Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 4 January 1912, Berlin

The Origin of Humanity in the Light of Spiritual Science

What spiritual science, from whose perspective these lectures are presented, has to say about the important question of the origin of humankind must, in essence, be of the utmost interest to all those who are interested in spiritual science because of the great worldview questions of the present day. For the question of the origin of man has been met with tremendous interest from all sides in recent decades, fueled in particular in the second half of the nineteenth century by the great and admirable advances in natural science. And it is understandable that, given the insistent manner in which natural science has attempted to elevate itself to the status of a worldview in recent decades, the question of the origin of man has had to be raised again and again, and has, in a sense, had to be placed at the center of modern worldview questions.

At first glance, it might seem that, precisely with regard to this question of the origin of man, the worldview that wants to stand on the firm ground of natural science in our present day and the one represented here as spiritual science are in the most stark contrast to each other. However, if one considers the state of scientific development as it was just a few decades ago, or perhaps even more recently, it might seem highly plausible to assume such a stark contrast. For one need only consider what it meant in 1864, when Darwin's scientific views, which were still young at the time but already on their way to gaining widespread acceptance, were applied by Ernst Haeckel at a German naturalists' conference to the question of the origin of man, even before Darwin himself had clearly expressed his views on the application of his principles to this question. Ernst Haeckel applied Darwin's principles to the science of man in such a way that he energetically, boldly, and courageously not only advocated the kinship of man with higher animals in terms of his form and living conditions, but also energetically advocated the direct real descent, the actual emergence of man from and out of the higher animal world.

At that time, if one wanted to be unprejudiced in this regard, one had to think, in the broadest circles, that the coming discoveries of scientific research would increasingly confirm and reinforce what Ernst Haeckel had expressed in 1864 as a bold research program: the derivation and ordering of all scientific principles in such a way that one could recognize how the order of man had gradually developed out of the orders of animals. If what Haeckel proclaimed at the time as a kind of program, but which he himself already considered to be an irrefutable truth, had proven to be true, if scientific research had really taken the path he had assumed, then the radical contrast between natural science and humanities mentioned above would undoubtedly still exist today. However, this has not been the case. Natural science itself has, in fact, produced quite different results and consequences, especially in recent decades, than had been assumed at the time. And the fact that we still have such great difficulty today in seeing clearly in this area when it comes to explaining the relationship between natural science and spiritual science is solely due to the fact that the popular dissemination and internalization of scientific knowledge has not kept pace with the discovery and production of this knowledge. Today, we are still faced with the popular belief, widespread in the broadest circles as a fixed dogma, and particularly in popular literature, that only those who completely accept the assertion that human beings are external, real as can be seen with the external senses, has developed over time from animal forms that are directly adjacent to him in the animal series in terms of their structure and living conditions. This belief is widespread, and if you listen carefully, you can still hear it everywhere, that anyone who wants to oppose this belief, this dogma, is simply answered: Well, you don't know anything about the worldview that results when you really stand on the solid ground of scientific facts. In fact, most people know nothing about this, because popular literature presents everything in such a way that one cannot know that this belief has become quite fragile in recent years, and what natural science today actually brings forth in terms of facts relating to our question has already moved, in a way that is questionable for the materialistic-monistic worldview, into close proximity to what spiritual science has to say. For one might say: The way in which natural science has developed in recent years with regard to our question is such that everywhere the old views of a direct emergence of man from the animal series adjacent to him must be doubted. And if we consider the course that this science has taken in just a few strokes before we go into the spiritual-scientific things, it will show us how it is true that spiritual science today can actually come into much less conflict with natural science than the natural scientific theories and hypotheses that are still held by a materialistic-monistic worldview are in conflict with the facts of natural science.

To indicate in a few strokes what has happened, let us return to the views that were quite understandably widespread in the 1860s and 1870s, for example. When Darwin himself followed up his 1858 book On the Origin of Species by Animal and Vegetable Kinds with his brilliant book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, what ideas did he and his immediate followers, who were more or less close to him or surpassed him, form in a comprehensible way? The view developed that, at a time long before our own, humans gradually evolved from forms belonging to the ape species, forms that did not necessarily correspond to the forms of this animal species that have survived to the present day, but were nevertheless related to them in a certain way in terms of their external form. A type of creature was regarded as the ancestor of humans, which had four limbs that, in contrast to the current distribution of the four limbs of humans into hands and feet, were more similar in shape, a type of four-handed creature in which the limbs of humans, which today have been transformed into feet, were also hand-like. So humans would have been a kind of four-handed climbing animal, still covered with a kind of hair coat, with an imperfectly developed brain and, accordingly, a differently shaped skull. And then, in more or less a straight line, such an ape-like creature would have evolved into modern humans through adaptation to circumstances and through everything that has resulted from the struggle for existence. One has gone so far as to not merely indulge in the view that the external forms and 'the more animalistic living conditions of humans had gradually developed from such an animal-like form, but as if all human mental activities were only a higher stage of development compared to what is already found in the animal world in terms of mental and soul-like activities.

Particular effort has been made to show that what human thinking, human feeling, human willing, and the nature of this willing are, according to the standards of moral worldview, are merely a complication, a development of simpler, primitive activities of the soul and spirit, which are also found in the animal kingdom, and that these activities have become as complicated and transformed as the external forms of the brain or the limbs. It would therefore be important that such a view would lead to the assumption that everything that humans today experience as their spiritual life, as the content of their soul life, is actually only the product the expression of a physical life that can be traced back to times when there was actually only a physical life that was still being realized in an animalistic way, times for which it makes no sense to speak of such a spiritual process or spiritual content as is lived out in the human soul today. Accordingly, human spiritual life would have developed as a kind of superstructure over earlier lower forms, so that there would be no justification for directly linking the spiritual life of human beings, as it is lived out in the soul, for which human beings have so long regarded a higher, purer origin, to a spiritual world that extends into our physical world. And for even more distant times in the past, it would turn out that animal life developed from lower forms and that what can be called spiritual and soul-like in animals must be traced back to an existence in primeval times, in which there were only those processes and essences that humans today are inclined to to think of as lived through and interwoven with any kind of spiritual influence. But this would mean that, for this worldview, the spirit would be presented, so to speak, as an illusion, as a false substantiality that springs forth from the physical, and everything spiritual would be traced back to what surrounds us as a sensory, physical, corporeal reality.

It is well known how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, worldview currents sprang up like mushrooms, animated entirely by the spirit just characterized, which saw its greatness in breaking with everything that old views had conveyed about the origin of human beings from a spiritual world and about human beings being taken up into a spiritual world when they had passed through the gate of death. It can be said that it was precisely the most sincere sense of truth and a sharpened intellectual conscience that led the most diverse personalities to such a worldview in the course of the nineteenth century. To a worldview that at that time by no means had a materialistic attitude in the background, but wanted to act and think in harmony with a noble and genuine idealism that said: No human being can hope to belong directly to a spiritual world, but only that the spirit that has developed out of material existence will find a more or less long existence in the human soul. Human culture will even further develop the spiritual in the course of evolution, but what one could do oneself in the spiritual realm would not even be preserved in a spiritual world, but could only live on with the complete extinction of human personality and individuality in what the human species produces as culture. — Yes, it can be said that even in many people an extraordinary amount of soul heroism was mixed into such a view, and that especially among the leading personalities in this field, not the slightest degree of opposition to moral worldviews can be observed. For many have said to themselves that this is precisely what the soul must strive for if it understands itself well, that it acts selflessly on the basis of what it can gain in the world, and then selflessly surrenders itself, in full recognition that it will be extinguished and that only its deeds will live on. It has been repeatedly emphasized that it is actually selfishness to seek immortality in any form.

Spiritual science is generally not inclined to condemn things that have arisen from a genuine sense of truth and an intellectual attitude, but must understand how such views are formed. Spiritual science could never engage in disparaging worldviews by pointing out the moral consequences that must result from the worldview in question, as is often done in the world. But it is something else entirely when an objective view of the world, a deeper knowledge and insight, proves to us everywhere that such a worldview is fragile. And then one must say: everything that has been achieved in such an admirable way by evolutionary history, comparative anatomy, paleontology, geology, and the rest of natural science, and which seemed to indicate so clearly that such a worldview must be confirmed, has in fact led more and more to the impossibility to be able to maintain such a worldview today on the basis of scientific facts. Therefore, certain researchers, of whom we can only cite examples here in the brief outlines with which we wish to characterize the development of the worldview, have come to combat ideas that have developed on the basis of earlier assumptions and hypotheses, precisely because the most advanced scientific knowledge has brought to light facts that are completely inconsistent with certain hypotheses and views. Let us highlight a personality such as Kollmann, because he is typical of the views that we also find represented in various nuances by others, namely because they are based on facts. From what he learned from observing evolutionary history, from observing prenatal humans, human embryos, and animal embryos before birth, and from what he saw in paleontology, Kollmann had to conclude it was impossible to assume that the ancestors of humans in earlier times had been shaped as, for example, orthodox Darwinists assumed in the 1870s and still assume today. It is impossible to imagine humans as having a receding forehead, an undeveloped, shrunken brain, and a physique reminiscent of today's apes. On the contrary, the aforementioned researcher found himself compelled by his discoveries to assume that, on the contrary, one must assume a brain configuration far exceeding the present-day unity of the human brain and the monkey brain, from which the monkey brain of today would then have developed from an original form that must actually have been much more similar to the human brain of today than the current monkey brain. So that the present monkey brain would have to be seen as a kind of regression from a form that no longer exists today and which, having become more definite in its brain formation, would also have to be assumed to be the steam form of the human brain. Furthermore, the same researcher felt compelled to assume that humans could not be derived from the forms of higher animals, but rather from small, pygmy-like beings. And so he searched everywhere for the remains of such an ancient, dwarf-like human race.

Once one allows such a hypothesis to sink into one's soul, one will say to oneself: The question of why paleontology, geology, cannot provide any real evidence for such a primitive human being as Kollmann assumes, and why everything that can currently be found in the way of fossilized apes and humans deviates from this primitive human form, is actually soon solved. — This can soon be ascertained. If one considers the conditions on Earth today, one must say to oneself: It is impossible that such a primitive form, which would be both human and ape at the same time, could be viable today, that it could exist under the current conditions of life on Earth. — But it immediately follows from this, whether such a researcher expresses it more or less clearly, that he must assume that the Earth must have had completely different conditions in earlier times than it does today, that we must look back to earlier times, which had completely different living conditions, and that we cannot find the ancestral form of today's human beings on any Earth that already had today's living conditions. We would therefore have to go back to Earth conditions that would differ greatly from what we imagine the current Earth conditions to be. Such a scientific hypothesis points out that our Earth must actually have had a completely different form in prehistoric times and that all conditions must have been different from what they are today.

This, however, shifts the whole question as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. What led natural scientists to advance such a worldview? Because their sense of truth and intellectual conscience forced them to break with the old view, for example, Linnaeus' view that the individual forms of living beings had been placed side by side in the world, as it were. This view did not seem to correspond to the level of scientific research, assuming arbitrary acts of creation that had once placed the individual forms of animals and, alongside them, humans on earth. If one considers why this view did not seem scientific, one must answer: it rightly did not seem scientific when one considers the laws and conditions of formation of living beings as they currently prevail, for according to these laws of nature, the placing of animal and human forms side by side is completely incompatible. If, on the other hand, the scientific facts themselves urged us, as we have seen from the more or less conscious or unconscious statements of the above-mentioned researcher, to assume completely different conditions of earthly existence for earlier times, then the basis no longer applies. Then one cannot say that it would still be so difficult to conceive of the individual forms of living beings in this phase of Earth's existence as being materially independent of one another and only spiritually dependent on one another.

But the natural scientist mentioned is only one type. Of particular importance is what natural scientists such as Klaatsch and Snell have to say on the basis of very specific scientific findings. They discovered, and stated very clearly, that according to the scientific facts that can be observed, there can be no question of humans being in any direct relationship with higher, ape-like mammals. It is not possible today to go into the results of, for example, blood research in recent years, although it would be interesting. Today, we will focus more on form. However, the same could be said about Friedmann's blood research as has been said about morphological development. These latter researchers found that it was quite impossible to speak of humans having evolved from higher mammals, because a conscientious examination of what we have today as a result of paleontology leads us to realize that the formative forces and conditions of the higher mammals themselves can only be understood as being based on basic forms primitive animal forms, which, when considered in connection with the earth, are actually much more similar to humans than to today's ape-like mammals. Today's apes would therefore be much less similar to the ancestral forms from which they themselves must have descended than humans are to this ancestral form.

This is an extremely interesting turn of events, which has entered the development of zoology, particularly through gossip, that researchers have been forced to conclude: When observing human hands, for example, it is impossible to seriously consider for even a moment that they evolved from the limbs of today's higher mammals. Instead, one must assume that in ancient times there were ancestral forms that were much more similar to today's human hands than to the limbs of today's higher mammals. — For example, the researcher mentioned above said: When we look at the gibbon, this remarkable species of ape that is always cited for its resemblance to humans, and see that its limbs are still most similar to human limbs, we must say that it does not have them because the human form developed from its form, but because it has preserved the most of the original form of all monkey species, from which humans also descend, and which humans have preserved most faithfully. — This is how this researcher came to assume that in times long past there was a species of living beings whose entire constitution was such that humans, as they stand before us today, have preserved most of it, and that the greatest deviations are found in those animal forms that developed alongside humans from these original forms of primeval times. Thus, humans would have most faithfully preserved an original life form that, according to this researcher, existed long before not only our ape species were present, but also the other mammals. A primordial form, therefore, that goes back to those times when our mammals did not yet exist. And it is interesting that Klaatsch says outright that this original form of animals must be thought of as more closely related to the ancient dragon species described in geology than to today's mammals and apes. So that all mammals are descended from an original form, which they have distorted into a caricature, as it were, while humans have preserved it most faithfully.

These are things that we do not discover from some spiritual science considered fantastical by natural scientists, but which we find within natural scientific research in such a way that researchers feel compelled to assert such things from what they see. Now, of course, one can say that such researchers are making strange leaps and that there is much to object to. But if we again picture that strange creature from which humans and mammals are supposed to have descended, we must say to ourselves: under today's conditions, such a creature is completely impossible; it cannot exist today. Humans have transformed the form of that creature in such a way that they have gradually adapted it to today's conditions. Now it is interesting that a researcher like Klaatsch, in the development of that primordial form into humans, which would have nothing to do with the laws that produced the various forms of mammals, feels compelled to assume as places of development from such a primordial form precisely those places where humans were least affected by what is called the “struggle for existence” in the Darwinian sense. For he says: if humans had had to endure the brutal struggle for existence with predators and so on in areas where predators were particularly widespread, they would never have been able to carry out this struggle; in order for their developmental potential to be realized, they had to be protected from conditions that were removed from this struggle for existence. — Thus, because he still has a materialistic-monistic way of thinking in the background, such a researcher tries to show us how the modern human foot developed from a limb structure in primitive beings, assuming that the second pair of limbs was a kind of climbing hand. According to this researcher's pure hypothesis, the human race, or this primitive form of the human race, would have lived in areas where there were not densely packed, but tall trees, so that although it was not a climbing animal, it could nevertheless, in adaptation to its climbing, because it could support itself on tree trunks, develop the hollow of the foot and the peculiar sharp angle of the big toe of the human foot. For when humans became creatures that walked on the ground, Klaatsch believes, they must already have had feet that were suited to this; they must therefore have developed these feet from other circumstances.

This is indeed a strange conclusion and a curious hypothesis. For how could the objection not be justified that the foot, when it was still a climbing hand, must also have been adapted to the circumstances? Materialistic-monistic thinking is therefore not sufficient. But it is interesting to observe how such a researcher comes to reject, for the formation of man from a primordial being, the principle that orthodox Darwinism had valued for so long: the “struggle for existence,” so that he wants to remove man from this struggle for existence. How could one say that today's scientific facts should be understood in such a way that they have reinforced and confirmed the worldview program that was so boldly and fearlessly conceived at the dawn of Darwinism? It seems to us highly interesting that natural scientists felt compelled to point to forms as the original forms of man that do not exist today, that are, so to speak, forms invented by natural scientists, merely hypothetical assumptions. And this goes so far that, for example, Klaatsch can say, in response to all the ideas that humans evolved from higher mammalian forms during the Ice Age through the struggle for existence, that this is a childish notion that can no longer be upheld today. Of course, such an idea, which this researcher calls childish, is still widely represented in popular literature, and there are still enough writers in this popular literature who say that they are presenting facts, when in fact they are only hypotheses that fail in comparison to what other researchers present as facts. Thus, scientific thinking leads us completely away from what is still widely presented today as a scientific worldview.

So, how can we briefly outline the course of scientific research from the past to the present? In the 1970s, people said: Look at the higher mammalian forms, and you will have a picture of what humans looked like in the distant past! Today, it is said: in these mammalian forms, you have animal forms that arose only because they deviated completely from what once existed as primitive humans, and which cannot be found in the fossil layers of the earth, for which there is no external evidence, but which today can only be constructed from what is found through geology. Natural science itself thus leads us back to forms that no longer exist today. Thus, in primeval times, humans are linked to forms that are truly quite different from what, until relatively recently, was believed to be the origin of humans.

This is a path that clearly shows us that it must lead directly to what spiritual science actually has to say about the origin of man. How does spiritual science differ from a natural-scientific-materialistic monism with regard to the question of the origin of human beings?

Spiritual science must assume that human beings, as they are today, lead back to a past — we have already indicated this as a path into the recent past in these lectures — that when we trace them backwards, we are first led to earlier lives, to earlier incarnations. What lives in human beings today as spirit or soul must be viewed, according to what has emerged in the last lectures, in such a way that it can have not only one life within the human body form in which it first encounters us in the sensory world, but that it can also have a life in the so-called disembodied state, so that we must view the full human life as divided into the part that is spent in the time from birth or conception to death, and the part that goes from death to a new birth, where the human being lives in a purely spiritual world and develops and utilizes the powers that he has acquired in the physical body. Then, through a new birth, the human being enters into existence in such a way that, although he acquires the outer physical form, the outer physical features from his line of descent as a result of what his parents and other ancestors can bequeath to him, what is bequeathed in this way does not include the actual core of the human being, but rather, immediately before the human being enters into existence, is in a spiritual world, where it has equipped itself with corresponding powers from previous lives, and that the human being can then, through this spiritual core of being, insofar as they have inherited forms as bodily forms and are composed of physical substances, can undergo plastic transformations and formations, that they transform themselves and, especially in the first years of childhood, become individually structured, so that the body can become a useful tool for the spiritual-soul, which enters into it as an independent entity. Therefore, we regard the spiritual-soul as an independent entity, as the first thing in spiritual science, which works on the human being in such a way that the human being takes over the basic structure of his form, his material conditions, from his hereditary conditions, but that the finer, more individual form is worked into what he takes over in accordance with these spiritual-soul conditions. However, from a spiritual scientific point of view, we do not see the spiritual-soul core working on the human form as if it were shaping the whole human being, but rather in such a way that within the physical body inherited in the physical world, there remains so much mobility and inner flexibility that the spiritual-soul core can work its way into it.

If we now trace human beings back to earlier times, we find that life in the sensory world is followed by life in the spiritual world between the last death and the present birth, but that this is then followed again by a previous earthly life, then again by a spiritual life, and so on. However, when we turn to the earlier existence of human beings using the means available to spiritual researchers, which will be outlined in a few strokes in connection with these explanations, we find that these incarnations, this entering into a physical body, ceased at one time in the past, so to speak, that what we can call the spiritual-soul core of human beings was present in a different way than it is now, when it enters physical existence through birth, but it was nevertheless present and also came out of the spiritual world. spiritual-soul core of the human being, was present in a different way than it is now, when it enters physical existence through birth, but it was nevertheless present and came out of the spiritual world just as it comes out now when it connects with the conditions of heredity. But we would find that he originally came out of the spiritual world in distant primeval times in such a way that he encountered earthly conditions that were very different from those of the present. Spiritual science shows us that in primeval times this spiritual-soul entity actually encountered earthly conditions in which far, far more had to be shaped and transformed than what was given to human beings as spiritual-soul beings in the form of their physical bodies. And as we go further and further back in time, we finally find that we ascend to such a primeval time in which the human spiritual-soul being was not yet dependent on ready-made physical forms into which it could only imprint the finer structures of the brain, the glandular system, and so on, and we are led back to primeval times in which the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being encountered conditions such that, without the processes of present-day heredity and procreation, the material conditions and laws of that time could be formed directly out of the spiritual. Thus we are not led back to a hypothetical form that is supposed to have once had a sensual-physical existence, as Klaatsch assumes for the ancient dragon age, but we are in truth led back to a spiritual archetype. And in the first embodiment of human beings, we see a directly plastic elaboration of physicality, and under the progressive conditions on Earth, the more solid forms of human physicality were then, so to speak, increasingly transferred to what was inherited, and all that remained for this inner spiritual core, which was becoming weaker and weaker in relation to the outer formative power, was the possibility of forming within what was given within the line of heredity. Today, because the spiritual-soul aspect has become weaker in the hereditary line and no longer has the power to shape the later physical body, it only shapes the finer conditions: the structure of the brain, the finer conditions of the blood circulation, the glandular system. It finds the physical body given to it by heredity. But if we go back to primeval times, we find completely different conditions of earthly existence, completely different conditions of the physical, in which the spiritual within the physical not only shapes the rest of the physical substances, as is the case today, but can directly shape the whole human being out of itself, so that what we see today as the human form must be regarded, in the spiritual scientific sense, as crystallized out of the spiritual, just as we see today a cube of salt crystallizing out of a salt solution, which gives itself its form through the inner laws of formation. And just as it is not necessary for the cubes of salt, which are all alike through their inner formation, to descend from a single one, it is equally unnecessary, when allowing these spiritual scientific considerations to work on one's soul, to think that there is a physical blood relationship with animals when what humans have today in their form, in their bone structure and in the structure of their other organs, is reminiscent of the conditions and functions of animals that have similar forms. We can attribute the similarity of form to the emergence of this form principle, which we can still recognize today as something directly spiritual and soul-related. This is explained in more detail in my book “An Outline of Esoteric Science.”

How spiritual science leads humans back to a spiritual archetype, to a primordial form of the human being that is spiritual in itself but so strongly imbued with forces that it still masters matter—this idea should be put forward. And alongside this, it should be shown how natural science, which is itself led to the archetype, must shape this archetype, which is not ape-like, solely on the basis of hypothetical ideas. But natural science still thinks that this archetype must have acted as a material being in primeval times. It did not act as a material being in primeval times, just as little as, for example, human beings today, when they sleep, when they leave the body as spiritual-soul beings, regulate certain conditions of production as material beings during the time between falling asleep and waking up. While today the spiritual-soul works more during sleep than during waking hours, namely by removing fatigue, we must think of what is creative in human beings, what removes fatigue during sleep, as being so intensified in primeval times that it could bring forth the whole human being in its formal relationships.

If we then ask ourselves: What is the meaning of the whole of evolution? We must say: Basically, the human being of today shows us, not in bold hypotheses, but through unbiased observation, what the meaning of such a development is. When we observe human beings in their lives, as we have already done here, how they remember their childhood with their consciousness, with their present ego, the thread of memory breaks off at some point, and for ordinary consciousness we can then only learn from our parents, siblings, and so on how we were before that point in time, otherwise we would have to place our origin much later. Was the spiritual-soul being of the child not yet present in those times, which we cannot remember, in the dim and sleepy life of the child? It was present; it was even stronger and more powerful in the first years of childhood in terms of external activity than later on. Before the ego consciousness appeared in humans, this dreamlike, active human being worked precisely on the finer development of the brain and the finer human body, and because it sent its powers there, an inner human soul being with ego consciousness did not yet come into being. When humans had then developed the finer conditions of their physicality out of their souls, this working on humans from outside was transformed into what appeared as conscious inner soul life. Thus we see that the formative power of the spiritual-soul must become weaker for the outer form so that it can appear as consciousness. Therefore, it is not absurd for spiritual science to go back in time and view the spiritual-soul nature in such a way that it first appeared as the creator of human form, and after it had taken on a form that was preserved through inheritance across generations, the spiritual-soul forces were able to withdraw into an inner life, into a conscious and increasingly conscious human soul life. In truth, this spiritual-soul core of the human being has only become weak in relation to external conditions, but what has been lost and what has been passed on to heredity has emerged in the powers of consciousness, which continue to develop further and further in the processes of culture.

It must now be interesting to consider how the origin of the animal world itself is to be thought of in relation to this human form. Here, too, only a brief mention can be made of what is explained in more detail in “Occult Science.” It can be said that the earthly conditions into which human beings had to find their way were formed earlier than the human physical form, and that at a certain point in time human beings entered the world of the sensory from the world of the supersensible, so that, as a purely spiritual archetype, the spiritual-soul worked its way into the physical to such an extent that it could then appear as a physical being, and that we must imagine what it worked its way into as something completely different from later physical forms, namely, mobile and plastic. And human beings shaped this plasticity at a time when it was possible for human forms, for spiritual science must assume that the animal world shaped itself into sensual matter at a much earlier time on earth, that it could not wait until the conditions had arisen that gave human beings their present form. Human beings waited, as it were, until the earth was ripe for this, so that what was reflected in their spiritual nature could be imprinted on the plastic, organic matter as the present human body form. Animals attained their bodily forms earlier and under different conditions, and this meant that, although their original form is also spiritual, the spiritual-soul aspect of the animal, working in much narrower conditions, came to the fore in a different form in the animal. Therefore, we must see in animals beings that human beings have, as it were, sent ahead into earthly existence and which, because they did not incarnate in the conditions in which human beings incarnated, we must therefore see in old forms that are not adapted to later earthly conditions.

Now, if spiritual science wants to think strictly in the sense of natural science, it must not only think its logic entirely in the sense of natural science, it must not only organize its logic entirely in the sense of natural science, for you will have seen that the explanations just given are not only strictly scientific in their thinking, but that the facts of natural science point entirely to what has been said today: that the forms which natural scientists conceive from the facts as archetypes and represent in material and sensory terms must be transformed into spiritual and soul forms, which have led to the present human form only because they later incarnated themselves in earthly conditions as animal forms. But natural science shows its results not only through hypothesis, but also through experiment, through trial and error. In this respect, too, spiritual science does not lag behind natural science. In earlier lectures, it has already been pointed out how human beings can develop spiritually and psychologically, how they can influence their spiritual and psychological nature through intimate soul processes — meditation, concentration, and the like — in such a way that it becomes much more powerful and stronger than it is in normal life. Today, it can only be pointed out that thoughts in meditative life must be born out of human will if they are to develop the human being into a spiritual researcher, while all other thoughts are formed out of the surrounding circumstances. When a person begins to devote themselves to such a meditative life with complete perseverance, when they place certain ideas, feelings, or impulses of will at the center of their soul life through their will, they succeed in detaching their spiritual-soul life from their physical body, and they can then, however much this is ridiculed and mocked today, advance to an inner life where they know: Now I live in the spiritual-soul core of my being and through it I am in direct connection with the spiritual world. I do not experience through my senses or through the mind, which is bound to the brain, but I experience within myself a spiritual-soul human being who has slipped out of his physical body, even out of his brain instrument. — And it has been mentioned that in the early stages of such an advancement, when the person has not yet progressed far enough, they have the feeling: You are now experiencing an inner spiritual life, but you cannot imagine it, cannot transform it into concepts. — This is a transitional state that may seem quite alarming to some. And it is true that while one otherwise considers oneself a rational person when one can form concepts from one's experiences, this is now something where, if one cannot grasp things in concepts, one cannot consider oneself a rational person, but rather an idiot when one goes through something like this: Now you are experiencing something, but you cannot comprehend it!

As strange as it sounds, in a certain higher sense you then become a kind of idiot for a certain period of time. But as you progress, you transform this spiritual-soul core of your being in such a way that it gains even greater powers, namely to consciously participate in what the spiritual-soul core of your being does, which is otherwise unconscious. While in early childhood one works unconsciously on one's outer configuration, after doing one's exercises for a certain period of time, one notices that one is strengthening the spiritual-soul core to such an extent that one can now consciously work on one's brain organization to create an organ that enables one to comprehend what one could not comprehend before and to bring what one experiences into consciousness. This is the basis for the communicability of spiritual science. What one can see in the early stages of spiritual research experience is so vague, so completely an experience in a new element of existence, that it has no conceptual contours at all. But if it remained that way, spiritual science could not be communicated. It can only be communicated when these experiences can be brought down into consciousness and put into concepts. But this can only be done through the brain. That is why the spiritual researcher must consciously transform his brain; that is why he first feels his brain like a block that he must first transform.

So we can say: in this higher human spiritual development, we can literally experience the work of the human being from his spiritual being as an experimental work on the configuration, on the organization of matter. — Higher spiritual knowledge always proceeds in such a way that the human spiritual life, which is first present in the spiritual, is worked into matter. There we see how the human soul, which becomes conscious of itself at a certain stage, continues the process that we see unfolding at the beginning of human development from the spiritual world, and this then points us to the spiritual origin of the human being in his development, which the human being experiences as a spiritual researcher when he trains himself over a long period of time in the methods indicated. Just as in everyday life, in the life between birth and death, earlier states appear in the memory, so that when a person reaches the age of fifty, they know what they experienced at the age of twenty, thirty, and so on, and their consciousness is expanded backwards, so too is human consciousness expanded backwards beyond birth through meditation and concentration into regions that are otherwise completely hidden from us if we only consider the brain in the physical body. This touches on a point that is still very distant from human consciousness today, but for which there will be an understanding in a relatively short time, when culture is fertilized by spiritual science. An area is touched upon that we can call the extension of human consciousness beyond the limits of the brain and the senses. Through this, we gain an expansion of our memories beyond our present life, an expansion of our consciousness of soul and spirit processes. These soul and spirit processes then present themselves in such a way that one can say: one no longer works merely with logical conclusions, as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and so on do, but one works with facts that appear before one's spiritual eyes, like memories of earlier times of one's earthly days. Spiritual vision expands. And as the spiritual-soul core of the human being develops, it encounters inner experience, and the spiritual origin of our earthly life is conjured up before our spiritual eye, in which the forms of beings are not contained as they are around us, but rather those beings as they have not yet taken form, as they would appear if one were to perceive a crystal that has not yet taken shape and were to shoot into becoming. In short, we learn to recognize what is in the human being, apart from the physical formative forces, how he is, without having to take into account the physical, which lies in heredity. We get to know them spiritually and emotionally, and we can then form an idea of what they were like at their place of origin when they first worked their way into the physical realm in a formative way and embodied themselves in the sensory world.

This is a result that every person can verify if they are willing to apply the necessary perseverance and courage required for such a self-experiment. For when a person experiences their spiritual-soul core within themselves, before they comprehend it, they do not experience something that is completely foreign to them, even though it has not been born out of the sensory environment, but rather as something that appears completely new, yet they feel: It is related to your innermost nature, what you feel as your innermost impact; it is you yourself as an eternal being, which as the first, as the eternal being underlying all outer physical form. One feels that one is now facing the whole human being, not with the senses, but spiritually. And there one finds a strange possibility of comparison with what we encounter in everyday life. The spiritual researcher experiences that he cannot say: What I am developing here is connected with my brain or with my eye and so on, but he must say: It is connected with the whole human being. It is similar to when we observe a child in everyday life. We see that a child actually laughs and cries differently than an adult. It is also different. A child laughs and cries with their whole body. What in an adult is only achieved through the secretion of the lacrimal glands, in a child extends to the whole organism. They feel shaken by what is expressed in their crying. The same is true of laughter: children laugh with their whole bodies, whereas adults may only turn up the corners of their mouths. This can also be observed later in life. What moves the soul first moves the whole person, and only then does it move the tear glands or the laughing muscles. The influence is specialized to a particular organ. Observe how, throughout a period of your life, when you feel moved, you experience something like a tightness, a tension in your chest; later in life, this concentrates on a slight feeling in the larynx, which you can notice if you pay attention to it. Thus, what is specialized emerges from the grasping of the whole human being. The spiritual-soul works its way out of the whole human being and then specializes in individual parts.

One goes through exactly the same process as a spiritual researcher. One feels a second human being developing within oneself. One feels that this inner human being, who lives within one as a spiritual being, works only to a lesser extent on the development of the organic than he did originally at the beginning of Earth's development.

I have cited individual facts that can serve to confirm the assertion that human beings — as natural science still believes today, even though its findings compel it to think quite differently — would not, if they were returned to the place of origin of their earthly existence, arrive at an original form of life that would be different from today's form, but would still be a sensual human form or animal form; — but it shows us that we are led back to such a primordial form that is spiritual-soul, and that, before the first development into a physical human form was possible, man existed as a spiritual-soul being. In this respect, too, man is the creature who creates himself out of his innermost spiritual-soul essence, the being who gives himself form according to the conditions he has in the spiritual-soul realm. But the spiritual-soul realm also presents itself to us as the original for man in the past. The spirit proves to us to be the truly creative force, and later on, what we encounter as material life in the outer world will also reveal itself to us as having been shaped out of the spirit.

Today, the only thing that should concern us is to bring this special chapter on the descent, the origin of man, before your soul, back to the point in his development when man was not yet a sensual being, but a spiritual-soul being. If natural science continues to follow the paths that have been marked out today, and which it has now taken, it will encounter spiritual science. Anyone who looks at things without prejudice today will have to say: So it only seemed as if human beings could be traced back to animal forms of origin, as if the spiritual and soul aspects needed only to be regarded as a development of physical forms. On the contrary, one must say: that which was believed to be the result of the sensory proves to be the original, the first, the creative, and the sensory the result. — Everywhere, wherever human beings can perceive with their senses and think with their minds, they are led to the spiritual. And when they recognize the spirit, to which we will return later, in its eternity, they will feel secure in the spiritual-soul nature of the world, which we can only address with the predicate of eternity.

Everything originates from the spirit! That is the insight of spiritual science. And because everything originates from the spirit, and material existence is only a transitional stage in which we are to acquire powers that we cannot acquire elsewhere, we perceive material existence as a transition point back to a spirit-pervaded life in the future. Just as human incarnations on earth began with the emergence of human beings from a purely spiritual existence, so they will end when they have fulfilled their task for human beings: namely, to give them what they need to take with them into the spiritual world. Just as human beings return to earthly existence after each death in order to develop what they were not yet able to develop before, just as we look back on the beginning of incarnations, so we look ahead into the future and see an end to incarnations, but also a return of human beings to the spiritual world.

Everything springs from the spirit. The human soul lives in the spirit, feeling powerful within it. It will become spirit when it has reached its goal on earth and acquired what the physical body can give. From spirit — through matter — to spirit! This is the great, meaningful, life-affirming answer that spiritual science has to give to the question of the origin and destiny of human beings.