12. Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

Many years ago, I took the liberty of calling this way of approaching knowledge and life, on the one hand, factual fanaticism. On the other hand, there is a certain dogmatism to which one surrenders, a dogmatism of facts, which means the same thing to the soul, even if it lies in a different field than any other dogmatism. One feels, so to speak, that one has no inner strength, I would say, no momentum or carrying power to grasp the truth, to let the truth be present in the soul, if one no longer feels guided by the leash of external facts or the external science that describes these facts. Spiritual science, however, because it has to speak about things and processes that do not belong to the field of ordinary life, makes it necessary to struggle to attain an understanding that is not dependent on the guidance of external facts and that does not submit to a dogma of facts, but rather feels the light of truth shining in an inner, soul experience. Inner grasping of living truth is what the modern soul must first become accustomed to. One can say outright that the modern soul is not capable of mustering the strong inner forces necessary to experience truth directly, rather than having it dictated to them. But this feeling is necessary if the results of spiritual science are to be examined and understood by souls. But when one brings oneself to such an inner experience of truth, then spiritual science becomes immediately understandable to every soul. For what some people argue against spiritual science, that here or there, somewhere in the field of natural science or historical science, there is something that could be said to convince us that the so-called truths of spiritual science are errors or fantasies, does not speak against spiritual science. There is nothing in the entire scope of scientific or historical knowledge that is not in complete harmony with the findings of spiritual science. This has often been emphasized in these lectures. But those who first become accustomed to scientific thinking, and also to historical thinking, acquire certain habits of thought, absorb prejudices, as it were, and it is these prejudices that must first be overcome. Opposition to spiritual science arises not from the judgments of science, but from prejudice. And when one considers what has been said in the lectures given here: that spiritual science creates powers of cognition that are not like passive looking with the eyes or passive listening with the ears, but like an inner gesture, like inner listening with the physiognomy of the soul, which must therefore become something active if the soul wants to penetrate the spiritual world, then one will understand that spiritual science can only be understood if human souls gradually become accustomed to drawing up from their depths the active soul forces, those forces that must be enlivened as free inner activities in the soul.