Lecture II

Now, I beg you to consider my next sentence very precisely, for I never go a step further than is justified by the deliberations preceding it, even if much may be suggested only sketchily; everywhere I merely indicate how far one can go, so I am not drawing a conclusion here. I am simply saying that now one is not far from recognizing something that is extraordinarily important to recognize for a true knowledge. First we must arrive at the point of recognizing that in an illness of the human organism during later life, one that goes in the direction of new formations, there is too much of the organizing force that results in an island of organization, so to speak. When we have reached this point we are not far from saying that, if the later period of life points in this way back to earliest childhood, this indicates ultimately that what reveals itself in childhood points back to the time before birth or, let us say, before conception; it points back to the soul-spiritual existence of the human being before he was clothed with a physical body. A person suffering from childhood illnesses is simply someone who brought along too much of the soul-spiritual from his prehuman, pre-earthly life; this excess then lives itself out in the childhood illnesses.