2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Now, when something like this is said, a large proportion of our contemporaries will naturally think that it is a reference to all kinds of fantastical, visionary activities of the human soul. But that is not the case at all. Spiritual science is, rather, something that must be worked out just as methodically and proceed in just as strict a manner as pure natural science. The reason why spiritual science finds it so difficult to gain acceptance today is that for centuries now — I will discuss this in one of my next lectures — all human worldviews have basically been based on more or less eliminating the spiritual from the soul, viewing the soul as the entirety of human inner life, and to think of it as more or less dependent on or independent of the body, but not to seek such a relationship between the soul and the spirit as is sought on the other hand between the soul and the body. Those who, through pure soul experiences alone, even if they are, as is often thought, mystically heightened soul experiences — experiences that are thus purely inwardly experienced with the soul that one has in everyday consciousness — wants to learn something about the actual essence of the human being as a spiritual being, that is like a person who, out of hunger and thirst, wants to learn about those processes that take place in the human body and which are the basis for what the soul experiences in hunger and thirst. Everyone can easily see that hunger and thirst are the inner experience of something that is happening in the body. The scientific view of the world says: when a person feels hunger and thirst, there is a chemical change in the blood or something similar, indicating that something has happened in the body that is expressed in the soul through the experience of hunger and thirst. However, if one wants to investigate what is happening in the body, one must look at the soul experiences. Of course, one cannot investigate in a living being who is not hungry how hunger is expressed physically, but one can never, by merely considering the inner experience of hunger or satiety, discover the physical processes associated with this inner experience of hunger or thirst or satiety. Nor can one, no matter how deeply one delves into mysticism, no matter how much one allows one's inner soul experiences to play out according to the pattern of some mystics, learn anything from this mere play about what underlies the soul as spirit. Just as natural science, through its methods, must go beyond the mere experience of hunger and thirst or satiety to something that is not observed in ordinary soul life — for in ordinary soul life, human beings know nothing of the chemical processes that take place in their bodies while they suffer from hunger and thirst — so too, in a true contemplation of the spirit, one must move beyond all that can be experienced in the soul through imagination, feeling, and willing, to something spiritual.