The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shall now have to build up gradually the principles outlined in the last lecture. You will have seen, no doubt, from what was discussed yesterday that much will have to be changed and revised even in the details of instruction.

Now just think back a little on what I brought to your notice in the previous lecture.¹ With my analysis in mind you can really see man as a being with three centres, in which sympathy and antipathy meet. We can then say: “Antipathy and sympathy meet even in the head.” We can simply take as a formula the case of the nervous system being intercepted at a certain point in the head for the first time, so that the sense-perceptions penetrate, and encounter antipathy from the individual. In such a case you see that you must think of each separate system as repeated again in the whole person, for the activity of the senses as such is really a fine activity of the limbs, so that the sphere of the senses is primarily pervaded by sympathy, and antipathy is sent out from the nervous system. If, for instance, you imagine sight, a kind of sympathy develops in the eye itself: the blood vessels of the eye; antipathy radiates through this sympathy: the nervous system of the eye. This is the origin of sight.

But a second, and for us a more important encounter, between sympathy and antipathy, occurs at the centre of the human system. Here, again, sympathy and antipathy encounter one another, so that a meeting between sympathy and antipathy ensues midway in the human system, in the breast-system. Here, again, the whole individual is active; for while sympathy and antipathy meet in us, in our breast we are conscious of their conflict. But you also know that this meeting is expressed in our carrying out—let us say—an instantaneous reflex action on receiving an impression, and in this reflex action we do not think much about it, but we swiftly repulse something or other which threatens us with danger; we repulse it purely instinctively. Other more subconscious reflex movements are then further reflected in the brain, in the soul, and the whole again acquires the character of an image. We accompany with imagery the conflict in action between sympathy and antipathy in our breast-system. In so doing we no longer realize clearly that a meeting between sympathy and antipathy is in question. But the breast is the scene of a process intimately bound up with the whole life of the individual. A meeting between sympathy and antipathy is in progress which is significantly bound up with our external life.

We develop a certain activity of the whole individual which expresses itself as sympathy, as an activity of sympathy. We allow the constant interplay between this activity of sympathy and a cosmic antipathy to take place in our breast-system. The expression of these conflicting sympathetic and antipathetic activities is human speech. And a distinct accompaniment by the brain of this encounter of sympathy and antipathy in the breast is the comprehension of speech. We trace speech with an understanding of it. In speech there are really present an activity which takes place in the breast and a parallel activity which takes place in the head, only that the breast is much more positive in this activity; in the head it has faded into an image. When you speak, you have all the time the breast-activity, and you accompany it at the same time with an image of it, with an activity of the head. You will easily see from this that speech is really built up on a persisting rhythm of sympathetic and antipathetic activity—like feeling. Speaking, too, is primarily anchored in feeling. The thought content of our speech is introduced by our accompanying the content of feeling with the content of knowledge and perception. But we shall only learn to understand speech if we really see it as fundamentally anchored in human feeling.

Now, as a matter of fact, speech is doubly anchored in human feeling: once, in all the feeling with which the individual confronts the world. With what feelings does he confront the world? Let us take a clear feeling, a clear shade of feeling: for instance, astonishment, amazement. As long as we remain in the individual, in this microcosm, with our soul, we experience astonishment, amazement. If we find ourselves able to establish the cosmic link, the cosmic relation, which can be bound up with this feeling-shade of astonishment, this astonishment becomes the sound o.²

The sound o is really nothing less than the action of breath in us when this breath is caught inwardly by astonishment, by amazement. You can understand the o, therefore, as the expression of astonishment, of amazement.

Lately the world's superficial method of observation has linked speech with something external. People have asked themselves: “What is the origin of the connections between sounds and the meaning of sounds?” People have not realized that everything in the world makes a feeling-impression on the individual. In some manner every single thing reacts upon human feeling, even if often quite delicately, so that it remains half-unconscious. But we shall never have a thing in front of us which we can describe by a word containing the sound o, unless somehow we feel astonishment, even if this astonishment is very subdued. If you say “stove” (German: Ofen) you say a word with o in it, because in “stove” there lies something which excites a subdued astonishment in you. Speech is grounded in this way in human feeling. You stand in a relation of feeling to the whole world and you respond to the whole world with sounds which express the relation of feeling in some way. As a rule, you see, people have only dealt with these things very superficially. They imagined that we imitated in speech the barking or growling of the animal. Accordingly a theory was evolved—the famous “Bow-wow theory”—according to which everything is imitation. These theories are dangerous because they are quarter-truths. When I imitate the dog and say “bow-wow”—that expresses the shade of feeling which lies in “ow”—I transpose myself into his condition of soul. Not in the sense of this theory, but on a detour, by transposing oneself into the condition of soul of the dog, is the sound formed. Another theory supposes that every object in the world conceals a tone; as, for instance, a bell contains its own tone. Based on this conception, the so-called “Ding-dong” theory was evolved. These two theories exist: the Bow-wow theory and the Ding-dong theory. But a person can only be understood by entering into the nature of speech as the expression for the world of feeling, for the relations of feeling, which we develop in response to things.

Another shade of response is that feeling-shade which we experience in the face of emptiness, or blackness, which, of course, is related to emptiness: this is the feeling-shade of fear, the feeling-shade of alarm. It is expressed by u, oo as in room. For fullness, for whiteness, light, and everything related to light or whiteness, including sound related to light, we have the feeling-shade of marvelling admiration, of wonder, of reverence: the a. If we have the feeling that an external impression is to be warded off, that we have, as it were, to avert our gaze from it, to protect ourselves, if, that is, we have the feeling that we must put up a resistance, this expresses itself in e. And if, again, we have the opposite feeling, of indicating, of approaching, of union, this expresses itself in i.

With these (we may go into all details later, as well as into diphthongs) we have the most important vowels, with the exception of one which is less common in European countries and which expresses a stronger emotion than all the others. If you try to produce a vowel by forming a sound in which a, o, u are all sounded, it means a feeling, at first, it is true, of fear, but an identification of oneself, in spite of it, with the former object of fear. The profoundest veneration would be expressed by this sound. The sound, as you know, is especially frequent in Oriental languages, but it also proves that the Orientals are people capable of developing great veneration—whereas it is absent from Occidental languages, because in the Occident we find people whose veneration is not their strongest point.

This survey gives us a picture of inner soul-stirrings expressed in vowels. All vowels express inner soul-emotions as experienced in sympathy with things. For even when we are afraid of a thing our fear is founded on some secret sympathy. We should not have this fear at all unless we had some secret sympathy with its object. In considering these facts you must be careful to take one complication into account. It is comparatively easy to observe that o is connected with astonishment, u with fear and alarm, a with wonder, reverence, e with resistance, i with approach, and aou with awe. But you will find the observation obscured by the facility with which confusion arises between the feeling-shades which you experience on hearing the sound and those you experience in making the sound. They are different. Of the feeling-shades which I have mentioned, you must remember that they are valid for communicating the sound. If, then, you wish to convey some emotion to someone by sound, these observations hold good. If you want to convey to someone that you yourself are afraid, or have had anxiety, you express it by u. One's own fear, and one's desire to excite fear in another person by making the и sound, are not the same feeling-shade. You will much more easily excite the echo of your own fear, if you want to excite fear, by saying to a child, for instance: “U-u-u-!” It is important to consider this in the light of the social significance of speech. If you take it into account you will readily make the above observation.

This experience through the vowels is manifestly a pure inward soul-process. This soul-process, actually the direct outcome of some sympathy, is often encountered by antipathy from outside. This occurs through the consonants, through the accompanying sounds. When we combine a vowel with a consonant, we always combine sympathy and antipathy, and our tongue, our lips, and our palate are really intended solely to function as antipathy-organs, to ward things off. If we spoke only in vowels, in self-sufficing sounds, we should have a simple relation of surrender towards things. We should actually identify ourselves with the flux of things, we should be very unegoistic, for we should develop the deepest possible sympathy with them; we should only draw back in response to the shade of sympathy in our feelings, for instance when we felt fear or horror, but in this very withdrawal sympathy would still be present. In the degree in which the vowels refer to the sound made by ourselves do the consonants refer to the description of the things themselves; the sound of things accompanies them. That is why you will find that the vowels must be sought out as shades of feeling.

Consonants fbm, etc., must be sought out as imitations of external things. Therefore, in showing you, yesterday, f by the fish, I was right in so far as I imitated the outward form of the fish. Consonants can always be traced back to imitations of external things; vowels, on the other hand, to the quite elementary expression of human shades of feeling about things. Consequently, you literally can understand speech as a meeting between sympathy and antipathy. The sympathies always reside in the vowels, the antipathies in the consonants, the accompanying sounds.

But we can understand speech formation in still another way: what really is that sympathy which is expressed in the “breast-man,” so that he brings antipathy to a standstill and the “head-man” merely accompanies it? It is essentially music exceeding certain limits. An experience of music disintegrates, exceeds a certain limit, “outwits” itself, as it were, becomes something more than a mere musical experience. That is: in the degree in which speech consists of vowels, it contains something musical, but in the degree in which it contains consonants, it contains something plastic, a painter's experience. And speech expresses a real synthesis, a real fusion of musical with plastic elements in man. You can see from this that in speech not only the natures of separate individuals are expressed by a kind of unconscious nuance, but, in fact, the natures of human communities. In German we say “Kopf.” “Kopf” expresses in its whole setting “roundness” form. Thus not only for the human head do we say “Kopf,” but for cabbage “Kohlkopf.” In German we express the form of the head in the word “Kopf.” The Roman did not express the form of the head; he said “caput,” and thereby expressed something psychic. He expressed the comprehending, understanding power of the head. He drew his name for “head” from a quite different source. He indicated on the one hand the sympathy of soul, mind (gemüt), and on the other the fusion of antipathy with the outer world. Just try to get a clear idea from the principal vowel of the source of the difference: “Kopf”—astonishment, amazement! The soul feels some astonishment, some amazement about anything round, because roundness in itself is bound up with all that produces astonishment, amazement. Take “caput:” the “A”—reverence. When a person makes a statement you have to accept its demand to be understood. You have to accept another person's statement in order to comprehend it.

In this way, in taking these things into account, you will be saved from the abstraction of going by what stands in the dictionary: For one language this word, for another language that. But the words of the separate languages have been derived here and there from quite different relations. It is utterly superficial to wish to compare them directly, and translating by the dictionary is really the worst translating. If in German we have the word “Fuss” (foot), that is because in our step we make a void, a furrow (Furche). Fuss is connected with Furche. We derive the name for foot from the action of making a furrow. The Romance languages derive “pes” from standing firm, having a point of stability. This linguistic study, so illuminating in teaching, this linguistic study of meanings, is completely absent in science, and it is easy to answer the question: Why is science still not enriched by things which, after all, could be of real practical help?

The reason is that we are still in the process of working out what is necessary for the fifth post-Atlantean period, particularly for education. If you take language in this way, as expressing something inward in its vowels, as indicating something external in its consonants, you will find yourself easily able to make drawings of consonants. Then you will not only need to use the material I give you in the next lectures, but you will be able to make pictures yourself, and so establish by yourself the inner contact with the children, which is far better than merely assimilation adopting the outer picture.

We have, then, recognized that speech is a relation of man to the cosmos. For man by himself would be content to admire, to be astonished; but his relations to the cosmos demand sound from his admiration, from his astonishment.

Now man is embedded in the cosmos in a peculiar way. It is easily possible from quite superficial comparisons to observe his rooted-ness in it. I say what I am saying now because—as you already saw from my previous lecture—much depends on the nature of our feelings to the growing human being, on our reverence for the growing being as a mysterious revelation of the whole cosmos. It is tremendously important to develop this sense as educators and teachers.

Now take, again, from a rather wider point of view the significant fact that the human being takes 18 breaths in a minute. How many breaths does he take in a day? 18 ×60 ×24 = 25,920 breaths in a day. But I can also calculate it by taking the number of breaths in 4 minutes, that is, 72. I should then, instead of multiplying 24 by 60, only have to multiply 6 by 60, that is multiply by 360 the number of breaths in 4 minutes, and my result would still be 25,920 breaths in a day (360 ×72 = 25,920). We can say: Every 4 minutes the process of breathing—breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out—is, as it were, a little day, and in multiplying this number by 360, the sum 25,920 is like a year in comparison, and the day of 24 hours is a “year” for our breathing. Now take our larger breathing-process which takes place in our daily alternation from waking to sleeping. What do waking and sleeping really mean? The meaning of waking and sleeping is that we are “breathing something in” and “breathing something out.” We breathe out the ego and the astral body when we fall asleep, and we breathe them in again when we wake up. We do this within the space of 24 hours. If we take this day, to have a corresponding year we must multiply it by 360. That is, in the course of a year we accomplish in this breathing something similar to the little day-long breathing-process in which we multiplied the breath of 4 minutes by 360: if we multiply by 360 the time between waking and sleeping which is passed in a day, we have the time spent between waking and sleeping in a year: and if, further, we multiply one year by our average span of life, that is by 72, the result is again 25,920. Now really you already have a twofold breathing-process: our fourfold breathing in and out, occurring 72 times, and making 25,920 times in a day; our waking and sleeping, occurring every day, 360 times in a year, and 25,920 times in our whole life. Then you have a third breathing-process, if you follow the sun in its revolution. You know that the point at which the sun rises every spring appears to proceed gradually every year, and the sun takes in this way 25,920 years to go round its whole orbit: here, too, then, in the “Platonic cosmic year” (Precessional Period), the same number 25,920.

How is our life poised in the world? We live 72 years on an average. Multiply this number by 360, and again you get 25,920. So you can visualize that the “Platonic year,” the sun's revolution round the worlds, which takes 25,920 years, has for its day our human life, so that we, in our human life, can look on the process which takes a year in the whole universe, as one breath, and can understand our human span of life as a day in the great year of the universe, so that again we can reverence the minutest process as a reflection of the great cosmic process. If you look at it more closely, the “Platonic year,” that is the course which is completed in the “Platonic year,” is a reflection of the entire process, which, since the old Saturn-evolution, through sun, moon, and earth-evolution, etc., up to Vulcan, has been taking place. But all the processes which take place in the way I have described are arranged as breathing-processes in terms of the number 25,920. And the process which takes place with us between waking and sleeping expresses again the process which took place during the moon-evolution, which is taking place during the earth-evolution, and which will take place during the Jupiter-evolution.³ It is an expression of our kinship with what is beyond earth. And our minutest breathing-process, which takes four minutes, expresses the force which makes us earthly beings. We must say, then: “We are earthly beings through our breathing-process; through our alternation from waking to sleeping we are moon, earth, and Jupiter beings; and through the interplay of our life's course with the conditions of the cosmic year we are cosmic beings. In the cosmic life, in the whole planetary system, one breath embraces a day of our existence; our seventy-two years of life are one day for that Being whose organs form the planetary system.” If you rise above the illusion that you are a limited being, if you comprehend what you are, as a process, as an interplay in the cosmos, what you are in reality, you can then say: “I myself am a breath of the cosmos.”

You may understand this in such a way that its theoretical aspect remains a matter of complete indifference to you, and it is simply a process about which once in a while you were quite interested to hear, but if you retain from it a sense of infinite reverence for what is mysteriously expressed in every human being, this sense will deepen within you to form the necessary inspiration for teaching and education. We cannot, in the education of the future, proceed by introducing into the process of education the external life of the adult. The scene is fearful to contemplate if in future people are to assemble in parliaments on a basis of democratic election, in order to decide the manifold question of teaching and education, acting on the opinions of those whose sole claim to a thorough realization of the situation is their democratic sense. If the situation were to develop as it promises now in Russia, the earth would abandon her appointed task, would be withdrawn from its fulfilment, would be unseated in the universe, and be frozen up.

The time is now ripe for man to extract what is necessary for education from his knowledge of the relation of man to the cosmos. We must permeate our whole education with this feeling: the growing being stands before us, but he is the continuation of what has taken place in the super-sensible before he was born or conceived. This feeling must arise from a knowledge such as we have just applied in the consideration of vowels and consonants. This feeling must permeate us. And only when, in actual fact, this feeling permeates us, shall we really be able to distinguish rightly. For do not imagine that this feeling is unfruitful! Man is so organized that with rightly directed feeling he can himself from these feelings derive his own guiding forces. If you do not achieve this vision in which every human being is a cosmic mystery, you can alternatively only get the feeling that each human being is a mere mechanism, and the cultivation of this feeling that the human being is a mere mechanism would, of course, mean the collapse of earthly civilization. The rise of this civilization, on the contrary, can only be sought in the permeation of our impulse for education by the experience of the cosmic significance of the whole being. We only acquire this cosmic feeling, however, as you see, by looking on the contents of human feeling as pertaining to the time between birth and death, and by regarding our human thinking as an indication of pre-natal processes, and on the human will as an indication of life after death, of the embryonic future or the embryo-to-be. In the threefold human being before us we have first the pre-natal experiences, then the experiences between birth and death, and thirdly what is after death; only that the pre-natal experiences loom into our life in the form of pictures, whereas what is after death is already present in us before death, like a seed.

Again, only through these facts do you get an idea of what really happens when one human being enters into a relation with another. If you read the old authorities on the art of teaching, for instance Herbart, so excellent for bygone times, you always have the feeling: They are operating with concepts with which they cannot approach reality at all; they remain outside reality. Only think how sympathy, rightly cultivated in the earthly sense, penetrates all willing. What lies in us as a seed of the future, as a seed of the after-death, through the will, prevails through love and sympathy. Because of this all that is involved in the will—so that it can be rightly checked or cultivated—must be pursued in education with quite peculiar love. We shall have to assist the sympathy already present in the individual by appealing to his will. What, then, will have to be the real impulse prompting the education of the will? It can be no other than the cultivation of our own sympathy with the pupil. The better the sympathies we cultivate with him, the better will be our educational methods.

And now you will say: “But as the education of the intellect, because it is permeated by antipathy, is the opposite of the education of the will, we should have to cultivate antipathies if we wish to educate the pupil from the point of view of his reason, his intellect!” And that is true; only you must understand it rightly. You must establish these antipathies on the proper footing. You must try to understand the pupil himself correctly if you wish to educate him correctly for the life of ideas. Your understanding itself contains the element of antipathy, for this is inherent in it. By understanding the pupil, by trying to penetrate into the feeling-shades of his being, you become the educator, the teacher, of his reason, of his perception. Here already reside the antipathies, but you make them good by educating the pupil. And you can rest assured: We are not brought together in life unless our meeting is conditioned beforehand. What appear to be external processes are really always the external expression of something inward, however extraordinary this may seem to the superficial view of the world. The fact that you are here to instruct and educate the Waldorf children and all that they represent, certainly points to the Karmic kinship of this group of teachers with just this group of children. And you are the right teachers for these children because you have formerly developed antipathies for these children, and you free yourself from these antipathies by educating the reason of these children now. And we must cultivate sympathies in the right way by producing the right kind of will-training.

Be clear, then, as to this: You can best try to penetrate to the dual being, “man,” by the methods tried in our discussion of training.⁴ But you must try to penetrate to every side of the human being. By following out the methods practised in our teachers' training course,⁵ you will only become a good educator for the child's life of ideas. You will be a good teacher for the child's life of will if you try to surround each individual child with sympathy, with real sympathy. These things belong to education, too: antipathy, which enables us to comprehend; sympathy, which enables us to love. Because we have a body, and through it centres at which sympathy and antipathy meet, these insinuate themselves into that social human intercourse which is expressed in education and teaching. I beg you to feel this through and through.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner: The General Study of the Human Being as the Basis of Pedagogy, Second Lecture. Phil.-Anthrop. Press, Dornach, Switzerland.
• 2. Extract from Eurythmy as Visible Speech referred to at end of this volume. (see inset)
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, World-evolution and Man, Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press of the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.
• 4. See The Art of Education, periodical of the pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner, fifth year, numbers 5 and 6.
• 5. The discussion was on the study and treatment of children's temperaments.

In the last lecture¹ I drew your attention to the necessity, as a point of departure in teaching, for a certain artistic shaping, to engage the whole being, above all, the “will-life.” From the discussions which we have pursued you will see at once why it is important, and you will see, further, that teaching must be managed so as always to take into account that man contains a dead, a dying element, which must be transmuted into something living. When we approach nature and other realms of the world in a merely contemplative attitude, by mental pictures, we are in the line of death; but when we approach nature and other world-beings with our will, we take part in a process of vivification. As educators, then, we shall have the task of continually vivifying dead substance, to protect from total expiration that quality in man which gravitates towards death; even, in a sense, to fertilize it with what vivifying element the will can give rise to. For this reason we must not be afraid of beginning our work with the child with a certain artistic form of teaching.

Now everything which approaches man artistically falls into two streams—the stream of the plastically formative and the stream of the musically poetical. These two domains of art, that of the plastically formative and the musically poetical, are really poles apart, although precisely through their polar antithesis they are well able to be reconciled in a higher synthesis, in a higher unity. You will be familiar, of course, with the fact that this duality of the artistic element comes to light even in racial terms during the course of the evolution of the universe. You need but remember certain writings by Heinrich Heine for this duality to be evident—he showed that what proceeded from the Greek people, or was related to them, that is what grew racially from their inner nature, is pre-eminently disposed towards the plastically formative shaping of the world, whereas all that sprang from the Jewish element is especially disposed to the really musical element in the world. You find, then, these two streams racially distributed, and anyone who is sensitive to these things will very easily be able to trace them in the history of art. Naturally there are continually arising aspirations, justified aspirations, to unite the musical with the plastically formative. But they can only really be completely united in a perfectly developed Eurhythmy, where the musical and the visible can become one—naturally not yet, for we are only at the beginning, but in the aims and ultimate achievement of Eurhythmy. It must, therefore, be remembered that the whole harmonious nature of man contains a plastically formative element towards which the will-impulse in man inclines. How, then, can we properly describe this human talent for becoming plastically creative?

Were we to be purely intellectual beings, were we only to observe the world through conceptions, we should gradually become walking corpses. We should, in actual fact, make the impression here on earth of dying beings. Only through the urge we feel within us to animate plastically-creatively with the imagination what is dying in concepts, do we save ourselves from this dying. You must beware of wanting to reduce everything to unity in an abstract way, if you wish to be true educators. Now you must not say: “We are not to cultivate the death-giving element in man, we are to avoid cultivating the conceptual, the thought-world in the human being.” In the psychic spiritual realm that would result in the same error as if doctors, turning into great pedagogues, were to contemplate the course of civilization and to say: “The bones represent the side of death in man; let us, then, protect man from this dying element, let us try to keep his bones alive, soft.” The opinion of such doctors would end in giving everyone rickets. It always implies a false principle to proceed to say, as many theosophists and anthroposophists like to do, if there is any talk of Ahriman and Lucifer² and their influences on human evolution; they say these things harm human nature, therefore we must beware of them. But that would be equivalent to excluding man from all the elements which should form his constitution. In the same way, we cannot prevent the cultivation of the conceptual element; we must cultivate it, but at the same time we must not neglect to approach human nature with the plastically formative. In this way there results the desired unity. It does not result from the extinction of the one element, but from the cultivation of both, side by side. In this respect people to-day cannot think in terms of unity. For this reason, too, they do not understand the Threefold State.³ In social life the only right solution is for the spiritual life, economic life, and the life of rights, to stand side by side and for their union to take place of itself, creatively, and not through human abstract organization. Only imagine what it would mean if people were to say: “As the head is a unity, and the rest of the body, too, the human body is really an anomaly; we ought to evolve the head from the rest of the body and allow it to move freely in the world!” We only act in accordance with nature when we allow the whole to grow out of one-sided aspects.

The question, then, is to develop the one isolated aspect, conceptual education. Then the other isolated aspect, the plastically formative, animates what is developed in the mere concept. The question here is to elevate these things into consciousness without losing our naivety, for this age always annihilates consciousness. There is no need to sacrifice our naivety if we fashion things concretely, not abstractedly. For instance, it would be a very good thing from all points of view to start as early as possible with the plastically formative, by letting the child live in the world of colour, by saturating oneself as a teacher with the instructions given by Goethe in the didactic part of his “Theory of Colour” (Farbenlehre). What is the basis of the didactic part of Goethe's Farbenlehre?⁴ The secret is that Goethe always imbues each separate colour with a feeling-shade. He emphasizes, for instance, the rousing quality of red, he emphasizes not only what the eye sees, but what the soul experiences in red. In the same way he lays stress upon the tranquillity, the self-absorption, experienced by the soul in blue. It is possible, without jarring on the child's naivety, to introduce him into the world of colour so that the feeling-shades of the world of colour issue forth in living experiences. (If, incidentally, the child gets itself at first thoroughly grubby it will be a good step in his education if he is trained to get himself less grubby.)

Begin as early as possible to bring the child in touch with colours, and in so doing it is a good idea to apply different colours to a coloured background from those you apply to a white surface; and try to awaken such experiences in the child as can only arise from a spiritual scientific understanding of the world of colour.⁵ If you work as I have done with a few friends at the smaller cupola of the Dornach building,⁶ you acquire a living relation to colour. You then discover if, for instance, you are painting with blue, that the blue colour itself possesses the power to portray inwardness. We can say, then, that in painting an angel impelled by his own inwardness you will feel the spontaneous urge to keep to blue, because the shading of blue, the light and dark of blue, produces in the soul the feeling of movement pertaining to the nature of the soul. A yellow-reddish colour produces in the soul the experience of lustre, giving a manifestation towards the external. If, then, the impression is aggressive, if we are encountered by a warning apparition, if the angel has something to say to us, if he desires to speak to us from his background, we express this by shades of yellow and red. In an elementary fashion we can invite children to understand this living inwardness of colours.

Then we ourselves must be very profoundly convinced that mere drawing is something untrue. The truest thing is the experience of colour; less true is the experience of light and shade, and the least true is drawing. Drawing as such already approaches that abstract element present in nature as a process of dying. We ought really only to draw with the consciousness that we are essentially drawing dead substance. With colours we should paint with the consciousness that we are evoking the living element from what is dead. What, after all, is the horizontal line? When we simply take a pencil and draw a horizontal line, we do an abstract, a dead thing, something untrue to nature, which always has two streams: the dead and the living. We extract the one trend and affirm that it is nature. But if I say: “I see green and I see blue, which are different from each other,” the horizontal line emerges from the contiguity of the colours and I express a truth. In this way you will gradually realize that the form of nature really arises from colour, that therefore the function of drawing is abstraction. We ought to produce already in the growing child a proper feeling for these things, because they vivify his whole soul's being and bring it into a right relation with the outside world. Our civilization is notoriously sick for lack of a right relation to the outside world. There is absolutely no need, I wish to remind you, to return to one-sided-ness again in teaching. For instance, it will be quite wise gradually to pass from the purely abstract art which people produce in their delight in beauty, to concrete art, to the arts and crafts, for humanity to-day sorely needs truly artistic productions in the general conditions of civilization. We have in actual fact reduced ourselves in the course of the nineteenth century to making furniture to please the eye, for example to making a chair for the eye, whereas its inherent character should be to be felt when it is sat on. To that end it should be fashioned; we should feel the chair; it must not only be beautiful; its nature must be to be sat on. The whole fusion of the sense of feeling with the chair, and even the cultivated sense of feeling—with the way in which the arms are formed on the chair, etc.—should be expressed in the chair, in our desire to find support in the chair. If, therefore, we were to introduce into school-life teaching in handiwork and manual skill with a decided technical-industrial bias, we should render the school a great service. For just imagine what a great cultural problem the individual who means well to humanity is faced with to-day, when he sees how, for instance, abstractions are on the point of inundating modern civilization: there will no longer be even a residue of beauty in civilization; this will be exclusively utilitarian! And even if people dream of beauty, they will have no sense of the compulsion we are under to emphasize more emphatically than ever the necessity for beauty, because of the socializing of life towards which we gravitate. This has to be realized.

There must, therefore, be no reservations with the plastically formative in teaching. But just as little must there be reservations in the true experience of that dynamic element which is expressed in architecture. It is very easy here to fall into the error of introducing the child too early to this experience. But, in a sense, even this must happen; I had addressed a few words to the children of Münich who were on holiday at Dornach, eighty of them, and who had had twelve lessons in Eurhythmy from Frau Kisseleff,⁷ and who were able to demonstrate what they had learnt to a group of their staff and Dornach anthroposophists. The children had their hearts in their work, and at the end of the complete Eurhythmy performance, which also included demonstrations by our Dornach Eurhythmists, the children came up and said: “Did you like our performance too?” They had the real urge to perform as well. It was a beautiful thing. Now at the request of the people who had arranged the whole entertainment, I had to say a few words to the children. It was the evening before the children were to be taken back again to Münich and district. I expressly said: “I am saying something to you now which you do not understand yet. You will only understand it later. But notice if you hear the word ‘Soul’ in future, for you cannot understand it yet!” This drawing of the child's attention to something which he does not yet understand, which must first mature, is extraordinarily important. And the principle is false which is so much to the fore in these days: We are only to impart to the child what he can at the moment understand—this principle makes education a dead thing and takes away its living element. For education is only living when what has been assimilated is cherished for a time deep in the soul, and then, after a while, is recalled to the surface. This is very important in education from seven to fifteen years of age; in these years a great deal can be introduced tenderly into the child's soul which can only be understood later. I beg you to feel no scruple at teaching beyond the child's age and appealing to something which he can only understand later. The contrary principle has introduced a deadening element into our pedagogy. But the child must know that he has to wait. It is one of the feelings we can promote within the child that he must be ready to wait for a perfect understanding until much later. For this reason it was not at all a bad idea in olden times to make the children simply learn 1 × 1 = 1, 2 × 2 = 4, 3 × 3 = 9, etc., instead of their learning it, as they do to-day, from the calculating machine. This principle of forcing back the child's comprehension must be overthrown. It can naturally only be done with tact, for we must not depart too far from what the child can love, but he can absorb a great deal of material, purely on the teacher's authority, for which understanding only dawns later.

If you introduce the plastically formative element to the child in this way you will see that you can vivify much of what is sapping away life.

The musical element, which lives in the human being from birth onwards, and which—as I have already said—expresses itself particularly in the child's third and fourth years in a gift for dancing, is essentially an element of will, potent with life. But, extraordinary as it may sound, it is true that it contains as it plays its part in the child, an excessive life, a benumbing life, a life directed against consciousness. The child's development is very easily brought by a profoundly musical experience into a certain degree of reduced consciousness. One must say, therefore: “The educational value of music must consist in a constant inter-harmonizing of the Dionysian element springing up in the human being, with the Apollonian. While the death-giving element must be vivified by the plastically formative element, a supremely living power in music must be partially subdued and toned down so that it does not affect the human being too profoundly.” This is the feeling with which we should introduce music to children.

Now this is the position: Karma develops human nature with a bias towards one side or the other. This is particularly noticeable in music. But I want to point out that here it is over-emphasized. We should not insist too much: This is a musical child; this one is not musical. Certainly the fact is there, but to draw from it the conclusion that the unmusical child must be kept apart from all music and only the musical children must be given a musical education, is thoroughly false; even the most unmusical children should be included in any musical activity. It is right without a doubt, from the point of view of producing music more and more, only to encourage the really musical children to appear in public. But even the unmusical children should be there, developing sensitiveness, for you will notice that even in the unmusical child there is a trace of the musical disposition which is only very deep down and which loving assistance brings to the surface. That should never be neglected, for it is far truer than we imagine that, in Shakespeare's words

The man that hath no music in himself
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; ...
Let no such man be trusted.

The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene I.

That is a very fundamental truth. Nothing should therefore be left undone to bring in touch with music the children considered at first to be unmusical.

But of the greatest importance, particularly socially, will be the cultivation of music in an elementary way, so that, without any paralysing theory, the children are taught from the elementary facts of music. The children should get a clear idea of the elements of music, of harmonies and melodies, etc., from the application of the most elementary facts, from aural analysis of melodies and harmonies, so that in music we proceed to build up the structure of the artistic element as a whole in just the same elementary way as we do with the plastically formative element, where we begin with the isolated detail. This will help to mitigate the persistent intrusion into music of dilettantism; although it, must not for a moment be denied that even musical dilettantism has a certain utility in the social life of the community. Without it we should not with ease be able to get very far, but it should confine itself to the listeners. Precisely if this were done it would be possible to give due prominence within our social life to those who can really produce music. For it should not be forgotten that all plastically formative art tends to individualize people: all the art of music and poetry, on the other hand, furthers social intercourse. People come together and unite in music and poetry; but they become more individual through plastic and formative art. The individuality is better preserved by the plastically formative; social life is better maintained in common enjoyment and experience of music and poetry. Poetry is created in the solitude of the soul—there alone; but it is understood through its general reception. With no intention of inventing an abstraction we can say that man discloses his innermost soul in the creation of poetry, and that his inner soul finds response again in the innermost soul of other people who absorb his creation. That is why pleasure, above all things, in, and yearning for, music and poetry, should be cultivated in the growing child. In poetry the child should early become familiar with real poetry. The individual to-day grows up into a social order in which he is tyrannized over by the prose of language. There are to-day innumerable reciters who tyrannize over people with prose, and place in the foreground of the poem nothing but the prose-content. And when the poem is so recited that the emphasis is laid on the thought content, we consider it nowadays the perfect recitation. But a really perfect recitation is one which particularly emphasizes the musical element. In the few words with which I sometimes introduce our Eurhythmy demonstrations, I have often drawn attention to the way in which in a poet like Schiller a poem arises from the depth of his soul. In many of his poems he first feels the lilt of an undefined melody, and only later into this undefined melody does he sink, as it were, the content, the words. The undefined melody is the element in which the content is suspended, and the poetical activity lives in the fashioning of the language, not in the content, but in the measure, in the rhythm, in the preservation of the rhyme, that is in the music which underlies poetry. I said that the present mode of recitation is to tyrannize over people, because it is always tyranny to attach the greatest value to the prose, to the content of a poem, to its abstract treatment. Spiritual-scientifically we can only escape the tyranny by presenting a subject, as I always try to do, from the most different angles, so that comprehension of it is kept fluid and artistic. I felt particular pleasure when one of our artistically gifted friends said that certain cycles of my lectures, purely in virtue of their inner structure, could be transformed into a symphony. Something of this kind actually does underlie the structure of certain cycles. Take, for instance, the cycle given in Vienna⁸ on the life between death and a new birth, and you will see that you could make a symphony out of it. That is possible because an anthroposophical lecture should not make a tyrannical impression, but should arouse people's will. When, however, people come to a subject like the “Threefold State,” they say that they cannot understand it. In reality it is not difficult to understand; only they are not used to the mode of expression.

It is consequently of extreme importance to draw the child's attention in every poem to the music underlying it. For this reason the division of teaching should be arranged so that the lessons of recitation should come as near as possible to those of music. The teacher of music should be in close contact with the teacher of recitation, so that when the one lesson follows the other a living connection between the two is achieved. It would be especially useful if the teacher of music were still present during the recitation lesson and vice versa, so that each could continually indicate the connections with the other lesson. This would completely exclude what is at present so very prominent in our school-life, and what is really horrible—the abstract explanation of poems. This detailed explanation of poems, verging perilously on grammar, is the death of all that should influence the child. This “interpretation” of poems is a quite appalling thing.

Now you will object: But the interpreting is necessary to understand the poem! The answer to that must be: Teaching must be arranged to form a whole. This must be discussed in the weekly Staff-meeting. This and that poem come up for recitation. Then there must flow in from the rest of the teaching what is necessary for the understanding of the poem. Care must be taken that the child brings ready with him to the recitation lesson what he needs to understand the poem. You can quite well—for instance, take Schiller's Spaziergang—explain the cultural-historical aspect, the psychological aspect of the poem, not taking one line after the other with the poem in your hand, but so as to familiarize the child with the substance. In the recitation lesson stress must be laid solely on the artistic communication of art.

If we were to guide the artistic element like this, in its two streams, to harmonize human nature through and through, we should have very important results. We must simply consider that when a human being sings it is an infinitely valuable achievement of companionship with the world. Singing, you see, is itself an echo of the world. When the human being sings he expresses the meaningful wisdom from which the world is built. But we must not forget that when he sings he combines the cosmic melody with the human word. That is why something unnatural enters into song. This can easily be felt in the incompatibility of the sound of a poem with its content. It would mean a certain progress if one were to pursue the attempt already begun, to maintain sheer recitative in the lines, and only to animate the rhyme with melody, so that the lines would pass in a flow of recitative and the rhyme be sung like an aria.⁹ This would result in a clean severance of the music of a poem from its words, which, of course, disturb the actually musical person.

And again, when the musical ear of the individual is cultivated he himself becomes more disposed to a living experience of the musical essence of the world. This is of the supremest value for the evolution of the individual. We must not forget: In the plastically formative we contemplate beauty, we live it; in music we ourselves become beauty. This is extraordinarily significant. The further back you go into olden times the less you find what we really call music. You have the distinct impression that music is only in process of creation, in spite of the fact that many musical forms are already dying out again. This arises from a very significant cosmic fact. In all plastic or formative art man was the imitator of the old celestial order. The highest imitation of a world-heaven order is the plastic formative imitation of the world. But in music man himself is creative. Here he does not create out of a given material, but lays the very foundations for what will only come to fulfilment in the future. It is, of course, possible to create music of a kind by imitating musically, for instance, the rushing of water or the song of the nightingale. But true music and true poetry are a creation of something new, and from this creation of the new will arise one day the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions.¹⁰ In linking up with music we retrieve, in a sense, what is still to be; we retrieve it for reality out of the present nullity of its existence.

Only in linking up in this way with the great facts of the world do we acquire a right understanding of teaching. Only this can confer on it the right consecration, and in receiving this consecration it is really transformed into a kind of divine service.

I have set up more or less an ideal. But surely our concrete practice can be ranged in the realm of the ideal. There is one thing we ought not to neglect, for instance, when we go with the children we are teaching—as we shall, of course—into the mountains and the fields, when, that is, we take them out to nature. In introducing these children like this to nature we should always remember that natural science teaching itself only belongs to the school building. Let us suppose that we are just coming into the country with the children, and we draw their attention to a stone or a flower. In so doing we should scrupulously avoid allowing so much as an echo of what we teach in the school-room to be heard outside in nature. Out in the open we should refer the children to nature in quite a different way from what we do in the class-room. We ought never to neglect the opportunity of drawing their attention to the fact that we are bringing them out into the open to feel the beauty of nature and we are taking the products of nature back into the school-room, so that there we can study and analyse nature with them. We should, therefore, never mention to the children, while we are outside, what we explain to them in school, for instance, about plants. We ought to lay stress on the difference between studying dead nature in the class-room—and contemplating nature in its beauty out of doors. We should compare these two experiences side by side. Whoever takes the children out into nature to exemplify to them out of doors from some object of nature what he is teaching in the class room is not doing right. Even in children we should evoke a kind of feeling that it is sad to have to analyse nature when we return to the class-room. Only the children should feel the necessity of it, because, of course, the disturbance of what is natural is essential even in the building up of the human being. We should on no account suppose that we do well to expound a beetle scientifically out of doors. The scientific explanation of the beetle belongs to the class-room. What we should do when we take the children out into the open is to excite pleasure in the beetle, delight in the way he runs, in his amusing ways, in his relation to the rest of nature. And in the same way we should not neglect to awaken the distinct sense in the child's soul that music is a creative element, an element that goes beyond nature, and that man himself becomes a fellow-creator of nature when he creates music. This sense will naturally have to be formed in a very rudimentary manner as an experience, but the first experience to be felt from the will-like element of music is that man should feel himself part of the cosmos.

• 1. Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, third lecture (the accompanying course. See Preface).
• 2. R. Steiner, Outlines of Occult Science, Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press of the Goetheanum, Dornach, also the Four Mystery Plays.
• 3. R. Steiner, The Threefold State.
• 4. See the Introduction to Goethe's works on Natural Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner.
• 5. R. Steiner's Theory of Colour.
• 6. Wege zu einem neuen Baustil (“Ways to a New Style in Architecture”) five lectures by Rudolf Steiner, with 104 illustrations. The Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press of the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.
• 7. Eurhythmy teacher at the Goetheanum, 1913–27.
• 8. Inneres Wesen des deuschen und Leben zwischen Tod und neuer Gebrut, 1914.
• 9. Paul Baumann, Songs of the Free Waldorf School.
• 10. R. Steiner, Outlines of Occult Science.

Based on such sentiments as might arise from the discussions which we have actually pursued in our meeting on “General Principles of Teaching,”¹ I should like to mention, in connection with method, an extraordinarily important point, which, moreover, has reference to our discussions on method of yesterday.

You must look on the first school-lesson which you take with your pupils in every class as a lesson of outstanding significance. The influence of this first school-lesson will be far more important in one connection than that of all the other lessons. But the other lessons, too, will have to be employed to make the potential influence of the first lesson fruitful for the whole course of teaching. Let us imagine, without more delay, in concrete terms, how—as you will soon be in a position to become familiar with children coming from all quarters of education, and mis-education, too—we are going to arrange the first school-lesson. Of course here I can only give you general suggestions which you will be able to develop further. The point is that you will not have to act in accordance with certain principles of education which have arisen lately, but you will have to aim at things of real value for the child's development.

You have, then, a group in front of you, of various children. The first thing will be to draw the attention of the children to the reason why they are really there. It is extremely important to address the children somewhat in this way: “So now you have come to school, and I shall tell you why you have come to school.” And now this act of coming to school must be consciously appreciated. “You have come to school because you have to learn something in school. To-day you have no idea of all that you are to learn in school, but you will have to learn very many things here. Why will you have to learn very many things in school? Well, you have already met grown-ups, the big people, and you will have seen that they can do something which you cannot. And you are here so that one day you too will be able to do what the big people can do. Some day you will be able to do what you cannot do yet.” To give the children this complex of idea is extremely important. But this deep-seated idea has still another consequence.

No teaching proceeds in the right course unless it is accompanied by a certain reverence for the previous generation. However much this shade of feeling must remain a nuance of feeling and sentiment, it must nevertheless be cultivated in the children by all possible means: the child must look up with reverence, with respect, to what the older generations have already achieved and what he is to achieve, too, through the school. This looking with a certain respect to the surrounding culture must be inspired in the child from the very first, so that he really sees almost a kind of higher being in the people who have already grown older. Without awakening this sense in teaching and education one cannot get on. But neither can one get on without raising to the level of the soul's consciousness the ideals that are to be realized. Proceed to reflect with the child, then, in the following way, quite without hesitation at the fact that you are, in so doing, looking beyond the child's horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the child which he will only understand later. The principle that you should only teach the child what he already understands, what he can already form an opinion on, is the principle which has ruined so much in our culture. A very famous educator of a still more famous personality of to-day once boasted that he had educated this person on this principle: he said: “I have educated this young man well, for I have made him form an immediate opinion on everything.” Now very many people to-day are in agreement with this principle of forming opinions about everything and it is not remarkable that you find a very well-known teacher of a still better-known personality wishing to emphasize this principle again in pedagogical books. I have even found it said in a modern pedagogical work referring to this principle: It only remains to desire that such a model education might be given to every German boy and every German girl. You see from this that examples are plentiful among present-day educationists, of how not to behave, for this kind of educating conceals a great tragedy, and this tragedy again is connected with the present world catastrophe.

The point, then, is not that the child should at once form an opinion on everything imaginable, but that between the seventh and fifteenth year he absorbs what he is to absorb, from love for his teacher, from a sense of his authority. Accordingly you must try to continue the already suggested conversation with the child, enlarging on it in the way which best suits you: “Look how grown-ups have books and can read. You cannot read yet, but you will learn to read, and when you have learnt to read you will be able, one day, too, to handle books and to learn from them what the grown-ups learn from these books. Grown-ups can write letters to each other, too; in fact, they can write about all the things in the world. You also will be able to write letters later, for besides learning to read you will learn to write. And besides being able to read and write, the grownups can calculate. You do not know at all yet what calculating is. But you have to be able to calculate in life, when, for instance, you want to buy something to eat, or when you want to buy clothes or make clothes.” We must talk like this to the child, and then tell him: “You will learn to calculate, too.” It is a good thing to draw the child's attention to this fact, and then perhaps, even the next day, to redirect his attention to it, so that we take it through with the child, like other things, by frequent repetition. It is important, then, to make the child fully conscious of what he is doing.

Altogether it is most important for teaching and for education to see that the consciousness—if I may put it like this—is consciously awakened to what otherwise goes on in life through force of habit. On the other hand, it is of no benefit to teaching or to education to introduce all kinds of tricks into teaching, merely for the sake of the “aim” or only the ostensible aim, of the lesson. You find it suggested to-day that the child should come to school equipped with a box of burnt matches, and with these burnt matches—preferably not round, but square, so as not to roll off the steep benches of the school-room—he should be encouraged to make shapes. He is to be encouraged, for instance, to imitate the shapes of a house, and so on, with these matches. “Playing with sticks” is, in fact, a favourite subject quite particularly recommended nowadays for young children. But such a practice, in the face of a real knowledge of life, is like playing at things; it is meaningless for the inner being of the individual to learn things by playing at matches. For whatever playing at matches can lead to, this can only appear to man in later life as child's play. It is unwise to introduce mere trifling into education. On the contrary it is our task to introduce real life-fullness into education; but mere playing about should have no place there. Do not, however, misunderstand me: I do not say that games should not be introduced into education, but only that a game artificially prepared for the purpose of teaching is a mistake in school. As to how games should be incorporated in teaching we shall have much to say later.

But how can we really educate the child from the first, particularly in the forming of his will?

Having thoroughly talked over what I have just explained, that is, what is suited on the one hand to awakening the child's consciousness to the reason for his coming to school, and on the other hand to his developing a certain reverence, a certain respect, for the grown-up, it is important to pass on to something else. It is well to say to him at this point, for instance, “Look at yourself, now. You have two hands, a left hand and a right hand. You have these hands to work with; you can do all kinds of things with these hands.” That is, let us try to awaken the child's consciousness to the nature of man. The child must not only know that he has hands, but he must be conscious that he has hands. Of course you will probably say here: “Obviously he is conscious of having hands.” But there is a difference if while knowing he has hands to work with this thought has never crossed his soul. When you have talked with the child for a time about hands and about working with hands, go on to let him make something or other requiring manual skill. This can sometimes be done in the first lesson. You can say to him: “Watch me do this.” (You draw a straight line, Fig. 1.) “Now do it with your own hand.” Now you can let the children do the same, as slowly as possible, for it will naturally be a slow process if you are going to call the children out one by one and let them do

it on the board and then go back to their places. The right assimilation of teaching in this case is of the greatest importance. After this you can say to the child: “Now I am making this (Fig. 2); now do the same with your hand.” Now each child does this too. When this is finished you say to them: “This line (Fig. 1) is a straight line, and the other (Fig. 2) is a curved line; so now with your hands you have made a straight and a curved line.” You help the children who are clumsy with their hands, but be careful to see that each child from the first performs his task with a certain perfection.

In this way, then, see that you let the children do something by themselves from the first, and see, further, that a performance of this kind is repeated as revision in the following lessons. In the next lesson, then, have a straight line made, then a curved line. Here a subtle distinction comes into play. The greatest value must not first of all be attached to whether the children can make a straight and a curved line from memory. But the second time, as before, you yourself show on the board how a straight line is drawn and let the children make it after you, and the curved line in the same way. But then you must ask: “Peter, what is that?” “A straight line.” “John, what is that?” “A curved line.” You ought to utilize the principle of repetition by letting the child imitate the drawing and, in refraining from telling him what he is doing, let the child say it himself. It is very important to make this fine distinction. You must attach importance to do habitually the proper thing in front of the children, taking your educational impulses right into your own personal habits.

Then you need not be in the least afraid of setting up fairly soon—it is even an especially good plan to do things like this very early with the children—a paint-box with a glass of water by the side. You take a brush and dip it in the water, take some colour and, on a white surface that you have previously pinned on the board with drawing-pins, you apply a small yellow patch. When you have made this small yellow patch, again let every child make his own yellow patch like it. Each child must leave a certain space between his and the other yellow patches so that you end by having so many distinct yellow patches. Then you yourself dip the brush in the blue paint and make, next to the little surface which you painted yellow, directly next to it, a blue patch. Now you let the children make each a blue patch just the same. When about half the children have done this you say: “Now we will do something else; I am going to dip the brush in the green and add a green patch to the other patches.” Now let the other children—avoiding as well as you can making the children jealous of each other—make a green patch in the same way. This will take some time; the children will take it in well, as, in fact, in teaching, all depends on going quite slowly, in quite little steps, from one thing to the next. At this point you should say: “Now I am going to tell you something that you cannot understand properly yet, but that you will understand perfectly some day: what we have done up there, where we put blue next to yellow, is more beautiful than what we did down here, where we have green next to yellow; blue near yellow is more beautiful than green near yellow.” That will linger long in the child's soul. It will often have to be referred to again, to be repeated, but the child himself will turn it over; he will not absorb it with complete indifference but he will learn by and by to understand very well from simple, primitive illustrations how to distinguish in his feeling a beautiful thing from a less beautiful thing.

A similar process can be applied to the teaching of music. Here, too, it is a good plan to start from some single note. There is no need even to tell the child the name of this note, but strike a note in some way or other. Then it is a good plan to let the children themselves strike this note immediately, that is, here, too, to combine it with the element of will. Afterwards you strike a second concordant note and again let a number of children take turns at striking this same concordant note. Then go on to strike a note dissonant with a given note and again let the children do it after you. And now you try, as previously with colour, to awaken in the children a feeling for concord and discord in tones, by talking to them not of “concord” and “discord,” but of “beautiful” and “less beautiful,” by appealing, that is, to feeling. It is with these things, not with letters, that the first lesson should start. This is how we should begin.

Now let us take first the teacher who takes the main morning lessons. He will conduct with the children the conversations I have just described. Perhaps the musical element will have to be separate from these; the children will then be introduced to it at another time. Now it will be well for the music-master to enter into a quite similar conversation with the children, but based more upon music, and also to refer to it frequently, so that the child realizes: This is not only repeated by one teacher, but the other teacher says the same, and we learn the same from both. This should help to give the school a more corporative character. These matters should always be discussed in the weekly staff meeting and so produce a certain unity in the teaching.

Only when you have taught the children manually and aurally like this is the time ripe for passing on to the first elements of reading, and, in fact, particularly to the reading of handwriting. It will have an extraordinarily good effect on the child from the point of view of method to have spoken to him as early as the first lesson about reading, writing, and arithmetic, and how he cannot do these things yet, it is true, but will learn them all in school. This awakens hope, desire, resolve in the child, and he enters through their spontaneous power into a world of feeling, which again incites to the world of will. You can refrain from introducing the child directly to what you intend to teach him later and leave him in a state of expectancy. This has an extremely favourable effect on the development of the will of the growing being.

I should now like, before going into this further, to dissipate a few of those ideas which might perhaps lead you astray. There has been so much sinning in the name of the methods hitherto employed in learning to read and to write, but especially in what is, after all, connected with learning to read and write: with language, with grammar, syntax, etc. There has been so much sinning that there are doubtless few people who do not remember with a kind of horror how they were made to learn grammar or even syntax. This horror is, of course, fully justified. Only it must not therefore be imagined that the learning of grammar as such is useless and that it should be entirely ousted. That would be an utterly false idea. Obviously, if people are going to try to come by the right method by going from one extreme to the other, we shall be hearing it said: “Well, then, let us do away with grammar altogether; let us teach the child to read practically, by putting reading passages before him: let us teach him to read and write without any grammar.” This idea might result from the very horror which many a person still remembers. Yet the learning of grammar is not a useless factor, particularly in our time, for the following reason.

What do we really do when we elevate unconscious speech into grammar, into the knowledge of grammar? We pass with our pupil from unconscious language to the higher plane of a fully conscious approach; we do not in the least wish to teach him grammar pedantically, but we want to elevate into consciousness processes otherwise performed unconsciously. Unconsciously, or half-consciously, in fact, man climbs in life up to the external world in a way corresponding to what he learns in grammar. In grammar, for instance, we learn that there are nouns. Nouns indicate objects, objects which in a sense are enclosed in space. That we encounter such objects in life is not without significance for our life. Through all that is expressed in nouns we become conscious of our independence as human beings. We disassociate ourselves from the outer world in learning to describe things by nouns. When we call a thing “table” or “chair,” we disassociate ourselves from the table or chair. We are here, the table or chair is there. It is quite another matter when we describe things by adjectives. When I say: “The chair is blue,” I define some quality which unites me with the chair. The quality which I perceive unites me with the chair. When I describe an object by a noun I disassociate myself from it; when I define its quality I approach and unite with it again, so that the development of our consciousness in relation to things is reflected in forms of address of which we must become conscious by all means. When I use a verb, “Someone writes,” I do not only associate myself with the individual of whom I use the verb, but I participate in the action of his physical body; I perform it with him, my ego does it with him. My ego joins in the gesture of a physical body when I use a verb. Our listening, particularly to verbs, is in reality always a participation. The most spiritual part of man, in fact, participates, but merely as “tendency.” But only in Eurhythmy is it fully expressed. Eurhythmy gives, besides all else, a form of listening. When someone tells a tale, the listener all the time participates with his ego in the physical life behind the sounds, but suppresses it. The ego performs a constant Eurhythmy, and the Eurhythmy expressed in the physical body is only listening made visible. So you are always engaged in Eurhythmy when you listen, and when you are actually performing Eurhythmy you are only making visible what you leave invisible when you listen. The manifestation of the activity of the listener is, in fact, Eurhythmy. It is nothing in the least arbitrary, but it is in reality the activity of the listening person revealed. People to-day, of course, are inwardly fearfully sluggish, and in listening they inwardly perform at first very bad Eurhythmy. You become better controlled when you really learn to listen. In making this activity normal you elevate it into a real Eurhythmy. People will learn from Eurhythmy to listen rightly, for to-day, of course, they cannot listen properly at all.

I have made curious discoveries while delivering my present lectures.² In the discussions speakers stand up, but you very soon notice from their speeches that they have really not heard the whole lecture at all, not even physically, but that they have only heard parts of it. Particularly in the present age of our human evolution this is of quite especial significance. Someone puts in his spoke, in the discussion, for instance, and says what he has been accustomed to think for decades. You may address a socialistically minded audience, but they really only hear you say what they have heard from their political propagandists for decades; they do not even physically hear the rest. They sometimes naively confess as much in these words: “Dr. Steiner says many beautiful things, but he says nothing new.” People have become so rigid in their listening that they confuse everything that has not been fossilized within them decades ago. People cannot listen, and will become increasingly less able to do so in these times, unless the power of listening is stirred to life afresh by Eurhythmy.

A kind of healing or restoration of the soul's being must take place again. Consequently, it will be particularly important to add the hygiene of the soul to all the materialistic hygienic tendencies of gymnastic training and to all that is exclusively concerned with the physiology and the functions of the body. This can be achieved by having alternate Gymnastics and Eurhythmy. Then, even if Eurhythmy, in the first place, is Art, the hygienic element in it will be of particular benefit, for people will not only learn something artistic in Eurhythmy, but they will learn for the soul what they learn for the body in Gymnastics, and, moreover, there will result a very beautiful interplay of these two forms of expression. The point is really to educate our children so that they take thought again for their surroundings, for their fellow-beings. That, of course, is the foundation of all social life. In these days everyone talks of social impulses, but sheer anti-social tendencies prevail. People will have to learn to respect one another before socialism can begin. They can only do this if they really listen to each other. It is extraordinarily important to direct people's feelings to these matters again, if we are to be educators and teachers.

Now simply this knowledge: by using a noun I dissociate myself from my surroundings, by using an adjective I unite myself with them, and by using a verb I actively merge in them, I participate—this knowledge alone will compel you to speak of “noun,” “adjective,” and “verb” with quite a different inner emphasis from what you would give to these words without this consciousness. All this, however, is only by way of preliminary; it must be developed further. For the moment I only wish to evoke certain ideas whose absence might confuse you.

It is, then, extraordinarily important to know how significant for man is the elevation to consciousness of the structure of our language. But besides this, we must acquire a feeling which has also to a great degree already died out in modern people—a feeling of how wise language really is. It is much cleverer, of course, than all of us. Language—as you will doubtless believe from the outset—has not been built up in its structure by man. For imagine what would have resulted if people had had to sit down together in parliaments to determine the structure of language according to their lights! Something about as clever as our laws! But language is truly cleverer than our State-laws. The structure of language contains the greatest wisdom. And you can learn an extraordinary amount from the way a nation or other group of people expresses itself. If you consciously penetrate into the framework of a language its genius teaches you very much. And to learn how to feel something concrete of the working and active influence of the spirit of language is extraordinarily important. To believe that the genius of a language works at its construction means a great deal. This feeling, too, can be further developed, can be developed into the consciousness: we human beings speak; animals cannot; they have at the most the beginnings of an articulate language. In these times, of course, when people like to confuse everything, we attribute language to ants and bees as well. But in the light of reality that is all nonsense. It is all based on a form of opinion to which I have frequently drawn attention. There are naturalist philosophers to-day who imagine themselves very wise and who say: “Why should not the plants, too, have a life of the will and a life of feeling?” There are, in fact, such things as plants—the so-called insectivorous plants—which, when small creatures fly in their proximity, attract them, and when they have crept inside, close up. Those, then, are beings which apparently use will towards what approaches them. But we cannot claim that such outward signs are really characteristic of will. If such a view is mentioned, I usually say, applying the same logic to my argument: “I know something which waits, too, till a living creature comes near it, then encloses and imprisons it. I refer to the mouse-trap. The very mousetrap could just as well be considered a living creature as the Venus fly-trap (the plant that catches flies).”

We must be profoundly conscious that the power of articulate speech is mere human property. Man must also become conscious of his relation in the world to the other three kingdoms of nature. If he is conscious of this he knows that his ego is essentially bound up with our power to speak, though to-day's speaking has become very abstract. But I should like to remind you of a fact which will inspire you anew with respect for language. When in very olden times, for instance in the Jewish civilization—but it was even more pronounced in still older civilizations—when priests and those who represented a cult or were in charge of it—in the course of their rites and ceremonies came to certain ideas, they interrupted their words and conveyed certain descriptions of higher beings, not through words, but through silence and through the corresponding Eurhythmic gesture—they were silent and then they went on speaking. In this way, for example, the name which already sounds so abstract to us to-day and which expressed in Hebrew, “I am that I am,” was never uttered, but speech was invariably used up to this point, then a sign was made, and only after that was the speaking resumed. Thus was expressed by gesture the “Unutterable and ineffable name of God in man.” Why was this done? Because if this name had been spoken and repeated, as a matter of course, without further ceremony, people would have been stunned by it, so great was their sensitiveness in those days. There were then certain sounds and combinations of sound in speech by which the people of more ancient civilizations could be stunned, so violent was their effect. Something like an actual swoon would have come over people at the utterance and hearing of such words. That is why they spoke of the “ineffable name of God.” It was profoundly significant. And this is seen when it is laid down: Only the priests, and they only on certain occasions may utter such names, because otherwise, at their utterance before those unprepared for them, heaven and earth would collapse. That is, people would have fainted and lost consciousness. That is why a name of this kind was expressed by a gesture. The real essence of language, then, was expressed by a feeling of this kind. But nowadays people chatter thoughtlessly about everything. We can no longer vary our feelings, and those people are very rare who, without sentimentality, feel tears in their eyes, for instance, at certain passages in novels. In fact, this is quite atavistic to-day. The living experience of what lies in the essence of language and the feeling in language has become very dulled.

This experience, among many other things, will have to be revived, and if we revive it we shall be able to feel profoundly how much we owe to the power of speech. We owe much of our ego-sense, of our sense of ourselves as personalities, to nothing less than our language. And it is possible for man to have a feeling as intense as prayer: “I hear language spoken around me; the power of language is flowing into me.” When you have felt the holiness in this call of the language to the ego you will also be able to awaken it in the children. And then, in fact, you will not awaken this ego-sense in children in an egoistic form, but quite differently. For this ego-sense in children can be awakened in two ways. If it is falsely excited it directly stimulates egoism; if it is rightly stirred, it stimulates the will, it is an impulse to selflessness itself, a direct impulse to life with the outer world.

What I have just said is meant to permeate you as educators and teachers. It is left to you to apply it in the teaching of languages. Of how it can be imbued in practice with consciousness, to awaken in the child the conscious feeling of his personality, we shall speak in our next lecture.

• 1. See Lecture IV of the accompanying course referred to in the Preface.
• 2. These were the lectures on the Threefold State.

In the last lecture we spoke of how the first school-lesson should be conducted. Naturally I cannot go on to describe every step separately, but I should like to indicate the essential course of the teaching, so that you are able to make something of it in practice.

You have seen that we have considered as most important: first, the child's consciousness of why he has actually come to school; then the transition by which he becomes conscious that he has hands; and then, after making him conscious of this, that a kind of drawing should be embarked on, and even a kind of transition to painting, from which the sense of the beautiful and the less beautiful can be developed. We have seen that this emerging sense can be observed in hearing, too, and that the first elements of the musical experience of beauty and the less beautiful will be linked up with it.

Let us now suppose that you have pursued such exercises with pencil and with colour for some time. It is absolutely a condition of well-founded teaching that a certain intimacy with drawing should precede the learning to write, so that, in a sense, writing is derived from drawing. And a further condition is that the reading of printed characters should only be developed from the reading of handwriting. We shall then try to find the transition from drawing to handwriting, from writing to the reading of handwriting, and from the reading of handwriting to the reading of print. I assume for this purpose that you have succeeded, through the element of drawing, in giving the child a certain mastery of the round and straight-lined forms which he will need for writing. Then from this point we would again seek the transition to what we have already mentioned as the foundation of teaching in reading and writing. To-day I will first try to show you by a few examples how this can be done.

We assume, then, that the child has already come to the point at which he can master straight-lined and round forms with his little hand. We began with the fish and the F. You do not need to proceed alphabetically; I am only doing it now so that you have it in encyclopaedic form. Let us see what success we have in beginning to evolve writing and reading on the lines of your own free imagination. I should first say to the child at this point: “You know what a bath is”—and here I will say in parenthesis that much depends in teaching on being able to make use of any situation in a rational way, that is, on always having between the lines of the lesson anything that may help your purpose. It is well to use the word “bath” for what I now intend to do, so that the child remembers, in connection with being at school, baths, washing, and cleanliness. It is well to have something like this in the background, without having to moralize or give orders. It is well to select your examples so that the child is compelled to think of something which contributes at the same time to a moral-aesthetic attitude. Then go on to say: “Look; when the grown-ups want to write down what a bath is, they write it like this: BATH. So this is the picture of what you mean when you say Bath and when you give a name to it.” Then, again, I simply let a number of children write this after me, so that whenever they come to something of this kind they get it into their little hand; they do not merely look at it, but they grasp it with their whole being. Now I shall say: “Watch yourself beginning to say ‘bath.’ We will just get the beginning clear: ‘B.’” The child must be guided from saying the whole word “bath” to breathing the first sound, as I illustrated with “fish.” And now it must be made clear to the child that just as Bath is the sign for the whole bath, “B” is the sign for the beginning of the word “bath.”

Then I draw the child's attention to the presence in other words of a similar beginning. I say: “When you say ‘band’ you begin just the same way; when you say ‘bow,’ which many women wear on their heads, a bow of ribbon, you begin just the same way; and perhaps, too, you have seen a bear at the zoo; for that, too, you begin to breathe the same way; each of these words begins with the same breathing out.” In this way I try to pass with the child from the whole of the word to the initial letter, to lead him to nothing but the single sound, to the letter, always to develop the initial letter from the word.

Now the problem for you is to try, let us say, first to evolve the initial letter yourself in the same visualizing way from drawing. You will be able to do this easily if you simply call your imagination to your aid and say to yourselves:

“The people who first saw animals which begin with B, like beaver, bear, etc., portrayed the back of the animal, the feet on which it sits and the lifted fore-feet; they drew an animal in the act of rising, standing on its hind legs, and the drawing became the B. You will find in every word—” and here you can give full rein to your imagination; there is no need to go into histories of civilizations, which are incomplete in any case—you will find that the initial letter is pictorial, representing the form of an animal or plant or even an external object. This is historically the fact: if you go back to the most ancient forms of the Egyptian writing, which was still hieroglyphic, you find that everywhere the letters are imitations of such things. And not until the transition from the Egyptian civilization to the Phoenician was the process completed which we can call a development from the “picture” to the “sign” to represent a sound. Let the child follow the same line. It leads to the following:

In the earliest periods of the evolution of writing in Egypt, literally every detail which had to be written down was written down in picture-writing, was drawn—indeed, was so drawn that it became necessary to learn the easiest possible way of making the drawings. Anyone who made a mistake, when he was appointed to copy these hieroglyphics, if, for instance, the error occurred in a sacred word, was condemned to death. In ancient Egypt, then, matters of writing were taken very, very seriously. But all writing which existed was picture-writing of the kind I have described. Then civilization passed over to the Phoenicians, who lived more in the world outside them. Here the initial

image was always retained and transferred to the sound. As an example I will show you from a word where the process is most easily paralleled in our language (though we cannot here study Egyptian) and is also true of the Egyptian language. The Egyptians saw that the sound M could be best shown by watching chiefly the upper lip. So they took the sign for M from the picture of the upper lip. From this sign there then evolved the letter which we have for the beginning of the word Mouth and which then remained for every similar beginning, for everything beginning with M. The picture of the word was taken over. Thus transferring the picture of the word to the initial letter one came to the sign for the sound.

This principle, which is contained in the history of the evolution of writing, can also be very well applied to teaching, and now is the moment to apply it. That is: we shall try to arrive at the letter from the drawing: just as we get from the “fish” with his two fins to F, we get from the bear, dancing, standing up, to B. We get from the upper lip to the mouth, to the M, and we try with our imagination to trace for the child a path like this from drawing to writing. I said that you have no need to study the history of writing in civilized life and refer to it for what you need. For what you look up in this research is of far less value to you in teaching than are the discoveries of your own soul's making, of your own imagination. The activity which you apply to the study of the history of writing deadens you so that your influence on your pupil is far less living than when you think out for yourself something like the Ð’ from the picture of the bear. This thinking out for yourself refreshes you so that what you want to convey to your pupil is much more living than when you embark on excursions into the history of civilizations to discover something for your lesson. And from these two points of view both life and teaching must be considered. For you must ask yourself: “What is more important, to have learnt an historical, most elaborately ascertained fact and incorporated it painfully into your teaching—or to feel yourself so astir in your soul that you transmit to the child with your own enthusiasm the discovery you make?” You will always feel joy, even if it is a quite calm joy, in transferring to letters the form of some animal or some plant which you have found yourself. And this joy which you yourself feel will live in what you make of your pupil.

Then you go on to draw the child's attention to the fact that the letter which he has seen at the beginning of a word occurs in the middle of words too. You go on to say to him: “Let us see; you know what grows outside in the fields or on the hills, what is gathered in autumn and what wine is made from: the vine? (Rebe). The grown-ups write Rebe like this: REBE. Now just think, when you say Rebe quite slowly there is the same sound in the middle as there was at the beginning of Bear.” Then always write it up first in big letters so that the child sees the resemblance with the picture. Like this we teach him that what he has learnt for the beginning of a word is found, too, in the middle of words. We go on to split the whole into its atoms.

You see the important thing for us who wish to achieve living teaching as opposed to dead: all depends on starting from the whole. As in arithmetic we start with the sum, not with the addenda, and analyse the sum, here, too, we go from the whole to the part. This has the great advantage for education and teaching that we succeed in leading the child into the world in a fully living way; for the world is a whole, and the child lives in enduring intimacy with the living whole when we proceed as I have suggested. When you let the child learn the separate letters from their pictures he enters into a relation with living reality. But you must never omit to write up the letter forms so that they are seen to emerge from an image, and you must always be careful to explain the accompanying sounds, the consonants, as

drawings of external things—but never the vowels. The vowels must always be made to render the human inner being and its relation to the outside world. When, for instance, you try to teach the child a, you will say to him: “Now just think of the sun which you see in the morning. Can any of you remember what you did when the sun rose in the morning?” Then perhaps one child or another will remember what he did. If he does not, if nobody remembers, you must refresh the child's memory a little to bring back to him what he did: how he must have stood, what he must have said if the sunrise was very beautiful: “Ah!” You must let this echo of emotion resound; you must try to derive the resonance, which we hear in the vowel, from emotion. And then you must try to say: “When you stood like that and said ‘Ah!’ it was as if a sunbeam had streamed out of your mouth in the shape of an opening angle. When you see the sunrise you let the life inside you stream out like this (Fig. 1) and you reveal it when you say ‘Ah!’ But you do not let it all stream out; you hold some of it back and that becomes this sign (Fig. 2).” You can try some time to clothe in picture-form the essence of the breath in a vowel. In this way you get drawings which can represent to you in images the process by which the vowel-signs arose. Vowels, you remember, are also rare in the primitive civilizations known to-day. The languages of primitive races are very rich in consonants; much more is expressed in the accompanying sounds, in the consonants, than we know. They sometimes literally click their tongues, they have all kinds of refined resources for pronouncing complicated consonants, and the vowel only vibrates in an undertone between them. Among the African races you find sounds which are like the cracking of a whip, etc.; on the other hand, the vowels are only faintly heard, and the European travellers who meet with such races usually sound the vowels much more than the natives do.

We can always derive the vowels from drawing. If, for instance, you succeed in making the child imagine—by appealing to his feeling—that he is in a situation like this: “Your brother or your sister is coming to you. They tell you something, but you don't understand them. Then there comes a moment when it begins to dawn on you. What sound do you make, then, to show that it is dawning?” Then, again, a child will discover, or the other children will be drawn on until one of them says: “i, i, i” (English ee, ee, ee). The pictorial form of the sound ee then expresses the pointing to something that has been understood. In Eurhythmy it is more clearly expressed. The simple stroke, then, which ought to be thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, is turned into “i;” the stroke alone is made, and the vanishing at the top is expressed by the smaller sign above it. In this way all the vowels can be extracted from the shape assumed by the breath, from the shape of the breath.

In this way you teach the child first of all a kind of picture-writing. Then you need not be at all shy of calling to your aid ideas which evoke real experiences of past history. You can teach the child this: you can say to him: “Just look at the top of the house; what do you say for that? ‘Dach!’ (roof). But then you ought to make a D like this, (Diagram 5); that is awkward. So people changed it round: D.” Such ideas lie concealed in writing and you can utilize them by all means. But then people did not want to write so complicatedly; instead, they wanted to make writing simpler. So from the sign D, which should really be (Diagram 6) (and here you pass on to small letters) there grew this sign, the little d. You can derive the existing letter-forms like this without exception from figures which you have taught to the child pictorially. (Diagram 7)

These facts, of course, have already been observed by individual people; very few in number, it is true. There are educationists who have already drawn attention to the fact that writing should spring from drawing. But they proceed on different lines from those laid down here. They more or less anticipate letters in their final forms; they take a letter in its present form and do not come to the Ð’ from the drawing of the sitting or dancing bear, but they take the b as it is now, divide it up into its separate strokes and lines: | ), and try to lead the child in this way from drawing to writing. They do abstractly what we are attempting to do concretely. That is, several educationists have already rightly observed the practicability of deriving writing from drawing, but people are too firmly rooted in the dead husks of civilized life to be able to conceive of the living process clearly.

Here, too, I should not like to forget to warn you of being led astray by many modern attempts. Don't say: here, this has already been attempted: and there, something else. For you will see that the attempt has not been very profoundly and firmly willed. Humanity continually feels the urge to realize such aims, but it will not be able to carry them out until it has taken spiritual science into its culture.

Thus we can always link up with man and his relation to the world around him by writing organically and teaching reading from the reading of what is written.

Now it is natural to teaching—and we should not leave this out of account—that there should be a certain yearning to be completely free. And notice how freedom inspires this discussion of the preparation of lessons. Our discussion has an inner relation to freedom. For I draw your attention to the fact that you are not to enslave yourself by cramming yourself with the knowledge of how writing evolved from Egyptians to Phoenicians, but you are to look to developing yourself the capacities of your own soul. Positively the same results can be achieved by one teacher in this way, by another teacher in that. Not everyone can make use of a dancing bear; perhaps someone else will make use of something much better for the same point. The ultimate aim can be secured just as well by one teacher as by another. But every teacher puts himself into his teaching, and thus it is that his freedom is perfectly preserved. The more the staff wish to preserve their freedom in this respect, the more they will be able to put into their teaching, to devote themselves to it. This fact has been almost completely lost sight of in recent times. You can see this in a certain phenomenon.

A few years ago there was some agitation—the younger among you have perhaps not had the experience, but it caused the older ones, who had an understanding of such things, a good deal of annoyance—in favour of imposing in spiritual things something similar to the famous “Imperial German State-Gravy” in the material sphere. As you know, it was frequently insisted that a uniform sauce or gravy should be made for all the inns which did not depend entirely on foreign visitors, but rather on Germans. It was called “Imperial German State-Gravy;” people wanted to organize things uniformly. In the same way the attempt was made to make spelling, orthography, uniform. Now people have a quite extraordinary attitude to this question. You can study it in concrete examples. German spiritual life contains a very beautiful, tender relationship between Novalis and a woman. This relationship is so beautiful because Novalis, after her death, still continued to live with her consciously. He speaks of this, following her, in his meditation, into the spiritual world. It is one of the most beautiful, most intimate things which you can read in the history of German literature—this relationship of Novalis to a woman. Now there is a very intelligent, even very interesting (from the point of view I have mentioned), severely philological treatise by a German scholar on the relation between Novalis and his beloved. The delicate, lovely relationship is “put in its proper light,” for it can be proved that the beloved died before she could spell properly. She made spelling mistakes in her letters! In short, the portrait of this personality in its relation to Novalis is shown up in a thoroughly trivial light—in accordance with quite strict scholarship. The method of this scholarship is so good that everyone who writes an essay in which he follows this method deserves to get full marks for it. I only want to remind you that people have already forgotten that Goethe could never spell properly, that in reality he made mistakes all his life, especially in his youth. In spite of this, however, he could rise to Goethean greatness! Not to mention the people who knew him, whom he valued very much—whose letters, in the facsimiles now made, would leave a schoolmaster's hand literally scored with red ink! They would get a thoroughly bad mark!

This absurdity is connected with an utter lack of freedom in our common life, which should play no part in teaching and in education. But a few decades ago it was so pronounced that the enlightened minds among the teachers were seriously annoyed by it. A uniform German orthography was to be set up—the famous “Puttkammer” orthography. That is, in the very school itself the State did not merely exercise a right of supervision, it did not merely control administration, but it laid down even the spelling by law. It looks like it, too! For through this Puttkammer orthography we have really lost much that might still awaken us to-day to some of the intimacies of the German language. Because nowadays they are given an abstract kind of writing, people lose much of the quality which used to live in the German language; the so-called standard language (Schriftsprache) suffers loss.

Now the thing that matters in such a case is, above all, to have the right attitude. Obviously we cannot let any sort of orthography run riot, but we can at least know the extreme ways of dealing with this question. If, after learning to write, people could write what they hear from others, or from themselves, just as they hear it, they would write very variously; they would have very varied fashions of orthography; they would be very individualistic. It would be extraordinarily interesting, but it would obstruct intercourse. On the other hand, our task is to develop not only our individuality in human intercourse, but also our social impulses and social feelings. Many things which we would develop as individuals must be sacrificed where we have to meet others. But we should feel that this is the position, and the feeling should be educated with us, that we do such and such a thing only for social reasons. When you come with your writing-lessons to orthography you will have to start with a certain definite feeling-complex. You will have to draw the child's attention again and again—I have already mentioned this fact from another point of view—to the necessity for reverence, respect for grown-up people, to the fact that he is growing up to an already finished life, which is to receive him, that therefore he must respect what is already there. From this point of view, too, we must try to introduce the child to a thing like orthography. Along with the spelling we must cultivate in him the feeling of respect, of reverence, for what our forefathers have settled. And we must not try to teach spelling from some abstraction, for instance as if orthography had been created by a “divine”—for some, а “Puttkammer” law, as though it came from the Absolute—but you must develop in the child the feeling that the grown-ups, whom one must respect, write like this, therefore their example should be followed. There will result, indeed, a certain variety in spelling, but it will not run riot; instead, it will represent the adjustment of the growing child to the grown-up people about him. And we should reckon with this kind of adaptability: we ought not to want to produce the belief: that is right, and that is wrong; but we ought only to encourage the belief: that is how the grown-ups write; that is, you build here, too, on a living authority.

That is what I meant when I said: “The transition must be found from the child's first period up to the change of teeth, to his second period up to puberty, that is from the principle of imitation to that of authority.” What I meant by this must everywhere be realized in concrete detail, not by inculcating authority in the child, but by proceeding so that the sensitiveness to authority arises of itself, that is by basing the teaching of spelling and the whole orthographic form of writing on so-called authority in the way I have just described.

You will not only have to be teachers and educators at the Waldorf School, but if things go well you will also have to be protagonists of the whole Waldorf School system. For, of course, you will know far more exactly what the Waldorf School really means than can be conveyed to the neighbouring or more distant outside world. But to be the true protagonists of the aims of the Waldorf School and of its aims for civilization in general you will have to be in a position to conduct your defence against prevailing opinion wherever this shows itself antagonistic or even merely demurring. Consequently, I must introduce into these pedagogical-didactic reflections a chapter which will quite naturally connect with what we have already so far analysed in our discussions on method.

You know that in the sphere of educational theory, as well as other spheres, much is expected at the present time from the so-called experimental psychology. Experiments are carried out on people to determine an individual's gift for forming ideas, for memorizing, even for willing, although this can naturally only be ascertained by a detour. The will fulfils itself in sleep, and the electrical apparatus in the psychological laboratory can only indirectly discover an individual's experiences during sleep, just as these cannot be observed directly by way of experiment. Such experiments, indeed, are carried out. Do not imagine that I object to such experiments as a whole. They can be valuable as tendrils of science, as offshoots of science. All kinds of interesting things can be learnt from such experiments and I have decidedly no desire to condemn them, lock, stock, and barrel. I should like everyone who is attracted to work of this kind to have the means of acquiring such psychological laboratories and of carrying out their experiments there. But we must consider for a moment the rise of this experimental psychology in the form in which it is especially recommended by the educationist, Meumann,¹ who is really one of the Herbartian school.

Why is experimental psychology practised to-day? Because people have lost the gift of studying man directly. They can no longer rely on the forces which inwardly bind one man to another—or, to the child. So they try to discover by external devices, by external experiments, what should be done with the growing child. Clearly our principles and methods of teaching take a much more inward course. This is, moreover, urgent and vital for the present day and the immediate future of mankind. Granted, then, on the one hand, the urge to experimental psychology, on the other hand, as a result of this experimental psychology, we get the misconstruction of certain simple facts of life. Let me illustrate this by an example.

These experimental psychologists and educationists have lately been particularly interested in what they call the process of comprehension; for instance, the process of comprehension in reading, in the reading of a given passage. In order to ascertain this process of comprehension they have tried to work with “subjects,” as they are called. If we summarize the steps taken in great detail, this is the procedure. A “subject,” a child or an adult, is given a reading passage, and the investigation is now directed as to which is the most effective method for the child, for instance, to adopt, in order to arrive at the most rapid comprehension. It is discovered that the most effective method is first to “dispose” the reader to the reading passage, that is, first to introduce the person concerned to the meaning of such a reading passage. Then, after numerous tests, the “subject” carries out what is called “passive comprehension.” After having dealt with the meaning, by making “scheme” or plan, it is supposed to be passively comprehended. For through this passive assimilation of a reading passage there should occur what is called “learning to anticipate”: repeating once more in free spiritual activity what has just been worked out in scheme or plan and then passively assimilated. And then follows, as fourth act to this drama, the filling in of all that until now has remained uncertain, that is, of all that has not penetrated completely into the life of the human spirit and soul. If you let the subject carry out, in correct succession, first the process of familiarizing himself with the meaning of a reading passage, then of passive assimilation, then of learning to anticipate, then of returning to the as yet incompletely assimilated parts, you then see that a given reading passage is most effectively grasped, read, and remembered. Do not misunderstand me: I mention this procedure because it must be mentioned in view of the fact that people talk to-day so much at cross-purposes, for they may want to imply the same thing with diametrically opposed words. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will say: “A scrupulously faithful method like this reveals exactly what should be done in education.” But those who have a profounder understanding of the life of the whole being know that this is not the way to true education—any more than you can put together again a living beetle from its separate parts after it has been dissected. It cannot be done. Nor can it be done by trying anatomy on the human soul-activity. It is interesting, of course, and in another connection it can be extremely valuable for science, to practise anatomy on the activity of the human soul—but it does not make educators. For this reason there can proceed from this experimental psychology no new true building up of education; this can only proceed from an inner understanding of man.

I had to say this for fear lest you should misunderstand me when I make a statement which will naturally cause annoyance to a supporter of modern opinion. The statement is one-sided in its way, and its one-sidedness must, of course, be counterbalanced. What do the experimental psychologists get, when they have split up into atoms like this the soul of their subject and have made a martyr of him—this process is not pleasant if it is inflicted on you—what good do they get out of it? According to them they have obtained an extraordinarily valuable result, which is constantly being impressed by italics in educational textbooks as a conclusion arrived at. This statement, translated into decent German, runs roughly like this: You can remember a reading passage better when you have understood the meaning than when you have not understood the meaning. It has been “determined by research”—to use scientific jargon—that it is useful firstly to understand the meaning of a reading passage if you want to learn it easily. And here I must make the heretical declaration that, in as far as this theory is correct, I could have known it before, for I should like to know what person with a normal human intelligence does not know for himself that a reading passage can be remembered better when its meaning has been understood than when this has not been understood. Every single one of the conclusions of experimental psychology is an appalling platitude. The platitudes printed in the textbooks of experimental psychology are sometimes of such a kind that only those people can have anything to do with them who have already trained themselves in the pursuit of science to submit to intense boredom for an occasional striking point. You are easily trained to do this by the drill of the school-system—for even the elementary school has this defect, although it is less conspicuous here than at the universities.

This heretical statement is meant particularly for the educationist: It is to some extent self-evident that one must first understand the meaning of a thing which is to be remembered. But there is this to consider: that what has been assimilated by understanding the meaning, only affects the observation, only affects thought-perception, and that this elevation of the human being to the level of sense-comprehension educates him one-sidedly to a mere observation of the world, to a thought-perception. And if we teach simply and solely in accordance with this theory we shall get nothing but weak-willed people. The statement, then, is in a sense correct—and yet not conclusively correct. It ought, as a matter of fact, to be further expressed in these terms: If you want to do the best possible thing for the thinking perception of the individual you can do it by analysing the meaning of everything that he absorbs. And, in fact, if we were to analyse merely the meaning of things, we could go very far in educating human observation of the world. But we should never educate a man's will—volitional man—for the will cannot be forced by simply throwing the light on the meaning of a thing. The will likes to sleep, and it does not wish to be fully awakened by what I should like to call the perpetual unchaste laying bare of the meaning. And the point is, that the very inevitability of life breaks in upon this simple truth of the value of revealing meanings, so that with the child, too, we must study subjects which do not lay bare the meaning. Then we shall educate his will.

The mischievous effects of the one-sided application of the principles of explaining the meanings have been particularly active in movements like the Theosophical Movement. You know how much I have protested for years against a certain mischievous influence in Theosophical circles. I have even had to see Hamlet, for instance, a pure work of art, explained in terms of theosophical cant like this: “This is Manas, this is the Ego—that is the astral body. This character represents one thing—that one another.” Such explanations were particularly in favour. I protested against them because it is a sin against human life to interpret symbolically what is meant to be taken directly, in its elements, as art. It leads to a mischievous reading of a meaning into things, and this is dragged to the level of mere observation to which it should not be dragged. This all arises from the fact that the actual Theosophical Movement is a decadent movement. It is the furthest-flung offshoot of a declining culture; in its entire attitude it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy aims at being the opposite: at being an ascending movement, the beginning of an ascent. That is a radical difference. That is why so much is written in the field of Theosophy which is really an extreme symptom of decadence. But that there exist people at all who contrive to interpret Hamlet symbolically, character by character, is the result of the appalling way in which we have been educated only to look for meanings.

Human life makes it indispensable that we should not only be educated in terms of the meaning, but from what the will experiences in the sleeping life: by rhythm, measure, melody, harmony of colours, repetition, in fact all spontaneous activity which does not seek to comprehend. When you let the child repeat sentences which he is far from understanding because of his tender age, when you encourage the child to take in these sentences just by memory itself, you certainly do not influence his comprehension—because you are unable to enter into their meaning, for that must only dawn later—but you influence his will, and that is what you should do; that is what you must do. You must try first of all to acquaint the child with things which are first and foremost artistic: music, drawing, plastic art, etc.; but on the other hand you must also give the child things which can have some abstract form of meaning in such a way that he does not, it is true, understand this at once, but only later in life. Then he will understand it because he has assimilated it by repetition, and can remember, and later understand, with his greater maturity, what he could not understand before. There you have worked upon his will. And quite especially you have worked upon his feeling—and you should not forget this. Just as feeling—this can be observed of the soul as well as of the spirit—lies between willing and thinking, so does the education of feeling lie midway between the methods of educating the thinking and those of willing. For the thinking knowledge or thinking perception we must definitely practise subjects concerned with revealing meanings: reading, writing, etc.; for action inspired by will we must cultivate everything which does not aim at a mere interpretation of meanings but at a direct impression through the whole being, for instance, of artistic subjects. What lies midway between the two (i.e. thought and will) will chiefly influence the development of feeling, the formation of its disposition. You can produce a strong effect on the education of the feeling nature when the child is made to assimilate something first of all only by rote, uncomprehended, without tampering with its meaning. For only after some time, when he has matured through other processes, and remembers it, can he understand what he absorbed earlier. This is a subtlety of education which must absolutely be respected, if we are to educate people with inner feelings. For feeling plays a peculiar role in life. In this sphere, too, people should make observations. But they do not observe rightly. I will indicate an observation which you can easily, with a little industry, make for yourselves.

Suppose you are trying to get a clear idea of the state of Goethe's soul in 1790. You can do this by studying a selection of the works composed by Goethe in the year 1790. You find, of course, at the end of every edition of Goethe a chronological index of his poems, in their order of composition; so you take out the poems written in 1790 and the plays written in 1790 and study them. You remember that in precisely this year he finished the beautiful essay, Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (“The Metamorphosis of Plants”); you recall that just at that time he conceived the first idea of the Farbenlehre (“Theory of Colour”); you imagine from all this the state of his soul in 1790 and ask yourselves: “What were the influences active on Goethe's psychic life in 1790?” You will only be able to answer this question if you cast a critical glance on all Goethe's previous experiences from 1749 to 1790 and on what followed after this year—of which Goethe at the time was still unaware, but which you now know—during the period from 1790 to 1832, that is, to his death. Then there emerges the remarkable realization that the actual state of his soul in the year 1790 was a combination of what was to come later, the conquests remaining for the individual to make, and those he had already experienced. This is an extraordinarily significant discovery. People only avoid it because it leads into provinces which they quite naturally do not like to enter for observations of this kind. Try to extend your observations in this way to the soul-life of an individual who died recently and whom you have known for some time. If you train yourself to a more careful study of the soul you will then find this: A man, a friend of yours, died, let us say, in 1918. You have known him for some time, so that you can ask yourselves: “What was the state of his soul in 1912?” If you consider everything that you know of him you will find that the state of his soul in 1912 was such that the preparation for his approaching death was unconsciously reflected in his psychic disposition at that time; it was unconsciously reflected in his feelings. Taken as a whole I call the life of the feelings the psychic disposition, “Mood of Soul” (Seelenstimmung). A man who is soon to die has a quite different inner disposition from one who has still long to live.

You will now understand that people do not like to study these things, for it would create a very unpleasant impression—to put it mildly—if we were to observe the signs of approaching death in people's psychic disposition. These, however, can be observed. But in everyday life it is not wise for people to notice these things. That is why they are usually hidden from this life just as the will is withdrawn, as a sleeping power, even when we are awake, from the waking consciousness. But the educator must, after all, take up a position outside ordinary life to some extent. He must not be afraid to take up his stand detached from his usual life and to absorb truths for his teaching which are rather disturbing, rather tragic, for everyday life. In this connection there is lost ground to cover in the educational system of Central Europe. You know that especially the teachers in the universities in the early decades of this Central European system of education and teaching were people on whom the actual man of the world rather turned up his nose in scorn. Unworldly, pedantic fellows, who could not adapt themselves properly to the world, who always wore long, black frock-coats and never evening dress; these were the former educators of youth, especially the teachers of more mature youth. In these days things have changed. The university professors have begun to wear correct evening dress and to adapt themselves to worldly custom, and it is considered a great mark of progress that their former state is at last a thing of the past. It is a good thing. But it must be a thing of the past in other senses, too; it must in future be a thing of the past to the extent that the detachment from life does not merely consist, as it did formerly, in the teacher's wearing the invariable long pedantic frock-coat when other people did not. The detachment from life can remain to some extent, but it must be bound up with a profounder conception of life than that of people who wear evening dress for dinner. I am only speaking figuratively, of course, for I have nothing against “evening dress.”

An educator must be able to study life more profoundly, otherwise he will never give appropriate and fruitful attention to the growing child. Consequently, he will have to accept, among others, such truths as I have just mentioned. Life itself, to a certain extent, demands the presence of mysteries. We need no diplomatic secrets in the near future. But for education we need the knowledge of certain mysteries of life. The old Mystery teachers withheld such secrets of life esoterically because these could not be revealed directly to life. But in a certain degree every teacher must know truths which he cannot impart directly to the world, because the world would be confused in normal progress, if it had access to such truths all the time. But you do not fully understand how to treat the growing child if you cannot estimate the influence on him of something imparted in such a way that he does not fully understand it at the time. He will understand when it is returned to later, and when he is told, not only what he then realizes, but what he had assimilated earlier. This makes a profound impression on the feelings and disposition.

For this reason the custom should be followed in every school as faithfully as possible—wherever possible—of the teacher retaining his same pupils; of taking them over for the first form, of keeping them the next year in the second form, of going up with them again in the third year, etc., as far as this is possible in conjunction with outside regulations. The teacher, after finishing with the eighth class, should then begin anew with the first class. For one must sometimes be able to come back years later in a positive way to what was instilled into the children's souls years before. In any case, the formation of the disposition or feeling life suffers greatly when the children are passed every year to a fresh teacher who cannot himself develop what he instilled into children in earlier years. It is part of the teaching method itself that the teacher should go up with his own pupils through the different school-stages. Only in this way can we enter into the rhythm of life. And in the most comprehensive sense life has a rhythm. This manifests itself even in everyday decisions, in the rhythm of day to day itself. If you have accustomed yourself, for instance, only for a week, to eat a buttered roll every day at half-past ten in the morning, you will probably feel hungry for the buttered roll at the same time in the second week. The human organism conforms as closely as this to a rhythm. But not only the external organism, but the whole being, is rhythmically organized. For this reason, too, it is a good thing throughout life as a whole—and that is what we are concerned with when we educate and teach children—to be able to attend to rhythmical repetition. For this reason we do well to think that even every year is not too often to return to quite definite educational themes. Therefore select subjects for the children, make a note of them, and come back to something similar every year. Even in more abstract things this method can be followed. You teach, let us say, in a way suited to the child's disposition, addition in the first school year; you come back to addition in the second, and teach more about it, and in the third year you return to it in the same way, so that the same act takes place repeatedly, but in progressive repetition.

To enter like this into the rhythm of life is of quite particular importance for all education and teaching—far more important than continuously repeating: Do build up your lessons according to the principle of meaning—thus inartistically pulling to bits whatever you deal with. You can only divine what is demanded here by gradually developing a feeling for life itself. But you will then part company very markedly, precisely as educationists, from the external experimental aims so frequent to-day even in education. Again, not to condemn, but to correct, certain tendencies which have proved detrimental to our spiritual culture, do I emphasize these things. You can embark on modern textbooks of education where the results are worked out which have been obtained through experiments on memory. The “subjects”—people experimented upon—are treated in a strange way. Tests are made on them to show how they can remember something of which they have understood the meaning; then they are given words written one after the other with no connecting sense, and they have to learn these, etc. These experiments for ascertaining the laws of the memory are practised very extensively to-day. Again a result has been obtained which is committed to formulae in scientific form. Just as, for instance, in physics, the Law of Gay-Lussac, among others, is formulated, people are anxious to formulate such laws in experimental education or psychology. You find, for example, very learnedly expounded, the gist of conclusions about a certain scientific yearning which is quite justified, namely, to prove the existence of types of memory. Firstly, the quickly or slowly assimilating memory; secondly, the quickly or slowly reproducing memory. So a “subject” is tormented to furnish evidence for the fact that there are people who memorize easily and people who memorize with difficulty; then other “subjects” are tormented to prove that there are people who can call back to mind easily, and people who can call back to mind only with difficulty, what they have once learnt. Now it has been determined by research that there are such types of memory; those showing a rapid or a slow assimilation, and those showing an easy or painful recollection or reproduction of what was assimilated. Thirdly, there are also types of memory which can be called “true and exact;” fourthly, there is a comprehensive memory; fifthly, a retentive and reliable memory, in opposition to the type which easily forgets. This answers very satisfactorily to the craving of modern science to systematize. The scientific result has now been obtained. We can ask: “What has been discovered scientifically in exact psychology about the types of memory?” And we learn: firstly, there is a type of memory which assimilates easily or laboriously; secondly, a type which reproduces easily or laboriously; thirdly, there is a true or exact memory; fourthly, a comprehensive memory, that is, there are people who can remember great passages of prose in contrast to those who can only remember short ones; fifthly, a retentive memory, which has perhaps remembered things from years ago, in contrast to the kind which forgets quickly.

This scientific method of observation scrupulously and very conscientiously maltreats innumerable victims, and sets to work most ingeniously to obtain results, in order that education, too, after having tested the children in experimental psychology, may know what various types of memory are to be differentiated. But with all due respect for such a science, I should like to make the following objection. Anyone endowed with a little sound common sense must know that there are people who commit things to memory easily or with difficulty; there are also those who easily or laboriously recall things once known, and again there are people who can recount things truly and accurately, in contrast to those who muddle everything they try to tell. There are people with an extensive memory, who can remember a long story, in contrast to those who can only remember a short one; and there are also people who can remember a thing for a long time, even years, and people who have forgotten everything in a week! It is part, in fact, of the fairly ancient wisdom of sound common sense, but it is discovered again in a science which inspires us with respect, because the methods which it applies are so ingenious.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this: firstly, let us, above all, prefer to cultivate sound common sense in education and teaching, rather than expend it on such experimenting, which will, it is true, develop ingenuity very considerably, but which will not bring the teacher in touch with the quality of individuality in the child. But we can also draw a second conclusion: our age is actually in a sorry plight if we have to assume that the people who are going to become our teachers and educators have so little healthy human intelligence that they can only learn in this roundabout way that there are the different kinds of memory which we have just mentioned. Moreover, these things must undoubtedly be considered symptoms of the state of our present spiritual standard.

I had to draw your attention to these things. For people will say to you: “Well, you have let yourself be appointed at this Waldorf School. It is only a dilettante institution; the people there don't even want to know anything about the greatest conquest of our time: about the methods of experimental psychology. The study of this experimental psychological method is for experts, but the methods of the Waldorf School are quackery in comparison!” You will have to realize that you will sometimes have to acknowledge the connection of science—which must not be respected any the less for that—with what remains to be built up by us on an inner educational theory and method, but which, compared with the external relations which are set up by experiment, inspires an inner loving attentiveness towards the child. Certainly this quality has not completely disappeared; it prevails even more than is realized. But it definitely prevails in opposition to the ever-encroaching aims of scientific educational theory. To a certain extent it is true that the pursuit of science can destroy a good deal in modern life, but it has not the power to drive out all healthy human intelligence. This healthy human intelligence or sound common sense should be our starting-point, and when this is properly cultivated it will produce an inner connection with the ideals of teaching. We must realize, of course, that we live at the beginning of a new age, and we must completely master this fact. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century the surviving traditions of the Greek and Latin-Roman times were preserved. After the middle of the fifteenth century these are only the clattering after traditional repetition. But the people whose life is in this “clattering” still feel, in certain sub-regions of their consciousness, the craving to return to the Graeco-Latin age, which we can admire profoundly in its place, of course, but whose persistence into our age is no longer a living thing. Just think for a moment how self-satisfied the person is in these days, who has learnt something and can descant on it in the following terms: “A good teacher must not merely bring out the rhythm, and the rhyme in a poem; he must comment technically on the text; he must introduce the meaning, and only when he has unravelled the meaning will the pupils absorb it as an inner activity.” After such a person has long held forth on the importance of starting with the meaning, he concludes with: “As the old Latin said: rem tene, verba sequuntur, if you have understood the question, words will follow of themselves.” These are tactics which you will frequently find in people who imagine that they have learnt a great deal, that they have gone far beyond dilettantism in enunciating something first as a piece of sublime contemporary wisdom, and then following it up with, “as the old Latin said. ...” And, of course, he has only to say it in Greek for people to believe implicitly that it is something quite extraordinary. For the fourth post-Atlantean period of civilization, this attitude was desirable; it is unbecoming in our age. The Greek did not introduce his children, first of all, to old grammar schools where they could learn, let us say, ancient Egyptian; he made them learn Greek. But to-day we begin by introducing people to ancient tongues before their own. That is a fact which must be realized.

• 1. See Dr. C. v. Heydebrand, Gegen Experimentalpsychologie und Pädagogik.

(Dr. Steiner in the original first paragraph confined his remarks to the educational system in Germany in 1919 and before. They may be summarized as follows: In Germany you will be sharing the many difficulties inevitable in country schools where the equipment is defective in comparison with the town schools. On the other hand, the country schools have often better methods and have preserved many simple, good old principles, which die out as soon as modern intellectualism is introduced.—

In these circumstances you will often have to rely on your gift for invention. You will have to fall back on many a simple device where the average town schools have abundant resources. That may, indeed, animate your teaching, but it will also make the teaching of some subjects thoroughly distasteful. You will feel this particularly when you have brought the children to the end of their ninth year and can really only continue your teaching provided you have adequate materials for it. You will then have to use drawing, and simple elementary painting, as a substitute for many a thing which, in ideal conditions, you would not convey by drawing or by painting, but by a study of the thing itself.

I have made this preliminary observation because I should like to speak to you to-day about the transition in method which must be attended to just when the children have passed their ninth year. We shall only understand the curriculum at this point if we have trained ourselves in method so far that we have realized the nature of each individual child between seven and fifteen years. I should like to explain to you, as teachers, what you will have to make clear to children (in a rather different, more elementary way), just when they are between their ninth and tenth year. In some children this stage is reached even before the ninth year, with some it only occurs later, but on an average what I have to tell you to-day begins with the ninth year.

When we approach this period in their lives we shall have to feel the need to introduce natural history into the timetable in addition to the other things. Before this the children have grown familiar with natural history in narrative form, in the same way as I took in our training class¹ the relations of the animal world and the vegetable world to man. The method so far used to familiarize the child with natural history has been chiefly narrative, descriptive. But with actual natural history, before the Rubicon of the ninth year has been crossed you will hardly have started.

Now here it is of great importance to know that the development to be aimed at in the child by means of natural history teaching is radically defeated unless the teaching of natural history starts with an exposition of man. You may say with justice: “The child at nine years of age can be told little natural history about man.” But be it never so little, the little that a child can be taught about man should be taught as a preparation for all other teaching in natural history. You must know, in the meantime, that in man we have, as it were, a synthesis, a compendium, of all three natural kingdoms, that the other three natural kingdoms merge in man on a higher plane. You will not need to tell the child this, but by the course of your teaching you will have to awaken in him the feeling that man is this consummation of all other kingdoms of nature. You will succeed in this if, in speaking of man, you lay sufficient emphasis on him; if, from your manner of referring to man, you produce in the child an impression of the importance of man within the entire world-order. You will perhaps start, when the child is nine, to describe the human form in its external aspect. You will draw his attention to the principal division of man into head, trunk, and limbs, but in so doing you will be more concerned with the outer appearance, with the outward form. You will be wise to use the drawing already practised to produce in the child, even at this early age, an idea of the most outstanding features of the human form: that the head is spherical, that it is slightly flattened underneath and rests on the trunk at the flattened spot, that is, that it is a sphere poised on the trunk. It is well to give the child this idea. It awakens simultaneously the elements of feeling and will, for the child starts by seeing the head artistically, as spherical. This is important. In this way you compass the whole human being, not merely the intellect. Then you try to arouse in the child the idea that the trunk is in a sense a fragment of the head. And then, for the limbs, you awaken the idea that they are appended to the trunk and affixed to it. There is much that the child will not be able to understand, but at least call up a vivid picture that the limbs are “fixed into” the human organism. At this point you must not go any further, for the limbs are continued internally in the morphological constitution of the human being, and are there connected with the digestive and sexual organs, which are simply a continuation, in an inward direction, of the limbs. But you evoke the clear idea in the children that the limbs are affixed to the organism from outside. This gives the child a first conception of the human form.

Try further to excite in the child a first, if still elementary, primitive conception, that our gazing on the world is bound up with the spherical head. You can say to him: “You have your eyes, your ears, your nose, your mouth, in your head. You see with your eyes, you hear with your ears, you smell with your nose, you taste with your mouth. Most of what you know about the outside world you know through your head.” If you develop this thought further the child derives from it a conception of the formation and function of the head. Then you try to produce in him a conception of the trunk by saying: “What you taste with your tongue enters your trunk as food; what you hear with your ears goes into your trunk as sound.” It is well with children to evoke an idea of the organic system of the whole being. If you then suggest to the child that he has the respiratory organs in the chest and breathes through these, that in the lower part of the body he has the stomach with which he digests food, it is an excellent plan. And it is moreover a good thing to let the child reflect on how the human limbs serve, as feet for walking on, and as hands for free movement and work. It is well at the same time to awaken in the child an understanding for the different services rendered to the human body by the feet, which carry it and make it possible for the human being to work in the different places where he has to live—and, in contrast to this, by the arms and hands, with which the human being does not need to carry his own body but can work freely. While his feet stand on the ground, his hands can be extended in the air to work. In short, the child's attention must be clearly directed to the essential difference between human legs and feet, and human arms and hands. The difference between the service performed by the feet and legs, in carrying the human body, and that performed by the hands and arms in working, not for the human body but for the world—this difference between the egoistical service of the feet and the selfless service of the hands in labouring for the human world outside, ought to be impressed on the child early and through the feelings.

Thus we ought to teach the child, by evolving ideas from form, as much as possible about man from natural history. Only then should you go on to the rest of natural history, and first of all to the animal kingdom. Here it would be a good plan to bring to the lesson—you will have to contrive this in some way or other—a cuttle-fish, a mouse, a lamb, or even a horse, something or other from the mammals, and then, in addition, perhaps, an example of a human being—now you ought to have enough specimens of human beings: you need only present one of the pupils to the others as a human object! You must be clear as to how to proceed. You will try to familiarize the class first of all with the cuttle-fish. You will tell them how it lives in the sea; you will describe, by studying or drawing it, its appearance; in a word, you will make the children acquainted with the cuttle-fish. They will feel, while you describe the cuttle-fish to them, that you are describing it in a particular way. Perhaps only later, when, for instance, you describe the mouse, the children will notice how differently you treat the subject of the mouse from that of the cuttle-fish. You must try to develop this artistic feeling in the children, which, from your different procedure in describing the cuttle-fish and the mouse, will be at the same time a feeling of the difference between these two creatures. With the cuttle-fish you must suggest how it feels its immediate surroundings: if it scents danger in its surroundings it at once emits its dark juice and envelops itself in an aura, to divert the attention of the approaching enemy. You can tell the child many things which help him to understand that the cuttle-fish, when protecting itself from its enemies, or, too, when feeding, always acts like the human being when he eats or looks at something. When the human being eats, he has a taste—a feeling which is conveyed to him through his tongue, through his taste-organ. Again, the human eye feels the constant need to look into light, and, when it does so, can adjust itself to light. Because the taste-organs of the human being desire to taste, they absorb what serves to nourish him. So describe the cuttle-fish in such a way that the child feels from your description the sensitiveness of the cuttle-fish, its fine perception of things surrounding it. You will have to work out for yourself an artistic description of the cuttle-fish so that the children really grasp it in this artistic description.

Then describe the mouse. Describe how it has a pointed snout, how on this pointed snout there can be seen very strong whiskers, how, besides, you can see the gnawing-teeth protruding from the lower and upper jaws; describe the disproportionately large ears of the mouse, then come to its cylindrical body and to the fine velvety growth of hair. Then go on to describe the limbs, the smaller forefeet, the slightly larger hind-feet, which enable the mouse to leap. Then notice its tail, covered with scales, scurf, and less hairy. At the same time show the child that when the mouse is climbing or grasping something by its fore-feet, it supports itself on its tail, which it can use very skilfully because it is not hairy but scurfy, and therefore inwardly more sensitive. In a word, you again try to describe the mouse to the child by building up its physical form artistically. And you will succeed in this artistic construction if you evoke in the child a notion of how, for all the functions for which the cuttle-fish does not need limbs grown on to the body, the mouse needs limbs grown on. The cuttle-fish is sensitive in itself, in its own body; consequently, it does not need such big ears as the mouse. Its relation to its surroundings allows it to imbibe nourishment without the help of the pointed snout which the mouse has. Nor does it need such large grown-on limbs as the mouse, because it can use its own body to propel itself forward in the water. Sum up in artistic form what you are trying to show the child: that the cuttle-fish expresses itself less through its limb-organs than through its body.

I have to describe all this to you first so that you can translate it into teaching, for you must first be conscious of what you must later introduce less consciously into artistically prepared lessons. In short, describe the mouse so that you gradually produce in the child the feeling that the mouse is completely adapted to serve the life of its trunk through its limbs. Then, too, make clear to the child that, after all, the lamb is so organized that its limbs serve its body, and the horse, when it lives wild, is organized so that with its limbs it can serve its body. For instance, show clearly why the mouse has such very pointed teeth; these teeth have to be sharp and pointed, or else the mouse would not be able to gnaw at objects, as it must, to nourish itself, and even to bore holes, in which it then lives. But in this way it is constantly wearing away its teeth. But the teeth of the mouse are arranged—like our nails—always to grow new again from inside, and the tooth-substance is constantly being renewed. Here you see, particularly with the teeth, which are, of course, also organs appended to the rest of the organism, that they are designed to enable the body of the mouse to live.

In this way you have given the child a profound, if only rudimentary impression, through the feelings, of the cuttlefish, and you have also evoked in him a clear idea of the structure of the mouse. And now you return to the structure of the human being. You make clear to the child that if we now look for the ways in which man most resembles a cuttlefish, curiously enough we are brought to the human head. The part of man which most resembles the cuttle-fish is the head. It is prejudice which causes people to imagine that the head is their most perfect organ. The head is indeed very complex in formation, but it is really only a transformed cuttle-fish—I mean, a transformed lower animal, for the relation of the human head to its surroundings is that of the lower animals to theirs. It is in his trunk that man most resembles the higher animals: the mouse, lamb, horse. But, whilst the cuttle-fish can maintain its entire existence by means of its head, man cannot do this. The head must be poised on the trunk and rest upon it; it cannot move freely. But the cuttle-fish, which is really all head and nothing else, can move freely in the water. You must at least succeed in giving the children a feeling of how the lower animals are heads which can move freely, though they are not so perfect as the human head. And you must awaken in the children a feeling for the fact that the higher animals are chiefly trunk, and are endowed by nature with refined organs chiefly for the satisfaction of the needs of the trunk, which is much less true of man; as far as his trunk goes he is more imperfectly formed than the higher animals.

You must then awaken in the child a feeling of the external feature in which man is the most perfect of all creatures. That is, his limbs. If you trace the higher animals up to the ape, you will find that the front limbs are not so very different from the hind limbs, and that the four limbs as a whole serve essentially to bear the trunk, to propel it forwards, etc. The wonderful differentiation of the limbs into feet and hands, into legs and arms, occurs for the first time in man, and is marked by the tendency to stand upright in his carriage and even in his structure. No animal species is so perfectly formed as man, from the point of view of the inter-organization of the limbs.

Then introduce a quite graphic description of the human arms and hands: how they have been relieved of the weight of carrying the body, how the hands do not come in contact with the earth for the purposes of the body, but how they are transformed so as to be able to grasp objects, so as to perform labour. And then go on to the will-aspect, to the moral aspect. Produce in the child, through the feelings, not theoretically, this vivid idea: for instance, you take up chalk to write with; you can only take up the chalk because your hand is designed to perform labour, because it no longer has to carry the body. The animal cannot be lazy with its arms because it cannot really be said to have any. When people talk of apes as being four-handed it is only an incorrect way of talking, for the ape actually has four legs and feet shaped like arms, and not four “hands.” For when, after all, animals are formed to climb, their climbing is a function which serves the body, and their feet are shaped like hands so that they can support the body in climbing. For the human body, hands and arms are freed from the task of supporting it, expressing thus the most beautiful symbol of human freedom. In fact, no more beautiful symbol could exist for it than our hands and arms. Man can both work with his hands and arms for others and for the support of his own body.

By this description of the cuttle-fish, the mouse, the lamb, the horse, and the human being himself, you gradually awaken in the child, by way of the feelings, a clear conception that the lower animals have the character of head, the higher animals of trunk, and the human being of the limbs. It only inculcates man with conceit to teach him perpetually that he is the most perfect creature in the world by virtue of his head. On hearing this he instinctively derives the notion that man is perfect through idleness, through laziness. For the human being knows instinctively that his head is a lazy-bones, that it rests on his shoulders, that it does not want to move itself through the world, that it lets itself be carried by the limbs. It is not true that man is the most perfect creature because of his head, because of his lazy-bones of a head, but because of his limbs, which are a part of the structure and work of the world. You make man in his inmost heart more moral if you do not teach him that he is perfect through his lazy head, but through his active limbs. For the creatures which are only head, like the lower animals, have to propel their own heads, and the creatures which only use their limbs in the service of the trunk are, compared with man, the less perfect creatures because their limbs are less fashioned for free use than are those of the human being. They are burdened from the start by a certain purpose; they invariably serve the body. In man, one pair of limbs, his hands, is completely liberated into the sphere of human freedom. You will only give man a sound experience of the world if you awaken in him the idea that he is perfect on account of his limbs, not on account of his head. You can do this very well by the comparative description of the cuttle-fish, the mouse or the lamb or the horse, and the human being. At the same time you will notice that you should never really omit the human being in describing anything in the natural kingdom, for in man you see all the activities of nature combined. We should always have man in the background when we are describing anything in nature. That is why, after reaching the child's ninth year, and going on to teach natural history, we should take man as our starting-point.

In the study of childhood it is found that something happens just between the ninth and tenth year, though it is not so evident as at an earlier stage. When the child begins to move his limbs a little more consciously than before and to walk about, even if it is unsteadily, when he begins to move his arms and hands with a purpose, he is just beginning to be partially aware of his Ego, and will later be able to remember as far back as this moment, but no further. If you notice how normally (there are individual exceptions) the human being begins at this age to say “I,”—or perhaps a little later, because the activity of speech, that is, the will-element, must first have developed—you can see that the emergence in man of self-consciousness is distinctly perceptible at this stage, whereas the change is not so evident which takes place in the human consciousness round about the ninth year. At this point self-consciousness increases; you notice that the child understands much more intelligently what is said to him about the difference between man and the world. Before the Rubicon of the ninth year the child is far more merged in his surroundings than after this age. He then finds himself more separated from his surroundings. For this reason you can now begin to talk to the child a little about things of the soul, for which he would have shown little understanding before he reached the age of nine. When he is nine his self-consciousness both deepens and increases.

Anyone with a feeling for such things will observe that at this age the child begins to use words much more inwardly than before, to become much more aware that words arise from his inner nature. Nowadays, when people are much more concerned with outer than inner nature, far too little attention is shown to this sudden change in the ninth or tenth year. But the teacher must pay attention to it. For his reason you will be able to address the child from a quite different background of feeling when you introduce him—not before this stage has been reached—to natural history, which must always compare man with the other kingdoms of nature. Whereas before, when the individual was more merged in nature, you could only speak to the child of the things of natural history in the form of stories, now that he is past nine years of age you can show him the cuttle-fish, the mouse, the lamb, or the horse, and the human being, and talk with him of their relationship to each other and to man. Before this stage you would stumble on something quite unintelligible to the child if you were to connect the functions of the head with the cuttle-fish, or the functions of the trunk with the mouse, or if you were to seek the distinguishing perfection of man in the human limbs. And now you are to use the very material offered to you by the child's age, for when you teach natural history in the way I have described, you plant in the child's soul moral concepts which are firm and strong. Moral concepts are not instilled into the child's soul by appealing to the reason, but by appealing to the feelings and the will. But you will be appealing to the feeling and the will in directing the child's thoughts and feelings to the way in which he himself is only fully human if he employs his hands in work for the world, and how this makes him the most perfect creature; further, how the human head is related to the cuttle-fish, and the human trunk to the mouse, sheep, or horse. Through feeling himself duly placed like this in the natural order the child absorbs feelings by which he will later know himself to be fully man.

You can implant in the child's soul this quite particularly important moral element if you take pains to arrange your teaching of natural history so that the child has no suspicion that you intend to teach him anything moral. But you will never implant so much as a trace of morality in the children if your teaching of natural history is independent of man and describes the cuttle-fish for itself, the mouse or the lamb or the horse for itself, and even man for himself; these descriptions would simply be verbal-definitions. You can only describe man if you build him up from all other organisms and activities of nature. Schiller admired in Goethe his naive conception of nature, in the light of which he considered the human being composed of all the single entities of nature, as Schiller states in the beautiful letter which he wrote to Goethe at the beginning of the nineties in the eighteenth century. I have again and again brought this to your notice because it contains something which should permeate our civilization and our culture: the consciousness of the synthesis of all nature in man. Goethe is repeatedly expressing it like this: “Man is placed at the summit of nature and feels there that he is a whole nature;” or again: “The whole world reaches within man its own consciousness.” If you go through my writings you will find such utterances of Goethe's quoted again and again. I have not quoted them because they struck me as pleasing, but because such ideas should become part of the consciousness of our age. That is why I am always so grieved that one of the most important of educational writings has really remained quite unknown, or at least unfruitful in the actual sphere of education. Schiller, as a matter of fact, learnt good educational theory from Goethe's naive self-education, and introduced this educational theory into his work Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (“Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”). These letters contain a tremendous wealth of educational theory; one only has to think out its implications to their logical conclusion. Schiller arrived at his discoveries, remember, through Goethe's vision. Just recall how Goethe, a product of civilization and yet rooted in nature, from his very earliest childhood opposed the educational principles in force around him. Goethe could never isolate the human being from his surroundings. He always took man in his setting of nature and felt himself, as a human being, one with nature. That is why, for instance, he took no pleasure in piano lessons as long as they were given to him in no kind of connection with the human being. He only began to take an interest in piano lessons when he was shown the function of the different fingers, when he heard: “That is the thumb; that is the index-finger, etc.,” and when he knew how the thumb and the index-finger are applied in playing the piano. He always wanted to see the whole being rooted in the whole of nature. And again—I have mentioned this before, too—at the age of seven he built his own altar to nature, taking for the purpose his father's music desk, laying minerals upon it, and plants from his father's rock-garden, and on top putting a little fumigating candle; then he caught up the beams of the morning sun in a burning-glass and offered a sacrifice to the great God of nature—a rebellion against what people wanted him to learn. Goethe was always a person who wanted to be educated as people ought to be educated now. And because Goethe was like this, after first struggling hard with himself towards that end, he won Schiller's great admiration and inspired in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters on education what you know to be the contents of these letters.

My old friend and teacher, Schröer, once told me that he had to sit on a school commission to examine prospective teachers, but he had not been able to prepare the work demanded of the future teachers in the examination. So he questioned them on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. They had learnt from A to Z everything about Plato and all else that was to be known, but when Schröer began to question them on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters they revolted! And all over Vienna the tale spread: Schröer had tried to examine the teachers on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, while obviously no one on earth can make anything of them.

But if we wish to turn to many a healthy and sound, if rudimentary suggestion, we have to go back to Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education, and also to Jean Paul's educational doctrines in Levana. This, too, contains very many practical hints for teaching. In recent times there have been many improvements, but it cannot be said that the potential influence of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters and Jean Paul's educational doctrines have really entered the educational system of our days. Things are often turned according to personal points of view.

I have now tried to give you an idea of how it is possible to learn from a certain age in childhood, roughly the ninth year, the educational methods which ought to be adopted at this age. In the next lecture we shall see how the child's fourteenth and fifteenth years should be employed to give the child what satisfies the needs of his nature at that age. In this way we shall come near to winning insight into how the whole world appears to children between seven and fifteen years of age and into the obligations of the educator and teacher. From this insight will arise our curriculum. In these days people ask abstractly: “How are we to develop the child's latent possibilities?” But we must first know them, if all the oft-repeated phrases about teaching according to the “development of the child's possibilities” are to have any concrete meaning.

• 1. See No. 3 of the sixth year of the periodical, The Art of Education.