3. Natural Science and Anthroposophy

May people condemn as heresy what appears as an anthroposophical method and thereby distort it in a certain way before humanity, by presenting it as if it were something inferior in a bad sense, as one often calls it so “inferior” in the field of experiments, pragmatism and so on - in all the fields of manifold superstition, people may, may, as I said, distort all that the spiritual researcher develops there, by starting from a fixed philosophical basis. The methods and meditative techniques developed there, ladies and gentlemen, are nothing other than a further development of those inner soul forces that we have when we do mathematics and whose application in external natural science has yielded such great and significant results. Once we have learned what is present in the soul as an activity when we mathematize, once we have familiarized ourselves with this peculiar, scientifically formed form of creation, we can develop it further by, so to speak, recreating what arises in our memory, so that we have a kind of guiding impulse for our lives from this memory. We have these impulses for our lives as guiding impulses because what occurred as external experiences at a certain point in our childhood is transformed into inner experiences. We can, so to speak, always bring up images from the unfathomable depths of the soul of what we have experienced. But we can also distinguish between the living experience of being inside the experience, as we had it ten years ago, and the act of bringing up what was experienced back then. And no matter how vivid the images may be, the essential thing in this memory life is that we make what we are experiencing temporarily into a lasting one in us through imagination, although it is a lasting one that we cannot immediately determine as to what is going on down there in the soul life - or perhaps also in the organic life. But we can determine what we have before us if we bring up from these depths what we have experienced.