VI. Present and Future Evolution of the World and of Mankind

Even as we can trace the great sequences of cosmic evolution from Saturn to Vulcan, so too we can the shorter periods—the periods, for example, of Earth evolution proper. Since the tremendous upheaval that brought the life of old Atlantis to an end, there have been the successive stages in man's development described in this book as the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean and the Graeco-Latin epochs. The fifth is the present—the epoch man is going through today. In preparation ever since the fourth or fifth century A.D., it began gradually about the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to emerge fully in the fifteenth. The preceding epoch—the Graeco-Latin—began about the eighth century B.C., the Christ-Event taking place when the first third of it was over. With the transition from the Egypto-Chaldean into the Graeco-Latin epoch, the whole mode and disposition of man's soul and all his faculties had undergone an essential change. The kind of logical thinking and intellectual comprehension of the world with which we are now familiar did not exist in Egypto-Chaldean times. Knowledge, which man today acquired by the deliberate exercise of his intelligence, he then received directly; it was given to him as an intuitive and inner—in some respects, supersensible—knowledge. Such was the form of cognition proper to that age. Man saw the objects around him, and in the very act of looking at them, the concept—the picture of them his soul needed—arose of its own accord within him. Now when cognition is of this nature, pictures not only of the sense-perceptible world make their appearance in man's soul, but from the depths of the inner life there dawns a knowledge, howsoever limited, of facts and beings imperceptible to the outer senses. This was a remnant of the dim and pristine supersensible awareness, once the common property of all mankind.