Second Lecture

Our spiritual scientific research provides us with a guideline for understanding the world in which we live. We need only think of how attempts have been made, based on this spiritual scientific research, to recognize how the leading peoples of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch embody the various soul members of the human being in the impulses of their culture; we need only think of how, for example, the peoples who inhabit the Italian and Spanish peninsulas—as peoples, not as individuals, as has already been repeatedly explained here—incorporate into their culture everything connected with the sentient soul, so that what we feel as the character of the sentient soul lives primarily in the peoples who inhabit the Italian and Spanish peninsulas. These peoples represent, in a sense, a special development of the main process indicated by this sign (the lower sign in Figure 1). They show, in a certain way, more concretely and more sharply developed, what lives in the impulses of the blood and the nerves, of the etheric and astral bodies, in the sense indicated above. One might say that everything that came over from ancient times is expressed in these peoples and their fundamental impulses in such a way that the forces striving upward from below take on a clearer form. This lower sign has something still inorganic, merely dynamic; it contains only hints of the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.