Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

That, dear attendees, is the one enemy that arises in the human soul when faced with the riddles of the spiritual world. The other enemy appears primarily to those souls who enter into the modern way of scientific life. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical, one might say exact, way in order to follow sense phenomena to their external laws and to permeate them with ideas through which they become understandable. But it is very often the case, especially when one is conscientiously immersed in the external world in this way, that one notices how our thinking becomes, I might say, thin through this scientific path, how it only gradually becomes appropriate to what the sensory world is, and how, in its thinness, it cannot find its way up from the sensory to the supersensible realm, precisely because of its conscientiousness. And then precisely those who enter deeply into the scientific sphere are assailed by doubt, the other enemy of the human soul life. Doubt is certainly something that is connected with the development and education of the intellect. But when doubt presents itself to the human intellect, then it sinks down into the soul, it sinks down into the mind. Those who, on the basis of the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognize the connection between the life of the soul and the physical experience of the human being, know how what takes place in the soul pours into the body and how that which — one must put it this way — rushes from doubt into the , how it first causes a certain wasting disease of the soul life in the person, how this wasting disease can weaken us — I would say — to the marrow, to the limbs, to the muscles, that we can become unfit for our soul, for our spiritual and for our physical activity precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by modern man from one side or the other, perhaps the worst doubters feel particularly compelled to seek information about the spiritual, about the supersensible, to which they do not want to turn out of traditional belief, like the first type of person, who surrender to superstition. Since they want to turn to the supersensible realm through knowledge, scientific minds are led to study the abnormal spiritual life, the spiritual life of attuned people, mediums, people who have all kinds of hallucinations. It is seen that something else is going on in the abnormal life than in the normal human life of knowledge and will, and it is believed that something can be drawn from this abnormal life, which comes from mediumship or from visions, about human abilities and their connection with another world into the realm of ordinary consciousness.