4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

Anyone who regards spiritual science, as it is meant here and as I have been allowed to present it here for years, as something that is very far removed from ordinary human nature, in the ordinary life of man, something strangely remote, alien, and, as it were, otherworldly; who sees in spiritual research something that can only be acquired through special, extraordinary gifts, not accessible to ordinary human nature. In contrast to this, it has been emphasized time and again: spiritual science wants to be nothing more than the genuine continuation of the natural scientific world view for the spiritual realm, insofar as this has found its methods in more recent times, which, in relation to the research of material, external sensory phenomena, has led to previously unimagined results and successes. The difficulty in understanding the whole attitude and intention of spiritual science lies in the fact that, from the point of view of the present-day world-view attitude, it is difficult for man to realize that this spiritual science basically wants nothing more than to inner human thought and other soul experiences in a similar way, through purely inward processes, as certain external manipulations, certain external actions are refined and developed in the scientific experiment. Just as the scientific experiment, through which nature is to be coaxed into revealing its secrets, is basically nothing more than a refinement, in a certain sense an elevation, if I may use the word, of activities that are otherwise also carried out with external material things, which are only carried out in a certain, let us say, methodical sense, so that through their combination nature reveals its secrets to the human soul. Just as the scientific experiment is nothing more than a continuation, so to speak, of the external activity of man, so too is spiritual scientific research nothing more than a continuation, let us say, a refinement of what the human soul accomplishes in the ordinary course of life and in ordinary science in terms of thinking and other soul activities. The first difficulty is that the path from one to the other is not always sought in the way I indicated here eight days ago.