Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

142
The theories must indeed come. It is a necessary part of human
experience, a necessary condition of human freedom, to detach oneself
from the world and consider it abstractly. But this is only one half of
the story, and a true education will also sow the seeds of imaginative
thinking by which ultimately the adult may regain in consciousness
that union with the spiritual being of the world from which he fell in
childhood. This is also attempted in a Steiner school.
The world is interpreted morphologically rather than
atomistically. The life-giving principle of polarity is again and again
invoked. The exact eye of the scientist is enriched with the vision of the
artist. The Fantasy of the young child is born again in the creative act
of Imagination, which becomes an organ not for the inner life of man
alone but for the understanding of the world.
It is here where the education founded by Rudolf Steiner stands
in the very centre of one of the most acute problems of to-day—the
relation of the Sciences with the Humanities. By its very definition
modern Natural Science investigates a world outside man —moral and
aesthetic considerations which form the core of his being have no place
in the laboratory. The Humanities on the other hand (as their very
name implies) are essentially concerned with human values. The two
may be taught side by side, but they share no common language, and
man remains in a divided world where his moral and aesthetic being
cannot converse with his scientific knowledge. The dichotomy was
clearly seen, and its solution prophetically envisaged, more than a hundred
years ago by the American Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essay on
Nature, only that he uses the term naturalist where we would say natural
scientist or simply scientist. A few of his more pregnant sentences
will make a fitting end to this article.
“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is
because man is disunited with himself … He cannot be a naturalist till
he satisfies all the demands of the spirit … There are innocent men
who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of
duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are
patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light
of their understanding. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach
every object from personal relations and see it in the light of thought,
shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections,
then will God go forth anew into the creation.”
Such a faithful thinker was Rudolf Steiner, and we owe it to his
recovery of the wholeness of Imagination that we can show our children
a world where God has gone forth again into the creation.