The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Soul of Animals in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Even though it remains an eternal truth—what was inscribed on the famous Greek temple as a call to the innermost essence of humanity: “Know thyself!”—even though this must remain the guiding principle for all thought, inquiry, and feeling, yet when a person looks at the world and at himself with an unbiased gaze, he soon realizes that self-knowledge cannot consist solely of looking inward, gazing into one’s own inner self, or reflecting on oneself, but that true self-knowledge must come to a person through the contemplation of the great world and its entities.

[ 2 ] That which surrounds us—that which is more or less related to us, connected to us, and in relation to which we feel superior or inferior—gives us, when we understand it, true self-knowledge in the truest sense of the word. That is why it has always been recognized how significant, for human understanding, the knowledge of those creatures must be that are closest to us on the descending scale: the understanding of the true nature, the inner life, of animals. When a person lets their gaze wander over the abundance of animal forms, each one presents a distinctive feature, elaborated in detail. When he looks at himself, even at a superficial glance, he finds within himself everything he sees distributed among the individual animals, but brought into a certain harmony. When he looks at what surrounds him in the animal kingdom outside, it can, in a sense, confuse him, so that he must first separate it out in order to bring it into order. He can do this best when he views it within the broad context of animal life. But like so much else in human knowledge, human views of animals depended on how people felt and perceived things in a particular era and under certain conditions.

[ 3 ] Even in our immediate surroundings, we can see how differently people relate to these creatures that are related to them. We see how some people want to see in animals something that is as close as possible to humans in a spiritual and soulful sense. And we see others who never tire of emphasizing, time and again, the distance that even the highest animals have from humans. We also see how such differences are expressed in moral behavior. We see how some people make this or that animal their dear friend in the truest sense of the word, how they treat the animal’s services to them almost as they would those of a human being, how they bestow love, trust, and friendship upon it. On the other hand, we see how certain people harbor a very particular aversion toward one animal or another. We see how, driven by an ethical impulse, one person—who sees himself far more as a researcher—repeatedly points out the similarity between higher animals and their activities and those of human beings. Thus, we see monkeys performing actions that are reminiscent of the emotional and intellectual qualities of human beings. But we also see how some people view the most highly developed animals as a sort of caricature of human behavior, perceiving drives and instincts—which are more or less attenuated in humans—to appear in these animals in a raw, unvarnished, unrefined form, so that a kind of shame overtakes them. We see how materialistic thinking and feeling, especially in the epoch that has just passed, never tired of emphasizing again and again that everything the human soul can express—everything to which the human soul can rise—is already present in a certain hint in animals, as we see in the manifestations of language, laughter, emotion, and moral sensibility. Indeed, some even believe that, with regard to religious feeling, traces of it can be found in a certain sense among animals. Thus it is claimed: Everything that human beings possess in terms of perfection has developed gradually, merely summing up individual characteristics that are already present in animals, so that one can actually regard human beings only as the most highly formed, most highly developed animals.

[ 4 ] Other eras, which were less materialistic in their thinking, did not know how to create a sufficiently wide gap between humans and animals. For example, we find in Descartes—whose lifetime is not so far removed from our own, having lived from 1596 to 1650, and who is often called the founder of modern philosophy—a curious view of animals. He denies animals everything that actually makes humans human: reason, intellect, and everything that is encompassed by the concept of a rational soul. He regards the animal as a kind of automaton. External stimuli set it in motion, and the response to these stimuli is all that manifests itself in the animal. Thus, he regards the animal as little more than a kind of higher, highly complex machine.

[ 5 ] And indeed, anyone who takes an unbiased look at the animal world around us can very easily sense the difficulties involved in judging animals and, so to speak, look into the inner world of a being that is related to us, yet in a certain sense remains distant. We see, if we do not allow our view to be clouded by any prejudice or preconceived opinion, very quickly that a view such as that of Descartes cannot hold. We see that, in fact, even to the casual observer, those qualities that we describe in humans as rational, intelligent, or spiritual are, in a certain sense, certainly present in animals. Many people say, indeed, that what characterizes animals is that their intelligence and their spiritual nature are, in a certain sense, static, whereas human spiritual nature is changeable to the extent that we can educate humans. Although this is emphasized by some, even a superficial observer would not readily concede it. When we observe the animals around us, we see how high certain animals closely related to humans can rise in terms of intelligence; we see what a faithful memory dogs sometimes seem to possess. We need not go into the subtleties of these characteristics of the animal soul, but merely touch upon what most of you have experienced in life, either directly or indirectly. Who doesn’t know how long dogs retain a memory of where they’ve hidden something or the like? Who doesn’t know that cats, when locked in this or that room, have opened the doorknob on their own to make their way out into the open? Indeed, it is by no means incorrect to claim that horses that have once been taken to the farrier know the way, so that when they are missing a horseshoe, they go to the farrier of their own accord. Anyone who observes such things can hardly fail to see that, with regard to certain expressions of intelligence and certain mental activities, there is only a qualitative difference between animals and humans—merely a kind of enhancement of human mental faculties compared to those of animals. Of course, a large number of people easily dismiss such things with a quote from Goethe, which need only be slightly adapted for this case: Where serious concepts regarding the animal kingdom are lacking, the word “instinct” steps in at just the right moment. — “Instinct” is such a catch-all term, a veritable hodgepodge into which everything one does not understand in earthly life is thrown! Admittedly, very few people bother to form a clear conception of these—used in the pejorative sense—mystical instincts. This, however, compels us to delve deeper into these matters. If we observe animals closely, we will see how certain psychological traits of human beings—such as envy, jealousy, love, quarrelsomeness, and all manner of other traits—are also found in the animal kingdom, sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes to a greater degree than in humans. When one considers this, it compels one to examine the matter more closely. Now, however, a vast number of observations of animal life have been recorded in the most diverse ways. What may not yet have been known to researchers in Descartes’ time is readily accessible today, because the animal world has been scientifically and thoroughly investigated from every angle with the aim of understanding human nature. It might seem grotesque, but anyone familiar with animals will not find it particularly surprising that, through careful training, dogs have been taught to do the following: when presented with cards bearing specific numbers, have the word for that number spoken to them, have the cards shuffled and presented to them again, and have the number named in words, they then point to the relevant card bearing the named number. I do not wish to speak of that man who claims to have taught his dogs to play dominoes properly; if a tile did not suit them, they would whine quite loudly. All these are things that are merely an extension of what each of you is familiar with.

[ 6 ] We must then point out how certain characteristics can be so deeply ingrained in an animal that they are passed on not only to the individual animal but also to its offspring. Certain behaviors that were taught to a particular dog have been observed in its offspring, even though those offspring could not possibly have learned them from their own parents. The fact is that even when the offspring were separated from their mothers immediately after birth, the traits that had been taught to the ancestor appeared in the offspring. An external trait that had been taught to the animal became so deeply ingrained that it became part of the principle of heredity and was simply passed on from the ancestors to the offspring.

[ 7 ] However, all these undeniable facts are counterbalanced by certain other factors that must give pause to anyone who wishes to judge the matter thoroughly rather than hastily. Let’s take another example: two dogs that had gotten into the habit of hunting rats together. People wanted to prevent these two dogs from constantly going out to hunt rats. So they were locked up in two separate rooms. The two rooms were separated by a closed door. It turned out that the smaller dog first made itself heard by barking. As a result, the larger dog managed to open the door handle. They were now together and could once again go hunting together. They tried something else. They locked them apart again in the two rooms, but this time tied the doorknob with a string. They were able to communicate again. And now the smaller one was even more mischievous; he figured out that he could bite through the string. Once again, they were reunited and went hunting together.

[ 8 ] This is an example that might lead one to speak of a very advanced level of intelligence in both animals. But it has its limits. The two dogs were once again locked in separate rooms. This time, however, the door handle had been concealed by stretching a piece of fabric over it, and now they could no longer get together. So we see the boundary drawn very clearly. In the latter case, it would have been necessary for one of the dogs to conclude that there must be a doorknob to be found. He could not see it; previously, he could see everything. Since he could not see it, he did not come up with the idea. We see the boundary very clearly. We can take this as our starting point and investigate where such a boundary lies. We can greatly admire and marvel at lower animals in terms of their spiritual nature. Anyone with a sense of the laws of nature will admire the structure of an ant, the activity of an ant, the structure and remarkable activity of bees, or—as we move up to higher animals—the structure built by the beaver, and so on. — Who would not want to seriously admire what appears to be something akin to memory and intelligence in smaller animals, when we see how insects—take ants, for example, or similar insects—once they have found a place where they can gather material for their nest, carry whatever they can carry it to the nest and keep coming back, even bringing others along to help them carry what is still missing.

[ 9 ] Here we see the intelligent behavior of animals in their ability to return to the place where they once gathered something. We see an intelligent behavior—a kind of understanding—in the fact that one ant takes another along to help. It has been objected that all of this need not be based on anything other than a kind of subtle perception of what is at the location in question. Once the ant has perceived the objects at that location, it can move far away, and its subtle sensory organs will guide it back there because it perceives them. Certain researchers have endeavored to refute such objections. They have made it impossible for these ants to locate these objects—if sensory perception alone were the factor—by placing them against the wind, thereby rendering smell and perception impossible. Nevertheless, the ants found the objects again, so that the researchers seemed justified in believing that there is indeed a kind of memory that repeatedly drives the animal back to the place it has memorized.

[ 10 ] But even here there are things that, in a certain sense, should give us pause. We see that animals do indeed possess a subtle, well-developed ability to perform this or that action. Anyone who delves into such subtleties—such as those that come to light, for example, when, say, an insect pupates, how the individual threads are spun along specific lines and in specific directions, how each direction is spun one by one—can see something like a geometry, a kind of arithmetic—something to which human beings only develop an aptitude after a long, long period of training. Often, things are so intricately constructed that human geometry is still far from being able to replicate them. For example, we see the honeycomb cell built in the shape of a regular hexagon. Indeed, even when such insects find themselves in a situation where they must modify their structure or their activity at all—because of this or that circumstance—we see that they do not continue building according to a preconceived template, but often adapt to the circumstances in a marvelous way. Indeed, we see how a certain kind of intelligence manifests itself in response to specific research methods when such an insect—a caterpillar—spins itself into a cocoon and is then treated in a particular way.

[ 11 ] A researcher once tried to get to the bottom of this matter and observed the following: When he let the caterpillar in question spin its cocoon and it had spun up to three threads, he took it out and placed it in another web that he had taken from an insect that had also spun individual threads. But he had removed the threads that were already there. The caterpillar then started over from the beginning and spun the three threads again. If, after spinning up to three threads, the animal was placed in a web from which six threads had been removed—leaving only the seventh, eighth, and ninth threads, while the first, second, and third were also left in place—then the animal began to spin the fifth, sixth, and seventh threads; then it stopped again. What is strange, however, is that after the animal had spun six threads and was placed in a web where the first three were present, it began to spin the second thread again, and then the third, fourth, fifth, and so on. — It behaves like a boy who has learned a poem, who has recited the first three stanzas and is then supposed to recite the seventh. So it is with this animal as well. It saw that the three threads were there; but it could not orient itself accordingly. Thus we see how a kind of mechanical process prevails in the animal’s activity.

[ 12 ] We can also see this in another significant example: There is an insect called the sand wasp. It has a peculiar trait: It leaves its burrow, finds some insect, but does not bring it directly into the burrow; instead, it leaves it at the entrance. It then goes inside and checks the burrow to see if everything is in order; then it retrieves the insect and places it inside. This can be regarded as a very sensible process. — But the situation can also unfold in the following way. Imagine that you commit an act of mischief against the sand wasp by taking its prey away and placing it a long way outside the burrow. The animal returns, searches for, and finds the prey again. Now it goes back to the entrance of the burrow, goes back inside, inspects the burrow once more, and only then brings the captured insect inside. But if you take this even further by taking the insect away from her again, she’ll bring it back to the entrance of the burrow, go back inside, and so on. — If you do this forty times, she will repeat the same procedure forty times. You see, until the very end—when she concludes, “The cave is fine; I don’t need to check anymore”—the insect does not appear. We could multiply this example a thousandfold.

[ 13 ] However, our natural sciences have left behind a time when, when asked about these matters, they believed they could get by solely with terms like “struggle for existence,” “adaptation,” and the like. As strange as it may sound to some unbiased thinkers, the prevailing view was: An animal has acquired these instincts for certain reasons; in the past, the animal did not possess these instincts at all. At some point, however, such an animal may have performed an action that was advantageous to its survival. By performing this advantageous action, the animal was able to place itself in living conditions that were favorable to it. The others, which behaved in a less adaptive manner, gradually perished. Among those that performed adaptive actions, such impulses to act were passed down; they became habits, drives, and what we observe in the realm of instincts. You will admit that if we apply this principle—that in the course of evolution, in the struggle for existence, animals have acquired purposeful instincts—with an unbiased view of the animal world, a great deal becomes apparent. It is quite plausible for some to say: The ancestors acquired something at one time; this was then passed down to their descendants. Those who did something adaptive survived the struggle for existence; the others perished. Therefore, only those equipped with adaptive instincts remained.

[ 14 ] But if we apply this to the entire realm of nature, there are many things that do not stand up to such a view, for one must ask what form of expediency underlies the instincts of certain insects that, when they see a flame, rush into it and perish in it. Or what adaptation favorable to the struggle for existence underlies the fact that certain domestic animals, such as horses and cattle, behave in the same way? When we lead them away from the fire, we see them rush back into it again and again. This observation can also be made. That is one thing.

[ 15 ] However, this principle of instinct does not get us very far in other respects either, when we consider that animals have acquired certain characteristics and pass them on to their offspring—that is, they inherit them. If we want to apply this principle to bees, for example, we must be clear about the following. As you know, a distinction is made between the queen, the drones, and the worker bees. They all have specific characteristics that enable them to fulfill their roles in the hive and in the life of the colony. Generation after generation in the life of the colony, these worker bees with specific characteristics appear again and again—characteristics that the drones and the queen do not possess. Now the question arises: Can these characteristics be inherited? That is impossible, for these worker bees are precisely the ones that are infertile. The task of reproduction is carried out by those who do not possess the characteristics of the worker bees. Time and again, the queen gives birth to worker bees with traits that the queen herself does not possess. Thus we see that the purely materialistic theory of descent and the doctrine that speaks of the struggle for existence contradict each other in the most manifold ways and must inevitably lead to contradictions. We could—but we do not wish to—multiply these individual examples from animal life a thousandfold. After all, no matter how many examples you might cite, they all point to the same conclusion.

[ 16 ] The qualities that we recognize as characteristics of the human soul can be found in one form or another throughout the animal kingdom—whether in a weaker or stronger form is another question—but we do find them. We also find certain manifestations that can be regarded as expressions of intelligence, as expressions of a certain rational activity. Is it now—and this is the big question—necessary to arrive at the materialistic explanation that everything a human being possesses as the content of their soul is nothing more than a transformation, a higher form of what we find in the animal world? Are these related traits in the animal soul and the human soul proof that human beings are nothing more than a kind of higher animal? The answer to this question can only be provided and resolved through spiritual science.

[ 17 ] Spiritual science views all the similarities between humans and the animal world with an unbiased eye; but since it goes beyond what the external sensory world offers—since it reaches down to the spiritual foundation of existence—it is able to reveal the immense gulf that lies between humans and animals. What distinguishes humans from animals has already been emphasized in a certain respect in the previous lectures, particularly in the last one. Spiritual science would be turning a blind eye if it were to deny that animals have a soul. In the sense of spiritual science, the animal possesses a soul-like quality just as the human being does. But it possesses this soul-like quality in a different way. Already in the last lecture, when we considered the concept of repeated earthly lives in relation to man, woman, and child, we were able to point out the great difference between the individual human being and the individual animal. To briefly repeat this once more: The entire animal kingdom arouses in us exactly the same degree of interest as the individual human being does in its development from birth to death. As an individual, the human being is a species unto itself. What we find, for example, in the lion—as father, son, grandson, and great-grandson—has so little in common with one another that we are interested in the lion as a genus or species, as this specific type, only to the same extent that we are interested in the individual human being. Therefore, in the true sense of the word, only the individual human being has a biography, and this biography is for the individual human being exactly the same as the description of the genus is for the animal. It was already mentioned last time that certain people—“dog dads” or “cat moms”—have something to object to here. They say, in fact, that they could write a biography of their cat or dog just as easily as they could of a human being. But I have already mentioned that a schoolteacher once asked the children to write a biography of their pen! By way of comparison, one can do anything, but that is not the point. One must view the matter impartially. And if you really examine the matter closely, you will find that certain details, certain distinctive features, are always present. A quill pen also has distinctive features that set it apart from other quill pens. But that is not the point. What matters is the inner value of the being in question; what matters is that, in fact, the individual being—if it has a healthy nature—captures our interest in the same way as the entire animal species does.

[ 18 ] This is, for the time being, merely a logical indication of what spiritual science now presents to you as a distinctive feature of the so-called animal soul. In spiritual science, we speak of the individual soul in humans, and of a group soul, a generic soul, a species soul, or a type soul in animals. This means that exactly what we attribute to the individual human being—what is contained within the individual human being, within his or her own skin—we attribute as a soul to the entire animal type, to the entire animal species. We seek the human soul within the human being; as spiritual scientists, we seek the animal soul outside the animal, however grotesque that may seem. Precisely because we focus so closely on the phenomena, we are led all the more to contemplate levels higher than the physical plane. I have pointed out that just as there is light, color, and radiance surrounding the blind person, so too is there a spiritual world surrounding the human being who has only physical perceptions, a world in which spiritual beings exist. The moment the spiritual organs of perception or cognition are opened, he sees a new world of facts and beings around him, just as one who was born blind and has undergone an operation to restore his sight is able to see, so that light, color, and radiance—which he could not perceive before but which were nevertheless present around him—appear to him as a new world.

[ 19 ] The individual human soul has descended from a higher world into the physical body. It is not physical, but it has descended into the physical world. It permeates and spiritualizes the body. The animal soul—which is a species, type, or generic soul—cannot be found at all in the physical world as a soul or as an individual being. But when a person’s spiritual eyes are opened, they encounter the animal soul. They encounter it as a self-contained being, just as they find the individual human soul within a specific person when they get to know that person. We call the world that opens up immediately when the first organs of perception are opened the astral world, for reasons we will discuss in the following lectures.

[ 20 ] Just as we find self-contained human individualities in the physical world, so we find self-contained entities of a spiritual nature within the astral world; only, entire groups of animals—groups of animals of the same kind—belong to these group souls. If I am to illustrate this with a comparison, imagine that I am standing in front of you, with a wall in front of me so that you cannot see me—a wall with holes large enough for me to stick my ten fingers through. You would then see ten fingers, but you would not see me. Yet from your own experience, you know that there must be a human being somewhere to whom these fingers belong. If you break through the wall, you discover the person. The spiritual researcher stands in a similar relationship to the higher world. In the physical world, he sees various but similarly formed animal individuals, such as lions, tigers, monkeys, and so on. To him, these are individual animals that do not belong to a common physical body, but they do belong to a common soul entity. The wall that conceals these soul beings is simply the boundary between the physical and the astral worlds. Wherever the individual lions may be—whether one is in Africa or in Europe, or in European menageries—that is irrelevant. Just as the connecting lines from my ten fingers lead to the human being, so too do the individual connecting lines of the individual animals lead to the species soul. Wherever spiritual science has existed, a distinction has been made between human beings and animals such that it has become clear that what for the animal still exists in a spiritual world—in a supersensible world—and what it extends into the physical world like an arm is, in the case of the human being, drawn into the body. The fact that human beings take possession of this in their individuality represents humanity’s higher development, so there is no need to be surprised when individual animals display intelligent expressions. Just as you now see intelligent actions in my hands when they are stretched through the wall—seeing how they grasp this or that—so you can also see how individual bees, and individual animals in general, do this or that. The actual agent, however, has not descended into the physical world at all. The agent uses the animal like an organ, like a limb that it extends into the physical world.

[ 21 ] If we take this as our starting point, it explains many things in this world. It is precisely in such matters that you can see time and again: for most people today, the spiritual eyes—the higher organs of perception—are not open. They cannot, therefore, convince themselves that there are self-contained animal souls in the spiritual world who send their much finer organs down into individual animals. But you can tell yourself something else as well. You can assume that the ideas of the seers—which seem completely crazy—are true, and if we take them hypothetically, then something in this world becomes explainable, something becomes comprehensible. Well, let’s consider one of the examples in light of this assumption. Let’s say, for example, we take that sand wasp that, as its executive organ, fetches its prey, places it in front of the nest, then goes inside, and then fetches it again. Intelligence underlies this, though not the same intelligence that underlies the action of the index finger. If, in an individual case, the animal were to err in its action, could order be maintained, as it were, by the “central authority,” by the species soul? No! Only because intelligence resides in the central authority—the species soul—and is not left to the individual animal in specific cases, only then is it possible for wisdom to reign throughout the entire animal kingdom. Up there, where the species soul is, wisdom reigns. That is why we also see, wherever this species soul comes into play—where adjustments must be made in response to external conditions—that such adjustments do indeed occur. But when it comes to the spiritual aspect of the “animal” corresponding to the intentions of the species, the animal is, as it were, part of a unified whole. If you leave it up to each individual soldier to do as he pleases, how could anything unified—a unified undertaking—come about? Isn’t it necessary, precisely for the sake of unity, that the individual must do the opposite? If you think these ideas through, you will find that the apparent contradiction resolves itself even where the fly throws itself into the flame and meets its death. Individually, this leads to death; but on a larger scale, it benefits the species.

[ 22 ] Thus we see abilities and characteristics—wisdom and intelligence—manifested in animals. We also see wisdom as the foundation of human beings. Animals possess it as well. Ask about memory: humans have it. Ask about animals, and you must reverse the perspective and say that memory “has” the animal, that imagination “has” the animal. The animal is possessed by imagination; it is possessed by memory. The animal is a limb of a higher being that possesses memory and imagination. The animal is driven by the wise group soul standing behind it, which is not located within the individual animal. How, then, do we account for the taming of animals and the like? You can explain this very well under these conditions. We practice the hand as a single hand. By practicing it as a single hand, we must bring certain activities of our central organ into play. But in addition, the hand must be practiced, and once the hand is practiced, the exercise becomes ingrained as a habit in the hand. Thus, when we care for and train an individual animal, we can know that this individual animal, just like the individual limb, progresses in a certain way. However, it has a retroactive effect on the central authority. It becomes apparent that it penetrates so deeply into the soul of the species that such characteristics, having become habits, reappear in the offspring without further ado. This is not the case with humans. In humans, such individual traits are not readily inherited, because in humans the species-specific is overshadowed—or rather, outshone—by the individual.

[ 23 ] It is precisely from such premises that we can best grasp the course of human and animal evolution. Today, the theory of evolution is already on the verge of collapse. What was claimed not long ago—that individual humans are closely related to the most highly developed mammals—is now being disputed again by serious researchers. It is said that it is impossible for humans to be descendants of apes. But the opposite can also be argued, for we still share certain abilities with many lower apes, so that certain researchers take the position that the ancestral form from which humans are descended no longer exists at all. Natural science still cannot accept the view that the ape has degenerated while humans have evolved upward. Spiritual science does not merely conceive of this lineage; it is able to investigate it with reference to the animal type or generic souls and the human individual souls. If we trace our lineage back from today’s higher mammals and from human beings, we do indeed arrive at a common ancestor. But this ancestor was not an animal in the modern sense. This ancestor was much closer to human beings than it was similar to any modern animal. The true ancestors we must seek are, in a certain sense, generic or type souls for both human beings and animals.

[ 24 ] Who, looking at human life with an unbiased eye, would deny this? Go back, further and further back, in human evolution, or look at certain people today—so-called “savages”—who have remained at a lower stage of development: Do we not see far more characteristics typical of the human species in them than in developed, civilized people? The further back we go in time, the less human beings are individual beings. Indeed, individuality has only recently developed in human beings, and we look forward to times in the future when human beings will possess even more individual traits. Humanity is on the path from being a generic or typological entity to becoming an increasingly individual being. Today, humanity stands in the middle. If we go back to the origins of the human race, we find entire groups of people whose individual members had no distinct sense of self, and for whom the sense of tribe and family was far greater than the sense of the individual. Moreover, the individual was readily sacrificed for the sake of the interests of the tribe or the species; in short, as we go further and further back in human history, we come to recognize a group soul in humanity, so that in ancient, ancient times—in times of the distant past—we also perceive the human soul as a group soul, just like the animal soul of today. But the human soul had found another path. How did it find this alternative path that the animal soul lacks? The animal soul, so to speak, had fixed, hardened, and solidified its individual characteristics earlier than the human soul. And because it had solidified them, the animals were no longer capable of further development; they remained stuck at that earlier stage. If we go back to the monkey, we must say that each individual monkey species is based on a group soul that cast its characteristics into a fixed form too early. Consequently, it could no longer further develop the characteristics that had been cast into physical forms. The human being was, with regard to the physical body, still a more finely formed, malleable being that was still capable of change. The group soul of humanity has preserved whatever capacity for development and transformation it still possessed. With its longing to form a physical body, it did not descend as early as the group souls of today’s animals. The human soul has waited until now, when a more comprehensive life on Earth has become possible for it. Thus, the animal group souls could not use the bodies of animals to enter them in the same way that the human soul has entered the physical body of the human being. The human body has retained the capacity to become more perfect; it possesses the potential to become a dwelling place, a temple for the higher individuality, in which the supersensible intelligence can then also dwell.

[ 25 ] Therefore, we do not find abilities such as extrasensory memory, extrasensory imagination, and intelligence in animals, but rather above animals. The spiritual, however, we find embedded within human beings; it has taken up residence in them. Therefore, we need not be surprised that, when we trace the evolution of the world back, we find a point in time when animals had long since been roaming our Earth, whereas we can trace human beings back only to the Tertiary period or the early Diluvial period. Geology does not go any further back. The human soul waited to incarnate after the animals had already become physical beings. The human body crystallized out of the spiritual realm. Animal bodies solidified earlier than human bodies did as they solidified out of their group soul. In ancient times, when the animal group souls had already solidified, those souls were still imperfect. They could therefore form only imperfect stages. It was only later that the human group soul became individualized, and then these individuals were born on our Earth. Thus we also understand why the animal kingdom appears to us like a human being taken apart. In ancient times, the group soul that was called upon to develop itself shaped certain group souls; it constructed animal forms. It could go no further. Others developed its characteristics. We should not be surprised that the being that waited the longest and descended last exhibits the greatest complexity—and, in turn, the greatest harmony in the convergence of what is spread out across the animal world. That is why Goethe was able to say so beautifully: “When human beings look out into nature and perceive what is fragmented in the natural world, and then synthesize and transform it into what constitutes measure and order within themselves, it is as if nature were standing at the pinnacle of becoming and admiring itself.”

[ 26 ] Thus, the animal kingdom has become individualized in human beings; in human beings, the characteristics of the animal world are united into a single whole. Thus, we perceive the divine spirit in the succession of animal forms. Each animal form is a one-sided manifestation of the divine spirit. But a harmonious, all-encompassing expression of it is the human being. That is why Paracelsus, drawing on this awareness, was able to say what is still so difficult to understand: When we look out into the animal world, every animal is like a letter to us, and the human being is the word composed of the individual letters. — This is a wonderful analogy for the relationship between animals and humans. Goethe familiarized himself much more thoroughly with the individual forms of animals. He told himself: When we look at an animal and study its form, we can see how divine creation manifests itself in the greatest diversity, in a broad picture; then we can perceive the primordial idea that branches out into its most varied forms across the most diverse animals.

[ 27 ] One need not be as grotesque as Oken, who said that every single human organ is like an animal species, and he actually pointed to specific human organs. For example, he says that the octopus gave us the tongue. Since he was not a scholar of the humanities, he expressed this vague intuition in this grotesque form. Goethe, on the other hand, found that just as a human thought is distributed across the various species, so too does the original archetype underlie every animal; it is just that in animals, the individual organ—which interplays harmoniously in humans—is expressed in a one-sided manner. Goethe says: Let us take a lion, for example, and compare it to a horned or antlered animal. The same primordial thought underlies both. But the lion possesses a specific force that forms the teeth. The same force that forms the teeth in the lion forms the antlers in the antlered animal. That is why no antlered animal can grow a full set of teeth in its upper jaw. That is why Goethe looks for the deficiency on the other side of the animal.

[ 28 ] In the bosom of nature, the animal itself is perfectly created. All its limbs are arranged according to eternal laws, and its form secretly preserves the archetype. And the archetype, which was already present in the most imperfect being—represented by the soul in the most imperfect animal—attains its most perfect form in human beings, the bearers of the individual soul. Therefore, human beings have not only been endowed with form, as are the animals, but they also bring this archetype to life within themselves through creative thought. In him, the thought is reflected—not merely in form and shape, but in its full expression. As we envision this thought itself, Goethe says, tracing this ascent to the heights: “Rejoice, nature’s highest creature, that within yourself you are able to grasp the great thought according to which the sequence of beings has been shaped all the way up to you.”