IV. The Art of Education Consists of Bringing Into Balance the Physical and Spiritual Nature of the Developing Human Being

It means, for example, that the ego must not enter the physical body, etheric body and astral body too deeply, but that on the other hand it must neither be kept too much outside. If it settles down too firmly in the human organism, if the ego unites with them too intensively, man becomes too much an exclusively corporeal being; he will then think only with his brain, will be entirely dependent on his organism, in short he will become too earthly, the ego will have been too strongly absorbed by the bodily organisation. That we must avoid. Through our education we must try to avoid everything that would lead to the ego becoming too strongly absorbed by the bodily organisation, becoming too dependent on it. You will understand the utter seriousness of this matter when I tell you that the cause of the criminality and brutality of some men lies in the fact that their ego was allowed to be absorbed too strongly during their years of growing up. The characteristics of degeneracy, found by anthropologists and known to you, which manifest fully only in later years, reveal themselves often as an ego which has been too strongly absorbed by the rest of the bodily organisation. And if there is such a man born with the earlobe of a criminal, it is all the more important that we see to it, that his ego will not sink too deeply into the rest of his organisation. Because through a true artistic treatment in education we can avoid that even in a man with degenerate physical characteristics the ego sinks too deeply into his organism, we can thus save him from becoming a criminal.