VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

Naturally I can only touch on individual points, but I will pick them out in such a way that when I have finished you will have some idea of the relationship I have referred to. First of all, I want to say that it can make a certain impression on a receptive soul from the outset when there is talk in the field of spiritual science of supersensible knowledge, of the progression from seer research to supersensible knowledge. But anyone who believes that he must approach these things from the presuppositions of contemporary philosophy can and must immediately, if there is any mention of such a thing, consider the fact that the objections which philosophy has to make against many things that it calls direct experience, direct perception, must apply in the same way to everything that we produce in the field of spiritual science, so to speak. As long as we, for example, clothe our seer experiences in such words that when we speak them out we make use — perhaps without being aware of it — of spatial or temporal conceptions, as soon as it can be shown to us that we do this, as soon as we are not able to shape our terminology in such a way that we do not secretly insert spatial and time into our findings, a Kantian or some other contemporary epistemologist can always come and object – either in the old form or in the various forms that these theories have taken in more recent times – that, from an epistemological point of view, space and time themselves are mere categories or forms of our imagination. Even if we clothe our visionary results in such forms, taken from time and space, we would nevertheless thereby give something that is bound to our ability to imagine. So basically – I know that the expression is contestable here – we would then express only something subjective with all our visionary results. That is a possible objection that can always be made. I will mention it as an example of numerous other objections that can be rightly formulated from an epistemological point of view.