29. The Mystery of Human Temperaments

GA 68d/1909-01-19/p020 ·1909-01-19 · 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.

In what we encounter in a person's temperament, we have something that is, in a certain sense, like a physiognomy of their innermost individuality. We understand how individuality colors the characteristics that are inherited through the generations in the form of temperamental traits. Temperament stands in the middle between what we inherit and what we bring with us individually. But we now understand how this works in detail when we consider the whole of human nature from the perspective of spiritual science. For spiritual science, what the outer senses can perceive in human beings, what materialistic thinking alone wants to recognize, is only a single link in the human being, the physical body. Physical lawfulness, that which human beings share with the whole of surrounding external nature, the sum of chemical and physical laws, is what we in spiritual science call the physical body. But above this we recognize higher, supersensible members of human nature that are just as real and essential as the external physical body.

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Cite: GA 68d/1909-01-19/p020 · edition English