14. How Can We Know About Supernatural Worlds?

A spirit of the present who has actually shown how he tries to penetrate the supersensible everywhere, and who has also shown in some of his writings how serious he is about this, has recently been concerned, among other things, with what has been described here as the doctrine of repeated earthly lives: Maurice Maeterlinck – a passage that I would like to quote verbatim. He has no idea where the evidence lies, so he calls it mere belief. Spiritual science has nothing to do with belief, but, like the worldview of Copernicus, it has everything to do with belief because it is science, like Copernicanism; it does not interfere with belief. But Maeterlinck considers it a belief, and the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, which is the same as what is known in certain religious doctrines as the transmigration of souls — which, however, is not what is meant here, but rather the doctrine of repeated earthly lives — is alive. In his book “On Death,” Maeterlinck writes: