Lecture Four

Children will be capable of acquiring the right view (which I have characterized in a somewhat abstract way) at about ten years of age. This may be seen through intimately observing what develops in a child. But up to this age, our teaching about plants—springing as they do from the living body of the Earth—must be in the form of an image. We should clothe it in fairy tales, in pictures, and in legends. Only after the tenth year, when the child begins to feel like an independent personality, can we speak of plants individually. Before then, a child does not discriminate between the self and the environment. The I is not completely separated from the surrounding world. So we must speak of plants as though they were little human beings or little angels, we must make them feel and act like human beings, and we must do the same thing with the animals. Only later in school life do we speak of them objectively as separate units.