I. Inner Experience of Language I

Now in the method as carried out here in the anthroposophical prosecution of spiritual Science the attempt is made, by means of many-sided conditions of the conceptions in question, gradually to lead over into the concrete. Just think, if from one side only it is mentioned that the human being is divided into physical body, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, spirit self . . . and here “spirit” comes in—spirit-self, life spirit, spirit man. It can only take effect with full consciousness, for most people who hear the matter can come to no concrete conception of it at all. But then it soon follows that the people will be told—“Look at the course of human life: from birth to the seventh year, to the change of teeth, the physical body comes principally into activity, then till the fourteenth year the etheric body, then the sentient-body, then from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the sentient soul, then in the thirties the intellectual soul,” and so on. With that people are told: “Observe the concrete man from the outside developing through the course of his life and the differences that appear. If at the beginning of his twenties you look at a man with his special characteristics, these characteristics will be symptoms for what you pictured when the expression “sentient soul” is employed. If you look at a child with his characteristic of doing everything that his elders do, of doing everything through his physical body, then in the way the child behaves you will get an idea of what one understands by “physical body.” And if you look at an old man with his gray hair and wrinkled countenance, with the flesh noticeably withering and observe him in his movements, the way he acts, you no longer see as in the child, how whatever is in him is acting chiefly through the sheaths, instead you see in the old man, indeed, what is beginning to free itself from the physical body. Observing the old man, you will gradually get an idea of the spirit from his gestures, his way of behavior. Comparing an old man with a child and comparing the gestures of the old with those imitated by the young, there is awakened in your soul a feeling of the difference between spirit and matter. Think how in that way the pictorial power in imaginative ideas is helped, my dear friends. It is an indication that one should. think concretely of the course of human life, and then gain an experience of filling your onetime abstract words with concrete content.