Truths and Errors of Spiritual Research
GA 69a
VIII. The Questions of Life and the Riddle of Death II
17 May 1913, Stuttgart
Since a number of years, I have spoken here about the objects of spiritual science, and several listeners who have already participated in these considerations many a time will find various knowledge that is not new just in the today's comprising consideration. Only that which I have said this year about spiritual science gave occasion to envisage the objects from the most different viewpoints. Since one could say, today spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means generally acknowledged and many people confuse it with everything that one calls “theosophy” more or less exactly.
The so-called chance passes something on to you in this respect. When I came on a lecture tour through a certain city, I saw two little writings in a bookstore in which I looked, however, for something quite different. The one contained a popular representation of the philosophical worldviews and approaches to life of the nineteenth century (probably by Max Bernhard Weinstein, 1852-1918, published under this title in Leipzig in 1910). If you look at this writing more exactly, you get the impression that this booklet was written with a certain seriousness; the single chapters correspond to a rather thorough knowledge of that which is discussed there—with the only exception of theosophy or—as it is meant in the narrower sense here—spiritual science.
I try to bring together spiritual science with that which is said there just in this chapter, and there one must say, as good and conscientious other chapters are, as superficial is the chapter about spiritual science. I do not want to dwell on this chapter here, I would only like to point out that beside various incorrect statements the author says that spiritual science spreads abstruse fantasies of these or those world facts.—Now I thought, there could be alluded to my Occult Science, and somebody would deny that what is well proved there, without inspection of the thing. However, I read on straight away, and found the sentence that in the circles of the supporters of this spiritual research everywhere prophecies of wars and earthquakes play a big role.—I ask you, do such prophecies play a big role in my explanations?
One could assume that few people read such writings. However, the other booklet or more precisely pamphlet had the title Seven Sects of Perdition. A Warning for Protestant Christians (edited by a Protestant association in 1913). I will not read out it. You find the following seven sects of perdition enumerated:
First: Adventists or Sabbatists—about four pages. Secondly: the dawn Bible students—also four pages. Thirdly: the new-apostolic—three pages. Fourthly: the Mormons—four pages. Fifthly: the Scientists—three pages. Sixthly: the spiritists—only two pages. Seventhly: theosophy, about that he knows half a page only. However, I do not want to read out it completely but only half of it.
“In particular it [theosophy] teaches self-redemption instead of the redemption by Christ; one can equal it to paganism” and one points to the church history. It is interesting also that this pamphlet contains the remark that you can buy the booklet at any price and dimension, also as loose sheets. For pennies you can form an opinion about that of which should be talk today, and then you can attach the concerning sheet to the wall.
Thereby it becomes clear where from the judgements come which face us from some sides if they condemn the value of our object wholesale. It is typical also that the author of this pamphlet can say only half a page about the “seventh sect.” Now, from this outer example it arises that there, indeed, in our time many prejudices exist against spiritual science and that there is little will to get really to the prime concern of spiritual science. Nevertheless, one may assume that that who wants to judge an object knows this really. It is obvious that this is not the case with spiritual science among wide sections of the population. From those persons who want to know nothing about it one cannot demand that they deal with it; however, from those who judge publicly. It would probably confuse some persons to have to deal with the things about which they want to judge “conscientiously.”
One has repeatedly to ask, how shall spiritual science place itself into the immediate life of the present? How and with which right does it position itself to the big questions of life and to the riddle of death?
It becomes more and more evident that from unaware depths of the soul life these cardinal questions become aspirations in the human souls. However, the area of spiritual science is as big as the world, and one would have to speak a lot if one only wanted to indicate what spiritual science encloses. However, even if spiritual science has to extend its research infinitely, nevertheless, its investigations culminate in both life riddles that we call with the words destiny and death. The knowledge has to assert itself that the outer science cannot answer the big questions of life and immortality if it is aware of its borders. However, this outer science tries to produce the most varied worldviews, namely just such worldviews that believe to stand on the ground of natural sciences, and believe that they are allowed to say that their results are directly contrary to that which spiritual science has to say.
It would be a wild-goose chase to speak of the fact that the bases of spiritual science really conflict natural sciences. These natural sciences have produced many things for three, four centuries, which have changed our whole life largely. If that is true which Goethe says that one has to judge a school of thought according to its fertility, natural sciences have shown their fertility—indeed, only with the solution of material life riddles. However, one has to take something else into account. Natural sciences have educated humanity in a particular way. They have been a wonderful means of education, so that the human being put the questions of life and death in another way than he put them before. It also corresponds to the fact that spiritual science works with its method, its whole view, completely after the pattern of natural sciences. However, while the questions have become deeper, the souls have been duped into accepting that as real only which they perceive with their senses.
Spiritual science cannot offer physical things. It cannot go into a laboratory and create spiritual knowledge there. Already the spirit that lives in us between birth and death can be fathomed for a certain time and for our consciousness by soul processes only. Everybody knows that the spiritual life is in him since his birth; everybody should know that he can reach that which he has experienced, for example, twenty years ago only by memory, and that he cannot bring up this process of memory with outer apparatuses. So one should also recognise that spiritual science has to look for its sources by an increase of such inner experiences like memory. However, it will still last long, until humanity realises that the method of spiritual science is, indeed, an inner one, but is inspired by the same spirit as the outer natural sciences. One can recognise this immediately if one looks at that which such critics of spiritual science say who deny that one can reach what is beyond sense perception. Even if they concede that there is something supersensible, nevertheless, they say, the human cognition cannot penetrate into it. With such spirits, one can observe with which difficulties spiritual science has to fight. Since such an objection has no other value as if anybody wanted to say, for example, what have the today's botanists in mind, actually? They say—and this should be a basic achievement of the nineteenth century—, the plants consist of single cells, and the animals consist of such cells, too. Let us assume that now anybody proves how much a human being can see with his eyes. He cannot see the cells and everything that crosses the borders of physical cognition.—Those who speak in such a way prove that the eyes cannot look into that which, nevertheless, the naturalists have seen. Such a proof can be right; then one would prove that it is impossible to reach the cell composition of plants and animals with the human eyes and to penetrate into these subtlest processes. Someone would be a fool who wanted to prove that such a proof is wrong.—Numerous proofs are of the same quality, which assume that the human cognitive faculties, as well as they are, can know nothing about the supersensible. Such proofs can be quite correct, and a fool would be who wanted to disprove them.
However, completely apart from the limits of the physical eye, [one has to take into account] that one has armed the eyes with cognitive means like microscope, telescope, and spectroscope and can thereby observe processes and substances which [were invisible before], for example, with spectral analysis. The fact that this has been done is also right, and it is as right if old worldviews spoke about the limits of knowledge. Just as natural sciences have sharpened the eye, spiritual science strengthens that about which one can say in its natural state probably rightly: it has limits. However, from it we realise that the proof of the limits of knowledge is justified just as little as the proof of the limits of the eye. The eye arms itself with microscope, telescope, and spectroscope—the human mind gains strength with inner, intimate means: meditation, concentration, and contemplation. I have already mentioned that. From my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? you can more exactly get to know what one understands by meditation, concentration, and contemplation.
The normal soul activity, however, depends completely on the physical body, on the nerves or the brain. Spiritual science argues nothing against that. However, spiritual science applies methods by which the mental capacity becomes different, as well as the vision became different by the application of microscope and telescope.
Let me speak about the mental capacity first. In the usual life, it deals with the world of the things. How does this mental capacity work? We stand here just at one of those points where it will maybe become obvious already in the next time that natural sciences—if they are properly understood—are in harmony with that which spiritual science has to give. Natural sciences already touch this. If we develop a thought that is directed in the usual life to the area of our sensory existence, the mental capacity intervenes in our brain. This is just a common result of spiritual science and natural sciences, save that spiritual science knows it, while natural sciences hypothesise. However, the usual life already teaches us how the thinking intervenes in the brain, and one knows that the mental capacity works in such a way that it causes destructive processes in the brain, destructive processes of the smallest subtlest structures of the brain. The mental capacity is active, and it destroys the brain perpetually. Our mental capacity could be protected from causing this destruction if it were used different.
Just as a human being behaves who sees himself in the mirror, the mental processes behave; they intervene in the brain: they reflect the work of thinking in our soul, so that we become aware of the mental process. Thus, the usual mental capacity works. The usual life proves it, while the thinking causes tiredness that sleep again balances. This is the regular course: the balance of these destructive processes with sleep. Natural sciences already have words for it like assimilation and catabolism, and for that who knows to observe these things it becomes clear that the results of natural sciences also lead to that which spiritual science teaches.
This process of thinking is as natural as the vision of the eye. Just as one can strengthen the eye with instruments, one can strengthen the mental capacity, not with outer means but with the inner means of concentration, meditation, and contemplation. What do they cause? They cause that the human being gets around—if he wants to become a spiritual researcher - to giving himself contents of thought arbitrarily which are not stimulated from the outside. The usual thinking proceeds in such a way that we get from outer impressions to inner experiences. The spiritual thinking proceeds in such a way that the inner work differs from the usual way [of thinking]. For longer time the thoughts have to be directed to an inner soul experience that the human being himself has created and that is not stimulated from the outside. For example, the soul dwells on the words:
In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.
Of course, this is folly for the usual thinking. However, it matters that we do not have images of the outside world [in the meditation]. These images have rather the purpose to deepen the soul forces. This happens if the soul tries to bring out its inner abilities from its depths to do something that one does not do in the usual life at all: concentrating on such an image. One usually does not apply the soul forces that appear in the meditation in the usual day life; at most, they become faintly noticeable. They are brought up quite different in the meditation. Slumbering soul forces emerge from the depths of the soul, and then it becomes obvious that these soul forces are independent of that on which the usual mental capacity is dependent. While the usual thinking is dependent on the brain and causes destructive processes, that thinking creates an inner power, which gives the soul the experience: I am independent of my physical body.
We want now to characterise this process of the independent mental capacity a little more. We get here to an area that natural sciences can also acknowledge. I have already touched one chapter. Du Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R.,1815-1890, German physiologist) pointed [in his lecture] at the scientific congress in Leipzig (1872) to the limits of cognition and he considered the sleeping human being only as explicable because he is free of affects, desires, and mental pictures. Something is there that just such scientific thinkers who take the facts, as they are, will recognise more and more. Let us assume that anybody says, air surrounds us, the human being inhales it, then a quantity of air is in him; now I want to investigate the air. I investigate the lung how it is nourished how it carries out its organic processes et cetera.—It would be the worst method to investigate the air this way. One would find out something about the lung. However, one investigates the air best of all in the atmosphere, because the air has its existence in the atmosphere. If anybody wanted to recognise the air by investigations of the lung, one would consider him as brainless.
One is still far away from getting to know the affects and passions if one investigates the physical body. One cannot get to know the thinking, while one investigates the brain. This would be as brainless as to investigate the air in the lung. As the lung inhales the air in a respiratory process that envelops the earth as atmosphere, the body inhales the soul life with every awakening. As well as the inhaled air relates to the lung, the soul life relates to the brain. With falling asleep, the body exhales the soul life again. While we are waking, we have the soul life in ourselves, which belongs to the spiritual-mental life in which we live as we live physically in the atmosphere.
Here we have a field where it is clear, how natural sciences and spiritual science intertwine, as Du Bois-Reymond already recognised. The spiritual life belongs to the entire spiritual world, as well as the air belongs to the physical atmosphere. We may say, if the human being sleeps, he has exhaled spirit and soul. His spirit and soul are in the spiritual-mental of the whole world; however, he cannot perceive them there because he has no consciousness.
Somebody who has developed his mental capacity by meditation in such a way tears his power of thought out of the material body forces; he becomes aware of himself as it were beyond the body. That is he develops thought processes that do not originate from the application to the things of the material world, but he goes with his thinking to the spiritual world. He knows by immediate experience that he develops the thought process beyond the body and experiences beings that face him as spirits. This is based on the release of the thinking from the body and is that which can be considered as the first source of spiritual research. One can also experience internally that the thinking is different which one acquires this way; it does not tire us. Since it is an important phenomenon that we experience such processes, which do not fatigue us. However, some meditating people believe at first to note that they fall asleep straight away with the meditation. This is due to the fact that then the process has not yet advanced far enough because it is difficult to detach the thought process from the purely external. It takes years and years.
What do you experience then? Then you experience something that cannot be characterised in the abstract, you experience stupefying inner things. You experience that you have your self beyond yourself that you survey from without what you have experienced.
As you feel enclosed in your skin in the day consciousness, you experience it now as an outer object. The outer world remains interesting, you are attracted to it like with hundred about hundred magnetic forces. You do not want to be torn away from the outside world. You feel, so to speak, that you belong to it. However, these are emotional forces and sensory forces, which belong, above all, to the reality of higher experience. You learn to recognise the forces with which you feel attracted to the outer physical body. Now you get to know the reason, why you wake up in the morning, you learn to recognise that the body says to us, you belong to me, you have to unite with me as that unites with me which is exhaled by the outer physical nature [during sleep] when that is repaired which the outer life has destroyed. One learns to recognise, why the soul returns to the physical body.
You learn something else: the forces that were there before conception. You get to know the soul as it is today, however, you also learn to recognise that they are the same soul forces, which were there before birth, which have drawn us to the parents who could give the physical body. You get to know the forces that led to the present life on earth, also the forces that led to our destiny. If the human beings develop forces to get free from the body with the thinking, then they get around to recognising the forces by symbols that lead their destinies. The materialist dream research has already recognised that one experiences images, memories in the dreams.
One cannot easily imagine that in the usual everyday life a misfortune that a human being experienced twenty years ago is not something that he deeply longs for. If we have drawn ourselves with the thinking from the body, we experience that that which was unpleasant to us at that time that we feel now attracted by it. Why? Because the soul recognises that it has imperfections. They are so deeply concealed that one does not notice them with the usual day consciousness. This inclination to compensate imperfections works in the depths of the soul, even if it knows nothing of it in the usual consciousness. It feels attracted to something that brings ill luck into life; not before it has passed this ordeal, the former imperfection can change into a perfection.
The life with the released mental capacity looks in such a way that in the soul the forces appear to which we feel attracted. The question of destiny becomes the question of imagining. We start understanding the misfortune because we know that the soul must search the misfortune to compensate certain imperfections. It has to know that we were equipped before our birth with forces that have drawn us to the suitable embryo, as well as the plant seed is drawn to the topsoil that is suitable to it. In this respect, spiritual science is also in harmony with natural sciences that cannot deny that, for example, an Alpine plant grows in surroundings whose conditions correspond to its growth. The soul is led to such a destiny in which it can change an imperfection into a perfection. We walk through the gate of death. If the soul did anybody wrong and walks now released from the body through the gate of death, it feels: I can only feel perfect in future, if I try to balance out what I did wrong. Committed crime changes into a feeling: my soul is helpless against that which happened, but I can learn to develop forces which are as predisposition in me and which cause that I get a destiny in which I can transform myself.
In similar way, the human being gets beyond the present soul life if he acquires another soul force. As we can disengage the mental capacity, so that it proceeds internally, we can disengage another force that finds other use in the usual life: the power of speech. What happens with this power of speech? We develop something spiritual-mental in the speech, but it does not remain something spiritual-mental in the usual life. It intervenes in the processes of the brain, of the larynx—the power of speech intervenes in the material-bodily. As we stop the mental capacity, before it intervenes in the brain, we can also stop the power of speech, before it intervenes in the brain and the larynx.
Natural sciences look for the organ of speech in the third convolution of the brain, in Broca's field; monkeys do not have it. Someone who pursues the facts only with the view of natural sciences says, speech comes about with Broca's organ.—However, the fact militates against it that somebody who grows up only on a lonesome island does not attain language, in spite of Broca's organ. The fact is that the power of speech structures the brain, so that Broca's organ is [structured) and from there the activities of will develop in such a way that language originates. Thus, we have something spiritual in the power of speech that intervenes in the organic. However, we can now change the power of speech, while we do not allow it to come close to the bodily. We achieve this, while we make our meditation, concentration, and contemplation somewhat different. To release the power of speech it is not sufficient that we dedicate ourselves only to the contents of mental pictures, but it matters that we penetrate the object of our mental picture with sensation and emotion. We can meditate in thoughts on such a saying like
In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.
However, we can set our thoughts aglow with feelings, we can feel our soul life in that light which becomes a symbol of the flowing wisdom to us. Then we feel that we retain the forces which, otherwise, we let flow out in words. This leads to Inspiration, as well as the thought power—if it is retained—leads to Imagination.
If the human being emancipates the power of speech so that he applies the same forces internally, but retains them in the soul, then the view of the spiritual world extends. Then we can take up other results of spiritual science. Since the soul life extends not only up to the existence beyond the body, but we learn also to look back to former lives on earth. Stopping the power of speech enables us to experience former lives on earth. One always regarded silence as something special. Hence, one needs not limit the outer talking; one has only to apply the inner forces.
I want to bring not only results of spiritual science, but I want also to show the means which lead to them. One maybe contemplates: how long does the interval last, actually, between two lives on earth? For the spiritual researcher arises that our former life on earth goes back to a time where still nothing of the individual language was there. The individual language needed so long time for its development as time passed since our last life on earth.—This is an example of the fact that one can only investigate facts of the spiritual world if the suitable soul forces have developed. However, to understand that without prejudice what the spiritual researcher says, one only needs to think logically. As well as someone can understand a portrait who does not understand the technique of painting, everybody can also understand the messages of the spiritual researcher. One must be a spiritual researcher to penetrate into the spiritual world, but if one puts the investigated into words, one can understand them with common sense.
One has to expect no answer to questions of the spiritual world from science. However, the common sense knows what is right. Numerous philosophers say that the human being puts questions that exceed the usual capacity of the senses, for example, the question of human destiny. The outer life does not answer it. The thinking about which I have here spoken today answers it, while it changes the question of either sympathy or aversion into a question of imagining. The big questions answer themselves in such a way that life confirms spiritual science everywhere.
Except the mental capacity and the power of speech, one can still develop a third. The human being knows that he intervenes with it already in the usual life in such a way that it can seize his blood circulation. Shame makes us blush; fear makes us turn pale. Our soul life intervenes up to the activity of the heart. One can also retain this force in the soul if the human being carries out concentration, meditation, and contemplation in suitable way, so that that which lives in the blood circulation remains in the spiritual-mental. If he connects his will impulses with those forces if he meditates, for example, the sentence:
In the bright light living wisdom is flowing
and feels it in the following way: I want to move through time in such a way that I contribute to the flowing light process, then he tears a part out of that force which expresses itself in the blood circulation, in the movements of the limbs, in the gestures of the everyday life and turns them to the spiritual. The meditation has to come about with such motionlessness of the limbs as usually in sleep. If one breaks away these forces, one can seize that which works beyond the earth as a spiritual-mental life. One gets to know the earth as a re-embodiment of a spiritual being, as one has recognised the human soul as reincarnated from former lives.
Thus, the human being rises in the universe, he experiences his coherence with a spiritual-mental that surrounds us as physically the air surrounds us. Thus, we grow into the spiritual world, while we solve not only the questions of life theoretically, but experience the solution. Then that is not theory which spiritual science gives, it becomes an elixir of life, then it flows out into our soul lives like steam energy into a machine. As natural sciences intervene in the outer life and achieve triumphs, spiritual science will intervene in the inner human life; it will give us power and certainty of life. This will not remain a theory, but get closer to the solution of the questions of life at every turn, while the human being realises what he has in his inside, as well as he has the air in his lung.
Then he knows that he has a soul in himself, something that walks from life to life. One speaks about immortality not only theoretically, but one experiences it in himself, as well as one can experience the future plant in the seed that only creates it. Yes, spiritual science shows the living spiritual core by now; we learn to experience that which prepared the next life. We understand immortality, while we experience it in such a way that there is a guarantee of living on. We will recognise that something exists after this life and something existed before this life. We get to know an originally spiritual state from which we have arisen. We learn to recognise, as long as we are still imperfect, that we must develop that we will go over together with the earth into a spiritual-mental state at the end of our lives on earth. We will know that we must experience our guilt in this and in future lives as imperfections, until we recognise that our lives are lined up. We get to know immortality in our own souls. With it, spiritual science gives us what the human being needs in this present to solve the questions of life and the riddle of death.
It becomes completely obvious—if one looks at the present time—that, on one side, the need exists of that which spiritual science can give—that, on the other side, one has the biggest prejudices if spiritual science answers single questions of everything that it has to be.
Let us take an example. One mostly judges using outer reasons. There is a famous professor of philosophy (presumably Ernst Mach, 1838-1916, Austrian philosopher and physicist). If he speaks about the soul, you find the following words, and countless students carry the words as the highest wisdom into the world. In view of this fact, you must not be surprised about prejudices against spiritual science. There he says, the sum of our experiences, imagining, willing and feeling as they combine in the consciousness to a unity is the soul which rises to moral impulses at a certain level of perfection. Of course, someone who gives such definitions of the soul can only get to the result that the soul dissolves at death. The child has already to learn in the school that one is not allowed to add apples, pears, and plums and “unless the first and second were, the third and fourth would never be.” However, what does the philosopher mean? He talks about a sum of imagining, feeling and willing and—it is strange—this can become moral feeling and willing. He performs a miracle absent-mindedly. Such a miracle is put absent-mindedly: the single experiences combine to a unity, and after they have been summed up, they get to moral feeling and willing. The child already learns at school that one is not allowed to add different things.
From there the objections against spiritual science originate. However, where it is measured in life, solutions are found which can be understood and whose comprehensibility can make the soul healthy. Spiritual science can be measured how it can cope with life. Life answers the questions in such a way as well as the scientific questions are answered. A scientific invention is so long a figment, until life proves it true. It proves itself, while it says, yes, if the facts turn out to be right in life, I can reveal myself to you. This also applies to spiritual science.
If the human being walks through the gate of death, he fights in the spiritual world for that which he has already prepared here: the seed of a new life. Then in the postmortal life, the life between birth and death turns out to be a transformation of a new soul life.
We ask a modern psychologist, Bartholomäus von Carneri (1821-1909, Austrian materialist psychologist)) to get to know something about death which is only another state of consciousness to spiritual science. He says: “Life was a fight, the human being got tired from this fight, and death is the most beneficent if it proves to be sleep after the heavy work of life which no god disturbs.”—Yes, you can touch it here with your own hands in this characteristic that got stuck unconsciously in impossible mental pictures. Someone who wants to prove the cessation of the human soul life talks of the fact that it is the most beneficent if he sleeps without being disturbed by a god. I would like to know which mechanic says if his machine does not work: I put it to bed. There one notices how those get entangled who do not yet want to get themselves into spiritual research.
Others admit [the existence of a soul], as that American who was, actually, a chemist said in a lecture which he held in 1909: every human being has to feel as an independent soul. Yes, so far the naturalists who judge impartially have come: behind the bodily, something exists. One is allowed today to speak about soul and spirit in general which are behind the sensory world. However, one is labelled as a daydreamer if one does not only say: this is spirit, spirit, and spirit. However, if you say, as well as one finds beings in the animal and plant realms, there are spiritual hierarchies that outrank the human being, then one discounts it as a pipe dream.
If humanity gradually understands that spiritual research places itself in the spiritual life of the present, it knows: it is the same situation as it was when natural sciences, when Galilei, Copernicus, and Kepler appeared. At that time, people said, the human view has proved with certainty that the earth stands still and the sun circles around it, against all appearance these men state that the earth circles around the sun, that is nonsense.—Even if Copernicus was denoted a swindler; nevertheless, his teachings were accepted later.
The world does not behave much different today compared with spiritual science that substitutes scientific materialism with spiritual reality. Spiritual research shows what its knowledge can give. It solves questions of life and death. However, one objects what I have read out at the beginning of this talk [from two writings]. People who face spiritual science as those once who denounced Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler as heretics, will “prove” for long that one can prove the human life only from birth to death. The course of the times and of the universal spirit will be in such a way that humanity has to recognise that it will experience the same as it experienced with Giordano Bruno concerning the outer borders of space. People considered the [visible firmament] as the border of space that encloses the world.
Giordano Bruno proved that only the [restricted] human cognitive faculties gave this border. Spiritual science shows today that the temporal firmament, that [the limitation of the human life] between birth and death has to be wiped out. As Giordano Bruno extended the borders of the firmament, spiritual science shows the infinite temporality [of the human life], the infinite possibility of life transformation, [so that the human beings] will recognise the everlasting work with self-knowledge.
Hence, may popular writings speak of figments and prophecies, that who recognises the development says, may people brand spiritual research and spiritual science ever so much. The course of time will show that spiritual research is as little a sect as natural sciences are a sect. One may say about those who want to progress in the area of truth that the genius of humanity will neglect them, and one will recognise that spiritual science is not a sect, but that it speaks about the riddles of life from deep knowledge and that its knowledge has to be handed over—as the knowledge of Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler—to the welfare of humanity.