Lecture Five

It is indeed a grievous feature of present-day life that when one human being meets another, there is no mutual understanding. You can find clubs and societies with one or another common aim, where people have worked together for years, but they really do not know each other at all. People know nothing about the inner life of those they work with, because they lack a living interest, a living devotion, a living sympathy in relation to the other. But such living interest, devotion, and sympathy will be present if, at the right age, we permeate every area of teaching and education with the principle of imitation and, in its proper place, the principle of authority. This social feeling and understanding for others depends, in a most intimate way, on whether or not we have any sense of what in our world participates in the spiritual realm.