10. Soul Nature And Moral Human Value In The Light Of Spiritual Science (Anthroposophy)

GA 334/1920-05-05/p008 ·1920-05-05 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: unknown. How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.

I have met many people who see this moral life as a kind of ephemeral smoke that rises, actually the illusion of a smoke that rises from natural scientific events, that fills people with illusion for a while, only to disappear forever. And how should one think differently, if one is completely honest, than that what arises in the mind of man, after man has developed over the course of millions of years from lower animal forms, how should think otherwise than that what arises in the mind of man as ideals will also disappear without a trace when the earth falls back into the state into which it dissolves in the general course of the world. It would have been just an episode that men had set themselves moral ideals. Men would have acted under the influence of these moral ideals. All these moral ideals would have meant nothing more than that they were illusionary bubbles that had arisen, according to which men had arranged their lives, and which had no further consequences in the evolution of the world.

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Cite: GA 334/1920-05-05/p008 · edition English