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

Spiritual research does not take the starting point of taking the facts of natural science directly, but it builds on what the soul forces themselves have acquired over the centuries through a different exercise of the soul forces. A person who has gone through the process of scientific thinking, through physics, chemistry, biology and physiology, thinks differently from someone who has not gone through these sciences as they have developed in modern times, because they have acquired the methods and forms of thought of these sciences. Spiritual research first looks at the way in which thinking has been practiced in recent times. And spiritual research becomes clear about this: the way in which thinking is practiced must gradually lead, through what is experienced in this exercise, to what was described the day before yesterday as a special exercise of thinking and will. Thus it is not what has been investigated by natural science that is placed in a relationship by the spiritual researcher to spiritual research, but rather what inner consciousness of these activities one has acquired, that is what is particularly emphasized; how one has learned to think differently, how one has learned to feel differently in nature, how the soul forces have been stimulated. And then the spiritual researcher says: This stimulation is just the beginning of a path; because if you follow it up - he himself has led to what was described here the day before yesterday - you can see from it that you are really led to grasp something in the soul through the exercise of thinking, feeling and willing, which can detach itself from the physical organization.