Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man

Now, you cannot blame the broad masses of mankind; it is not their fault. The fault lies with these leaders, and I have given you examples of these representative people of our age, the representative media of our age, how they are filled with lies. In order to characterize our present age, we must say to a person who today for example holds a horseshoe magnet in his hand: Look, what you have in your hand is a magnet which has forces in it. But he says: No, that is no magnet, that is a shoe which we put on horses' hoofs. Then he takes the shoe and dismisses you. People have the magnetized iron in their hand and do not know that there is an invisible force in it. This is just a picture analogous to what we talked about in our spiritual science; they will not recognize our spiritual science. The problem today is that things are very complicated, but our thoughts are not sufficiently developed to be able to take these things into our understanding. Therefore everything splits itself apart; people walk by each other, each finding his own methods in his particular domain and have no inkling that the historical necessity demands that all this can actually be illuminated from spiritual science.