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

Then Karl Lamprecht, by always also observing how the various artistic achievements emerge from the same impulses, finds that what he now calls the individualistic age begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. Now, he says, the assertion of the individual comes first. Before that, the individual works more out of the whole, out of the whole that is grasped in conventions, for example in the last [era]. Now the individual asserts himself and in the individual gradually, namely, the rational, the intellectual element. And it is quite interesting – to a certain extent – how Karl Lamprecht shows for individual areas of life how this understanding comes up with the intellectual from the mid-fifteenth century. It is quite interesting when Karl Lamprecht goes into this area in detail. For example, when he shows how the diplomatic and political relationships between different people in earlier ages arose out of elementary impulses of will and feeling, whereas now the diplomatic and political is submerged in intellectualism and begins to be determined by the intellect. Karl Lamprecht then allows this age to last until about the middle of the eighteenth century.