The Rudolf Steiner Archive

31. The Animal Soul and Human Individuality

[ 1 ] Today we will consider the question of whether creatures other than humans possess a soul—specifically, whether animals are endowed with a soul in any way. To those who skim over such matters, this may seem superfluous; yet even in the past, people of great intellect have grappled with it. Descartes, the reviver of philosophy—which had died out in the Middle Ages—who lived at the beginning of the 17th century, already raised this question. He, of course, viewed animals as machines, as beings in which one cannot speak of true animation—mere reflex machines. Anyone who observes animal life with discernment will find it difficult to share this view. We need only point out how many animals in our surroundings perform actions and form relationships—even among themselves—that are difficult to conceive of without a soul. One example is the dog’s loyalty. It is hard for us to accept the idea that nothing lives within a dog that is similar to what lives within a human being.

[ 2 ] When we consider certain tasks, can we disregard the higher mental activity involved? Let us consider, for example, a beaver dam. Such an artful construction would require great mental effort on the part of a human being. The fact that certain beams are precisely—and I mean very precisely—angled to match the slope of the water and the specific conditions reflects a profound wisdom.

[ 3 ] Take the ants! In every anthill, you’ll find something akin to a wise human government—indeed, one that even surpasses that of modern humans. Ants are divided into three groups: workers, males, and females. It has been demonstrated that the workers are very intelligent, the females less so, and the males very stupid. Everything in the colony is artfully organized: how they procure everything necessary for the construction of the nest and the rearing of the young, how they carry out their raids, and so on. If all this necessitates a spiritual activity in human society, then we cannot deny that animals possess a soul. People are always content to attribute this to instinct, but they never try to conceive of anything beyond instinct. We must now also consider the other side and not overlook the fact that there is a fundamental difference between what the animal accomplishes and what the human being accomplishes with his soul. Let us take a specific fact as an example. Travelers have repeatedly observed that when they built a fire in cold weather and then left it, the monkeys would come and warm themselves by it. However, it has never been observed that a monkey would fetch wood to keep the fire going. It does not arrive at this combination, and that is of paramount importance: it cannot add anything new from its own mental faculties, such as stoking the fire and so on.

[ 4 ] If we want to understand the animal soul, we must start by recognizing this difference from the human soul. Another difference between the animal soul and the human soul is that you can write a biography of every human being, but not of an animal. This is very important. If you ask yourself about your interest in different beings, you will find that you feel the same interest toward animals in an entire group of the same kind as you do toward a single human being. Imagine a lion, and you will feel exactly the same way toward the lion’s grandfather, father, son, grandson, and so on. When it comes to humans, this view would seem downright frivolous to you. The fact that a dog owner might claim to be able to write a biography of his dog means nothing. After all, you could just as easily write a biography of a steel nib or discuss the differences in the lives of a darning needle and a sewing needle. It is merely a figurative concept. Just as the entire animal species varies greatly, so too does each individual human being. A common soul lives within the entire animal group. Just as your ten fingers are parts of your hand, so are all wolves parts of the wolf group’s soul.

[ 5 ] Now we must examine the human soul in greater detail, which in the past was not as individualized as it is today. At a certain point in human evolution, people were much closer to the group soul. In his Germania, written a hundred years after Christ, Tacitus paints a picture of the individual Germanic tribal groups. At that time, all members of a group felt they belonged together—with differences, of course, for everything in human evolution proceeds in stages. All members of a group also saw themselves as equal. Distinctly individual physiognomies are a sign of the individual soul’s separation from the group soul. Among primitive peoples, you can still find more or less the same physiognomy today. We must note this fact: that a distinct physiognomy is proof that individuality has a formative effect on the body. This will become even more pronounced among more highly developed human races. A time will come when national character will recede entirely. When a soul is incarnated sometimes in this nation and sometimes in that, national differences will disappear; each person will see only their own likeness over and over again, the more their individuality has asserted itself. In the past, when people still married within the same tribe, the members stuck together like the fingers of a hand; one would avenge another’s humiliation as if it had happened to him. This cohesion is disappearing more and more; the larger the community, the more universal the human community, the more individual the souls and characters become. This does not result in a hodgepodge; rather, the more differences fade away, the more individuality emerges.

[ 6 ] How, then, do human group souls differ from those of animals? To answer this, we must go far back in evolutionary history. There was a time when human beings did not yet live as they do now, with their physical bodies and spiritual core. I am referring to the Lemurian era. At that time, the highest beings were a kind of human-animal hybrid with a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and the potential for an “I”—but not yet the “I” itself—beings capable of receiving the divine seed. The soul that lives within us today had not yet emerged from the bosom of the Divine; it still dwelt in a layer of soul-spirit. Imagine a vessel of water containing a thousand drops that merge into one another without separation, forming a single whole. Take a thousand small sponges, each capable of holding a single drop, and dip them in; each one will be filled with a drop. In the same way, imagine that the human shells absorb the divine seed. Only through this do they become individual and independent. Now imagine that, in the beginning, the soul did not immediately take up residence in every single individual, but rather one soul was distributed among many bodies as a group soul. What now dwells in the individual once inhabited an entire tribe. And here you must grasp a new concept. Such a group soul does not die either. The beautiful, significant aspect of death is a distinctive feature, a privilege of the individual human soul. When a part of a group soul dies, it is immediately replaced, just like the appendage you cut off from a polyp. Thus, the group soul—which does not descend to the physical plane—perceives death as the departure of a member and birth as the regrowth of one. It does not possess the privilege of death. Only when a sentient being says, “I am ——,” does death begin to intervene in individual life. Through death, which is fought for, the human being attains a higher life. If death were not overcome, the human being could not attain an even higher life through it.

[ 7 ] On the astral plane, we find the souls of animals, each of which is connected to every other member of its group by a thread. To understand how animal group souls come into being, you must be clear about what makes a human being a physical being, and what that is like.

[ 8 ] When the divine seeds descended, they found the hosts to be very different. Some were specially trained for battle, while others were similarly built but more trained for work, patience, and so on. As a result, the various bodies became distinct in the most diverse ways, including in their outward appearance. What exists today among lower animals, such as insects and others, had already branched off during an earlier incarnation of the Earth and developed independently.

[ 9 ] Now we are concerned only with animals from fish upward. When the descent into the waiting body took place—which stood, externally but not internally, at approximately the level of a fish’s body—there were still no mammals. The human being who lived at that time had to move about half swimming, half floating, and possessed fin-like organs for this purpose. What happened to his body on Earth was brought about by the human soul dwelling within him. Only in the course of long evolutions was this body transformed into the present godlike form. Many things remained stagnant along the long path. But because the Earth continued to transform in the meantime, this stagnation led to a downward evolution of the bodies. Take, for example, two siblings: one progresses through all the stages of life, while the other remains stuck at the childhood stage. By the age of sixty, however, the latter no longer looks like a child. In the same way, today’s fish have degenerated and look different than they did in the past. Humanity continued to evolve and shaped everything up to the mammalian body. Everywhere, some individuals stagnated again—people who had degenerated through decadence. If you really put yourself in their shoes, you will understand that all animals have aged at the juvenile stage, have aged prematurely, and have assumed fixed forms that they should have transcended: they have, as it were, crystallized in their entire development. This upward evolution, however, placed humans in a peculiar situation with regard to certain characteristics. They lost their sense of security. Monkeys in captivity soon fall ill with tuberculosis and other diseases. Animals cannot tolerate the human way of life. They also have a certain security when it comes to food. When a cow walks across a meadow, she knows exactly which grass is good for her. Human beings no longer have that. They need uncertainty in order to attain free will. The current uncertainty is necessary for achieving security on a higher level. Human beings adapt to the higher level. Thus, becoming uncertain is a guarantee that human beings will become independent. What has remained secure is that which has not progressed to the point where the “I” operates within the individual being. We should be no more surprised by animal wisdom than by the wisdom of our hand. The individual beaver is merely the agent of the group soul on the astral plane. The ant stands on a level quite different from that of the beaver, and much farther removed from us, because it split off from the group soul during Earth’s much earlier planetary existence. In its one-sided direction, it has progressed even further than human beings. Human beings think, feel, and will in close connection. If I see something I like, I reach for it. Imagination gives rise to volition. Without this interlocking, human beings would become very insecure. In spiritual training, will, imagination, and feeling are torn apart; they must be completely separated. For humanity as a whole, this will not be achieved until Earth’s Jupiteric stage. But before the student experiences this, he encounters the Keeper of the Threshold, who brings clarity to his entire life up to that point.

[ 10 ] Certain animal group souls have prematurely undergone this division of soul activity into the Trinity. In fact, individual parts of the spiritual student’s brain are differentiated, just like ants in a colony. The ant anticipated this prematurely and now remains immaturely clever, like a child. The beaver group soul will have to make up for what it has missed; the ant soul has forfeited this opportunity once and for all and is taking a completely different path. Animal souls are human souls that have become one-sided. Oken says: “The tongue is an octopus.”—This is not, of course, to be taken literally. But the being in whom the qualities of the tongue have come to the fore too strongly has remained stuck there. Paracelsus spoke these profound words: “When we survey nature, we see nothing but individual letters, and the word they form is ‘human being.’ Imagine all the various qualities you find together in a human being distributed among different bodies, each belonging to a group soul.” Animals are human beings who have remained stuck in the one-sided development of their characteristics. Human beings became inventors through a loss of security. The first element they learned to harness was fire. With it, they ascended the first rung of culture, which made them productive beings. They are an encyclopedia of the various animal souls.

[ 11 ] Now there is one more point you need to clarify. If you consider lower animals, you will find that they cannot directly express suffering and joy through sound. Insects do make sounds, but these are merely physical noises. Occult science makes very nuanced distinctions between animals that produce sounds and those that do not. But it is only in human beings that the inner sound becomes a word, becomes language. Even the most highly developed animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds. In later times, the animal group souls—not the individual animals—will become human, but in a constitution entirely different from that of present-day humans.

[ 12 ] Even before the emergence of the humanities, Goethe sensed this and expressed it beautifully in his Metamorphosis of Animals: animals are like a human being laid out in pieces. The entire animal kingdom is visible in the human form. Thus, when looking at all animal beings, the human being says: “All of this, combined into one, is you.”

Q&A

Will there be further splits in the course of human evolution?

[ 13 ] Yes, and that is what is called “passing through the crisis” in Theosophy. We are now in the fifth epoch. The sixth epoch will see a completely different race—noble and beautiful—in contrast to the offshoot of decadence, which will consist of a race of abominably ugly, animalistic, sensual, and depraved people, far more repulsive than is possible in the present human race, because they will have regressed. And how this division will take place is described very clearly in the Apocalypse, in the so-called “Last Judgment.” Those who are completely selfless can already now become ready for the sixth era. They may still be reincarnated, but then only to help others. Some may find this judgment harsh, but they do have a choice. Understand me correctly: I am not referring to reincarnation, but rather to the sixth era.

Why do old people become mentally frail, even though the soul cannot change?

[ 14 ] The soul does not change either. It never descends from the level it has once attained, but its instrument has grown weak. It is like a great pianist who, when playing a poor-quality instrument, can no longer play as well as he used to.

[ 15 ] You will say, “But the soul no longer knows its own level.” Yes, the soul does not see itself as long as it is in the physical body. There is only the soul’s reflection, its mirror image. Now, if the mirror becomes cloudy or broken, it can no longer reflect. Only the student of spirituality truly perceives his soul.