Lecture V

Dreaming and intoxication are the principal factors controlling mankind today. And just as the only way to stop people from dreaming is to wake them up, the only way to overcome intoxication is to look at our inner impulses in total clarity. This means giving people spiritual science that, far from making the soul drunk, awakens the soul to spiritual impulses. But people are not yet ready to go along with this. I have said before that if we offer the challenge of spiritual science to a hardened monist of the Haeckelian school, one who desires only to prove his monism on the basis of natural science, he falls on his face with a thud, metaphorically speaking, he falls down with a loud thud as a matter of course. That is the obvious thing to happen, for he immediately feels he is in a void and his consciousness is completely bowled over. If you take an ordinary person, someone who wants to base his whole world view on natural science, they mean nothing to him; he cannot understand a thing. If he is honest, he will say, “Here we go again, it makes my head spin.” Which means he plops down with a thud.