IX. Synopsis of a Lecture from the “French Course”

Let us consider the child. At about the seventh year of life, a child develops his or her second teeth. This is not merely the work of the period of time immediately preceding this change. It is a process that begins with embryonic development and only concludes with the second teeth. These forces, which produce the second teeth at a certain stage of development, were always active in the child’s organism. But they do not reveal themselves in this way in subsequent periods of life. Further tooth formations do not occur. And yet the forces concerned have not been lost, they continue to work, they have merely been transformed. They have undergone a metamorphosis (there are other forces, too, in the child’s organism that undergo a similar metamorphosis).