Fourth Lecture

This was not due to a great childishness of expression, but it was based on the real view, on the real state of mind. The ancient man did not see nature as we see it under the influence of today's science, even if we are not scientists; he did not see his spiritual being so abstractly, so merely in terms of ideas, as we have to today. Through this confusion of nature and spirit, man brought himself into fatalism; for in the way just described, when natural phenomena became imbued with spiritual acts for man, it was natural that all life should be intended in the external way in which human acts are intended. It was a picture, but the old man had no other picture; but that necessarily leads to the deception of fatalism.