8. The Harmony Between Spiritual Science and Natural Science and the Misconceptions about the Former and the Building Dedicated to it in Dornach

Now the spiritual researcher continues: We are now living in a time when the human soul must be able to look into the spiritual life in a similar way to the way people were able to look into the processes and entities of the purely natural three to four centuries ago. Spiritual science would like to penetrate into the spiritual realm in the same way that natural science has penetrated into the realm of nature in recent centuries, in the same way of seeking truth, in the same spirit of research. And one can say: spiritual science shares this conviction with many personalities, but in such a way that precisely with many personalities, who also understand the tremendous turnaround brought about by the scientific approach, this relationship between spiritual contemplation and natural science is viewed differently than the spiritual researcher must view it. Thus, for example, one can see how philosophy, which also wants to penetrate into the spiritual realm through the same conceptual world - not through the spiritual-scientific conceptual world of which I spoke the day before yesterday, but through the conceptual world that is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science -, which wants to penetrate into the spiritual realm through this conceptual world , this philosophy has often been forced in modern times, under the influence, I might say, of the splendor of natural scientific observations, to take the path of simply taking the truths that the natural scientist has discovered about the essences of nature and the facts of nature. And then, through all kinds of conceptual connections, through reflection on what natural science has discovered, one tried to penetrate more deeply into the essence of the phenomena. One felt, as it were, no longer as philosophically sovereign as before in the face of nature and the world; one felt that one had to reckon with the findings of natural science. The peculiarity of many personalities who wanted to appreciate the scientific way of looking at things in this way lies in the fact that these personalities say to themselves: one must accept the results of natural research; one must simply process philosophically what natural research reveals about nature and its events. Then one will recognize that which can be fathomed more deeply about the world.