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

In the Graeco-Latin epoch an ever growing number of people were born in whom such faculties were lacking. Men now began to think about things with purely intellectual reflection. They drifted farther and farther away form the direct though dreamlike perception of the world of soul and spirit. Instead, they had to form an intellectual picture of it for themselves—intellectual, though aided by the life of feeling. Broadly speaking, man may be said to have been in this condition throughout the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Those alone, who—as an heirloom from the past—retained the earlier faculties of soul, were able still to receive the spiritual world into their consciousness directly. But they were the belated remnants of a bygone age; their manner of cognition was no longer suited to the time. For by the very laws of evolution, an older faculty of soul loses its full significance when new faculties develop. The life of man becomes adapted to the new and has no further use for the old. There were however individuals who began to supplement the newly acquired faculties of intellect and feeling with the fully conscious development of higher powers of cognition, whereby they could penetrate once more into the world of soul and spirit. They had to set about it in a different way from the disciples of the old Initiates, who had not yet had to reckon with the new faculties of mind and soul due to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Thus the fourth epoch witnessed the first beginnings of the modern form of spiritual training, described in the present work. But this was in its infancy; it could only come to full development in the fifth epoch (from the twelfth and thirteenth and more especially the fifteenth century onward.) Those who contrived to reach up into the supersensible worlds in this new way were able by their own Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to gain knowledge of the higher regions of existence. Those on the other hand who did not get beyond the recently developed powers of intelligence and feeling, could only learn of what the old clairvoyance had still known from the traditions which were handed down through the generations, whether by word of mouth or in writing.