Lecture VI

There are many signs today of how, gradually, understanding can be aroused of this interplay of one world with another. I should like to start from the obvious even though it is not sufficiently appreciated that it is. In our time, in the widest circles, there is a strong impulse to get to know the order of nature, the laws of nature, that work through everything, including all the living things that meet us in the world of the senses. There is a tendency to ignore any knowledge coming from other worlds about man and world existence and simply to build a whole world conception out of the one world. This it is that gives the more or less monistic or materialistic stamp to our present world conception. Now, one may say that against this endeavour, other strivings have made themselves felt today as a kind of wholesome check. Within the world in which we live, these endeavours seek such phenomena as are governed by laws different from those of the natural world and, in all their manifoldness, are felt by the materialistic mind to be inconsistent with the order of nature. We should certainly pay heed to all that is done in a serious and scientific way in this field. In this contemporary confrontation of purely materialistic research with another research, which, although little noticed and by using the same methods as ordinary research, seeks other connections in our sensory existence than this existence itself offers—in all this we may, indeed, look for quite different worlds, with different laws of being playing into this other research. In this respect it is most desirable, particularly for anthroposophists, to give heed to all that is being done in this direction by extending the methods of science to the interplay of super-sensible worlds into our physical existence. I have already pointed this out to smaller circles; today I shall do so for this larger one.