The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We know that everyone who's on a path of esoteric development must gradually transform his whole thinking, make it different than it is in ordinary sense life, so that he can find his way into the spiritual world. We must learn to rethink, as it were, and our whole life of feeling and perception must also become different than it had been until now. What really is our thinking in ordinary life? We're used to saying that thinking takes place in the physical body, but that's not the case. The etheric body is the real causer of our thoughts. Our physical body only has something to do with it to the extent that it's a mirror for our thoughts that reflects the picture so that we can thereby become aware of it. We can clarify this through an example. When a man looks into a mirror he has his mirror image before him, the mirror gives him the outer impression of his physical shape that is, a shadow of his outer personality. Likewise the thoughts that have their living seat in the etheric body are the reflected shadow pictures of our physical brain when we think them. What do the concentration exercises that are given us bring about? They help us to gradually loosen ourselves from the thought shadows as we concentrate and contract ourselves in our etheric body so that we can press forward to the real origin of our ideas that have their life in the etheric body. It should become ever clearer to us not only that our thoughts are shadows but that all of our percepts are really nothing, and that in reality only the spiritual world exists. A naive man says that what he perceives exists. But what is existence (Sein) really? Philosophers have tried to get behind this entity in various ways. “Sein” is really derived from sehen(seeing); it's really the past participle of “sehen.” No one can see existence in the physical world, because it rests in the spiritual world; but one only sees the spirit when one doesn't see matter. Matter is really nothing, it's enveloped by spirit which is the real thing. The following example can elucidate this. When one has a bottle of seltzer water before one can't really see the water—one sees the glittering bubbles of carbon dioxide that rise like shiny pearls. And what are these sparkling, shiny pearls? They're just empty gas bubbles filled with a substance that's much thinner than water, that's “nothing” in comparison with water. So what one sees here is nothing, whereas one doesn't see the real water in which they're resting.

Thus we must become aware that all space around us is filled with spiritual realities, beings and facts, and that there's nothing there where we perceive the world's things, nothing but a hole. When we stretch out an arm we push it through the spiritual world, but we don't feel it; we only feel resistance when our hand runs into nothing or matter. We don't really see objects in space—we only see the contours of the spiritual world that these objects bound.

We grow into the spiritual world when we've gotten to the point where we've let all the shadowiness of our thoughts and of our outer surroundings fall away. But to be able to rightly place ourselves into the new world we must transform our whole thinking through esoteric development so that we can understand and judge the things and facts of the spiritual world correctly. Because it's an entirely new world for us, but a world that's more real than the one we've known so far. We enter a world that has real things and beings in it, and we connect ourselves with it, we grow into this world. As the beings and things of this world move into us we lose our head thoughts—it's as if we had stuck our head into an anthill. Then we become aware of the elemental world. As our soul life gets stronger through thought concentration and our inner self gets increasingly separate from the physical body, the things of that world appear before our soul's eye in ever clearer Imaginations and visions. We'll see that all the thoughts we've had about good, benevolent and noble things have become transformed into Imaginations that continue to live and to give their value to the universe, and that all bad, evil and low, egotistical thoughts remain behind as waste products. This becomes something that's unproductive by itself but which becomes food for what's supposed to develop from the germ of the good. Just as the mineral soil furnishes food stuffs for plants here on the physical plane, so everything that's thought badly becomes the soil for germinating thoughts of good, true and beautiful things in the elemental world. That's the reason why an occultist can think out bad and wrong things so quickly and imagine them in thought. But he doesn't let it get further. He knows that he's only allowed to get to the point where it remains thought—he doesn't let it pass over into deed, into reality. He only lets it prepare the soil from which the germ of the good can grow.

That's what happened in the world order also, that's the way the earth's mineral kingdom arose. The Elohim thought erroneous things on old Moon—that was all right there—and the mineral kingdom on earth arose from this. Jahve-Elohim was able to create man from this dust and give him his physical sheath. But Lucifer who is now about where the Elohim were on old Moon still wants to go on doing the same thing. He can only use men for this, he can only think errors within men.

We want to develop ourselves into an organ of the spiritual world, just as we've developed our physical eyes into organs for sunlight. The germ for it lay in us, and we also have a germ for that spiritual development in us that we can only unfold through strict self-training. Various means are indicated in How Does One Attain Knowledge Of Higher Worlds? to really free ourselves from the physical body through concentration and so on, so that through this splitting of one's nature one can cross the threshold of the spiritual world and behold spiritual reality. The following verses express the position one has to take with respect to the physical world and to this new spiritual world. They can be meditated in any way by people who've already received a verse to meditate on; one who doesn't have such can meditate the first verse in the morning, the second in the evening and the third verse should only be meditated occasionally to check the extent to which one has attained what was striven for in the first two strophes.

To things I turn myself
I turn myself with ray senses;—
Sense existence, you deceive me!—
What flees existence as nothing:
For you it's existence and reality;
May what must seem like nothing to you
Be disclosed to my inner life.—

(I must attain this: it's the taking of a position towards the new, outer world.)

Spirit light warm me
Let me feel myself volitionally in you.
Well thought, truly known things
How does shining I experience you
May weaving of error, badly thought things
Show itself to shining soul
That I may be weaving in myself.

(That's a questioning and experiencing in the new existence within.)

Shining I and luminous soul (- oneself -)
Floats over real developing being
What was thought, what was known
Now becomes dense spirit existence
And what seems like existence to the senses
Lives in the ocean of divine reality
Like aery existential bubbles.

(In anticipation of truth. It's a guessing, a feeling of the new self.)

When elaborated each of these strophes contains the same thing that's successively compressed in our rosicrucian verse in the ten words: Ex Deo nascimur, In Christo morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus

Today I shall speak in the most concrete way about the Spirit in order to lay a foundation for the next few days, and I must appeal to you to try to arouse a fundamental feeling for what is here meant by the Spirit.

What is taken into account by the human being today? He attaches importance only to what he experiences consciously, from the time he wakes up in the morning until the time he goes to sleep at night. He reckons as part of the world only that which he experiences in his waking consciousness. If you were listening to the voice of the present and had accustomed yourselves to it, you might say: Yes, but was it not always so? Did human beings in earlier times include in what they meant by reality anything in addition to what they experienced in their waking consciousness?

I certainly do not wish to create the impression that we ought to go back to the conditions in earlier epochs of civilization. That is not my intention. The thing that matters is to go forward, not back. But in order to find our bearings we may turn back, look back, rather, beyond the time of the fifteenth century, before the age I attempted to describe radically to you yesterday. What men of that time said about the world is looked upon today as mere phantasy, as not belonging to reality. You need only look at the literature of olden times and you will find, when men spoke of “salt,” “mercury,” phosphorus and so on, that they included many things in the meaning which people are anxious to exclude today.

People say nowadays: “Yes, in those days men added something out of their own phantasy when they spoke of salt, mercury, phosphorus.”

We will not argue about the reason why this is so anxiously excluded today. But we must realize that people saw something in phosphorus, in addition to what is seen by the mere senses, in the way modern men see color. It was surrounded by a spiritual-etheric aura, just as around the whole of Nature there seemed to hover a spiritual aura, although after the fourth or fifth century A.D. it was very colorless and pale. Even so, men were still able to see it. It was as little the outcome of phantasy as the red color we see. They actually saw it.

Why were they able to see this aura? Because something streamed over to them from their experiences during sleep. In the waking Consciousness of that time man did not experience in salt, sulphur, or phosphorus any more than he does today; but when people in those days woke up, sleep had not been unfruitful for their souls. Sleep still worked over into the day and man's perception was richer; his experience of everything around him was more intense.

Without this knowledge as a basis we cannot understand earlier times. Later on the experience of the ancients in connection with sulphur, phosphorus and so on became a mere name, an abstraction. The Spirit continued as an abstraction in tradition, until, at the end of the nineteenth century, the word spirit conveyed nothing to the mind, nothing by way of experience. External culture, which alleges such great progress, naturally attaches the greatest importance to the fact that the human being acts with his waking consciousness. Naturally, with this he will build machines; but with his waking consciousness he can work very little upon his own nature. if we were obliged to be always awake we should very soon become old-at least by the end of our twentieth year—and more repulsively old than people today. We cannot always be awake, because the forces we need to work inwardly upon our organism are active within us only during sleep. it is of course true that the human being can work at external, visible forms of culture when he is awake, but only in sleeping consciousness can he work upon himself. And in olden times much more streamed over from sleeping consciousness into the waking state.

The great change took place in the middle of the fifteenth century: this trickling of sleep consciousness into waking consciousness ceased. Pictorially I would say: In the tenth and eleventh centuries of western civilization man still grew up in such a way that he felt: Divine-spiritual powers have been performing deeds within me between my going to sleep and waking up. He felt the influx of divine-spiritual forces just as in waking consciousness he experienced the health-bringing light of the sun. And before going to sleep there was in every human being an elemental mood of prayer, full of Nature-forces. People entered sleep—or if they were men of knowledge they at least strove to do so—by giving themselves over to divine-spiritual powers.

The education of those who were destined for the spiritual life was such that this mood was deliberately cultivated. At the end of the nineteenth century those who regarded themselves as the most spiritual men had for a long time replaced this by another method of preparation. I have often witnessed how people prepare themselves for sleep: “I must take my fill of beer to prepare for sleep.” This sounds grotesque. Yet we see it is historically true that vision into the spiritual world through sleep was a deliberate and conscious striving among human beings of past epochs, apart from the fact that the candidates for initiation—the students of those days-were prepared in a sacred way for the temple-sleep in which they were made aware of man's participation in the spiritual world.

At the present time when one considers the development of civilization people do not ask: What has come about in modern mankind from the educational point of view? The question is not asked because people do not think of the whole human being but only of part of him. One has a strange impression if one sees a little further than the nearest spiritual horizon: people believe they at last know the truth about certain things, whereas the men of old were altogether naive. Read any current history of physics and you will find that it is written as if everything before this age were naive; now at last things have been perceived in the form in which they can permanently remain. A sharp line is drawn between what has been achieved today and the ideas of nature evolved in “childish” times. No one thinks of asking: What educational effect has the science that is absorbed today, from the point of view of world-historical progress?

Let us think of some earlier book on natural science. From the modern point of view it is childish. But now let us put aside the modern point of view and ask: What educational effect had such a book at that time and what effect has a modern book? The modern book may be very clever and the older one very phantastic, but if we consider the educational value as a whole, we shall have to admit that when a book was read—and it was not so easy to read books in those days, there was something ceremonial about it—it drew something out of the depths of men's souls. The reading of a book was actually like the process of growing: productive forces were released in the organism and human beings were aware of them. They felt something real was there. Today everything is logical and formal. Everything is assimilated by means of the head, formally and intellectually, but no will-force is involved. And because it is all assimilated by the head only and is thus entirely dependent upon the physical head-organization, it remains unfruitful for the development of the true man.

Today there are people who struggle against materialism. My dear friends, it would be almost more sensible if they did not. For what does materialism affirm? It asserts that thinking is a product of the brain. Modern thinking is a product of the brain. That is just the secret—that modern thinking is a product of the brain. With regard to modern thinking, materialism is quite right, but it is not right about thinking as it was before the middle of the fifteenth century. At that time man did not think only with the brain but with what was alive in the brain. He had living concepts. The concepts of that time gave the same impression as an ant-hill, they were all alive. Modern concepts are dead. Modern thinking is clever, but dreadfully lazy! People do not feel it, and the less they feel it the more they love it. In earlier times people felt a tingling when they were thinking—because thinking was a reality in the soul. People are made to believe that thinking was always as it is today. But modern thinking is a product of the brain; earlier thinking was not so.

We ought to be grateful to the materialists for drawing attention to the fact that present-clay thinking is dependent upon the brain. Such is the truth and it is a much more serious matter than is usually imagined. People believe that materialism is a wrong philosophy. That is not at all true. Materialism is a product of world-evolution but a dead product, describing life in the condition where life has died.

This thinking which has evolved more and more since the fifteenth century and which has entrenched itself in civilization the farther west we go, (oriental civilization in spite of its decadence has after all preserved some of the older kind of thinking) has quite definite characteristics. The farther west we come the more does a thinking, regarded by the orientals as inferior, take the upper hand. It does not impress the oriental at all; he despises it. But he himself has nothing new; all he has is the old kind of thinking and it is perishing. But the European, and more so the American, would not feel at ease if he had to transfer himself into the thinking of the Vedas. That kind of thinking made one tingle and the Westerners love dead thinking, where one does not notice that one is thinking at all. The time has come when people confess that a millwheel is revolving in their heads—not only when someone is talking nonsense but when they are talking about living things. They merely want to snatch at what is dead.

Here is an example which I am only quoting for the sake of cultural interest, not for the sake of polemics. I described how it is possible to see an aura of colors around stones, plants and animals. The way in which I put this in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds was such that it made living thinking, not dead thinking, a necessity. A short time ago a professor at a University who is said to have something to do with philosophy, came across this description. To think livingly! Oh, no? that won't do; that is impossible! And there is supposed to be an aura of colors around stone, plant, animal!—He had only seen colors in the solar spectrum and so he thinks that I too can only have seen them in the solar spectrum and have transferred them to stone, plant and animal. He cannot in the least follow my way of describing, so he calls it just a torrent of words. For him, indeed, it is so. He is incapable of understanding it at all. And for a great number of University professors it can be the same. A millwheel is going round in their heads, so away with the head; and then, of course, nothing can possibly come out of it!

The living human being, however, demands a living kind of thinking and this demand is in his very blood. You must be clear about this. You must get your head so strong again that it can stand not only logical, abstract thinking, but even living thinking. You must not immediately get a buzzing head when it is a matter of thinking in a living way. For those whose characteristic was pure intellectualism had dead thinking. The purpose of this dead thinking was the materialistic education of the West. If we look into it, we get a very doubtful picture.

The earlier kind of thinking could be carried over into sleep when the human being was still an entity. He was a being among other beings. He was a real entity during sleep because he had carried living thinking with him into sleep. He brought it out of sleep when he woke up and took it back with him when he fell asleep. Modern thinking is bound to the brain but this cannot help us during sleep. Today, therefore, according to the way of modern science, we can be the cleverest and most learned people, but we are clever only during the day. We cease to be clever during the night, in face of that world through which we can work upon our own being. Men have forgotten to work upon themselves. With the concepts we evolve from the time of waking to that of sleeping we can only achieve something between waking and sleeping. Nothing can be achieved with the real being of man. Man must work out of the forces with which he builds up his own being. During the period when he has to build himself up, when he is a little child, he needs the greatest amount of sleep. If ever a method should be discovered for cramming into babies all that is taught to seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, you would soon see what they would look like! It is a very good thing that babies are still provided for from the mother's breast and not from the lecturing desk. It is out of sleep that man must bring the forces through which he can work upon his own being.

We can carry into sleep nothing from the concepts we evolve through science, through external observation and experiments and the controlling of experiments; and we can bring nothing of what is developed in sleep into these concepts of the material world. The spiritual and the intellectual do not get on well together unless united in the world of full consciousness. Formerly this union was consummated, but in a more subconscious way. Nowadays the union must be fully conscious, and to this human beings do not wish to be converted.

What happened when a man of earlier times passed with his soul into sleep? He was still an entity, because he had within him what hovers around material things. He bore this into sleep. He could still maintain his identity when in sleep he was outside the physical body and in the spiritual world. Today he is less and less of a real entity. He is well-nigh absorbed by the spirituality of Nature when he leaves his body in sleep. In true perception of the world, this is at once evident to the soul. You should only see it!—well, you will be able to see it if you will exert yourselves to acquire the necessary vision. Humanity must attain this vision, for we are living in an age when it can no longer be said that it is impossible to speak of the Spirit as we speak of animals or stones. With such faculties of vision you will be able to see that even though Caesar was not very portly in physical life, yet when his soul left his body in sleep it was of a considerable “size”—not in the spatial sense, but its greatness could be experienced. His soul was majestic. Today a man may be one of the most portly of bankers, but when his soul steps out of his body in sleep into the spirituality of Nature, you should see what a ghastly, shrunken framework it becomes. The portly banker becomes quite an insignificant figure! Since the last third of the nineteenth century humanity has really been suffering from spiritual under-nourishment. The intellect does not nourish the Spirit. It only distends it. That is why the human being takes no spirituality with him into sleep. He is well-nigh sucked up when with his soul as a thin skeleton, he stretches out into the world of spiritual Nature between sleeping and waking.

That is why the question of materialism is far from theoretical. Nothing is of less importance today than the theoretical strife between materialistic, spiritualistic and idealistic philosophy. These things are of no reality, for the refutation of materialism achieves nothing. We may refute materialism as often as we like, nothing will come of it. For, the reasons we bring in order to refute it are just as materialistic as those we quote for or against idealism. Theoretical refutations achieve nothing one way or the other. But what really matters is that in our whole way of looking at the world we have the Spirit once again. Thereby our concepts will regain the force to nourish our being. To make this clear, let me say the following.

Now, I really do not find any very great difference between those people who call themselves materialists and those who in little sectarian circles call themselves, let us say, theosophists. For the way in which the one makes out a case for materialism and another for theosophy is by no means essentially different. It comes down to whether people want to make out a case for theosophy with the kind of thinking entirely dependent upon the brain. If this is so, even theosophy is materialistic. It is not a question of words, but whether the words express the Spirit. When I compare much of the theosophical twaddle with Haeckel's thought, I find the Spirit in Haeckel, whereas the theosophists speak of the Spirit as if it were matter, but diluted matter. The point is not that one speaks about the Spirit but that one speaks through the Spirit. One can speak spiritually about the material, that is to say, it is possible to speak about the material in mobile concepts. And that is always much more spiritual than to speak un-spiritually about the Spirit.

However many come forward today with every possible kind of logical argument in defense of the spiritual view of the world; this simply does not help us, does not help one bit. During the night we remain just as barren if during the day we ponder about hydrogen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silica, potassium, sodium and so on, and then evolve our theories; as if we ponder about the human being consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies. It is all the same so far as what is living is concerned. To speak in a living way about potassium or calcium, to treat chemistry as really alive, this is much more valuable than a dead, intellectual theosophy. For theosophy too can be taught in a dead, intellectual way. It does not really matter whether we speak materialistically or intellectually, what matters is that the Spirit shall be in what we say. The Spirit must penetrate us with its livingness. But because this is no longer understood, it is very disagreeable when anyone takes this seriously.

I did this in one of my last Oxford lectures, and to make myself quite clear I said: It is all the same to me whether people speak of spiritism, realism, idealism, materialism or anything else When I need language to describe some external phenomenon I use materialistic language. This can be done in such a way that the Spirit too lives within it. If one speaks out of the realm of the Spirit, what one says will be spiritual although the language may have materialistic form. That is the difference between what is cultivated here as Anthroposophy and what is pursued in other places under similar names. Every other week books against Anthroposophy are brought out. They contain statements which are supposed to be leveled against what I have said, but what they attack is always quite new to me for as a rule I have never said such things. They collect all sorts of rubbish and then write voluminous books about it. What they attack has usually nothing whatever to do with what I actually say. The point is not to fight materialism but to see to it that the concepts come out of the world of the Spirit, that they are really experienced, that they are concepts filled with life. What is here presented and accepted as Anthroposophy is quite different from what the world says about it.

People fight today against Anthroposophy—and sometimes also in defense of it—quite materialistically, un-spiritually, whereas what really matters is that experience of the Spirit should be made a reality in us. People easily get muddied, for when one begins to speak of spiritual beings as one speaks of plants and animals in the physical world, they take one for a fool. I can understand that; but there is just this, that this folly is the true reality, indeed the living reality for human beings! The other kind of reality is good for machines but not for human beings.

This is what I wanted to say quite clearly, my dear friends, that in what I intend here and have always intended, the important thing is not merely to speak about the Spirit, but out of the Spirit, to unfold the Spirit in the very speaking. The Spirit can have an educative effect upon our dead cultural life. The Spirit must be the lightning which strikes our dead culture and kindles it to renewed life. Therefore, do not think that you will find here any plea for rigid concepts such as the concepts physical body, etheric body, astral body, which are so nicely arrayed on the walls of theosophical groups and are pointed out just as, in a lecture room, sodium, potassium and so on are pointed to with their atomic weights. There is no difference between pointing at tables giving the atomic weight of potassium and pointing to the etheric body. It is exactly the same, and that is not the point. Interpreted in this way, Theosophy—or even Anthroposophy—is not new, but merely the latest product of the old.

The most incredible twaddle is heard when people suddenly feel themselves called upon to uphold the spiritual. I do not mention these things for the sake of criticism, but as a symptom. I will tell you two stories; the first runs as follows. I was once at a meeting in the West of Europe on the subject of theosophy. The lectures had come to an end. I fell into conversation with someone about the value of these lectures. This personality who was a good disciple of theosophical sectarianism told me of his impression of the lectures in these words: “There are such beautiful vibrations in this hall.” The pleasant sensation, you see, was expressed in terms of vibrations—in other words, materialistically.

Another time people pestered me about some discovery that had been made on the spiritual plane. It was stated that repeated earth-lives—which as a matter of fact can only be revealed to the soul by genuinely spiritual perception—must also be perceived in an earthly guise, must be clothed in terms of materialistic thinking. So these people began to speak of the “permanent atom” which goes through all earth-lives. They said: If I am now living on the Earth, and come back again after hundreds of years, the atoms will be scattered to the four winds—but one single atom goes over into the next earth-life. It was called the “permanent atom”. Quite happily the most materialistic ideas were being introduced into the truth of repeated earth-lives, into a truth that can only be grasped by the Spirit. As if it could profit anyone to have a single atom say from the fourth or filth century going around in his brain! Surely it is the same as if a surgeon in the world beyond had managed to equip me in this life by having preserved my stomach from a former incarnation and inserted it in my present body. In principle, these things are exactly the same.

I am not telling you this as a joke, but as an interesting symptom of people who, wanting to speak of the Spirit, talk of the pleasant sensation coming from spiritual “vibrations” and have only absorbed through imitation what others have known about repeated earth-lives, clothe this in such a way that they talk about the permanent atom. Books have been written by theosophists about this permanent atom—books with curious drawings showing the distribution of hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine and so on. And when one looks at them they seem no less outrageous than the sketches which materialists have made of the atoms. It does not matter whether we say: This is spiritual, or that is material. What matters is to realize the necessity of entering the living Spirit. I do not say this in a polemic sense but to make it clear to you.

The following is characteristic. There lives at the present time a very gifted Benedictine Father Mager, one of the finest minds in the Order—and the Benedictines have exceedingly fine minds. Mager has written an extremely interesting little book on “The Behaviour of Man in the Sight of God.” It belongs, in thought, to the time when Benedict founded his Order. Had it been written then it would have been quite in accordance with the times. When someone writes a book about the “Behaviour of Man in the Sight of God” one can admire it. And I do admire it. The same priest has, however, also given his opinion on Anthroposophy. And now he becomes the densest of materialists. It is really terribly difficult for one to force one's way into such a rigid kind of thought in order to describe the statements made by this priest. What he censures most is that the perception in Imaginative knowledge, which I put first, is of such a nature that for Father Mager it amounts to a lot of pictures. He gets no farther. And then he says, in accordance with his scientific conscience, that Anthroposophy materializes the world. He takes violent exception to the fact that Anthroposophy materializes the world, in other words, that Anthroposophy does not confine itself to the unreal, abstract concepts he loves—for this Father loves the most abstract concepts. Just read any Catholic philosophy and you will find—Being, Becoming, Existence, Beauty and so on—all in the most abstract form. Whatever you do, don't touch the world! And the Father notices that Anthroposophy contains living concepts which can actually come down to real things, to the real world. That is an abomination to him.

One ought to answer him: If knowledge is to be anything real, it must follow the course taken by God in connection with the world. This course started from the Spiritual and was materialized. The world was first spiritual and then became more and more material, so that real knowledge must follow this course. It is not sought for in Anthroposophy, but one comes to it. The picture slips into reality; but Father Mager condemns this. And yet it is exactly what he must himself believe if he wants to give his faith a reasonable content. But he calls it in our case the materialization of knowledge.

Of course, there is no satisfying those who insist: For heaven's sake no living concepts, for they will slip into reality, and concepts must be kept away from that! In such cases we can only have concepts belonging to waking consciousness and none that is capable of working upon man from the spiritual world. And that is exactly what we need. We need a living evolution and a living education of the human race. The fully conscious human being feels the culture of the present day to be cold, arid. It must be given life and inner activity once again. It must become such that it fills the human being, fills him with life. Only this can lead us to the point where we shall no longer have to confess that we ought not to mention the Spirit, but it leads us to where the good will to develop within us the inclination not for abstract speaking, but for inward action in the Spirit that flows into us, not for obscure, nebulous mysticism, but for the courageous, energetic permeation of our being with spirituality. Permeated by spirit we can speak of matter and we shall not be led astray when talking of important material discoveries, because we are able to speak about them in a spiritual way. We shall shape into a force that educates humanity what we sense darkly within us as an urge forward. Tomorrow, we will speak of these things again.

Today I shall begin with a review of ethics up to the end of the nineteenth century. I do not wish to convey that philosophical expositions can give rise to an impulse for the renewal of the moral life, but rather to show that forces which work from other sources to determine the moral life are symptomatically expressed in the philosophical expositions of ethics.

We must give up the view that systems of philosophy which start from the intellect can give a sound direction. Yet the whole impulse of the age expresses itself in what the philosophers say. No one will declare that our reaction to the temperature of a room is influenced by the thermometer; what the thermometer registers is dependent upon the temperature of the room. In the same way we can gauge, from what philosophers write about morality, the condition of morals in general.

You see, I treat philosophical expositions of ethics in rather a different way, merely as a kind of thermometer for registering conditions. Just as we know the temperature of a room by reading the thermometer, so we can find out a great deal about the undercurrents of the life of humanity in a particular region or period by knowing what the philosophers express in their writings.

Consider the following only from this point of view as I read you a passage printed in 1893 in the periodical Deutsche Literaturzeitung that deals with Spencer's Principle of Ethics. The reviewer says: “It contains, as I think, the most complete argument, supported by a crushing weight of material, that there is absolutely no such thing as one universal morality for all mankind, nor is there an unchangeable Moral Law: that there exists only one norm which underlies all judgments of human characteristics and actions, namely, the practical fitness or unfitness of a character or action for the given state of the society in which the judgment is made. On this account the same things will be very differently judged according to the different cultural conditions in which they occur. The view of the present writer is that this masterpiece (Spencer's Principles of Ethics) must, from a scientific point of view at least, strike dumb any recent attempts to base ethical judgments upon intuition, inborn feelings, or the most evident of axioms and the like.”

This passage is characteristic of the attitude of most of the civilized world at the end of the nineteenth century, so that it could be expressed in philosophical terms.

Let us be clear as to what is said. The attempt is made in this very important work, Spencer's Principles of Ethics, to prove—as the reviewer rightly says—with crushing weight of material, that it is impossible to draw forth from the human soul moral intuitions, moral axioms, and that we must stop talking about moral intuitions. We can only say with certainty that man acts according to his natural endowments. Any action is judged by a man's social environment; he is forced to bring his action into line with the judgment of this social environment. Hence conventional moral judgments are modified as human society changes from century to century. And a reviewer in the nineties of last century says that it is at last possible to silence, so far as science is concerned, all attempts to speak of ethics and moral views in such a way that moral intuitions arise out of the soul.

I have chosen this example because it characterizes what faced one when one thought about ethics and moral impulses.

Into this mood of the age, my dear friends, I sent my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which culminates in the view that the end of the nineteenth century makes it eminently necessary that men, as time goes on, will only be able to find moral impulses in the very essence of the soul; that even for the moral impulses of everyday life, they will be obliged to have recourse to moral intuitions. All other impulses will become gradually less decisive than the moral intuitions laid bare in the soul. In view of the situation which I faced, I was obliged to say, “The future of human ethics depends upon the power of moral intuition becoming stronger; advance in moral education can only be made as we strengthen the force of moral intuition within the soul, when the individual becomes more and more aware of the moral intuitions which arise in his soul.”

Over against this stood the judgment—a universal one, for we only speak here of what holds good universally—that it is proven with overwhelming evidence that all moral intuitions must be silenced. It was therefore necessary to attempt to write a book that would present in a virile way the very point of view which, with equal vigor, science declared should be forever silenced.

This example shows clearly that the turning-point of the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous significance for the spiritual evolution of the West. It goes to show those who have been growing up since the end of the last century are faced with quite a different situation in the life of soul from that of previous centuries. And I said with regard to the Spiritual, that at the end of the nineteenth century, man stood, in his soul-being, face to face with “Nothingness”. It was necessary to emphasize, because of man's deeper spiritual nature, that for the future, moral intuition is confronted with what had come from the past, with the Nothingness. This turning-point of the nineteenth century revealed itself in German culture in a most tragic way. We need only mention the name of Nietzsche.

For those who lived through the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century with alert and wide-awake consciousness, Nietzsche represents an experience of real tragedy. Nietzsche was a personality who through the successive periods of his life poignantly experienced that he was faced with the Nothingness, that Nothingness which he had at first assumed to be a “something,” a reality.

It will not be superfluous for our study during the next few days to say a few words about Friedrich Nietzsche. In a certain respect Nietzsche, through his tragic destiny, clearly indicates the twilight in the spiritual evolution of mankind at the end of the nineteenth century, making a new dawn necessary for the century just beginning.

Nietzsche started from a mature scientific standpoint; this he first met in philology in the middle of the nineteenth century. With a mind of extraordinary inner flexibility Nietzsche assimilated the philological standpoint of the middle of the nineteenth century and with it he absorbed the whole spirit of Greek culture.

Nietzsche was not a personality to shut himself off from the general culture. The very reverse of a theoretical scholar, he accepted naturally what he found in the middle of the nineteenth century, namely, Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism. This made a profound impression upon him, because he realized more deeply than Schopenhauer the decline of the spiritual life in the midst of which he was living.

The only form in which the light that pointed towards the future came to him was in Richard Wagner's music. As you know, Wagner was a follower of Schopenhauer at the time he made Nietzsche's acquaintance.

Thus, towards the beginning of the last third of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche developed the view that was no theory but the very substance of life to him—that already in Greek culture there had dawned the age in which the full human content was being crushed by intellectualism. Nietzsche was not correct in regard to the complete development of intellectualism, for in the form in which Nietzsche experienced intellectualism as an all-destroying spirit, it had, as I said yesterday, come upon the scene only since the fifteenth century. What Nietzsche experienced was the intellectualism of the immediate present. He dated it back to the later age of Greek culture, and held that the influence working so destructively upon what was livingly spiritual began with Socrates. And so Nietzsche became anti-Socratic in his philosophy. With the advent of Socrates in the spiritual life of Greece he saw intellectualism and the faculty of understanding driving away the old spirituality.

Not many have grasped with such innate power the contrast between the character of Greek culture as it appears in the writings of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, in the early sculpture and in the mighty philosophies of men like Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and others; the contrast of this life of soul, still full of spiritual impulses—and that other life of soul which gradually began to paralyze the true spirituality. According to Nietzsche this began with Socrates who confronted all world-questions with intellectual questions, with Socrates who established his art of definition, about which Nietzsche felt: “When it began man no longer looked at the immediate and living Spirit in the old natural way.” Provided this idea is not carried too far and thus made intellectual, it shows that Nietzsche felt something of great significance.

Real experience of the Spiritual, wherever we meet it, always becomes individualism. Definition inevitably becomes generalization. In going through life and meeting individuals we must have an open heart—an open mind for the individual. Towards each single individual we should be capable of unfolding an entirely new human feeling. We only do justice to the human being when we see in him an entirely new personality. For this reason every individual has the right to ask of us that we should develop a new feeling for him as a human being. If we come with a general idea in our heads, saying that the human being should be like this or like that—then we are being unjust to the individual. With every definition of a human being we are really putting up a screen to make the human individual invisible.

Nietzsche felt this in regard to the spiritual life—hence his opposition to the Socratic teaching. And so, during the sixties and early seventies of the nineteenth century there grew in his soul the idea that the true and living Greek culture has a kind of pessimism at the root of its feeling about the world. He thought the Greeks were convinced that immediate life, in its elementary form, cannot give man satisfaction, a complete feeling of his dignity as man. Therefore the Greeks took refuge in what art was to them. And to the Greeks, the art they cultivated in the time of their prime was the great comforter, helping to overcome what was lacking in material existence. So that for Nietzsche, Greek art could be understood only out of a tragic feeling about life, and he thought that this mission of art would again be revived by Wagner and through his artistic impulse.

The seventies approached and Nietzsche began to feel that after all this was not so, because in his time he failed to find the impulse which the Greeks had set up as the great consoler for the material life around them. And so he reflected: “What was it that I wanted to find in Wagner's art as a renewal of Greek art? What was it? Ideals.” But it dawned upon him, as he let these ideals work upon his soul, that they were no different from those of his own epoch.

During the last third of the nineteenth century there came a terribly tragic moment in Nietzsche's life, the moment when he felt his ideals to belong to his own times. He was forced to admit: “My ideals are no different from what this present age calls its ideals. After all, I am drawing from the same forces from which my own age draws its ideals.” This was a moment of great pain for Nietzsche. For he had experienced the idealistic tendencies manifest in his day. He had found, for example, a David Friedrich Strauss—revered by the whole age as a great man—but whom he had unmasked as a philistine. And he realized that his own ideals, stimulated by his absorption in Wagner and in Greek art, strongly resembled those of his time. But these ideals seemed to him impotent and unable to grasp the Spiritual.

So he said to himself: “If I am true to myself, I cannot have any ideals in common with my time.” This was a tragic discovery although not expressed in these words. Anyone who has steeped himself in what Nietzsche lived through during the years of which I am speaking, knows that there came for Nietzsche the tragic moment when, in his own way, he said: “When a man of the present day speaks of ideals and these coincide with what others call their ideals, then he is moving in the realm of the ‘empty phrase’, the ‘empty phrase’ that is no longer the living body but the dead corpse of the Spirit.”

This brought Nietzsche to the conviction: I must resolutely put aside the ideals I have evolved hitherto. And this putting aside all his ideals began in the middle of the seventies. He published his Human All Too Human, The Dawn of Day and The Joyful Wisdom—works in which he pays some homage to Voltaire but which also contain a certain view of human morals.

An external inducement to forsake his former idealism and steer towards the views of his second period was his acquaintance with the works of Paul Rée. Paul Rée treated the moral nature and its development from a purely scientific point of view, entirely in line with the natural science of the day. Paul Rée has written the very interesting little book, On the Origin of Moral Perceptions and also a book on The Genesis of Conscience. This book, which everyone should read who wants to know about the thought of the last third of the nineteenth century, had a very deep influence on Nietzsche.

What is the spirit of this book? Again, I am not describing it because I think that philosophy has a direct influence upon life; I do so because I want to have a thermometer for culture by which we can read the state of the ethical impulses of the time. Paul Rée's view amounted to this: The human being, originally, had no more than what in his opinion a child has, namely, a life of instinct, impulses of unconscious, instinctive activity. The individual human being, when he becomes active, comes up against others. Certain of these activities unfolded towards the outer world happen to suit other human beings, to be beneficial to them; other activities may be harmful. From this there arises the judgment: What proceeds from the instinctive activities of the human being as beneficial is gradually seen to be “Good;” what proves harmful to others is branded as “Evil.” Life becomes more complicated all the time. People forget how they put labels on things. They speak of good and evil and have forgotten that in the beginning the good was simply what was beneficial and the evil what was felt to be harmful. So finally what has arisen has become instinct, has recast itself as instinct. It is just as if someone struck out blindly with his arm—if the result is a caress, then this is called good; if it is a box on the ears, then it is evil. And so judgments pile up. The sum of such judgments becomes instinct. People know how they raise their hand just as little as they know why a voice comes out of the soul and utters this or that moral judgment. This voice they call conscience. This voice of conscience is simply what has arisen out of instinctive judgments about the beneficial and the harmful. It has become instinct, and because its origin has been forgotten, it speaks from within as if it were the voice of conscience.

Nietzsche realized fully that not everyone would agree with Paul Rée. But he was also quite clear that when views on natural science were such as they were in his day, it is impossible to think about Ethics otherwise than in the way Paul Rée did. Nietzsche was thoroughly honest; he deduced the ultimate consequences as Paul Rée had done. Nietzsche bore the philosopher no grudge for having written such things. This had not much more significance for Nietzsche than what was circumscribed by the four walls of the room in which Paul Rée did his writing, just as a thermometer indicates nothing more than the temperature of the immediate environment. However, it shows something universal, and Nietzsche felt this. He felt the ethical sediment of the times in this book and with this he agreed. For him there was nothing more important than to put aside the old “empty phrase” and to say: “When people talk about nebulous ideals they make nothing clear. In fact everything is instinct.”

Nietzsche often said to himself: Here is someone who says, I am an enthusiast for this or that ideal and I rejoice that others too should be enthusiastic about it. And so, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that when all is said and done, a man who is an enthusiast for certain ideals and wants to enthuse others, is so constituted that when he is thinking of these ideals he can work up the juices in his stomach in the best way for the digestion of his food. I am putting this rather inelegantly but it is exactly what Nietzsche felt in the seventies and eighties. He said to himself: People talk about all sorts of spiritual things and call them ideals. But in reality it is there for no other purpose than to enable people, each according to his constitution, to digest and carry out bodily functions in the best way. What is known as human must be divested of the “empty phrase,” for in truth the human is all-too-human.

With a magnificent devotion to honesty, Nietzsche declared war on all idealism. I know that this aspect of Nietzsche has not always been emphasized. A great deal that has been said about him is pure snobbery, without anything serious in it. So Nietzsche found himself facing the “Nothingness” at the end of the first period of his spiritual development, consciously facing the Nothingness in a second period which began with Human All Too Human and ended with The Joyful Wisdom. Finally, only one mood remained, for it is impossible to reach a real spiritual content when all ideals are traced back to bodily functions. One example will show what Nietzsche's view became. He said to himself: There are people who work towards asceticism, that is to say, towards abstention from physical enjoyment. Why do they do this? They do it because they have exceedingly bad digestion arid feel most comfortable when they abstain from physical enjoyment. That is why they regard asceticism as the highest aim worth striving for. But unconsciously they are seeking what makes them most comfortable. They wish to feel the greatest enjoyment in the absence of enjoyment. That absence of enjoyment is their greatest enjoyment shows us how they are constituted.

In Nietzsche, who was thoroughly honest, this mood intensified to moments when he gave vent to words like these:

“Ich wohn' in meinem eigenen Haus,
Hab' niemand etwas nachgemacht,
Und lache jeden Meister aus,
Der sich nicht selber ausgelacht.”

(I dwell within my own house and
have imitated no single man; and I
laugh at every master who has not
laughed at himself.)

In its poetic anticipation this verse is a magnificent description of the mood that came to its climax about the turn of the nineteenth century, yet it was already there earlier, in a form that made itself felt in the life of soul. Nietzsche found his way out of this second period of facing the Nothingness by creating what is implicit in two ideas to which he gave poetic expression. The one was the idea of the “Superman.” Ultimately there was nothing left but to call upon something which must be born out of the human being but was not yet there. After his grandiose experience of facing Nothingness, there arose the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, which came to him out of the theory of evolution. In his scientific period he had become familiar with the idea of evolution. But as he steeped himself in what came from these thoughts about evolution he discovered nothing that would bring evolution forward; these only gave him the idea of eternal recurrence. This was his last period, which need not be described any further, although from the point of view of psychology a very great deal might be learnt from it.

I do not wish to draw a character-study but only to indicate how Nietzsche, who was forced through illness to lay down his pen at the end of the eighties, had experienced in advance the mood that dominated deeper souls at the turn of the century. During the last third of the nineteenth century Nietzsche tried to express a mood drawn from his store of ideas, from Greek philosophy and art, from art as found in Wagner, from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and so on. But time and again Nietzsche himself abandoned his own views.

One of his last works is called The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with the Hammer. He felt himself as a destroyer of the old ideas. It was really very remarkable. The old ideas had already been destroyed by the spirit of cultural evolution. During Nietzsche's youth the store of ideas was already destroyed. Up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ideas continued through tradition but came to an end in the last third of the nineteenth century. The old spirit was already in ruins. It was only in the “empty phrase,” the cliché, that these ideas lived on.

Those who thought in accordance with spiritual reality in Nietzsche's day would not have felt that they had to smash the ideals with a hammer but that they had already been smashed simply in the course of the evolution of the human race. Mankind would not have reached freedom unless this had happened. But Nietzsche who found these ideals still blossoming in the empty phrase was under the illusion that he was doing what had already long been done.

What had been the inner fuel of the spiritual life in the former age, the fuel whereby the Spirit in man could be kindled and, once kindled, illuminate both Nature and his own life—this had passed away. In the realm of the moral this is expressed by people saying: There can be no moral intuitions any longer.

As I mentioned yesterday, theoretical refutations of materialism as world-conception are sheer nonsense, for materialism has its justification in this age. Thoughts which our age has to recognize as right are products of the brain. Therefore a refutation of materialism is in itself of the nature of the empty phrase, and no one who is honest can see the good of refuting materialism theoretically for nothing is to be gained by it. The human being has come to the stage where he no longer has an inner, living Spirit but only a reflection of the Spirit entirely dependent upon the physical brain. Here materialism is fully justified as a theoretical world conception. The point is not that people have a false world-conception or refute it, but that little by little they have come to an inner attitude of life and soul that is lacking in Spirit. This rings tragically, like a cry, through Nietzsche's philosophy.

This is the situation of the spiritual life in which souls with natural feeling among the young of the twentieth century found themselves. You will not come to any clear view, to any tangible experience, of what is brewing indistinctly, subconsciously in your souls and what you call the experiences of youth, unless you look into this revolution that has inevitably taken place in the spiritual life of the present period of evolution.

If you try to characterize what you experience on any other basis, you will always feel after a time that you must brush it aside. You will not hit upon a truth but only on clichés. For unless the human being today honestly admits: I must grasp the living, the active Spirit, the Spirit which no longer has its reality but only its corpse in intellectualism—unless I come to this, there is no freedom from the confusion of the age. As long as anyone believes that he can find Spirit in intellectualism, which is merely the form of the Spirit in the same way as the human corpse is the form of a man, man will not find himself.

To find oneself is only possible if man will honestly confess: Intellectualism has the same relation to the living essence of the Spirit as a dead corpse to the man who has died. The form is still there but the life of the Spirit has gone out of intellectualism. Just as the human corpse can be treated with preparations that preserve its form—as indeed Egyptian mummies show—so too can the corpse of the Spirit be preserved by padding it out with the results of experiment and observation. But thereby man gets nothing of what is livingly spiritual, he gets nothing that he can unite naturally with the living impulses of the soul. He gets nothing but a dead thing, a dead thing that can wonderfully reproduce what is dead in the world, just as one can still marvel at the human form in the mummy. But in intellectualism we cannot get what is truly spiritual any more than a real human being can be made out of a mummy.

As long as importance is attached to conserving what the union of observation and intellect is intended to conserve, one can only say: The achievements of the modern age are great. The moment the human being has to unite in the depths of his soul with what his Spirit inwardly holds up before him—there can be no link between intellectualism and the soul. Then the only thing is for him to say: “I am thirsting for something, and nothing I find out of intellectuality gives me water to quench my thirst.”

This is what lives in the feelings of young people today although, naturally, it is not so clear when expressed in words. Young people today say many things, annoying things when one gets to the bottom of what is said. But one soon overcomes it. The annoyance is due to the fact that bombastic words are used that express anything rather than what the speaker really feels. The empty phrase over-reaches itself and what appears as the character of the youth movement is, for one who lives in the Spirit, like a continuous bursting of bubbles; it is really intellectualism overreaching itself. I do not want to hurt any of you personally, but if it does hurt—well, I cannot help it. I should be sorry, but I still think it right to say it. I cannot say only pleasant things; I must sometimes say things which will not please everyone. Moreover I must say what I know to be true. So, in order to characterize what is rightly there in the souls of young people today, we need something more than a revival of old concepts over-reaching themselves in empty phrases; we need a highly-developed feeling for truth.

We need truth at the bottom of our soul. Truth is the alpha and the omega of what we need today, and when your Chairman said yesterday that we have got to a point where we do not want to utter the word “Spirit” any longer, that is in itself a confession of the truth. It would be much more clever if our age, which has lost the Spirit, would stop there and not want to talk about the Spirit, because then human beings would again begin to thirst for the Spirit. Instead of this, anything and everything is termed “Spirit,” “spiritual.” What we need is truth, and if any young person today acknowledges the condition of his own soul, he can only say: This age has taken all spirit out of my soul, but my soul thirsts for the Spirit, thirsts for something new, thirsts for a new conquest of the Spirit.

As long as this is not felt in all honesty the youth movement cannot come into its own. Let me add the following to what I have said in characterization of what we must seek. In the deepest, innermost being of the soul, we must seek for light; above all else we must acquire the most profound feeling for honesty and truth. If we build upon honesty and truth, then we shall progress, for humanity must indeed progress. Then we shall speak of the Spirit which is so like our human nature. The soul is most of all like the Spirit, therefore it can find the Spirit if only it so wills. In our time the soul must strive beyond empty phrase, convention and routine; beyond the empty phrase to a grasp of truth; beyond convention to a direct, elementary warm-hearted relation between man and man; beyond routine to the state in which the Spirit lives in every single action, so that we no longer act automatically but that the Spirit lives in the most ordinary everyday actions. We must come to spirituality in action, to the immediate experience of human beings in their relations to one another and to honest, upright experience of truth.

Yesterday I tried to characterize the spiritual life at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; to describe it as I experienced it, and as it led to the writing of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (The Philosophy of Freedom).

The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was to point to moral intuitions as that within man which, in the evolution of the world, should lead to the founding of the moral life of the future. In other words, through my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, I wanted to show that the time has come, if morality is to continue in the evolution of mankind, to make an appeal to what the individual is able to call forth from his inmost nature. I mentioned that the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was published at a time when it was universally said that at last it had been recognized that moral intuitions were an impossibility and that any discussion about moral intuitions must once and for all be silenced. I therefore considered it essential to establish the reality of moral intuition. Thus there was a distinct cleft between what the age, among many of its most eminent minds considered to be truth, and what I was obliged to maintain as truth out of the principles of human evolution.

But on what is this difference really based? Let us look into the depths of man's life of soul, as we see it today in the West. In earlier times people also spoke of moral intuitions, that is to say, it was said that, as an individual entity, man could call forth from within himself independently of external life the impetus to action. But when the new age dawned, in the first third of the fifteenth century and more powerfully in subsequent centuries, what had been said about moral intuitions was no longer quite true. It was said: Morality cannot be established by the observation of external facts; men were no longer aware of a real light when they looked into their inner being. So they declared that moral intuitions were there, but that actually nothing more was known about them. For centuries statements were such that one might say: The thinking, which had been natural before the fifteenth century, moved onwards automatically and facts formerly justified had ceased to be so.

Traditions, of which I have spoken, persisted through the centuries and contributed towards such statements. Before the fifteenth century, men did not speak in indefinite terms as was current later, and this very indefiniteness was untruthful. When speaking of intuitions, of moral intuitions he spoke of that which rose up in his inner being, of which he had a picture as real as the world of Nature when he opened his eyes in the morning. Outside he saw Nature around him, the plants and the clouds; when he looked into his inner being, there arose the Spiritual, the Moral as it was given to him. The further we go back in evolution the more we find that the rising tip of an inner realm into human experience was a matter of course. These facts, as I have explained them to you, are the outcome of Spiritual Science; they may also be studied historically by considering external symptoms. In the days when speech, from being an inner reality was lapsing into untruthfulness, proof for the existence of God came into evidence.

Had anyone during the first centuries of Christianity spoken about proofs for the existence of God, as Anselm of Canterbury, people would not have known what was meant. In earlier times they would have known still less! For in the second or third century before Christ, to speak of proofs for the existence of God would have been as if someone sitting there in the first row were to stand up and I were to say: “Mr. X stands there,” and someone in the room were to assert “No, that must first be proved!” What man experienced as the divine was a Being of full reality standing before his soul. He was endowed with the faculty of perception for what he called divine; this God appears primitive and incomplete in the eyes of modern man. They could not get beyond the point they were then capable of reaching. But the men of that age had no desire to hear about proofs, for that would have seemed absurd. Man began to “prove” the existence of the divine when he had lost it, when it was no longer perceived by inner, spiritual perception. The introduction of proofs for the existence of God shows, if one looks at the facts impartially, that direct perception of the divine had been lost. But the moral impulses of that time were bound up with what was divine. Moral impulses of that time can no longer be regarded as moral impulses for today. When in the first third of the fifteenth century the faculty of perception of the divine-spiritual in the old sense was exhausted, perception of the moral also faded and all that remained was the traditional dogma of morals which men called “conscience.” But the term was always applied in the vaguest manner.

When, therefore, at the end of the nineteenth century it was said that all talk about moral intuitions must be silenced, it was the final consequence of a historical development. Until then human beings had a feeling, however dim, that such intuitions had once existed. But now they began to put themselves to the test. Intelligence had at least brought them to the point of being able to do this; they discovered that with the methods they were accustomed to use to think scientifically, they were unable to approach moral intuitions.

Let us consider the moral intuitions of olden times. History has become very threadbare in this respect. We have a history of outer events and in the nineteenth century a history of culture was established. But this age has been incapable of producing a history which takes man's inner life of soul into account; there is no knowledge of how the life of soul developed from the earliest times until the first third of the fifteenth century. But if we go back in time and consider what was spoken of as moral intuition, we find that it did not arise as a result of inner effort. For this reason the Old Testament, for instance, is right not to feel what figured then as moral intuition as begotten from within, but as divine commandments, coming to the soul from outside. And the further back we go the more the human being felt what he saw when he beheld the moral, to be a gift to his inner nature from some living divine being outside him. Moral intuitions held good as divine commands—not in a figurative or symbolic sense, but in an absolutely real sense.

There is a good deal of truth in contemporary religious philosophies when they allude to a primal revelation preceding the historical age on earth. External science cannot get much beyond, shall I say, a paleontology of the soul. Just as in the earth we find fossils, indicating an earlier form of life, so in fossilized moral ideas we find forms pointing back to the once living, God-given moral ideas. Thus we can get to the concept of primal revelation and say: This primal revelation faded out. Human beings lost the faculty for being conscious of primal revelation. And this loss reached its culminating point in the first third of the fifteenth century. Human beings perceived nothing when they looked within themselves. They preserved only the tradition of what they had once beheld. Religious communities gradually seized upon this tradition and turned its externalized content, this purely traditional content, into dogmas which people were expected merely to believe, whereas formerly they had living experience of their truth, though as coming from outside man.

This was the very significant situation at the end of the nineteenth century: Certain circles realized that the old intuitions, the God-given intuitions, were no longer there; that if a man wants to prove with his head the ideas of the people of old, moral intuitions simply disappear; science has silenced them. Human beings even when receptive are no longer capable of receiving moral intuitions. To be consistent, one would have had to become a kind of Spengler, and to say:—There are no moral intuitions; man in future will have no alternative but gradually to wither up—perhaps asking one's grandfather: “Have you heard that there were once moral intuitions, moral influences?” And the grandfather would answer: “One would have to search the libraries; at second or third-hand one might still glean some knowledge of moral intuitions but no longer from actual experience.” So there is no alternative but to wither up and become senile, not to have youth any more.—That would have been consistent. But people did not dare, for consistency was not an outstanding quality of the dawning age of the intellect.

Indeed, there were many things that one did not dare! If a judgment were pronounced it was only half given, as in the case of du Bois-Reymond [a leading German physiologist at the turn of the nineteenth century] who delivered a speech about the boundaries to the knowledge of Nature. He said that supernaturalism could not be mentioned in connection with natural science, for supernaturalism was faith and not knowledge. Science stops short at the supernatural—and nothing further was said by him on the subject. If mentioned, people got excited and said that this was no longer science; consistency was not a characteristic of the century then ending.

So, on one hand, there was the alternative of withering. The Spiritual passes over gradually into the life of soul, the life of soul into the physical. As a result, after some decades, souls would only have been able to ferret out antiquated moral impulses. After some years, not only the thirty-year-olds but also the twenty-year-olds would have been going about with bald heads, and the fifteen-year-olds with grey hair! This is a figurative way of speaking, but Spenglerism would have become an impulse carried into practice. That was one alternative.

The other alternative was to become fully conscious of the following: With the loss of the old intuitions we are facing Nothingness. What can be done? In this Nothingness to seek the “All”! Out of this very Nothingness try to find something that is not given, but which we ourselves must strenuously work for. This was no longer possible with passive powers of the past, but only with the strongest powers of cognition of this age: with the cognitional powers of pure thinking. For in acts of pure thinking, this thinking goes straight over into the will. You can observe and think, without exerting your will. You can carry out experiments and think: it does not pass right over into the will. You can do this without much effort. Pure thinking, by which I mean the unfolding of primary, original activity, requires energy. There the lightning-flash of will must strike directly into the thinking itself. But the lightning-flash of will must come from each single individual. Courage was needed to call upon this pure thinking which becomes pure will; it arises as a new faculty—the faculty of drawing out of the human individuality moral impulses which have to be worked for and are no longer given in the form of the old impulses. Intuitions must be called up that are strenuously worked for. Today what man works for in his inner being is called “phantasy.” Thus in this present age which has, apart from this, silenced inner work, moral impulses for the future must be produced out of moral phantasy, moral Imagination; the human being had to be shown the way from merely poetical, artistic phantasy, to a creative moral Imagination.

The old intuitions were always given to groups. There is a mysterious connection between primal revelation and human groups. It was always to groups of human beings in association that the old intuitions were given. The new intuitions must be produced in the sphere of each single, individual human soul; in other words, each single human being must be made the source of his own morality. This must be brought forth through the intuitions out of the Nothingness by which man is confronted.

That was the only possibility left, if as an honest man one was not willing to turn to a kind of Spenglerism—and to work in the Spengler way is far from alive. It was a question of finding a living reality out of the Nothingness which confronted men, and it goes without saying that at first one could only make a beginning. For a creative power in the human being had to be called upon, the creation, as it were, of an inner man within the outer man. In earlier times the outer man received moral impulses from outside. Now the human being has to create an inner man and with this inner man there came, or will come, the new moral intuition. So, out of the times themselves there had to be born a kind of Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—something that must inevitably be in sharp opposition to the times.

Let us complete this survey of the condition of the soul of modern man by considering another aspect. You see, as a preparation for intellectualism in western civilization, the consciousness of man's pre-earthly existence had for a long time been wiped out. Western civilization had lost it in very early times. So that in the West there was not this consciousness: “When I issue from the embryonic state of physical development something unites itself with me, something that descends from the heights of spirit and soul and permeates this physical earth-being.”

Now in this connection the following presents itself quite clearly to our vision. I have already given you a picture to elucidate it. I said that when we look at a corpse we know that it cannot have its form through the forces of nature, but must be the remains of a living human being. It would be foolish to speak about the human form as if it were itself something living. We must go back to what was the living human being. In the same way, looked at impartially, man's intellectual thinking presents itself as dead. People naturally will say: “Prove this for us.” It proves itself in the very beholding and the kind of proofs necessary for the side issues are indeed available. But to demonstrate it I would have to go into a good deal of philosophy and this lies outside the scope of our present task. To anyone looking at it without prejudice, intellectual thinking, out of which our whole modern civilization flows, bears the same relation to living thinking as the corpse to the living human being. Just as the corpse is derived from the living man, so the thinking we have today is derived from the living thinking of an earlier time. But upon sound reflection I must say to myself: “This dead thinking must have originated in a living thinking which was there before birth. The physical organism is the tomb of the living thinking, and the receptacle of dead thinking.”

But the strange fact is that during the first two periods of human life, up to the sixth, seventh or eighth years, to the end of the change of teeth, and then further, up to the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth years—that is to say, to the age of puberty—the human being has a thinking not yet entirely dead; but in process of dying. It was only living thinking in pre-earthly existence. During the first two periods of life it comes to the point of dying, and for modern man, since the first third of the fifteenth century, thinking is quite dead by the time of puberty. It is then the corpse of living thinking. It was not always so in the evolution of mankind. If we go back before the fifteenth century, it becomes evident that thinking still was something living. There existed livingly the kind of thinking which human beings today do not like because they feel as if ants were swarming in their brain. They do not like it when something is really alive within them. They want their head to behave in a quiet and comfortable way.

And the thinking in it, too, should take a peaceful course so that all one needs is to help things along with the laws of logic. But pure thinking—that is just as if an ant-heap were let loose in one's head, and that, people say, is not as it should be. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the human being was still able to endure living thinking. I am not saying this in order to criticize; that would be out-of-place, just as out-of-place as to criticize a cow because she is no longer a calf. It would have been the greatest disaster for humanity if this had not happened. There had to be human beings who could not endure having an ant-heap in their head! For what was dead had to be brought to life again in a different way.

And so it came about after the middle of the fifteenth century that human beings inwardly experienced a dead thinking once puberty was passed. They were filled out with the corpse of thinking. Go really deeply and seriously into this idea and you will understand that it is only since that time that an inorganic natural science could arise, because the human being began to grasp purely inorganic laws. Now for the first time man could grasp what is dead in the way striven for since Galileo and Copernicus. The living had first to die inwardly. When man was still inwardly alive in his thinking, he could not grasp the dead in an external way for the living kind of knowledge imparted itself to what was external. Natural science became increasingly pure science and nothing more, and this continued until, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was well-nigh only mathematics. That was the ideal towards which it strove—it strove to be Phoronomy, a kind of system of pure mechanics.

So, in the modern age, man began more and more to make what is dead into the actual object of knowledge. That was the whole aim. This lasted for some centuries; evolution took this direction. Men of genius like de Lamettrie, for example, anticipated the idea that the human being was really a machine. Yes, the human being who only wants to grasp what is dead avails himself of what is merely a machine within him, of what is dead within him. And this makes the development of natural science easy for modern man. For his thinking is dead by the time of puberty, whereas in earlier days he had God-given intuitions; thinking preserved the forces of growth within itself far beyond puberty. In later times, living thinking was lost; human beings in later life learnt nothing more; they simply repeated mechanically what they had assimilated in earlier youth.

You see, this suited the old, who held the control of culture in their hands: to comprehend a dead world with their dead thinking. On this dead thinking, science can be founded, but with it the young can never be taught and educated. And why? Because up to puberty the young preserve the livingness of thinking, in an unconscious way. And so, in spite of all the thought given today to principles of education, if rigidified objective science which comprehends only what is dead becomes the teacher of the living, the youthful feel it like a thorn in the flesh. This thorn enters their heart and they have to tear out from their heart what is living. Many still overlook what has had to come about out of the depths of human evolution: a definite cleavage between young and old. And this cleavage is due to the fact that the young cannot allow the dead thorn to be thrust into their living heart—the thorn which the head produces out of intellectualism. The young demand the livingness that can only come out of the Spirit as the result of strenuous effort by the individual. We are making a beginning in the sphere of moral intuitions.

A beginning has been made in what I have tried to present in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in regard to this purely spiritual matter—for such are moral intuitions, striven for by the human individuality. Because one has dared to open one's mouth while others were saying that nothing should be said—the powers which ordained that one should be stopped from speaking of moral intuitions will themselves be silenced. And so I called upon the living, the purely Spiritual Science is dead. Science cannot make what is living flow from the mouth. And without this one cannot build on it. One must appeal to an inner livingness, and so begin to seek in the right way. The divine lies precisely in the appeal to the original, moral, spiritual intuitions. But if one has once grasped the spiritual then one can unfold the forces which enable one to grasp the Spiritual in wider spheres of cosmic existence. And that is the straight path from moral intuitions to other spiritual contents.

In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have tried to show that knowledge of the super-sensible worlds is built up gradually out of Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive experience. If we look at outer Nature, we reach first Imagination, then Inspiration, and lastly Intuition. In the moral world it is different. If in that world we reach picture-consciousness, Imaginations as such, then with Imaginations of Nature we have at the same time developed the faculty for moral intuitions. Already at the first stage we acquire what, in the other sphere, is not attained until the third stage. In the moral world, intuition follows immediately upon outer perception. In the world of Nature, however, there are two intermediate stages. So that if, in the moral world one speaks of intuitions not in mere phrases but honestly, truthfully, one simply cannot do otherwise than recognize these intuitions as being purely spiritual. But then one must work on to discover other realms of the Spirit. For qualitatively one has grasped in moral Intuition the same as the evolution of the natural world, filled with content by a book such as Occult Science.

But, my dear friends, we must proceed as follows. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that outer science by its very nature can only comprehend what is material; hence perception of the material is not only materialism but also phenomenalism. On the other, we must work to bring back life into what has been made into dead thinking by natural science.

Thus certain Bible words become alive on a higher level. I do not want to intersperse what I say in a sentimental way with words from the Bible but only to elucidate things for our better mutual understanding.

Why is it that today we no longer have any real philosophies? It is because thinking, as I have described it, has died; when based merely upon dead thinking, philosophies are dead from the very outset. They are not alive. And if like Bergson one seeks in philosophy for something living, nothing comes of it because, although spasmodic efforts are made, one cannot lay hold of the living. To grasp the living means first to attain vision. What we need to reach the living is what after our fifteenth year we can add to what has worked within us before our fifteenth year. This is not disturbed by our intellect. What works within us, a spontaneous, living wisdom—we must learn to carry this over into the dead thinking. Dead thinking must be permeated with forces of growth and with reality. For this reason—not out of sentimentality—I want to refer to the words. from the Bible: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

For it is always the Kingdom of Heaven that one is seeking. But if one does not become like the child before puberty, one cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Childlikeness, youthfulness, must be brought into dead thinking. Thereby it becomes alive, it comes once more to intuitions; thus we learn to speak out of the primal wisdom of the child. Out of a science of language such as Fritz Mauthner has written, moral intuitions not only become dumb, but actually all talk about the world is silenced. People ought to stop talking about the world because Mauthner proves that all talk about the world consists only of words and words are incapable of expressing reality!

Such thinking has made its appearance only since the first third of the nineteenth century. But supposing our words and concepts not only meant something but had real existence. Then indeed they would not be transparent; then, like clouded lenses before our eyes, they would conceal what is material; because they are realities they would hide the world from us. Something splendid would be made of man had he concepts and words which signify something in themselves! He would have been held fast by them. But concepts and words must be transparent so that we may reach things through them. It is imperative when the desire is almost universal to silence all talk about reality, that we learn to speak a new language.

In this sense we must return to childhood and learn a new language. The language we learn in the first years of childhood gradually becomes dead, because it is permeated by dead intellectual concepts. We must quicken it to new life. We must find something that strikes into what we are thinking, just as when we learnt to speak an impulse arose in us out of the unconscious. We must find a science that is alive. We should consider it a matter of course that the thinking which reached its apex in the last third of the nineteenth century silences our moral intuitions. We must learn to open our mouth by letting our lips be moved by the Spirit. Then we shall become children again, that is to say, we shall carry childhood on into our later years. And that we must do. If a youth movement wants to have truth and not only phraseology, then such a movement is imbued of necessity with the longing for the human mouth to be opened by the Spirit, a longing for the quickening of human speech by the Spirit which wells forth from the individual. As a first step, individual moral intuitions must be brought out of the human individuality; we shall see how as a result, the true Science of the Spirit, which makes all Anthropology into Anthroposophy, is born.

In the ways you want to be active during your stay here, many of you are thinking above all about the question of education. Not so much, perhaps, about education in the sense of ordinary school pedagogy but because we are living in an age when many new impulses must come into the evolution of mankind. There is a tendency to think that the attitude of the older towards the younger generation must assume a different character, and thence comes the thought of education. The fundamental character of the age is considered as having to do with education.

In saying this I want to describe an impression which, I believe, may be noticed in many of you. It seems to me important that when anyone looks at his epoch, he should not only bear in mind the generation now young, entering the century in full youth, and its relation to the older generation that has, in the way I have described, carried over something from the last third of the nineteenth century, but one must also consider: What will be the attitude of this young generation towards the coming generation, to the generation which cannot, as the first, after the last third of the nineteenth century, maintain the same attitude to Nothingness that I have described? For the coming generation will not have what the present age has given to the younger generation through opposition towards their elders, namely enthusiasm—more or less indefinite, but nevertheless enthusiasm. What will further evolve will have much more the character of a longing, of an undefined yearning, than was the case among those who derived their enthusiasm from a mood of opposition against the traditional.

And here we must look still more deeply into the human soul than I have done up to now.

I have already shown that in the evolution in the West, consciousness of the pre-earthly existence of the soul has been lost. If we take the religious conceptions which are closest to the development of the human heart in the West during the past centuries, we can but say: For a long time existence before the descent into a physical earthly body has been lost to man's sight. Form an idea of how utterly different it is when one is permeated with the consciousness that something has come down from divine-spiritual worlds into the physical human body, has united itself with the physical human body. If nothing of this consciousness exists there is quite a different feeling, especially about the growing child.

The growing child, when looked at with this consciousness, reveals from its very first breath, or even before, what is being manifested by the spiritual world. Something is revealed from day to day, from week to week, from year to year. Observed in this way, the child becomes a riddle which one approaches in quite a different way from what is possible when one thinks one is confronting a being whose existence begins with birth or conception, and who, as is said nowadays, develops from this starting point, from this point of germination.

We shall understand one another still better if I call to your attention how with this there is connected the keynote of the riddle of the whole world. You know that in former days this fundamental feeling about the world-riddle was expressed in the paradigm: “Man, know thyself!” This saying, “Man, know thyself “is about the only saying which can hold its own against the objections always arising when a solution of the world-riddle is broached. Now I will say something rather paradoxical. Suppose somebody found what he might call the solution of the world-riddle. What would there remain to do after the moment when this world-riddle was solved? Man would lose all freshness of spontaneous striving; all livingness in striving would cease. It would indeed be comfortless to have to admit that the world-riddle has been solved by means of a cognitional method. All that is necessary is to look in some book or other; there the solution is given.

A great many people think thus about the solution of the world-riddle. They consider the world-riddle a system of questions that must be answered by explanations or something of the kind. One feels benumbed at the thought that a solution of the world-riddle could somewhere be given in this way, that the solution could actually be studied! It is a terrible, a horrible thought; all life is frozen by it.

But what lies in the words “Man, know thyself!” expresses something quite different. It really says: Man! look around you at the world; the world is full of riddles, full of mystery, and man's slightest movement points in the widest sense to cosmic mysteries.—Now one can indicate precisely where all these riddles are solved. There is quite a short formula for the indication. We can say: All the riddles of the world are solved in man—again in the very widest sense. Man himself, moving as a living being through the world—he is the solution of the world-riddle! Let him gaze at the sun and experience one of the cosmic mysteries. Let him look into his own being and know: Within thyself lies the solution of this cosmic mystery. “Man, know thyself and thou knowest the world I.”

But this way of expressing the formula is an intimation that no answer is final. Man is the solution of the world-riddle but to know the human being, we have what is infinite before us and so imbued with life that we never reach an end. We know that we bear the solution of the world-riddle within ourselves. But we know too that we shall never come to an end of what there is to search for in ourselves. From such a formula we only know that we are not given out of the universe abstract questions to be answered in an abstract way, but that the whole universe is a question and the human being an answer. We know that the question of the nature of the universe has resounded from times primeval until today, that the answer to these world-questions has resounded from human hearts, but that the questioning will go on resounding endlessly, that human beings must continue on into the distant future to learn to live their answer. We are not directed in a pedantic way to what might be found in a book but to the human being himself. Yet in the sentence, “Man, know thyself!” there sounds over to us from ancient times when school, church and centers of art were all united in the Mysteries, something which points to what has not been learnt from formulae, but from that book about the world which can be deciphered, but deciphered only through endless activity. And the name of this book about the world is “Man.”

If the full import of what I put before you yesterday is grasped, through such a change in the experiencing of knowledge, through the attitude we have to knowledge, the spark of life will strike into the whole nature of man. And that is what is needed.

If we picture the moral evolution of man up to the time when it became problematic, up to the first third of the fifteenth century, we find that the most diverse impulses were necessary to follow what I characterized yesterday as God-given commandments. When we imagine the driving forces prevalent among various peoples in different epochs, we find a great range of inner impulses arising like instincts, depending on particular conditions of life. One could make an interesting study of how these impulses to obey the old moral intuitions originate, how they grow out of the family, out of the racial stock, out of man's inclination towards the other sex, out of the necessity to live together in communities, out of man's pursuit of his own advantage.

But in the same way as we were obliged to call attention yesterday to how old moral intuitions have lived themselves out in historical evolution, so the impulses mentioned no longer contain an impelling force for the human being They cannot contain it if the self-acquired moral intuitions, of which I spoke yesterday, have to appear in man; if single individuals are challenged in the world-evolution of humanity, on the one hand, to find for themselves moral intuitions by dint of the labor of their own souls, and, on the other to acquire the inner strength to live according to these moral intuitions. And then it dawns upon us that the old moral impulses will increasingly take a different course.

We see emerging in the depths of the soul, although misjudged and misunderstood today by the majority of civilized humanity, two moral impulses of supreme importance. If attempts are made to interpret them, confused ideas usually result. If people want to put them into practice, they do not know as a rule what to do with them. Nonetheless they are arising: in the inner life of man the impulse of moral love, and outwardly, in the intercourse between human beings, the moral impulse of confidence.

Now the degree of strength in which moral love will be needed in the immediate future for all moral life, was not necessary in the past—not just in this form. Certainly, of former times too one could say that the words, “Joy and love are the pinions which bear man to great deeds,” are true. But if we speak truly and not in mere phrases, we must say: That joy and that love which fired human beings to do this or that were only a metamorphosis of the impulses described before. Great and pure love, working from within outwards, will have in future to give man wings to fulfil his moral intuitions. Those human beings will feel themselves weak and lacking in will, in face of moral intuitions, who do not experience the fire of love for what is moral springing from the depths of their souls, when through their moral intuitions they confront the deed to be accomplished.

There you see how in our times we have a parting of the ways! It becomes evident by contrasting the atavistic elements of the older age which play over in many ways into the present with what is living within us like the early flush of dawn. You will often have heard those fine words Kant wrote about duty: “Duty! Sublime and mighty Name, you embrace nothing that charms and require only submission”—and so forth. The sternest terms in which to characterize duty! Here the content of duty stands as a moral intuition imparted from outside, and the human being confronts this moral intuition in such a way that he has to submit to it. The moral experience when he thus submits himself is that no inner satisfaction is gained from obedience to duty; only the cold statement: “I must perform my duty” remains.

You know Schiller's answer to Kant's definition of duty:

“Gerne dien' ich den Freunden, doch tu' ich es leider mit Neigung,
Und so wurmt es mich oft, dass ich nicht tugendhaft bin.”

(I serve my friend gladly, but unfortunately I do it with inclination, and so it often worries me that I am not virtuous.)

Thus Schiller retorts ironically to this categorical imperative.

You see, over against the so-called categorical imperative, as it comes down from former times out of old moral impulses, there stands the summons to mankind, out of the depths of his soul, evermore to unfold love for what is to become action and deed. For however often in future there may resound: “Submit to duty, to what brings you nothing that will please”—it will be of no avail. Just as little as a man of sixty can behave like a baby can we live at a later age in a way suitable to an earlier epoch. Perhaps that would please people better. But that is of no account. The important thing is what is necessary and possible for the evolution of humanity. We can simply not discuss whether what Kant, as a descendant of very ancient times, has said should be carried on into the future. It cannot be carried on, because humanity has developed beyond it, developed in such a way that action out of love must give mankind the impulse for the future.

On the one hand we are led to the conception of ethical individualism, on the other, to the necessity of knowing that this ethical individualism must be borne on the love arising from perception of the deed to be accomplished. Thus it is, from man's subjective viewpoint.

From the aspect of the social life, the matter presents itself differently. There are people today in whom there no longer echoes the voice of progressive evolution; because they accept all kinds of outside opinions they say: “Yes, but if you try to found morality on the individual, you will upset the social life.” But such a statement is meaningless. It is just as sensible as if someone were to say: if in Stuttgart it rains a certain number of times in three months, Nature will ruin some particular crop on the land.—If one is conscious of a certain responsibility towards knowledge one cannot imagine anything more empty. As humanity is developing in the direction of individualism, there is no sense in saying that ethical individualism upsets the community. It is rather a question of seeking those forces by which man's evolution can progress; this is necessary if man is to develop ethical individualism, which holds the community together and fills it with real life.

Such a force is confidence—confidence between one human being and another. Just as in our inner being we must call upon love for an ethical future, so we must call upon confidence in relation to men's intercourse with each other. We must meet the human being so that we feel him to be a world-riddle, a walking world-riddle. Then we shall learn in the presence of every human being to unfold feelings which draw forth confidence from the depths of our soul. Confidence in an absolutely real sense, individual, unique confidence, is hardest to wring from the human soul. But without a system of education, a cultural pedagogics, which is directed towards confidence, civilization can progress no further. In future mankind will have to realize this necessity to build up confidence in social life; they will also have to experience the tragedy when this confidence cannot develop in the proper way in the human soul.

Oh my dear friends, what men have ever felt in the depths of their souls when they have been disappointed by a human being on whom they had relied, all such feelings will in future be as nothing compared with the tragedy when, with an infinitely deepened feeling of trust, human beings will tragically experience disillusionment in their fellow men. It will be the bitterest thing, not because men have never been disappointed, but because the feeling of confidence and disillusionment will be infinitely deepened in future; because one will build to such a degree in the soul upon the joy of confidence and the pain of the inevitable mistrust. Ethical impulses will penetrate to depths of the soul where they spring directly from the confidence between man and man.

Just as love will fire the human hand, the human arm, so that from within it draws the strength to do a deed, so from without there will flow the mood of confidence in order that the deed may find its way from the one human being to the other. The morality of the future will have to be grounded on the free moral love arising from the depths of the human soul; future social action will have to be steeped in confidence. For if one individuality is to meet another in a moral way, above all an atmosphere of confidence will be necessary.

So we anticipate an ethics, a conception of morality that will speak little of the ethical intuitions of old but will emphasize how a human being must develop from childhood so that there may be awakened in him the power of moral love. Much will have to be given in the pedagogics of the future to the growing generation by teachers and educators through what educates effectively without words. In education and teaching there will have to be imparted much of that knowledge which is not an abstract indication of how man consists of this or that, but which leads us over to the other human being in such a way that we can have the proper confidence in him.

Knowledge of man, but not a knowledge that makes us cold towards our fellow-men but which fills us with confidence—this must become the very fibre of future education. For we have to give weight again, but in a new way, to what once was taken seriously but is so no longer in the age of intellectualism.

If you go back to Greece, you will find that the doctor in his medical art, for example, felt extraordinarily akin to the priest, and priests felt themselves akin to the doctor. Such an attitude can be seen dimly, confusedly in the personality of Paracelsus who has been, and still is, so little understood. Today we relegate to the sphere of religion the abstract instruction which leads away from real life. For in religious instruction we are told what man is without his body, and so on—in a way that is singularly foreign to life. Over against this stands the opposite pole in civilization, where everything brought forth by our own time is kept far from the realm of religion.

Who today sees any trace of a religious act in healing, for instance, an act in which permeation by the spirit plays a part? Paracelsus still had a feeling for this. For him, the religious life was such that it entered into the science of healing. It was a branch of the religious life. This was so in olden times. The human being was a totality: what he had to perform in the service of mankind was permeated by religious impulses. In quite another way, for we must strive to gain moral intuitions that are not God-given but born by our own efforts,—life must again be permeated by a religious quality. But first and foremost it must be made evident in the sphere of education. Confidence between one human being and another—the great demand of the future—must permeate social life.

If we ask ourselves—What is the most essential quality to be a moral human being in the future?—We can only answer: “You must have confidence in the human being.” But when a child comes into the world, that is to say, when the human being comes out of pre-earthly existence and unites with his physical body in order to use it as an instrument on earth between birth and death—when the human being confronts us as a child and reveals his soul to us, what must we bring to him in the way of confidence? Just as surely as the child, from its first movement on earth, is a human being, yet the confidence we bring him is different from the confidence we bring to an adult. When we meet the child as teacher or as a member of the older generation, this confidence is transformed in a certain respect. The child comes into earthly existence from a pre-earthly world of soul and spirit. We observe, revealing itself in a wonderful way from day to day permeating the physical out of the world of soul and spirit, what may be called in the modern sense of the word—the divine.

We need again the divine which leads the human being out of pre-earthly into the present, as through his bodily nature he is led onwards in earthly existence. When we speak of confidence between men in the moral sphere, and apply it to education, we must specialize and say:—“We confront the child who has been sent down to us by the divine-spiritual Powers—and for whom we should be the solvers of all riddles—we confront the child with confidence in God.” Yes, in face of the child, confidence in man becomes confidence in God. And a future will have to come in the evolution of humanity in which what weaves even in a more neutralized form from man to man, will assume a religious coloring in relation to the child or to young people generally who have to be guided into life.

There we see how through actual life, morality is transformed back into religiousness, into a religiousness that expresses itself directly in everyday life. In olden times all moral life was a special part of the religious life, for in the commandments of religion moral commandments were given at the same time.

Humanity has passed through the epoch of abstraction; now, however, we must again enter the epoch of the concrete. We must feel once again how the moral becomes the religious. And in future the moral deeds of education and instruction will have to shape themselves in a modern sense into what is religious. For pedagogy, my dear friends, is not merely a technical art. Pedagogics is essentially a special chapter in the moral sphere of man. Only he who finds education within the realm of morality, within the sphere of ethics, discovers it in the right way. What I have described here as a specifically religious shade of morality, receives its right coloring if we say:—“The riddle of life stands before us as an enigma. The solution of the riddle lies in Man.”—And there indeed it does lie. But anyone who teaches has to work unceasingly, in a living way, at the solution of this riddle. When we learn to feel how in education we are working unceasingly at the solution of the world-riddle, we take our place in the world quite differently from what would have been the case had we sought for solutions merely by means of head knowledge.

In regard to the feeling about Education with which you may have come here, the important thing is to carry away with you into the world this special aspect of pedagogics. This feeling will enable you to stand in the world and not only lead you to asking:—How profound is the tragedy of the young who had to follow the old?—You will also ask, looking into the future: “What living forces must I release in myself to look rightly upon those who are coming after me?” For they in turn will look back to those who were once there. A youth movement in whatever form, if it considers life in a fully responsible way, must have a Janus head; it must not only look at the demands the young make on the old, but also be able to look at the still undefined demands raging around us with tremendous power—demands which the coming youth will make upon us.

Not only opposition against the old, but a creative looking forward, is the right guiding thought for a true youth movement. Opposition may, to begin with, have acted as a stimulus to enthusiasm. The power of deed will only be bestowed by the will to create, the will to do creative work within the present evolution of humanity.

Yesterday I pointed out how the longing of the young today is permeated by something Janus-headed. Certainly, this appears to be permeated by enthusiasm which comes from opposition. But however strongly, at the beginning of the century, this feeling breathed of the present, whoever has now had experience of it no longer finds the opposition in its full measure. Many do not yet admit this impartially, particularly among the young themselves. Yet it indicates something very significant. The generation which at the beginning of the twentieth century confronted world-evolution in such a way that “facing Nothingness” was a most profound experience—this generation was quite new upon the scene in human evolution. But this feeling must reckon with many disappointments prepared out of its own depths.

The full spread of the sails as it was some twenty years ago is no longer there. Not only the terrible event of World War I has deflated these sails, but certain experiences working outward from within have arisen in young people and modified their original feeling. One such experience became evident, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the feelings of those who had grown older in years but were not inwardly old. It was not clearly expressed in words, but in other than the literal words there was in the young something which pointed to a responsive tiredness.

Here I am placing before you an idea difficult to describe accurately, because what I really mean is only fully intelligible to those who have experienced the youth movement with a certain awakeness, whereas a great part of humanity has been asleep to this youth movement. When one speaks to people in the way I have during the past days, it is as if one were talking of something quite foreign to them, something they have slept through and towards which even today they adopt an extraordinarily sleepy attitude.

Responsive tiredness, I called it. In ordinary life organic existence requires not only activity but also after accomplished work the accompanying state of tiredness. We must not only be able to get tired, we must also from time to time be able to carry tiredness around within us. To pass our days in such a way that we go to sleep at night simply because it is customary to do so, is not healthy; it is certainly less healthy than to have the due amount of tiredness in the evening and for this to lead in the normal way into sleep. So too, the capacity to become tired-out by the phenomena meeting us in life is something that must be.

When education, for example, has been discussed, I have often heard it said that there must be an education which makes learning a game for children; school must be all joy for the child. Yes, those who speak like this should just try how they can make school all joy for the children, so that the children laugh all the time, so that learning is play and at the same time they are learning something. This is the very best possible educational principle for ensuring that nothing at all is learnt.

The right thing is for teachers to be able to handle what does not give the child joy, but perhaps a good deal of toil and woe, in such a way that the child as a matter of course submits to it. It is very easy to say what should be given to the child. But childhood can be injured through learning being made into a game. For it is essential that we should also in our life of soul be made tired by certain things—that is to say, things should create a responsive tiredness. One must express it thus, though it sounds pedantic. Tiredness existed among the young in earlier times, too, when they had to strive towards something living, a certain science, a certain kind of knowledge. I mean times when those possessing a certain amount of knowledge were still able to stand before the young, who wanted to acquire it, as an embodied ideal. Tiredness certainly existed even then.

My dear friends, there may be some here who take the above statement with mild scepticism. There are many people today who would take it with scepticism, for when it is claimed that those who knew something stood as a kind of ideal for those anxious to learn, this idea appears to many as unrealizable. For, at the present time, it is almost incredible that anybody should be regarded as a kind of embodied knowledge, embodied science, that is striven for as we strive for a personal ideal.

Yet, leaving out ancient times, this feeling was still present in a high degree even in the later Middle Ages. Those wonderful and inspiring feelings of reverence, permeating life with real recreative forces for the soul in the later Middle Ages, have to a great extent been lost. And because the urge that once existed was no longer there, the young could no longer get tired from what they were destined to experience. To give this concrete expression I should have to say: Science—I mean science as it was actually pursued, not what frequently goes by the name of science—could be stored up, something that is not in the heads of human beings but in the libraries. Science gradually was not really wanted any more. Hence it did not make people tired. There was no feeling of being overcome by an urge for it; it no longer made one tired. There was no longer any possibility of getting tired from a knowledge that was acquired with difficulty.

And from this, what permeated the young, at the turn of the nineteenth century, derived a quite special character—the character of the life-force in a human being who goes to bed at night before he is tired and keeps turning and twisting about without knowing why. I do not want to imply anything derogatory, for I am not of the opinion that these forces, which are there at night in the human being when he turns and twists about in bed because he is not tired, are unhealthy forces. I am not calling them unhealthy. They are quite healthy life-forces, but they are not in their proper place; and so it was, with those forces which worked in the young at the turn of the nineteenth century. They were thoroughly healthy forces, but there was nothing to give them direction. The young had no longer the urge to tire these forces by what was told them by their elders. But forces cannot be present in the world without being active, and so, at the time referred to, innumerable forces yearned for activity and had no guiding line.

And these forces appeared, for example, in the academic youth. And then one noticed things which I have indicated during these lectures, but which must receive more careful consideration if we want to understand ourselves.

Since the first third of the fifteenth century, all man's striving for knowledge has, out of intellectuality, taken on a character pre-eminently adapted to science, which hardly touches the human being at all. People no longer feel how the human element holds sway in writings of the twelfth or thirteenth century, for instance. This does not imply that we have to return to the twelfth or thirteenth century, to implicit belief in all we find there. We shall certainly not comply with the demands of certain churches in this direction.

But because of the indifference with which people study nowadays what is to be found in a chapter of modern biology—or of some other subject—it is impossible to understand what Albertus Magnus wrote. In that way we do not get to know what he wrote at all. We must take the book and sit down to it as if we were sitting down in front of another human being, because what he says cannot be taken with indifference, or objectively as one says; the inner being, the life of soul, is engaged, it rises and fails, and is quickened to movement. The life of soul is at work when we read even the driest chapter written at that time, by an Albertus Magnus, for instance. Quite apart from the fact that in these writings there is still the power of pictorial expression for what appear abstract things, there is always something in the general ideas which gives us a feeling of movement that we might be working with spade and shovel—from the point of view of our life of soul, that is—everything is brought into splendid human activity; through the pictures we are given we sense that the one who possesses this knowledge has full confidence in what he is imparting.

For such people it was not a matter of indifference if they discovered something of which they thought that in the eyes of God it could be either pleasing or displeasing. What a difference there is between the picture given, let us say, by Albertus Magnus, as the great scholar of the Middle Ages, and one of the eminent minds of the nineteenth century, as, for example, Herbart—one could name others but Herbart had a great influence on education up to the last third of the nineteenth century—whoever realizes what a difference there is must see it like this: Albertus Magnus seems to come before us as a kind of fiery luminous cloud. What he does when he devotes himself to knowledge is something that lights up in him or becomes dim. We feel him as it were in a fiery, luminous cloud, and gradually we enter this fire, because if one possesses the faculty of getting inside such a soul, even if for the modern soul it is antiquated, in steeping oneself in what is moral, writing about it, speaking about it, or only studying it, it is not a matter of indifference whether in the eyes of a divine-spiritual Being one is sympathetic or antipathetic. This feeling of sympathy or antipathy is always present.

On the other hand, if according to the objective scientific method, Herbart discusses the five moral ideas: good-will, perfection, equity, rights, retribution—well, here we have not a cloud which encircles us with warmth or cold but something that gradually freezes us to death, that is objective to the point of iciness. And that is the mood that has crept into the whole nature of knowledge and reached its climax at the end of the nineteenth century.

And so knowledge gradually became something to which people devoted themselves in a way that even outwardly was quite remarkable. It was only at the lecture-desk that one got to know those represented as men of knowledge. I do not know if others as old as myself have had similar experiences. But in the nineties of last century I was always having cause for annoyance. At that time I used to be mixing in all kinds of learned circles, and there I had much reason to rejoice, and was eager to discuss many questions. One could look forward to such conversations and say to oneself: Now we shall be able to discuss, let us say, “the difference between epigenesis and evolution”—and so on.

Yes, one might begin like that but very soon one heard: No, there is to be no “talking shop.” Anything that savored of talking shop was taboo. The man who knew his subject was only heard from the platform and when he left it he was no longer the same person. He took the line of speaking about everything under the sun except his own special subject. In short, life in science became so objective that those with a special subject treated this too very objectively, and wanted to be ordinary men when not obliged to deal with their subject.

Other experiences of a similar kind could be related. I have said this just for the sake of elucidation. But I will tell you the real point in another way. We may find that the teacher hands on to the young things he has only half learnt. We find here or there, for example, those who teach standing before their class with a note-book, or even a printed book by someone else—for all I know, the note-book too may contain things written by other people, but I will not assume that—and boldly setting to work to give his lesson out of this book. By such a procedure he is presupposing that there is no super-sensible world at all. How is it that people give their lessons from a note-book or some other book, thus presupposing that no super-sensible world exists?

Here too Nietzsche had one of his many interesting flashes of insight. He called attention to the fact that within every human being another is hidden. This is taken to be a poetic way of speaking, but it is no such thing. In every human being another is hidden! This hidden being is often much cleverer than the one to be seen. In the child, for example, this hidden being is infinitely wiser. He is a super-sensible reality. He is there within the human being, and if we sit in front of a class of say, thirty pupils, and teach with the help of a book or a notebook, we may perhaps be able to train these thirty pupils to regard this, in their visible selves, as something natural, but—of this we can be quite certain—all the thirty invisible human beings sitting there are judging differently. They say: “He is wanting to teach me something that he has first to read. I should like to know why I am expected to know what he is reading. There is no reason for me to know what he is only now reading for himself. He doesn't know it himself, otherwise he wouldn't be so uncertain. I am still very young and am expected to learn what he, who is so much older, doesn't know even yet and reads to me out of a book!”

These things must be taken concretely. To speak of a super-sensible world does not mean merely to lose oneself in phantastic mysticism and to talk of things which—I say this in inverted commas—are “hidden” from one; to speak of super-sensible worlds means in the face of life itself to speak about actual realities. We are speaking of actual realities when we speak as the thirty invisible children about the teacher of the thirty visible ones who perhaps on account of discipline were too timid to say this aloud. If we think it through, it does not seem so stupid; the statements of these thirty invisible, super-sensible beings are, in fact, quite reasonable.

Thus, we must realize that in the young individuality sitting at the feet of someone who is to teach or educate, much goes on that is entirely hidden from outer perception. And that was how there arose deep aversion to what came in this way. For naturally one could not have a great deal of confidence in a man who faced the hidden being in one in such a way that this job of his had become as objective as the approach to knowledge generally at the end of the nineteenth century. So a deep antipathy was felt; one simply did not try to take in hand what should have carried one through life, and consequently could not get tired from it. There was no desire to have what would have made one tired. And nobody knew what to do with the forces which could have led to the tiredness.

Now one could also meet on other ground those who were in the youth movement at the turn of the nineteenth century. Often they were not young physically—mostly very old. They were to be met in movements like the theosophical movement. Many were no longer young, yet had a feeling towards what contemporary knowledge gave them similar to the young. They did not want this knowledge, for it could no longer make them tired. Whereas the young, as the result of this incapacity to get tired, raged,—forgive the expression—many theosophists were looking in their theosophy for a kind of opiate. For what is contained in theosophical literature is to a great extent a sleeping draught for the soul. People were actually lulling themselves to sleep. They kept the spirit busy—but look at the way in which they did so. By inventing the maddest allegories! It was enough to drive a sensitive soul out of its body to listen to the explanations given to old myths and sagas. And oh! what allegories, what symbols! Looked at from the biology of the life of soul, it was sheer narcotics! It would really be quite good to draw a parallel between the turning and twisting in bed after spending a day that has not been tiring and the taking of a sleeping draught in order to cripple the real activity of the Spirit.

What I describe are not theories but moods of the age, and it is imperative to become familiar with these moods by looking from every angle at what was there. This incapacity to get tired at the turn of the nineteenth century is extraordinarily significant. Yes, but this led to the impossibility of finding anything right, for human evolution had arrived at a point where people said with great enthusiasm: “We shall allow nothing to come to us from outside; we want to develop everything from within our own being. We want to wander through the world and wait until there comes out of our own inner being what neither parents, nor teachers, nor even the old traditions can give us any longer. We want to wait for the New to approach us.”

My dear friends, ask those who have spoken in such a way whether this new thing has come to them, whether ready-prepared it has dropped into the laps of those who have had this great longing. Indeed the intoxication of those times is beginning in some degree to be followed by the “morning after” headache. My only aim is to characterize, not to criticize. The first thing that arose was a great rejection, a rejection of something which was there, which man could not use for his innermost being. And behind this great rejection there was hidden the positive—the genuine longing for something new.

But this genuine longing for what is new can be fulfilled in no other way than by man permeating himself with something not of this earth. Not of this earth in the sense that when man only lets soul and body function as they do, nothing can come with the power really to satisfy. The human being unwilling to take in anything is like a lung which finds no air to breathe. Certainly a lung which finds no air to breathe may first, before it dies, even if only for a moment, experience the greatest thirst for air. But the lung cannot out of itself quench this thirst for air; it has to allow for the air to come to it. In reality the young who honestly feel the thirst of which we have been speaking, cannot but long for something with which to be in harmony, that does not come only out of himself like the science that has grown old and is no longer wholesome for the soul to breathe in.

That was felt in the first place but far too little that a new young science must be there, a new spiritual life, able once again to unite with the soul.

Now what belongs to present and future ages must link itself with older phenomena of human evolution. The difference consists in these old phenomena of human evolution arising from a life of soul that was full of pictures and dream-like, whereas the life of soul we bear within us and towards which we are still striving, must become fully conscious. But we must in many respects go back to older contents of the soul.

Now I should like to turn your mind's eye to a constitution of the Spirit prevailing in old Brahmanism in the ancient East. The old Brahmin schools spoke of four means to knowledge on the path of life. And these four means for gaining knowledge are—well, it is difficult to give ancient thoughts in a suitable form considering we are living not only centuries but thousands of years later—but, in order to get somewhere near the mark, I will depict these four means to knowledge in the following way. First, there was that which hovered, as it were, midway between tradition and remembrance, something connected with the Sanscrit root smrti (s-mr-ti—Tradition, Remembrance.) which at present man only has as idea. But it can be described. Everyone knows what remembrance, personal remembrance is. These people did not connect certain concepts with personal remembrance in the rigid way we do, where the idea I have here in mind was concerned. What they remembered out of their own childhood became one with what their fathers and grandfathers had told them. They did not distinguish between what they themselves remembered and what they received through tradition. If you were to practise a more subtle psychology, you would notice that actually these things flow together in what lives in the soul of the child, because the child takes in a great deal that is based on tradition. The modern human being sees only that he acquired it as a child. The ancient Indian did not see this. He paid much more heed to its content, which did not lead him into his own childhood but to his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Thus tradition and personal remembrance flowed into each other indistinguishably. That was the first means of acquiring knowledge.

The second means for acquiring knowledge was what we might describe as “being represented”, (not a “representation” as the word is applied in ordinary intercourse today, but literally—an “appearing before the eyes”)—what we call “perception.”

The third means to knowledge was what we might call thinking that aims at synthesis.

Thus we could say: remembrance with tradition, observation, and the thinking that aims at synthesis.

But a fourth means for acquiring knowledge was also taught with all clarity in ancient Brahmanism. This can be described by saying: Having something communicated by other human beings.

So I ask you to notice that in ancient Brahmanism tradition was not identified with having something communicated by other human beings. This was a fourth means for the attainment of knowledge. Perhaps this will be clearer if we link it up with what is tradition and at the same time of the nature of remembrance. Where tradition is concerned, the human being did not become conscious of the way in which it came to him, he was conscious only of the content. But in man's remembrance he had in mind that it had been communicated to him by someone else. The fact of having received something from others was an awakening force in knowledge itself.

Today many of those who are true sons of the nineteenth century are shaking their heads, if we count this “what is told us by others” as one of the means of acquiring knowledge. A philosopher who dabbled in thinking that aimed at synthesis and regarded what he was told by others as a means to knowledge would never get through with his thesis nor be accepted as a university lecturer. At most he might become a theologian, for theology is judged in a different way. What is at the bottom of all this? In olden times men understood the experience of having something kindled within them in mutual intercourse with another human being. They counted somebody else telling them what they themselves did not know among the things needed for life. It was reckoned so emphatically as one of the factors necessary for life that it was considered equal to perception through eyes and ears.

Today people will naturally have a different feeling—that it is splendid for a human being to tell another what the other does not know, and the world calls for this. But it has nothing to do with the essence of things. What is essential is for observations and experiments to be made and for the results to be clearly expressed. The other has nothing to do with the essential nature of knowledge. Today it will be natural to feel this. But from the human standpoint it is not correct. It is part of life that man should be permeated in soul and spirit by what I described yesterday as a necessary factor of the social life, namely, by confidence. In this particular domain, confidence consists in what one human being tells another, thus becoming for the other a source of experience for soul and spirit.

Confidence must above all things be evoked in the young. Out of confidence there must be found that for which the young are thirsting. Our whole modern spiritual development has moved in the opposite direction. Even in theoretical pedagogics no value is attached any longer to the fact that a human being might have something he would like to tell another which the latter did not know. Theoretical pedagogics was thought out in such a way that as far as possible there was only presented to the young what could be proved in front of them. But that could not be a comprehensive proof. In this regard people have remained at a very infantile stage. Pedagogy envisaged: How can I give the children something under the assumption that they do not believe me? How can I introduce a method which perceptibly proves? No wonder that there came the corresponding echo and that it was henceforth demanded of teachers: Yes, now prove that for me! And now what I am going to say may sound antiquated, my dear friends. But I do not feel it at all antiquated; I feel it as something really young, even as part of the youth movement.

Today when someone stands there before a number of young people who are to be taught, it is as if there sounds towards him out of the young souls even before he is in their presence: “Prove that for me, prove that for me; you have no right to ask us to believe you!” I feel it as tragic—and this is no criticism—that the young should suffer from having been educated by the old so that they have no longer the ability to receive what is necessary for life. And so there arises a tremendous question, which we shall be considering in the next few days. I should like to give you a graphic description of it.

Let us imagine the youth movement progressing and taking hold of younger and younger human beings—finally mere infants. We should then get an infant youth movement, and just as the later youth movement rejects the knowledge that can be given to it, so will the infants who ought still to be at their mothers' breasts, say: “We refuse it, we refuse to receive anything from outside. We don't want our mothers' milk any longer; we want to get everything out of ourselves!”

What I have here presented as a picture is a burning question for the youth movement. For the young are really asking: “Where are we to obtain spiritual nourishment?” And the way in which they have asked hitherto has been very suggestive of this picture of the infants. And so in the coming days we shall consider the question of “the source of life”, after which Faust was striving. The question I have put before you as a picture is intended to stimulate us to contribute towards a Solution, but a solution which may mean something for your perception, for your feeling, even for your whole life.

Up to now we have given an outer description of what was experienced by those growing-up about the turn of the nineteenth century, by considering the trend of man's spiritual culture. Today, in order to find the bridge to a true self-knowledge, we will study the human being more from within. When we consider the externals of spiritual evolution, especially in the West, we are led back to the first third of the fifteenth century; in an inward study we find ourselves led back to the fourth post-Christian century. A date indicating some important moment would be the year 333 A.D., yet this date is of course only approximate. It is not a date from which to make calculations, but as pointing approximately to weighty matters affecting a large proportion of European humanity.

Let us look into the soul of a man who before this date lived into the culture of Southern Europe, or in certain districts of Northern Africa. These districts come into prominence when we try to gain an idea of what gave the tone to the cultural life of the time. The souls of these human beings were still so constituted that they were conscious that human thought was not simply a head process, but that it was revealed, either directly to the individual, or, where the human being was not able to receive such revelation directly, through the confidential communication of other human beings. The prevalent feeling among the educated today—and among the uneducated—is that their thoughts are worked out in their own heads—this feeling did not then exist. It was a period of actual transition. In the Middle East outstanding spiritual personalities were concerned with how thoughts came to humanity from spiritual realms. In Southern Europe and in Northern Africa doubts crept in as to whether the human being possessed the faculty of receiving thoughts by revelation. These doubts were only faint at first, there was still an overwhelming feeling: When I have a thought, this thought has been put into me by a God either indirectly or transmitted by way of human heredity, that is, through tradition, not natural heredity. Thought can enter earthly evolution only as revelation.

The first Westerners to feel strong doubts in this direction were those who had come from the Northern peoples and entered the civilization of the South. They were of Germanic and Celtic blood and had moved with the various migrations from the North to the South. These people, had they grown up only out of their own forces, might have reached the point of saying: Thoughts are something we work out for ourselves. This feeling, however, was dulled down by what they found as the Graeco-Latin culture, as the culture of the East. These cultures were extraordinarily intermixed up to the fourth century; every possible trend was working within them. Yet in the migrations southwards it was realized that thoughts can be grasped only by drawing them down into the world of the senses from a super-sensible world.

We have, my dear friends, only an external history, we have no history of feeling, no history of thought, no history of the soul. Hence such things do not come to our notice; we do not notice how the whole disposition of soul changes from one century to another. There was a tremendous swing round in man's inner perception in the fourth century. We find then something that for the very first time caused man to reflect upon the origin of thought; so that what previously had been accepted without question, namely, the fact that thoughts were revealed, gradually came to a point where a theory was needed to prove that they were the result of revelation. But these people were by no means convinced that the human being could create his thought-world out of himself.

Now consider the great difference here between the souls of the present day and the souls of that time. I am speaking of some souls only. What I am describing to you was naturally present in various shades. For one part of humanity matters were as I have described them; for another, there was still an invincibly strong, intense belief that soul-spiritual Beings descending into the human organism communicated thoughts to man. It was, if I may put it, only the “elite” among humanity who at that time grasped thought in such a way that they had to ask: Where do thoughts come from? The others knew very little about thoughts; for them it was quite evident that thoughts were given.

Now take the souls born approximately after the year 333. These souls were no longer able, out of a natural feeling, to give a matter-of-course explanation of the origin of thought. Thus a period followed in which theorists, philosophers and philosophical theologians argued as to the significance of thoughts in the world and there arose the struggle between Nominalism and Realism. The Nominalists were those in the Middle Ages who said: Thoughts live only in the human individuality; they are only a summing-up of what exists outside in the world and within the separate individuals. The Realists still had a vivid recollection of ancient times when men regarded thoughts as having substance, as something substantial that was revealed. They conceived thoughts so that they said: It is not I who think the thought; it is not I who, for instance, sum up all dogs into the general concept dog; but there exists one general thought “dog” and this is revealed out of the spiritual world, just as a color or tone is revealed to the senses. It was a struggle to understand rightly the nature of thought which had, as it were, alighted as an independent possession into the human soul. It is of extraordinary interest to steep oneself, from this point of view, in the spiritual history of the Middle Ages.

As we approach the fifteenth century, we discover with what intensity human beings strove to come to terms with what is revealed through thought in man. Whereas mankind before the year 333 really had the idea: There is a divine weaving streaming around the earth just as in the physical world the atmosphere streams round it; and in this streaming, Beings reveal themselves to man and leave behind in him thoughts. They are, so to speak, the footprints of the divine world surrounding the earth, which are graven into men as thoughts. Whereas those souls who before the year 333 considered that in the thought-world a feeling of their connection with the spiritual world existed, we find the Middle Ages permeated by the tragedy of still seeking to connect thought in some way with the divine-spiritual.

Now why did those souls who, up to the fifteenth century thought about thoughts, if I may put it so—why was it that they strove so vigorously to connect thoughts with what is divine-spiritual in the cosmos? It was because they felt an inner impulse which they were unable to express in clear concepts, but which was present in them as a definite experience of soul. This originated from all the souls who were born to play a leading part, from the fourth to the fourteenth century, being reincarnations from the time before the year 333 from the souls who had argued vehemently as to the real or merely nominal character of concepts, having lived previously at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Mystery of Golgotha took place in comparative isolation in Western Asia. But that was only the external manifestation of a spiritual event which took place in the physical world. Something happened in the souls who had reached a certain degree of maturity. When we consider those actually fighting over the reality or unreality of thoughts we find personalities in whom were reincarnated souls whose previous incarnation had taken place during the first three Christian centuries. Essentially, however, civilized mankind was made up of souls reincarnated from the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of the real connection between the human soul and the divine spiritual world which expressed itself in the acceptance of thought being received through revelation—out of this experience which souls living in the Middle Ages had in an earlier earth-life many centuries before, arose the impulse to dispute about the reality or unreality of the thought-world.

For what is it that is known as Scholasticism at the beginning of the new era in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth centuries? What actually filled the souls of the Scholastics? It is the following—the decisive moment had arrived in the evolution of man; it was not given utterance but was felt by outstanding souls of that time. The Gods had forsaken the sphere of human thought, as if man only had thoughts that were wrung dry.

When we observe the souls who lived from the fifteenth century on into later times, we find them to be those who in their previous incarnation had lived not long after the year 333. Up to the eighth, [or] ninth post-Christian centuries, at least those who were teachers still had the feeling that human thought was a gift of the Gods. And the men who in their previous earth-life had already felt the world of thought to be forsaken by the Gods were those—naturally I am speaking only of a part of humanity—destined to be born again about the turn of the nineteenth century.

When, therefore, we observe not only external destiny, but the inner destiny of the human soul, we must pay no heed to that which wells up out of our childhood from the depths of the soul. We must look to the time in which souls were incarnated who could no longer hear from their teachers that thoughts were Beings permeated, imbued by the divine. There-by the inner feeling arose to flee from thought, that something warmer, more saturated with substance should be found. This arose because already in a previous incarnation the divine character of thought had become subject to the gravest doubts, or had indeed been entirely lost. It was at the turn of the nineteenth century that what shines through with the greatest intensity out of the previous earth-life was experienced as tragedy.

Since the first third of the fifteenth century the receiving of thought from the divine-spiritual world was already lost to man. Because he could no longer receive thoughts out of the divine-spiritual world, they were grasped out of external observation. External observation and the art of making experiments reached such a height just because the taking in of things inwardly was replaced by gleaning them from the external sense world.

In the development of world-history, however, what is solely dependent on external conditions does not immediately become apparent. For even if since the fifteenth century man has lost the faculty of perceiving thought from within as a revelation from the divine-spiritual world, souls were not yet there able to feel the full tragedy of being forsaken by revealed thought. In those who had lived their former life on earth before the sixth or seventh century, particularly before the fourth post-Christian century, there lived the feeling: Yes, we must admit that we receive our thoughts from the external world, but in spite of this our soul tells us that even the thoughts received from the external world are given us by God. We no longer know how thoughts are God-given, but our inner being tells us that this is so.

A truly brilliant spirit who had such a mood of soul was Johannes Kepler. Johannes Kepler was as much a natural scientist of an earlier time as of a later one. He drew his thoughts from external observation, but in his inner experience he had an absolute feeling that spiritual Beings are there when man is receiving his thoughts from Nature. Kepler felt himself to be partly an Initiate, and for him it was a matter of course that he experienced his abstract building up of the universe artistically.

It is extraordinarily valuable, from a scientific point of view, to immerse oneself in the progress human thought has made through such a man as Kepler. But one is more deeply stirred when one steeps oneself in Kepler's life of soul, in that soul-life which in later times did not work with such intensity and inwardness in any other natural scientist, certainly not in any authoritative teacher of mankind at large. For between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries the feeling was entirely lost that through thought the human soul is brought into connection with the divine-spiritual.

Those who do not merely study the course of time in an unimaginative fashion just taking in the content, but are able to experience something in the course of events, have remarkable things revealed to them. I do not wish here to talk of how Goethe's special way of thinking about Nature has become an impossibility for later science. I mean for the external science of the times following his; for science did not realize where the difference lay between external science and that of Goethe. But I do not want to speak about this. You need only look at certain scientific books of the first third of the nineteenth century, those that gave the tone to the later mode of thought; you need only look, for instance, into the physiological works either of Henle or Burdach which absolutely belong to the first third of the nineteenth century, although they may have been written later, and you will note in them all a different style. There is still something of the spirit which wells up directly out of the soul when, let us say, they speak of the embryo or of the structure of the human brain; there is still something of what has since been entirely lost.

In this connection it is significant to bring to mind a personality still actively working during the last third of the nineteenth century. He was already subject to the forces driving out the spirit from science, nevertheless he still retained the spiritual life in his own soul. Just let the anatomy of Hyrtl work upon you; he hardly belonged to the last third, chiefly to the second third of the nineteenth century. These books are written in the style of later anatomists, but one can see that it was difficult for Hyrtl. He writes chapter after chapter, always restraining the impulse to allow his soul to flow into his sentences. Occasionally it peeps up through the style, occasionally even through the content. But there is, one might say, the iron necessity to stop the soul and spirit welling up from the man's inner being whenever natural processes are described. Today we can barely imagine what can be experienced when, let us say, we go back from a contemporary anatomical book to Hyrtl or Burdach. One feels as if charged with a certain amount of warmth in one's scientific feeling on going back to the second third, but particularly to the first third of the nineteenth century. Certainly at that time science was not at its zenith. But that is only of secondary importance and need not be considered further. I am speaking of what was experienced in science. And about that one can say: Through studying the path taken by the scientific soul, we can verify what Spiritual Science reveals to us, namely, that at the end of the nineteenth century more and more souls arose in whom there no longer lived from their previous earth-life the impulse that thought is God-given—I mean that there was no longer even an echo of this. For although the sense for the individual past earth-life had been lost, its echo still lived on long afterwards.

Thus felt those who still had a living warmth within them, who had not become dried up by the prejudice that in science one must be objective—in its usual sense; actually what is striven for by Spiritual Science is the truly objective science, but not in the scientists' meaning of the word. These souls not dried up through striving after objectivity asked: What is there in us still bound up with the divine-spiritual (they did not ask this consciously but subconsciously) from which we were torn in our previous earthly incarnation? Rising to the surface of consciousness was the feeling that man had lost his connection with the divine-spiritual world. On the other hand, it is a feeling that man dare not lose this connection, for without even this faint consciousness there is no life for his soul. Hence an intense yearning aroused, the strong inclination to that undefined longing for the Spirit, and yet the incapacity to reach it.

It is characteristic of the generation growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth that it should ask the older generations: Can we discover the Spiritual in our earthly environment? And the leaders who were asked unconsciously by youth: How can we find the Spiritual in Nature, how can we find it within human life itself?—these leaders condemned as unscientific this bringing the Spirit into the study of Nature and of human life.

Thus in the second half of the nineteenth century a dreadful thing happened—the slogan “Psychology, science of the soul without a soul” arose. I lay no special stress on how certain philosophers said that we need a soul-science without soul. What the philosophers say has no great influence, but it is symptomatic of what figures very widely as feeling and of how one deals with the younger generation. True, only a few philosophers actually said: We need a psychology without soul. But the whole age said: We older people wish to teach you mineralogy, zoology, botany, biology, anthropology, even history, in a way to make it appear to you as if at the most there are experiences of the soul, but not a soul as such. And the whole world, in so far as it is observed scientifically, must be experienced as having no soul. Those who were first to bring with them out of their previous earth-life the tragedy of experiencing soullessness were compelled to ask with the utmost insistence: Where can we look to fill the soul with Spirit? And from what their age considered of greatest value—in other respects rightly so—they gleaned the least information.

Those who in the last third of the nineteenth century wrote that one can gather the nature of their soul-life from their books were, even in the nineteenth century, a vanishing minority. In general the people who wrote these books were not the most brilliant. Among those who do not write books there are distinctly cleverer people than among those who do write them. In the last third of the nineteenth century profounder natures were living in the midst of the superficial ones content with a science bereft of Spirit. And when one looks into these profounder natures, which is possible through Spiritual Science, one finds in the last third of the nineteenth century a wrestling with deep problems. Those who had this inner life were no longer listened to; they no longer found the opportunity to become leaders.

Many people foresaw clearly what the microscope was bringing in its wake in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were to be found among those who, participating in the cultural life, did not really penetrate into it because they felt dissatisfied with a culture devoid of Spirit, and therefore had their thoughts inwardly silenced in face of the growing scientific conceptions, yet asking with deep feeling: How can microcosmic evolution be brought into relation with macrocosmic evolution? This problem became increasingly pressing in their feeling life.

There were also men who, as a result of their education, followed the scientific tradition that continued to become ever emptier and emptier of spirit. They hoped, for instance, for always greater scientific results from the further development of the microscope; they hoped with its help to see smaller and smaller objects. But others of a deeper nature looked with disturbed feelings upon the further development of the microscope, particularly upon the views which followed in its train. The highest hope of one group was, by examining ever smaller and smaller objects, to penetrate into the nature of what is living. But others felt that this whole business would bring the world to naught, that the use of the microscope sucked the soul dry.

I trust you will not think that I am indulging in satire in a mystic, fantastical fashion on the use of the microscope. That would never occur to me. I am naturally fully aware of the services rendered by the microscope, and I would never wish to put a spoke in any scientific wheel. I am simply recounting facts relating to the life of soul.

The number of these solitary spirits steadily decreased. Fortlage, who lived as Professor in Jena at the end of the nineteenth century, was one of them. He spoke somewhat as follows: One can look more and more thoroughly into the microscope and go on discovering ever smaller things, but in this minuteness one loses what is substantially true. If you want to see what is being sought with the aid of the microscope—which, with ever greater perfection, allows one to penetrate further and further into the minute—then turn your gaze out into the infinite space of the universe. From the stars there speaks what you are seeking within the minute. You talk of the secrets of life, and seek for them from what is minute, and ever more minute. But there one loses life, not for reality, but for knowledge. Life is lost in this way. You can find it again when you understand how to read the stars.

Some have said: Life is brought down from the cosmos. But they sought for a material means, possibly in the meteor-showers flying through cosmic space and bringing germs out of other worlds down to the earth. But when one gazes from the earth out into limitless space, it is not limitless at all. For the mechanistic-mathematical way of perception, the firmament was done away with by Giordano Bruno: but for more intimate perception it is again there in the sense that one cannot simply draw a radius from the earth and prolong it into infinity. This radius has in fact an end, and at this end there is everywhere, at the inner periphery, life to be found and not death. From this world-periphery life radiates in from all directions.

I only wish to indicate to you by these examples the nature of those inner problems of experience which confronted the soul at the turn of the nineteenth century. Out of the dullest experience of soul the question really was put: Where can we rediscover the Spiritual?

You see, this question must set the mood if any phase of the youth movement is to find a right content—Where can I find the Spiritual? How does one experience the Spiritual? The really important thing is that side by side with all yearning expectation there shall also be found among the young, single ideals striving towards an inner activity of the soul. I should like to preface what I have to say tomorrow by the following.

In what I have named Anthroposophy, in fact in the foreword to my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, you will meet with something which you will not be able to comprehend if you only give yourself up to that passive thinking so specially loved today, to that popular god-forsaken thinking of even a previous incarnation. You will only understand if you develop in Freedom the inner impulse to bring activity into your thinking. You will never get on with Spiritual Science if that spark, that lightning, through which activity in thinking is awakened does not flash up. Through this activity we must reconquer the divine nature of thinking.

Anthroposophical literature demands that one shall think actively. Most people are only able to think passively, finding active thinking impossible. But active thinking has no room for sleepy nor for intellectual dreaming. One must keep in step with it and get one's thinking on the move. The moment thinking is set in motion one goes with it. Then what I should like to call modern clairvoyance ceases to be anything miraculous. That this clairvoyance should still appear as something particularly miraculous comes from people not wishing to develop the energy to bring activity into their thinking. It often drives one to despair. One often feels when demanding active thinking of anyone that his mood is illustrated by the following anecdote: Somebody was lying in a ditch without moving hand or foot, not even opening his eyes; he was asked by a passer-by: “Why are you so sad?” The man answered: “Because I don't want to do anything.” The questioner was astonished at this, for the man lying there was doing nothing and had apparently done nothing for a long time. But he wanted to do even more “doing nothings” Then the questioner said: “Well, you certainly are doing nothing,” and got the answer: “I have to revolve with the earth and even that I don't want to do “

This is how people appear who do not wish to bring activity into thinking, into what alone out of man's being can bring the soul back into connection with the divine-spiritual content of the world. Many of you have learnt to despise thinking, because it has met you only in its passive form. This, however, is only head-thinking in which the heart plays no part. But try for once really to think actively and you will see how the heart is then engaged; if one succeeds in developing active thinking the whole human being in a way suited to our present age enters with the greatest intensity into the spiritual world. For through active thinking we are able to bring force into our thinking—the force of a stout heart. If you do not seek the Spirit on the path of thought, which although difficult to tread must be trodden with courage, with the very blood of one's heart, if you do not try on this path to suck in that spiritual life which has flowed through humanity from the very beginning, you will create a movement where the infant would believe himself able to draw nourishment out of himself and not from his mother's breast. You only come to a movement with real content when you find the secret of developing within an activity which enables you to draw again out of cosmic life true spiritual nourishment, true spiritual drink.

But that is pre-eminently a problem of the will, a problem of the will experienced through feeling. Infinitely much depends today upon good-will, upon an energetic willing, and no theories can solve what we are seeking today. Courageous, strong will alone can bring the solution.

Let us devote the next few days to the question of how to find this good-will, this strong will.

From what I said yesterday about the course of historical evolution, you will have gathered that the way in which a human being confronts his fellow men at present was different before the year 333 A.D.

I assume that you are familiar with the soul principles of man according to anthroposophical knowledge. You know that we must differentiate in the soul between what was active in human nature up to the fifteenth century—the so-called intellectual or mind soul—and the consciousness soul which since that time has been principally active in those who have developed to the level of culture to which man has so far advanced.

In describing a particular activity of the soul as that of the intellectual or mind soul, it does not indicate that intellect, in itself, as we understand it today, is a special characteristic of the intellectual or mind soul. The intellectual or mind soul was developed particularly by the Greeks and among them intellect was certainly not what it is today. But you will have been able to gather that from yesterday's lecture.

Among the Greeks, concepts, ideas, were bestowed by the Spirit. But because of this, their intellect was not so cold, so lifeless and dry as ours is today when it is the result of effort. Intellectualism has first arisen through the special development in the consciousness soul. You can only get the right conception of the intellectual or mind soul by transporting yourselves into the mind of a Greek. Then you will certainly discover the difference between the relation of the Greek towards the world and our own. This will be made clearer by our lecture today.

These introductory words serve as a basis to understand that in the centuries preceding the modern age, that is, up to the fifteenth century, human beings met and spoke to one another out of the intellectual or mind soul. Today we face the consciousness soul. But to feel it the developing human being had to reach the turn of the nineteenth century. It has been brought about by circumstances already described. But because of this the problems of life have appeared in an entirely new way. Problems must be regarded in a new way nowadays, otherwise the connecting bridge between consciousness soul and consciousness soul, which means for modern humanity the bridge between one man and another, cannot be found. We are suffering from this at the present time—we cannot find the bridge between human being and human being.

Above all we must ask many of our questions in a new way, in a form that may at first seem grotesque. But it is not meant to be so. Now let us suppose that a three-year-old child were to resolve not to pass through the tedious process of waiting for its second teeth until the seventh year, but this child were to say: It is weary work to go through four more years until I get my second teeth; I will get them at once. (I could use other comparisons which would appear still more grotesque, but this one will suffice,) Such a thing is impossible, isn't it? For there are certain conditions of natural development.

And so, too, it is a condition of natural development, for which today only few people have any feeling, that only from a certain age onwards the human being can know something about the connections in life of which he must know, but which cannot be exhausted by information about external things. Naturally even at the age of nine we may know, for example, that the human being has ten fingers. But matters where a judgment formed by active thinking is necessary, cannot be known before we reach a certain time in life, that is, between about the eighteenth and nineteenth years. Just as it is impossible to get the second teeth before the seventh year so it is impossible to know something in its essential reality before the eighteenth year. It is simply impossible before the eighteenth year really to know about those things that are not just under our nose, things for which active judgment is necessary. Before this one may have heard something, may believe something on authority. But one cannot know anything about it. Before this we cannot unfold that inner activity of soul necessary for us to say: I know something about this or that which does not lie in a region accessible to mere eyes or ears. Such things are hardly mentioned today. They are, however, exceedingly important for life. If culture is to find roots again, one must speak about such things, and treat them in a knowledgeable way.

What, then, follows from the fact that before his eighteenth year the human being cannot, properly speaking, know anything? It follows that the human being before he is eighteen must depend upon those who are older, just as the infant is dependent on its mother's breast—it is in no way different. From this, however, there follows something of the greatest significance for the intercourse between teachers, educators, and the younger generation. If this is not heeded the connection is simply false.

Now, people are not conscious today that this is so; generally in the sphere of education, an opposite direction is taken. But it was not always so. If we look back before the first third of the fifteenth century, a real modern youth movement would not have been possible. At that time there could never have been a youth movement in the present form with a justified right of existence. Why could there have been no such thing? To answer this question we must turn to the conditions which obtained among those preparing for life in the monastic schools. We could also take the conditions for the young who were being prepared for trades. We should not find much difference. In the earliest of those times it was definitely realized that no one could be brought before his eighteenth year to the point of real knowledge. It would have seemed absurd had one maintained that it was possible to give anyone real knowledge before his eighteenth year. At that time it was known among older people, especially if they wanted to teach or educate: “The young cannot be brought to the point of actual knowledge. We must be capable of inducing the young to believe in what we, according to our knowledge, hold to be true.” And to lead the young to believe was a sacred task.

Today this is all upside-down, because what in earlier times was demanded only of the young, namely, belief, is now demanded in connection with the super-sensible of those who are grown-up. At that time the concept of belief was only there for those who were young. But it was regarded as something sacred. A man would have reproached himself with violating his most sacred duty if, as teacher or educator, he had failed to make the young believe in him out of the freshness and lively conviction of individual human nature, so that they thus received the truth. This shade of feeling lay in all education, in all instruction. In other respects the education and teaching of that time may today arouse a sense of antipathy because of its division into all kinds of classes and distinctions. But putting that aside, the desire was there to maintain the faith of the young.

Something else was connected with this: that teachers felt that it was first of all necessary to justify the claim that the young should believe in one. I shall explain this by means of an example in the monastery schools which were the only educational institutions in the time preceding the fifteenth century. One had first to justify the claim that one should be taken seriously; for this was the basis upon which the belief of the young was to be founded. A man did not think, just because he was a grown-up or because some authority had granted him a diploma or given him a post, that the young had to believe in him. It is true that diplomas and the like played a certain external role even in those days. But to justify the right to be taken seriously meant that to begin with one avoided giving them definite knowledge. It was not customary in those days to impart knowledge. It is so foreign to us today to connect any definite concept with the remark: We do not wish to impart knowledge to the young—that this saying is quite unintelligible. But at that time it was self-understood that before there was any wish to impart knowledge the young should be made to see and to feel that one was capable of something. It was only when the young people had reached a certain age that the teacher told them what he knew. The first step was to show what one could do, and for this reason the substance of the teaching was the trinity of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. These were not sciences. For it is only in the course of time that grammar has become the present pseudo-scientific monstrosity. In those times grammar was not at all what it is today; it was the art of combining and separating thoughts and words. Instruction in grammar was the teaching of an art, and all the more so in the case of dialectic and rhetoric. Everything given was so arranged that the pupils should feel the ability of their teachers, that they should feel their teachers capable of speaking and thinking and of letting beauty hold sway in their speaking. Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric—this was instruction in ability, in an ability closely connected with the human activity of the teacher and educator.

Today when we speak of the objective method of teaching, we keep the teaching quite apart from the personality of the teacher. We drag in every possible kind of gadget, even those dreadful calculating machines, in order that the teaching may be as impersonal as possible. We try to separate it entirely from the personal. Such a separation is not really possible. The endeavour to keep the teaching entirely apart from the personal only leads to the worst sides of the teacher coming into play, and his good side is quite unable to unfold when so much objectivity is dragged in.

Thus it was a natural demand on the teacher that he should first let the young feel what he was capable of in the very highest sense, as a human being. He had to show his mastery of speech, his mastery of thought, and how beauty was part of his speech. Only by letting the young for a time witness what one could do, was the right acquired to lead them gradually to what can be known, to arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, to music as it was conceived of at that time, that is, as a permeation of the whole world-order by harmony and melody. Because a start was made from grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, one was able later to pour into arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music as much of the artistic as was possible, having had an artistic point of departure.

Now all this has evaporated, has vanished into thin air, with the first dawn of intellectualism. Of everything artistic that appeared then we have but the scantiest remains. Here and there, in certain universities, the doctor's degree still bears with it the title: “Doctor of Philosophy and of the Seven Liberal Arts.” But you know the real state of affairs where the Seven Liberal Arts are concerned! That can be established historically; for instance, the famous Curtius who taught in Berlin was an extraordinary personality who held a quite irregular diploma. If you ask for what subject he actually received the venia legendi, you would expect it to have been for history of art. But that is not correct. His teaching certificate was for Eloquentia—fluency of speech. But the times were such that this branch of knowledge was out of date. He was professor of eloquence, but in order to teach he took up history of art—and dealt with it most excellently. Even at the time when Curtius was teaching it would have been strange had eloquence been a branch of instruction. Eloquence or rhetoric, however, was one of the fundamental branches of instruction given to the young of earlier times, with the result that something thoroughly artistic came into education. But the introduction of the artistic into education was still in keeping with the old order in which intellectual or mind soul encountered intellectual or mind soul. And today people are still not able to put the question from the new point of view: How must things be in human affairs if consciousness soul is to meet consciousness soul? As soon as education is considered in the wider sense this question arises of itself. It has been put for a long time, for decades, but human beings have not yet developed an active enough thinking to formulate and feel it clearly. And where do we find an answer?

One answer to this question is found by learning to perceive—for it is a matter of the unfolding of will and not of a theoretical solution—that when the child enters earthly existence he brings with him the power of imitation; up to the time of the change of teeth, the child just imitates. Out of this power of imitation speech is learnt. Speech is, so to speak, poured into the child just as his blood circulation is poured into him when he comes into earthly existence. But the child should not come to a more and more conscious education by giving him out of the consciousness soul knowledge in the form of truth. In earlier times it was said: Before the eighteenth year the child cannot know anything, so he must be led through ability to knowledge which he accepts first as belief; thereby the forces of knowledge will be awakened in him between the eighteenth and nineteenth years. For it is out of the inner being that the forces of knowledge must be awakened. To keep the young waiting until their eighteenth year, adults behaved in relation to youth so as to show what they were capable of, afterwards educating them to experience together with the teacher in a provisional way, up to the eighteenth year, what later they would be expected to know. Up to the eighteenth or nineteenth year the “acquisition of knowledge” was provisional, because before the eighteenth or nineteenth year it is not possible really to know anything. But in fact no teacher can convey knowledge to any boy or girl if in their feeling there has not ripened the conviction: He is capable! A teacher has not the right sense of responsibility towards the human being if he wants to set to work before the young take it as a matter of course that be knows his job.

Before the students were given arithmetic—as arithmetic was understood in those days, and it was not the dry, abstract stuff of today—those who guided them into arithmetic, knowing too how to speak and think, had also the gift of eloquence. When the young know this out of their own feeling, it is a good reason for looking up to those who are older. When they only know that the teacher has a diploma, it sometimes happens that when the child is not more than ten everything goes to pieces. The question which was a living one in those days must again be given life. But because today consciousness soul encounters consciousness soul in human affairs, this question cannot be solved as formerly when human beings confronted each other with their mind souls. Today a different solution must be found.

Naturally, we cannot return to the liberal arts, although it would be preferable than what is being done today. We must reckon with modern conditions—not the external conditions but those dealing with the evolution of the human race. Here we must find the transition from imitation, which up to the change of teeth is natural in the child, to the stage when we can bring knowledge to the human being, reckoning first upon trust and belief and later upon his own judgment.

But there is an intermediate period, today a very critical one for the young. For this period we must find the solution of the most significant world-problem; upon these problems depends the future progress or otherwise of human evolution—even its total submergence. The question is: How must adults handle children between the years of imitation and the years when knowledge can be given? Today this is one of the weightiest of all cultural questions.

And what was the youth movement in so far as it is to be taken seriously? It can be summed up in the burning question: Have the older people an answer for this? And it became clear to the young that no such answer was to be found in the schools, so they drifted out—out into grove and meadow and into the fields. They preferred, instead of being school boys and girls, to become birds—birds of passage (Wandervögel).

We must look at life, not at theories, when one seeks to encompass the great problems of world-culture. If one really looks into life today one will find that the period between the age of imitation and the age at which the human being can receive knowledge in the form of truth must be filled if humanity is not to pine away. This must be done by giving the human being with artistic beauty what he needs for head, heart and will. The seven-foldness of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, grew out of an older cultural order; it was of the nature of art. Today too we need art but, according to the demands of the consciousness soul, it must not be specialized in the way of the Seven Liberal Arts. During the primary school age and far beyond it, for as long as education holds good, the whole teaching must be warmed through and fired by the artistic element. During the primary school years everything must be steeped in beauty, and in later years beauty must rule as the interpreter of truth.

Those human beings who have not learnt to walk in the ways of beauty, and through beauty to capture truth, will never come to the full manhood needed to meet the challenges of life. The great German writers divined this even if its full importance was not emphasized. They were not met with understanding. How clearly we see this search for truth through beauty in Goethe. Listen how he says: “Art is a manifestation of secret forces of Nature,” which simply means that only through an artistic grasp of the world does man reach the living truth—otherwise it is dead. And Schiller's words, the beautiful words: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you penetrate to the land of knowledge.” Unless we first permeate ourselves with the meaning of the path, [that] only through the artistic can we penetrate into the realm of truth, there can be no question of acquiring a real understanding of the super-sensible world in accordance with the age of the consciousness soul.

For you see, with the help of the recognized sciences, today knowledge of man is limited to the physical body alone. With modern science there is no possibility of knowing anything about the human being beyond his physical body. That is why science can only speak conclusively—yet grandly—about physiology or biology so long as it is a question of the physical body. True, people talk about psychology. It is only known as experimental psychology; phenomena of the life of soul are observed, but what figures as phenomena of the soul is connected with the physical body. They cannot form the slightest conception of any real phenomena of the life of soul. Hence they have hit upon the idea psycho-physical parallelism. Parallel lines, however, can meet only at infinity. So, too, the connection between the physical body and the soul can be understood only at infinity. Thus psycho-physical parallelism was setup.

All this is symptomatic of the incapacity of the age to understand the human being. For, firstly, if one seeks to understand the human being, the power of intellectualism ceases. Man cannot be understood out of the intellect. One may choose to adhere firmly and rigidly to intellectualism; but then, knowledge of the human being must be renounced. But for that one would be obliged to tear out the mind and heart and that is impossible. If it is torn out it withers way. For the head can renounce knowledge of man, but this entails the stunting of mind and heart. All our present culture is expressed in a withered life of mind and heart. And, secondly, understanding of man is not to be achieved with concepts that lead us in the domain of outer Nature. However much we can achieve outwardly with these concepts they cannot lead us to the second member of the human body, to the human etheric body, the body of formative forces.

Just imagine that with the methods of modern science man could know as much, let us say, as he will know at the end of earth evolution—quite an appalling amount! I will assume the existence of a very finished and very clever scientist. I am not saying that there are not among us scientists already near this stage. For it is not my belief that in the future there will be more progress in intellectualism. A different path will be taken. I have the very highest respect for the intellectualism of our learned men. Do not for a moment think that I am saying this out of a lack of respect. I mean this in all seriousness. There are vast numbers of very clever scientists, of this there is no doubt at all! But even were I to assume that science had reached its highest peak, it would still only be able to understand the physical body of man, nothing at all of the etheric body. Knowledge of the etheric body is not based upon phantasy. But the stimulus to acquire the faculty for perceiving this subordinate super-sensible member of man's nature can arise only out of artistic experience of the soul. Art must become the life blood of the soul.

The more people wish in our objective science to avoid carefully everything of the nature of art, the more are they led away from knowledge of man. Through the microscope and other instruments we have come to know a great deal. But it never leads us nearer to the etheric body, only farther from it. Finally we entirely lose the path to what is a prime necessity for understanding man. In the case of plants we may get the better of this, for they do not concern us so intimately. It does not worry the plant that it is not the product of the laboratory which modern science makes it out to be. It still goes on growing under the influence of the etheric force of the cosmos and does not limit itself to the forces presumed to exist by physics and chemistry. But when we confront men things are different. Then our feeling, our confidence, our reverence, in short all that is in our mind which in the age of the consciousness soul naturally rises above instinct—for with the consciousness soul everything rises above instinct—depends upon our having an education which allows us to perceive something more than merely the human physical body.

When teachers deprive us of insight into what man really is, we cannot expect those forces to flourish which in the right way place man over against man. Everything depends upon the human being to free himself from the shackles of mere observation and experiment. Indeed we can estimate observation and experiment at their right value only when we have become free of them, and the simplest way of breaking free is the artistic way.

Yes, when the teacher stands in front of the child again as—in an earlier epoch—grammar dialectic, rhetoric stood, that is to say, when the teacher stands before the young so that his way of teaching is again that of the artist, and is permeated by art, there will arise a different youth movement—it may appear unattractive to you, but nevertheless it will arise—which will crowd around the teachers who are artists, because there they will draw nourishment and receive what the young must expect from those who are older. The youth movement cannot be a mere opposition, a mere revolt against the older generation, for then it becomes like the infant who can do nothing because it cannot receive milk from its mother. What is to be learnt must be learnt. But it will be learnt when there is as natural an urge towards those who are older as the infant has towards its mother's breast, or as the small child feels when, by imitating, he learns to speak. This urge will be stimulated when the young find the artistic coming from the older generation, when truth first appears in the garb of beauty. In this way all that is best will be kindled in the young, not the intellect which always remains passive, but the will which stirs thinking into activity. Artistic education will be an education of the will, and it is upon the education of the will that everything else depends.

Tomorrow, then, we shall continue.

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

During the epoch of the consciousness soul the most abstract elements come consciously to life in the inner being of man, yet also in the subconscious, in what man desires of life, most concrete things are seeking to find their way into existence.

The human being who is growing into the epoch of the consciousness soul is held fast today in the abstract ideas of the head. But there lives outside man's head, if I may so express myself, the desire to experience more than the head is able to. To begin with man has only a connection with Nature formed between her and his head. Everything he absorbs in science, so far as he regards it as valid, is acquired from Nature through the head. Between man and Nature today there always stands man's head. It is as though everything that comes to the human being from the world were to pour itself into the head, as though the head were entirely choked up so that it lets nothing through its dense layers that could bring about a relation with the world. Everything remains stuck fast in the head. Man thinks everything through only with his head. But he cannot, after all, live merely as a head. For joined to the head there is always the rest of the organism. The life of the rest of the organism remains dull, unconscious, because everything is directed towards the head. Everything stops short there. The rest of man receives nothing from the world because the head allows nothing to reach it. The head has gradually become an insatiable glutton. It wants everything that comes from the world outside, and man is obliged to live, where his heart and the rest of his organism is concerned, as if he had nothing whatever to do with the surrounding world.

But these other parts of the organism develop wish, will, capacity for desire; they feel themselves isolated. For instance, the eyes catch colors and allow only scanty remains to be experienced in the head, so that the colors cannot work down, they cannot reach the blood nor the nervous system in the rest of the body. It is only in his head that man still knows something about the world. But he has all the more capacity for intensely desiring with the rest of his organism to meet the outside world. This again is something living in the maturing human being—this desire to find some kind of connection with the world not only with the head but with the rest of the organism; to learn to think not only with the head but with the whole man; to learn to experience the world with the whole man and not only with the head.

Now human beings today still have the capacity of learning to experience the world with the whole man at an early age. For what I have just been saying refers to the grown man. Before the change of teeth a child still has the faculty of grasping the world with his whole being. This is shown, for example, in the fact that it would be a mistake to suppose that the baby's experience when sucking milk is as abstract as an adult's. When we drink milk we taste it on our tongue, and perhaps round our tongue. But we lose the experience of taste when the milk has passed our throat. People ought to ask why their stomach should be less capable of tasting than the palate—it is not less but equally capable of tasting; only the head is a glutton. In the grown man the head claims all taste for itself. The child, however, tastes with its entire organism and therefore with its stomach. The infant is all sense-organ. There is nothing in him that is not sense-organ. The infant tastes with his whole being. Later this is forgotten by man; and this tasting is impaired by the child learning to speak. For then the head which has to take part in learning to speak begins to stir and develops the first stage of insatiability. The head in return for giving itself up to learning to speak reserves for itself the pleasures of tasting. Even as regards “tasting the world,” connection with the world is very soon lost. Now this “tasting the world” is of no particular importance, but the relation of the whole human being with the world is.

You see, we can get to know an important philosopher such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, in various ways. Every way is right. I do not wish to stress any one of the following in particular. It is wonderful to go deeply into the philosophy of Fichte—which not many people do nowadays because they find it too difficult—and much is gained from it, yet they would have gained far more if with strong feeling they had walked behind Fichte and had seen him appear, planting the whole sole of his foot and especially his heels firmly on the ground. The experience of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's walk, the curious way he stumped his heel on the ground, is something of tremendous power. For those able to experience each step with the whole being, this would have been a more intensive philosophy than all Fichte was able to say from the platform. It may seem grotesque, but perhaps you will feel what I am trying to say.

Today such things have been entirely lost. At most a man, who not twenty but fifty years ago was a boy, can remember how some philosophy of this kind still existed among the country folk. In the country people still got to know each other in this way and many expressions with the wonderful plasticity of dialect reveal that what today is seen only with the head was then seen with the whole man.* (An incident is quoted here which is untranslatable because of the Austrian idiom.)

As I have said, these things have been lost. Human beings have reduced themselves to their head and have forced themselves to believe that the head is their most valuable part. But this has not brought them to an ideal condition, because the rest of human nature asserts its claims in the subconscious. Experiencing through something other than the head is lost today with the change of teeth in early childhood. If you have an eye for these things you can see the walk of the father or the mother in the son or daughter decades later. So exactly has the child lived itself into the adults around him that what he has felt becomes part of his own nature. But this living ourselves into something no longer spells culture with us. Culture is what the head observes and what can be worked out by means of the head. Sometimes people dispense with the head, and then they write down everything and put it in the archives! Then it goes out of the head into the hair where it cannot be retained because at thirty they no longer have any hair!

But really I am not saying this as a joke, nor for the sake of being critical, for this is all part of the necessary development of humanity. Men had to become like this to find through inner effort, inner activity, what they can no longer find in a natural way; in other words, to experience freedom.

And so today, after the change of teeth, we must simply pass over to a different way of experiencing the surrounding world from the way of the child who experiences it with his whole being. Therefore primary school education in future must proceed by way of the artistic I described yesterday, so that through the outer man the soul-nature of another human being is experienced. If you educate the human being by what is abstract and scientific, he experiences nothing of your soul. He only experiences your soul if you approach him through art. For in the realm of the artistic everyone is individual, each one is a different person. It is the ideal of science that everyone should be alike. It would be quite a thing—so say people today—were everyone to teach a different science. But that could not be, for science confines itself to what is the same for all human beings. In the realm of the artistic each human being is an individuality in himself. But because of this there can come about an individual, personal relation of the child to the man who is alive and active artistically, and this should be so. True, one does not come to the feeling for the whole man as outer physical being as in the first years of childhood, but to a feeling for the whole man in the soul of the one who is to lead.

Education must have soul, and as scientist one cannot have soul. We can have soul only through what we are artistically. We can have soul if we give science an artistic form through the way it is presented, but not through the content of science as science is understood today. Science is not an individual affair. Hence during the primary school age it establishes no relation between teacher and pupil. All instruction must therefore be permeated by art, by human individuality, for of more value than any thought-out curriculum is the individuality of the teacher and educator. It is individuality that must work in the school. What grows between teacher and pupil from the change of teeth to puberty—what is the link between them?

What binds them together is solely what man brings with him into his earthly existence from super-sensible, spiritual worlds, from his pre-earthly existence. My dear friends, it is never the head that recognizes what man brings with him out of his pre-earthly life. The head is made for the purpose of grasping what is on the earth. And on the earth there is only the physical part of man. The head understands nothing of what confronts one as the other human being and comes from pre-earthly existence. In the particular coloring the artistic impulse gives to the human soul there lives and weaves what the human being has brought down from pre-earthly existence; and between the period of the change of teeth and puberty the child is particularly disposed to feel in his heart what meets him in the teacher as coming out of pre-earthly existence. A young child has the tendency to feel the outer human form in its earthly shape; from his seventh to his fourteenth or fifteenth year he seeks—not through theoretical concepts but through the living-together with human beings—what does not lend it self to be grasped in concepts but is manifested in the teacher; and it resists conceptual form. Concepts have form, that is to say, external limits. But human individuality in the sense described has no external limits, only intensity, quality; it is experienced as quality, as intensity, very particularly in the period of life referred to. It is experienced, however, through no other atmosphere than that of art.

But we are now living in the epoch of the consciousness soul. The first treasures we acquire for the soul in this epoch consist in intellectual concepts, in abstractions. Today even the farmer loves abstractions. How could it be otherwise, for he indulges in the most abstract reading—the village newspaper and much else besides! Our riches consist really in abstractions. And therefore we must free ourselves from this kind of thinking, through developing what I spoke of yesterday. We must purify our thinking and mould it, into will. To this end we must make our individuality stronger and stronger, and this happens when we work our way through to pure thinking. I do not say this out of idle vanity, but because that is how I see it. Whoever works his way through to pure thinking as I have described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will find that this does not bring him simply to the possession of a few concepts which make up a philosophic system, but that it lays hold of his own individuality, of his pre-earthly existence.

He need not suddenly become clairvoyant; that will only happen when he is able to behold the pre-earthly. But he can confirm it by gaining the strength of will that is acquired in the flow of pure thoughts. Then the individuality comes forth. Then one does not feel happy with a philosophic system in which one concept proceeds from another and everything has rigid outlines. But one feels compelled to have one's being in a living and weaving world. We acquire a special kind of life of soul when we experience in the right way what is meant by the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Thus it is a bringing down of pre-earthly existence into the life of the human being. But it is also the preparation for the vocation of teacher, of educator. Through study we cannot become teachers. We cannot drill others into being teachers, because each one of us is already a teacher. Every human being is a teacher, but he is sleeping and must be awakened, and Art is the awakener. When this is developed it brings the teacher, as a human being, nearer to those whom he would educate. And as a human being he must come near to them. Those who are to be educated must get something from him as a human being. It would be terrible if anyone were to believe it possible to teach just because he knows a great deal. This leads to absolute absurdity. This absurdity will be apparent to you if you think about the following picture.

Now take a class in a school. There are perhaps thirty pupils in the class. Among these pupils there are, let us say, two geniuses, or only one, for that is enough. If we have to organize a school we cannot always give the post of teacher to a genius just for a future genius to be able to learn all he should be able to learn. You will say that this would not matter in the primary school. If the child is a genius he will go on to a higher school and there certainly find geniuses as teachers. You would not say this because experience does not bear it out—but you must admit the case may arise that the teacher is faced with a class in which there are children predestined to become cleverer than he is himself. Now our task of teacher consists in bringing the children not merely to our degree of cleverness, but to the full development of their own powers.

As teachers, therefore, we may come into the position of having to educate somebody who will be greater than we. It is impossible to provide schools with enough teachers unless one holds to the principle that it does not matter if the teacher is not as clever as the pupil will be some day. Nevertheless he will still be a good teacher because it does not depend on the giving out of knowledge but on activating the individuality of the soul, upon the pre-earthly existence. Then it is really the child who educates himself through us. And that is the truth. In reality we do not educate at all. We only disturb the process of education when we intervene too energetically. We only educate when we behave in such a way that through our own behavior the child can educate himself. We send the child to primary school in order to rid him of troublesome elements. The teacher should see to it that the troublesome elements are got rid of, that the child escapes conditions under which he cannot develop. So we must be quite clear upon this point: we cannot cram anything into a human being through teaching and education. What we can do is to see to it that the human being, as he grows up, should succeed in developing the abilities within him. That we can do, but not through what we know but through what stirs inwardly within us in an artistic way. And even if the rare thing should happen that as teachers we are not particularly endowed with genius—one should not say this, but in spite of your youth movement you are old enough for me to say it—if the teacher has only a kind of instinctive artistic sense he will offer less hindrance to the growth of the child's soul than the teacher who is inartistic and tremendously learned. To be tremendously learned is not difficult.

These things must for once be said most emphatically. For even when spoken clearly, our age does not hear them. Our age is terribly unreceptive for such things. And regarding those who assure one that they have understood everything, after thirty years it is often apparent that they have understood nothing whatever. Thus the configuration of soul in the human being is what is essential in practical pedagogy, in instruction and education, during the child's life between the change of teeth and puberty. And after this the human being enters a period of life in which, in this age of the consciousness soul, still deeper forces must work up out of human nature if men are to give anything to one another.

You see, the feeling with which one man meets another is tremendously complicated. If you wanted to describe the whole round of sympathies and antipathies, and the interworking of sympathies and antipathies with which you meet another man, you would never come to an actual definition. In fifty years you would not succeed in defining what you can experience in five minutes as the relations of life between man and man. Before puberty it is pre-eminently an experience of the pre-earthly. The pre-earthly sheds its light through every movement of the hands, every look, through the very stressing of words. Actually it is the quality of the gesture, the word, the thought, of the teacher that works through to the child and which the child is seeking.

And when as grown-up people—so grown-up that we have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen or even beyond!—we meet other human beings, then the matter is still more complicated. Then, what attracts or repels others in a human being actually veils itself in a darkness impenetrable to the world of abstract concepts. But if, with the help of Anthroposophy, we investigate what one can really experience in five minutes but cannot describe in fifty years, we find that it is what rises up from the previous earth-life or series of earth-lives into the present life of the soul, and what is exchanged. This indefinite, indefinable element that comes upon us when we meet as adults is what shines through from earlier lives on earth into the present. Not only the pre-earthly existence but everything the human being has passed through in the way of destiny in his successive earth-lives.

And if we study what is working upon the human being we find how today, in the epoch of the consciousness soul—because everything is pushed into the head and what we take in from the outer world cannot get through to man as a whole—our head culture sets itself against what alone can work from man to man. Human beings pass one another by because they stare at each other only with the head, with the eyes—I will not say, because they knock their heads together! Human beings pass one another by because only what plays over from repeated earth-lives can work between man and man, and modern culture does nothing to develop a sense for this. But this must also be brought into our education; we should be able to experience what is deeper down in man, what plays over from previous earth-lives. This will not be achieved unless we draw into our education the whole life of man as it is lived out on earth.

Today there is only a feeling for the immediate present. Therefore all that is asked of education is that it shall benefit the child. But if this is the only thing that is asked, very little service is rendered to life. Firstly, because the question is put one-sidedly, one gets a one-sided answer; and secondly, the child should be educated for the whole of life, not only for the schoolroom or the short period after school so that he does not disgrace us. But we need an understanding for the imponderable things in life, an understanding for the unity in man's life as a whole as it unfolds on earth.

There are human beings whose very presence, at a certain age, is felt by those around them as a benediction. There are such human beings. If we were to look for the reason why such people, not through their acts but through their being, have become a blessing to those around them, we would find that as children they were fortunate to have been able in a natural way to look up to someone in authority whom they could revere. They had this experience at the right time of life. And because they were able to revere, after many years they become a blessing to the world around them. It can be expressed concisely by saying: There are human beings who can bless. There are not many who can bless. But it is a question of the power to bless. There are men who certainly have the power to bless. They acquire it in later life, because in their childhood they have learnt to pray. Two human gestures are causally connected: the gestures of praying and blessing; the second develops from the first. No one learns to bless who does not learn it from prayer. This must not be understood sentimentally or with the slightest tinge of mysticism, but rather as a phenomenon of Nature is observed—except that this phenomenon is nearer to us in a human way.

Now we have to care for a child hygienically so that he can grow in accordance with nature. If you were to devise an apparatus for a child that would keep him a certain size so that he could not grow, so that even the size of his arm would not change and the young human being would remain as he is all his life, this would be terrible. The human being must be treated in such a way that he can grow. What would it be like were the little child not to change, were he to look no different ten years hence? It would be dreadful were he to remain as he is at four or five. But in school we supply the children with concepts and cherish the notion that they should remain unchanged for the whole of the children's lives. The child is supposed to preserve them in memory; fifty years hence they are to be the same as they are today. Our school text-books ensure that the child remains a child. We should educate the child so that all his concepts are capable of growth, that his concepts and will-impulses are really alive. This is not easy. But the artistic way of education succeeds in doing it. And the child has a different feeling when we offer him living concepts instead of dead ones, for unconsciously he knows that what he is given grows with him just as his arms grow with his body.

It is heart-breaking to witness children being educated to define a concept, so that they have the concept as a definition only. It is just the same as if we wanted to confine a limb in an apparatus. The child must be given pictures capable of growth, pictures which become something quite different in ten or twenty years. If we give him pictures that are capable of growth, we stimulate in him the faculty through feeling to find his way into what is often hidden in the depths of the human individuality. And so we see how complicated are the connections We learn to come to a deeper relation to human beings through the possibility being given us in our youth for growth in our life of soul.

For what does it mean to experience another human being? We cannot experience other people with dead concepts. We can comprehend them only if we meet them in such a way that they become for us an experience which takes hold of us inwardly, which is something for our own inner being. For this, however, activity in the inner being is needed. Otherwise our culture will reach the point which it is fast approaching. People go out to luncheons, dinners and teas, without knowing much about one another. Yet it is about themselves that, relatively speaking, modern people know most. And what do they instinctively make of their experiences? Suppose they go about among the people they meet at lunch or dinner. At most they think—Is he like me or is he different? And if we believe him to be like ourselves, we consider him a fine fellow; if he is not like ourselves, then he is not a fine fellow and we do not trouble ourselves about him any longer. And as most men are not the same as ourselves, the most we can do is sometimes to believe—because really it would be too boring to find no fine fellow anywhere—that we have found someone like ourselves. But in this way we do not really find another human being but always ourselves. We see ourselves in everyone else. For many people this is relatively good. For if they were to meet somebody who in their opinion was not altogether, but yet to a certain extent, a fine fellow, and were really to comprehend him, this would be so overwhelming an experience that it would quite drown their own manhood, and by a second encounter their ego would be drowned still more deeply. In the case of a third or fourth there would be no approaching him at all, for by that time he would certainly have lost himself! There is too little inner strength and activity, too little kernel, too little inner individuality developed, so that people for fear of losing themselves dare not experience the other human being. Thus men pass one another by.

The most important thing is to establish an education through which human beings learn once again how to live with one another. This cannot be done through hollow phrases. It can be done only through an art of education founded upon a true knowledge of the human being, that art of education referred to here. But our intellectualistic age has plunged the whole of life into intellectuality. In our institutions we actually live very much as if no longer among human beings at all, we live in an embodied intellect in which we are entangled, not like a spider in its own web, but like countless flies which have got themselves caught.

When we meet anyone, do we feel in any sense what this human being can become for us? Do we judge today as humanly as this? No, for the most part we do not—present company is always excepted—for the most part we do not but we ask—well, perhaps on the door of a certain man's house there will be a little plate with an inscription “Counselor at Law,” conveying a concept of some kind. So now we know something about this man. In another case the inscription is “Medical Practitioner.” Now we know that the man can cure us. In another case the inscription is “Professor of English.” And now we know something about him—and so on and so forth. If we want to know something about chemistry, how do we set about it? We have no other means than to enquire if somewhere there is a man who is a qualified chemist. What he can tell us then is chemistry. And so we go on. We are really caught up in this spider's web of concepts. We do not live among human beings. We trouble ourselves very little about human beings. We only concern ourselves with what is on paper. For many people that is their only essential fact. How else should they know what kind of man I am unless it is written down somewhere on paper!

This, of course, is all rather an overstatement, and yet it does characterize our epoch. Intellectuality is no longer merely in our heads but it is woven around us everywhere. We are guided by concepts and not by human impulses.

When I was still fairly young, at Baden near Vienna I got to know the Austrian poet Hermann Rollett, long since dead. He was convinced that the right thing was development towards intellectualism, that one must develop more and more towards the intellectual. At the same time, however, he had an incurable dread of this, for he felt that intellectualism only takes hold of man's head. And once when I visited him with Schröer, we were talking with him and he began to speak in poetical fashion about his incurable fear in regard to culture. He said: When one looks at human beings today, they cannot use their fingers properly; many of them cannot write; they get writer's cramp, their fingers atrophy. When it is a question of sewing on trouser buttons, only tailors can do that! It is dreadful; the limbs are atrophying. The fingers and the limbs will not only get less skillful but they will also get smaller, they will wither away and heads will get larger and larger. That is how he described his poet's dream and then he said he thought the time would come when only balls, balls which are heads, would be rolling about over the surface of the earth.

That was the cultural dread I met with in this man in the last third of the nineteenth century. Now he was also a child of his age, that is to say, he was a materialist, and that was why he had so great a dread that at some point in the future such living heads would be rolling about on the earth. Physical heads will not do this. But to a serious extent the etheric and astral heads do it already today. And a healthy education of the young must preserve human beings from this, must set human beings upon their legs again, and lead them to the point where, if they are pondering over something, they will feel the beating of their heart again and not merely add something to their knowledge. With this we must reckon if in preparation for man's future, we penetrate ourselves with the art that must enter education. What more there is to be said on this subject I shall try to develop for you tomorrow.