4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

I have also already pointed out that in the development of the spiritual researcher, particular importance must be attached to his ability to devote himself to the so-called limits of knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond speaks of seven world riddles that man can face as limits beyond which human knowledge cannot go. When human beings say two things to themselves at such boundary points, these become the starting point for spiritual scientific investigations. The first thing is that one must first feel in one's inner life what such a boundary question actually means. On such occasions, I like to draw attention to real, genuine seekers of knowledge. One example is Friedrich Theodor Vischer. When he dealt with the important topic of human dream fantasy, he came upon such a boundary question. He said to himself: If one considers the relationship of human soul life to human body life, one must say: It is quite certain that the soul cannot be in the body, but it is equally certain that the soul cannot be anywhere outside the body. Anyone who develops such a way of thinking, who strives for knowledge not according to conventional, academic methods, but according to the inner, necessary currents of the soul, will in many cases come to the conclusion that they must say to themselves: You are at a point where all the ideas that have come to you from your sensory observations, from your entire conscious life that takes place day after day under the influence of sensory observation, cannot lead you any further. One can now, as so often happens in the present day, stop at such boundaries and say, well, there is a limit, and man cannot go beyond it! One is already deceiving oneself by saying this. But I do not want to talk about that. What matters is that it is precisely at such boundaries that one tries to penetrate with the full life of the soul, that one tries to live into a real contradiction that presents spiritual-soul reality to us, just as it presents itself as external contradictory reality when a green leaf appears on a plant one moment and a yellow petal the next. In reality, contradictions also realize themselves. When one experiences them, instead of approaching them with logical thinking, with one's usual, sober judgment, when one approaches them instead with the full, living inner soul, when one allows a contradiction to play itself out in the soul itself and does not approach it with the prejudice of life and try to resolve it, then you notice how it wells up, how something really sets in that can be compared to what I have done in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (On Soul Riddles).