13. Sleep and Death from the Point of View of Spiritual Science

What spiritual science always has to assert is not based on philosophical speculation, but on what has been called the inner experience, the inner experience of spiritual facts; it has to assert the independence, the self-contained nature of the human soul — to put it more popularly: that the human being has a spiritual-soul existence that goes beyond the physical-bodily. I said that this is entirely consistent with a healthy philosophy based on scientific principles, because many people, from the way of thinking of our time, perceive such an assertion as the extreme of all unscientificness. It is easy to say from a scientific point of view: How can one speak of the human soul as something independent when physiologists show that everything is dependent on what develops physically in the human being. We see how, when a part of the brain is injured, disturbances occur immediately due to the loss of a part of the brain functions. Must we not be led to the thought that the soul activities lie in the normally behaving nervous system or brain? One can point out how mental abilities grow with the adolescent human being, how in old age, when the external system withers, hardens, mental abilities decrease and so on. On the basis of such observations, many a train of thought could be formed that would have to suggest the idea that spiritual experience basically consists in nothing other than the activity of the nervous system and the rest of the organism. Let us hear what an astute philosopher, Otto Liebmann, whom I have mentioned in my book “Riddles of Philosophy,” has to say about this. He is not one of those who make assertions based on superficial thinking, but rather he states what the facts of the analysis of human thought are capable of providing. He deals with the belief that the human soul exists only in the physical, and says remarkable words, corresponding to a sharp-witted philosophy that coincides with the current state of natural science. In summary, he says: It is by no means certain what Munk and others have established regarding the dependence of mental activity on the brain, because, for example, an injured part of the brain can be replaced by other functions. But if we had reached our goal, then in principle nothing would have changed. That is to say, modern philosophy says that no matter how far one advances in the study of the connection between the soul and the physical, one can only know that one must use certain internal organs in order to think, feel and will. We can draw the parallel that we need certain parts of the brain for the soul, just as we use the hand to grasp. But when we use this hand to grasp, the mechanical action of the hand is added to the soul. We cannot speak of the soul actions of the brain in this way. However, this is only because the investigations of natural science are not complete. As it moves forward to prove the connection between the physical and the soul, it will find that there is a different connection between thinking, feeling, willing and the nervous system than between the hand and grasping. It will find that they are connected in the same way as the imprints that feet make in soft soil are connected to the soil.