42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II

GA 246/1911-06-06/p024 ·1911-06-06 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Then the moment may easily come when we say to ourselves in life: The best thing we can do is to give ourselves to the better person, to sacrifice ourselves to this better person with everything that is in us, everything that is our wisdom, everything that is even our already achieved morality - and to wipe away and dampen all pride and all the arrogance we have in us in the face of what is in us! - Then we feel that there is something in us that really lives in the first three years of childhood and makes us human. And we are aware, when we consider what has now been said, that the human being as he is today is imperfect and cannot consciously carry within him that which works in him in the first years of life; he must first make himself more perfect so that he can consciously carry within him that which now works unconsciously in him in the first three years of childhood.

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Cite: GA 246/1911-06-06/p024 · edition English