Thus I was fully confirmed in my hopes of the Conference; but I was
also often astonished at what I heard. Not least among my surprises was
Rudolf Steiner's presentation of Goethe as the herald of the new form
of scientific knowledge which he himself was expounding. I was here
introduced to a side of Goethe which was as completely unknown to me as
to so many others among my contemporaries, who had not yet come into
touch with Anthroposophy. For me, as for them, Goethe had always been
the great thinker revealing his thoughts through poetry. Indeed, only
shortly before my meeting with Rudolf Steiner it was in his poetry that
Goethe had become newly alive to me as a helper in my search for a
fuller human experience of nature and my fellow-men. But despite all my
Goethe studies I had been quite unaware that more than a century
earlier he had achieved something in the field of science, organic and
inorganic alike, which could help modern man towards the new kind of
knowledge so badly needed to-day. This was inevitable for me, since I
shared the modern conviction that art and science were fields of
activity essentially strange to one another. And so it was again Rudolf
Steiner who opened the way for me to Goethe as botanist, physicist and
the like.

I must mention another aspect of the Stuttgart Conference which Belongs
to this picture of my first encounter with Anthroposophy, and gave it
special weight for anyone in my situation at that period. In Stuttgart
there were many different activities concerned with the practical
application of Rudolf Steiner's teachings, and so one could become
acquainted with teachings and applications at the same time. There was
the Waldorf School, founded little more than a year before, with
several hundred pupils already. It was the first school to undertake
the transformation of anthroposophical knowledge of man into
educational practice; later it was followed by others, in Germany and