Fourth Lecture

Now, however, the question arises: what is the relationship between the human and the cosmic? I have already hinted at something about this from a certain point of view; today we want to add a few aphorisms. When reasonable philologists – today philology, too, has firstly become abstracted and secondly rather philistine – but when reasonable philologists studied the languages that could be found among the so-called wild people in America when the "civilized", I say that in quotation marks, had penetrated into America, when these civilized people had discovered the wild Americans, the more insightful philologists found it remarkable that these wild people had such logically transparent languages! A great number of such languages were found there in which, as philologists can assure us, and as is also true, the refinements of Spanish and Italian can be found in the formation and structure of the language. Such things were found among the wild natives of Greenland. Now there is no doubt about it: these savages did not have the intellect of which modern man is so proud. Nor would this modern intellect get very far if it were to engage in language formation and creation; for what the modern intellect achieves when it wants to be creative in language can be sufficiently demonstrated in many places. In fact, objective reason was at work in the human soul, which was still a wild one, which did not yet have the present intellect. This objective reason I also showed you at work in humanity's creativity in language the other day. Reason held sway there. This reason that held sway there did not yet affect man as strongly individualized as today's world reason affects man; it affected man even less individualized, less separated, and worked in him even more as cosmic reason. And so it has come about in the development of mankind. In those ancient times, man was not the wild creature that today's anthropology awakens illusionary ideas about, but he was a member of a whole organism - although this is of course figuratively speaking - and he gradually individualized himself. So he was a member and expressed more and more cosmic reason, or one could also say that cosmic reason was expressed more and more in him.