37. Are the Former Abilities of the Human Soul Lost?

The following question has been put: “If we are to acquire those abilities through ever new embodiments in the successive races, which those offer us the opportunity to develop, and if nothing of what the soul has acquired through experience is to be lost from its store of knowledge again— how is it that in humanity of today (at least in our civilized countries), which also lived in the third and fourth root races on earth, nothing at all has remained of the abilities of will, imagination, and control of natural forces, which according to the seers were so highly developed at that time? Is there perhaps a law that forbids and closes again the simple paths that have already been found to a certain goal, so that all strength is used to find new, higher paths?