Lecture II

What is active in the human physical-etheric during the childhood years, what truly engages in a creative activity, thus remains in a weakened form, toned down in the soul life as a world of pictures or a world of thoughts or mental images, in short, as a world force in thoughts and mental images, a force in its creative substantiality. It simply sits in our organism; what we know from age seven on simply sits within our organism in an organizing way. It creates there, but not at all, in the same as we are able to see it creating in outer nature; we see it creating within our own organism. Thus if a child were already a sage and were able to express himself not about outer nature but rather about what goes on within him, if the child were able to look within to his inner nature and penetrate nature there, he would say, “To know this nature means to create this nature.” The child would simply saturate himself with the creating forces, would become one with these creating forces. And in his medical instinct, in his physiological instinct, Schelling merely stated something that for the entire later life is absurd; he drew forth something from the age of childhood and extended it by saying, as it were: all this knowing in old age is nothing but a faint web of images; if one were able to know as a child, one would have to say that to know actually means to create, means to develop creative activity. We are able to see this creative activity, however, only in our own inner being.