Man,
Woman and Child
Berlin, 8 January 1908
Notes of a participant:
Spiritual science shall not only satisfy
scientific curiosity. It shall give the human being an impulse
for life or acting, for certainty and satisfaction in life.
What spiritual science offers shall enable us to act and manage
our tasks efficiently.
The child faces us like a
living riddle. Prejudices in many fields of life can still be
corrected, however, prejudices of child education have often
detrimental effects and can no longer be corrected.
In the triality
of man, woman and child the entire humanity appears. In the
child many things are inheridited from man and woman. Hence,
the question of
heredity has impact here which also comprises the
riddle of destiny to a certain degree. What has the child got
from its ancestors? Concerning this consider Ibsen's
dramas (Henrik I., 1829–1906,
Norwegian dramatist). Everywhere in
art the question of heredity arises, because one feels its
significance and practical importance. However, we are not
deceived by the prejudices which are suggested by the facts
that one gains from the observation of lower animals. One of
the biggest mistakes in this field is that we apply to the
present human being automatically what observation and
experiments with lower animals show or what we know about the
history of our ancestors. Spiritual science acknowledges what
science understands by heredity, but it ascends to higher facts
that become obvious, actually, only from the aspects of the
spiritual world. It exists an increase of lawfulness.
Lawfulness prevails in the entire nature, in the bodily and in
the spiritual. However, we have to ascend with our insights
from lower principles to principles that apply to the higher
regions. We have to accomplish this increase without
fail.
Into what does heredity
transform in higher regions? The solution of this question
instills healthy respect of the becoming human being. It is a
huge difference between the lower animals and the human being.
The basic difference between the human being and other
creatures is as follows: all that interests us in the animal is
connected with the concept of species or genus. We do not
notice the same respect of the individual with the animals as
with the human being. The portrayal of a lion is the portrayal
of the lion species. The species prevails. In contrast, the
individuality prevails with the human being. That is why a
biography of any human being is possible, even of the simplest.
In this fact many things are concealed, above all, that the
human being is a species, a genus in himself.
In the human being, something lives that
corresponds to an entire animal species.
The principle of soul
re-embodiment or reincarnation results from this. We cannot
understand the human individual from the ancestors. Perhaps,
outer qualities can be led back, admittedly, to ancestors, but
not that what belongs to the own being of a human
individuality. Just as little, we can derive the individuality
of any animal species from the qualities of its
ancestors.
The cause of the origin
of a living being must always arise from the living. Few
centuries ago, one still believed in procreation, for example,
that animals come into being from river mud. The human soul is
not composed of all kinds of qualities, as little as a worm of
certain inorganic substances, as one meant at that time. A soul
always goes back to a soul; and the soul that lives in a human
being today goes back to a former soul existence. It is a
re-embodiment, but it is not a conglomerate of qualities of the
fatherly or motherly side. Thus, the principle of reincarnation
results inevitably. From this viewpoint, we want to look at
man, at woman and child.
What as the deeper basis
as the individuality of the child appears is that what as a
soul fits into the physical nature, after it had lived on in
another existence in the meantime. Man and woman have to give
the child a cover only. Motherly love and fatherly love is
degraded thereby by no means. The individuality of a human
being exists for a long time before the copulation of the
parents. A kind of unaware love leads the child to these
certain parents and causes them to begetting. Then as a gift in
return, both parents meet the child with their parental
love.
Death and love are tied
together with certain creatures. Some animals die after the
copulation. Such beings point to the coherence of the living
beings in the universe and to the fact of love. Love is for the
human being something by which he dedicates his individual
existence to the entire being. It is not that rhetorical thing
of poetry, but a force pervading the entire nature. Love is the
counter-image of egoism. In it, the individual goes beyond
itself as it were. It is a real increase of life with more
perfect beings.
The individual being is
the human being. One can only understand the significance of
individual and love completely considering the nature of the
human being in the sense of spiritual science. According to it,
the physical body is only a dress of the entire human
existence. He has the etheric body in common with animals and
plants. The astral body that also the animals have encloses the
mental, from the lowest desire up to the highest moral
ideas.
However, the human being
owns the force of the ego only, hence, he may be regarded as a
crown of creation. That personality felt the depth of the word
“I” who spoke: the ego is, was and will be there.
True knowledge of the ego is the highest form of knowledge. The
ego-knowledge stands behind the “veiled picture at
Sais.” “No mortal being has lifted my veils.”
The true ego-knowledge is possible only to that human force
which is immortal. Only the supersensible in the human being
recognises the immortal. Hence, what is mortal in us does not
lift the veil of the goddess. A German romantic said boldly, if
no mortal lifts the veil of Isis, we must become just
immortal.
Up to the second
dentition of the child the physical body develops. Then the
human being grows, admittedly, even further, but the figure
becomes only taller, the form extends which he has received up
to the seventh year. With it, we have an important regulator
for education. Up to this time, one should develop the physical
form of the child. If one does not do this, one has omitted
something for the whole life of the human being concerned. In
the second period up to puberty, the etheric body develops. In
the time before, it was by no means idle. The etheric body is
enclosed only in a kind of motherly sheath up to the second
dentition. Only thenceforward, it gets free and can develop.
The sexual maturity is a final point of the development of the
etheric body, and from now on, the development of the astral
body becomes free. Even later, the real education of the ego
begins.
Another picture results
from the hereditary process of the physical, another from that
of the etheric body and again another from that of the astral
body.
What the human being
brings as inheritance of the ancestors lies in the physical and
in the etheric body. Up to the sexual maturity, these inherited
qualities become completely visible. Then, however, the
development of the special individuality of the human being
begins, and this expresses itself in love. Certain animal
species die with the act of love because here their being stops
and their individual existence is over. The higher the
individuality of a being is, the more it takes along beyond the
sexual maturity as something imperishable. In reality, there
are transitions. Thus, the human being saves his inner life
beyond the species only.
Perhaps, by a
confrontation of a human being and a stone you get the
understanding of it: in the crystal, the outer forces that have
formed it conclude. They do no longer impress anything into the
inside of the stone. With the plant, the essentials are not the
increase of the form, but only a kind of recurrence of the form
principle as Goethe explained it. What the human being himself
acquired on former stages he shows as effect of his ego now. As
the plant searches and receives its materials from the soil to
build up its body, the young human being chooses his parents to
build up his physical body.
Here the ideas of
spiritual science immediately intervene in the will, in the
feelings, in life. We must respect the right of the child in
the deepest sense. Towards the next generation, the human being
feels different if he sees the matters in this
light.
Concerning that, the
natural sciences say, from the male principle a number of
qualities changes over to the germ, also from the female part,
from the ovum. Both groups of qualities must blend in the
embryo. The everlasting return of the same qualities is thereby
avoided. This is the reason why the male and female gametes
blend. This is the essential in nature.
Concerning the soul our
natural sciences are the most superstitious that can be there.
Schopenhauer had a flash of genius when he said, what strives
for existence brings the human individualities of both sexes
together in love. In the end, spiritual science teaches this
too. The human being are brought together to procreate the
future generations. If one considers every child that way, we
have no right to force our peculiarity upon it. The right
educator can promote the development of the child only as far
as he has learnt this with himself. The child is the greatest
teacher of the educator.
If the educator solves
this riddle of the child thoroughly, he is the best educator.
To him who penetrates such views with his soul they change into
respect to the being of the child and arouse awe of what there
grows and becomes. This attitude to duties extends to the
entire growing generation. We adults are for the growing
generation a sort of mother soil from which it develops. We
have to give the child what it needs for life, but we are not
allowed to form it in our own image under constraint, but we
must leave it free in its development and respect it. It is a
much more significant mission of the human beings to respect
this nascent freedom than respecting that freedom of that which
is there already. Spiritual science is a right educator of this
respect. It shows the supersensible and the facts which
spiritual beings create constructing the universe for ages and
help the human beings with it. The knowledge of yesterday
enables us to find adequate solutions also for the present. Our
work in the present must respect the freedom of the developing
supersensible. Freedom of the supersensible in the sensuous
shall be our motto.
Thus, we help humanity to
advance to a future that is salutary for us and means a divine
condition. If the look is opened to the supersensible in the
present, the past becomes explicable to us, and we can learn
from it what helps and is advisable for the future
If Yesterday is clear and obvious to you,
You work freely and powerfully Today
You can also hope for a Tomorrow
That is not less happy.
From Goethe's Zahme Xenien (1820/1827)
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