Development of the Child up to Puberty

Schmidt Number: S-4562

On-line since: 23rd February, 2016

Man and his relationship to the cosmos

Volume VI — Part 2

Part of an 11 lecture series given between
22 July to 20 August 1921:

Human development, World soul and World Spirit

Lecture entitled:

Development of the child up to puberty.

Lecture by Rudolf Steiner

Dornach, 7 August 1921

If we want to fathom the meaning of the materialistic age we need to research how the combination of important fundamental forces add up to the development of mankind. Next we need consider human evolution from a specific angle today. I will link these to various things I have already mentioned recently and reach a clear outcome.

I have often referred to the importance of the time period in an individual's development which co-insides with the change of teeth around the seventh year of life. The change of teeth indicates that certain forces present and active in the organism up to this time no longer exercise their actions as is the case up to the seventh year. From the moment the stage of dentition begins or is taking place the human being goes into a state of metamorphosis. What appears with the pushing out of the second set of teeth is something which had been working in the human body already. When they appear as if freed out of the body then the appearance is by contrast more like a soul force. We discover by researching this appearance, that up to the seventh year a soul force is active within the human being and to a certain extend finds its conclusive work done with the change of teeth. When we develop the inclination and ability to observe such things we will come to see how the child's entire soul constitution is metamorphosed, how precisely from this moment in life the ability arises to construct defined concepts similar to the way other soul abilities occur. Where had these soul qualities been before the change of teeth? They were in the body and were active there. That which later would become spiritual was working in the body.

Here we arrive at quite a different observation regarding the cooperation between the soul-spiritual and the bodily aspects in contrast to how they are depicted by abstract psychological representations, which refers to a psycho-physical parallelism or to an alternate interaction between soul and body. We arrive at a true observation of what works in an important way during the first seven years of the human organism. We gradually see something which is hidden up to the moment it becomes freed to work as a soul force. We only need to develop an ability to observe such things to become aware how a certain process of power gradually works into the bodily aspect during the first seven years of life and how from this moment onwards reappear as something soul-spiritual. Then we also realise what the actual activity within the human body, at least in part, is during the first seven years of life.

When we find ourselves in the condition in life which takes place between falling asleep and waking, something happens which I have just described, in two conditions following upon one another in a meaningful way. We can also observe that a child sleeps in a certain way which is different to the one he or she will become after the change of teeth. It is as if the difference is not apparent, but it is there. The child up to his seventh year is in a state of sleep — a state in which its soul is intrinsically within the state of falling asleep and waking — unable to transmit the same forces which he later sends as soul forces because these forces are related to the physical, to the corporeal organism. As a result the child doesn't send sharply outlined concepts into his state of sleep. It sends very few sharply defined concepts and even less outlined imaginations but these indistinct representations have the peculiar ability to encompass the soul spiritual reality in a better way than through sharply defined representations.

This is something important, the sharper the outlines of our concepts in daily life, the less these concepts are able to enter our sleep condition, understanding realities from there. As a result of this the child often in fact brings a particular knowledge of spiritual reality out of its sleeping condition. This ceases in the same way as I described in the forces being freed during the change of teeth, sharply outlined concepts now come to the fore and can influence sleep life. These sharply outlined concepts subdue to a certain extent the view on spiritual realities as we live between falling asleep and waking.

What I have just said can be proved through supersensible sight which develops the power I have often described which can be found in my “Occult Science” and in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.” When clairvoyant sight attains the power of imagination, when each image appears, as we know, as having a spiritual reality as foundation, then we gradually come to behold spiritual realities amidst the condition of sleeping and waking, and then we can evaluate the difference between a child's sleep before his seventh year and its sleep after turning seven. We can see how to some extent insight is eased regarding what in our imagination we have clarified regarding observation of spiritual realities in whose proximity we are between falling asleep and waking up.

When the change of teeth has come about, the development of puberty starts within the soul element, which can be grasped to a certain degree through imagination. Through simply experiencing our imagination we can see what is forming in the soul.

Man acquires simply through the imaginative experience that which is formed in the soul. The experience I have mentioned regarding the conditions between falling asleep and waking is only one of the experiences which can be made through imaginative knowledge. Under these interesting conditions which take place in the child between dentition and puberty, we see how there is actually a strong struggle taking place in the becoming of the human being. The fight to a certain extent in this period of life is between the ether body and the astral body which undergoes a particular transformation towards puberty. When we consider the physical correlation corresponding to this condition of a struggle, then we can say that it's during this period of the child's life when there is a struggle between growing forces and those forces which appear through physical inspiration, through breathing. This is a very important process in inner development, a process which has to be studied time and again. A part of what becomes freed up for the soul during dentition, are growing forces. Of course a considerable part of these growing forces remain in the body and see to growth, while a part of this is freed during dentition and come to the fore as soul forces.

The growing forces working on in the child resists against what appears essentially in the respiratory process. What now appears in the breathing process could not essentially appear before. The respiratory process is certainly present in the child but as long as it has the forces rising from dentition, so long will nothing in the child happen which is actually as striking, as meaningful as what later takes place between breathing and the physical body. The greatest part of our development depends upon the breathing process. As a result Oriental exercises focus particularly on the breathing process while the human beings who live into the breathing exercises actually come into contact with their inner organisation, brings physicality into an inner movement which is related to perception of the spiritual world.

As we said, before the start of dentition, what breathing actually wants to affect in us fails to become active in the body. Now the battle starts between the growing forces retained in the body against the forces penetrating through the breathing processes. The first meaningful process appearing as a result of the physical breathing processes is puberty.

This connection between breathing and puberty is not yet being examined by science. It is, however, definitely present. We actually breathe in what brings on puberty, which also gives us the further opportunity to step into a relationship in the widest sense between the world and loving surroundings. We actually breathe this in. In every process of nature there's also a spiritual process. In the breathing process exists not only the spiritual but also the soul spiritual. This soul spiritual process permeates us through breathing. It can only penetrate when the forces have become ensouled, forces which formerly worked up to the change of teeth and stopped at this point. What wanted to stream in through the breathing process can now take place.

However, again they come into opposition — a war — of what comes out of the growing processes and what is still a growth process, coming from ether forces in other words. This war is evident between the ether forces rising from the ether body and their correlation found in the material, in the metabolism and blood circulation as astral forces. Here the metabolic system plays into the rhythmic system. We can schematically say: we have our metabolic system but this plays into our blood rhythm; the metabolic system I depict here in white (weiß) and the circulation system playing into it: red (rot) in the drawing. This is what streams from the ether body upwards between the ages of seven to fourteen.

The astral body works against it. We have the inward streaming of the rhythmical in the physical correlation which comes from breathing and the war takes place between the blood circulation and the breathing rhythms in blue (blau). This is what is happening in that period of life.

To speak somewhat vividly in perhaps a radical image: between about the ninth and the tenth year in the life of every child, what had been planned before and appeared as skirmishes before the actual main battle, now goes over into the main battle. The astral and ether bodies direct their chief attack during the ninth and tenth year of life.

As a result this period in time is so important for educators to observe. It is simply so, that teachers, educators and instructors need to give their full attention to something — which may appear differently in nearly each person — taking place in this moment in time.

Here something exceptional can be seen in each child. Some temperamental qualities move into an evident metamorphosis. Marked ideas appear. Above all this is the moment in time where one could start — while before it had been good to not let the child distinguish between the Ego (Ich) and the outer world — allowing this distinction between the Ego and the outer world to come to the fore. While it had been preferable before to use fairy tale imagery to the child, how processes of nature were like human processes, by personifying and clarifying, now the child may be educated about nature in a more instructive manner.

Stories of nature, even in their most elementary forms, should actually only from this moment be presented to the child because the child, as it starts with its first period of life, feels its Ego clearly, while it had just sensed its Ego before. This is a clearly outlined concept, a more or less sharply outlined term linked to the Ego which appears at this time. The child first learns at this moment to really distinguish itself from the surroundings. This corresponds to a definite counter streaming of the breathing rhythm with the circulatory rhythm, the astral and the ether bodies.

There are two sides to this within the human being. On the one side it is present in the condition between waking up and falling asleep. For this state I have just made indications. In the condition between falling asleep and waking, something different presents itself. When we have made progress in Imagination and developed Inspiration somewhat, we may evaluate what happens through Inspiration during the breathing process which has its physical correlation, we discover only at this moment in time — for one child it will be a little earlier, for another a bit later but on average between nine and ten — there is a liberation of the I and the astral body from the physical body during sleep. The child namely becomes intimately connected with his physical and etheric bodies even during asleep. From this time the I lights up as an individual being when actually the I and astral body are not participants of the functions of the ether and physical bodies.

If a child dies before this moment when life had led it up to its fifth, sixth and even into its eighth, ninth year, it still has something which hasn't separated much from the soul spiritual world which is experienced between death and a new birth; so that children relatively easily are pulled back into the soul spiritual world and to some extent only attach something to life which they completed with conception or birth, that an actual cutting off from a new life, if we consider this kind of death, is only really there when children die after this point. Their connection to a certain extent to a new life will be less intensive than the life before. Here clearly conditions are experienced as I've described in “Theosophy” where children who have died earlier are thrown back and then piece life together from what they experience to the life they had led up to their conception or up to birth. One should even say: what we have before us in the child up to the time between his ninth and tenth year of life shows there is much less separation between the soul-physical and the soul-spiritual than in the later human being. Later a person is much more of a dualistic being than the child. The child has the soul-spiritual incorporated into his body and this works into the body. As a duality the soul-spiritual appears opposite the bodily soul element only after this illustrated time. One should say: from this moment the soul-spiritual is less concerned by the bodily element than it had been concerned before. The child as a bodily being is far more of a soul being than the older person. The body of the child is even permeated by the soul forces of growth because it still retains soulful forces even when the largest part of dentition has taken place.

Thus we can say that this battle I have depicted calms down gradually from about the twelfth year onwards and with sexual maturity the astral body takes its full entitlement in the human constitution. That which loosens itself from the human being, which to some extent now is less concerned with the physical is that which the human being takes again with him or her through the gate of death on dying. As we've said, the child in its earlier years is more thrown back to its former life; human beings after this period in time are separated from their former life. What is released here holds within it a seed which allows it to pass through the gate of death. One can really penetrate these things with imaginative knowledge and one can discern particularities precisely. One can point out how the forces rising here lead to sharply defined concepts — which however diminish spiritual realities in whose presence we are during sleep — and make the human being into an independent being.

As a result of the human being cutting off, diminishing the spiritual realities, the human being again becomes the spirit amongst spirits who he must be when he goes through the gate of death. The child always slips, I might say, into spiritual realities; the later human being detaches himself from these spiritual realities and becomes consistent in himself. Admittedly, what becomes consistent can only be seen clearly with imaginative and inspired knowledge, but it does exist in people. This process happens anyhow, as I've indicated yesterday. When human beings don't allow spiritual science to work on them, then it is already so: what is released — particularly during this age in which we receive such materialistic concepts and intellectual ideas, where already at school intellectualism and materialism are imported, because our school subjects are presented materialistically — what is released here is organised in an ahrimanic direction. Because we are asleep in our will even during the day, what becomes released here are trapped by our instincts. We educate ourselves in order to master our instinctive lives by absorbing spiritual scientific concepts.

Intellectuals, materialists or sensualist have an opinion about these concepts, they say these spiritual scientific concepts are fantasy, there's nothing real in them compared with reality. What they mean with “reality” is only what can be perceived by the senses. This is not what is meant by these concepts at all. Everything which appears as concepts in my “spiritual science” does not refer to the outer sense world, it wants to describe the supersensible world. Should these concepts be accepted thus, then they are taken up in a supersensible way even though one can't yet see into the supersensible. Concepts are taken up which are suitable for the supersensible world and not applicable to the senses, physical world, and one thus breaks free from the physical sensory world, in other words, instincts.

This education however is necessary in the human race; without it humankind will enter more and more into social chaos. The actual results — it is like I said yesterday — the actual results of intellectualism and materialism in science, the actual outcome of our present day scientific leaning is a social condition which is chaotic and rising in such an alarming manner in Eastern Europe.

As I said, with logic you can't derive Bolshevism from Bergson's philosophy or from Machsher Avenarius's philosophy; but plain logic brings you closer to deriving it. This is something which present day mankind must look at clearly; dualism has developed in the last centuries between nature observation and the moral world of ideas. On the one side we have the observation of nature which only works with the necessity, as I've often pointed out, to being strictly exact and wanting to link everything to definite connections and causalities. This kind of nature observation creates a worldly structure, builds hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the earth.

Here you stand before what the human being experiences in religious and moral ideas. This is completely torn away from what lives in the observation of nature. This is why people strive so hard to justify the moral-religious content through mere faith. The moral-religious content has been elevated to a system whose content must stand for itself which to some extent should not be allowed to be ruined by anything else, like how outer nature is described, what a person may feel, how the one influences the other. Our present day nature observation, as it exists in its newest phase, where optics and electrodynamics merge, draws by necessity the imagination of the death of warmth to itself. Then the earth with all its people and animals will die and then no human soul will develop despite all its moral ideals. This earth's demise is ensured by the Law of Conservation of Matter, of the Conservation of Energy: through this Law of the Conservation Of Energy the result is the death of the earth, the death of all human souls just like materialists consider the death of the soul as connected to the death of the human body. Only when we are absolutely clear in our mind that what lives in us as morality, what permeates us as religious ideas, form a seed within us, a seed containing a reality, just as the seed of a plant unfolds into a plant the following year, only then can we know that the start of this seed is for a future natural existence and that the earth with everything it contains, visible, audible, perceptible to our senses, does not depend on the law of conservation of energy but that it dies, falls away from all human souls who then carry the moral ideals through as new natural events, into the Jupiter-, Venus-, and Vulcan existence; only when we are clear that Heaven and Earth will perish but My word, the Logos, which develops in the human soul, will not perish — when we are clear, literally clear about these words, only then can we speak of moral and religious content of our human souls. Otherwise it is dishonest. Otherwise we put to a certain extent morality in the world and adhere to another certainty than the natural certainty. If we are clear in our minds that the words of Christ are true, that a cosmos originates from morality, wrested free from the death shroud when this cosmos disintegrates, then we have a world view which indicates morality and naturalness in its metamorphosis.

This is essentially what must penetrate present day humanity because with the schooling of natural thinking developed over the last decades, it is impossible to also accomplish the most essential social concepts which we need. Something must live in the social concepts which recognise morality at the same time in its cosmic implications. The human being must once again learn that he or she is a cosmic being. Earlier the social affairs which needed to be organized on the earth round was not understood; before it had been acknowledged that human beings are connected with cosmic intentions, with cosmic entities.

This is what is felt by people in our age who experience the whole tragedy in their souls, who have come from the abyss between the natural scientific notion and the moral view which we have. Probably only a few slightly sense the implications of this abyss, but it must be crossed over — to say this literally: “Heaven and Earth will perish but my Word will not perish.” This means, what sprouts in the human soul will enfold, just as the earth will perish.

One can't be an avid supporter of the Law of Conservation of Energy and believe at the same time that the moral world indicates eternity. Only to the degree with which courage is found to establish and view the world through the view of nature, will a way be found out of this chaos of the present. This way out can only be found when human beings decide, once again, but now fully conscious, to revert back to that wisdom which once was experienced in the old mysteries in an instinctive way. If humanity makes the decision to consciously penetrate the spiritual world it is an objective possibility, my dear friends. Since the end of the 19^th Century a wave from the spiritual world wants to enter our physical world. I could say, it storms in, it is there. Mankind only needs to open their hearts and their senses, and human hearts and human souls will be spoken to. The spiritual world has good intentions, but humanity is still resisting. What was experienced in the second decades of the 20^th Century in such a terribly way, ultimately is the bracing of humanity against the inward thrusting wave from the spiritual world. However one could say, it is at its worst, just where scientific minds turn against the streaming in from the spiritual worlds. One should not however, once materialistic and intellectual thinking habits have been withdrawn, now introduce some sort of form which would rule, which could be acquired from the spiritual world.

In relation to this the intellectual-materialistic wave it had its peak, its impact in the second half of the 19^th Century. Obviously materialism prepared this long in advance. I have repeatedly referred to its actual worldly historic beginning: what lived in Hellenism as materialism was only a prelude, somewhat in Democritus and in change. Its world historical importance only gradually developed from the 15^th Century. It developed slowly, certainly, but it still, when the actual dogmatic tradition was relinquished, I might say, allowed a feeling for a spiritual world's existence within the physical, that the spiritual world can be grasped but not registered through mere intellectual gestures.

Today some who do not see the essence of it, point out with a certain nostalgia to not that far back in time, positivism and materialistic thoughts actually shamed the human being who was regarded as completely inhuman. After that, basically only in the second half of the 19^th Century they came to view humankind as completely inhuman, wiping out the specifically human. Thus they avenged themselves by claiming that the human being had thoroughly educated itself in a relatively total abstract way of thinking, as it appeared in the renewed version of the Theory of Relativity. As a result it is always interesting and one should take responsibility for it, that there are still singular minds who refer back to the time when even materialistically orientated minds considered that anything pertaining to people should be dealt with through the mind.

Certainly, a thoroughly intellectual and positivistic mind was Auguste Comte but he wasn't alive in the end of the 19^th Century when people were completely excluded from human observation even though, where intellectualism and materialism only became external nature's concepts — but only the outer nature concept, where a human being no longer considered his own humanity in relation to it, that even his own human qualities were thought of as being in the images of nature. Thus it is interesting if we can read what the English thinker Frederick Harrison, briefly wrote about Auguste Comte. He said: I'm thinking about a concise remark by Auguste Comte which he made more than sixty years ago. Auguste Comte, the positivist, the intellectualist who was still somewhat touched by the spirituality of olden times, already saw that in the future the human being will be completely omitted. Despite his positivism, despite his intellectualism it displeased him to what he referred to and what he had been creating, which only came about in the last third of the 19^th Century so he hadn't seen it: our modern doctors, said Comte, appear to be essentially animal doctors. He meant, so Harrison continues, that they often, more particularly with women, are treated like horses or cows.

Comte stressed that an illness should be observed from more than one side, that it contains a spiritual element and occasionally even a prominent kind of spiritual element, thus the human doctor should just as much be a philosopher of the soul as an anatomist is to the body. He claimed that true medication would have two sides. From this basis — Harrison adds — he would reject Freudian one sidedness. Harrison continues — how this Comtian point of view has developed further and how people have gradually degenerated to the point of view where people are treated like horses and cows and how this has gradually made human doctors into animal doctors. Everything is relative — this is already contained in the kernel of the theory of relativity. The main teaching of Auguste Comte had a better basis and a more thorough philosophical depth and life than Einstein, he said. — It is always refreshing when one can still today hear such a statement, because we live in the age where the scientific mind opposes everything which comes from a spiritual side, namely what wants to transport the mind in human life, in human action and particularly in important areas such a medical activities.

If we ask ourselves: what is it then, which makes materialism and intellectualism so attractive for today's science? Look for yourself how things are taking place. Consider how our education is set up to hardly involve the teachers in the child's whole organization. The teacher is far too comfortable, and has personally been raised far too comfortably to really delve into the intricacies of child development, like I have depicted today again. Such things would rather not be bothered with — because what would be required? It would call for not shying away from every transition in daily life while living a delusion, to a life which is quite different, where our knowledge becomes reality.

This transformation of people, this otherness, this change pertaining to knowledge is shied away from today; people do not want it. People want to comfortably rise to higher truths which can only be the highest abstractions because to reach abstraction can be done with a certain comfort. This way no inner changes are needed in order to reach it. However, to come to a real life content, how it forms the basis of our outer sensory content, can't be attained when at least concepts aren't changed which have no significance for ordinary sense life, whose meaning one can only penetrate with a power coming from within and working outward. People are put into life which also stretches into the supersensible world, and in our age it relies on this supersensible world being elucidated in a healthy way. When I said yesterday that the materialistic-intellectual point of view doesn't just include a few scientifically educated people, even with a scientific education, but that they are popular beliefs in the simplest people still connected to ancient beliefs, then it must be said: it is urgent and necessary that whatever flows into our overall life in popular form should also contain information of the spiritual world.

Presently overall characteristic attributes can be found everywhere where the effort is made to introduce Anthroposophical spiritual science into areas of life. In medicine, in religion, the social life, everywhere the introduction of anything non-sectarian should be made: Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which comes to the fore with the same scientific earnest with which it had been introduced since the middle of the 15 Century as scientific, is to be fully recognized.

When a child has grown up and has had the luck to have undergone some higher learning, what becomes apparent today? These young people, doctors, theologians, philologists, lawyers, will not become anything else; they will not be converted but stay as they are and only accept abstractions applicable to their science. If an attempt is made to offer them some knowledge of the world then they immediately withdraw particularly into this comfortable life of abstraction in which they desire to continue living — but which is leading towards chaos. Thus we can observe an interesting symptom arising which I want to single out. On occasion where the Nurnberg main preacher Geyer held seemingly many lectures at various places, it can be noticed: here people suspect, mainly scientific people suspect that an attempt is being made to introduce Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science into their lives. This the people don't want. Even well minded people don't want it. They sense that here they must re-adjust their views in relation to their entire scientific orientation, here they must think quite differently about their own basic beliefs. As a result when something appears which challenges their own basic beliefs, they revert to their comfortable abstract criticism. So we discover already at the start of the Geyer lectures a quote by the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen, but also a person who should be able to greet with inner satisfaction and joy anything available in this area where spiritual science can fruitfully bring clarification into the psychological areas and is fruitfully elucidated.

Spiritual science goes along a healthy path while the psychiatrist follows it in a morbid way. Psychiatry can only become healthy if it is enlightened in all areas, in all its details if it is based in the healthy manner of anthroposophical spiritual science. Through this the psychiatrist should rise up, letting his psychiatry be permeated by spiritual science; because this psychiatry has basically become nothing other than psycho-pathology. This is a terrible thing at the present — this psychiatry. What does the psychiatrist do? He doesn't sense how the rays of light which can come to him through anthroposophical spiritual science can clarify psychiatry. Instead, he positions spiritual science as he does psychiatry at present that means, he uses the same measure for both. Even if he means well by doing so it becomes something extraordinarily interesting because we can compare it to looking at our faces in a garden mirror ball — if you have a pretty face you will still see the beauty, but it is broken up in squares. Naturally spiritual science will thus appear checkered if it is opposed in full force even by someone with good intentions. It is always interesting to read a bit of what Dr Kolb, the principal medical psychiatrist, always meaning well, has to say:

“The famous Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner I see ...” excuse me, I must read this — “a genial but extraordinarily imbalanced personality with some understandable striking traits according to psychiatric knowledge. The principal preacher Geyer from Nurnberg appears to base his teachings on Steiner. I have twice heard a public lecture like this from many highly respected clergy. The lecture as a piece of art, was charming. I would consider it an atrocity to pick this blue flower of poetry, which was served so gracefully, and the blue haze” — the blue appears to be less critical than the haze — “in which he brings us closer to Steiner's painted age clouded by critical colour. Now as psychiatrist I must say: the `clairvoyance' of Steiner is nothing other than ordinary thinking which is influenced by a kind of self-hypnosis when a genial and what I would like to accept as...” — after this it becomes quite different! — “an ethically high-standing personality with glowing scientific and general education, highly informed about the present religious-philosophic teachings, as Steiner is, to some extent see into your brain and offer the content of the brain as `Anthroposophy,' yet amongst a multitude of fantastic traits much which is good, noble and morally high standing, perhaps isolated valuable scientific thoughts can be found.”

Now I ask you, just listen to this: ordinary thinking, influenced by Anthroposophy, sees into the brain and what is seen in the brain, is presented as Anthroposophy! Please, take this genial quote from this psychiatrist: therefore everything perceived by looking into the brain is also a bit influenced by auto suggestions!

“When however his teaching up to now are thrown to be people from the pulpit, then fewer genial people, without previous training, will preach about the marvelling products of his `clairvoyance.'”

They have actually done quite well, these untrained people! It is in fact as if this psychiatrist, whose anthroposophical thoughts are influenced by auto-hypnosis which he sees in the brain, actually lives completely outside the actual world.

“As occultism is similar to communism with a fatal attraction on the mentally weak, on immature youth, the prematurely old aged, on dreamers, on hysterics, above all on psychopaths, the insecure, the sick liars and swindlers, so we will experience that demoralized through war, death and misery and worry about the future we have become susceptible for the rise of `Prophets' similar to those historical deeds of the Munster Anabaptists we read with horror. The Catholic church is greatly merited by rejecting Steiner with complete lucidity and sharpness.” This `lucidity and sharpness' you read near a living person here! — “and I would like as Protestant to ask every single spiritual Protestant heartily, to test the danger of the demise of our church into a dreary and dangerous sect before it becomes a dangerous temptation of ideally orientated Christians with pathological traits strongly recommending Steiner's teachings.”

This lesson was received by the principal preacher Geyer from the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Dr Gustav Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen.

You see how the state of mind of a person is constituted who has completely accepted the thinking habits of the modern scientific spirit. Please, just consider for a bit, just for my sake meditate over what appears when a person, instead of directing his gaze to the outer world, directs himself through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and brings sharply into focus what is in my `occult science,' letting this gaze turn inward and depict the human brain, as if influenced by auto hypnosis. Isn't it true that what the psychiatrist is describing is madness! This depiction actually rises from a psychiatric base! Yet one must say that such a man as Gustav Kolb is well meaning and discovers that the blue haze should not be dissected by other critical colours; because he finds it barbaric to oppose the blue flower introduced by the priest Geyer. So from the one side he is even benevolent but he is really a typical representative of modern science.

This is the situation which can definitely be hoped for and expected from by modern science towards anthroposophically orientated science. Therefore it must always be mentioned that active, spiritual science orientated collaborators are needed, in every shop, found on every corner, who are revealed in this way and then drawn into the right light in which they are moved when there is a reference to, first of all, present day science being unable to be different from what it is, and secondly: brain instead of Anthroposophy.

Really, we must free ourselves from preconceived ideas in order to make it possible today, to convince the occasional person permeated by these modern scientific habits, to change. The joy several of our short minded followers often have that the occasional person can be converted, is a misplaced joy. It is concerned with unprejudiced humanity being penetrated by what anthroposophic spiritual science offers and then grimly facing the characteristics of modern science where it turns into nonsense, even when well meant. We are confronted today with immense seriousness. Therefore it must ever and again be stressed that at least among us many who sense this earnestness must rise instead of merely sitting and listening for a bit with the pleasure of hearing anthroposophic truths, but should rather want to permeate anthroposophic orientated spiritual science into every part of active life and also have the courage and energy to step forward where it is needed. I draw your attention repeatedly to what opposes spiritual science, with all the possible grotesque, ridiculous, deceitful and good-natured impotent forms it assumes. The battle which is fought against this, is even more sparse. It has to be done for the salvation of the further evolution of humanity. Healing must come through the modern spirit of science — as you know, where it is entitled, it is also appreciated by spiritual science — because it wants to set itself up in those areas of which it understands nothing, making it sick.