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

Should anyone be prone to think that this account of cosmic evolution implied a fatalistic picture, he will have misunderstood it. To think that by this evolution a fated number of human beings will be condemned to belong to the “bad humanity” argues a mistaken notion of how the two realms—the external and sense-perceptible, and that of soul and spirit—are related. They represent, within certain limits, two distinct evolutionary streams. It is from forces inherent in the former stream—in the external, material and sense-perceptible—that the forms of the “bad humanity” arise. A human soul—a human individual—will only be under necessity of incarnating in such a form if he himself has given rise to the conditions for it. When the time comes it might even happen that among human souls who have been through the earlier evolutionary times there were none left to ensoul these forms. They might, without exception, be too good for the bodies of that kind. In that event, the forms would have to be ensouled out of the Universe in some other way than by human souls who had lived through the preceding epochs. They will only be ensouled by human souls if the latter have themselves incurred this kind of incarnation. Supersensible cognition can only tell what it sees. It sees that in the cosmic future there will be two human kingdoms—“good” and “bad.” It has not to start reasoning and to conclude, from the condition of human souls today, what their condition will have to be in the cosmic future, as though by some necessity or law of Nature. The evolution of human forms and the evolution of the destinies of human souls have to be looked for along two distinct paths of spiritual research. A tendency to confuse the two would be an unavowed survival of materialism, impairing the clear outlook of supersensible science.