4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

Now, I have already indicated in previous lectures that today's considerations in this field suffer from a fundamental deficiency. Precisely when one approaches such a consideration from the standpoint of the scientific approach, which has been so successful in other fields, one still encounters the impossibility of overcoming the prejudice that confuses the soul life with the activities of the actual spirit life in the human being. Today, soul and spirit are almost universally confused in scientific, philosophical, and popular thinking. Such thinking today is indeed still akin to a chemist who wanted to analyze a composite substance and imagined that that there must be two elements, two partial substances, in this composite substance, who then acts entirely under this prejudice and, as a result, cannot produce anything proper because he does not take into account that the investigation can only be fruitful if he proceeds on the basis of a threefold structure.