The Bible and Wisdom II

Let us look back a little at the development of human consciousness. The word “development” is used very frequently today, but no other science takes the word “development” as seriously and intensively as Spiritual Science. Human consciousness as it is today has developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go far, far back in the origins of humankind, not in the sense of materialistic science, but as I explained the day before yesterday, we find that human consciousness appears to be more and more different the further back we go. This consciousness, which links the various concepts of the intellect and the external sensory perceptions in the familiar way, only came into being in the distant past, but it did come into being. We can find a state of consciousness in that time that was very different from today, because memory in particular was very different. What humans have today as memory is only a degraded remnant of an ancient soul power that existed in a completely different way. In ancient times, when humans did not yet have the combinatory power of their present intellect, when they were not yet able to calculate and count in the present sense, when they had not yet developed their intellectual logic, they had another power of the soul: they had developed a universal memory. This had to diminish, had to recede, so that our present intellect could develop at its expense. This is the course of development in general, that one power recedes into the background so that another can emerge. Memory is a diminishing power, intellect and reason are increasing soul powers.