2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

Ordinary thinking establishes limits of knowledge at such points of the soul's life. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the “seven world riddles” that cannot be solved; but one could cite hundreds and hundreds of such so-called limits of human soul life. If one does not easily resign oneself to such limits, but instead attempts to go through everything that the soul must go through, saying to oneself: You must raise questions here, the natural external world cannot give you any answers, nor can that which springs from your own soul give you any answers, — if one connects oneself so deeply with these questions in one's innermost soul life, if one has the patience to live with them not only logically but also inwardly, if one raises them again and again in one's soul in order to know not only what they say logically but also what they trigger inwardly in the soul, then something gradually sprouts from such questions in the soul. One experiences something in one's soul that I will try to clarify in the following way by means of a comparison: In many cases, the scientific worldview thinks that the lowest living beings initially have only an inner life activity, which they develop by interacting with the outside world, thereby transforming their still undifferentiated organism so that it not only interacts with the outside world in an indeterminate way, but that this interaction itself becomes differentiated into the sense of touch, and according to the scientific view, the other senses are said to have developed gradually from the sense of touch. What is experienced by the being in living matter can really be compared to what the soul experiences when it encounters such boundaries. If one really learns to know the soul experience in relation to such boundaries, one feels that this does not mean something that has to do with the development of external sensory organs. If one has the patience to live inwardly into such boundary mysteries, then something like a soulful touching develops from the encounter, and something emerges from it like a differentiation of the soul life. This is something that, of course, is not believed in the widest circles today. But people will believe in it more and more when they realize that only in this way can real knowledge about the phenomena of the world and, in particular, about the mystery of the human being be gained. Gradually, it will become apparent from within that human beings not only encounter boundary questions, but that they develop their soul life in the same way that mere living beings develop living substance, and thus those higher organs of vision arise through which the soul gradually learns to penetrate into the spirit. This is only one of those exercises — or whatever you want to call them — that the soul has to go through in order to transform the undifferentiated soul life so that it can truly penetrate the spiritual world.