delusion that God’s presence reveals itself in this nature in any way directly, or otherwise than through the agencies above mentioned, arises from darkness of mind and profanity of will.
36. The complete avoidance of dim feeling as a solvent of love and the setting up in its stead of clear knowledge as the usual solvent, as has already been mentioned, can happen only as the result of a deliberate art of education, and hitherto has not happened in this way. By this means too, as we have also seen, a type of man quite different from men as they have usually been hitherto will be introduced and become the rule. As the result of this education, therefore, a totally new order of things and a new creation would begin. Now, in this new form, mankind would fashion itself by means of itself, for mankind considered as the present generation educates itself as the future generation; and mankind can do this only by means of knowledge, the one common true light and air of this world which can be freely imparted and which binds the spiritual world into a unity. Formerly mankind became just what it did become and was able to become; the time for such chance development has gone by; for where mankind has developed most it has become nothing. If it is not to remain in this nothingness, it must henceforward make itself all that it is yet to become. The real destiny of the human race on earth, I said in the lectures of which these are the continuation, is in freedom to make itself what it really is originally. Now, this making of itself deliberately, and according to rule, must have a beginning somewhere and at some moment in space and time. Thereby a second great period, one of free and deliberate development of the human race, would appear in place of the first period, one of development that is not free. We are of opinion that, in regard
