4. The Eternal Forces of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science

Today, one of the many riddles confronts us in our immediate present. And because it confronts us, it will be discussed at the end of this lecture. I speak about this mystery in the knowledge that there may, of course, be many among the honored listeners who, if one goes into such details, may find the matter, which may already be found quite fantastic in general, to be the height of fantasy; but the spiritual researcher cannot be deterred by such things. Just as mankind, even great minds, regarded it as the height of fantasy when the world came into being, that the earth moves around the sun; and as people who regarded it as wild fantasy have become accustomed to taking it seriously, so it is with all truth. Today it must still be considered fantastic that something similar to what happened with the physical universe should now also happen with the spiritual cosmos of man. At the forefront of the newer worldviews, it was the task of those who had to give the new impulse to point out, for example: It has been said that up there the firmament limits the outer space; but there is nothing up there. You yourselves are doing that. It is the limitation of our vision. Beyond the non-existent boundary, space continues, filled to the brim. Just as the spatial firmament was swept aside in the past, so the temporal firmament is swept aside by spiritual science, which shows that only human conditioning of perception leads to this temporal firmament. There is nothing there at all. The spiritual firmament extends into temporal infinity. Man progresses through repeated lives on earth. One must look at the path that truth takes through the development of mankind if one wants to find the strength to advocate what contradicts habitual thinking. But anyone who is familiar with the course of recent scientific development will be able to find such strength and will be convinced that, of course, people will talk about folly, reverie, wild fantasy when such claims are made, as they are here today. But scientific findings have also had this fate, and spiritual scientific findings will also have this fate. They will also become a matter of course. Just as many worlds are spoken of today, the repeated lives of man will be spoken of as a truth based on spiritual observation, which can be attained in the manner described.