{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 102/1908-05-16/p012","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"There are beings that can be seen with clairvoyant vision at many spots in the depths of the earth, especially places little touched by living growths, places, for instance, in a mine which have always been of a mineral nature. If you dig into metallic or stony ground you find beings which manifest at first in remarkable fashion—it is as if something were to scatter us. They seem able to crouch close together in vast numbers, and when the earth is laid open they appear to burst asunder. The important point is that they do not fly apart into a certain number but that in their own bodily nature they become larger. Even when they reach their greatest size, they are still always small creatures in comparison with men. The enlightened man knows nothing of them. People, however, who have preserved a certain nature-sense, i.e. the old clairvoyant forces which everyone once possessed and which had to be lost with the acquisition of objective consciousness, could tell you all sorts of things about such beings. Many names have been given to them, such as goblins, gnomes, and so forth. Apart from the fact that their body is invisible, they differ essentially from man in as much as one could never reasonably attribute to them any kind of moral responsibility. What one calls moral responsibility in man is entirely lacking in them; what they do, they do automatically, and at the same time it is not at all unlike what the human intellect, intelligence, does. They possess what one calls wit in the highest degree and anyone coming into touch with them can observe good proofs of this. Their nature prompts them to play all sorts of tricks on man, as every miner can tell you who has still preserved something of a healthy nature-sense—not so much the miners in coal mines as those in metal mines.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Lecture VIII","site_heading":"Elemental Beings and Human Evolution's Moral Consequences","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","date":"1908-05-16","location":null,"word_count":316,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/102/1908-05-16/p012","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"not_established","translator":null,"identified_edition":"AP1961","book_title":"The Influence of Spiritual Beings on Man","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA102/English/AP1961/19080516p01.html","evidence":null,"reason":"source_says_translator_unknown","note":"The source page itself says the translator is unknown. No translator is established for this lecture: nothing at the level of the lecture names one. Do not attribute this English to a translator, and do not borrow a credit from another lecture of the volume. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/102/1908-05-16/p012"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/102/1908-05-16/p012"}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"paired_german":{"status":"no_paragraph_pairing","note":"No paragraph pairing exists for this paragraph, so no German text is given. The German paragraph of the same number is a different passage or an unestablished one. Read the German unit (german_unit.fetch_unit) and find the place by its content.","german_unit":{"lang":"de","edition":"original","unit_locus":"GA 102/1908-05-16","paragraph_count":26,"fetch_unit":{"ga":"102","lecture":"1908-05-16","lang":"de","edition":"original"},"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/102/1908-05-16","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/ga/102/1908-05-16?lang=de"},"pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"nearest_pairs":{"before":{"de":[8],"en":[10]},"after":{"de":[11],"en":[14]}}},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":0.89,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":6438,"original_word_count":7213,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"not_established","translator":null,"identified_edition":"AP1961","book_title":"The Influence of Spiritual Beings on Man","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA102/English/AP1961/19080516p01.html","evidence":null,"reason":"source_says_translator_unknown","note":"The source page itself says the translator is unknown. No translator is established for this lecture: nothing at the level of the lecture names one. Do not attribute this English to a translator, and do not borrow a credit from another lecture of the volume. Cite the German for anything load-bearing.","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}