The Theosophical Movement Is the Answer to the Spiritual Longing of Our Time

Everything was pressing towards the most comprehensive spiritual life that spiritual science will give to the world, when we consider the past times. Do not look at what flows out of arbitrary endeavors of the time, but look at what the times themselves bring as necessities. Do not ask how this or that person, who believes himself to be standing on the firm ground of natural science, wants to think about the riddles of time and the human soul, because he cannot overlook what comes into consideration. Ask the great ones who have long since died, who speak to our soul with objectivity. Ask a person who did so much for 19th-century science, such as Alexander von Humboldt, who wanted to give such a comprehensive picture of the development of nature in his “Cosmos”, ask him where he wanted to go beyond what interested the naturalist, where for him the deepest riddles of all natural questions were touched upon. And his answer is: It is the one hundred and fourth Psalm of David! But this same Alexander von Humboldt was again a soul yearning, a soul that - completely in possession of the natural scientific culture of its time - from the nineteenth century directed its view to what flowed out of the fervent feeling of the spiritual world, as it comes to light in the one hundred and fourth Psalm of David. Ask now how much of what is spoken to the human soul in the hymn-like language of the 104th Psalm can be found in concrete form in spiritual science, as is necessary for our time! If we bear this in mind, we may say: What is the soul of Alexander von Humboldt's reply to what we are doing? It would answer us thus: We have longed for what you are attempting, and we sensed that it must come! And Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander's brother, the great linguist, the last of the time when the great poetry of which I spoke yesterday, the Bhagavad Gita, became known in Europe, this great spirit, spoke in a way that he said he had already lived enough after the acquaintance of the Bhagavad Gita had fallen into his life.