While natural science has devised and continues to devise ever more elaborate and more precise tools for investigation, it has left unexamined and unimproved the first and most essential, the most ubiquitously applied, of all its tools. It has never tried to examine the nature of thinking itself; the point at which unconscious process blossoms into, or rather ‘sets’ as, conscious thought” (Owen Barfield, from the foreword). Rudolf Steiner examines the effects of scientists’ failure to examine thinking itself since the beginning of the so-called scientific revolution. This has led to a materialistic attitude in human culture that generates what Steiner calls “the karma of materialism.” He explains that there is a lack of harmony between the human intellect, which involves the physical body and life forces, and the sense of morality, which involves the most recent aspect of our human constitution―our individuality, or I-being.