The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The History of Humanity in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Thoughts and inner struggles that, until relatively recently, were the concern of only a few individuals distinguished by their special education must, by the very nature of humanity’s development, become a matter of universal concern in the present day. The day before yesterday, I took the liberty of speaking here about such a universal concern—one that was previously, to a greater or lesser extent, a matter of reflection for only a few individuals—namely, gaining an understanding of the distinctive characteristics of the various peoples living across the earth. Today I would like to speak about another such matter; I would like to speak about what, under the influence of our humanity—which necessarily strives for the new—is to become of what can be called history, the history of human development in the broadest sense of the word.

[ 2 ] When, not too long ago, the question—How should we actually approach the history of humankind? — was still more or less a matter for scholars, the distinguished art writer, art theorist, and art critic Herman Grimm—whom I have often mentioned here in these lectures—made a statement that, in a certain respect, is extraordinarily significant for evaluating our contemporary view of history. Herman Grimm says—in an attempt to characterize what is today widely regarded as history, and specifically what is written as history—that humanity today feels it is dragging far too much dead weight along with this history.

[ 3 ] While we certainly must admire what has been revealed to humanity in recent decades through all manner of excavations and discoveries of external documents, we must nevertheless say that the accumulated material—the material gathered in the form of notes throughout history—lacks, in today’s historical consideration of humanity, the broader perspectives. And it is these broad perspectives, and these alone, that can give history a value worth living for. For when does history have a value worth living for human beings? It has such value only when what can be contemplated within it—the past destinies of humanity and its cultural forms—can yield a result for our own soul, something that warms our own heart, so that from this warmed heart forces may develop that are capable of properly grounding us in life. In this regard, we must acknowledge that we are burdened by a certain weight in our current historical perspective and that the broad perspectives we need most today—in light of the most pressing needs of contemporary humanity—are lacking.

[ 4 ] Not that historical perspectives on earlier times did not, in their own way, offer such broad perspectives. Not that we cannot appreciate what it meant for a young man or a young woman to become acquainted with the great historical figures of antiquity and to emulate them, thereby fulfilling the saying used by the poet: “Each must choose his own hero, following in his footsteps up the path to Olympus.” But the very act of choosing such individual figures as role models, and of incorporating what has been proven true about them into one’s own will, depended, after all, on living in an era in which lively admiration could spring forth for personalities and for legal, political, or ecclesiastical institutions that flourished in those times from which we have now moved on. To put it somewhat radically, one might ask: How can young people today be as enthusiastic about Alexander the Great as they once were, when they have become more or less indifferent to the very thing that Alexander the Great himself regarded as his ideal? In earlier times, a great mass of humanity had to look to individuals who managed the affairs of this humanity within vast empires—empires they had founded through conquest—so that history, in its ancient form with its grand perspectives, could exert its influence on this humanity, particularly on the will of the people.

[ 5 ] This is indeed the most significant fact of recent history: that the members of the broad masses of humanity must participate in all public life; that everything that bears even the slightest human semblance seeks to come forward and regard the affairs of humanity as its own. This is what ultimately flows through our present as a legitimate democratic spirit. People are now taking part in the great public affairs of life—affairs toward which they have become more or less indifferent, or at least uninterested, in what once inspired the people of earlier ages. This is the crux of the matter—because humanity’s intellectual interests have spread democratically among all people—this is the point where the necessity arises to arrive at a new way of viewing history. And for those who allow the events of the present to truly take effect on them with an open mind—especially for those who can truly feel the plight of the present age—for them, among the many other conceptual or ideal questions, among the great intellectual questions of the present, there is this one: How can we instill in children—and later in young people—an appreciation of our ancestors that has such an impact, such a profound experience, that the will can be strengthened and a clear sense of direction in life can be established precisely through the influence of a historical perspective? Thus, what interests us as human beings in the first place—the spirit in the developmental history of our own earthly race—is interwoven with the great questions of education, pedagogy, and didactics; and in this way, everything is ultimately interwoven with the great social question of our time. And the point is that, as was said the day before yesterday and in last week’s lectures, we live in the age of intellectualism—that age in which the intellect plays a leading role in the ordering of human affairs. This human intellect, in its sobriety and dryness, has not been suited to writing history in such a way that it can truly become what it must become—in the sense of what has just been said—if it is to retain its proper value for humanity. It is precisely here that Spiritual Science believes it can do its part toward a renewal of the historical perspective.

[ 6 ] Spiritual Science is based on the premise of gaining insight through the enrichment of a person’s inner life. What our knowledge and our other human faculties are in ordinary life is to be developed through Spiritual Science into a higher form of perception and into an elevated soul life inspired by this perception; this is to be developed in the same way that a child’s faculties are developed from a lower stage to those of an adult; the faculties lying dormant within the human being are to spring forth from within. A strengthened power of thought and a will disciplined through strict self-control are to draw forth from the deepest inner core of the human being powers of knowledge and insight capable of looking into those spiritual depths of the world and of human existence of which [without these abilities] they can at best have only a vague inkling.

[ 7 ] This is what is unique about this spiritual insight, as it is understood here: that it encompasses the whole person. If we can say that, with its striving for clarity, the intellectualistic understanding—which has grown so vast over the last three to four centuries—not only dominates our life of understanding but also our practical life; if we can say that it is primarily something that engages the human mind, the purely intellectual realm of the human being, then we must say that Spiritual Science strives no less for complete clarity, for inner logic, and for illuminating concepts; but that these concepts, because they arise from the human being’s previously trained thinking and will, call upon the powers of the whole human being. It would be a great mistake to believe that Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, seeks to draw upon obscure feelings, or that this Spiritual Science has anything in common with all those nebulous, mystical currents with which it is so easily confused. No, its path is to be such that it gains clear ideas and insights about the spiritual realm of the kind that are sought with clarity, precision, and exactness only in the natural sciences. But these ideas are to spring from such a development of the human soul life that—despite their clarity and precision—they fill the whole human being with their power and engage the whole human being. While we are generally not engaged with our mind and feelings when we recognize today’s laws of the universe as formulated by the natural sciences, and while few impulses for the will spring from these scientifically formulated laws, it can be said that what is recognized in the field of Spiritual Science regarding the interrelationships of the world truly pulses through the human soul and transforms the person to such an extent that it pours into the will, enabling the person to orient themselves and engage in the practice of life, so that they may act in accordance with humanity’s great mission on Earth.

[ 8 ] If one understands correctly what this is all about—I have often described in these lectures exactly how a person arrives at such an understanding—then one will easily be able to grasp what follows.

[ 9 ] When one first considers the individual human body, one actually does so only by observing what is present. When we observe the parts of the human body—whether as laypeople or scientists—as the human body presents itself, we actually regard it as something that exists in the present, even though this human body bears within itself the traces of its own past. No matter how scientifically we observe a human body, we pay little attention to what that body has preserved from the past. When we turn to ordinary soul life, things are already different; there we do not merely observe the present in a person, but as human beings we look into our own past, all the way back to near birth. There we synthesize in our memory everything we have essentially experienced. We must realize that we would be spiritually ill if we could not properly extend our memory beyond our experiences. There we extend our interest from the present moment into our immediate past. Indeed, we expand it in a different way by seeking to draw from this past the impulses and forces of the past itself to shape our future. We connect the present with the past and the future. Thus, a certain elevation in our perspective can already be seen in ordinary life when we rise from the view of the physical to the experiences of the soul.

[ 10 ] If we now proceed within this spiritual realm and develop ourselves in such a way that we cultivate the power of thought, progress from thinking to seeing, and move from the will to inner, spiritual experience, then something entirely different emerges. When we, as it were, survey the few decades we have to live through here as earthly human beings—by looking back on our individual earthly development from childhood to adulthood—and take stock of our existence within ordinary soul life—a new element of our entire being enters our innermost being; our own past enters our memory. When we expand our human understanding through spiritual insight—when we develop beyond ordinary, earthly perception to perceive the spiritual—then the connection with the developmental history of all humanity enters our vision. So paradoxical

[ 11 ] No matter how it may still appear to many members of present-day humanity, it must nevertheless be said: Much will depend, for a wholesome and flourishing soul-spiritual development into the future, on understanding how human beings—by simply embracing their entire humanity within themselves and continuing to develop their strength and their power of insight—become one with all of humanity. In this way, what we can investigate about history through external documents is supplemented by what we can recognize inwardly through the insight we have thus gained: our connection to all of humanity, as members of which we then feel all the more strongly.

[ 12 ] And here lies the path, which I can, however, only sketch out in broad strokes today: to begin by ascending, through Spiritual Science, to a comprehensive historical perspective that can then serve as a common thread running through the history of human development. In the natural sciences—which, with some justification, have in recent times come to encompass [above all] the physical and bodily aspects of human beings—one speaks of the so-called biogenetic law. It has become famous in connection with modern theories of descent. I need only characterize it here in a few words. It states that as the human being develops as an embryo in the womb before birth, it passes through—as if repeating them—all the stages of development that are represented in the various animal forms. Development begins with the human being first resembling lower animals, taking on a fish-like form. It then develops through higher animal forms until it gradually assumes the human form, which then comes into the world. It is said that the development of the human being is a repetition of those physical, animal-like forms that the human being went through before assuming its present human form. The development that a human being undergoes from conception to birth is a brief repetition of what humanity has undergone over the course of—as they say—millions of years in its evolution of form. Attempts have now been made to link this scientific finding—and one cannot call it anything else—to an external, intellectual observation; I do not wish to dwell here on the greater or lesser validity of this finding. Attempts have also been made to view the spiritual-soul aspects and the historical development of the human being in a similar way. The aim is to view what is developing as contemporary culture—that which characterizes people today as civilized human beings, as people with a certain level of education—in relation to the past, just as one views embryonic development in relation to the past. And one has even come to investigate how the primordial cultures, so to speak, take on their particular, repetitive form during human childhood, and how, as the human being grows up, he repeats later cultures, and so on, until—after having repeated the earlier epochs from birth through childhood—he develops into what he actually is as a human being living in this time.

[ 13 ] Spiritual Science enables a certain degree of self-knowledge precisely because, through spiritual exercises and the strengthening of the soul’s powers, one gains a more intimate understanding of the human being; for through this, one can observe the course of human life—as it presents itself to us in ourselves or in others—more precisely than is possible with today’s superficiality or than is attempted in contemporary psychology or similar disciplines. And it then becomes apparent that when a person advances toward the possibility of true self-knowledge through Spiritual Science, this self-knowledge actually yields something different from what is still commonly assumed today. This self-knowledge gained through Spiritual Science actually reveals many astonishing things about childhood; even if not exactly [using the methods of natural science], Spiritual Science nonetheless offers a great deal of extraordinarily important insight into the stages of childhood. Yet this is precisely what is important for the renewal of pedagogy: that all that is required is a precise and honest application of ordinary human abilities; in this way, one will be able to understand the developing child and become a proper teacher and educator of that child, provided one follows the principles of Spiritual Science, even if one has not personally attained the ability to see. One can be a competent teacher in the sense of Spiritual Science if one simply has the sincere will to engage intimately with the development of the human being within the child, even without being able to see.

[ 14 ] But this is not the case with regard to the earlier stages of individual human life. One actually becomes aware of what is essential here only when one has developed one’s powers of cognition to the extent possible within Spiritual Science. Then one realizes that, beginning around the age of 30, inner capacities are already present in the human being, though barely hinted at; one realizes that they emerge, as it were, intimately into the soul life from unknown depths, but that at first they manifest themselves so faintly in ordinary life that one cannot really make use of them—they are so faint that they are drowned out by what assails the human being through the external affairs of the world. One must observe quite intimately to see what continually seeks to emerge in the soul life of a person in later life, appearing not in its original form, but as if it were the echo of something entirely different from what it is now. And if one looks more closely, one discovers something quite remarkable through spiritual insight: If one wishes to consider the natural foundation of the human being in its connection with the prehistoric forms through which humanity has passed, then one must even look at embryonic development—the stage of human development preceding childhood—one must go back to the very beginning of life. But if one wishes to consider the historical development of humanity, then one must look to the final years of individual human development. Then one must look at the innermost faculties that today seem to flit through the soul, never quite coming to the surface. They are just as much rudiments, hints of something that preceded them and is now historically past, as the suggestive forms of embryonic development in the womb today are hints of what [has passed in the history of development. To understand the natural development of the human being, one must go back to the beginning of life; to understand historical development, one must, by sharpening the powers of insight through Spiritual Science, acquire the ability to perceive the end of human life.

[ 15 ] If one seeks to penetrate that which, I might say, appears like a faint evening glow in today’s humanity once one has passed the age of thirty, then one learns, in these shadows that flit through the life of the soul, to recognize that which alone makes one understand the other—that which echoes from long-past eras of human development. One then turns one’s gaze to what are called prehistoric cultures; indeed, one even sharpens one’s perception of the prehistoric, which has left only its final echoes recorded in history; one lets one’s gaze wander back from the Vedanta philosophy of the Indians, from the Vedas, to that from which they originate—must originate—for they do not appear as original products but as final outcomes; and one learns to recognize the basis of that remarkable element of power that permeated ancient Indian culture, that first dawn of an earthly culture. One finds a kinship with what lives as a shadow in the human age, with what once lived in humanity with the freshness of youth and shaped the culture of primeval times. One then gradually comes to recognize the spiritual reversal of the fundamental biogenetic law in nature. One learns to recognize how, in those ancient times—to which one must indeed go back if one wishes to understand the history of human development—human beings retained, right up to their oldest age, the capacity for physical development, to which a capacity for spiritual and soul development was linked. Today, during our childhood, we make an important leap—also for our soul life—around the age of seven, when the teeth begin to change; at which point an important developmental phase of childhood is completed. The body undergoes a metamorphosis, and spiritual and psychological development accompanies this metamorphosis. And again, when sexual maturity sets in, the body undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being’s spiritual and psychological constitution also accompanies this physical metamorphosis. Human beings develop what they do spiritually and psychologically during these stages of life simply because their bodies also undergo this development. Soon enough, however, we humans lose the ability to perceive such transformations, or even to acknowledge them. It is true that we undergo another transformation in our early twenties; it is more subtle, yet still clearly present. But the transformations that occur at the end of one’s twenties—and especially those that occur even later—are actually present only as shadows. And only those who sharpen their vision through Spiritual Science notice how these shadows of the transformations emerge—transformations that were, however, present with full clarity in earlier stages of human development. Just as today we experience the transition through tooth replacement and sexual maturity—both physically and psychically—only during childhood, and just as, by virtue of being natural human beings, we simultaneously undergo a psychic-spiritual development and feel, as it were, united as whole human beings in our development—while later our psychic-spiritual aspect separates and goes its own way— so, in earlier epochs of the Earth’s development, human beings underwent spiritual and soul metamorphoses that were clearly intertwined with the physical.

[ 16 ] And once we have grasped this—once we have grasped how human beings in the earliest historical period we can trace lived entirely within their own bodies on Earth, how they experienced what was within their bodies right up into old age— then we understand that a language so entirely different is spoken in the oldest documents that speak of humanity’s historical development. Then we also understand the freshness with which words of wisdom in these ancient documents come to meet us. Then we understand how, back then, something poetic was poured out over what we today produce only in abstract philosophy; then we understand how a figure like Confucius could produce the highest sayings of wisdom when we know that what we experience only in childhood was also experienced in those ages even when one’s hair had already begun to turn gray. Even then, human beings still experienced their physical nature. They did not speak merely from a more abstract soul-spiritual realm; they spoke of the most abstract matters of humanity with their whole being. This is what flows toward us not only from the writings, but also from what has been handed down and overheard regarding the public affairs of this primordial humanity.

[ 17 ] And when we look back, we feel ourselves to be a part of this entire human development, this development of humanity; we sense what it must have meant that in those times, even as people grew old, they remained like children and experienced everything—as a child would—that we today experience in old age with a sober, matter-of-fact detachment. One understands how, back then, the entire inner life of the soul had a different hue; one understands that human coexistence was such that the childlike, youthful person looked up to the elderly in a way that we cannot today. For the young person could say to themselves: When I myself grow old, something will well up from within me that one can only experience by growing old; one can look forward to growing old, for this process of growing old gives one a joy that one must actually grow old to experience. And one could also look up to old age with reverence in a different way than when one believes that old age consists only of a sober, abstract exterior—as we today are mostly led to believe we must think of old age. The whole relationship of human beings to the world becomes different as a result. And we understand the entire character of ancient times inwardly, not merely outwardly and dryly, when we empathize in this way with the earliest periods of human development. We then come to understand how there was an early period of human development in which a person lived so fully within their body that they experienced their physical development simultaneously as a spiritual-soul reality—just as we today feel only when we experience the spiritual-soul realm as such. But in those days, human beings also felt themselves to be in complete harmony with nature. The people of those ancient times were not yet capable of despising, underestimating, or even overestimating the material world, for to them, everything spiritual was still revealed within the material. They ate and drank, but in what they consumed as food and drink, the spiritual was revealed to them. They did not know only the material. By picking the fruit from the tree, they could say to themselves as they savored it: Through the blossom, throughout the entire growth process, and in the power of the tree, the Divine is at work; it gives me the fruit; the Divine is in direct relationship with me as I enter into a spiritual-physical relationship with the world.

[ 18 ] This is how people of the first epoch on Earth perceived their economic, legal, and spiritual connections to nature, to other human beings, and to the spiritual realm. They perceived God as present on Earth; they perceived God in everything that revealed itself to them even in a physical sense—for they did not yet know a spiritual experience separate from materiality. Everything that presented itself to them in an earthly, sensory way, they also experienced spiritually; they organized their institutions according to what revealed itself to them as divine. These institutions—if one could study them today through an external historical perspective (though this is possible only through Spiritual Science)—the institutions that people established at that time can only be described as theophanies. One can only describe them by saying: Through everything that human beings experienced so inwardly, they were themselves—and their environment was—spiritual, and what took place in economic life was for them merely a reflection of the spiritual, like a shadow image of the spiritual. It is entirely incorrect, from the perspective of Spiritual Science, to view a primordial humanity that supposedly lived on Earth in an animal-like manner and acted on animal instincts, like more advanced apes. It is clear from Spiritual Science that human beings did indeed begin with the most material of experiences, but that they perceived this most material experience as spiritual and divine, and that they organized all economic activity on Earth as a reflection, a mirror image, of the spiritual-soul life. Humanity began its evolutionary history on Earth with spiritual experience—albeit in conjunction with matter. And it did not progress to anything else until it ceased to be able—in later life, in one’s forties, or even early fifties—to perceive the inner soul-spiritual metamorphoses in harmony with the aging body. Human beings were thus confined to bringing their sense of unity between the spiritual-soul and the physical to a close at a younger age. In the preceding cultural epoch, human beings still felt the harmony between the physical and the spiritual-soul well into their thirties—but no further. In the middle of life, people still sensed what it meant to enter their thirties physically and spiritually; then it ceased, just as today our ordinary experience ends earlier for us, just as we grow old earlier without truly experiencing the process of aging inwardly in conjunction with the body.

[ 19 ] This second period of human development—which begins around the 8th century B.C.—includes that marvelous culture which has exerted such a great, such a colossal influence on the entire civilizational life of modern times; it includes the development of Greek culture. Anyone who today cannot sense how, at its core, this Greek culture is fundamentally different from our own does not truly understand the history of human development.

[ 20 ] Oh, this Greek way of life! One truly enriches one’s human existence when one can put oneself in the shoes of the Greek, though no longer, like primitive man, remained young into old age, yet felt himself to be a unified human being until middle age, and still, even in his thirties, sensed a spiritual and emotional connection with his physical self—much as we experience it, for example, until the time of sexual maturity. That which lived and wove as a unity within the Greek nature formed the foundation for the harmonious art and spiritual creativity of Greek culture. This experience of the human being—even in middle age, in the middle stage of life—as a whole, as an inner harmony, made it possible for what we know as Greek civilization to develop out of the ancient forms of artistic creation, drama, and musical sensibility. We can only truly come to know this Greek civilization in a genuinely human way if we are able to direct our gaze toward the individual Greek. Oh, this Greek—he is to be our representative of this second epoch in the history of human development. He also viewed the nature around him differently than we do. Because the growth forces of his soul and spirit were still being drawn upon well into his thirties, these growth forces flowed right into his sensory perception. And anyone who can appreciate what it means for physical forces to act within the human being in such a way that they express themselves in the soul and spirit well into one’s thirties will have to admit: A different force pushes its way into the senses themselves, and this results in a different perception of sensory reality. In this way, one learns to empathize with the entire development of humanity; one learns to feel one’s way into the individual human beings of antiquity. One learns to feel how they perceived their surroundings in such a way that nature—with all its blossoms, with all its other manifestations, indeed with the stars, the sun, and the moon, with the clouds, and so on—had a different effect on them in all its nuances of impression than it has on us. When one sensitively traces what was different about the Greeks, one can say to oneself with inner insight: The Greeks vividly perceived precisely the brightness in their natural surroundings—everything that stood out, that shone and glittered—while they had little appreciation for what did not shine or glitter. Anyone who believes that the Greeks saw their surroundings in the same way we see them has no sense of the history of human development; they view it much like a forty-year-old who believes that a child already sees the world just as he does. But the Greeks, who lived during the second epoch of human development, perceived the nature around them with great vividness. He saw that which glows and shines, that which spoke directly to the human being; he also saw in other people that which is more active from person to person, that which is more radiant from person to person. Right down to the color of another person’s face, the Greek saw his fellow human beings differently than we do. This is what Spiritual Science must say based on its empathetic understanding of the history of human development.

[ 21 ] This is not refuted by external observation, but rather fully confirmed, no matter how one may argue about these matters. Anyone who examines Greek literature with an open mind cannot help but notice that the Greeks do not actually have a specific word to express the color blue. They have a word, yAauxög (glaukos), which they use to describe dark hair and also the dark-colored eyebrows of certain people, and they use the same term to refer to the blue stone lapis lazuli. They use the same word to describe everything blue and everything black—or, more generally, anything dark. It is also quite interesting that the Greeks have a word for green, xAwoög (chloros), but they use this word simultaneously to describe yellow resin, honey, and hair—just as people today who are color-blind to blue cannot distinguish between green and yellow, so that we can say: External history also confirms that the Greeks regarded the light colors as the ones that mattered to them; and that they did not yet have such a strong feeling for blue or for dark colors in general that they would have expressed this feeling specifically. Here we must recognize a completely different physical and psychological constitution of the Greek people. And this provides us with a historical perspective that allows us to perceive, from within, the course of progress across the earth. This leads us into the innermost being of the human being.

[ 22 ] And if we continue down this path and follow such perspectives even just once, then we will come to view other matters in the same way. Then one will understand why Roman writers tell us that Greek painters used only four colors—black, white, red, and yellow—and make no mention of the fact that they also painted in blue. Perhaps they, too, had what we perceive as blue and used it to cover surfaces, but they did not call it by that name. They perceived everything solely insofar as it was bright, luminous, and radiant. That is to say, they lived in harmony with what was active in nature, and they did not yet know the contemplative element. For one comes to recognize that this contemplative element can only emerge in the history of human development when the 1930s cease to influence human beings in such a way that they still perceive the spiritual-soul aspect in harmony with the physical-bodily aspect—when, so to speak, this sense of unity, in which one as a human being simultaneously experiences the metamorphoses of the physical-bodily and the spiritual-soul aspects, has already come to an end in the 1920s. Then what the human body of old age is primarily organized for begins to develop; then what emerges are things that, in earlier ages, were present in full clarity, but now appear only in traces, in shadows. If one observes these things impartially, one is led to say that in the present age, this dependence of the spiritual and soul aspects on the physical and bodily aspects normally ceases around the age of 26, 27th year for the average person, unless the person takes matters into their own hands by actively guiding their inner development; in which case, only those elements emerge within the human being that have been instilled there through childhood education. Now, something of the utmost significance becomes apparent when we view the history of human development in this way. We look back on earlier periods of human development. We can understand that people were more content back then with a form of upbringing in which the individual grew up in harmony with their surroundings through the natural process of imitation. We see the profound human significance of education and instruction emerge only in this third, “reflective” epoch. We come to recognize how we, as human beings, are situated within the history of the development of all humanity; we no longer perceive our relationship to humanity as a whole as something abstract. We feel our mission in this particular age; by belonging to it, we know that, for example, the tasks of education are particularly relevant to the present age of humanity—tasks among which the social question ranks as one of the most important.

[ 23 ] In the first epoch of humanity—and, to some extent, in the second—people could tell themselves in their youth—they could learn this from the sentiments and teachings of their elders—that as they grew up and grew older, they would experience this and that, which would become accessible to them simply through the physical changes they would undergo in old age. — In our time, what fills a person’s old age must be planted as a seed in their youth through education and instruction. And the time is drawing ever closer—it is already here to a large extent—when we must feel a strong obligation to educate young people in such a way that, throughout their later years, they can recall what they learned during their school years. Because life, in its basic events, no longer provides what was given to people in earlier epochs of human history, what is experienced during the school years must—I would say—be able to exert a temporally flexible influence, so that it may remain joyful, uplifting, inspiring, and invigorating throughout one’s entire life

[ 24 ] can resonate and shed light on things until they turn gray. In this way, history can gain new perspectives; in this way, history can in turn provide us with insights that also strengthen our will and can give us direction in life.

[ 25 ] This is what the Spiritual Science must repeatedly and consistently draw attention to: that by striving to penetrate more deeply into life and existence—all the way to those realms where this life and this existence reveal themselves as spiritual—it can also directly serve practical life.

[ 26 ] History that confines itself solely to the external will not be able to provide people with such breadth [of perspective] on historical development that simultaneously becomes a source of vitality within them. Nor does it provide ideas that can enlighten him about what has taken place in the development of humanity.

[ 27 ] It is curious, for example, to hear that one of the greatest historians of the era just past, Ranke, was always uncertain about how he should place the figure of Jesus Christ within the history of humanity. He was convinced that the figure of Jesus Christ should really be viewed solely from a religious perspective—that is, that he must be considered on a different plane than that of ordinary historical analysis. He was unable to place the life of Christ within the forces that shape history. Herman Grimm attempted to remedy this shortcoming of Ranke’s with a few suggestions, but he did not succeed, because in this regard, under present-day conditions, success can only be achieved through a Spiritual Science approach.

[ 28 ] What, then, has humanity essentially become as a result of becoming a “reflective” people, of having developed, since the mid-15th century, into this reflective, intellectualistic period? What has he become as a result of developing into everything that arises from intellectualism in the realm of technology, in the realm of external life, and in the realm of external knowledge—admittedly, as something great?

[ 29 ] In the first epoch—and to a large extent still in the second, for which the Greek can serve as our representative—human beings felt themselves to be part of the whole world, simply because their bodies are part of the whole world. They saw the lightning; he had an instinctive realization that the power inherent in lightning was akin to the power that lived within his own feelings. He felt himself to be at home within the whole of worldly existence. He was rich in inner experience because, fundamentally, he felt himself to be a part of the whole world; because what lived and wove within him as a human being was the very same thing that lived and wove throughout the whole world. He saw his own destiny in the course of the stars. He could trace not only what was natural within him, all the way to the farthest heights of the heavens, but also what was moral within him—he could trace it all the way to cosmic expanses.

[ 30 ] We today have different experiences. Since the dawn of modern intellectual life in the third epoch of human history—in which we have become reflective human beings—we have discovered that we are capable of precise calculation, gazing up at the starry worlds with Galilean grandeur and Bruno’s insight. But we bring down from them nothing but mathematical-mechanistic formulas about the planets and the sun’s orbit, and today, at most, what spectral analysis tells us about them. And here on this Earth, we have become lonely. We know we stand on this Earth, but we no longer feel any kinship with the vastness of the stars. If we live honestly within the modern mechanistic worldview, we can no longer feel ourselves to be a living part of the world. We stand alone with our Earth in the vastness of space; and regarding that which is not our Earth, we merely calculate. If we are honest, can we then still develop the biblical faith that Christ descended from the world we calculate in this way—from those heavenly heights—to accomplish, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the most important event, the very meaning of all earthly development?

[ 31 ] What humanity has achieved in the realm of calculation and mechanistic understanding is precisely what has led it away from a spiritual understanding of the history of humanity’s own development. Only Spiritual Science will be able to restore meaning to the fact that what lived within Jesus descended from spiritual heights, and that the great union of the spiritual world with earthly humanity was brought about for the sake of human progress. That the Mystery of Golgotha is a spiritual reality—this is what will only be able to emerge once again in full clarity before the soul of humanity through Spiritual Science.

[ 32 ] And then, when one experiences the Mystery of Golgotha from a perspective renewed by Spiritual Science, one might say that Spiritual Science also brings to light another fact—one that seems only incidental to the history of human development—but which has a profound effect on those who can perceive it in all its depth. Then, by applying this reversed fundamental law of biogenetics that I have described to you today, one discovers the fact that states: What human beings today experience in the epoch of their individual development is a shadowy hint of what was clearly experienced in body and soul by our human ancestors and is today experienced [only] in the external metamorphoses of humanity from earlier epochs of development. Just as the physical aspect of the human being at the embryonic stage is a repetition, in hints, of what was experienced by human ancestors over millions of years, so too is what occurs today in human adulthood a shadowy repetition of what was clearly and distinctly present internally in pre-humanity. In this way, we connect our present life with the past.

[ 33 ] And if you use the Spiritual Science methods that have often been described here—and which you can read about in my books *How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, *Esoteric Science*, *The Mystery of Man*, “The Riddles of the Soul,” you will be able to say to yourself that it is indeed possible, through inner vision, to understand how, in pre-Christian times, people remained capable of developing in this way—that is, how they experienced the physical-bodily realm inwardly, even in their spiritual and soul life, well into their thirties, right up to the late thirties. Then the trend continued steadily downward until our own time, the third epoch in the history of human development, in which human beings experience the spiritual and soul aspects together with the physical body only up to their early twenties. In between lies something that constitutes an important transition in human life.

[ 34 ] As human beings have evolved over the course of history on Earth, they have, in a sense, descended from the youthful, childlike experience of aging into those years when they experience only their “Unified Self” up into their thirties. From the depths of the world, a figure appeared to them who, up into their thirties, exemplified what they are meant to live out—so that in their youth they might absorb the forces necessary to carry into old age what they have thus absorbed in their youth. In the era following the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings can no longer carry into old age—through natural development—the forces they need in that stage of life. For this reason, the life of Christ Jesus—which extended only to the middle of his earthly life—has been presented to them on earth, a life that provided humanity with a divine-human model up to the age of 33. If a person grasps the powerful forces of this model so that they can realize inwardly: “Not I, but Christ in me,” we will structure all education and all instruction so that it is permeated by Christ, so that in youth we allow the child to absorb the forces which, as I have indicated, can extend—with temporal flexibility—into the highest age; in this way, we will permeate the whole human being with Christ—and thus we will work toward the progress of humanity in this area, based on an understanding of the history of human development.

[ 35 ] And just as I have been able to show in certain areas that a truly inner, living understanding of human evolutionary history, in turn, provides insights from the perspective of Spiritual Science—insights that can show us what we must do in our present age—so, too, can we demonstrate this in certain other areas. We can point out how human beings, through their physical development, were constituted in such a way that they recognized the divine in the material world. What we have inherited from this relationship between humanity and the divine continues to work within us; we need only nurture it independently, for today it seeks to be independent. It seeks to be nurtured as an independent element of our social life.

[ 36 ] In the second epoch of human development—during which a person is still only able to harmonize the physical-bodily with the spiritual-soul aspects, up until about the age of thirty, which lies in the middle of one’s earthly life—it is in this second epoch that, in particular, the instinctive forces of human soul life become fully awake, those instinctive forces of human soul life that find expression, for example, in the factors of public life that shape law and the state. Thus, in the second epoch of human development, we see the seeds sown for what we may well conceive of as law—not through reflection, but instinctively. That is why there is always something contentious in all legal concepts, because they arose instinctively during the second epoch.

[ 37 ] The third epoch, which began in the mid-15th century—as can be clearly traced historically—this third epoch, in which we still live today, is primarily a contemplative one. Humanity is withdrawing from the cosmos. Humanity is withdrawing from that with which humanity in the first epoch felt organically connected. Humanity is becoming lonely on Earth, and this growing loneliness in the spirit on Earth turns everything upside down. In the first human epoch, people took it for granted that the spiritual-soul aspect permeated the world, and they perceived the economic realm merely as a reflection of the spiritual-soul aspect. In our epoch, where human beings stand separated from the spiritual-soul aspects in the later stages of individual life—where they feel in harmony with their physical development as whole human beings only until their early twenties—economic life becomes decisive. Economic life extends into the structure of the state; the economic sphere becomes the state economy, becomes an empire. It becomes what we now see emerging—what then becomes a one-sided approach in Marxism, what becomes theory there and appears as if economic life were everything, and spiritual life, which was once everything, were merely a reflection of economic life—that is, as if spiritual life were merely ideology. Because we have separated ourselves from the external-physical realm through our natural development and through the history of human development—since this is the normal development of human nature—human beings must now, through their culture and civilization, seek harmony between what has become separated: the spiritual, which they must nurture in its independence because it no longer appears connected to the material, and the economic, which he must cultivate so that he can properly grapple with it, so that he can reintroduce the spirit that used to be a natural part of it. And in the middle, he must cultivate the state and legal system as an independent element.

[ 38 ] History, properly understood and contemplated from within, also gives us true social insight into the present. It lives on in what we wish to incorporate into the social organism today. Human beings have passed through [these epochs] by developing the three members of the social organism in a more or less one-sided manner. Now the time has come when, out of humanity’s consciousness, we must develop these three members into independent entities so that we may become strong enough to unite them—an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or political life, and an independent economic life—through our inner humanity.

[ 39 ] Greek civilization, which in its middle age still maintained a harmony between the spiritual-soul and the bodily-physical, was nevertheless doomed to divide people externally into classes: the class of teachers, the class of soldiers, and the class of providers. We strive for a social structure in which people are not divided into such groups, but rather in which life is structured in threefold terms, and each individual lives within each of these aspects; within every single person, the three aspects work together.

[ 40 ] But, ladies and gentlemen, what gives us the strongest reason to consider the Trinity is that historical perspective on humanity which allows us to gain new insights. I would like to say that, in a lively scholarly circle, Herman Grimm observed how the historical facts—which are so numerous today—are dragged along like dead weight, and how the broader perspectives are lacking. Indeed, as the history of recent years teaches us, we need such broad perspectives; yet what has [so far] sprung from human thought and feeling could only be experienced by individuals. The many people who come from the masses to participate in public affairs will not be able to draw inspiration from this kind of history—[as Herman Grimm presents it].

[ 41 ] If, from a perspective based on Spiritual Science, we establish a history of humanity that reveals how people, as they have journeyed through the millennia, have felt in one way at one time and in another way at another, if, through historical development, we learn from what every human being experiences within themselves—and must experience within themselves—in order to feel equal to all other human beings, then we will have a history that our age needs, and that the coming age will need: a view of history that is not confined to the intellect alone, a view of history that, while certainly drawing on clear and objective concepts, penetrates human life in such a way that the insights warm the heart, and the heart, warmed by these insights, becomes a source of will. And when one realizes that, ultimately, everything necessary for social progress does not depend on institutions—for these themselves depend on human beings—but must depend on human beings, then one yearns for the strong will within human beings to become the capacity for strong action, so that the institutions recognized and understood as necessary can actually be established. But the person we need—the creative, the discerning, the person who can orient themselves correctly in the public sphere—will be none other than the one who can purify and illuminate their will and their actions—not with dead, not with intellectualistic, but with living, spirit-filled insight. This insight will come to him, however, when he can recognize himself, with feeling, as a link in the entire history of human development; when he can point to humanity’s past, and from it a light will arise that will guide him to work, to act, and to shape the future.