I. The Difference Between Man and Animal

Among the misunderstandings arising in this way we may include the belief that Spiritual Science wishes to pronounce sentence, sentence of wholesale extermination, upon all the striving of the age, in so far as this striving proceeds from personalities outside the pale of Spiritual Science. Here too lies mere misunderstanding. Spiritual scientists who seriously and adequately pay heed to present world conditions are very ready to enter into the attitude of mind, the mood of soul, of their contemporaries, and will ask themselves the question: “What is going on in the souls of my seriously minded contemporaries in the direction where we have to look for the improvement of much that both deserves and needs to be improved?” What, however, must above all be borne in mind as a particularly striking fact at present is that just in the case of those who make the most earnest endeavours, there is often a refusal to enter upon concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, recognition of the spiritual world, which can appear to men as a reality and not merely as something to be disclosed through a sum of concepts. Today most men prefer to remain with their experiences altogether in the sense world, and at best they allow that a spiritual world can be disclosed by means of concepts and ideas. They do not want to set out on an investigation where there is any question of penetrating to the spiritual world in actual experience. This aversion to spiritual reality is a characteristic feature of our time; it it is a feature of our time to which attention must be paid particularly by those of us who try to take our stand on the ground of spiritual Science.