2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Today, one can find that in certain fields, the scientific worldview has, if the word is taken in its limited sense, reached a kind of ideal-beautiful limitation of its domain. Today, we have works in the field of natural science that can be considered exemplary precisely because of the way they limit their task to the implementation of individual problems. After what might be called the one-sided Darwinian-Haeckelian romanticism of the last third of the nineteenth century, biology, for example, has brought us to the point where we now have such an exemplary work that satisfies the highest demands as that of the Berlin researcher Oscar Hertwig on “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance.” We also have methodologically outstanding achievements in areas that touch on the boundaries of what is to be considered here, such as Theodor Ziehen's “Physiological Psychology.” It can be said that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represented here takes the side of such methodical research wherever the consideration of the actual scientific field is important. I myself, with everything I wish to contribute to spiritual science, am always opposed to worldviews that are sometimes well-intentioned but nevertheless amateurish, arising from inadequate efforts at knowledge. It is precisely this methodical scientific worldview that makes it difficult for spiritual science to find understanding among our contemporaries. Even in such an exemplary book as Oscar Hertwig's Das Werden der Organismen (The Development of Organisms), published in 1916, we find, among other things, the scientific conviction that natural science can only deal with the finite and must leave the infinite out of consideration. However, natural science can explore the finite in all its aspects. Hertwig rightly repeats the view of Nägelis, the great botanist, from his scientific point of view with these words, and Theodor Ziehen also says that he wants to consider everything in human soul life that has parallel phenomena in human physical life, so that physiology can provide information about these parallel phenomena. Everything else must be left to epistemology, metaphysics, or the like. But then we also find in Ziehens' “Physiological Psychology,” which is exemplary from my point of view, that what is put forward by current physiological-psychological research is, in its details, which actually say nothing special about the great mysteries of the soul and spirit, more important than everything that centuries have attempted to achieve with regard to questions about the supernatural in the life of the soul and the like. If we add to this the authoritative statement made decades ago by the great physiologist Da Bois-Reymond that real science should only concern itself with the sensory world because, as he said, where the supersensible begins, science ends, we find that — and we could multiply what has been said a hundred or a thousand times over — whereby the scientific view of the world would like to pull the rug out from under the feet of all spiritual science. We find it in the fact that, while on the one hand it is always said quite benevolently: All questions that go beyond sensory observation must be left to metaphysics or something similar, on the other hand, however, it is asserted — and in such a way that this view is instilled in the widest circles of our contemporaries — that real science can only be achieved in the realm of sensory observation.