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An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

III. SLEEP AND DEATH

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It ought not to be denied--apart from clairvoyant observation of course--that by means of the force producing power of the corresponding thoughts, the just cited proof is the only one which stands firm before all unprejudiced logic. All other considerations are no doubt very important, but in all of them there will be something on which an opponent might seize as a point of attack. Surely one who has acquired a fairly impartial way of looking at things will find something in the possibility and actual fact of man's education, which has the power of logical proof that a spiritual being is struggling for existence within the sheath of the body. He will compare animals with man and say to himself that at the birth of the former there appears certain definite qualities and capacities as something, decisive in itself, which plainly shows how it has been designed by heredity and how it will unfold itself in the outer world. We see how a young chicken carries out life's functions in the appointed way from its birth; but by means of education something comes into touch with man's inner life which is independent of any connection with his heredity, and he may be in a position to assimilate the effects of such external influences. The educator knows that such influences are met by forces coming from man's inner nature. If this is not the case, all instruction and training are meaningless. The unprejudiced educator finds the boundary line between inherited talents and those inner forces of the man himself which shine through them and originate in former lives, to be very sharply marked. It is true, we cannot bring forward such weighty proofs for things of this kind as we can for certain physical facts, by means of scales; but then these are just the intimate things of life, and one who has the power to appreciate such impalpable proofs will find them convincing--even more convincing than palpable reality.

That animals may be trained, and thus, to a certain extent, acquire qualities and capacities by education, is no objection to one who is able to see reality, for apart from the fact that transitional stages are met with all over the world, the results of training an animal by no means fade away with its individual existence, as is the case with a man. What is more, the fact has been emphasized that faculties acquired by domestic animals through intercourse with man are transmitted, that is to say, continue in the species, not in the individual. Darwin describes how dogs fetch and carry without having been taught to do so, or without having seen it done. Who would make such an assertion with regard to human education?

Now there are thinkers whose observations have led them beyond the opinion that a man is built by purely inherited forces from without. They rise to the thought that a spiritual being, an individuality, exists before life in the body, and fashions it; but many of them find it impossible to conceive that there are repeated earthly lives, and that the fruits of former lives are moulding forces during the intermediate state between two lives. Let us take one instance from among the ranks of these thinkers. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, son of the great Fichte, in his _Anthropology_ (p. 528) gives the observations which led him to the following conclusion:

"Parents are _not_ generators in the full sense of the word. They supply organic substance, and not alone this, but also that intermediate element of mental and sense nature which appears in temperament, colouring of character, definite tendencies, and so on, the common source of which proves to be 'imagination' in the wider sense indicated by us. In all these elements of personality, the mingling and particular combination of the souls of the parents is unmistakable; it is therefore a perfectly well-grounded assertion that this combination is simply the result of procreation, even if we regard procreation, as we must do, as really a soul-process. But the real ultimate centre of the personality is just what is lacking here; for a deeper and more searching observation reveals the fact that even those peculiarities of disposition are but a covering and an instrument for the containing of the individual's really spiritual and ideal capabilities, and are qualified to aid these in their development or to hinder them, but in no wise able to originate them." It is further stated in the same work (p. 532): "Every individual pre-exists as regards the fundamental form of his spirit, for no individual, from a spiritual point of view, resembles another, just as no species of animal resembles another species."

These thoughts reach only far enough to allow a spiritual being to come into the human body; but as the forces shaping such a being are not derived from causes existing in former lives, it would be necessary that, each time a fresh personality appears, a spiritual being should come forth from a Divine First Cause. With this hypothesis there would be no possibility of explaining the relationship which certainly exists between the potentialities struggling out of man's innermost being, and that which is forcing its way thither from his external earthly environment during life. Man's innermost being, issuing in the case of each single person from a Divine First Cause, would find what confronts him in earthly life quite strange and foreign. Only then would this not be the case--as, in fact, it is not--if there had already been a connection between the inner man and the outer world, and if the inner man were not living in it for the first time.

The unprejudiced educator may undoubtedly observe clearly that he impresses the consciousness of his pupil with something taken from life's experiences which in itself is foreign to his merely inherited qualities, but which, however, appears to him as if the work out of which these experiences arise, had been done by him in the past. Only repeated lives on earth, in conjunction with the facts set forth by occult science as taking place in spiritual regions between two earthly lives,--only this view can afford a satisfactory explanation of present human life looked at from every side. I say expressly "present" human life, for occult investigation shows that the cycle of earthly life certainly had a beginning, and at that time man's spiritual being, which later entered a bodily frame, existed under different conditions. In the following chapter we shall go back to this primeval condition of human existence. When it has been shown, from the reports of occult science how human beings received their present form in connection with the evolution of the earth, it will also be possible to indicate more precisely how the spiritual germ of man's being descends from superphysical worlds into a bodily form, and how the spiritual law of causation, or "human destiny," is developed.

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