19. Prejudices from Alleged Science

In my lectures on the development of the earth and of mankind, I have pointed out that the ancestors of the present civilized peoples lived in a region of the earth which once extended over the surface of the earth in the place now occupied by a large part of the Atlantic Ocean. In this magazine, the articles “From the Akasha Chronicle” have referred more to the mental and spiritual characteristics of these Atlantean ancestors. In oral discourse, it has also often been described how the surface of the earth in the old Atlantean land looked. It was said: At that time, the air was saturated with water vapor. Man lived in the watery mist, which never cleared up to the point of complete air purity in certain areas. The sun and moon could not be seen as they are today, but were surrounded by colored halos. The distribution of rain and sunshine that we see today did not exist at that time. One can explore this ancient land clairvoyantly: the rainbow did not exist at that time. It did not appear until the post-Atlantean period. Our ancestors lived in a misty land. These facts have been obtained by purely supersensible observation; and it must even be said that the spiritual researcher does best when he carefully avoids all conclusions from his scientific knowledge, for such conclusions easily lead him astray from the unbiased inner sense of spiritual research. Now, however, compare with such statements certain views to which individual natural scientists feel impelled to adhere at the present time. There are today researchers who find themselves obliged by the facts to assume that the earth was embedded in a mass of clouds at a certain time in its development. They point out that even today the cloudy sky outweighs the unclouded sky, so that life is still largely under the influence of sunlight that is weakened by cloud formation, so that one cannot say that life could not have developed in the former cloud cover. They also point out that those organisms in the plant world that can be counted among the oldest were those that could develop even without direct sunlight. Thus, among the forms of this older plant world, those that need direct sunlight and anhydrous air, like desert plants, are missing. And as regards the animal world, a researcher (Hilgard) has pointed out that the giant eyes of extinct animals (for example, the ichthyosaur) indicate that there must have been a twilight-like illumination on the earth in their era. I do not consider such views to be in need of correction. They interest the spiritual researcher less for what they establish than for the direction in which the research of facts sees itself forced. Some time ago, the magazine “Kosmos”, which stands more or less on the Haeckelian point of view, published an essay that is worth considering, which pointed to the possibility of a former Atlantic mainland from certain facts of the plant and animal world.