My answers are inadequate
To those demanding day and date
And ever set a tiny shock
Through strangers asking what's o'clock;
Whose days are spent in whittling rhyme-
What's time to her, or she to Time?
—Dorothy Parker, “Daylight Savings”
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Anthroposophy and the Natural Sciences
Foundations and Methods
5 public lectures and an evening discussion, various cities,
June 17, 1920 – May 11, 1922 (CW 75)
You see, we are now living in an era in which some people strive to open up a veritable chasm between knowledge and faith. Some of them consider only those sciences healthy that deal with the purely factual, with registering, systematizing, establishing laws—that is, the purely factual. In contrast, others in the sphere of religion believe they must demand faith to uphold their sphere.
Still, all this is just a characteristic of a temporary era. Just as in ear- lier ages people subdivided the soul into many different soul forces, so people in our time split it into a sphere of knowing and another one of faith. But when our soul is totally honest with itself, it cannot really bear this split. We’ll understand what we’re dealing with here when we see the reason for this split. You see, these days you can still talk with many people about life after death or about divine cosmology if you are talking on the basis of faith; that is, you can do so as long as you are not appealing in any way—and this sort of appeal is found least of all in religions—to those inner powers of persuasion that lead to proof. By talking about life after death, you naturally appeal to people’s wishes, their feelings of fear, and so on.
Things are very different when you talk about what I spoke about today—namely, about preexistence, about human life, our soul-spir- itual life, before birth or, let’s say, before conception. This is what anthroposophy talks about most extensively. In anthroposophy, we focus more on prenatal life—that is, on human life before concep- tion, on preexisting life, from which follows as a matter of course life after death.
We focus more on this life before birth because human egotism is less involved there. It is not a matter of indifference to people whether they go on living after death or not; but out of their egotism, they are less interested in whether they have already lived before they came to life on earth. Of course, once we open the sources of knowledge about that life on the other side of birth, the life we lived before we came into earthly life, then the other life, the one after death, follows logically. When you read my writings, you will find this described in detail. Indeed, in anthroposophy we consider the reality of this life before birth as more or less a matter of course.
—Rudolf Steiner, from a “Disputation Evening: On Natural-scientific Questions,” in Anthroposophy and the Natural Sciences (CW 75)
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