III. Man's Life in Sleep and After Death

Think how little there is among the Greeks—none whatever among the Orientals—but how little among the Greeks of the study of history in our sense of the word. The Greek is much more interested in the far-off beginnings when the Earth was being formed within the Cosmos, when the interior forces of the Earth, the Titanic forces, waged war on those other forces, those mighty spiritual forces which the Greek conceived as underlying the web of earthly conditions within which man finds himself enwoven. But we men of modern times are called upon to understand history; we must be able to show how man started from an ancient dream-like clairvoyance and has now arrived at a consciousness that is intellectual in character and tinged only with a memory of the mythical, and then go on to show how there is need for man now to work his way out of this intellectual consciousness and learn to look right into the world of the Spirit. For the present epoch of time marks the transition to the attainment of conscious experience in the spiritual world. That is why it is so very important for us that we should turn our attention to history. You will find that in our anthroposophical work we give ourselves again and again to the study of the different epochs of history, going back first of all to the time when men still received their knowledge from higher Beings, and then following the whole development right up to our own age.