here the midbrain is required, and when we eat potatoes the task of digestion is imposed upon the midbrain. When we eat a different kind of food this burden is not present. If we eat potatoes in excess, we impose upon the midbrain the task of the primary digestion; that is to say, we undermine the real function of the midbrain in relation to the nerve-sense system, which is to permeate thoughts with feeling [Gemüt]. We thus thrust our thinking into the forebrain, where it becomes intellectual and to some extent actually animal-like.

The essential point is not whether a potato, or cabbage, or corn, is composed of such and such a percentage of carbohydrates. For a true physiology of nutrition all that is irrelevant. What we really need to know is how these things actually work within the human being. If we wish to develop a living grasp of what man needs today, we have the task of freeing ourselves from all these things that can never give us a true knowledge of man. The way we talk about nature nowadays not only is misleading: it leads us straight into emptiness of thought, emptiness of feeling.

Now you are all aware that there is a well-known process in the human being by means of which carbon combines with oxygen so that carbon dioxide is produced, that is, the mixture of carbon and oxygen that we exhale. You will often hear this process talked about as if it were a sort of inner burning, the same sort of thing as when a candle burns. There, too, carbon combines with oxygen, but to talk in this way is about as intelligent as to ask why the human being needs two lungs; we might just as well put two stones into him, two inorganic objects. If we mentally transfer into the human being the outer process of burning, we think in the same way as we would if we viewed the lungs as two stones. The burning that takes place outwardly in connection with oxygen is a dead burning, an inorganic burning. What takes place in the human being is a living burning, permeated with soul. Any process that takes place outside in nature changes when it occurs in the human being; in the human being it is permeated with soul; it is spiritual. What carbon together with oxygen does within the human organism bears the same relation to what happens outside as the living lungs bear to two stones. It is more important to guide one's whole life of feeling in this direction than to ponder over these things; then in all realms of the life of soul one would come to a direct experience of nature that could truly guide one from nature to the human being. Nowadays people remain with nature outside and do not at all reach the human being.

You will discover that if you speak to children with this kind of feeling and attitude [Gesinnung], they will understand the most difficult things as they need to be understood in their particular age. If you rely on the accursed textbooks that are so popular, the children really understand nothing; you torment the children, bore them, call forth their scorn. What you must do is to create a relationship to the world in yourselves that is both living and true to reality. That, above all, is what the teacher needs. I would like to emphasize strongly at the beginning that the teacher should strive continually to bring to life in himself what in the course of civilization has become dead. One of the chief tasks in Waldorf education is to bring life to knowledge and to feel a kind of repugnance for the way in which things are presented nowadays in so-called scientific textbooks. After having conquered this stage of repugnance, we should be able to develop what in reality lives in ourselves and that passes over to the children in a living way. We must begin at this point with ourselves and then look at nature itself in this way. A good deal of courage is needed, because much of what is true is regarded nowadays as sheer madness. Everything possible should be done to develop this courage.

Think of a butterfly. It lays an egg, the caterpillar crawls out and spins its cocoon, becoming a chrysalis, and finally the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. These things are described in the textbooks, but how? Without any consciousness whatever of the wonderful mystery that really lies here. The butterfly lays an egg, but it is essential that this egg be laid at the proper time of year and that it be receptive to everything that works as the earthy, as the solid or solid-fluid quality in nature. The most essential thing for the development of the egg is the “salty” element. Then comes the time when in addition to the earthy element, the fluid, and with the fluid the etheric, takes over. The fluid element, which becomes permeated with the etheric, passes over into the development of the caterpillar that crawls out of the egg. When we have the egg, we think primarily of the earth with the physical element. When we have the caterpillar that crawls out of the egg we see its shape. What crawls out is a being actually permeated with the etheric, fluid-watery element, and that is what makes the caterpillar into a caterpillar.

Now the caterpillar must develop its being in the air; the most important thing now for the caterpillar is that it come in contact with the light, so that it actually lives in the light-permeated air but at the same time expresses an inner relationship to the astral and, with this relationship to astrality, absorbs light. It is essential for the caterpillar to be exposed through its sensory system to the rays of the sun, to the radiating sun with its light. Next you see in the caterpillar what can be perceived in its most extreme form when you lie in bed with the lights still burning, and moths fly toward the light. There you have the apparently inexplicable urge of the moth to sacrifice itself. We shall hear why. The moth dashes into the light and is burnt up. Caterpillars have the same urge regarding the radiating light, but they are organized in such a way that they cannot hurl themselves into the sun. The moth can hurl itself into the light. The caterpillar has the same urge to give itself up to the light but cannot do so, for the sun is a long way off. The caterpillar develops this urge, goes out of itself, passes into the radiating light, gives itself up, spinning physical material out of its own body into the rays of the sun. The caterpillar sacrifices itself to the rays of the sun; it desires to destroy itself, but all destruction is birth. It spins its sheath during the day in the direction of the sun's rays and, when it rests at night, what has been spun hardens, so that these threads are spun rhythmically, day and night. These threads that the caterpillar spins are materialized, spun light.

Out of the threads that the light has formed, that it has materialized, the caterpillar spins its chrysalis, it passes wholly into the light. The light itself is the cause of the spinning of the chrysalis. The caterpillar cannot hurl itself into the light but gives itself up to it, creating the chamber in which the light is enclosed. The chrysalis is created from above downward in accordance with the laws of form of the primal wisdom. The butterfly is formed after the caterpillar has prepared the secluded chamber for the light. There you have the whole process from the egg to the brilliantly colored butterfly, which is born out of the light, as all colors are born out of the light. The whole process is born out of the cosmos.

If the process that we see extended into a fourfoldness—egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly—is in any way condensed, then the whole is changed. When the process occurs inwardly within the animal element, what remains is a being created out of the light. You see, the only way in which we can really get to the essence of the matter is to picture [vorstellen] the process artistically. It is impossible to picture this process whereby the butterfly forms itself from the chrysalis and is born out of the light unless we picture it artistically. If you picture the process in accordance with reality, you will find yourselves in a world of wonderful artistry. Just try for yourselves, and see how you receive an entirely different consciousness if you know something in this way. It is a consciousness entirely different from what you experience if you know something in the modern, outer way, which really gives no knowledge at all. Every detail becomes interesting if you allow yourselves, with soul and body, to grow together with the cosmos in its work of artistic creation.

Again, look at a tadpole with its resemblance to a fish; it breathes with gills and has a fish-like tail to swim with. The creature lives wholly in the watery element, the watery-earthly element. Then the tadpole develops into a frog. What happens? The blood vessels leading into the gills wither away, and the whole blood system is rounded off inwardly. Through this rounding off, the lung arises. The veins leading to the fishlike tail also wither away, but others elongate into legs so that the frog can hop about on land. This wonderful transformation of a system of blood vessels that at first feeds the gills and tail, this extraordinarily artistic transformation into lungs and limbs, is a truly marvelous process. How is it brought about? The first system of blood vessels, which feeds the gills and tail, is produced by the earthly-watery element; the second is produced by the watery-airy element that is permeated glitteringly with light.

You can learn to understand how the elements work together, but work together in an artistic way. If you reach this sort of understanding of the world of nature, you simply cannot help feeling as if you possessed the creative powers within yourselves. You cannot possibly be like most people nowadays when they study modern science. They are really not fully human. They just sit with their heads unhappily in their hands and strain their brains; study exhausts them. This is all unnatural; it is really nonsensical. It is just as if eating were to make us tired—but that happens only when we eat too much. Surely it is impossible to be wearied by anything that is so intimately bound up with man as this living-together of nature, spirit, and soul. Yet I have known many people who have been keen students, have written books, but who suffered from anæmia of the brain. It is really the same sort of thing as when a person suffers from anæmia in some other part of the organism. No one can suffer from anæmia of the brain who sees things in the way I have described it, in their true relation to reality. This is something that brings us to life inwardly, which is what we need above all else in our work as teachers. We must relate ourselves directly to life, and anything we are going to introduce in our teaching in school should sustain and uphold us inwardly, should truly enliven us. It is for this reason that no true teaching can ever be boring. How could it be? One might as well expect children to find eating and drinking boring, which usually does not happen unless a child is ill. If our teaching is boring there must be something wrong with it, and we ought to ask ourselves in every case (unless we are dealing with a really psychopathic child) what it is that is lacking in us when our teaching bores the children.

These are things that really matter, and we must realize, my dear friends, that we should neglect no single opportunity of quickening the inner life of soul and spirit. Otherwise we cannot teach. However erudite we may be, we cannot be good teachers. This is connected with what I described as our task to bring about the synthesis of what in successive stages of world evolution was separate: the gymnast, the rhetorician, and the professor. It is especially necessary today that we not allow the last relics that still live in the genius of our language, which can have an effect upon our whole human nature, to vanish, but that we try to bring a musical, sculptural-painterly quality into speech, so that what comes to expression in speech may again work back upon us. We therefore should make it one of the primary demands on ourselves never to speak in a slovenly way in the school but really to form and mold our speech so that as teachers our speech has something artistic about it. This may require some exertion, but it is of enormous significance. If it is achieved, there may flow out from the school an impulse for a revival, a renewal of civilization through the synthesis of gymnast, rhetorician, and professor. We must overcome the professorial quality—the learned knowledge, intellectual knowledge—which at the present time is the most disastrous of the three in all education. We can achieve something with children only by being human beings, not merely by being able to think.

This is the introduction I wished to give you today. I will add something in later talks about matters that fundamentally concern the teacher himself, for the educational problem is in many ways a problem of those who are actually teachers.

Today I wish to speak about the following question: with what forces are we really working when we work educationally? Actually, this question cannot be answered in any definite sense by the culture of today. We can say, of course, that the outer life within which human beings stand, making it possible for them to earn a living, requires them to have capacities that they cannot have yet as children. We must impart such capacities to them. The behavior proper for adults is also, perhaps, something that the child cannot acquire by himself; it must be imparted to him through education. But the answer to the question—why do we actually educate?—remains something rather superficial in modern culture, because the adult today does not really see anything of great value in what he became through the teaching and education he received. He does not look back with any particularly deep gratitude to what he has become through his education. Ask yourself in your own heart whether this gratitude is always alive in you. In individual cases, of course, it may be present on reflection, but on the whole we do not think with deep gratitude about our own education, because the human soul (Gemüt) does not have a full realization of what education actually means, nor which forces in human nature are quickened by it. That is why it is so difficult nowadays to arouse in people enthusiasm for education. All our methods, all our ingenious, formed, outer methods of education, are of little value in this respect. Answers to the question—how can this or that be achieved?—are of little use. What is of the greatest importance, however, is for a person to have enthusiasm in his work and to be able to develop this enthusiasm to the full if he is to be a true teacher. This enthusiasm is infectious, and it alone can work miracles in education. The child eagerly responds to enthusiasm, and, when there is no response on his part, it usually indicates a lack of this enthusiasm in the teacher.

As a kind of obvious secret, let me say that although a great deal has been said about enthusiasm here, when I go through the classes in the school I see a kind of depression, a kind of heaviness in the teachers. The lessons are really conducted with a certain heaviness. This heaviness must be eliminated. Actually, it may also express itself in artificial enthusiasm. Artificial enthusiasm can achieve nothing at all. The only enthusiasm capable of achieving anything is that kindled by our own living interest in the subjects with which we must deal in the classroom. Now, it is essential for you to realize that as teachers we need to develop a consciousness of our own. It is necessary for us to work at cultivating this consciousness. This work to develop our own consciousness is certainly made infinitely more difficult by the fact that in the higher grades we must take into account the impossible demands made upon our children from outside in preparation for graduation. This lies like a leaden burden upon the teaching in the higher grades. Nevertheless, it is essential not to lose sight of our own goal, and therefore we must work to develop this consciousness, the Waldorf teacher's consciousness, if I may so express it. This is only possible, however, when in the field of education we come to an actual experience of the spiritual. Such an experience of the spiritual is difficult to attain for modern humanity, and this fact must be faced and understood. We must realize that we really need something quite specific, something that is hardly present anywhere else in the world, if we are to be capable of mastering the task of the Waldorf school. In all humility, without any trace of pride or arrogance, we must become conscious of this, but conscious of it inwardly, deep in our hearts, not merely by talking about it; within our hearts we must be able to become conscious of it. This is possible, however, only if we have a clear understanding of what humanity has lost in this respect, has lost just in the last three or four centuries. It is this that we must find again.

What has been lost is the realization that when the human being enters the world out of his pre-earthly existence he is, compared with the actual forces of the being of man, a being who needs to be healed. This bond of education with the healing of man has been lost from sight. During a certain period of the Middle Ages, certainly, it was believed that the human being, as man on earth, was ill and that his health had to be restored; that the human being as he was on the earth actually stood below his proper level and that something real had to be done in order to make man truly man. This is often understood merely in a formal sense. It is said that the human being must evolve, must be brought to a higher level, but this is meant abstractly, not concretely. It will be interpreted concretely only when the activity of education is actually brought into connection with the activity of healing. In healing a sick person, one knows that something has actually been achieved: if the sick person has been made healthy, he has been raised to a higher level, to the level of the normal human being. In ancient times, those who knew the world mysteries regarded birth as synonymous with an illness, because, in fact, when the human being is born he falls in a certain sense below his proper level and is not the being he was in pre-earthly existence. In comparison with the higher human nature, it is really something abnormal for the human being to bear within him constituents of his body, to have to bear a certain heaviness. It would not be considered particularly intelligent today to say that, in comparison with the higher nature of man, it is of the nature of illness to have to struggle continually until death with the physical forces of the body. Without such radical conceptions, however, we cannot approach the reality of what education means. Education must have something of the process of healing. In order to make this clear, let me offer the following.

The human being really lives within four complexes of forces. In one he is active when he walks, moves his legs with a pendulum swing, or when he uses his legs in order to dance or make other movements. This movement, taking place in the outer, physical world of space, can also be pictured as bringing about changes of location in space. Similarly, other possibilities of human movement, of the arms, hands, head, eye muscles, and so forth, can be designated as changes in location of an ordinary inanimate body, that is to say, if we leave out of account the inner activity of the human being. This is one complex of forces within which the human being lives and is active.

The second is unfolded when man begins to work upon the physical substances that he absorbs into himself; in the widest sense this includes everything that belongs to the activity of nourishment. Whereas the limbs of man are the mediators of what man has in common with beings that change their physical location, there is another activity that man needs in order to continue the activity connected with the outer substances that man absorbs as nourishment. If you put a piece of sugar into your mouth, it dissolves. This is a continuation of what sugar is in the outer world. Sugar is hard and white. You dissolve it, and it becomes liquid, viscous, and then undergoes further changes. The chemist speaks of chemical changes, but that is not relevant here. The sugar continually changes. It is worked upon and absorbed into the whole organism. There you have a second kind of activity. This continues right into the rhythmic system, and then the rhythmic system takes over the activity of the digestive system. What happens in this second kind of activity of man, however, is very different from the human activity of moving the limbs or of moving the whole human body in the outer world. The activity of nourishment is quite different from the activity exercised when we move outwardly or, let us say, lift a weight. This activity of nourishment cannot proceed at all without the intervention, at every point of this activity, of the astral nature of the human being. The astral nature of the human being must permeate each individual part of this activity, of nourishment. In the activity that I have described as the activity of walking, grasping, and so on, we are dealing essentially with the same forces man makes use of that we can also verify physically. What really happens in these movements is that the etheric organism is set in motion and through its mediation arises a leverage movement that we can see in an act of grasping or walking. If we focus on the activity of walking or grasping, we need only consider that which we have in the physical world as it is inserted within the working of the etheric; then we have what happens in man. We never have this, however, if we consider the activity of nourishment. This can arise only if the astral body takes hold of processes that otherwise we have in the test tube. There astral forces above all must be at work, and a fact that is considered nary at all is that in this process physical forces no longer play a part. This is exceedingly interesting, because it is generally believed that in nourishment, for example, physical forces are at work. As soon as the human being no longer exists in relation to the outer world, the physical forces cease to have their raison d'etre; they are no longer active, no longer have any effect. In the activity of nourishment, the physical substances are worked upon by the astral and etheric. The physical effect of a piece of sulfur or salt outside the body has no significance within the body. Only the astral nature of a substance is seized hold of by the astral, and then the etheric-astral is the really active factor in nourishment.

Going further, we come to the activities taking place in the rhythmic nature of man, in the blood rhythm, in the breathing rhythm. In their inner constitution these activities are similar to the forces at work in the system of nourishment. They are the result of cooperation between the etheric and the astral, but in the activity of digestion the astral is in a certain respect weaker than the etheric, and in the rhythmic activity the astral becomes stronger than the etheric. In the rhythmic system the etheric withdraws more into the background (though actually only the etheric that is within the human being). The etheric outside the human being begins to take part again in the activity that is exercised in the rhythmic system of man, so that actually with the activity of breathing one has the force of man's inner etheric body, the force of the outer ether of the world, and the astral activity of man.

Now, picture to yourselves what is really going on when the human being breathes. The physical activity of carbon, oxygen, etc., is completely suppressed, but the combined working of the etheric outside, the etheric within, and the astral is a most important factor. This plays a great part. These are the forces, however, that we must know in any substance if we wish to speak of the healing effect of that substance. We cannot discover the extent to which a substance is a remedy if we do not know how that substance, when introduced into the body, is laid hold of by these three systems of forces. The whole of therapy depends upon knowledge of these three forces in connection with the substances used. Knowledge of the healing influence in the outer and inner etheric and in the astral is what constitutes therapy in the real sense. What does it mean when antimony, for example, is used as a remedy? It simply means that some form of antimony is introduced into the body; it is laid hold of in a certain way by the inner etheric forces, by the outer etheric forces that enter by way of the breathing, and by the astral forces in the human being. We realize the extent to which antimony is a remedy when we understand the effect of these three systems of forces on a substance within the human organism. [Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Fundamentals of Therapy, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967.]

In ascending to the rhythmic activity, therefore, we come to recognize a much more delicate process than exists, for example, in the activity of nourishment. It is essentially this rhythmic activity that must be considered if we wish to recognize the healing effects. Unless we know how a particular substance affects the rhythm of breathing or the blood circulation, we cannot understand the nature of this substance as a remedy.

Now the strange thing is this. Whereas the doctor brings into operation the therapeutic forces in the unconscious, in the rhythmic system of the blood circulation or the breathing, as teachers we must bring the next higher stage into operation: that which is connected with the activity in the nerves, in the senses. This is the next metamorphosis of the remedy. What we do as teachers, is really to work in such a way on the physical human being that the substances that are taken up are subjected to the etheric activity and to the outer physical activity—namely, to perception, whenever something is perceived—and to the inner physical activity, that is to say, to the inner changes of location brought about mechanically through the human being moving himself. Whereas in the remedy are contained the outer and inner etheric and the astral, in education are contained outer physical forces (as in gymnastics) and inner physical forces. When the human being bows his head, a change takes place in his entire dynamic system; the center of gravity shifts a little, and so forth. In the workings of light upon the eye we have recognized outer physical forces in their greatest delicacy and refinement. Moreover, outer physical forces are operating when pressure is made on an organ of touch. We therefore have etheric activity, outer physical forces, and inner physical forces, that is to say, physical changes in the nervous system, destruction in the nervous system. These are true physical processes that are actually present only in the nervous system of the human being. It is with these three systems that we are essentially dealing as a teacher with the child. This is the higher metamorphosis of what is done in healing.

What kinds of activity are present in the human being? There are the movements of walking, grasping, the movement of the limbs, outer changes of location, the activity in the process of nourishment, the rhythmic activity—which is through and through a healing activity—and the perceiving activity if we regard it from outside. Regarded from within, educational activity is entirely a perceiving activity.

This will now give you deeper insight into the nature of man. You will be able to say to yourselves that, since factors are active in the rhythmic system that are healing factors, there is a doctor (Arzt) continually present in the human being. In fact, the whole rhythmic system is a doctor. The function of a doctor is to heal something, however, and if healing is needed there must be illness. If that is so, walking, grasping, digesting must be continual processes of illness, and breathing and blood circulation a continual healing. This is indeed the case. In modern science, however, where discrimination is lacking, it is not realized that the human being is continually becoming ill. Eating and drinking, especially, are processes that continually create illness. We cannot avoid continually injuring our health through eating and drinking. Eating and drinking to excess merely injure us more seriously, but we are always injuring ourselves to a slight degree. The rhythmic system, however, is continually healing this illness. Human life on the earth is a continual process of becoming ill and a continual healing. This process of becoming ill brings about a genuinely physical illness. What the human being does in intercourse with the outer world, the consequences of walking, grasping, and the like, is a more intense but less noticeable process of becoming ill. We must counter it through a higher process of healing, through a process of education, which is a metamorphosis of the healing process.

The forces inherent in education are metamorphoses of therapeutic forces: they are therapeutic forces transformed. The goal of all our educational thinking must be to transform this thinking so as to rise fruitfully from the level of physical thinking to spiritual thinking. In physical thinking we have two categories which, in our academic age, give rise to a barren enthusiasm that has such a terrible influence. We have only two concepts: right-wrong, true-false. To discover whether something is “true” or “false” is the highest ideal of those whose entire lives are given up to the world of academia. In the concepts “true” and “false,” however, there is so little reality. They are something formal, established by mere logic, which actually does nothing but combine and separate. The concepts of “true” and “false” are dreadfully barren, prosaic, and formal. The moment we rise to the truths of the spiritual world we can no longer speak of “true” and “false,” for in the spiritual world that would be as nonsensical as saying that to drink such and such a quantity of wine every day is “false.” The expression “false” here is out of place. One says something real regarding this only by saying that such a thing gives rise to illness. Correct or incorrect are outer, formal concepts, even regarding the physical. Pertaining to the spiritual world, the concepts of “true” and “false” should be discarded altogether. As soon as we reach the spiritual world we must substitute “healthy” and “ill” for “true” and “false.” If someone said about a lecture such as the one I gave here yesterday evening, that is “right,” it would mean nothing at all. In the physical world things can be “right”; in the spiritual world nothing is “wrong” or “right.” There, things are reality. After all, is a hunchback “true” or “false”? In such a case we cannot speak of right or wrong. A drawing may be false or correct, but not a plant; a plant however, can be healthy or diseased. In the spiritual world things are either healthy or ill, fruitful or unfruitful. In what one does there must be reality. If someone considers that a lecture such as I gave yesterday is healthy or health-bringing, that is to the point. If he simply considers it “right,” he merely shows that he cannot rise to the level where reality lies. It is a question of health or illness when we are dealing with spiritual truths, and it is precisely this that we must learn in connection with education. We must learn to regard things in their educational application as either healthy or unhealthy, injurious to health. This is of particular significance if one wishes to engender a true consciousness of oneself as a teacher. It may be said that engendering this consciousness begins with passing from the “true” and “false” of logic, to the reality of “healthy” or “ill.” Then we come quite close to understanding the principle of healing. This can be developed in concrete detail but we must also let ourselves be stimulated by a comprehensive knowledge of man, a knowledge of man in relation to the world around him.

In describing the breathing process, for example, according to modern science, no particular weight is laid on the essential factor, on the actual human factor.

It is said that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen, leaving aside for the moment the other constituents. Man inhales oxygen along with a certain amount of nitrogen. He then exhales oxygen combined with carbon, and also nitrogen. The percentages are measured, and it is then believed that the essentials of the process have been described. Little account is taken, however, of the essentially human factor. This begins to dawn upon us when we consider the following. There is a definite percentage of nitrogen in the air that is good for breathing, and also a definite percentage of oxygen. Suppose a man comes to a region where the air is poor in nitrogen, containing less than the normal percentage. If the person breathes in this nitrogen-poor air, this air gradually becomes richer in nitrogen through his breathing. He exhales from his body nitrogen that he would not otherwise exhale in order to augment the nitrogen content of the air in his environment. I do not know whether any account is taken of this in physiology today. I have often pointed out that the human being living in air that is poor in nitrogen corrects this lack; he prefers to take nitrogen from his own organic substances, depriving them of it in order to augment the nitrogen content of the outside air. He does the same with respect to the normal content of oxygen in the air. The human being is so intimately related to his environment that the moment the environment is not as it ought to be, he corrects it, improves upon it. We thus may say that the human being is constituted in such a way that he needs nitrogen and oxygen not only for himself; it is even more necessary for him to have nitrogen and oxygen in certain percentages in his environment than within his own organism. The environment of a human being is more important for this subconscious forces than the make-up of his own body. The incredibly interesting fact is that through his instincts the human being has a far greater interest in his environment than in the make-up of his own body. This is something that can be proved by experiment, provided the experiments are arranged intelligently. It is only a question of arranging experiments in this realm. If our research institutes would only tackle such problems, what a vast amount there would be for them to do! The problems are there and are of tremendous importance. They are terribly important for education, too, for it is only now that we can ask why the human being needs an environment containing a particular amount of nitrogen and a particular amount of oxygen. We know that in the inner activity of nourishment or general growth, all kinds of combinations of substances are formed in the human being, revealing themselves in a definite way when man becomes a corpse. It is only in this dead form, however, that these things are investigated by science today.

Now the strange thing is that in the sphere of the human being that encompasses part of the rhythmic activity and part of the metabolic-limb activity, there: is a tendency for an activity to unfold between carbon and nitrogen. In the sphere that extends from the rhythmic upward to the nerve-sense activity, there is a tendency to unfold an activity between carbon and oxygen. It is truly interesting, if one observes a soul-constitution not worn out by dry scholarship, to see sparkling soda water, where the carbon dioxide appears in the liquid as the result of the interplay of carbon and oxygen. If one observes these bubbles one has directly and imaginatively a view of what goes on in the course of the rhythmic breathing activity from the lung system toward the head. The bubbling effervescence in sparkling water is a picture of what, in a fine and delicate way, plays upward toward the human head. Looking at a spring of sparkling water, we can say that this activity of the rising carbon dioxide is really similar, only in a coarser form, to a continual, inward activity within the human being that rises from the lungs to the head. In the head, something must continually be stimulated by a delicate, intimate sparkling-water activity; otherwise, the human being becomes stupid or dull. If we neglect to bring this effervescence of sparkling water to the head of a human being, then the carbon within him suddenly shows an inclination for hydrogen instead of oxygen. This rises up to the brain and produces “marsh gas,” such as is found in subterranean vaults, and then the human being becomes dull, drowsy, musty.

To begin with, these things confront us as inner—one would like to say—physical activities, but they are not really physical, for the production of marsh gas or carbon dioxide becomes in this case an inner spiritual life. We are not being led into materialism here but into the delicate weaving of the spiritual in matter.

Now if, in teaching languages, for example, we make the child learn too much vocabulary, if we make him memorize through an unconscious mechanization, this process can lead to the development of marsh gas in the head. If we bring as many living pictures as possible to the child, the effect is such that the breathing system lets the carbon dioxide effervesce toward the head. We therefore play a part, in fact, in something that makes either for health or illness. This shows us how as teachers we must demand a higher metamorphosis of the forces of healing. To be able to perceive these hidden relationships in the human organism kindles enthusiasm in the highest degree. We realize for the first time that the head is a remarkable vault that can be filled with either marsh gas or carbon dioxide. We feel we are standing before the deeper well-springs of existence.

In the next lecture, we shall study another activity, with which this activity must be brought into balance. This can happen, however, only when there is on the one hand the right kind of teaching in the musical sphere and, on the other, the right kind of teaching in lessons that are based upon outer perception (Anschauung) and not upon the musical sphere. Thus, our teaching takes shape, and our interest is aroused in the human being before us. To this something else must be added: the feeling of responsibility. The consciousness of a Waldorf teacher should be imbued with the realization that makes him say in all humility: people are let loose into the educational world today as if the totally blind were sent out to paint in color. Few know what is really taking place in education. It is no wonder that a blind man has no particular enthusiasm for painting in color; no wonder there is no real enthusiasm for education in the world! The moment we enter into education in the way described, however, the whole art of our education will provide the stimulus for this enthusiasm, and we shall feel that we are in touch with the well-springs of the world, and find the true feeling of responsibility. We realize that we can bring either health or illness. This enthusiasm on the one hand and a feeling of responsibility on the other: both must arise in us.

What I wish to offer you in these lectures is intended essentially as an impulse toward the inner enrichment of the teacher's profession. In continuation of what I said this afternoon, I would like to add the following. You see, we must bring our knowledge of the human being to the point where we really can know in detail what is going on in the human being in his ordinary activity in the world. I have shown you that the first form of activity we perceive in the human being is the one in which he moves his limbs. Now we must pose the question: what actually moves his limbs? What force is at work when a man walks or does something with his arms? What is it? Now, the materialistic view will simply be that it is man himself, and, thinking about man in this way, that it is a piece of the cosmos consisting of blood, bones, and so on, described as man, that moves the limbs! This is the true initiator of action! Fundamentally, there is no sense in putting it like that, since man himself is the object in movement, is that which is moved. If we ask who is the actual subject, who is moving the arm or the leg, then we arrive at something spiritual, certainly not material. We are forced to say to ourselves that it is the spiritual itself that must bring physical forces, forces that usually we designate as physical, into action. Our leg must be moved by something spiritual just as, for example, we say that a piece of wood is moved by us from one place to another.

Here, however, we come to something remarkable that generally receives little attention, because a great illusion prevails regarding it. Our human movement is really a magical effect, because in it something is set in motion by the spirit. Our movement as a human being is in truth a magical effect, and our view of man is entirely incorrect if we do not associate the magical element with the movements he makes. The will—that is to say, something purely spiritual—must intervene in physical activity; these are in truth magical effects. When you walk, an inner magician, something essential, is working within you. How does this happen? The fact that we are physical human beings, made up of bones, blood, and so forth, does not make us into moving human beings; at best it is able to make us inert beings, beings who lie permanently in bed. If we are to be able to move, the will must be directly active. Materialistic science simplifies things by theorizing about the motor nerves and the like. That is nonsense. In actual fact we have in human movement a magical effect, a direct intervention of the spirit into the bodily movements. How is this possible? This will become clear in the following.

I pointed out to you this afternoon that as the life process in man passes from the rhythmic system to the metabolic-limb system, what comes out of carbon has an affinity for what comes out of nitrogen, and there arises a continual tendency in the human being to create combinations of carbon and nitrogen. This tendency exists, and we shall never become clear about the digestive process itself, and especially the excretory process, if this tendency toward the combination of carbon and nitrogen is not kept in mind. This tendency finally leads to the formation of cyanic acid. As a matter of fact, there exists from above downward in the human being a continual tendency to produce cyanic acid, or at any rate, cyanides. There is really no commonly accepted expression for what happens here.

What happens only goes so far as just to reach the point of coming into being, and then it is immediately arrested by the secretions, particularly of the gall bladder. Thus, downward in the human being, there is this continual tendency to create cyanide combinations that are arrested in their status nascendi by gall secretions. To create cyanide combinations in man, however, means to destroy him; the speediest method of destroying the human form [Gestalt] is to permeate it with cyanide. This tendency exists particularly in the direction of the metabolic-limb system; the human organism continually wants to create cyanide combinations, which are in turn immediately broken up. At this moment between the coming into being and the immediate dissolution of the cyanide compounds, the will lays hold of the muscular system. In the paralyzing of this process lies the possibility for the will to take hold so that man can move. From above downward there is always a tendency in the human being to destroy organic substance through a kind of poisoning. This is continually on the point of beginning, and we would not be able to move, we could never achieve any freeing of the will, if this continual tendency to destroy ourselves were not present. Thus, to express it in a grotesque way, from above downward we have this continual tendency to make ourselves into ghosts and thereby to move by magical means. We must not limit our gaze to the physical body with the movements of man but must turn to his will, to the calling forth of spatial movements by purely magical means.

You see, therefore, every time the human being brings himself into movement, he is faced with the responsibility of intervening in the processes that are the actual processes of illness and death. On the other hand, we have the task of knowing that this process of illness is opposed by the health-bringing process, of which I spoke this afternoon. For everything that occurs in the processes in lower man there is a corresponding process above. Carbon has the tendency to form nitrogen compounds downward but upward it has the tendency to form oxygen compounds. Early alchemists called carbon “The Stone of the Wise,” which is nothing other than carbon fully understood. Upward it has the tendency to form oxygen compounds, acids or oxides. These stimulate the thoughts, and whenever we vitally occupy a child we stimulate the formation of carbon compounds and therewith the activity of thinking. Whenever we guide a child into some form of action while he is thinking, we call forth a state of balance between the formation of carbonic and cyanic acids. In human life everything actually depends upon symmetry being produced between these two things.

If a human being is occupied only with intellectual work, the process of the formation of carbonic acid is too strongly stimulated in him; the upper organism is saturated with carbonic acid. Now a proper, intelligently conducted musical education counteracts this excessive formation of the carbonic acid and enables the human being to bring again some activity, inner activity at least, into the carbonic acid process. By arranging a schedule so that the teaching of music, for example, is interspersed among the other subjects, we actually penetrate directly into the processes of illness and health in the human organism. I am not telling you these things today simply for the sake of the subject matter, although I believe they are among the most interesting things that could be found in physiology, for it is only in this way that we can see clearly into the living activity of the substances and forces within the being of man. Processes of illness and health are continually taking place in the human organism, and everything a person does or is guided to do has its effect upon these processes. From this knowledge must be created a feeling of responsibility and a true consciousness of one's purpose as teacher. We must realize, in all humility, the importance of our profession, that we help to orient what are in the most eminent sense cosmic processes. In fact, as teachers we are coworkers in the actual guidance of the world. It is the particular value of these things for our whole life of feeling [Gemüt] and for consciousness that I wish to stress today.

By fully penetrating this, every one of our actions will take on extraordinary importance. Think how often I have said that a person will completely misapprehend the whole of human evolution if he persists in trivial pictorial instructions [Anschauungsunterricht] and never attempts to introduce to a child more than he can already understand; he fails to realize that a great deal of what is taught a child in his eighth or ninth year will be accepted only if the child feels himself in the presence of a beloved teacher, confronted by an obvious authority. The teacher should represent to the child the whole world of truth, beauty, and goodness. What the teacher takes to be beautiful or true or good should be so for the pupil. This obvious authority, during the period between the change of teeth and puberty, must be the basis of all the teaching. A child does not always understand the things that he accepts under the influence of this authority but accepts them because he loves the teacher. What he has accepted will then emerge in later life, say in his thirty-fifth year, and signify an essential enlivening of the whole inner being of man. Anyone who says that one should merely teach children trivial mental conceptions has no real insight into human nature, nor does he know what a vital force it is when in his thirty-fifth year a person can call up something he once accepted simply through love for his teacher. Now you can see the inner significance of what I have been saying. The process in man that is the equilibrium between the carbon and the cyanide processes is essentially supported, made essentially more vital by the fact that something of this condition remains deeply embedded in human nature in the same way that something that we may have accepted in love in our eighth or ninth year remains hidden and is understood only decades later. What occurs between receptivity and understanding, what lies directly in the soul in the process of balance between the lower and upper man, together with the corresponding action of carbon, has enormous influence.

Of course, you cannot apply these things in detail in your methods of teaching, but you can go into the classroom supported by this knowledge of man and apply one aspect or another in various realms of your teaching; if one has acquired this knowledge, a definite result will follow. One can distinguish between those who have knowledge that is inwardly mobile or inwardly immobile. One who simply knows how diamonds, graphite, and coal appear in nature outside the human being, and goes no further than that, will not teach in a very lively way. If one knows, however, that the carbon in coal, in graphite, and so on, also lives within man as a substance metamorphosed; that on the one side it acts only in death-bringing compounds and on the other only in compounds of resurrection; if one speaks not only of the metamorphoses of carbon, which in the various stages of the earth's evolution produced diamond, coal, and graphite; if one realizes that there are different kinds of metamorphosis of carbon in man, which can become inwardly alive, can be spiritualized, can mediate between death and life; if one understands this, one has in this understanding an immediate source of inspiration. If you can understand this, you will find the right method of teaching in school; it is essential for the right method to occur to you; you should not stand in the classroom with such a sour look that anyone can tell from your expression that you stand before the children in a morose, surly mood. Such a mood is impossible if you possess an inwardly mobile, creative knowledge. Then, in all humility, you will realize the importance of the work, and this will reveal itself even in your facial expression while teaching. Your expression is then naturally illuminated by the etheric and astral and unites with that which is outer form to create a whole.

The face of a teacher has three main nuances of expression, with any number of intermediate stages. There is the face with which he meets ordinary people, when he forgets that he is a teacher and simply engages in natural conversation; there is the face he has when he has finished his lesson and leaves the classroom; and there is the face he has in the classroom. We may often be ashamed of human nature when we see the difference in the face of a teacher when he is going into his classroom and when he leaves it. These things are connected with the whole consciousness of the teacher. Perhaps it may comfort you a little if I say that every face becomes twice as beautiful under the influence of an active, vital knowledge than it is otherwise, but the knowledge must do its work, the knowledge must live, and the faces of the teachers should always be alive, inwardly expressive, especially when the lessons are actually being given. In what I am telling you, the important thing is not that you should know these things but that they should work on your life of feeling [Gemüt], strengthening you, giving you the vigor to spiritualize your profession.

Teachers ought to be conscious, especially nowadays, of their great social task, and they should ponder a great deal about this task. The teacher, above all others, should be deeply permeated by awareness of the great needs of modern civilization.

I will give you an example of what is needed in order to adopt the right attitude in our civilization today. You have all heard of Mahatma Gandhi who, since the war, or really since 1914, has set a movement going for the liberation of India from English rule. Gandhi's activities began first in South Africa with the aim of helping the Indians who were living there under appalling conditions and for whose emancipation he did a great deal before 1914. Then he went to India itself and instituted a movement for liberation in the life there. I shall speak today only of what took place when the final verdict was passed on Mahatma Gandhi and omit the court proceedings leading up to it. I would like to speak only of the last act in the drama, as it were, between him and his judge. Gandhi had been accused of stirring up the Indian people against British rule in order to make India independent. Being a lawyer, he conducted his own defense and had not the slightest doubt that he would have to be condemned. In his speech—I cannot quote the actual words—he spoke more or less to the following effect, “My Lords, I beg of you to condemn me in accordance with the full strength of the law. I am perfectly aware that in the eyes of British law in India my crime is the gravest one imaginable. I do not plead any mitigating circumstances; I beg of you to condemn me with the full strength of the law. I affirm, moreover, that my condemnation is required not only in obedience to the principles of outer justice but to the principles of expediency of the British Government. For if I were to be acquitted I should feel it incumbent upon me to continue to propagate the movement, and millions of Indians would join it. My acquittal would lead to results that I regard as my duty.”

The contents of this speech are very characteristic of that which lives and weaves in our time. Gandhi says that he must of necessity be condemned and declares that it is his duty to continue the activity for which he is to be condemned. The judge replied, “Mahatma Gandhi, you have rendered my task of sentencing you immeasurably easier, because you have made it clear that I must of necessity condemn you. It is obvious that you have transgressed against British law, but you and all those present here will realize how hard it will be for me to sentence you. It is clear that a large portion of the Indian people looks upon you as a saint, as one who has taken up his task in obedience to the highest duties devolving upon humanity. The judgment I shall pass on you will be looked upon by the majority of the Indian people as the condemnation of a human being who has devoted himself to the highest service of humanity. Clearly, however, British law must in all severity be put into effect against you. You would regard it as your duty, if you were acquitted, to continue tomorrow what you were doing yesterday. We on our side have to regard it as our most solemn duty to make that impossible. I condemn you in the full consciousness that my sentence will in turn be condemned by millions. I condemn you while admiring your actions, but condemn you I must.” Gandhi's sentence was six years at hard labor.

You could hardly find a more striking example of what is characteristic of our times. We have two levels of actuality before us. Below is the level of truth, the level where the accused declares that if he is acquitted, it will be his solemn duty to continue what he must define as criminal in face of outer law. On the level of truth, also, we have the judge's statement that he admires the one whom, out of duty to his Government, he sentences to six years' hard labor. Above, at the level of facts, you have what the accused in this case, because he is a great soul, defined as crime: the crime that is his duty and that he would at once continue were he to be acquitted. Whereas on the one level you have the admiration of the judge for a great human being, on the other you have the passing of judgment and its outer justification. You have truths below, facts above, which have nothing to do with one another. They touch on one another at only one point, at the point where they confront each other in statement and counter-statement.

Here, my dear friends, you have a most striking example of the fact that nowadays we have a level of truth and a level of untruth. The level of untruth, however, is in public events, and at no point are the two levels in touch with each other. We must keep this clearly in mind, because it is intimately bound up with the whole life of spirit of our times. An example as striking as this reveals things that occur everywhere but are usually less obvious and startling. We must achieve first, however, a real consciousness of what has come to pass in the present in order to put truth in the place of what is happening in the present. We simply must find the true path. Naturally, it is not a matter of overturning everything or of engaging in false radicalism, which leads only to destruction, but of seeing what one can do. We have to find the way to a clear insight and then work in the area where our efforts can be most fruitful.

The most fruitful sphere of activity of all is that of education. There, even if education is controlled by dictatorial rules and standards, the teacher can let what he gains from a true feeling for his profession flow into the lessons he gives. He must, however, have a knowledge of man that will imbue life and spirit into what is otherwise dead knowledge, and, on the other hand, have an enthusiasm arising from a really free and open-minded conception of what life actually is today. You must be clear that in outer life you are at the level above, but as a teacher confronting children it is possible to maintain the level below. It is not by practicing an educational method based on clichés, but by acquiring real enthusiasm for your profession, the consciousness of your profession, that you can emancipate yourselves from the constraints in educational activity and be inspired by the majesty contained in a true knowledge of man. It is sometimes a very bitter experience to speak to anthroposophists, for example, and be compelled to say things that—though not in the bad sense- turn upside down what people have learned and then to find that no attention is paid to what has been said. If you grasped the full weight of what I said in the lecture yesterday [Rudolf Steiner, “The Michael Inspiration, Spiritual Milestones in the Course of the Year,” The Festivals and Their Meaning, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981.] about meteoric iron, for instance, you might well be astonished at the indifference with which such a matter is received. I can understand this in the case of people who have not learned anything but in the case of those who are conversant with the scientific concepts about iron, it is incomprehensible. But the world is like that today.

That is not, however, how the world should be in the head and especially in the heart of the teacher and educator. He must be filled with the consciousness that all the knowledge acquired through modern science is dead knowledge, out of which we must create something living, and the only sort of knowledge that we can use in school arises from this enthusiasm. If you are permeated on the one side with the enthusiasm kindled by such a knowledge of man, and, on the other, with the consciousness of the necessity to put truth in place of the lies that are accepted today—you can find no more impressive example than the legal case I just described to you—if you realize this necessity with your whole being and know that it is the teacher's task to find the right direction through recognition of this necessity, and of the appalling crudities inherent in what appears to be truth in public life today, then something happens within the human being that colors every sphere. You will become a different kind of eurythmy teacher, a different kind of art teacher, a different kind of mathematics teacher. In every sphere you will become different if you are permeated in the real sense by this consciousness. Everything is established by this enthusiasm. This is not the time to talk about the niceties of this or that method. We must bring life into the world, which through its dead intellectualism is faced with the danger of falling still further into death.

Basically, we have fallen out of the habit of being inwardly incensed by things as they are. If you merely pull a long face, however, about things that ought to be rejected in our civilization, you certainly will not be able to educate. That is why it is so necessary from time to time to speak of things in such a way that they can really take hold of our feeling [Gemüt]. If you go away from these lectures with nothing more than the feeling that there has to be a change in the spiritual factors governing the world today, then you will have grasped my aim in giving them.

The dragon takes on the most diverse forms; he takes on every possible form. Those that arise from human emotions are harmful enough but not nearly as harmful as the form the dragon acquires from the dead and deadening knowledge prevailing today. There the dragon becomes especially horrible. One might almost say that the correct symbol for institutions of higher education today would be a thick black pall hung somewhere on the wall of every lecture room. Then one would realize that behind it there is something that must not be shown, because to do so would throw a strange light on what goes on in these lecture rooms! Behind the black pall there should be a picture of Michael's battle with the dragon, the battle with deadening intellectualism. What I have said today shows you how the struggle between Michael and the dragon should live in teachers. What I wanted to present to you is this: we must come to be aware of this battle of Michael as a reality to us in order to celebrate Michaelmas in the right way. No one is more called to play a part in inaugurating the Michael festival in the right way than the teacher. The teacher should unite himself with Michael in a particularly close way, for to live in these times means simply to crawl into the dragon and further the old intellectual operation. To live in the truth means to unite oneself with Michael. We must unite ourselves with Michael whenever we enter the classroom; only through this can we bring with us the necessary strength. Verily, Michael is strong! If we understand Michael's struggle with the dragon in a particular sphere, we are working for the healing of humanity in the future. If I had been asked to give these lectures a title, I would have had to say: Michael's Struggle with the Dragon, presented for the teachers at the Waldorf School. One should not speak about the possibility of celebrating a Michael festival now but rather give thought to introducing into the most diverse spheres of life the kind of consciousness with which a Michael festival could be connected. If you can make these things come alive in your hearts, to permeate your souls with them; if you can bring this consciousness with you into the classroom and sustain it there in complete tranquility, without any element of agitation or high-sounding phrases; if you can let yourselves be inspired to unpretentious action through what can be kindled in your consciousness by surrender to these necessities, then you will enter into the alliance with Michael, as is essential for the teacher and educator.

In considering the beginnings of Waldorf education—now a movement of over 300 schools worldwide—one may well be astonished to find that Rudolf Steiner preferred to convey its revolutionary thrust by word of mouth rather than by means of the printed page. Over a period of almost six years (1919-1924) Steiner, traveling widely in Germany, Switzerland, France, Norway, Holland, and England, gave some 200 lectures on the Waldorf approach, speaking to small groups of qualified teachers as well as to large public audiences.

Important seeds had been planted in Steiner's early years through his own experiences as tutor and teacher. In 1907 he formulated his views on education in an essay entitled Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. It was not until twelve years later, soon after the first World War, which left Middle Europe shattered, morally depleted, and financially in ruins, that Steiner answered the call from Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, to found a school initially intended for the children of the factory workers.

Three mighty courses of fourteen lectures each (The Study of Man, Practical Advice for Teachers, Discussions with Teachers, August-September 1919), given over a period of two weeks to a group of twelve young, able, enthusiastic teachers, launched the bold venture that was to grow into a strong movement with schools in Europe, the United States, Canada, South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Steiner became the director of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. He was tireless in giving his time and strength, entering into every detail of the curriculum, the work in the classroom, the life of the students; he counseled teachers, visited classes, and advised parents, all this in spite of a host of other commitments in such fields as medicine, agriculture, and social renewal.

In studying Rudolf Steiner's educational work, a careful distinction should be made between the courses given to the first teachers of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, who were well prepared through a sound basis in anthroposophy, and those given to public audiences often without the slightest background in spiritual science.

Steiner emphasized that the Waldorf approach was a great deal more than the application of methods of teaching; this new art of education was born out of a solid anthroposophical foundation, out of a knowledge of the growing child as body, soul, and spirit. Today it would be said that Waldorf education is holistic, that it aims at unfolding the capacities of hand, heart, and head in the child according to the stages of child development.

The three lectures published here were given in 1923 to the original teachers of the Waldorf School, who had received four years of intensive training and practice under Steiner's personal guidance. They should be read with this background in mine; their original and sometimes startling message will then be understood more readily. For beginners, it may well be advisable first to work through Steiner's written work and some of the earlier public lectures, for example, A Modern Art of Education, fourteen lectures delivered in August 1923 in Ilkley, England, or The Renewal of Education, fourteen lectures given to Swiss teachers in April and May 1920 in Basel, Switzerland, or Spiritual Ground of Education, four lectures given at Manchester College, Oxford, England, in August 1922. It should be mentioned that many invaluable indications on education will also be found in Steiner's lectures on the social question, the arts, medicine, curative education, and the sciences.

Serious readers will readily become aware that Steiner's comprehensive teachings are undogmatic in character. They are indications, seeds that parents or teachers or anyone genuinely interested in the development and well-being of the child can make their own and verify through experience. Rather than encountering a number of easily applicable educational recipes, they will find themselves engaged in a process of discovery in the realm of childhood and adolescence.

Rene M. Querido

Today I would like to make a few aphoristic remarks on various pedagogical questions which we discussed in our first course and which I have since added to as I feel necessary at the present time. The Christmas course that I gave in Dornach, which in many ways complements the other explanations on pedagogy, I have not yet been able to print after the postscripts. I hope that this will happen some day. But for the time being it has been appearing continuously in the lectures of Steffen at the "Goetheanum". This reprint in the "Goetheanum" will now also be published in book form, so that at least these lectures by Steffen on this Christmas course, which I consider to be especially important for study by those interested in pedagogy, will be available.

Today I would like to point out some feelings that the teacher, the educator, should always have, and that he should also repeatedly, I would like to say meditatively, call into consciousness. The basic feeling must be what I have expressed in various ways: respect for the individuality of the child. We must be aware that there is a spiritual individuality embodied in every child, and that what we have before us as a physical child is not actually a true expression of the child's individuality. The regularity, the structure of the human organism, as you have seen from much that has come before our souls since the first Teacher's Course, is an extraordinarily complicated one. And for a variety of reasons, that which is the true individuality of a child is prevented from fully expressing itself by obstacles in the physical and also in the etheric organism, so that we actually always have before us in the child the more or less unknown true individuality and that which is actually concealed by the physical of the child. It is also possible to express the same truth in the other form that I tried to say in the public lectures in Vienna: We must be aware that in a certain individuality of a child, if we characterize it radically, there could be a genius, and it could also be that we ourselves as teachers and educators would not be a genius. If this relationship exists, that the child is a genius and the teacher is not a genius, it is a completely justified relationship, because not all teachers can be geniuses, and pedagogy has to deal with the general laws. But, of course, it would be quite wrong if the teacher then wanted to inculcate his own individuality or even his own sympathies and antipathies into the child, if he wanted to teach the child as right, as desirable, etc., what he himself thinks is right and desirable. Of course, he would hold the child back on his level, and we must not do that under any circumstances. We can help ourselves tremendously if we, I would say, once again meditate and become very deeply aware that all education basically has nothing to do with the real individuality of the human being, that we, as educators and teachers, actually have the main task, It is our duty as educators and teachers to stand before individuality with reverence, to offer it the possibility to follow its own laws of development, and to remove only those obstacles to development which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional, that is, in the physical body and in the etheric body. We are only called upon to remove those inhibitions which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional and to let the individuality develop freely; so that we should basically use what we teach the child in terms of knowledge only to bring the body, both the physical-emotional and the etheric-emotional, so far forward that the human being can just develop freely.

My dear friends, this seems abstract, but it is the most concrete thing in education, and at the same time it points to where one makes the most mistakes. Many people say that it is necessary to develop the individuality of the child. This is as true as it is empty. For if the physical and etheric inhibitions were not there, the individuality of each child would develop properly in life. But we have to remove these physical and etheric inhibitions. Just think of the terrible things we do when we teach six, seven, eight year old children to read and write. It is not often enough that this is brought home to us in all its gravity. For when the child grows up to be six, seven, eight years old, he really brings nothing with him to point out or even to imitate those little demonic things that appear before him on paper. There is no human relationship to the letter forms of today. Therefore, we must be aware of the fact that there is a terrible gap between what has developed in the later course of human civilization and what the child in his 7th year is. Today we have to teach the child something that it certainly does not want, so that it can grow into today's civilization. And if we don't want to spoil the child, we have to proceed in such a way that we treat the child in these years as it needs to be treated, so that the obstacles to its development are removed and it is gradually led, after the obstacles to its development are removed, to the point of view of the soul, to the state of the soul, where the adult people stood in that period of culture when the present forms of writing came into being. The nature of the child itself gives cause for this, of course.

You see, today experiments are being conducted on the tiredness of children. The fact that such figures have been found should not be the end of the research, but the beginning. We should ask ourselves: Why are children so tired? - We are looking at a system, we are looking at the head system, and probably also at the metabolic system and the limb system, which are tired, while the rhythmic system, which is in the highest flower of its development from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, is not really tired. For the heart beats even when it is tired, and the respiratory rhythm and all rhythms go on unharmed by any fatigue, so that the present figures of experimental psychology say something different from what is usually assumed today. They say that the rhythmic system is not taken into account enough in the education of children. But the rhythmic system is stimulated directly from the soul when the whole teaching is artistic, plastic-artistic or musical-artistic. Then you will find that the child will hardly get tired to a great extent because of this kind of teaching. And the teacher should indeed acquire a watchful eye to see whether his children tire too much; he should acquire a certain instinct to see whether the fatigue is much greater than it should be according to the mere external conditions, whether the air in the classroom is somewhat worse than it should be, whether the children have to sit for hours on end, that is, the purely physical things that occupy the metabolic-limb organism. On the other hand, the child has to think. If the thoughts echo in a quiet rhythm, they are not too tired. They get a little tired, but not too tired. The rhythmic system is the physical organ of education and teaching that must be used especially by the child. Now, in the subjects that are not directly artistic, we must try to make the teaching as artistic as possible. This must be taken very seriously, for this is the only real means of education: the artistic between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Yesterday I said that what is very important for this age of life is that we transform everything into the image, either into the musical image or into the plastic image. Now, of course, you may find how extraordinarily difficult it is in some subjects to work through the image. It will be relatively easy to work through the image in history, where you can make an image of what you are describing; it will be relatively easy in this or that subject, for example, in natural history, where you should also make an image of what you want to teach the child. In other subjects it will be more difficult. In languages, for example, it will not be so difficult to bring things into the picture, if one attaches any importance at all to taking the pictorial aspect of language into account in teaching. One should not miss any opportunity to look at how sentences are structured, for example, a three-part sentence structure consisting of the main clause, the relative clause and the conditional clause, even with ten, eleven, twelve-year-old children. Not true, the grammatical aspect is not the main thing; it should be treated by us only as a means to get the picture, but we should not neglect to give the child, I would say, even a spatial-visual idea of a main clause and a relative clause. Of course, this can be done in many different ways. You can make the main proposition a large circle, the relative proposition a small circle, perhaps placed eccentrically - without theorizing, by staying in the picture - and you can make the conditional proposition, the if proposition, so vivid that you introduce, say, rays against the circle as the conditional factors. It is not necessary to exaggerate these things, but it is really necessary to come back to these things again and again after a good preparation of the subject. And even with ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old children, one should pay attention to what I would call the moral-characterological aspects of pictorial style. Not that you should have style lessons at that age. We discussed yesterday where that should be in the class. Rather, the matter should be grasped more from the inner intuitive. You can go very far. For example, you can treat the individual reading piece, not the pedantic reading pieces that are in our reading books, but what you really prepare carefully, you can treat it according to your temperament. You can talk about a melancholic style or a choleric style, not about the content. So please leave out the content completely, even the poetic content, I mean the sentence structure. There is no need to take things apart, which should be avoided; but the transformation into the image, which should be cultivated, when I say: into the moral-characterological. One can find the possibility to have a stimulating effect on the children already in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th years, if one restrains oneself in an appropriate way to make the necessary studies..

You see, my dear friends, I do not want to mend anybody's things, I only want to characterize something. Again, at our Vienna Congress, I was able to make quite meaningful studies, meaningful for me, when I compared the attitude, the stylistic attitude of those who spoke, let us say, from Northern Germany, and those who spoke as our Viennese, who were called here. I always thought to myself, when Baravalle or Stein or another Viennese comes again, will he again begin his lecture with "if"? That is so characteristic of the Austrian, it is infinitely meaningful to begin with a conditional sentence, it immediately leads into the moral-characterological. I think you yourself are hardly aware of how you begin your lectures with "If"! The North Germans and the Swiss do not begin with "if," they immediately blurt out an unconditional, affirmative sentence. This is so characteristic, and this is how one should learn to approach things, first of all, so that one can become free, if I may say so, from one's own conditions, and so that in this becoming free one can also achieve an artistic treatment, which is not pedantic, an artistic treatment of any teaching material. If you learn to pay attention to such things, you can achieve an artistic treatment of any subject. And I would like to point out that it is extremely important to feel oneself in artistic things in such a way that one pays attention to details in artistic things, if one wants to be a good teacher for children from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Again, look at the photographs*; look at how Dr. Kolisko and Walleen are standing, and do not look at them with an interpretive, commenting sense, but look at them with an artistic sense, and you will see how much they give you. It is very important not to force things like that; of course, if you make a judgment with your mind, that someone always holds a folder in a certain hand position and things like that, it comes out immediately as nonsense. But if you grasp it with an artistic sense, something comes out that cannot be completely put into words, but which pours the artistic into your limbs in a tremendously significant way, which is exactly what you need as an educator. It is very important to be able to transform things into a picture, because the picture brings the things that we want to teach the child closer to the human being.

With what we, after our own scientific education, what we have taken up and what we are always confronted with when we prepare ourselves - the books we prepare ourselves from contain nothing but abominations - we burden ourselves with something that is scientific systematics, and when we do not have enough time to get rid of the whole thing - when we prepare ourselves for a lesson, we have to take a contemporary book in which things are arranged scientifically - then this haunts our minds. When we bring this to the children, it is something that is not possible. And we have to realize that this causes us great difficulties, that today scientific systematics, not human systematics, have crept into the preparation books that we can use. So we have to get rid of it absolutely. We have to get everything that we bring into the school for this age absolutely free of all scientific systematics.

And here it is good to remember times when older children, older young people were taught in such a way that it was taken for granted that the appeal was not to the head, but to the whole person. One only has to remember the medieval education: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, where it was not important to teach this or that, but to get the child to be able to express himself in a sentence that was grammatically correct. There, grammar was not taught, but the child was given the opportunity to think in such a pictorial way that his sentences had a pictorial character. Then, not true, rhetoric: the child should be accustomed to feel the beauty of the word in its formation; dialectic: the child should be accustomed to let the thought free in itself, and so on; there it was a matter of ability. And basically it must also come to ability in the most spiritual things, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. But the ability is reached only at that age when everything is brought into the picture.

Well, that's where the trivialities sometimes play an extraordinarily large role. For example, when presenting mathematics, it really makes a difference whether you put one line of letters that is wider and then another that is shorter, whether you put it at the beginning or in the middle. You can make a picture out of what is an arithmetic operation at the end, which the students have in front of them, and put a certain value on something like that, so that even what you write on the blackboard becomes a picture; that even in the trivialities these things are thoroughly taken into account. Sometimes there are opportunities to bring out the picture from a very special corner of life, I would say. Mathematical formulas or sequences of formulas can sometimes be described by figures that are immediately perceived as beautiful. We should not miss such opportunities. It would be a sin and a pity if we missed such an opportunity to make something descriptive, which might be a kind of unnecessary tendril for those who can only think in a philistine way. We should gradually inoculate the philistro-logical way out of our souls for this age, if I may say so. Today we inoculate it much too much more and more. We should inoculate it out; we should work with all our might towards the imaginative or towards the musical, and then actually come close to rhythm for this age of life.

And now we should not close our minds to the realization that truly imponderables play a great role in the totality of teaching. You see, in our very first pedagogical courses, we spoke of a pedagogical relationship between the four temperaments. The task of the educator is to study these four temperaments in the child continuously, to study them in such a way that he can take them into account continuously. This is because, as I say, the right karma of a class is created through the right treatment of the temperaments of the children in the class. After all, such a class is together; they are souls that are together. As they work with the teacher and with each other, a part of their life karma is played out. All kinds of threads of life are being spun, but a piece of karma is being played out; especially between the 7th and 14th years, a piece of karma is being played out very strongly. And how the individual temperaments work into that karma is what we should look at. In this respect, the class can be a constant subject of inner apercus, if we let this be the quiet undertone of our pedagogical work. And above all, one should not let it happen that in any class there are sleeping, co-sleeping students. By sleeping students I mean those who, during the course of the lesson, give only half or three-quarters or a quarter of their whole being. It can happen that the few gifted ones, as they are usually called - they are not always - show up and the others remain asleep. Then the lesson will be really lively with a few, and the others will always be a kind of extras, and this is what must be avoided at all costs. Because, of course, this becoming an extra or being a chatterbox - I don't mean that in a bad way - is also based on other moments. But it is also based on the contrast of temperaments. Of course, among the students there are those who have, let's say, a sanguine or even a choleric temperament, and they will always show off, and you will always have to deal with them if you don't pay special pedagogical attention to them; and there are others, the more melancholic, phlegmatic ones, who then become the extras. This must be avoided at all costs, because the best thing we can do for the students who think more quickly and speak more easily is to make those who think more slowly and do not open their mouths so readily take part in everything, speak, cooperate, and so on. It is absolutely necessary that we go along with this inconvenience. Then we will feel that for a short time we may make less progress than if we left the extras to themselves, but in the long run it will be different. In the long run it will turn out that we have a tremendous effect on the memory retention of the children by not allowing the extras. What is justified in memory is essentially supported by the fact that we do not allow extras.

And so I would say that the possibility of working quite pictorially depends also on the effectiveness of these imponderables. We will see from experience that if we allow all the temperaments, all the possible dispositions of a class to really live themselves out, that for the age from the change of teeth to sexual maturity we are much more likely to arrive at a pictoriality seated in the soul than if we do not. Of course, a certain, I would say, strong devotion to the lesson is necessary if the things to be taught are really always to be taught with the consideration that they will become pictorial; but nevertheless, one should never end a lesson for this age without giving the child something pictorial. Those who are able to draw with the children from the very beginning have an easier time in this respect; but those who, let us say, give the children something pictorial, for example in languages or arithmetic, have all the more effect on them. And, in fact, there is no other real preparation for the educator for this pictorial work than that which I have indicated: to sharpen our sense of observation of life in such a way that we can respond objectively to what life reveals, especially in the human being. A healthy artistic physiognomics, not only human physiognomics, but also, for example, animal physiognomics, should indeed be revived among educators, a healthy, not the sentimental physiognomics of Lavater and the like, but a healthy physiognomics in which the pictorial is sought, without going so far as to close the concept, staying in the picture, being satisfied with it, when one has brought things into the picture, such a healthy physiognomy should be revived, and it will then pass over of itself into all kinds of actions, into all kinds of processes that the teacher develops during the lesson. Nowhere should we pay so much attention to the how and not so much to the what as in teaching and education. It is not the what that is important, but the fact that the what appears in a certain way, in a certain way in the lesson. And there is no greater enemy for the teacher than an incomplete preparation, because it always makes him stop at the "what," whereas a complete preparation always makes him go from the "what" to the "how," makes him rejoice to see how he can prepare it for the child, how he can form it before the child, because the forming itself has become like an inspiration and the like. We should not shrink back when we ourselves often bring incomprehensible things to the children in this respect. Incomprehensible things which the children accept on our authority - and for the children, between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, authority decides - are better taught to the children than trivial things which are comprehensible to them and which they grasp out of their own intellect.

These are quite, I would say, finer nuances of what the teacher, the educator, should do with his own soul life. You will notice, if you perhaps look again at the Christmas course on education, that there is actually everywhere an emphasis on answering the question: How do we form the shell of the human being, the physical body, the etheric body? - Not, how do we form the individuality? That will form itself. If you say, "How do we form the physical body? -...people today, in this materialistic age, have no idea that it is only through the spiritual-mental processes, the spiritual-mental processes that you develop during the teaching, that you form the physical body.

For example, suppose a child stumbles over its own words, cannot find the next word. You see, in the child, before he has reached sexual maturity, this stumbling over his own words is a trait that is still based in physical corporeality in the Upper Man. The upper man is the man in physical relationship, who undergoes his main development in the first and even in the infantile period of life. If you find the possibility to find out the right tempo for what you make the child sing, tell, to get the right tempo for such a person who makes us wait there when he has to look for the transition from one word to the other, then you are in a position to cure this in the child up to sexual maturity absolutely from the spiritual. You are removing a physical inhibition. If you have not removed it from the physical up to sexual maturity, then you have formed its counterpart in the metabolic limb system, then it has become a property of the intestines, then you cannot get it out. Then whatever you do in the ordinary sense as spiritual practices will not help you. They have to be done in such a way that they affect the digestive system, and of course it is not always possible to introduce this, I would say, in a general way. That would lead to the abuse of certain exercises. But with the child, we have to watch carefully to see if he goes from one word to another, from one thought to another, subnormally slowly. And in the child we can still make the body healthy. We make the digestive system sick if we do not cure such waiting from one word to another in youth. This is our duty, and it is more important than any content - which we need, because we have to teach, and therefore we have to have content - to teach the child. This is simply how the mind works in the whole physical organism. In order to learn to control the physical organism in the right way, we have to know the spiritual science, because it is the spirit that works in the physical organism. Therefore, we need to bring healthy medical thinking closer to educational thinking in a certain way. So that we really know how to take such a thing seriously, let us say that when it is said in the Old Testament that someone was tormented by bad dreams, the expression is not used: My brain has done something special, God has afflicted me through my brain. - No one who was active in the Old Testament would have said that. But he said: God is afflicting me through my kidneys. - And why? For the simple reason that it is true. People today are proud to know that spiritual things come from the brain, and they arrogantly disregard what is written in the Old Testament. Not only the brain is spiritualized, but the whole organism is spiritualized. Dreams, for example, come from the kidneys; the expression in the Old Testament is very serious. Just as it is clever in the modern sense to say that compassion also comes from the brain; but in the deeper sense it is nonsense, and the Old Testament form, that compassion comes from the bowels, is the correct one.

And so we must know that when we approach the child with the soul-spiritual, we are treating its whole body. We are the very ones who, with medical wisdom, take care of the physical-spiritual of the child when we do this or that in the construction of sentences, in the treatment of colors, in the treatment of sounds, in the treatment of this or that object. We are influencing the whole physical; for in the physical is the spirit, and we are influencing this spirit, not only the spirit which is only directly in the brain, for there, strangely enough, is the most ineffective thing. And so we must see ourselves as educators, either as people who are constantly bringing up in children something that nourishes and shapes life, or something that is poisonous and destroys the body. If we exaggerate a little in the direction of formalism, if we make the children think until they are tired, then we condemn them between the ages of 7 and 14 to relatively early sclerosis. We just have to be aware that we are working on the whole life when we develop this or that in the child's environment in education and teaching. And if we are not aware of this, we will certainly not approach pedagogical issues in the right way: We are really entitled to remove only the obstacles and hindrances that arise from the physical and etheric nature of man.

As for the rest, today's man, who is much more selfish than he thinks, will naturally say - this seems right to me, that seems wrong to me - and will then bring up the child to feel and think as much as possible like himself. That, of course, is wrong. What is right in all matters is life - not the individual teacher - whom we must ask. Today, of course, we have to teach a child to write. I must confess that I cannot find in myself any judgment of taste that would give me an answer directly from human nature as to whether a child should learn to write or not; it arises only from consideration of the development of civilization. Mankind has now come to the point where a certain content of civilization has an effect on the way of writing and reading. In order to educate the child not for another world but for this world, we must teach him to read and write. This is something we must accept as a condition of civilization, and we must remove the obstacles to development that come with living in a certain age. We have an enormous amount of work to do if we want to answer the question: How can we make the objects that are already given for the human development of the child as harmless as possible? - Because we can always assume that by giving the child a certain material, we are doing the child more harm than good. So we must always ask ourselves: How can we avoid the harm that must always be done when we teach the child something? Well, of course, this is all the less true the more artistic the material is, and all the more true the more cognitive the material is. But this fact must always be before our minds. And now we should be very clear about this: the right authoritative relationship that should exist between the change of teeth and sexual maturity between the educator and the child, this right authoritative relationship is brought about under no other circumstances than when we make an effort to make the teaching artistic-pictorial. If we can do that, then the authoritative relationship will certainly develop. You see, what undermines the authoritative relationship is one-sided intellectuality. Of course, it is easiest to cultivate one-sided intellectuality in the fields of arithmetic, science, and so on. But it is there that we should work into the pictorial. Often we are too unimaginative in language teaching. Let us be clear about this: when we create figuratively, there is a certain selflessness involved. It is much easier to think cleverly, it is much more selfish to think cleverly, than to create pictorially; and we face the child unselfishly when we create pictorially in our teaching. When the child has reached sexual maturity, and knowledge is to pass into cognition, then, because its intellect is now awakened, it simply rejects the judgment of the teacher, the educator, of its own accord. Then nothing is achieved by mere authority, then we have to be able to compete, then we really have to compete with the child, because actually at the age of 17 one is as clever as at the age of 35 in terms of the ability to judge. There are certain nuances, but basically you are as smart at 17 as you are at 35 in terms of formal logic. So you really have to compete with the child as soon as they reach sexual maturity. And therefore, what I said yesterday, that one must not show oneself in any way, must come true. Of course, this will be easy for the younger child if you devote yourself to an artistic organization of the lessons. And a great deal will be achieved if one gets a feeling for how different parts of one or the other can be formed artistically in different ways. Let's say you take the children through a series of plants. You talk about the blossoms; now you try to describe the blossoms in the whole tone, I would say, up to the tone of voice, in such a way that the whole words and ideas are something flowing, that they are light. Now, when you develop this, you try to appeal to the sanguine children in particular, so that the sanguine children contribute to the whole class what they have especially in the ability to perceive, in the easy ability to perceive, let us say, for such ideas as an artistic person develops when he describes blossoms. If you turn to the leaves, you may find that you strike such a tone that the melancholy children are more interested in the leaves; the dialog with the class now passes to the melancholy children. If you describe the roots, which are not usually seen, but which you can describe in such a way that their power can be felt in the flowers, if you describe what is usually invisible, then you must no longer describe statically, but dynamically, and then the choleric children help you to have a real dialog. In this way the whole class can be used for mutual stimulation, if only one develops the sense for it, which can become instinctive. Only, isn't it, it is necessary to pay attention to such things.

Well, actually the thing is that you imagine it to be much more difficult than it actually is. Because once you have brought yourself a quarter in such a direction, then you yourself have the need to bring yourself in 'such a direction'. But there is a catch. You start with great desire. You say to yourself: I want to do this now, I really want to create a picture, I want to create a picture for the lessons, tomorrow I will start. - Now it goes on for eight days, but after that you get lazy, and that is the catch. You have to persevere for a quarter of a year, and then you have to persevere longer. Eight days won't do it, but a quarter of a year will do it, if you are serious about training yourself for a quarter of a year.

And now today, my dear friends, I do not want to have given you one rule or another for one thing or another in class. Perhaps we will always organize pedagogical lectures at future meetings, so that we always move forward. But I would have liked to give you something today that would have made you meditate and put you in a pedagogical and pedagogical mood. I would have liked to see an arm move differently here and there in a class, so that it would create a different image in front of the students. Sometimes I wish that the always unimaginative bumpiness, for example, would not be one of the first things in the classroom. Sometimes I wish that this or that ungraceful wiping of the blackboard would be replaced by a more graceful one. All this comes naturally. It is worked out from the unartistic to the artistic when the general sense for it is there, and the general sense is actually much more important for the pedagogue than the individual dogmatic rule. I would like you to have taken up this today, which draws your attention to the importance of the heartbeat with which one is in pedagogy.

If today we think of the education of the young, we must bear in mind that we are concerned with feelings, the ideas, the will impulses of the next generation; we must be clear that our present work is to prepare this next generation for definite tasks which will be accomplished, at some time in the future of mankind. When a thing of this kind is said, the question at once arises; Why is it then that humanity has reached the widespread misery in which it is today? Humanity has entered into this misery because it has really in essential things made itself dependent, through and through dependent, on the kind of thinking and feeling peculiar to the western man. It is true to say that when today someone in Central Europe speaks about, e.g., Fichte, Herder or even Goethe, if he belongs to external public life, either as a journalist, book-wright or the like, he is much further from the true spiritual impulse living in Fichte, Herder or Goethe when he is thinking and active in Berlin or Vienna, than he is from what is felt and thought today in London, Paris, New York or Chicago. Things have worked out gradually In such a way that speaking generally our whole civilization has been flooded by the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of the western nations and our whole public life is lived in the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of these nations.

It must also be admitted that this is particularly true where the art of education is concerned. For from the last third of the 19th century European nations, speaking generally, have learned from the western nations in all such educational matters, and today it is taken for granted by those men who discuss or dispute among other things about questions of education, that they should make use of the habits of thought which come from the west. If you trace back all the educational ideas which are considered reasonable in Central Europe today, you will find their source in the views of Herbert Spencer or similar men. People do not trace out the numerous paths by which the views of Spencer and others like him have entered the heads of those who have to decide about spiritual questions in Central Europe, but these paths exist—they are to be found. And if you (I will not lay special stress on the details) take the spirit of the educational line such as is to be found, e.g., in Fichte, it is now not only absolutely different from that which is generally looked upon today as sensible pedagogy, but the fact is that modern men are hardly in a position to think and feel along the lines which would enable then to understand what was meant by Fichte and Herder that they could find a way of continuing it. Thus, our experience today in the realm of pedagogy, especially in the art of pedagogy, is that the principles that have arisen are exactly the opposite of what they ought to be. Here I would like to point out to you something which Spencer has written.

Spencer was of the opinion that the way of giving object lessons should be such that they would lead over into the experience of the naturalist, into the research work of the men of science. What then would have to be done in the school? According to that, we should have to teach the children in school in such a way that when they are grown up and have the opportunity, they can continue what they have learned in the school about plants, minerals, animals, etc., so that they can become regular scientists or natural philosophers. It is true that this kind of idea is frequently attacked, but at the same time people really put this principle into practice. And for this reason; Our textbooks are composed with this in view, and no one thinks of altering or doing away with our textbooks. Today the fact is that, e.g., the textbooks on botany are composed for future botanists rather than for human beings in general. In the same way textbooks on zoology are written for future zoologists, not for human beings in general.

Now the remarkable thing is that we ought to strive for the exact opposite of that which Spencer has laid down as a true educational principle. When we are teaching the children about plants and animals in our Volkschule lessons, we could hardly imagine a greater mistake in our method of education than to treat the subject as an introduction to the studies which would be required to enable the child later to become a botanist or zoologist. If, on the contrary, you could have arranged your lessons so that your way of teaching about plants and animals would hinder the child in question from becoming a botanist or zoologist, then you would have acted more wisely than by following Spencer's principle, for no one should become a botanist or zoologist through what he learns in the Volkschule; that he can only become through his special gifts which are revealed by his choice of vocation and which would be sure to appear during his life if there is a true art of education. Through his gifts! That is, if he has the gifts necessary for a botanist, he can become a botanist; and if he has the gifts necessary for a zoologist, he can become a zoologist. That can only be the result of the gifts of the child in question, i.e., of his predetermined Karma. This must come about through the fact that we recognise this child has the makings of a botanist, that child has the makings of a zoologist. It must never be the result of making our Volkschule lessons in any way a preparation for special scientific activity. Just think what has happened of late. It has come about that unfortunately our “scientists” have been our educationalists; people who have definitely trained themselves to think scientifically have been engaged in pedagogy, have taken a most important part in deciding educational questions. That is to say, it has been thought that the teacher as such has something to do with the scientist; a scientific training has actually been taken as a teacher's training, whereas the two should be completely and absolutely different. If the teacher is a scientist, if he makes it his business to think scientifically in a narrow sense (that he can do as a private man, but not as a teacher), then there comes about something which does often happen. The teacher cuts rather a comical figure in his class and among his pupils or among his colleagues; jokes are made at his expense. Goethe's “Baccalaureus” in the upper classes is not such a rarity as is usually supposed.

And as a matter of fact, if you are asked today whether you would be more on the side of the teacher when his pupils make jokes about him or on the side of the scholars, you would under present educational conditions be more on the side of the scholars. For it is in our universities that you can best see whence this has arisen. What are our universities, properly speaking? Are they institutions for teaching young men and women or are they institutions for research? They would like to be both and that is why they have become the caricatures which they are today. It is usually even held up as a special feature of our universities that they are at the same time institutions for teaching and for research. But it is in this way that the bad methods, which come into our education when it is carried out by scientists, work their way first of all into our highest educational centres. Later these bad methods find their way down into the Mittelschule, and then finally also into the Volkschule. And it is this which cannot sufficiently be borne in mind, that the art of education must proceed from life and that it cannot proceed from abstract scientific thought.

Now the remarkable thing is that there is now arising, chiefly out of the western culture, just what can be called a pedagogy with a scientific, even a natural scientific, bent and that when we remember what was to be found in Herder, in Fichte, what was to be found in Jean Paul, in Schiller and similar minds, we know that here is really a pedagogy, which has been forgotten, taken from life, a pedagogy drawn directly from life. And now there lies before us the calling of the Central European nations, that calling which has its place in the history of the world, to cherish and develop this pedagogy, to make it their esoteric task to develop this pedagogy. For many things can be common to humanity and many things must be common to humanity if an improvement in social affairs is to come in the future; but the western nations will not be able to understand what will arise out of the whole concrete Central European spiritual culture with regard to the art of education; on the contrary, it will annoy them, and it really ought not to be told them in its original form. It could only have an undesirable effect upon them. It will only be possible to speak of it to them when they have made up their minds to take their stand on the esoteric foundation of Spiritual Science. With regard to all those things which have been looked upon in Germany during the last forty years with such pride, with regard to all those things which have been considered such a great advance, Germany has lost. All this will pass over to the dominion of the western nations. In this respect there is nothing to be done, and we can only hope to awaken so much understanding for the threefold social organism that the western nations will take part in it. But with regard to what has to be given for the art of education, we have something to give the world from Central Europe which no one else can give, not an oriental and not a western man. But we must know how to keep this among those who are able to understand it; we must understand how to guard it with a certain sense of trust, and we must know that it is this guardianship which will make our work effectual. You must know exactly about what things you have to be silent before certain people if you want to obtain a result. Then we must above all things be clear that there is nothing to hope from anything that might come to us from the kind of thought which, proceeding from the west, is indispensable in many branches of modern civilization; we must know that there is absolutely nothing to be expected from this direction for the educational art we have to develop.

There is a publication about education by Herbert Spencer which is extraordinarily Interesting. He gives there a whole number of maxims, of “Principles,” as he calls them, about the intellectual education of the child. Among these principles there is one which he especially emphasizes. In teaching you should never proceed from the abstract, but always from the concrete; you should always work your subject out from an individual case. Now in his book about education, before anything concrete is approached, there is the worst possible abstract litter, really abstract chaff, and he does not notice that he is himself carrying out the opposite of those principles which he sets forth as indispensable. Thus, we have an illustration of how an eminent, leading philosopher of the present day absolutely contradicts what he himself advocates.

Now you saw last year that our pedagogy has not to be built up on abstract principles of education, for it was said that we should not bring things to the child from the outside, but rather develop the individuality of the child. You know that our educational art should be built upon a real sympathy with the child's being, that it should be built up, in the widest sense, on a knowledge of the growing child, and in our first course of lectures and then later in our conferences we have collected sufficient facts about the being of the growing child. If as teachers we can enter into the child's being, then, out of our knowledge of the child, there will spring up a perception of the way in which we should act. In this respect we must as teachers become artists. Just as it is impossible for an artist to take a book on aesthetics in his hand in order to paint or model according to the principles laid down by the writer, so it should be quite impossible for a teacher to use an “educational guide” in order to teach, but what he needs is a real insight into what the child really is, what he will become as he works his way through childhood. It is above all necessary that we should be clear about the following: we teach, let us say, to begin with in the first class, the 6-7 year old children; now our teaching will always be bad, will have failed to fulfil its purpose if after we have worked with this first class for a year we do not say to ourselves; Who then has really learned the most? It is I, the teacher! If we say to ourselves, “At the beginning of the school year I had excellent educational principles, I have followed the best educational authorities, have done everything to carry out these principles;”—If you really had done this, you really would have taught badly. You would however certainly have taught best if each morning you had gone into your class in fear and trembling without over much confidence in yourself and then had said at the end of the year, you yourself have really learned the most during this time! For whether you can say: you, yourself have learned the most depends on how you have acted; it depends upon what you have really done, depends upon your constantly having had the feeling: you are growing while you are helping the children to grow, you are experimenting in the highest sense of the word, you are not really able to do so very much, but by working with the children there grows in you a certain power. Sometimes you will have the feeling: there is not much to be done with this kind of child, but you will have taken trouble with them. From other children, owing to their special gifts, you will have had certain experiences. In short, you have become quite a different person from what you were before you began, and you have taught what you would not have been able to teach a year earlier. At the end of the school year you say: yes, now for the first time you can do what you ought to have been doing. This is quite a religious feeling! And here there lies hidden a certain secret. If at the beginning of the school year you had really been able to do all you can do at the end, you would have taught badly. You have given good lessons because you had to work them out as you went along! I must put the following paradox before you. You taught well when you did not know at the beginning what you had learned by the end of the year, and it would have been harmful if you had already known at the beginning of the year what you had learned by the end. A remarkable paradox!

It is important for many people that they should know this, but it is most important of all that teachers should know it. For this is a special case of universal comprehensive understanding; a knowledge, no matter what the subject is, which can be comprehended in abstract principles, which can be represented by ideas in the mind, can be of no practical value; it is only what leads to this knowledge, only what is found on the way to this knowledge that is of any practical value. For this knowledge which is ours after we have taught for a year, receives its first value after our death. It is not until after the death of a man that this knowledge becomes such a reality that it can further his development, that it can further the development of the real individual man. In life it is not the ready knowledge that is of value, but the work which leads to the knowledge and particularly in the art of education this work has its own particular value. It is the same in education as in the arts, I do not think that an artist has the right attitude of mind if, when he has finished a work, he does not say to himself; it is only now that you could really do it. I do not think that an artist has the right attitude of mind If he is satisfied with any work he has done. He may have a certain natural egoistic feeling for what he has done, but he cannot really be satisfied with it. A work of art when it is finished really loses for the artist a large part of its interest, and this loss of interest is owing to the peculiar nature of the knowledge which is acquired while the work is being done. And on the other hand, the living element in a work of art, the life that springs from it, owes its being to the fact that it has not yet been transmuted into knowledge.

The same thing is indeed true with regard to the whole human organism. Our head is as “finished” as anything can be finished, for it is formed out of the forces of our last incarnation; it is over mature. Human heads are all over mature, even the immature ones. But the rest of the organism is only at the stage of furnishing the seed for the head in our next incarnation; it is full of life and energy, but it is incomplete. It will not be until our death that the rest of our organization will really show its true form, namely the form of the forces which are at work in it. The constitution of the rest of our organism shows that there is flowing life in it; ossification is reduced to the minimum in this part of our organism while in our head it reaches the maximum.

This peculiar kind of real heartfelt modesty, this feeling that we ourselves are still only becoming, is something which will give the teachers strength, for more arises out of this feeling than out of any abstract principles. If when we are in our class we are conscious that we are doing everything imperfectly, then we shall teach well. If on the other hand we are constantly smacking our lips with satisfaction over the perfection of our teaching, then it is quite certain that we shall teach badly.

But now imagine the following: to begin with you have charge of the teaching of the first class and so on, so that you have gone through everything that has to be gone through, of excitements, disappointments, successes too, if you will. Imagine that you have gone through all the classes of the Volkschule; at the end of each year you have spoken to yourself somewhat after the fashion that I have just described, and now you go down again from the eighth to the first class. Yes, now it might be supposed that you must say to yourself; now I am beginning with what I have learned, now I shall be able to do it well, I shall be an excellent teacher! But it will not be like that. The course of your new class will bring something quite different before your mind. At the end of the second third of each school year, you will say just the same out of a really right feeling. I have now learned what it was possible to learn about seven, eight and nine-year old children by working with them; at the end of each school year I know what I ought to have done. But when you have reached the fourth or fifth, school year, you will again not know how you really ought to have taught. For now, you will correct what you thought to be right after you have taught for a year. And so, after you have finished the eighth school year and have corrected everything, if you really have the good fortune to begin again at the first school year, you will be in the same position, only you will teach in a different spirit. But if you go through your teaching with true, noble, not with mock scepticism, you will find that your diffidence has brought you an imponderable power which will make you peculiarly fitted to accomplish more with the children that are entrusted to you. That is doubtless true. The effect however in life will really then only be a different one, not one that is so much better, but a different effect. I might say that the quality which you bring about in the children will not be much better than the first time; the effect will only be a different one. You will attain something different in quality but not much more in quantity. You will attain something that is different in quality and that is sufficient, for everything which we acquire in the way described with the necessary, noble diffidence and heartfelt humility has the effect that we are able to make individualities out of the children; on the whole they become individualities. We cannot have the same class twice over and send out into the world the same copies of a cut and dried educational pattern.

We can however give the world figures which are individually different. We bring about many-sidedness in life. This does not depend on the working out of abstract principles, but rather this many-sidedness in life depends on a deeper understanding of life such as has been put before you.

Thus, you can see that what matters more than anything else in a teacher is the way in which he regards his holy calling. That is not without significance, for the most Important things In teaching and in education are those which are imponderable. A teacher who enters his classroom with this feeling in his heart achieves something different from another. Just as, even in everyday life, it is not always the largest thing physically that determines our standard but something quite small, so also it is not always what we do with the largest number of words which carries most weight, but sometimes it is that perception, that feeling which we have built up in our hearts before we enter the classroom. There is one thing especially which is of great importance. That is that we must quickly strip off our narrower, personal self like a snake skin when we go into the class. A teacher may in certain circumstances, because he, as is sometimes said with such self-satisfaction, is also only human, go through all sorts of experiences between the end of a class one day and beginning again on the next. It may be that he has been warned by his creditors, or he may have had a quarrel with his wife, as does happen in life.

These are things which bring disharmonies. Disharmonies of this kind give a man's frame of mind a certain tendency; so also do happy joyous feelings. The father of one of your pupils, if he particularly likes you, may have sent you a hare after he has been out hunting, or a bunch of flowers perhaps, if you are a lady teacher. What I mean is that it is quite a natural thing in life to have moods of this kind. As teachers we must train ourselves to lay aside these moods and to give ourselves up entirely to the content of the subject we are going to teach, so that we are really able in presenting one subject to speak tragically, taking our mood from our subject and then to pass over into a humorous mood as we proceed with our lesson, in this way entering completely into our subject. The important thing however is that we should now be able to perceive the whole reaction of the class to tragedy or sentimentality or humour. Then, when we are in a position to do this, we shall be aware that tragedy, sentimentality and humour are of extraordinary significance for the souls of children. And if we allow our lessons to be carried along by an alternation between humour, sentimentality and tragedy, if we pass from the one mood into the other and back again, if we are really able, after presenting something for which we needed a certain heaviness, to pass over into a certain lightness, not a forced lightness, but one that arises because we are living in our lesson, then we are bringing about in the soul something akin to the in and outbreathing in the bodily organism. In teaching, our object is not to teach merely intellectually or intellectualistically, but to be able to really take these various moods into consideration. For what is tragedy, what is sentimentality, what is a “melancholic” mood? It is just the same as an inbreathing in the organism, the same as filling the organism with air. Tragedy signifies that we are trying harder and harder to draw our physical body together so that in our drawing together of the physical body we are aware how the astral body comes ever more and more out of the physical body owing to the drawing together of the physical body. A humorous mood signifies that we paralyze the physical body, but with the astral body we do just the opposite of what we did before; we stretch it out as far as possible, stretch it out over its surroundings so that we are aware, if we, e.g., do not merely see redness but grow into it, how we stretch out our astral body beyond this redness, pass over into it. Laughing simply means that we drive the astral body out of our face; laughing is simply nothing else but an outbreathing. Only, if we want to apply all this, we must have a certain feeling for the force there is in these things. It is not always advisable to go straight over into something humorous when we have just had something serious or melancholy, but if we can always have in our lessons the means of preventing the childish soul from being imprisoned by the serious, the tragic, and of freeing it so that it can really experience this breathing in and out between the two frames of mind.

I have now told you something of the variety of moods which should be taken into consideration by the teacher, for this is just as necessary as any other part of special pedagogy.

It is impossible to educate or teach without a spiritual grasp of the whole human being, for this whole human being comes into consideration even far more prominently during the time of a child's development than later on. As we know, this whole human being comprises within itself the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. These four members of the nature of man are by no means going through a symmetrical development, but rather they develop in very different ways; and we must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and of the etheric body, and that of the astral body and of the ego. The outer manifestations of this differentiated development express themselves—as you know from the various elucidations—in the change of teeth and in that change which in the male appears as the change of voice at puberty, but which also proclaims itself clearly in the female, though in a different way. The essence of the phenomenon is the same as with the male in the change of his voice, only in the female organism it appears in a more diffused form, so that it is not merely observable in one organ as in the case of the male organism, but it extends more over the entire organism.

You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice, or puberty, lies that period of teaching with which we have principally to do in the grade-schools; but the careful educator, in teaching and educating, must pay close attention as well to the years following the change of voice, or its analogy in the female organism.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. Before the change of teeth—that is, between birth and the change of teeth—the physical body and the etheric body in the child's organism are strongly influenced by the nervous-sensory system, that is, from above downward. Up to about the seventh year the physical body and the etheric body are most active from the head. In the head are concentrated, as it were, the forces that are particularly active in these years—that is, in the years when imitation plays so important a role. And what takes place in the formative process in the remaining organism of trunk and limbs is achieved through the emanation of rays from the head to this remaining organism, to the trunk and the limb organism, from the physical body and the etheric body. That which here radiates from the head into the physical and etheric bodies of the whole child, right into the tips of his fingers and toes—this that radiates from the head into the whole child is soul-activity, even though it has its inception in the physical body: the same soul-activity that is later active in the soul as mind and memory. Later on this soul-activity appears in such a form that after the change of teeth the child begins to think, and that his memories become more conscious. The whole change that takes place in the soul-life of the child shows that certain psychic powers previously active in the organism become active as soul-forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is a result of the same forces which after the seventh year appear as mental forces, intellectual forces.

There you have a case of actual co-operation between soul and body, when you realize how the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body but independently. Now those forces which in the body itself come newly into being as soul-forces begin to be active with the seventh year; and from then on, they operate through into the next incarnation. Now that which is radiated forth from the body is repulsed, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are checked. Thus, at this time of the change of teeth the hardest battle is fought between the forces tending downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The physical change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between those two kinds of forces: the forces that later appear in the child as the reasoning and intellectual powers, and those that must be employed particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. All these forces that shoot up, arising out of the conflict, we employ when we develop writing out of drawing; for these forces really tend to pass over into plastic creation, drawing, and so forth. Those are the forces that come to an end with the change of teeth, that previously had modelled the body of the child: the sculpture-forces. We work with them later, when the change of teeth is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are in the main the forces in which the child's soul lived in the spiritual world before conception; at first their activity lies in forming the body, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul- forces. Thus, in the educational period following the seventh year, during which we must work with the forces of authority, we simply see that manifesting itself in the child which formerly he practiced unconsciously as imitation, when these forces still influenced the body unconsciously. If later the child becomes a sculptor, a draftsman, or an architect—but a real architect who works out of the forms—this is because such a person has the capacity for retaining in his organism, in his head, a little more of those forces that radiate downward into the organism, so that later on as well these forces of childhood can radiate downward. But if they are entirely used up, if with the change of teeth everything passes over into the psychic, children result who have no talent for architecture, who could never become sculptors.

These forces are related to the experiences between death and a new birth; and the reverence that is needed in educational activity, and that takes on a religious character, arises if one is conscious that when, around the seventh year, one calls forth from the child's soul these forces that are applied in learning to draw and to write, it is actually the spiritual world that sends down these forces. And the child is the mediator, and you are in reality working with forces sent down from the spiritual world. When this reverence permeates the instruction it truly works miracles. And if you have this reverence, if you have the feeling that by means of this telephone which transcends time you are in contact with the forces developed in the spiritual world during the time before birth—if you have this feeling that engenders a deep reverence, then you will see that through the reality of such a feeling you can accomplish more than through any amount of intellectual theorizing about what should be done. The teacher's feelings are the most important means of education there is, for this reverence can have an immeasurable formative influence upon the child.

Thus, we find in the change of teeth, when the child is entrusted to us, a process that directly represents a transfer through the child of spiritual forces out of the spiritual world into the physical world.

Another process takes place in the years of puberty, but it is prepared gradually through the whole cycle from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year. During this period something comes to light in those regions of the soul-life not yet illuminated by consciousness—for consciousness is still being formed, and something of the outer world which remains unconscious is constantly radiating into those regions not yet illuminated by consciousness—that only gradually becomes conscious, but that from birth has permeated the child from the outer world, that has co-operated in building the child's body, and that has entered into the plastic forces.

Those, again, are different forces. While the plastic forces enter the head from within, these forces now come from without. They are dammed up by the plastic forces and then descend into the organism. They co-operate in what takes place, beginning with the seventh year, in connection with the building of the child's body. I can characterize these forces in no other way than as those active in speech and in music. These forces are derived from the world.

The musical forces derive more from the outer world, the extra-human world, from the observation of processes in nature, particularly their regularities and irregularities. For all that takes place in nature is permeated by a mysterious music: I In- earthly projection of the “music of the spheres.” In every plant, in every animal, there is really incorporated a tone of the music of the spheres. That is also the case with reference to the human body, but it no longer lives in what is human speech—that is, in expressions of the soul—but it does live in the body, in its forms and so forth. All this the child absorbs unconsciously, and that is why children are musical to such a high degree. They take all that into their organism. While that which the child experiences as forms of movement, lines and plastic elements in his surroundings is absorbed by him and then acts from within, from the head, all that is absorbed by the child as tone-texture, as speech-content, comes from without. And this again, that which comes from without, is opposed by the gradually developing spiritual element of music and speech—only somewhat later: around the fourteenth year. This also is dammed up again now, in the woman in the whole organism, in the man more in the region of the larynx, where it causes the change of voice. The whole process, then, is brought about by the fact that here an element of the nature of will expresses itself from within in conflict with a similar element coming from without; and in this conflict is manifested that which at puberty appears as the change of voice. That is a conflict between inner music-speech forces and outer music-speech forces. Up to the seventh year, man is essentially permeated more by plastic and less by musical forces—that is, less by the music and speech forces that glow through the organism. But beginning with the seventh year what proceeds from music-speech becomes particularly active in the etheric body. Then this condition is opposed by the ego and the astral body: an element of the nature of will struggles from with-out against the similar one from within, and this appears at puberty. It is manifest even externally by the pitch of the voice that a difference exists between the male and the female. Only partially do the pitches of the voices of men and of women over lap: the woman's voice reaches higher, the man's goes lower—down to the bass. That corresponds with absolute accuracy to the structure of the remaining organism that forms itself out of the conflict of these forces.

These things show that in our soul-life we are concerned with something which at certain definite times co-operates also in the up-building of the organism. All the abstract discussions you find in modern scientific books on psychology, all the talk about psycho-physical parallelism, are merely testimony to the inability to grasp the connection between the psychic and the physical. For the psychic is not connected with the physical in the manner set forth in the senseless theories thought out by the psycho-physical parallelists; but rather we have to do with the recognition of this wholly concrete action of the psychic in the body, and then in turn with the reaction. Up to the seventh year what is plastic-architectonic works together with what is active in music-speech; only this changes in the seventh year, so that from then on the relation between music-speech on the one hand and the plastic-architectonic on the other is merely a different one. But through the whole period up to puberty this co-operation takes place between the plastic-architectonic, which emanates from the head and has its seat there, and speech-music, which comes from without, uses the head as a passage, and spreads itself into the organism.

From this we see that human language as well, but particularly music, co-operates in the formation of man. First it forms him, then it is dammed up as it halts at the larynx; now it does not enter the gate as it did before. For before, you see, it is speech that changes our organs, even down into the bony system; and anyone who observes a human skeleton from a psycho-physical thoughts of our present-day philosophers--and considers the differentiation between the male and the female skeleton sees in the skeleton an embodied musical achievement performed in the reciprocal action between the human organism and the outer world. Were we to take a sonata, and could we preserve its structure through some spiritual process of crystallization, we would have, as it were, the principal forms, the scheme of arrangement, of the human skeleton. And that will incidentally attest the difference between man and the animals. Whatever the animal absorbs of the music-speech element—very little of the speech, but very much of the musical—passes through the animal, because in a sense the animal lacks man's isolation that later leads to mutation. In the shape of an animal skeleton we find a musical image too, but only in the sense that a composite picture of the different animal skeletons, such as one can gain, for instance, in a museum, is needed to yield a musical coherence. An animal invariably manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

Such things we should consider carefully in forming our picture of man: they will show us what feelings we should develop. As our reverence grows through feeling our connection, through fostering our feeling of contact, with pre-natal conditions, we acquire greater enthusiasm for teaching, by occupying ourselves intensely with the other forces of man. A Dionysian element, as it were, irradiates the music-speech instruction, while we have more of an Apollonian element in teaching the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we impart with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The plastic forces offer the stronger opposition, hence they are held up as early as the seventh year; the others act less vigorously, so they are held up only in the fourteenth year. You must not interpret that to mean physical strength and weakness: it refers rather to the counter-pressure that is exerted. Since the plastic forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter-pressure is stronger. Therefore, they must be held up earlier, whereas the music-forces are permitted by cosmic guidance to remain longer in the organism. The human being is permeated longer by the music forces than by the plastic ones.

If you let this thought ripen within you and bring the requisite enthusiasm to bear, conscious that by developing an appreciation for speech and music precisely during the grade-school period, when that battle is still raging and when you are still influencing the corporeality—not just the soul—then you are preparing that which man carries with him even beyond death. To this we contribute essentially with everything we teach the child of music and speech during the grade-school period. And that gives us a certain enthusiasm, because we know that thereby we are working for the future. On the other hand, by working with the plastic forces we make contact with what lived in man before birth or conception, and that gives us reverence. In that which reaches into the future we infuse our own forces, and we know that we are fructifying the germ of music-speech with something that will operate into the future after the physical has been stripped off. Music itself is a reflection of what is spheric in the air—only thus does it become physical. The air is in a sense the medium that renders tones physical, just as it is the air in the larynx that renders speech physical. That which has its being as non-physical in the speech-air, and as non-physical in the music-air unfolds its true activity only after death. That gives us the right enthusiasm for our teaching, because we know that when working with music and speech we are working for the future. And I believe that in the pedagogy of the future, teachers will no longer be addressed as they usually are today, but rather in ideas and concepts that can transform themselves into feelings, into the future. For nothing is more important than that we be able, as teachers, to develop the necessary reverence, the necessary enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—those are two fundamental forces by which the teacher-soul must be permeated.

To make you understand the matter still better I should like to mention that music has its being principally in the human astral body. After death man still carries his astral body fur a time; and as long as he does so, until he lays it aside completely—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy — there still exists in man after death a sort of memory—it is only a sort of memory—of earthly music. Thus, it comes about that whatever in life we receive of music continues to act like a memory of music after death—until about the time the astral body is laid aside. Then the earthly music is transformed in the life after death into the “music of the spheres,” and it remains as such until some time previous to the new birth. The matter will be more comprehensible for you if you know that what man here on earth receives in the way of music plays a very important role in the shaping of his soul-organism after death. That organism is molded there during this period. This is, of course, the kamaloka time; and that is also the comforting feature of the kamaloka time: we can render easier this existence, which the Roman Catholics call purgatory, for human beings if we know that. Not, to be sure, by relieving them of their perception: that they must have; for they would remain imperfect if they could not observe the imperfect things they have done. But we furnish the possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life if during that time after death, when he still has his astral body, he can have many memories of things musical. This can be studied on a comparatively low plane of spiritual knowledge. You need only, after having heard a concert, wake up in the night, and you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert again before waking. You even experience it much better by thus awaking in the night after a concert. You experience it very accurately. The point is that music imprints itself upon the astral body, it remains there, it still vibrates; it remains for about thirty years after death. What comes from music continues to vibrate much longer than what comes from speech: we lose the latter as such comparatively quickly after death, and there remains only its spiritual extract. What is musical is as long as the astral body. What comes from speech can be a great boon to us after death, especially if we have often absorbed it in the form which I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. When I describe the latter in this way I naturally have every reason to point out that these things cannot be rightly interpreted without keeping in view the peculiar course the astral body takes after death: then the matters must be described somewhat as I have described them in my lectures on eurythmy. Here, you see, we must talk to people in the most primitive language, so to speak; and it is really true that, seen from the point of view beyond the Threshold, people are actually all primitive: only beyond the Threshold are they real human beings. And we can only work ourselves out of this primitive-man state by working ourselves into spiritual reality. This is also the reason for the constantly increasing fury against the endeavors of Anthroposophy to show the path to a spiritual reality.

Now I would call your attention to something that is very much in the foreground in the art of pedagogy and that can be pedagogically employed—namely, that in the first conflict which I described in connection with the adolescent child, the outer expression of which is the change of teeth, and in that later struggle whose equivalent is the change of voice, there is to be considered something peculiar that gives to each its special character: everything that up to the seventh year descends from the head appears as an attack in relation to that which meets it from within and which builds up. And everything is a warding off that acts from within toward the head, that rises upward and opposes the current emanating from the head and descending.

In the case of music in turn the conditions are similar; but here that which comes from within appears as an attack, and that which descends from above through the head-organism appears as the warding off. If we had not music, frightful forces really would rise up in man. I am completely convinced that up to the sixteenth or seventeenth century traditions deriving from the old Mysteries were active, and that even then people still wrote and spoke under the influence of this after-effect of the Mysteries. They no longer knew, to be sure, the whole meaning of this effect, but in much that still appears in comparatively recent times we simply have reminiscences of the old Mystery-wisdom. Hence, I have always been deeply impressed by the passage in Shakespeare :*

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Is fit for treason, murder and deceit!
Let no such man be trusted.”

Merchant of Venice, V, 1.

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.”

Translator's Note: The third line of the German translation of this passage reads: “Is fit for treason, murder and deceit”, and thus it is quoted by Dr. Steiner. Thus, must be kept in mind to understand what follows.

In the old Mystery-schools the pupils were told: that which acts in man as an attack from within and which must be continually warded off, which is dammed back for the nature of man, is “treason, murder and deceit,” and the music that is active in man is that which opposes the former. Music is the means of defense against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder and deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains what comes to us from music-speech quite aside from the pleasure it affords. Its purpose is to make people into human beings. One must, of course, keep in mind that the old Mystery- teachers expressed themselves somewhat differently: they expressed things more concretely. They would not have said “treason, murder and deceit” (it is already toned down in Shakespeare) but would have said something like “serpent, wolf and fox.” The serpent, the wolf and the fox are warded off from the inner nature of the human being through music. The old Mystery-teachers would always have used animal forms to depict that which rises out of the human being, but which must then be transformed into what is human. Thus, we can achieve the right enthusiasm when we see the treacherous serpent rising out of the child and combat it with music-speech instruction, and in like manner contend with the murderous wolf and the tricky fox or the cat. That is what can then permeate us with the intelligent, the true sort of enthusiasm—not the burning, Luciferic sort that alone is acknowledged today. We must recognize, then: attack and warding off.

Man has within him two levels where the warding off occurs. First, within himself, where the warding off appears in the change of teeth in the seventh year; and then again, in what he has received from music and speech, through which is warded off that which tends to rise up within him. But both battlefields are within man himself, what comes from music-speech more toward the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic- plastic more toward the inner world. But there is still a third battlefield, and that lies at the border between the etheric body and the outer world. The etheric body is always larger than the physical body; it extends beyond it in all directions; and here also there is such a battlefield. Here the battle is fought more under the influence of consciousness, whereas the other two proceed more in the subconscious. And the third conflict manifests itself when everything has worked itself to the surface that is a transformation of what takes place on the one hand between the human being and what is plastic-architectonic, and on the other between him and what is music-speech, when this amalgamates with the etheric body, thereby taking hold of the astral body, and is thus moved more toward the periphery, toward the outer border.

Through this originates everything that shoots through the fingers in drawing, painting, and so on. This makes of painting an art functioning more in the environs of man. The draftsman, the sculptor, must work more out of his inner faculties, the musician more out of his devotion to the world. That which lias ils being in painting and drawing, to which we lead the child when we have it make forms and lines, that is a battle that lakes place wholly on the surface, a battle that is fought principally between two forces, one of which acts inward from without, the other on I ward from within. The force that acts outward from within really tends constantly to disperse the human being, tends to continue the forming of man—not violently but in a delicate way. This force—it is not so powerful as that, but I must express il more radically so that you will see what I mean—this force, acting outward from within, tends to make our eyes swell up, to raise a goiter for us, to make the nose grow big and to make the ears bigger: everything tends to swell outward. Another force is the one we absorb from the outer world, through which this swelling up is warded off. And even if we only make a stroke—draw something—this is an effort to divert, through the force acting from the outer world inward, that inner force which tends to deform us. It is a complicated reflex action, then, that we as men execute in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. In drawing or in having the canvas before us, the feeling actually glimmers in our consciousness that we are excluding something that is out there, that in the forms and strokes we are setting up thick walls, barbed wire. In drawing we really have such barbed wire by means of which we quickly catch something that tends to destroy us from within and prevent its action from becoming too strong. Therefore, instruction in drawing works best if we begin its study from the human being. If you study what motions the hand tends to make—if, say, in eurythmy instruction you have the child hold these motions, these forms that he wants to execute—then you have arrested the motion, the line, that tends to destroy, and then it does not act destructively. So when you begin to have the eurythmic forms drawn, and then see that drawing and also writing are formed out of the will that lives there, you have something which the nature of man really wants, something linked with the development and essence of human nature.

And in connection with eurythmy we should know this, that in our etheric body we constantly have the tendency to practice eurythmy: that is something the etheric body simply does of its own accord; for eurythmy is nothing but motions gleaned from what the etheric body tends to do of itself. It is really the etheric body that makes these motions, and it is only prevented from doing so when we cause the physical body to execute them. When we cause them to be executed by the physical body these movements are held back in the etheric body, react upon us, and have a health-giving effect on man.

That is what affects the human being in a certain hygienic- therapeutic as well as didactic-pedagogic way, and which outwardly gives the impression of beauty. Such things will be understood only when we know that something which is trying to manifest itself in the etheric organization of man must be stopped at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case, that of eurythmy, an element more connected with the will is stopped; in the other, in drawing and painting, an element more closely allied with the intellect. But fundamentally both processes are but the two poles of one and the same thing.

If we now follow this process too with our feeling and incorporate it in our sensitive teaching ability, we have the third feeling that we need. That is the feeling which should really always penetrate us especially in grade-school instruction: that, when a human being is placed in the world, he is really exposed to things from which we must protect him through our teaching. Otherwise he would become one with the world too much. Man really always has the tendency to become psychically rickety, to make his limbs rickety, to become a gnome. And in teaching and educating him we work at forming him. We best obtain a feeling for this forming if we observe the child making a drawing, then smooth this out a bit so that the result is not what the child wants, but not what we want either, but a result of both. If I succeed, while smoothing out what the child wants to scribble, in merging my feelings with those of the child, the best results obtain. And if I transform all that into feeling and let it permeate me, the feeling arises that I must protect the child from an over-strong coalescence with the outer world. We must see that the child grows slowly into the outer world and not let him do so too rapidly. That is the third feeling that we as educators must cherish within us: we constantly hold a protecting hand over the child.

Reverence, enthusiasm, and the feeling of protection, these three are actually the panacea, as it were, the magic formula in the soul of the educator and teacher. And if one wished to represent, externally, artistically, something like an embodiment of art and pedagogy in a group, one would have to represent this:

Reverence for what precedes the child's existence (before birth);

Enthusiastic looking forward to what follows it (after death);

Protecting gesture for what the child experiences (during life).

Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these three sentences with a gesture.

This work of art would also best represent the external manifestation of the teacher-character.

When one says something thus derived out of the intimacies of the world-mysteries one always feels it as unsatisfactory when uttered in conventional speech. But if one must say such things by means of external speech one always has the feeling that a supplement is necessary. What is spoken rather abstractly always feels the urge to pass over into the artistic. That is why I wanted to give you that hint in closing.

The fact is, we must learn to bear something of mankind's future frame of mind within us, consisting of the knowledge that the possession of mere science makes the human being into something which will cause him to regard himself as a psycho-spiritual monster. He who is a scientist pure and simple will not have the impulse—not even in the forming of his thoughts—to transform the scientific into the artistic. But only through the artistic can one comprehend the world. Goethe's saying always remains true:

“He to whom Nature begins to reveal her manifest secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent — Art.”

As educators we should have the feeling: as far as you are a scientist only, you are in soul and spirit a monster. Not until you have transformed your psycho-spiritual-physical organism, when your knowledge takes on artistic form, will you become a human being. Future development will in the main lead from science to artistic grasp, from the monster to the complete human being. And in this it is the pedagogue's duty to co-operate.

We have differentiated colours in that out of their own nature we have got black, white, green and peach-colour as images, and from this pictorial character of colours we had to differentiate what I called the luminous nature of colours which we meet in blue, yellow and red. And we saw that just these colours, blue, yellow and red, possess what I might call certain properties of will, by reason of their being luminous. As you know, one perceives a colour as a so-called colour of the spectrum, such as we see in the rainbow, and we perceive colour in solid bodies. And we know also that we must make use of bodies as painting-colours, their bodily composition, mixture, etc., if we want to practice the art of colour which is painting. Here we are brought to the important question, the answer to which in the state of present-day knowledge, is nowhere to be found, the question namely: What is the relation of colour as such, which we have got to know as something volatile and fleeting, either as image or luster, to solid body, to matter? What makes matter as such appear to us coloured? Those who have looked into Goethe's Theory of Colour, will perhaps know that there, this question is not touched upon, from a certain intellectual honesty of Goethe, because from the means at his disposal he simply was not capable of getting as far as the problem—how is colour applied to solid matter? Moreover this is a question, in the highest sense, for the Art of Painting. For in painting we practice this phenomenon, at any rate for the purpose of outward appearance. We apply colour and through its application we try to call forth the impression of something painted. So, if we want to raise the study of the nature of colour to the plane of painting, we must be interested in this coloured appearance of material nature. Now since in recent times the physicists of colour have regarded the theory of colour as a part of Optics, we find also explanations of the colour of solids worthy of the new physics. We find, for example, the characteristic explanation of the question, Why is a body red? A body is red because it absorbs all other colours and reflects only red. This is the explanation so characteristic of the new Physics, for it is based approximately on the logical formula: Why is a man stupid? He is stupid because he absorbs all cleverness and radiates only stupidity outwards. If one applies this logical principle so common in colour-theory everywhere to the rest of life, you see what interesting things result. He pursued his problem as far as his means allowed him. Then he stopped in front of the question: How is matter coloured?

Now let us recall how we first got the pictorial character of the first four colours we dealt with. We saw that we there have a property which produces on a medium its shadow or its image. We saw how the living forms its image or shadow in the lifeless and how thereby green results. We saw then how the psychic forms its image in the living and produces thereby peach-colour. We saw how the spiritual forms its image in the psychic, and thereby white is the result, and finally how the lifeless reflects its image or shadow in the spiritual and produces black.

There we have all the colours which have a pictorial or image character. The rest have the luster or luminous character. The pictorial character we meet most visibly in the objective world is green. Black and white are to a certain extent frontier-colours and are for this reason no more regarded as colours. Peach-colour, we have seen, is to be understood really only in movement. So that green is the most typical. And this would be the colour applied to the external world, or, as we say, applied to the Vegetable Kingdom. And so in the Vegetable Kingdom we have expressed the real origin of applied colour as image. Now it is a question perhaps of examining this vegetable green in order to find the character, the essence of green. And here we must enlarge the problem contrary to what is usually recognized today.

We know from our Occult Science that the Vegetable Kingdom was formed during the previous metamorphosis-condition of our earth. But we also know that at that time there was as yet no solid matter. We know it has been transformed during the evolution of our earth, and must have been made, during the evolution of the old moon, in a fluid state, for there existed nothing solid then. We can speak of colour matter floating in this fluid and permeating it. It need not be attached to anything, or at the most, to the surface. Only on the surface does the fluid matter tend to become solid. And so, if we look back at this stage of evolution, we might say: in the formation of vegetation we have to do with a fluid green, or, in act, with fluid colour-matter, and with something that is really a fluid element. And plants—as you can see in my Occult Science—could not have assumed their firm shape, could not have put on their mineral form, till the period of earth-evolution. It is possible that something was formed in vegetation which made it definite, and not fluid. So that what we call plants first appeared during the formation of the earth. It was then that colour must have taken on the character in plants such as we perceive today; it was then that it became a permanent green.

Now a plant does not wear only this green—at least generally,—for you are aware how a plant in the course of its metamorphosis merges into other colours, as a plant has yellow, blue or red flowers, and as a green fruit—take for example, a melon, merges into yellow. A superficial observation shows you what is at work there when a plant takes on a colour other than green. When this happens—you can easily prove it—the sun is essential to the circumstances connected with the growth of these other colours,—direct sunlight. Just consider how plants, if they cannot hold up their flowers to the sunlight, in fact hide themselves, curl up, etc. And we shall find a connection,—superficially a connection,—between the absence of green colour in certain plant parts and the sun. The sun metamorphoses, one might say, the green. It brings the green to another condition. If we bring the manifold colouring of vegetation into relation with a heavenly body—as already said, in a superficial study—we shall not find it difficult to consult the statements of Occult Science, and to ask: What has it, from its observations, to say concerning possible other relationships of coloured plant-life to the stars?

And here we have to ask ourselves the question: What kind of starry phenomenon is of the greatest effect on earth? What heavenly body is there whose influence would be contrary to the sun's, and could produce that in plant-nature which sunlight as it were metamorphoses, destroys, changes to other colours? What is there that can produce the green in the vegetable world?

We arrive at that particular heavenly body which represents the polaric opposite of the sun, namely the moon. And Spiritual Science can establish the connection between the green of plants and this moon-nature (I will only just mention the subject today) as well as one can establish the connection of the rest of plant-life, with the sun. This it does by pointing to the properties of moonlight as opposed to sunlight, and above all, by pointing out how moon-light influences sun-darkness. If we consider vegetation, we get an interplay of lunar and solar influences. But at the same time we get an explanation why green becomes an image, and why green in plants is not luminous like the other colours. The other colours in plants are lustrous. They have a shiny character. Just look with proper understanding at the colour of flowers; they shine at one. Compare it with the green. It is “fixed” to the plant. You see in it nothing else but a copy of what you perceive in the Cosmos. Sunlight shines; moonlight is the pictorial image of sunlight. Thus you find again the image (or shadow, Ed.) of light, colour as the image of light, in the green of plants. And you have in the plant through the sun the colour of the luster. And you have the colour of the “fixation”; the colour of the image in the green. These things cannot be understood with the clumsy ideas of Physics. They have to be brought into the region of feeling and must be realized with spiritual sensibility. Then you automatically get what we have understood in this way, the transition into Art. Physics, with its clumsy methods of approaching the world of colour, has driven all artistic considerations from its study. So that actually the artist has not the least idea what to make of what Physics has to say concerning it.

But if we regard the colour of plants in such a way that we know that cosmic forces play a part, that we have in the colour-formation of plants a conjunction of solar and lunar forces, we then have the first element by which we can understand how colour is attached to an object, at any rate primarily to a vegetable object, how it becomes an embodied colour. It becomes a embodied colour because it is not the luster which works on it cosmically, but already the image as such. In the plant we have to deal with that green which becomes an image because at one time in the evolution of the earth the moon was separated from this earth. In this separation we must see the real origin of the green in the vegetable world. Because of it the plant can no longer be exposed to the equivalent of lunar forces on the earth, but receives its image-character direct from the Cosmos.

Our feeling is well acquainted with this cosmic interchange of relations in respect of vegetation, and if we question our feeling we shall be able to approach this character of green and other colours from this world of feeling by means of an artistic appreciation of the nature of colours. It is, you see, something peculiar. If you go back in the history of painting you will find that the great painters of former ages paint people and human situations, but seldom paint external nature, in so far as it consists of plant-life. You can of course also easily find the explanation for it; that in older times it was not so usual to observe nature and that therefore one did not paint it. But that of course is only a superficial explanation, though people today are easily satisfied with such superficial explanations.

What lies behind it is different. Landscape painting arises really at that time in which materialism and intellectualism grip mankind, in which an abstract nature acquires more and more power over human civilization and culture. You may say that landscape painting is in fact a product of the last three or four centuries. If you take this into consideration you will have to say to yourself: only in the last three or four centuries has man reached a state of soul which enables him to comprehend the element necessary for painting nature in landscape. Why? If you look at the pictures of old times, we shall conclude that all these pictures have a quite definite character. Precisely if we differentiate (we will discuss it more exactly) in colour between the image-character and the luster-character, we find that the old artists did not make this distinction in their painting. And they paid no attention, as we had to do yesterday, to this inner will-nature of colour-luster. The old painters do not always take into consideration that yellow demands a shadowy edge. They take it into consideration when they carry their painting more into the spiritual; but not when they paint the everyday world. Nor did they pay attention to what we demanded of blue; possibly rather more so with red. You can see this in certain pictures by Leonardo, and also in others, for example, by Titian. But in general we can say that the old painters do not make this distinction between image and luster in the nature of colours. Why? They stand in a different relationship to the world of colours; they grasp what is luster in colour-nature. They grasp what is image and give it in painting an image-character. But if you give image-character to what in the world of colours is luster, if you have turned everything in the nature of colours into image, then you cannot paint a landscape of plants.

Why not?

Now suppose you want to paint a landscape of plant-life, and it is to give a real impression of life, you have to paint the plants themselves as well in their green as in their individual colours rather darker than they really are. You must make a green surface, in any case darker than it is. You must also make the red or yellow plant-life darker than reality. But then, after you have got your colour in this way in image-character, rather darker than it really is, you must cover the whole with an atmosphere, and this atmosphere must in a certain way be yellowish-white. You must get the whole in a yellowish-white light, and only then you get in the right manner what a plant really is. You have to paint a glow over the image; and therefore you must cross over to the luster-character of colour; you must have its luster-character.

And I would ask you to look, from this point of view, at the whole effort of modern landscape painting, look how it has tried to get more and more at the secret of painting vegetation. If you paint it as it is out there, you don't get there. The picture does not create the impression of life. It does this only if you paint the trees, etc. darker in their colour than they are, and pour over them the glow, something yellowish-white, that is luminous. Because the old masters did not cultivate the painting of this glow, of this lit-up atmosphere, they could not paint a landscape at all.

You notice particularly in painting towards the end of the nineteenth century, how they sought the means to comprehend landscape. Open air painting, all sorts of things have cropped up in order to comprehend landscape. They do it only if they resolve to paint the Vegetable Kingdom darker in its separate shades and then to cover it with the gleaming yellowish-white. Of course you must do this according to colour-composition, etc. Then you succeed really in painting on the canvas, or any other surface, something that gives you the impression of life. It is a matter of sensibility, and this sensibility leads you to paint in something that floods it as the expression of the shining Cosmos, of that which descends out f the universe on to earth as luster. In no other way can you get behind the secret of plant-life, that is, of nature clothed in vegetation.

If you obey this law, you will also realize that everything painting seeks to achieve must also be sought in the nature of colours itself. What are in fact the media of painting? You have the surface, canvas or paper or what not, and on the surface you have to fix in pictorial form what is there. But if something refuses to be fixed in pictorial form, such as plant-nature, you must at least pour over it the luster-character.

Observe, we have not yet reached the different coloured mineral substances, the lifeless objects. In this case particularly it is necessary to understand the matter with sensibility. The world of colour cannot be captured with the reason; we must apply our sensibility, and now I ask you to reflect if there is anything in the nature of colour itself which raises the question, when you are painting, something inorganic, i.e. walls or some other inanimate objects: is there any need to understand whatever you are painting from the colour itself? There is a strong necessity; for think for a moment what is tolerable and what is intolerable. You agree, don't you, that if I paint a black table on a white ground, that is quite tolerable. If I paint a blue table—just imagine a room full of furniture painted blue—if you have any artistic feeling, you would find it intolerable. Equally impossible is a room with yellow or red furniture, that is a painted room. You can, as I've said, paint a black table on a white ground, it is purely a drawing, but you can do it; in fact, one can put directly upon paper or canvas only something whereby the inorganic, the inanimate is to result, which at first has image-character in its colour. So we have to ask generally: What do the colours black, white, green and peach allow to inanimate objects? You must get from the colour what can be painted. And then it always results that when you paint according to the colour, that is the colour which is also an image, you still have not got the inanimate object. You would have only the image—the colour is already that. You would not evoke the representation of the chair, you would have the image of it, if you had to paint it purely from a colour which is image.

So what must you do? You must try to give the image when you are painting still-life, the character of the luster. That is the point. You have to give the colours that have image-character, black, white, green and peach-colour, inner illumination, that is, luster-character. And then you can combine what you have thus vivified with the other lusters, with blue and yellow and red. So you must strip those colours of the image-character they have, and give them luster-character; which means that the painter, if he paints still-life, must really always bear in mind that a certain source of light, a dull source of light lies in the things themselves. He must so to speak think of his canvas or his paper as in a certain sense luminant. Here he requires on his surface the glow of the light which he has to paint on it. If he paints inanimate objects, he must bear in mind, he must contain in his mental make-up the idea, that a kind of illumination underlies inanimate objects, that in a way his surface is transparent and emits lights from within.

Now you see we arrive at the point in painting where in applying the colour, in conjuring the colour on to the surface, we must give the colour the character of reflecting light; otherwise we are not painters. If we always strive more and more to produce a painting out of the colour itself, as after all later human development demands, we shall have to pursue this attempt further and further; namely to get to the root of the essential nature of colour, so as to compel a colour, if it is an image colour, to return and take on again its luster-character, to make it inwardly luminous. If we paint it otherwise, we get no endurable painting of inanimate nature. A wall which is not covered with paint so as to have this inward light is, as a painting, no wall, but only the image of one. We must bring the colours to glow inwardly, and thereby in a certain sense, they become mineralized. Therefore we shall have more and more to find a way of not painting from the palette, smearing the material colour on to the surface, for then we shall never be able to evoke the inner light in the right way, but of painting form the pot (tiegel); we shall have to paint only with that colour which has got the green of liquid because it is watery, (i.e. with liquid colours, Ed.) And generally speaking an inartistic element has been introduced into painting with the palette. Painting from the palette is materialistic, a failure to understand the inner nature of colour which, as such, is really never absorbed by the material body, but lives in it, and must proceed from it. Therefore, when I put it on the surface, I must make it shine.

You are aware that in our building we have tried to bring out this light by using vegetable colours which can most easily be made to develop this inner glow. Any one who has feeling for these things will see how coloured minerals, in different degrees, it is true, show this inner light which we attempt to conjure up when we want to paint a mineral. When we want to paint a mineral according to its colour, we learn to look at it not as a model, naturalistically, but, as is necessary, as in the act of giving light from inside. Now, how does a mineral proceed to give light inwardly? If we have the coloured mineral, its colour appears to us because it is in sunlight. Sunlight in this case does much less than in the case of plants. In plants sunlight conjures up all the colours which occur besides green. In a coloured mineral, or any inanimate coloured object the effect of sunlight is that in the dark, when all cats are grey or black, we do not see the colours; it simply makes the colours visible. But the reason for the colour is, after all, inside. Why? How does it get there? Here we arrive again at the problem from which we started today.

Now, to lead you to the green of plants, I have had to point out to you the breaking away of the moon, as you find it described in my Occult Science. Now I must point out to you the other similar events, which have taken place in the course of the earth's evolution.

If you follow what I have explained in my Occult Science concerning the earth's development, you will find that those universal bodies which surround the earth and belong to its planetary system, were, as you know, in connection with the whole terrestrial planet; they were torn away just as the moon was. Of course that in itself is connected with the sun. But, generally speaking, if we look simply at the earth, we can regard this as an exodus. Observe that the internal colouring of inanimate objects is connected with this departure of the other planets. Solids become coloured, because the earth is freed from those forces which she had while the planets were tied to her, and they effect her from out of the Cosmos, and thereby evoke the inner force of the Cosmos in the coloured mineral bodies. This is, in fact, exactly what the minerals get from the forces which are no more there, but now shed their influence from out of the Cosmos. We see it is a much more hidden occult matter than with the plants' green. But here we have something which just because it is hidden, goes much deeper into its nature and therefore includes not only living vegetation but also the lifeless mineral. And so we are brought—I am only mentioning it here—if we are to consider the colouring of solids, to something of which modern Physics takes no account. We are brought to the workings of the Cosmos. We cannot explain the colouration of inanimate things in any way if we do not know that this is connected with what the terrestrial bodies have retained as inner forces since the other planets have been removed from the earth.

For instance, we explain the reddish colour in some mineral or other by means of the earth's connection with some planet, for example, with Mars or Mercury; a mineral yellow, by means of the earth's connection with Jupiter or Venus, and so on. For this reason the colouration of mineral swill always remain a riddle until we come to think of the earth in conjunction with the extra-terrestrial bodies in the Cosmos.

If we turn to living things, we must turn to sun and moonlight, and thus come to the one green surface colour, and to the surface colours which later become luster and luminosity emitted by the plant. But if we wish to understand that particular light that confronts us from the inside of substances, that element of the otherwise fluctuating spectrum which is constant inside solid bodies, we must remember that at one time what is now cosmic was in the interior of the earth and is thus the origin of those heavy elements in the earth's composition which are more or less liquid. We have to look outside the earth for the origin of what lies hidden under the surface of minerals. That is the essential thing. The surface of the earth admits of an easier terrestrial explanation than what lies under it, which requires an extra-terrestrial explanation. And thus the mineral component parts of our earth flash out at us in those colours which they have retained from the elements which have left the earth for the planets. And these colours remain under the influence of the corresponding planets of the cosmic environment.

This is the reason why, when we apply the lifeless paint to a surface we must, as it were, get the light behind the surface, we must spiritualize the surface and create a secret inner radiance. I mean, we must try to get the downward-streaming planetary influence behind the surface on which we paint the picture, so that the painting gives us organically the impression of the essential, not merely of the pictorial, and so it will depend on imparting the spiritual to the colours, in order to paint inanimate nature. But how to do it?

Recall the scheme which I have given you, in which I said: black is the image of the lifeless in the spiritual. We create the spiritual according to the luster and paint in it the lifeless. And in so far as we colour it, and convert it completely to a luster, we wake its essence. This is in fact the process which must be adopted for the painting of inanimate things.

And now you will find that we can ascend again to the Animal Kingdom. If you want to paint a landscape in which the Animal Kingdom is especially conspicuous, you have something which works as follows—it can be grasped only with your feeling. If you want to introduce animals into your landscape, you must paint their colour rather lighter than reality, and you must spread over it a soft bluish light. Suppose you were painting red animals—rather a rare occurrence—you would have to have a soft bluish sheen over them, and everywhere where you had the animal and the vegetation together, you would have to blend the yellowish sheen into the bluish one.

You would have to base this blending on the points of conjunction and then you get the possibility of painting the animal nature, otherwise it will always give the impression of inanimate representation. So that we may say that when we paint inanimate nature, it must be all luster, it must gleam from inside. When we paint the living plant-life, it must appear as luster-image. We first paint the image, and in fact paint so dark that we deviate from the natural colour. We present the image-character, in fact, by painting rather darker, and then overspreading it with luster, luster-image.

If we paint creatures with souls and even animals, we must paint the image-luster. We must not go straight to the complete picture. This we achieve by painting lighter, that is, by leading the image over to the luster, and adding on top that which in a certain sense dulls the pure transparency. Thus we get the image-luster.

And if we go to a step up to human beings, we must aspire to paint the pure image.

This is what those painters have done who have not yet painted external Nature, they have merely created the pure image. And thus we come to the complete image; that is, we must now include those colours which we have met in pictures as lusters. That happens because we deprive them in a sense of their luster-character when we get to human beings; we treat them as images. This means we paint the surface anyhow and try somehow to find a reason for it. The yellow surface insists on being, as it were, washed out at the edge. In no other way is it permissible to have the yellow, it must be washed out at the edge. In a painting of human beings, one can remove its real colour-nature and convert it into an image. In this way one transforms the luster-colour into colour and thereby reaches the human; when one paints a human being one need worry about nothing except the pure transparency of the medium.

It is true one must develop most particularly the feeling for what colour becomes after its transition into image-character. You see, one penetrates in fact the whole nature of colour—also in so far as this nature is expressed in painting—if one cultivates a sensibility to the difference between the pictorial and that which is to be found in luster. The pictorial really more nearly approaches the quality of thought, and the more so, the further we proceed in the pictorial. When we paint a man, we can really paint only our thoughts of him. But this thought of him must be made evident. It must be expressed in the colour. And one lives in the colour when one is, for example, in a position to introduce somewhere a yellow surface and to say to oneself: this ought really to be shaded off; I transform it into image, and I must therefore modify it where it touches neighboring colours. I must apologize, as it were, in my picture that I do not yield to the will of the yellow.

Thus you see how in fact it is possible to paint from the colour itself; how it is possible to regard the world of colour as such as something which so develops in the procession of our earth's evolution that colour first irradiates the earth as light from the Cosmo; and then, since something in the earth departs from it and returns again as radiation, colour becomes incorporated in the object. And we follow this experience in colour—this cosmic experience, and attain thereby the possibility of ourselves living in the colour. It is living in the colour, when I have it dissolved in the pot, and by dipping the brush in it an applying it to the surface, transform it into something fixed and firm; whereas it is not living in the colour if I stand there with a palette and mix colours together, if, having the colours already solid and material on the palette, I then daub them on the surface. That is not living in the colour, but outside it. I live in the colour only when I must translate it from a fluid to a solid condition. Then I experience in a sense the same that the colour itself has experienced, in developing from the former lunar condition to the terrestrial condition and there becoming solid; for a solid can arise only with the earth. And then again there is this in my relation with colour. My soul must live with colour. I must rejoice with yellow, feel the dignity or seriousness of red; I must share with blue its soft, I might almost say, its tearful mood, I must be able to spiritualize colour, if I want to bring it to inner capabilities. I may not paint without this spiritual understanding for colour, especially not inorganic or lifeless objects This does not mean that one is to paint symbolically, that one must unfold the quite inartistic; this colour means one thing and that means another. The point is not that colours signify something other than themselves; but that one will be able to live with the colour.

Living with the colour ceased when one left the pot colour for the palette colour and because of this change we have all the tailors' dummies which are painted by the portrait-painters from time to time on their respective canvases. They are dolls, dummies and so forth; there is nothing real, nothing with an inner impulse of life, which can be painted only if one understands what living with the colour is.

Such are the few remarks I wanted to make to you in these three addresses. Naturally they could be enlarged endlessly, and this can be done at another opportunity in the future. For the present I wanted only to make these few remarks, and to provide a transition to such studies.

One hears very often, after all, that artists have a proper fear of everything scientific, that they refuse to let knowledge or science interfere in their Art. Goethe already—although he could not get to the inner causes of colouration, still produced the elements of it—rightly said on the subject of this fear in painters: Up till now one has found in painters a fear and a decided antipathy towards all theoretic studies on colour and what belongs to it, with which one cannot reproach them, for till now the so-called theories were groundless, vacillating and tending to empiricism. We should like our efforts to do something to calm this fear and help to stimulate artists to put to practical proof the laws as laid down.

If one proceeds in the right way consciously, one's knowledge becomes raised from the abstract to the concrete in Art, and this is particularly the case with such a fluctuating element as in the world of colour. And it is only the fault of the decadence of our Science that artists rightly have such a fear of theory. This theory is material-intellectual, especially this theory that we come across in modern physical Optics. The element of colour is fluctuating, and the most one can wish is that the painter should not solidify his colour as he does on the palette, but should leave it in a fluid state in the pot. But if the physicist comes along then and draws his lines on the board and says that from his strokes and lines run out here the yellow, there blue—this attitude is enough to drive one mad. That has nothing to do with Physics. Physics must be content with the light that is in the room. You cannot undertake the consideration of colour at all without first lifting it into the region of the soul. For it is sheer nonsense to say: Colour is something subjective which produces an effect on us And if one goes further and says,—and in doing so one conceives an inexact picture of the Ego—that there is some external objective inclination which affects us, our Ego, it is rubbish; the Ego itself is in the colour. The Ego and the human astral body are not to be differentiated from colour, they live in it and are outside the physical human body in proportion as they are bound up with colour out there; they only reproduce the colours in the physical and etheric body. That is the point. So that the whole question of the effect of an objective on a subjective colour is nonsense; for the Ego, the astral body, already exist in the colour, and they enter with it. Colour is the conveyer of the Ego and the astral body into the physical and into the etheric body. So that the whole method of study must come out.

Thus everything which has crept into Physics, and which Physics includes in its diagrammatic lines, must come out. There should first of all be a period in which one abstains altogether from drawing, when one speaks of colour in a discussion on Physics; but one should try to understand colour in its fluctuation, in its life.

That is the important thing. Then you pass of your own accord from the theoretical to the artistic. Then you produce a method of studying colour which the painter can understand; because, if he identifies himself with such a method, and lives wholly in it, it is then no theoretical process of thought, but an element in colour itself. And, since he lives in the colour, he receives from it each time the answer to the question: How am I going to apply it?

Hence the possibility of conducting a dialogue with colours, for they tell you themselves how they want to be applied on the surface. It is this which makes a line of approach aspiring to attain reality enter the sphere of Art. Our Physics had ruined it for us; and therefore it must be emphasized today with all distinctness that such things which above all verge on Psychology and Aesthetics must not be allowed to be further corrupted by the physical view, but that it must be understood that quite another way and method must be employed. We see the spiritual and psychic elements in Goetheanism, which must be carried further. It has not yet, for instance, shown the differentiation of colours into images and lusters. We have to live Goetheanism thoughtfully, in order to proceed further and further. And this we can do only through Spiritual Science.

If one regards the psychic in all movements and life, the varied and manifold world of colour becomes one whole world. One gradually takes one's place in what I should like to call an astral apprehension of the world. Then all visible colour becomes a revelation of the psychic in the world.

Let us look at the green of the plant. When a plant puts on its green we cannot regard the green colour as something subjective and see vibrations in the plant as the physicists do. After all, we no longer have the plant if we think only of the vibrations in the trees which are supposed to cause the colour. These are merely abstractions. In reality we cannot imagine the plant without its green, if we use our living imagination. The plant creates its green out of itself. But how?

Now, lifeless substances are incorporated in the plant, but these lifeless substances are made to live. In the plant are iron, carbon and some silicic acid. There are all kinds of substances which are found also in the Mineral Kingdom: and in seeing how life penetrates through the lifeless, and makes for itself an image by means of the lifeless, i.e. the image of the plant, we get the feeling of green as the lifeless image of life.

Everywhere we look out upon our green surroundings. We know that the lifeless substances of the earth live plants. Life itself we do not perceive. We perceive plants because they contain the lifeless substances. And because of this they are green. The green is the lifeless image of the life that exists on earth.

Now let us look at the green, since in a way we have in it a kind of world-word which tells us how life in the plant weaves and flows.

Then let us look at men. If we examine nature we find the colour that most resembles the healthy human complexion to be the fresh peach-blossom in spring. No other colour in nature is like it. But we feel that the inner health of man is expressed also in this peach-coloured time. We learn from the flesh-colour to know the living health of man which is really endowed by the soul. And we feel that when the colour of the skin becomes green, the man is ill and soul cannot find the right way into the physical body. On the other hand if the soul occupies the physical body too markedly in an egoistical way, as e.g. with avarice, the man becomes pale; as also is the case in fear.

Between paleness and greenness lies the healthy human colour with the suggestion of peach. And as we feel in the plant's green the lifeless image of life, we feel in the characteristic flesh-colour of a sound person the living image of the soul.

You see the world is beginning now to come alive in colours. The living forms itself through the lifeless into the image of green. The psychic forms the human skin into the image of peach or flesh-colour.

Let us look further. The sun appears to us whitish, which we feel to be closely related to light. If we awake at night in darkness we feel that it is not our real human environment in which we can fully feel our ego. For this we need light between us and other objects. We need light between ourselves and the wall so that the wall can have its effect on us from the distance. Our ego-feeling lights up in us if we wake up in light. In the darkness we feel ourselves strange in the world.

I say, light: but I could also take other sense-perceptions. And you will notice an apparent contradiction, because a person born blind never sees light. But it is not a question of seeing light directly, but of how one is organized. Man, even if born blind, is organized for light. And the limitation of ego-energy which is present in the blind, is there because of the absence of light.

Whiteness is related to light. If we feel whiteness in this way, as we feel the ego stimulated in a room by whiteness to its inner strength, we can say, making the thought living and not abstract: Whiteness is the psychic appearance of the spirit. For this reason we always feel, when we see white in pictures, yes, that is meant to be the spirit.

Take, on the other hand, black. When you see black, when we use black somewhere, it can most easily be used to represent the spiritual image of the lifeless, just as we feel ourselves killed, lamed, when our spirit has to find its place on awakening in black darkness. So one can feel black as the spiritual image of the lifeless.

And think now how one can live in colours! We experience the world as colour and light, when we experience green as the lifeless image of life, peach and flesh-colour as the living image of the soul, white as the psychic image of the spirit and black as the spiritual image of the lifeless.

I have really completed a circle by saying this, for observe how I had to describe green as the lifeless image of life; I stopped at life. Peach and flesh-colour = living image of the soul. I stopped at the soul. White = the psychic image of the spirit. I stopped at the soul and go up to the spirit. Black = the spiritual image of the lifeless. I stopped at the spiritual, proceeded to the lifeless, but came back again, since the green was the lifeless image of life. I have completed the circle. Thereby this living participation in colour becomes a real, artistic experience of the astral element in the world.

And if one has this artistic experience, death, life, soul and spirit present themselves as in a wheel of life, for from death one returns to death through the life of the psychic and spiritual; if they present themselves also through light and colour, as I have just described them, one knows one must go outside space, one cannot remain in space, the riddle of space must be solved on a surface.

And one loses the idea of space; as a sculptor has lost the habit of thinking with the head, so we lose now the idea of space. Everything presses on one as light and colour; one becomes a painter. The source of painting is opened of its own accord by means of such a view. And one gets the great inward pleasure of putting on this or that colour and setting the other colour next to it. For then colours become a living revelation of the living, of the lifeless, of the spiritual and of the psychic.

Thus, having passed beyond dead thought, one really arrives at the point of feeling oneself driven no longer to speak in words, no longer to think in ideas, and no longer even to create forms, but to reproduce in colour and light, the reflections of life and death, spirit and soul as they appear in the world.

Of course in treating of things artistic, I must refer not to the abstract understanding, but to artistic feeling. What is artistic must be understood artistically. Therefore I cannot here point out to you by means of some concept-illustration, how green, peach-colour, white and black give one the desire to have an enclosed image. One wants to have a contour and the circumscribed picture inside it. Then these four colours always contain something of shadow. White is the lightest shadow, for it is shadowed light. Black is the darkest. Green and peach-colour are images, that is, self-contained surfaces, which give to the surface something of a shadowy nature.

Thus in these four colours we have image-colours or shadow-colours, and we want to feel them as such.

The case is quite different when we go on to other colours. These other colours are, if I take three nuances of them, red, yellow and blue. With these we have not the desire, if we rely on our purely artistic sensibility, to have them in a circumscribed contour, but we feel the need for the surface to shine in these colours, so that the radiation of the red comes forth from the surface to meet us, or that the mattness of the blue has a calming effect on us, or that the gleam of the yellow shines out form the surface towards us.

And so one can call the four colours, flesh-colour, and green, black and white, the image or shadow-colours; and on the other hand blue, yellow, and red the luster-colours which shine forth from the image of the shadowy.

And when we follow with our sensibility how the world becomes luminous with the three colours, red, yellow and blue, we say again to ourselves, that in the lustrousness of red we want preferably to see the living; the living wants to reveal itself to us in active red; so that we may call red the luster of the living.

If the spirit wants to reveal itself to us not merely in its abstract equality as white, but to speak to us inwardly and intensively—that is to our soul—it will shine yellow. Yellow is the luster of the spirit.

If the soul desires to remain truly inward and this state is to be expressed artistically in colour, then the soul will withdraw itself from outer phenomena and remain, as it were, sealed. This give the soft luminosity of blue, which is thus the luster of the soul.

In this way we live in colour; we understand it with our sensibility and our feeling if we realize everywhere how a world forms itself out of the four image-colours and the three luster-colours. And if one in this manner lives in the luster and the image-character of the world of colour, one becomes a painter, who paints with his inner soul, for one learns to live in the colour.

One learns, for example, what each colour wishes to say to us. Blue is the luster of the psychic. When we paint a surface blue, we are satisfied only if we paint it strong at the edged and weaker in the center.

On the other hand, if we want yellow's message we make it thicker in the middle and lighter towards the edge. The colour itself demands it, and thus what lives in the colour reveals itself gradually. We come to produce the form out of the colour, that is, to paint out of the world of colour itself, through our feeling.

If we experience the world as colour in this way, it will not occur to us if we want, for instance, to represent a figure in a picture as a gleaming white figure, a figure that lives in the spirit, to reveal it in any other colour, but in a yellow, lighter at the edges. It will not occur to use to paint the soul element in a picture otherwise than by using blue shaded off inwards to a softer blue even if it is only in the garment.

If you appreciate from this standpoint the painters of the Renaissance, Raphael, Michelangelo, and even Leonardo, you will find in all of them that at the time they really lived in this way in colour.

And, above all, there was present something else. In the painting which has practically died out in our time, but was still to be found echoed in the Renaissance painting, there was that inner perspective of the picture which lives in the colour. A man who feels the luster of red properly will always feel how the red comes forward out of the picture, how it brings the object it represents near to us; while blue takes the object it represents into the distance. We paint colour-perspective as inner perspective. It is the perspective which still lived in the psychic-spiritual.

It was in the materialistic age—a fact often over-looked—that space-perspective first appeared, the perspective that deals with spatial measurement, so that distance did not become blue, but smaller, the foreground not red, but larger. This perspective is a side-product of the materialistic age which, living in the material element in space, wanted to paint in it also.

We are today again at a time when we must find our way back again to the natural element in painting. For the surface belongs also to the materials of a painter, for he works upon it. But an artist must before all things have a feeling for his material. For instance, if he wants to carve a plastic figure out of wood, he must carve, for example, the man's eyes out of the wood. Whatever is concave he must see with his artist's eye and hollow out. The wood-sculptor hollows out the wood.

The sculptor in marble or some other hard stone does not bother about how the eye goes in. He does not hollow out, but he notices how the brow emerges from the eye. He applies; he keeps the convex in mind. The marble-worker, even if he has made his model in plasticine or clay, must think in terms of his material. He must live in it, so that it speaks to him.

It must always also be the same with colour; one must reckon with the fact that the painter's material is the surface. And the surface can only be felt in this way if the third dimension of space is ignored. It is ignored when one has what is qualitative one the surface as the expression of the third dimension; when one feels blue as a retiring and red as an advancing colour, when, in short, the third dimension is inherent in the colour. Then one really releases matter, whereas in space-perspective matter is only imitated.

I am, of course, not saying anything against spatial perspective; it was natural and self-evident in the middle of the fifteenth century, and indeed added something powerful to the old aesthetics of painting. But the important thing is that after passing through materialism artistically for a time, as expressed in space-perspective, we can return to a more spiritual interpretation of painting also, so that we come back one more to colour-perspective.

In talking about Art, one cannot theorize; one must remain always in the medium of Art itself and the thing that can be of service to us in talking about Art must be artistic sensibility. One cannot speak about Mathematics or Mechanics or Physics from artistic sensibility, but from reason and understanding, by the light of which one can in no wise consider Art, though this is what was done by the aestheticists of the nineteenth century.

Man in his earthly existence varies in his conditions of consciousness; he varies in the conditions of full wakefulness, of sleep, and of dreaming.

Let us first put the question to ourselves: is it an essential part of man to live as earthly being in these three conditions of consciousness?

We must clearly realize that of earthly beings only man lives in these three conditions. Animals live in an essentially different alternation. They do not have that deep, dreamless sleep which man has for the greater part of the time between falling asleep and awaking. On the other hand, animals do not have the complete wakefulness of man between awaking and going to sleep. Animal “wakefulness” is somewhat like human dream; but the experiences of the higher animals are more definite. On the other hand, animals are never so deeply unconscious as man is in deep sleep.

Therefore animals do not differentiate themselves from their surroundings so much as man. They have not got an outer and an inner world, as man has. The higher animals, (Dr. Steiner means by higher animals, the warm-blooded vertebrates, birds and mammals. – Ed.) subconsciously, feel themselves, with their whole inner being, like a part of the surrounding world.

When an animal sees a plant, his first feeling is not: that is outwardly a plant, and I am inwardly a separate being—but the animal gets a strong inner experience from the plant, a direct sympathy or antipathy. It feels as it were, the plant's nature inwardly. The circumstance that people of our time are not able to observe anything that is not obvious, prevents them from seeing in the impulses and behaviour of animals that it is as I have said.

Only man has the clear and sharp differentiation between his inner world and the outer world. Why does he recognize an outer world? How does he come at all to speak of an inner and an outer world? Because every time he sleeps, his ego and his astral body are outside his physical and etheric body: he abandons, so to speak, his physical and etheric bodies and is among those things which are outer world. During sleep we share the fate of outer things. As tables and benches, trees and clouds are during wakefulness outside our physical and etheric bodies and are therefore described as outer world, so, during sleep, our own astral bodies and our ego belong to the outer world. And here something happens.

In order to realize what happens here, let us first start from what happens when we face the world in a perfectly normal condition of wakefulness. There are the various objects outside us. And the scientific thought of man has gradually brought it to the point of recognizing such physical things as belonging certainly to the outer world as can be weighted, measured and counted. The content of our physical science without doubt is determined according to weight, dimension and number.

We reckon with the calculations which apply to earthly things, we weigh and measure them, and what we ascertain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours, and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave themselves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical object, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned—he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the modern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things—sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.

You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not according to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.

But what is there are—if I may so express it—the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of free-moving sound and so on.

If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words, what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.

When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight, we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the rainbow.

If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given—the rainbow is an optical illusion. Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift it up—and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.

He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies, comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the uttermost parts of the Earth. It has a contrary weight. (See Diagram 1) These things of the earth want to go down there to the earth's center (downward arrow); these (upward arrow) want to escape into universal space.

And there is something there similar to a measurement. You get it, for instance, if you have, let us say, a small reddish cloud, and this small reddish cloud is hemmed in by a mighty yellow structure; you then measure, not with a measuring-rule, but qualitatively, the stronger-shining red with the weaker-shining yellow. And as the measuring-rule tells you: that is five yards, the red tells you here: (see Diagram 1): if I were to spread myself out, I should go into the yellow five times. I must expand myself. I must become bigger, then I, too, should become yellow. Thus are measurements made in this case.

If it still more difficult to be clear about counting, because after all in earthly counting we mostly count only peas or apples, which lie side by side indifferently, and we always have the feeling that I we place as second one by the one, this one doesn't mind a bit that another one lies next to it. In human life it is of course different. There is sometimes the case that the one is directed to the other. But this is already verging on the spiritual.

In physical mathematics it is a matter of indifference to divisions what is added to them. But here it is not the case. When a one is of a definite kind, it demands—let us say—some three or five others, according to its kind. It has always an inner relationship to the others. Here number is a reality. And if a consciousness of it begins, as is the case when you are out there with your ego and your astral body, you also get to the point of ascertaining something like dimension, number and weight, but of an opposite kind.

And then, when sight and hearing out there are no longer a mere chaotic mingling of red and yellow and sounds, but you begin to feel things are ordered, then arises the perception of the spiritual beings, who realize themselves in these free-floating sense-experiences. Then we enter the positive spiritual world, and the life and doings of the spiritual beings. As here on earth we enter the life and doings of earthly things, ascertaining them with the scales and the rod and our calculations, so, by adapting ourselves to the purely qualitative, opposite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring colour by colour, etc.—we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also permeate all the realms of nature.

Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he could not recognize an outer world.

It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.

And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.

It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and antipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we had not the possibility of dreaming, nor the continuation of this dream-force in our inner life, we should have no beauty. That we have a disposition for beauty is due to the fact that we are able to dream. For prosaic existence we have to say: we have to thank the power of dreaming that we have a memory. For the art life of man we have to thank the power of dreaming that there is beauty. The manner in which we feel or create beauty is namely very similar to the weaving, creating power of dreaming.

We behave in the experience of beauty and to the creation of it—through the help of our physical body—as we behave outside our physical body or half bound to it, when we dream. There is really only a slight jump from dreaming to living in beauty. And only because in these materialistic times people are of such coarse temperament that they do not notice this jump, is so little consciousness to be found of the whole significance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free movement and life, whereas when one gives oneself up to freedom, to apparent inner compulsion, that is, if one experiences this jump one has no longer the feeling that it is the same as dreaming, that it is the same except that use is made of the powers of the physical body. This generation will long ponder what “chaos” meant in former times. There are most diverse definitions of “chaos.” Actually it can only be characterized by saying: when man reaches a state of consciousness in which the experience of weight, of earthly dimension just ceases, and things begin to become less heavy, but as yet with no tendency to escape into the universe, but maintain themselves still—let us say—horizontally, in equilibrium, when the fixed boundaries get blurred, when the swaying indefiniteness of the world is seen with the physical body still, but already also with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then you see chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos towards man.

In Greece one still had the feeling that one cannot really make the physical world beautiful; it is half a necessity of nature; it is as it is. One cannot set up the Cosmos—which means the beautiful world—out of earthly things, but only out of chaos, by shaping the chaos. And what one makes with earthly things is merely an imitation in matter of the molded chaos.

This is always the case in Art; and in Greece, where the mystery-cults still had a certain influence, one had a very vivid image of this relation of chaos to Cosmos.

But when one looks round in all these worlds—the unconsciousness of sleep, the half-consciousness of dream—one does not find the Good. The beings who are in these worlds are predestined with all wisdom from the very beginning to run their life's course there. One finds in them controlling, constructive wisdom. One finds in them beauty. But there is no sense in speaking of goodness among these beings when as earth-man it is a question of our meeting them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a distinction between inner and outer world, so that the good can follow the spiritual world or not. As the state of sleep is apportioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the Good.

This does not contradict what I have been saying during these days, that when one leaves earthly things and emerges into the Cosmos, one is induced to abandon also earthly concepts so as to speak of the moral world-order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on this earth. Only there the predestination,—that which is appointed,—is spiritual; there is no contradiction.

But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.

Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as regards goodness. In this state we must most certainly arrive at the idea of goodness.

What does modern science achieve when it attempts to explain man? It refuses to rise from truth, through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything in accordance with an external causal necessity which corresponds only to the idea of truth. And here one entirely fails to reach that element in man which weaves and lives when he is awake. One reaches at the most only what man is when asleep. Therefore if you read anthropologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the following impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern science. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed ... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He lies the whole time in bed.

It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the evening.

Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain chiefly from external things.

Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from those which are in common use today.

It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he is. He is really—so ends this materialistic description pathetically—a product of every air-current.

If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist, he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a living man.

Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The opposite pole must be found to that which has been attained. What was achieved during the nineteenth century7, so glorious for materialistic philosophy? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way—we can say it sincerely and honestly—it succeeded in defining the outer world according to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has escaped one.

And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure, number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.

It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e. of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art—it must all go. It is ghastly studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is attached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.

I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics. It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a painter has a true or a false theory of colour.

It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?

If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They devoted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.

Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.

But what was the possibility that came from living in this—I might say—imponderable sensible perception? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos. He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.

Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives everywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the representation. Light quivers through the universe, and the light carries gold. Everywhere in light there is gold. Gold lives and moves in light. And when man lives on earth—you know already that it changes after seven years—his heart is not composed of the cucumber and the salad and the roast veal the man has in the meantime eaten, but these old teachers knew that the heart is built of light's gold, and the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the gold weaving in the light to build up the heart out of the whole universe.

Yes, those people talked differently and you must be aware of this difference, for one must relearn to talk thus, only on another plane of consciousness. In painting, what once was there, but then disappeared, when one still painted by cosmic inspiration, because weight did not yet exist,—this painting has left its last trace in, let me say, Cimabue, and the Russian Icon-painting. The Icon was still painted out of the macrocosm, the whole outer world. It was so to speak a slice out of the macrocosm. But then one began in a blind alley, one could not get further, for the simple reason that this world-philosophy no longer existed among mankind. If one had wanted to paint the Icon with inner sympathy, not merely by tradition and prayer, one would have to have known how to handle gold. The treatment of gold on the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.

There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection. Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe. One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.

This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century. Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.

Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a minimum degree, but still it became heavy. And then arose the Madonna as counter to the Icon—the Icon which ahs no weight, the Madonna which has weight, even if she is beautiful—beauty has survived. But Icons are no longer paintable at all, because man does not feel them. If men today think they can feel Icons, it is an untruth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It becomes dependent on a scheme, on tradition.

Raphael's painting, built as it is on Giotto's development fro Cimabue, can remain Art only so long as the light of beauty streams upon it. To a certain extent it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still sensed something of the gold weaving in the light, and at least gave their pictures the luster of gold, making it irradiate them from outside.

But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.

And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to speak.

If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.

We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical naturalism to free musical Art.

We see how in all provinces it is a question of making an effort, of mankind waking up. It is this we ought to take up—this impulse to awake, to look round and see what is and what is not, and to advance ever onwards wherever the summons calls.

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

I have described how the modern philosopher comes to admit to himself: where does this intellectualism lead? To build a gigantic machine, and place it in the centre of the earth, in order to blow up the earth into all corners of the universe—he admitted it is so. The others do not admit it!

And so I have tried in different places to show how the ideas of only thirty or forty years ago are dissolved through the theory of Relativity—simply melted away like snow in the sun—so I have tried to show you how the summons is to be found everywhere really to strive towards Anthroposophy. For the philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann says: if the world really is as we imagine it—i.e. as he imagined it in the sense of the nineteenth century—then we really must blow it up into space, because we cannot endure any longer on it; and it is only a question of progressing far enough till we are able to do it. We must sigh for this future time when we can blow the world into universal space.

But the Relativists, before that, will see to it that mankind has no concepts left. Space, Time, Movement are abolished. Even apart from this, one can reach such profound despair, that in certain circumstances one sees the highest satisfaction in that explosion into the whole universe.

One must, however, make oneself clearly acquainted with the meaning of certain impulses in our time.