The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] It is precisely the considerations we must make in light of our intention to now also teach and educate older students that must lead us, at least for today’s lesson, into somewhat deeper realms of human and world studies. Without such deeper foundations for life, we cannot truly undertake a task like the one that arises when we seek to expand the Waldorf school to higher levels with a clear conscience.

[ 2 ] We must be clear about the fact that life is, in reality, a unified whole, and that we can only take a piece out of life to the detriment of life itself. Life first presents us with that into which we, as human beings, grow from childhood onward. We are brought into the world in such a way that, at first, we “sleep” our way into it. Just consider how a child, in the first years of life, faces the world in complete unconsciousness. Then the child becomes more and more conscious. But what does it mean for a child to become conscious? It means that the child learns to adapt its inner life to the outer world. It learns to relate the outer world to itself and to relate itself to the outer world. It learns to consciously recognize external things and to distinguish itself from them. This becomes increasingly evident to the child as it grows older. It looks up at the sphere of earthly life, sees the cosmic world, and certainly senses that there is a lawfulness in this cosmic world; yet it grows into the whole as if into something that absorbs it, without ever fully coming to terms with the mystery that exists between the human being and the cosmic world. Then the child grows up and is increasingly taken in by the conscious care of other people. It is raised; it is taught. It grows up in such a way that it becomes clear from its entire individuality that it, too, must in some way become involved in the workings of the world.

[ 3 ] We raise the child to cope with the ways of the world by first letting it play, thereby awakening its activity. We strive in every way to ensure that everything we do with the child is carried out in such a way that the demands of human existence are met; that is, that we provide a healthy, wholesome upbringing, and that we nurture the child’s physical, emotional, and intellectual development. We seek a second goal. We try to immerse ourselves in the demands of social and technical life. Efforts have been made to educate and instruct the child in such a way that it can later work and participate in the workings of society, that it can integrate socially into human life and get along with other people. We strive to impart skills and knowledge that will enable them to grow into technical life, so that their work may be of significance both to society and to human life, and so that they themselves may find a path in life that is connected to the broader social life of humanity. We accomplish all of this. And in order to accomplish this in the right way—so that, on the one hand, we can truly take the demands of human nature into account, ensuring we do not send people out into the world as mentally, emotionally, or physically sick or stunted beings—we must, on the other hand, be able to say that people grow into society in such a way that they can take hold of something through which they can advance both themselves and the world. It must be our concern to ensure that both of these needs are met in this way.

[ 4 ] But we must admit to ourselves: today, it causes us a certain amount of difficulty to somehow respond to the child’s needs amid these twofold concerns. And in fact, as an unbiased look at the entire situation in which we find ourselves as teachers and educators teaches us, it causes us not only a certain amount of difficulty, but even a certain skepticism, a certain doubt. It is, after all, easy to see that in our time there is debate in the most varied ways: How should we actually educate the youth, what should we do? These are, in essence, all questions that, in the intensity and distinctness with which they arise today—with this extremity—would have been utterly impossible in older cultures. If you simply observe historical development with an open mind, you will have to admit: in older cultures, there was naturally an extraordinary amount that seems incomprehensible to us today. We need only look at the status of the ruling classes and the slave and helot classes in ancient Greece to see a picture that, from our present-day perspective, we rightly do not approve of. But if we familiarize ourselves with the views the Greeks held regarding the education of youth, it would be unthinkable that debates such as those we experience today regarding the education of youth could have taken place among them—debates in which one person holds the exact opposite view of another regarding the manner in which children, young men, and young women should be raised and integrated into the social order. So it is not merely that teaching and educating pose a challenge for us; we must have a pedagogy, a didactics. We believe that through such things as pedagogy and didactics, we can acquire what is necessary for us as educators and teachers. But when we see, on the other hand, how the debates clash with one another, how there is absolutely no prospect of mutual understanding from either side—how those who emphasize physical education more, and those who emphasize the spiritual and emotional aspects more, cannot reach an understanding with one another—then, precisely in connection with the tasks of education—and then, as we specialize, in didactics—we are led not only to say: “It is arduous to educate”—but rather that we cannot move beyond a certain *ignorabimus* regarding our position as educators and teachers.

[ 5 ] We should actually feel this quite strongly in the present, and I believe this feeling will become even more acute if we take a somewhat broader view of the matter. You will gain this broader perspective when, for example, you examine and study a genuine body of educational principles and ideas—such as those that have emerged from, let’s say, the Central European world. I would like to encourage you, just as an experiment, to familiarize yourself with everything that has been said about intellectual, emotional, and physical education by people whose education was entirely shaped by Central Europe. Take the book by Dittes or Diesterweg and read through the views on the educational system that are developed there. For example, I would like to draw your attention to the interesting essay found in Karl Julius Schröer’s booklet *Unterrichtsfragen* (*Questions of Instruction*), which, I believe, properly addresses the question of the role of physical education in the classroom, where this section on “physical education” is developed in great detail. As you allow such ideas to sink in, I would like you to consider the mindset and outlook from which they arose. For while there is certainly a genuine, inner understanding of human physical nature—and consideration is given throughout to the fact that human beings, as physical beings, must grow up to function effectively in the world—there is nevertheless a strong, I would say, pervasive awareness that human beings are spiritual beings, and that their souls must be taken into account in every respect. And I would ask you to read comparatively—not based on outward appearances, for you should have moved beyond such things since you stand on anthroposophical ground—but by tracing the underlying attitude, that is, the deeper aspects of the soul in general, in any of the numerous treatises on—one must say, not “Erziehung,” but rather “Education”—from Anglo-American literature. You will find chapters there on intellectual education, aesthetic education, and physical education. But pay attention to the underlying foundation from which this grows. You will have the distinct feeling that you cannot possibly relate the word “Erziehung” to what “Education” means there, for it is underlying everywhere—even where the spirit is discussed, that we have spirit in our culture, and where intellectual education is the subject—the notion that the human being is a kind of mechanism; that one must nurture and develop one’s physical mechanism, and that if we only develop this physical organism or mechanism correctly, everything moral and everything intellectual will follow of its own accord. There is a much stronger inclination toward this physical aspect. One might say that in educational and instructional works of the first kind, the premise is made that one can, after all, reach a person on a spiritual and emotional level. And if one can indeed reach them properly on a spiritual and emotional level, then this spiritual and emotional engagement also leads to the proper care of the person’s physical being. In works on education, on the other hand, the underlying assumption is that one must educate in a physical sense if one is to educate properly; then there is still some sort of little chamber inside the person that one is not really supposed to concern oneself with. One educates around the periphery of the physical body and always assumes: There is this little chamber that one is not supposed to concern oneself with; locked inside are the intellect, morality, and religion; there is also a kind of instinctive morality, religion, and instinctive logic within it. And once one has sufficiently educated the physical body in all its aspects, these forces turn inward; they dissolve the barriers of this little box, and then intellect, morality, and religion burst forth—and that happens all on its own. One must read this in such a way that one reads between the lines everywhere and takes into account what actually underlies it all.

[ 6 ] It is indeed absolutely necessary today to take such global distinctions into account. It is far more important than what we are accustomed to observing on the surface, when one considers these symptoms that can be observed beneath the surface. Just try, for a moment, to grasp the symptoms in our transitional culture by, for example, following the extraordinarily important debates that have taken place in England in recent weeks under the influence of the most dire social conditions—the sweeping strikes that have been breaking out and have thrown the entire social fabric into turmoil. Debates took place there that filled the newspapers. And suddenly, in recent weeks, we see a completely different tone emerging in all this journalism dealing with these important matters. All of a sudden, everything in this journalism seems to be coming from a completely different angle. And what is that, exactly? The various—I really don’t even know what they’re all called—ball games and tennis matches are starting up. This is something that’s starting to interest people so much that it’s overshadowing all interest in the most important social issues. The debates suddenly take on the character of: let’s just make sure we get out as soon as possible to where the big stadiums are, where the big games are played, where we can move about as human beings so that our muscles become as strong as possible, and where we can focus our attention on these important facts—that —I may be describing this somewhat amateurishly, but I’m not really in a position to provide precise, detailed, and accurate descriptions of these cultural phenomena—that one pays special attention to the fact that, if someone somewhere throws something resembling a spherical object, another catches it properly with their big toe or in some other way.

[ 7 ] It is indeed a very strange insight one gains when one actually delves into the nuances. It’s of no use at all today to read about the peculiarities of our contemporary journalism. What they want to say is insignificant; what characterizes them is why they come to say this or that. That is infinitely more important today. But talking to people about what they mean is a matter of no importance today; it is far more important today to look everywhere at the underlying motives behind why people do this or that, how they come to assert this or that, and why this or that exists. That is what matters today. What difference is there between the German Minister of Reconstruction and the French minister, or whether one agrees with the arguments of one or the other—that is all just wishy-washy nonsense. That cannot be the issue for those who wish to participate in the progress of today’s civilization; rather, the sole concern must be to fathom why one person is untruthful in a very specific way and why the other’s untruthfulness has an entirely different character. What is revealed by these two forms of untruthfulness—this difference—is precisely what we must focus on.

[ 8 ] We must be clear about the fact that we live in an age in which the words people speak have no meaning in terms of their content, but rather it is solely the forces that govern and act within them that matter. In this way, the one who is to teach young men and women must grow into his or her own age. And they must grow into their age in an even deeper way: they must not retain the fundamental character that defines human thinking and the entire mindset of people today. If one goes about today, having imbued oneself with anthroposophical consciousness—one no longer finds people one finds moles who move within the narrowest circle of what they have been immersed in, who behave in such a way that they think only within that very narrow circle and do not think beyond it, nor do they have any interest whatsoever in concerning themselves with what is happening outside that circle. If we do not find a way to thoroughly outgrow this mole-like existence, if we merely keep forming the same judgments from a different perspective—judgments instilled in us by the events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—then we cannot participate fruitfully in what needs to be done to escape this misery.

[ 9 ] And if anyone is to be thoroughly imbued with such a concept as I have just put forward, it is the teacher; it is the one who seeks to educate young people; it is especially the one who seeks to guide the child into the more mature age of boyhood and girlhood, which begins when we move from the 9th to the 10th grade. We must organize the entire school in such a way that this can be incorporated into the school, and for this it is necessary that you grasp the matter even more deeply, that you—above all now at this important turning point for our school—realize the following: this applies not only to those who teach in the upper grades, but to the entire teaching staff— the point is to synthesize the entire field of pedagogy and didactics into a fundamental sense, so that you can, as it were, feel in your soul the full weight and force of the task: to set people free into this world. Without this, our Waldorf school will remain nothing more than an empty phrase. We can say all the beautiful things about the Waldorf school, but we will be standing on ground riddled with holes until those holes become so large that we no longer have any ground at all on which to walk. We must make this a reality within ourselves. We can only do this if we are able to grasp the teaching profession deeply and thoroughly.

[ 10 ] And so we must ask ourselves: What are we, really, as people of the present? — We have been placed in this present by what has shaped us through the events of civilization in the last third of the 19th century. And, my dear friends, what are you today? Some of you studied philology and history, just as they were taught in secondary schools and universities at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Others studied mathematical and scientific subjects. One of you has grown into who you are through this or that method of singing and gymnastics, while another has done so through a different method. One, through the particular preferences of his teachers, has found his way more toward a physical, bodily conception of the gentleman; the other has found his way more toward what one might call the internalized human being—but internalized through intellectualism. Everything that has been instilled in us has become our very humanity, right down to our fingertips. And we must be clear that what has been instilled in us must now, in our time, truly take hold—that we must thoroughly take it into our own hands. And this can only happen through a contemporary examination of conscience that transcends the individual. Without this contemporary examination of conscience, we cannot grow beyond what our time can offer us. And we must grow beyond what our time can offer us. We must not be mere puppets of the historical current that emerged at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Above all, we must take our rightful place through a recognition of what we can be beyond the constraints of our historical context—through a universal examination of conscience.

[ 11 ] And so we ask ourselves: Is not everything we have become infected by the materialistic mindset that has emerged? — Certainly, good will is present in many ways. But this good will has been tainted by the perspective that has emerged from the scientific worldview. And from this perspective has also emerged what we have come to know about physical education.

[ 12 ] Essentially, humanity has always wanted to hide from itself the fact that it needs a profound examination of conscience—something that would thoroughly stir up everything within us with the question: How do we, as older people, actually stand before the youth today? — And no other answer can emerge than this: when we consider boys and girls at the stage of life they are in—as they reach sexual maturity—and when we see them coming toward us after this maturation, then we must admit to ourselves, if we are to be deeply and honestly sincere: We do not know what to do with them unless we take charge of their upbringing and education based on new foundational principles. We find ourselves in a situation where we have created a gulf between ourselves and these young people.

[ 13 ] That is the big question, one that is becoming relevant even today. Look at today’s youth movement and how it has taken shape. What is it, if not living proof that guidance through education and instruction—and through all forms of experimentation—has been completely lost? Look at what has become of it: at this very moment, with remarkable speed, this very youth we are speaking of here has felt an inner urge to break away from the guidance of their elders in order, in a certain sense, to take the reins into their own hands. Yes, the fact that this has arisen—that this impulse has flared up among the youth—we need not attribute to the youth themselves. Discussing how this arose among the youth is of great interest to Spiritual Science, but it is not, at first glance, of pedagogical interest. The pedagogical interest can only lie in the fact that the elders were to blame—that they had lost the reins of leadership, that they had lost their understanding of the maturing youth. And since the elders at home could no longer hold the young people back, the youth became “Wandervögel,” seeking in the unknown that which the elders could no longer provide. Thoughts and words had become dull; there was nothing left to offer the growing youth, and so they wandered out into the woods, seeking within themselves what they could not find in the words or the examples set by the elders. This is one of the most significant phenomena of our time: young people were suddenly faced with a great question that, in all past ages, had been answered in one way or another by their elders—but which could no longer be answered by them, because the language the elders spoke was no longer understood by the youth.

[ 14 ] Look back on your own youth. You may have been more well-behaved than the Wandervögel; you may have been a little less eager to go hiking. To put it bluntly: you behaved yourselves, you pretended to listen to the older generation, and you stayed put. And the others no longer pretended to listen to their elders; they broke away from them and set out into the world. We saw that. We also saw the full outcome of the youth movement. Not long ago, a need to connect with one’s true self emerged within this youth movement. They wanted to find, through themselves and for themselves, what their elders could no longer give them. They wanted to get out into nature. In something undefined, they wanted to find what the older generation could no longer give them. And there they found that connection, one to the other. They formed small cliques. Basically, a curious individual phenomenon occurred that is actually immensely instructive: the older generation lost their leadership; they became philistines. The older generation didn’t believe it: a great longing had awakened in the youth—the very longing embodied in the Wandervogel. And what did the older generation say about this, having themselves been somewhat touched by the new era? They didn’t say, “We must now seek within ourselves to find the possibility, to establish a connection within ourselves; we must embark on a profound examination of conscience; we must find the path from old age to youth.” — They said something entirely different: “Well, since the youth no longer wants to learn anything from us, let us learn from the youth.” And so we see, from the rural boarding schools to other areas, the older generation adapting to what the youth wants and demands. If you take an unbiased look at the situation that has arisen, it amounts to nothing other than the older generation wanting to be led by the youth, that they have capitulated more and more, that they have relinquished more and more of their leadership, until—in a particularly turbulent time—works councils were established in the individual educational institutions, elected not by the teaching staff but by the student body.

[ 15 ] Well, this phase, which has taken on the character of the elderly, really calls for deep reflection. But what has become of the youth themselves? Young people have moved from the need for connection—from finding themselves within a clique—to finding themselves spiritually through hermitage. The final phase is that everyone feels cast back upon themselves, that each individual harbors a certain fear of connection. It is, in fact, an atomizing longing—that very thing in which one once felt, sought, and believed with certainty that one would find something in the world. This has transformed into brooding over the question: How can it be that one cannot come to terms with oneself as a human being? — And you see this latter feeling looming ever more clearly today when you observe with an alert mind what is happening everywhere. You see, as uncertainty grows, a fragmentation of the human soul’s powers everywhere. You see everywhere a particular fear, a horror vacui, so that young people dread and shudder at what is to come as they grow older and older. They have a horror of the life into which they are to grow. And in contrast to this, there is, in essence, only one thing: precisely what I would like to call the great examination of conscience. And this cannot depend on external appearances, but can only aim at asking oneself: Yes, how did it actually come to pass that, when we want to take the lead, we—with the powers of old age—no longer understand the youth at all?

[ 16 ] We can look back to a more distant era—let’s say, to the Greeks. Among the people of Greece, as history tells us, we still find a certain understanding between the older and younger generations. In particular, if you seek to truly understand Greek life, you will find a remarkable understanding between people who are between the ages of 14, 15, and in their early twenties—that is, in the “third stage of life”—and those in the stage of life I have referred to as the “fifth,” which lies between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. This is what is peculiar about the Greek era and also about early Roman culture: that people who were 35, 36, or 37 years old got along well with those who were as old as our elementary school students are today, and that those who had entered a more mature age got along better with those who had entered their early thirties. There was a mutual understanding between the older generation and the youth, precisely according to age groups. It is by no means easy to fathom the mysteries of human development; indeed, we can still clearly sense this in the Greeks: when a young man or woman reaches sexual maturity, they look up to those who have reached the age of 28 or 29. From there, they choose those who appeal to them most, whom they now freely aspire to emulate. They can no longer follow a self-evident authority, but instead aspire to that very age. And we see this disappearing more and more as humanity develops through the Middle Ages up to the present day. People are, so to speak, thrown into disarray. One might say: chaos arises from the natural order established by the spirit. And in the world, this then becomes a social issue; within our world of education and instruction, it is a pedagogical and didactic issue. Without taking the entire global context into account, we truly cannot make any progress.

[ 17 ] I would now like to draw your attention to a very specific fact that should show you what the issue is: You need only generalize this specific fact to see why this lack of understanding has arisen between the older generation and the younger generation. You see, as we grow into life so vividly through our schooling today, we learn, for example, that there are as many as 70 chemical elements. We learn this, and when we become teachers, we generally have an awareness of these chemical elements—that this is simply the way it is, even if this understanding has been somewhat eroded in recent times; but it remains deep within us that we are dealing with some 70 chemical elements, and that through their synthesis and analysis, all things in the external world are brought about. We even form a worldview. And that was the farce: that in the last third of the 19th century, a worldview was built upon these 70 chemical elements. People simply thought about the world in such a way that they asked themselves: Well, how could the celestial bodies—which have since solidified—have come into being through chemical and physical changes; how did spontaneous generation occur through a particularly complex chemical synthesis? People sought to grasp the entire world with thoughts that arose from such elements.

[ 18 ] But this whole way of facing the world with one’s head would have seemed like folly to a Greek, like something inhuman. If a Greek had been expected to create a mental image of the world as consisting of some 70 elements that synthesize and analyze one another, he would have felt, deep down, that human beings would thereby seem to him like something bound to crumble into dust. He would not have understood any of it; what is a human being supposed to do with such a world, consisting of 70 elements that can be analyzed and synthesized? What is the point of it all? The world wants to exist just fine; it wants to form a gigantic world-retort, but how does humanity look in the midst of it all? It would be as if one were to place a large retort in a room, let all sorts of elements boil inside it, open a door, and through that retort door push a human being into whatever is being allowed to bubble away there from salts and acids. That is roughly the thought that would have occurred to a Greek if he had been expected to conceive of the world as composed of some 70 elements. He would not have believed it. It would have contradicted his intuition. He would have found himself instinctively drawn to a feeling such as the one I have described.

[ 19 ] But a human being is by no means just a head. That was just a custom in the villages; it was nothing but a farce when you came to stalls where someone stood in front and said, “Come on in, ladies and gentlemen!” “Here you can see a living, talking human head!” — And when you went inside, all you saw was a head with no body. A human being is not just a head, but a whole person. And if, with his head, he wants to develop such views—where his entire life of will and feeling, his very physical nature, is supposed to be such that he can think the world consists only of such stuff—then a person must feel differently; he must have something different in his fingertips than the Greek had in his fingertips, for whom that would have been considered folly. One feels differently, one relates to the world differently, by believing that it is merely something suitable for a retort, but not for a universe. And so it was, of course, with the sociological matters that appeared to the Greeks. These things must be considered. One must tell oneself: We do not merely think that the world consists of 74 elements; rather, we go about our daily lives—we wash our hands in the morning and dry them—in such a way that we also feel this to be true. The fact that this is possible—that when we wash ourselves, our minds accept such an inhuman worldview as reality, that we are capable of thinking this way—imprints a very specific character on our feelings and our sensibilities. Yes, and if we can feel, sense, and think in such a way that the human being actually falls completely outside the picture, then the fact is that, with this sense and feeling, when we stand before fifteen-year-old boys and girls, we cannot connect with them; we do not know what to do with it. With our worldview, we can hold university lectures; we can analyze what we believe to be the truth, but we cannot live by it. We then send the people who are supposed to educate others out from our universities, and they have absolutely nothing left that connects them to young people. That is the terrible abyss that has opened up before us.

[ 20 ] You see, for us humans, a certain resonance with what we teach today as chemistry and physics arises when we haven’t taken proper care of ourselves, when we’ve reached the age of 50 or 55. By then we have become so sclerotic that there is a faint resonance within us from the world out there. Over the course of our physical lives, the world forces slowly do something strange to us humans: our organisms harden as we grow older. We become dissociated; we gather dust, so to speak, on the inside as we approach the age of 50. But there we are dissolved—slowly, not as cruelly as if we were sealed in a retort. It doesn’t go that far, but it does proceed more slowly; it happens in a somewhat more humane way. But at this stage of life, when a person is approaching death, something begins to take effect within them that resembles what we describe with our modern science. We understand the world in such a way that only the very elderly can truly grasp it. Nature is kind; she allows them to become a little childlike in this regard.

[ 21 ] When one speaks of such things, it seems as if one were trying to make fun of the world. It is not humor; it is profound tragedy, truth: Today we are describing only that part of the world that unfolds after we have died—nothing else at all. Once we have died, something similar takes place, and as we grow old, we have a premonition of what happens in our physical body after we die. We describe nothing else. We have filled all our educational institutions with this kind of knowledge, which relates to the physical human being as he dissolves, after he has died. But this does not live within our bodies. We perceive it through the thoughts we take in. — And the concepts formed since time immemorial—the theological concepts—live on only in words, because there is no harmony whatsoever between what theology says and what is taught as the natural history of the human corpse. As long as one considers these things purely from an epistemological perspective, the matter is not particularly serious; but the moment one seeks to integrate them into life, then they become serious. If one takes the human being as a whole and asks: What kind of people do people become under the influence of such a life? — then the question takes on great significance; then it becomes a matter of life and death. We cannot avoid this vital question; or rather, we must not evade it. In the classroom, we are confronted with the child, within whom forces are at work that are entirely different from those we ourselves have learned about. And we know absolutely nothing about what is actually at work within the child; we are separated from the child by an abyss.

[ 22 ] To the Greeks, it would have seemed foolish to speak of some 70 elements, as we do today. What did they say? They said that the structure of the world does not consist of some 70 elements, but rather that a quartet of forces acts in combination: fire, water, earth, and air. When we approach our scholars today—the leaders of our educational system, with their noses in the air—we naturally get the response: that is a childish worldview that has been outgrown; it is something that no longer needs to be taken into account. —And if there is someone who begins to think a little, they say: Well, we still have that today. Today these are the four states of matter—solid, liquid, gaseous—and we shouldn’t view heat that way anymore; that, too, was child’s play. We still have it, but we’ve set it straight. And we must look upon what the Greeks had with a certain degree of goodwill. Well, it’s fortunate that we’ve come so wonderfully far that we now have some 70 elements, whereas people in the past engaged in all sorts of animism, speaking of fire, water, air, and earth.

[ 23 ] But that is not how it is. The matter runs much deeper than that. The Greeks spoke of fire, water, earth, and air, and in doing so did not have the same mental image of these things that we have today; rather, if you had asked a Greek who lived within this Greek worldview —there were still numerous people who lived within this Greek worldview, right up until the 15th century; later generations saw it written down in the surviving texts, and people today sometimes see it as well, though they no longer understand any of it at all—well, if you had asked him: “What do you imagine when you think of warmth? What do you imagine when you think of fire?” — By “fire,” I imagine something that is warm and dry. — What do you imagine when you think of “air”? — By “air,” I imagine something that is warm and moist. — He does not imagine the external, physical air, but rather forms an idea. He does not imagine an external, physical fire; he forms an idea. Within this idea lay the underlying concept: warm and dry. It was not a crude clinging to the sensory; rather, it was certain inner qualities through which he created a mental image of it. One had to rise to something that is not seen with the eyes but grasped with the mind in order to arrive at these elements—at what was then called an “element.”

[ 24 ] Yes, what exactly did they arrive at there? You see, they arrived at a conception that corresponds, in its effect, to what the etheric in the human being—the etheric body—is. There they approached the etheric body. One was not actually inside the etheric body, but one was dealing with the way the etheric body works on the physical body. No human being can ever form a mental image of how the etheric body works on the physical body if they try to examine some chemical configuration, such as how oxygen and carbon interact with one another. One can never in any way grasp the activity of the etheric body in relation to the physical body by applying ideas such as those involving the interaction of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, or sulfur. In doing so, one completely removes oneself from the etheric activity and remains within the physical realm—that is, one remains within what happens to a human being after death. One can only come to terms with what constantly takes place in life—as the etheric body works upon the physical body—by thinking in terms of warm and dry, cold and moist, warm and moist; that is, by inwardly visualizing these qualities with which the etheric body engages the physical, and by holding this living conception of nature within the four elements. These four elements are not a childish mental image that looks merely at the outer physical world, but one that looks at the etheric activity. And this mental image has been lost altogether in later times.

[ 25 ] But this has an effect on the whole person. Think about it: as you grow up, you learn only that the world consists of some 70 elements—iodine, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, and so on—and that they’re all swirling around in a jumble. This has such an effect on the world of sensation that you, as a human being, find yourself completely removed from it. That is over there, and we have nothing to do with the whole thing.

[ 26 ] One can reasonably form a mental image of what it might mean if one imagines the world as consisting of these four elements: fire, water, air, and earth. One imagines it as the Greeks did: in fire, the warm and dry; in air, the warm and moist; in water, the cold and moist; in earth, the cold and dry. When one imagines these qualities and brings them to life within oneself, these are mental images that grasp one qualitatively. One becomes permeated by them. They enter the limbs; they take hold of one. One becomes something entirely different when one grasps such mental images—which enter the limbs—than when one grasps a mental image that actually enters the limbs only after one has died as a physical human being. The corpses in the graves might indeed feel as they do when the seventy or so elements group together according to chemical laws. But living human beings derive nothing for their lives from such a mental image. In contrast, they are gripped by it in their etheric body when they have this mental image of the four elements.

[ 27 ] That is precisely the point, you see: our education has actually become completely unnecessary for us as human beings; for us humans, it has become completely unnecessary. Today, our education prepares us, at most, to put the outer human being in order—to do what is mechanically external to the human being. That is what we are prepared for. We have nothing at all for the inner human being. It does not penetrate into the limbs. It remains in the intellect. It has absolutely no effect on feeling or the will. Today, if we want to have any effect on anyone at all, we must approach them entirely externally through all sorts of sermons. We have to tell them something from the outside, but we give them nothing that works its way inward. It is a terrible insincerity in the way we relate to the young people growing up today. We tell them to be good, but we give them nothing through which they can actually be good. So they can only follow us out of deference to authority. If we are able to confront a person with the sword all the way into old age—if they do not follow—then that works; and afterward, we must have the power of a police sergeant who ensures that what we say is carried out by the person. — An intellectual insight that is completely meaningless to the person gives them absolutely nothing for their inner life. Herein lies the reason why we cannot reach people who are standing at this very important moment, when they are supposed to bring the spiritual-soul aspect into a reciprocal relationship with the physical-bodily aspect. What are people to make of the youth who, out of life itself, want to relate the spiritual-soul aspect to the physical?

[ 28 ] That is where we want to begin tomorrow so that we can work our way into the problem. My main aim today was to convey a sense of how this is a matter of worldview that preoccupies us at that crucial moment when we must find a way to connect with children’s souls at a very specific and important stage of life.