The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The Natural Sciences and the Development of Humanity II

[ 1 ] If one wishes to gain a clear understanding of what the natural sciences—in the modern sense of the term—mean for the development of humanity as a whole, one must go back to the origins of our present civilization. As can be seen from standard historical and scientific perspectives, one must conceive of these sources as lying very far back in time. But only when one considers the development of humankind—the gradual emergence of its distinctive abilities throughout the modern era—can one see how these abilities rise from the depths of the human soul, leading to our present understanding of nature and to the application of this understanding in technology and daily life.

[ 2 ] Now, once one has familiarized oneself with the current state of scholarship, there is a certain difficulty in grasping the essence of the entire recent epoch of world history.

[ 3 ] Yesterday we attempted, by way of introduction, to take the present as our starting point—in the broader sense, of course, by including Herder and Goethe within this present—and to explore certain currents that lead back to earlier times. We saw how one of the two spiritual currents so characteristic of Goethe led back to the Egyptian worldview, and the other to the Chaldean one. We transported ourselves back to pre-Christian times, and we highlighted characteristic differences between the entire nature of the spiritual constitution of the Chaldean peoples living in the Near East—which can be traced back to about the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C.—and that of the Egyptians, who can be considered to date even further back, even in purely historical terms.

[ 4 ] We have seen that the Chaldeans hold a view that is more rooted in the external world, in which the human mind, so to speak, becomes so absorbed in the external world that even time becomes elastic. This state of mind necessitates viewing the hours of the day in summer as longer than in winter, whereas among the Egyptians, the division of the year has been strictly maintained for centuries, as it results, so to speak, from a kind of calculation rather than from the observation of external events. One assumes the year consists of 365 days, thus always adding 365 more days to 365, and fails to notice that, in doing so, one no longer corresponds to the course of the year as it presents itself in the sensory world; rather, by treating the year as shorter than it is and simply calculating, one comes into contradiction with what one actually perceives in the external world.

[ 5 ] This revealed a significant difference in the spiritual disposition of two peoples who had engaged in trade and intellectual exchange—that is, who were outwardly close to one another. However, one can only truly appreciate such a difference by delving further into the origins of human civilization. This is made more difficult by the fact that cultures, which developed one after another in chronological order, are today intermingled geographically, existing side by side in various stages of development. When a European or an American today—seeking to move from materialism toward more spiritual conceptions of the human being—turns to contemporary Indian culture, he finds within that culture a highly developed spirituality, a mysticism permeated by subtle intellectual concepts. Within the worldview that confronts him there, he finds absolutely nothing of what he has come to know in Western or American civilization as a scientific worldview. If he feels a longing to learn something about human beings themselves that modern science cannot provide, and if he is not willing to take into account what a more recent spiritual science has to offer about this human being, then he will want to immerse himself in the spiritual worldview of present-day India—or at least of that which has been preserved from a relatively recent past.

[ 6 ] But anyone who is equipped with the insights of the spiritual science referred to here and approaches this Indian worldview in that way will find that what is present in it today—and which has been historically preserved from a past that lies more or less far behind us— there is something at work that is no longer entirely obvious, but rather appears as an undercurrent—something that, rising from dark depths, plays out within it. It plays out there even in the language, but especially in the world of ideas and imagery, and must be regarded as something that must have undergone many transformations before taking on its present form. What exists in India today has only taken its present form in very recent times; yet it contains elements that are ancient, elements that have taken millennia to develop into what they have become.

[ 7 ] If one looks at other cultures—say, those of the Near East or China—one finds that a similar situation exists there, but one gets the sense that one does not need to go back as far as in India to understand the present. And if one considers Egyptian life as it has unfolded since, say, the beginning of the third millennium B.C., one gets the sense that what is historically recorded in the documents presents itself in such a way that one needs to emotionally transport oneself back to the earliest times, as we attempted to do yesterday, for example; but one also finds that the ancient has been preserved with a kind of fidelity, so that its deepest essence is also visible in later periods, whereas in India the deepest essence must be sought at the beginning of its development.

[ 8 ] The situation is similar with regard to Greek culture and our own culture, which, as we shall see, begins around the 15th century. The situation appears to be such that, while elements of ancient origin have certainly been passed down—as the discerning observer can see—they are scarcely perceptible to the ordinary consciousness. In the following reflections, we shall see how these ancient elements can be discovered within European and American culture.

[ 9 ] One might say that the scientific element that has found its way into modern civilization seems to have done away with the old so thoroughly that this old way of life can now only be explored through very specific methods. Yet it is still there. Thus, cultures of different ages coexist on Earth. One must go back very, very far to understand contemporary Indian culture; one need only go back a little further to understand Near Eastern culture and its literatures, a little further still to understand Egyptian culture, and even less far to understand Greco-Roman culture, and so on. One can remain almost entirely in the present if one wishes to understand contemporary European and American culture.

[ 10 ] What has developed successively over the course of time stands side by side before us; and what stands side by side in this way is, in reality, of different ages—at least at first glance—so that the spatial and the temporal become intertwined, and only then, I might say, from the present-day standpoint, must find the methods to determine from which present-day cultures one can trace a path back to ancient times, and from which one finds access to those times difficult and, at best, only through detours.

[ 11 ] Now, as you know—and we saw yesterday just how outwardly this is often the case—the scientific perspective, the so-called anthropological or geological perspective, follows on directly from what history has to offer. Today, even external anthropological research takes us back to very early European times. Admittedly, there is still little discussion of how this applies to Asian peoples, but as far as European development is concerned, we are taken back to ancient times. As you know, anthropology and history—enriched by geology—now suggest that the oldest population of Europe, whose truly artistic remains have been found in certain cave sites in Spain and southern France, must date back millennia; that the remarkable paintings revealed by these cave discoveries draw our attention to how, in ancient times, people in Europe must already have lived with a certain level of culture—even before those significant events that anthropology and geology refer to as the European Ice Age, during which a large part of the European continent was covered in ice, rendering it uninhabitable. Regions such as those where the cave discoveries in southern France and Spain were made must have been oases. Amid the vast ice sheet, people must have lived there; nature must have been relatively abundant, and a culture must have developed there.

[ 12 ] Thus, even today, we are taken back to the very ancient times of European civilization. And here, in a sense, what external research can offer converges with what spiritual science has to say. Spiritual science can, after all, proceed only from what human beings’ developed soul faculties can fathom—what can arise through imagination and inspiration; it can speak of what can be inwardly and consciously perceived. One might say, with regard to what can be investigated through external history, that spiritual research can actually only fathom, to a greater or lesser extent, the spiritual aspect of development—and to a lesser extent, what has taken place in external nature. Through this spiritual research, however, one can go back to those times when human beings and their environment were still viewed under conditions entirely different from those at the time of the European glaciation.

[ 13 ] The purpose of these particular lectures will not so much be to look back to those ancient times when human beings lived under conditions and in regions of the world that were entirely different from those of later periods; but rather to evoke a sense of how justified it is to point to such supersensible insights, which can also trace the historical development of humanity back to early times.

[ 14 ] In any case, however, if we approach what external history presents with that perspective and that sensibility that can be gained from spiritual science, we can learn something about the course of human civilization’s development. From the standpoint of external anthropology, geology, and history, it can be acknowledged that, if one goes back some ten to fifteen millennia, a completely different way of life existed than in today’s civilized Europe. One can acknowledge that the development of European, Asian, and, to a large extent, ancient American humanity took place during this period, roughly the last ten to fifteen thousand years.

[ 15 ] But the documents that are available must be examined in a very special way, one that can be gained through spiritual science. It must be said, however: If, through considerations such as those I presented yesterday in my introduction, one has acquired the ability to trace back from the present to earlier states of the soul, then one can, in a certain sense, view what now exists side by side in the proper light with regard to its antiquity. Then, of course, one’s gaze is first directed toward the Indian regions.

[ 16 ] That which still lives on today in a remarkably perceptive way of interpreting the world leads back to those times when the great, mighty Indian philosophy and the Vedic texts came into being. But even when one allows the Vedic texts, Vedanta philosophy, and the Indian philosophy of yoga to sink in, one senses that in order to understand what still exists among us on Earth in their aftereffects, one must trace it back to very early times. And if one then compares it with other forms of culture—for example, with our European way of thinking logically, or with the Greek way of developing ideas—one finds everywhere that today’s European civilization, when set against the Indian one, appears like a great-grandchild, a grandchild, or a child living alongside the father at the same time. Indian civilization stands there as if rejecting the very early times, yet having grown old. In the state in which it presents itself as having grown old, one can still fathom that which once revealed itself in ancient times as the highest spirituality. But one sees it precisely in its decadence, in its senility; one sees it just as one sees in the child how it embodies certain states of the father at an earlier stage of that father’s life—but differently, because it experiences these states at a later time. Think, for example, of a person who was a child in the 1890s, and look up from him to his father or even his grandfather. Certainly, the grandfather was a child in the 1840s and 1850s; but he experienced childhood under different circumstances than the child of the 1890s; who, in essence, already knew quite different things than the grandfather with his naïve childishness in the 1840s. If one adopts a perspective on such matters in the development of peoples, then contemporary European civilizations—or even Greek civilization, insofar as we can penetrate it—appear to have been born late compared to what was born early as Indian civilization, which, however, confronts us today already in a state of senility. Can we empathize with this Indian civilization, which has now become senile—with that which was, in essence, already ancient at the time of the Vedic poems and Vedanta philosophy? But if we possess a state of mind cultivated by spiritual science, enabling us to perceive the earlier from the later—just as one can look upon childhood in a person who has grown old, because one has the insight to do so—then we do indeed arrive at an understanding of the primordial Indian culture as well. But one then also tells oneself that this primordial Indian culture was, without a doubt, a kind of culture that is fundamentally different from our own. This culture must have been spiritual through and through and must have conceived of human beings in a particularly spiritual way. And one then tells oneself that when one considers the diversity of what one encounters specifically in Indian culture—in contrast to Vedic poetry with its imagery, which nevertheless remains within the lyrical realm; the incisive Vedanta philosophy; and the fervent yoga philosophy—it must be that, over the course of time, one culture has blended with another; there must simply have once been a primordial culture of a wholly spiritual nature. But then something less spiritual must have come to dominate, finding its expression in Vedic poetry. Then what emerged in the fervent philosophy of yoga must have taken root. It is impossible that all this could have come from a single people. Here, peoples with different dispositions must have intermingled. One brought the teachings of yoga, the other the Vedic poetry. These peoples found a primordial Indian culture already in place, which they then permeated, drawing from it that which was mature and ancient, yet had died out within the people. The invading peoples arrived with fresh blood; they shaped what the people, who were in a state of decadence, could no longer develop further. And so it continued. Thus the present state of affairs gradually came into being; and one will then not be very far from comparing the ancient Indian culture with what remains in the regions where today’s civilization has developed. One will compare the people of ancient India with those who might have painted the remarkable pictures that appear in Western Europe—these peculiar images with their, I would say, deeply evocative lines. When one sees these pictures, when one can put oneself in the position of what a human soul experiences in creating precisely such images, then one comes to say to oneself: Yes, certainly, there is something very primitive in these paintings—sometimes something like what gifted children of today might paint—but there is also something else. One can see from these paintings how these people lived with a certain love for the external nature that surrounded them; and one sees that these paintings were created out of deep inner impulses; one sees—I would say—that they were painted by people who did not first figure out with their eyes how to draw lines or apply colors, but who, drawing from their inner experiences, formed and painted what lay deep—I would say—within their very bodies.

[ 17 ] If one compares this with what has taken shape in ancient Indian culture, one nevertheless finds a kinship. In Western Europe, the phenomenon appears in a primitive form, and it remains primitive at first; over in Asia, in South Asia, it continues to develop further and further because it is constantly enriched by other tribes; and it evolves all the way up to Vedanta philosophy. If I were to present these matters from a spiritual-scientific perspective, as I have often done, you would see that one can approach the subject with a completely different level of concreteness. But for now, I want to frame the matter today as it presents itself to the spiritual scientist, even while taking external documents into account. But the way we are accustomed to approaching these matters today—with broad, general concepts acquired through the crude, natural-scientific perspective—we cannot get to the heart of them. To achieve this, I would say, one must make one’s concepts so flexible, so malleable, as you will see from the reflections I intend to present to you today. Of course, one cannot demonstrate the connection between the cave culture of Western Europe and Indian culture in the same way one proves the similarity of triangles; yet the certainty is no less for that, provided one is willing to engage with these matters and returns to the state of the soul that was brought to our attention yesterday.

[ 18 ] Anyone who, from this perspective, delves into the concepts—the wondrous concepts—of Vedanta philosophy will, in a sense, see in them—transformed entirely into the abstract-spiritual realm—the very lines of the cave paintings in Spain and southern France. And it will therefore not be surprising to him—even from the perspective of external research—that spiritual science reveals to him how a common indigenous population, which must be sought, for example, at the beginning of the 8th millennium B.C., gradually spread across the habitable regions of Europe, Africa, and Asia—and that, depending on the varying living conditions, this ancient culture—within which people still lived entirely immersed in the external natural world—developed, proving to be most gifted in ancient India. There, what is otherwise expressed only in a primitive form is revealed. There, what had previously astonished people—such as the culture of Crete—continued to develop. This culture originated in southern Europe. Over in Asia, however, it developed as the primordial Indian culture, advancing further and further, remaining, so to speak, viable well into old age, but reaching its zenith during the time when the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy arose, followed by yoga philosophy and other philosophical schools of thought. There is a great deal intermingled within this Indian tradition—elements that took shape at different times and that coexist today.

[ 19 ] If one takes a closer look at what is emerging in ancient Indian culture, one must say that it all points to a human being with a state of soul that cannot be attained today through external means.

[ 20 ] I spoke yesterday about how one can advance to imaginative visualization, and if one does this consciously, one also gains an understanding of what people such as the ancient Chaldeans or the later Egyptians experienced—not yet consciously, but instinctively. Their state of mind was simply one that was thoroughly different from that of people today.

[ 21 ] By immersing oneself in these imaginative visions, one becomes an image oneself, merges with the imagery, and lives oneself into the process of becoming. This is how, for example, the Chaldeans lived within the process of becoming. But on the other hand, by rising to a state of inspiration, one also learns to recognize how to overcome the separation between the subjective inner world and the outer objective world; one feels, as it were, at one with the universe, so deeply immersed in it that one says to oneself: That which announces itself through you is the voice, the language of the universe itself; you merely allow yourself to be a link in the universe and let the world reveal itself through you.” — Today we can consciously attain this through inspiration. The Egyptians lived it out instinctively at a late stage. But this takes us further back in time, a period for which Chinese culture provides a relatively good record. What is usually described to us as such, however, is already a later product; but just as ancient stages—stages of childhood—are revealed in Indian culture, so too are ancient stages of civilization revealed in Chinese culture. And when we trace a particular concept back to its origins, we truly sense how an instinctive inspiration lives within this Chinese culture. Today, through the method of spiritual science, we attain a conscious inspiration. In Chinese culture, a more or less instinctive inspiration is at work; that is to say, its results are present as an underlying foundation in what is transmitted today as Chinese literature. There we are led back, however, to a human perspective through which human beings feel themselves to be a part of the entire universe. Just as we speak today of the threefold human being—the head human, the limb human, and, in the middle, the rhythmic human—and fathom their essence in its full depth through inspiration, so did the ancestors of modern Chinese culture once live in an instinctive, inspired awareness of something similar. This insight, however, did not pertain to the human being; rather, because the human being was merely a part of the entire universe, it pertained to the entire universe. Just as we perceive our head, so did the Chinese perceive what they called Yang. For when we wish to look at our head, we usually cannot see it; at most, we catch a glimpse of the tip of our nose when we turn our eyes toward it. Just as we can see the other superficial parts of our organism when we look at our exterior, but the head is, so to speak, only mentally conscious, so the Chinese were conscious of something they called Yang. And by this Yang they meant that which is above, that which spreads out spiritually, the heavenly, the luminous, the generative, the active, the giving. And they did not distinguish themselves—in terms of what lived within their heads—from this Yang. Just as we, who distinguish human beings from their environment, perceive the “limb-human”—the human being who sets us in motion and brings us into contact with our surroundings—so the Chinese spoke of Yin, referring to everything that is dark, earthy, receptive, and so on. Today we say that in our metabolic-limb human we take in external substances; we connect these external substances to our own being through our metabolic-limb human, and we take in the sensory-mental element through our head organization. But in between lies everything that, in a sense, establishes this rhythm between the head and the metabolic human of the limbs. The rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of blood circulation bring this about. Just as we perceive and understand the human being in this way, so did the Chinese of old view the entire universe: above, the creative, bright, and heavenly; below, the earthly, the dark, receptive—and the balance between the two—that which forms a rhythm between heaven and earth—he sensed this when the clouds appeared in the sky, when the rain dripped down, when what had fallen to the earth evaporated again, when the plants grew out of the earth toward the sky, and so on. In all of this, he sensed the rhythm of the Upper and the Lower, and he called this the Tao. And so he had a vision of that with which he was intertwined. It presented itself to him in this threefold division. But he did not distinguish himself from any of it.

[ 22 ] This view then appears to us in a transformed form in the Near East. In everything we have inherited as ancient culture, particularly from the region of Persia, what is evident in Chinese culture must once have taken a completely different form, which then metamorphosed into what has been handed down in the contrast between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman—the bright, radiant, shining god of light and the dark, gloomy Ahriman—between whom the world is depicted as unfolding in rhythm.

[ 23 ] The difference between what must once have been proto-Indian, and what then emerged, completely transformed, in Chinese culture—and what one senses as an underlying current even in some Near Eastern cultures—I call it “proto-Persian” in my book *Outlines of Esoteric Science* —is that the Proto-Indian had not yet distinguished between above and below, between heaven and earth; that it had not yet spoken of a subjective aspect within the human being and an objective aspect in the external world, and that it had not yet distinguished in the external world between that which is more spiritual and light and that which is more dark and physical, whereas in a later period, in Primordial Persian thought, the two were distinguished, and the interactions between them were conceived as mediated by the Tao or by something that constitutes a rhythmic balance.

[ 24 ] What happened there? How did humankind leave behind that earlier stage, in which it had not yet distinguished the spiritual-light from the physical-dark, and how did it come to conceive of such a contrast, such polarity or duality?

[ 25 ] When we consider what is contained in these documents, and allow the feelings that live on in these documents and traditions to influence our own state of mind, we come to realize: In those earliest times, human beings were in such a relationship with their environment that they had to interfere with it as little as possible. Although, from the perspective of our—admittedly correct—views, they lived on a high spiritual level, they also lived, on the other hand, in animal-like innocence. For everything they experienced—that sense of oneness with the universe, which was later conceived as having been breathed forth by Brahma—was, after all, purely instinctive.

[ 26 ] All of this was possible only for a person who did not interfere with the natural world, who placed himself within it, I would say, like an animal, like a bird that takes whatever food nature offers it, that does not first have to work for its food but, at most, simply retrieves it—just as a bird flies to obtain it—and thus lives in complete harmony with all the realms of nature, extending its love to all of them as well.

[ 27 ] When one delves into all of this with fully human insight, one immediately comes to see that what still lives in the Indian-Oriental worldview—as love for animals, as love for plants—emerges from the universal love that harms no being, and which therefore cannot yet have reached that fully awakened human consciousness in which people later found themselves, but lived in a spirituality that, though instinctive, was in a certain sense higher than the Greek spirituality and our own today; a spirituality that lived in an innocent relationship with nature, loved that nature, slaughtered nothing, and even consumed the plants on which people depended only by taking what grew wild, without specifically cultivating them. With such a perspective, one looks back on the people who inhabited the regions of South Asia some eight millennia ago. Later, something occurred that awakened in human beings an awareness of the radical distinction between the upper and the lower—between the spiritual, which cannot be altered, which is beyond human reach, and which is above, and the physical, which can be worked on and with which one can engage. Around the beginning of the 6th millennium, a change took place—its traces can be found in the decadent remnants of that era—through which people began to regard that which they could handle and change as something distinct, something under their control. They began to tame animals, turning wild animals into domesticated ones, and became farmers.

[ 28 ] This is evidently the great, radical turning point from the 7th to the 6th millennium B.C., when humans began to work nature, thereby distinguishing nature from that which they cannot work—which merely shines down as the luminous, glittering aspect upon that which is workable and can receive its form from humans. However, it is not only humans who exert such a formative influence; humans make tools, take up their primitive hoe—which is, after all, the instrument that preceded the plow—and it was probably women who first engaged in agriculture; he plows the soil by hand with it and sows seeds; but he also sees that, just as the earth can receive its form from him, so too does it cover itself with plants in the spring—not through his action—and that the plants wither away again in the fall. And just as the earth can receive its form from human beings, so too can it receive it from that which shines down upon him from outer space; and he comes to understand the difference between light and darkness, between spirit and matter.

[ 29 ] All of this developed in such a way that human beings first learned to distinguish themselves from the external world by working the land, by becoming farmers and herders. One can still see in Persian culture of a later period how everything is geared toward agriculture. One can see the connection between what is expressed in the Avesta and what has been described here, and one can see the progress made in comparison to the ancient Indian culture.

[ 30 ] All of this, however, unfolds in such a way that at first human beings are still unaware of themselves as selves; they identify with the external world; they are, so to speak, entirely in the grip of instinctive inspiration; and from this instinctive inspiration, he progresses to a later state of soul development that emerges in the Near East at the beginning of the third millennium as the pictorial Chaldean culture—of which we can say that human beings have now advanced to the point where they not only distinguish between the upper and lower realms but also engage with the constellations; that he invents all manner of instruments, water clocks, and so on. But if we remain within the Chaldean context, we find everywhere how deeply humanity lives in the external world, how, so to speak, it struggles to attain an inner experience.

[ 31 ] In Egypt, we see something different. We see that the Chaldean culture actually emerged later than the Egyptian; we can trace the Egyptian culture back a long way, but above all we can trace it back to those times for which we must also locate the Proto-Persian culture with its metamorphosis of the Chinese, where a distinction was made between the upper and the lower. But we see, precisely at the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., a powerful, radical upheaval within Egyptian culture itself. Just as we saw such a radical upheaval in the emergence of domesticated animals and agriculture, so too do we see another radical upheaval around the beginning of the 3rd millennium. We approach this in the following way: We see how, within Egypt, pyramid construction developed in later times. Today, we can trace Egyptian culture historically even further back than the period of pyramid construction. Pyramid construction appeared precisely at the beginning of the third millennium, but we can trace Egyptian culture further back. This Egyptian culture dates back to the Menes period before the 3rd millennium. That is not when the mighty pyramids were built. At the same time as pyramid construction in Egypt, we see something emerging that strongly suggests the Egyptians experienced an internalization of their entire state of consciousness. Undoubtedly, powerful tools had to be developed in order to build the pyramids. These tools could only have emerged from a certain type of metalworking, and this metalworking, in turn, could only have arisen from specific knowledge of the internal structure of metals.

[ 32 ] We see what would later be called chemical knowledge emerging in a primitive form among the Egyptians; in other words, we see how human beings begin to set their inner being into vigorous activity, yet are not yet aware that this inner being exists. But how human beings become aware of the power of this inner world becomes particularly evident when we consider Egyptian medicine, which was highly developed from a certain point of view. It is, of course, something entirely different from our own medicine. For the diseases that existed in Egypt, there were in fact specialists even in ancient Egypt, particularly ophthalmologists. The medical practice there made use of what is known as “temple sleep.” The sick were brought to the temples and induced into a kind of sleep in which they fell into dream-like states. What they recalled from these states was studied in its characteristic imagery by priest-scholars trained in such matters. These scholars identified, first, something that pointed to the person’s pathology by observing the unfolding of the inner drama of the dreams and the nature of the images—whether dark images followed light ones, or light ones followed dark ones, and so on. On the other hand, they found in the specific configuration of the dreams a hint as to the remedy that should be used. Through this observation of what a person experiences internally and what appears before the inner eye in dream images, the people of Egypt studied the inner physical condition of the sick person.

[ 33 ] We see this occurring in parallel with what was developing over in Chaldea. In Chaldea, people lived more in a world of external imagery. They invented tools such as their marvelous water clocks, which sprang from the imagery inherent in their nature. They lived so deeply within this imagery that they perceived time as shifting images. There, imagery was more of an external element in which human beings lived. For the Egyptians, imagery was something grasped in the innermost being of the human being—something understood so deeply that it was even studied in the figures of their dreams; in short, we see here a period in which human beings no longer felt themselves to be merely a part of the whole world, but in which they distinguished themselves from the world and became individualized in two ways: the Chaldean and the Egyptian. And we see the turning point in the emergence of the pictorial perception of the instinctive-imaginative, which presents itself to us in two distinct ways: in one form over there in Chaldea, and in another form over here in Egypt.

[ 34 ] And we see how, at the beginning of pyramid construction—which, in its dimensions and geometric proportions, is based on an understanding of the stages of human development, on the development of inner strength, and on the perception of this inner strength— we see how a third cultural epoch emerges—a cultural epoch in which instinctive imagination imparts a distinctive nuance to human development. And we see how, in all these periods, social conditions arise as a necessary consequence of what manifests as the state of the soul. When we study the social conditions of ancient India, we will find that people there lived together peacefully.

[ 35 ] In Proto-Persian, we see how human beings, by taking up the struggle against nature, acquire a kind of warlike element; and we see how this warlike instinct carries over into their imaginations. And because human beings are gripped at their very core—because this instinctive gripping of the human being in relation to itself can only manifest in the emotional and volitional realms—those impulses of power arise within them that find expression in the grotesquely large pyramidal structures, which are burial sites and are at the same time intended to serve as testaments to the outward power of those who rule. We see how the consciousness of power emerges, but also how foreign peoples are now intermingling from other regions, how they introduce different blood into that which, as imaginative and instinctive forces, also manifests itself in social conditions; we see how such peoples come more from the interior of Asia and mingle with the others. What they bring with them is connected to this feeling of being more than human—of feeling like a human being set apart from the environment.

[ 36 ] Among the Egyptians, this tendency intensified to such an extent during a certain era that they regarded themselves as divine beings; their sense of self-awareness was so strong that they viewed everyone else as barbarians and recognized as human only those who could live within inner images. Here we see the emergence of an intense sense of self-importance, and this development of the human being’s intense sense of self-importance is accompanied by an event that is linked to this state of mind.

[ 37 ] When we study the Code of Hammurabi, we find that he does not yet list the horse among domesticated animals. However, it appeared in cultural life shortly thereafter. Admittedly, Hammurabi lists donkeys and cattle, and somewhat later in his era, the horse is first mentioned in the documents as the “donkey of the mountain country.” The horse is called the “donkey of the mountain country” because it was brought over from the mountainous east. Peoples who migrated from Asia into the Chaldean region brought the horse with them, and with it the warlike element emerged. We first see this warlike element emerging in earlier times; but we see it further developed as the horse, along with other animals, was domesticated. And this, too, is connected to the state of mind of the people of that time. One could say that human beings did not mount the horse—and thereby, in a sense, strengthen themselves as individuals by chaining an animal to their own movement—until they had awakened to that degree of self-consciousness, as expressed in the pictorial imagination of the Chaldeans and as it was inwardly expressed in the dreamlike life of the Egyptians. The external circumstances of human development are so intimately connected with the metamorphosis of the soul’s constitution across successive epochs that one can say: on the one hand, the building of the pyramids, and on the other, the domestication of the horse; externally, they express the third cultural epoch, the Chaldean-Egyptian one, and internally, this is connected with the emergence of instinctive-imaginative experience.

[ 38 ] In Egypt, what emerged during the Pyramid Age as a high culture—one that, however, expressed itself entirely in a dreamlike, imaginative manner—began to decline relatively early. This culture dawned at the beginning of the 3rd millennium and was, in fact, in decline after four centuries. The spiritual disposition underlying this culture, even after it itself begins to decline, continues to live on, spreading from Asia into the Near East and Asia Minor, crossing over to the European continent, and—as it plays out there—is still clearly perceptible even in what comes from Asia Minor and from the earlier Greek culture. It is still discernible in the Homeric epics and their worldview. But as we approach the Homeric epics, we are already drawing near to a radical turning point. The worldview underlying the Homeric poems still clearly reveals the pictorial, the imaginative conception, and that view of humanity that is rooted in the pictorial. When Homer describes Achilles or Hector—aside from the fact that he alludes to the pictorial element through images viewed from the outside, for example when he says: “the swift-footed Achilles, Hector, the hero with the billowing plume on his helmet”—he presents the subject in such a way that one must see it vividly with the inner eye of the soul in order to grasp its unique character.

[ 39 ] We can still see traces of the Chaldean influence in Homer’s entire worldview. This changes as Greek culture developed—the culture we then find in Aeschylus and Sophocles and in Greek sculpture—and we can distinguish it from the earlier culture by recognizing how strongly the impulse to perceive human beings in their true humanity lived within the Greeks. When we look at what was pictorial among the Chaldeans, we can already see how plastic perception emerged in pictorial form, and we see this particularly among one of the peoples who were at least geographically close to the Chaldeans—the Sumerians. We see, however, that this people, just like the Egyptians, is only just beginning to depict human beings externally. We then find among the Greeks, both in drama and where drama is transferred into the realm of sculpture, how the human being is to be grasped in his outward manifestation. I would say that the human being of the third epoch felt himself strongly by living out his deep, instinctive forces. In Egypt, this was expressed through the construction of the pyramids, where, in a sense, human power was allowed to grow to gigantic proportions in the act of building them; and among certain Asian tribes, who lived particularly warlike lives, it was manifested in mounting a horse and thus feeling at one with it. The Greek then goes on to say: I have no need of external means; all human power lies within my own skin. — And he sculpturally shapes those human beings who are already perfect within themselves in a way that incorporates into the human being everything that a preceding epoch had still sought through an external embodiment. This complete immersion, this living fully within the human condition and seeking all that is highest within the human being itself—we find this fully realized in the Greek spirit, and it later manifests itself in a different, more external way, as expressed in Roman culture. In a sense, we can still see this today when we recall Caesar walking across the Forum or the other figures in the Roman toga—how, in forms far more abstract than in Greece, this force that shapes human beings with the highest power and is felt within the human skin manifested itself.

[ 40 ] A new era begins around the 6th century B.C. The Homeric era preceded it. We see this new era developing with particular strength and vigor in Greece, where it rose to greatness over the course of about four centuries before eventually entering a period of decline.

[ 41 ] And now Christianity enters the picture. While the Greek still sensed something fully alive when he stood before his statue of Zeus, the Roman essentially saw only an abstract concept when he looked at his statues. This tendency toward abstraction grew ever stronger; and even in the 4th century A.D., in the Roman Senate chamber, when the senators entered, each would scatter a grain of incense into the glowing flame before the statue of Victoria before taking his seat as a senator. We see how, in an abstract, purely conceptual form—which is nonetheless reality—what was still perceived in Greece in the statues of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo, in the highest fullness of existence, lives on in a statue that is itself perceived as abstract; there, people still sensed something like the magical weaving of the gods’ powers themselves within Zeus and Athena. In Rome, everything has become an abstract concept.

[ 42 ] We then see how Emperor Constantine, who introduced Christianity, had this column removed from the Senate chamber because he believed it had lost all meaning in light of the Christian worldview. We see how Julian the Apostate once again immerses himself in the fully human worldview of the fourth epoch, how he has the Column of Victoria carried back into the Senate Hall, how he allows the old ceremonies to be performed once more with the senators—yet how he can no longer restore the old ways, and how he ultimately perishes because of it. For the arrow that struck him was the arrow of an assassin hired by his enemies.

[ 43 ] And then, out of all this, emerges the era that I will describe in greater detail later, the age in which human beings are characterized by inner spirituality, intellectuality, and rational faculties—an age that, in its own distinctive way, developed throughout the Middle Ages, when people reflected upon reason itself, as happened in Scholasticism, where disputes raged over nominalism and realism. Then the 15th century dawns, and with it a completely different spirit emerges—the spirit that then led into the age of natural science, the spirit that was particularly strongly developed in its early stages in Galileo and Copernicus, the spirit that brought us the great advances in human consciousness, a spirit that represents an internalization in contrast to the Greek spirit—even if it later degenerated into materialism in the 18th century — and which then revealed so much of the outer world of nature in the 19th century.

[ 44 ] And today we stand at a true turning point. I certainly do not wish to put forward Spenglerian fantasies about historical eras. But there is something else I want to say. We look back to the beginning of the Egyptian era, to the dawn of the age of pyramid-building, which is also heralded by other signs; we see how the first stage of consciousness in the understanding of the human being emerges there; we see how the next stage begins in the 8th century B.C., how in Greek and Roman culture the spiritual constitution of the people of that era develops through the grasping of “humanity as such”; how this era comes to an end and the internalization of the intellect begins at the start of the 15th century.

[ 45 ] So, in a sense, we are looking at three major turning points: a turning point marking the beginning of the Egyptian-Chaldean era, we see the beginning of the fourth era, the Greco-Latin era, and we see the emergence of the era that introduced the natural sciences—an era that, in turn, brought about something akin to the construction of the pyramids, something that represents a special infusion of new vitality into human development.

[ 46 ] We see four centuries of the heyday of the Pyramid Age, then see it fade away—fade away radically—and only that which asserted itself in the imagery of Chaldean culture remains

[ 47 ] has—the transition into Greek culture. In the 8th century, we see a new era dawning; four centuries later, it fades away in Greek civilization. We see it becoming abstract in Roman civilization. We see how, then, a new era begins again at the start of the 15th century—the era that brought us the scientific approach, intellectuality, and rationality. And today we are roughly at a point in time—four hundred to five hundred years after this radical turning point—that corresponds to the period of decline in Egypt following the beginning of the third millennium, and to the period of decline in Greece following the beginning of the fourth historical era. We must be vigilant today so that we, as civilized people, do not suffer the same fate as the Egyptians did four hundred years after the dawn of the third historical epoch, or as the Greeks did four hundred to five hundred years after the dawn of the fourth epoch—so that we, who are at the same distance behind the dawn of the fifth epoch, do not suffer the same fate.

[ 48 ] The Romans were unable to carry forward what was still fully alive among the Greeks; they were only able to introduce abstractness and intellectualism into life, which then, however, withered away in the dead Latin language. We must pay attention to all this today because we have become more self-aware than the Greeks were; and out of this self-awareness, we must ensure that we prevent from within the decline that occurred among the Greeks and which stands as a terrible example. Thus, we must learn from history so that we do not suffer the same fate as those who were bound to grow weak because they had become attached to the external. We must overcome what could not be overcome in earlier epochs. And when we say we must learn from history, this must be done in such a way that we steel our strength, that we remain vigilant regarding what earlier times teach us—so that we learn not only to avoid the mistakes made by individual people, but also those that, strictly speaking, cannot even be called mistakes, but rather necessary shortcomings in human development. We must overcome what threatens to befall humanity today, just as it befell a previous generation. We must emerge from a great crisis. And we can be certain that we can only understand the essence of our present crisis if we grasp it from the depths of humanity’s historical development. In doing so, however, we will also understand how natural science is to become spiritual science. For this can only be understood if we are able to grasp it from within the entire spirit of human development.