Consciousness Evolution: From Atavistic Wisdom to Inner Freedom

This means that the development of humanity is quite complicated, and one must delve into spiritual science if one wants to understand what is there. But now it is necessary, in order to face the things that approach our soul in the development of the world correctly, to engage fearlessly in what spiritual science has to proclaim from the spiritual worlds. For spiritual science is, in a sense, a first impulse, to which more and more other impulses must be added so that humanity can move toward its appropriate development in the future. You have seen from what I have explained that we must steer between Scylla and Charybdis, that we must follow a very specific path in our spiritual science, and this must be taken very, very seriously. We have now, have we not, pursued a natural science with materialistic methods. I have tried to explain and characterize its peculiarities to you in recent weeks. I have told you in recent weeks that a materialistic method of natural science is indeed fully justifiable. But why must this materialistic method exist? We can characterize this materialistic method precisely by saying — as we have heard in recent weeks — that it is suitable for veiling, for concealing the actual spiritual that lies behind it. Why must this materialistic method exist? Why is it here today, especially in our time?