Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 18 January 1912, Berlin

The Origin of the Animal World in the Light of Spiritual Science

If, from the point of view of currently prevailing ideas, it was already somewhat difficult to discuss the origin of human beings from a spiritual scientific perspective, which was to be done in the last lecture of this cycle, it will be even less easy today to talk about the origin of the animal world. For if, on the one hand, the difficulty arises from the fact that everything relating to the animal world is — at least apparently — even more remote than everything relating to the nature and essence of human beings, on the other hand there must also be a particular difficulty arising from the fact that, in the current world of ideas, the influence of spiritual facts and spiritual causes on the development and origin of animal existence is not accepted at all. On the contrary, we find that in the course of the last stages of development of our spiritual life, the idea has become particularly prevalent that the development of animal life involves exactly the same causes, forces, and entities as the development of inanimate, so-called inorganic nature. And we know that the greatest triumphs of natural science have actually been achieved precisely in this field of the so-called purely natural development of living beings.

Now, we must say that, on the one hand, the longing for a purely natural development, as it is usually called, aims at a development that takes into account only those forces that also prevail in inanimate existence. We see how research in this direction seems to rush from triumph to triumph, and indeed, when interpreted correctly, does so. On the other hand, we can see how deeper thinkers, who are thoroughly grounded in scientific facts and are also completely familiar with all that science has produced in recent times, yet are unable to share the views of those who would like to derive life entirely from a mere connection or combination, albeit of a very complicated nature, of those forces and processes that are also present in inanimate nature. A large number of thinkers of the present and the immediate past did not find it particularly difficult to say: Up to a certain point in time, the development of our earth consisted primarily of the unfolding of inanimate processes, and then a point in time arrived when certain substances combined in a complex manner in such a way that the simplest living beings came into being, whereupon development progressed in such a way that, as they say, in the struggle for existence and in adaptation to the environment, these simpler living beings developed into increasingly complex living beings, up to and including human beings. — But another group of recent thinkers had to say to themselves: It is impossible to imagine that the mere combination of inanimate substances could at any time have given rise to what can be called in the true sense of the word spontaneous generation, the emergence of the living from the non-living.

One such thinker of the latter kind is Gustav Theodor Fechner, who was brilliant in many different fields. Since this personality is associated with truly important advances in natural science in many different areas, one should not dismiss the views of such a thinker as easily as is usually the case today. Gustav Theodor Fechner cannot imagine that life could ever have developed from non-living matter. Rather, it is natural for him to imagine that the inanimate can emerge from the animate through processes of separation, because we do indeed see that the life process within living beings secretes substances which, after they have served their purpose in the life process, pass over to the rest of nature and then, so to speak, belong to the inanimate, to inorganic processes. Thus, Fechner can well imagine that our Earth was once a single large living being at its inception. From this great living being, the Earth, which obtained its respiration and perhaps also its nutrition from outer space, from this great, powerful unified organism that was once our Earth, living beings developed on the one hand as if by a special separation of what were only living organs in the great Earth organism, through the independence of such organs. And on the other hand, those substances separated from the great living being Earth that today belong to the lifeless processes of nature in a similar way to how substances separate from an organism after they have served the living processes for a time. Thus, according to this thinker, it was not the living that emerged from the lifeless, but the lifeless that emerged from the living.

In a similar, perhaps even more fantastical way, a concept emerged from the natural scientist Wilhelm Preyer, who proved his legitimacy and his right to speak on scientific matters not only through his extensive physiological and biological research, but also through his writings on Darwinism. Preyer also imagines that the Earth was a kind of living being at its inception. Indeed, he was generally averse to speaking of anything as absolutely inanimate. He says: We actually have no particular right to regard a flame as something completely inanimate, but we can very well regard the burning in the flame as a kind of life process at the lowest level, which has simplified itself and been brought down from a higher level, just as those life processes that we observe today may have developed upwards. When a flame burns, Preyer believes, it appears as if something similar to a life process is revealed to us in the consumption of the material and in the whole way in which burning presents itself to us as a fact. And so he did not consider it impossible that the earth itself was a great life process, a life process that must have taken place under conditions quite different from those under which life processes take place today. And so we see the most remarkable ideas emerging from the mind of a natural scientist, which Preyer expresses by saying: At the beginning of its existence, the earth may well have been a great, powerful organism, whose breath we must seek in the glowing iron vapors, whose blood flow we must imagine in the molten metals, and whose nourishment must have come from meteorites drawn in from outer space. This is certainly a peculiar organism and a peculiar life process, but this natural scientist believes he cannot express it any other way than by tracing the inanimate back to an original living being rather than the living back to the inanimate. And what appears to us today as our life in the various realms appeared to him only as a particularly developed life, while the life of a burning candle appeared to him as a life that was in a certain sense regressed, so that the latter may well appear to us externally as lifeless.

If we have to say that such phenomena in the development of modern spiritual life can show us, in a sense, how important thinkers, who stand firmly on the ground of natural science not only in their convictions but also in their insights, do not regard the earth merely as the glowing liquid, lifeless gas ball of Kant-Laplace theory, but see the original Earth as a great living being in order to explain what lives today, this can teach us, in a sense, that reducing the living to the lifeless is not so easy after all. On the other hand, we must say that even the pioneering minds behind the greatest achievements of modern scientific research cannot teach us that scientific thinking has reduced all living things to a lifeless existence, and that in this respect natural science would directly contradict what spiritual science has to say, namely that everything material, and indeed everything living, can be traced back to spiritual causes. Is it correct, then, that what Darwin or Lamarck or other pioneering minds have achieved for the great accomplishments of natural science excludes the consideration of spiritual causes underlying phenomena?

Attention has often been drawn from this point to a remarkable passage in Darwin's writings, where this great and powerful pioneer points out how he succeeded in showing the transformation of one life form into another, and how this made it seem quite possible to him to trace today's living beings in all their complexity back to earlier, perhaps less complex living beings, and thus to explain the diversity of today's life forms by means of original life forms that may have differed little from one another. But then Darwin says in a very significant way: Thus, it would have been possible to trace today's diverse life forms back to an original one and to explain today's life in all its diversity through evolution. — But Darwin speaks of these original life forms in such a way that he assumes, as he literally says, that “the Creator once breathed life into them.” Yes, we can say outright that Darwin, the naturalist working in the middle of the nineteenth century, believed that his explanation of the transformation of species in living nature was justified because he simply assumed that the origin of development was the Creator. We can see from Darwin's entire way of thinking that he would immediately have been forced to recognize the inadequacy of his explanation if he had not been able to assume the intervention of spiritual facts at some point in the development of the earth. It is precisely this that makes him feel firm and strong on the ground he has entered, telling himself that if one can assume that original life, created from the spiritual, existed in its simplest forms, then one can also expect this life in its simplest forms to have had the driving force, the impetus, to transform itself into complex and manifold forms.

In an even higher sense, this must be applied to Jean Lamarck, who spoke of a natural development of living beings through adaptation to their environment into increasingly complex forms. In Lamarck's case in particular, we see that his idea is this: one may assume a development from the outwardly imperfect to the outwardly ever more perfect, because one need not think this to be in any way contradictory to the interweaving and permeation of this entire development with fundamental spiritual forces. How else could Lamarck have included a passage in his seminal work that we can quote verbatim, which is precisely characteristic of the approach that has now been identified in older scientific thinkers? Lamarck says in his “Philosophie zoologique”:

"Since it had not been taken into account that the individuals of a species must remain unchanged as long as the circumstances affecting their way of life do not change significantly, and since the prevailing prejudices are consistent with the assumption of this progressive generation of similar individuals, it has been assumed that each species is immutable and as old as nature itself, and that it was specially created by the sublime creator of all things."

Lamarck is aware that he must break with the single creation of all species at the starting point of this natural existence, that he must think of the species we have around us today as having come into being through evolution. But then he continues:

"Certainly, everything exists only through the will of the sublime creator of all things. But can we prescribe rules for him in the exercise of his will, or determine the manner in which he has done so? Could not his infinite omnipotence have created an order of things unknown to us, which brought into existence, one after another, everything we see and everything that exists? Whatever his will may have been, the immeasurable greatness of his power is certainly always the same, and however he may have carried out this will, nothing can diminish its greatness. So, by respecting the decisions of this infinite wisdom, I remain within the limits of a simple observer of nature."

So speaks the man who is rightly invoked today when the theory of evolution is discussed. But we also see that this man thus outlined his program in the most definite way from the outset. What is this program?

Lamarck says that if one determines everything that is available to one as a simple observer of nature through observation, it is possible to imagine that organisms have developed in a continuous series; but originally one must assume that spiritual driving forces are at work in this entire development, because otherwise one has no firm ground at all. This is clearly recognizable as the attitude of the pioneering Lamarck. It must then be said, however, that this natural scientist outlined his particular program by limiting himself to the processes of the external world and not ascending at all to what must underlie the entire process of development spiritually. He suddenly hands over the spiritual to a world he does not intend to penetrate, which he assumes from the outset to be a realm of unhindered creative will; but he limits himself to describing what has sprung from this creative will and is manifesting itself in ongoing development.

Now, on the other hand, it must be said that, as things stand today, it can never rightly occur to the scientific observer that, under the conditions accessible to present-day external observation, living beings could ever develop from non-living matter on the earth today. The idea that living things develop from non-living things is by no means a new one; in fact, it is the older one. It has already been emphasized here that it was a great advance in natural science, but one that lies barely two centuries behind us, when Francesco Redi uttered the sentence: Living things can only arise from living things. It is interesting to note that in the centuries before Francesco Redi, it was still widely believed that living and quite complex organisms could arise from purely inanimate matter. Not only was it assumed that lower animals, such as earthworms, could develop from river mud, which appeared inanimate to the naked eye, without a living germ from an earthworm ancestor having been placed in the mud, but it was also systematically assumed that animals could develop from the mud without any living germ from an animal ancestor having been placed in the mud. earthworms, for example, could develop from river mud, which appeared to be inanimate to the naked eye, without a living germ from an earthworm ancestor having been placed in the mud. But it was also systematically assumed that animals up to the level of insects, or even higher, could develop from inanimate substances. It is interesting to note that in a work by St. Isidore, who died in 636, it is systematically stated that bees can develop from an ox carcass—something that has already passed into the inanimate—if it is only beaten sufficiently. Indeed, this man, who was at the pinnacle of scholarship in his time, not only stated how bees could develop from an ox carcass, but also told us how hornets could develop from horse carcasses, drones from mules, and wasps from donkey carcasses in the same way. But that's not all: until the seventeenth century, it was claimed that ants and eels could arise from what had already turned into inanimate matter. And the belief that living things can be formed from non-living things in the simplest way was so powerful that Francesco Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno because he had the audacity to utter the sentence: Living things can only arise from living things; for only inaccurate observation could give rise to the assumption that living beings can develop from inanimate matter, because the river mud must already contain the living germs of living beings if living things are to develop.

Today, spiritual science must add to the achievements of Francesco Redi the statement that the spiritual can only develop from the spiritual. And because, ultimately, all earthly development culminates in the spiritual, as it is represented simply and at a subordinate level in the animal world, as it is represented at a higher level in the normal human being, and at the highest level in the human spirit itself, this spiritual, which ultimately emerges as if born out of the seemingly spiritless, can only be traced back to an original spiritual. If spiritual science is compelled to assert this today, as we have heard in earlier lectures and also in previous years in these lecture cycles, and if it wants to further substantiate this statement in its entirety in the individual fields: Spiritual can only arise from the spiritual — and says: Everything that appears to us as material is only transformed spiritual substance — then today, because other things have become fashionable, it is no longer exposed to the fate of Francesco Redi or Giordano Bruno, but to a different fate. Because today it has to represent a truth that will become as much a part of cultural life as the statement: Life can only arise from life — has become established, spiritual science will be regarded as a dream, as something that is by no means firmly grounded in real scientific knowledge.

Now, what spiritual science has to say from its point of view about the question of the origin of the animal world will first be outlined here. Then it will be shown why I have set myself the task in these lectures of bringing what spiritual science produces into harmony with the achievements of natural science, just as the insights of spiritual science into the origin of the animal world can be brought into harmony with the achievements of contemporary natural science.

Spiritual science as such cannot, however, go back to what Gustav Theodor Fechner or Preyer assumed to be the original earth organism. But on the other hand, it must be emphasized again and again that no explanation will succeed in making it even logically plausible that the diversity of living beings could have developed within our Earth's evolution from a purely nebulous structure, as assumed by the Kant-Laplace theory; one would have to resort to the very latest means of inquiry, so to speak, if one wanted to reconcile the organic or animal world with it. This would lead us to the now widely admired but no less fantastical thinking of the Swedish researcher Svante Arrhenius, who believed that—just at the right moment, when the Earth was ready to receive the seeds of living beings—it received such seeds from outer space through what is known as radiation pressure. It is easy for anyone to see that such an explanation is no explanation at all, because one would then have the task of explaining where and how these living beings originated, even if they only entered the Earth as the simplest germs through radiation pressure.

Spiritual science must go back to a form of the Earth where it does not yet appear to us as occupied and populated by such living beings as we recognize today. In a certain sense, spiritual science also shows us something similar to what Fechner and Preyer imagined through pure intellectual conclusions, namely that at its inception, the Earth was a living being that did not merely contain gases and vapors in an inanimate form, as the Kant-Laplace theory assumes. This theory can also be explained very easily to even the simplest student by saying: Look, it is really possible that by simply rotating a drop in a liquid, something can split off, which then circles around the large drop as a small drop due to the rotation, so that something like a small world system can be created. — One only forgets that it is one's own rotation that has set the drop in motion, and that if such a process really did take place on a large scale, if the planets were split off by the rotation of a gas ball, then a giant professor or a giant teacher must have been at work in outer space, because when conducting an experiment, one must take all processes into account and not forget oneself. If it is already impossible to explain even the separation of the planets from a once-existing gas ball based on what we currently know, it will be even less possible to explain life within a planetary existence without a living being, if only non-living beings existed before.

Spiritual science, however, leads us back to an Earth that was not only animated at its inception, but also imbued with spirit, so that we must go back to an original spiritual Earth being in the development of the Earth. If we wanted to visualize this spiritualized Earth being, as it were, this being would appear substantially as we still see today, in a sense, the last remnants of this original Earth state in the lowest organisms, of which it is actually difficult to say whether they are plant or animal beings, mobile but not yet formed living matter before us. If we consider these lowest organisms, which could actually be described as flowing life, because they initially look like a round drop, but which, when stimulated from outside, change their form and position, extending into feelers or feet that crawl across the ground, but which have no definite form of their own, — when we visualize this original life substance, we have before us, in the sense of spiritual science, the whole of the original earth matter, and within this earth matter we do not yet have what we today have as inanimate substances. The whole earth is, so to speak, a living but still unformed substance, and spiritual science must think of this unformed substance as a purely spiritual entity at the starting point of earth's development, which we call the form principle, the supersensible form principle. Today, in the spirit of spiritual science, we can only get an idea of what this earth was actually like at the beginning of its development if we imagine a sleeping human being and say to ourselves, as we have often done in previous lectures: When we imagine the sleeping human being, we have the physical body lying in bed, and this physical body is permeated by what we call in spiritual science a no longer sensory body form: the etheric body. But outside, as it were, in the orbit of this physical living body, we have what is within this physical body during waking life: the living life of the soul, which we call the connection between the ego and the astral body of the human being. — Thus, in the waking human being, we have before us the inner soul, permeating the outer body; in the sleeping human being, however, we have before us the outer body, separated from the inner soul. This inner soul is unconscious in today's sleeping human being; it is, so to speak, not permeated by any real inner content, at least not consciously. But for a real thinker, it is impossible to imagine that the sleeping human being actually still has this within them, or that what is living activity in the sleeping human being also causes the phenomena of soul life itself during the waking state. What can we imagine if we proceed in a truly logical manner? We can only imagine — this can only be sketched out today, but anyone who thinks logically and consistently cannot come to any other conclusion — that the human being exercises and expresses his soul activity through his waking bodily activity, so that the waking human being needs his physical organs in order to develop consciousness, and that the physical organs must be formed in such a way that, when animated by the soul principle, they can be carriers or mediators of conscious life. But no human being can ever imagine that the inner, living, organic activity that takes place during sleep can bring about what enters our consciousness as inner soul processes when we are awake. We need only make a simple comparison, which is quite sufficient for this purpose, and we will be able to see how this matter stands.

Let us replace the brain, the organ of the soul, which gives us the waking conscious state, with the lungs and breathing. Then we must say that the lungs breathe only because oxygen flows into them from outside. But the activity of the lungs is not exhausted by the flow of oxygen, for organic activity cannot influence the supply of oxygen. However, from the way we nourish and enliven our lungs from within, we cannot learn anything about the nature and essence of oxygen, and the lungs cannot be supplied with oxygen from within. Just as we have to think of the inner life process as passing into the lungs, so during sleep we also have to think of the inner life process as passing into the brain and the other organs. In the evening, our organs are exhausted because the activity of the soul wears them out, and they must be permeated by pure life activity so that they can once again be mediators of the soul's activity. But just as mere inner life activity cannot supply the lungs with oxygen, neither can inner life activity supply the human being during sleep with what we might call human drives, desires, passions, and so on. Nothing follows from the mere physical activity of the human being for his soul activity, just as nothing follows from the mere life activity that pours into the lungs for the nature of oxygen, which is entirely united with the lungs from outside. And no human being can escape the entirely compelling conclusion: just as oxygen as such exists in the outside world and communicates with the lungs, only that the lungs, because they do not fall asleep, are supplied with it not alternately but constantly, so too the human organs of cognition are not called upon from within by mere bodily activity to mediate soul activity, but this must flow into them upon awakening, just as oxygen flows into the lungs from outside. So there must be something that, combining with the human ego, flows into bodily activity in the morning and then acts in the human soul organs. Thus, in what sleep life is, we must think of the spiritual separately and regard it, so to speak, as something that awakens a part of our bodily organs in the morning to become soul organs.

So we have, as it were, a living organism in the sleeping human being and, hovering above it, an independent spiritual being. During waking life, we must imagine that what flows out of us as soul processes, that is, as spiritual-soul processes, can only effect certain processes that undoubtedly run parallel to them in the organism, which are the effects of the soul processes and which, when they reach their peak, cause fatigue, are, so to speak, processes of dissolution of the material, while these processes of fatigue are reversed by the body during sleep.

In a similar way, spiritual science shows that at its starting point, the earth actually consisted of a duality, of something that is not the same as the sleeping and waking human being, but can be compared to what, so to speak, like the last remnants of the simplest organisms today, was a mobile life substance, but in no way were they organisms transformed into animal or human forms, or even plant forms. And just as we have to think of what is the soul content of the human being in connection with the human body, surrounding it in sleep, so we have to think of the whole Earth body at its beginning as surrounded by what we can call the Earth spirit, the common, unified Earth spirit. It is in this Earth spirit that we must seek everything that later took form within the Earth's development. But in this Earth spirit we must also seek everything that has a stimulating effect on the liquid material substance, as it were on the sleeping Earth, so that the whole life substance is set in motion in the most diverse ways. Thus we must think of the stimulating causes as acting upon the liquid living matter — I would say like spiritual currents from the surroundings of the earth — which, like the storm whipping up the sea and forming all kinds of waves, originally brought forth only such forms in the liquid substance that did not solidify but, after they had temporarily formed, they reverted to their original formless state. The principle of form itself is to be thought of as a supersensible, spiritual principle that was connected with the original substance of the earth. If we still want to imagine something similar today for this mode of action or for this interaction between spirit and matter in relation to the earth at its starting point, we can imagine — as the natural science of the future will reveal — a narrower region in which what happened at the starting point of the earth's development takes place. We can still point to something that acts on unformed life substance. All such processes that our own spiritual life produces in the brain substance, in the blood substance, can be compared to the processes that originally took place at the beginning of the Earth between the spiritual form principle and what, as living substance, underlies the becoming of the Earth.

In our present understanding, such a thing cannot be proven. It can only be proven that spiritual science, with the means already described, produces something similar for the whole of Earth's development as is produced in the memory of the individual human life. Through the development of certain forces, which have also been mentioned here, that lie in the depths of the soul — these are also the forces through whose development the spiritual researcher can look directly into the spiritual being of the earth — human memory and the spiritual vision of human beings are expanded. In this way, matter and material life can be completely permeated by spiritual vision, and material processes can also reveal themselves in their existence in such a way that they allow not only their present states but also their earlier states, from which they have developed, to appear directly before the spiritual eye. Just as human beings today carry within themselves what has shaped their soul life since childhood and can thus follow the line of memory, so they can follow their soul life back to earlier states; they can trace it back not only to the present, but also to decades ago and so on. When the spiritual gaze does not remain attached to the outer material, but penetrates the surface of things and enters into the spiritual underpinnings, then something asserts itself within the spiritual realm that transports the human being into a kind of world memory, which is also called reading the Akashic Records, and through this he looks back on earlier, original states of the earth.

Evidence can therefore only be provided in such a spiritual manner. But once these things have been researched, we have at our disposal the means to corroborate what spiritual researchers have brought to light and to show that there is complete harmony between what things still represent to us today and what spiritual researchers must assert on the basis of their findings. Therefore, even in a popular lecture, there is no other way than to recount what is presented to the spiritual researcher and what flows from direct spiritual observation, while this spiritual-scientific observation transports us, so to speak, to the starting point of the Earth's becoming. But at the same time we must emphasize that in such states, what we have to recognize as spiritual is much closer to material creation than the spiritual is to material creation today. Today, the spiritual needs the support, the resistance of the material body, so that the spiritual in human beings only brings forth those images of the material that we visualize in our minds. We cannot bring it to a greater condensation than these images.

Spiritual science, however, stands on the ground — the following lectures will draw attention to the origin of matter — that all material existence was originally spiritual, only that the spiritual, when it was still creating matter, was in a more original, more volitional, more powerful state than it is today in human spiritual life. Therefore, we must think of what surrounded the earth as a spiritual form principle as being much closer to what we called the original life substance than it is today to think of the sleeping human being in relation to the soul that surrounds him. And we must then go on to think that through the intervention of the supersensible form principle in the substance, everything that we today call inanimate nature came into being. In fact, we must think that through the influence of the spiritual form principle, a substance separated itself from the moving and agitated matter, which then became lifeless. In this respect, spiritual science is again close to the investigations of Fechner and Preyer. But such inanimate matter is in a certain way taken up again by the form principle, in that the form principle now appears in this lifeless matter as crystallization, so that we must think of everything mineral as originating from originally spiritual, animated matter and taken up by the form principle. Therefore, even today, when we speak of crystals, we can still recognize a supersensible form principle. However, the form principle asserted itself differently in matter that remained animate. And if we disregard plants today, we must imagine that under the influence of those substances that gradually separated from the living substance as lifeless and grouped themselves in various ways, the earth formed into what we call solid earth, liquid water, air, and so on. We must further imagine that during this time the formative principle is at work in all living and lifeless substance, that living, formed matter is exposed to the external lifeless — indeed, while it was previously completely alive within itself, it now has to assert itself with the lifeless materiality, also through the fact that in the course of the Earth's development, the principle of nutrition asserted itself as an incorporation of the non-living into the living.

We thus see the living, as it were, taking in the non-living, which it has first separated from itself in a certain way. As a result, life on earth increasingly enters into conditions that are expressed through the non-living as the elements earth, water, air, and so on, and life can only be formed in such a way that the forms are adapted to the external elements.

Now we must imagine life on earth in such a way that, in the further course of events, it keeps the inanimate and the living separated in the most diverse ways through the principle of form. We must imagine that the substances which today have fallen down from the heights and are connected with the earth's body were still dissolved in a middle earth age and existed as vapour in the earth of that time. We can certainly speak of such an Earth period in which an air envelope such as we have today did not exist. We must speak of vapors and gases that have long since solidified. We must imagine the entire distribution of water and air in a middle Earth period differently. We must imagine that the principle of form, which is to be thought of as purely spiritual, had to form the living substance into lifeless, shaped matter, and had to derive from the latter the conditions for breathing and so on, for example, so that the formative principle had to create in this way the most diverse forms that were adapted to ancient Earth conditions, which no longer exist at all. Spiritual science now shows, however, that development progressed in such a way that only a part of the living substance actually came into being in those times, and that when the formless matter was directly seized by the spiritual principle, a part of the old, mobile, formless substance was retained. So in ancient times, when the earth was covered in a completely different way by substances that have now fallen to the ground through condensation or lead a liquid existence in the earth itself, we have, as it were, crystallized the form principle into old forms that can no longer exist under today's conditions. Let us take a state in which our Earth did not yet have the form as a planet that we see today. Quite obviously, other forms of living beings had to arise, living beings that were adapted to the old conditions and could no longer exist today. It is now easy to explain that many of these life forms had to become completely extinct when the Earth itself changed its form. We find what is still geologically verifiable and what paleontology shows, that animals lived that we have to imagine were only adapted to water that was just beginning to take on its present form, but which was still interspersed with completely different substances. We find other animals that were adapted to the atmospheric conditions of that time, such as the dinosaur species and so on. In short, we could encounter the most diverse animal forms that were adapted to the conditions of that time. In addition, other forms arose that were adapted to the conditions in such a way that they could no longer be formed from the formless, moving matter according to the original form principle, but were capable of transforming themselves in successive generations and developing further in the line of inheritance in such a way that they developed the later forms from the old ones. The new ones were then adapted to the newer conditions on Earth. While those forms that had been so strongly permeated by the form principle in ancient times that they could no longer be transformed had to die out, the organisms that had remained more flexible, in which the living had not yet formed so strongly, were able to transform themselves and thus develop further.

For human beings, development is such that in ancient times we cannot see them within what could be seen with the outer eye, but we would find them in such a fine, formless, flexible matter that in the times when animal forms already existed, they could have become anything. Human beings descended from the formless into form at the very latest. While the animals that are in the world today had already taken on the principle of form earlier, so that they had to transform their earlier form in adaptation to the transformation of the earth, human beings did not allow themselves to descend into the old forms, but waited until the earth had the distribution of air and water that it has now. Only then did the condensation of the still barely formed matter into the later human form take place for humans. Because humans entered the formed shape last, they appeared in such a way that they are not merely adapted to individual specific Earth conditions. But if we go back to the animals, we must imagine their origin in such a way that certain forms adapted to very specific territories on Earth. These animals then took on a form that was by no means similar to their present-day descendants, but was adapted to the conditions of that time. However, because the animals were only adapted to territorial conditions that changed rapidly in certain respects, they could only change within certain limits. Humans, however, who at the time when the Earth was still subject to rapid changes had not yet entered into a form, but only later, when it was possible for them to transfer that form into their physical bodies across the entire surface of the Earth in such a way that they were adapted to the whole Earth as such, could populate the earth as a being that was least adapted to external conditions and most adapted to inner spiritual driving forces. From the outset, therefore, human beings were adapted to such formative forces that their inner being corresponded to the spiritual, that the formative forces could act directly on the soul in such a way that they made its outer physical form upright, that they made its hands living tools of the spirit. But all this could only happen after the earth had passed through certain formative principles, so that human beings could be adapted to what could determine their entire form and their experience of life from within. Thus, in human beings, the formative principle determines their form through the medium of the spiritual, while in animals, the formative principle had to intervene much more in the inanimate and inorganic. We can still see today how animals have tied their entire soul life even more closely to the physical, while human beings are capable of developing a soul life that rises above the physical life.

If we observe animals, how they are completely immersed in their physical life, how they are once formed, we see how they digest, how directly the soul permeates physical life and is linked to physical functions. But if we observe how the soul in humans immediately rises above the physical as something independent, we will see that humans are shaped in this way because the animal world was formed earlier than humans, adapted to other conditions of our earthly existence, out of formlessness. Only in this way could such a soul being become active in humans, which became so independent of physical life that humans can retain the formative principle within this soul being even when they pass through the gate of death and initially lay down their physical life. Because the formative principle took hold of the animal soul so much earlier, that an intimate connection with physical life had to be established, and because the animal is therefore completely absorbed in physical life, what is experienced in the individual animal is not detached from physical life. In humans, it detaches itself, retains a formative principle in the soul in addition to the organic, physical substance, and can form a new physical life after the time between death and a new birth. It is only because the form principle has directly grasped the spiritual-soul life in humans that this spiritual-soul life has the independence that can pass from life to life, enabling it to go through its existence in repeated lives. In contrast, the intimate connection with the form of existence that had to be established in animals between the formative principle and living matter meant that when the animal died, the formative principle has exhausted itself in the organic realm, and the animal's soul falls back into a general animal soul life, continuing not in an individual but in a general animal form, in a continuation of the group soul of the animal and not of the individual animal soul.

Thus we see that we must seek the origin of the animal in the fact that what later penetrates and permeates the human being penetrates the animal earlier. The animal is, as it were, left behind by the principle of ongoing development. It is a backward being in relation to the human being, who is an advanced being. We can easily imagine how this formation came about by means of a simple comparison: imagine a liquid in a glass, containing a substance dissolved in such a way that it cannot be distinguished from the liquid. But if we leave it standing, a sediment settles and the finer liquid remains at the top. This is how we should imagine the entire process of development: in what we regard as duality — between the spiritual-forming and what is the living substance below, so to speak — that which is the spiritual substance. This also contains the forming principle for the human being. But for the human being, formlessness remains the longest. For animals, formation occurs earlier, so that at a time when humans still remained above in a formless, thinner substance, animal beings had already condensed below and continued to live in such a way that they could only develop into stronger and stronger forms, which transformed over time. In contrast, in terms of form, human beings can only be traced back to what is originally formless in living beings, but in which the spirit acts as a driving principle and gradually brings it to its present form. As we proceed further, we must also think of animal forms in such a way that they did not emerge from one animal form, but rather, while certain animals were forming here and there, others remained behind, forming only later, while still others descended even later, and so on. Thus, man descended last.

It is peculiar that we find what has now been said fully explained when we read books such as Haeckel's. Outwardly, the assertion is made that human beings can be traced back to animals. But if we follow the ladder, we see that human beings can be traced back to something that cannot be traced back to the current conditions on Earth, but to imagined living beings. And the same is true of animals. We find the beings to which spiritual science refers as hypothetical beings also in Haeckel's family tree, except that these are not traced back to formed beings, but to formless ones. It is not possible to elaborate on this further at present. But from my “Occult Science” it follows that what is now presented as Earth has developed downwards from earlier spiritual stages. This follows from the fact that one cannot say that spiritual science is simply introducing something unknown. No! Ultimately, the earth is traced back to earlier planetary stages of existence, just as human beings are traced back to earlier lives in relation to their present life. And when we go back to the earlier stages, we find that the material is not something living, but something spiritual. We come to know the starting point of all living things as spirit. In this way we trace the foundation back to something familiar that is within ourselves, namely to spirit, to something we have within ourselves, whereas external science traces it back to something unknown. Spiritual science is in a different position here than the current hypothetical theory of evolution. Spiritual science traces evolution back to something that was spiritual and still is today. Only that the spiritual within us does not manifest itself in the same way as the thinner liquid separates from the denser substance in the glass. The finer spiritual in human beings has separated, just as the finer in the glass has separated from the denser, settled matter.

We must therefore trace the animal world back to the fact that in order for humans to develop their spiritual nature as they have today, they first had to separate the entire animal world so that they, as finer spiritual beings, could develop above the foundation of the animal world, just as in our comparison the finer substance appears when it has separated the coarser matter below on the ground. Today, we can only point to the events insofar as they reveal to us the origin of the animal world. How the spiritual and soul aspects subsequently developed must be left to a later lecture. However, it should be mentioned that the facts do not contradict this principle at all, and that natural science will come to realize that the course of events could not have been other than as it is presented today. For do animals appear to us in such a way that it would be necessary to speak of the special spirituality that exists only in human beings? On the contrary! Closer observation will show that there is sometimes much more intelligence within the animal world, that human beings must first acquire their intelligence, and that perhaps the advantage of human beings over animals lies in the fact that they were able to acquire their limited intelligence in the first place. Wherever we look in the animal world, at beavers, wasps, and so on, we see intelligence at work, we see spirit at work, making use of the animals. One cannot say that this intelligence is within the individual animals. One need only point out how certain insects care for their offspring. There we see that we are dealing with a supersensible intellect that pervades the animal kingdom, which is as objective for the animal world as matter itself is objective for the animal world. We can see this when the insect lays its eggs in such a way that the larva has to live in completely different conditions. The insect itself may have lived in the air, but the larva must first live in water. The insect may therefore not even be aware of the conditions in which the larva must live. It can therefore only be guided by an instinct within it to lay its eggs where the larva can live. Or let us consider animals such as beavers and so on, which, with their ingrained organizations, form what can be called external architecture. We are not far from recognizing, based on external observation, that intelligence is at work within the animal substance itself. When we look at humans, we see that, once they are born, they must first acquire the abilities that are already formed in animals. They are not yet at the stage where they have within themselves what animals have already formed within themselves. This provides a yardstick by which we can see that animals are formed earlier and that humans continue to be formed after they are born. It will not be confirmation of the ape ancestry of humans if the natural scientist Emil Selenka has found that the ape nature in its embryonic state is much closer to the human form than the later ape form, from which one can assume that humans are formed much earlier than the ape form, only that humans acquire their form only when they enter the world themselves.

Everywhere, natural science shows in its facts that what spiritual science has to say is confirmed precisely by the most advanced natural science. Yes, one could go even further — I do not shy away from doing so — and show how natural science today, so to speak, brings to light something that provides full proof of the facts of spiritual science, contrary to its own theories. Precisely when one considers such research results as those on the reproductive process of lower animals by the two brothers Oscar and Richard Hertwig from 1875, which have since been confirmed many times, that the principle of fertilization, for example in sea urchin eggs, can be replaced by the influence of acids, that is, that fertilization can be derived from a process that is initially purely inorganic, it must be said that the processes that lead to the formation of the embryo are in fact the result of a spiritual process. eggs, can be replaced by the influence of acids, so that fertilization can be derived from what was initially a purely inorganic process, it must be said that the processes that are now linked to the principle of heredity can only be imagined and can only occur as they appear externally, whereas in ancient times they appeared quite differently. Thus, one can very well speak of the fertilization of the animated earth core, which was formless living matter, by the spiritual form principle flowing around it, while remaining in harmony with scientific facts, so that the living was formed out of the form principle, and then the non-living separated from the living, which was the unified substance of the whole earth.

It becomes clear to us how, in essence, the whole of earthly existence appears in such a way that we can only understand it in the sense of Goethe, who, however, only hinted at what is reality for the spiritual researcher with regard to the origin of animals and humans. For when we look out into the whole world, how does everything that surrounds us ultimately gain its true value? Only, as Goethe says, by being reflected in a human soul. For spiritual science, however, the natural process of the earth also shows itself in such a way that it basically progresses from the oldest to the youngest forms in such a way that everything—as the blossom of the earth form—is oriented toward the idea that one can imagine what must ultimately be brought forth from the earth process, just as the blossom or fruit is brought forth from the plant.

Thus, a consideration of the origin of the animal world gives rise to a fundamental conviction of spiritual scientific knowledge, which can be summarized in the words that enlighten the human being, but which at the same time impose on us a responsibility with the consciousness of human dignity, which is built on the foundation of all other existence. Because we could only become human beings through the entire remaining development of the earth being directed toward us, we must prove ourselves worthy of this earth by striving to progress from degree of perfection to degree of perfection, for development shows us that it is directed toward the perfection of the human being. And this gives us the obligation not to stand still, but to advance to ever finer and finer forms of spiritual life. The spiritual life that human beings carry within themselves today could only be built on the foundation of the lower, and we must again repel the present and leave it to the lower elements so that further spiritual life can develop within us. To summarize, we can say: It is true for human beings, but it also establishes their highest duty:

Let the elements
be permeated by the spirit in their formation.
They had to receive
the spirit's ultimate impulse:
To clothe the human being
In spirit form and soul life.