Rudolf Steiner:
Now, I don't fancy you can really think that if you take a piece of wood, a few strings, and so on, and deal with them in a haphazard fashion, the result will be a violin. A violin results when mind, spirit, is exerted, when the wood is fashioned in a particular way, when the strings are put through a special process, and so on and so forth. This then is what we must say — particularly because people at that time did not yet think for themselves — the way in which machines were originally made could only be ascribed to possession by the spirit, that is to say, the people having the spirit working in them. For this reason, primitive men, who did not work with intellect but with imagination, were naturally inclined to talk of the spirit. When today someone constructs a machine by means of intellect, he does not say — and rightly does not say — that the spirit has been helping him. But when a man of those early times — who was not conscious of thinking, had no capacity for thinking — when he constructed anything, he immediately felt: The spirit was helping me.
When the Europeans, the “superior” men, first arrived in America, and when even later, in the 19th century, they came to the regions where Indians such as belonged to more ancient times were still living, these Indians spoke of the “great Spirit” ruling everywhere. These primitive men in general have gone on speaking in this way of the being ruling in everything. It was this “great Spirit” who was venerated particularly by the human beings living in Atlantean times when there was still land between Europe and America; the Indians still had this veneration, and knew nothing as yet of intellect. The. Indians then gradually came to know the “superior” men — before being exterminated by them. Paper on which there were little signs, printed paper, was held in abhorrence by Indians; they took the little signs to be small devils and abominated them, for these signs were intellectual in origin. The man whose activities arise out of imagination abominates what comes from the intellect.
Now, the European with his materialistic civilization knows how an engine is constructed. The intellectual way in which a European constructs his engine could never have been the way the ancient Greeks would have set about it, for the Greeks still lacked intellect. Intellect first came to man in the 15th or 16th century. The Greeks would have done their constructing with the help of their imagination. Since the Greeks ascribed to good spirits all natural forms and to bad spirits all that has no part in nature and is artificially produced, they would have spoken thus: In the engine there lives an evil spirit. They would certainly have done their constructing out of imagination and it would never have occurred to them that in this they were not aided by the spirit.
You see therefore that ultimately we have to ascribe more spirit to the original primitive man; for imagination is of a more spiritual nature in the human soul than the mere intellect, so highly prized today.
Old conditions, however, can never come back. Hence we have certainly to go forward, but not with the idea that what today exists in the animal as pure instinct can ever be developed into spirit. We ought not therefore to picture primitive men as having been possessed of mere instinct, for they realized: What is working in us is the spirit. This is why they had such belief in the spirit.
All this contributes a little to our understanding of how human evolution originated. So we must allow right on both sides — on the side of those who imagine human beings to have arisen from animal forms; well, so indeed they have, but not from such animal forms as we have now, for these came into being later, when human beings were already in existence. But those animal forms which in the course of human evolution have gradually grown into man's present form, together with the faculties existing at that time, have arisen because the spiritual — not intellectually, it is true, but imaginatively — was more perfect than it is today. At the same time we have always to remember: This original perfection depended upon man, though lacking freedom, being as it were possessed by the spirit. Intellect enables man to become free; by means of intellect, he can be freed.
Just consider this. Anyone who works with his intellect may say: At a certain time I am going to think out such and such a thing. This cannot be done by a poet, for he still works today with imagination. Now, Goethe was a great poet. When, because someone wanted him to write a poem, or he himself felt inclined to do so, he set himself down to write — well, the result was execrable! That people are not aware of this today comes simply from their inability to distinguish good poetry from bad. Among Goethe's poems there are many bad ones. Imaginative work can be done only when the mood is on the poet, and when the mood is on him he must write down the poem at once. You see, that is how it was in the case of primitive men. They were never able to do things out of free will at all. Free will is something that developed gradually, but not wisdom. Wisdom was originally greater than intellect, and must reacquire its greatness. That means our having to come back to the spirit by way of the intellect.
That, you see, is the task of anthroposophy; it has no wish to do what many people would like, that is, to bring back primitive conditions among men — old Indian wisdom, for example. It is nonsense when people harp on that; anthroposophy sets value on a return to the spirit precisely in full possession of the intellect, with intellect fully alive. It must be strictly borne in mind that we have nothing at all against the intellect; we have to go forward with it. To begin with, human beings had spirit without intellect; then the spirit fell away, whereas the intellect increased. Now, by means of the intellect, we have to return to the spirit. Culture is obliged to take this course, for if it does not do so — well, people are always saying that the world war was unlike anything seen before, and it is a fact that men have never before so torn each other to pieces — but if mankind refuses to take the course of bringing their intellect with them on their return to the spirit, then still greater wars will come upon us, wars that go on becoming more and more savage. Men will exterminate each other like two rats that, shut up together in a cage, gnaw each other till there is nothing left but two tails. That is putting it brutally, but in actual fact men are on the way to mutual extermination, and it is very important to know whither they are going.
Source: August 6, 1924
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