# 138. Conception of the Spiritual

At present, one is not understood when one speaks of the spirit. People believe that one then fantasizes. One fantasizes no more than the physiologist and the anatomist fantasize when they describe the physical processes that underlie the subjectively unconscious respiratory or metabolic processes. Mind, however, cannot be grasped by the microscope; but just as the microscope makes the small visible by enlarging it, so mind comes to perception when the soul powers are so strengthened that the soul makes use of its own being in order to perceive. The spiritual essence of a plant is perceived immediately if one adjusts oneself in such a way that one still experiences something, if one distracts oneself from sensory perception. When you look at the plant, like a word when you read. You can describe the word according to its letter forms. You can learn as little about the spirit through mere inner contemplation as you can learn about the stomach by contemplating the feeling of hunger or satiety. The imagination, feeling, etc. of the mystic is only based on the spiritual. He does not yet have it. The body must be anatomized in order to get to know the processes of metabolism, etc.; the spirit must be condensed, strengthened - in order to get to know it. One must seek how it carries the human being from an 'other' world, how it lets him arise and pass away; how it sustains him throughout physical life. If one gives oneself over to scientific conceptions, then one weans oneself from the contemplation of the spirit. But if the spirit is not paralyzed, it also comes into independent activity through this. Through natural science, human beings have, as it were, overcome their visionary illiteracy. —