1. Knowledge of Nature and Knowledge of the Mind

But what has humanity as such achieved, in particular with regard to – if I may use Lessing's expression – the “education of humanity” through scientific thinking, through the characterized methodology and inner discipline? I would like to particularly point out what has actually been achieved in the course of more recent times. And if we want to appreciate and honor this in the right way, then we have to look back to older times in the development of humanity, to those times when there was not yet a scientific thinking in our present sense, when people did not draw such a strict, conceptual line between what man subjectively brought to the outer world and what is really objectively present in the outer world. Today, one need only take any literary work that wanted to have a scientific character and that still belongs to that older time, which did not have the scientific impact, and one will see how man was not yet able to really separate the subjective from the objective; but how he was also not able to develop something that is precisely one of the most important developmental forces of the latest phase of human history: full self-awareness, full human composure, that places itself in the universe and becomes more and more aware of itself as an individuality, as a personality in this universe. The growth of personality consciousness, the growth of the sense of self, the growth of composure, is what increases to the same extent that modern scientific consciousness arises. Man consolidates himself inwardly, one might say, in relation to all the forces with which he holds his personality together, precisely under the influence of this veneration of the principle of objectivity. Man becomes stronger inwardly as a personality, and his longing for free individuality grows to the same extent that scientific consciousness has developed in recent times. From this consideration alone, something can be inferred, which you will find confirmed when you penetrate into the now already somewhat widespread literature of our anthroposophical spiritual science. And what can follow from this consideration is this: the more man engages in the observation of the sense world and in the gradual processing of this sense world in a scientific way, the more he arrives at an inner consciousness of himself as I. With these two latter elements, that grows in man which securely places him as an I in his whole environment. This should be felt particularly by technicians, because one can develop a feeling there for how the human inner consciousness is changed by looking not only at the establishment of natural laws through observation, through experimentation, but at the weaving of natural laws into what one has to accomplish for the world in terms of instruments, tools, and entire undertakings. In this integration of natural laws into enterprise, in this integration of natural laws into reality, one can feel how human inner composure grows under the influence of a scientific way of thinking.