6. Spiritual Scientific Findings on the Ideas of Freedom and Social-moral Life

I have always found it interesting — I may make this personal remark; I have been intensively engaged with this problem for more than thirty years now, seeking to explore it from all sides — I found it interesting how it shed light on a mystery when Herman Grimm often said to me in conversation: If one applies the usual concepts, the scientific concepts, to historical life, so that they should be suitable, one does not get anywhere. If one wants to grasp historical life, if one wants to look into the impulses that are at work in it, then one can only do so with the imagination. Herman Grimm was not yet a spiritual researcher; he rejected such things. But he believed that historical life could only be grasped with the imagination. Well, it cannot be grasped with the imagination either. But Grimm was at least a personality who knew that one cannot enter into historical life with ordinary concepts.