Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

One then tends towards these world-view contents, which go right into our philosophies – people do not even realize how this is the case even in the philosophies that are considered to be unprejudiced by some great thinkers, but they are not – one holds, as they say, with the belief in that which they cannot achieve with knowledge, with insight. And today we have already come so far as to construct all kinds of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand independently in the face of knowledge, in the face of knowledge, which is only supposed to be directed towards our sensual or the like, while faith alone may be directed towards the supersensible. But this supersensible realm is taken from what has been handed down traditionally and has an effect on people with the strength with which it often does so today, through its venerable age. But if we look impartially at what people believe and what they hold in terms of worldviews that have been handed down historically, we can trace this in real history — not just in the history that is recognized today, but in a history that is steeped in psychology and the study of the soul. There one sees that what one wants to believe today, what one accepts as an idea in its effect on the world of feeling, that in older epochs of humanity this was once entirely derived from insights that the individual human being gained out of his need for knowledge, on paths that were to lead him into the supersensible. Everything that is justified as religious belief today can in fact be traced back to ancient knowledge.