Lecture I

If one considers this development of modern scientific thought, must one not then say to oneself that scientific research is entangling itself in a kind of web, and only outside of this web can one find the world? For in the final analysis it is there, where matter haunts space, that the external world lies. If this is the one place into which one cannot penetrate, one has no way in which to come to terms with life. Within man one finds the fact of consciousness. Does one come at all near to it with explanations conceived in observing external nature? If in one's search for explanations one pulls up short at human life, how, then, can one arrive at notions of how to live in a way worthy of a human being? How, if one cannot understand the existence or the essence of man according to the assumptions one makes concerning that existence?