through this sense! The moral sense, which will, at this period, be developed by pictures of life and by standard authorities, will also gain a certain stability if, through the sense of beauty, the good is recognized as beautiful and the bad as ugly. Thought in its own shape, as an inner life of distilled ideas, must, at the period in question, be kept in the background. It must develop spontaneously, as it were, uninfluenced from without, while the soul is nourished by means of similes and pictures representing life and the mysteries of nature. Thus, in the midst of the other experiences of the soul between the seventh year and the time of puberty, thought must grow and the faculty for judgment be matured, so that after a successful puberty the person becomes capable of forming his own opinions concerning the matters of life and knowledge, with complete independence. Indeed, the less one works directly upon the critical faculty, and the more one works indirectly through the development of the other spiritual powers, the better will it be for the whole after-life of the person concerned. Occult science lays down the principles, not only for the spiritual side of education, but also for the purely physical. Thus, to give a characteristic example, let us consider gymnastics and children’s games. Just as love and joy must permeate the environment during the first years of childhood, so too the growing etheric body must be taught really to experience from bodily exercise a feeling of its own expansion, of its ever increasing strength. For instance gymnastic exercises ought to be so carried out that with every movement, with every step, the feeling rises in the inner self of the boy or girl: “I feel increasing power within me.” And this feeling should manifest itself within as a healthy delight, as a sensation of pleasure. For the devising of gymnastic exercises, in this sense, it is of course necessary to possess more than a merely intellectual knowledge of the human body, anatomically and physiologically. It is necessary to possess a close intuitive and sympathetic knowledge of the relation of joy and comfort to the postures and movements of the human body. The formulator of such exercises ought himself to experience how one movement or posture of the limbs will produce a pleasant and comfortable sensation, but another a loss of strength, and so forth. A belief that gymnastics and bodily exercises can be cultivated in this direction is one that can only be supplied to the educator by occult science, or, above all, by a mind sympathetic to such thought. One does not even require the power of vision in the spiritual worlds, but only the inclination to apply to life what has been given out by occultism. If, especially in such practical departments as this of education, occult knowledge were applied, then all the useless talk of how this knowledge has yet to be proved would straightway cease. For