Lecture II

One may thus say that it points in a clarifying way to some interesting phenomena. One need not look back very far—perhaps still with Griesinger and others, or in the pre-Griesinger era in psychiatry—to discover that not so long ago psychiatrists also at least incorporated the bodily condition in their diagnoses. But what has become more and more common today? It has become commonplace for psychiatrists to flood us with descriptions of illness in their literature that merely describe the soul-spiritual abnormalities, so that here materialism has actually led us into an abstract soul-spiritual domain. This is its tragedy. Here materialism itself has led away from materialism. This is what is so remarkable about materialism, that in certain regards it leads to a misunderstanding, to a lack of comprehension of the material world itself. One who pursues the spirit as a real fact, however, also pursues it where it works its way into the material and where it then withdraws so that the material is deposited, as in the so-called mental illnesses.