"These objections are superficial," Steiner quickly adds. He did not get his information from the texts cited but from his own spiritual vision. Born with a powerful clairvoyant perception of the spiritual world, he quickly discovered it was not safe to let people know this, so he hid his abilities until he had completed a comprehensive education in, among other things, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and the arts. When Steiner speaks of his perceptions, we can take them as strongly representing the facts as we would accept the boundary markings of trained surveyors. We would not require that we be able to use the surveyors's instruments and make the same calculations as they did to verify the results they provided to us. The fact that our new survey matches previous surveyors's work we take as confirmation that our surveyors did a good job, not as evidence of their having copied someone else's work. If we ask the surveyors if they are confident that they produced an accurate survey, we might expect them to say that they carefully examined every step to ensure accuracy, just as Steiner does below:

Why is it necessary to have access to the supersensible worlds? The answer is that it is not necessary to do so, especially for people who are focused solely on things of the sensory perceptible world. A physicist, a lawyer, a biologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, an environmentalist -- none of these need access to supersensible worlds to do their jobs. Steiner's point is that anyone deeply concerned with the meaning of life itself will not find adequate answers without investigating supersensible worlds, the worlds that have been occulted or hidden from scientists.

Even if the proofs of the scientific intellect are irrefutable, Steiner says that "they need not be decisive for reality." This is not an easy concept to grasp, so he gives us a comparison to help us grasp it. We cannot see into supersensible worlds with our ordinary human cognitive functions, just as scientists cannot see into the heart of a cell with their ordinary human cognition. They require a strong microscope to augment their human sight -- it is as if the mechanical, human-made microscope creates a new and stronger organ of sight for them. They have no hesitation, if they require a closer view at the microscopic world, of pulling out a stronger set of lens. Steiner points out that our natural human cognition can be given a stronger set of lens, not by any mechanical means, but by spiritual means.

Certainly no scientists worth the name scientist would dispute the validity of a field of science without examining it -- they would never do as Steiner's severest critics have done: "attempt to discredit a completely independent striving for truth by failing to judge it on its own merit." That there are such scientists yet today, who would belittle spiritual science, calling it a subjective delusion without doing a thorough investigation, tells us more about the scientists than about spiritual science. If they did but examine spiritual science earnestly on its own terms, they would find that Rudolf Steiner strives for and achieves objective experiences which have universal validity when recognized entirely inwardly in one's soul-life. He achieves this not by bringing forward pieces of old doctrines such as Theosophy or Gnosticism or Rosicrucianism and binding them in new book covers, but rather by providing truths which resonate with the current abilities of the evolved human being in our time. His result is a "striving for truth" worthy of the name "spiritual science."