5. Natural Death and Spiritual Life

Let us try to imagine what this world of thought, which we now know to be bound to the forces of dying and of death in man, is capable of. It is capable of penetrating into what is also outwardly dead nature, and in this respect, more recent knowledge has celebrated its great, justified triumphs. It has spread more and more over the field of dead, inorganic, inanimate nature; it wants to see through this dead, this inanimate nature in such a way that one day — this is its ideal — it will be able to see the emergence of the living within the dead, like a combination of the forces that work within the dead. Today, in a certain respect, it is believed that we are on the way to such an understanding of the organic from the inorganic. But even if such an ideal of scientific knowledge, which is entirely justified in its field, could be fulfilled, we will only recognize that which is dead in the living. Allow me to express this in the following way, ladies and gentlemen.