28. Temperaments in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 68d/1909-01-09/p009 ·1909-01-09 · English High

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.

We see how this great connoisseur of human nature, Goethe, has to refer to a person's moral qualities when he wants to point out inherited traits. This is what our own nature consists of. This is the other current in which human beings are placed, of which today's culture is not very aware. Spiritual science shows us what flows together with what is given to us in the line of inheritance; it leads us to the great fact of so-called re-embodiment — reincarnation — and of karma. It shows us how the innermost core of a person's being connects with something that is given by the line of inheritance. For the spiritual scientist, this core of being is enveloped in outer shells by what comes from the line of inheritance. And just as we have to go back to our father and mother for the qualities of a person that belong to their appearance, so if we want to grasp a person's innermost being, we have to go back to something completely different, to a previous life of that person.

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Cite: GA 68d/1909-01-09/p009 · edition English