IV. Theosophy and Christianity

You may now say that you believe that everything has gradually changed, and that is well founded. It is only through the development of the sense of reality over the centuries, through man's learning above all to train his senses and arm them with instruments, that he has made progress in his knowledge of the outer world. But these tremendous advances in our world travel, the penetration of the starry sky with the Copernican worldview, the penetration of the smallest living creatures with the microscope, have all brought us, as every thing casts its shadow, their dark sides as well. They have brought us very specific habits of thinking; habits of thinking that depend above all on what is actually real, on what can be perceived by the senses. And so it has come to pass that, in the most natural way, this thinking, which turns to the purely sensory, has become a habit, that it has also approached the highest religious truths and attempted to comprehend the spirit and its content in the same way that the natural scientist attempts to comprehend external nature with his senses.