32. The Origin of Man

GA 68b/1907-10-31/p013 ·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 let us expand this little reflection to include, say, different peoples living side by side, a lower-developed people and a higher-developed people. Today, we have become accustomed to thinking that a higher-developed people with significant spiritual education [and cultural achievements] has developed from a state in which a lower-developed people finds itself today. Exactly the same conclusion as one would draw if one were to place these two people next to each other today. It is possible that one could be corrected if one were to research the facts, just as spiritual science is able to show that it is not the case that the spiritually higher educated people descend from the lower, but that] on the contrary, there is a common descent [of the two], that one that is spiritually more highly developed has developed in one direction and the other in the direction of decline. So that when we examine the ancestry, we are led up to a common primal people, not to the one that lives next to the other today, but to a common one. Since both live side by side, [they descend equally from the primal people]. Only one has developed upwards, the other downwards [in a certain respect].

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-10-31/p013 · edition English