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

It is a prejudice today that the human soul has not changed since the time when it can be observed. Oh, it has changed so much. If you go back with a spiritual scientific view to the first period after the great glacial epoch of earthly development, which reached its peak in particular in ancient Indian culture, you encounter a completely different kind of mankind, from which impulses must have emerged that are quite different from those of later times; we encounter a type of human being that remained capable of development into old age in a way that we are only capable of development in the first years of childhood. We are capable of development so that we experience - we still experience it in dullness - what occurs at the change of teeth, for example. We experience the physical in the soul. How does the young person experience sexual maturity, the physical body in the spiritual soul! But in our time, this ends in the twenties. Certain precocious children – one dare not even say this today – even believe that this dependency of the spiritual soul on the physical body ends. It is believed that one is even more mature at twenty for writing “below the line” than at twenty. The dependency on the physical body also lasts until then. But then it stops. I do not mean the external dependency that occurs in the fatigue of the body, in the greying of the hair, in the wrinkles of the face - that is external dependency.