Not until we come to the last chapters of this work can we deal with those methods by which man acquires the faculty of looking back, by means of occult perception, upon those earlier conditions of the earth which are now under discussion. For the present we shall merely intimate that the facts concerning the primeval past have not passed beyond the reach of occult research. If a being comes into corporeal existence his material part perishes after physical death. But the spiritual forces, which from out their own depth gave existence to the body, do not “disappear in this way.” They leave their traces, their exact images behind them impressed upon the spiritual ground-work of the world. Any one who is able to raise his perceptive faculty through the visible to the invisible world, attains at length a level on which he may see before him what may be compared to a vast spiritual panorama, in which are recorded all the past events of the world’s history. These imperishable traces of everything immaterial are called in occult science the “Akashic Records.” Here it must once more be repeated that investigations of the supersensible realms of existence can be carried on only with the aid of spiritual perception, and consequently can be instituted in the sphere now under consideration, only by reading the Akashic Records above-mentioned. Nevertheless, what was said earlier in this book in a similar instance holds good here. Supersensible facts are only to be investigated by supersensible perceptions; but once investigated and communicated by occult science, they may be grasped by the ordinary powers of thought, if these are honestly exercised without bias. In the following pages the various conditions of the earth’s evolution, as given by occult science, will be detailed. The transformation of our planet will be traced down to the conditions of life in which we now find it. Any one who surveys what comes before him at the present time merely through the evidence of his senses, and then lends an ear to what occult science has to say on the subject, namely:—how that which now lies before him has been evolved from a far distant past,—will be able, if his thought is genuinely unbiased, to say to himself: “In the first place, what occult science reports is quite logical; in the second place, I can, if I assume the reports of occult investigation to be correct, understand how things have become as they now appear.” By “logical” is not meant, in this connection, of course, that errors might not be made from a logical standpoint in some description given by occult research. We are here speaking of “logic” as it is understood in the ordinary life of the physical world. Just as a logical demonstration is accepted there as it is in physical research, even though a single investigator, in a certain domain of facts, may make illogical statements, so is it also with regard to occult science. It may even