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An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

III. SLEEP AND DEATH

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Here, too, the unseen causes might appear intelligible to rational sense-observation from their visible effects, and whoever observes life with absolute impartiality will find that, with every fresh observation, this appears to be more and more true. The important question, however, is how to find the right point of view from which to observe their effects in life. Where, for example, are the effects of that to be found which occult science describes as incidents of the time of purification? How are the effects of the experience which, according to occult investigations, man undergoes in purely spiritual regions, manifested after this time of purification?

Problems enough press upon every serious and profound student of life in this domain. We see one man born in want and misery, endowed only with inferior abilities, so that on account of these facts, which are incident to his birth, he appears predestined to a miserable existence. Another, from the first moment of his life, is tended and cherished by loving hands and hearts; brilliant talents are unfolded in him; his gifts point to a successful and satisfactory career. Two opposite views may be taken when met by such questions as these. The one will adhere to what the senses perceive and what the understanding, relying on these senses, is able to comprehend. This view will admit no problem in the fact that one man is born fortunate and the other unfortunate. Even if the word "chance" is not used, there will be no question of thinking that such things are brought about through any law of cause and effect. And with regard to talents and abilities, such a view will consider them as "inherited" from parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. It refuses to seek the causes in spiritual events which the man himself met with before birth--regardless of heredity--and by means of which he shaped his talents and abilities.

Another view would find no satisfaction in such an interpretation. It would assert that even in the manifested world nothing happens in definite places or surroundings without our having to presuppose causes for the event in question. Even though in many cases such causes have not yet been investigated, they are there. An Alpine flower does not grow in the lowlands. Its nature has something which associates it with Alpine regions. Just so must there be something in a man which determines his birth in a certain environment. Causes belonging to the physical world alone are not sufficient to account for this. To a more profound thinker such an explanation appears in somewhat the same light as when one has dealt another a blow, the motive for which is not attributed to the feelings of the one but is to be explained by the physical mechanism of the hand.

Any explanation of abilities and talents solely by "heredity" is to such a viewpoint equally unsatisfactory. It is true one may say: "See how certain talents are inherited in families." During two and a half centuries musical talents were inherited by members of the Bach family. Eight mathematicians sprang from the Bernoulli family, to some of whom quite different occupations were assigned in their childhood; but the inherited talents always drove them to the family vocation. It may be further pointed out how, by an exact investigation of the line of ancestry of a person in one way or another the gifts of this person have shown themselves in the forefathers, and only represent the sum of inherited talents. Whoever holds the latter of the two views above indicated will be sure not to let such facts pass unnoticed, but to _him_ they cannot mean the same as they do to one who relies for his interpretation on the events of the world of sense alone. The former will point out that inherited talents can no more of themselves, combine into a complete personality than can the metal parts of a watch fit themselves together. And if objection is made that the co-operation of the parents may possibly produce the combination of talents,--that this as it were, takes the place of the watchmaker,--he will reply: "Look impartially at what is new in every child-personality, at that which is absolutely new; that cannot come from the parents, for the simple reason that it does not exist in them."

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