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

At the same university there was a pure scientist, a naturalist who had been particularly concerned with criminal anthropology, with anthropology in general, a naturalist who was not a Darwinist but who stood firmly on the ground of fact-finding research and who has strictly adhered to this ground to this day. Just at the time when the Christian professor took up his post as rector and spoke in honor of Galileo, the natural scientist was working on a “science of the soul.” And lo and behold: the natural scientist dedicated his work on the soul to the Christian priest who stood up for Galileo. The natural scientist, who is not even a Christian by confession or descent, dedicated a work to the Christian priest that is now, as a science of the soul, entirely grounded in physiology and natural science, as a token of gratitude, so to speak, for the fact that the one who stood on the ground of spiritual life as a priest and as a Christian found the way over to an objective consideration of the natural thinker Galileo. In this way, harmony between spiritual science and natural science, between life in the spirit and life in natural scientific knowledge, has emerged in a particular example! The time will come when the goal of spiritual striving in all fields will no longer be seen as a struggle but as harmony, and that will be the time when the misunderstandings regarding spiritual research will also disappear. Today, such misunderstandings are just as understandable when they arise in the religious field or in the field of natural science as the objections to Copernicanism were understandable in their time. But people will realize more and more that this goal is not some distant, nebulous ideal, but something that can and must be striven for in the immediate future. It is remarkable how, I might say, natural science unconsciously approaches spiritual research. Only a very superficial example will be given at the end.