Lecture XI

Whether we consider humanity in general or the initiates and the mysteries in ancient times, we find that the whole view of the world had another orientation from that of today. If the human being remains standing by what he has acquired since the middle of the fifteenth century, through the kind of cognition that has arisen since that time, one finds that the human being had mental images of the evolution of the earth, of the evolution of the human race; he lost track, however, of the mental images that might have given him satisfactory indications concerning the beginning and end of the earth. We might say that the human being was able to survey a certain line of evolution; he looked back historically, he looked back geologically. When he went back still further, however, he began to construct hypotheses. He imagined that the beginning of the world was a primordial mist, which appeared to be a physical formation. Out of it evolved—that is to say, not really, but people imagined that this was so—the higher beings of the realms of nature, plants, animals, and so on. In accordance with conceptions of modern physics, people thought that earthly existence disintegrates in the end (see drawing below) by heat—again a hypothesis. Man thus saw only a segment, as it were, between the beginning and end of the earth. Beginning and end became a hazy, unsatisfactory picture to present-day human beings.