Dual Forms of Cognition in the Middle Ages

But the human beings acquired the habit of restricting themselves to the world of the senses. This habit, to be sure, also produced excellent things, for the human beings acquired the tendency to become thoroughly absorbed in the facts of the sensory world. It suffices to consider that spiritual science, the spiritual science which is orientated towards Anthroposophy, sees in the sensory world an image of the super-sensible world; what we encounter in the sensory world really contains the images of the super-sensible world. If we consider this, we shall be able to appreciate fully the importance of penetrating into the sensory material world. We must emphasize again and again and we should continually lay stress upon the fact that the other form of materialism which has come to the fore in spiritism, which seeks to cognise the spirit in a materialistic manner, is unfruitful, because the spirit can, of course, never be seen through the senses. and the whole method of spiritism is, therefore, a humbug. On the other hand, we should realise that what we observe through our ordinary, normal senses and what we elaborate from out this sensory observation, with the aid of the intellect which has developed in the course of human evolution, is in every way an image of the super-sensible world, and consequently the study of this image can, in a certain way, lead us into the super-sensible world far better than, for instance, spiritism. In earlier times, I have often expressed this by saying: Some people are sitting around a table in order to “summon spirits”; yet, they completely overlook the fact that there are so and so many spirits sitting around the table! They should be conscious of their own spirit. Undoubtedly this spirit sets forth what they should seek; but owing to the fact that they forget their own spirit, that they are unwilling to grasp their own spirit, they seek the spirit in a materialistic, external manner, in spiritistic experiments which ape and imitate the experiments made in laboratories. Materialism, which works within the images of the super-sensible world, without being aware of the fact that it is dealing with images of the super-sensible world, this materialism has, after all, achieved great things through its methods of investigation, it has achieved great and mighty things.