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

And also in the external, dear attendees — what can come into the world through spiritual science, it is indeed little, relatively little —, and also in the external, misunderstandings are bound to arise and are basically understandable. In this regard, I would like to say a few words again today – I already tried to do so from this same place last winter – about the external symbol of spiritual scientific research, the Dornach building, which has not yet been completed. It is understandable, completely understandable, that this Dornach building is still met with many, many misunderstandings today. Because basically, It is just as true that it is based on purely artistic principles and not on anything symbolic or similar as it is true that it enters the world in such a way that it basically presents itself as something quite different from what we have been accustomed to seeing as a building or as an artistic presentation. In many respects, it contradicts the habits of feeling of previous artistic views in the same way that spiritual science contradicts and must contradict the habits of thinking of previous scientific views. Why is this the case? Yes, dearest ones present, as was shown the day before yesterday, spiritual science, in accordance with its methods, leads to a different way of thinking, or rather, to a transformation of thinking, leading to such an activity of the soul that arises from thinking, which lives much more in reality than the ordinary pictorial thinking, which wants to give nothing other than a reproduction of external reality. While ordinary thinking must see its value precisely in the fact that the ideas it awakens are faithful replicas of an external reality, nothing directly experienced itself, but only something relived from external reality, that which develops from thinking through the spiritual research method must be something that the soul experiences directly. The soul should not have to rise into an image, but into real life, into the objective thought-being of the world. And so it is also with what develops out of the will. But through this, the soul also comes to immerse itself more in what otherwise emerges instinctively as the artistic, as the stylistic, as the artistic formation - in which it can immerse itself even more. That is the essential thing in the soul's activities that come to light through spiritual research, that the soul becomes more immersed in spiritual reality. And by becoming immersed in spiritual reality, it also immerses itself differently in the world of forms, in the world of shaping. But through this it is led not to replace art with something other than art, but to approach art in a different way. While the other art must start from what presents itself to the senses, and what presents itself to the senses can be elevated into the spiritual, so that art appears as something elevated out of the sensory world, into which is poured that to which one has ascended in a spiritual quest. What can be called 'the artistic being grasped by spiritual science' is something that takes the opposite path to the external sensory reality. The human being is first within the spiritual. He lives vividly the weaving and living of spiritual events, he faces the spirit as spirit. And when now the possibility of artistic activity is present in him, when art is to come into being, then the sensuous element is not led upwards until one can give it the splendor of the spiritual, as it happens in other art, as it has happened in art up to now, but the spiritual is led down into the material.