Why have the Gods allowed human beings to exist at all?

Rudolf Steiner, November 13, 1909:

"Why have the Gods allowed human beings to exist at all? Because it was only in human beings that they could cause faculties to develop which otherwise could not have been developed at all. The power to think, to picture something in thoughts in which there is the quality of discrimination — this faculty can be developed only on this our Earth; formerly it did not exist, it could only come about through the fact of the existence of human beings. We might take the following comparison. — Suppose you have a grain of corn — of wheat, let us say. However long you look at it, no wheat will grow out of it. You must put it in the soil and let it grow, you must let the growth-forces work upon it. That which the divine-spiritual Beings had before the formation of man may be compared to the grain of wheat. If this “grain of wheat” was to come to life in the form of thoughts, it had first to be cultivated by human beings on the physical plane. The only possible means of cultivating thoughts on the Earth from the higher world is through human incarnations. So that the thoughts of men on the physical plane have a character which is entirely their own and must lead up to what is possible in the higher worlds. It was necessary for the Gods that there should be men on the Earth. The Gods allowed men to come into being in order to preserve through them in the form of thought what they had had in the higher worlds. Thus what comes down from the higher worlds would never have taken form in thought if man had not been able to give it this form. And he who will not think on the Earth deprives the Gods of what they have reckoned upon, and he cannot accomplish what is his real human task and destiny upon Earth. For he can only attain this in an incarnation wherein he really labors at the development of his powers of thought. If this is realized, all the rest follows from it."





Source: http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-tasks-and-aims-of-spiritual-science.html