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

Ordinary historical research into documents already leads back quite a long way today compared to earlier times; but we only arrive at an understanding of the developmental history of humanity, an understanding that can arise from comparing the various earthly developmental epochs, when we can go much further through the seeing consciousness, through the insight of the seeing consciousness into the development of humanity, than historical documents can provide. Of course, this will naturally be dismissed as fantasy – that may be – but it is nevertheless true that what I described the day before yesterday as the three foundations of true, non-fantastical, non-superstitious clairvoyant consciousness in imagination, inspiration and intuition, that this is added to by following the development of humanity on earth from within, by looking inwardly. Then, not guided by external documents but examining the life of the soul through inner spiritual vision, one goes further back than the seventh or eighth century BC. One goes back to a time that took hold a few millennia earlier. One goes back to those periods of time that follow that significant catastrophe in the earth's history, which geology reports as the Ice Age, which various folk traditions report as the Flood, which of course must be dated much further back than tradition says; one goes back into ancient times, into which no external document, no literary monument, but into which spiritual vision reaches - today I can only hint at the results - one comes back into an ancient past, where a culture existed from which that which emerged later, but in a much later time, existed as the culture of ancient India. Sanskrit literature reports on this, but it is a later product than what I actually mean here in the development of mankind. One goes back to an age in which the human soul worked under completely different conditions.