I. The Difference Between Man and Animal

In this connection a most profound change in human conceptions is needed. For men have informed themselves about all kinds of scientific concepts that have become popular today. Wither they have learnt them in some school through direct tuition or they have received the information from any doubtful source: what I am referring to is those newspaper articles that circulate scientific conceptions throughout the world. Men are under the domination of these scientific conceptions. Where what I have been referring to is concerned, men are absolutely dominated by what I might call an instinctive bias towards the belief that animals really see their environment in the same way as men do. When a man takes his dog for a walk he instinctively believes that the dog is seeing the world in the same way as he does himself, that the dog is seeing the grass, the wheat, the stone in the same colours as he does. He also thinks—if he can think at all—that he can deal in abstractions and therefore has abstract concepts which, however, the dog doesn't have; and so on. Yet it is not so. This dog running beside us is living just as much in abstract concepts as we are. In fact he is living in them with greater intensity. And he has no need to acquire them, for from the start he is living in them to a high degree. It is not the same however, with external perception; which gives him quite a different picture. You need only be attentive to certain things that can be observed in life. These are certainly not always taken sufficiently in earnest. I could give you quite a number of examples to show you in this direction how men from pure instinct think upside down. For instance I was once going down a street in Zurich, I think it was, after a lecture held at the evening meeting of one of our Groups. A coachman was waiting there whose horse refused to answer to the rein and showed signs of shying. The coachman said it was afraid of its own shadow. He of course saw the horse's shadow thrown on the wall by his lamps and supposed that the horse saw the shadow just as he did. Naturally he had no inkling of what was going on in—can I say—the horse's soul, nor what was going on in his own soul. He sees the horse's shadow but the horse has a vivid sense of being in that bit of space in the etheric body where the shadow is formed. This is a quite different process of inner perception—a very different process. You see, you have here the collision between the old way of thinking back to the most elementary, the most instinctive perception of naive men, and what must come into men through the new Spiritual Science. It is true you will first seriously have to take stock of what lies at the root of this. For with regard to such things the crass materialism of a Vogt or Moleschott, a Clifford or Spencer, and so on, differs far less from the handed down creeds of individual religions than does the new way at thought underlying Spiritual Science. Today certain materialists actually think that there is not much difference between man and animal. They may same time have also heard it ring out (even if the bells were not ringing together) that man can form abstract concepts which nevertheless are different from the usual conceptions of the senses. But they say to themselves: Abstract concepts! Perhaps those are nothing very important, nothing very essential; fundamentally men do not differ from animals. Modern materialism as a whole is actually the creation of Church creeds. This must be faced in all seriousness and it will then be seen that it is a question of a fresh kind of conception for the soul of man if we are not to prefer going back to the old conceptions with the idea that all will then soon go well!