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

A strangely enigmatic characteristic emerged, one that distinguished the different eras but indulged in endless repetition. If we wish to recognize the basis of this, we must point to something that can certainly be regarded today as paradoxical, perhaps as fantastic, perhaps as a mere reverie, but which must penetrate into the historical way of looking at humanity if history is really to become for life what it is believed to be for practical life. If we consider the individual human being in the development of his soul with that which enters into his ordinary consciousness, we do not stand at all in the realm that contains the driving forces in historical becoming. For why? That which works and lives from person to person in the moral, historical, and social togetherness does not live in the ordinary consciousness of the human being.