From such influences as these, there came about a cleavage in the soul of the people of the fifth epoch of civilization which still continues, and is manifest in most diverse phenomena. The soul had not retained, from ancient times a sufficiently strong attraction for spiritual things to enable it to hold fast the connection between the worlds of spirit and sense. The attraction existed only as a training of feeling and emotion, not as direct vision of the spiritual world. On the other hand, man’s attention was more and more directed toward the world of the senses and its conquest; and the intellectual powers which had been awakened in the latter part of the Atlantean period, all those human powers of which the physical brain is the instrument, were concentrated upon the sense-world, and upon gaining knowledge of and mastery over it. Two worlds, so to speak, were developed within man: the one directed toward the life of physical sense; the other susceptible to the revelation of the spirit in such a way as to permeate with feeling and emotion even though lacking clairvoyant vision. The tendency to this cleavage of soul already existed when the teaching concerning the Christ was introduced into Europe. 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.