The Recovery of the Living Source of Speech

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.