Lecture XVI

We must in fact get hold of it from quite another angle. If we in our time study the form and formation of the human body and look for some connection with what is there in cosmic space, the most we can do to begin with is in some outward sense to see that the connection is there. Man is today very largely independent of the movements of cosmic space; everything points to the fact that this is so. For all that comes to expression in his immediate experience, man has emancipated himself from the phenomena of the Universe. We therefore have to look back into the time when what he underwent depended less upon his conscious life of soul than in his ordinary, by which I mean, post-natal life on Earth. We must look back into the time when he was an embryo. In the embryo the forming and development of man does indeed take place in harmony with cosmic forces. What afterwards remains is only what is carried forward, so to speak. Implanted in the whole human organization during the embryonal life it then persists. We cannot say it is "inherited" in the customary sense, for in fact nothing is inherited, but we must think of some such process, where entities derived from an earlier period of development stay on.