Lecture III

We have now put together a number of building blocks that should be suitable for erecting a kind of building to penetrate deeper into the essence of the human being through this building of contemplation. In order to proceed from the discussions we had yesterday and the day before yesterday, it is necessary that we expand our considerations today to areas that we have touched on, in such a way that we consider the soul-spiritual, which of course works in man, and the bodily-material, which also works in him, in connection. In the scientific development of modern times, it has become difficult to combine this view of the interaction of the spiritual-soul and the physical-material in the human being in a fruitful way, because modern man actually only knows a duality in this area. He is familiar with the material world and its effects and configurations, and then he also looks at this material world in the human being. He looks at it in the human being by studying physiology, chemistry and biology. Certain views then arise from these studies and are absorbed into popular consciousness. People cling to them with a certain tenacity, and it must be emphasized again and again that even those who, in their Sunday best, still live in old traditional religious ideas, fully recognize as authority what popular science says about the physical body of the human being, perhaps even more so. On the other hand, certain people do have ideas about the spiritual and mental. But these ideas about the spiritual and soul are so abstract, sometimes they are actually just empty words about something that was once known more precisely, but the knowledge of which has been lost, so that not much can be done with them. People today do talk about thinking, feeling, and willing; they talk about imagining. But they do not really have any experiences of these things. One might say that words have been handed down and humanity clings to these words without associating much meaning with them. One also sees that his game is introduced into the literary works on psychology and the like that appear today, where thinking, feeling and willing are nothing but empty abstractions.