1. The Human Soul in the Realm of the Supernatural and Its Relationship to the Body

Now, in order to avoid misunderstanding, it must be emphasized again and again that spiritual science is as far removed as possible from misjudging natural science; the value of what natural science has brought forth in recent times about the mysteries of nerve life, about the mysteries of the human organism in general, should not be taken away. But its value lies in a different realm than that of knowledge of the soul. One can abandon oneself to mere thinking, but then one starves, like someone who is starving; but to abandon oneself to the knowledge of the soul life based solely on external observation, which natural science, anatomy, physiology, and biology provide, is like introducing into the human organism not useful food, but all kinds of stuff that is indigestible. If you fill your stomach with indigestible stones or the like, the human organism is simply unable to make anything out of this indigestible stuff. So if you simply take the findings of natural science as they are, without processing them spiritually, you cannot expect them to provide any insight into the spiritual world or the life of the soul in the realm of the supersensible. In recent times, people have indulged in a wide variety of ideas that are supposed to explain how the soul actually relates to the body. Not only are the strangest fairy tales circulating in what is often called science. Fairy tales, superstition, which people want to eradicate from external life, often flourish in science as strongly as they ever have in life, only one notices them in science just as little as one noticed them in external life at that time. Take the fairy tale of the telegraph wires: that the nerves themselves are telegraph wires to the soul, which transmit external sensory impressions, and then other nerves, which direct the impulses of the will to the periphery of the body. One would rather not talk about this fairy tale, about this recurring comparison, because what is meant by this comparison is very far from the real facts and springs only from an unnoticed scientific superstition.