Five lectures Dennis gave at Rudolf Steiner College to craftspeople and teachers from Ruskin Mill, who educate young people with learning difficulties through practical crafts. The question running through all five is how a sense impression becomes a feeling, and how imagination can change that, in a student and in a teacher.

Dennis starts from what he calls menu consciousness. When life comes as a list of choices, we form opinions instead of making decisions. His answer is the formula he takes from Steiner: enliven the senses, and then ensoul the life. Notice the sympathy and antipathy every sense impression stirs, then come to understand it. From there the week moves from form in nature and the difference between fantasy and imagination, to the neurology of feeling and what it means for students on the autistic spectrum, to a four-step practice of phenomenology (observe, depict or describe, represent, silence), and finally to the seven-year stages of life and the shadow each stage leaves for the next.

Every lecture has exercises done in the room: sympathy and antipathy in Winslow Homer’s The Fog Warning, flipping and rotating a Necker cube, drawing the missing leaf in a row of dandelion leaves, and two alchemical pictures, the lion eating the sun and the snake eating its tail. The examples come from the workshop: the sound of the hammer, a dull chisel, nailing deck as a young carpenter. Dennis’s point is that the judgment a craftsperson learns, whether a curve is right, is the same faculty that later becomes moral judgment.

Given at Rudolf Steiner College, Fair Oaks, California, in December 2011.