53. The Human Character
GA 68b/1909-10-29/p061
·1909-10-29
·
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.
If we look at this human skull, a kind of craniology, we can look back at the person's previous incarnation. What we get is very unlike what has been practiced as phrenology throughout many ages. Here, all kinds of predispositions have been discovered. An overview of this shows us how powerless human knowledge is when it does not go into depth. What we see on the skullcap cannot be broken down into individual forms, but is the result of the work of the ego on the sentient soul in a previous life. This is entirely individual and cannot be explained by any classification. What a person has acquired in a lifetime, that he has not remained closed in himself, but has allowed the moral ideals within him to take effect, will reappear in a later incarnation.
Read this passage in another edition