Education

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.

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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.’

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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.