2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

The spiritual science represented here cannot go along with this reaction against purely mechanistic natural science either. Instead, it must — as I pointed out here two weeks ago — make use of something completely different. With the powers of knowledge and possibilities of knowledge that lead to the great, significant scientific results, it is impossible to go beyond the purely physical and chemical. Of course, living beings, up to and including human beings, have physical and chemical laws because they have physical bodies. These must naturally be considered in terms of physics and chemistry, and one must not speculate about any kind of life force. But the mere powers of cognition and possibilities of cognition, as they must rightly be applied in natural science, are not sufficient to truly penetrate and understand the living or the soul, and one has only the choice of either remaining purely in the realm of physical and chemical laws and then renouncing any understanding of life, of the soul and the spirit, or appealing to powers of cognition quite different from those by which the purely natural, namely the physical and chemical, can be considered.