14. The Development of the German Soul

You may think that such things as I am saying now have somehow been invented. They are no more invented than, say, the laws of sound change formulated by Jacob Grimm were invented, on a completely different level. It doesn't look as if it was thought up when you say: words that are related, that are in development, have a “t” in Greek, for example, and the same word, as it develops up to the Germanic, has a “th” or a “z” in the same place; when it has developed up to New High German, it has a “d”. These laws of sound change show how, in the succession of time, conformity to law prevails wherever the soul comes into play. If you simply develop them as Jakob Grimm presented them, they naturally appear in their abstractness; but they can be substantiated, proven in all the cases that matter, from the full breadth of experience. And so today I can only characterize these fundamental laws, as it were, which I have hinted at to you. But anyone who wants to go into what external experience offers to a spirit like the one I have described, who, like Jacob Grimm, can research the nature of the people using the methods of external science, will see the truth of it everywhere. There is not enough time today to go into this, which would be very interesting, to show how these general laws are realized in all soul phenomena, and how these soul phenomena of man and his appearance in the physical world, insofar as he belongs to any folk soul, can only be explained by coming behind the particular configuration of his appearance in this way.