26. The Secret of the Human Temperaments

GA 68d/1908-12-15/p019 ·1908-12-15 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: mixed sources. This volume draws on more than one kind of record (transcripts, notes, documents). Check the volume's own front matter before weighing a single passage. Evidence: «Vorträge aus den Jahren 1905 bis 1909 in Form von ausführlichen Mitschriften, Zuhörernotizen und Zeitungsreferaten» (Lectures from the years 1905 to 1909 in the form of detailed transcripts, listeners' notes and newspaper reports). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68d). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Of course, materialistic thinking objects to such things in particular. For example, it is said: Oh, what are you talking about the descending human being; it's all inherited! We can also find the qualities of the greatest genius in our ancestors. There are people who take Goethe or Leibniz or this or that person and research them up to the earliest ancestors, and then find the characteristics that emerge in genius scattered among the ancestors, one characteristic in this person and one in that. And so these people tell us: You can see that genius is based solely on inheritance. Genius is very rarely found at the beginning of a generation, but usually at the end of it, so it has inherited its characteristics from its ancestors. – What a strange logic this is! For anyone who considers this logic will find that it says the opposite of what it claims. This logic wants to prove that genius inherits its characteristics. It would prove it if it could be shown that Here is a genius, the son has inherited his qualities, the grandson again and so on. But that is not the case. That is precisely what is denied. The genius is infertile. It is rare that one can simply inherit genius. If the genius is at the end of a line of succession, this does not mean that this individuality flows down in its entirety in the line. Of course, the physical and etheric bodies, which are the instruments of the human essence, come from the line of inheritance, and it is not surprising that they show the characteristics that can be read together here or there. That is just as clever as telling someone who has fallen into water and been pulled out: This one is wet. That is self-evident. So it is with the characteristics that one inherits. The logic that is usually applied to somehow refute the well-established fact that a person flows together from the two lines, one of which goes from generation to generation and is called race, people, tribe, family, but the other lies within the spiritual world, where a person progresses from life to life and, in long periods between death and a new birth, prepares for that new birth in a purely spiritual world, is wrong. These two lines merge.

Read this passage in another edition
DEoriginalENEnglish
Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/68d/1908-12-15/p019.json
Cite: GA 68d/1908-12-15/p019 · edition English