The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. What Does Geology Have to Say About the Origin of the World?

[ 1 ] It could weigh like a nightmare on that worldview which is based on spiritual science if, in all seriousness and truth, this worldview were to come into conflict with the well-founded findings of scientific research — that research which, over the course of the last few centuries and especially during the nineteenth century, has achieved so much that is great and beneficial, not only in the realm of knowledge but also in the realm of humanity’s overall progress. In particular, however, it would be disheartening if this spiritual science were to contradict a branch of scientific research that is relatively recent but which, by its very nature and its specific tasks, is capable not only of arousing human interest in the deepest sense of the word but also of opening up perspectives into what we call the evolution of our planet, as well as the evolution and transformation of the creatures that inhabit this planet. This young branch of scientific research is geology, the science that—particularly since the second third of the nineteenth century, though also before that—has experienced such tremendous growth and, despite the major questions we will discuss—questions that have remained unresolved and still stand today—has achieved significant results. Our main concern today will be to bring to mind the relationship that spiritual science must have to geology, and to answer the question: How much does geology have to say—in the sense of spiritual science, that branch of knowledge which has always underlain these considerations here—about the origin, the gradual formation, and the development of the Earth and its living beings?

[ 2 ] However, we must take a moment to reflect on what the methods and nature of geological research actually entail. It is, of course, well known that geology derives its findings directly from the Earth’s surface and that, based on what it finds there, it draws conclusions regarding how our planet may have formed and changed over time. It is well known that when we have the opportunity—through various exposures of our earth’s surface, such as during railroad construction, in quarries, or in mining—to study deeper layers of our earth in terms of their rock composition and other constituents, these layers appear different from the ones we initially walk upon, different from the outermost surface. But even within this surface, the ground reveals itself to us in the most diverse ways when we examine it in terms of its rock types and mineral composition. It is also well known that among the most interesting areas of research are those that pertain to layers of our Earth’s surface that clearly exhibit such characteristics that we can say the material covering the ground there was originally dissolved in water or was otherwise subjected to the force of water—that is to say, it was once carried there by water in times long past. Even today, we can see how rivers carry away the rock materials that accumulate in their water and then deposit them in other areas. We see how the ground becomes covered by such deposits. In the same way, we must imagine that in ancient times, one deposit was formed on top of another. On top of one such deposit, we must imagine another deposited over it, which, when we examine it, reveals that it has a character different from that of the lower layer. Thus, our Earth reveals its rock material of varying character in layers. It is, of course, not difficult to conclude that the layers lying at the very top must be the youngest, having been deposited by the most recent processes on our Earth, and that, the deeper and deeper we have the opportunity to look into the depths of the Earth, the more we encounter layers that were deposited in older and ever-older times and have been covered by the younger layers. Furthermore, it is also known that all sorts of inclusions are found in these layers of our Earth, which, according to our current understanding, originate from the fact that animals and plants met their end, so to speak, were washed away by water and carried along with the layers, and were buried naturally, and are then found, more or less altered or unchanged, within the rock material as the remains of prehistoric organisms. It is also not difficult to imagine that we must assume a certain relationship between such a layer of rock material, as it lies there, and the animal and plant inclusions contained within it.

[ 3 ] However, one must not imagine that younger layers are so neatly superimposed over older ones across the entire surface of the Earth; rather, one must be aware that older layers—recognizable by their character—sometimes extend all the way to the surface, and that in the course of the Earth’s development, the most diverse disturbances, disarranged stratifications, overlays, overthrusts, and so on—have occurred in these strata, so that it is by no means easy for the geologist to determine in any given case how one stratum came to lie above another. These are matters that can only be touched upon here. In any case, we may disregard the irregularities just mentioned and assume that geologists have access to the Earth’s strata, with their inclusions, throughout the entire sequence, and that they draw conclusions from these about what the Earth actually looked like when the uppermost layer had not yet been deposited, or when deeper layers lying beneath the upper layer did not yet exist, and so on, — so that one can form ideas from this about what our Earth looked like in times past.

[ 4 ] It is also a well-known and interesting fact that the uppermost layers—that is, the youngest of our Earth’s material—contain fossils of more perfect animal and plant life forms, and that the deeper we go, the more we encounter the remains of less perfect life forms, which we are accustomed to classifying today among the lower species and genera of the animal and plant kingdoms. We then arrive, so to speak, at the lowest strata of our Earth’s surface—which have been covered time and again by other strata—and reach the so-called Cambrian period of our Earth’s development, where we see that the animal life forms in this stratum consist only of fossils of those animals that did not yet possess a vertebral skeleton. We then encounter other animals with a vertebral skeleton in the layers that lie above—layers that geology is justified in regarding as younger strata in the Earth’s history.

[ 5 ] Thus, geology seems to provide full confirmation of what natural science now knows from other sources: that, in the course of our Earth’s development, living beings have slowly and gradually evolved from imperfect to more perfect forms. If, for example, we take a look at the Cambrian strata, the lowest sedimentary layer, and imagine that all the other strata had not yet formed, we would have to conclude that in the earliest times only the most primitive animal organisms existed—organisms that did not yet possess a skeleton and were the first precursors of imperfect animals—which then met their end and were deposited in the lowest layer of rock. We must imagine that these creatures had descendants and perhaps evolved under different conditions that subsequently arose. In the next layer—which is thus younger—we see the appearance of animals that already possess skeletal-like structures to a certain extent. And as we approach the younger layers, we see increasingly more perfect animal species appear, until we reach the Tertiary strata, where we see that mammals are already present, and then, in the layers even younger than the Tertiary strata, we see humans appear.

[ 6 ] You know that there is a school of thought today that simply assumes that the lower animals that lived during the Cambrian Period had descendants, some of whom remained at that stage, while others continued to evolve and eventually became skeletal animals and so on; so that we would have to explain the appearance of more perfect animals in the later, younger strata by saying that the most imperfect, simplest animal and plant life forms had gradually become more perfect. This would provide a purely vivid picture of the gradual development of life and also of the other processes on our Earth—much as it would have appeared to the eye of an observer who could have watched over the course of the trillions and trillions of years that geology has calculated for this process. To help us visualize the nature of these methods and types of research, the following may be noted. For example, if one observes how certain layers are still being deposited today by river sedimentation or similar processes over the course of a certain number of years, and one measures the thickness of such a layer—yielding a specific measurement—and can say: ‘such a layer was deposited over so many years’—then one can calculate how long it took for such layers to be deposited as we observe them, assuming that conditions were the same as they are today. This yields a wide variety of figures, depending on the different calculations that geologists have made. There is no need to dwell on the fact that there are contradictions here, for anyone familiar with these contradictions will know that they are meaningless, even if they are sometimes quite stark and the differences recorded by individual researchers amount to many trillions of years.

[ 7 ] When we visualize all of this, we still have only a picture of how—according to the principles of geology, and in exactly the same tone in which what has just been said was described—the processes in the development of our Earth have unfolded over the last trillions of years. Geology further compels us to assume that other processes preceded all of these. For all these layers, which contain the remains of animal organisms, rest, so to speak, upon others that then protrude to the surface by breaking through the layers superimposed upon them, forming mountains and thus becoming visible, so that the concepts of geology lead us to conclude that all layers of our Earth containing the remains of living beings rest upon another layer, which, so to speak, points us back to an age of our Earth that preceded all life. For the composition of this oldest and lowest layer of our Earth’s surface shows us that, when it was formed—at least according to current understanding—life as we know it today could not have existed on our Earth. Geology is compelled to assume that the lowest layer owes its formation to a process of fire, within which it is impossible to conceive of any life whatsoever, so that geology would take us back in the history of our Earth’s development to ancient times in which, so to speak, the oldest types of rock and minerals were formed as a result of a process of fire. Only later, on the basis of this lowest layer, were the younger layers—containing the remains of living organisms—deposited through processes that took place after our Earth had already cooled sufficiently through the radiation of its heat into outer space to make life possible. All of this must be conceived in conjunction with physical and chemical processes that cannot be described in detail.

[ 8 ] When we look back, as it were, to these earliest times of our Earth, after a certain cooling has already taken place — in geology, one imagines the Earth in a still-hot state before the first rock formation took place — we find our globe — as far as the surface is concerned — covered with a base layer, and we see how, over this base layer, those strata spread out which, through their inclusions, provide living evidence that life has existed on our Earth for a very long time. When we examine these oldest layers—upon which the layers containing life rest—in terms of their rock material, which is essentially what is known as granite, we are thus looking at a form of our Earth that still presents it to us as a kind of lifeless state in the sense of our modern geology. This is where the upper layers are exposed and the granite emerges to form mountains: as it were, a testament to the earliest times of our Earth.

[ 9 ] Goethe, who—in addition to being a great poet—was also a great natural philosopher and naturalist, felt particularly deeply, whenever he encountered this oldest rock formation on our Earth—granite—how this granular rock is, as it were, the Earth’s skeletal framework upon which everything else rises. This instilled in Goethe something that felt to him like the echo of a primal tranquility of our planet, and he regarded this rock with awe. Such a man could not help but contemplate the processes within the Earth’s evolution not only with his intellect but also with his heart—what these remnants reveal to us about the Earth’s formation. More deeply moving and leading even deeper into the mysteries than any abstract thought are the words Goethe spoke in the presence of this “eldest son of nature,” as he put it—in the presence of granite:

[ 10 ] “. . . With these sentiments I approach you, you oldest and most venerable monuments of time. Sitting on a high, bare peak and surveying a vast expanse, I can say to myself: Here you rest directly upon a foundation that reaches down to the deepest places of the earth; no newer layer, no accumulated debris has settled between you and the solid ground of the primeval world, you do not, as in those fertile, beautiful valleys, walk over a lasting grave; these peaks have produced nothing living and have devoured nothing living; they are, above all, life and beyond all life. At this moment, as the Earth’s inner forces of attraction and movement seem to act directly upon me, as the influences of the heavens hover around me, I am lifted to higher contemplations of nature; and just as the human spirit animates all things, so too does a metaphor stir within me, whose sublimity I cannot resist. “So lonely,” I say to myself, looking down upon this completely bare summit and barely discerning in the distance, at its base, a low-growing moss; “so lonely,” I say, “is the state of mind of the person who wishes to open his soul only to the oldest, first, and deepest feelings of truth.”

[ 11 ] This is the feeling that came over Goethe as he gazed at this rock, which, by its very nature, shows that it could contain nothing living within it, and therefore could not have engulfed anything living, such as the layers lying above it.

[ 12 ] As sketchy as what I have been able to present so far may be, it nevertheless shows—as it were, in broad strokes—the picture that geology allows us to form today of the Earth’s history and its living beings. However, people have not always thought this way, and this way of thinking has developed only very gradually. For example, at the time when Goethe was engaged in geology, a controversy was raging, in a certain sense, over the origin of our Earth—a controversy known as the dispute between the Plutonists and the Neptunists. One of the foremost representatives of the latter was the geologist Werner, who was also acquainted with Goethe. He held the view that, essentially, none of the stratifications we observe within the Earth’s crust can be attributed to any fiery processes, but rather that all available evidence indicates the Earth was fundamentally formed from a watery element—a watery configuration of our planet. That even the oldest strata were deposits from water—that is, that even granite did not form through seething fire, but was likewise deposited from water and was only transformed by later processes over the course of time to such an extent that its aquatic origin no longer appears so clear today. Everything, so to speak, arose from water—that was a fundamental belief of the Neptunists, and of Werner in particular. In contrast stood the view of the Plutonists, who assumed that our Earth, along with our entire planetary system, had formed from a gaseous, high-temperature cosmic nebula, had separated from it through cooling, and had continued to cool through the radiation of heat into outer space. They argued that conditions subsequently arose in which, due to thermal effects, granite and perhaps similar types of rock could have formed; however, they maintained that the radiation of heat had cooled only the Earth’s surface, while its interior remained molten and fiery, and that volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are living testimony to the fact that the Earth’s crust conceals remnants of a molten state within its interior. The adherents of the Neptunist school, on the other hand, saw in all volcanic phenomena only processes underlying them that, in a sense, were made possible by pressure or chemical conditions within the Earth—which they did not at all conceive of as molten— made it possible for massive internal catastrophes to occur, which discharge outward, so that we are only now witnessing such processes that manifest themselves upward in such a way that they push entire mountain ranges out of the Earth’s interior. In short: even in the first half of the nineteenth century, we are still dealing with a very interesting dispute between the view that can be briefly described with the words Goethe uses in *Faust*: “Everything has sprung from water,” and the view according to which, fundamentally speaking, all geological formations are based on processes involving the effects of fire. Then one must consider that something took place at the very top of the outermost shell—which relates to the interior as an eggshell does to the yolk—resulting in a very thin layer remaining as a cooling layer, which, so to speak, surrounds the Earth as a covering layer over the mighty terrestrial volcano that is our planet, upon which we walk.

[ 13 ] Now we must ask ourselves: What does this external research have to say, and what does spiritual science—using the methods described in the lectures given so far—have to say about the formation of the Earth? — You can learn even more about the stages of the Earth that exist today and those that preceded them in my book *Outline of Esoteric Science*. — How far does geology really take us? Let us now summarize this in clear terms.

[ 14 ] Geology can tell us: Look at the rock layers you find on the Earth’s surface. The way these layers are arranged shows you that sedimentation has taken place—at least in recent times—and that as a result, animals have found their graves here, some of whose descendants are still on Earth today, but also others that have become extinct, and whom we come to know as inhabitants of the Earth only by excavating their remains found within the Earth. There we are led down to the very lowest layer of the Earth’s surface, which still belongs to that which relates to the entire planet as the eggshell does to the yolk, and which shows us that it may well owe its origin to the action of fire. Those with a deeper insight, however—such as Goethe—express themselves more cautiously, even when they wish to think entirely in geological terms. And it is interesting to hear Goethe’s words regarding this lower layer.

“...It lies in the very depths of the Earth—this type of rock—unshaken, its high ridges rising up, their peaks never reached by the water that surrounds them. That is all we know about this rock, and little more. Composed of familiar elements in a mysterious way, however, it allows us to deduce its origin from neither fire nor water.”

[ 15 ] Goethe, then, already points out that neither the effects of fire nor those of water may be what points us toward the mysterious formation of this oldest son of our Earth, granite. If we simply set alongside geological research—which, strictly speaking, cannot take us any further—what spiritual science has to say, what has been gained from clairvoyant research, the picture looks something like this.

[ 16 ] If we look with the mind’s eye—which can be sharpened by the methods frequently mentioned in the course of these lectures—into our planet’s prehistory, what might present itself to the physical eye appears to us, in a certain sense, roughly in the same time period and sequence of events as that presented to us by geological research. In a sense, we are also looking back there, just as geological research has had to construct this retrospective view in the imagination. Starting with those beings whom we today, according to our human concepts, describe as perfect, as we move backward in time, we observe increasingly imperfect living beings on Earth, and we sometimes see grotesque forms intermingled among them—forms found, for example, in the various dinosaur forms, such as the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur, dinosaur, and Archaeopteryx. We then find beings that had no vertebral skeleton whatsoever, and so on, and indeed, through clairvoyant vision, we encounter an epoch in Earth’s history in which we cannot perceive beings such as those now living on our planet. We must therefore acknowledge that spiritual scientific research, too, can observe this gradual ascent in the degrees of perfection from its own sources. If we now go back in this way and, so to speak, arrive through clairvoyant research at the point in time that geology “fixes” with granite—which, in the sense of modern geology, was extruded from the already cooled but still fiery Earth’s structure—then we must ask: What must geology—and what must spiritual science—now assume as the conditions of an earlier time?

[ 17 ] If we remain on truly solid ground within geology—in fact, no natural scientist should doubt what is about to be said—then geology can offer only conjectures about what lies beyond the granite, in prehistoric times. It can also make such conjectures about what the interior of the Earth might have looked like, for the boreholes that have been drilled into the Earth extend only so far that they must be described as tiny needle pricks. Conjectures and hypotheses, nothing more—at most, mere intuitions about what preceded the upheavals and movements that led to the formation of granite!

[ 18 ] Spiritual science now traces—albeit with that perspective whose distinctive features have often been described here—the process of the Earth’s formation, moving backward into prehistory, and finds in the realm visible to the eye increasingly imperfect beings as the precursors of our present earthly world of life. But it finds that the Earth, when we trace it backward in this way, presents itself in a vastly different manner than it does in the present. Just as it currently appears as the mineral foundation upon which we walk, surrounded by the air where mists, cloud formations, and so on are found, so it does not present itself at all in this way as we retrace our steps into prehistory. A large number of substances that are now in the depths of the Earth were, in earlier times, still in the Earth’s atmosphere and only gradually settled to the surface. Geology must also acknowledge this. But the further back we go, the more we find that our Earth, as a planet, becomes an entirely different entity—something quite different—and that, as it were, what is now the atmosphere increasingly reveals to us, as we go further back in time, the character of a living being. That within the atmosphere of our Earth we find not only the kind of mineral air and mineral cloud formations that we have today, but that within what belongs to our Earth, in the most ancient times, we find something like the living limbs of a great living being. As we move backward in this way, we feel as if we could stand today as tiny beings within a human organism, standing on the solid ground of a bone and looking out to see the circulatory system, the nervous system, and so on as our surroundings. Thus, someone in ancient times who had stood on the Earth and looked out would not have seen mineral structures and mineral air, but rather living, pulsating life. The further back we go, the more this would be the case, so that we could go back as far as the epoch we call the Granite Formation. And we could say to ourselves: The Earth is, in essence, a mighty living being; it contains a vast, diverse life within it, and is not yet inhabited by the living beings that today walk upon its surface or dwell in the water and so on, but rather by those that live within it—as it were, like parasites of the entire living Earth organism, swimming in its blood, just as today the rain clouds float in the air and the like. Then we come to a time about which we must say: On the Earth’s surface, the temperature is indeed so high that life cannot develop, but in the surrounding area, life is developing—life that wants to come down but cannot. Why can’t it come down? Down there, through the process of fire—the process of intense heating—what the living being of our Earth secretes from itself is first absorbed, just as our living organism secretes the solid components—the bones—from the soft parts. And now let us look at the formation of granite and say: The material contained in granite—quartz, feldspar, and mica—was originally dissolved within the great living being: the Earth. For its development, the Earth needs to be able to rid itself of these substances; it secretes them and allows them to fall to the Earth. What lies below absorbs these separated substances, forming a bedrock massif, a skeletal framework within the living being that is the Earth. And if we go back even further, we must seek the causes as to why the entire living Earth separated from itself the substances that today, as chemical substances, form our Earth and are not, at the same time, those found in animal, plant, or human organisms. These substances were gradually separated in a similar way at that time through the action of fire or water and then transformed into the skeletal framework of our Earth. If we now ask further back how it came to be that these substances were separated from the living Earth and formed a foundation from which life has receded, and if we inquire into the causes that made this possible, we come upon something that—when spoken of as processes within the development of our Earth—still very easily causes offense even today in the broadest circles; and not among scientific thinkers—who should acknowledge it—but especially among those who wish to build a worldview upon a few ideas they have formed. We must, however, point out what spiritual science reveals through its observations: that this is indeed the truth. For it becomes evident that these processes—akin to the separation of rock materials—within the Earth organism were preceded by a process that we can now describe in terms of a contemporary phenomenon when we refer to our own inner processes, which are, of course, little known to external science, but which have also been described—albeit only in a tentative way—in these lectures — has already been described to some extent by spiritual science—to that process that takes place throughout the day in our own bodies when, through work and through the concepts created by the spirit, we exert our muscles—the tools of our brain—and indeed our entire body. This is where the process takes place that we call fatigue. In essence, this is actually a kind of destructive process within the organism. Therefore, we can say: While we go about our waking daily life from morning to evening, thinking, feeling, and willing, destructive processes are taking place within us, which we then experience as fatigue. Such processes of a spiritual-psychic nature—which, however, affect matter—a scientific worldview would certainly be reluctant to acknowledge as external natural phenomena. But they were present in that great, mighty organism that was once the Earth. And as the Earth approached the point at which granite and similar substances were separated out, it was seized by nothing but such destructive processes, which worked in such a way that a spiritual-soul element was acting upon a material one. Into that organism—into which had previously been worked not only the substances found today in plant, animal, and human organisms, but also the substances that today constitute our Earth’s crust—poured everything that existed in the form of such destructive processes brought about by spiritual-soul processes. These destructive processes initiated within the great living being that is the Earth what then led to the expulsion—as it were, through a process of separation—of what we today find as chemical substances in the structure of our Earth, substances that we do not find in organic bodies.

[ 19 ] Thus, spiritual science leads us back to the Earth as an organism—not to some primordial state of our Earth in which it was, so to speak, dead matter, but to a time when the Earth was originally a great organism. In the spirit of spiritual science, we must, in fact, completely reverse a question that is posed entirely incorrectly today. No science—if it assumes that our Earth was once a lifeless sphere in which only chemical and physical processes took place—will be able to explain how life could have arisen from this lifeless sphere. This is a major point of contention, but it is generally posed entirely incorrectly. For people usually ask: How could life have developed from the non-living? — But that is not the case: it is not the living that precedes the non-living, but the reverse—the non-living precedes the living. The non-living mineral is a secretion, just as our bones are a secretion of our organism. Thus, all rock is a secretion of our Earth organism, and it is spiritual-soul processes—albeit initially processes of destruction—that caused our Earth organism to produce such secretions. If we were to go back even further, we would see that this path would lead us much farther still. We would be led from what takes place in our mineral realm to the Earth as an organism; indeed, we can already see that as we go back even further, we arrive not only at an organism but at a structure of our planet that is permeated by spiritual-psychic influences. Not only do we not trace life back to the inanimate, but we trace the inanimate back to secretion processes originating in the living, and we regard the living as a consequence of spiritual-soul forces. The further back we go, the closer we come to that from which what we now have before us—minerals, plant forms, and so on—truly sprang: We approach the spiritual and allow spiritual science to tell us that what we encounter today in the diversity of earthly phenomena did not form solely from an inanimate, fiery primordial nebula, but that everything emerged from the spiritual, and that originally our Earth was pure spirit. The process unfolded in such a way that, on the one hand, formations that were more mineral in nature separated from the spiritual realm, and on the other hand, the possibility arose for certain new formations to emerge that could take on a new form of spiritual activity. For if we now take the reverse path and say: In the ancient rock materials we have something that has separated out from the original Earth organism, and we then proceed on to our own time, this separation continues unceasingly. Granite is merely the oldest product of this separation. But the processes that give rise to these separations will become less and less vital, increasingly mere chemical and mechanical processes, so that in our own time we are ultimately left with only those water-related effects that can be observed, for example, when a river carries rock material from one place to another. But what we encounter there as mechanical-chemical processes is merely the final product—it is what has become the law-governed mineral, the resulting state that has come about as a consequence of what originally unfolded as the effects of life.

[ 20 ] We can thus see how, in the course of Earth’s evolution, something is indeed taking place with regard to the very ground on which we walk—something similar to what occurs within the individual human or animal organism. There we see how this human being lives up to a certain point, how he then passes through the gate of death, sheds his body as a corpse, and we see the processes—which are purely mineral processes—continue. During the body’s lifetime, however, these chemical and physical processes were integrated into spiritual-psychic processes. Thus we also return to a point in the Earth’s existence where the processes we now observe as chemical and mechanical were interwoven with and permeated by organic, indeed spiritual-psychic, processes. But what takes place in the soil of our Earth is, so to speak, merely one current that has remained from earlier processes—processes that were at first more vividly organic and then spiritual. This soil had to come into being, had to form, so that a different kind of life could now unfold within it: the life that gradually became our own, so that, as it were, such brain-tools could gradually develop in living beings, through which they can now internalize the spirit, form thoughts and feelings within themselves that, as it were, repeat the external processes through perception and sensation. Therefore, the entire material mass of our Earth must first be “sifted through,” so that what are today merely mineral substances are separated out, and those substances are retained that can now form organisms—organisms that are permeated only by a portion of the old material mass. These are the parts that can only now begin to form—for example, into what humanity is today. The spirit that lives in the human head and in the human heart—that is, in a being that is, so to speak, more finely organized than the entire Earth as a planetary entity—could only arise in a being that has had the other material mass, which today does not belong to organic life, separated from itself. The entire material mass of our Earth has been sifted, and what has flowed away has been made into the foundation that was handed over to purely mineral life, so that a new life could develop upon it—a life that we now see entering its lowest form at the very moment when geology presents to us, from the subsequent era, the simplest beings in their Cambrian form. If we consider what exists in today’s life from the perspective of spiritual science, we must say: This life was originally in the sphere surrounding the Earth; it then, as it were, descended from this sphere, but could not set foot on the Earth’s surface until it had first sent ahead the material masses it needed to move about upon it. The process of decomposition, brought about by spiritual and soul processes, is the initiating phase of two currents that have been unfolding ever since: one ascending current, which unfolded a finer, higher form of life—requiring only a portion of the material masses—and another current, which continues the decomposition and serves as the foundation for the finer organisms that then develop up to the level of human beings. These finer organisms are in a process of ascending development. Why? Because—though this is something people today would not admit—by separating out the coarsest material, as in a massive process of excretion that ultimately formed the Earth’s surface, they have been able to isolate themselves more or less from the Earth and its internal forces, and are now devoted to the cosmic influences flowing into the Earth from without. They are now exposed to the more spiritual processes of these world forces, and it is to this that they owe their ascent from imperfect living beings to human beings.

[ 21 ] When we look at the Earth’s evolution in this way—when we look at the ground on which we walk, without taking the individual processes into account—we say to ourselves: We stand upon it; it contains—in the granite and in what has been deposited upon it—that which the realms of living beings could not utilize, which they could only use by depositing it as soil upon which to walk. And what exists as a continuation of this is a process of destruction and dissolution. Essentially, we would have to familiarize ourselves with the idea that when geologists today describe the Earth’s surface—how it consists of valleys and mountains and is built up in layers—it must be something like a decomposing corpse that continues an ancient process of destruction and decomposition. We would then, in the spirit of spiritual science, be walking upon such a process of destruction so that we might have the foundation we need when we contemplate the flourishing forces that point toward the future—forces that move in the opposite direction from those we encounter in the earth’s surface. For these forces pointing toward the future are something that, so to speak, penetrates human souls and human spirits independently of the earth, and perhaps also those beings that exist outside the human realm, which are only just rising up on the foundation of the earth. In the earth itself, however, we would have something in a state of decay. Viewed from a spiritual-scientific and geological perspective, our Earth would appear to us as a corpse that is decaying more and more, and the geological laws would at the same time be the laws of the dissolving earthly corpse. And human beings on Earth would be something that rises out of the Earth’s corpse, just as the human soul, when it passes through the gate of death, rises from the corpse and leaves it behind to those forces that decompose and destroy it.

[ 22 ] Saying this might paint a bleak picture. But it will only paint a bleak picture if, so to speak, one despairs of the spirit, regards the spirit as bound solely to matter, and believes that humanity’s departure from the living form of the Earth marks the very end of humanity. But if one considers things as a sound view of nature dictates, one must say: It must come to pass, in a certain sense, that not only the individual human being but all of humanity will gradually shed the earthly body in order to be able to ascend step by step into other regions of development. Thus, from a spiritual-scientific and geological perspective, we would have already passed the midpoint of the Earth’s evolution since the time when the “eldest son of the Earth” was separated, and the beings who represent a new beginning for the future will continue to unfold on the foundation thus established.

[ 23 ] What does modern geology have to say about such a humanities-based geological perspective? When words, theories, hypotheses, and worldviews are taken into account—ones that are casually and hastily formed by partisan movements and the like—it is very easy to see how such a humanistic science comes into conflict with scientific thinking. But if one considers this humanistic science—which works just as rigorously and methodically as any other science—in relation to the natural sciences, then it is indeed necessary to look at what the natural sciences actually have to say; that is to say, in light of what has been said today, to raise the question: What does geology have to say about the formation of the Earth? Today, popular science writings and popular worldviews often lump together matters of a very secondary nature, and then claim: “Science” has established this. When one then compares this with what the “convoluted, half-mad” researchers of the humanities say, it will appear to many as something one “cannot engage with at all.” For this is what many will say—those who perhaps know little more about spiritual science than what reaches them from all sorts of obscure sources. But one must turn to what real science and real spiritual science have to say. For spiritual science is not to be regarded like popular worldviews that are only seemingly derived from science, but with the rigor with which every true science must be regarded by true researchers at the sources. What emerges then is something I cannot describe to you other than by referring you to the work produced by one of the most eminent geologists of our time—a work that a very well-known geologist of our time has called the geological epic of the nineteenth century: *The Face of the Earth* by Eduard Sueß. It can be said that this work—on which Süss labored not for years but for decades, and in the most meticulous manner imaginable—brings together the geological research that this youngest branch of natural science has produced over the course of just a few decades. What does it reveal?

[ 24 ] Eduard Sueß was the one who once said: Let us set aside all the prejudices of the Neptunists, the Plutonists, and all the other theories that have accumulated among nineteenth-century geologists. Let us not speculate, but rather look at what presents itself as the physiognomy, as the image of the Earth’s surface.” — Eduard Sueß began with this perspective, which, while certainly evident to the senses, was pure and unclouded by any theory or hypothesis. From this, he arrived at views different from those that had been commonplace for many decades. He concluded that the mountains, which appear to us as seemingly massive ranges, are in fact no more than the wrinkles on an apple’s skin and can be explained in no other way than by assuming that certain purely physical -chemical forces are at work within the Earth, and it is through their activity that our landforms—our valleys and mountains, the various strata, and so on—come into being; so that, essentially, the distribution of water and land, the formation of the continents, and so on, can be explained by the formation of folds, by certain forces pushing the Earth’s masses together, causing certain masses of earth to pile up into mountains. Other forces are at work that cause these towering formations to collapse; this, in turn, leads to the formation of the oceans. Thus, through collapses, overthrusts, and folds, and so on, he explains, for example, the Alpine mountain range. In an insightful way, he demonstrates that the entire face of the Earth has come into being through such compressions, collapses, folds, and so on. The formation of oceans and continents, for example, is explained by the fact that certain collapses occur, causing the water to flow off in one direction; and where water once was, land is thus exposed, and so on. We are thus dealing with an Earth’s surface where processes occur that are based on the mechanical forces shaking up the Earth’s masses and on collapses. And as Süss attempts to form an overall picture of what is happening beneath our feet as we walk about, he arrives at a peculiar conclusion: that, fundamentally speaking, it is a process of destruction that is taking place on our Earth’s surface, and that, in fact, the soil where we today plow the fields from which our crops come was created solely because folds, collapses—in short: processes of destruction—have been at work elsewhere. I need only quote a few words from this most significant work of contemporary geology, and you can see from them where the meticulous naturalist Eduard Sueß was led by a purely empirical geological approach.

“...It is the collapse of the globe that we are witnessing. It began, of course, a very long time ago, and the transience of the human race allows us to remain optimistic. The signs are not limited to the high mountains. Large blocks of rock have sunk hundreds, and in some cases many thousands, of feet deep, and not the slightest step on the surface—only the variety of rock types or deep mining reveals the existence of the fault. Time has leveled everything. In Bohemia, the Palatinate, Belgium, Pennsylvania, and numerous other places, the plow quietly cuts its furrows across the most massive faults.”

[ 25 ] Here you have the result of careful scientific research into the ground on which we walk. Now consider what spiritual science has to say about the initiation of this process through a spiritual-soul process of destruction, the continuation of which, on the one hand, entails the physical-mechanical process of destruction taking place on the Earth’s surface—a process that geology, through careful research, is compelled to acknowledge on its own. This is the case in all fields. If you consult the actual research and the facts, you will see everywhere: on the one hand, spiritual science stands with what it has to say based on clairvoyant research, and on the other, natural science—which must be conceived of as free from monistic, materialistic, or other prejudices—stands on the pure, sound ground of facts. Everywhere, you will see, spiritual science flows into natural science in such a way that natural science, through what it has to offer from the pure ground of facts, provides the most comprehensive proof of what spiritual science has to say on its own. There is never a contradiction between spiritual science and true natural science. Contradictions exist only between sound spiritual science, which engages with reality, and the theories of fantasists and those who claim to stand on the firm ground of science, yet immediately lose that firm ground when they do not converge with what the facts say, but rather with what they themselves wish to say about the facts. Spiritual science allows the spiritual facts to reveal what they have to say about the mysteries of the world. Natural science, with its methods, looks at what has been revealed to it and what it has to say. The two are in complete harmony. And if you do not rely on those popular works that claim, “This and that is scientifically established,” but instead go to the sources, then you will find—particularly in the field of geology—that geologists everywhere advance to a certain point and then leave things open to question. Once you have reached these points of uncertainty, you can take them as a starting point by now turning to spiritual scientific research. This then tells us: If what clairvoyance reveals is correct, then the external factual evidence must take such and such a form. In the case of geology, it has been shown: If what spiritual science sets out to demonstrate is correct, then—as a continuation of today’s process of decomposition—our Earth must now be in a state of collapse. Geology, which is grounded in facts, demonstrates from the laws of nature that this is indeed the case! The findings of natural science are everywhere the consequences of spiritual scientific research. When we consider the full spirit and meaning of this debate, we will by no means become gloomy at the thought that we are walking on ground that is a decaying corpse. For we realize that what has developed on this ground contains within itself the seeds of the future.

[ 26 ] The following lectures, too, will show us more and more that, just as human beings look to their spirit, so too the spiritual realm—which once laid the groundwork beneath our feet—is moving toward future epochs that will reveal it at ever higher and higher levels. Even the geologist Sueß—because, through his engagement with nature, he appreciates all that is beautiful in nature, even within its processes of destruction—knows how to admire the face of the Earth, expressing these words worth heeding in his great, monumental work: “In the face of these open questions, we rejoice in the sunshine, the starry firmament, and all the diversity of our Earth’s face, which has been brought about by precisely these processes, while at the same time recognizing to what degree life is governed by the nature and destinies of the planet,” if even the geologist—rising above all pessimism—feels this outlook in his soul, then all the more so does the spiritual researcher, who knows that Goethe’s words are true: nature invented death in order to have abundant life— and who also knows that it is true, from a cognitive standpoint, to say: Nature invented death in order to have ever higher and ever more spiritual life—the spiritual researcher who knows this says: Even if we must look upon what a higher life has cast aside as upon a corpse in the process of decay, we still see in everything that walks upon this earth the glimmering seeds of that which can stir hope and security in our hearts. But this tells us: We walk upon the ground that the past world has given us, which, in its decay and destruction, it has transformed into the ground beneath our feet. We walk upon this earth, sensing—as we rise in spirit to the heights of heaven—that in the course of future development we must leave this earth at the right time to be received into the bosom of the spiritual world, with which, if we understand it correctly, we feel so intimately connected.