III. The Path to Freedom and Love and Their Significance in World Happenings

Those who, on the basis of some particular conception of the world, speak of the imperishability of matter, annul freedom on the one side and the full development of love on the other. For only through the fact that in us the past dies away, becomes semblance, and the future is a new creation in the condition of a seed, does there arise in us the feeling of love, the devotion to something to which we are not coerced by the past, and freedom, action that is not predetermined. Freedom and love are, in reality, comprehensible only to a spiritual-scientific conception of the world, not to any other. Those who are conversant with the picture of the world that has appeared in the course of the last few centuries will be able to assess the difficulties that will have to be overcome before the habits of thought prevailing in modern humanity can be induced to give way to this unbiased, spiritual-scientific thinking. For in the picture of the world existing in natural science there are really no points from which we can go forward to a true understanding of freedom and love.