The Mission of Spiritual Science and of Its Building at Dornach

The searcher who works on the basis of the kind of knowledge indicated in this booklet sees that the method of his investigations is in complete accord with the endeavours of present-day natural science. But he knows that these endeavours of natural science must everywhere come to a stand-still or run into blind alleys if they do not meet what spiritual science can bring to light from opposite starting-points. A true view of the matter would look upon both directions of work as being like the boring of a tunnel, which commences from opposite directions, but, when the work is properly arranged, the two parties meet. The facts of contemporary work fully confirm this view. It is only misled opinions-regarding these facts which deny this and presume that spiritual science and natural science contradict each other. This contradiction, however, does not really exist. We have a brilliant example of the importance of the meeting of natural science and spiritual science in a book which has just been published, in, my opinion an epoch-making book. Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken: Neue Einsichten und Betrachtungen über die Seele, by Karl Ludwig Schleich. If you read the important chapter on “Hysteria—a metaphysical problem,” you will see how a practical physician, who is at the same time a penetrating thinker, confronts facts which can only be fully elucidated by spiritual science, facts which compel him to say: “In the production of tissue through the impulse of hysteria we have the metaphysical problem of incarnation,” in “mediumistic vision, a kind of clairvoyance of possibilities of disease.” But a person would be under one of the very worst of illusions if he seriously thought that without the results of spiritual science he could explain all the actual experiences of man by the facts discovered by natural science. The scientist who refuses to consider spiritual science is like a man who has a piece of magnetic iron in his hand, but has no notion of magnetism and only uses the iron for an instrument in which magnetism plays no part. What would have come out of it if he had put the magnetism and not the material iron to some use? If you also read in Schleich's book the chapter on “The myth of the change of matter in the brain,” you will see for yourself how, by constraint of thought, the scientific physician comes to a formal description of what spiritual science—from a comprehensive presentation of spirit-life—appropriately describes as the etheric body of man. It is interesting to notice how this particular chapter in Schleich's book shows that at the present time natural science and spiritual science often talk in vain, because the co-operation of natural scientists and spiritual scientists in intellectual affairs is so difficult, on account of the dissipation of our intellectual life. Here we come to the painful thought: How different these things would be if scientists were really to become acquainted with spiritual science, instead of passing it by and leaving it to the foolish misrepresentations of those who act in accordance with the axiom: “Do not examine, but keep your irrelevant, prejudiced verdict!” At the close of the above-mentioned chapter Schleich says—and the case is important, because there is no question of ill-will, it is the statement of an upright, true investigator—“If Goethe, that seer and prophet, observed so many connections in nature and demonstrated that the skull with all its parts is nothing but an expanded cervical vertebra, because all the constituent parts of the latter can be traced in the bony covering of the brain, it would not surprise me if the thought I have just expressed, namely, of the heaping up of the brain out of the elements of the spinal marrow, did not also slip into the labyrinth of his thought. I should not be surprised if some day a slip of paper by Goethe on this subject was found.” Such is our intellectual co-operation at the present time! In 1916 an honest searcher expects that some time a scrap of paper of Goethe's will be found. But this was found by me as long ago as 1891. In the Goeian Annual for 1892, page 175, in the article Goethe as Anatomist, written by Professor K. v. Bardeleben, you will read, “The fact that Goethe occupied himself not only with Osteology, but also with the ligaments, the muscles, as well as the brain, is shown by various notes, most of them on loose leaves. In the Venetian Diary for 1790 R. Steiner found the following sentence, which may be closely connected with Goethe's thought on the vertebral nature of the skull-bones: ‘The brain itself is only a large principal ganglion. The organisation of the brain is repeated in each ganglion, so that each ganglion is to be looked upon as a small subordinate brain.’“ On the basis of this and similar things which I found, I was able to write in 1897 in my book, Goethe's Weltanschauung, out of purely scientific thought, “Each nerve-centre in the ganglia was to him (Goethe) a brain at a lower stage.” And this, in addition to many other things in connection with it, I have often mentioned since. This is only intended to be a small example of the manner in which investigators talk in vain in our pursuit of modern science. I shall certainly be the last to reproach Schleich for not knowing Goethe's Annual for 1892 and my book of 1897; the uncertainty in our pursuit of science comes not from people but from the conditions.