Fourth Lecture

But what happens in any given age is always preceded by a long period of preparation. And in fact we can only study that which emerges as particularly significant in a particular age. In our endeavor to build a bridge between the dualisms of the present, we want to take a particularly close look at the hallucinatory aspect of the intellect, which is connected with everything I have described, and at the illusory aspect of natural phenomena, which in turn is connected with what I have described. This leads man into a kind of inner conflict in life. I would say that there are two currents at work in him, whereas he must strive for one current. And today, one of these currents is particularly seductive: the one that arises from the relationship between man and his soul and the natural order. Today's man, who sees in it a reality that is the same for all things – the anatomist, if I choose a nearby example, or the physiologist – today takes the human body and differentiates only externally, not internally, the individual limbs of this body. I would say he puts the heart next to the liver and examines both only in a purely external way, not taking into account the time perspective of which I spoke recently; whereas in fact one only gets a proper understanding of the nature of the heart as well as the liver if one takes this time perspective into account , for example, if one really proceeds spiritually scientifically in embryology in such a way that one learns to distinguish in time the disposition of the heart in the development of the embryo, and furthermore, that one does not simply let them exist next to each other and consist of cells, which on the one hand is right and on the other hand is nonsense. Because something can be right and nonsense at the same time, as we know.