III. Historical Occurrences of the Last Century

We have lost a real science of the soul. We no longer have any; and I have pointed out—only recently in public lectures in Basel[^1] and in other places—why we have lost the science of the soul. The science of the spirit became uncomfortable to the Catholic Church as early as the 9th century; and, as I have frequently explained, the spirit was abolished at the Eighth General Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 869. At that time the dogma was announced that, if a man is a true Christian, he must not think that he consists of body, soul, and spirit, but only of body and soul, and that the soul has spiritual qualities. Psychology still teaches that today, and believes that such teaching represents the point of view of unprejudiced science; but it is only repeating the dogma of 869. Even all that refers to the soul was monopolized by the confessional churches in the form of belief, in the form of creed or dogma. All knowledge pertaining to the soul that should come from man himself was monopolized by the denominational societies; and only external nature was left as the object of real knowledge, of free knowledge. No wonder we have today no science of the soul, for secular scholarship has devoted itself entirely to the science of nature, since the science of the soul was monopolized and the science of the spirit abolished. So we have no science of the soul. If we build upon the science that is the fashion today, we can make no progress; for if we build upon the word-psychology of our time (it really is not much more than that), we cannot come to a real understanding of what takes place in the soul. You know from my statement in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment that upon crossing over the threshold to the spiritual world, thinking, feeling, and willing become separated in the consciousness. In the ordinary present-day consciousness thinking, feeling, and willing form a sort of chaos; they are intermingled. At the moment when the threshold to the spiritual world is crossed, at the moment when one sets about acquiring the science of initiation through experience, thinking, feeling, and willing become independent powers in the consciousness. They become independent, and then one learns to know them.