RUDOLPH STEINER ON HUMAN and ANIMAL SPIRITS

 "THE HUMAN SPIRIT AND THE ANIMAL SPIRIT"
FROM letters of Rudolph Steiner.

Berlin, Nov. 17, 1910.  Manuscript from Ghent library.

MAN NEEDS CONTACT WITH  OTHER HUMANS TO SURVIVE -- ANIMAL DOESN'T

We realize that the animal soul-life may not be distinguished from that of man in such a way as to justified the assertion that man is superior to the animal with in respect of certain spiritual attributes. To refute such a view we need only point to how certain achievements, obviously attained only by man struggling to a definite stage of intelligence, are brought about objectively with the animal world in the building of their dwellings and in the whole of their life. So that in what the animal does, in what it produces, in what it creates, we have exactly the same intelligence activity that is shown by man in the tools and products he makes. It might really be said: into what the animal does their flows, and then congeals, the same intelligence that we find in man. Therefore we may not speak of animal soul and human soul by simply saying that the animal is to a definite extent behind man or man to a definite extent in advance of the animal. 

When speaking of the soul - and we describe this soul life is the inner life –

in contradiction to the spirit life seen preeminently in formation and development, we referred to the fact that we discover how intimately bound up is this soul life of the animal with its own organization; and what the animal can experience in its soul appears to us as predetermined by its whole structure and the whole arrangement of its organs. Thus it must be said that animals’ life of soul is determined by the fashion of its organization, and in its soul life the animal lives, as it were, within itself. ... the human soul is able to surrender itself directly to the spirit. (FREE WILL?)  

WITHOUT HUMAN CONTACT, MAN WOULD STAY IN STATE OF HELPLESSNESS

... In the animal all spiritual achievements immediately connected with its organs and experienced in its soul have been implanted into, and bound up with, what is hereditary in its species. We may also say that their lives in itself out in the animals soul what belongs to the species, and because this is hereditary, the animal comes into existence with a predisposition towards all the activities conditioned by the spirit which can be experienced through its soul nature... It is different with man who in his life of soul emancipates himself from his bodily organism... He enters existence helpless, up to a certain extent where the functions that should serve him and life are concerned. On the other hand, however, this helplessness is the one thing that enables man to develop in soul and spirit...  An immediate relation exists in the animal between spirit and body.