The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

external reality of the senses, but I was too well aware of the self-existent spiritual,
resting upon its own foundation, independent of the sense-perceptible, to yield
the argument to the external world of the senses. But the problem was how to
build a bridge from this world to the world of the spirit. … Thus my search was
directed along the path from sense-observation to the spiritual, which was firmly
established in my inner experiential knowledge. Behind the sense-perceptible
phenomena, I sought, not for a non-spiritual world of atoms, but for the spiritual,
which appears to reveal itself within man himself, but which in reality inheres in
the objects and processes of the sense world itself.
Because of man’s attitude in the act of knowing, it appears as if the thoughts
of things were within man, whereas in reality they hold sway within the things
themselves. It is necessary for man, in experiencing world or appearances, to
separate thoughts from things; in a true experience of knowledge, he restores
them again to things.
The evolution of the world is thus to be understood in such fashion that
the antecedent non-spiritual, out of which the succeeding spirituality of man
unfolds, possesses also a spiritual beside itself and outside itself. The later spiritpermeated
sense-perceptible, amid which man appears, comes to pass by reason
of the fact that the spiritual progenitor of man unites with imperfect, nonspiritual
forms, and, having transformed these, then appears in sense-perceptible forms. 32
I will attempt to explain from a contemporary perspective what this might
mean. For the time being this concludes our brief explanation of the anthroposophical
understanding of the nature of the human being. For the reader who is unfamiliar
with these terms and concepts, I can assure you that I shall return to them in greater
descriptive detail in the course of the book. What you have just read is as much as can
be squeezed into an introduction. Bear with me, more will be revealed as we go along.
Steiner and Paleoanthropology
The science of paleoanthropology was only beginning to emancipate itself from
the tradition of noble amateur when Steiner wrote about human evolution. He was clearly
aware of discoveries in the field, whether it was Karl Gorjanovic-Kramberger’s discovery
of Neanderthal fossils at Krapina in Croatia, which Steiner referred to in a lecture in 1905
(although the monograph on the fossils only appeared a year later), or the discovery of
the Ice Age cave paintings at Altamira, which Steiner acknowledged as pre-historic. One
can only speculate on what his views would have been today, given the amount of data
and fossils available. In subsequent chapters I will explore what an anthroposophical
interpretation of this material might mean based on Steiner’s approach to the knowledge
available to him.
So what, in a nutshell, did Steiner believe his spiritual science could offer to the
study of human origins? In 1905 he gave a lecture, later printed under the title Haeckel and
Theosophy, in which he outlined the relationship between spiritual and natural science. 33
In those days he used the term “theosophy” for the spiritual science he later termed
_________________________
32
Steiner, R., Preface to the New Edition, 1923, A Theory of Knowledge, originally published in
1886, this edition 1967, Anthroposophic Press, pXVI.
33
Steiner, R., 1935, “Two Essays on Haeckel,” the lecture dated October 5, 1905, given in Berlin.
All the following quotes come from this lecture, unless otherwise stated.
90