14. The Development of the German Soul

GA 65/1916-04-13/p012 ·1916-04-13 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: unknown. How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.

If you examine people in general, you can apply more general principles. If you want to examine an individual person, everyone can easily object, but the objection is fair, I just can't go into it now: Well, if you want to understand the person, you have to wait until they have changed their teeth, until they have become that old. Of course, you have to wait for the individual person if you want to understand them. But you know, science is not achieved through individual observations alone, but by applying what is observed in one case to the general case. And now you have to try to recognize how certain peculiarities of the soul present themselves during these years. And if one were to undertake a kind of amalgamation of the qualities in the first twenty years and the qualities in the second thirty years up to the forty-second and forty-third years and form an idea of what the soul life is in these years, then one comes to the conclusion that in the girl, until the teeth change, it presses into the physical. The way in which the physical configures itself, how it forms plastically, within which the soul lives and works, is only revealed in later years as a soul configuration in the manner indicated.

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Cite: GA 65/1916-04-13/p012 · edition English