nated by
the figure of the coming Christ. It was announced of Him that His kingdom
would replace that of the other Light-God.(25)

From such influences as these, there came about a cleavage in the soul of
the people of the fifth epoch of civilization which still continues, and
is manifest in most diverse phenomena. The soul had not retained, from
ancient times a sufficiently strong attraction for spiritual things to
enable it to hold fast the connection between the worlds of spirit and
sense. The attraction existed only as a training of feeling and emotion,
not as direct vision of the spiritual world. On the other hand, man's
attention was more and more directed toward the world of the senses and
its conquest; and the intellectual powers which had been awakened in the
latter part of the Atlantean period, all those human powers of which the
physical brain is the instrument, were concentrated upon the sense-world,
and upon gaining knowledge of and mastery over it. Two worlds, so to
speak, were developed within man: the one directed toward the life of
physical sense; the other susceptible to the revelation of the spirit in
such a way as to permeate with feeling and emotion even though lacking
clairvoyant vision. The tendency to this cleavage of soul already existed
when the teaching concerning the Christ was introduced into Europe.

This message from the spiritual world was received into men's hearts, and
permeated feeling and emotion; but it was not possible to bridge the gulf
between this state of devotion and what human intelligence, concentrated
on the sense-world, was learning in the sphere of physical existence. What
is now known as the contradiction between external science and spiritual
knowledge is simply a consequence of this fact. The Christian mysticism
(of Eckhart, Tauler and others) is the result of Christianity becoming
permeated with feeling and emotion. Science, occupied as it is exclusively
with the world of sense and its results in life, is the consequence of the
other tendency of the soul, and all achievements in the sphere of outer
material civilization are entirely due to this divergence of tendencies.
Since those human faculties, of which the brain is the instrument, were
concentrated exclusively on physical life, they were able to reach that
pitch of perfection which makes contemporary science, technical skill, and
other forms of mental activity possible. Such a material civilization
could originate