Lecture II

When we look for the souls which gradually struggled upwards out of this lower class, and which from being tempted developed higher, we find them chiefly in a part of the European population of which modern history tells but little. Century after century this people developed in order to rise to a higher stage, to recover again, as it were, from the heavy set-back the souls had received in the Atlantean epoch. In Asia there was a continuation in the progress of civilisation; in Europe, on the other hand, there was a change from the former moral collapse into a gradual moral improvement.