All persecution, with its attendant violence and force, belongs to the animal kingdom. Everyone who uses such persecution as part of his behaviour reveals and compromises himself as a human being with an animal mentality. It is such a being that the great wise people of the long lost past have symbolised by the ancient Sphinx – the animal body with the human head. This almost imperishable stone colossus in the Egyptian desert has for thousands upon thousands of years served the purpose of reminding people that they are not yet finished human beings. The human head of the Sphinx expresses the terrestrial human being having attained certain mental abilities that do not belong to the ordinary animal plane of existence. As these abilities belong to a plane of existence that lies above the animal kingdom (in the same way as the animal kingdom lies above the plant kingdom) they raise the human being up to the plane above the animal kingdom to the same extent as he gradually develops these higher abilities in his mentality or psyche.
      As these higher abilities are "human" abilities, the "animal" becomes a "human being" to the same extent as he has developed enough to attain these abilities. But since the attainment of these abilities can take place only through a long epoch of evolution this epoch will necessarily come to constitute an area of life or a plane of existence for beings in whom the human abilities are present in a more or less advanced stage of development. And these beings must therefore be human in their being to the same extent as these abilities are developed in them. By virtue of these human characteristics these beings differ from the ordinary animal kingdom and appear as "human beings". To these beings belong the ordinary terrestrial human being. But such a being is not a "human being" in its purest form. He is human only to the same degree or extent that he, by virtue of his human abilities and capacities, has developed the ability to act humanely. But in areas of manifestation where he is not so developed he can act only in an "animal" way.