If it often happens that memory does not go back as far as the fourth year of a child’s life, it may nevertheless be said that the influence of the higher spirit-sphere, in the above sense, lasts through the first three years. At the end of that span of time a child becomes capable of linking its impressions of the outer world to the ideas of its ego. It is true that this coherent ego-conception can only be reckoned as existing as far back as memory extends. Yet we must say that _virtually_ memory extends to the beginning of the fourth year, only it is so weak at the beginning of distinct ego-consciousness as to be imperceptible. It may therefore be granted that those higher powers which dispose of a human being in the early years of childhood can be operative for three years; therefore man, during the present middle period of the earth, is so organized that he can receive these forces for _only_ three years. Supposing a man now stood before us, and that some cosmic powers could cause his ordinary ego to be removed. (For this purpose we must assume that it would be possible to remove from the physical, etheric and astral bodies the ordinary ego which has gone through the incarnations with the man.) And now suppose that an ego could then be introduced into the three bodies which is working in connection with spiritual worlds, what would happen to a person thus treated? At the end of three years his body would necessarily be shattered. Something would occur, through cosmic karma, which would prevent the spirit-being which would be in connection with higher worlds, from living more than three years in that body.[1] Only at the end of all his earthly lives will man have that within him which will enable him to live more than three years with that spirit-being. But then, it is true, man will be able to say to himself, “Not I, but that Higher One within me, Who was always there, is now working in me.” Till that time comes, he is not able to say this. The most he can say is that he feels that higher being, but has not yet progressed far enough with his real, actual human ego, to be able to bring the other to full life within him. Supposing then that, at some time in the middle earth-period, a human organism were to come into the world, and later in life be freed from his ego by the action of certain cosmic powers, receiving in exchange the ego which usually only works in man during the first three years of life, and which would be in connection with the spiritual worlds in which man exists between death and re-birth: how long would such a person be able to live in an earthly body? About three years. For at the end of that time, something would arise through cosmic karma, which would destroy the human organism in question.