III. Fundamental Impulses in History

What I have said during these evenings has been directed to showing, from the most various points of view, that that aspect of events which is generally accepted as the history of mankind is, in many respects, a superficial one. How, for an understanding of the present condition of affairs, it is peculiarly necessary that we should not be led into any illusions as to this superficial way of regarding mankind's historic evolution in these latter days. We must not on any account assume that what holds good, and what I am about to say, of the more or less final phase of the historic evolution covered by the Fifth post-Atlantean age,—that that holds good for the whole course of human history. We must have no such ideas. For this final phase, however, what I am about to say holds good