Fourth Lecture

Now let us try to understand why ancient people were so easily seduced into fatalism. We know, of course, that the state of mind of human beings has changed radically in the course of evolution, and it is a superstition to assume, as popular Darwinism does, that there has been only a gradual evolution. A radical change has taken place in the state of mind, and in this respect history is most of all a fable convenante. The state of mind of ancient people was such that the natural never really confronted them as it confronts today's people, and in contrast to this, the spiritual did not confront them conceptually, as in terms of ideas, as it confronts today's people. Everything that the ancient man imagined about nature, he imagined in such a way that he imagined the natural combined with the spiritual, and again he imagined the spiritual in such a way that he took images from the course of nature for the imagination. If you had old teachings about the gods, they are actually completely imbued, as myths completely imbued, with ideas taken from the nature that can be perceived by the senses. When people spoke of nature, they did not speak as we speak today, so dryly, so abstractly, but they spoke of elementary spirituality, of essences that carry and bring about natural phenomena.