Man and the Historical and Moral Life of Humanity according to the Results of Spiritual Science

Karl Lamprecht attempts to go beyond the old English and Rankean views of history, which rely only on external documents. He tries to turn his attention to the inner driving forces of historical development, to that which cannot be found merely in external records, but which can be found if one wants to penetrate into the soul life of the people, seeking the deeper forces that condition historical development. Karl Lamprecht comes to many interesting conclusions. He says: If we look back at the earliest development of the German people, we find that by the third century A.D. a peculiar kind of emotional power and its effects had developed in the soul of this people. If we examine the various areas in which these powers were expressed in this ancient time, whether in the , in the military, in the state, in the social sphere, in the artistic sphere, in a primitive way, as it was then, one must say: the people of the German nation lived in such a way back then that they shaped their social life and their social work out of a certain symbolist, emblem-forming disposition. Not only did they try to depict world events in symbols in primitive art, they also lived from person to person in such a way that the symbolic nature shaped these experiences. For example, one identified with the leaders of the people, seeing in these leaders of the people symbols of the whole nation, and this, says Karl Lamprecht, meant that at that time what can be described as the military-comradely principle emerged in the moral, in the social togetherness.