1. Knowledge of Nature and Knowledge of the Mind

A confrontation with what was alive in modern spiritual life and – because spiritual life is, after all, at the basis of all human cultural and civilizational development – with all of modern human life: such a confrontation with these two cornerstones stands at the starting point of what anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to become: a confrontation with the scientific way of thinking. And I say explicitly: with the scientific way of thinking. For when this starting point is mentioned, it is not a matter of going into individual scientific results – which have already been so gratefully addressed in the lectures that have been given so far – but rather of looking at the way way in which the scientific researcher wants to relate to reality, and to look in particular at what one has as a human being in terms of one's own human development in the present in the practice of scientific research or even just in the appropriation of scientific results.