more and more
human thinking, feeling, and willing. The "hidden wisdom of the Grail"
will be revealed, and as an inner force will more and more permeate the
manifestations of human life.

Through the whole of the fifth period, knowledge concerning the
supersensible world will flow into human consciousness; and when the sixth
period begins, humanity will be able to regain on a higher level that
clairvoyance which it possessed at an earlier epoch in a dim and
indistinct manner. Yet the new acquisition will take a form quite
different from the old. What the soul knew of higher worlds in ancient
times, was not permeated by its own forces of intellect and feeling. Its
knowledge was instinctive. In the future it will not only have instincts,
but it will _understand_ them, and feel them to be the essence of its own
nature. When the soul learns a fact concerning some other being or thing,
its intellect will find this fact verified through its own nature. Or when
some fact regarding an ethical law or human conduct presents itself, the
soul will say to itself: "My feeling is only justified when I carry out
what is implied in this knowledge." Such a condition of soul will have to
be developed by a large part of humanity in the sixth period.

In a certain manner, that which human evolution accomplished during the
third period--the Egypto-Chaldean--is repeated in the fifth. At that time
the soul could still perceive certain facts of the supersensible worlds,
but this perception was disappearing. For the intellectual faculties were
at that time beginning to develop and it was their mission to at first
exclude man from the higher worlds. In the fifth period supersensible
facts which in the third period were perceived in hazy clairvoyance, are
again becoming manifest; but they are now interpenetrated by the
intellectual and emotional life of the individual man. They are also
imbued with what may be imparted to the soul by a knowledge of the Christ
Mystery; therefore they assume a form totally different from that which
they had previously.

Whereas in ancient times impressions from the higher worlds were felt as
forces acting from out a spiritual world to which man did not properly
belong, through development in later times these impressions are felt as
those of a world into which man is growing, of which he more and more
forms a part. Let no one suppose that a repetition of the Egypto-Chaldean
civilization can take place in such a w