I. Inner Experience of Language I

Something else is involved in this. A man feels an enormous satisfaction today in thinking in abstractions, free from the reality that the senses bring him. But he simply comes thereby into gaps in his conceptions; at least they are gaps for the dead. Today when people repeat spirit, spirit, spirit, the words are just so many blanks for nothing concrete is called forth. Most present-day thoughts are abstractions. The farther east one goes, say Europeans the more pictorial speech becomes. And that is just the reason why speech is more nearly related to spiritual things the farther east one goes; because it is more in the form of pictures. Speaking in abstractions should not lead away at all from the concrete sense-conception, but should simply illuminate it. Just think how many of you, my dear friends, thought concretely of the sentence I have just spoken: the sense-conception that have reality should be illumined by the abstractions? You may imagine the concrete sense-conception as a darkness which is illumined by the abstraction. So when we utter the sentence “into our concrete conceptions abstractions enter to illumine them” we think of rays of light falling into a dark room which is blue-black except where the yellow rays stream in. So when I state “into our concrete sense-conceptions the abstractions send their light” I have in mind a dark room into which fall bright rays of light. For how many people is it the case today that they really have such a picture in mind? They say aloud the word illumine without having any of the actual concrete conception in what you would call a spiritual sense. But the important thing is that when we pass over into abstraction, we do not only have a different picture of the concrete, of the physical, that we experience the change in conception. We can make this experience our own on watching eurhythmy; for then through another, less over-worked, medium, through the medium of gesture, what lies within the words comes to expression. And men can find their way back to imagery in ideas.