The Bridge Between Morality and Nature

You know of course, in spiritual science most questions arise in a totally different manner than questions tossed up in the popular fashion. In spiritual science the actual phrasing of a question has to be quite different to the often trivial manner in which they are composed today. It is extraordinary that in the 19th century, theoretically, quite strong points of view arose, and quite a firm idea was established that a soul-spiritual element was nowhere to be found in the physical bodily nature, and that the soul-spiritual could be regarded as a kind of consequence of the physical body. This point of view became something exceptionally fascinating for those individuals who were familiar with natural scientific research. We only need to be reminded of the utter dependency the human being actually has in his or her life between birth and death on physical origins, on the entire physical organisation. Materialistic science stresses repeatedly that the same measure is to be applied to the development of the outer body from the first days of childhood, as to the development of the soul-spiritual abilities; how the human being, when not cared for physically, will accordingly be retarded in his or her soul-spiritual nature. It is pointed out how with advanced age, with physical bodily degeneration, likewise the spirit-soul abilities will diminish. It is pointed out how the human being with some kind of underlying injury will show a soul-spiritual abnormality indicating that the human being is dependent on the shape and manner of his or her existence within the physical bodily nature. It is pointed out how the human being can imbibe certain poisons which to some extent have a chemical effect on him and despite this, can in specific cases have an effect on his spiritual normality, stimulated by the soul-spiritual paralysing conditions through physical substances administered to his body, and so on. It was also shown, that whatever is available as physical research, proves that in all acts of violence the soul-spiritual element is basically only a function of the physical bodily nature. Yes, those researchers who developed an inclination for such phenomena, I might say, also pointed to minute facts of this kind. One of these kinds of phenomena, the degeneration of the thyroid influencing soul-spiritual abilities, was an example of the researcher Gley who said that the highest talents in human beings, the soul-spiritual, are exclusively dependant on chemical processes which develop from the thyroid. All these things are somewhat captivating in the manner in which the scientific art of thought had developed in the recent times. Actually one can't say anything other than that the more people refer to this scientific manner of thinking, concepts of soul-spiritual nature are ever more pushed to the background; that the spiritual-soul element would be increasingly seen as something which has no substantial meaning. With intensity it creates so to speak an opposition under the populations of civilised regions: on the one side stand those who are more or less infected by the scientific thought pattern present in the more modern times, who consider it great progress for their spiritual development, if they speak about such a thing at all, declining reference to an individual spiritual soul. On the other side stand the portion of the population who want to continue living in the old religious wisdom, in old ideas of the soul-spiritual, from a moral divine world order, which actually under scrutiny has been handed down from ancient times and is only surviving through keeping it away from those mindsets which scientific thinking has brought about.