2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Thus we see that everything spiritual and intellectual is excluded from this science, and that only what remains is claimed to be scientific in character. In response to such efforts, I would like to emphasize that spiritual science, even in the question of the so-called old life force, stands firmly on the ground of researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond, Hertwig, and others. For this life force, which haunted science until the middle, even until the end of the second third of the nineteenth century, is a product of speculation. Because it was believed that the phenomena of living organisms could not be explained by physical and chemical laws and forces, people speculated about an undefined life force, to which they then attributed everything that could not be explained from a physical and chemical point of view. In his excellent preface to his “Investigations on Animal Electricity” in the mid-nineteenth century, Du Bois-Reymond said, I believe with some justification, that advances in physiology actually made it necessary for someone to come along who—as Gottsched once banished Hanswurst from the stage—would banish this life force from physiology. Even spiritual science can agree with such a harsh condemnation of the life force as it was understood in the old scientific sense. For it can see through everything that is rightly put forward from a physiological-biological point of view against such a hypothetical, speculative postulation of a life force, and it can regard what today appears as so-called neovitalism only as a reaction caused by the isolated realization that that which lives cannot simply be recognized by us in the same way as the purely physical and chemical. But this reaction more or less returns to the old speculation about an undefined life force.