5. Anthroposophy and Cosmology

The soul-spiritual element that we carry within us today in this more or less abstract form suffers from a marked semblance character, so that we can really only perceive it from within, as we say. Nor can we escape from this perception from within by looking at what physiology and anatomy tell us about man. All the magnificent results that ordinary science has achieved present us with a solid shape of complex structure; yet it is one quite different in kind from what we observe within us when we visualize our thinking, feeling and volition, and we cannot find a bridge from one to the other. We can watch the struggles of psychologists to establish a relationship between what they comprehend in its abstractness and semblance nature—the only way that is open to their inward perception—and what exists outside. The two things are so far apart that we cannot establish a connection between them directly, through ordinary consciousness. But if we proceed without prejudice and fix our eyes, not upon an illusion of the solid man, but upon man as a being of liquid, a being of air and heat, then by a process of empathy with ourselves we shall become aware of the flow of heat and cold in the currents of our respiratory circulation, if we provide a basis on which we can do so.