VII. The Rhythmic System, Sleeping and Waking, Imitation

Thus here too it is essential to develop by means of a true observation of the nature of the child a fine sense of the degree to which we may call with safety upon the different forces at work. A most vital principle is here at stake. If I allow the child to think, if I teach him to write, for instance, in an intellectual way, saying: ‘Here are the letters and you must learn them,’ I am overstraining the mental powers of the child and laying the germs of sclerosis, at any rate of a tendency to sclerosis. The human being as such has no inner relationship whatever to the letters of modern script. They are little ‘demons’ so far as human nature is concerned, and we have to find the right way to approach them. This way is found if to begin with we stimulate the child's artistic feeling by letting him paint or draw the lines and colours that flow of themselves on to the paper from his innermost being. Then, as the child's artistic sense is aroused, one always feels—and feeling is here the essential thing—how greatly man is enriched by this artistic activity. One feels that intellectuality impoverishes the soul, makes a man inwardly barren, whereas artistic activity makes him inwardly rich, so rich in fact that this richness must somehow be modified. The pictorial and artistic tends of itself to pass into the more attenuated form of concepts and ideas, and must in a measure be impoverished in this process of transference. But if, after having stimulated the child artistically, we then allow the intellectuality to develop from the artistic feeling, it will have the right intensity. The intellect too will lay hold of the body in such a way as to bring about a rightly balanced and not an excessive hardening process.