4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

And basically, everyone admits that this is the ideal of humanity, as it has been carried out. The opponents of spiritual science are only there because of misunderstandings. So that one can also say in a particular case: the spiritual scientist is really in complete agreement with what people say, yes, often with what they say against spiritual science. When, for example, Leonard Nelson wrote a very spirited essay in the September issue of the 'Neuer Merkur' about the present-day tasks in relation to philosophy, it seems as if everything that Nelson, who is one of the most brilliant people of the present day, expresses there could be characterized as opposition to spiritual science. The counter-check would be that the spiritual researcher has no need to say no to anything this man says. On the one hand, Leonard Nelson shows how man degenerates when he cultivates only the intellect; how he thereby enters into an abstraction that cannot lead him to any truly life-filled philosophy. In a much more consistent and higher sense, this must be admitted by the spiritual researcher who seeks the agony of skepticism, of doubt, which becomes suffering, when the spirit wants to develop in a one-sided way, without the root of soul love. Nelson only points to thinking and knows nothing about the fact that when this same thinking is experienced, a completely different world creeps into it, a world that is much richer in content than the sensual world and that remains closed to him. One completely agrees with what he positively asserts. He just does not allow himself to agree with himself, he misunderstands himself. Likewise, one can agree with him when he says on the other hand: When man now delves into his own nature, broods within himself, a false mysticism comes to light, man enters into a nebulous inner dreaming. He does not want to be anchored only through thinking; he believes that he is closer to the basis of the world precisely through feeling. In truth, it is only a subjective thing that is achieved there. The spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with what is said in a positive way. But the author of the essay, on the other hand, does not know that one discovers something completely new if one only goes the right way. He does not understand himself and basically only refutes himself by having a different view from the one he, if I may use the paradoxical expression, asserts as a view and practically exercises. What he does is completely in line with spiritual science. Basically, the spiritual researcher is not opposed to what people really mean; and they are only opponents because they misunderstand each other and thus misunderstand him, talk at cross purposes.