X. Why Don't We Remember Our Past Lives?

GA 349/1923-04-18/p046 ·1923-04-18 · 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.

Now, in ancient Greece, someone once ridiculed such clever learning. The children learned at school: What is a human being? A human being is a living creature that has two legs and no feathers. Now a particularly clever boy thought about it, took a rooster, plucked it and the next day he brought it to the teacher in its plucked state and said: “Teacher, is this a human being? It has no feathers and two legs!” That was the strength of the definition. So the things that are still in our books today are more or less in line with the definitions.

Read this passage in another edition
DEoriginalENEnglish
Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/349/1923-04-18/p046.json
Cite: GA 349/1923-04-18/p046 · edition English