Lecture XVII

In this way, when one gradually penetrates into what spiritual science is able to give, one comes to know the human being in the totality of his nature, in his soul and bodily being. Now, man stands before us in a completely different way. It is strange—materialistic science aimed at knowing what matter was, and yet could not know anything, for example, of the nature of the forces that are active in the child's body until the seventh year. Now comes spiritual science and teaches how one really comes to know matter; spiritual science penetrates right into the material element. This is the tragedy of materialism—it becomes more and more abstract and no longer teaches what matter really is. What does the modern physician really know of the liver and kidney, of the stomach and lungs—that is, of the material structures? One day when the insights attained through spiritual science are applied to medicine and natural science, when something of what I tried to show in the course held in Dornach this spring[^1] penetrates modern science, one will see that spirit insight is called upon to throw light even into the essence of matter, while the materialist confronts the whole world like a blind man standing before color. Material existence is just what the materialist never comes to know.