Results of Spiritual Research

GA 62 — 14 November 1912, Berlin

3. The Tasks of Spiritual Research for the Present and the Future

The spiritual science referred to in these lectures is not something that arises from the arbitrariness of this or that person, or is based on the subjective ideas of one or more individuals. Rather, it is a spiritual world view that, with a certain inevitability, arises from the needs and demands of our time, insofar as this time emerges as a recognizable product of the developmental history of humanity. Only when a world view is, as it were, demanded by its time can it claim with a certain justification the trusting words that were spoken in the first lecture of this winter. Only under such a condition can it say: No matter from what quarter it may be opposed, if it contains any element of truth it may rely on the fact that truth will always, however much it is buried, find the cracks and crevices through which it will spread in the spiritual life of mankind.

We shall now try to show, not with generalities but with specific facts, how in the course of the last few centuries and especially in the very last period up to the present day, the seeking human soul has developed more and more into what the spiritual science meant here wants to be for this seeking human soul.

Who could not, if compelled by his own mind and the needs of his soul to seek explanations of the riddles of the world for the strength and security of his life, not be tempted first to turn to natural science, which is certainly not underestimated by spiritual science but fully recognized in its triumphs and achievements? Today, countless people believe that whether a world view will emerge from a synthesis of these scientific facts and laws, which will open up vistas for man beyond what he can perceive with his senses, grasp with his mind, and with which he feels connected in his existence, but which he strives to recognize so that he can know what the destiny of the soul is, and indeed the destiny of its work in the world.

In the face of such longing and such hope, however, it may well be pointed out that in the course of human evolution, the relationship of the soul to what external science can be has changed completely, and precisely the example that we can give here in relation to soul questions in relation to science may show us clearly how our time, in one respect at least, may be characterized not only by the trivial and hackneyed expression, a “time of transition,” but how it is a time that, in the highest sense, demands a new epoch in spiritual research. We need only recall the example of a great personality, who, like many others of his kind, has contributed to advancing our spiritual culture: Kepler, who is the real great formulator of the Copernican world view, on the basis of which, nevertheless, many questions of our present-day world view arise.

Who today, if he has no heart or mind for actual spiritual science, might not even be able to say: Through achievements such as Kepler's, humanity has succeeded in learning about the movements of the heavenly bodies through pure objective natural science and its laws. And how can man say — could man say — that alongside this, the belief persists that these movements of the heavenly bodies are regulated in some way by spiritual beings, to which spiritual science wants to point, by spiritual beings that stand behind the material and its laws, since everything can be explained in a mechanical, physical way! Why is there any need for spiritual forces behind these physical laws?

Such a statement looks extremely compelling, and it can be pointed out that it was precisely the liberation from long-held prejudices of the old spiritual worldviews that allowed people like Kepler to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies in space on the basis of purely physical laws. But if we approach Kepler himself objectively, without time prejudices, and study his spiritual peculiarities, we find the remarkable thing that everything that Kepler's gaze directed out into the heavens, what actually gave him the inner impulses to discover his great and powerful laws was the consciousness of being embedded with his soul in the spiritual depths of existence, in the activity of spiritual beings that fill the spaces and work throughout time. He was clear about the fact that what he ascribed to the planetary movements as 'laws' could only be given to him because the laws are the thoughts of divine spiritual beings. If we investigate the source of such impulses in Kepler, we must say that they were based on the fact that the whole course of human development has always kept the human soul in connection with the spiritual-soul, and that what was spiritual-mental was taken for granted, was still there in Kepler's time, was there in tradition, in the general belief, was there to inspire the soul, to inspire and awaken thoughts in it.

But who could deny that this background of Kepler's creative work has gradually disappeared in the course of the last few centuries, disappeared through what has been has been created out of it, so that today the human soul can easily believe that Kepler's laws and everything that has come into being in this way could be invoked as proof against the assumption of a spiritual-divine world. If we go from Kepler through the centuries up to our time, we see how that which is still born out of the consciousness of the connection between man and the Divine-Spiritual, more and more eliminates this consciousness itself, and how a time is approaching, great and powerful through its scientific achievements, great and powerful through the creation of momentous insights in the field of natural science, a time in which the human soul is gradually incapable of truly rising to the spiritual from the abundance of this scientific material, from the abundance of what has been recognized in the material field. One could say that the course of our intellectual development in recent centuries is characterized by the fact that the more it has brought is immense, great and admirable, but that the human soul's ability to see through to the spiritual from these achievements has been impaired, even destroyed, precisely by the abundance and nature of the scientific achievements.

This becomes clear to us when we consider, for example, the way in which Goethe, with his way of researching natural processes, was still part of the overall direction of the world view of his time. It is interesting to see how Herman Grimm, for example, this brilliant and at the same time profound connoisseur of Goethe, feels compelled to characterize Goethe's place in the natural scientific directions of his time. Herman Grimm asks: How did the centuries preceding the age of Goethe still conceive the relationship of man to nature?

Anyone familiar with these centuries will agree with Herman Grimm: they differed so much from later ones that, when looking at the nature of animals, plants and other things, man stood on the earth and believed himself authorized to see in man something like a kind of conclusion to all the rest of earthly creation, indeed to the creation of the world; that he felt authorized to say: There is such a meaning in the whole development that one can recognize when looking at stones, plants and animals, how an inner essence has gradually developed, already having man in mind, developed upward, in order to present everything else to man and his goal. Whether one still wanted to cling to the old Mosaic creation story in the process is not important. But this conviction was there: to see in all world empires something like an impulse that already includes man and makes everything else only in preparation for making man, who has been there spiritually from the beginning, the summit of all this creation.

What emerged more and more in the face of this? First, as Herman Grimm also believes, astronomy began. The Earth was made into an insignificant world body in the universe and man was placed on Earth as if he, without having been predisposed from the outset in the other realms, had finally surrendered like a natural necessity, so that he would not be entitled to connect his mind to the whole course of events. Geology assumes that an enormous period of time elapsed before man appeared on earth, and that, in the sense of natural science, this would by no means show the traces that everything else would be there to prepare man later. In a certain way, Goethe may be called a radical naturalist. Here I have often mentioned how he endeavored, through his own scientific discoveries, to eliminate from his views on the external structure of the human being anything that might distinguish him from the other organisms on earth. One may call Goethe a descent theorist, a development theorist before Darwin and the other development theorists of our time. But Herman Grimm rightly points out how Goethe did not refrain from seeing something 'spiritual' behind the material processes, which are seen by Darwinism as nothing more than material processes, and which develops spiritually in all material processes, so that man is indeed placed there.

We have a remarkable saying from Goethe that can really draw attention to how hard he tried, even though he was so scientifically minded, to present man as the pinnacle and crown of spiritual existence. He says: After all, what are all the millions of stars in the world for if not to be looked at and absorbed into our being by human eyes at last? And not without good reason. It would take a great deal, of course, to prove the right to ask the question, if we go through all these scientific facts and laws. Where do we find anything outside of man that could give us a clue that spirit reigns in all living and non-living things? Where do we find, when we scientifically consider man himself, after the realization has been gained that mental life is bound to brain processes, where do we find a hint to think of the soul's existence outside the bounds of birth and death?

Today, one need only open one of the more important and famous philosophies, for example that of the world-famous Wundt, and one will find everywhere that when such philosophers start from scientific research, certain conclusions, certain results are the facts of natural science, and that the philosophers everywhere approach, for my part, the spiritual, but that they are forced to stop at the moment when it would be a matter of grasping the spiritual. Why is that? For the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, as it has developed in dependence on the research of natural science and follows the facts of natural science step by step, offers no possibility of finding the way out of matter and its laws into real spiritual happenings and their nature, because everywhere the thread of thought breaks off. Why did it not tear Goethe away? Because Goethe was still imbued with impulses that had emerged as ancient ones in the development of humanity, because something of what had remained historically, of the ancient spiritual views, still lived in him — which we will get to know -, and because his soul had not yet been emptied of what had come to the soul by direct spiritual paths over the millennia when that soul looked out at the things of material events.

But our time developed quickly, and therefore, in its rapid development, those who based their thinking on scientific research have hardly retained what was still present in Goethe. Hence we have seen that although Darwin revealed the connections of living beings in more detail and more forcefully than Goethe, he nevertheless stopped at the whole meaning and nature of his research. But whereas in this whole way and meaning of research Goethe saw the spirit everywhere behind the phenomena, the Darwinians — not Darwin himself! — have had to regard as an obstacle to somehow arriving at the spiritual that which did not prevent Goethe from arriving at the spirit.

Therefore, we can understand that those who place their hopes for a worldview in contemporary science must see these hopes disappointed in many cases. However, something that has existed in humanity does not simply disappear. We can see even in modern times that serious researchers who only want science do not at all agree that science should only present external facts, but could very well serve to prove the continuous course of a world wisdom that lives in things. It is interesting that even a historian from the school of Ranke, Lord Acton, in a momentous university speech at Cambridge in 1895 as a history teacher to his students, could say: I hope that the completely objective description of historical facts will reveal the workings of a divine world wisdom. Yes, even in those days Lord Acton spoke of the working of the “Risen One” in history.

Thus we see that even in our time there still remains from the times when the existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted, something like a carrying of research, like a carrying of all scientific thinking was carried by such an attitude, just as the soul is still permeated by the spirit through this carrying from ancient times. But it is equally true that he who today completely embraces the habits of scientific thinking and, for example, follows how the individual soul activities have their corresponding expressions in brain or other nervous processes, that such a person, precisely by pursuing fact after fact, can easily say to himself: Yes, for what a person is able to think, feel and sense in material life, there are clues for the researcher everywhere; but what might lie for the soul before or after that, science tells me nothing.

How widespread is the error that science, because it cannot get beyond the consideration of facts and their laws to the spiritual, must therefore also reject the spiritual! And again, it is characteristic of the general situation of world-views in our time that even those who hold the view that we can only arrive at a world-view by summarizing the facts and laws of natural science, always warn ed against hasty conclusions, against the making of hypotheses, which always wants to group a few facts together in order to draw conclusions as to how the life of the soul is bound to this or that, what the whole cosmic connection is like, or the like.

Such a warning was recently given again in a significant place. At this year's naturalists' meeting, the very important naturalist Wettstein gave a speech on biology, on the science of life, in its usability for the world view, and he warned against drawing general conclusions for the world view from the facts as they are. But many people still believe that we should therefore wait with regard to the riddles related to the life of the soul until natural science has come to the end of its facts. What has been presented here, namely the assertion that a person who wants to penetrate the secrets of the soul and spirit in order to come to conclusions about soul and spirit must have gone around all the scientific facts in the world, reminds one of a beautiful saying by Goethe: “To understand that the sky is blue everywhere, one does not need to travel around the world.”

But I would like to show in concrete terms how the path of the human soul to its secrets in the spiritual realm is, to a certain extent, independent of what the individual laws of natural science, what the individual laws of learning can give this human soul. To substantiate this, I would like to point out the following fact: In the nineteenth century, we had an important philosopher in Munich, Moriz Carriere. He was one of those who, with a wealth of not only ideas but also of real scientific learning, tried to understand the world and its phenomena. Through his great work on the cultural development of humanity, Carriere proved how he had compiled fact after fact from ancient times in a scholarly manner in order to understand the path of the spirit through world development. From all such processes, Carriere has now formed a worldview, which I mention all the more gladly because it was formed well before the development of an actual spiritual science. It is a worldview that came to the insight of the connection between the soul and a spiritual world spread out through space and time, just as there is a connection between what is physically in the human body and the substances and forces that are spread out in space and that work in time.

One day, Moritz Carriere was shown the manuscript of a simple man, a man who was not at all learned, who had none of the wealth of learning through which Moritz Carriere had come to the view of the connection between the soul and the spiritual that has just been described. This simple man's name was Zeuner, he was born in 1813. Due to a series of events that cannot be described here for lack of time, Zeuner was forced to spend many, many lonely months in prison. He had allowed himself to be carried away by the revolutionary movement, and this had landed him in prison. But he was, without being a scholar, a highly-natured soul. In the manuscript that he showed to Moriz Carriere in the 1870s, he recounts how he brooded and brooded in his lonely cell, filled only – as was the spirit of his time and the people who had surrounded him until then — with materialistic views, but how his soul had become desolate in solitude, how it had suffered from the hunger to have something in which to believe. Then he continues to tell how he once heard a strange song from his cell, which reminded him of experiences from his early childhood and connected him with other experiences, how this again sparked a spark of joy in the soul, and how this impulse, given to the soul as a result, an impulse of inner freshness and activity of the soul, triggered thoughts in this simple, unassuming soul, thoughts that Zeuner then wrote down. And he later sent this manuscript to Moriz Carriere. When you read it – Moriz Carriere had it printed later – you have to agree with Carriere: Zeuner, in abandoning himself to the solitary soul that imperiously struggles to emerge from his breast, has found something that represents the connection between the soul and the world spirit in the same way that Carriere was able to represent it after a lifetime of learning and a lifetime of science.

You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere. The path to the spiritual must be found in a different way than by merely summarizing scientific laws or by drawing consequences from scientific research. Rather, the debate with science must be a different one. No world view can exist today, and no world view may exist - because the needs of the human soul would sweep it away - that would contradict science. Therefore, in the first two lectures, it was necessary to emphasize so sharply what can be said by natural science against spiritual research and how spiritual science has to react to it. And it cannot be emphasized often enough that one should feel misled with regard to any spiritual-scientific knowledge if it comes into conflict with a justified result of natural science. But if one then again looks at this natural science and if one has a sense and a heart for the necessary authority that must emanate from natural science, then one will all the more have to point out what can mislead the soul, what must mislead it precisely through the abundance of what is available, if it wants to set out on the path to the spirit. I would also like to substantiate this with examples.

Let attention be drawn to two researchers who were both grounded in the history of development, in the field of natural science. Both researchers understood the origin of individual living organisms in the same way as the Darwinians, but they only excluded the human being. They were clear about the fact that the laws applicable to the animal world could not be applied to man, but that, just as one had to derive one's physical from the physical, so one had to derive one's spiritual-mental from a spiritual-mental. Both were completely clear about this. They were equally good naturalists and spiritualists, but their thinking habits were those of the scientific direction. They thought like a true scientist thinks. How did one of them, Mivart, and how did the other, Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, think about the actual processes of evolution?

Wallace said to himself that man could not simply be placed in the animal series. Not only because there is a considerable difference between man and the most highly developed ape in the external structure of the brain, even if we only consider the savage, and because the ape's brain is far too imperfect compared to the brain of the savage if man is supposed to have developed from the ape in a straight line of evolution.

The other researcher, Mivart, found that the cultural level of the wild man was not outwardly different from the developmental stage of the most highly developed ape. But if you look at the mental activities of the savage and, in contrast, the activities of the most highly developed ape, you have to assume that the brains of the two are so similar that man therefore does not belong in the animal series. If you look at the brains again, you can clearly see that the human brain has not developed from the ape brain through adaptation to external tasks, but that civilization develops all possibilities in such a way that it only appears as if everything is already predisposed so that it could one day become the tool of civilization.

So because the ape brain and the human brain differ so greatly, one man, Wallace, believes he has to assume that there is no relationship between man and the animal kingdom. And it was precisely the similarity of the mental characteristics in both that was proof for Wallace of what he said. For Mivart, his contemporary, the opposite was the case; he was of the opinion that if one compares the mental characteristics of wild man with those of the highest-standing ape, such a great difference emerges that one cannot assume any ancestral relationship between the savage and the ape because of this difference.

We see, then, two naturalists, both accustomed to scientific thinking, both assuming what is their opinion for opposite reasons; one because the characteristics of the savage and the highest ape are so similar, the other because they are so different. If now two researchers, both of whom tend to derive man from the spiritual, can be so misled with regard to their evidence by the abundance of facts, how much more so should the who is even more prejudiced in the habits of merely materialistic thinking, not be even more incapable of arriving at the spiritual from these facts and laws themselves through the abundance of facts!

Natural science only leads us from fact to fact. If we have spiritual science, then precisely the natural science can be grasped and put into the right perspective from this spiritual science. But the laws of spiritual science can never be found from natural science in any way. Therefore, the human soul would be deprived of all its spiritual nourishment if it were to rely only on what natural science produces. Natural science itself will achieve its greatness and importance precisely by keeping within its limits.

But anyone who takes even a slight interest in the life of the soul will soon find that the soul needs answers to questions about the spirit for its security, strength and work in life. In ancient times, as we have shown with reference to Kepler and Goethe, and as we can show with reference to others, the answers to these questions were already contained in the soul's entire view of the world. Today, however, they are not, and a new task arises, which we have already been able to characterize and which we will still characterize in its essence: the task of spiritual science. What has been lost through the greatness of natural science must be found anew by spiritual science in its own right, showing the way by which the human soul can reach its spiritual home. Whoever understands the age correctly will grasp how, after the course of events has been described, a strong need, a strong longing, arises to understand the world more and more from the spirit and to establish an independent spiritual science alongside natural science.

If we go into details, even into the law of repeated lives on earth, which is perhaps rejected by many spiritual believers today, we see it slowly and gradually emerging and becoming part of more recent culture, for example in Lessing's treatise on the “Education of the Human Race”. Again and again we see, even if little is known about it today, how in the nineteenth century, inwardly consistent soul researchers are led to the only appropriate law for the human soul: repeated earthly lives.

The more natural science celebrates its great triumphs on the material plane, the more the spirit yearns to go its own way. And again with a concrete example, I would like to show how the whole course of spiritual life in our time is such that it naturally leads to what spiritual science wants to be today. I would like to draw attention to a thinker, to a researcher, whom I will discuss more in the course of these winter lectures, who is interesting precisely with regard to a longing for spiritual science: Herman Grimm, the art historian. A comprehensive spirit, he shows us precisely how, in modern times, the soul has been pushed out of a mere natural scientific view of events, especially in human life, and how the soul is being held back again by the impulses and forces of the time from taking the last step of pushing out, from pushing into spiritual science.

Anyone who carefully studies the writings of Herman Grimm will see that he is looking for a world principle, not a dead world principle, but a creative law, which, for example, the practical historian can hold to, and which must be something other than the so-called historical ideas. Ideas can create just as little as — in the image of the last lecture — a painter can paint a picture. Ideas are dead. Only something living can be effective. Herman Grimm sought for the living element in history, that can powerfully create from epoch to epoch, that once in the primeval epoch of humanity created the form of the human soul for impersonal reasons and then from people to people, from age to age conjured up the individual achievements out of itself. And what did he think he had found as such? The creative imagination.

A German philosopher, Frohschammer, also believed that imagination was the creator not only in historical development but also in nature. Herman Grimm could not get around to showing – which he wanted to do – how imagination is really a kind of divinity that lives in the will and brings about deeds in human history, just as the individual human being brings about the deeds of his soul out of himself. He created what he did in the light of this view, that behind historical becoming stands the creative imagination, that everything has come about through the creative imagination. But what is imagination for him? Do we not see in the urge of a researcher to understand the facts the approach to something spiritual, but which is not spirit? For the creative imagination remains only an abstraction, which is indeed more alive than the ideas of history, but for the realist it is still only an abstraction.

One would like to say that a researcher like Herman Grimm has reached the gateway of spiritual science. He cannot stop at the external material 'facts' and external events, he sees behind all external events what the imagination creates and objectifies it in world events. But no one can recognize in the imagination something real and creative. It remains an abstraction, and only when one penetrates behind it to what is no longer an abstraction, what is spiritual, what is as real as a real sensual, only when one approaches the spiritual facts, which are not circumscribed ideas but are essential, can one understand how what is around us really happens in the world. Therefore, we see from such a profound thinker how the yearning of our time for the spiritual is approaching, and how the obstacles created by time are so formidable that people cannot enter through the gate to the spiritual. Do we not see the urge to approach this spiritual science? Do we not see how this spiritual science has tasks for the present and the future that correspond to the longing, the urge, the demands of the time?

Let us take a closer look at the reasons that hinder the souls of today! From the longing for the spiritual, we can clearly see that people cannot help but long for the spirit and its laws when they look clearly into the conditions of the times, but that they cannot penetrate into the spiritual and are now, so to speak, waiting for a spiritual. Wherever you look, you see the urge for what is still unknown. But from the nature of the urge itself, you can see quite clearly that a time will come, not so far away, when people will understand: spiritual science is the answer to the longing, to the urge they have.

Not long ago, a book could be seen at the booksellers in every train station that was truly not written by a man who would easily indulge in every single enthusiasm. This book does not come from a lonely brooder and a person who does not know the spiritual needs of the time. If spiritual science wants to show its legitimacy, then it must not rely on the often peculiar enthusiasts who, in their sectarian nature, want to understand what can help humanity; but it can refer to what in the book 'On the Criticism of the Times', by Walther Rathenau, which has been written by a man who is in the thick of industrial and commercial life and who knows the workings of our time.

Not that I would agree with everything in it. Objections could be raised against every page of this book, but what could be called the urge of the time for spiritual knowledge is symptomatically demonstrated by such a book. What does Walter Rathenau represent? He represents precisely what I tried to explain in more detail in the spirit of the development of the last century. In Rathenau's case it is as follows: Through the progress of natural scientific development, a mechanization of life has generally resulted. Whereas man in former times sought to explain that which presented itself to his senses out of the spirit, today he explains it out of the mechanical. But the relationship of man to man has also become mechanized. 'Mechanization' is what has come about through the great progress and significant achievements of the time. And one can feel – and Walther Rathenau feels it – how the soul within the thinking and social mechanism becomes desolate, how it gradually becomes empty under such goals, how one can indeed take away its nourishment, but cannot satisfy its hunger through mechanization.

What many of the best connoisseurs of the time have said has also been said here: one pushes back what the soul spiritually desires, and one will be able to see, even if the soul is satisfied with something superficial, that the hunger in question will show itself all the more. — So we see how a person who is completely immersed in his time writes:

“Time is not seeking its meaning and its God, it is seeking its soul, which has darkened in the mixture of blood, in the throng of mechanistic thinking and desiring.

It seeks its soul and will find it; admittedly against the will of mechanization. This epoch had no interest in developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to obscure the otherworldly. Nevertheless, we are surrounded by mystery as much as ever; it comes to light beneath every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes a single step to the center of the world. The three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity, could not be taken away from the individual by mechanization; for the life of the whole, they are evaporated into insignificance. Humanitarianism sank to cold pity and the duty of care, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, covered by the regimentation of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered the service of interests in this world and the next and thus became suspicious not only to ignoble natures. There is probably no single path by which it would not be possible for man to find his soul, even if it were the joy of flying an airplane. But humanity will not take any detours. No prophets will come and no religious founders, because this over-anesthetized time will no longer perceive a single voice: otherwise it could still listen to Christ and Paul today. No esoteric communities will take the lead, because a secret teaching is misunderstood by the first disciple, let alone the second. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is a mirror and a play of the soul, not its creator.

The greatest and most wonderful thing is its simplicity. Nothing will happen except that mankind, under the pressure and urge of mechanization, of bondage, of fruitless struggle, will cast aside the obstacles that weigh on the growth of its soul. This will not happen through brooding and thinking, but through free understanding and experience. What many people talk about today and a few people understand will later be grasped by many and ultimately by everyone: that no power on earth can withstand the soul.

In so far as such words express longings, and in so far as our time demands the spirit, one can certainly agree with them. Only one must add: there is here a complete knowledge of what the time requires, but a complete lack of knowledge of what can satisfy these longings and needs. There is also a clear judgment that the justified individualism of our time is no longer suited to receiving a single religious founder or prophet, or to founding secret schools on any sectarian side that wants to call itself “esoteric”.

True spiritual science will want neither the one nor the other. True spiritual science knows how true esotericism is justified when it does not want to become exoteric but remains within itself. For it is not a matter of what wants to become established as esoteric, but of what wants to become established in our time in such a way that it can be absorbed by the healthy mind. In this respect, the authority of some prophet will not suffice for the age, but only the truth that is completely independent of man and his subjective individuality, to which the human soul can surrender if it only wants to. In this respect, what was meant here by spiritual science has been aptly expressed in the words of this practical man, Rathenau.

But why is it so difficult for our age to return to spiritual science? Why does something like an insurmountable wall arise between the urge of the time and actual spiritual science?

This, too, can be shown, and the real obstacles can be identified. What would someone say, for example, about a science that wants to be a “science” and prove itself to be responsive to the needs of the human spirit, if the person who wants to be a scientist only ever answered every question about the connection between the physical human body and scientific facts by saying: “There is this or that organization in the physical body of the human being; this corresponds to what is also outside in nature.” Can anyone imagine a serious natural science that only ever answers everything one asks it with: “That's nature!” Nature is behind the movements of the stars, nature is behind chemical processes, nature, nature, nature. Just one word! Can you imagine someone who would do such a thing being taken seriously as a naturalist?

Now one can say again: the impulses of the human soul to enter into the spiritual world have become so weak in recent times that the urge to do so, which is very much alive, is expressed in our time only in what would be quite similar in spiritual science as in natural science, where people would only ever cry: nature, nature, nature! Let us see weighty voices raised, vigorously advocating that the scientific study of our time must lead man to the soul. But they do not get any further by demanding this orientation towards the soul than by emphasizing: “Man has a soul, there is a soul,” and so on; “soul, soul, soul - spirit, spirit, spirit,” they say, just as the less than satisfied naturalist would say: “nature, nature, nature!”

We see – and not insignificant, but quite significant facts are cited – how an important man of the present day, at a celebration of Harvard University in America, gave a speech about how a general worldview that leads to the spiritual must be born out of science, Dr. Eliot, a man who stands firmly on the ground of science, who is a close connoisseur of contemporary science. I would like to quote again from a speech delivered at an outstanding place on earth. Dr. Eliot said:

"Men have always assumed a soul different from the body, although inherent in it. No one is willing to be absorbed in his body. On the contrary, everyone now believes, and all men have believed, that there is in man an animating, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something just as real as the body, and more characteristic... This spirit or soul is the most effective part of the human being, it is recognized as such, and this has always been the case.

Dr. Elliot says nothing more than that he points to the “soul,” analogous to how someone would always point only to “nature, nature, nature.” We have not yet reached the point in our time when our thinking about the spirit would be as comfortable as it is with nature. In natural science we distinguish oxygen and hydrogen in water, and we do not say: oxygen and hydrogen belong to 'nature'. There we are dealing with the details of nature. Likewise, spiritual science must come to the point where it can relate that which lives in the soul as forces and as activities not only to a “general spiritual reality”, but to a spiritual world, to a concrete realm of the spirit, which is distinguished and described in the same way as the individual facts of natural science.

Only when spiritual science is able to approach the observation of the individual facts of the human soul in the same way that natural science approaches the observation of the individual facts of nature will it be able to give the human soul what the soul desires. The next lecture is intended to show what these paths are like. But above all, it should be explained how, in our time, there is a desire for something whose meaning and essence is not yet clear, and how spiritual science in our time has the task of bringing knowledge of the spiritual, just as natural science brings knowledge of natural facts. And just as natural science regards it as its task to trace a substance that is also found in the human body in its development out in the world in order to recognize the whole context, so spiritual science will regard it as its task to trace any activity of the human soul back to the spiritual powers and the spiritual principles of creation out in the universe.

From this, however, it will also recognize how that which lives in the human soul relates to the whole universe, to space and time. Only in this way can it arrive at the answers to the riddles of immortality and of the fate of man between death and the next birth. Not the abstract pointing to “spirit” and “soul” in general can lead to anything useful. This will only lead to doubt about the true answers, for example, to the question of immortality. Only when one sees how something completely different is linked to it, which is not subject to transience in the course of time, will it be possible to answer these questions from spiritual science.

If we consider this, we may say that the tasks for spiritual research in the present and future are similar to those that arose for natural science at the dawn of modern scientific development. Just as the old traditions were overcome at the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on, and the human spirit itself was directed towards scientific facts, and just as a certain abundance of scientific scientific achievements has come into being, so it must be the most serious task of our time to establish a spiritual science in a comprehensive way and to show the paths that the soul has to take to the individual spiritual entities and the individual spiritual facts.

Natural science has not had an easy time of it. It has also had to fight against obstacles, as we are again facing today in relation to spiritual science. I have often pointed out such obstacles. For example, Galileo tried to make it clear to the people of his time that it had been believed throughout the Middle Ages that the nerves of the human body emanated from the heart, whereas he wanted to show that they emanate from the brain. A friend said to him: “That contradicts everything Aristotle taught.” – Apart from the fact that Aristotle did not mean it that way, people still believed that the nerves of the human body emanate from the heart. The entire Middle Ages did not look at nature itself, but only preserved old traditions and prejudices. When Galileo showed his friend the corpse to convince him that the nerves go out from the brain, the latter replied: “When I look at it, it looks as if the nerves of the human being go out from the brain, but that contradicts Aristotle, and if I come into conflict with Aristotle, I believe Aristotle and not nature.

That is how strongly people's prejudices can pile up. And when, later, in the Galilean sense, Francesco Redi overthrew the prevailing prejudice that living beings could develop from something inanimate, that lower animals, worms and the like could arise from river mud, when he uttered the sentence: ” only from the living, and that it was only an inaccurate way of observing when they believed that worms could come from river mud in which there was no germ, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

And so, when today the spiritual scientist says: If you believe that everything produced by the soul of a developing child is determined solely by what it has inherited from its parents and their ancestors, then you are observing inaccurately; it has its origin rather in a spiritual germ which already went through an earlier life on earth and then underwent a life in the spiritual. If spiritual science points to a spiritual germ, as Francesco Redi pointed to the material germ, then the prejudices of the time stand in its way. Even if they do not burn people anymore, they have other means of rendering such heretical assertions harmless or at least ridiculing them. The way in which the times treat their people changes from epoch to epoch, but the essence of prejudice always remains the same. In a similar way, the time for research into spiritual needs today stands in the same relation to the time of the dawn of scientific development as it did to the scientific needs of that time. And if science has brought an increase in external culture to humanity through its fruits, the fruits of spiritual culture will be quite different. Above all, they will be fruits for the life of the soul.

How many people today suffer practically from scientific prejudices! There stands a person, and if he is a scientific believer and rejects the spirit, he may well say to himself: There is a certain kind of individuality in me; I look up to my blood relationship and have to recognize how I am the result of the inheritance from my blood relationship. Then depression, a lack of energy and an inability to fight against fate descends into many a soul. For if it were the case that man is only the result of heredity, then it would be just as impossible to stop the bad effects of heredity as it is to stop the lightning that flashes towards a person. But if spiritual science does not remain a mere theory, but becomes a force of the soul, so that we know: there lives in us a soul-core that carries what the line of inheritance has given only as an outer shell and must seek ever deeper and deeper forces within itself. Then courage, hope and energy will grow to control and improve what shows up as weakness in the external physical existence through the spiritual. There will no longer be a moment in a person's life when one cannot gain certainty with regard to the spiritual forces in the person to overcome external obstacles.

This is the case in many areas. So mere belief in the material world, in which the life of the soul is supposed to be harnessed, can depress our happiness and energy, while spiritual science, on the other hand, when it becomes the living inner power of the soul, can give us security against all mechanization of life. This is another task of spiritual science: to create the possibility in all fields of facing life with security and health. Dr. Eliot also promises a healthy science in his way. He, too, knows the soul's urge toward the spirit, but he acts like the naturalist who would speak only of “nature, nature, nature” in everything. He says: such a new science will not speak of death and mourning as the old one does, but of life and joy.

I readily believe that the soul longs for a worldview that strives for “life and joy,” that wants to reject and not let “death and mourning” come close to it, to which many old worldviews went back and which above all presented the mystery of death to people. I readily believe that people want to reject death and mourning. But death and sorrow come of themselves. No matter how much people may resist and say that they want to reject death and sorrow in their worldviews, they want to have life and joy. But death and sorrow come of themselves, and then one must come to terms with them. But one can only cope with them when one knows the living spirit, which continues life even where outer nature sets in death and mourning, and which also knows the creative principle in pain, suffering and sorrow. We shall yet see that spiritual science, as it is meant here, is able to regard what appears to be an obstacle to development, evil, that which contradicts life, as something that advances the world and serves life.

One could say: What the truth of spiritual research, as it follows not from the arbitrariness of an individual, but from what man can recognize today, if he correctly interprets his environment through the paths of the soul to a spiritual knowledge , what this truth can mean in the context of the whole world, can be seen in the way the spiritual-scientific researcher relates to the natural-scientific world-explorer in the dawn of modern times. Let us look at Giordano Bruno, in whom Copernicus's world view is most succinctly expressed! How does he stand in his time? He takes up the laws of Copernicanism and looks out into the vastness of space. Before that, there was a worldview that relied only on the external sense perception. When we hear today that everything is uncertain that has not been investigated by conventional science, we might object: But look at the time of Copernicus and Giordano Bruno! As long as we relied on what meets the eye with regard to the starry sky, we did not have the right view of the external world system. It was only when we went beyond the external sense perception and devoted ourselves to thought that we found through inner energy what we now recognize as true.

Only when Copernicus and Giordano Bruno had progressed so far as to overcome the delusion of sensory appearance were they able to point out how erroneous was the previous belief of men that the earth was something fixed in space, around which the moon, sun and planets revolved, then came the sphere of fixed stars, and behind that was, as it were, the so-called eighth sphere, which limited everything. Giordano Bruno stood up and said to the people: When you direct your gaze into the celestial space, there is no “eighth sphere” there, you make it yourself; but there is the blue firmament, and the spaces are filled with worlds like ours, and we see out into a sea of infinity if we are only able to overcome the boundary that we have set for ourselves! It was this conquest of the barrier of space that constituted the greatness of the Copernican and Giordano Bruno world views, in that it was recognized: because man's gaze did not reach further, he believed in an eighth sphere, whereas in truth the expanse of space is unlimited.

Today, humanity is on the same ground in terms of spiritual science. Just as Giordano Bruno showed that the blue vault of heaven is only there because the human eye does not reach further, so spiritual science shows that human life between birth and death is only limited because the gaze of the ordinary person only goes so far. Just as the firmament is no limit to the contemplation of the universe, so birth and death are no limit to the contemplation of man, which we erect only because the ordinary man's view reaches only so far. Just as the spatial limitation of the world was removed by natural science and space was opened up, so today the limits of birth and death for the human being are removed by spiritual science, in that it teaches us to direct our spiritual gaze into the life of the soul in its eternal duration, just as natural science in the dawn of modern times has directed our gaze into eternity or, better said, into the infinity of space. Exactly the same today as then, only in a different field!

Just as the natural sciences, which have turned to the external life of man and to the external knowledge of man's life, have brought infinite advantages and achievements, so too will the soul's view of what it needs for its life, expanded beyond birth and death, beyond the temporal, bring infinite values to the human soul. For spiritual scientific research, when pursued correctly, will pass over into the human soul and will become life there, will become strength and confidence, will place us in the whole social context and bring the soul what the souls, which are only beginning to understand a little, long for so much.

Absolutely true, not only in theory but in life and in strength, spiritual science will do what I have already tried to summarize in a few words, with which I also want to conclude my reflection today, which should show what the spirit and meaning and goal of spiritual science is, and what this spiritual science of the human soul should be. The meaning and goal of spiritual science, we can grasp it something like this:

Man's mind speaks to man:
Things in the vastness of space;
They change in the course of time.
Recognizing, the human soul,
Unlimited by the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the passage of time,
Penetrates into the realm of the spirit.