The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Points of View

[ 1 ] Scientific thinking has had a profound influence on the modern imagination. It is becoming increasingly impossible to speak of spiritual needs, of the "life of the soul", without engaging with the concepts and findings of natural science. Certainly, there are still many people who satisfy these needs without allowing themselves to be disturbed by the scientific current in spiritual life. Those who hear the pulse of the times cannot be among them. With increasing rapidity the ideas drawn from the knowledge of nature conquer the minds; and the hearts follow, though much less willingly, though often despondently and timidly. It is not only the number of those who are conquered that matters; but the fact that there is a power inherent in scientific thinking that gives the observer the conviction that this thinking contains something that a contemporary world view cannot pass by without receiving meaningful impressions. Some excesses of this thinking necessitate a justified rejection of its ideas. But we cannot stand still in an age in which wide circles turn to this way of thinking and are drawn to it as if by a magical power. This is not altered by the fact that individual personalities realize how real science has "long since" led beyond the "shallow wisdom of force and matter" of materialism. Much more attention, it seems, should be paid to those who boldly declare that it is the ideas of natural science on which a new religion must also be built. If such appear shallow and superficial to one who knows the deeper spiritual interests of mankind, he must listen to them; for to them the attention of the present is turned; and there are reasons to believe that they will gain more and more attention in the near future. And the others also come into consideration, who have lagged behind the interests of their hearts behind those of their heads. They are those whose minds cannot escape the ideas of natural science. The burden of proof weighs on them. But the religious needs of their minds cannot be satisfied by these ideas. They provide too bleak a perspective for such satisfaction. Is the human soul supposed to be enthusiastic about the heights of beauty, truth and goodness, only to be swept away into insubstantiality like a bubble of foam blown up by the material brain? This is a feeling that weighs on many like an Alp. And scientific ideas also weigh on them because they impose themselves with a powerful authoritative force. Such people remain blind to this conflict in their souls for as long as they can. Indeed, they comfort themselves by saying that full clarity in these matters is denied to the human soul. They think scientifically, as far as the experience of the senses and the logic of the mind require it; but they retain their acquired religious feelings and prefer to remain in a darkness that clouds the mind about these things. They don't have the courage to bring themselves to clarity.

[ 2 ] There can be no doubt about it: the scientific way of thinking is the most powerful force in the intellectual life of modern times. And whoever speaks of the spiritual interests of mankind must not pass it by carelessly. But there is also no doubt that the way in which it initially satisfies spiritual needs is superficial and shallow. It would be dismal if this were the right way. Or would it not be depressing if one had to agree as soon as someone said: "Thought is a form of power. We walk with the same power with which we think. Man is an organism which transforms various forms of force into thought-force, an organism which we keep in activity with what we call "food" and with which we produce what we call thought. What a marvelous chemical process that could transform a mere quantum of food into the divine tragedy of a "Hamlet"!"? This is written in a brochure by Robert G. Ingersoll,^{1Ingersoll's words are not quoted at this point in the book merely with regard to those people who pronounce them in exactly the same wording as their conviction. Quite a lot of people will not do this and yet form such ideas about natural phenomena and man that, if they were really consistent, they would have to come to these statements. It is not a question of what someone says theoretically as his conviction, but of whether this conviction really follows from his whole way of thinking. Someone may even find the above words abhorrent or ridiculous for his own person: if, without ascending to the spiritual foundations of natural phenomena, he forms an explanation of them that takes into account the merely external, the other will make a materialistic philosophy out of it as a logical consequence.} which bears the title "Modern Twilight of the Gods". - Such thoughts may meet with little outward approval when they are expressed by one or the other: it makes no difference. The main thing is that countless people feel compelled by the scientific way of thinking to take a stand on the processes of the world in the sense of the above sentences, even if they have the opinion that they do not.

[ 3 ] Certainly these things would be bleak if natural science itself were forced to make the confession that many of its more recent prophets proclaim. Most dismal for those who have gained the conviction from the content of this natural science that its way of thinking is valid and its methods unshakeable in its field of nature. For such a one must say to himself: no matter how much people argue about individual questions; no matter how volumes after volumes are written, observations after observations are collected about the "struggle for existence" ^{2From the facts which are currently treated with the catchwords "struggle for existence", "omnipotence of natural breeding" and so on, the "spirit of nature" speaks powerfully to those who can perceive correctly. Not from the opinions that science forms about it today. In the first circumstance lies the reason why natural science will be heard in ever wider circles. But it follows from the second circumstance that the opinions of science must not be taken as if they necessarily belonged to the knowledge of facts. The possibility of being seduced into the latter, however, is unlimited at the present time.} and its insignificance, about the "omnipotence" or "impotence" of "natural breeding": natural science itself is moving in a direction which, within certain limits, must meet with ever-increasing approval.

[ 4 ] But are the demands of natural science really those of which some of its representatives speak? The fact that they are not is proven by the behavior of these representatives themselves. Their behavior in their own field is not what many describe and claim for other fields. Or would Darwin and Ernst Haeckel ever have made the great discoveries in the field of the development of life if, instead of observing life and the structure of living beings, they had gone into the laboratory to carry out chemical experiments on a piece of tissue cut out of an organism? Would Lyell have been able to depict the development of the earth's crust if he had not examined the layers of the earth and their contents, but had instead tested the chemical properties of countless stones? Why not really follow in the footsteps of these researchers, who present themselves as monumental figures in the recent development of science! One will then pursue the higher realms of intellectual life as they did in the field of natural observation. They will not then believe that they have grasped the essence of the "divine" Hamlet tragedy when they say that a miraculous chemical process has transformed a quantum of food into this tragedy. One will no more believe this than any natural scientist can seriously believe that he has understood the function of heat in the development of the earth when he has studied the effect of heat on sulphur in the chemical retort. He does not seek to understand the structure of the human brain by taking a piece out of the head and examining how an alkali acts on it, but by asking himself how it has developed from the organs of lower organisms in the course of evolution.

[ 5 ] It is therefore true that those who study the essence of the spirit can only learn from natural science. He only really needs to do it the way science does it. He must not allow himself to be deceived by what individual representatives of natural science want to prescribe. He should research in the spiritual realm as they do in the physical; but he need not adopt the opinions which they, clouded by their thinking about the purely physical, present of the spiritual world.

[ 6 ] One only acts in the sense of natural science if one observes the spiritual development of man just as impartially as the natural scientist observes the sensory world. In the field of spiritual life, however, one is then led to a way of looking at things that is as different from the purely scientific approach as the geological approach is from the purely physical approach, the study of the development of life from the study of mere chemical laws. One is led to higher methods, which may not be those of the natural sciences, but are nevertheless entirely in their spirit. In this way many a one-sided view of natural science will be modified or corrected from another point of view; but one is only continuing natural science; one is not sinning against it. - Such methods alone can lead to a real penetration into spiritual developments such as those of Christianity or other religious conceptions. Those who apply them may arouse the objection of some people who believe they are thinking scientifically, but they know that they are in full agreement with a truly scientific way of thinking.

[ 7 ] A researcher must also go beyond the mere historical investigation of the documents of spiritual life. He must do so precisely because of his attitude drawn from the observation of natural events. It is of little value for the exposition of a chemical law to describe the retorts, dishes and tweezers that led to the discovery of the law. But it is of just as much and just as little value if, in order to explain the origin of Christianity, one establishes the historical sources from which the evangelist Luke drew; or from which the "Secret Revelation" of John is compiled. ^{3It should not be inferred from such remarks as the one about Luke's sources and so on that the purely historical research is underestimated by the author of this book. This is not the case. It certainly has its justification, but it should not be intolerant of the way of thinking which proceeds from spiritual points of view. This book does not set great store by quoting all sorts of things at every opportunity, but anyone who wants to can certainly see that an all-round, truly unbiased judgment will nowhere find what is said here in contradiction with what is truly historically established. However, anyone who does not want to be all-round, but considers this or that theory to be what "one" has established as certain, may find that the assertions of this book "cannot be upheld" from a “scientific” point of view, but are "without any objective basis".} “History” can only be the forecourt of actual research. One does not learn anything about the ideas that prevail in the writings of Moses or in the traditions of the Greek mystics by following the historical genesis of the documents. In these the ideas in question have only found an external expression. And even the natural scientist who wants to investigate the nature of "man" does not trace how the word "man" came into being and how it has developed in language. He focuses on the thing, not on the word in which the thing finds its expression. And in the spiritual life, one will have to stick to the spirit and not to its external documents.