LECTURE V
THE
EMANCIPATION OF THE
WILL IN THE
HUMAN
ORGANISM
9th
August, 1923.
In
yesterday's lecture I tried to show how thinking and feeling become
independent at about the seventh and fourteenth years of life
respectively and release themselves from the bodily constitution of
the human being. To-day I want to show how the will in the being of
man gradually presses on to its independence during the process
of growth.
The human
will really remains bound up with the organism longest of all. Until
about the twentieth or twenty-first year of life, the will is very
largely dependent on organic activity. This organic activity is
generated in particular by the way in which the breathing is carried
over into the blood circulation, which then in its turn, by the inner
fire or warmth thus engendered in the organism, takes hold of the
functions of movement. It lays hold of the force arising in legs,
feet, arms and hands when man moves and transforms it into a
manifestation of the will.
It may be
said that everything of the nature of will in the child, even
including “children” between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-one, is dependent upon the manner in which the forces of the
organism play over into movement. The teacher especially must cherish
the power for unprejudiced observation of such things. He must be
able to notice that a child has a strong will or the predisposition
to a strong will if, when he walks, he places the back of his foot,
his heel, firmly on the ground and that he is endowed with a less
energetic will if he uses the front part of his foot and has a
tripping gait.
All this
however, the way in which the legs move, the capacity to prolong the
movement of arms into dexterity of the fingers, all this is still an
outer, physical manifestation of the will in the boy or girl, even
after the fifteenth year. Only at about the twentieth year does the
will release itself from the organism in the same way as feeling
releases itself at about the fourteenth year and thinking at about
the seventh year at the change of teeth. The external processes that
are revealed by the freed thinking, however, are very striking
and can readily be perceived: the change of teeth is a remarkable
phenomenon in human life. The emancipation of feeling is less
so; it expresses itself in the adjustment of the so-called secondary
sexual organs — their development in the case of the boy, the
corresponding transformation in the girl — the change of voice
in the boy and the change of the inner life habits of the girl, and
so forth. Here, the external symptoms of the metamorphosis in the
human being are less striking. Feeling, therefore, becomes
independent of the physical constitution in a more inner sense.
The outer
symptoms of the emancipation of the will at about the twentieth or
twenty-first year are still less apparent and are therefore
practically unnoticed by an age like ours, which lives in
externalities. In our time, in their own opinion, human beings are
“grown-up” when they have reached the age of fourteen or
fifteen. Our young people do not recognise that between the fifteenth
and twenty-first years they should be acquiring not only outer
knowledge but inner character and, above all, will power. Even before
the age of twenty-one they set up as reformers, as teachers, and
instead of applying themselves to what they can learn from their
elders, they begin to write pamphlets and things of that kind. This
is quite understandable in an age that is directed to the
externalities of life. The decisive change that takes place at about
the twentieth or twenty-first year is hidden from such an age because
it is wholly of an inner kind. But there is such a change and
it may be described in the following way.
Up to his
twenty-first year of life, approximately of course, man is not a
self-contained personality; he is strongly subject to earthly
gravity, to the earth's force of attraction. He struggles with
earthly gravity until about the twenty-first year. And in this
connection, external science will make many discoveries that are
already known to the “exact clairvoyance” of which I
spoke yesterday.
In our
blood, in the blood corpuscles, we have iron. Until about the
twenty-first year, the nature of these blood corpuscles is such that
their gravity preponderates. From the twenty-first year onwards, the
being of man receives an upward impulse from below; an upward impulse
is given to all his blood. From the twenty-first year he sets the
sole of his foot on the earth otherwise than he did before. This,
indeed, is not known to-day but it is a fact of fundamental
importance for the understanding of the human being in so far
as this understanding has to be revealed in education. From the
twenty-first year onwards, with every tread of the foot there works
through the human organism from below upwards, a force which did not
work before. Man becomes a being complete in himself, one who has
paralysed the downward-working forces by forces which work from below
upwards, whereas before this age all the force of his growth and
development flowed downwards from the head. This downward stream of
forces is strongest of all in the little child up to the seventh year
of life. The whole process of bodily organization during this period
has its start in the head-organism. Up to the seventh year the head
does everything and only when thinking is set free with the change of
teeth, does the head also release itself from this strong downward
streaming force.
A great
deal is known to-day about positive and negative magnetism: a great
deal is known about positive and negative electricity, but very
little indeed is known about what is going on in man himself. The
fact that the forces streaming from the head to the feet and from the
feet to the head are only organized in the course of the first two
decades of life, is an anthroposophical truth of great significance,
fundamentally significant, indeed, for the whole of education. It is
a truth of which people to-day are wholly unconscious. And yet all
education is really based on this question. For why do
we educate? That is the great question.
Standing
as we do within the human and not in the animal kingdom, we have to
ask ourselves: Why do we educate? Why is it that the animals grow up
and carry out the functions of their lives without education? Why is
it that the human being cannot acquire what he needs in life merely
through observation and imitation? Why has a teacher to intervene in
the child's freedom? This is a question that is practically never
raised because these things are taken as a matter of course. But one
can only become a true teacher when one ceases to take this question
as a matter of course, when one realises that it is an interference
with the child to stand in front of him and want to educate him. Why
should the child put up with it? We regard it as our obvious business
to educate our children — but not their subconscious life. And
so we talk a great deal about the children's naughtiness and it never
occurs to us that in their subconscious life — not in their
clear consciousness — we must appear very comic to the children
when we teach them something from outside. They are quite justified
in their immediate feeling of antipathy. And the great question for
education is this: How can we change what at the outset is bound to
be unsympathetic to children into something sympathetic? Now the
opportunity to do this is given between the seventh and fourteenth
years. For at the seventh year, the head, which is the bearer of
thinking, becomes independent. It no longer generates the
downward-flowing forces so strongly as it did in the child up to the
seventh year. It settles down, as it were, and looks after its own
affairs.
Now only
when the fourteenth or fifteenth year has been reached do the organs
of movement assume a personal nature of will. The will now becomes
independent in the organs of movement. The forces flowing from below
upwards, forces which have to become those of will, begin to work for
the first time. For all will works from below upwards; all thought
from above downwards. The direction of thought is from heaven to
earth; the direction of will from earth to heaven. These two
functions are not bound up with each other, not enclosed one within
the other, between the seventh and fourteenth years. In the middle
system of man, where breathing and circulation live and whence they
originate, there lives also the feeling-nature of man which frees
itself during this period. If we rightly develop the feeling-nature
between the seventh and fourteenth years we set up a true
relationship between the downward-flowing and the upward-flowing
forces. It comes to no less than this, that between the child's
seventh and fourteenth years, we have to bring his thinking into a
right relationship with his will, with his willing. And in this it is
possible to fail. It is on this account that we have to educate the
human being, for in the animal this interplay of thinking and willing
— in so far as the animal has dreamlike thought and will
— comes about of itself. In the human being, the interplay of
thought and will does not come about of itself. In the animal, the
process is natural; in the human being it must become a moral process.
And because here on earth man has the opportunity of bringing about
this union of his thinking with his willing, therefore it is that he
can become a moral being. The whole character of man, in so far as it
proceeds from the inner being, depends upon the true harmony being
established by human activity between thinking and willing. The
Greeks brought about this harmonization of thinking and willing by
again calling into play in their gymnastics the stream of forces
flowing from the head into the limbs which is there naturally in the
earliest years of life and allowing the arms and legs so to move in
dancing and wrestling that the head-activity was poured into the
limbs. Now we cannot return to Greek culture nor have that
civilization over again. We must take our start from the spirit. And
so we must understand how in the twenty-first year, the will of man
is freed as a result of the inner processes in the organs of movement
which have been described, just as feeling was freed at the
fourteenth year and thinking at the seventh year.
Modern
civilization is not awake to this. It has slept away its insight into
the fact that education must consist in bringing the will, which
appears in full freedom as a quality of soul about the twentieth
year, into union with the thinking that is already released at the
seventh year. We only acquire true reverence for the development of
the human being when we bring the spirit into contact with the bodily
nature of man, as we showed yesterday with regard to thinking and
feeling and as we have just tried to show with regard to the will. We
must see the will at work in the organs of movement, in the quite
distinctive movement of fingers and arms, in the individuality of the
tread of the feet when the twentieth or twenty-first year is reached.
Preparation for this has, however, been going on since the fifteenth
year. If we can thus get back the spirit that is no more a mere
association of ideas, a skeleton spirit, but a living
spirit which can now even perceive how a man walks, how he moves his
fingers, then we have again come back to the human being and we can
educate once more.
The Greeks
still had this power of perception instinctively. It was gradually
lost but only very slowly. It continued as a tradition down to the
sixteenth century, and the most conspicuous thing about the
sixteenth century is that civilized humanity as a whole loses an
understanding of the relation between thinking and willing. Since the
sixteenth century people have begun to reflect about education and
yet have no regard for the weightiest problems of the understanding
of man. They do not understand man and they want to educate him. This
is the tragedy that has existed since the sixteenth century and has
continued up to our present age.
People
feel and realize nowadays that alteration must be made in education.
On all sides educational unions and leagues for educational reform
are springing up. People feel that education needs something but they
do not approach the fundamental problem, which is this: How can
one harmonize thinking and willing in the human being? At most they
say: “There is too much intellectualism; we must educate less
intellectually, we must educate the will.” Now the will must
not be educated for its own sake. All talk as to which is best, the
education of thought or the education of will, is amateurish. This
question alone is really practical and pertinent to the nature of
man: How can we set up a true harmony between the thinking that is
freeing itself in the head and the will that is becoming free in the
limbs? If we would be educators in the true sense, we must have
neither a one-sided regard to thinking nor a one-sided regard to
willing, but we must envisage the whole being, in all its aspects.
This we cannot do with the associated ideas to which we are
accustomed when we speak of spirit to-day: it is only possible to do
so when we regard the thinking which dominates the present age as the
corpse of a living thinking and when we understand that we must work
our way through to this living thinking by self-development.
In this
connection let me here place frankly before you one fundamental
principle of all educational reform. I must ask your forbearance if I
state this truth quite frankly, because to utter it seems almost like
an insult to modern humanity and one is always reluctant to be
insulting. It is a peculiarity of present-day civilization that
people know that education must be different. Hence the innumerable
unions for educational reform. People know quite well that education
is not right and that it ought to be changed; but they are just as
firmly convinced that they know very well indeed what education ought
to be, that each one in his union can say how one ought to educate.
But they should consider this: If education is so bad that it must be
fundamentally reformed, they themselves have suffered from it and
this bad education has not necessarily made them capable of knowing
that they and their contemporaries have been badly educated but they
equally assume that they know perfectly well what really good
education ought to be! And so the educational unions spring up like
so many mushrooms.
The
Waldorf School method did not take its start from this principle but
from the principle that men do not yet know what education ought to
be and that first of all one must acquire a fundamental knowledge of
the human being. Therefore the first seminary course for the Waldorf
School contained fundamental teaching concerning the being and
nature of man, in order that the teachers might gradually learn what
they could not yet know — namely, how children ought to be
educated. For it is only possible to know how to educate when one
understands the real being of man.
The first
thing that was imparted to the teachers of the Waldorf School in the
seminary course was a fundamental knowledge of man. Thus it was hoped
that from an understanding of the true nature of man they would
gain inner enthusiasm and love for education. For when one
understands the human being the very best thing for the practice of
education must spring forth from this knowledge. Pedagogy is love for
man resulting from knowledge of man; at all events it is only on this
foundation that it can be built up.
Now to one
who observes human life as expressed in present-day civilization in
an external way, all the educational unions will be an outer sign
that people know a great deal nowadays about how children ought to be
educated. To one who has a deeper perception of human life, it is not
so. The Greeks educated by instinct; they did not talk very much
about education. Plato was the first who spoke a little, not
very much, about education from the standpoint of a kind of
philosophical mis-education.
It was not
until the sixteenth century that people began to talk a great deal
about education. As a matter of fact people speak as a rule very
little of what they can do and much more of what they cannot! To one
possessed of a deeper knowledge of human nature, a great deal of talk
about any subject is not a sign that it is understood; on the
contrary, human life reveals to him that when in any age there is a
tendency to discuss some subject very much, this is a sign that very
little is known about it. And so for one who can truly see into
modern civilization, the emergence of the problem of education lies
in the fact that no longer is it known how the development of man
takes place.
In making
a statement like this one must of course ask pardon, and this I do,
with all due respect. Truth, however, cannot be concealed; it must be
stated.
The
following is interpolated from a source that the Editor cannot trace.
It is not in his original German text. — Ed.: —
If the Waldorf School method achieves something, it will achieve
it by substituting for ignorance of the human being, knowledge of the human
being, by substituting for mere external anthropological talk about
man, a true anthroposophical insight into his inner nature. And this
is the bringing of the living spirit right down into the bodily
constitution, the bodily functions.
Some time in the future it will be just natural to speak of the
human being with knowledge as it is mostly natural nowadays to speak with
ignorance. Some day it will be known, even in general civilization,
how thinking is connected with the force which enables the teeth to
grow. Some day people will be able to observe how the inner force of
feeling is connected with that which comes from the chest organs and
is expressed in the movement of the lips. The change in the lip
movements and the control of them by feeling which sets in between
the seventh and fourteenth years will be an outer significant sign of
an inner development of the human being. It will be observed
how the consolidation of the forces flowing from below upwards, which
occurs in the human being between the ages of fourteen and
twenty-one, takes place and is checked in the human head itself. Just
as the quality of thought is made manifest in the teeth and that
which comes from feeling in the lips, so a true knowledge of man will
see in the highly significant organism of the palate which bounds the
cavity of the mouth at the back, the way in which the upward-flowing
forces work and, arrested by the gums, pass over into speech. If at
some future time people do not only look through the microscope or
the telescope when they want to see the most minute or the greatest,
but observe all that confronts them outwardly in the world —
and this they do not see to-day, in spite of microscope and telescope
— then they will perceive how thinking lives in the labial
sounds, willing in the palatal sounds which particularly influence
the tongue, and how through the labial and palatal sounds, speech,
like every other function, becomes an expression of the whole human
being.
Attempts are made to-day to ‘read’ the lines of the
hand and other external phenomena of this kind. People try to understand
human nature from symptoms. These things can only be rightly understood
when it is realized that one must seek for the whole human
being in what he expresses; when people perceive how speech, which
makes man as an individual being into a social being, is in its inner
movement and configuration a reflection of the whole man. Dental
sounds, labial sounds, palatal sounds do not exist in speech by
accident; they are there because in the dental sounds the head, in
the labial sounds the breast system, in the palatal sounds the rest
of the being of man wins its way into speech.
Our civilization must therefore learn to speak about the
revelation of the whole human being and then the spirit will be brought
to the whole man. Then the way will be found from the spirit of man into
the most intimate expressions of his being, namely of his moral life.
And out of this there will proceed the inner impulse for an education
such as we need.
* * *
The most
significant document that can reveal to us how different must be our
conception of the world and its civilization from that of olden
times, is the Gospel of St. John — the deepest and most
beautiful document of Greek culture. This marvellous Gospel shows,
even in the first line, that we must rise to ideas of quite a
different nature, to living ideas,
if we would learn from ancient times something for our present age.
In the Gospel of St. John, Greek thought and feeling were the vesture
for the newly arising Christianity. The first line runs: ‘In
the beginning was the WORD’ — in Greek LOGOS. But
in the ordinary recital of ‘word’ there remains nothing
of what the writer of the Gospel of St. John felt when he wrote
‘In the beginning was the WORD.’ The feeble,
insignificant meaning we have when we express ‘word’ was
certainly not in the mind of the writer of his Gospel when he wrote
the line. He would mean something quite different. With us, the
‘word’ is a feeble expression of abstract thoughts; to
the Greeks it was still a call to the human will. When a syllable was
uttered, the body of a Greek would tingle to express this syllable
even through his whole being. The Greek still knew that one does not
only express oneself by saying ‘It is all one to me.’ He
knew how, when he heard the phrase ‘It is all one to me,’
he tingled to make those corresponding movements (shrugging the
shoulders). The word did not only live in the organs of speech but in
the whole of man's organism of movement. But humanity has forgotten
these things.
If you
want to realize how the word — the word that in ancient Greece
still summoned forth a gesture — how the word can live through
the whole being of man, you should go to the demonstration of
Eurhythmy next week. It is only a beginning, just a modest beginning,
this effort to bring will once again into the word; to
show people, at any rate on the stage if not in ordinary life, that
the word does actually live in the movement of their limbs. And
when we introduce Eurhythmy into our schools, it is a humble beginning,
and must still be regarded as such to-day, to make the word once
more a principle of movement in the whole of life.
In Greece
there was quite a different feeling, one that came over from the
East. Man was urged to let the will reveal itself through the limbs,
with every syllable, with every word, every phrase, with the rhythm
and measure of every phrase. He realized how the word could
become creative in every movement. But in those days he knew still
more. Words were to him expressions for the forces of cloud
formations, the forces lying in the growth of plants and all natural
phenomena. The word rumbled in the rumbling waves, worked in the
whistling wind. Just as the word lives
in my breath so that I make a corresponding movement, so did the
Greek find all that was living in the word, in the raging wind,
in the surging wave, even in the rumbling earthquake. It was
the word that pealed forth from the earth.
The paltry
ideas which arise in us when we say ‘word’ would be very
much out of place if one were to transfer them to the primal
beginning of the world. I wonder what would have happened if these
words and ideas — these feeble ideas of the ‘word’
— had been there at the beginning of the world and were
supposed to be creative? Our present-day intellectualistic word has,
to be sure, little in it that is creative.
Thus above
all, we must rise to what the Greek perceived as a revelation of
the whole human being, a call to the will, when he spoke of the WORD,
LOGOS. For he felt the Logos throb and pulse with life through the whole
Cosmos. And then he felt what really resounds in the line: ‘In the
beginning was the WORD. ...’ In all that was conjured up in
these words there lived the living creative force not only within man
but in wind and wave, cloud, sunshine and starlight. Everywhere the
world and the Cosmos were a revelation of the WORD. Greek gymnastic
was a revelation of the WORD. And in its weaker division, in musical
education, there was a shadowy image of all that was felt in the
WORD. The WORD worked in Greek wrestling. The shadowy image of the
WORD in music worked in the Greek dances. The spirit worked into the
nature of man even though it was a bodily, gymnastic education that
was given.
We must
realize how feeble our ideas have become in modern civilization and
rightly perceive how the mighty impulse pulsating through such a line
as ‘In the beginning was the WORD’ was weakened when it
passed over into Roman culture, becoming more and more shadowy, until
all we now feel is an inner lassitude when we speak of it. In olden
times, all wisdom, all science was a paraphrase of the sentence
‘In the beginning was the WORD.’ At first, the WORD,
LOGOS, lived in the ideas that arose in man when he spoke these
words, but this life grew feebler and feebler. And then came the
Middle Ages and the LOGOS died. Only the dead LOGOS could come forth
from man. And those who were educated were not only educated by
having the dead LOGOS communicated to them, but also the dead word
— the Latin tongue in its decay. The dying word of speech
became the chief medium of education up to the time of the sixteenth
century, when there arose a certain inner revolt against it.
What then
does civilization signify up to the sixteenth century? It signifies
the death of human feeling for the living LOGOS of the Gospel of St.
John. And the dependence on dead speech is an outer manifestation of
this death of the LOGOS. If one wants briefly to characterize the
course of civilization in so far as it fundamentally affects the
impulses of education, one really should say: All that humanity has
lost is expressed above all in the fact that understanding of what
lives in the Gospel of St. John has disappeared step by step.
The course
of civilization through the Middle Ages up to the sixteenth century
in its gradual loss of understanding of such writing as the Gospel of
St. John fully explains the failure of present-day humanity to grasp
its significance. Hence the clamour for educational reform.
The
question of education in our age will only assume its right bearing
when people, seeking to understand the Gospel of St. John, realize
the barrenness of the human heart and compare this with the intense
devotion arising within man in times when he believed himself to be
transported from his own being out into all the creative forces of
the universe as he allowed the true content of this first sentence of
the Gospel to ring within him — ”In the beginning was the
Word.” We must realize that the cry of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries for a different kind of education arose because
the most devout people of that time, those who felt most deeply the
need for a renewal of education, also sensed the loss of the inner
elementary life-force which enables man to have also a living
understanding of the spirit. For it is the spirit to which the Gospel
of St. John refers when it speaks of the Logos.
We have
reached a point where we do indeed long for the spirit but our speech
is composed of mere words. And in the words we have lost the spirit
that still existed for the Greeks inasmuch as then the whole human
being in his activity in the world rose up into the
‘word’ when it was uttered; man indeed ascended to cosmic
activity when, in the world-creative ‘words’ he expressed
the idea of the Divinity, which lies at the foundation of the
universe. And this must become living in us too if we would be men in
the full sense. And the teacher must be a ‘whole’ man,
for otherwise he can only educate half men and quarter men. The
teacher must again have an understanding of the ‘word.’
* * *
If we
would bring before our souls this mystery of the WORD, the WORD in
its fullness, as it worked and was understood in the age when
the full significance of the Gospel according to St. John was still
felt, let us say to ourselves: In the old consciousness of man,
spirit was present in the WORD — even in the feeble
‘word’ that was used in speech. Spirit poured into the
‘word’ and was the power within it.
I am not
criticizing any epoch, nor do I say that one epoch is of less value
than another. I merely want to describe how the different epochs
follow one another, each having its special value.But some
epochs have to be characterized more by negative, some more by
positive characteristics.
Let us
picture to ourselves the dimness, the darkness, that gradually crept
over the living impulse in the ‘word’ when the sentence
“In the beginning was the WORD” was spoken. Let us now
consider civilized mankind in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries
and how it had to prepare for a growth of the inner impulse of
freedom. You see one has also to value elements that were not present
in certain periods. Consider, then, that humanity had to win its
freedom with full consciousness and this would not have been possible
if the spirit had still poured into and inspired the WORD as in
earlier times. Then we shall understand how education in its old form
became an impossibility as soon as Francis Bacon, in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, came forward with a significant statement
which, when we face it honestly, implies an annihilation of what is
contained in the phrase “In the beginning was the WORD.”
Before this time there was always a shadow of the spirit in the WORD,
in the LOGOS. Bacon asks mankind to see in the ‘word’
only an idol, no longer the spirit but an idol, no longer to hold
fast by the ‘word’ with its own power but to guard
against the “intellectualism” of the ‘word.’
For if one has lost the real content of the ‘word’ out of
which, in earlier times, knowledge, civilization and power were
created — one is clinging to an idol — so thinks Francis
Bacon. In the doctrine of idols which appears with Bacon lies the
whole “swing-away” from the ‘word’ which took
place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whither then
does man tend? Towards the things of sense. Man was taught to hold
fast to all that the senses can perceive.
Thus there
was once an age when man was not only aware of the ‘word’
in itself but also of the world-creative spirit living in the WORD,
in the LOGOS. Then came the age when the ‘word’ became an
idol, a misleading thing, an idol that misleads one into
intellectualism. Man was taught to hold fast by the outer, sensible
object lest he fall a prey to the idol in the ‘word.’
Bacon demands that man shall not now hold fast to that which pours
into him from the Gods but to that which lies in the outer world in
lifeless objects or at most in external living objects. Man is
directed away from the ‘word’ to outer sensible objects.
This feeling alone remains in him: he must educate, he must approach
human nature itself. The spirit is there within the human being but
the ‘word’ is an idol. He can only direct the human being
to look with his eyes at what is outside man. Education no longer
makes use of what is truly human but of what is outside the
human.
And now
there exists the problem of education in the form we have to-day
bringing fierce zeal but also fearful tragedy. We see it arising very
characteristically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
in Michel de Montaigne, in John Locke and — parallel with what
was happening here in England — we see it in Comenius over on
the Continent. In these three men, Montaigne, Locke, Comenius, we can
see approximately how the departure from the Logos and the turning
towards the things of sense becomes the strongest impulse in
civilization. Fear of the idol in the ‘word’ arose in
men. The Logos disappears. What is called perception or observation,
a function which is quite justifiable as we shall see in the
following lectures, but which is now understood in the sense of
material perception, becomes the decisive factor. And we see how
anxiously Montaigne, John Locke and Comenius desire to divert man
from all that is super-sensible, all that is living in
the LOGOS. John Locke and Montaigne always point to what is outside
the human and try expressly to avoid all that is not the direct
object of the senses, to bring as much of the sense-world as possible
to the young through education. Comenius writes books the object of
which is to show that one ought not to work through the
‘word’ but through artificially created
sense-perceptions. And thus the transition is accomplished; we see
mankind losing the feeling of all connection of the spirit with the
‘word.’ Civilization as a whole can no longer
accept the inner sense of “In the beginning was the
WORD,” and grapples on to outer facts of sense. The WORD, the
LOGOS, is only accepted at all because it forms part of tradition.
Thus the
longing arises, with intense zeal but also with fearful tragedy, only
to educate by means of sense-perception, because the
‘word’ is felt to be an idol in the Baconian sense. And
this longing appears in its most symptomatic form in Montaigne, John
Locke and Comenius. They show us what is living in the whole of
humanity; they show us how the mood which finds expression to-day as
our deep longing to bring the spirit once again to the human being
arose just when men could no longer believe in the spirit any more
but only in the idol of the ‘word,’ as did Bacon. From
that which has lived in all educational unions until the present,
beginning with Montaigne and Comenius, fully justified as it was in
those times, there must develop for the sake of the present age
something which is able to bring the spirit, the creative spirit, the
essential spirit, the will-bearing spirit to the human being,
something which can recognize in the body of man and in his earthly
deeds a revelation of that spirit which reveals itself in
super-sensible worlds.
With this
pouring of the super-sensible into the sensible, with this rediscovery
of the spirit which has been lost in the WORD, in the LOGOS since the
‘word’ became an idol, begins a new era in education.
Montaigne, John Locke, and Comenius knew very well what education
ought to be. Their programmes are just as splendid as those of modern
educational unions and all that people demand for education to-day is
already to be found in the abstract writings of these three. What we
have to find to-day, however, are the means which will lead us to
reality. For no education will develop from abstract principles or
programmes; it will only develop from reality. And because man
himself is soul and spirit, because he has a physical nature, a
nature of soul and a spiritual nature, reality must again come into
our life; for reality will bring the spirit with it and only the
spirit can sustain the educational art of the future.
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