4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

This is achieved through the genuine training of the soul's abilities, which not everyone needs to acquire. But every human being has a sense of truth. If this sense of truth is not clouded by prejudices, which are all too easy to find in popular or scientific worldviews today, then one will be able to agree with what the spiritual researcher has to say, even before one has become a spiritual researcher oneself. For the seer differs from other people — I have already expressed this here as a parable — like the one who watches the watchmaker from the one who only sees the watch. The one who sees the watch knows that it was created through the intellectual activity of the watchmaker; one does not need to have watched the watchmaker to know this. When the spiritual researcher describes, through seerish observation based on his research, how everyday life comes about, those who observe this directly will find confirmation of what has been said everywhere, even if they are not spiritual researchers themselves. Even if it still seems paradoxical today in the general development of intellectual culture how the spiritual researcher has to think about the body, soul, and spirit of the human being, in the course of time, as natural science works against what spiritual research has to say, spiritual research will also achieve what natural science has slowly and gradually achieved. Just consider that there was a time when certain prejudices prevented the emergence of physiology and biology in the modern sense. Today, there is a prejudice against building a bridge between the human soul and what goes on in the human body as the soul flows through it. The study of anatomy only emerged during the Middle Ages. Before that, there was a prejudice against adding what goes on in the body to what the soul can experience within. Spiritual science is in the same position today. And even if one does not believe it, today's prejudices are of the same value and stem from the same causes. Just as in the Middle Ages people did not want to allow the body to be dissected in order to recognize what takes place in the body as a condition for spiritual life, so even today the most serious scientists are still reluctant to investigate the spirit using spiritual scientific methods. And just as the Middle Ages only gradually came to allow the study of the human body to be opened up to science, so too will the cultural development of humanity make it necessary for the study of the spirit, which is not the same as the soul, to be opened up to spiritual science.