II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

Thus on the other side of existence, in our thoughts and feelings, we lead a life which is not immediately felt as real; yet out of these thoughts and emotions emerges man's moral world, the world of moral impulses. To regard the world like this, in its duality—on the one hand all that is grossly material and concrete and, to begin with, represents reality, and on the other, the less real thoughts and feelings which contain the moral impulses—this has something depressing about it for one who, confronted by science's assertion of the conservation of matter and energy, finds a kind of eternity being attributed to what is externally real, while that which arises out of thoughts and feelings as the moral World-Order appears to be doomed to perish in a vast graveyard of material existence—a conception to which the hypothetical conclusions drawn from the phenomena of nature must inescapably lead. Thus ordinary consciousness is faced with this duality: on the one hand the material world, on the other the moral-spiritual world, and man lives in this world, or rather in both the worlds which have so little to do with one another. With one side of his being man is given over to the material world in which the nutritive processes operate and in which, from these processes, his desires rise up where his senses receive impressions and his intellect co-ordinates these impressions. He is conscious of belonging to this material world, but he is also conscious of the fact that his dignity as a human being can only be maintained if the moral-spiritual impulses which flow from the thoughts and feelings, whose reality is in dispute, have real meaning for him. And in his ordinary consciousness man here finds himself faced with the problem of imbuing his physical body, through which he is membered into the physical world, with qualities which for him must contain the element of unreality. In external nature he can discover nothing that is governed by the principle of moral-spiritual impulses. There he sees the stones subject to inexorable laws, containing nothing of moral-spiritual impulses. He observes the plants in their gentle tranquillity, how in unfolding their blossoms they respond to the neutral light and warmth of the sun, and here again he can find no trace of moral impulses entering into the sun's warmth and light as they awaken the plants to life.