eloped to be fighters, others were similar, but more developed for work, for patience, and so on. The various bodies thus became different in their development and also in their external form. The lower animals of today insects and others, had branched off during an earlier stage in earth evolution and become something separate.
We'll now only consider animals from the fishes upwards. Mammals did not yet exist when the descent came into the waiting body which externally, not inwardly, was more or less at the level of a fish's body. The human being of that time had to move around half by swimming and half by floating, and had fin-like organs for that purpose. What happened to his body on earth happened because of the human soul that dwelt in it. It took long periods of evolution to transform it into the god-like body of today. Much came to a standstill along that long route. But because the earth continued to go through its transformation, coming to a standstill became bodily regression. Take two siblings, for an example. One changes at every stage of life, the other remains at childhood level. He will no longer look like a child when he's 60, however. That is how the fishes of today have regressed, looking different from the way they did before.
Humanity continued to evolve, configuring everything, finally also the mammalian body. All the time some would come to a standstill, human bodies grown decadent. If you really enter into it you will realize that all animals have aged at their juvenile stage, prematurely, assuming fixed forms which they should have gone beyond. They have crystallized, as it were, in the whole of their development.
Further evolution did, however, put man in a peculiar position where some of his qualities are concerned. He lost his certainty. Apes kept imprisoned will soon develop tuberculosis and other diseases. Animals do not tolerate the human way of life. They also have some degree of certainty where the choice of foods is concerned. A cow walking across a pasture knows exactly which herb is good for it. Man no longer has this. He needs uncertainty in order to determine his free choice. Present-day uncertainty is necessary so that certainty may be gained at a higher level. Man adapts to the higher level. Growing uncertain thus guarantees his independence. Certainty has remained where development has not gone so far that the I is at work in the individual entity. We should not be surprised at the wisdom we see in the animal world any more than at the wisdom of our own hand. An individual beaver is just the group soul's unskilled worker on the physical plan. The ant is at a very different level from the beaver and much further removed from us, for it separated off at a much earlier planetary existence of the earth. In taking just a single route it has gone further than man. For human beings, thinking, feeling and doing are firmly connected. If I see something I like, I reach out for it. The idea leads to the action. Without this firm connection people would be very unsure of themselves. Spiritual training tears will, idea and feeling apart, separating them completely. This will only come true for the whole of humanity at the Jupiter stage of earth evolution. But before he experiences this, the pupil meets the guardian of the threshold who gives him clarity concerning the whole of his life so far.
Some animal group souls went prematurely through this separation of soul functions into three. It is a fact that some parts in the brain of a spiritual pupil are differentiated like the ants in an ant heap. The ant did this prematurely and continues to be immature but clever like a child. The beaver group soul will have to catch up on things it has missed, the ant soul has thrown away its opportunity, going in a completely different direction. Animal souls are human souls that have grown one-sided. Oken said the tongue was a cuttlefish. This should not be taken literally, of course, but the creature in whom tongue properties came too much to the fore has remained stationary at that point. Paracelsus said 