4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

Thus, investigations today often remain fruitless — apart from the fact that they are also fruitless for many other reasons — because people do not want to renounce the prejudice that human beings can be considered without taking into account their division into the three entities, if I may call them that, or into the three elements of body, soul, and spirit. I have already indicated in an earlier lecture that what is meant here by spiritual science is to build a bridge from the soul life to the spirit, just as physical science and biology are concerned with building a bridge from the soul life to the physical being of the human being. Once again, I would like to draw attention to what I have already indicated in order to explain what is actually meant. Soul experience, in the broader sense, is undoubtedly — even if soul experience in this case is based on physical and bodily foundations — when human beings feel hunger, thirst, satiety, the need to breathe, and the like. But no matter how much one develops these sensations, no matter how much one tries to make hunger greater or smaller in order to observe it inwardly and psychologically, or no matter how much one compares the feeling of hunger with satiety and the like, it is impossible, through this mere inner observation, through what one experiences spiritually, to discover which physical, bodily foundations serve as the condition for this spiritual experience. In the manner familiar to you, the bridge must be built by scientific methods in such a way that one moves from mere mental experience to what is happening in the physical organization of the human being while this or that mental experience is present.