The nature of man : approached through the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner

embryognesis so that an elephant or lion results. The modern work on genes and so on does not affect this argument, as one still has to account for the turning on or off of genetic information in different cells and regions of the developing organism. And this organising system is supersensory, ideal in nature. Here we must call on Goethe’s perception of the Idea.

Returning to the field of Evolution we are then faced with the question as to how Man appeared at the completion of the evolutionary process, which must be regarded as an embryonic process extended over vast periods of time. Must not the Idea of Man have been acting from non-spatial realms throughout the evolutionary-embryogenesis of Man? As in an artistic work, the final picture becomes clearer and clearer. We can then understand the natural kingdoms as having been cast out from the developing human form, somewhat as bits of marble are chipped away from the statue as it becomes gradually visible under the sculptor’s hammer and chisel. These natural forms can then only harden and become fixed in their limitations. But the further clearing and perfecting of the human form was brought about by these lower forms sacrificing any further evolution for themselves. Only Man continued to evolve. In this sense Man was the first being in the evolutionary development, but the last to reach manifestation. The whole reaches expression in the human form: only partial functions are expressed in the forms of animals and vegetables. Man is synthesis, nature analysis. Steiner portrayed the evolutionary process in great rhythmic periods in which impulses from spiritual beings were active, and Dr. Karl K6nig was able to show the correspondences between these macrocosmic processes and phases and the microcosmic ones of human embryogenesis. In these evolutionary periods not only have physical forms evolved; the etheric and astral bodies have also become further developed and perfected beyond the stage of their first appearance.

We have been approaching the understanding of how the developing human form became more and more an image of the whole. We can call spirit by the name of wholeness, and so we can begin to grasp the human form as the image of the spiritual. Thus the full achievement of the evolutionary development of Man required that the Infinite, the Whole, should become fully

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