T H E
C H I L D ' S C H A N G I N G C O N S C I O U S N E S S
Lecture Two
DORNACH, APRIL 16, 1923
To begin with we will try to understand more fully the
nature of the growing human being, bearing in mind the later
stages in life, in order to draw conclusions about education
from our findings. Knowledge of the human being made possible
through anthroposophical research — as outlined briefly
yesterday — fundamentally differs from the findings of
modern science and other research. The knowledge of the human
being produced by our contemporary civilization is based mainly
on what remains when the human spirit and part of the human
soul are ignored. Such knowledge rests on what can be found,
both anatomically and physiologically, when one looks at a
corpse. Furthermore, it is supported by investigations into
pathological changes, due to illness or other causes, from
which conclusions are drawn with regard to the healthy human
being. What is gained through this approach then forms the
background for the attitude from which judgments are made
regarding the living, healthy human being.
The
anthroposophical approach begins by looking at the human being
as an entity, an organization of body, soul, and spirit. It
attempts to comprehend the human being not in an abstract and
dead way, but through a living mode of observation that can
recognize and comprehend with living concepts the human
totality of spirit, soul, and body. This approach enables us to
perceive accurately the various metamorphoses that take place
during a lifetime. Children are different beings depending on
whether they are going through the development between birth
and change of teeth, or between the second dentition and
puberty — the latter period being the time when they are
in the care of the class teacher — or during the stage
following puberty. Human beings are completely different
creatures depending on which of these three stages they are
going through. But the differences are so deeply hidden that
they escape a more external form of observation. This external
method of observation does not lead to a clear perception and
judgment of how body, soul, and spirit are permeated by spirit
in entirely different ways during each of the first three
periods of life.
It
would surely not be proper for teachers to first acquire
theoretical knowledge and then to think: What I have learned in
theory I will now apply in my teaching in one way or another.
With this attitude they would only distance themselves from the
child's true being. Teachers need to transform their knowledge
of the human being into a kind of higher instinct whereby they
can respond properly to whatever comes from each individual
child. This is another way that anthroposophical knowledge of
the human being differs from the usual kind, and can lead to a
routine approach to education at best, but not to a firmly
founded pedagogical sense and teaching practice. To achieve
this, one's knowledge of human nature must be capable of
becoming pedagogical instinct the moment one has to deal with a
child, so that in response to all that comes from the child one
knows instantly and exactly what must be done in every single
case. If I may use a comparison, there are all kinds of
theories about what we should eat or drink, but in ordinary
life we do not usually follow such theoretical directions. We
drink when thirsty and eat when hungry, according to the
constitution of the human organism. Eating and drinking follow
a certain rhythmical pattern for good reasons, but usually one
eats and drinks when hungry or thirsty; life itself sees to
that.
Knowledge of the human being, which forms the basis of a sound
and practical way of teaching, must create in the teachers,
every time they face a child, something like the relationship
between hunger and eating. The teachers' response to a given
pedagogical situation has to become as natural as satisfying a
sensation of hunger by eating. This is only possible if
knowledge of the human being has permeated flesh and blood as
well as soul and spirit, so that you intuitively know what
needs to be done every time you face a child. Only if your
knowledge of human beings has such inner fullness that it can
become instinctive can it lead to the proper kind of practical
teaching. It will not happen on the basis of psychological
experiments leading to theories about pupils' powers of memory,
concentration, and so on. In that case, intellectual ideas are
inserted between theory and practice. This presents an unreal
situation that externalizes all educational methods and
practice. The first thing to be aimed for is a living
comprehension of the child in all its pulsing life.
Let's look now at young children as they grow into earthly
life. Let our observations be straightforward and simple, and
we shall find that there are three things with which they have
to come to terms, three activities that become a decisive
factor for the entire life to come. These are what are simply
called walking, speaking, and thinking.
Jean Paul — this is the name he gave himself — once
said: “The human being learns more for the whole of life
during the first three years than he does during his three
years at university.”
[Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter)
(1763–1825) German poet.] This is entirely true; it is a fact.
For even if academic studies nowadays extend over longer
periods of time, their gain for life amounts to less than what
is acquired for the whole of life during the time when children
are learning how to walk, speak, and think.
What does it actually mean when we say the child is learning to
walk, speak, and think? The capacity to walk comprises far more
than is generally realized. It is by no means simply a case of
the young child — after the stage of crawling —
managing to stand up and take the first steps in order to
develop what will eventually become an individual and
characteristic way of walking. An inner adjustment underlies
learning to walk; there is an inner orientation of the young
child. The equilibrium of the organism, with all its
possibilities for movement, becomes related to the equilibrium
and all the possibilities for movement of the whole universe,
because the child stands within it. While learning to walk,
children are seeking to relate their own equilibrium to that of
the entire cosmos.
They are also seeking the specifically human relationship
between the activities of arms and hands and those of the lower
limbs. The movements of arms and hands have a special affinity
to the life of the soul, while those of the legs lag behind,
serving more the physical body. This is of immense importance
for the whole of later life. The differentiation between the
activities of legs and feet and those of arms and hands
represents the human quest for balance of soul that is
lifelong.
When raising themselves up, young children are first of all
seeking physical balance. But when freely moving arms and
hands, they are also seeking balance of soul. There is
infinitely more than meets the eye hidden behind what is
commonly called “learning to walk,” as everyone can
find out. The expression “learning to walk”
signifies only the most obvious and outwardly important aspect
perceptible to our senses. A deeper look at this phenomenon
would make one wish to characterize it in the following way. To
learn to walk is to learn to experience the principles of
statics and dynamics in one's own inner being and to relate
these to the entire universe.
[The terms statics and
dynamics, the principles of rest or equilibrium and of
movement, are used by Steiner in various ways in this and the
following lectures. These polar forces, active in the young
child, work in full coordination in walking, while the body's
weight is being transferred from one leg to the other. The way
that a child gradually learns to control these forces is not
only highly individual, but is significant for the child's
entire life. — TRANS.]
Better still, to learn to walk is
to meet the forces of statics and dynamics both in body and
soul and to relate these experiences to the whole cosmos. This
is what learning to walk is all about. But through the fact
that the movements of arms and hands have become emancipated
from those of the legs and feet, something else has happened. A
basis has been created for attaining a purely human
development. Thus, the child who is learning to walk adapts
itself outwardly to the external, visible world with its own
rhythms and beat, as well as inwardly with its entire inner
being.
So
you see that something very noteworthy is woven into the
development of the human being. The activities of the legs, in
a certain way, have the effect of producing in the physical and
soul life a stronger connection with what is of the nature of
beat, of what cuts into life. In the characteristic attunement
of the movements of right and left leg, we learn to relate
ourselves to what lies below our feet. And then, through the
emancipation of the movements of our arms from those of our
legs, a new musical and melodious element is introduced into
the beat and rhythm provided by the activities of our legs. The
content of our lives — or one might say, the themes of
our lives — comes to the fore in the movements of our
arms. Their activity, in turn, forms the basis for what is
being developed when the child is learning to speak. Outwardly,
this is already shown through the fact that with most people,
the stronger activity of the right arm corresponds to the
formation of the left speech organ. From the relationship
between the activities of legs and arms, as you can observe
them in a freely moving human being, yet another relationship
comes into being. It is the relationship that the child gains
to the surrounding world through learning to speak.
When you look at how all this is interconnected and belongs
together, when you see how in the process of sentence formation
the legs are working upwards into speech, and how the content,
the meaning of words, enters into the process of sound
production — that is, into the inner experience of the
structure of the sentences — you have an impression of
how the beat-like, rhythmical element of the moving legs works
upon the more musical-thematic and inward element of the moving
arms and hands. Consequently, if a child walks with firm and
even steps, if its walk does not tend to be slovenly, you have
the physical basis — which, naturally, is a manifestation
of the spirit, as we shall see later — for a good feeling
for the structure of both spoken and written sentences. Through
the movement of the legs, the child learns to form correct
sentences. You will also find that if a child has a slouching
gait, it will have difficulties finding the right intervals
between sentences, and that the contours of its sentences
become blurred. Likewise, if a child does not learn to move its
arms harmoniously, its speech will become rasping and
unmelodious.
[The German word Intervall refers to
differences in pitch only, and not to a break in the flow of
time. — TRANS.]
In addition, if you cannot help a child
to become sensitive in its fingertips, it will not develop the
right sense for modulation in speech.
All
this refers to the time when the child learns to walk and talk.
But something else can also be detected. You may have noticed
that in life the proper timing of certain processes is
sometimes disturbed, that certain phases of development make
their appearance later than one would expect according to the
natural course of development. But in this context you can also
see that the proper sequence of events can be safeguarded if
children are encouraged to learn to walk first, that is, if one
can possibly avoid having children learn to speak before they
can walk. Speech has to be developed on the basis of the right
kind of walking and of the free movement of the arms.
Otherwise, children's speech will not be anchored in their
whole being. Instead, they will only babble indistinctly. You
may have come across some people whose speech sounded not
unlike bleating. In such a case, not enough attention was paid
to what I have just tried to characterize.
The
third faculty the child must learn on the basis of walking and
speaking is thinking, which should gradually become more and
more conscious. But this faculty ought to be developed last,
for it lies in the child's nature to learn to think only
through speaking. In its early stages, speaking is an imitation
of the sounds that the child hears. As the sounds are perceived
by the child in whom the characteristic relationship between
the movements of the legs and arms is deeply rooted, it learns
intuitively to make sense of the sounds that it imitates,
though without linking any thought to what it has heard. At
first, the child only links feelings to the sounds coming
toward it. Thinking, which arises later, can develop only out
of speech. Therefore, the correct sequence we need to encourage
in the growing child is learning to walk, learning to speak,
and finally, learning to think.
We
must now enter a bit more deeply into these three important
processes of development. Thinking, which is — or ought
to be — the last faculty developed, always has the
quality of mirroring, or reflecting, outer nature and its
processes. Moral impulses do not originate in the sphere of
thinking, as we all know. They arise in that part of the human
being we call the conscience, about which we shall have more to
say later on. In any case, human conscience arises in the
depths of the soul before penetrating the sphere of thinking.
The faculty of thinking, on the other hand, that we acquire in
childhood, is attuned only to perceiving the essence of outer
nature and its processes. Thus all of the child's first
thinking is aimed at creating images of outer nature and its
processes.
However, when we turn to learning to speak, we come across
quite a different situation. With regard to the development of
this faculty, present-day science has been able to make only
tentative observations. Orthodox science has achieved quite
wonderful results, for instance in its investigations into the
animal world. And when it compares its findings with what
happens in a human being, it has made many discoveries that
deserve our full recognition. But with regard to the
comprehension of the processes taking place when a child is
learning to speak, contemporary science has remained rather in
the dark.
The
same applies to animal communication through sound. And here a
key question needs to be answered first. In order to speak, the
human being uses the larynx and other speech organs. The higher
animals also possess these organs, even if in a more primitive
form. If we disregard certain animals capable of producing
sounds that in some species have developed into a kind of
singing, but think instead of animals that emit only very
primitive sounds, an obvious question comes to mind (and I
raise this question not only from a causal, but also from quite
a utilitarian point of view). Why should such animals have a
larynx with its neighboring organs, since these are used for
speech only by the human being? Though the animal is not
capable of using them for speaking, they are there
nevertheless, and this even very markedly. Comparative anatomy
shows that even in relatively dumb animals — dumb in
comparison with the human being — organs of this kind
exist.
It
is a fact that these organs, at least to a certain extent, have
possibilities destined to be realized only by the human being.
Though incapable of making use of these organs for speech, the
animal nevertheless possesses them. What is the meaning of
this? A more advanced physiology will come to discover that the
animal forms of the various species depend, in each case, upon
the animal's larynx and its neighboring organs. If, for
instance, a certain animal grows into a lion, the underlying
causes have to be looked for in its upper chest organs. From
there, forces are radiating out that create the form of a lion.
If an animal grows into a cow, the cause of this particular
form is to be found in what becomes the speech organ in the
human being. From these organs, the forces creating the animal
forms radiate. One day this will have to be studied in detail
in order to learn how to approach morphology more
realistically. Then one will find out how to correctly study
animal forms, how to grasp the nature of the upper chest organs
and the way these pass over into the organs of the mouth. For
it is from this region that forces radiate creating the entire
animal form.
Human beings form these organs into speech organs on the basis
of their upright walk and freely moving arms. They take in what
works through sound and speech from their surroundings —
if we are dealing with present times. And what is it they
absorb in this way? Think of how the potential to give form to
the entire human organism lies in these organs. This means that
if, for instance, a child hears an angry or passionate voice,
if it is surrounded by loud and ill-tempered shouting, it will
absorb something the animal keeps out. The animal lets itself
be shaped only by the larynx and its neighboring organs, but
members of the human species allow vehement or passionate
voices to enter their inner being. These sounds flow into the
human form, right into the structure of the most delicate
tissues. If children hear only gentle speech in their
surroundings, this too flows right into the structure of their
finest tissues. It flows into their very formation, and
especially so into the more refined parts of their
organization. The coarser parts are able to withstand these
influences, as in the case of the animal. But whatever is taken
in through speech flows into the finer parts of the child's
organization. This is how the differing organizations of the
various nations come about. They all flow out of the language
spoken. The human being is an imprint of language. You will
therefore be able to appreciate what it means that in the
course of human evolution so many people have learned to speak
several languages. It has had the effect of making such people
more universal. These things are of immense importance for
human development.
And
so we see how during the early period of childhood the human
being is inwardly predisposed, right down to the blood
circulation, by what comes from the environment. These
influences become instrumental for the orientation of a
person's thought life. What happens in a human being through
learning to speak is something I ask you to consider most
seriously. This human faculty might best be understood in its
essence by comparing it with animal development. If an animal
could express what lives in its forming and shaping, emanating
from its upper chest organs, it would have to say, My form
conforms with what streams from my upper chest and mouth
organs, and I do not allow anything to enter my being that
would modify this form. So would the animal speak if it were
able to express this relationship. The human being, on the
other hand, would say, I adapt the upper organs of my chest and
mouth to the world processes that work through language, and I
adjust the structure of my innermost organization
accordingly.
The
human being adapts the most inward physical organization to
what comes from the surroundings through language, but not the
outer organization, which develops in a way similar to that of
animals. This is of immense importance for an understanding of
the entire human being. For out of language, the general
orientation of thought is developed, and because of this the
human being during the first three years of life is given over
entirely to what comes from the outer world, whereas the animal
is rigidly enclosed within itself. Accordingly, the way that we
find our relationship during these three years to statics and
dynamics, then to speech, and finally to thinking, is of such
profound importance. It is essential that this process develops
in the right way. No doubt you are all aware that this can
happen in the most varied ways in each individual human
being.
Whether these processes take their proper course depends on
many things. But the most fundamental factor during the first
stage of childhood is the right relationship between the
child's times of sleeping and waking. This means that we have
to acquire an instinctive knowledge of how much sleep a child
needs and how long it should be awake. For example, suppose
that a child sleeps too much, relatively speaking. In this case
it will develop a tendency to hold back in the activity of its
legs. If a child gets too much sleep, inwardly it will lose the
will to walk. It will become lethargic in its walking, and,
because of this, it will also become lazy in its speech. Such a
child will not develop a proper flow in its speech and it will
speak more slowly than it should according to its natural
disposition. When we meet such a person in later life —
unless this imbalance has been put right during the subsequent
school years — we sometimes despair because he or she
gives us the opportunity, one might say, to go for a little
walk between every two words spoken. There are such people who
have difficulties in finding their way from one word to the
next. And if we come across them and look at their childhood,
we will find that when they were learning to walk, they were
allowed to sleep too much.
Now
let us take the case of a child whose parents or those in
charge did not ensure that it had the relatively long hours of
sleep appropriate to its age. The inner being of such a child
is incapable of gaining the necessary control over its leg
movements. Instead of walking normally, the child will have a
floppy gait. In its speech, instead of controlling the
sequential flow of words with the forces of the soul, it will
let the words fall out of its mouth. The words of the sentences
will not cohere. This is quite different from the case of a
child who has difficulties in finding the right words. Here an
overabundance of speech energy prevents it from getting from
one word on to the next. Thus, in the instance mentioned
previously, I was referring to the opposite, namely to a lack
of the necessary energy. The words, as they follow each other,
are not carried along by the flow of the soul; instead, the
child waits for the right moment to “click in” the
next word. If this reaches extreme proportions, the result is
stammering. If one finds a tendency toward stammering in
people, especially in their twenties and thirties, one can be
sure that as young children they were not given enough sleep.
From this you can see how knowledge of the human being can give
us the fundamentals of what needs to be done.
Now
let us consider the entire human organism and see how during
the first three years it adapts itself to earthly conditions of
life, how it allows the principles of statics and dynamics,
underlying the faculty of autonomous movement, to flow into
what is produced through shaping the air in speech. In this
process there is much more involved that is of consequence for
the development of thinking. Compare this situation with that
of an adult, and you will see that in the child there is a much
stronger working together of these inner dynamics — of
walking, fidgeting, movements of arms, and creating mental
images. In the child all this flows together into a unity far
more than in the adult.
The
child remains a far more homogeneous being than a grown-up in
other respects as well. If, for instance, we as adults suck a
sweet (which we really shouldn't do), this merely amounts to a
titillation of the tongue, for the sweet taste does not go much
further than that. But the child is in a different position.
There the taste continues to spread. Children don't tell us
this and we don't notice it; nevertheless, the taste continues
to have an effect upon the child. Many among you will surely
have observed how, according to their individual makeup,
certain children are strongly permeated by soul and spiritual
forces and how this quality comes to outer expression in them.
It is far more interesting to watch the arms and legs of such a
lively child than its mouth, when it is standing some distance
away from a table where there is a bowl full of sugar. What the
mouth says is more or less obvious, but the way such a child
develops desire right down to its toes, or in the arms, as it
steers toward the sugar bowl: you can clearly see it is not
just a matter of the tongue anticipating sweetness, but changes
are taking place throughout the entire being of the child.
Here, tasting flows throughout the whole human being. If you
enter into these things without preconceptions, you will come
to realize that the young child, in a certain sense, is really
just one great sense organ. Mainly this is so during the very
first years (and more generally so between birth and the change
of teeth) and is, naturally, less so in later years. What has
become localized in the sense organs on the periphery of the
human body in the adult, permeates the child's entire
organism.
Of
course, you must understand these things with a certain
discernment, but fundamentally they are real. Their existence
is so real that orthodox physiology will one day be able to
prove them with regard to the most conspicuous of all our sense
organs, namely the human eye. People come to me quite
frequently and ask, Considering the present state of science,
what would you recommend as a suitable theme for a thesis?
(Theses, too, belong to the chapter on “school
misery.”) If such a question is asked by students of
physiology, I refer them to a topical problem. I tell them to
observe the developmental phases of the human eye as seen in
the embryo, and then to compare these with the corresponding
phases of the entire embryo from its germinal stage onward.
This will lead them to a kind of inverted parallel between the
eye and the whole embryo as its development progresses. They
will discover that, in a certain way, the eye begins its
development later, it omits the first stages. In contrast, the
embryo as an entity never reaches its final stage — as
the eye does — but stops short beforehand. This points to
something of great significance for embryology. If one looks at
the whole development of the embryo, one will come to recognize
that in these beginning stages we may observe ideal stages that
exist only as an indication. The eye continues to develop into
a perfected sense organ, whereas the embryo remains behind in
its development only to continue its further growth later
on.
But
the situation in the young child is still one where, in its
entire soul and spiritual development, the child's senses are
poured out, as it were, over all of its corporeality. In a
certain way the child is entirely a sense organ and it
confronts the world as such. This has to be borne in mind, not
only with regard to educational matters, but concerning
everything that is happening in the child's environment before
the change of teeth. We shall go into questions relating to
more practical methods of teaching at a later stage. But it is
only if one can see the fundamentals in the right light that
one will be able to find the correct answers to particular
human questions. One of these has been handed to me, which is
of extraordinary importance for anyone who does not merely look
at human evolution from external and well-known aspects of
history.
In
the past, as you know, there was far more discussion of sin and
original sin than is customary today. Now I do not wish to go
into this question in detail, I only want to outline what this
expression implied to those who studied such questions as we
study general scientific subjects today (not in its present
popular sense where such matters have undergone a certain
coarsening). To those inquiring minds, original sin stood for
all inherited characteristics.
[The German word for “original sin”
is Erbsunde, which means literally “inherited sin.”
— TRANS.]
This means that what a person had inherited from his or her
forebears was considered to represent original sin. Such was
the actual concept of this expression; only later on was it
changed to what we associate it with today. In earlier times,
it was definitely felt that physical features inherited from
one's ancestors gave rise to sinfulness.
And
what do we say today? We not only believe in studying inherited
characteristics most carefully, but we even encourage their
cultivation! If an earlier form of science had been asked to
judge the modern attitude, it would have responded, With all
your progress you have managed to come up with a most
extraordinary principle — you have actually taught
society to cultivate what is of sinful origin in the human
being! Because we know of historical events only from what is
rather superficially recorded in history books, we do not
notice such subtle changes of interpretation.
If
you look into what I have told you today — namely how the
child, through its relationship to dynamics and statics,
through learning to speak and to think, adapts itself to the
environment — then you will be able to distinguish
between the part played by purely physical heredity and that of
the environmental influences, which are far stronger than is
generally realized.
Often we hear it said that someone has inherited a particular
trait from either the father or the mother, whereas in reality
it is simply the result of imitating a certain way of walking,
or a characteristic gesture of hands, or a specific manner of
speaking, from those close to the person in his or her early
childhood. The child's total surrender to the influences of the
environment is what is of preeminent importance during the
first years and not heredity as such. In their proper place,
theories of heredity have their justification, but these also
need to be seen within the context of what I said yesterday,
when speaking about soft ground into which footmarks were
imprinted.
If
now some hypothetical Martian were to appear on the Earth, a
being unacquainted with the human race, it might explain the
origin of these footprints in the following way: Certain forces
have pushed up the Earth, more in some places and less in
others, which has caused the configuration of these footmarks.
This is how some people would explain the nature of the human
soul on the basis of heredity and as a result of the working of
the brain. Just as the footprints have been pressed into the
Earth from outside, so have environmental influences,
experienced during the childhood stage of imitation, through
learning to walk, speak, and think, been imprinted in the body,
and particularly so in the brain and the nervous system.
What orthodox physical psychology maintains is perfectly
correct. The brain is a clear imprint of what the human
individual is as a being of soul. One only has to know that the
brain is not the cause, the creator of the soul element, but
the ground on which the soul develops. Just as I cannot walk
without the ground under my feet, neither can I, as a physical
being, think without a brain. This is obvious. But the brain is
no more than the ground into which the activities of thinking
and speaking imprint what is received from the surrounding
world. It is not a matter of heredity.
Perhaps now you can see that people tend to have only unclear
notions about what is happening in the child during these first
three “nonacademic” years. During that time, to a
large extent, the foundations are being laid for a person's
whole inner life and configuration. I have already spoken of
how thinking, which develops later, turns toward the outer
world. It forms images of the natural world and its processes.
But the faculty of speaking, which is developed earlier,
absorbs — at least in nuances and in modified form
— what lives spiritually in language. And language,
coming from the child's environment, works upon the child's
soul. Through language we take in from our surroundings what we
make our own in the realm of the soul. The entire soul
atmosphere of our surroundings permeates us through the medium
of language. And we know that the child is one great sense
organ; we know that inner processes are inaugurated through
these soul impressions.
If
a child, for example, is frequently exposed to the outbursts of
an over-choleric father who utters his words as if in constant
anger, it will inwardly experience its father's entire soul
background through the way he forms his words. And this has an
effect not only on the child's soul, but, through the
atmosphere of anger surrounding it, causes the activity of fine
glandular secretions to increase as well. Eventually, the
glands of such a child become accustomed to an enhanced
activity of secretion, and this can affect the whole life of
such a child. Unless these harmful influences are balanced
through the right kind of education later on, a tendency will
develop toward nervous anxieties in any angry atmosphere. Here
you have an example of how a certain soul condition directly
enters and affects the physical organization. The attempt is
often made to comprehend the relationship between the human
soul and body, but a fact such as this, where during the first
period of life a physical condition directly manifests itself
as a symptom in the realm of the soul, simply goes
unnoticed.
While the child enters into the realm of statics and dynamics
working through its surroundings, it does something
unconsciously that is of great importance. Think for a moment
of how much trouble it means for many an older pupil to learn
the laws of statics and dynamics and to apply them, even if
only in the field of mechanics. The young child does this
unconsciously. It incorporates statics and dynamics into its
entire being. Anthroposophical research shows us that what most
accomplished experts in the field of statics and dynamics
manage to think out for the external world is child's play
compared with the way the child incorporates these complicated
forces while learning to walk. It does so through imitation.
Here is an opportunity to observe the strange outer effects of
imitation in just this situation. You can find many examples in
life. I will give you one.
There once were two girls of roughly the same age, who could be
seen walking side by side. This case happened many years ago,
in a town in central Germany. When they walked next to each
other, they both limped with one leg. While both were
performing the same limb movements, they displayed a marked
difference between the movements of their more mobile right
arms and right fingers and a somewhat paralyzed way they
carried their left arms and left fingers. Both children were
exact copies of each other. The slightly younger one was a true
copy of the older one. And yet, only the older sister had a
damaged left leg. Both legs of the younger one were perfectly
normal. It was only by sheer imitation that she copied the
movements of her handicapped sister. You can find similar cases
everywhere, though many of them, being less conspicuous, may
easily escape your notice.
When a child learns to walk, when it makes the principles of
statics and dynamics its own, it takes in the spirit in its
environment. One could formulate it in this way: In learning to
walk, we take hold of the soul element of our milieu. And in
what the child ought to learn first after entering earthly
life, it takes hold of the spirit in its surroundings.
Spirit, soul, and body — spirit, soul, and nature —
this is the right order in which the surrounding world
approaches the human being. But as we take hold of the soul
element in our surroundings, we also lay the foundations for
our future sympathies and antipathies in life. These flow into
us quite unnoticed. The way we learn to speak is, at the same
time, also the way we acquire certain fundamental sympathies
and antipathies. And the most curious aspect of it all is that
whoever is able to develop an eye for such matters (an eye of
the soul, of course) will find in the way a child walks —
whether it does so more with the heel or with the toes, whether
it has a firm footstep or whether it creeps along — a
preparation for the moral character the child will develop in
later life. Thus, we may say that together with the spiritual
element the child absorbs while learning to walk, there also
flows into it a moral element emanating from the environment.
And it is a good thing if one can learn to perceive how the
characteristic way a child moves its legs portends its moral
character, whether it will develop into a morally good or bad
person. For the most naturalistic quality belongs to what we
take in through our thinking during childhood. What we absorb
through language is already permeated by an element of soul.
What we make our own through statics and dynamics is pervaded
by moral and spiritual powers. But here statics and dynamics
are not of the kind we learn about in school; here they are
born directly out of the spirit.
It
is most important to look at these matters in the right way, so
that one does not arrive at the kind of psychology that is
based primarily on physical aspects. In this kind of psychology
one reads in fair detail what the author has managed to
establish in the first thirty pages of print, only to find that
relevant aspects of the soul are stuck on artificially. One
must no longer speak today of the human spirit, since an
Ecumenical Council abolished it, declaring that the human being
does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but only of body and
soul, the latter having certain spiritual properties.
[The
Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in
A.D. 869.]
The
trichotomy of the human being was dogmatically forbidden during
the Middle Ages, and today, our contemporary
“unbiased” science begins its psychology with the
declaration that the human being consists of body and soul
only. Blissfully unaware of how little “unbiased”
its findings are, it is still adhering to medieval dogmatism.
The most erudite university professors follow this ancient
dogma without having the slightest notion of it. In order to
arrive at an accurate picture of the human being, it is
essential to recognize all three constituent parts: body, soul,
and spirit.
Materialistic minds can grasp only human thinking — and
this is their tragedy. Materialism has the least understanding
of matter because it cannot see the spirit working through
matter. It can only dogmatize — there is only matter and
its effects. But it does not know that everywhere matter is
permeated with spirit. If one wants to describe materialism,
one has to resort to a paradoxical definition. Materialism is
the one view of the world that has no understanding of what
matter is.
What is important is to know exactly where the borderlines are
between the phenomena of body, soul, and spirit, and how one
leads over into the other. This is of special importance with
regard to the child's development during the first period of
life.
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