42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II

The second thing that man teaches himself - really out of that individuality that goes from incarnation to incarnation, from embodiment to embodiment - is the language through which he learns the truth from his fellow human beings and can express it himself. Those pedagogues who look deeper into the human gears know very well that a person who would be transferred to a desert island and would not be together with other people would not learn the language. What we inherit, what is implanted for later years so that it is subject to the principles of heredity, does not depend on people being together with their fellow human beings. For example, we are predisposed by heredity to change our teeth in our seventh year. We can be out on a desert island; if we only have the opportunity to grow up, we will change our teeth. But we only learn to speak when our soul being as such is stimulated; when that which we carry from life to life is stimulated. We have to form the germ for our laryngeal development at a time when we do not yet have our ego-consciousness. Before the time up to which we remember back, we must lay the seed for the formation of our laryngeal development so that our larynx can become a speech organism.