re the physical things of
the outside world today because he has got to clearness in his consciousness
and thereby the other soul forces have become more imperfect , as powerful
the will was in those days. The human will had influence on the whole
physical surroundings. Because it strives and is the upward trend in
the development, this will strove for the higher. Thus that was caused,
immediately from the living nature, what separated the centre of the
heavenly body in two, so that at that time already a kind of invagination
took place. One centre became two centres in a more mental way. We see
this separation of the centres achieved in the later development in
the separation of the earth and the moon.
These are sketchy indications
I could give you. However, you will see that the matters coincide. Who
tries to think consistently and strictly can admit this from the start.
I myself might give a rebuttal as I have indicated it in the outset
concerning Eduard von Hartmann. Habitual ways of thinking are something
temporary. Who studies history of the Middle Ages, for example, not
only the external one, because it is a wrong picture which is given
to us, finds my explanations verified.
Goethe also says that it
is basically only the historians' own spirit, in which the times
are reflected. It is the task of theosophy to show the development in
the past to receive an idea of the great human future. I have quoted
Goethe, because he deeply looked into these mystic, mysterious connections
of the world development. He used a strange figure, the “old man
with the lamp” in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the
Beautiful Lily. The lamp can only shine where another light shines.
I have shown that as the incarnation of ancient wisdom. Now we come
to an even more profound significance. It becomes clear to us what Goethe
means with the light which spreads its light only where light is. Where
the gift of clairvoyance is developed again, the lamp develops its whole
magic force. There we get to that time when the human being becomes
the flame to look back to this epoch in which he was a luminous being
when the ability developed to bring light into existence. Goethe knew
that this internal light was there once in the human being and that
the present-day seeing of light is a later developmental state.
Before the human being could
see the sun, he had to become an internally luminous being first; he
had to develop light in himself to show light to the light. Goethe was
a mystic; one does not know it only. At the head of his preface to the
theory of colours he pronounces it using the words of an old mystic:
Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?