Second Lecture

At the time these writings were produced, people were completely opposed to a mindset of knowledge and science that arose directly from agnosticism. Everywhere — even where one encountered a serious quest for knowledge and a serious endeavor to put into practice what human beings can achieve as knowledge — everywhere one encountered people who could not get beyond agnosticism, people who, because of everything that agnosticism had planted in them, had to be completely hostile to everything that could lead to anthroposophy. Everything one experienced with such people led one to raise two questions out of a sense of the times, which seem to be of eminent, purely human significance. For someone who, on the one hand, had learned to love scientific endeavour, but who, on the other hand, also recognised the profound influence that the scientific spirit had gained over all human life in recent times, the important question of life arose: Can science, where it seeks to develop to its highest flowering, as philosophy, provide what human beings must have from their deepest innermost being as the actual answers to the fundamental questions of life? And this question, in contrast to the consciousness of the time, split into two others: Does contemporary science provide what human beings must seek from their innermost urge? And what is it that human beings must seek in our time in accordance with this innermost urge?