9. Voltaire from the Perspective of Spiritual Science

This changed in more recent times; even today, because people are not yet willing to delve into spiritual science, they do not look into these things with complete thoroughness. It changed particularly since the blossoming of natural science in the dawn of modern thinking, since the times of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno. For it was then that what we call the consciousness soul began to develop. And it began to develop in such a way that human beings now really became a mystery to themselves, as they now began to feel themselves separated from the rest of nature by their independent soul, while at the same time experiencing their soul as something special alongside the physical. As strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true that when the more materialistic trend emerged in the natural sciences, it can be said of this period that the human soul felt more separated from nature.