28. Historic Cataclysms at the Dawn of the Spiritual Soul

In the spiritual life of this age, it is just the leading personalities who to begin with do not know what Anthroposophy intends. Wide circles of people who follow in their wake are thereby kept away from Anthroposophy. The leading people of today live in a soul-content which in the course of time has grown altogether unaccustomed to use the spiritual forces. For them, it is as though one would call upon a man having an organ paralysed, to use it. Paralysed were the higher faculties of Knowledge from the sixteenth into the latter half of the nineteenth century. And mankind remained utterly unconscious of the fact; indeed, the one-sided application of Knowledge-powers directed to the outer world of sense was regarded as a sign of special progress.