Aim
and Being of Spiritual Research
Berlin, 24 January 1918
As
already during the past years, I would like to hold a number of
talks about objects of spiritual science here in Berlin in this
winter. The talks will contain a common line of thought;
however, I would like to form the single talks in such a way
that every talk is a concluded whole for itself.
I
intended the today's talk as introduction at first. It should
deal with the aim and being of spiritual research as I mean
here.
If
one speaks of the aims of spiritual research, one refers,
actually, to something that is an aim of every really human,
humanely feeling heart and of humanity, of the human quest for
knowledge at the same time. However, every age must try to
reach this aim different. It is also in other areas of the
human striving in such a way. If you let the different epochs
of human development pass, you realise that from age to age the
characters of the human attempts change. That is why humanity
has to intend that which is ancient in an always-new form, even
if the search is directed to the everlasting, imperishable aim
of humanity. You need only to remember how different the human
being considers the outer spatial world edifice today compared
to how he considered it five to six centuries ago. In
particular, spiritual science wants to consider this fact. It
wants to pursue the highest aim of human quest for knowledge in
such a way, as it just has to correspond to the character of
the present and the next future.
Spiritual science is misjudged very easily and is still
misunderstood largely. Besides, one thinks of something
sectarian, fancies something that possibly wants to appear like
a new religious foundation or as the case may be. This is
wrong. Spiritual science wants to be an immediate continuation
of the scientific worldview that intervenes so deeply in any
human thinking and imagination. At first spiritual science has
not arisen at all from a religious impulse, but from that which
has to position itself necessarily beside natural sciences with
their great achievements and insights into the outer existence.
I have to emphasise repeatedly that spiritual science
acknowledges the scientific achievements, appreciates them in
the deepest sense; but just that which has made natural
sciences great by which they got their great results has
stopped them at the same time from finding means and ways to
penetrate into the spiritual life of humanity. I need only to
point to the real aim of the human spiritual striving, and you
will recognise at once if you look around at the present
scientific life that I am right.
The
significant philosopher
Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) wrote a history of
psychology at the end of his life (Modern Psychology,
1901). In this history of psychology, he said that, actually,
since the middle of the nineteenth century already the academic
psychology could not touch two main questions of psychology.
These two main questions are the question of immortality and
that of human freedom; and everything culminates that strives
in this area for knowledge in gaining sure, truthful knowledge
about these two questions. Just for these two questions, one
will not find means and ways in the modern scientific
psychology.
One
of the maybe most significant psychologists of our time is
Franz
Brentano (1838-1917) who died in Zurich last year. He
already said during the seventies of the last century looking
at that which can be “soul science” from the
scientific spirit of the present: this soul science deals with
how a mental picture is tied up with the other how attention
relates to the human soul which role memory plays how love and
hatred work, how the feelings surge up and down; however,
— Franz Brentano meant — if the precise
investigation of all these things implicated that the answer of
the question of immortality was impaired and had to give way to
the results of a single research, then the single research, in
spite of its precision and exactness, would be futile. One has
to say, just that kind of scientific thinking of penetrating
into the outer relations of nature is inappropriate to
penetrate into the human soul life, namely for following
reason:
The
present naturalist must consider that as an ideal to pursue the
phenomena of nature in such a way that nothing is mixed in it
of that which comes from the human soul, from the subjective
nature of the human being. One should exclude everything that
does not come from the principles of nature, but that the human
mind adds from itself. If the ideal of natural sciences must be
to exclude the subjective, may you be surprised that a way of
thinking develops which is inappropriate to penetrate into the
soul life just because of that which makes it great?
This was not always in such a way. Someone who can trace back
the course of the human spiritual development finds that
natural sciences, as they are today, are not older than three
or four centuries.
Before, the human being also looked at nature. However, one
pursued only what the human being believed to know about
nature: in any knowledge or putative knowledge about nature,
something of the soul was always contained. One spoke about
nature and her phenomena so that one always saw something that
resembled the being of the human soul.
This kind of the consideration of nature disappeared with full
right, and another kind has come up which excludes anything
mental and spiritual. Somebody who stands on the viewpoint that
we can look down today at the childish achievements of former
centuries and millennia haughtily, will easier cope with these
questions than someone who looks a little deeper into the human
connections. One can be of the opinion that with reference to
the great achievements of somebody like Helmholtz
(Hermann von H., 1821-1894, German physiologist and physicist)
or Julius
Robert Mayer (1814-1878, German physician and
physicist), these are the truths for which humanity has striven
since centuries in vain. However, a more precise consideration
shows that this is not in such a way but that any striving
leads us back to the great ideas of Lessing that the
development of humanity is an “education of
humanity” for centuries and millenniums. Humanity
progresses in such a way that it discovers that what it
discovers to progress on and on and to go through the different
forms of development. Thereby one gets around to imagining a
special form of development not as a final truth. Since just as
Copernicus
thought different from the older astronomers before him, future
times will think again different from Copernicus. However, one
comes to the following line of thought. These modern times, in
particular since the thirteenth century, unfolded a thinking
about nature which forms one level of human development which
can be characterised especially saying, the human being has
learnt to expel anything spiritual from nature to consider
nature in such a way that she shows her chemical, physical
principles, in order to look for those forces which lead into
the soul life, into the spirit, with stronger power in the own
inside.
Thus, just natural sciences refer to the fact that one has to
go the way of the spirit, indeed, after the pattern and the
requirements of natural sciences and with the severity
prevailing in them that, however, this way to the spirit is
built on internal, own forces of the human soul. This leads us
even so far that spiritual science presents
“scientific” results and scientific security and
aims at a form as natural sciences have that it has, however,
to take ways different from those of natural sciences because
it wants to prove equal to natural sciences. Besides, it must
understand that one cannot penetrate with those thoughts,
ideas, and mental pictures that are suitable for the physical
knowledge into the human soul life.
There we can say that spiritual science just turns to cognitive
forces that are different from those which science acknowledges
and uses. Against this striving for such special cognitive
forces, everything is directed that attaches itself as
misunderstandings or even as dishonesty to spiritual science. I
have to say, while this spiritual science tries to find the
everlasting of the human soul, of that which is beyond birth
and death, it must penetrate into the depths of the human soul
which always exist, indeed, in every soul which cannot be
searched, however, with the present methods of science and are
also not searched.
It
concerns that the human being searches his everlasting essence
in himself first, that the forces by which they can be found
must be brought up first from the inside of the soul. I am
allowed to use the comparison that I have applied in my book
The Riddle of Man: what leads the human being,
actually, to the soul knowledge, “sleeps” in the
usual life in the soul, it must be only woken. An awakening
from the everyday consciousness is necessary, so that spiritual
knowledge appears. Something must be brought up that is found
down there in the depths of the soul. Now this series of talks
will show how you can bring up it. Today I only want to
indicate that it does not concern outer measures at all but an
intimate inner way of the soul that is directed above all to
make the usual soul forces more powerful than they are in the
usual life. Exercises to be described and those I have
described in my book How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other
writings enable the soul to get such stronger forces from
itself and to develop a more intensive thinking, a tenderer
feeling, a clearer willing which are able then to look at the
spiritual world in such a way as physical eyes look at colours
and forms, as physical ears hear tones. By such exercises, the
human being gets around to beholding with spiritual organs as
one sees and hears, otherwise, in the outer life with physical
organs.
He
gets around to living in a human being who is as supersensible
as one lives in the usual life in the sensory world. The human
being lives with his whole soul being in — even if the
expression does not match completely — in a
“supersensible corporeality.” The human being
carries this supersensible corporeality always in himself. It
has to penetrate to the knowledge of the essence of the human
being first from the inside. If you recognise nature, you have
to recognise other than if you want to recognise the spirit;
you have to behold with other forces into the realm of the
spirit than in the realm of nature. Even if I want to describe
the intimate soul processes only later which lead to the
beholding of the spirit, nevertheless, I already bring in
something that belongs to it.
Something peculiar appears, especially if you ask yourself, why
does the human being know nothing in his usual consciousness
about his everlasting essence? Spiritual research shows that
this everlasting if one beholds it with the spiritual
consciousness escapes exceptionally easily from the usual
observation and thinking. The everlasting essence of the human
being behaves in such a way, as for example tender feelings
behave. They can live in the human soul, and they live most
intensely if you do not look at them with the usual mind,
because then they escape. It is similar with the everlasting
essence of the human being. Our natural sciences strive for
robust, trivial concepts easily to be understood; they adapt
the observation in such a way that such concepts prevail in
them. If you want to look at the soul life and at its
everlasting core with such mental pictures, it escapes. Thus,
it escapes especially from those who believe to stand with all
their mental pictures and ideas just firmly on the ground of
modern natural sciences.
Something else takes place. Someone who approaches the
spiritual world with such soul forces, as I have described them
in the book How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, can note
that the soul has a peculiar shyness, a kind of fear to
penetrate in the depths of the soul where the everlasting of
the soul lives. Most people do not know such fear because it is
deep in the subconscious. On the other side, the human being
strives with all fibres of his being for recognising something
of the soul life; however, he regards the ways, which lead to
it as difficult so that something like this shyness and fear
afflict him. Just if the human being starts doing such
exercises, not only this everlasting escapes in the described
way, but also the fear and shyness become even bigger.
Something else is added. If we have grasped as a spiritual
researcher something of these things and try to approach that
just gained with spiritual-scientifically untrained, but with
scientifically well-trained thinking, this just gained is
confused. It is actual in such a way, as if that which is so
greatly applicable to the outer nature banishes what the human
being can bring out of his inside about his own being. Besides
that, is added that the human being is inclined very easily to
bring in the results of the soul research because of his
wishes, his desires and prejudices what he would like to have
in them that he colours that with his imagination which should
arise objectively. All that brings obstacle about obstacle.
Someone who wants to recognise how one approaches the spirit
does not need at all so much to apply certain exercises to
bring up certain abilities concealed in the soul; since if one
lets them prevail as they want to prevail, they already come
automatically, they do not come only for the cited reasons.
A
big part of the efforts that you have to do within the
exercises originates from the fact that you have to remove the
just told obstacles. Someone who gets to know spiritual
research cursorily, however, will easily think, now, our exact
science demands more strict thinking, more trained development
of ideas. However, someone who penetrates deeper into spiritual
research realises that it requires more “thoughts”
than the official science today. However, on the other side you
can strengthen a weak thinking, a thinking that is developed in
particular in the today's form by the fact that it can be
carried from experiment to experiment and accustoms itself
thereby to a certain passiveness. This thinking must become
more powerful; only then you are able to adapt the observation
in such a way that the results of the everlasting essence of
the human being do not escape that they are not destroyed, and
that shyness and fear are overcome.
To
all that other things are added which are rather unusual to the
today's human being, and which he must regard as paradoxical. I
have to say repeatedly what I have already stressed at other
opportunities: true spiritual research must absolutely work
with inner means, it has to get the power of the supersensible
beholding from the healthy human nature, to organise the
supersensible human body in such a way that this can develop
its supersensible organs regardless of the physical human body.
These methods are contrary to those, which approach people
everywhere today and are estimated or overestimated by this or
that understandably, and have to lead into the supersensible,
into the area of the everlasting of the human nature. Today one
knows the wide area of the unconscious or subconscious soul
life. One knows how one can bring the human nature by all kinds
of measures to quite different performances than the so-called
normal ones are; one knows what hypnosis and somnambulism can
perform. Of all these things cannot be talk in the true
spiritual research. All that does not make that out of the
human being what spiritual research can do. It does not make
him more independent from his physical body, but just more
dependent. If one often reproaches spiritual research that it
leads the human being to pathological conditions, this is not
right. Since the ways and methods of spiritual research are
just contrary to those attempts that want to come close in
other way to the soul life; these attempts make the human being
more dependent from his usual consciousness. On the contrary,
he becomes more independent just by the methods of spiritual
research than he is in the usual consciousness. On this way of
spiritual research, the human being gets forces, which can
penetrate, into the spiritual realm, which must seem, however,
paradoxical to someone who wants to have no closer knowledge of
them.
What the human being gets out of his soul looks quite different
from the usual soul forces. You need only to point out that the
human being needs the memory as a soul force to be competent
daily in the usual life. You need only to consider what the
human being would be if he had to live from day to day without
the single points of his life being connected in memory. If the
spiritual researcher gets around to calling a spiritual
supersensible event to mind from the spiritual beholding which
can really throw light on the everlasting core of the human
nature, then it is just a special sign of this conquest of the
supersensible that one cannot remember such things in the usual
sense that such results of spiritual research are not subject
to the usual memory. You have to do certain inner performances
if you want to get to the spiritual beholding. You can remember
these performances. If you have managed by these performances
to behold a fact in the spiritual worlds, then this fact does
not appear later if you want to return to that fact, you can
remember only the soul performances that you have done. You
have to cause that again, then you can bring along the soul
again that it beholds the same. Just in such a way as you can
grasp the objects round us in concepts and mental pictures
— then it is no longer that which you have seen —,
you can remember the concepts and mental pictures. If you
really want to approach the soul life, you have already to do
such differentiations. You must get used to the fact of the
repeating of the soul performances. Without such condition, you
cannot really approach the big questions of human existence. In
the usual life, we know that something becomes more familiar if
we repeatedly practise it. This causes the force of habit. What
would the usual life be if we could not do something better by
repetition that we should do. Nevertheless, in the end, any
creating and working in life is based on the fact that we
improve ourselves habitually.
With the spiritual experiences, it is different. That must seem
again so paradoxical to the human being. It often happens that
somebody does such exercises, as they should be discussed
later, and that he does good progress relatively soon because
the human soul always has reserve forces of the psychic. I know
many people who were able to approach the supersensible doing
the first exercises for only relatively short time. Then,
however, they are surprised. They have done maybe quite
significant supersensible experiences and have beheld rather
significant things. However, after some time these experiences
do not return, they cannot cause them again. Since it behaves
with the spiritual experience just vice versa as in usual
practising of the outer world. In the outer world, you bring a
skill to higher perfection if you practise it often. In the
spiritual beholding, that escapes from us by repetition, which
we have already reached; it becomes weaker and weaker, it goes
away. Hence, the efforts must become stronger and stronger. It
is a characteristic of the spiritual exercises that one finds
the possibility to do stronger and stronger efforts to prevent
the spiritual world from escaping more and more. Of course,
these things are to be understood in such a way that they can
be overcome; but they are typical for the spiritual world.
A
third is yet to be added. I tell these details today, because I
do not want to talk in the abstract, but I would like to
discuss the things already in the concrete. If we want to look
at something in the outer world, we are used to directing the
attention upon it very long. Presence of mind is necessary for
the beholding of the spiritual. Since the most important and
most essential approaches us from the spiritual world in such a
way that it appears quite quick and scurries so that one cannot
observe it.
Therefore, the secrets of the spiritual world escape from the
human being because he does not have enough presence of mind.
One of the best exercises to find the way in the spiritual
world is that one gets already used in the outer life to
developing presence of mind that one gets used not to
hesitating in a situation not waiting for a quarter of an hour
in order to decide to have these or those thoughts. The more
presence of mind you have and especially in situations which
require a quick thinking, the more you train yourself to grasp
what the spiritual world offers. Hence, human beings who are
quickly determined in certain situations of the outer life will
be the most qualified ones to do spiritual observations. In
later talks, I still show other things how the human being must
develop the forces to behold into that world where his
everlasting essence is.
Now
I do not want that every human being who studies spiritual
science should become a spiritual researcher by such exercises
immediately. However, I mean this: as the chemist has to
develop the chemical methods, the physicist the physical
methods to get chemical and physical results, one has to
develop the suitable spiritual-scientific methods if he wants
to approach the spiritual world scientifically. However, if the
results are investigated and shown, then the human being can
understand these results with the usual mind, although it is
also quite possible today that everybody who wants it can bring
himself to the point where he can also convince himself by the
immediate view of the truth of that which spiritual research
has to say about the spiritual world.
If
you cross the borders of the sensory world in the intimated
way, you can convince yourself of the fact that those concepts
and mental pictures which just are suitable to look at the
outer nature in the sense of natural sciences are not suitable
in the same way to approach the spiritual world. This faces us
in an especially typical way if spiritual research has used one
to feeling the riddles of life deeply with all possible
intimacy that one does not yet approach them in such a way that
they present everything that they could present. Spiritual
research is also built on the same truth reasons of the human
soul like natural sciences; but spiritual research works on the
deeper impulses of the emotional life even if the emotional
life cannot solve world riddles. It can just approach those
riddles that one regards less, otherwise, if it is deepened
with the ideas of spiritual science.
Let
us state such a riddle which reveals itself if the human being
faces a corpse. In its full depth, one does not often compare
the human corpse with the living human being; since, otherwise,
one would recognise that in it one of the deepest comparisons
of life approaches us. Since the human corpse which presents
the immediate problem of death and with it of immortality. We
look at it, we examine it also as an anatomist, as a
physiologist to solve some human riddles, but we think too
little what it means: that this dead corpse is there; what it
is now, it is no longer the “human being;” what it
is now gets its significance because another is no longer in it
that was in it once. The corpse in all its forms and
connections does no longer have an original sense, actually:
something gives it sense that is no longer in it. Spiritual
research regards the usual imagining and thinking as an
analogue of this corpse. As little, this dead corpse still
carries life in itself, as it is true that it has no sense or
significance without this life, it is true that our usual
thinking cannot penetrate into the supersensible secrets.
Since the usual thinking and imagining is dead compared with
the supersensible secrets, as a corpse is dead compared with
life. Materialism is right: this scientific thinking is due to
the fact that we carry this corpse of thinking in ourselves
which is the tool of the usual mind. With full right the
materialistic natural sciences say, when the usual life stops,
the consciousness also stops. Since then another consciousness
enters which you can only imagine with spiritual research. As
the human body has its sense only with life, something else
must penetrate into the human thinking. The usual thinking is
only in that what we cast off as a corpse. However, we must
become independent from that which can become a corpse. While
spiritual research strives to immerse this thinking which
itself is a corpse in that which ensouls the corpse, this
thinking is invigorated and combines with a supersensible world
where the corpse can never be. Just as little the corpse has
its true being by that which it still is, as little this
thinking has its being in itself. As life has to penetrate the
human body, so that it becomes that which makes it an inspired
being from a mere body, the human being can also combine in
thinking with that which leaves the body. Spiritual-scientific
knowledge is a real process, is no theoretical process. Since
spiritual research immerses the human thinking and imagining in
that which remains concealed to the usual consciousness just
because the human being cannot submerge in these things in the
usual life. The human cognitive feeling is deepened immensely
if one draws these parallels between the corpse and the usual
thinking. We get to know in the following talks, how just from
the right investigation of this secret of life and death the
riddles of immortality face us and how they express themselves,
but can be anticipated already also from that which I have
discussed today here. It is the purpose of spiritual research
to connect the human soul with its everlasting part, which does
not only live between birth — or conception — and
death, but enters the earth with birth through the gate of life
and leaves it through the other gate of death into a spiritual
realm.
However, spiritual research searches those depths of the soul
in which the human being does not only live his passing life by
the senses, by his physical body but in which he lives his
immortal life. With it, the question of immortality can be a
scientific question, and this will be the way of the spiritual
striving in the future. Already the present will want this
striving that beside natural sciences a special spiritual
science positions itself; and just then natural sciences will
have the great pedagogic value if one does no longer look in
their area for that which cannot be found there: the human soul
and its activities. However, if one trains the soul with the
spiritual methods on the other side after the ideal of
scientific truth and truthfulness to get to a spiritual science
like to natural sciences by the scientific methods, then
immortality becomes immediate certainty for the soul.
One
can say that many people aim at that today which spiritual
research wants. One does not need to believe that the spiritual
researcher presents himself with any stubborn idea to his
contemporaries and wants to force something on them that
inspires only just him. No, the spiritual researcher wants,
actually, nothing but what also the souls of many people want.
Some dissatisfied feelings, unsatisfied aspirations that can
develop up to morbidity and nervousness are often there because
people look for the secret of the spiritual world and do not
really know that they are searching. The best, most scientific
spirits belong to them. Now, indeed, it is not in such a way,
but one can already say, before these sad times have occurred,
it was in such a way that people looked in sanitariums and the
like for healing of something that was in their souls and that
in the wake of it appeared also in the physical life of them.
People pilgrimaged to the sanitariums, and these pilgrimages
were much bigger than the real pilgrimages of other times.
However, if one properly understood today what spiritual
science can be for the human soul, one would do other
pilgrimages than to baths and health resorts, namely such
pilgrimages which can lead the soul into the spiritual world
from which the human being can get strength and health.
You
will maybe learn already from the few indications that
spiritual science does not want to be something theoretical,
but something that deepens and strengthens the soul that can
cause understanding of the real, true life. Spiritual science
does not want to be any confused, unclear, dark mysticism; it
wants to be something that can intervene in life that makes
human beings “practical” in life in the modern
sense. In a time of railways, telegraphs, telephones, airplanes
and so on, it is impossible to think about spiritual things in
such a way as one thought about the same objects in the Middle
Ages. Today it is also impossible to develop the social living
together properly if one cannot develop lively ideas. One can
realise that in many phenomena of the present, which I mean
with it. I would like to remind only of a book that appeared in
the last time. This book does not deal with the questions of
spiritual science, but indicates the longing for spiritual
science everywhere. It deals with the matters of economy, with
those matters, which are necessary for humanity if it wants to
find a way out of the immensely catastrophic conditions of the
present. Most of you will know the book by Walther
Rathenau (1867-1922, German author, industrialist, and
politician) On Coming Things.
It
deals with the objects of economy, with the human needs, with
that which should be performed as outer institutions for the
future arrangement of life. However, through the whole book
something runs like a red thread: the longing for viewpoints
and concepts to be able to regulate the conditions of the soul
life from the outer life. You need only to open yourself to few
sentences of this book and you realise how that is meant which
I say here. Walther Rathenau also speaks of those who want to
make the spirit only a result of the outer body and of the
outer economic conditions today in the age of mechanisation. He
says, for example, in his book:
“Enough of these arguments. They require what they have
to prove that the body is the first, that the spirit is the
second that matter forms the mind. If we believe that we are
creatures of flesh, then someone who wants it may sweeten life;
then the struggle for God and our souls is futile, and those
have the say who are there for the sake of the useful and
benefit. If we believe, however, that the spirit forms its body
that the will carries the world upwards that the divine spark
lives in us: then the human being is his own work, then his
destiny is his own work, then his world is his own
work.”
A
man speaks out of this book who has taken an interest in that
what had to be performed within this war, a man speaks, after
he has realised what has developed in the course of the last
years, and he speaks about the causes of the outer catastrophic
effects. The strange is that a practical man completely
standing in life gets to the words:
“For the last time I have pointed in the year before the
outbreak of war to the approaching turn: the serious must come
not because of political necessity, but because of the
transcendent law ...”
After these catastrophic events have lasted for two years,
Walther Rathenau writes this book and looks back at that which
has occurred up to now and which must come, and then he
pronounces the following sentence:
“Political and military reasons are not decisive but
transcendent ones!”
“The transcendent reasons”, that means those, which
come from the spiritual world. One could increase this example
endlessly. There speaks a person out of the lively need to make
the needs of the spiritual-mental essence of the human being
the leading principle of the social order. However, while one
reads this book and compares it to the former books by Walther
Rathenau, On the Critique of Time and The Mechanics
of the Spirit, one has the feeling: the concepts are weak,
they do not intervene in life because they themselves do not
come from full reality. He speaks in abstract forms about the
longing of the soul; but you can nowhere note that he really
defers to the spiritual world. What one would think of a person
who believes to stand in the scientific education and possibly
would say, I am not interested in sulphur, silicon, and
calcium; they all are only matter? One would say about him, he
does not want to defer to the single. We do not speak about one
matter unless we want to be abstract materialists but about
seventy elements if we want to understand the real structure of
nature.
Thus, one does not speak of the spirit generally, but of the
concrete spiritual world which is a world of spiritual beings
that intervene in our soul life, as there are single materials
in the outer life. However, this is something that the human
beings fear even today if one speaks in spiritual science of
penetrating into the concrete spiritual life which seizes the
spiritual reality in such a way that also strong, powerful
concepts can be found which have the power to intervene in the
outer social life.
It
is necessary even today that I haven often to help myself of
certain ideas and mental pictures about which some people say
that they are difficult. I have a form of spiritual research in
mind, which is simple and popular, so that every human being
can take it up easily. This must be like that. Only single
human beings need physics, astronomy and so on. However,
everybody needs spiritual research. Spiritual research is yet
far from the other research today. It has to position itself
even today on a viewpoint that is equal to the attacks directed
against it on the part of the remaining research. If it
appeared today already “quick like a shot” in its
simple form which it can have, it would be laughed out of
court. Today it has to appear with more difficult concepts, so
that it is forearmed against that which the official science
counters. You have to make the best of it.
Above all, you have to familiarise yourself with the fact that
this spiritual research has to introduce something in our
cultural life that is especially necessary to the recovery of
this cultural life.
If
you dwell upon this spiritual research, you realise that its
results have a character of which you can say: it aims at
really confronting the spiritual world, but without any
sentimentality, without any wrong mysticism and churchy-ness,
without that what makes the human being weak. No, the human
being should just become strong because he knows his relation
to the spiritual world. Spiritual science does not want to
assert itself in sectarian way; it does not want to establish a
new religious form. It develops from the modern scientific way
of thinking at first. However, it has to develop other concepts
and cognitive abilities than the modern scientific research
does. Hence, one has to search its origin in a modern
scientific thinking. The fact that then spiritual science can
just become the best support of the religious life is another
question. This is a question which Rittelmeyer
(Friedrich R., 1872-1938, German theologian, founder of the
Christian Community) exhausted in an article in the magazine
Die christliche Welt (The Christian World)
recently. You can learn from this article what spiritual
science can be just for the deepening of the religious life
after the judgment of such a discerning man. Maybe it will be
it just because it wants to put no new form of religious life,
but because it is anxious to answer the question: how does one
penetrate scientifically as seriously into the spiritual realm
as one penetrates scientifically into nature?
I
wanted to allege that spiritual science does not present itself
arbitrarily today but summarises what the best spirits of
humanity have always wanted, a summary of that which Goethe
faced, for example, considering Haller's
(Albrecht von H., 1708-1777, Swiss naturalist) statement:
“No created mind penetrates into the being of
nature.” Haller was a great naturalist. However, he stood
on the side of those who have become more and more numerous
since then who believe that the human cognitive faculties have
limits. The cognitive faculties that we apply to the usual life
have limits indeed. However, one can extend the cognitive
faculties in such a way that we can penetrate to a certain
degree into the riddle of the everlasting in the soul that one
can combine with the riddle of the everlasting. Spiritual
science will be able to show that with its research. It can
confirm its method of research with Goethe's words with which I
would like to conclude this talk. Goethe remembered Haller's
words and said:
“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.”
O you Philistine!
Do not remind me
And my brothers and sisters
Of such a word.
We think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!”
I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.
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