Youth's Search in Nature

This really expressed an outlook that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, produced human beings who actually were only "images." Human beings actually became mere images. There were no longer human beings walking on the earth; with a few exceptions there were only images. And when the turn of the century came, the civilized world was populated not by human beings but by images. The time came when what should have been truth was changed in a strange way into its opposite. At times it was painful to see the things that were presented as truths. The teaching arose that even encouraged over-population in individual regions. It was said that if many people were born it was a sign that all was going well—in this way the increase in population was encouraged. This increase in population was understood as expressing true progress. if you looked at the matter spiritually, however, you had to say that through the influence of such a world conception more and more souls came to the earth from the spiritual world really before their time—beings who actually were spiritually premature and basically did not find the earth. The human beings of the last third of the nineteenth century did not find the earth at all. They were on the earth without finding the content of their being, and they went about like appendages of their intellects. That was what was so horrible, that human beings walked about like appendages of their intellects, not like human beings!