32. The Origin of Man

GA 68b/1907-10-31/p004 ·1907-10-31 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Now, however, from the point of view from which we are to speak to you today about human descent, it is difficult to make ourselves understood even to our contemporaries, if they are not already somehow prepared for it through spiritual science, because compared to what is being put forward from many sides today about the descent or origin of man, what we have to say in this our meditation will seem as if it were spoken in a completely, completely different language; and given the great interest that is shown in this question today, and given the public suggestion — we may perhaps call it that — which is not true science, but many of the catchwords that have been taken from this science and which today dominate many minds, with all this, much of what is presented today will perhaps seem to some even more than what was already said in the last three lectures [of this series] much more like a mere reverie, like a fantasy. When two such fundamentally different things confront each other as what a world view that is more materialistically colored — the word does not need to be pressed — has to say about the origin of man and what spiritual science, as we are considering it here, has to present, when two such different things confront each other, then, then, above all, one must first of all bring one thing to mind. Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the concepts and ideas that dominate our popular literature when the origin of man is discussed and it is claimed that this origin of man is spoken of in the way it must be according to scientific facts; [if you are confronted with this] when you have read your way into popular [or, for that matter, more or less scientific literature, one must still bear in mind that the concepts and ideas that someone adopts are not always based entirely on real contemplation, on real observation, but on authority, which is adopted in a, one might say, mysterious, mystical way – and this word is used in the worst sense – [by what is once popular], by what once has prestige.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-10-31/p004 · edition English