III. Man and the World

You see, it goes deep into the heart when you have some opportunities to see into life today. Those who have become completely accustomed to the concepts that science can provide today are increasingly unable to grasp the vital social interrelations and social demands. They are virtually pushed aside by real life. And that is why I have said here and elsewhere in recent days: Make parliaments and state assemblies out of people who are educated in the sense of today's world view. You will see what these scholars decide, who think scientifically! This is quite certainly suited to corrupting people in terms of social institutions, because in this area of social life, only unfruitful thinking can be done from a scientific point of view. It is the same in many, many respects. One loses a certain flexibility of mind through this merely intellectual knowledge. This will change as soon as you engage with the concepts of spiritual science. Try to realize how differently you have to tune your mind if you want to grasp what is offered in spiritual science and if you want to grasp what is offered in the education of the outer world today. Certainly, spiritual science encounters so much resistance because it requires more agility, more fluidity of mind, to find one's way into it. In what is available today in popular literature - or even its offshoots, which flow through the channels into journalism, where people then absorb information in their Sunday papers - people can move around with extraordinary ease. And if they go to today's lectures, where people are spoon-fed information in words and pictures, so that they don't even have to think, don't even have to set their minds in motion, you will find nothing in all of this that frees the mind to think, to imagine. It loses its freedom. The mind becomes narrow and limited. Our intellectual education is the path to spiritual limitation. Certainly, our intellectual education has made great strides in the fields of science and technology, but it is the path to limitation; it narrows thinking, imagination. And one must appeal to something quite different in the imagination if one wants to understand spiritual science. Therefore, when people approach spiritual science today, they are afraid to take the first step! When they have read only a few pages, some say: I lose myself there, I do not get any further, it goes into fantasy! - It does not go into fantasy at all, but the person in question has only lost the opportunity to really free his thoughts, to plunge into reality with his thoughts, when they are not leading the external sense world by the hand.