I. Technology and Art

If, with the means that spiritual science puts at our disposal, we observe the way human life has run its course from the Middle Ages up to modern times, and are able to look right into the soul, we shall in fact find that man's relationship to speech was altogether different in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, even in the last phase of it that lasted up till the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Whenever they spoke people heard undertones, genuine undertones. People no longer believe this, because nowadays human beings really only live in the material aspect of the sounds of speech. A spiritual element joined with the sound as though it sounded again an octave lower. Thus when people spoke, or heard people speaking, something resounded in the words that was not differentiated according to one or another language, but was of a universal human character. One can really say that when human experience comes to expression, as it were, in the flowering of the separate languages, mankind today experiences the flowering as a vibrating of sounds in the ear, and experiences the sounds as something that have a meaning. Whereas in earlier times they experienced a steeping of the whole element of speech in something that joined with it and was not differentiated into the various languages. The dividing line between the one experience and the other fell in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Mankind was torn away from the genius of language.