{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 199/1920-09-18/p007","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"To begin with, we will not speak about what really lies beyond death, only about the motives that underlie the preaching of the doctrine of immortality. Spiritual science cannot appeal to these motives. In fact, spiritual science will not make any appeal when it is supposed to speak of the human soul's existence prior to birth or conception, for it actually has nothing to do with the soul's egotism. As a rule, people give little thought to how they fared prior to birth or conception, as to what their experiences were before they descended into an earthly body. This leaves them more or less indifferent, and does not stimulate the same longing as does the question of life after death. An interest in this area will only be found in those in whom the desire is aroused to comprehend the human being in general, in whom exists a longing to discover that force in the human soul which, as an immortal force, actually lies at the basis of what we are in the outer physical world owing to our body. In our Western civilization, which is doomed to decline unless new forces are injected into it, we find little inclination and few concepts to which one might turn if one were to speak about this life of the human soul before birth. As you know, the churches view this teaching as heresy; they do not realize that in this they are not really teaching Christianity but Aristotelian philosophy. For when Aristotle's philosophy was included in the Church's philosophy in the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the origin, of the creation, of each individual human soul at birth, or, respectively, with the development of the human embryo in the mother's womb, gained ground increasingly in the philosophy of the Church. Thus, gradually, the belief arose that this denial of the human soul's preexistence was part of the true doctrine of the Church, of Christianity. It was not part of it. To the real practical teaching of Christianity belongs the penetration of the spiritual worlds. Penetration into the spiritual worlds cannot exist without the insight into the preexistence of the human soul.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Lecture XVII","site_heading":"Prenatal Existence and the Spiritual Foundations of Human Development","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","date":"1920-09-18","location":null,"word_count":360,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/199/1920-09-18/p007","alignment_confidence":"high","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Maria St. Goar","identified_edition":"AP1986","book_title":"Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA199/English/AP1986/19200918p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/199/1920-09-18/p007"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/199/1920-09-18/p007","paragraph_aligned":true}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1920-09-18","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 199/1920-09-18/p006","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/199/1920-09-18/p006"}],"bead_confidence":"high","length_check":{"de_words":355,"en_words":360,"ratio":1.01,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.07,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":6369,"original_word_count":5930,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Maria St. Goar","identified_edition":"AP1986","book_title":"Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA199/English/AP1986/19200918p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"entity_parity":{"status":"discrepancy","checked_against":["GA 199/1920-09-18/p006"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":["Christ"],"bead_confidence":"high","bead_length_ratio":1.01,"likely_cause":"unresolved","note":"NAME MISMATCH between this English passage and its German counterpart. A name the German carries is absent here (or a name appears here that the German does not carry). Two things cause this and they need telling apart: the translation really drops or reassigns what the original distinguishes, OR the paragraph alignment paired the wrong passages. `bead_confidence` does NOT settle which: this corpus's embedding aligner pairs topically-related paragraphs at full confidence, and a sampled high-confidence mismatch proved to be a wrong pairing. Read the German passages listed and confirm they are counterparts BEFORE drawing any conclusion about the translation."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}