I. At the Dawn of the Michael Age

With the ninth century,…all such dates must of course be taken as giving about the middle of the time: the transition takes place quite gradually,…there awoke in men's souls the light of personal, individual intelligence. Man began to have the feeling: ‘ I construct my thoughts.’ And this construction of thoughts became so pre-eminent a feature of the soul's life, that thinkers regarded the essence of the human soul as residing in this, its intelligent behaviour. Until then, people had an imaginative conception of the soul. They looked on her essential being as residing, not in the construction of thoughts, but in her participation in the intelligent, spiritual substance of the world. People thought of the supersensible Spirit-Beings as thinking; and they work into Man; they think into him too. And what thus lives in Man as his part in the supersensible, spiritual world,—this they felt as “Soul.”