{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 9/l02/p009-p013","extent":"range","passage_number":9,"through":13,"paragraph_count":5,"first_locus":"GA 9/l02/p009","last_locus":"GA 9/l02/p013","lang":"en","edition":"RSP1965","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"title":"Re-imbodiment of the Spirit and Destiny","date":null,"location":null,"alignment_confidence":"high","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["AP1971","RSP1965"]},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null,"word_count":7973,"original_word_count":null,"may_be_abridged":false},"site_heading":null,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p009-p013","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p009-p013.json","lecture_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02#p009","word_count":1697,"quote_safe":true,"passages":[{"passage_number":9,"locus":"GA 9/l02/p009","text":"Spirit and soul have thus far been considered only within the period lying between birth and death. One cannot stop there. Anyone wishing to do so would be like a man who observes the human body also within the same limits. Much can certainly be discovered within these limits; but the human form can never be explained by what lies between birth and death. It cannot build itself up directly out of mere physical substances and forces. It can only descend from a form like its own, which arises as the resultant of what has been handed on by heredity. The physical materials and forces build up the body during life; the forces of propagation enable another body, a body which can have the same form, to proceed from it; that is to say, one which is able to be the bearer of a similar life-body. Each life-body is a repetition of its forefather. Only because it is such a repetition does it appear, not in any chance form, but in that passed on to it by heredity. The forces which make possible my human form lay in my forefathers. But the *spirit* of a man appears also in a definite form (the word “form” is naturally used in a spiritual sense). And the forms of the spirit are the most varied imaginable in different persons. No two men have the same spiritual form. Investigations in this region should be made in just as quiet and matter-of-fact a manner as in the physical world. It cannot be said that the differences in human beings in a spiritual respect arise only from the differences in their environment, their upbringing, etc. This is by no means the case: for two people under similar influences as regards environment, upbringing, etc., develop in quite different ways. One must therefore admit that they have entered on their path of life with quite different qualities Here one is brought face to face with an important fact which when its full bearing is recognised, sheds light on the being of man. A person who is set upon directing his outlook exclusively towards material happenings, could indeed assert that the individual differences of human personalities arise from differences in the constitution of the material germs. (And in view of the laws of heredity discovered by Gregor Mendel and further developed by others, such a view can say much that gives it the appearance of justification, even to a scientific judgment.) One who judges in this way only shows, however, that he has no insight into the real relation of man to his experience. For it is obvious to careful observation that external circumstances affect different persons in different ways, because of something which is not the direct result of their material development. To the really accurate investigator in this domain it becomes apparent that what proceeds from the material basis can be distinguished from that which, it is true, arises through the mutual interaction of the man with his experiences, but which can only take shape and form in that the soul itself enters into this mutual interaction. It is clear that the soul stands here in relation to something within the external world, which, by virtue of its very nature, cannot be connected with the material, germinal basis.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":551,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p009","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p007","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p007"}],"bead_confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":496,"en_words":551,"ratio":1.11,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p007"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":10,"locus":"GA 9/l02/p010","text":"Human beings differ from their animal fellow-creatures on the earth through their physical form. But in respect of this form they are, within certain limits, like one another. There is only one human species. However great may be the differences between races, tribes, peoples, and personalities, as regards the physical body, the resemblance between man and man is greater than between man and any animal species. Everything that finds expression in the human species is conditioned through inheritance from forefathers to descendants. And the human form is bound to this heredity. As the lion can inherit its physical form through lion forefathers only, so can the human being inherit his physical body through human forefathers only.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":116,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p010","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p008","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p008"}],"bead_confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":112,"en_words":116,"ratio":1.04,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p008"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":11,"locus":"GA 9/l02/p011","text":"Just as the physical similarity of men is clear to the eye, so does the difference of their spiritual forms reveal itself to the unprejudiced spiritual gaze. There is one very evident fact through which this is expressed. It consists in the existence of the life-history of a human being. Were a human being merely a member of a species, no life-history could exist. A lion, a dove, lay claim to interest in so far as they belong to the lion or the dove species. The single being in all its essentials has been understood when one has described the species. It matters little whether one has to do with father, son, or grandson. What is of interest in them, father, son and grandson have in common. But what a human being signifies begins, not where he is merely a member of a species, but where he is a single individual being. I have not in the least understood the nature of Mr. Smith if I have described his son or his father. I must know his own life-history. Anyone who reflects on the nature of biography becomes aware that in respect of the spiritual *each man is a species for himself*. Those people, to be sure, who regard a biography merely as a collection of external incidents in the life of a person, may claim they can write the biography of a dog in the same way as that of a man. But anyone who depicts in a biography the real individuality of a man, grasps the fact that he has in the biography of one human being something that corresponds to the description of a whole species in the animal kingdom. The point is not—and this is quite obvious—that one can relate something in the nature of a biography about an animal—especially clever ones—but the point is that the human biography does not correspond to the life-history of the individual animal but to the description of the animal species. Of course there will always be people who will seek to refute what has been said here by urging that owners of menageries, for instance, know how single animals of the same species differ from one another. The man who judges thus, shows however, that he is unable to distinguish the difference between individuals from a difference which reveals itself as acquired *only* through individuality.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":396,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p011","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p009","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p009"}],"bead_confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":338,"en_words":396,"ratio":1.17,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p009"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":12,"locus":"GA 9/l02/p012","text":"Now if genus or species in the physical sense becomes intelligible only when one understands it as conditioned by heredity, so too the spiritual being can be understood only through a similar *spiritual heredity*. I have received my physical human form because of my descent from human forefathers. Whence have I that which finds expression in my life-history? As physical man, I repeat the shape of my forefathers. What do I repeat as spiritual man? Anyone claiming that what is comprised in my life-history required no further explanation, but has just be accepted as such, must be regarded as being also bound to maintain that he has seen, somewhere, an earth-mound on which the lumps of matter have, quite by themselves, conglomerated into a living man.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":126,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p012","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p010","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p010"}],"bead_confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":117,"en_words":126,"ratio":1.08,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p010"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":13,"locus":"GA 9/l02/p013","text":"As physical man I spring from other physical men, for I have the same shape as the whole human species. The qualities of the species, accordingly, could thus be acquired within the species through heredity. As spiritual man I have my own form as I have my own life-history. I can therefore have obtained this form from no one but myself. And since I entered the world not with undefined but with defined soul-predispositions, and since the course of my life, as it comes to expression in my life-history, is determined by these predispositions, my work upon myself cannot have begun with my birth. I must, as spiritual man, have existed before my birth. In my forefathers I certainly did not exist; for they as spiritual human beings, are different from me. My life-history is not explainable through theirs. On the contrary, I must, as spiritual being, be the repetition of someone through whose life-history mine can be explained. The only thinkable alternative would be this: that I owe the form of the content of my life-history to a spiritual life only, prior to birth (or more correctly to conception.) But one would only be entitled to hold this idea if one were willing to assume that what acts upon the human soul from its physical surroundings is of the same nature as what the soul receives from a purely spiritual world. Such an assumption contradicts really accurate observation. For what affects the human soul out of its physical environment works in the same way as a later experience works on a similar earlier experience in the same life. In order to observe these relations correctly, one must acquire a perception of how there are impressions operating in human life, whose influence upon the aptitudes of the soul is like standing before a deed that has to be done, in contrast to what has already been practised in physical life. But the soul does not bring faculties gained in this immediate life to meet these impressions, but aptitudes which receive the impressions in the same way as do the faculties acquired through practice. Anyone who penetrates into these matters, arrives at the conception of earth-lives which must have preceded this present one. He cannot in his thinking stop at purely spiritual experiences preceding this present earth-life. The physical form which Schiller bore, he inherited from his forefathers. But just as little as Schiller's physical form can have grown directly out of the earth, as little can his spiritual being have arisen directly out of a spiritual environment. He must himself be the re-embodiment of a spiritual being, through whose life-history his own will be explicable, just as his physical human form is explicable through human propagation. In the same way, therefore, as the physical human form is again and again a repetition, a re-embodiment, of the distinctively human species, so too the spiritual human being must be a re-embodiment of the same spiritual human being. For, as spiritual human being, each one is in fact his own species.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":508,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/9/l02/p013","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p011","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p011"}],"bead_confidence":"high","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":468,"en_words":508,"ratio":1.09,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 9/wiederverkörperung_des_geistes_und_schicksal/p011"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}],"witnesses":[{"lang":"en","edition":"AP1971","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":false,"first_passage":1,"last_passage":33,"passage_count":33,"word_count":7892,"completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null}},{"lang":"en","edition":"RSP1965","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"first_passage":1,"last_passage":30,"passage_count":30,"word_count":7973,"completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null}}],"aligned_witness":{"status":"no_other_language","note":"No German witness of this unit is served."}}