1. At the Dawn of the Michael Age

Man began to have the feeling: ‘I myself form my thoughts.’ And this forming of thoughts came to be the thing of first importance in the soul's life, so that man saw in the intellectual experience the very essence and being of his soul. In earlier times men had had an imaginative conception of the soul. To them the essential thing about the soul was not that it formed thoughts, but that it partook of the spiritual content of the Universe. It was the supersensible, spiritual Beings whom they conceived to be thinking, and—extending their influence into the human being—thinking into him as well. That which lives in the human being of the supersensible, spiritual world—this they felt as the soul.