The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. The Origin of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] In the previous lecture, which today’s lecture follows, we spoke about the hidden depths of the life of the soul and explained that the life of the soul is not absolutely bound to matter; that it is not only separable from the physical, but also from the ideas derived from the physical through the senses and the intellect. The possibility of separating soul experiences from physical perceptions was demonstrated by the difference between images of memory and images of dreams. The former [memories] arise without the original power of soulful empathy, while the latter [dream images] arise with the original accompanying phenomena of emotional life—joy, sorrow, and the like. There—in memory—the life of the soul detaches itself from the life of imagination, which is derived from the external world, and withdraws into the hidden depths of the soul; and there it acts and works, there it exercises its power by working upon the entire human organism.

[ 2 ] While the life of the imagination often reveals its powerlessness—for we do not know what is happening in the depths of the sea when the surface ripples—the hidden life of the soul proves to be a power. We see this in dreams, in the trance of mediums, in the workings of art, and in the knowledge of the parapsychologist. For human beings can penetrate into this realm through the training of their minds, so that they learn to draw consciously from the sources of truly real life—into which they do not merely gaze uncontrollably, like the dreamer or the fantasist, thereby becoming dreamers, a hallucinator, or even a liar; nor, like one gifted with atavistic clairvoyance, does he become a plaything of the spirits of such a soul or astral world in a dream; nor does he merely, like the true artist, draw from the spirit and shape it into beauty—but rather, as one who knows and consciously perceives, he can distinguish what is a vision from what is true and of his own volition. [...]

[ 3 ] If this understanding of the hidden is to lead to true spiritual research, it can only be achieved, first, through self-knowledge—by delving into one’s own inner self—and, second, through this self-knowledge, the understanding of the spiritual environment arises and grows. The greater the self-knowledge, the broader the spiritual horizon becomes, along with the power to penetrate even the realities of the environment and the hidden spirit of the world. l..]

[ 4 ] Ladies and gentlemen! When approaching the subject of today’s discussion, one finds oneself—based on the perspectives presented here—in a situation that is, in essence, quite peculiar in relation to everything that has been thought and researched in our era over the past decades regarding the important question of human origins. One finds oneself in this peculiar situation precisely because, over the course of the last few decades, the origin of humankind has been presented primarily in the form in which people today believe they must think about it: in accordance with the findings of modern natural science. And who could deny that the great, the tremendous advances in the natural sciences in recent times have every right to have a say at the very moment when this significant question confronts humanity?

[ 5 ] Most of those present today who are addressing this question from the perspective of natural science must, understandably, have the impression that everything that can be said here about this question from the standpoint of spiritual science is, in essence, directly at odds with what natural science has to say on the matter—understandably so, ladies and gentlemen, and I ask you to bear in mind that this is being said. For it is precisely with such questions that what should have come to the fore during the two lectures I gave on my last visit—which dealt with how, on the one hand, theosophy can be refuted and, on the other, how it can be defended—always lingers in the background. Precisely with questions such as today’s, the spiritual scientist must be fully aware that much, much of what stems from contemporary ideas can seemingly be brought up—and quite justifiably—against his assertions. Therefore, it must be understood that a lecture such as the one this evening can offer some food for thought, but is far from being able to quickly convince someone who is still unfamiliar [with theosophical views]. Let this be said by way of introduction to characterize the spirit in which such a lecture is given. What, then, have we witnessed in recent decades [with regard to our topic today]? More and more, among those [scientists] who believe they are qualified to pass judgment on this field, the view has taken hold that human beings, in the totality of their being, originated from creatures which—in terms of a systematic classification of living beings—actually fall below the sphere of what modern humans call their education, their culture, and indeed the sphere of their human activities in general. [The otherwise] extraordinarily fruitful principle of evolution has led to the established belief that, in the past, evolution had progressed to such an extent that, from simple, primitive life forms—to which today’s primitive life forms are still similar—through slow evolution—as it is said, through the “struggle for existence,” through adaptation — gradually gave rise to ever more complex forms of life, all the way up to the higher animals, and that in the course of such progressive development, humanity had, as it were, risen from the lower kingdoms. Thus, one seeks the ancestors of humankind among animal beings, and there is such a widespread conviction regarding this point that anyone who attempts to put forward anything that contradicts it is actually considered to be of a backward mind. Now, first of all, it is not so much the natural scientists—those who remain within the realm of facts—but rather the natural scientists who have felt called upon to link worldviews and the mysteries of the world to their research—who have felt compelled, so to speak, to present, first and foremost, the external form and the external physical conditions of human life as diversifications, as complications arising from the forces originating in the kingdoms below humanity, so that one would merely be dealing with more complicated living conditions than those found among animals—namely, those that stand one level below humans—but that one must nevertheless derive these forces from what is already found in lower living beings.

[ 6 ] Those natural scientists who sought to link a worldview to the facts of natural science have reinforced this belief. But not only has this belief taken hold; it has also become established that the higher intellectual faculties—what we call a person’s aesthetic sensibility and moral impulses—are merely higher forms of the mental and emotional faculties found in the animal kingdom, and that one can also find more primitive forms of moral behavior in animals, which, in relation to humans, can be described in moral terms—so that many are convinced that humans, as intellectual, moral, and aesthetic beings, have emerged from the living beings below them merely through a process of complication.

[ 7 ] It must be acknowledged that, in the face of the magnificent achievements of modern science, it is extraordinarily difficult to come up with any other mindset, any other worldview. And it must be readily admitted that, as a scholar of the humanities, one often finds oneself in a rather peculiar situation: on the one hand, one is influenced by the achievements of the natural sciences, and on the other hand, by what certain more or less amateurish scholars of the humanities believe they must derive from those scientific findings. If one compares the thoroughness of the presentations, it is true that, in terms of thoroughness, one would actually prefer to side with the natural scientist rather than with many an amateur researcher in the humanities.

[ 8 ] The point is that spiritual science finds itself in a very special situation in this area precisely because, fundamentally speaking, it comes into conflict only with the thoughts, ideas, and hypotheses that have arisen from the findings of the natural sciences, whereas it is becoming increasingly clear to the spiritual scientist that the [actual] findings of the natural sciences virtually compel human thinking to gradually adopt the perspective offered by spiritual science. In fact, the conflict between spiritual science and natural science is not so great, for the facts of natural science correspond more to spiritual science than to monistic and materialistic [interpretations]. Thus, as a spiritual scientist, one feels increasingly in harmony with the facts as one progresses and comes into conflict only with the hypotheses that some draw from the facts.

[ 9 ] When one considers human beings in their development and seeks to trace them back to [their] origin, it seems only natural that our views of them must align with our views of the Earth’s evolutionary process; and this evolutionary process of the Earth—[this tracing back]—has, after all, [until now] been understood entirely in the materialistic sense in which the biological theory of evolution, the theory of the evolution of living beings, is also [applied]. When one reflects on the Earth’s evolutionary history, one generally considers only what the external, inanimate forces—the forces [of] physics, chemistry, and geology, and one traces the Earth back to a state in which it looked different from today, in which it was perhaps in a state that, compared to our present-day Earth, resembles a gaseous sphere. We know that this is a widely held hypothesis; we know that a gaseous state is assumed from which the Earth condensed. It is well known that if one traces this even further back into the distant past, one comes to envision the entire solar system in a gaseous state. Admittedly, the spiritual researcher recognizes that objections to this so-called Kant-Laplace theory have recently arisen, but it remains predominant in the broadest circles. It is believed that the entire solar system itself originated from a kind of primordial nebula that was in motion and rotation, and one also imagines that, through the forces at work in this motion, the planets separated—among them our Earth.

[ 10 ] I have often pointed out how the so-called [Plateau] experiment is conducted even in schools to illustrate this Kant-Laplace theory. One takes a large drop of a substance that can float on water, inserts a sheet of paper at the equator—piercing it with a needle at the axis—and sets the drop in rotation, thereby demonstrating that small droplets do indeed break off and move around the center. What could be simpler than proving in this way how a solar system might have formed? But in an experiment, it is essential to take into account everything that must logically be considered, and it turns out that: One forgets something in this experiment—oneself; one forgets that one is standing there and spinning, and that one has a logical right to formulate the hypothesis [and apply the experiment to the solar system] only if one assumes that there is a giant teacher out there in the universe who has caused this entire movement with a giant needle. If one does not include this additional assumption in this experiment, one is standing on entirely unjustified ground.

[ 11 ] Spiritual science, of course, does not simply put forward such a professor as a theory, but it states that nowhere does formless matter like this cosmic nebula exist; rather, matter everywhere is permeated or at least guided by spiritual powers and forces, [without our falling into anthropomorphism in the process]. Therefore, it is clear to spiritual science: even if it is justified, in terms of material form, to posit the existence of such a primordial nebula, this external process is underpinned by a spiritual process, just as the activity of the spiritual-soul aspect underlies the processes occurring in the human body. Spiritual science does not proceed from an analogy, but from spiritual research. Spiritual science seeks, within the specifically concrete, the spiritual events, the spiritual forces, and the spiritual beings that underlie them, so that it perceives the spirit within them rather than relying on external, materialistic hypotheses.

[ 12 ] Now, if one were to follow the standard presentations of the Kant-Laplace theory and the operations associated with it, one could say that it is possible to derive what our body is and the formation of physical and mental structures from the rotation within the primordial nebula. If one is willing to assume that some giant teacher out there sets the whole thing in motion, then one could, at a pinch, say that the Earth’s form arose from the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula. But then one comes back to a problematic point, and this has been recognized not only by researchers in the spiritual sciences but also by thoughtful natural scientists. This point concerns the origin of life itself on our Earth. If one disregards certain conditions, one might perhaps succumb to the belief that [through the chance coming together] of certain substances, life could once have arisen through spontaneous generation. It would take us very, very far afield to examine all the philosophical and other reasons that demonstrate the impossibility of deriving life from conditions conceived in purely physical terms. Far more important is that this impossibility struck deep-thinking minds such as Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Preyer—Darwin’s insightful biographer—as self-evident; they found no way to reconcile in their minds the idea of life emerging from a lifeless Earth. Thus, these researchers resorted to the assumption that, at the beginning of its formation, our Earth was by no means merely some physical or physically chemical processes, but rather they assumed that—even if it is true today that the Earth’s body beneath our feet appears lifeless to mineralogists and that living beings on it reproduce through heredity within their own kingdoms— this did not apply to ancient times; rather, Preyer and Fechner were compelled to conceive of the Earth in the distant past as a living being, as a great organism, so that, in the view of these natural scientists, the Earth was originally a great living organism in the universe. Then the time would have come when certain substances and components of this Earth crystallized out of this so-called living substance, and what crystallized out of it is our present-day body, which contains chemical and physical forces within itself. While the Earth originally possessed a unified life, it, in their view, imparts its life to individual earthly beings, so that the origin of living beings could be understood as the emergence of a living entity from a living earthly body.

[ 13 ] It makes a strange impression when Darwin’s biographer turns his thoughts to this primordial form of the Earth and forms a conception based on his own thinking. When we hear Preyer say that the Earth organism was originally to be conceived as alive, that its blood streams were glowing iron vapors, that the breath of this Earth body consisted of cosmic vapors flowing in from the surroundings, and that the nourishment of the Earth body was matter that flowed to it from the cosmos—a strange mixture of concepts from physical science [with life processes]! He cannot quite shake off his physical concepts, but he must nevertheless imagine that the inflowing vapors involve something akin to nutrition, respiration, and blood circulation. When it comes to nutrition, we need not think that glowing iron performs these functions. But Preyer shows us one thing: that even natural scientists can feel compelled to recognize the Earth as an organism. They meet spiritual science halfway; they admit that, if one goes back in time, one arrives at a starting point where the Earth was [a great living organism], that the Earth, as something dead in the further course [of development], gave rise to the living [...]—[specialized] into [the most diverse] beings—plants, animals, and humans. They envision the distant past as teeming with life. But one thing is still missing, which spiritual science must attribute to this earthly body based on these premises: [What is missing is the idea] that the Earth’s body must in truth not only have a living point of origin, but that it must be conceived as [animated, spiritualized], so that when we look back to the Earth’s origin, we are not dealing merely with a [living] organism, but must imagine the Earth as an animated, [spiritualized] organism.

[ 14 ] Yes, one might say: What else is one doing there but inserting into one’s original assumption precisely what is supposed to be explained in the first place? Instead of developing the spirit, one assumes the spirit to exist from the outset. But this is what one must do, my esteemed audience, according to all possible premises of a science of knowledge, for nowhere is it possible—or even conceivable—that the higher realms of nature develop from lower ones; nowhere in the course of our experience do we find the spiritual-soul aspect emerging from the merely physical, or the living from the merely [physical-]chemical. What we encounter—particularly within ourselves—is that we see the spiritual-psychic working upon the material; and anyone who has followed what has been presented about this spiritual-psychic aspect in the lectures held here will know just how rightly one can speak, particularly in the case of human beings, of the spiritual-psychic aspect working upon the outer physical-material body.

[ 15 ] We trace the human being within us—let us say, in time—from that moment onward, up to the point we can recall in normal [human life], and there, in our memory, we see our experiences emerging from the depths of our consciousness. At the center of these events of consciousness, we see that which to which we apply the word “I” becoming more and more alive. It would be absurd, however, to assume that this “I” only began at the moment we can recall. It must have been there even in that dreamlike, twilight state of consciousness where the child does not yet say “I” to itself. The “I” must have been there. How was it present there in connection with the other soul forces? When we consider the ordinary soul life of a human being, we can say that what emerges as consciousness at this stage is something special, something personal. We see how we weave in the special life energies that are, after all, unique to us. Therefore, we are compelled to regard what we later see at work within our consciousness as the actual agent of our entire organism. We must consider that we inherit the general structure of this organism from our ancestors, but that the energies that constitute our organism must be worked into it [down to the finest plastic formations of the brain].

[ 16 ] Once we recognize this, we are not far from tracing this individuality back to a previous earthly life. There we see the spiritual-soul aspect at work on our inner, physical-material being, and we then tell ourselves that, just as today, just as in our present earthly existence, our “I,” with its soul forces, is still working on our body in early childhood. This work is not inherited from our ancestors; rather, within what we have become through hereditary forces, [a certain leeway is still left] into which we can work our spiritual-soul nature. We see this, for example, in the fact that we develop from a crawling being into a walking being. We see how the spiritual-soul nature raises us up; we see the spiritual-soul nature at work on the physical body.

[ 17 ] Only when we move on to what was mentioned in the last lecture—on the hidden depths of soul life—namely, the spiritual training through which one gains insight into the spiritual world that lies beyond the physical world—can we truly comprehend what has already been described here. If one applies to oneself the methods found in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, one gradually reaches the point where, as a human being, one is no longer dependent on living in the soul in such a way that one must make use of physical instruments. Spiritual science shows that a person can apply methods of meditation and concentration to themselves through which they can acquire a spiritual nature independent of the physical, so that they have experiences and know that they are not having them with the help of the senses; rather, they know: “Now you are experiencing something in your original spiritual-soul nature; you are becoming aware of what you are beyond this physical being.”

[ 18 ] And it is particularly interesting that when one advances to this kind of training, one has the feeling right from the start: Yes, you are now experiencing something supernatural. But at the same time, one is initially unable to express what one is experiencing in this way through concepts, ideas, and words. Why not? Because when one expresses ideas and concepts in words, one needs the instrument of the brain. The ideas and concepts that people form are drawn from the world, so a gap opens up between what one experiences and what one can express. Only when one exercises patience and perseverance and continues the exercises does the moment come when one is able to truly express the experiences brought down from the spiritual world in concepts and ideas drawn from external life. Before one reaches this stage, one knows that one perceives the brain as something that offers one heavy resistance, and one feels that, in the further course of the training, one must do the work—much as a child must malleably shape its still-clumsy brain for life—to work such subtle formations into the brain that they cannot even be detected by natural scientists using external instruments. The work of the soul-spiritual being on the material substance of the physical body, however, can only be observed inwardly. Thus, we see once again in the soul-spiritual realm the true origin of what is becoming.

[ 19 ] It is by no means an unfounded assertion to say: Certainly, given the current conditions on our Earth, the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being—just as it was before the formation of the first material atom of our body—is capable only of [utilizing] the scope [that is limited] by the general structure of our physical body. While this scope—over which hereditary factors have no power—shapes the spiritual-soul aspect, we see that the physical aspect, the general human form, can only be sustained by human beings of the same kind. Thus, under today’s conditions of life, the spiritual-soul aspect is only capable of shaping certain things within a body preserved through heredity.

[ 20 ] If this is the case today—and if we assume that the Earth has undergone a process of development, which even the natural sciences acknowledge—this does not necessarily mean that, in the distant past, the spiritual-soul aspects were only capable of operating within a certain range. Take it for now merely as a hypothesis; it need not be regarded as absurd when spiritual science says: The further back we go into ancient conditions, the more powerfully the spiritual-soul aspects [of the human being] act. In the distant past, these spiritual-soul aspects were so significant, so powerful, that they could even shape what today can only be shaped through heredity. Just as today the spiritual-soul aspect shapes only a small part of the material human being, so in ancient times we see it shaping the entire organism, so that within the animated Earth organism, human souls existed as the spiritual-soul aspect, and the Earth body was once able to provide a substance that could be formed directly from the soul into a complete human being by the spiritual-soul worlds.

[ 21 ] Thus we look back to the ancient past, when conditions were not yet as they are today, when human souls were contained within the collective soul of the Earth organism—that is to say, the Earth organism also possessed organic substance that was different from the present one, which can be classified only in terms of hereditary forces within the human body. Thus we return to a configuration of the Earth—in contrast to the form of the Earth in which we now live—in which reproduction did not take place as it does in our time; we do not find such a connection between generations, between the masculine and the feminine. In place of the interplay between the masculine and the feminine, we find the interplay of the spiritual-soul aspect with the living substance of the Earth body. The spiritual-soul aspect had a fertilizing effect on the earthly substance and brought forth what the human being was at the origin of their earthly existence: a creature formed and shaped purely from the spiritual-soul core of their being.

[ 22 ] If we truly examine the current circumstances with an open mind, this may seem like a bold hypothesis, but it is by no means absurd. We see, then, that our earthly body is, as it were, formed from living substance. Just as it is surrounded by a layer of air today, so was it once surrounded by a layer of soul and spirit; and just as rain falls from the air today and the soil is fertilized by seeds, so did spiritual and soul-like [seeds] once fertilize the living substance, and this caused the fertilized earth to bring forth human beings. It is quite understandable—and perfectly comprehensible to the spiritual researcher—that [such ideas] turn the stomachs of those who base their views on the natural sciences.

[ 23 ] [Something else needs to be said], which is also true. When the spiritual researcher refers back to earthly epochs in which it made no sense to speak of male and female, but rather in which the heavenly and the earthly mutually enriched one another, he is hindered by the views of natural scientists—though not by the facts of natural science that have emerged in recent decades. These facts have led natural scientists to specific assumptions. There we see how, in recent times—a period that began when Ernst Haeckel, at the [Stettin] Naturalists’ Congress [1863], felt compelled for the first time to offer a materialistic interpretation of human origins in his conception of Darwinian theory— we see how naturalists adhering to this older viewpoint felt compelled to draw a straight line of development [from the protozoa] to humans, and how they are always forced to assert that a creature similar to today’s apes lived on Earth before humans. [But recent research has] corrected this view. Everywhere we see that attempts have been made to trace the ancestors of humans back to a physical, animal-like being that, through the perfection of its physical organization, also attained a high level of mental organization.

[ 24 ] We see that it is becoming necessary to no longer accept such ideas—that humans once had an ancestor that somehow resembled a modern animal. Naturalists say that there were once human ancestors who resembled today’s apes. The animal world as we know it today is said to have emerged from a process of decline, so that what we call apes are beings that arose, on the one hand, from the degenerate remnants of a higher form, and on the other hand, we have human beings. We view apes and humans as two branches tracing back to a being that no longer exists, one that is said to have existed only in the distant past. This common ancestor of the animal kingdom and humanity—to which the facts lead natural scientists and those with a natural-scientific worldview—is [hypothetically] a being that is purely imaginary.

[ 25 ] Now, certain naturalists have been compelled by meticulous findings to trace this creature’s origins ever further back, so that many are already forced to say that even higher mammals bear no resemblance to this hypothetical creature; we would have to go even further back to a creature from which the very first forms of mammals are descended, and this creature simultaneously gave rise to a branch that has always been elevated above the animal realm and that eventually evolved into humans. When one sees a monkey, one must always trace it back to an earlier stage of animality and then assume a purely hypothetical, purely conceptual being that formed one branch that became reptiles, while another branch diverged and became human. We thus see the naturalist moving toward a view that humans and animals were formed from the same essence.

[ 26 ] How far are such scholars from what we have expounded in spiritual science? No further than that their habits of thought compel them to conceive of the Earth’s conditions of development in such a way that they can imagine the origin of today’s life forms only in physical terms, whereas spiritual researchers posit in this place something that arose under entirely different earthly conditions and from entirely different causes: the fertilization of the Earth’s substance through the spiritual-soul aspect.

[ 27 ] We also find it possible to conceive of the further course of evolution, all the way up to the human being, as a being shaped out of the spiritual-soul aspects. Just as modern human beings are the product of a father and a mother, so too was such a primordial human being—as I have now described him in the sense of spiritual science—formed from two sources: the substance of the Earth and the spiritual-soul aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, we can say that human beings belonged to the spiritual atmosphere. Through this primordial element, human beings lived more within the entire celestial sphere and felt their connection to cosmic conditions.

[ 28 ] But we could only receive our spiritual-soul seed at a specific point on Earth. This is what individualizes human beings—the fact that they came [to a specific place]—and this is what made them unique beings, beings who found a home here, who became firmly bound to this specific location on Earth.

[ 29 ] Thus, in this primeval human being, we find at the same time: a universal human element and an individual one, an earthbound element and a more heavenly, macrocosmic element. We see the peculiar aftereffects of what we have just characterized in modern human beings.

[ 30 ] If one carefully examines everything that comes to a human being through heredity, it becomes apparent that, despite all other conditions specialized through heredity, we find at the core of the human being something universally human, and that a second aspect is individualized within every human nature. We still find both today: something universally human and the specialized aspect. If one examines present-day humanity, one finds that the universally human aspect is inherited from the female side, and the specific, individual character is essentially inherited from male ancestors, regardless of whether the individual is male or female. This means that we still see the lingering effects of what manifested in the primordial human as a general heavenly element—if the term is not taken too literally—and of what in him came from the general life substance of the Earth. Therefore, we need only assume that in the primordial human beings, who were formed out of the spirit, the macrocosmic element—which had a fertilizing effect from the surrounding sphere—prevailed in one case, while the element that came from the Earth itself receded into the background. As a result, a portion of the primordial human beings became specialized. Where the heavenly influence was stronger, it specialized into the feminine; and where the earthly element predominated—where the specific earthly destiny gained the upper hand—there the more individual aspect, the predisposition toward the masculine, took shape. Here we see how, out of these general conditions, the predispositions were shaped from the originally spiritual-soul human being, became increasingly condensed, and developed into man and woman.

[ 31 ] And we must conceive of this entire process, my esteemed audience, in such a way that the circumstances were constantly changing—which means nothing other than that the conditions disappeared that had made it possible for the cosmic elements to exert a fertilizing influence from within the spiritual sphere. The living substance of the Earth expelled the purely mineral and chemical elements from within itself and was therefore no longer able to produce living substance. In place of what had arisen through the Lower and Upper in spiritual fertilization—which could no longer shape human beings in this way—something emerged in a different manner and became formative by being placed within human beings themselves, so that procreation took place from generation to generation. We see the forces that shape human beings as tracing back in such a way that the feminine contribution leads back to a cosmic, heavenly element, and that which is given through the masculine in procreation leads back to the original, organically living earthly substance. We still see the general at work in the feminine and the individual in the masculine. No one will shed light on the laws of heredity and the respective roles of the masculine and feminine who does not take these things into account—not even in a purely hypothetical sense. The forces that acted between the Earth’s environment and the Earth itself had to be transferred to the process of heredity.

[ 32 ] We must now consider how the development of animals relates to this evolution of humankind and to this view of human origins. For, in a certain sense, the origin of humankind cannot be fully understood without taking the development of animals into account. It becomes apparent that human beings, as they stand before us today in their duality—such that, on the one hand, there are still certain areas where the spiritual-soul aspect is at work, while on the other hand they inherit certain traits— could only have come into being as he is today if he had retained this spiritual-soul formation up to a certain point in time, until conditions on Earth were such that they could no longer, of their own accord, provide the possibility for human beings to arise from the spiritual-soul realm. Only then did the present mode of reproduction take shape. As a being formed by the spiritual-soul realm, the human being had to wait.

[ 33 ] What would have happened if he had earlier renounced his origin in the spiritual-soul realm and merely submitted to earthly conditions? Simple reflections can show us this. If the spiritual-soul aspect had not remained in its original form until the very last moment, but had instead allowed earthly conditions to take precedence, then the spiritual-soul aspect would have become weak in relation to earthly conditions. Had human beings transitioned earlier to the mode of reproduction that is now characteristic of them, they would be weaker in their spiritual-soul forces, and that which comes from the earth would have gained the upper hand—because it was even more powerful than the organizing forces the earth had possessed—and they would have descended to a lower level under the influence of the earth’s organizing forces.

[ 34 ] This is the case with the animal kingdom. The spiritual-soul aspect of the animals united with the Earth at various times by descending into the earthly spheres before human beings did. The animal preceded human beings. Human beings, however, do not descend from animals, but from their spiritual archetype. Those spiritual archetypes that became animals descended earlier than human beings, who remained in the spiritual regions the longest. Thus, the lines of development do not lead to the archetype of the animal kingdom and of human beings. We must conceive of the archetype of the animal kingdom separately from the spiritual-soul aspects of human beings.

[ 35 ] Thus we see how, in accordance with a logically developed theory of evolution, spiritual science places human beings within the overall evolution of the Earth, and how this is consistent with a properly considered scientific view. Spiritual science places the human being within a line of development that takes into account the metamorphoses of the Earth itself, how animal forms subsequently emerge, and finally how the human being emerges—having waited so long within the Earth’s spiritual sphere so that he could adapt to Earth’s conditions in a way that afforded the greatest scope for the spiritual and soul life.

[ 36 ] Ladies and gentlemen, I have already indicated that what has been said today must, in many cases, be regarded as unthinkable—even as absurd—precisely by those who have equipped themselves with all the knowledge of our time. And if there are even just a few individuals who have the inclination and the will to recognize that these aspects [of spiritual science], which play a role in cultural life, are pursued with the same seriousness as [those of] natural science, then that will suffice to show how this influence on cultural life takes place. Spiritual science proceeds from a different standpoint and arrives at something to which the natural scientist must still be hostile; yet those who are willing can see that true natural science, based on facts, “goes straight” toward what spiritual science has to offer. Spiritual science proceeds from a different standpoint than natural science; however, it arrives at something to which the natural scientist must still take a negative stance. If one disregards what is imagined in natural science and considers only the facts, one will see that these facts everywhere corroborate and prove what has been characterized today.

[ 37 ] For human beings, however, it is important to be aware that within them there is an independent spiritual element that is not the result of the material-physical, but rather that the physical is the result of a spiritual element that has its origin in the spiritual environment and has planted its seeds in the now-lifeless substance of the earth.

[ 38 ] The study of external facts in the Earth’s evolution [does not contradict the independent significance of the spiritual-soul aspect in human nature; rather, natural science confirms the relationship in which it stands to the world, to spirit, and to the soul, through] every deeper reflection, every immersion into its essence—like a soliloquy, like a conversation the soul conducts with itself, which must take shape, which, arising from the depths of human nature, must repeatedly take such a form that [we] can [summarize in words] the relationship of the human being to itself and to life:

Humanity sprang from the Spirit,
In the Spirit, a person’s entire life unfolds and takes shape,
A person’s whole being strives toward the Spirit.