Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/520/en

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As group souls or genus souls of the animals, Rudolf Steiner designates spiritual beings comparable to the I of the human being, beings that direct the individual animals of the animal species belonging to them, as it were from without. The group soul guides and works through the blood; the human being, however, through his "keeping" — through the manner in which he inwardly and outwardly conducts himself toward the animal: he "keeps" the domestic animal, otherwise it would fall. He once lifted it out of its natural, group-soul-guided creatureliness, held it back at the stage of still-heightened embryonal plasticity, and thereby preserved for it, across all subsequent generations, a certain measure of youthfulness. Thus through the human being the development of domestic animals took a different direction. It bends off, so to speak, prematurely — before the fall into wild nature. In the wild fauna, the development of species has aged morphologically and physiologically into an end-stage. The wolf, for example, regarded as the progenitor of dogs, has evolutively lost its youthfulness. It is wolf, is no longer plastically formable, as it was in the times of the high flowering of its evolution in the Tertiary (Atlantis). Its behavior is purely the projection of its group soul into the earthly form of existence. The dog, by contrast — like the domestic animal species as a whole — appears, as it were explosively and with great plasticity, in a multitude of breeds. This manifoldness is the work of a humanity that in the post-Atlantean ages (Holocene) freed itself further from its bondage within its own group-soul nature, and now itself, in the spirit-connected youthfulness of the I-awakening, united with the group souls of certain animal species. Domestic animals, seen in this light, have not emerged genetically from the evolutive end-product of a lineage through mere selection; rather, it is near at hand to assume that they owe their origin to the particular soul-spiritual constitution of an early humanity that still stood in a dreamlike relationship to the genus souls of the animals.