ermediate element
of mental and sense nature which appears in temperament, colouring of
character, definite tendencies, and so on, the common source of which
proves to be 'imagination' in the wider sense indicated by us. In all
these elements of personality, the mingling and particular combination of
the souls of the parents is unmistakable; it is therefore a perfectly
well-grounded assertion that this combination is simply the result of
procreation, even if we regard procreation, as we must do, as really a
soul-process. But the real ultimate centre of the personality is just what
is lacking here; for a deeper and more searching observation reveals the
fact that even those peculiarities of disposition are but a covering and
an instrument for the containing of the individual's really spiritual and
ideal capabilities, and are qualified to aid these in their development or
to hinder them, but in no wise able to originate them." It is further
stated in the same work (p. 532): "Every individual pre-exists as regards
the fundamental form of his spirit, for no individual, from a spiritual
point of view, resembles another, just as no species of animal resembles
another species."

These thoughts reach only far enough to allow a spiritual being to come
into the human body; but as the forces shaping such a being are not
derived from causes existing in former lives, it would be necessary that,
each time a fresh personality appears, a spiritual being should come forth
from a Divine First Cause. With this hypothesis there would be no
possibility of explaining the relationship which certainly exists between
the potentialities struggling out of man's innermost being, and that which
is forcing its way thither from his external earthly environment during
life. Man's innermost being, issuing in the case of each single person
from a Divine First Cause, would find what confronts him in earthly life
quite strange and foreign. Only then would this not be the case--as, in
fact, it is not--if there had already been a connection between the inner
man and the outer world, and if the inner man were not living in it for
the first time.

The unprejudiced educator may undoubtedly observe clearly that he
impresses the consciousness of his pupil with something taken from life's
experiences which in itself is foreign to his merely inherited qualities,
but which, however, appears to him as if the work out of which these
experiences arise, had been done