XVIII. Spiritual Science and the Spiritual Goals of Our Time

Above all, spiritual research is a unique discipline in that it seeks to connect the human soul with its spiritual source in a way that is based on scientific thinking. It shows that what man carries in his soul as the deepest, innermost part is spiritual , a spiritual core; and that this spiritual core is connected with an all-embracing spiritual life of the world that lies beyond the life of the senses, and that it cannot be perceived or recognized by the ordinary human senses or by the intellect that binds itself to these human senses. But in this method of research, a tremendous difference between spiritual science and all other sciences immediately comes to light. Every other science works with the same means of thinking and looking at things, which are otherwise peculiar to man in everyday life. Just as man is, just as he develops in the normal way from childhood to later age, as he develops a certain capacity for knowledge, so he also approaches the scientific research objects of the present. And everything that such a normal person has to say forms the content of the sciences in the various fields of life.