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An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

IV. THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD AND MAN

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This message from the spiritual world was received into men's hearts, and permeated feeling and emotion; but it was not possible to bridge the gulf between this state of devotion and what human intelligence, concentrated on the sense-world, was learning in the sphere of physical existence. What is now known as the contradiction between external science and spiritual knowledge is simply a consequence of this fact. The Christian mysticism (of Eckhart, Tauler and others) is the result of Christianity becoming permeated with feeling and emotion. Science, occupied as it is exclusively with the world of sense and its results in life, is the consequence of the other tendency of the soul, and all achievements in the sphere of outer material civilization are entirely due to this divergence of tendencies. Since those human faculties, of which the brain is the instrument, were concentrated exclusively on physical life, they were able to reach that pitch of perfection which makes contemporary science, technical skill, and other forms of mental activity possible. Such a material civilization could originate only among the nations of Europe, for they are those descendants of Atlantean ancestors who converted their natural inclination toward the physical sense-world into faculties only when it had reached a certain degree of maturity. Previously they had allowed it to lie dormant, and had lived on what remained in them of the Atlantean clairvoyance and on the communications of their Initiates. While mental culture was outwardly almost entirely given up to these influences, in them ripened slowly the desire for the material conquest of the world.

Now, however, the dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean era of civilization is already at hand. What is to arise at a certain time in human evolution has ripened slowly in the preceding age. The first beginnings of that which can even now be developed, is to be discovered in the thread which binds together the two tendencies of the human breast, material civilization and life in the spiritual world. To this end it is necessary, on the one hand, that the results of spiritual vision should be understood; and on the other, that in the observations and experiences of of the sense-world the revelations of the Spirit be recognized. The sixth civilization-epoch will bring to full development the harmony between the two.

Herewith the studies in this book have reached a point where we may turn from the perspectives of the past to those of the future. But it will be better to precede the latter by a study of the Knowledge of Higher Worlds and of Initiation. Then, after this study and in connection with it, we shall be able to indicate in brief the outlook for the future, in so far as that can be done within the framework of this book.

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