III. Earthly Knowledge and Celestial Insight. Man as a Citizen of the Universe and Man as an Earthly Hermit.

And for a long time, for centuries, what was revealed within was not about the universe. Man described the mineral kingdom according to spatial-temporal forces. He then described the workings of this mineral kingdom in geognosy, in geology. He described the outer sensory processes, how they take place, how plants sprout out of the mineral ground of the earth. He also described the sensory processes that take place in the inner being of the animal and the physical human being itself. He looked around everywhere on earth, inquiring what his senses told him about this earthly existence. Above all, they told him nothing about his own soul, about his own spirit. It was precisely out of this cosmic mood, if one grasped it properly, out of this mood, which can be expressed in the words: I, a human being, am an earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe — it was precisely out of this mood that the impulse had to come to develop the truly human in free inner unfolding.