Spiritual Science and the Future of Humanity

GA 69e — 11 January 1913, Leipzig

X. Truths and Fallacies of Spiritual Research

If the question of truth and error is a deeply significant one in every area of human life, it may be said that in the field of spiritual research this question takes on a very special significance. This is probably because what spiritual research wants to give people and be is connected with those vital questions that not only approach the soul in the same way as the questions of one or other science, but approach the soul, one might say daily, and ultimately make up the interest of this human soul, make up everything that can give the soul consolation and hope on the one hand, and security and strength in life on the other.

The field of spiritual research is wide. It extends, so to speak, to the entire field of development of every entity with which man can be thought to be connected in any way, for everything that comes to man in these fields of spiritual research, one might say, is condensed into significant life riddles and life questions. A question that really confronts us every hour is contained in the momentous words of human destinies. On the one hand, we see the human being entering into existence, already surrounded by hardship and misery from the cradle, and we can predict that hardship and misery will perhaps accompany him throughout his life. If we find him endowed with few abilities in childhood, so that we can know in a certain way that he will initially be only a little useful member of the human community, so that is perhaps mysterious on the one hand; on the other hand, we need only compare how many others enter life blessed with goods of fortune or endowed with significant abilities, so that one can know he will become a useful member of humanity. Outer science is not at all in a position to raise such questions, for outer science with its presuppositions proves itself from the outset incapable of answering such questions. Finally, there approaches man the other, which so to speak spiritual research combines: the question [of immortality], which finally approaches the incomprehensibilities of the human being.

Perhaps it may be said, especially in our time, that this question does not approach man at all in the manner of scientific questions. How many desires, hopes and feelings, which must not intrude into a scientific question at all, are mixed up in this question. There have been and still are enough people in our time who do not believe in the survival of the human soul when the gate of life has closed, and who deny such a survival of the human soul after death, and it may be said that a materialistic way of thinking must come to this view. Noble natures in particular may say that it is selfish to want to live only on condition that this entity passes through the gate of death and then has another form of existence, while it is selfless to give up what one has gained to the general public. From this point of view, many truly noble natures have found the necessity that materialism presents here to be more unselfish than an egoistic need for survival after death.

If only human desires and longings, fear and the dread of life after 'death were decisive, then one could easily assume that one would have to come to more materialistic views precisely out of noble sentiments. But if one approaches the question more deeply, it develops as an eminently scientific question, even if science does not have the means to provide an answer. One need only be a connoisseur of the human soul to say that the most significant thing a person can achieve for his soul is a very individual life. The subtlety, the uniqueness that serves our powers best, that furthers most what we can achieve for ourselves, cannot be given away to anything; and if the soul had to give it away with death, it would have to be lost. From this would follow that significant riddle: it would be against the world order for such a loss to happen, that the best that the soul can achieve should disappear into nothing. Not that this is an answer to the question that has been raised. But it is necessary to raise this question. These are questions that cannot be called scientific in the usual sense, questions that may also be of little concern to some souls who live their lives indifferently.

But apart from whether we can answer these questions or not, the question of where the sources of truth and error can be found in this area is closely related to our inner soul life and destiny. I have often had the opportunity to speak here about the subject of what spiritual research has to offer. Of course, it is not possible to talk about any of them, not even in an introductory way, and it is not my job here to talk about what can be heard in other lectures or is available in the literature. I want to talk about how man comes to such questions, what the insights are, then what the sources are and how man can come to errors.

Because there is a certain necessity to spread the knowledge of spiritual science, it should not only be spoken of truth and error in the field of spiritual science, insofar as these lie on the path of the spiritual researcher himself, but also in relation to the dissemination of the knowledge of spiritual science. The fate of the human being cannot be known if we only look at what the world of the senses reveals, and anyone who is not very familiar with our science also knows that the intellect cannot explain the reasons why a soul is destined for this or that fate. He also knows that the intellect can tell us nothing about the soul's fate after death, because the soul dwells in the supersensible, invisible realm, if it still exists at all as such. The ordinary powers that man has at his disposal to know the world, these powers are not sufficient to answer these deepest questions.

This is where the question arises: Are there forces in the human soul that can penetrate beyond the ordinary senses, that are not dependent on the mind alone, which is bound to the human brain? If we come to the conclusion that the soul not only goes through one life on earth, but that this life repeats itself between birth and death, and that what the soul meets as fate is what it has earned in past lives, and that what we do now creates causes for a future life . It must be said: What enters through birth into physical existence carries with it the forces that it brings in through birth into the external worlds, and knowledge of these supersensible worlds can answer questions about why a soul comes into very specific life situations. Everywhere we are pointed to the necessity of such questions, to the necessity of investigating everything with the powers of the soul that our science cannot investigate.

But do such powers exist in the human soul? It will be easiest to understand how such powers can prevail in the soul if we start from everyday phenomena, which admittedly do not approach man in the same way as the dismaying, surprising event of death, for example, but which approach without man thinking much about them. It is well known that man only reflects on what surprises him; he reflects less on what falls within his daily habits, and yet it is precisely these that can point to the deepest depths of human life. One such phenomenon that occurs daily is the state of waking and sleeping. The state of sleep is mysterious. Every day we are forced to pass into unconsciousness, into a state that spreads darkness around us. This is a significant mystery.

Let us first consider this state purely externally. We see when we fall asleep how our physical body, so to speak, falls away from us, how we gradually become unable to direct our limbs as we do during the day. Finally, we see how our senses cease to be awake to us, how our minds become paralyzed, as it were, and then we pass into an unconscious state. It would be impossible for everything that takes place in the soul from morning to evening in the form of affects, suffering, drives and desires, to disappear when we fall asleep and then arise anew every morning. It must be there, even if the person is not aware of it.

Let us first hypothetically assume what spiritual research shows. It can only be pointed out now; it cannot be shown in detail. So let us hypothetically assume that in what we see with our physical eyes, in what we can grasp with our hands, there is a supersensible spiritual element, a spiritual-secluded supersensible element. This is the source of difficulties, of incipient passion and so on, and this spiritual-supernatural goes out of the dormant state into a spiritual world, so it is present. It should be explicitly stated that this is initially a hypothesis. We will see through our considerations that it has a certain justification. If this is the case, then we have to say that the soul and spirit are also present in sleep, but are unaware of themselves when they enter that world; after all, they use the brain to perceive and appropriate the external world.

We can therefore assume that the soul and spiritual aspects are not strong enough to lead a conscious life when separated from the physical body, that they are too weak for this. If this is the case, then there must be a way to strengthen these powers. It would have to be possible for a person to artificially induce a kind of sleep, so that a state of mind would arise that, on the one hand, resembles ordinary sleep but, on the other hand, is essentially different. The induction of such a state is indeed necessary, and only in such a state can real spiritual research take place. The question is therefore whether the soul and spirit in man can be made so strong that man can, as it were, put himself into a kind of artificial sleep that is not sleep. Then the human being should be able to bring about what is brought about in sleep, that his spiritual-soul life has nothing to do with the body, that the intellect is silent, that the human being is also outwardly physical as in sleep. During sleep, the human being is in a state in which his inner being is silent, subdued, and shrouded in darkness. If, however, a person can voluntarily free himself from his own soul forces, so that he can have experiences free of the body, as if disembodied, then he experiences in the spirit, but initially he can only remember himself as a spiritual being through inner experiences.

What today appears to the broadest sections of humanity as foolishness should be feasible. There can be no proof against its feasibility. People believe they have proof against it, but such people can only claim that with their present powers they cannot know about such things. However, one can only claim that something is known, but not that something is not known. Otherwise, such a worldview makes a logical mistake. But first of all, the strong development of will must be learned, to free oneself artificially from all sense impressions, to effect silence, to dampen all color and light impressions, to want to know nothing of all this, and likewise nothing of hearing impressions and all other impressions; thus to bring to a standstill the ordinary thinking and so on. All this must be brought to a standstill by exercise of the will, just as it is in sleep. Man must now make strong what is otherwise so weak in sleep. This is done through meditation and the like.

What kind of purely mental activities are these? For they are purely mental activities. A meditation is a kind of mental-spiritual experience; but it differs from everything else that a person is used to. Let us consider how this mental activity is perceived. It differs from all other human activities in that these are there to form concepts, ideas and feelings in order to inwardly perceive something external, to depict something external. Man seeks images and expressions in ordinary life. Only in this way can ordinary life be sustained. But the whole purpose of such institutions, which exist for ordinary life, cannot be decisive for the development of the soul, which has been spiritually demanded. For this development of the soul, everything that can be spiritually thought, imagined, felt, desired, is only there for inner self-education, to help the soul to progress, to equip the soul inwardly with forces, so to speak. not what one feels, what one recognizes as outer truth through one's thinking and feeling, that is what matters, but what this thinking, feeling and sensing brings forth in the soul, what it makes of the soul.

This brings us to a completely different level than that of ordinary life, of science. In a sense, the human being must become free of the meaning of his concepts, of the content of his feelings, and must devote himself entirely to some practice with his soul. It is best if the person does not take for meditation ideas that represent something external, because in doing so one feels dependent on the external world. Best for meditation are ideas that can live entirely in the soul alone.

An idea that will seem foolish to the external, material thinker: Imagine that someone has two glasses in front of them, one with water and the other empty. Now imagine that they pour water from the first glass into the second, and the partially filled glass does not become emptier, but rather fuller and fuller, and the more they pour, the fuller the glass becomes.

This is not an actual external process. Nor is that what is important here, but rather what it can evoke in the soul. It can be a symbol for the following: It points us to an area of life that, on the one hand, leads us again and again into its depths, and on the other hand, repeatedly presents us with life's riddles, that which we summarize as “love,” starting with passionate love and rising to the soul form of love. Enormous human suffering can be summarized in this idea, and love has one property: the property that when a loving person does something for another out of love, gives up his spiritual wealth, he does not become poorer and emptier, but fuller and fuller.

It is not so foolish to form such images and symbols. In other areas, people are accustomed to forming such symbols [like a] medal. The medal is circular. We need not worry about it, but draw a circle. All the properties of the circle apply to the medal.

It is not important to recognize an object in order to perhaps fathom the essence of love, but rather to have an idea that is emancipated from external reality. Consider what happens when you manage to empty the soul of all mental judgments, of all external impressions, and to concentrate the full extent of the soul's power only on such an idea, which you have brought into focus. Otherwise in life, we distribute the most diverse powers of the soul that we have within us among the most diverse ideas arising from the behavior of human beings. We often have the soul occupied with many things at the same time. We now empty the soul completely of them and concentrate completely on one such idea, for example, of goodwill, of kindness. We must concentrate exclusively on it, live in it, and if we have enough patience and persistence to do such exercises over and over again, then we will actually bring it about that dormant forces in our soul are awakened. We learn to transform ourselves from a usually suffering, passive being into an active being, and thus we first take hold of ourselves. It is not enough to do just a few such soul exercises, but it all depends on having the patience to prepare the soul so that it always feels active.

Then there comes a time when the soul feels as if it has been reborn, because it no longer needs to form such images, to present such ideas to itself, but these then arise as if from the depths of the soul itself, and the person then indeed lives as if in a new world emerging from the hidden depths. When man has reached this stage, then the actual schooling of the spirit begins, for then a new world appears before him. But what is this world? In order to understand what this world is, we want to point out that today's materialistic man, when it comes to the imaginative world, believes that these are illusions, fantasies, and that they are the same as what emerges in a sick, pathological soul.

When we realize that we are only at the beginning of spiritual research with this imaginative world, then we compare what the spiritual researcher has attained through meditation with what can be experienced in an unhealthy soul. We encounter a trait in sick people that you are well aware of: the trait that such people have the unshakable belief that they are facing an objective world, and it is in vain to try to talk them out of it. They put forward everything with the greatest ingenuity, things that have not even been thought of, and thus they master the thinking mind. If the spiritual researcher were never able to distinguish truth from error here, he would not differ from such a sick soul. The question is how to deal with this.

From this alone you can see that initially we are dealing with nothing more than images that arise from within, which therefore need not be anything other than reflections of what the person has within himself. The person has activated forces, awakened inner life that was not there before, but he has not lived in anything other than himself. What stands before him is initially nothing more than a reflection of his own inner being. Because this reflection is experienced by the human being in this way, it is extremely difficult to make the decision that the true spiritual researcher must now make. It is necessary to realize that one is dealing with nothing but the reflections of one's own inner being, of what one carries in one's soul. But it is not enough for the spiritual researcher to know that everything is only a reflection of one's own inner self; it is also necessary that he actually has the strength to suppress the whole imaginative world so that it is no longer there.

There is also the possibility that people come to such experiences without training. Such people are then usually in love with such experiences. A person is usually extremely happy when such a world arises in him. It is therefore only through strong will training that a person, if he wants to become a spiritual researcher, suppresses the whole imaginative world so that it is no longer there. He actually suppresses his own being, for which he has trained himself. Only then do you realize how much you are in love with yourself.

It takes one of the strongest volitional efforts to suppress these reflections. Man already lives in self-love in the outer life, and this intensifies when this inner life begins. Now one should suppress what one has striven for. But it must be done. Then, however, when you have completely suppressed these reflections by developing the strong will to extinguish them, you have replaced the imaginations and must wait until they come back. Then they will come back in a new form, so that it is then impossible to mistake them for anything other than the objective world. Anyone familiar with such things finds it understandable that many people simply deny this process, for the reason that it is not easy to carry out. But then, when a new world has emerged after the person has suppressed the first imaginative world, then one knows how to distinguish between fantasy and reality in this new world as well. For many, the world is our imagination. And if such a philosophy claims that one cannot get beyond imagination, then it would be all the easier to say: How can one then distinguish between imagination and reality? This sentence is easily refutable. It is a banality that I will say, but that does not matter. The taste of lemonade on the tongue with mere imagination - but that does not quench thirst.

There is no logical proof as to whether a thing really exists or is only an idea. Proof can only be provided by life. But experience also makes a precise distinction between idea, mere fantasy and what is real; or should a person be able to distinguish between a hot iron that is imagined and a real hot iron? The same applies to Kant's sentence that three real thalers contain no more or less than three possible thalers. You can pay a debt with real thalers, but not with possible ones.

You may say that it is different with spiritual things, that what you see could really be self-suggestion. Real life makes the difference. But one must first be in real life. Life alone decides on reality, and so it is also in the spiritual realm. The practice of the soul, the evocation of the power of knowledge in the soul, teaches us to distinguish between imagination and reality. In this way, man is able to evoke the state that is indeed similar to the state of sleep in that man does not use his body. Then, when man has reached this imaginative knowledge, it goes up to higher levels, where man actually begins to have what is called a spiritual world around him, and not only in the way between death and a new birth, but in such a way that it enters into his thoughts, which he remembers. Man comes to know truths about the world beyond. How the characterized questions are to be solved through meditation can be read in the literature. The point is that when man tries to gain knowledge in this way, error does not occur as it does in relation to external knowledge, but error then springs up everywhere. In the outer world we are corrected by many things to which we are accustomed. In this area, correction does not come so easily. The human being is dependent on himself.

There are two things that must be considered. Today they can only be presented as an empirical rule. These are two things that the human being carries into the spiritual world, because he carries his entire soul condition into it, the nature of his power of judgment, his moral condition. What does the human being bring into these spiritual worlds? What the human being develops as good or bad judgment contributes to whether the human being receives stimulation in the right way. A healthy power of judgment will stir his soul in the right way. What must live in his soul will be developed regularly, like our normal eyes and ears. Just as badly constituted senses relate to the world, so does what is cultivated in the soul when a person does not endeavor to maintain sound judgment. Those who want to enter the spiritual world must start from sound human understanding.

The second thing we have to bring with us is a healthy moral state of mind and soul, a soul mood and soul disposition that has, in a sense, managed to be free of soul moods. If a person brings immoral moods into it, then the effect is not one of unhealthy judgment, but rather the immoral mood has a numbing effect, not obliterating, but evoking bad images, untrue images. Mere deception of the soul world would be merely corrected by the power of judgment; what is evoked as a work of deception by an immoral state of mind is there and one believes in it if moral drive is not set in at the same time as spiritual training.

For in the training of the spirit, it must be taken into account that man must free himself from many things, which he can only free himself from with difficulty if he wants to search objectively. We want to start from ordinary life. There we find a phenomenon that can actually be studied everywhere. We find people who are materialists and believe only in nature and law. Such people think that anyone who believes in something other than nature is a fool, and that anything that cannot be explained in materialistic terms is nonsense. On the other hand, there are idealists who are less accustomed to dealing with matter. They are more accustomed to and respect more people with a pronounced soul life. They are therefore better suited to recognize the world and its immaterial conditions. There is realism and spiritualism, and the biggest mistake in ordinary life is that everyone swears by their “ism”. What is this “ism” other than what they have imagined: the expression of their own self. They therefore love it. The idealist loves his ideas, and so on. More far-seeing minds than Goethe's are not really in the mood to say, “I am an idealist, from my point of view things are like this.” Rather, we can see in Goethe's case how he is convinced of something that is actually considered foolish by the true materialist.

The world of material phenomena lives out itself before us, and one must study matter and the law – and one will realize that what matter grants has its justification. Thus, one must also explain that which belongs to the world and its material phenomena through these material phenomena. One can very well engage with the explanations that the materialist gives for matter. Goethe says: “Between the various one-sided directions, the path into truth opens up.” One must recognize that the world is an extremely diverse one and that one must grasp the various fields through the most diverse forms of thought and imagination. So one will always find that matter must be explained in a materialistic way. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that you already find your way in ordinary life. You get beyond that by practicing self-knowledge, which is often quite difficult. If you try to practice self-knowledge objectively, you soon realize what point of view you are taking. This has no further significance except in our soul life. One is then more inclined to also allow others such a point of view. Such ideas are necessary.

The spiritual researcher must recognize that points of view are there for areas of the world, and that one must, as it were, have the opportunity to grasp the world as a whole, to approach it from different sides with different points of view, just as one recognizes the shape of a tree by photographing it from different sides. A materialistic and an idealistic world view can both be correct. This insight must be gained through self-knowledge. Through self-knowledge, one seeks to overcome one-sidedness.

In practice, many things turn out differently than in theory, if one takes the trouble to carry them out seriously. You have conquered a point of view, and when you realize the limitations of it, you feel the ground shaking beneath you. The point of view we have conquered is our own self. And that is why you have to go through such feelings, otherwise you will not get away from your own self, otherwise everything remains subjectively formed. It is this “getting away from oneself” that is important. When we talk about misconceptions, we cannot say: these are truths and those are misconceptions. We become free of misconceptions through self-education, when we can let go of ourselves, when we can give up our point of view. There is nothing that people are more infatuated with than their point of view.

But he must go further. He must not only get away from what we call point of view, but get away from the subjective of his thinking and feeling. One must practice self-knowledge, but that comes naturally if the spiritual training is done in the right way.

When we are confronted with the spiritual world, we are outside of our ordinary life, in which we otherwise stand. We stand before ourselves, have become a thing ourselves. Otherwise we live ourselves, now we stand before ourselves as before an external thing. The spiritual researcher joins the spiritual things when he strives into the spiritual world. We compare ourselves with the spiritual world. This comparison is usually not favorable. This is easy to understand, because when a person begins to know himself, he then knows everything that is missing in him. Man shrinks back from self-knowledge. It is indeed true: self-knowledge is what we snatch from what we have loved. We are in the air. We have felt in a certain way so far; we have to see that as a narrowly limited personality. We have thought in a certain way – narrowly limited personality. Only now does a person realize how in love he is with himself. Self-knowledge is not only difficult because it is so hard to achieve, but also because it requires moral courage, because you put yourself out of yourself, put what you were aside; because you enter into a new state of mind that you are quite unaccustomed to.

To have experienced this mood is what is necessary to avoid error in the field of spiritual research. The errors come from within us. We must always be able to renew this impression, to place ourselves beside ourselves, then we know what to eliminate; then we know how to eliminate the errors. In the field of spiritual research, repeating an error is not the same as in the ordinary world. We have to fight errors at every turn; they are realities. In the spiritual realm, truths have to be gathered at every turn, because only when we understand all this can we agree on the value of insights into the spiritual world. After all, the objection can be raised that the spiritual world is only relevant for those who can see into it. This is not the case: only those who want to explore the spiritual world must be able to see into it. Any unbiased person can understand it.

How does the spiritual researcher relate to the ordinary state of mind? A painter must learn much before he can create a picture. When contemplating the painting, one person may see only the color combinations, while another looks for what the painter has put into it, and the person who experiences most deeply would be disturbed if a theorist came along and explained how colors are mixed, or if someone were to discuss art history and so on. You stand before the picture: if you can grasp what has been put into it, then you grasp it, and you need not be a painter. It is the same with what the spiritual researcher brings to light.

Then the spiritual researcher must express what he has researched in terms that are familiar to people of his time, that can be penetrated by a healthy mind; and then the other person, as listener or reader, receives it, only the person must not approach what the spiritual researcher has to say with prejudices. Then he will understand through a sound mind what the spiritual researcher has brought down. It is not the case that only what the spiritual researcher brings can be understood when one applies this power of judgment; what moves the soul is given in a sufficient way, even if she is not a spiritual researcher herself.

The spiritual researcher himself gains nothing from his research if he only stays there and looks at things, if he does not bring down what he sees so that he can communicate it to other people. In what can be given through spiritual research, the spiritual researcher and the person who only takes in things through a healthy sense of truth are exactly the same. Because this is so, a fruitful dissemination of the knowledge of spiritual research can only take place if this peculiarity of truth and error is taken into account. It must be emphasized here that the truth of what spiritual research has to say can be proclaimed by the spiritual researcher, and that everything can be understood by the ordinary mind if one is unbiased enough. The whole scope of science can be used to verify what is said through spiritual research, but not half-baked science. If it is true on the one hand that the natural sense of truth can always be convinced by what the spiritual researcher brings forth, it must also be said that this sense of truth must also be applied to the spiritual researcher, and here we are faced with the error in the dissemination.

One can understand those who reject spiritual research. These are not even the people who worry the spiritual researcher. They sometimes feel the obligation to test and the time will come when they will see from their feeling of having to test what many have already seen. The spiritual researcher is not worried about his opponents of this kind. He is much more concerned about some of his supporters.

As true as it is that some people reject without reason, it is also true that many people make themselves followers without reason, simply because of what is called belief in authority. That is why many do not apply common sense at all. For such people, there is no way to distinguish between a charlatan who talks about all kinds of things he doesn't really know much about, and someone who knows how to research conscientiously. For people of sound mind, these two phenomena are always known. It is known that the two have always gone hand in hand and that people have been little inclined to distinguish between them. People who are not morally stable are therefore exposed to a certain danger, because they are subject to temptation. This is because the spiritual researcher and anyone who can see into the spiritual world is seen as something very special. This is an unhealthy judgment in the dissemination of spiritual research, because by looking into it, he is nothing more than a researcher in this field, only what can be learned here is much more important than what can be researched in other fields. But a person is no different or higher or better because of this, and if you consider that the fool carries his follies and the clever man his cleverness, you will not consider someone who has something to share from spiritual research to be a higher being. You can judge him by what he has in common with others. The value of a person lies in his moral state of mind.

Those who recognize the life of the soul in a spiritual sense will know how the human soul's longing, human nature's urge, is directed towards the solutions that can actually only be provided by spiritual science. It is all the more necessary that this knowledge be spread in a healthy way, because it is intended to give people the opportunity to understand their destiny, but also the opportunity to experience their destiny in an appropriate way, so that they do not stand in life without a foundation.

What spiritual research has to offer is wisdom that strengthens and fortifies us for our existence. Those who lack the strengthening and fortifying effects of spiritual science will gradually find that they lack strength and power to live in general. Spiritual research is increasingly becoming a necessity in our time. It is all the more necessary to recognize its sources, truths and fallacies. When man opens himself to such directions and thoughts, as they could only be outlined today, then he arrives at that which will more and more be able to be this spiritual research for spiritual culture, and that will strengthen him inwardly in the acknowledgment of this research, in being penetrated by the truth of this research, and he will remain calm in the face of those who do not want to engage in this research. He remains calm so that this calmness of his appears to us as a sign of the evenly attained conviction through spiritual science. Then, when he has looked into and thought about the things himself, he understands the words with which we want to conclude today's reflection as a conclusion in line with our feelings, because the best with which spiritual science can conclude is what can be combined into a feeling; truth and error are rarely viewed in this way, as opposed to everything that can shake spiritual science and its power. We must face it as Goethe, for example, faced a matter that can be compared with the way the spiritual researcher relates to spiritual research. He once had to deal with a great philosophical school that denied movement, so that people said there was actually no movement.

Goethe, who was imbued with the insubstantiality of such views, found words that aptly expressed the refutation from a healthy sense of truth. He said:

Enemy powers may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

Those who understand spiritual research in the right way can behave in a similar way to Goethe here in the face of the refutations of spiritual research.