These thoughts reach only far enough to allow a spiritual being to come into the human body; but as the forces shaping such a being are not derived from causes existing in former lives, it would be necessary that, each time a fresh personality appears, a spiritual being should come forth from a Divine First Cause. With this hypothesis there would be no possibility of explaining the relationship which certainly exists between the potentialities struggling out of man’s innermost being, and that which is forcing its way thither from his external earthly environment during life. Man’s innermost being, issuing in the case of each single person from a Divine First Cause, would find what confronts him in earthly life quite strange and foreign. Only then would this not be the case—as, in fact, it is not—if there had already been a connection between the inner man and the outer world, and if the inner man were not living in it for the first time. The unprejudiced educator may undoubtedly observe clearly that he impresses the consciousness of his pupil with something taken from life’s experiences which in itself is foreign to his merely inherited qualities, but which, however, appears to him as if the work out of which these experiences arise, had been done by him in the past. Only repeated lives on earth, in conjunction with the facts set forth by occult science as taking place in spiritual regions between two earthly lives,—only this view can afford a satisfactory explanation of present human life looked at from every side. I say expressly “present” human life, for occult investigation shows that the cycle of earthly life certainly had a beginning, and at that time man’s spiritual being, which later entered a bodily frame, existed under different conditions. In the following chapter we shall go back to this primeval condition of human existence. When it has been shown, from the reports of occult science how human beings received their present form in connection with the evolution of the earth, it will also be possible to indicate more precisely how the spiritual germ of man’s being descends from superphysical worlds into a bodily form, and how the spiritual law of causation, or “human destiny,” is developed. CHAPTER IV. THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD AND MAN