Lecture I

We can see how until recently investigators in psychology and education have carefully observed the details of the daily life of man, be it fully mature men and women or the transitional developmental life. We might ask: What is fundamentally necessary for an observation of the soul life of the grownup or the developing child? It is to acquire a certain inner relationship to what one observes. Try to put yourselves into the observational methods of olden times, in the fields of psychology and education. You will find that the inner relationship that once existed between human beings has diminished in recent times. We are not so intimately connected in an objective way with the soul life of another human being as was the case in the past. We are no longer aware when our own soul vibrates in sympathetic reverberation with what lives in the soul of another. We are more removed from the objective soul life of the other; formerly it could be directly observed. We are becoming more and more estranged from any really intimate contact with the soul of the other, where in a directly intuitive way one takes part with one's own inner nature in the inner nature of the other soul. Now an effort is made to approach the human soul from the outside through the use of instruments. There is an effort to explore the human soul through the use of apparatus in an external way. This effort is in the character of our time and must be acknowledged as being partially justified. If one has become estranged from a direct perception of the inner activity, then one must accept the outer expression of the inner activity, and at the same time be content with the outer use of experimentation.