Healthy Thinking

Lecture 4

Mankind’s history in the light of Spiritual Science

Stuttgart on 12 March 1920

My dear honourable friends! Thoughts and spiritual struggles which recently separated the affairs of individual peoples due to their specific education, must by necessity become a general matter in the entire development of humanity at present. Such a generalization, which recently had been more or less a concern in the thoughts of individuals, regarding acquiring relationships for the peculiarities of individual peoples living on the earth, was what I mentioned the day before yesterday. Today I want to speak about another matter; I want to speak about what is regarded as history, the evolution of humanity in the broadest sense of the word, under the influence of the latest striving in humanity.

Quite recently the question arose: How should we actually relate to human history? – This was more or less a matter of scholarship. The excellent artistic writer, artistic thinker and observer of art, Herman Grimm, made a remark, which I have allowed myself to mention several times here in these lectures, a remark of extraordinary importance regarding the evaluation of our view of history. Herman Grimm said, by wanting to characterise what is mostly regarded as history and historic writing, that people today felt with this kind of history they have to drag too much ballast along with them.

While we certainly admire what has been revealed in recent years from all kinds of excavations and discoveries of external documents of humanity, we still need to admit that this gathered material, the noteworthy accumulated material of history, today lacks the great points of view in the historical consideration of mankind. These important viewpoints are the one and only things which give history a value in life. When does history have a value in life for mankind? It only has value when that, which can be thought through, which can be seen through in past human destinies and human expression, provide results for our own souls, something which warms our own being, which can enkindle the mind and develop forces which can be made our own and position us correctly in life. In this regard we can already say that we have to drag ballast along in present historical considerations while great points of view, which we need today regarding burning needs in present day humanity, are missing.

Not as if historical consideration of earlier times in their way had such great viewpoints. Not as if we value what it could mean for a young man, for a young girl, to get to know the great figures in ancient history and emulate them and retain a saying the poet used: “Everyone has to choose his hero, whose path he copies up the hill to find Olympus”. The way such individual role models were chosen and what was being tested by them, is to be absorbed into one’s own will, which depended on you living in a time when a lively admiration could sprout forth for personalities, and for legal, state or church figures, who were flourishing at that time, from where we originate after all. Expressing it rather radically one could say: Today we could, in the same way as earlier, warm young people toward Alexander the Great, since they have become more or less indifferent to what Alexander the Great himself regarded as his ideal. In earlier times masses of people looked towards single ones who attended to the affairs within encompassing kingdoms which they conquered so that history in its old form with its great viewpoints could have an effect on humanity, namely on the will of the people.

This is the most significant fact in modern history, that members of the broad masses of humanity take part in all public life and that everything that can have a human face to it, wants to join in and look at affairs as if these are their own affairs. This is the thing which finally considers how the democratic spirit floods into our present. People participate in the big public affairs of life while they have become more or less indifferent to what had inspired their relatives of earlier ages. Here, above all, is the point – because the spiritual interests of mankind have democratically spread to all people – here is the point, the necessity, for how to arrive at a new way of looking at history. For those who want to allow unbiased facts of present events to work on them without prejudice, especially for those who are well aware of the hardships of the present time, they are among many who have idealistic or ideal questions among the great spiritual questions, it is this: How do we bring the contemplation of our forefathers into the child and then into the young person in order to have such an effect, such an experience, that it toughens the will, that life’s orientation can be clarified precisely through the influence of such a historic method of observation?

So, what interests we have after all, as human beings – that spirit is interwoven in the developmental history of our earthly lineage - we let it weave into the big questions of education, pedagogy, didactics, weaving it fundamentally into the big social question of the present. It is concerned with what we said yesterday and in lectures the previous week, to live in the intellectual epoch where the mind plays the leading role in ordering human affairs. This human mind in its sobriety, its dryness, has not been suitable to write history in such a way that it could really become what it should become in the sense of what has just been said, if it is to receive the right value for humanity. Just here is where spiritual science believes it is able to lead towards a new formation of a historical approach.

Spiritual science assumes that knowledge is gained through increasing the inner life of the human being. What is regarded as our knowledge and other human capabilities in ordinary life, should be developed through spiritual science towards a higher seeing and this higher seeing directed to an elevated soul life; it should be developed as a child’s capabilities are developed from a lower stage to that higher stage of capabilities of a grown-up person; out of the inner human being’s sleeping capabilities it should be allowed to spring forth. Strengthened thinking, a strict self discipline through the will, should lift out powers of vision and knowledge from the deepest inner human being which could reach into those spiritual depths of the world and of human existence, of which they would have no clue without these developed capabilities. That’s the peculiarity of this spiritual knowledge which is meant here, that it takes hold of the whole person. When we can admit to ourselves that with our striving for clarity, intellectual knowledge, which has grown so big in the last three to four centuries, not only rules our life of knowledge but also our practical life, when we admit that it’s preferable in addressing our intellectual nature as humans, then we must say that spiritual science does not strive any less for full clarity, for inner logic, for clear concepts, but that these concepts, while before, they had been derived from previously practiced thinking and previously practiced will, they do draw on the powers of the whole person.

It would be a great mistake to believe that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be created out of dark feelings, that this spiritual science wants to have something in common with all the nebulous, mystical streams with which one can so easily become confused. No, its path will be such that it will gain spiritually clear ideas and insights in the same way as science is striving for clear, precise and exact knowledge. However these ideas should spring up out of such a development of human soul life - despite its clarity, despite its exactness – that its power would fulfil the whole human being, taking the whole person into consideration. We are as a rule not engaged with our temper and feelings when we discern today’s scientific formulations, because these scientific formulations of laws call out little incentive for the will. One can say that what is recognised in the sphere of spiritual science regarding world coherences, so readily pulses through a human being and changes him, that it pours into his will and he orientates and positions himself in practical life, in order to accomplish single deeds in accordance with the great mission of humanity on earth.

If one wants to understand in a correct way what it is about – I have often characterised in lectures details how such knowledge may be arrived at – then one will easily have insight into what follows.

When one, first of all, looks at the human body, one really only does it through an observation made in the present moment. If one looks at the human limbs, as a lay person or scientist, in the way the body is presented, then we are actually considering what is before us in the present even though this human body contains traces of its past within it. We hardly consider, while we look at the human body, what this body preserves from the past, no matter how scientific. If we move forward to ordinary spiritual life, things will be different, we don’t just see the human being in the present but we see ourselves as human beings in our own past, right up to just before birth. In a thoughtful way we grasp everything we have experienced, in essential points. Then we know we would be mentally ill if we could not properly expand the memory of our experiences. There we stretch out the interest from the present moment to our immediate past. Yes, we stretch it in a different way by wanting to gain from impulses and forces of the past, what we can work into our future. We connect the present with the past and the future.

So a certain elevation in methods of observation is already apparent in ordinary life when we rise from a bodily to a soul experience. If we now proceed from soul experiences and develop them in us in such a way that they strengthens our thinking, letting thinking become seeing, then from will move to inner spiritual experience, something quite different turns out. When we look over our own few decades which we have lived as earthlings, where we have come from our individual childhood to grown adults – look over our existence as our ordinary soul life – then a new element of our entire being steps in from our inner life, our own past steps into our memories. If we extend our human being further through spiritual cognition, when we develop beyond earthly cognition to see the spiritual, then the connection of evolution of the whole of mankind enters into our vision. As paradoxical as it may appear to many members of present day humanity, it should still be said: Much will depend on a healthy, prosperous soul-spiritual development in the future, for you to see how the human being – through grasping inwardly his own human power, his power of cognition – becomes one with all of humanity. What we research in outer documents about history can be supplemented by what we, through our inner knowledge, can recognise: our connection to all of humanity and feeling ourselves as a real member of humanity.

Here is the way which I can only indicate as a sketch today: spiritual scientifically it firstly rises to a comprehensive historical point of view to then continue further as a common theme in the evolutionary history of humanity.

Science which, with a certain authority in modern time, includes the physical bodily nature of mankind, speaks about a so-called biogenetic basic law. It has become famous in connection with the examination of ancestry in more recent times. I need to characterize it here only in a few words. It is said that the human being, before being born and still in the mother’s body as an embryo, repeats all the stages of development, represented as individual animal forms. Development begins when the embryo resembles a lower animal by its fish-like form. It then develops through to higher animal forms, gradually taking on a human form, which then sees the light of day. Added to this it is said: Human evolution is a repetition of those physical, animal-like forms which the embryo goes through before it has taken on its human form. The development which the human being undergoes from conception to birth is a brief repetition of what human beings, it is said, has gone through in the development of his form. People are now trying with this outer mental examination – you can’t call it anything else – to connect it to scientific results, whose greater or lesser authority I will not dwell upon here. People have also tried to see the soul-spiritual historical aspect of humanity in a similar way. People want to take what developed into culture at present, what people of the present day regard as civilized people, people with a certain education, and consider it with connection to the past, like they look at the embryonic development in relation to the past. People have come as far as wanting to research how ancient cultures somehow are repeated in childhood and how, when a person grows up, he repeats later cultures and so on, until he – after he had from birth to childhood repeated earlier epochs – he develops out of this what we actually have as a living human being.

Spiritual science enables certain self knowledge precisely through its spiritual exercises, so that through the strengthening of soul forces it provides an intimate judgement of people which in this way gains a more precise observation of one’s own - or the course of life of others - than what is possible with the superficial possibilities or through the search of today’s soul sciences or the like. That's when it turns out that man, if he can be made aware through spiritual science of the possibility of a true self-knowledge, is advancing, and actually through this self-knowledge gains something different than is usually assumed today. This self-knowledge through spiritual science provides much about childhood; not exactly according to scientific methods, but this spiritual science has extraordinary things to say about the periods of childhood. This alone is important for the renewal of pedagogy; it only requires a precise and honest application of ordinary human abilities in order to understand the developing child and become a proper teacher and educator of this child when you are directed by spiritual scientific principles, also when you haven’t seen it yourselves. One can be a capable teacher in the sense of spiritual science, if one only has the honest will to respond intimately to the development of the human in the child, even without sight.

With reference to the older stages of development in the lives of individuals it is not so. What is important here only comes to one’s awareness when one’s own cognitive abilities have been thus strengthened as they can be within spiritual science. Then one notices that from about the thirtieth year of human life onwards there are already inner abilities which are hardly indicated; one notices that these to a certain extent intimately appear in the soul life out of mysterious depths, that they firstly announce themselves so weakly in ordinary life that they can’t be handled property – they are so weak that they become drowned out by the storms of external affairs of the world upon the individual. One needs intimate observation in order to see what is taking place in people’s mature years that want to rise up continuously in their soul life, which doesn’t resemble its original form but as if it were the echo of something completely different than it is now. If one looks more closely, then through spiritual observation one discovers something quite extraordinary: if one wants to observe the natural foundation of people in relation to what people have gone through in their prehistoric forms, then one has to go back to embryonic development, to the period of development preceding childhood; one must go back to the beginning of life.

If one wants to look at the historical evolution of humanity, one has to look at the final years of an individual’s development. Look at the intimate skills which scurry through the inner soul, which do not really surface. These are only rudiments, indications of something that has gone before, the historical past, as today the suggestive forms of embryonic development in the womb are suggestive forms of what had happened historically. For the natural development in human beings one has to go back to the beginning of life; for the historical development one has to, through the sharpening of powers of cognition from spiritual science, acquire a view of the end of human life. If one wants to penetrate what I could call a faint sunset approaching mankind today, if one has passed the thirties then one has learnt to recognise in these shadows that flutter up in the soul life, what makes us understand another person, echoing from long gone times of human development. One is then looking at what one calls prehistoric cultures, yes, one even sharpens one’s eye for the prehistoric, which only left an echo in history; one allows one’s gaze to drift back from the Vedanta philosophy of the Indian, the Vedas, back to where they came from, from where they must have originated, for they do not show themselves as original products, but as final results. From this one can learn to recognise what this strange element of power is based on, that flowed through the ancient Indian culture, this first dawn of an earth culture. One finds a kinship with the shadowy part of human old age compared with what was provided for in primeval times as a youthful freshness in the culture. Gradually one learns to recognise the spiritual reversal of the biogenetic fundamental law in nature. One learns to recognise that in these ancient times to which one has to return in order to understand the evolutionary history of mankind, the human being needs to be connected, through keeping up to his latest age of physical development, with the soul spiritual capacity of development.

During our childhood today we make an important jump for our soul life around the seventh year, when the change of teeth starts; here a very important developmental period in the child’s life comes to an end. The body goes through a metamorphosis guided by a soul-spiritual development. Then again, at the start of puberty, the body undergoes metamorphosis and also here the soul-spiritual constitution of the human being accompanies this bodily metamorphosis. What develops at these stages of life includes a soul-spiritual development simply because the body also experiences these developments. Then for us human beings the possibility disappears of seeing such transformations, or even admitting to such transformation. Admittedly it is very clear that we still go through a transformation at the beginning of our twenties; it is just more intimate yet it is clearly there. What appears at the end of our twenties and even what appears later, are actually only present in a shadowy way. Only those who have sharpened their gaze through spiritual science will notice how these shadows of transformations rise up, these transformations having been clearly present in earlier human evolutionary stages. Just as today the child’s transition through the change of teeth and through puberty experiences it simultaneously in the body and spirit, how through this we are natural human beings, simultaneously going through a soul-spiritual development and as it were feel ourselves as whole human beings in our development – while later our soul-spiritual becomes separate and goes its own way – so in earlier evolutionary epochs man and earth, together, clearly went through a bodily metamorphosis at the same time.

Once we have grasped how the human being during the first historic period which we can research, lived on the earth in his body, how he felt by living in his body up to a ripe old age, then we understand that quite a different language was uttered in the oldest documents which speak about the historic development of humanity. Then we also understand the freshness with which these wisdom-filled documents meet us. Then we understand what had at that time been poured out as poetic and which we today produce as only abstract philosophy, we understand how a Confucius brings forth the higher wisdom when we know that this which we only experience in childhood, has been experienced in those ages when hair had already started turning grey. Even then man still experienced his physical being. He wasn’t speaking in a more abstract soul-spiritual way, he spoke out in full lifeblood regarding the most abstract affairs of mankind. This is the stream we encounter not only from writings, but also from what has been handed down and overheard in public affairs of these prehistoric people.

When we look back we feel we are members of this entire human development, this development of humanity, we feel what it must mean that in these times the human being, despite becoming aged, remained child-like and experienced everything as children do, but what today is experienced as sober and dry in old age. People believed, because their inner soul life had a different colouring, people believed that the way people lived together was such that the childlike, the youthful person looked up differently to the older person than is possible today. The younger person could say to himself: When I become old myself, something will rise up within me which is only possible when I have become old; one can be happy about becoming old because aging gives one a kind of joy which you can only experience once you have aged. One could also look up at old age in other ways than if one believes the aged only have a sober and abstract outer countenance – like people are made to believe today. The entire positioning of man in relation to the world therefore becomes something different.

We can understand the entire character of ancient times in a different, inner way, not merely as outwardly dry, if we allow ourselves to feel into the primal times of human development. We learn to understand how there was a first period of human development in which the human being lived in such a way in his body, that he experienced his bodily stages of development simultaneously as soul-spiritual fact in the same way we feel today when we experience something soul-spiritual as such. At that time people felt themselves in full harmony with nature. The person of this olden time hadn’t had the possibility to despise any material thing, to underestimate or even overestimate something because for him all spirituality revealed itself in material things. He ate and he drank but what he absorbed from food and drink was revealed to him as spiritual. He wasn’t aware of matter only. He could, after taking fruit from trees and taking joy in the fruit, say to himself: Through the blood, in all that grows, in the power of the trees, the divine works, it gives me fruit as a gift; I experience the divine directly in myself in this respect because I go with a spiritual-bodily relationship into the world.

In this way the human being experienced in the first earthly epochs that he was spiritually linked to how he ran his economic affairs, ran legal matters and spiritually interacted with nature and other people. He experienced God as present on earth, he experienced God in all that was also revealed physically – of a spiritual life separated from materiality he did not yet know. Everything presented to him as earthly-sensually, he also experienced spiritually; he orientated himself in his organizations according to what was revealed to him as divine.

The organizations that people of that time were making, one can only call them theophany (a visible but not necessarily material manifestation of the Diety - translator). One can only describe it by saying: Through everything that people experienced inwardly, what was within them and around them in the environment was spiritual; what happened in economic life was only a reflection of the spiritual, like a shadow of the spiritual.

It is quite erroneous for spiritual scientific observations to regard ancient humanity as something animal-like living out of animal instincts, like superior apes. It is clear through spiritual science that the human being started from a physical experience but that his experience of matter was spiritually-divine; everything about his affairs was a mirror-image, a reflection of the soul-spiritual established on earth. Man started his historical evolution from matter albeit out of a spiritual experience. He only progressed further when he stopped being able to discern in a more advanced age, in the forties or even in the early fifties, the inner soul-spiritual metamorphoses in harmony with his aging body. The human being was reduced, already in younger years, to be locked out of a sense of unity of the soul-spiritual and the physical. During the earlier cultural age the human beings could sense a harmony between the physical and soul-spiritual right up into his thirties but no further. In the middle of life he could experience coming into his thirtieth year, in what is called, the physical-spiritual, but then it stopped, just like today the ordinary earthly life ends earlier, how we already feel older earlier, without us really experiencing aging inwardly with the body.

During the second period of human development – it began about 8^th century BC – the wonderful folklore which still falls into our life in modern times, gained such a great, gigantic influence on the whole civilized world, came into the development of the Greek people. Whoever is unable to feel how basically this great Grecian folklore differs from ours, doesn’t really understand the developmental history of humanity.

Oh, this Greek folklore! You really enrich your life when you put yourself in the shoes of the Greek, no longer remaining young like the ancient human being up to a ripe old age, but who could feel up to the middle of life as a unified human being, and still in the thirties sense a soul-spiritual connection with the body, a bit like we sense it up to the time of adolescence. That which lived and weaved there as a unit in Greek nature is what created the foundation of this harmonious art and for this spiritual creation of Greek culture. This possibility that people could in the midlife of existence still sense life as a whole, as inner harmony, made it possible that from old forms of artistic creation, drama and musical feeling could develop to what we know as Greek culture. We only really get to know the true human part of Greek culture when we link our gaze to the individual Greek.

Oh, this Greek! He should be our representative of this second epoch of the evolution of humanity. He still saw nature around him in a different way to us. Because the growing forces of his soul-spiritual nature was still being taken into account up to the thirtieth year of his life, growing forces streamed right into his sense observations. Whoever can sense what bodily-physical powers work into the being of a person so that he expresses himself soul-spiritually right up to his thirties, must say to himself: Into the very senses themselves another force pushes in and because of this, another kind of concept of sensory reality is the result. In this way one can learn to sense into the entire development of humanity, one learns to sense into individualities of prehistoric times. One learns to feel how he looked at his surroundings in such a way that nature with all its flowers, with all its other expressions, yes, with stars, sun and moon, with clouds and so on, in all nuances of impressions, worked differently on him, than it works on us. When you pursue with your feelings as to what was different for the ancient Greek, one can say to oneself inwardly in recognition: The Greek vividly felt the very light in his natural environment, everything that stood out, that was lit up and glowed - while he had no sense for anything that didn’t shine or glow.

Whoever believes that the Greeks saw their surroundings in the same way we do, has no sense for the historical development of humanity; he looks at it like a forty-year old who believes that the child sees its environment in just the same way he sees it. However, the Greek, who lived in the second epoch of human development, saw nature around him as alive in greater vividness. He saw what shone and glowed around him, what spoke directly to people, he saw also in other people, what was more active between one person and another, what was shining more from one person to another person. Right into the skin colours of the face of another person, the Greek saw them differently as to how we see our contemporaries. This is what spiritual science can reveal, from its discerning compassion for the evolutionary history of mankind. This is not disproved through outer observation, but fully confirmed, in whatever way one might argue about these things.

Whoever examines Greek literature without prejudice, will notice that the Greek actually does not have a word for blue. They have the word γλαύκος (glaukos) with which to indicate dark hair and also the dark-coloured eyebrows of certain people, and with the same expression they also refer to the blue stone lapis lazuli. They use the same word for everything which is blue and black or even dark. It is quite interesting also that they have a word for green Χλωροσ (chloros) but with this word they also simultaneously pointed to yellow resin, to honey and hair – like blue-blind people today can’t distinguish between green and yellow. Hence we can say: external history also confirms that the Greek saw the light colours as those which were important to him, and he did not yet have a strong enough feeling for blue, for the dark colours, that he could even describe this feeling in particular. Here we are looking at quite a different bodily-soul constitution of the Greek person. This gives us a historical observation which inwardly recognises the course of progress over the whole earth. This directs us to the inner being of humankind.

When we now continue in this way and have once followed such a point of view, then other issues can be considered in a similar way. Then one can understand why Roman writers tell us Greek painters had painted with only four colours, with black, white, red and yellow and didn’t mention they also painted with blue. Perhaps they also had what we see as blue, and covered the surface with it, but they didn’t call it blue. Everything they experienced was only in as far as it was bright or lit and shone. That means they lived in a life empowered by nature and didn’t know about the element of contemplation. One learns to recognise that this contemplative element in the developmental history of mankind can only appear, even if the thirties no longer affect man in such a way that he is able to perceive the soul-spiritual still in harmony with the bodily-physical, when a sense of unity, so to speak, where one experiences the simultaneous metamorphosis of the bodily physical with the soul-spiritual, stops in the twenties. From then on, there develops what the human body is most readily regarded for, the aging body, developing what in earlier epochs had in full clarity only been as traces, in shadows. If you research these things without prejudice, then you can say that in our present epoch normally the dependence of the soul-spiritual on the bodily-physical ends around the age of 26 or 27 for normal people, if the human being himself doesn’t get a hold on his inner development, for then the only things that arise within him are what had settled in him from his education while still a child.

Now something extremely meaningful appears when we consider human evolution in this way. Let’s look back at earlier times in human evolution. We can understand that people were more satisfied with an education where the human being grew up with his surroundings by imitating natural conditions. We only see the deep human importance of education and teaching in essence appear in the third, “contemplative” epoch. We learn to realize how we are situated in the evolutionary history of the whole of humanity; we no longer feel our relationship to all of humanity as something abstract. We sense our mission in this particular time epoch; by belonging to it we realize in particular, for example, the educational tasks approaching mankind – one of the most important being the social question belonging to it.

During the first epoch of humanity and as an echo in the second epoch, in his youth man could say to himself – according to what he learnt from moods and communications of the older people – by you growing up and turning older, you will experience this and that, which you simply through your bodily transformation will experience in an older age. – In our time the thing that makes a person fulfilled in old age must be germinated by his education and training in his youth. More and more the time is coming – it is already here to a large extent – where we have to feel the strong commitment to educate the youth in such a way that at quite a later age he will be reminded about what he had learnt during his years of schooling. While life in its most elementary events no longer gives one what had been given in earlier epochs of mankind, now, what is experienced during years of schooling would have to work - I would like to call it – in an elastic way, in order for it to be joyful and uplifting and inspiring and invigorating for the whole of life right up to turning grey, colouring and illuminating life. In a way such as this, history can acquire points of view; in such a way history can give us insights which in turn can strengthen the will and give orientation in life.

To this spiritual science repeatedly call our attention - that we endeavour to penetrate more deeply into our life and existence, into those regions where this life and this existence are uncovered as spiritual, which can directly render service to practical life.

The kind of history that just indicates the outer surface will not be able to offer a person such vastness in his consideration of historical development which can offer life forces at the same time. It also doesn’t give him ideas towards the solution of what happened in human evolution.

It is extraordinary when one hears, for example, that one of the great historians of the epoch just past, Ranke, was always doubtful of how the figure of Christ Jesus should be placed into human history. His conviction was to position the figure of Christ Jesus as purely religious, which means to regard it on a different page to the one we usually view history. He wasn’t in the position to allow the Christ life into history as a creative power. Herman Grimm tried to improve on this deficiency of Ranke’s view, but he did not succeed because with this viewpoint, under today’s restrictions of the present day and age, something can only succeed if done through a spiritual scientific approach.

What has the human being basically become through his development as “more contemplative”, that he has developed towards contemplation since the middle of the 15^th Century in this intellectualized period? What has he become through developing all those things in the area of technology, in the field of external life and external insights out of intellectualism, which is, even so, something big?

In the first epoch and for the most part still in the second one in which the Greek can be our representative, there the person felt himself as a member of the entire world, simply through his body being a member of the whole world. He saw lightening and instinctively knew that the power inherent in lightening was connected with the power living in his own feelings. He sensed himself within the world’s existence. His inner life was rich because he felt himself to be a member of the whole world while what lived and weaved in him as a human being, was the same as what lived and weaved in the whole world. He regarded his destiny in the movement of the stars. He could follow not only nature’s laws into the most distant heights of heaven, but also what was morally in him, this he could follow into the cosmic widths.

Today we have other experiences. Since the beginning of a renewed spiritual life in the third evolutionary period of humanity, we have experienced, as thoughtful humanity, how well we can calculate with Galilean magnificence and Bruno’s insight, when looking up into the starry worlds. However, we don’t derive anything from them but mathematical, mechanical formulae regarding planets and the sun’s course, and at most all that spectral analysis has to say about it today. Here on earth we have become lonely. We know we are standing on this earth, but we no longer feel we have a relationship to the world of the stars.

If we are honest, living within the contemporary mechanistic point of view, we no longer feel like a vital member of the world. Lonely, we stand on our earth in space, and about that which is not our earth, we only calculate. Could we actually, if we are honest, still develop a biblical belief that out of this world which we calculate so well, from out of these heavenly heights the Christ could descend, to fulfil the important event which would make sense of the whole of earthly evolution?

What humanity has conquered through calculation, through mechanistic knowledge, are things brought down through spiritual understanding of the evolutionary history of human beings themselves. Spiritual science will only connect meaning to it again, if that, which lived in Jesus, having come down from spiritual heights, concludes the great marriage of the spiritual world with the earthly human beings for the salvation of humanity. That the Mystery of Golgotha is spiritual is something which can reach human souls with full clarity only through spiritual science. Only when the Mystery of Golgotha is thus experienced through a spiritually scientifically renewed viewpoint, can one say, spiritual science pushes itself further, apparently only as an incidental fact in human evolutionary history but which has a shattering effect on those who can feel it in all its depths.

Then one discovers that by characterising the inverted biogenetic basic laws, a fact which says: That which the human being experiences today during different age periods in his individual development are shadowy indications of what clearly had been experienced soul-bodily in his forefathers and is, still today, being experienced in external human metamorphoses from earlier developmental epochs. How, in a natural way, the physical human being is in embryonic steps of development a repetition of what had been experienced in his human ancestry over millions of years, today appears during the age periods of human beings as a shadowy repetition of what was clearly, inwardly, present in pre-humanity. In this way we connect the relationship of our present life to that of prehistoric times.

When you research through spiritual science, according to what I have often characterised here and what you can read in my books “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and “Riddles of the Soul” you will find facts which enable you to say that it is possible through inner sight to discover how, in the pre-Christian times, the human being remained able during his development, to inwardly experience his soul-spiritual and also his bodily-physical nature right up to his thirties, right into the last year of his thirties. Then this went further down, right into our time where the third epoch in the developmental history of mankind, the human beings experience the soul-spiritual together with the physical-bodily only up to his twenties. In between lies an important transition in human life.

The human being, in that he has shaped his developmental history over the earth, has, so to speak, descended from the youthful and childlike experience of aging in those times and only experienced this unity into his thirties. From the depths of the world the form was revealed to him which lived as a model for him into his thirties as to how he should live, so that he could absorb the strength in his youth and carry this strength, absorbed during his youth, into old age. In the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, the human being can no longer carry the strength resulting from natural development into old age which he needs for that age. That is why the life of Christ Jesus, which only reaches into the middle of earthly life, has been presented to him on earth, which is a divine-human example for man up to the 33rd year. By grasping the strong forces in this example, one can inwardly understand: “Not I, but Christ in me”; so that we direct all education, all schooling to be Christ-imbued throughout, that in its youth we let the child absorb these forces, who then, as I’ve indicated, can with time-linked elasticity stretch into the oldest age, so we can allow all people to become Christ-imbued – then we work for the progress of humanity in this area, out of the knowledge of human evolutionary history.

Like I have been able to indicate in certain areas how a really inner, lively understanding of human evolutionary history repeatedly presents points of view from spiritual science, how it can show us what we need to do in our present epoch, so we can likewise point to other areas. We can point out how people were able to recognise the divine in matter. What we have inherited from relationships which human beings had to the divine continues to work in us; we have to do it on our own because today it wants to be independent. It wants to become an independent member of our social life.

In the second epoch of human development, where the human being still experienced agreement of the bodily-physical with the soul spiritual somewhat up to his thirties, which went into the middle of the earthly course of life, in this second epoch particularly instinctive forces in the human soul life awakened fully, those instinctive forces which for instance are expressed in rights, in state formative factors of public life. With this we notice in the second epoch of human evolution the germinal structure for what we can call Law, not through reasoning but through instinct. Because of this there is always something controversial in all legal terms because they were instinctively created during the second epoch.

In the third epoch, starting in the middle of the 15^th Century – one can easily follow this historically – this third epoch in which we are now living, is particularly one of reasoning, contemplation. Human beings have withdrawn from the cosmos. The human being has withdrawn from what the human being of the first epoch thought he was connected. The human being has become lonely on the earth, and this loneliness of spirit on the earth turns everything upside down. In the first human epoch the soul-spiritual was experienced as obviously flooding the world, where the economic activity was regarded only as a mirror image of the soul-spiritual experience. In our epoch where man is separated soul-spiritually from the external in later epochs of individual lives, where he, only in his twenties, feels like a complete person in harmony with his physical-bodily development, during this time economic life becomes decisive. Economic life extends into the state configuration, the economic sphere becomes state economy, becomes empire. It becomes what we can see appearing now, in the one-sided method turning into Marxism; what becomes theory and acts that way, appears as if economic life is everything and spiritual life, which once had been everything, is replaced by economic life which had only been its mirror image; now spiritual life would only be regarded as an ideology.

Because of our natural development through evolution, humanity has separated from the outer physical because it is the normal development of human nature. The human being now needs to find harmony between those things that separated him, through his culture, through his civilisation: for the spiritual, which he must cultivate independently for himself, because it is no longer connected with physicality, and the economic life, which he must nurture so that he can battle properly with it, so that he can re-introduce the spirit which earlier had obviously been incorporated within it. In the middle of this he must nurture the state-legal aspect as an independent member.

To rightly understand history, looked at inwardly, gives us a true social insight for the present. It lives in what we want to include into the social organism. Humanity has gone through these epochs by more or less developing the three members of the social organism separately. Now the time has come for us, out of our human consciousness, to develop the three members independently, so that we become strong through our inner humanity and we connect with one another through these three members: an independent spiritual life, an independent legal- or state life and an independent economic life.

The Greeks who still experienced harmony in their middle age between the soul-spiritual and bodily-physical, these Greeks were still condemned to divide the people outwardly into classes: into teaching (doctrine), defending (military service),and feeding (nutrition). We are striving towards a social formation, where, not the people are divided into such groups, but that life has its members in a threefold way, and that each single person can live into these members and single people can work together in the three members.

That however, my dear friends, which in the strongest sense allows consideration of the three-foldness in this way, needs to be the historical consideration of mankind which will offer new points of view. I want to say that in the witty scholarship that Herman Grimm found, historical facts which are so numerous today are dragged along like ballast - but great points of view are missing. Yes, like history learnt during the last few years, we need such great points of view because what has up to now germinated from human thoughts and feelings, could only have been experienced by a few. This kind of history, as Herman Grim presents it, will not be edifying to numerous people who come out of the great masses to participate in public affairs.

If out of spiritual science we can establish human history, through which one can see how people through the millennia have felt this way or that way, when one learns through historic evolution what these people experienced within, what they had to experience in order to simultaneously experience what all other people were experiencing, then we will have a history which we need in our time, regarding how the coming epoch can be used: an historic examination not merely through the intellect but an historic examination which as it were is created out of clear, objective concepts, which penetrates into human life so that it warms the knowledge of the mind and that knowledge thus warmed, build the will forces. When a person experiences that finally everything necessary for the furtherance of social progress is not dependant on establishments – because these themselves depend on people – but must depend on people, then one craves for a powerful will in people to become the strong disposition for strong deeds so that the identified establishments deemed necessary are also liable to be met. However, the people we need, the creative, the insightful, who orientate themselves correctly in the public world will only be those whose will and deeds glow and are illuminated, not with dead intellectualism, no, but with lively, spirit filled knowledge. They will be when they feel they can recognise themselves as members of the entire evolutionary history of humanity if they can point to their past history by discovering light within it, a light illuminating them to work, to be active, to be productive into the future.