The Bridge Between Morality and Nature
Thus we have on the one side numerous populations who are regarded by others as retarded, as people who know nothing of the laws of nature and therefore could remain with old religious ideas. Certainly something else has appeared more and more in the last while. This fascinating power of persuasion, I'd like to say, which for the greatest part of mankind had as the scientific ideas in the middle or beginning of the last third of the nineteenth century, this fascinating power of persuasion has gradually decreased. It has diminished with many scientific a mindset and people have become more tolerant towards that which had earlier been regarded as still contained by retarded, uninformed people, and that it must disappear. These latest phenomena are actually only referred back to because of the general sleepiness of the modern soul. Basically it is impossible to have on one side an almighty order of nature and on the other side some kind of real moral spiritual world order. Just as the order of nature was once regarded in recent times, it doesn't tolerate a moral world order and now only when mankind doesn't think efficiently, can one place today's natural observation below that which has come out of old traditional declarations. Consequently it is basically only those people who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century and the fifties and sixties who decidedly pointed out that the human being is a physical bodily being, and out of the physical body as precursor appeared the soul spiritual and that any opposition to this idea should gradually be eradicated. I have also remarked once in an open lecture in Basel and also other places, that there are people who with great intensity have repulsed the idea that one must be entitled to decline from a moral mindset and that basically a criminal has just as much right to run free as those who live according to a moral idea.