After this time it will be necessary to use forethought concerning the matter that is to be related, so that pictures of life, such as he can beneficially emulate, may be set before the soul of the young person. It must not be overlooked that bad habits can be ousted by pictures correspondingly repulsive. Warnings against such bad habits and tendencies are at best of little avail, but if one were to let the living picture of a bad man affect the youthful imagination, explaining the result to which the tendency in question leads, one would do much toward its extermination. One thing to bear always in mind is, that it is not abstract representations that influence the developing etheric body, but living pictures in their spiritual clearness, and, of course, these latter must be applied with the utmost tact, for otherwise the opposite to what is desired will be the result. In the matter of stories it is always a question of the way in which they are told. The verbal narration of a tale can therefore not be successfully replaced by a reading of it. During the time between the second teeth and puberty, the spiritually pictorial, or, as one might also call it, the symbolical representation, ought to be considered in yet another way. It is necessary that the young person should learn to know the secrets of nature, the laws of life, as far as possible through symbols and not by the means of dry and intellectual ideas. Allegories about the spiritual relation of things ought so to reach the soul that the law and order of existence underlying the allegories is rather perceived and divined, than grasped by the means of intellectual ideas. The saying that “all things transient are only symbols” ought to form an all-important motto for the education during this period. It is very important for a person to receive the secrets of nature in allegories before they appear to his soul in the form of natural laws, etc. An example will make this clear. Supposing one wished to speak to a young person of the immortality of the soul, of its going forth from the body, one might as an instance make the comparison of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. As the butterfly comes forth from the chrysalis, so the soul comes forth from the shell of the body after death. No one who has not previously received them by means of some such image, will adequately grasp the right facts in the abstract ideas. For by such a simile one speaks not only to the intellect, but also to the sensations and feelings, to the whole soul. The youth having gone through all this, approaches the matter in quite a different attitude of mind when it is given to him later in intellectual conceptions. Indeed the man who cannot first approach the riddle of existence with this feeling is much to be pitied. It is necessary that the teacher should have similes at his disposal for all natural laws and secrets of the world.