Lecture III

We see human beings appearing on the Earth; they are born, grow up, are creative or active according to their destiny and the particular faculties they possess. The historical life of humanity through the ages is, after all, the outcome of human faculties, human deeds, human thoughts and feelings. But all these human beings who appear in an earthly life between birth and death—all of them have passed through previous lives in which they experienced the Earthly in a different way, worked upon it in a different way. The influences of earlier lives make themselves felt in all later lives, but it is only possible to understand the sequence of connections by taking account, too, of the periods lying between death and rebirth. Then, for the first time, we have a true conception of history, for we realise that what appears on the Earth through human beings in one epoch is linked with the happenings of an earlier epoch. But the essential question is: How are the fruits and happenings of an earlier epoch carried over into later times?—Historians have long been content to record consecutive facts but from data of this kind it is impossible to understand why later events follow those that preceded them. Some have said that ideas are at work in history and then become actuality. But no genuine thinker can conceive why this should be so. Others—those who hold the materialistic view of history—say: Ideas—so much twaddle! Economic factors are the only reality, they lie at the root of everything!—Such is the materialistic, mechanistic conception of history.