LECTURE IV
THE
CONNECTION OF THE
SPIRIT WITH
BODILY
ORGANS
8th
August, 1923.
Education
in any given epoch is naturally dependent on the general form of
civilization prevailing at the time. What the general form of
civilization has to offer, that can be passed on to the child in its
education by the teacher. When I was speaking of the Greeks, I told
you that they possessed an intimate knowledge of the whole human
being, and from this intimate knowledge were able to educate the
child in a way that is no longer possible for us to-day. The
knowledge of the whole human being possessed by the Greek was derived
entirely from the human body. The body of man was in a certain sense
transparent to him. The body revealed both soul and spirit in so far
as the Greeks comprehended these. And we have seen how the Greeks
educated the whole human being by taking the body as the
starting-point. All that could not be made to proceed from the body,
in the sense in which I showed that music proceeded from it, was
imparted to the human being comparatively late in life, indeed
only after his bodily education had been completed, at about the
twentieth year or even later.
We to-day
are in quite a different position. The very greatest illusions in
human evolution are really due to the belief that ancient epochs,
which had to do with a totally different humanity, can be renewed.
But particularly in this present age it behoves us to turn with
practical commonsense to reality. And if we understand this
historical necessity, we can only say: just as the Greeks had to
direct their whole education from the standpoint of the body, so must
we direct our education from the standpoint of the spirit. What we
have to do is to find the way to approach even bodily education from
out of the spirit. For whether we like it or not, mankind has now
come to a point where the spirit must be grasped as spirit and
attained to by human effort as the true essence of the human being.
Now it is
just when we desire to educate in accordance with the needs of our
epoch, that we feel how little progress has been made by civilization
in general, in respect of this permeation by the spirit. And then
there arises precisely in respect of education the longing to make
the spirit more and more man's own possession.
Where do
we find, let us say at a comparatively high level, the conception of
the spirit possessed by modern humanity? You must not be shocked if I
characterize this by examples from the height of modern spiritual
life. That which appears at the top merely symbolically, and within
the limits of the cultural life, rules, in reality, the whole of
civilization. In the course of our endeavour to grasp what
‘spirit’ is, we have to-day only reached the stage of
apprehending the spirit in ideas, in thinking. And perhaps the best
way to understand human thinking in our age in its greatest scope is
to observe this modern thought as it appears, let us say, in John
Stuart Mill or in Herbert Spencer. I asked you not to be shocked by
the fact that I point to the highest level of culture. For that which
in John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer appears merely, so to say, as
an outstanding symptom, in reality dominates every sphere, and is the
characteristic thinking of our civilization. When, therefore,
we ask to-day: How do men come to understand the spirit from which
education should proceed just as the Greek educated the body? We have
to answer that men conceive of the spirit just as John Stuart Mill or
Herbert Spencer conceived of it. Now what was their conception? Let
us think for a moment of the idea people have to-day when they speak
of the spirit. I do not here mean a nebulous and absolutely
indefinite image hovering somewhere ‘above the clouds.’
This is something that tradition has imparted and there is no actual
experience connected with it. We can only speak of the spirit in
humanity when we observe the attitude men have towards it, how they
work and what they do with it. And the spirit in our present
civilization is the spirit which John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer
had already worked into their philosophies. There indeed it is and
there it had to be sought. What we must observe is the way in which
men apply the spirit, not the way in which they speak about it in the
abstract.
And now
let us consider this ‘thought out’ spirit, for in our
time the spirit is really only a mental conception — a spirit
that can at most think philosophically. Compared with the full
content perceived by the Greek when he spoke of man, of Anthropos,
the element of spirit in which we whirl around when we think, is
something — well — distilled, unsubstantial to the
highest degree. When he spoke of man, the Greek had always the
picture of bodily man before him and the bodily man was at once a
revelation of soul and spirit. This man was somewhere, at some
time; this man had limits to his being; he was bounded by his skin.
And those who trained this man in the Greek gymnasia covered his skin
with oil in order to emphasize this boundary. Man was strongly
outlined. He was a wholly concrete entity, existing at some
particular point in space and time, with some particular form.
And now
think of the kind of thought we have about the spirit to-day. Where
is the spirit, what is its form? It is all indefinite, there is never
a ‘how’ or ‘when;’ never any definite form,
never any imagery. People do try indeed to build up some kind of
image, but let us look at John Stuart Mill's idea of imagery, for
instance. He said: When a man thinks, one idea is followed by a
second and a third. Man thinks indeed in ideas — which are the
inward images of words. He thinks in ideas and the ideas get
associated with one another. This really is the essence of the
discovery: one idea leads to a second, fourth, and so on. The ideas
associate themselves. And modern psychology speaks in the most varied
ways of associations of ideas as the real inner essence of spiritual
life. Now suppose we were to ask: What kind of feeling and perception
of our own being should we have if this association of ideas were
indeed our spirit? We stand in the world; now the ideas begin to
move; they associate themselves. And now we look back upon
ourselves, upon what we really are, as spirit, in these
associated ideas. This leads to a consciousness of the self that is
exactly like the consciousness a man would have if he were to look at
himself in a mirror and see a skeleton and moreover a dead skeleton.
Think of the shock you would have if you were to look in the mirror
and see a skeleton! In the skeleton, the bones associate, they are
held together by external means and are fixed one above the other,
according to mechanical law. Our idea of the spirit, therefore, is
merely a copy of mechanics. To those who have a full sense of
manhood, who feel healthy and are healthy, it is actually as though
they were to look at themselves in a mirror and see their spirit
composed of bones; for in the books describing association-psychology
one sees oneself as in a mirror. We may have this pleasure constantly
(not of course in the external, bodily sense) for it arises whenever
we compare the modern state of affairs with that of the Greeks.
Spiritually, we have this experience again and again. We go to our
philosophers, thinking that they may be able to give us self-knowledge,
and they place their books before us as a mirror in which we see
ourselves as a bony spectre in associations of ideas.
This is
what a man experiences to-day when he tries to think in a practical
way about education and to approach the real essence of education
from the standpoint of general civilization. No indication of what
education ought to be is given him but he is shown how to find a heap
of bones and how to piece together a skeleton. This is how the
ordinary man feels to-day. He longs for a new education, and
everywhere the question arises: How ought we to educate? But where
can he turn? He can only turn to the general form of civilization and
this civilization shows him that all he can build up is a skeleton.
And now a strong feeling for this civilization overwhelms the human
being. If his feeling is healthy he should be able to feel himself
permeated by this intellectualistic nature of modern thought and
ideas. And it is this that confuses him. He would like to think that
what the mirror reveals is sublime and perfect; he would like to be
able to make something of it, above all, he would like to make use of
it in education — but he cannot. One cannot educate with this.
If we are
to have the necessary enthusiasm as educationalists, therefore, we
must learn in the first place to perceive all that is not living, but
dead, in our intellectualistic culture — for the skeleton is a
dead thing. And if we saturate ourselves with the knowledge that our
thinking is dead we very soon discover that all death proceeds from
the living. If you were to find a corpse, you would not take it as
the original. You would only think of a corpse as something in itself
if you had no conception of a human being. If, however, you have a
conception of what a human being is, you know that the corpse is
something that has been left behind. From the nature of the corpse,
you do not only infer the human being, buy you know also that the
human being was there. If you recognize the kind of thinking that is
cultivated to-day as being a thing dead, as being a corpse, you can
relate it to something living. Moreover you then have the inner
impulse to make this thing living and so to re-vitalize the whole of
civilization. It will then be possible once more for something
practical to emerge from our modern civilization, something that can
reach the living man, just as the Greeks reached him in their education.
Let us not
undervalue perceptions with which a teacher can set out and, indeed,
must set out. The teachers at the Waldorf
School were first of all given a Seminary Course. It was not merely a
question of following the points of a given programme, but of
imparting an understanding in the soul of how to bring back all that
is the most treasured heritage of our age into relation with the
innermost being of man, in order to make dead thinking, colourless
thinking into thinking full of character — primitive, inorganic
thinking into truly ‘human’ thinking. In the first place,
then, thoughts must begin really to live in the teacher.
Now when a
thing lives, something follows from this life. The human being who
has definite place in space and time, who has spirit, soul, body, a
definite form and boundary, does not merely think; he also feels and
wills. And when a thought is communicated to him, this thought is the
germ both of a feeling and of an impulse of will; it becomes a complete
thing. The ideal of our modern thinking is to be what people call
‘objective,’ as passive and calm as possible, in short to
be a passive reflection of the outer world and a mere handmaiden of
experience. It contains no force; no impulse of feeling and of will
arises from it.
The Greek
took his start from the bodily man who was there before him. We must
take our start — and everyone feels this to be true —
from ideal man, but this ideal must not be merely theoretical; it
must live and it must contain the force of both feeling and will. The
first thing needful when we think about reform in education to-day is
that we grow beyond abstract and theoretical ideals.
Our
thoughts do not become gestures and they must become so once more.
They must not only be received by the child who sits passively, but
they must move his arms and hands and guide him when he passes out
into the world. Then we shall have unified human beings, for we must
again educate unified human beings; we shall have human beings who
experience their bodily education as a continuation of what we have
given them in the schoolroom. People do not think like this nowadays.
They think that what is given in the schoolroom is so much
intellectualism, something that it is necessary to give. But it
fatigues and strains the human being, perhaps even causes nervous
troubles. Something else must be added, so it is felt, and then
follows physical training. And so to-day we have two separate
branches: intellectualistic education and bodily training. The one
does not promote the other. We have two human beings in point of
fact, one nebulous and hypothetical and the other real, and we do not
understand this real man as the Greek understood him. We squint, as
it were, when we observe a human being, for there seems to be two in
front of us. We must again learn to ‘see straight,’ to
see the whole being of man as a unity, a totality.
This is the most important thing of all in education.
* * *
What we
must do, therefore, is to press forward beyond the more or less
theoretical maxims of education in existence to-day to an education
that is practical in the real sense of the word. From what I have
said, it follows that much depends upon how we again bring the spirit
which we really only grasp intellectually, to the human being, how we
make the spirit human in the true sense, so that this nebulous spirit
by means of which we observe men, shall become human. We must learn
how to behold man in the spirit, as the Greeks beheld him in the body.
As a
preliminary to-day, let me give an example which will explain how,
from out of the spirit, we can begin to understand the human being
right down into the body. As an example I will choose the way in
which the spirit may be connected with a definite organ in the human
being. I choose the most striking example, but merely provisionally.
These things will become more definite in the following lectures. Let
me show you the connection between the spirit and a process which the
Greeks too considered to be deeply symbolical and of extraordinary
significance in the development of the child: the coming of the
teeth. The time of the change of the teeth was, in Greece, the age at
which the child was given over to public education. And now let us
try to envisage this contact of the spirit with the human being, the
relation of the spirit to the human teeth. It will seem strange that
in discussing man as a spiritual being, I speak first of the teeth.
It only seems strange because as a result of modern culture, people
are quite familiar with the form of a tiny animal germ when they look
through the microscope, but they know very little about what lies
before them. It is realized that the teeth are necessary for eating;
that is the most striking thing about them. It is known that they are
necessary for speech, that sounds are connected with them, that the
air flows in a particular way from the lungs and the larynx through
the lips and palate, and that certain consonants have to be formed by
the teeth. It is known, therefore, that the teeth serve a useful
purpose in eating and speaking.
Now a
truly spiritual understanding of the human being shows us something
else as well. If you are able to study man in the way I described in
the first lecture, it will dawn on you that the child develops teeth
not only for the sake of eating and speaking, but for quite a
different purpose as well. Strange as it sounds to-day, the child
develops teeth for the purpose of thinking. Modern science little
knows that the teeth are the most important of all organs of thought.
For the child, up to the time of the second dentition, these teeth
constitute the organ of thought. As thinking arises spontaneously in
the child in its interplay with its environment, as the life of
thought rises from the dim sleeping and dreaming life of very early
childhood, this whole process is bound up with what is happening in
the head where the teeth are pressing through; it is bound up with
the forces that are pressing outwards from the head. The forces that
press the teeth out from the jaw are the same forces that now bring
thought to the surface from the dim, sleeping and dreaming life of
childhood. With the same degree of intensity as it teethes, the child
learns to think.
Now how
does the child learn to think? It learns to think because it is an
imitative being and as such is wholly given up to its environment.
Right into its innermost being it imitates what is going on in its
environment and what happens in this environment under the impulses
of thoughts. In exactly the same measure as thought then springs up
in the child, in exactly the same measure do the teeth emerge. In
effect, the force that appears in the soul as thinking lies within
these teeth.
Let us now
follow the further development of the child. At about the seventh
year, the child undergoes the change of teeth. He gets his second
teeth. I have already said that the force which produces the first
and second teeth has been present in the whole organism of the child
— only it shows itself in the strongest form in the head. The
second teeth only come once. The forces which drive the second teeth
out from the organism of the child do not work again as physical
forces in the course of earthly life up till death. They become
powers of the soul, powers of the spirit; they vivify the inner being
of the human soul. Thus, when we observe the child between the
seventh and fourteenth years of life, with particular regard to his
characteristic qualities of soul, we find that what now appears
between the seventh and fourteenth years as qualities of soul, namely
in the child's thinking, worked up to the seventh year upon the
organs. It worked in the physical organism, forced out the teeth,
reached its culmination as physical force with the change of teeth
and then changed itself into an activity of soul.
These
things can, of course, only be truly observed when one presses
forward to the mode of cognition which I described in a previous
lecture as the first stage of exact clairvoyance, as Imaginative
Knowledge. The abstract intellectual knowledge of the human being
that is common to-day does not lead to this other kind of knowledge.
Thought must vivify itself from within so that it becomes
imaginative. Nothing whatever can really be grasped by
intellectualistic thinking; with it everything remains external. One
looks at things and forms mental images of what one sees. But
thinking can be inwardly re-enforced, it can be made active. Then one
no longer has abstract intellectualistic thoughts but
imaginative pictures which now fill the soul in place of the
intellectual thoughts. At the first stage of exact clairvoyance, as I
have described it, one can perceive indeed how, besides the forces of
the physical body, there is working in man a super-sensible body, if
you will forgive the paradoxical expression. One becomes aware of the
super-sensible in man, and one of its characteristics in comparison
with the physical is that it cannot be weighed. This super-sensible
body I call the etheric body, which strives away from the earth out
into cosmic spaces. It contains the forces that are opposed to
gravity and strives perpetually against gravity.
Just as
ordinary physical knowledge teaches us of the physical body of man,
so does Imaginative Knowledge, the first stage of exact clairvoyance,
teach us of the etheric body that is always striving to get away from
earthly gravity. And just as we gradually learn to relate the
physical body to its environment, so do we also learn to relate the
etheric body to its environment.
In
studying the physical body of man, we look outside in Nature, in
material Nature, for the substances of which it is composed. We
realize that everything in man which is subject to gravity, his
heaviness, his weight, all this has weight in outer Nature as well.
It enters into man through the assimilation of nourishment. In this
way we obtain, as it were, a natural conception of the human organism
in so far as the organism is physical. Similarly, through Imaginative
Knowledge we obtain a conception of the relationship of the
individual etheric body or body of formative forces in man to the
surrounding world. That which in Spring drives the plants out of the
soil against gravity in all directions towards the Cosmos; that which
organizes the plants, brings them into relation with the
upward-flowing stream of light, with that part of the chemistry of
the plant, in short, which works upwards, all this must be related to
the etheric body of man, just as salt, cabbage, turnip and meat are
related to the physical body. Thus in the first stage of exact
clairvoyance, this rich, comprehensive, unified thought is able to
approach the etheric body or body of formative forces of man, this
‘second Man,’ as it were. Up to the change of teeth, this
body of formative forces is most intimately bound up with the
physical body. There from within, it organizes the physical body; it
is the force which drives out the teeth. When the human being gets
his second teeth, the part of the etheric body that drives the teeth
out has no more to do for the physical body. Its activity is
emancipated, as it were, from the physical body. With the change of
teeth the inner etheric forces which have pressed the teeth out, are
freed and with these etheric forces we carry on the free thought that
begins to assert itself in the child from the seventh year onwards.
The force of the teeth is no longer a physical force as it was in the
child during the time when the teeth are the organs of thought; it is
now an etheric force. But the same force which produced the teeth is
now working in the etheric body as thought. When we perceive
ourselves as thinking human beings and feel that thinking seems to
proceed from the head (many people only have this experience when
thinking has brought on a headache), a true knowledge shows us that
the force with which we think from out of the head is the same as the
force which was once contained in the teeth.
Thus our
knowledge brings us near to the unity of the being of man. We learn
once again how the physical is connected with what is of the soul. We
know that the child first thinks with the forces of the teeth and
this is why teething troubles are so inwardly bound up with the whole
life of the child. Think of all that happens when the child is
teething! All these teething troubles arise because the process of
teething is so intimately connected with the innermost life, with the
innermost spirituality of the child. The growth-forces of the teeth
are freed and become the forces of thought in the human being, the
free, independent force of thought. If we have the necessary gift of
observation, we can see this process of becoming independent; we see
how with the change of teeth, thinking emancipates itself from
bondage to the body. And what happens now? In the first place the
teeth become the helpers of that which permeates thought, speech. The
teeth, which had, at first, the independent task of growing in
accordance with the forces of thought, are now pressed down one
stage, as it were. Thinking, which now no longer takes place in the
physical body but in the etheric body, descends one stage. This
already happens during the first seven years, for the whole process
goes on successively, merely reaching its culmination with the coming
of the second teeth. But then, when thought seeks expression in
speech, the teeth become the helpers of thought.
And so, we
look at the human being; we see his head; in the head the
growth-forces of the teeth free themselves and become the force of
thinking. Then, pressed down, as it were, into speech, we have all
the processes for which the teeth are no longer directly responsible,
because the etheric body now takes over the responsibility. The teeth
become the helpers of speech. In this, their relationship with
thought is still apparent. When we understand how the dental sounds
find their way into the whole process of thinking, how man takes the
teeth to his aid when through sounds like d or t, he brings the
definite thought-element into speech, we again see in the dental
sounds, the particular task performed by the teeth.
I have
shown you by this example of the teeth — which may perhaps seem
very grotesque — how we come to understand the human being from
out of the spirit. If we proceed in this way, thinking gradually
ceases to be an abstract drifting in associated ideas, but connects
itself with man, it goes into the man. Then we no longer see merely
physical functions in the human being, such as biting by the teeth or
at most movement in the dental sounds of speech, but the teeth become
for us an outer picture, a Nature Imagination of the process of
thinking. Thinking points to the teeth and says to us, as it were:
There in the teeth is my outer countenance! When we really come to
understand the teeth, thought that is otherwise abstract and nebulous
assumes definite picture-form. We see how thought is working in the
head at the place where the teeth lie and how thought develops from
the first to the second teeth, The whole process again takes on
definite form. A real image of the spirit begins to arise in Nature
herself. The spirit is once again creative.
We need
something more than modern anthropology, for modern anthropology
studies the human being in a wholly external way, and associates the
elements of his being just as the different properties of ideas are
associated. What we need is a kind of thinking that is not afraid to
press onwards to the inner being of man nor to speak of how the
spirit becomes teeth and works in the teeth. This indeed is what we
need, for then we penetrate into the being of man from the spirit.
And then the element of art arises. The abstract, theoretical and
unpractical mode of observation, which merely evolves a human being
with a skeleton-like thinking must be led over into imaginative
thought. Theoretical observation passes over into artistic feeling
and becomes artistic, creative power. To see the spirit actively at
work within one must, to begin with, mould the teeth. The element of
art, then, begins to be the guide to the first stage of exact
clairvoyance — that of Imaginative Knowledge. Here we begin to
understand man in his real being. Man is only an abstraction in our
thinking to-day.
Now in
education, the being with whom we find ourselves confronted is the
real man. He stands there, but there is an abyss between us. We stand
here with our abstract spirit, and we must cross this abyss. We must
before all else show how we can cross it. All we know of man to-day
is how to put a cap on his head! We do not know how to put the spirit
into his whole being, and this we must learn to do. We must learn how
to clothe the human being inwardly, spiritually, just as we have
learned how to clothe him externally, so that the spirit is treated
just as the outer vesture is treated. When we approach the human
being in this way, we shall attain to a living Pedagogy and a living
Didactic.
* * *
Just as
the period of life at about the seventh year is significant in
earthly existence on account of all the facts which I have described,
so, similarly, is there a point in the earthly life of man which on
account of the symptoms which then arise in life, is no less
significant. The actual points of time are, of course, approximate
occurring in the case of some human beings earlier in others later.
The indication of seven-yearly periods is approximate. But round
about the fourteenth or fifteenth year, there is once more a time of
extraordinary importance in earthly existence. This is the age when
puberty is reached. But puberty, the expression of the life of sex is
only the most external symptom of a complete transformation that
takes place in the being of man between the seventh and fourteenth
years. Just as we must seek in the growth-forces of the teeth, in the
human head, for the physical origin of thought that frees itself
about the seventh year of life and becomes a function of soul, so we
must look for the activity of the second soul-force, namely feeling,
in other parts of the human organism.
Feeling
releases itself much later than thinking from the physical
constitution of the human being. And during the time of
tutelage from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the child's
feeling-life is really still inwardly bound up with its physical
body. Thinking is already free; feeling is, between the seventh and
fourteenth years, still bound up with the body. All the feelings of
joy, of sorrow and of pain that express themselves in the child still
have a strong physical connection with the secretions of the organs,
the acceleration or retardation, speed or slackening of the breathing
system and so on. If our perception is keen enough, we can observe in
these very phenomena the great transformation that is taking
place in the life of feeling, when the outer symptoms of the change
make their appearance. Just as the appearance of the second teeth
denotes a certain climax of growth, so at the close of the subsequent
life-period, when feeling is gradually released from its connection
with the body and becomes a soul function, these processes are
expressed in speech. This may be observed most clearly in boys. The
voice changes; the larynx reveals the change. The head, therefore,
reveals the change which lifts thinking out of the physical organism,
and the breathing system, the seat of the organic rhythmic activity,
expresses the emancipation of feeling. Feeling detaches itself from
the bodily constitution and becomes an independent function of soul.
We know how this expresses itself in the boy. The larynx changes and
the voice gets deeper. In the girl different phenomena appear in
bodily growth and development; but this is only the external aspect.
Anyone who
has reached the stage of exact, imaginative clairvoyance, knows, for
he perceives it, that the male physical body transforms the larynx at
about the fourteenth year of life. The same thing happens in the
female sex to the etheric body, or body of formative forces. The
change occurs in the etheric body and the etheric body of the female
takes on, as etheric body, a form exactly resembling the physical
body of the male. Again, the etheric body of the male at the
fourteenth year takes on a form resembling the physical body of the
female. However extraordinary it may appear to a mode of knowledge
that clings to the physical, it is nevertheless the case that at this
all-important point of life, the male bears within him the etheric
female and female the etheric male from the fourteenth year onwards.
This is expressed differently through the corresponding symptoms in
the male and female.
Now if one
reaches the second stage of exact clairvoyance (it is described in
greater detail in my books), if beyond Imagination, one attains
to Inspiration — the actual perception of the purely spiritual
that is no longer bound up with the physical body of man — then
one becomes aware of how in actual fact at this important time round
about the fourteenth and fifteenth years a third human member
develops into a state of independence. In my books I have
called this third member the astral body according to an older
tradition. This astral body is more essentially of the nature of soul
than the etheric body; indeed the astral body is already of the soul
and spirit. It is the third member of man and constitutes his second
super-sensible being.
Up to the
fourteenth or fifteenth years, this astral body works through the
physical organism and, at the fourteenth or fifteenth year, becomes
independent. Thus there devolves upon the teacher a most significant
task, namely to help the development to independence of this being of
soul and spirit which lies hidden in the depths of the organism up to
the seventh or eight years and then gradually frees itself. It is
this gradual process of detachment that we must assist, if we have
the child to teach between the ages of seven and fourteen. And then,
if we have acquired the kind of knowledge of which I have spoken, we
notice how the child's speech becomes quite a different thing. The
crude science of to-day — if I may call it so — concerns
itself merely with the obvious soul qualities of the human being and
speaks of the other phenomena as secondary sexual
characteristics. To spiritual observation, however, the
secondary phenomena are primary and vice versa.
This
metamorphosis, the whole way in which feeling withdraws itself
from the organs of speech, is of extraordinary significance.
And as teachers and educationalists it is our task, a task that
really inspires one's innermost being, gradually to release speech
from the bodily constitution. How wonderful in a child of seven are
the natural, spontaneous movements of the lips which come from
organic activity! When the seven-year-old child utters the labial
sounds, it is quite different from the way in which the child of
fourteen or fifteen utters them. When the seven-year-old child utters
the labial sounds, it is an organic activity; the circulation of the
blood and of the fluids into the lips is entirely involuntary. When
the child reaches his twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth years, this
organic activity is transferred into the organism proper and the soul
activity of feeling has to emerge and to move the lips voluntarily,
in order that the element of feeling in speech may come to expression.
Just as
the thought-element in speech, the hard thought-element is manifested
in the teeth, so is the soft, loving element of feeling manifested in
the lips. And it is the labial sounds which impart warmth and loving
sympathy to speech, sympathy with another being and the conveying of
it. This marvellous transition from an organic functioning of the
lips to a functioning conditioned by the soul, this development of
the lips in the organic soul nature of the human being is a thing in
which the teacher can take part and thereby a most wonderful
atmosphere can be brought into the school. For just as we see the
super-sensible, etheric element that permeates the body emerging
at the seventh year of life as independent thinking-power, so do we
see the element of soul and spirit emerging at the age of fourteen or
fifteen. As teachers we help to bring the soul and spirit to birth.
What Socrates meant is seen at a higher level.
In the
following lectures I shall explain the new elements that appear in
walking, in movement, even when the human being is twenty or
twenty-one years old in the third period of life. It is enough to-day
to have shown how thinking emancipates itself from organic activity
and how feeling goes on emancipating itself from organic activity
until the fourteenth or fifteenth year; to have shown how this gives
us insight into man's development and how an otherwise merely
abstract mode of thinking becomes a picture, an
‘imagination;’ to have shown also how that which finds
expression in human speech, in words, actually appears in its true
form as soul and spirit when the human being reaches his fourteenth
or fifteenth year.
Hence it
can be said that if we would reach the human being from the
standpoint of living thought, we must soar into the realm of art. If
we would bring the living spirit, the spiritual essence of feeling to
the human being, we must not merely set about this with an artistic
sense as in the former case, but also with a religious sense. For the
religious sense alone can penetrate to the reality of the spirit.
Education
between the seventh and fourteenth years, therefore, can only
be carried on in the truly human sense when it is carried on in an
atmosphere of religion, when it becomes almost a sacramental office,
not of course in a sentimental, but in a truly human sense. And so we
see what happens when a man brings life and soul to his otherwise
abstract thinking, thinking that merely arises from the association
of ideas. He finds the way to an artistic apprehension of man; to an
apprehension of man within the religious life. Art and religion are
thus united in education. Light is thrown not only on the question of
the pupil, but on that of the teacher as well when we realize that
pedagogy should become so practical, so clear and so living a
knowledge that the teacher can only be a true educator of youth when
he is able inwardly to become a thoroughly religious man.
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