I. Inner Experience of Language I

If we wish to keep in sight the deeper essentials of human development from the present into the future we must bear in mind the necessity of taking up into our speech what the speech of today lacks. Because of its lack man is shut off from the whole world in which he is between death and a new birth. Hence we are exhorted, when we would establish a connection with a dead person, not simply to speak with him in verbal conceptions, for that achieves little, but to think of some concrete situation—you have stood near him in some particular way, have heard his voice, have shared an experience—to think quite concretely of the situation and everything that happened in relation to it that makes a connection with the dead. Today man uses language in a sense which shuts him off completely from the world of the dead; the genius of speech has died to a greet extent, and must be reanimated. Much that is customary today in the use of language should be dropped. A very great deal depends upon this, my dear friends. For it is only by actually trying to listen to the genius of speech lying behind the concrete words that we shell come back to imaginative conception (which I have already mentioned here as essential for future evolution). Then we shall gradually free ourselves altogether from distorted abstractions.