605. If we now consider all those recognizable forms of life we call "terrestrial people", then it is not difficult to see that they are certainly to be found at different stages of "satiation" with physical existence. Some are moving rapidly into it, having a particularly strong desire for material things such as money, property or physical power, and they are the culminating "materialists". Such beings usually have only a very elementary ability to believe in anything non-physical with their physical day-consciousness. They believe only in their one temporary life on Earth and regard this as the whole of their existence. Any concept of, or belief in, immortality and higher spiritual worlds or planes of existence, can, therefore, only be regarded by such persons as a product of pure imagination, superstition or naïvety. Contemporary with these beings, we find others within terrestrial mankind, who have long since passed the culminating stage of materialism; these are beings who have acquired wider faculties for experiencing and for whom immortality and higher forms of existence lie within their area of day-consciousness and have become realistic facts. That these beings are really more advanced in development than the others is evidenced by the fact that they not only possess intelligence fully at the level of the "materialists", so that they orientate themselves with equal ease in material phenomena, but they also reveal a humanitarian quality in their daily behaviour – that is to say, a consideration for fellow beings of all categories, whether plants, animals or people – which far surpasses any sympathetic attitude possessed by materialistic beings. As the quality of humanity is shown to manifest in phases, that is on a rising scale from purely primitive beginning stages to most extensive stages of brilliance where that quality or ability has become genius, and also as all levels on that scale are synonymous with terrestrial man's so-called "levels of character", then the identity of the "humanists" as being "more highly developed" than the "materialists" is thereby unshakeably confirmed. To deny this would be the same as to deny the reality that constitutes the difference between human beings and animals. The lower the step a person represents on the scale of humane qualities, the more his behaviour resembles that of an animal. Is it not actually the case that the animal stage – that is to say, having inconsiderate, revengeful, homicidal and injurious tendencies of mind – reaches its peak in an inhumane person, and that such a being is an animal at its highest peak of genius? Remove humane qualities from civilized man and what remains is simply a "child of Nature", a primordial being who originally knows no other laws than that which promotes the "right of superior force", the unwritten basis of animal life. Indeed, humane qualities, i.e. love, cannot be registered as belonging to primitiveness or to these lowest spheres of mankind. On the contrary, it can only shine and scintillate as the supporting foundation of all guidance towards the pinnacles of life.
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