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

Understandably, misunderstandings arise from many, many other things as well. I would now like to point out a misunderstanding that is bound to arise in a perfectly understandable way. As we saw the day before yesterday, the spiritual researcher has to speak of how, through what he does with his own soul, the soul powers are changed, that a different kind of soul activity from that of ordinary life and ordinary science occurs in his soul. And so someone who is grounded in natural science must say to himself: Well, if a different soul life can be distinguished from the soul life that we can call normal — we are familiar with that; these are all the abnormal phenomena of the soul, which are known under the most diverse names, and which can only be distinguished by the self-deception that the spiritual researcher arbitrarily wants to bring about with his own soul. Then the naturalist shows us how certain soul processes of normal life are closely bound to a normal brain; he shows us, by the very sure and conscientious scientific method, how spiritual processes cease when certain parts of the brain are switched off, and he shows us how spiritual processes, how the whole soul life, the whole soul mood, can be changed by a physical change. The natural scientist can then reply to the spiritual researcher: Yes, is nothing more achieved by those strange exercises, which you speak of as a strange enthusiast, than a change in the physical organization, albeit one that cannot be proven externally or anatomically? And is not, after all, what you call spiritual research methods with other soul powers nothing more than a special kind of disorder of the soul life in general?