13. The Value of Extrasensory Knowledge for the Human Soul

We, honored attendees, are indeed standing in our fateful present in difficult events that also promise great things. The question can be raised: what effect can the things we are now experiencing – the daring deeds of courage, the daring deeds of overcoming fear of death, the noble deeds of willingness to make sacrifices – have on a soul that absorbs what spiritual research wants to give to humanity? We are not living in a small time! For months events in our surroundings have been presenting themselves to us in a way that, one might well say, has not been seen in all of human history, not in such magnitude and with such significance. If one adds up the various nationalities fighting on the side of the Central European powers, even leaving out minor tribal differences, one arrives at twenty-one different peoples from the most diverse parts of the world. And if we count the various nations fighting on the side of the Central European powers, we get, again leaving out minor tribal differences, fourteen fighting individual nations; so that we can say that over a large part of the inhabited earth, thirty-five nations, leaving out minor tribal differences, are fighting each other today. And if, from the point of view of spiritual science, we turn our eyes to that which is intervening in such a powerful historical way in our time, oh, there a very special nuance of feeling presents itself to us.