XVIII. Spiritual Science and the Spiritual Goals of Our Time

I do not want to talk about what science has achieved in terms of commercial and industrial aspects of contemporary cultural life; I want to talk about what scientific thinking has achieved. Apart from the fact that it has influenced the various cultural fields, it has contributed to a certain education of all human thinking, it has transformed the nature of the habits of thought, of the life of imagination and the cognitive needs of the human soul to a much greater extent than is usually realized. For this transformation has not only taken hold of those who have been drawn to science directly through their profession, their inclination or their interest, but of all souls; people simply think differently today than they did five or six centuries ago. We are accustomed to holding very different ideas about what we might call the reign of a sense of existence than we had in earlier centuries.