6. The Innate Capacities of the Nations of the World

Let us consider the various impelling forces underlying the civilized world in the light of the most important European differentiations that come to expression through language. I have often brought to your attention the fact that the English-speaking peoples possess the real germinal potentiality for the development of the consciousness soul. It is important that we should see this clearly. This is connected with everything that happens to the world, if we may so express the matter, under the influence of the English-speaking peoples. The English people—I am by no means speaking of individual persons, but of the people—are endowed with all the impelling forces that lead to the consciousness soul. The condition is such that the trend toward the consciousness soul appears instinctively in them in a manner entirely different from that characterizing the rest of humanity. This spiritualized instinct to develop the consciousness soul exists nowhere else in the world as it does among the English people. There it is an instinct, and nowhere else is that so, even among the people of Roman descent who are united with the English-speaking peoples. The people of Roman descent constitute really successors to what actually lived in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. At that time this Roman people had the instinct for what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in special degree. Their instincts are no longer elemental in the same way. They have been rationalized, intellectualized and they appear in rhetoric, through the intellect, through the psychic life as a decorative form. They have been removed from the instinctive life. What appears among the Latin people as a folk temperament is altogether different from what appears as a folk temperament among the English people. Among the English people this trend toward the consciousness soul, this striving of the individual person to stand upon his own feet, is an instinct.