Fourth Lecture

I shall continue, in a more aphoristic form, to bring you further thoughts on the subject we have been dealing with for weeks now, and which I have always characterized by saying that the great difficulty in matters of world-view now lies — I always emphasize the word “now”—that out of the views of the present time it becomes difficult for people to build a bridge between what is called idealism and what can be described as a view of the natural order of things. When modern man attempts to build such a bridge, when he tries to realize how, for example, moral ideas — if we take one group out of the sum total of ideas — now not externally but internally real to the views, to the concepts that one develops about the course of the causal natural order, he falls into a kind of world-view dualism, as one could express it spiritually. We have emphasized this again and again. Man tries to build such a bridge, but he does not succeed.