Lecture II

In these recent lectures it was intended to show from the most varied points of view that we have been passing through an age with a quite distinct character and that now a new age must begin. The age that has been running its course is the time when thinking and perceiving have reached their most pronounced form of materialism, the time when throughout the centuries materialistic thinking and perceiving have increasingly taken hold of the inner life of the human soul. But just as a pendulum that has swung to one side has then to swing in the opposite direction, we are now faced by an age when the human soul must once more come to the perception that in everything having to do with the senses, in everything material, spiritual impulses, spiritual forces, are experience of the spiritual forces behind material sense phenomena—spiritual forces to which for centuries mankind has been able to give but little attention and but little interest.