Lecture Eleven

These are things that must be brought to light by Spiritual Science. They have quite disappeared. About six or seven centuries before the Christian era, the ancient primeval wisdom began gradually to disappear, until replaced by Philosophy from the middle of the fifteenth century. But men such as Pythagoras, for instance, still knew so much of the ancient wisdom that they could say: We dwell on the Earth, we belong through the Earth to a cosmic system, to which Jupiter and Saturn also belong; but if we remain in these three dimensions, then we shall not belong in the same way to Venus and Mercury. We cannot belong to the two latter directly, as we do to Saturn and Jupiter; but if our Earth is in one space with Saturn and Jupiter, there must be a ‘ counter-Earth’ which is in another space with Venus and Mercury. Hence ancient astronomers spoke of the Earth and the counter-Earth. Of course the modern materialist would say: “Counter-Earth? I see nothing of that!” He is like a person who weighs a man, having first charged him to think about nothing, and weighs him again when he has charged him to think a specially clever thought, and then says: I have weighed him, but I have not found the weight of his thought. Materialism rejects what has no weight or cannot be seen. Remarkable things however shine out of the atavistic primeval wisdom to which we can return by the inner vision of Spiritual Science. It is of urgent necessity that we should work our way through now to that which is entirely new and which has yet been on Earth all the time, and has only now in these days to be acquired in full consciousness. Unless we do, this we shall lose the very possibility of thinking.