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

But spiritual science achieves this by showing that, in addition to their body, which is in one sense an expression of their soul and spirit, human beings have a spiritual aspect that can only be grasped by intuitive consciousness, by supersensible consciousness: by imaginative consciousness, from which social ideas also flow, by inspired consciousness, from which moral ideas flow, which are lived out in ordinary life in compassion, in empathy with other people, from which, when it becomes intuitive consciousness, legal ideas flow, because in intuitive consciousness the human being not only penetrates into what the other being is, but through this intuitive consciousness also experiences the other being to a certain degree within himself. And as spiritual science penetrates into what is eternal in human beings and can only be grasped through imaginative, inspired, intuitive consciousness, spiritual science also penetrates into what can pulsate in human life under the light, under the sun of freedom. Today it is still quite paradoxical when, in order to describe reality, one finds oneself saying that sleep and dream impulses pulsate in history, in social life, in moral life, in legal life, in the life of freedom, and that what pulsates there can only be found through spiritual science. But I must mention again and again: what spiritual science must bring into the world as a paradox for the present time can be compared to the paradox that Copernicus brought into the world when people believed that the earth stood still and the sun and stars moved around it. He replaced this with the opposite. It was not until 1822 that a certain church allowed people to believe in Copernicanism! Now, how long it will take before the scholars and so-called educated people of today will allow or no longer be ashamed, as if it were a superstition, to accept that spiritual science explains life, expands it to concepts that correspond to reality, and leads to fruitful concepts, remains to be seen. But the signs of the times speak so strongly that one would wish it could happen very, very soon! But enlightened, outstanding minds have always seen what is true, even if only in individual flashes of inspiration. Spiritual science is actually nothing new in this respect. It merely summarizes systematically and through realistic observation what the flashes of inspiration of the most outstanding personalities of humanity have always been about.