34. The Beginning and the End of the Earth
GA 68b/1907-12-16/p012
·1907-12-16
·
English
MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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.
Spiritual science, however, says: [Of course] with the abilities of human nature, which such a world view speaks of, which is limited only to the sense world, we cannot penetrate into the supersensible world. But spiritual science, in a much stricter sense than any knowledge based on external facts, holds fast to what we call development. There is much talk of development today — it is also shown how man has developed through many stages to his present form. But when this view has arrived, it wants to stop at a certain point. It assumes that man has developed so far; but this view does not want to know anything about further development. It has a strange inconsistency, which may not be admitted theoretically, but which is expressed step by step in attitudes and feelings, in that one says: Man has developed, but there can be no question of further development.
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