As the muscles of the hand grow strong and powerful when they do work suitable for them, so the brain and the other organs of the physical human body will be directed towards the right path, if they receive the right impressions from their environment. An example will best illustrate the point in question. A doll can be made out of an old piece of cloth, by making two corners serve for arms, two for legs and a knot for the head, with the eyes, nose and mouth painted in ink—or a so-called “beautiful” doll can be bought with real hair and painted cheeks, and given to the child. The latter, it is hardly necessary to say, is really horrible, and is calculated to ruin the child’s sound aesthetic taste for life. Here the question of education is quite a different one. If the child has the rag-doll to look at, it has to complete out of its own imagination the impression of a human being which the doll is intended to convey. This work of the imagination helps to build up the forms of the brain, so that it opens up as the muscles of the hand expand by doing their natural work. When the child possesses the so-called “beautiful doll,” there is nothing further for the brain to do. It becomes, as it were, stunted and dried up, instead of expanding itself. If people could look into the brain after the manner of the occultist and see it building itself up into forms, they would certainly only give their children that kind of plaything which is really able to stimulate the creative powers of the brain. All toys that are only composed of dead mathematical forms have a desolating and deadening effect on the child’s formative powers, whilst on the other hand everything that stimulates the perception of something living tends to influence in the right direction. Our materialistic age produces but few good toys—such for instance as that in which two movable pieces of wood are made to represent two smiths facing one another and hammering at some object. Such things may still be bought in the country. Very good also are those picture books in which the figures are made to be pulled by strings, thus enabling the child to transform the dead picture into a representation of action. All this produces an inner activity of the organs, and out of this activity the right form of the organs builds itself up. Of course these things can only just be indicated here, but in the future occult science will be called upon to point out that which in each particular case is necessary, and this it is able to do. For it is not an empty abstraction, but a body of vital facts quite able to furnish the guiding-lines for practical matters.