Pfeiffer & Steiner meet

Pfeiffer, … first met Rudolf Steiner at the age of 19. Pfeiffer’s mother and stepfather were both anthroposophists and knew Steiner personally, but they never spoke to Ehrenfried about Spiritual Science, leaving him to find it on his own. Pfeiffer was in university at the time, and Steiner immediately set to work designing Pfeiffer’s education. The course load was extremely heavy, and strongly weighted to the sciences: as Steiner told Pfeiffer, ‘to overcome materialism, we must know its means and methods as well as we know our own.’

Pfeiffer wrote in the introduction the Agriculture Course:

During my own years at the university, for example, it was my regular practice to lay my proposed course of studies for the new term before Rudolf Steiner for guidance in the choice of subjects. On one occasion he urged me to take simultaneously two — no, three — main subjects, chemistry, physics and botany, each requiring six hours a day. To the objection that there were not hours enough in the day for this, he replied simply, “Oh, you’ll manage it somehow.”