level. A great part of the work of this last human kingdom consists
in ennobling the souls which have sunk into the evil community, so that
they may still gain admittance into the true human kingdom.

The Venus condition will be of such a nature that the plant kingdom will
have disappeared also; the lowest kingdom will be the animal kingdom once
more transformed, and above that there will be three successive human
kingdoms of different degrees of perfection. The earth will remain united
with the sun during the Venus period; while during that of Jupiter it will
have happened that, at a certain point, the sun separates from Jupiter,
the latter receiving its influence from outside. Then there is again a
union between the sun and Jupiter, the transformation gradually passing
into the Venus state. During that state another planet detaches itself
from Venus, containing all kinds of beings which have opposed evolution,
an "irredeemable moon," as it were, following a path of evolution which is
of a character impossible to describe, because it is too unlike anything
which man can experience on earth. But evolved humanity will pass on in a
fully spiritualized state of existence to the Vulcan evolution, a
description of which lies beyond the scope of this work.

We see that from the fruits of the "Wisdom of the Grail" springs the
highest ideal of human evolution conceivable for man: spiritualization
attained by him through his own efforts. For in the end this
spiritualization appears as a product of the harmony which he wrought out
in the fifth and sixth periods of the present evolution, between the
faculties of reason and emotion which he had then attained and cognition
of supersensible worlds. That which he thus achieves within his soul will
finally become in itself the outer world. The human spirit rises to the
mighty impressions of its outer world and at first divines, later
recognizes spiritual beings behind these impressions; the human heart
senses the unspeakable exaltedness of the Spirit. Man can, however, also
recognize that his inner experiences of intellect, feeling and character
are but the germs of a nascent spirit world.

He who thinks that human liberty is not compatible with a foreknowledge
and predestination of future conditions, ought to consider that man's
freedom of action in the future depends just as little on the arrangement
of predestined things as does his liberty of action with regard to
inhabiting a hou