Ninth Lecture
It may be said that scientific research in particular has reached a certain level today, and that this level of scientific research would be accessible to those who are called upon today to represent the natural sciences if most of them did not simply become absorbed in their subject and did not go beyond the boundaries of their subject. If only, I might say, a dozen of the official representatives — and only these are listened to today — would make an honest effort to examine with the most profound honesty what is contained in my 'Occult Science: An Outline of the Fundamental Principles of the Science of Man and Nature', ' and in my 'Theosophy', they would find everything confirmed from the side that can be characterized by saying: Look at life, whether life does not confirm what can be experienced through spiritual science, what is sought here from the spiritual world! — Anyone who really masters natural science today comes to the verification of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gives. This is absolutely a truth. But we are faced with the peculiar fact that precisely those who could undertake such an examination are absolutely not concerned about it, have not been concerned about it until now — I am ignoring those who, in our circles, have received the stimulus for it — that no one has set themselves the task of really testing the spiritual-scientific results of anthroposophy against the, fully understood, natural-scientific research of the present! The spiritual-scientific research really has no need to fear this test; it will pass it. It should only be employed, it will be passed. But admittedly, in a time when one is not even inclined to go into the most primitive truths, this test will perhaps take a long time.
Cite:
GA 174b/1917-05-11/p016 · edition English