I. The Difference Between Man and Animal

Thus people look for the reason why certain animals are afraid. There is no need to look for the reason, my dear friends. Fear is, of course, a quite general universal characteristic of animals. When animals are not afraid it is just because they have been trained and given different habits in some particular way. Fear is innate in the animal because the animal has in a high degree the faculty for abstraction, for abstract concepts, and lives in them. For you must realise that the world you acquire after long study, when you have learned to live in the abstract—this is the world in which the animal lives. And the world here in which man lives in his senses is for the animals, in spite of animals possessing senses, for them far more unknown than for man—and man himself has fear of the unknown. This is thoroughly in accordance with deep truth, The animal gases into the world with timidity; this has definite import. Recently I have spoken of it in an article on “The Ahrimanic and Luciferic in the Life of Man” in the recent number of the publication “Das Reich”: men are afraid in face of spiritual life; how is it that they become so afraid? It comes about by their having at the present time to meet the Guardian of the Threshold in the subconscious. There they come to the decision of which I have spoken; there they approach the animal. The animal is afraid, the animals are going through the region of fear. The connection is thus. And the condition of fear will increase more and more if men do not take serious pains really to learn about, really to take to themselves, the world they have to meet—the spiritual world.