The Mission of Esoteric Science in Our Time

But immediately, important objections arise from among our contemporaries. Our education today has a tendency to say: We have absolutely no need to speak of any supernatural world, any invisible world; these are the prejudices of a past that is, thank God, now gone. So say many. And not so long ago — although such voices are already becoming rarer today — those who considered themselves the most enlightened and advanced said that turning to invisible, supersensible backgrounds of things belonged to a childish, naive age of human development, when people did not yet stand firmly on the ground of scientific knowledge, when people still believed they could solve the riddles of existence through all kinds of fabrications and flights of fancy. But modern times have taught people that research, which makes use of the experience of the external senses, does not need to resort to such supernatural powers or beings, but that the world as we see it with our senses can be explained from within itself. And if we can explain the world from within itself—so say the materialists and also those who call themselves monists, and there are many of them among our contemporaries—if we can discover the sensory causes within the sensory world, then we have no reason to invoke supernatural entities.