The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 27 October 1904, Berlin

Theosophy and Darwin

At present, we find two important cultural trends. One is evident in Darwin, which has already passed its peak, and another in Tolstoy, which is just beginning.

Many of our contemporaries who concern themselves with questions related to Darwin are of the opinion that what is called Darwinism represents something like a definitive truth; that, in contrast, everything that people thought in the past has been superseded, and that these truths that have finally been discovered will remain valid for the distant future. Many people cannot imagine that human opinions are something that can change. They have no idea that the most important concept we find in Darwinism, the concept of evolution, is no less applicable to spiritual life than to natural life, and that, above all, human opinions and human knowledge themselves are subject to evolution. Only when you look back over a longer period of the development of the human spirit will it become clear to you that the truths, insights, and views of a particular epoch have developed from earlier points of view, have changed, and will change again in the future.

Theosophy would not fulfill its task very well if it did not apply this very concept of development to the great phenomena of life, especially spiritual life. So today, let us not look at what is associated with the name Darwin from the narrowly limited horizon of a contemporary human being, but from a higher point of view. To do so, we will have to go back quite a long way in time, for no one can understand these phenomena if they are considered in isolation, without reference to other, similar phenomena. Theosophy enables us to place these phenomena in their proper context. Theosophy considers the development of the human spirit, the development of this spirit in the various forms of existence, as we have learned in the last lectures. This human spirit, this human being as he is today and as he has been for thousands of years, is not something finished, something complete. In thousands of years and in even more distant times, he will no longer be what he is today. In order to understand how it positions itself in the world today and how it initially views its task in the world, we must highlight the characteristic peculiarities that we encounter in today's human being. But in order to do so, we must broaden our view somewhat by not overestimating certain concepts and mental images that we have.

There is one concept in particular that people today overestimate: the concept of conscious human activity, as we understand consciousness today. Whenever people consider art, technology, and the like that originate from them, they have in a certain sense the concept of conscious creation, of conscious thinking, in the background. They do not even notice that there are artistic and technical activities around them in the world that are at least as important as human activities, but differ from human activities in that humans carry out what they do consciously; for humans are active in the world through their thoughts. Everything that humans undertake is ultimately a realized human thought. As a thought, the house first lives in the mind of the builder, and when it is finished, it is a thought that has become material. But we also find such thoughts that have become material elsewhere in the world. Just consider impartially — not through the lens of the current worldview — the regularity of the movement of the stars, and you will find that the structure of the world is based on a universal thought, just like the construction of a house. How could man, as an astronomer, force this structure of the world into mathematical and other laws, how could he find the laws of the structure of the world, if these laws, which he grasps in his mind, were not first contained in this structure of the world itself? Or, to take another example, consider the structures built by a well-known animal, the beaver. They are so ingenious, so mathematically regular, that the engineer who studies these things must say to himself: if he were given the task of building the most practical structure under the given conditions, he could not build anything more practical or more perfect, given the slope of the river and the requirements of the beaver's way of life. You can observe this throughout nature, if you observe it impartially, and you will see everywhere that what humans consciously accomplish in thought and translate into reality is all around us, and that what is all around us is permeated by thought.

We are accustomed to calling what animals accomplish an instinctive activity. We would therefore also call the artistic construction of a beaver, ants, or bees an instinctive activity. But then we come to understand that human activity differs from the activity around us only in that humans are aware of the laws of their activity, that they have knowledge of them. And this is precisely what we call instinctive activity, which is present in a being that has no awareness of the laws according to which it works. If you consider in this way two beings that are far apart in their development, such as humans in their conscious activity and, for example, beavers or ants, you will be struck by the great difference between human conscious intellectual activity and the unconscious, instinctive activity of a relatively imperfect animal. There are countless degrees between these two activities. Of these degrees, we can also describe those that humans have gone through in a long, but in relation to the great period of the world, nevertheless short, past. In the course of these lectures, we will be led to an earlier, much earlier stage of human cultural activity — today I can only hint at this — we will be led to the human ancestors of a long-gone era, to the so-called Atlanteans, whose culture has long since disappeared and whose descendants are the creators of the culture of our present human race. If we now follow the mental activity, the whole way in which human beings acted in their environment, among these Atlanteans, who were our predecessors many millennia ago, and see by what means the theosophical view of the world comes to know the mental activity of these ancestors, we would see that, although it is not as far removed from our present intellectual activity as the activity of animals, our Atlantean ancestors were nevertheless of a fundamentally different nature than our present-day contemporaries. These Atlantean ancestors were by no means incapable of constructing great buildings or of harnessing nature; but their activity was more instinctive than the fully conscious activity of present-day humanity. It was not as instinctive as that of animals, but more instinctive than that of today's intellectual humanity.

The history of ancient Babylon and Assyria tells us of artfully constructed buildings, and today's architects who study these things assure us that the way in which the works of those people were created was so extraordinary that the conscious activity of today's architects is not yet advanced enough to accomplish what humans were capable of doing at that time on relatively unconscious levels. You should not be offended by the word “instinctive.” There is only a slight difference between the spirit of people today and that of the past. If we were to trace back the activities that — to put it in popular terms people have more control over, more in their feelings and intuition, which we perform more mechanically and not by consciously setting ourselves the task, if we were to trace these activities back, we would come to our Atlantean ancestors, who acted instinctively to a much greater degree than was the case in the times we can trace historically. So we can say that we can trace human intellectual activity historically back to a time when intellectual activity was not yet present to the degree it is today, indeed, when it was not present at all at the beginning of the Atlantean period, and that we must also admit, on the other hand, that in the future human beings will develop mental abilities that are completely different from their present intellect. So, our present intellect, which is the most distinctive and characteristic feature of contemporary human beings, is not something that is eternal or even unchangeable, but rather something that is in the process of development. It has come into being and will evolve into other, higher forms.

What, then, is the activity of this mind? We have already hinted at this. It consists in human beings increasingly overcoming the merely instinctive nature of their activity and clearly knowing the laws they apply in their outer life, as well as clearly knowing the laws that have been realized in nature. But if this intellect itself is in the process of development, then it has obviously gone through various stages of development; it has progressed from relatively imperfect stages to a higher stage in the present, and it will ascend to yet others in the future.

If we look back at our Atlantean ancestors, we see the mind first emerging in its infancy, then developing to a peak, only to be replaced by a higher spiritual activity in the future. This mind cannot develop all at once. It must, so to speak, accomplish its task piece by piece. It must proceed from stage to stage if it wants to know the laws that are in our nature and that it itself realizes. This can only happen in successive stages. What is the purpose of this intellect? It is to comprehend the things around it, to know about them. It is to recreate them within itself, to recreate conceptually what is outside in reality. He must acquire this knowledge gradually. But this knowledge must correspond to external things. External things, however, are manifold. The things we can pursue in the world are spirit, soul, and external physical reality.

The mind did not suddenly appear in the soul during its development in order to comprehend this external nature in all its diversity. Piece by piece, human beings had to conquer the different kinds of reality: the spiritual, the soul, and the physical. And in a very interesting way, we can follow how he conquers them. Man is not able to comprehend things out in the world until he has appropriated them in the solitude of his reflection. Man would never be able to comprehend an ellipse as a star's path if he had not first appropriated the laws of the ellipse, its forms, in solitude. Once he has found the concept within himself, he also sees it realized in the outside world. Only when man has created the knowledge within himself can he find it materialized in the outside world. Now we must be clear that this has happened at various stages of intellectual development during our human racial development. The human mind first had to form a concept of the image it can see in the outside world in order to then understand what it sees in the outside world. As a rule, humans first recognize what lives within themselves. That is the spirit, the soul. Only gradually do they arrive at concepts of what is around them. You can observe this in every child. They do not first have a concept of inanimate nature, but of the soul. They hit the table they bumped into because they consider it to be similar to themselves. The same is true in cultural development. In cultural development, we can observe an epoch that researchers have called animism. In all of nature, people saw living beings; in every stone, in every rock, in every spring, they saw something alive, because they themselves were alive and could form the concept of the living from within themselves. In the same way, earlier human races first gained the concept of the spirit, then that of the soul-living, and last of all they acquired the concept of the external, mechanical, lifeless.

If we look back to the time we can trace historically, to the time of ancient India with its Vedas and Vedanta philosophy, and study these ancient worldviews, we find that people had a concept of the spiritual in the most comprehensive sense. The concept of the spirit lives on in these ancient, wonderful documents. But what the ancient peoples could not do was to comprehend the individual spirit, the special spirit. They had a grand mental image of the all-encompassing world spirit and its various transformations in the world, but to look into the individual human soul in order to grasp the spirit of the human soul was not yet possible in those early days. They had no concept of psychology in our sense, of what we now call spiritual science, which will only become true spiritual science in the future. They thought about the spirit, but did not understand the individual spirit. If we trace the beginnings of spiritual development up to the dawn of Greek civilization, we find that even those who called themselves philosophers at that time applied the concept of the soul to the whole world. For them, everything was animated. But when it came to understanding the individual soul, their understanding failed.

First, man forms the general concept of the spirit and the general concept of the soul. But only later does he approach these concepts with his spirit in order to comprehend them in the individual being. Throughout the Middle Ages, we can see that man does not yet penetrate into the individual spirit. I would like to mention Giordano Bruno here. Anyone who studies the philosophy of this influential spirit will find that he has an all-encompassing concept of world life, a concept of life in its highest meaning. The whole world is life to him; he sees life in every stone, in every star. Every single part of the universe is a limb, an organ of the universe to him. He looks up at the stars as if they were living beings. And he also consistently regards the individual human being in this sense. In the living human being, he sees only one stage in the sequence of general spiritual human life. He calls the human being who stands physically before us a spirit spread out in space, life spread out in space. And he understands death as nothing more than the contraction of life into a single point. For him, expansion and contraction are the manifestations of life and death. Life is eternal. The life that appears to us in the physical realm is a life expanded in space; the life that does not appear in the physical realm is contracted life. Thus, life continually alternates between expansion and contraction. In addition to these two characteristics, through which Giordano Bruno shows what a comprehensive concept he has of life, I could perhaps also mention the concept of heaven, a concept that science is still far from reaching, but which one would have to study, one would have to immerse oneself in, in order to return to a comprehensive concept of heaven. But what even Giordano Bruno was not yet able to do was to comprehend the individual living being, the special being. However, the possibility of comprehending these individual living special beings is developing precisely at this time. Only now are we beginning to clarify the processes in the human body for the intellect; only now are we beginning to understand how blood flows in the body, how the body's activities proceed. What we now call physiology was just beginning to take shape at that time. If you look at the natural scientists of that time, such as Paracelsus, you will see that they lacked a certain concept; human cultural development had not yet produced the concept that dominates our worldview today: the concept of mechanism. The concept of mechanism is the one that was grasped last. What a machine is, man grasped last. It was only after Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus that scientific thinking began to develop the concept of the machine, the concept of the mechanical.

We have thus seen how, in the course of time, human intellectual development has successively grasped the concepts of spirit, soul, life, and mechanism. Now the reverse follows in our racial development. After human development had grasped the concepts, it applied them to external things themselves, and the first epoch in this regard is the application of the concept of the machine to the surrounding reality. People not only want to understand the machine, but also apply the concept of the machine to the individual being. The application of the concept of machine activity is the hallmark of the epoch, of which only a few centuries have passed. The 17th century belongs to this epoch. If we go back to that time, we find the philosopher Descartes. He applies the concept of mechanism to the animal world. He does not distinguish between animals and inanimate objects, but regards the entire animal and plant world as beings that are like automatons, as beings that are completely absorbed in pure mechanical activity. This came about simply because humanity had progressed so far in grasping the concept of mechanics, but did not yet understand how to apply the concept of the soul and spirit to individual beings, but only understood how to apply the concept of mechanics to nature. Thus, humans saw right through plants, animals, and the human soul, as it were. They could not grasp anything; it was not possible for them to see anything higher in plants, animals, and humans. And in their outer form, all beings are mechanical. Every being on the physical plane is mechanical. The mind first grasps this lowest level. It grasps the physical body of the various things in the world, and it grasps it, as is natural, first of all as purely physical, mechanical activity. That was the epoch of mechanical understanding of the world and at the same time the epoch of not recognizing anything higher in the world. This epoch extends into our own time. We see how people today strive to apply the concept of the mechanical to the outside world; we see how Descartes understands plants, animals, and humans mechanically, because the physical body of humans is also mechanical. Hence the assertion that humans are only machines.

Then come the great explorers and the great technical activity of the mechanical world, of industry. We see how the intellect and the mechanical concept celebrate their greatest triumphs. It penetrates down to individual living beings and understands them in their physical and technical context. What was not yet possible in the 18th century, namely to understand the coexistence of animals and plants mechanically, was achieved in the 19th century. It is not development that is essential, but the fact that there is a relationship between beings. Development is not the characteristic feature of Darwinism, for there has always been a theory of development. You can go back to Aristotle, even to Vedanta philosophy, and also to Goethe; everywhere you will find that the theory of development has existed at all times. Even in the modern scientific sense, there was already a theory of evolution at the beginning of the 19th century: Lamarckism. Lamarck's theory views the animal world as ascending from the imperfect to the perfect, up to the physical human being. But at that time, Lamarckism could not yet become popular. Lamarck was not understood. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the time was ripe for understanding the theory of evolution in a mechanical way. By then, experience of external physical life had progressed so far that it was possible to construct the wonderful edifice that Darwin erected, and in doing so he did nothing more than mechanically construct what surrounds us; he expressed in mechanical terms what is around us.

The next step was that man, at least as a hypothesis, grasped the idea of the physical kinship of the material human being with other material organisms. That was the last piece, the keystone in the edifice. And we will learn the significance of the keystone when we talk about the philosophy of Ernst Haeckel.

If we apply the idea of development to human beings themselves, we find that it is understandable that one stage of development of the spiritual human being must be the conquest of spiritual thought. Darwinism has conquered this area of the world through purely external causes, through the law of the struggle for existence. It therefore represents a necessary phase of development in human culture, and we will understand the necessity of its emergence from the necessity of its overcoming. This gives us the broad perspective of viewing Darwinism as a phase in scientific development. Only the prejudiced can say that Darwinism views the world and facts as they really are. The facts are known; they have always been there. Only the way of thinking is different. If you read Goethe's essays “History of My Botanical Studies,” you will find almost word for word what Darwin describes in his own way. You will also find much in Goethe's “Metamorphosis of Plants.” Goethe bases a far higher, much more comprehensive theory of life on the same facts, a theory from which today's science will replace something higher than Darwinism. This is Goethe's teaching on the connection between organisms. But just as every phase of development must be gone through, so too must the study of Darwinism be gone through. The whole situation in the middle of the 19th century was such that it was only through it that humanity became ready to introduce mechanical ideas into the animal and plant kingdoms. This powerful idea then found expression in the mechanical struggle for existence among living beings. It has its origin in a very specific way of human life itself.

In addition to his observations, Darwin based everything that was most decisive for his theory on the teachings of Malthus. It was this theory about population and food growth that led him to establish the external struggle for existence as the principle of perfection. Malthus advocates the law that humanity reproduces faster than the possibility of obtaining food grows. The increase in food occurs slowly in arithmetic progression, i.e., 1-2-3-4 and so on, but the increase in population occurs in geometric progression, i.e., 1-2-4-8-16 and so on. If this is the case, then it is natural that the unequal increase in food in relation to the increase in population will lead to a struggle for existence. This is the bleak so-called Malthusian law. While Malthus, in the first half of the 19th century, wanted to draw only logical conclusions from this law, which boiled down to the nature of coexistence, a way to promote culture, a way to offer people a better life, Darwin said to himself: If this law prevails in human life, then it is all the more certain that the struggle for existence is everywhere. — Darwinism therefore shows most clearly that humans start from themselves; what they observe in themselves, they transfer to the external world. The purely mechanical law of the struggle of all against all, which became the principle of life in the 19th century, confronts us again in Darwin's theory. I do not want to talk about the fact that scientific research has long since made it impossible to adhere to the principle of the struggle for existence, but only to emphasize that the application of the principle is not a necessity.

However, we must also understand that something comprehensive, something ultimate, was not offered by man's mechanical understanding of the entire environment. There is something else in beings besides mere mechanism. We have seen how mechanism, the external physical form, is only one part, only one of the elements that make up the world. By understanding the external appearance, we understand only the very lowest part of the beings that exist around us. Every phase of human cultural development also has its dark side; every phase shows its radicalism. Anyone who had seen clearly during the heyday of Darwinism would have said to himself: Certainly, the development of mechanical thinking must take place; but this thinking is not yet suitable for understanding life, soul, and spirit in individual beings. We must first learn to apply Bruno's idea of the all-encompassing world life to the individual special being that stands before us, then we will gradually be able to understand the world around us in transparency up to the spirit. Today, we are only able to apply the concept of the mechanical to individual beings. In the future, we must succeed in finding the concepts of life, soul, and spirit in individual beings as well. We must once again come to see plants not only with the eyes of the mechanically thinking physiologist, but with the concepts of the scientist ascending to higher stages of life. We must ascend to the concepts of the soul and the spirit. These concepts have already been formulated in previous epochs; today's humanity must learn to apply them itself. That would have been the idea of someone who had a complete overview of things.

That was the tendency to be easily satisfied with the mechanical concepts of the world and to believe that with them, that is, with the mechanical point of view, everything had been achieved, that the mechanism explained everything. Such minds did indeed exist. That was in the time when the purely material was declared to be the universe, the time of Büchner, Vogt, and also — in terms of concepts, not research — Haeckel. That is the other extreme. In between were the cautious minds who, although they could not rise to a higher understanding of worldly things, had a vague feeling that they had only grasped a part, only possessed a part. These are the cautious researchers who grasped what was right; who told themselves that they were at a stage where they could not yet explore everything, and who humbly revered what they could not explore as the unexplorable. For those researchers who had the right feeling, there should have been the sense that behind what they found there was something unknown, which they were not called upon to intervene in with their mechanical thinking.

Now let us ask which researchers thought this way, and we encounter one who belongs to this epoch, who writes: “I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth descend from a primordial form into which life was breathed by the Creator.” This is a cautious researcher, a researcher who understands the external world mechanically but cannot penetrate to the understanding of life and spirit; he remains with the idea of a Creator and reveres him in humility. The same researcher may also be cited in contrast to the radicals who have emerged in the wake of Darwinism. There have also been attempts to explain language mechanically. In his book “The Wonders of Life,” Haeckel demands that it be recognized how all language also arises from the mechanical principle. The other researcher mentioned above, on the other hand, says: “Language is that wonderful spiritual machine that attaches certain signs to all kinds of things and qualities and arouses trains of thought that would never have arisen from mere sensory impressions, and if they had arisen, could not have been further developed.” This cautious researcher goes on to say: What has arisen mechanically does not penetrate up to language; it must be left to future times to comprehend this. — Here again comes a feeling of reverence for the unfathomable. And the same researcher says it clearly: “An almighty and omniscient creator orders everything and foresees every event.” — Here you have a researcher who belongs to the age of the conquest of the world by mechanical thoughts and who finds the right point of view towards the things and beings in the world; who modestly pursues what he can pursue and points to the future epoch of development, indicating that he is saying: Here is a limit for me.

What this researcher has spoken from his feelings is the standpoint that the theosophist must take toward the Darwinian theory of evolution. He shows us the big picture of the development of our race, he shows us that Darwinism is only one phase that will lead to the concept of life, to the application of the concept of soul and spirit. Just as we have a mechanical science today, so in the future we will have a science of life, soul, and spirit. This is the point of view that Theosophy opens up; and it wants nothing more than to anticipate what the future of humanity must bring. It wants to show where we are going, and it must be emphasized that this Theosophical view is in agreement with the cautious researchers who have found the right point of view for themselves. For these words do not come from an obscure Darwinian who could not free himself from traditional prejudices — who wanted to link religious prejudices with our Darwinism — but from someone whose competence you will not doubt: they come from Charles Darwin himself!