37. Are the Former Abilities of the Human Soul Lost?

The following question has been put: “If we are to acquire those abilities through ever new embodiments in the successive races, which those offer us the opportunity to develop, and if nothing of what the soul has acquired through experience is to be lost from its store of knowledge again— how is it that in humanity of today (at least in our civilized countries), which also lived in the third and fourth root races on earth, nothing at all has remained of the abilities of will, imagination, and control of natural forces, which according to the seers were so highly developed at that time? Is there perhaps a law that forbids and closes again the simple paths that have already been found to a certain goal, so that all strength is used to find new, higher paths?

In fact, nothing is lost of the abilities that the soul has acquired during its passage through a stage of development. But when a new ability is acquired, the previously acquired ability takes on a different form. It then no longer lives for itself, but as a basis for the new ability. For example, the Atlanteans had acquired the ability of memory. The present human being can only have a very weak idea of what the memory of an Atlantean was capable of. Everything that appears in our fifth root race as a kind of innate idea was first acquired in Atlantis through memory. The ideas of space, time, numbers and so on would cause quite different difficulties if the present human being were to acquire them. For the ability that this present human being is to acquire is the combining mind. The Atlanteans had no logic. Now, however, every previously acquired soul power must recede in its own form, dive down below the threshold of consciousness, if a new one is to be acquired. The beaver would have to transform its ability to intuitively build its artificial structures into something else if, for example, it suddenly became a thinking being. The Atlanteans, for example, also had the ability to control the life force in a certain way. They constructed their wonderful machines through this force. But they had nothing of what the peoples of the fifth root race have as a gift to tell about. They had no myths or fairy tales. The life-controlling power of the Atlanteans first appeared in the mask of mythology among the members of our race. And in this form it could become the basis for the intellectual activity of our race. The great inventors of our race are incarnations of “seers” of the Atlantean race. Their ingenious ideas are the expression of something that has another as its basis, something that was in them as a life-giving force during their Atlantean incarnation. Our logic, knowledge of nature, technology, etc. grow out of a soil that was laid in Atlantis. If, for example, a technician could transform his combining power back, something would come out of it that the Atlanteans were capable of. The entire Roman jurisprudence was transformed willpower of an earlier time. The will itself remained in the background, and instead of taking on forms itself, it transformed into the thought forms that live out in the legal terms. The sense of beauty of the Greeks is built on the basis of direct forces, which the Atlanteans live out in a magnificent breeding of plants and 'animal forms'. Phidias' imagination was alive with something that the Atlanteans used directly to transform real living beings.