Lecture IV

By the time of the Graeco-Latin epoch this state of things had already changed. Men had lost their sensitivity for everything I have been describing and remembrance of it alone remained. In the Graeco-Latin epoch, among the leading peoples, for example of Southern Europe, there was no longer any equal possibility of direct vision of the spiritual Beings of the heavens, but remembrance of that vision remained. Just as a man remembers today what he experienced yesterday, so did souls in the Graeco-Latin epoch still remember what they had experienced of the Universe in earlier incarnations. This radiated into the souls of men and was a living experience. Plato speaks of it as ‘recollection’, but men do not always call it so. Progress in evolution consisted in the suppression of this direct experience and the development during the Graeco-Latin epoch of the faculty of judgement and the formation of concepts. Hence the earlier vision was bound to recede and could survive only as recollection, remembrance. This is exemplified most clearly of all in Aristotle who lived in the fourth century BC. and was the founder of logic, of the art of judgement; he himself was no longer able to perceive anything of the spiritual realities in the worlds of the stars, but in his writings he brings all the old theories back again. He does not speak of the physical heavenly bodies as we know them today but of the ‘Spirits of the Spheres’, of spiritual Beings. And a great many of his utterances were an enumeration of the individual planetary Spirits and of the fixed stars, finally leading to the one universal Godhead. The Spirits of the Spheres still play an important role in the works of Aristotle.