7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?

GA 68b/1907-01-21/p021 ·1907-01-21 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Da keine professionellen Stenogramme vorliegen, handelt es sich oftmals um notizenhaft festgehaltene Zusammenfassungen oder Berichte.» (Since no professional shorthand transcripts exist, these are often summaries or reports kept in the form of notes.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68b). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

But today, for a number of years, one is not such a great fool [before science] when one utters this word. For those who today consider the somewhat advanced state of the science of life phenomena cannot help but say to themselves: there is more to beings than a mere chemical-physical process. And many are of the opinion that they are speaking of a life force. They know that this is speculation. Spiritual science does not take this speculative point of view. It takes the view that there is a higher experience, that man is able to see more when certain powers slumbering in his soul are awakened. Comparison with the man born blind and the man who has received sight: the one who does not see can never decide whether something is there or not, but the one who sees it can. There is no possibility of speaking of limits to knowledge. For man makes the discovery that he has as many worlds around him as he has organs to perceive them. This is how spiritual science differs from what is called science today: it starts from discussing things that enter our existence as something new through the awakening of organs.

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Cite: GA 68b/1907-01-21/p021 · edition English