The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The Educator as Shaper of the Future Content of the Human Soul

[ 1 ] So far, I have tried to show you how to approach human beings from the external perspective. Today I would like to approach our task from the other side—the side I would like to call the inner experience of what I have tried to discuss over the past three days. It might seem as though the view of the human being that I have attempted to present would not, at first glance, provide a foundation for the practical art of education. However, the very point here is to first approach the essence of the human being from these two different perspectives—the external, as we have done so far, and the internal—and only then to derive from this genuine points of reference, rather than mere points of view, for the art of education.

[ 2 ] First of all, I would like to point out that, little by little, through the approach that has, in a sense, been put forward here as the future of natural science, the human being becomes transparent from the outside. In a sense, by observing human beings—through the activity of the organs and the whole being—one comes to discover what is then experienced internally within the human being: first as a mental image, then as feeling, and finally as will. In all current worldviews, on the one hand, we are dealing with an impenetrable, dark human being whom we cannot fathom, who stands before us as if opaque; and on the other hand, we are dealing with more or less abstract inner experiences of thinking, feeling, and willing, the concrete interpretation of which we do not at all perceive or feel inwardly. We have seen that the human being is a threefold being. If we now look at the human being inwardly from the three aspects of thinking, feeling, and willing—we will already see how the two perspectives, the external and the internal, come together.

[ 3 ] What we gain today as the content of our imagination is, at its core, something very, very abstract. As teachers, educators, and mentors, this content of imagination does not allow us to connect with the developing human being. It is, in a sense, a barrier between us and other people. It exists in social life and brings us social misery. It also exists in such specific areas as teaching and education. Due to the materialistic, scientific development that has permeated our entire way of thinking and has also seeped into our mindset, everything we have to say about the soul and the spirit has gradually become mere rhetoric; and one cannot act on the basis of rhetoric, nor can one relate to an adult on the basis of rhetoric. Nor can one relate to a child on the basis of empty phrases. One must penetrate to reality. This reality is not granted to us if we possess only that abstract, intellectualistic life of the mind, as it has been cultivated by the scientific approach to date. Through this approach, one does indeed arrive at the spirit. Everything we have today in our intellectualist education as content of the intellect is spirit, but it is filtered spirit. It is a spirit that, in a sense, cannot emerge from within itself, that does not experience itself inwardly as real content, and that therefore—if I may put it in comparative terms—remains more brutal. This spirit dominates our lives—this spirit that does not truly penetrate anything, this spirit that, in art, shapes the material outer form instead of drawing it out of the material itself, this spirit that, with regard to the social structures of human community, seeks to impose external social connections instead of drawing them out of the immediate, living human being itself. One develops a completely different attitude toward the spirit when one adheres to what Spiritual Science has to offer. For you see, Spiritual Science is far more important because of the way it presents itself than because of its content. If you adhere to what constitutes knowledge today, you will find that it, so to speak, reflects what is already there. This is how we have arrived at naturalism, which in art merely depicts the external world, because we lack insights that go beyond this external world to arrive at an independent content. We move only within a mere imitation of the external world. We do not become aware of how living content can spring forth from the sources within the human being, for this living content can then come from nothing other than the spirit itself.

[ 4 ] Now consider the complete contrast between the subject matter of Spiritual Science and that of conventional natural science. When they hear what Spiritual Science has to say, many people today initially regard it—to put it bluntly—as something foolish, something entirely fantastical. Why is that? Because people are not accustomed to hearing the world described in the way that Spiritual Science describes it. They are accustomed to hearing the world described in such a way that they can compare what is being discussed with what they see out there, with what their eyes perceive, and with what is otherwise perceived. Spiritual Science presents things for which one cannot initially find a counterpart in the external world—things one cannot discover simply by observing with the senses—but which can only be brought into being by creating from one’s own spirit. One does, of course, create from the deeper content of the world, but one must create productively from the spirit itself. This is what matters—this productive creation from the spirit itself. When one studies Spiritual Science, if I may put it that way, one does not wait for a tree or an animal to come toward one from the outside, which one then represents in a concept; one must generate the concept in its inner liveliness. We will see examples shortly of how one must generate concepts inwardly precisely from Spiritual Science, and how they thereby become a living content within the human being. So that one can say: our intellectualistic mind has gradually become empty. Spiritual Science gives this intellectualistic mind something through which it can fill its own emptiness from within itself.

[ 5 ] If, for example, you take something like my *Secret Science* today and read this *Secret Science* as you would any other book dealing with the world today, you will not be able to make sense of it; for even with works of art today, one is compelled to say: ‘Yes, something is being depicted here—where in the world can one find such a thing?’ Even from drama, from the novel itself—that is, from products of the imagination—people today demand that their content be found in the world exactly as depicted, or at least almost exactly as depicted. With the content of Spiritual Science, you simply cannot do that at first. You are compelled to do something else. And that is why there is so much opposition to spiritual science—because one is compelled to do something entirely different from what is expected of the ordinary scientific or artistic works of the present day. One is compelled to participate actively, from within, in every step that is, so to speak, traced as having been taken by the author of such a book on Spiritual Science. One gains nothing from reading such a book unless one immediately produces its content from within oneself, following the book’s instructions. It is precisely through this that Spiritual Science today stands in the most stark opposition to the spirit of the age. People today also prefer to attend lectures in which what they are actually supposed to take in is presented to their senses through slides or similar means. Or people go to the movies today because they can see something there; they don’t care much that there are also a few words of explanation. In other words: people want to remain passive, to remain people who merely watch, who merely look on. If one allows the habits of the present age to influence oneself in this way, one gains nothing at all from a book or lecture on Spiritual Science. In fact, the Spiritual Science lecture or book contains nothing at all. Everything depends on one’s inner work to develop what, I might say, is only outlined in the book or in the lecture.

[ 6 ] The point, then, is that the intellect—which has become passive in our intellectualistic age—must become active. Spiritual Science itself is an inner activity, insofar as it involves engaging with a world of ideas, and in this respect it differs radically from what people are accustomed to today. You see, this inner self-education is of immense importance. For through it, the abstract intellectualism that is so characteristic of today’s intellectual education is thoroughly overcome. As a result, however, the entire spiritual and psychological constitution of the human being is transformed.

[ 7 ] I found it, I might say, deeply moving when, just this morning, I received a letter from a teacher at our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which we founded based on the educational principles outlined here. You may be aware that, weeks earlier, I had prepared the teaching staff of this Waldorf School through a seminar course; the teachers keep rereading the course material time and again. In this letter, the teacher wrote: “When I read these educational lectures again and again, it feels as if I were in a foreign land and suddenly heard the sounds of home.” — It is a feeling I can understand quite well. The human being—the innermost human being today—feels alienated in our intellectualistic world; and if he truly overcomes himself to the point of bringing his active, inner self into play, as he must do with every presentation of Spiritual Science, then he experiences something like a primal sense of human belonging, like sounds emanating from the spiritual world, from which humanity actually originates. And what matters is that one gets into the habit of keeping the spiritual ever-present. What, for example, was important to me in relation to the teachers at the Waldorf School? What mattered to me was that these teachers, so to speak, set aside everything that constitutes conventional pedagogy—which is then applied in the classroom in such a way that one remembers to do this one way and that another, with “proper pedagogical science” dictating this and that, and so on. Spiritual Science, in a sense, amounts to the fact that at every moment one actually forgets the spiritual content one has absorbed through Spiritual Science, and must constantly take it in anew and generate it within oneself. One does not truly possess Spiritual Science if one regards it as something one simply remembers.

[ 8 ] Please don’t hold it against me if I share something personal here. No matter how many times—30, 40, or 50—I speak on the same topic, I am never able to give the exact same lecture. I am just as incapable of doing this as I am—forgive the grotesque comparison—of eating again what I ate yesterday. One stands right in the midst of life itself. And so, with the content of Spiritual Science, one stands right in the midst of life itself. One must continually work it out anew. So I also tried to prepare the teachers at the Waldorf School in such a way that, in a sense, they would enter their school every morning with a virgin soul, to face something completely new, a host of new riddles. The ability to forget—which is merely the other side of the process of assimilation—is what Spiritual Science instills in a person; it is the result of self-education through Spiritual Science. You will say: “I also know a few people who work in Spiritual Science or are anthroposophists who can count on one hand what they have learned.” Yes, my dear friends here present, that is indeed still the imperfection of the anthroposophists. I have not been able to prevent such anthroposophists from being here today; they may therefore have to listen to this. It is an imperfection when one possesses anthroposophical knowledge merely as rote memorization, rather than as a primal source of inner soul experience that seeks to be recreated anew in the soul at every moment. Yet this is precisely the attitude one should adopt when facing a human being, especially when teaching or educating them. So this is what it is all about: that Spiritual Science, through the way one processes it, brings a vitality to our soul that unfolds just as the digestive process in the physical realm unfolds anew every day, so that everything that is merely memorized fades in comparison to what Spiritual Science offers by proceeding from the active intellect, not from the passive intellect.

[ 9 ] This is what I would like to call an enrichment of the art of education, beginning in the realm of mental images, by allowing Spiritual Science to flow into one’s entire thinking and imagination. On the one hand, one can approach the human being inwardly from the perspective of imagination and intellect; but one can also do so from the perspective of the will. I can only describe this here, but the ideas I will attempt to describe are capable—if one grasps them deeply enough—of kindling a fire within those who are tasked with educating or teaching people. Here I would like to point out something related to the question that was posed to me.

[ 10 ] The question has been raised as to how the child’s development—as I have attempted to outline, at least initially—how this development of the child up to the age of 7, and then up to the ages of 14 and 15, relates to what emerges regarding development from Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law.

[ 11 ] As you know, this fundamental law of biogenetics states—from the perspective of the natural sciences—that, if we limit ourselves to humans, the course of phylogeny is repeated in human embryonic development; in a sense, ontogeny is a repetition of phylogeny. From conception to birth, the human being gradually undergoes a development in which it passes through the various animal forms, from the simpler to the more complex, all the way up to the human being. This law, which is extraordinarily significant for the scientific worldview—I am well aware of its exceptions and limitations—but precisely because one is aware of them, one must call it a very significant scientific law—this law has been applied to the spiritual and psychological development of the individual human being in relation to humanity as a whole. This has led people down a completely wrong path.

[ 12 ] How might one find a parallel between the psychological and spiritual development of the human being and this fundamental law of biogenetics? Only if one could say: the small child, when it begins its earthly life, passes through, as it were, the primordial states of the human race. As it grows up, it passes through states corresponding to later epochs of human development, and so on. The child’s development repeats the development of the entire human race. One can conceive of such a thing as a figment of the imagination, but it does not correspond to reality; and only Spiritual Science is capable of approaching reality in this realm. If one traces the human embryo from the first, second, and third weeks—as far as is currently possible—until it reaches maturity, one sees there the hints of successive, increasingly perfected forms: the fish-like form, and so on. If, on the other hand, one observes a child’s first years of development, one sees no repetition of any primordial states of human evolution, nor of subsequent epochs in human evolution as it progresses. One would have to project forces and processes into the child’s development if one wished to find such things. It was a beautiful dream when people like the educator Wolf or others claimed that children, in a sense, go through the era of the wild barbarians, followed by certain phases of boyhood where they experience the Persian cultural era, and so on. Beautiful poetic images may emerge from this, but it remains nonsense, for such a description does not correspond at all to true reality! One must be able to view human life in its full reality if one wishes to find the corresponding spiritual-soul aspect of the fundamental law of biogenetics. And this is where Spiritual Science reveals that one must not look to the beginning of life, but must look to the end of life. When one has passed the ages of 35, 40, or 45 and has truly preserved the capacity for some self-observation beyond these years, certain rudiments become apparent in the human soul life, in the innermost experience of the human being. Just as rudiments of phylogenetic development become apparent in embryonic life with regard to external physicality, so too do remarkable inner experiences emerge that a person has after the ages of 35, 40, 45th years, when they rise to true self-observation—which one may perhaps attain only by cultivating that activity of thought which one must acquire when one truly lives through Spiritual Science. Then one realizes: in old age, inner experiences arise that do not fully come to the surface, that appear like vestiges; the physicality that offers us the possibility of truly bringing forth what occurs spiritually and psychologically in old age is no longer there; the body, physicality, fails. If we do not allow ourselves to be misled by our physicality, we become spiritually and soulfully rich in old age. However, in today’s intellectualistic culture, very few people notice anything of what arises in the human soul in old age, as if in a rudimentary form. And do you know why people do not notice it? They do not notice it because of our education system, which is built on intellectualism today! It makes us highly dependent on the physical. Yet we fail to notice how, as soon as we pass the age of 35, things arise in our soul life that simply cannot be physically lived out due to the physical nature of humanity today, but which can be experienced inwardly if we do not, in fact, sleep through this period of human life spiritually.

[ 13 ] This is what weighs so terribly on one’s soul: that the majority of humanity today simply sleeps through those experiences of aging—which can lead a person into immense depths—simply by growing older, by growing older with full inner awareness. So much of human life is simply slept through today! If one cultivates the active intellect—and above all, as we shall soon see, the active life of feeling and will—then one becomes aware of these rudiments of soul life in old age. And an art of education truly inspired by Spiritual Science will bring about a situation in which we can actually have these experiences of old age. Then people will also recognize within the social order that such experiences of old age exist; then they will also approach old age in a different way. They will, so to speak, be curious about what old age has to offer. A completely different inner life experience will mature within the human being.

[ 14 ] But why do such experiences of old age, such rudimentary experiences, occur? To understand this, one must consider the true evolution of the human race from the perspective of Spiritual Science. This true evolution of the human race has been completely obscured by our materialistic anthropology. It is believed that human savagery marked the starting point of human development. That is not the case. On the contrary, if we go back to the 7th and 8th millennia B.C., a primal knowledge—admittedly of an instinctive nature—was widespread among a large part of the then-civilized human race; a primal knowledge before which we bow in humility today, if we are able to grasp it. The last remnants of this are recorded in the Vedas of the Indians. But this is not the original; it is already something derived. With an immensely dry intellectuality, our scholarship today approaches what are the first historical remnants of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian cultures. But what our scholarship brings to light only with utter dryness is, in turn, merely the last remnant of humanity’s instinctive primordial knowledge, through which human beings felt at one with the entire universe. Anyone who truly masters the natural sciences today, and then sees what this primordial knowledge of humanity was—even in the faint reflection that has been historically handed down—can understand that Spiritual Science reveals what has not been historically handed down; You can read about this in my *The Secret Science*—anyone who truly knows how to look into this primordial knowledge knows that things looked different in the earlier stages of human development than today’s materialistic anthropology believes; this anthropology imagines that human beings evolved on their own from a “savage” state to the point where we say today: “We have come so wonderfully far.” No, a true examination of human development shows us that there was first a period of prehistoric development. This takes us back to the 7th, 8th, 9th millennia before the emergence of Christianity, when human beings possessed a primal knowledge that they could, however, only acquire by remaining capable of physical and soul development well into later life. And then we look to the first culture that arose in southern Asia following a great global catastrophe that had struck the Earth. We can only come close to understanding this primordial culture by observing the distinctive nature of humanity at that time. The parallel progression of physical and soul development up to the age of seven, and then again until sexual maturity, ceases in our twenties; by then, we are fully formed human beings for the present age. We must no longer believe that we can rise above the abysses of development in the same way that we rise above the loss of baby teeth and sexual maturity.

[ 15 ] This was different in the dawn of humanity. In ancient India, people continued to develop physically and bodily well into their fifties, whereas we only develop to that extent until our twenties. Through this parallelism between physical development and spiritual-soul development, a primal, instinctive knowledge existed—one experienced by the patriarchs of that time, by those who simply grew old and who underwent the same physical transformation—which we experience only at sexual maturity—well into their fifties, alongside their spiritual-soul development.

[ 16 ] Then came the period I have called the “primordial Persian” in my *Secret Science*. This takes us back to the 4th, 5th, and 6th millennia B.C., when physical development continued well into one’s forties. And then comes the Egyptian-Babylonian phase of development, which extends into the 3rd and 4th millennia B.C. During this period, human beings remain capable of physical development until the middle of life, well past the age of 35. Then comes the phase of development about which we actually know anything significant from a historical perspective: the Greek-Latin, or Greek-Roman, era—a period in which human beings still remain fully capable of physical development until the early thirties. The Greeks lived differently, and even the ancient Romans lived differently than we do. Such truths about the development of world history—people simply do not want to admit them today because they do not turn their attention to these matters. The Greeks still lived in such a way that they perceived the spiritual-soul aspect simultaneously as a physical reality. When they turned their gaze out into the world, they knew: I am not merely looking at things; at the same time, they were aware of the physical processes taking place in their bodies. This depended on the fact that they remained capable of development for much longer than we are physically capable of development.

[ 17 ] You see, everything that people in an earlier epoch of human development experienced physically—we experience that in old age only on a spiritual and soul level, if we do not sleep through it. These are the rudiments. While, in the biogenetic law, the beginning of life appears as a repetition of what was experienced in ancestral development, we are growing into what primeval humanity experienced precisely today by observing these rudiments in old age. What we experience today—in our late forties and early fifties—as soul rudiments can still give us a mental image of the first Indian primordial culture, which dates back to the 7th and 8th millennia B.C. What we experience inwardly and soulfully in our forties gives us a reflection of what the ancient Persian era was like in the 4th and 5th millennia. What we experience in our late thirties is a reflection—no longer physical, but purely spiritual—of what the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians lived and felt in a completely different way, which is why they were also able to lead a completely different social life. Scholars today describe the Greeks in such a way that they essentially view them as completely alien. It is quite remarkable just how much has actually been achieved in terms of outward appearances today. Before the war years, we heard how, here and there in the world, “Olympic Games” were to be celebrated once again—Olympic Games in which one imitates the outward form of something that was entirely based on the fact that, beyond the age of thirty, a person still undergoes a physical development that they simply do not undergo today. In earlier times, a spiritual and soul aspect flowed from the physical into human beings, continuing well into old age.

[ 18 ] So we can say:

[ 19 ] 1st Cultural Level: Real Experiences Up to Age 48
2nd Cultural Level: Real experiences up to and beyond age 42
3rd Cultural Level: Real experiences up to and beyond age 35
4th Cultural Level: Real experiences from age 28 to 35.

[ 20 ] The 5th cultural stage is the one we live in today—it is our present; we have been living within it since the mid-15th century. We remain capable of development within it only until the age of 27 or 28 at most.

[ 21 ] Only this perspective explains to us the nature of present-day humanity. Present-day humanity is such that it must develop differently from earlier humanity. Present-day humanity no longer develops spiritual-soul perspectives if it passively surrenders to physical development. If we do not want to become spiritually barren from the 1930s onward, we must draw our insights from sources other than those we derive solely through our physical development. For the time being, people are still succumbing to terrible illusions regarding these matters.

[ 22 ] I just want to draw your attention to the fact that our religious concepts—including those we still draw upon in our teaching today—are inherited. Why, then, do we actually have this fear of any renewal of religious concepts? Because today people view the acceptance of ideas from spiritual sources with immense apprehension. People want to cling to what they have inherited because, in a sense, they feel they are facing nothingness. This feeling is justified, for today, at the age of 27 or 28, the inner spiritual life awakened by physical development dies away in human beings. We would therefore be left desolate if the inherited religious mental images did not at least continue to operate within us, even unconsciously and instinctively. And if we did not pass on certain mental images from ancient times as tradition, we would all become desolate after the age of 28. We are simply compelled today to acknowledge this law of human development. You will notice that this is meant in a figurative sense. The further human development progresses, the younger humanity becomes. In other words: this human development passively reaches ever younger ages, and then ceases to be effective in a spiritual sense. The ancient Greeks still reached their thirties in terms of physical development. Modern humans reach that stage only in terms of soul-spiritual development and, inwardly, in terms of capacities that they must bring forth through productive spirituality. And the more people grow cold toward traditional religious mental images and refuse to replace them with anything else, the more they will experience this growing coldness. A purely intellectual education could never, ever provide people with anything for their later years. It is essentially what occurs with the loss of baby teeth, what occurs in early childhood—and which we can only advance further through a stimulation of the will. But the point is that people today live in a humanity that, due to its physical nature, remains capable of development only up to the age of 27 or 28, and that the further impulses for development in later life must be supplied from spiritual sources.

[ 23 ] When one looks at social life today, one does indeed say to oneself that viewing it through the lens of ideas reveals to us this process of humanity becoming a disciple, reveals to us this ever-increasing imperfection of humanity in a certain respect. But I believe that in the person who can truly grasp such a thing—who can place themselves within humanity with a full sense of responsibility and with such knowledge of human development—there arises the will that can enrich our art of education. One then looks toward what one actually has to accomplish. One must draw from spiritual sources that which allows a human being to remain human, even as he or she develops beyond the age of 27 or 28. This immersion, with feeling and heart, into the developmental impulses of humanity—that is the spur within us that we need first and foremost. People today do not grasp this sufficiently. When people today are taught that the Earth evolved from a primordial nebula along with the other planets, that it will one day fall back into the Sun, and that we do not know what the purpose of humanity actually is; when one incorporates into one’s outlook the entire course of development described by the scientific worldview, no will arises from it. From this worldview, which looks toward the true reality within the human being, will arises, for one now knows what one must do; one knows that the educational necessities are now beginning that were previously fulfilled by nature itself. One looks back to ancient times and says: “You Greeks were still fortunate enough to be able to develop spiritual and soul elements within yourselves from your physical nature well beyond the age of 28; you Egyptians, you Babylonians, you yourselves were able to draw this out even into your forties, purely because divine forces worked with primal power into your physical organs.” This possibility—of drawing out what nature itself, that is, the divine forces in nature, has accomplished—no longer exists for humanity today and will exist less and less for future humanity. We humans must take development into our own hands. We must increasingly find our way into the task of making human beings truly human.

[ 24 ] This is where science begins to become will itself. For it is here that it becomes apparent that we have only just entered that phase of human development in which new tasks are emerging, particularly for the art of education. That is why, up until very recently, the art of education was instinctive. More than anything else, the art of education was instinctive. There were, of course, sound abstract principles, which I have already discussed at length. Now, however, the need arises to breathe life into these abstract principles from within, because it is in our hands to either transform these abstract principles—by breathing life into them—into a true art of human education, or to consign humanity to desolation in the future.

[ 25 ] As I now stand at the beginning of what I actually wish to discuss from a pedagogical and artistic perspective, you can see that I would like to take as my starting point not a theoretical discussion, but a feeling. I would like to begin these reflections by stating that pedagogy must not be based on principles, but on a feeling. At this moment, we must be imbued with the feeling that the spiritual essence of humanity has been entrusted to the hands of those who shape young people—the educators. This is healthy when we, so to speak, feel the future of humanity within us. This is the correct starting point—not when we know this or that, but when we feel it, when we sense it, when we feel and sense the entire task of education as it relates to the development of humanity. Today I wanted to present this starting point to you not as a theoretical one, but as one based on feeling. I would like to say that what I wanted to present to you today has been properly grasped when you can forget all the individual sentences I have spoken, all the individual theoretical phrases I have used, and feel weighing upon your soul what the task of the educator is. If, encapsulated in this feeling, one can take away what these reflections were meant to inspire—if everything that has been said settles into a single feeling—then we will be able to develop the details of the art of education from this feeling in the following reflections.

Q&A

[ 26 ] Dr. Steiner (responding to objections raised verbally): I would like to say just a few more things today: It is, of course, extremely obvious to assume that, for example, children’s drawings resemble those of primitive peoples. However, this is based on a completely unfounded hypothesis—namely, that the peoples among whom we find these drawings today were the original peoples. We do, however, find that we can compare children’s drawings with drawings made by what we call “primitive peoples.” These peoples, however, are not primitive, but decadent. Furthermore, scientific anthropology makes the mistake of viewing peoples who live in a wild and barbaric manner today, as it were, as those from whom we are all more or less descended. The art of education must not be based on such a scientific error; for if it does, it will overestimate the resemblance between children’s characteristics and those of savage peoples living today; and this resemblance has also been thoroughly overestimated in recent times. One can, of course, acknowledge the facts, but the connection drawn between them is based on a misunderstanding of the true relationship between the development of the individual human being and the development of humanity as a whole. Nor is it decisive that we find children’s verses today that date back far into the period I have referred to here as the fifth epoch. These children’s verses do not go back any further than that. If we were to go back further through Spiritual Science than external anthropology can, we would find that we must by no means cite today’s children’s verses as evidence of what existed in earlier periods of human development.

[ 27 ] Today I wish to point out nothing other than that, starting from physical anthropology—which traces human beings back from the present to prehistoric times and sees in modern humans an echo of primitive man—we must embark on a path toward a perspective on human evolution developed by Spiritual Science. Along this path, one must, of course, also develop a sense of what remains—merely as a historical remnant—of humanity’s instinctive primordial culture. I refer to the Vedic literature, to the immensely significant Taoist sayings of Laozi, and so on. Precisely the one who conveys a perspective on human development based on Spiritual Science will have taken into account everything that has been historically handed down before arriving at what I have mentioned here.

[ 28 ] It was not for nothing that I said yesterday that it would, of course, be much more convenient to go along with the general trend than to have to resist so many things. But that is precisely what constitutes a dangerous pedagogical principle today: drawing a parallel between what children do and what today’s “wild peoples” do, or what earlier times—what we now call “earlier times”—set as an example for us. For the point is, in fact, that we must truly find the sources of spiritual life, and we must first seek them within the child.

[ 29 ] Now for the other point. Please note that I did say that today there is the abstract principle—I even described it as exemplary—of developing the child from within. We hear this in all its variations today, and we may come to believe that it is actually being done. But just try for a moment to consider what it means not to accept the child’s nature as some unknown, mystical entity that is then to be developed from within, but rather to prepare ourselves first through what we attain within ourselves as self-education—something we can attain only through Spiritual Science. Try, through Spiritual Science, to gain an insight into what truly lives within children! I have absolutely nothing against the principle that one should not impose anything from the outside on the child, but rather see everything within the child; yet one must first learn to see within the child. To do this, a person must first become transparent. And what I offer leads precisely to truly seeing the most diverse aspects of human nature. However, the various aspects of human nature are obscured by much of what stems today from the ordinary materialistic mindset. For what is often called “spiritual-psychic” today is an abstraction, an intellectual construct. Much of what is naturally necessary to substantiate the points I have made will only truly come to light in the following reflections. But I have no objection to the view that one should, above all, value and appreciate what is within the child and draw it out of the child, nor do I object when someone says that one should not impose upon the child what is within us. On the contrary, I regard both of these principles as entirely self-evident. My sole concern is to show how it is possible to truly observe these two principles in a comprehensive sense.