something according to his particular gift and degree of development, so that from the harmony of the separate parts which each individual was able to see, there arose what comes down to us from ancient times as primeval wisdom, that is supposing we know how to decipher the real occult records. These records are not the revelations of the Vedas, however much we may admire them. What the Indian holy teachers taught is of much earlier date than the composition of the Vedas, and it is only a feeble echo of their wisdom which lies before us in these mighty works. But when each of these men was in the presence of a superhuman predecessor of humanity, was gazing clairvoyantly into higher worlds and listening clairaudiently to what was being taught through that predecessor, it was as though the sun shone out of their eyes. What they were then able to say worked with overpowering force on their environment, so that all who heard them knew that it was not human life or wisdom that was speaking, but that _gods_, superhuman beings, were influencing human civilization. The ancient civilizations had their rise in this sounding through to mankind of the knowledge of the gods. Only by degrees in post-Atlantean times was the door, so to speak, closed into the divine spiritual world which in the Atlantean period had still been wide open for the human soul. And in the various countries and nations it was felt that man was thrown ever more and more on his own resources. What is revealed in the case of a child appears in humanity at large in a different way. The divine spiritual world is first diffused into the unconscious soul of a child, and the soul works upon the formation of the body. Then comes the moment at which the child learns to feel itself an “ego” and this is the moment to which its memory goes back in later life. This is what makes it possible to say that the wisest of men may still learn something from the soul of a child. From this point, however, the individual is left to himself. The ego-consciousness comes into being, and everything combines to make it possible for him to remember his experiences.