13. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects III

In this way, one comes to understand the whole of human education and organization. One moves away from merely fantasizing and speculating about the spiritual and soul life; one comes to grasp its connection with the physical. Then one gets out of the habit of speculating and forming hypotheses in the scientific field at all. One no longer asks: What can be speculated in order to grasp the spiritual-soul? Instead, one looks, for example, at the concrete development in the organism, at how it finally, so to speak, pushes out its teeth, and one must then acknowledge how the same thing that was bound to the organism, working hidden in the organism, later becomes free. We can follow this in its soul-spiritual form by looking at the soul-spiritual itself, as it has developed in the child; and so we find the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-organic by following the things in a concrete way. One no longer constructs an abstract psychology, as is often the case today, which has little more than some word content, but one studies concretely the behavior of one to the other, and one sees how that which is present in a later stage was actually observable in an earlier stage. One arrives at a complete empiricism. In the same way, we can study the other turning point in life, that of sexual maturity. On the one hand, we observe the organic process that culminates in sexual maturity. On the other hand, we ask ourselves: What develops in the soul and spirit? What happens to the forces that are no longer needed for the formation of something organic after sexual maturity, because they have brought the organic to a certain conclusion? What happens to these forces that have been, so to speak, embedded in the organic up to that point? — That which works in the particular nature of the will impulses is present in a completely different way after sexual maturity than before. Before sexual maturity, they are absorbed in a very specific way into the organic processes. But when they are no longer absorbed in the organic processes, they do not become free. Instead, they connect to the organism in a certain more intimate way. Thus, at this turning point in his life, man becomes more master of his organism than he was before. The will integrates itself more intimately and more intensely with the organism than was previously the case.