2. Human beings as Spiritual and Soul Beings

There are two ways out of what is either only inner life in the human soul or dependent on the body. One cannot escape by following the path attempted, for example, by Theodor Ziehen's “Physiological Psychology.” When Ziehen says that we cannot think what we want, but must think as determined by associations, as ideas relate to one another, he shows that he is essentially distracting from the spirit with his entire view. It can be said that Ziehen's view of human soul life is what it is solely because Ziehen overlooks the real spiritual impulses of the human soul. That is why Ziehen can say that the main law of human soul life is that one idea connects with another either according to their inner similarity or according to their temporal sequence. If I have seen a friend in a certain place and then see the friend again, the place that was connected with him in time can again be associated with him. If the life of the soul proceeds in this way, only according to these laws of association, then it proceeds in the way that the body allows this soul life to proceed. It is precisely the spirit that sleeps. The spirit submerges into the soul life that is dependent solely on the body. Contemporary psychology pushes the whole life of the soul down into the physical, it considers only that soul life into which the spirit submerges so deeply that it is no longer really there. For the truly spiritual begins wherever we free ourselves from associations through inner activity. The truly spiritual begins wherever the urge to speak ceases, and where all psychology that today seeks to base itself on natural science ceases to speak.