During the Greco-Roman period an ever-increasing number of individuals appeared without these capacities. Intelligent reflection concerning things took their place. Mankind was more and more shut off from the immediate perception of the psycho-spiritual world, and was more and more restricted to forming a picture of it through intelligence and feeling. This condition lasted more or less during the whole of the fourth division of the post-Atlantean period. Only those individuals who had preserved the old mental state as an inheritance could still become directly conscious of the spiritual world. But these were stragglers from an earlier time. Their manner of gaining knowledge was no longer suitable for later conditions. For, as a consequence of the laws of evolution, old faculties of the soul lose something of their former significance when new faculties appear. Human life then adapts itself to these new faculties, and can no longer use the old ones properly. There were individuals, however, who began in full consciousness to add to the powers of intelligence and feeling already gained, the development of other and higher powers, which made it possible for them once more to penetrate into the psycho-spiritual world. To this end they were obliged to set to work in a different way from that in which the pupils of the old Initiates had been trained. The latter had not been obliged to take into account those faculties of the soul which were developed only in the fourth period. The method of occult training which has been described in this work as that of the present age, began in its first rudiments in the fourth period. But it was then only in its beginning, it could not attain real maturity until the fifth period (from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward). Those who sought to rise into supersensible worlds in this manner could learn something of the higher regions of existence through the exercise of their own imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Those who went no further than the development of the faculties of reason and feeling could learn only through tradition what had been known to ancient clairvoyance. This was handed on, either by word of mouth or in writing, from generation to generation.