The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

and soul. We may even no longer think of our intentions and will as the expression of
spiritual forces. Nowadays when the term human spirit is used it has a hollow ring to
it. Nevertheless human cultural development or evolution is indeed directed by the
human spirit, however we wish to term it.
Who Did Humanity Imitate?
Throughout this book I have drawn the analogy of the ontological development
of the human being with the evolution of humanity. Naturally this is no naïve literal
parallelism, yet instructive all the same. The young child learns through imitation of
adult role models and, to a lesser extent, the environment. Who then did mankind
imitate? Who were the role models for humanity? This question stands alongside another.
In times before individual or even group “I”-consciousness, whose purpose or intentions
came to expression? The two questions are linked in that both ask the nature of the higher
guiding spiritual principles that work behind or above or within, spiritual prepositions
that go beyond space and time, human evolution. If there is no Divine Plan and yet all
is not random drift, can there be a spiritual guidance that creates opportunities but does
not determine the outcome?
Rudolf Steiner’s answers to these questions are profound and challenging.
One place to seek some answers is in the book of lectures which Steiner reworked and
published under the title of The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity. 76 In
this book Steiner points to a second, higher self within each individual which guides
us through life. This higher self guides us as we stand upright, find our balance, learn
the language of our community and develop the conceptual faculties that enable us to
be universally human. He describes this higher self being under the guiding spiritual
principles.
At key moments in human evolution these spiritual forces or beings have
intervened to provide opportunities and stimulation for the human spirit to take a step
towards emancipation. At each of these key stages other forces, regressive forces were
also active, working in the opposite direction, binding humanity to a more one-sided
specialization, in effect to a more animal nature. Evolution has been the dynamic tension
between these two tendencies.
Had this not occurred, Steiner said, human beings could not have developed
the “I”-consciousness we possess today. What the child achieves today out of his or her
will forces, guided by a higher self that stands behind the child as a spiritual principle,
mankind achieved at various points in evolutionary history.
In the various hominid species the means to achieving the key evolutionary
stages such as bipedal upright walking were different. If we observe carefully, we can
see that each child achieves these key developmental stages in entirely individual ways
that only conform to broad general patterns and maturational timetables. The way each
child does it tells us something about him or her, about his or her unique individuality.
It must be so because each “I” is striving to bring itself to full expression in genetically
different body patterns, in differing circumstances. Nothing in development or evolution
is predetermined.
Early hominids were equally guided by a “higher self,” only the further we go
back the less individual these spiritual directing forces were. Just as all other species
have their specific life histories within fairly narrow bands of individual variation, so
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Recently reissued by Anthroposophic Press.
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