Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 127

Chap.

I]

§ 42.

First the relation

THE SPIRITUAL SCIENCES

which

exists in the entire

103

domain

of this

study between our soul and our body, and between the expression of our soul and the visible cosmos. And secondly the necessity of examining our own psychical life not by itself, but in organic relation to the psychical life of our

human us.

Here, however, appearance should not deceive

race.

Whatever we observe physically

in

this respect,

or

observe in cosmic expressions of the psychical life, does not really belong as such to the psychical sciences. And where out of our own individual subject we try to find a bridge by

which to reach the subjective life of humanity, that bridge never anything but a bridge, and it is not the bridge, but the psychical world which we reach by it, that claims is

our attention. Distinction, therefore, must be made between pure and mixed spiritual sciences. Language, for instance, is a mixed spiritual science, because everything that pertains to the modulation of sounds, and the influence exerted on them

by the general build of the body, and especially by the organs of breathing, articulation, and of hearing, is somatic; and the real psychical study is only begun when in this body of language the logos as its psychic element is reached.

Thus war,

also in history the building of cities, the etc., is

the body of history, and

its

waging

of

psychical study

only begins when we seek to reach the motives of human action which hide behind this somatic exterior, and to interpret the mysterious power which, partly by and partly without these motives, caused hundreds of persons, and whole nations, to run a course which, if marked by retrogression, suggests, nevertheless, the unwinding of a ball of yarn. And whether you trace these motives, or whether

you study the mysterious succession of generations, your own subjective-psychical life is ever shown to be your starting-point, and empiricism leaves you in the lurch. This is most forcibly illustrated by Philosophy in the narrower sense, which, just because it tries logically to interpret, if not the cosmos itself, at least the image received of it by us, ever bears a strongly subjective character, and with

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