2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

But how can this spiritual being be found? The sensory presents itself to the senses when man encounters nature; the spiritual does not do so in the same way. The spiritual only confronts the human being when he awakens the possibilities of knowledge and perception from within himself, which I have called “seeing” in my book “The Riddle of Man,” which is hidden in ordinary life, slumbering, as it were. Now, I do not want to talk in abstractions, but would like to show with a concrete example that just as it is possible for the natural scientist, through his method, to move from subjective hunger and thirst to bodily processes that are not conscious in ordinary experience, it is equally possible to move from mere soul phenomena to spiritual phenomena, which are related to the soul on the one hand in the same way as the physical is related to the soul on the other. Even with such concrete questions, one immediately encounters resistance, which is imposed by the common view of the life of the soul. This view, which is based on scientific methods, actually only wants to consider the passive life of the soul, and indeed must do so. The active life of the soul, which in its essence is active from within, cannot be considered scientifically and is often lost sight of altogether. When natural science considers spiritual experience today, it often only looks at the way in which ideas are grouped together, how one idea, perhaps evoked by an external perception, evokes another that is stored in my memory, or even many others. It looks at how ideas associate, how they connect with emotional nuances, with impulses of the will, or the like. On this basis, it does not adopt methods that could be compared, in terms of the spiritual, with the rigorous methods of the scientific view of the world. If you pick up Theodor Ziehen's Physiological Psychology, you will see how everything boils down to the fact that our entire soul life is actually built on such associations when it goes beyond mere sensory life. But this kind of observation does not lead to a truly unbiased view of soul life.