5. Ways of Knowing the Eternal Powers of the Human Soul

What I have to say to you today about ways to knowledge of the eternal powers of the human soul will by no means be suitable to immediately evoke conviction in our time. Even those who speak from the point of view of spiritual science, as spiritual science is meant here, do not succumb to such an illusion. It can only be a matter of communications that are made for the purpose of stimulation, communications about a research method that believes it can say something with the same certainty and the same certainty about the soul life, its meaning and its significance in the universe as the newer natural science expresses something about the connections of the forces of nature, the meaning of this or that natural event in the whole world context. Precisely because spiritual science, as it is meant here, is, so to speak, a continuation of the achievements of nature, of the way of thinking, one could also say, of the spirit of research, for the spiritual life, which has been integrated into human development through the scientific world view over the last three to four centuries. But because this spiritual science seeks its field in the spiritual worlds, it is necessary that its scientific and research methods are quite different from the research methods and the research approach for the natural scientific point of view. It is precisely in order that spiritual science may be, as it were, the sister of natural science, that it must, because its field is so different, take other paths and other methods. And so the methods and paths that I have to describe to you will at first differ completely from those paths and methods that seek to eavesdrop on nature's secrets through external manipulation and action. But the attitude is the same.