Man or Matter
MAN OR MATTER
Introduction
to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature
on the Basis of Goethe's Method
of Training Observation and Thought
by
ERNST LEHRS
Ph. D.
FABER AND FABER LTD
24 Russell Square
London
First published in mcmli
by Faber and Faber Limited
24 Russell Square London W. C. I
Printed in Great Britain by
Latimer Trend & Co Ltd Plymouth
All rights reserved
ERRATA
*
Page 178, line 5 from bottom: universal should read
universe.
Page 184, line 15 from bottom: volume should read
amounts.
Page 230, line 2 from bottom: plane should be deleted.
Page 292, fig. 12 should look like this:
Page 299, line 10: after the closing bracket there should
be a '1' referring to the first footnote.
Page 325, line 3 from bottom: instead of nature read
matter.
Page 354, quotation: between lines 3 and 4 should be
inserted Such harmony is in immortal souls.
Contents
PREFACE page 15
Part I
SCIENCE AT THE THRESHOLD
I. INTRODUCTORY 19
The author's search for a way of extending the boundaries of
scientific understanding. A meeting with Rudolf Steiner,
and with the work arising from his teachings.
II. WHERE DO WE STAND TO-DAY? 27
The self-restriction of scientific inquiry to one-eyed colour-
blind observation. Its effect: The lack of a true conception
of 'force'.
III. THE ONLOOKER'S PHILOSOPHIC MALADY 39
Thought—the sole reality and yet a pure non-entity for the
modern spectator. Descartes and Hume. Robert Hooke's
' proof' of the non-reality of conceptual thinking. The modern
principle of Indeterminacy—a sign that science is still domi-
nated by the Humean way of thinking.
IV. THE COUNTRY THAT IS NOT OURS 46
Electricity, man's competitor in modern civilization. The on-
looker in search of the soul of nature. Galvani and Crookes.
Paradoxes in the discovery of electricity. 'Something un-
known is doing we don't know what.'
Part II
GOETHEANISM—WHENCE AND WHITHER
V. THE ADVENTURE OF REASON page 65
Kant and Goethe. Goethe's study of the plant—a path to-
ward seeing with the eye-of-the-spirit. Nature a script that
asks to be read.
VI. EXCEPT WE BECOME ... 92
Spiritual kinsmen of Goethe in the British sphere of human
culture.
Thomas Reid's philosophic discovery, its significance for
the overcoming of the onlooker-standpoint in science. The
picture of man inherent in Reid's philosophy.
Man's original gift of remembering his pre-earthly life. The
disappearance of this memory in the past, and its re-ap-
pearance in modern times. Pelagius versus Augustine.
Wordsworth and Traherne. Traherne, a 'Reidean before
Reid was born'.
VII. 'ALWAYS STAND BY FORM' 118
Ruskin and Howard-—two readers in the book of nature.
Goethe's meteorological ideas. His conception of the ur-
phenomenon. Goethe and Howard.
VIII. DYNAMICS VERSUS KINETICS 132
The onlooker science—by necessity a 'pointer-reading'
science. The onlooker's misjudgment of the cognitive value of
the impressions conveyed by the senses.The Parallelogram of
Forces—its fallacious kinematic and its true dynamic inter-
pretation. The roots in man of his concepts 'mass' and
'force'. The formula F =ma. The origin of man's faculty of
mathematical thinking.
IX. PRO LEVITATE 148
(a) ALERTNESS CONTRA INERTNESS
Limitations of the validity of the concept 'inertia'. Re-
statement of Newton's first law. Introduction of the term
'magical' as opposed to mechanical. The phenomenon of the
rising arm. Introduction of the term 'alertness' as opposed
to 'inertness' (inertia).
Van Helmont's discovery of the gaseous state of matter. The
four Elements. The old concept of 'Chaos'. Young and old
matter. The natural facts behind the ancient fire rites. The
event on Mount Sinai.
(b) LEVITY CONTRA GRAVITY page 162
The Contra Levitatem maxim of the Florentine Academi-
cians. Ruskin's warning against science as an interpreter of
its own observations. How man's inner nature and the outer
universe interpret one another. The Solfatara phenomenon.
The super-physical character of Levity.
X. THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER 170
The need of raising scientific inquiry to nature's upper
border. The laws of Conservation, their origin and their
validity. Joule and Mayer.
Extension of the field-concept from the central to the peri-
pheral field-type. Natural phenomena brought about by the
suctional effect of the earth's levity-field. The different con-
ditions of matter seen in the light of the levity-gravity polar-
ity. Heat, the fourth state of matter. Procreation of physical
substance—a natural fact. The case of Tillandsia. The prob-
lem of the trace-elements. Homeopathy, an example of the
effect of dematerialized matter. The meteorological circuit
of water. The nature of lightning.
XI. MATTER AS PART OF NATURE'S ALPHABET 192
The origin of the scientific conception of the chemical ele-
ment. Study of some prototypes of physical substances in the
light of the levity-gravity polarity. The functional concept of
matter. The complete order of polarities—cold-warm, dry-
moist—in the doctrine of the four elements. The position of
sulphur and phosphorus in this respect. Vulcanism and
snow-formation as manifestations of functional sulphur
and phosphorus respectively. The process of crystallization.
Carbon as a mediator between sulphur and phosphorus. The
alchemical triad.
XII. SPACE AND COUNTER-SPACE 210
Geometrical considerations required by the recognition of
levity. The value in this respect of projective geometrical
thinking. Geometrical polarities of the first and second order.
XIII. 'RADIANT MATTER' page 221
Electricity and magnetism as manifestations of interacting
levity and gravity. Electricity—a product of disintegrating
matter. Modern physics, no longer a 'natural' science.
Eddington's question,' Manufacture or Discovery?' Man's
enhanced responsibility in the age of physical science.
XIV. COLOURS AS 'DEEDS AND SUFFERINGS
OF LIGHT' 242
Goethe's Farbenlehre—the foundation of an optical science
based on the colour-seeing faculty of the eye. The modern
physicist's view of the Newtonian interpretation of the
spectrum. A short history of Goethe's search for a satisfac-
tory conception of Light and Colour. His discovery of
Newton's cardinal error. First results of his own studies.
The 'negative' spectrum.
XV. SEEING AS 'DEED'—I 255
Goethe's way of studying the totality of the act of seeing.
The 'inner light'.
XVI. SEEING AS 'DEED'—II 268
Extension of Goethe's inquiry to a pursuit of the act of seeing
beyond the boundaries of the body.
XVII. OPTICS OF THE DOER 281
Purging optics from its onlooker-concepts. The role of fore-
gone conclusions in the physical conception of light. The
true aspect of the so-called velocity of light.
XVIII. THE SPECTRUM AS A SCRIPT OF THE
SPIRIT 297
Evaluation of the foregoing studies for a new understanding
of the prismatic phenomenon. The secret of the rainbow.
Intimation of new possibilities of experimental research
guided by the new conception of the spectrum.
Part III
TOWARDS A NEW COSMOLOGY
XIX. THE COUNTRY IN WHICH MAN IS NOT A
STRANGER page 313
(a) INTRODUCTORY NOTE
From Goethe's seeing with the eye-of-the-spirit to Spiritual
Imagination. Levity (Ether) as revealed to Spiritual Imagina-
tion.
(b)—(e) WARMTH LIGHT SOUND LIFE 318
The four modifications of ether. Their relation to the four
elements.
XX. PRO ANIMA 334
(a) THE WELL-SPRINGS OF NATURE'S DEEDS
AND SUFFERINGS
The sentient (astral) forces of the cosmos as governors of the
various interactions between levity and gravity. The astral
aspect of the planetary system. Its reflexion in earthly sub-
stances. Beginnings of an astral conception of the human
organism in modern physiology.
(b) HEARING AS DEED 345
A Goetheanistic study of acoustic phenomena and of the
sense of hearing. From hearing with the ear-of-the-spirit to
Spiritual Inspiration.
(c) KEPLER AND THE 'MUSIC OF THE SPHERES' 354
Goethe's view of Kepler. Kepler's third law—a revelation of
the musical order of the universe.
XXI. KNOW THYSELF 364
INDEX 371
Illustrations
IN COLOUR
facing page
A The relation of the electrical polarity to Levity and
Gravity 238
B The Spectrum phenomenon as conceived by Goethe 250
C Light under the action of a transverse field-gradient 300
MONOCHROME
facing page
I. Robert Hooke's 'proof of the non-reality of human 68
concepts
II. Leaf-metamorphosis 69
III. Leaf-metamorphosis 76
IV. Goethe's sketch of a cloud-formation 77
V. A Snow-Crystal 202
VI. A cluster of Calcite crystals 203
VII. Various species of bacteria 318
VIII. Various species of fresh-water algae 319
Author's Note
The author makes grateful acknowledgment of the help he has
gained from other works in the wide field opened up by Rudolf
Steiner, and of his debt to the friends who in various ways assisted
him in preparing his manuscript.
Quotations have been made from the following books by kind
permission of their respective publishers:
The Life of Sir William Crookes by E. E. Fournier d'Albe (Messrs.
Ernest Benn Ltd.); Man the Unknown by A. Carrel (Messrs. Hamish
Hamilton Ltd.) The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature
of The Physical Worldly A.. Eddington (University Press, Cambridge);
Science and the Human Temperament by E. Schrödinger (Messrs.
George Allen and Unwin Ltd.); Centuries of Meditations and
Poetical Works by Th. Traherne (Messrs. P. J. and A. E. Dobell).
Preface
In this book the reader will find expounded a method of investigating
nature by means of which scientific understanding can be carried
across the boundaries of the physical-material to the supersensible
sources of all natural events, and thereby into the realm where is
rooted the true being of man.
The beginnings of this method were worked out by Goethe more
than 150 years ago. The nineteenth century, however, failed to pro-
vide any fertile ground for the development of the seeds thus sown.
It was left to Rudolf Steiner, shortly before the end of the century, to
recognize the significance of 'Goetheanism' for the future develop-
ment not only of science but of human culture in general. It is to
him, also, that we owe the possibility of carrying on Goethe's efforts
in the way required by the needs of our own time.
The following pages contain results of the author's work along the
path thus opened up by Goethe and Rudolf Steiner—a work begun
twenty-seven years ago, soon after he had made the acquaintance of
Rudolf Steiner. With the publication of these results he addresses
himself to everyone—with or without a specialized scientific training
—who is concerned with the fate of man's powers of cognition in the
present age.
*
The reader may welcome a remark as to the way in which this
book needs to be read.
It has not been the author's intention to provide an encyclopaedic
collection of new conceptions in various fields of natural observation.
Rather did he wish, as the sub-title of the book indicates, to offer a
new method of training both mind and eye (and other senses as well),
by means of which our modern 'onlooking' consciousness can be
transformed into a new kind of 'participating' consciousness. Hence
it would be of no avail to pick out one chapter or another for first
reading, perhaps because of some special interest in its subject-
matter. The chapters are stages on a road which has to be travelled,
and each stage is necessary for reaching the next. It is only through
thus accepting the method with which the book has been written that
the reader will be able to form a competent judgment of its essential
elements.
E. L.
Hawkwood College
Easter 1950
PART I
Science at the Threshold
CHAPTER I
Introductory
If I introduce this book by relating how I came to encounter Rudolf
Steiner and his work, more than twenty-five years ago, and what
decided me not only to make his way of knowledge my own, but also
to enter professionally into an activity inspired by his teachings, it is
because in this way I can most directly give the reader an impression
of the kind of spirit out of which I have written. I am sure, too, that
although what I have to say in this chapter is personal in content, it
is characteristic of many in our time.
When I first made acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner and his work,
I was finishing my academic training as an electrical engineer. At the
end of the 1914-18 war my first thought had been to take up my
studies from where I had let them drop, four years earlier. The war
seemed to imply nothing more than a passing interruption of them.
This, at any rate, was the opinion of my former teachers; the war had
made no difference whatever to their ideas, whether on the subject-
matter of their teaching or on its educational purpose. I myself, how-
ever, soon began to feel differently. It became obvious to me that my
relationship to my subject, and therefore to those teaching it, had
completely changed. What I had experienced through the war had
awakened in me a question of which I had previously been unaware;
now I felt obliged to put it to everything I came across.
As a child of my age I had grown up in the conviction that it was
within the scope of man to shape his life according to the laws of
reason within him; his progress, in the sense in which I then under-
stood it, seemed assured by his increasing ability to determine his
own outer conditions with the help of science. Indeed, it was the wish
to take an active part in this progress that had led me to choose my
profession. Now, however, the war stood there as a gigantic social
deed which I could in no way regard as reasonably justified. How, in
an age when the logic of science was supreme, was it possible that a
great part of mankind, including just those peoples to whom science
had owed its origin and never-ceasing expansion, could act in so com-
pletely unscientific a way? Where lay the causes of the contradiction
thus revealed between human thinking and human doing?
Pursued by these questions, I decided after a while to give my
studies a new turn. The kind of training then provided in Germany at
the so-called Technische Hochschulen was designed essentially to
give students a close practical acquaintance with all sorts of technical
appliances; it included only as much theory as was wanted for under-
standing the mathematical calculations arising in technical practice.
It now seemed to me necessary to pay more attention to theoretical
considerations, so as to gain a more exact knowledge of the sources
from which science drew its conception of nature. Accordingly I left
the Hochschule for a course in mathematics and physics at a univer-
sity, though without abandoning my original idea of preparing for a
career in the field of electrical engineering. It was with this in mind
that I later chose for my Ph.D. thesis a pi^ce of experimental research
on the uses of high-frequency electric currents.
During my subsequent years of stuffy, however, I found myself no
nearer an answer to the problem/ that haunted me. All that I
experienced, in scientific work as in life generally, merely gave it
an even sharper edge. Everywhere I saw an abyss widening between
human knowing and human action. How often was I not bitterly
disillusioned by the behaviour of men for whose ability to think
through the most complicated scientific questions I had the utmost
admiration!
On all sides I found this same bewildering gulf between scientific
achievement and the way men conducted their own lives and influ-
enced the lives of others. I was forced to the conclusion that human
thinking, at any rate in its modern form, was either powerless to
govern human actions, or at least unable to direct them towards right
ends. In fact, where scientific thinking had done most to change the
practical relations of human life, as in the mechanization of economic
production, conditions had arisen which made it more difficult, not
less, for men to live in a way worthy of man. At a time when humanity
was equipped as never before to investigate the order of the universe,
and had achieved triumphs of design in mechanical constructions,
human life was falling into ever wilder chaos. Why was this?
The fact that most of my contemporaries were apparently quite
unaware of the problem that stirred me so deeply could not weaken
my sense of its reality. This slumber of so many souls in face of the
vital questions of modern life seemed to me merely a further symp-
tom of the sickness of our age. Nor could I think much better of
those who, more sensitive to the contradictions in and around them,
sought refuge in art or religion. The catastrophe of the war had
shown me that this departmentalizing of life, which at one time I had
myself considered a sort of ideal, was quite inconsistent with the
needs of to-day. To make use of art or religion as a refuge was a sign
of their increasing separation from the rest of human culture. It im-
plied a cleavage between the different spheres of society which ruled
out any genuine solution of social problems.
I knew from history that religion and art had once exercised a
function which is to-day reserved for science, for they had given
guidance in even the most practical activities of human society. And
in so doing they had enhanced the quality of human living, whereas
the influence of science has had just the opposite effect. This power of
guidance, however, they had long since lost, and in view of this fact
I came to the conclusion that salvation must be looked for in the first
place from science. Here, in the thinking and knowing of man, was
the root of modern troubles; here must come a drastic revision, and
here, if possible, a completely new direction must be found.
Such views certainly flew in the face of the universal modern con-
viction that the present mode of knowledge, with whose help so much
insight into the natural world has been won, is the only one possible,
given once for all to man in a form never to be changed. But is there
any need, I asked myself, to cling to this purely static notion of man's
capacity for gaining knowledge? Among the greatest achievements of
modern science, does not the conception of evolution take a foremost
place? And does not this teach us that the condition of a living
organism at any time is the result of the one preceding it, and that
the transition implies a corresponding functional enhancement? But
if we have once recognized this as an established truth, why should
we apply it to organisms at every stage of development except the
.highest, namely the human, where the organic form reveals and
serves the self-conscious spirit?
Putting the question thus, I was led inevitably to a conclusion
which science itself had failed to draw from its idea of evolution.
Whatever the driving factor in evolution may be, it is clear that in
the kingdoms of nature leading up to man this factor has always
worked on the evolving organisms from outside. The moment we
come to man himself, however, and see how evolution has flowered
in his power of conscious thought, we have to reckon with a funda-
mental change.
Once a being has recognized itself as a product of evolution, it
immediately ceases to be that and nothing more. With its very first
act of self-knowledge it transcends its previous limits, and must in
future rely on its own conscious actions for the carrying on of its
development.
For me, accordingly, the concept of evolution, when thought
through to the end, began to suggest the possibility of further
growth in man's spiritual capacities. But I saw also that this growth
could no longer be merely passive, and the question which now beset
me was: by what action of his own can man break his way into this
new phase of evolution? I saw that this action must not consist
merely in giving outer effect to the natural powers of human think-
ing ; that was happening everywhere in the disordered world around
me. The necessary action must have inner effects; indeed, it had to be
one whereby the will was turned upon the thinking-powers them-
selves, entirely transforming them, and so removing the discrepancy
between the thinker and the doer in modern man.
Thus far I could go through my own observation and reflexion, but
no further. To form a general idea of the deed on which everything
else depended was one thing; it was quite another to know how to
perform the deed, and above all where to make a start with it. Any-
one intending to make a machine must first learn something of
mechanics; in the same way, anyone setting out to do something con-
structive in the sphere of human consciousness—and this, for me,
was the essential point—must begin by learning something of the
laws holding sway in that sphere. But who could give me this
knowledge?
Physiology, psychology and philosophy in their ordinary forms
were of no use to me, for they were themselves part and parcel of just
that kind of knowing which had to be overcome. In their various
accounts of man there was no vantage point from which the deed I
had in mind could be accomplished, for none of them looked beyond
the ordinary powers of knowledge. It was the same with the accepted
theory of evolution; as a product of the current mode of thinking it
could be applied to everything except the one essential—this very
mode of thinking. Obviously, the laws of the development of human
consciousness cannot be discovered from a standpoint within the
modern form of that consciousness. But how could one find a view-
point outside, as it were, this consciousness, from which to discover
its laws with the same scientific objectivity which it had itself applied
to discovering the laws of physical nature?
It was when this question stood before me in all clarity that destiny
led me to Rudolf Steiner and his work. The occasion was a confer-
ence held in 1921 in Stuttgart by the Anthroposophical Movement;
it was one of several arranged during the years 1920-2 especially for
teachers and students at the Hochschulen and Universities. What
chiefly moved me to attend this particular conference was the title
of a lecture to be given by one of the pupils and co-workers of
Rudolf Steiner—'The Overcoming of Einstein's Theory of Rela-
tivity'.1
The reader will readily appreciate what this title meant for me. In
the circles where my work lay, an intense controversy was just then
raging round Einstein's ideas. I usually took sides with the supporters
of Einstein, for it seemed to me that Einstein had carried the existing
mode of scientific thinking to its logical conclusions, whereas I
missed this consistency among his opponents. At the same time I
found that the effect of this theory, when its implications were fully
developed, was to make everything seem so 'relative' that no reliable
world-outlook was left. This was proof for me that our age was in
need of an altogether different form of scientific thinking, equally
consistent in itself, but more in tune with man's own being.
What appealed to me in the lecture-title was simply this, that
whereas everyone else sought to prove Einstein right or wrong, here
was someone who apparently intended, not merely to add another
proof for or against his theory—there were plenty of those already—
but to take some steps to overcome it. From the point of view of
orthodox science, of course, it was absurd to speak of 'overcoming'
a theory, as though it were an accomplished fact, but to me this title
suggested exactly what I was looking for.
Although it was the title of this lecture that drew me to the Stutt-
gart Conference (circumstances prevented me from hearing just this
lecture), it was the course given there by Rudolf Steiner himself
which was to prove the decisive experience of my life. It comprised
eight lectures, under the title: 'Mathematics, Scientific Experiment
1 The speaker was the late Dr. Elizabeth Vreede, for some years leader of the
Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland
and Observation, and Epistemological Results from the Standpoint
of Anthroposophy'; what they gave me answered my question
beyond all expectation.
In the course of a comprehensive historical survey the lecturer
characterized, in a way I found utterly convincing, the present
mathematical interpretation of nature as a transitional stage of hu-
man consciousness—a kind of knowing which is on the way from a
past pre-mathematical to a future post-mathematical form of cogni-
tion. The importance of mathematics, whether as a discipline of the
human spirit or as an instrument of natural science, was not for a
moment undervalued. On the contrary, what Rudolf Steiner said
about Projective (Synthetic) Geometry, for instance, its future possi-
bilities and its role as a means of understanding higher processes of
nature than had hitherto been accessible to science, clearly explained
the positive feelings I myself had experienced—without knowing why
—when I had studied the subject.
Through his lectures and his part in the discussions—they were
held daily by the various speakers and ranged over almost every field
of modern knowledge—I gradually realized that Rudolf Steiner was
in possession of unique powers. Not only did he show himself fully at
home in all these fields; he was able to connect them with each other,
and with the nature and being of man, in such a way that an apparent
chaos of unrelated details was wrought into a higher synthesis. More-
over, it became clear to me that one who could speak as he did about
the stages of human consciousness past, present and future, must have
full access to all of them at will, and be able to make each of them an
object of exact observation. I saw a thinker who was himself suffi-
cient proof that man can find within the resources of his own spirit
the vantage-ground for the deed which I had dimly surmised, and by
which alone true civilization could be saved. Through all these things
I knew that I had found the teacher I had been seeking.
Thus I was fully confirmed in my hopes of the Conference; but I
was also often astonished at what I heard. Not least among my sur-
prises was Rudolf Steiner's presentation of Goethe as the herald of
the new form of scientific knowledge which he himself was expound-
ing. I was here introduced to a side of Goethe which was as com-
pletely unknown to me as to so many others among my contempor-
aries, who had not yet come into touch with Anthroposophy. For me,
as for them, Goethe had always been the great thinker revealing his
thoughts through poetry. Indeed, only shortly before my meeting
width Rudolf Steiner it was in his poetry that Goethe had become
newly alive to me as a helper in my search for a fuller human experi-
j^nce of nature and my fellow-men. But despite all my Goethe studies
I had been quite unaware that more than a century earlier he had
achieved something in the field of science, organic and inorganic
alike, which could help modern man towards the new kind of know-
ledge so badly needed to-day. This was inevitable for me, since I
shared the modern conviction that art and science were fields of
activity essentially strange to one another. And so it was again
Rudolf Steiner who opened the way for me to Goethe as botanist,
physicist and the like.
I must mention another aspect of the Stuttgart Conference which
Belongs to this picture of my first encounter with Anthroposophy,
and gave it special weight for anyone in my situation at that period.
In Stuttgart there were many different activities concerned with the
practical application of Rudolf Steiner's teachings, and so one could
become acquainted with teachings and applications at the same time.
There was the Waldorf School, founded little more than a year before,
„ with several hundred pupils already. It was the first school to under-
take the transformation of anthroposophical knowledge of man into
educational practice; later it was followed by others, in Germany and
elsewhere. There was one of the clinics, where qualified doctors were
applying the same knowledge to the study of illness and the action of
medicaments. In various laboratories efforts were made to develop
new methods of experimental research in physics, chemistry, biology
and other branches of science. Further, a large business concern had
been founded in Stuttgart in an attempt to embody some of Rudolf
Steiner's ideas for the reform of social life. Besides all this I could
attend performances of the new art of movement, again the creation
of Rudolf Steiner and called by him 'Eurhythmy', in which the
astounded eye could see how noble a speech can be uttered by the
human body when its limbs are moved in accordance with its inherent
spiritual laws. Thus, in all the many things that were going on besides
the lectures, one could find direct proof of the fruitfulness of what
one heard in them.1
1 The activities mentioned above do not exhaust the practical possibilities of
Spiritual Science. At that time (1921) Rudolf Steiner had not yet given his indica-
tions for the treatment of children needing special care of soul and body, or for
the renewal of the art of acting, or for the conquest of materialistic methods in
agricultural practice. Nor did there yet exist the movement for religious renewal
Which Dr. Fr. Rittelmeyer later founded, with the help and advice of Rudolf Steiner.
Under the impression of this Conference I soon began to study the
writings of Rudolf Steiner. Not quite two years later, I decided to
join professionally with those who were putting Anthroposophy into
outer practice. Because it appeared to me as the most urgent need of
the time to prepare the new generation for the tasks awaiting it
through an education shaped on the entire human being, I turned to
Rudolf Steiner with the request to be taken into the Stuttgart School
as teacher of natural science. On this occasion I told him of my
general scientific interests, and how I hoped to follow them up later
on. I spoke of my intended educational activity as something which
might help me at the same time to prepare myself for this other task.
Anyone who learns so to see nature that his ideas can be taken up and
understood by the living, lively soul of the growing child will thereby
be training himself, I thought, in just that kind of observation and
thinking which the new science of nature demands. Rudolf Steiner
agreed with this, and it was not long afterwards that I joined the
school where I was to work for eleven years as a science master in the
senior classes, which activity I have since continued outside Germany
in a more or less similar form.
This conversation with Rudolf Steiner took place in a large hall
where, while we were talking, over a thousand people were assemb-
ling to discuss matters of concern to the Anthroposophical Move-
ment. This did not prevent him from asking me about the details of
my examination work, in which I was still engaged at that time; he
always gave himself fully to whatever claimed his attention at the
moment. I told him of my experimental researches in electrical high-
frequency phenomena, briefly introducing the particular problem
with which I was occupied. I took it for granted that a question from
such a specialized branch of physics would not be of much interest to
him. Judge of my astonishment when he at once took out of his
pocket a note-book and a huge carpenter's pencil, made a sketch and
proceeded to speak of the problem as one fully conversant with it,
and in such a way that he gave me the starting point for an entirely
new conception of electricity. It was instantly borne in on me that if
electricity came to be understood in this sense, results would follow
which in the end would lead to a quite new technique in the use of it.
From that moment it became one of my life's aims to contribute
whatever my circumstances and powers would allow to the develop-
ment of an understanding of nature of this kind.
CHAPTER II
Where Do We Stand To-day?
In the year 1932, when the world celebrated the hundredth anniver-
sary of Goethe's death, Professor W. Heisenberg, one of the foremost
thinkers in the field of modern physics, delivered a speech before the
Saxon Academy of Science which may be regarded as symptomatic of
the need in recent science to investigate critically the foundations of
its own efforts to know nature.1 In this speech Heisenberg draws a
picture of the progress of science which differs significantly from the
one generally known. Instead of giving the usual description of this
progress as 'a chain of brilliant and surprising discoveries', he shows
it as resting on the fact that, with the aim of continually simplifying
and unifying the scientific conception of the world, human thinking,
in course of time, has narrowed more and more the scope of its in-
quiries into outer nature.
'Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renun-
ciation, almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important stand-
points and established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge
accumulate, the claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world
in a certain sense diminishes.' Our justifiable admiration for the
success with which the unending multiplicity of natural occurrences
on earth and in the stars has been reduced to so simple a scheme of
laws—Heisenberg implies—-must therefore not make us forget that
these attainments are bought at the price 'of renouncing the aim of
bringing the phenomena of nature to our thinking in an immediate
and living way'.
In the course of his exposition, Heisenberg also speaks of Goethe,
1 This address and another by the same author are published together under
the common title, Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschqft ('Changes
in the foundations of Natural Science'). Heisenberg's name has become known
above all by his formulation of the so-called Principle of Indeterminacy.
in whose scientific endeavours he perceives a noteworthy attempt to
set scientific understanding upon a path other than that of pro-
gressive self-restriction.
'The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for
the progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis
for the bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical
optics of Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as
unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most outstand-
ing men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of
Newtonian optics.' There is only one thing for which Heisenberg cri-
ticizes Goethe: 'If one should wish to reproach Goethe, it could only
be for not going far enough—that is, for having attacked the views of
Newton instead of declaring that the whole of Newtonian Physics—
Optics, Mechanics and the Law of Gravitation—were from the devil.'
Although the full significance of Heisenberg's remarks on Goethe
will become apparent only at a later stage of our discussion, they have
been quoted here because they form part of the symptom we wish to
characterize. Only this much may be pointed out immediately, that
Goethe—if not in the scientific then indeed in the poetical part of his
writings—did fulfil what Heisenberg rightly feels to have been his
true task.1
We mentioned Heisenberg's speech as a symptom of a certain ten-
dency, characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically
its own epistemological foundations. A few years previous to Heisen-
berg's speech, the need of such a survey found an eloquent advocate
in the late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the
Modern World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern
physical theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a
medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter
upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations'.
Among the scientists who have felt this need, and who have taken
pains to fulfil it, the late Professor A. Eddington obtains an eminent
position. Among his relevant utterances we will quote here the fol-
lowing, because it contains a concrete statement concerning the field
of external observation which forms the basis for the modern scien-
tific world-picture. In his Philosophy of Physical Science we find him
stating that 'ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have
been reached by visual sensation alone—in fact by the simplest form
1 See, in this respect, Faust's dispute with Mephistopheles on the causes
responsible for the geological changes of the earth. (Faust II, Act 4)
of visual sensation, colourless and non-stereoscopic'.1 In other words,
jo order to obtain scientific cognition of the physical world, man has
felt constrained to surrender the use of all his senses except the sense
of sight, and to limit even the act of seeing to the use of a single,
colour-blind eye.
Let us listen to yet another voice from the ranks of present-day
science, expressing a criticism which is symptomatic of our time. It
comes from the late physiologist, Professor A, Carrel, who, concern-
ing the effect which scientific research has had on man's life in
general, says in his book, Man the Unknown: 'The sciences of inert
matter have led us into a country that is not ours. . . . Man is a
stranger in the world he has created.'
Of these utterances, Eddington's is at the present point of our dis-
cussion of special interest for us; for he outlines in it the precise field
of sense-perception into which science has withdrawn in the course of
that general retreat towards an ever more restricted questioning of
nature which was noted by Heisenberg.
The pertinence of Eddington's statement is shown immediately one
considers what a person would know of the world if his only source
of experience were the sense of sight, still further limited in the way
Eddington describes. Out of everything that the world brings to the
totality of our senses, there remains nothing more than mere move-
ments, with certain changes of rate, direction, and so on. The picture
of the world received by such an observer is a purely kinematic one.
And this is, indeed, the character of the world-picture of modern
physical science. For in the scientific treatment of natural pheno-
mena all the qualities brought to us by our other senses, such as
colour, tone, warmth, density and even electricity and magnetism, are
reduced to mere movement-changes.
As a result, modern science is prevented from conceiving any valid ,
idea of 'force'. In so far as the concept 'force' appears in scientific
considerations, it plays the part of an 'auxiliary concept', and what
man naively conceives as force has come to be defined as merely a
'descriptive law of behaviour'. We must leave it for later considera-
tions to show how the scientific mind of man has created for itself the
conviction that the part of science occupied with the actions offeree
1 See also Eddington's more elaborate description of this fact in his New
Pathways in Science. The above statement, like others of Eddington's, has been
Contested from the side of professional philosophy as logically untenable. Our
own further discussion will show that it accords with the facts.
in nature can properly be treated with purely kinematic concepts. It
is the fact itself which concerns us here. In respect of it, note as a
characteristic of modern text-books that they often simply use the
term 'kinetics' (a shortening of kinematics) to designate the science of
'dynamics'.1
In the course of our investigations we shall discover the peculiarity
in human nature which—during the first phase, now ended, of man's
struggle towards scientific awareness—has caused this renunciation
of all sense-experiences except those which come to man through the
sight of a single colour-blind eye. It will then also become clear out
of what historic necessity this self-restriction of scientific inquiry
arose. The acknowledgment of this necessity, however, must not pre-
vent us from recognizing the fact that, as a result of this restriction,
modern scientific research, which has penetrated far into the dynamic
substrata of nature, finds itself in the peculiar situation that it is not
at_all guided by its own concepts, but by the very forces it tries to
detect. And in this fact lies the root of the danger which besets the
present age.2
He who recognizes this, therefore, feels impelled to look for a way
which leads beyond a one-eyed, colour-blind conception of the
world. It is the aim of this book to show that such a way exists and
how it can be followed. Proof will thereby be given that along this
way not only is a true understanding achieved of the forces already
known to science (though not really understood by it), but also that
other forces, just as active in nature as for example electricity and
magnetism, come within reach of scientific observation and under-
standing. And it will be shown that these other forces are of a kind
that requires to be known to-day if we are to restore the lost balance
to human civilization.
*
There is a rule known to physicians that 'a true diagnosis of a case
contains in itself the therapy'. No true diagnosis is possible, however,
without investigation of the 'history' of the case. Applied to our task,
this means that we must try to find an aspect of human development,
both individual and historical, which will enable us to recognize in
1 Both words, kinematics and kinetics, are derivatives of the Greek word
kinein, to move. The term 'kinematic' is used when motion is considered abs-
tractly without reference to force or mass. Kinetics is applied kinematics, or, as
pointed out above, dynamics treated with kinematic concepts.
2 These last statements will find further illustration in the next two chapters.
man's own being the cause responsible for the peculiar narrowing of
the scope of scientific inquiry, as described by the scientists cited
above.
A characteristic of scientific inquiry, distinguishing it from man's
earlier ways of solving the riddles of the world, is that it admits as in-
struments of knowledge exclusively those activities of the human
soul over which we have full control because they take place in the
full light of consciousness. This also explains why there has been no
science, in the true sense of the word, prior to the beginning of the
era commonly called 'modern'—that is, before the fifteenth century.
For the consciousness on which man's scientific striving is based is
itself an outcome of human evolution.
This evolution, therefore, needs to be considered in such a way
that we understand the origin of modern man's state of mind, and in
particular why this state of mind cannot of itself have any other rela-
tionship to the world than that of a spectator. For let us be clear that
this peculiar relationship by no means belongs only to the scientific-
ally engaged mind. Every adult in our age is, by virtue of his psycho-
physical structure, more or less a world-spectator. What distin-
guishes the state of man's mind when engaged in scientific observa-
tion is that it is restricted to a one-eyed colour-blind approach.
*
'Death is the price man has to pay for his brain and his person-
ality'—this is how a modern physiologist (A. Carrel in his afore-
mentioned book, Man the Unknown) describes the connexion be-
tween man's bodily functions and his waking consciousness. It is
characteristic of the outlook prevailing in the nineteenth century that
thinking was regarded as the result of the life of the body; that is, of
the body's matter-building processes. Hence no attention was paid at
that time to the lonely voice of the German philosopher, C. Fortlage
(1806-81), who in his System of Psychology as Empirical Science
suggested that consciousness is really based on death processes in the
body. From this fact he boldly drew the conclusion (known to us to-
day to be true) that if 'partial death' gave rise to ordinary conscious-
ness, then 'total death' must result in an extraordinary enhancement
of consciousness. Again, when in our century Rudolf Steiner drew
attention to the same fact, which he had found along his own lines of
investigation, showing thereby the true role of the nervous system in
regard to the various activities of the soul, official science turned a
deaf ear to his pronouncement.1 To-day the scientist regards it as
forming part of 'unknown man' that life must recede—in other
words, that the organ-building processes of the body must come to a
standstill—if consciousness is to come into its own.
With the recognition of a death process in the nervous system as
the bodily foundation of consciousness, and particularly of man's
conceptual activities, the question arises as to the nature of those
activities which have their foundation in other systems, such as that
of the muscles, where life, not death, prevails. Here an answer must
be given which will surprise the reader acquainted with modern
theories of psycho-physical interaction; but if he meets it with an
open mind he will not find it difficult to test.
Just as the conceptual activity has as its bodily foundation the
brain, with the nervous appendages, so it is volitional activity which
is based on processes taking place in the muscular region of the body
and in those organs which provide the body's metabolism.
A statement which says that man's will is as directly based on the
metabolic processes of the body, both inside and outside the muscles,
as is his perceiving and thought-forming mind on a process in the
nerves, is bound to cause surprise. Firstly, it seems to leave out the
role commonly ascribed to the so-called motoric part of the nervous
system in bringing about bodily action; and secondly, the acknow-
ledgment of the dependence of consciousness on corporeal 'dying'
implies that willing is an unconscious activity because of its being
based on life processes of the body.
The first of these two problems will find its answer at a later stage
of our discussion when we shall see what entitles us to draw a direct
connexion between volition and muscular action. To answer the
second problem, simple self-observation is required. This tells us that,
when we move a limb, all that we know of is the intention (in its con-
ceptual form) which rouses the will and gives it its direction, and the
fact of the completed deed. In between, we accompany the movement
with a dim awareness of the momentary positions of the parts of the
body involved, so that we know whether or not they are moving in
the intended manner. This awareness is due to a particular sense, the
'sense of movement' or 'muscular sense'—one of those senses whose
existence physiology has lately come to acknowledge. Nothing, how-
ever, is known to us of all the complex changes which are set into
play within the muscles themselves in order to carry out some in-
1 First published in 1917 in his book Von Seelenrätseln,
tended movement. And it is these that are the direct outcome of the
activity of our will.
Regarding man's psycho-physical organization thus, we come to
see in it a kind of polarity—a death-pole, as it were, represented by
the nerves including their extension into the senses, and a life-pole,
represented by the metabolic and muscular systems; and connected
with them a pole of consciousness and one of unconsciousness—or as
we can also say, of waking and sleeping consciousness. For the de-
gree of consciousness on the side of the life-pole is not different from
the state in which the entire human being dwells during sleep.
It is by thus recognizing the dependence of consciousness on pro-1
cesses of bodily disintegration that we first come to understand why
consciousness, once it has reached a certain degree of brightness, is
bound to suffer repeated interruptions. Every night, when we sleep,
our nervous system becomes alive (though with gradually decreasing
intensity) in order that what has been destroyed during the day may
be restored. While the system is kept in this condition, no conscious-
ness can obtain in it.
In between the two polarically opposite systems there is a third,
again of clearly distinct character, which functions as a mediator be-
tween the two. Here all processes are of a strictly rhythmic nature, as
is shown by the process of breathing and the pulsation of the blood.
This system, too, provides the foundation for a certain type of psy-
chological process, namely feeling. That feeling is an activity of the
soul distinct from both thinking and willing, and that it has its direct
counterpart in the rhythmic processes of the body, can be most easily
tested through observing oneself when listening to music.
As one might expect from its median position, the feeling sphere of
the soul is characterized by a degree of consciousness half-way be-
tween waking and sleeping. Of our feelings we are not more conscious
than of our dreams; we are as little detached from them as from our
dream experiences while these last; what remains in our memory of
past feelings is usually not more than what we remember of past dreams.
This picture of the threefold psycho-physical structure of man will
now enable us to understand the evolution of consciousness both in
individual life and in the life of mankind. To furnish the foundation
of waking consciousness, parts of the body must become divorced
from life. This process, however, is one which, if we take the word in
its widest sense, we may call, ageing. All organic bodies, and equally
that of man, are originally traversed throughout by life. Only gradu-
ally certain parts of such an organism become precipitated, as it
were, from the general organic structure, and they do so increasingly
towards the end of that organism's life-span.
In the human body this separation sets in gently during the later
stages of embryonic development and brings about the first degree of
independence of bones and nerves from the rest of the organism. The
retreat of life continues after birth, reaching a certain climax in the
nervous system at about the twenty-first year. In the body of a small
child there is still comparatively little contrast between living and
non-living organs. There is equally little contrast between sleeping
and waking condition in its soul. And the nature of the soul at this
stage is volition throughout. Never, in fact, does man's soul so inten-
sively will as in the time when it is occupied in bringing the body into
an upright position, and never again does it exert its strength with the
same unconsciousness of the goal to which it strives.
What, then, is the soul's characteristic relationship to the world
around at this stage? The following observations will enable us to
answer this question.
It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object
against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as
'animism', by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his
experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his
surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes
the child's mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep
something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation of
such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither experiences
himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces the content of
the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of using his
imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from his own.
In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world
as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his
relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the
same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has
stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the
child who beats himself because he has done something which makes
him angry with himself.
In sharp contrast to this state of oneness of the child's soul, in
regard both to its own body and to the surrounding world, there
stands the separatedness of the adult's intellectual consciousness,
severed from both body and world. What happens to this part of the
soul during its transition from one condition to the other may be
aptly described by using a comparison from another sphere of natural
phenomena. (Later descriptions in this book will show that a com-
parison such as the one used here is more than a mere external
analogy.)
Let us think of water in which salt has been dissolved. In this state
the salt is one with its solvent; there is no visible distinction between
them. The situation changes when part of the salt crystallizes. By this
process the part of the salt substance concerned loses its connexion
with the liquid and contracts into individually outlined and spatially
defined pieces of solid matter. It thereby becomes optically distin-
guishable from its environment.
Something similar happens to the soul within the region of the
nervous system. What keeps the soul in a state of unconsciousness as
long as the body, in childhood, is traversed by life throughout, and
what continues to keep it in this condition in the parts which remain
alive after the separation of the nerves, is the fact that in these parts
—to maintain the analogy—the soul is dissolved in the body. With
the growing independence of the nerves, the soul itself gains inde-
pendence from the body. At the same time it undergoes a process
similar to contraction whereby it becomes discernible to itself as an
entity distinguished from the surrounding world. In this way the
soul is enabled, eventually, to meet the world from outside as a self-
conscious onlooker.
*
What we have here described as the emergence of an individual's
intellectual consciousness from the original, purely volitional condi-
tion of the soul is nothing but a replica of a greater process through
which mankind as a whole, or more exactly Western mankind, has
gone in the course of its historical development. Man was not always
the 'brain-thinker' he is to-day.1 Directly the separation of the nerve
system was completed, and thereby the full clarity of the brain-
bound consciousness achieved, man began to concern himself with
science in the modern sense.
To understand why this science became restricted to one-eyed,
1 Homer's men still think with the diaphragm (phrenes). Similarly, the ancient
practice of Yoga, as a means of acquiring knowledge, shows that at the time
When it flourished man's conceptual activity was felt to be seated elsewhere than
in the head.
colour-blind observation we need only apply to the human sense
system, in particular, what we have learnt concerning man's three-
fold being.
Sharply distinguished by their respective modes of functioning
though they are, the three bodily systems are each spread out through
the whole body and are thus to be found everywhere adjacent to each
other. Hence, the corresponding three states of consciousness, the
sleeping, dreaming and waking, are also everywhere adjacent and
woven into one another. It is the predominance of one or other
which imparts a particular quality of soul to one or other region of
the body. This is clearly shown within the realm of sense activity, it-
self the most conscious part of the human being. It is sufficient to
compare, say, the senses of sight and smell, and to notice in what
different degree we are conscious of the impressions they convey, and
how differently the corresponding elements of conception, feeling and
willing are blended in each. We never turn away as instinctively from
objectionable colour arrangement as from an unpleasant smell. How
small a part, on the other hand, do the representations of odours
play in our recollection of past experiences, compared with those of
sight.1 The same is valid in descending measure for all other senses.
Of all senses, the sense of sight has in greatest measure the qualities
of a 'conceptual sense'. The experiences which it brings, and these
alone, were suitable as a basis for the new science, and even so a
further limitation was necessary. For in spite of the special quality of
the sense of sight, it is still not free from certain elements of feeling
and will—that is, from elements with the character of dream or
sleep. The first plays a part in our perception of colour; the second,
in observing the forms and perspective ordering of objects we look at.
Here is repeated in a special way the threefold organization of
man, for the seeing of colour depends on an organic process apart
from the nerve processes and similar to that which takes place be-
tween heart and lungs, whilst the seeing of forms and spatial vision
depend upon certain movements of the eyeball (quick traversing of
the outline of the viewed object with the line of sight, alteration of the
angle between the two axes of sight according to distance), in which
the eye is active as a sort of outer limb of the body, an activity which
enters our consciousness as little as does that of our limbs. It now
becomes clear that no world-content obtained in such more or less
1 This must not be confused with the fact that a smell may evoke other
memories by way of association.
unconscious ways could be made available for the building of a new
scientific world-conception. Only as much as man experiences through
the sight of a single, colour-blind eye, could be used.1
*
If we would understand the role of science in the present phase of
human development, we must be ready to apply two entirely different
and seemingly contradictory judgments to one and the same his-
torical phenomenon. The fact that something has occurred out of
historical necessity—that is, a necessity springing from the very laws
of cosmic evolution—does not save it from having a character which,
in view of its consequences, must needs be called tragic.
In this era of advanced intellectualism, little understanding of the
existence of true tragedy in human existence has survived. As a result,
the word 'tragedy' itself has deteriorated in its meaning and is nowa-
days used mostly as a synonym for 'sad event', 'calamity' 'serious
event', even 'crime' (Oxford Diet.). In its original meaning, however,
springing from the dramatic poetry of ancient Greece, the word com-
bines the concept of calamity with that of inevitability; the author of
the destructive action was not held to be personally responsible for it,
since he was caught up in a nexus of circumstances which he could
not change.
This is not the place to discuss why tragedy in this sense forms part
of man's existence. It suffices to acknowledge that it does and, where
it occurs, to observe it with scientific objectivity.
Our considerations, starting from certain statements made by
some leading scientific thinkers of our time, have helped us not only
to confirm the truth inherent in these statements, but to recognize the
facts stated by them as being the outcome of certain laws of evolution
and thereby having an historic necessity. This, however, does not
mean that man's scientific labours, carried out under the historically
given restrictions, great and successful as these labours were and are,
have not led to calamitous effects such as we found indicated by Pro-
fessor Carrel. The sciences of matter have led man into a country that
is not his, and the world which he has created by means of scientific
1 For one who endeavours to observe historical facts in the manner here
described, it is no mere play of chance that the father of scientific atomism, John
Dalton, was by nature colour blind. In fact, colour blindness was known, for a
considerable time during the last century, as 'Daltonism', since it was through the
publication of Dalton's self-observations that for the first time general attention
was drawn to this phenomenon.
research is not only one in which he is a stranger but one which
threatens to-day to deprive him of his own existence. The reason is
that this world is essentially a world of active forces, and the true
nature of these is something which modern man, restricted to his
onlooker-consciousness, is positively unable to conceive.
We have taken a first step in diagnosing man's present spiritual
condition. A few more steps are required to lead us to the point
where we can conceive the therapy he needs.
CHAPTER III
The Onlooker's Philosophic Malady
In his isolation as world spectator, the modern philosopher was
bound to reach two completely opposite views regarding the objec-
tive value of human thought. One of these was given expression in
Descartes' famous words: Cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am').
Descartes (1596-1650), rightly described as the inaugurator of mod-
ern philosophy, thus held the view that only in his own thought-
activity does man find a guarantee of his own existence.
In coming to this view, Descartes took as his starting-point his ex-
perience that human consciousness contains only the thought pictures
evoked by sense-perception, and yet knows nothing of the how and
why of the things responsible for such impressions. He thus found
himself compelled, in the first place, to doubt whether any of these
things had any objective existence, at all. Hence, there remained over
for him only one indubitable item in the entire content of the uni-
verse—his own thinking; for were he to doubt even this, he could do
so only by again making use of it. From the 'I doubt, therefore I am',
he was led in this way to the 'I think, therefore I am'.
The other conception of human thought reached by the onlooker-
consciousness was diametrically opposed to that of Descartes, and
entirely cancelled its conceptual significance. It was put forward—
not long afterwards—by Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the first scien-
tist to make systematic use of the newly invented microscope by
means of which he made the fundamental discovery of the cellular
structure of plant tissues. It was, indeed, on the strength of his micro-
scopic studies that he boldly undertook to determine the relationship
of human thought to objective reality. He published his views in the
introduction to his Micrographia, the great work in which, with the
lavish help of carefully executed copper engravings, he made his
microscopic observations known to the world.
Hooke's line of thought is briefly as follows: In past ages men
subscribed to the naive belief that what they have in their conscious-
ness as thought pictures of the world, actually reproduces the real
content of that world. The microscope now demonstrates, however,
how much the familiar appearance of the world depends on the
structure of our sense apparatus; for it reveals a realm just as real as
that already known to us, but hitherto concealed from us because it is
not accessible to the natural senses. Accordingly, if the microscope
can penetrate through the veil of illusion which normally hides a
whole world of potentially visible phenomena, it may be that it can
even teach us something about the ideas we have hitherto formed
concerning the nature of things. Perhaps it can bring us a step
nearer the truth in the sphere of thought, as it so obviously has done
in that of observation.
Of all the ideas that human reason can form, Hooke considered
the simplest and the most fundamental to be the geometrical con-
cepts of point and straight line. Undoubtedly we are able to think
these, but the naïve consciousness takes for granted that it also per-
ceives them as objective realities outside itself, so that thoughts and
facts correspond to each other. We must now ask, however, if this
belief is not due to an optical deception. Let us turn to the microscope
and see what point and line in the external world look like through it.
For his investigation Hooke chose the point of a needle and a
knife-edge, as providing the best representatives among physical
objects of point and straight line. In the sketches here reproduced we
may see how Hooke made clear to his readers how little these two
things, when observed through the microscope, resemble what is seen
by the unaided eye. This fact convinced Hooke that the apparent
agreement between the world of perception and the world of ideas
rests on nothing more solid than an optical limitation (Plate I).
Compared with the more refined methods of present-day thought,
Hooke's procedure may strike us as somewhat primitive. Actually he
did nothing more than has since been done times without number;
for the scientist has become more and more willing to allow artifi-
cially evoked sense-perceptions to dictate the thoughts he uses in
forming a scientific picture of the world.
In the present context we are concerned with the historical import
of Hooke's procedure. This lies in the fact that, immediately after
Descartes had satisfied himself that in thinking man had the one sure
guarantee of his own existence, Hooke proved in a seemingly indub-
itable manner that thinking was entirely divorced from reality. It re-
quired only another century for philosophy to draw from this the
unavoidable consequence. It appeared in the form of Hume's philo-
sophic system, the outcome of which was universal scepticism.
As we shall see in due course, Hume's mode of reasoning continues
to rule scientific thought even to-day, quite irrespective of the fact
that science itself claims to have its philosophical parent in Kant, the
very thinker who devoted his life's work to the refutation of Hume.
*
On the basis of his investigations into human consciousness Hume
felt obliged to reason thus: My consciousness, as I know it, has no
contact with the external world other than that of a mere outside on-
looker. What it wins for its own content from the outer world is in
the nature of single, mutually unrelated parts. Whatever may unite
these parts into an objective whole within the world itself can never
enter my consciousness; and any such unifying factor entertained by
my thought can be only a self-constructed, hypothetical picture. Hume
summed up his view in two axioms which he himself described as the
alpha and omega of his whole philosophy. The first runs: 'All our
distinct perceptions are distinct existences.' The other: 'The Mind
never perceives any real connexions between distinct existences.'
(Treatise of Human Nature.)
If once we agree that we can know of nothing but unrelated
thought pictures, because our consciousness is not in a position to
relate these pictures to a unifying reality, then we have no right to
ascribe, with Descartes and his school, an objective reality to the self.
Even though the self may appear to us as the unifying agent among
our thoughts, it must itself be a mental picture among mental pic-
tures ; and man can have no knowledge of any permanent reality out-
side this fluctuating picture-realm. So, with Hume, the onlooker-
consciousness came to experience its own utter inability to achieve a
knowledge of the objective existence either of a material world be-
behind all external phenomena, or of a spiritual self behind all the
details of its own internal content.
Accordingly, human consciousness found itself hurled into the
abyss of universal scepticism. Hume himself suffered unspeakably
under the impact of what he considered inescapable ideas—rightly
described from another side as the 'suicide of human intelligence'—
and his philosophy often seemed to him like a malady, as he himself
called it, against whose grip he could see no remedy. The only thing
left to him, if he was to prevent philosophical suicide from ending in
physical suicide, was to forget in daily life his own conclusions as far
as possible.
What Hume experienced as his philosophical malady, however,
was the result not of a mental abnormality peculiar to himself, but of
that modern form of consciousness which still prevails in general to-
day. This explains why, despite all attempts to disprove Hume's
philosophy, scientific thought has not broken away from its alpha
and omega in the slightest degree.
A proof of this is to be found, for example, in the principle of In-
determinacy which has arisen in modern physics,
*
The conception of Indeterminacy as an unavoidable consequence
of the latest phase of physical research is due to Professor W. Heisen-
berg. Originally this conception forced itself upon Heisenberg as a
result of experimental research. In the meantime the same idea has
received its purely philosophical foundation. We shall here deal with
both lines of approach.
After the discovery by Galileo of the parallelogram of forces, it
became the object of classical physics—unexpressed, indeed, until
Newton wrote his Principia—to bring the unchanging laws ruling
nature into the light of human consciousness, and to give them con-
ceptual expression in the language of mathematical formulae. Since,
however, science was obliged to restrict itself to what could be ob-
served with a single, colour-blind eye, physics has taken as its main
object of research the spatio-temporal relationships, and their changes,
between discrete, ideally conceived, point-like particles. Accordingly,
the mathematically formulable laws holding sway in nature came to
mean the laws according to which the smallest particles in the material
foundation of the world change their position with regard to each
other. A science of this kind could logically maintain that, if ever it
succeeded in defining both the position and the state of motion, in
one single moment, of the totality of particles composing the universe,
it would have discovered the law on which universal existence depends.
This necessarily rested on the presupposition that it really was the ulti-
mate particles of the physical world which were under observation. In
the search for these, guided chiefly by the study of electricity, the physi-
cists tracked down ever smaller and smaller units; and along this path
scientific research has arrived at the following peculiar situation.
To observe any object in the sense world we need an appropriate
medium of observation. For ordinary things, light provides this. In
the sense in which light is understood to-day, this is possible because
the spatial extension of the single light impulses, their so-called wave-
length, is immeasurably smaller than the average magnitude of all
microscopically visible objects. This ensures that they can be ob-
served clearly by the human eye. Much smaller objects, however, will
require a correspondingly shorter wave-length in the medium of
observation. Now shorter wave-lengths than those of visible light
have been found in ultra-violet light and in X-rays; and these,
accordingly, are now often used for minute physical research.
In this way, however, we are led by nature to a definite boundary;
for we now find ourselves in a realm where the dimensions of the
observation medium and the observed object are more or less the
same. The result, unfortunately, is that when the 'light' meets the
object, it changes the latter's condition of movement. On the other
hand, if a 'light' is used whose wave-length is too big to have any
influence on the object's condition of movement, it precludes any
exact determination of the object's location.
Thus, having arrived at the very ground of the world—that is,
where the cosmic laws might be expected to reveal themselves di-
rectly—the scientist finds himself in the remarkable situation of only
being able to determine accurately either the position of an observed
object and not its state of motion, or its state of motion and not its
position. The law he seeks, however, requires that both should be
known at the same time. Nor is this situation due to the imperfection
of the scientific apparatus employed, but to its very perfection, so
that it appears to arise from the nature of the foundation of the
world—in so far, at least, as modern science is bound to conceive it.
If it is true that a valid scientific knowledge of nature is possible
only in the sphere open to a single-eyed, colour-blind observation,
and if it is true—as a science of this kind, at any rate, is obliged to
believe—that all processes within the material foundation of the
world depend on nothing but the movements of certain elementary
particles of extremely small size, then the fact must be faced that the
very nature of these processes rules out the discovery of any stable
ordering of things in the sense of mathematically formulable laws.
The discovery of such laws will then always be the last step but one
in scientific investigation; the last will inevitably be the dissolution of
I such laws into chaos. For a consistent scientific thinking that goes
this way, therefore, nothing is left but to recognize chaos as the only
real basis of an apparently ordered world, a chaos on whose surface
the laws that seem to hold sway are only the illusory picturings of the
human mind. This, then, is the principle of Indeterminacy as it has
been encountered in the course of practical investigation into the
electrical processes within physical matter.
In the following way Professor Schrödinger, another leading
thinker among modern theoretical physicists, explains the philosoph-
ical basis for the principle of Indeterminacy, which scientists have
established in the meantime:1
'Every quantitative observation, every observation making use of
measurement, is by nature discontinuous. . . . However far we go in
the pursuit of accuracy we shall never get anything other than a
finite series of discrete results. . . . The raw material of our quantita-
tive cognition of nature will always have this primitive and discon-
tinuous character. ... It is possible that a physical system might be
so simple that this meagre information would suffice to settle its fate;
in that case nature would not be more complicated than a game of
chess. To determine a position of a game of chess thirty-three facts
suffice. ... If nature is more complicated than a game of chess, a
belief to which one tends to incline, then a physical system cannot be
determined by a finite number of observations. But in practice a
finite number of observations is all that we could make.'
Classical physics, the author goes on to show, held that it was
possible to gain a real insight into the laws of the universe, because
in principle an infinite number of such discrete observations would
enable us to fill in the gaps sufficiently to allow us to determine the
system of the physical world. Against this assumption modern phy-
sics must hold the view that an infinite number of observations can-
not in any case be carried out in practice, and that nothing compels
us to assume that even this would suffice to furnish us with the means
for a complete determination, which alone would allow us to speak
of 'law' in nature. 'This is the direction in which modern physics has
led us without really intending it.'
What we have previously said will make it clear enough that in
these words of a modern physicist we meet once more the two funda-
mentals of Hume's philosophy. It is just as obvious, however, that
the very principle thus re-affirmed at the latest stage of modern phy-
1 In his book, Science and the Human Temperament (Dublin, 1935).
sical science was already firmly established by Hooke, when he
sought to prove to his contemporaries the unreality of human ideas.
Let us recall Hooke's motives and results. The human reason dis-
covers that certain law-abiding forms of thought dwell within itself;
these are the rules of mathematical thinking. The eye informs the
reason that the same kind of law and order is present also in the
outer world. The mind can think point and line; the eye reports that
the same forms exist in nature outside. (Hooke could just as well have
taken as his examples the apex and edge of a crystal.) The reason mis-
trusts the eye, however, and with the help of the microscope 'im-
proves' on it. What hitherto had been taken for a compact, regulated
whole now collapses into a heap of unordered parts; behind the
illusion of law a finer observation detects the reality of chaos!
Had science in its vehement career from discovery to discovery not
forgotten its own beginnings so completely, it would not have needed
its latest researches to bring out a principle which it had in fact been
following from the outset—a principle which philosophy had already
recognized, if not in quite the same formulation, in the eighteenth
century. Indeterminacy, as we have just seen it explained by Schrö-
dinger, is nothing but the exact continuation of Humean scepticism.
CHAPTER IV
The Country that is Not Ours
1 he last two chapters have served to show the impasse into which
human perception and thinking have come—in so far as they have
been used for scientific purposes—by virtue of the relationship to the
world in which man's consciousness found itself when it awoke to
itself at the beginning of modern times. Now although the onlooker
in man, especially in the earliest stage of our period, gave itself up to
the conviction that a self-contained picture of the universe could be
formed out of the kind of materials available to it, it nevertheless had
a dim inkling that this picture, because it lacked all dynamic content,
had no bearing on the real nature of the universe. Unable to find this
reality within himself, the world-onlooker set about searching in his
own way for what was missing, and turned to the perceptible world
outside man. Here he came, all unexpectedly, upon . . . electricity.
Scarcely was electricity discovered than it drew human scientific
thinking irresistibly into its own realm. Thereby man found himself,
with a consciousness completely blind to dynamics, within a sphere of
only too real dynamic forces. The following description will show
what results this has had for man and his civilization.
*
First, let us recall how potent a role electricity has come to play in
social life through the great discoveries which began at the end of the
eighteenth century. To do this we need only compare the present
relationship between production and consumption in the economic
sphere with what it was before the power-machine, and especially the
electrically driven machine, had been invented. Consider some major
public undertaking in former times—say the construction of a great
mediaeval cathedral. Almost all the work was done by human beings,
with some help, of course, from domesticated animals. Under these
circumstances the entire source of productive power lay in the will-
energies of living beings, whose bodies had to be supplied with food,
clothing and housing; and to provide these, other productive powers
of a similar kind were required near the same place. Accordingly,
since each of the power units employed in the work was simultane-
ously both producer and consumer, a certain natural limit was placed
on the accumulation of productive forces in any one locality.
This condition of natural balance between production and con-
sumption was profoundly disturbed by the introduction of the steam
engine; but even so there were still some limits, though of a quite
different kind, to local concentrations of productive power. For
steam engines require water and coal at the scene of action, and these
take up space and need continual shifting and replenishing. Owing to
the very nature of physical matter, it cannot be neaped up where it is
required in unlimited quantities.
All this changed directly man succeeded in producing energy
electro-magnetically by the mere rotation of material masses, and in
using the water-power of the earth—itself ultimately derived from the
cosmic energies of the sun—for driving his dynamos. Not only is the
source of energy thus tapped practically inexhaustible, but the
machines produce it without consuming on their own account, apart
from wear and tear, and so make possible the almost limitless accumu-
lation of power in one place. For electricity is distinguished from all
other power-supplying natural forces, living or otherwise, precisely
in this, that it can be concentrated spatially with the aid of a physical
carrier whose material bulk is insignificant compared with the energy
supplied.
Through this property of electricity it has been possible for man to
extend the range of his activity in all directions, far and near. So the
balance between production and consumption, which in previous
ages was more or less adequately maintained by natural conditions,
has been entirely destroyed, and a major social-economic problem
created.
In yet another way, and through quite another of its properties,
electricity plays an important part in modern life. Not only does it
compete with the human will; it also makes possible automatically
intelligent operations quite beyond anything man can do on his own.
There are innumerable examples of this in modern electrical techno-
logy; we need mention here only the photo-electric cell and the many
devices into which it enters.
To an ever-increasing, quite uncontrolled degree—for to the mind
of present-day man it is only natural to translate every new discovery
into practice as soon and as extensively as possible—electricity enters
decisively into our modern existence. If we take all its activities into
account, we see arising amongst humanity a vast realm of labour
units, possessed in their own way not only of will but of the sharpest
imaginable intelligence. Although they are wholly remote from man's
own nature, he more and more subdues his thoughts and actions to
theirs, allowing them to take rank as guides and shapers of his
civilization.
Turning to the sphere of scientific research, we find electricity play-
ing a role in the development of modern thinking remarkably similar
to its part as a labour-force in everyday life. We find it associated with
phenomena which, in Professor Heisenberg's words, expose their
mutual connexions to exact mathematical thinking more readily than
do any other facts of nature; and yet the way in which these pheno-
mena have become known has played fast and loose with mathema-
tical thinking to an unparalleled degree. To recognize that in this
sphere modern science owes its triumphs to a strange and often para-
doxical mixture of outer accident and error in human thought, we
need only review the history of the subject without prejudice.
*
The discovery of electricity has so far been accomplished in four
clearly distinct stages. The first extends from the time when men first
knew of electrical phenomena to the beginning of the natural scien-
tific age; the second includes the seventeenth and the greater part of
the eighteenth centuries; the third begins with Galvani's discovery
and closes with the first observations of radiant electricity; and the
fourth brings us to our own day. We shall here concern ourselves with
a few outstanding features of each phase, enough to characterize the
strange path along which man has been led by the discovery of
electricity.
Until the beginning of modern times, nothing more was known
about electricity, or of its sister force, magnetism, than what we find
in Pliny's writings. There, without recognizing a qualitative distinc-
tion between them, he refers to the faculty of rubbed amber and of
certain pieces of iron to attract other small pieces of matter. It re-
quired the awakening of that overruling interest in material nature,
characteristic of our own age, for the essential difference between
electric and magnetic attraction to be recognized. The first to give a
proper description of this was Queen Elizabeth's doctor, Gilbert. His
discovery was soon followed by the construction of the first electrical
machine by the German Guericke (also known through his invention
of the air pump) which opened the way for the discovery that electri-
city could be transmitted from one place to another.
It was not, however, until the beginning of the eighteenth century
that the crop of electrical discoveries began to increase considerably:
among these was the recognition of the dual nature of electricity, by
the Frenchman, Dufais, and the chance invention of the Leyden jar
(made simultaneously by the German, von Kleist, and two Dutch-
men, Musschenbroek and Cunaeus). The Leyden jar brought electri-
cal effects of quite unexpected intensity within reach. Stimulated by
what could be done with electricity in this form, more and more
people now busied themselves in experimenting with so fascinating a
force of nature, until in the second third of the century a whole army
of observers was at work, whether by way of profession or of hobby,
finding out ever new manifestations of its powers.
The mood that prevailed in those days among men engaged in
electrical research is well reflected in a letter written by the English-
man, Walsh, after he had established the electric nature of the shocks
given by certain fishes, to Benjamin Franklin, who shortly before had
discovered the natural occurrence of electricity in the atmosphere:
'I rejoice in addressing these communications to You. He, who
predicted and shewed that electricity wings the formidable bolt of the
Atmosphere, will hear with attention that in the deep it speeds a
humbler bolt, silent and invisible; He, who analysed the electrical
Phial, will hear with pleasure that its laws prevail in animate Phials;
He, who by Reason became an electrician, will hear with reverence of
an instinctive electrician, gifted in his birth with a wonderful appar-
atus, and with the skill to use it.' (Phil. Trans. 1773.)
Dare one believe that in electricity the soul of nature had been dis-
covered? This was the question which at that time stirred the hearts
;of very many in Europe. Doctors had already sought to arouse new
•vitality in their patients by the use of strong electric shocks; attempts
had even been made to bring the dead back to life by such means.
. In a time like ours, when we are primarily concerned with the
practical application of scientific discoveries, we are mostly accus-
|tomed to regard such flights of thought from a past age as nothing
but the unessential accompaniment of youthful, immature science,
and to smile at them accordingly as historical curiosities. This is a
mistake, for we then overlook how within them was hidden an inkling
of the truth, however wrongly conceived at the time, and we ignore
the role which such apparently fantastic hopes have played in con-
nexion with the entry of electricity into human civilization. (Nor are
such hopes confined to the eighteenth century; as we shall see, the
same impulse urged Crookes a hundred years later to that decisive
discovery which was to usher in the latest phase in the history of
science, a phase in which the investigating human spirit has been led
to that boundary of the physical-material world where the transition
takes place from inert matter into freely working energy.)
If there was any doubt left as to whether in nature the same power
was at work which, in animal and man, was hidden away within the
soul, this doubt seemed finally to have been dispelled through Gal-
vani's discovery that animal limbs could be made to move electrically
through being touched by two bits of different metals. No wonder
that 'the storm which was loosed in the world of the physicists, the
physiologists and the doctors through Galvani's publication can only
be compared with the one crossing the political horizon of Europe at
the same time. Wherever there happened to be frogs and two pieces
of different metals available, everyone sought proof with his own
eyes that the severed limbs could be marvellously re-enlivened.'1
Like many of his contemporaries, Galvani was drawn by the fas-
cinating behaviour of the new force of nature to carry on electrical
experiments as a hobby alongside his professional work, anatomical
research. For his experiments he used the room where his anatomical
specimens were set out. So it happened that his electrical machine
stood near some frogs' legs, prepared for dissection. By a further
coincidence his assistant, while playing with the machine, released a
few sparks just when some of the specimens were in such contact with
the surface beneath them that they were bound to react to the sudden
alteration of the electric field round the machine caused by its dis-
charge. At each spark the frogs' legs twitched. What Galvani saw
with his own eyes seemed to be no less than the union of two pheno-
mena, one observed by Franklin in the heights of the atmosphere, the
other by Walsh in the depths of the sea.
Galvani, as he himself describes, proceeded with immense enthu-
1 E. du Bois-Raymond: Investigations into Animal Electricity (1884). Galvani
published his discovery when the French Revolution had reached its zenith and
Napoleon was climbing to power.
siasm to investigate systematically what accident had thus put into
his hands.1 He wanted first to see whether changes occurring natur-
ally in the electrical condition of the atmosphere would call forth the
same reaction in his specimens. For this purpose he fastened one end
of an iron wire to a point high up outside his house; the lower end he
connected with the nervous substance of a limb from one of his
specimens, and to the foot of this he attached a second wire whose
other end he submerged in a well. The specimen itself was either en-
closed in a glass flask in order to insulate it, or simply left lying on a
table near the well. And all this he did whenever a thunderstorm was
threatening. As he himself reported: 'All took place as expected.
Whenever the lightning flashed, all the muscles simultaneously came
into repeated and violent twitchings, so that the movements of the
muscles, like the flash of the lightning, always preceded the thunder,
and thus, as it were, heralded its coming.' We can have some idea of
what went on in Galvani's mind during these experiments if we picture
vividly to ourselves the animal limbs twitching about every time the
lightning flashed, as if a revitalizing force of will had suddenly taken
possession of them.
In the course of his investigations—he carried them on for a long
time—Galvani was astonished to observe that some of his specimens,
which he had hung on to an iron railing by means of brass hooks,
sometimes fell to twitching even when the sky was quite clear and
there was no sign of thunder. His natural conclusion was that this
must be due to hitherto unnoticed electrical changes in the atmo-
sphere. Observations maintained for hours every day, however, led
to no conclusive result; when twitchings did occur it was only with
some of the specimens, and even then there was no discoverable
cause. Then it happened one day that Galvani, 'tired out with fruit-
less watching', took hold of one of the brass hooks by which the
specimens were hung, and pressed it more strongly than usual against
the iron railing. Immediately a twitching took place. 'I was almost at
the point of ascribing the occurrence to atmospheric electricity,'
Galvani tells us. All the same he took one of the specimens, a frog,
into his laboratory and there subjected it to similar conditions by
putting it on an iron plate, and pressing against this with the hook
that was stuck through its spinal cord. Immediately the twitching
occurred again. He tried with other metals and, for checking pur-
1 The above account follows A. J. von Oettingen's edition of Galvani's mono-
graph, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari.
poses, with non-metals as well. With some ingenuity he fixed up an
arrangement, rather like that of an electric bell, whereby the limbs in
contracting broke contact and in relaxing restored it, and so he man-
aged to keep the frog in continuous rhythmical movement.
Whereas Galvani had been rightly convinced by his earlier obser-
vations that the movement in the specimens represented a reaction to
an electric stimulus from outside, he now changed his mind. In the
very moment of his really significant discovery he succumbed to the
error that he had to do with an effect of animal electricity located
somewhere in the dead creature itself, perhaps in the fashion of what
had been observed in the electric fishes. He decided that the metal
attachment served merely to set in motion the electricity within the
animal.
Whilst Galvani persisted in this mistake until his death, Volta
realized that the source of the electric force, as in the first of Galvani's
observations, must still be sought outside the specimens, and himself
rightly attributed it to the contacting metals. Guided by this hypo-
thesis, Volta started systematic research into the Galvanic properties
of metals, and presently succeeded in producing electricity once more
from purely mineral substances, namely from two different metals in
contact with a conductive liquid.
This mode of producing electricity, however, differed from any pre-
viously known in allowing for the first time the production of con-
tinuous electrical effects. It is this quality of the cells and piles
constructed by Volta that laid open the road for electric force to
assume that role in human civilization which we have already
described. That Volta himself was aware of this essentially new
factor in the Galvanic production of electricity is shown by his own
report to the Royal Society:
'The chief of my results, and which comprehends nearly all the others,
is the construction of an apparatus which resembles in its effects,
viz. such as giving shocks to the arms, &c, the Leyden phial, and still
better electric batteries weakly charged; .. . but which infinitely sur-
passes the virtue and power of these same batteries; as it has no need,
like them, of being charged beforehand, by means of a foreign elec-
tricity ; and as it is capable of giving the usual commotion as often as
ever it is properly touched.'
Whilst Volta's success was based on avoiding Galvani's error, his
apparatus nevertheless turned out inadvertently to be a close coun-
terpart of precisely that animal organ which Galvani had in mind
when misinterpreting his own discoveries! That Volta himself realized
this is clear from the concluding words in his letter:
'This apparatus, as it resembles more the natural organ of the tor-
pedo, or of the electrical eel, than the Leyden Phial or the ordinary
electric batteries, I may call an artificial electric organ.'
This new method of producing continuous electrical effects had
far-reaching results, one of which was the discovery of the magnetic
properties of the electric current by the Dane, Oersted—once again a
purely accidental discovery, moving directly counter to the assump-
tions of the discoverer himself. About to leave the lecture room
where he had just been trying to prove the non-existence of such
magnetic properties (an attempt seemingly crowned with success),
Oersted happened to glance once more at his demonstration bench.
To his astonishment he noticed that one of his magnetic needles was
out of alignment; evidently it was attracted by a magnetic field
created by the current running through a wire he had just been using,
which was still in circuit. Thus what had escaped Oersted throughout
his planned researches—namely, that the magnetic force which
accompanies an electric current must be sought in a direction at right
angles to the current—a fortuitous event enabled him to detect.
These repeated strokes of chance and frequently mistaken inter-
pretations of the phenomenon thus detected show that men were ex-
ploring the electrical realm as it were in the dark; it was a realm for-
eign to their ordinary ideas and they had not developed the forms of
thought necessary for understanding it. (And this, as our further
survey will show, is still true, even to-day.)
In our historical survey we come next to the researches of Faraday
and Maxwell. Faraday was convinced that if electrical processes are
accompanied by magnetic forces, as Oersted had shown, the reverse
must also be true—magnetism must be accompanied by electricity.
He was led to this correct conviction by his belief in the qualitative
unity of all the forces of nature—a reflexion, as his biography shows,
of his strongly monotheistic, Old Testament faith. Precisely this view,
however—which since Faraday natural science has quite consciously
adopted as a leading principle—will reveal itself to us as a funda-
mental error.
It seems paradoxical to assert that the more consistently human
thought has followed this error, the greater have been the results of
the scientific investigation of electricity. Precisely this paradox, how-
ever, is characteristic of the realm of nature to which electricity be-
longs; and anyone earnestly seeking to overcome the illusions of our
age will have to face the fact that the immediate effectiveness of an
idea in practice is no proof of its ultimate truth.
Another eloquent example of the strange destiny of human thought
in connexion with electricity is to be found in the work of Clark
Maxwell, who, starting from Faraday's discoveries, gave the theory
of electricity its mathematical basis. Along his purely theoretical line
of thought he was led to the recognition of the existence of a form of
electrical activity hitherto undreamt of—electro-magnetic vibrations.
Stimulated by Maxwell's mathematical conclusions, Hertz and Mar-
coni were soon afterwards able to demonstrate those phenomena
which have led on the one hand to the electro-magnetic theory of
light, and on the other to the practical achievements of wireless
communication.
Once again, there is the paradoxical fact that this outcome of Max-
well's labours contradicts the very foundation on which he had built
his theoretical edifice. For his starting-point had been to form a
picture of the electro-magnetic field of force to which he could apply
certain well-known formulae of mechanics. This he did by comparing
the behaviour of the electrical force to the currents of an elastic fluid
—that is, of a material substance. It is true that both he and his suc-
cessors rightly emphasized that such a picture was not in any way
meant as an explanation of electricity, but merely as an auxiliary
concept in the form of a purely external analogy. Nevertheless, it was
in the guise of a material fluid that he thought of this force, and that
he could submit it to mathematical calculation. Yet the fact is that
from this starting-point the strict logic of mathematics led him to the
discovery that electricity is capable of behaviour which makes it
appear qualitatively similar to ... light!
Whilst practical men were turning the work of Faraday and Max-
well to account by exploiting the mechanical working of electricity in
power-production, and its similarity to light in the wireless communi-
cation of thought, a new field of research, with entirely new practical
possibilities, was suddenly opened up in the last third of the nine-
teenth century through the discovery of how electricity behaves in
rarefied air. This brings us to the discovery of cathode rays and the
phenomena accompanying them, from which the latest stage in the
history of electricity originated. And here once more, as in the history
of Galvani's discoveries, we encounter certain undercurrents of long-
ing and expectation in the human soul which seemed to find an
answer through this sudden, great advance in the knowledge of
electricity—an advance which has again led to practical applications
of the utmost significance for human society, though not at all in the
way first hoped for.
Interest in the phenomena arising when electricity passes through
gases with reduced pressure had simultaneously taken hold of several
investigators in the seventies of the nineteenth century. But the deci-
sive step in this sphere of research was taken by the English physicist,
William Crookes. He was led on by a line of thought which seems
entirely irrelevant; yet it was this which first directed his interest to
the peculiar phenomena accompanying cathode rays; and they
proved to be the starting-point of the long train of inquiry which has
now culminated in the release of atomic energy.1
In the midst of his many interests and activities, Crookes was filled
from his youth with a longing to find by empirical means the bridge
leading from the world of physical effects to that of superphysical
causes. He himself tells how this longing was awakened in him by the
loss of a much-beloved brother. Before the dead body he came to the
question, which thereafter was never to leave him, whether there was
a land where the human individuality continues after it has laid aside
its bodily sheath, and how that land was to be found. Seeing that
scientific research was the instrument which modern man had forged
to penetrate through the veil of external phenomena to the causes
producing them, it was natural for Crookes to turn to it in seeking
the way from the one world into the other.
It was after meeting with a man able to produce effects within the
corporeal world by means of forces quite different from those fami-
liar to science, that Crookes decided to devote himself to this scien-
tific quest. Thus he first came into touch with that sphere of pheno-
mena which is known as spiritualism, or perhaps more suitably,
spiritism. Crookes now found himself before a special order of hap-
penings which seemed to testify to a world other than that open to
our senses; physical matter here showed itself capable of movement
in defiance of gravity, manifestations of light and sound appeared
without a physical source to produce them. Through becoming fami-
liar with such things at seances arranged by his mediumistic acquain-
tance, he began to hope that he had found the way by which scientific
research could overstep the limits of the physical world. Accordingly,
1 For what follows see The Life of Sir William Crookes, by E. E. Fournier
D'Albe (London, 1923).
he threw himself eagerly into the systematic investigation of his new
experiences, and so became the father of modern scientific spiritism.
Crookes had hoped that the scientists of his day would be posi-
tively interested in his researches. But his first paper in this field,
'On Phenomena called Spiritual', was at once and almost unanim-
ously rejected by his colleagues, and as long as he concerned himself
with such matters he suffered through their opposition. It passed his
understanding as a scientist why anything should be regarded in ad-
vance as outside the scope of scientific research. After several years of
fruitless struggle he broke off his investigations into spiritism, deeply
disillusioned at his failure to interest official science in it. His own
partiality for it continued, however (he served as President of the
Society for Psychical Research from 1896-9), and he missed no
opportunity of confessing himself a pioneer in the search for the
boundary-land between the worlds of matter and spirit. Through all his
varied scientific work the longing persisted to know more of this land.
Just as Crookes had once sought to investigate spiritism scientific-
ally, so in his subsequent scientific inquiries he was always some-
thing of a spiritist. He admitted, indeed, that he felt specially attracted
by the strange light effects arising when electricity passes through
rarefied gases, because they reminded him of certain luminous pheno-
mena he had observed during his spiritistic investigations. Besides this,
there was the fact that light here showed itself susceptible to the mag-
netic force in a way otherwise characteristic only of certain material
substances. Accordingly, everything combined to suggest to Crookes
that here, if anywhere, he was at the boundary between the physical
and the superphysical worlds. No wonder that he threw himself into
the study of these phenomena with enthusiasm.
He soon succeeded in evoking striking effects—light and heat, and
also mechanical—along the path of electricity passing invisibly through
the tube later named after him. Thus he proved for the first time
visibly, so to say, the double nature—material and supermaterial—
of electricity. What Crookes himself thought about these discoveries
in the realm of the cathode rays we may judge from the title, 'Radiant
Matter', or 'The Fourth State of Matter', which he gave to his first
publication about them. And so he was only being consistent when,
in his lectures before the Royal Institution in London, and the British
Association in Sheffield in 1879, after showing to an amazed scientific
audience the newly discovered properties of electricity, he came to the
climax of his exposition by saying: 'We have seen that in some of its
The Country that is Not Ours
properties Radiant Matter is as material as this table, whilst in other
properties it almost assumes the character of Radiant Energy. We
have actually touched here the borderland where Matter and Force
seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between Known
and Unknown, which for me has always had peculiar temptations.'
And in boldly prophetic words, which time has partly justified, he
added, 'I venture to think that the greatest scientific problems of the
future will find their solution in this Borderland, and even beyond; here,
it seems to me, lie Ultimate Realities, subtle, far-reaching, wonderful.'
No one can read these words of Crookes without hearing again, as
an undertone, the question which had forced itself on him at the bed-
side of his dead brother, long before. All that is left of the human
being whom death has taken is a heap of substances, deserted by the
force which had used them as the instrument of its own activity.
Whither vanishes this force when it leaves the body, and is there any
possibility of its revealing itself even without occupying such a body?
Stirred by this question, the young Crookes set out to find a world
of forces which differ from the usual mechanical ones exercised by
matter on matter, in that they are autonomous, superior to matter in
its inert conglomeration, yet capable of using matter, just as the soul
makes use of the body so long as it dwells within it. His aim was to
secure proof that such forces exist, or, at any rate, to penetrate into
the realm where the transition from matter to pure, matter-free force
takes place. And once again, as in Galvani's day, electricity fascinated
the eyes of a man who was seeking for the land of the soul. What
spiritism denied, electricity seemed to grant.
The aversion to spiritism which Crookes met with in contemporary
science was, from the standpoint of such a science, largely justified.
Science, in the form in which Crookes himself conceived it, took for
granted that the relationship of human consciousness to the world
was that of external onlooking. Accordingly, if the scientist remained
within the limits thus prescribed for consciousness, it was only con-
sistent to refuse to make anything beyond these limits an object of
scientific research.
On the other hand, it says much for the courage and open minded-
ness of Crookes that he refused to be held back from what was for
him the only possible way of extending the boundaries of science be-
yond the given physical world. Moreover, it was only natural that in
his search for a world of a higher order than the physical he should,
as a man of his time, first turn his attention to spiritistic occurrences,
57
for spiritism, as it had come over to Europe from America in the
middle of the nineteenth century, was nothing but an attempt by the
onlooker-consciousness to learn something in its own way about the
supersensible world.The spiritist expects the spirit to reveal itself in out-
wardly perceptible phenomena as if it were part of the physical world.
Towards the end of his life Crookes confessed that if he were able
to begin again he would prefer to study telepathic phenomena—the
direct transference of thought from one person to another—rather
than the purely mechanical, or so-called tele kinetic, expressions of
psychic forces. But although his interest was thus turning towards a
more interior field of psychic investigation, he remained true to his
times in still assuming that knowledge about the world, whatever it
might be, could be won only by placing oneself as a mere onlooker
outside the object of research.
*
The stream of new discoveries which followed Crookes's work
justified his conviction that in cathode ray phenomena we have to do
with a frontier region of physical nature. Still, the land that lies on
the other side of this frontier is not the one Crookes had been looking
for throughout his life. For, instead of finding the way into the land
whither man's soul disappears at death, Crookes had inadvertently
crossed the border into another land—a land which the twentieth-
century scientist is impelled to call 'the country that is not ours'.
The realm thrown open to science by Crookes's observations,
which human knowledge now entered as if taking it by storm, was
that of the radioactive processes of the mineral stratum of the earth.
Many new and surprising properties of electricity were discovered
there—yet the riddle of electricity itself, instead of coming nearer,
withdrew into ever deeper obscurity.
The very first step into this newly discovered territory made the
riddle still more bewildering. As we have said, Maxwell's use of a
material analogy as a means of formulating mathematically the pro-
perties of electro-magnetic fields of force had led to results which
brought electricity into close conjunction with light. In his own way
Crookes focused, to begin with, his attention entirely on the light-
like character of electric effects in a vacuum. It was precisely these
observations, however, as continued by Lenard and others, which
presently made it necessary to see in electricity nothing else than a
special manifestation of inert mass.
The developments leading up to this stage are recent and familiar
enough to be briefly summarized. The first step was once more an
accident, when Röntgen (or rather one of his assistants) noticed that
a bunch of keys, laid down by chance on top of an unopened box of
photographic plates near a cathode tube, had produced an inexplic-
able shadow-image of itself on one of the plates. The cathode tube
was apparently giving off some hitherto unknown type of radiation,
capable of penetrating opaque substances. Röntgen was an experi-
mentalist, not a theorist; his pupils used to say privately that in pub-
lishing this discovery of X-rays he attempted a theoretical explana-
tion for the first and only time in his life—and got it wrong!
However, this accidental discovery had far-reaching consequences.
It drew attention to the fluorescence of minerals placed in the cathode
tube; this inspired Becquerel to inquire whether naturally fluorescent
substances gave off anything like X-rays, and eventually—yet again
by accident—he came upon certain uranium compounds. These were
found to give off a radiation similar to X-rays, and to give it off
naturally and all the time. Soon afterwards the Curies succeeded in
isolating the element, radium, an element which was found to be
undergoing a continuous natural disintegration. The way was now
clear for that long series of experiments on atomic disintegration
which led finally to the splitting of the nucleus and the construction
of the atomic bomb.
*
A typical modern paradox emerges from these results. By restrict-
ing his cognitive powers to a field of experience in which the concept
offeree as an objective reality was unthinkable, man has been led on
a line of practical investigation the pursuit of which was bound to
land him amongst the force-activities of the cosmos. For what dis-
tinguishes electric and sub-electric activities from all other forces of
physical nature so far known to science, is that for their operation
they have no need of the resistance offered by space-bound material
bodies; they represent a world of pure dynamics into which spatial
limitations do not enter.
Equally paradoxical is the situation of theoretical thinking in face
of that realm of natural being which practical research has lately
entered. We have seen that this thinking, by virtue of the conscious-
ness on which it is founded, is impelled always to clothe its ideas in
spatial form. Wherever anything in the pure spatial adjacency of phy-
sical things remains inexplicable, resort is had to hypothetical pic-
tures whose content consists once more of nothing but spatially ex-
tended and spatially adjacent items. In this way matter came to be
seen as consisting of molecules, molecules of atoms, and atoms of
electrons, protons, neutrons, and so forth.
In so far as scientific thought has held to purely spatial concep-
tions, it has been obliged to concentrate on ever smaller and smaller
spatial sizes, so that the spatially conceived atom-picture has finally
to reckon with dimensions wherein the old concept of space loses
validity. When once thinking had started in this direction, it was
electricity which once more gave it the strongest impulse to go even
further along the same lines.
Where we have arrived along this path is brought out in a passage
in Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World. There, after
describing the modern picture of electrons dancing round the atomic
nucleus, he says: 'This spectacle is so fascinating that we have per-
haps forgotten that there was a time when we wanted to be told what
an electron is. This question was never answered. No familiar con-
ceptions can be woven round the electron; it belongs to the waiting
list.' The only thing we can say about the electron, if we are not to
deceive ourselves, Eddington concludes, is: ''Something unknown is
doing we don't know what.'1
Let us add a further detail from this picture of the atom, as given
in Eddington's Philosophy of Physical Science. Referring to the so-
called positron, the positive particle regarded as the polar opposite of
the negative electron, he remarks: 'A positron is a hole from which
an electron has been removed; it is a bung-hole which would be
evened up with its surroundings if an electron were inserted.... You
will see that the physicist allows himself even greater liberty than the
sculptor. The sculptor removes material to obtain the form he
desires. The physicist goes further and adds material if necessary—
an operation which he describes as removing negative material. He
fills up a bung-hole, saying he is removing a positron.' Eddington thus
shows to what paradoxical ideas the scientist is driven, when with his
accustomed forms of thought he ventures into regions where the con-
ditions necessary for such forms no longer exist; and he concludes
his remarks with the following caution: 'Once again I would remind
you that objective truth is not the point at issue.'
1 Eddington's italics. See also, in this respect, Professor White head's criticism
of the hypothetical picture of the electron and its behaviour.
By this reminder Eddington shows how far science has reconciled
itself to the philosophic scepticism at which man's thinking had
arrived in the days of Hume. In so far as the above remark was in-
tended to be a consolation for the bewildered student, it is poor com-
fort in the light of the actions which science has let loose with the
help of those unknown entities. For it is just this resignation of human
thought which renders it unable to cope with the flood of phenomena
springing from the sub-material realm of nature, and has allowed
scientific research to outrun scientific understanding.
PART II
Goetheanism—Whence and Whither?
CHAPTER V
The Adventure of Reason
In 1790, a year before Galvani's monograph, Concerning the Forces
of Electricity, appeared, Goethe published his Metamorphosis of
Plants, which represents the first step towards the practical overcom-
ing of the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness in science.
Goethe's paper was not destined to raise such a storm as soon fol-
lowed Galvani's publication. And yet the fruit of Goethe's endeav-
ours is not less significant than Galvani's discovery, for the progress
of mankind. For in Goethe's achievement lay the seed of that form of
knowing which man requires, if in the age of the electrification of
civilization he is to remain master of his existence.
*
Among the essays in which Goethe in later years gave out some of
the results of his scientific observation in axiomatic form, is one called
'Intuitive Judgment' ('Anschauende Urteilskraft'), in which he main-
tains that he has achieved in practice what Kant had declared to be
for ever beyond the scope of the human mind. Goethe refers to a
passage in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant defines the limits of
human cognitional powers as he had observed them in his study of the
peculiar nature of the human reason. We must first go briefly into
Kant's own exposition of the matter.1
Kant distinguishes between two possible forms of reason, the
intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. By the first he means
a reason 'which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, pro-
ceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such)
1 Critique of Judgment, II, 11, 27. Goethe chose the title of his essay so as to
refute Kant by its very wording. Kant, through his inquiry into man's Urteils-
kraft, arrived at the conclusion that man is denied the power of Anschauung
(intuition). Against this, Goethe puts his Anschauende Urteilskraft.
to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts'. According to
Kant, such a reason lies outside human possibilities. In contrast to it,
the intellectus ectypus peculiar to man is restricted to taking in
through the senses the single details of the world as such; with these
it can certainly construct pictures of their totalities, but these pictures
never have more than a hypothetical character and can claim no real-
ity for themselves. Above all, it is not given to such a thinking to
think 'wholes' in such a way that through an act of thought alone the
single items contained in them can be conceived as parts springing
from them by necessity. (To illustrate this, we may say that, accord-
ing to Kant, we can certainly comprehend the parts of an organism,
say of a plant, and out of its components make a picture of the plant
as a whole; but we are not in a position to think that 'whole' of the
plant which conditions the existence of its organism and brings forth
its parts by necessity.) Kant expresses this in the following way:
'For external objects as phenomena an adequate ground related to
purposes cannot be met with; this, although it lies in nature, must be
sought only in the supersensible substrata of nature, from all possible
insight into which we are cut off. Our understanding has then this
peculiarity as concerns the judgment, that in cognitive understanding
the particular is not determined by the universal and cannot therefore
be derived from it.'
The attempt to prove whether or not another form of reason than
this (the intellectus archetypus) is possible—even though declared to
be beyond man—Kant regarded as superfluous, because the fact was
enough for him 'that we are led to the Idea of it—which contains no
contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding, which
has need of images (intellectus ectypus), and to the contingency of its
constitution'.
Kant here brings forward two reasons why it is permissible to con-
ceive of the existence of an extra-human, archetypal reason. On the
one hand he admits that the existence of our own reason in its present
condition is of a contingent order, and thus does not exclude the poss-
ible existence of a reason differently constituted. On the other hand,
he allows that we can think of a form of reason which in every
respect is the opposite of our own, without meeting any logical in-
consistency.
From these definitions emerges a conception of the properties of
man's cognitional powers which agrees exactly with those on which,
as we have seen, Hume built up his whole philosophy. Both allow to
the reason a knowledge-material consisting only of pictures—that is,
of pictures evoked in consciousness through sense-perception, and
received by it from the outer world in the form of disconnected units,
whilst denying it all powers, as Hume expressed it, ever 'to perceive
any real connections between distinct existences'.
This agreement between Kant and Hume must at first sight surprise
us, when we recall that, as already mentioned, Kant worked out his
philosophy precisely to protect the cognizing being of man from the
consequences of Hume's thought. For, as he himself said, it was his
becoming acquainted with Hume's Treatise that 'roused him out of
his dogmatic slumber' and obliged him to reflect on the foundations
of human knowing. We shall understand this apparent paradox, how-
ever, if we take it as a symptom of humanity's close imprisonment in
recent centuries within the limits of its onlooker-consciousness.
In his struggle against Hume, Kant was not concerned to challenge
his opponent's definition of man's reasoning power. His sole object
was to show that, if one accepted this definition, one must not go as
far as Hume in the application of this power. All that Kant could
aspire to do was to protect the ethical from attack by the intellectual
part of man, and to do this by proving that the former belongs to a
world into which the latter has no access. For with his will man be-
longs to a world of purposeful doing, whereas the reason, as our
quotations have shown, is incapable even in observing external nature,
of comprehending the wholes within nature which determine natural
ends. Still less can it do this in regard to man, a being who in his
actions is integrated into higher purposes.
Kant's deed is significant in that it correctly drew attention to that
polar division in human nature which, after all, was already estab-
lished in Kant's own time. Kant demonstrated also that to win in-
sight into the ethical nature of man with the aid of the isolated intel-
lect alone implied a trespass beyond permissible limits. In order to
give the doing part of the human being its necessary anchorage, how-
ever, Kant assigned it to a moral world-order entirely external to
man, to which it could be properly related only through obedient
submission.
In this way Kant became the philosopher of that division between
knowledge and faith which to this day is upheld in both the ecclesi-
astical and scientific spheres of our civilization. Nevertheless, he did
not succeed in safeguarding humanity from the consequences of
Hume's philosophy; for man cannot live indefinitely in the belief that
with the two parts of his own being he is bound up with two mutually
unrelated worlds. The time when this was feasible is already over, as
may be seen from the fact that ever greater masses of men wish to
determine their behaviour according to their own ideas, and as they
see no alternative in the civilization around them but to form ideas by
means of the discursive reason which inevitably leads to agnosticism,
they determine their actions accordingly. Meanwhile, the ethical life
as viewed by Kant accordingly shrinks ever further into a powerless,
hole-and-corner existence.
*
It is Goethe's merit to have first shown that there is a way out of
this impasse. He had no need to argue theoretically with Kant as to
the justification of denying man any power of understanding apart
from the discursive, and of leaving the faculty of intuitive knowledge
to a divinity somewhere outside the world of man. For Goethe was
his own witness that Kant was mistaken in regarding man's present
condition as his lasting nature. Let us hear how he expresses himself
on this fact at the beginning of his essay written as an answer to
Kant's statement:
'It is true, the author here seems to be pointing to an intellect not
human but divine. And yet, if in the moral sphere we are supposed to
lift ourselves up to a higher region through faith in God, Virtue and
Immortality, so drawing nearer to the Primal Being, why should it
not be likewise in the intellectual? By contemplation (Anschauen) of
an ever-creative nature, may we not make ourselves worthy to be
spiritual sharers in her productions? I at first, led by an inner urge
that would not rest, had quite unconsciously been seeking for the
realm of Type and Archetype, and my attempt had been rewarded: I
had been able to build up a description, in conformity with Nature
herself. Now therefore nothing more could hinder me from braving
what the Old Man of the King's Hill1 himself calls the Adventure of
Reason.'
Goethe started from the conviction that our senses as well as our
intellect are gifts of nature, and that, if at any given moment they
prove incapable through their collaboration of solving a riddle of
nature, we must ask her to help us to develop this collaboration ade-
quately. Thus there was no question for him of any restriction of
1 'Der Alte vom Königsberge'—a play upon words with the name of Kant's
native town, Königsberg.
sense-perception in order to bring the latter in line with the existing
power of the intellect, but rather to learn to make an ever fuller use
of the senses and to bring our intellect into line with what they tell.
'The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives', is one of his
basic utterances concerning their respective roles in our quest for
knowledge and understanding. As to the senses themselves, he was
sure that 'the human being is adequately equipped for all true earthly
requirements if he trusts his senses, and so develops them as to make
them worthy of trust'.
There is no contradiction in the statement that we have to trust our
senses, and that we have to develop them to make them trustworthy.
For, 'nature speaks upwards to the known senses of man, down-
wards to unknown senses of his'. Goethe's path was aimed at waken-
ing faculties, both perceptual and conceptual, which lay dormant in
himself. His experience showed him that 'every process in nature,
rightly observed, wakens in us a new organ of cognition'. Right
observation, in this respect, consisted in a form of contemplating
nature which he called a 're-creating (creating in the wake) of an ever-
creative nature' (Nachschaffen einer immer schaffenden Natur).
*
We should do Goethe an injustice if we measured the value of his
scientific work by the amount of factual knowledge he contributed
to one or other sphere of research. Although Goethe did bring many
new things to light, as has been duly recognized in the scientific fields
concerned, it cannot be gainsaid that other scientists in his own day,
working along the usual lines, far exceeded his total of discoveries.
Nor can it be denied that, as critics have pointed out, he occasionally
went astray in reporting his observations. These things, however, do
not determine the value or otherwise of his scientific labours. His
work draws its significance not so much from the 'what', to use a
Goethean expression, as from the 'how' of his observations, that is,
from his way of investigating nature. Having once developed this
method in the field of plant observation, Goethe was able, with its
aid, to establish a new view of animal nature, to lay the basis for a
new meteorology, and, by creating his theory of light and colour, to
provide a model for a research in the field of physics, free from
onlooker-restrictions.
In the scientific work of Goethe his botanical studies have a
special place. As a living organism, the plant is involved in an endless
process of becoming. It shares this characteristic, of course, with the
higher creatures of nature, and yet between it and them there is an
essential difference. Whereas in animal and man a considerable part
of the life-processes conceal themselves within the organism, in order
to provide a basis for inner soul processes, the plant brings its inner
life into direct and total outer manifestation. Hence the plant, better
than anything, could become Goethe's first teacher in his exercise of
re-creating nature.
It is for the same reason that we shall here use the plant for intro-
ducing Goethe's method. The following exposition, however, does
not aim at rendering in detail Goethe's own botanical researches, ex-
pounded by him in two extensive essays, Morphology and The Meta-
morphosis of Plants, as well as in a series of smaller writings. There
are several excellent translations of the chief paper, the Metamor-
phosis, from which the English-speaking reader can derive sufficient
insight into Goethe's way of expressing his ideas; a pleasure as well
as a profit which he should not deny himself.
Our own way of procedure will have to be such that Goethe's
method, and its fruitfulness for the general advance of science, come
as clearly as possible into view.1 Botanical details will be referred to
only as far as seems necessary for this purpose.
The data for observation, from which in Goethe's own fashion we
shall start, have been selected as best for our purpose, quite inde-
pendently of the data used by Goethe himself. Our choice was deter-
mined by the material available when these pages were being written.
The reader is free to supplement our studies by his own observation
of other plants.
*
Plates II and III show two series of leaves which are so arranged as
to represent definite stages in the growth-process of the plant con-
cerned. In each sequence shown the leaves have been taken from a
single plant, in which each leaf-form was repeated, perhaps several
times, before it passed over into the next stage. The leaves on Plate II
come from a Sidalcea (of the mallow family), those on Plate III from
a Delphinium. We will describe the forms in sequence, so that we
may grasp as clearly as possible the transition from one to another as
presented to the eye.
1 It is naturally to be expected that new light will also be thrown on the
various realms of knowledge as such dealt with in these pages.
Starting with the right-hand leaf at the bottom of Plate II, we let our
eye and mind be impressed by its characteristic form, seeking to take
hold of the pattern after which it is shaped. Its edge bears numerous
incisions of varying depths which, however, do not disturb the round-
ness of the leaf as a whole. If we re-create in our imagination the
'becoming' of such a leaf, that is, its gradual growth in all directions,
\ve receive an impression of these incisions as 'negative' forms, be-
cause, at the points where they occur, the multiplication of the cells
resulting from the general growth has been retarded. We observe that
this holding back follows a certain order.
We now proceed to the next leaf on the same plate and observe
that, whilst the initial plan is faithfully maintained, the ratio be-
tween the positive and negative forms has changed. A number of in-
cisions, hardly yet indicated in the first leaf, have become quite con-
spicuous. The leaf begins to look as if it were breaking up into a
number of subdivisions.
In the next leaf we find this process still further advanced. The
large incisions have almost reached the centre, while a number of
smaller ones at the periphery have also grown deeper into the leaf.
The basic plan of the total leaf is still maintained, but the negative
forms have so far got the upper hand that the original roundness is
no longer obvious.
The last leaf shows the process in its extreme degree. As we glance
back and along the whole series of development, we recognize that
the form of the last leaf is already indicated in that of the first. It
appears as if the form has gradually come to the fore through certain
forces which have increasingly prevented the leaf from filling in the
whole of its ground-plan with matter. In the last leaf the common
plan is still visible in the distribution of the veins, but the fleshy part
of the leaf has become restricted to narrow strips along these veins.
The metamorphosis of the delphinium leaf (Plate III) is of a differ-
ent character. Here the plant begins with a highly elaborate form of
the leaf, while in the end nothing remains but the barest indication of
it. The impression received from this series of leaves is that of a
gradual withdrawal of the magnificent form, revealed in its fullness
only in the first leaf.
A more intense impression of what these metamorphoses actually
mean is achieved by altering our mode of contemplation in the fol-
lowing way. After repeated and careful observation of the different
forms on either of the plates, we build up inwardly, as a memory
picture, the shape of the first leaf, and then transform this mental
image successively into the images of the ensuing forms until we
reach the final stage. The same process can also be tried retrogres-
sively, and so repeated forward and backward.
This is how Goethe studied the doing of the plant, and it is by this
method that he discovered the spiritual principle of all plant life, and
succeeded also in throwing a first light on the inner life-principle of
animals.
*
We chose the transformation of leaf forms into one another as the
starting-point of our observations, because the principle of metamor-
phosis appears here in a most conspicuous manner. This principle,
however, is not confined to this part of the plant's organism. In fact,
all the different organs which the plant produces within its life cycle
—foliage, calyx, corolla, organs of fertilization, fruit and seed—are
metamorphoses of one and the same organ.
Man has long learnt to make use of this law of metamorphosis in
the plant for what is called doubling the flower of a certain species.
Such a flower crowds many additional petals within its original
circle, and these petals are nothing but metamorphosed stamens;
this, for instance, is the difference between the wild and the cultivated
rose. The multitude of petals in the latter is obtained by the trans-
formation of a number of the former's innumerable stamens. (Note
the intermediate stages between the two, often found inside the
flower of such plants.)
This falling back from the stage of an organ of fertilization to that
of a petal shows that the plant is capable of regressive metamorphosis,
and we may conclude from this that in the normal sequence the dif-
ferent organs are transformed from one another by way of progressive
metamorphosis. It is evident that the regressive type occurs only as an
abnormality, or as a result of artificial cultivation. Plants once
brought into this condition frequently show a general state of un-
rest, so that other organs also are inclined to fall back to a lower
level. Thus we may come across a rose, an outer petal of which
appears in the form of a leaf of the calyx (sepal), or one of the sepals
is found to have grown into an ordinary rose leaf.
We now extend our mental exercise to the plant's whole organism.
By a similar mental effort as applied to the leaf-formations we strive to
build up a complete plant. We start with the seed, from which we
first imagine the cotyledons unfolding, letting this be followed by the
gradual development of the entire green part of the plant, its stem
and leaves, until the final leaves change into the sepals of the calyx.
These again we turn into the petals of the flower, until via pistil and
stamens the fruit and seed are formed.
By pursuing in this way the living doing of the plant from stage to
stage we become aware of a significant rhythm in its total life cycle.
This, when first discovered by Goethe, gave him the key to an under-
standing of nature's general procedure in building living organisms,
and in maintaining life in them.
The plant clearly divides into three major parts: firstly, the one
that extends from the cotyledons to the calyx, the green part of the
plant, that is, where the life principle is most active; secondly, the one
comprising the flower itself with the organs of fertilization, where the
vitality of the plant gives way to other principles; and lastly, the fruit
and seed, which are destined to be discharged from the mother
organism. Each of these three contains two kinds of organs: first,
organs with the tendency to grow into width—leaf, flower and fruit;
second, organs which are outwardly smaller and simpler, but have
the function of preparing the decisive leaps in the plant's develop-
ment : these are the calyx, the stamens, etc., and the seed.
In this succession, Goethe recognized a certain rhythm of expan-
sion and contraction, and he found that the plant passes through it
three times during any one cycle of its life. In the foliage the plant
expands, in the calyx it contracts; it expands again in the flower and
contracts in the pistil and stamens; finally, it expands in the fruit and
contracts in the seed.
The deeper meaning of this threefold rhythm will become clear
when we consider it against the background of what we observed in
the metamorphosis of the leaf. Take the mallow leaf; its metamor-
phosis shows a step-wise progression from coarser to finer forms,
whereby the characteristic plan of the leaf comes more and more into
view, so that in the topmost leaf it reaches a certain stage of perfec-
tion. Now we observe that in the calyx this stage is not improved on,
but that the plant recurs to a much simpler formation.
Whilst in the case of the mallow the withdrawal from the stage of
the leaf into that of the calyx occurs with a sudden leap, we observe
that the delphinium performs this process by degrees. Whilst the
mallow reaches the highly elaborate form of the leaf only in the final
stage, the delphinium leaps forth at the outset, as it were, with the
fully accomplished leaf, and then protracts its withdrawal into the
calyx over a number of steps, so that this process can be watched
with our very eyes. In this type of metamorphosis the last leaf be-
neath the calyx shows a form that differs little from that of a calyx
itself, with its simple sepals. Only in its general geometrical arrange-
ment does it still remind us of the original pattern.
In a case like this, the stem-leaves, to use Goethe's expression,
'softly steal into the calyx stage'.1 In the topmost leaf the plant has
already achieved something which, along the other line of metamor-
phosis, is tackled only after the leaf plan itself has been gradually
executed. In this case the calyx stage, we may say, is attained at one leap.
Whatever type of metamorphosis is followed by a plant (and there
are others as well, so that we may even speak of metamorphoses be-
tween different types of metamorphosis!) they all obey the same basic
rule, namely, that before proceeding to the next higher stage of the
cycle, the plant sacrifices something already achieved in a preceding
one. Behind the inconspicuous sheath of the calyx we see the plant
preparing itself for a new creation of an entirely different order. As
successor to the leaf, the flower appears to us time and again as a
miracle. Nothing in the lower realm of the plant predicts the form,
colour, scent and all the other properties of the new organ produced
at this stage. The completed leaf, preceding the plant's withdrawal
into the calyx, represents a triumph of structure over matter. Now, in
the flower, matter is overcome to a still higher degree. It is as if the
material substance here becomes transparent, so that what is imma-
terial in the plant may shine through its outer surface.
•*
In this 'climbing up the spiritual ladder' Goethe learned to recog-
nize one of nature's basic principles. He termed it Steigerung
(heightening). Thus he saw the plant develop through Metamor-
phosis and Heightening towards its consummation. Implicit in the
second of these two principles, however, there is yet another natural
principle for which Goethe did not coin a specific term, although he
shows through other utterances that he was well aware of it, and of its
universal significance for all life. We propose to call it here the prin-
ciple of Renunciation.
1 Delphinium, in particular, has the peculiarity (which it shares with a number
of other species) that its calyx appears in the guise of a flower, whilst the actual
flower is quite inconspicuous.
In the life of the plant this principle shows itself most conspicu-
ously where the green leaf is heightened into the flower. While pro-
gressing from leaf to flower the plant undergoes a decisive ebb in its
vitality. Compared with the leaf, the flower is a dying organ. This
dying, however, is of a kind we may aptly call a 'dying into being'.
Life in its mere vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that
a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place. The same prin-
ciple can be seen at work in the insect kingdom, when the caterpillar's
tremendous vitality passes over into the short-lived beauty of the
butterfly. In the human being it is responsible for that metamorphosis
of organic processes which occurs on the path from the metabolic to
the nervous system, and which we came to recognize as the precondi-
tion for the appearance of consciousness within the organism.
What powerful forces must be at work in the plant organism at this
point of transition from its green to its coloured parts! They enforce
a complete halt upon the juices that rise up right into the calyx, so
that these bring nothing of their life-bearing activity into the forma-
tion of the flower, but undergo a complete transmutation, not gradu-
ally, but with a sudden leap.
After achieving its masterpiece in the flower, the plant once more
goes through a process of withdrawal, this time into the tiny organs
of fertilization. (We shall return later to this essential stage in the life
cycle of the plant, and shall then clear up the misinterpretation put
upon it ever since scientific biology began.) After fertilization, the
fruit begins to swell; once more the plant produces an organ with a
more or less conspicuous spatial extension. This is followed by a final
and extreme contraction in the forming of the seed inside the fruit. In
the seed the plant gives up all outer appearance to such a degree that
nothing seems to remain but a small, insignificant speck of organized
matter. Yet this tiny, inconspicuous thing bears in it the power of
bringing forth a whole new plant.
In these three successive rhythms of expansion and contraction the
plant reveals to us the basic rule of its existence. During each expan-
sion, the active principle of the plant presses forth into visible appear-
ance ; during each contraction it withdraws from outer embodiment
into what we may describe as a more or less pure state of being. We
thus find the spiritual principle of the plant engaged in a kind of
breathing rhythm, now appearing, now disappearing, now assuming
power over matter, now withdrawing from it again.
In the fully developed plant this rhythm repeats itself three times in
succession and at ever higher levels, so that the plant, in climbing
from stage to stage, each time goes through a process of withdrawal
before appearing at the next. The greater the creative power required
at a certain stage, the more nearly complete must be the withdrawal
from outer appearance. This is why the most extreme withdrawal of
the plant into the state of being takes place in the seed, when the
plant prepares itself for its transition from one generation to another.
Even earlier, the flower stands towards the leaves as something like
a new generation springing from the small organ of the calyx, as does
the fruit to the flower when it arises from the tiny organs of repro-
duction. In the end, however, nothing appears outwardly so unlike
the actual plant as the little seed which, at the expense of all appear-
ance, has the power to renew the whole cycle.
Through studying the plant in this way Goethe grew aware also of
the significance of the nodes and eyes which the plant develops as
points where its vital energy is specially concentrated; not only the
seed, but the eye also, is capable of producing a new, complete plant.
In each of these eyes, formed in the axils of the leaves, the power
of the plant is present in its entirety, very much as in each single
seed.
In other ways, too, the plant shows its capacity to act as a whole at
various places of its organism. Otherwise, no plant could be propa-
gated by cuttings; in any little twig cut from a parent plant, all the
manifold forces operative in the gathering, transmuting, forming of
matter, that are necessary for the production of root, leaf, flower,
fruit, etc., are potentially present, ready to leap into action provided
we give it suitable outer conditions. Other plants, such as gloxinia
and begonia, are known to have the power of bringing forth a new,
complete plant from each of their leaves. From a small cut applied to
a vein in a leaf, which is then embedded in earth, a root will soon
be seen springing downward, and a stalk with leaves rising up-
ward.
A particular observation made by Goethe in this respect is of in-
terest for methodological reasons. In the introduction to his treatise
Metamorphosis of Plants, when referring to the regressive metamor-
phosis of stamens into petals as an example of an irregular metamor-
phosis, he remarks that 'experiences of this kind of metamorphosis
will enable us to disclose what is hidden from us in the regular
way of development, and to see clearly and visibly what we should
otherwise only be able to infer'. In this remark Goethe expresses a
truth that is valid in many spheres of life, both human and natural.
It is frequently a pathological aberration in an organic entity that
allows us to see in physical appearance things that do not come out-
wardly to the fore in the more balanced condition of normal develop-
ment, although they are equally part of the regular organic pro-
cess.
An enlightening experience of this kind came to Goethe's aid when
one day he happened to see a 'proliferated' rose (durchgewachsene
Rose), that is, a rose from whose centre a whole new plant had
sprung. Instead of the contracted seed-pod, with the attached, equally
contracted, organs of fertilization, there appeared a continuation of
the stalk, half red and half green, bearing in succession a number of
small reddish petals with traces of anthers. Thorns could be seen
appearing further up, petals half-turned into leaves, and even a num-
ber of fresh nodes from which little imperfect flowers were budding.
The whole phenomenon, in all its irregularity, was one more proof
for Goethe that the plant in its totality is potentially present at each
point of its organism.1
*
Goethe's observation of the single plant in statu agendi had trained
him to recognize things of quite different outer appearance as iden-
tical in their inner nature. Leaf, sepal, petal, etc., much as they differ
outwardly, yet showed themselves to him as manifestations of one
and the same spiritual archetype. His idea of Metamorphosis enabled
him to reduce what in outer appearance seems incompatibly different
to its common formative principle. His next step was to observe the
different appearances of one and the same species in different regions
of the earth, and thus to watch the capacity of the species to respond
in a completely flexible way to the various climatic conditions, yet
without concealing its inner identity in the varying outer forms. His
travels in Switzerland and Italy gave him opportunity for such obser-
vations, and in the Alpine regions especially he was delighted at the
variations in the species which he already knew so well from his
home in Weimar. He saw their proportions, the distances between
the single parts, the degree of lignification, the intensity of colour,
etc., varying with the varied conditions, yet never concealing the
identity of the species.
1 Goethe also describes a proliferated pink.
Having once advanced in his investigations from metamorphosis
in the parts of the single plant to metamorphosis among different
representatives of single plant species, Goethe had to take only one
further, entirely decisive, step in order to recognize how every mem-
ber of the plant kingdom is the manifestation of a single formative
principle common to them all. He was thus faced with the momentous
task of preparing his spirit to think an idea from which the plant
world in its entire variety could be derived.
Goethe did not take such a step easily, for it was one of his scien-
tific principles never to think out an idea prematurely. He was well
aware that he who aspires to recognize and to express in idea the
spirit which reveals itself through the phenomena of the sense-world
must develop the art of waiting—of waiting, however, in a way in-
tensely active, whereby one looks again and yet again, until what one
looks at begins to speak and the day at last dawns when, through
tireless 're-creation of an ever-creating nature', one has grown ripe
to express her secrets openly. Goethe was a master in this art of
active waiting.
*
It was in the very year that Galvani, through his chance discovery,
opened the way to the overwhelming invasion of mankind by the
purely physical forces of nature, that Goethe came clearly to see that
he had achieved the goal of his labours. We can form some picture of
the decisive act in the drama of his seeking and finding from letters
written during the years 1785-7.
In the spring of 1785 he writes to a friend in a way that shows him
fully aware of his new method of studying nature, which he recog-
nized was a reading of her phenomena: 'I can't tell you how the Book
of Nature is becoming readable to me. My long practice in spelling
has helped me; it now suddenly works, and my quiet joy is inexpress-
ible.' Again in the summer of the following year: 'It is a growing
aware of the Form with which again and again nature plays, and, in
playing, brings forth manifold life.'
Then Goethe went on his famous journey to Italy which was to
bear such significant fruit for his inner life, both in art and in science.
At Michaelmas, 1786, he reports from his visit to the botanical
garden in Padua that 'the thought becomes more and more living
that it may be possible out of one form to develop all plant forms'.
At this moment Goethe felt so near to the basic conception of the
plant for which he was seeking, that he already christened it with
a special name. The term he coined for it is Urpflanze, literally
rendered archetypal plant, or ur-plant, as we propose quite simply to
call it.1
It was the rich tropical and sub-tropical vegetation in the botanical
gardens in Palermo that helped Goethe to his decisive observations.
The peculiar nature of the warmer regions of the earth enables the
spirit to reveal itself more intensively than is possible in the temper-
ate zone. Thus in tropical vegetation many things come before the
eye which otherwise remain undisclosed, and then can be detected
only through an effort of active thought. From this point of view,
tropical vegetation is 'abnormal' in the same sense as was the proli-
ferated rose which confirmed for Goethe's physical perception that
inner law of plant-growth which had already become clear to his
mind.
During his sojourn in Palermo in the spring of 1787 Goethe writes
in his notebook: 'There must be one (ur-plant): how otherwise could
we recognize this or that formation to be a plant unless they were all
formed after one pattern?' Soon after this, he writes in a letter to the
poet Herder, one of his friends in Weimar:
'Further, I must confide 10 you that I am quite close to the secret
of plant creation, and that it is the simplest thing imaginable. The
ur-plant will be the strangest creature in the world, for which nature
herself should envy me. With this model and the key to it one will be
able to invent plants ad infinitum; they would be consistent; that is to
say, though non-existing, they would be capable of existing, being no
shades or semblances of the painter or poet, but possessing truth and
necessity. The same law will be capable of extension to all living
things.'
*
To become more familiar with the conception of the ur-plant, let
us bring the life-cycle of the plant before our inner eye once again.
There, all the different organs of the plant—leaf, blossom, fruit, etc.
—appear as the metamorphic revelations of the one, identical active
1 The terms 'primeval' or 'primordial' sometimes suggested for rendering the
prefix '«/•' are unsuitable in a case like this. 'Primeval plant', for instance, used by
some translators of Goethe, raises the misunderstanding—to which Goethe's
concept has anyhow been subject from the side of scientific botany—that by his
ur-plant he had in mind some primitive, prehistoric plant, the hypothetical an-
cestor in the Darwinian sense of the present-day plant kingdom.
principle, a principle which gradually manifests itself to us by way of
successive heightening from the cotyledons to the perfected glory of
the flower. Amongst all the forms which thus appear in turn, that of
the leaf has a special place; for the leaf is that organ of the plant in
which the ground-plan of all plant existence comes most immediately
to expression. Not only do all the different leaf forms arise, through
endless changing, out of each other, but the leaf, in accordance with
the same principle, also changes itself into all the other organs which
the plant produces in the course of its growth.
It is by precisely the same principle that the ur-plant reveals itself
in the plant kingdom as a whole. Just as in the single plant organism
the different parts are a graduated revelation of the ur-plant, so are
the single kinds and species within the total plant world. As we let our
glance range over all its ranks and stages (from the single-celled,
almost formless alga to the rose and beyond to the tree), we are fol-
lowing, step by step, the revelation of the ur-plant. Barely hinting at
itself in the lowest vegetable species, it comes in the next higher stages
into ever clearer view, finally streaming forth in full glory in the mag-
nificence of the manifold blossoming plants. Then, as its highest
creation, it brings forth the tree, which, itself a veritable miniature
earth, becomes the basis for innumerable single plant growths.
It has struck biologists of Goethe's own and later times that con-
trary to their method he did not build up his study of the plant by
starting with its lowest form, and so the reproach has been levelled
against him of having unduly neglected the latter. Because of this, the
views he had come to were regarded as scientifically unfounded.
Goethe's note-books prove that there is no justification for such a re-
proach. He was in actual fact deeply interested in the lower plants,
but he realized that they could not contribute anything fundamental
to the spiritual image of the plant as such which he was seeking to
attain. To understand the plant he found himself obliged to pay special
attention to examples in which it came to its most perfect expression.
For what was hidden in the alga was made manifest in the rose. To
demand of Goethe that in accordance with ordinary science he
should have explained nature 'from below upwards' is to misunder-
stand the methodological basis of all his investigations.
Seen with Goethe's eyes, the plant kingdom as a whole appears to
be a single mighty plant. In it the ur-plant, while pressing into appear-
ance, is seen to observe the very rule which we have found governing
its action in the single plant—that of repeated expansion and con-
traction.1 Taking the tree in the sense already indicated, as the state
of highest expansion along the ur-plant's way of entering into spatial
manifestation, we note that tree-formation occurs successively at four
different levels—as fern-tree (also the extinct tree-form of the horse-
tail) among the cryptogams, as coniferous tree among the gymno-
sperms, as palm-tree among the monocotyledons, and lastly in the
form of the manifold species of the leaf-trees at the highest level of
the plant kingdom, the dicotyledons. All these levels have come suc-
cessively into existence, as geological research has shown; the ur-
plant achieved these various tree-formations successively, thus giving
up again its state of expansion each time after having reached it at a
particular level.
From the concept of the ur-plant Goethe soon learned to develop
another concept which was to express the spiritual principle working
in a particular plant species, just as the ur-plant was the spiritual prin-
ciple covering the plant kingdom as a whole. He called it the type. In
the manifold types which are thus seen active in the plant world we
meet offsprings, as it were, of the mother, the 'ur-plant', which in
them assumes differentiated modes of action.
The present part of our discussion may be concluded by the intro-
duction of a concept which Goethe formed for the organ of cognition
attained through contemplating nature in the state of becoming, as
the plant had taught him to do.
Let us look back once again on the way in which we first tried to
build up the picture of leaf metamorphosis. There we made use, first
of all, of exact sense-perceptions to which we applied the power of
memory in its function as their keeper. We then endeavoured to
transform within our mind the single memory pictures (leaf forms) into
one another. By doing so we applied to them the activity of mobile
fantasy. In this way we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective
memory, which by nature is static, with the dynamic properties of
fantasy, and, on the other hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is
subjective, with the objective character of memory. Now, for the new
organ of cognition arising from the union of these two polar faculties
of the soul, Goethe coined the significant expression, exact sensorial
fantasy* In terms of our knowledge of man's psycho-physical make-
1 The following observation is not one made by Goethe himself. It is presented
here by the author as an example of the heuristic value of Goethe's method of
pictorial-dynamic contemplation of the sense-world.
3 'Exakte sinnliche Phantasie.'
up, acquired earlier, we can say that, just as the nervous system forms
the basis for memory, and the blood the basis for fantasy, so the
'exact sensorial fantasy' is based on a newly created collaboration of
the two.
*
Our observations have reached a point where we may consider that
stage in the life cycle of the single plant where, by means of the pro-
cess of pollination, the seed acquires the capacity to produce out of
itself a new example of the species. Our discussion of this will bring-
home the fundamental difference in idea that arises when, instead of
judging a process from the standpoint of the mere onlooker, we try to
comprehend it through re-creating it inwardly.
Biological science of our day takes it for granted that the process
uniting pollen with seed in the plant is an act of fertilization analo-
gous to that which occurs among the higher organisms of nature. Now
it is not to be gainsaid that to external observation this comparison
seems obvious, and that it is therefore only natural to speak of the
pollen as the male, and of the ovule as the female, element, and of
their union as entirely parallel to that between the sexes in the higher
kingdoms of nature.
Goethe confesses that at first he himself 'had credulously put up
with the ruling dogma of sexuality'. He was first made aware of the
invalidity of this analogy by Professor Schelver who, as Superinten-
dent of the Jena Botanical Institute, was working under Goethe's
direction and had trained himself in Goethe's method of observing
plants. This man had come to see that if one held strictly to the
Goethean practice of using nothing for the explanation of the plant
but what one could read from the plant itself, one must not ascribe
to it any sexual process. He was convinced that for a Goethean kind
of biology it must be possible to find, even for the process of pollina-
tion, an idea derived from nothing but the two principles of plant
life: growth and formation.
Goethe immediately recognized the Tightness of this thought, and
set about the task of relating the pollination process to the picture of
the plant which his investigations had already yielded. His way of
reporting the result shows how fully conscious he was of its revolu-
tionary nature. Nor was he in any doubt as to the kind of reception
it would be given by official biology.
In observing the growth of the plant, Goethe had perceived that
this proceeds simultaneously according to two different principles. On
the one hand the plant grows in an axial direction and thereby pro-
duces its main and side stems. To this growth principle Goethe gave
the name 'vertical tendency'. Were the plant to follow this principle
only, its lateral shoots would all stand vertically one above the other.
But observation shows that the different plant species obey very dif-
ferent laws in this respect, as may be seen if one links up all the leaf
buds along any plant stem; they form a line which winds spiral
fashion around it. Each plant family is distinguishable by its own
characteristic spiral, which can be represented either geometrically by
a diagram, or arithmetically by a fraction. If, for example, the leaves
are so arranged in a plant that every fifth leaf recurs on the same side
of the stem, while the spiral connecting the five successive leaf-buds
winds twice round the stem, this is expressed in botany by the
fraction 2/5. To distinguish this principle of plant growth from the
vertical tendency, Goethe used the term 'spiral tendency'.
To help towards a clear understanding of both tendencies, Goethe
describes an exercise which is characteristic of his way of schooling
himself in what he called exact sensorial fantasy. He first looks out
for a phenomenon in which the 'secret' of the spiral tendency is made
'open'. This he finds in such a plant as the convolvulus; in this kind
of plant the vertical tendency is lacking, and the spiral principle
comes obviously into outer view. Accordingly, the convolvulus re-
quires an external support, around which it can wind itself. Goethe
now suggests that after looking at a convolvulus as it grows upwards
around its support, one should first make this clearly present to one's
inner eye, and then again picture the plant's growth without the ver-
tical support, allowing instead the upward-growing plant inwardly to
produce a vertical support for itself. By way of inward re-creation
(which the reader should not fail to carry out himself) Goethe
attained a clear experience of how, in all those plants which in growing
upwards produce their leaves spiral-wise around the stem, the ver-
tical and spiral tendencies work together.
In following the two growth-principles, Goethe saw that the ver-
tical comes to a halt in the blossom; the straight line here shrinks
together, so to say, into a point, surviving only in the ovary and pistil
as continuations of the plant's stalk. The spiral tendency, on the
other hand, is to be found in the circle of the stamens arranged
around these; the process which in the leaves strove outwards in
spiral succession around a straight line is now telescoped on to a
single plane. In other words, the vertical-spiral growth of the plant
here separates into its two components. And when a pollen grain
lands on a pistil and joins with the ovule prepared in the ovary, the
two components are united again. Out of the now complete seed a
new and complete plant can arise.
Goethe understood that he would be taught a correct conception
of this process only by the plant itself. Accordingly, he asked himself
where else in the growing plant something like separation and re-
union could be seen. This he found in the branching and reuniting of
the veins in the leaves, known as anastomosis.
In the dividing of the two growth-principles in the plant through
the formation of carpel and pistil, on the one hand, and the pollen-
bearing stamens on the other, and in their reunion through the com-
ing together of the pollen with the seed, Goethe recognized a meta-
morphosis of the process of anastomosis at a higher level. His vision
of it caused him to term it 'spiritual anastomosis'.
Goethe held a lofty and comprehensive view of the significance of
the male and female principles as spiritual opposites in the cosmos.
Among the various manifestations of this polarity in earthly nature
he found one, but one only, in the duality of the sexes as character-
istic of man and animal. Nothing compelled him, therefore, to
ascribe it in the same form to the plant. This enabled him to discover
how the plant bore the same polarity in plant fashion.
In the neighbourhood of Weimar, Goethe often watched a vine
slinging its foliaged stem about the trunk and branches of an elm
tree. In this impressive sight nature offered him a picture of 'the
female and male, the one that needs and the one that gives, side by
side in the vertical and spiral directions'. Thus his artist's eye clearly
detected in the upward striving of the plant a decisively masculine
principle, and in its spiral winding an equally definite feminine prin-
ciple. Since in the normal plant both principles are inwardly con-
nected, 'we can represent vegetation as a whole as being in a secret
androgynous union from the root up. From this union, through the
changes of growth, both systems break away into open polarity and
so stand in decisive opposition to each other, only to unite again in a
higher sense.'
Thus Goethe found himself led to ideas regarding the male and
female principles in the plant, which were the exact opposite of those
one obtains if, in trying to explain the process of pollination, one
does not keep to the plant itself but imports an analogy from another
kingdom of nature. For in continuance of the vertical principle of the
plant, the pistil and carpel represent the male aspect in the process of
spiritual anastomosis, and the mobile, wind- or insect-borne pollen,
in continuing the spiral principle, represents the female part.
If the process of pollination is what the plant tells us it is, then the
question arises as to the reason for the occurrence of such a process
in the life cycle of the fully developed plant. Goethe himself has not
expressed himself explicitly on this subject. But his term 'spiritual
anastomosis'1 shows that he had some definite idea about it. Let us
picture in our mind what happens physically in the plant as a result
of pollination and then try to read from this picture, as from a hiero-
glyph, what act of the spiritual principle in the plant comes to ex-
pression through it.
Without pollination there is no ripening of the seed. Ripening
means for the seed its acquisition of the power to bring forth a new
and independent plant organism through which the species continues
its existence within nature. In the life cycle of the plant this event
takes place after the organism has reached its highest degree of phy-
sical perfection. When we now read these facts in the light of the
knowledge that they are deeds of the activity of the type, we may
describe them as follows:
Stage by stage the type expends itself in ever more elaborate forms
of appearance, until in the blossom a triumph of form over matter is
reached. A mere continuation of this path could lead to nothing but
a loss of all connexion between the plant's superphysical and physical
component parts. Thus, to guarantee for the species its continuation
in a new generation, the formative power of the type must find a way
of linking itself anew to some part of the plant's materiality. This is
achieved by the plant's abandoning the union between its two polar
growth-principles and re-establishing it again, which in the majority
of cases takes place even in such a way that the bearers of the two
principles originate from two different organisms.
By picturing the process in this way we are brought face to face
with a rule of nature which, once we have recognized it, proves to
hold sway at all levels of organic nature. In general terms it may be
expressed as follows:
In order that spiritual continuity may be maintained within the
coming and going multitude of nature's creations, the physical stream
must suffer discontinuity at certain intervals.
In the case of the plant this discontinuity is achieved by the break-
ing asunder of the male and female growth-principles. When they
have reunited, the type begins to abandon either the entire old plant
or at least part of it, according to whether the species is an annual or
a perennial one, in order to concentrate on the tiny seed, setting, as it
were, its living seal on it.
This is as far as we can go in describing this mysterious process, at
least at the present stage of our considerations.
*
Our pursuit of Goethe's way of observing the life of the plant has
brought us to a point where it becomes possible to rectify a wide-
spread error concerning his position as an evolutionary theorist.
Goethe has been honourably mentioned as a predecessor of Dar-
win. The truth is, that the idea of evolution emerging from Goethe's
mode of regarding nature is the exact opposite of the one held by
Darwin and—in whatever modified form—by his followers. A brief
consideration of the Darwinian concepts of inheritance and adapta-
tion will show this.
Goethe's approach to his conception of the type is clear evidence
that he did not undervalue the factor of adaptation as a formative
element in nature; we have seen that he became acquainted with it in
studying the same plant species under different climatic conditions.
In his view, however, adaptation appears not as the passive effect of
a blindly working, external cause, but as the response of the spiritual
type to the conditions meeting it from outside.
The same applies to the concept of inheritance. Through inheri-
tance Goethe saw single, accessory characteristics of a species being
carried over from one generation to the next; but never could the re-
appearance of the basic features of the species itself be explained in
this way. He was sufficiently initiated into nature's methods to know
that she was not in need of a continuity of the stream of physical sub-
stance, in the sense of the theory of inheritance, to guarantee a con-
tinuance of the features of the species through successive genera-
tions, but that it was her craft to achieve such continuance by means
of physical discontinuity.
*
Goethe was not temperamentally given to reflecting deliberately
about his own cognitional processes. Moreover, the excess of re-
flexion going on around him in the intellectual life of his younger
days inclined him to guard himself with a certain anxiety against
philosophical cogitations. His words to a friend—'Dear friend, I have
done it well, and never reflected about thinking'—bring this home to
us. If in his later years Goethe could become to some degree epistemo-
logically conscious of his spiritual achievements, as, for instance, his
essay on Intuitive Judgment shows, he owed this to his friendship
with Schiller, who became for him a kind of soul mirror, in which he
could see the reflexion of his own processes of consciousness. Indeed,
at their first personal encounter, significant as it was for their whole
later relationship, Schiller—though all unconsciously—performed a
decisive service of this kind for him. Goethe himself speaks of the
occasion in his essay Happy Encounter (Gliickliches Ereignis), written
twelve years after Schiller's death.
The occasion was, outwardly regarded, fortuitous: both men were
leaving a lecture on natural science at the University of Jena, Schiller
having been present as Professor of History in the University, and
Goethe as its patron and as a Weimar Minister of State. They met at
the door of the lecture hall and went out into the street together.
Schiller, who had been wanting to come into closer contact with
Goethe for a long time, used the opportunity to begin a conversation.
He opened with a comment on the lecture they had just heard, saying
that such a piecemeal way of handling nature could not bring the
layman any real satisfaction. Goethe, to whom this remark was
heartily welcome, replied that such a style of scientific observation
'was uncanny even for the initiated, and that there must certainly be
another way altogether, which did not treat of nature as divided and
in pieces, but presented her as working and alive, striving out of the
whole into the parts'.
Schiller's interest was at once aroused by this remark, although as
a thorough Kantian he could not conceal his doubts whether the kind
of thing indicated by Goethe was within human capacity. Goethe
began to explain himself further, and so the discussion proceeded,
until the speakers arrived at Schiller's house. Quite absorbed in his
description of plant metamorphosis, Goethe went in with Schiller
and climbed the stairs to the latter's study. Once there, he seized pen
and paper from Schiller's writing desk, and to bring his conception of
the ur-plant vividly before his companion's eyes he made 'a symbolic
plant appear with many a characteristic stroke of the pen'.
Although Schiller had listened up to this point 'with great interest
and definite understanding', he shook his head as Goethe finished,
and said—Kantian that he was at that time: 'That is no experience,
that is an idea.' These words were very disappointing to Goethe. At
once his old antipathy towards Schiller rose up, an antipathy caused
by much in Schiller's public utterances which he had found distaste-
ful.
Once again he felt that Schiller and he were 'spiritual antipodes,
removed from each other by more than an earth diameter'. However,
Goethe restrained his rising annoyance, and answered Schiller in a
tranquil but determined manner: 7 am glad to have ideas without
knowing it, and to see them with my very eyes.'
Although at this meeting Goethe and Schiller came to no real
agreement, the personal relationship formed through it did not break
off; both had become aware of the value of each to the other. For
Goethe his first meeting with Schiller had the significant result of
showing him that 'thinking about thought' could be fruitful. For
Schiller this significance consisted in his having met in Goethe a
human intellect which, simply by its existing properties, invalidated
Kant's philosophy. For him Goethe's mind became an object of
empirical study on which he based the beginnings of a new philo-
sophy free from onlooker-restrictions.
An essay, written by Goethe about the same time as the one just
quoted, shows how he came to think at a later date about the raising
of human perception into the realm of ideas. In this essay, entitled
Discovery of an Excellent Predecessor ^ Goethe comments on certain
views of the botanist, K. F. Wolff, regarding the relationships be-
tween the different plant organs, which seemed to be similar to his
own, and at which Wolff had arrived in his own way.
Wolff had risen up as an opponent of the so-called preformation
theory, still widespread at that time, according to which the entire
plant with all its different parts is already present in embryonic phy-
sical form in the seed, and simply grows out into space through phy-
sical enlargement. Such a mode of thought seemed inadmissible to
Wolff, for it made use of an hypothesis 'resting on an extra-sensible
conception, which was held to be thinkable, although it could never
be demonstrated from the sense world. Wolff laid it down as a funda-
mental principle of all research that 'nothing may be assumed, ad-
mitted or asserted that has not been actually seen and cannot be
made similarly visible to others'. Thus in Wolff we meet with a
phenomenologist who in his way tried to oppose certain trends of
1 Entdeckung eines trefflichen Vorarbeiters.
contemporary biological thinking. As such, Wolff had made certain
observations which caused him to ascribe to the plant features quite
similar to those which Goethe had grasped under the conception of
progressive and regressive metamorphosis. In this way Wolff had
grown convinced that all plant organs are transformed leaves. True
to his own principle, he had then turned to the microscope for his
eyes to confirm what his mind had already recognized.
The microscope gave him the confirmation he expected by showing
that all the different organs of the plant develop out of identical em-
bryonic beginnings. In his absolute reliance on physical observation,
however, he tried to go further than this and to detect in this way the
reason why the plant does not always bring forth the same organ. He
saw that the vegetative strength in the plant diminishes in proportion
as its organism enters upon its later stages. He therefore attributed
the differentiated evolution of plant organs from identical beginnings
to an ever weaker process of development in them.
Despite his joy in Wolff as someone who in his own fashion had
arrived at certain truths which he himself had also discovered, and
despite his agreement with Wolff's phenomenalistic principle, Goethe
could in no way accept his explanation of why metamorphosis took
place in plants. He said: 'In plant metamorphosis Wolff saw how the
same organ continuously draws together, makes itself smaller; he did
not see that this contraction alternates with an expansion. He saw
that the organ diminishes in volume, but not that at the same time
it ennobles itself, and so, against reason, he attributed decline to the
path towards perfection.' What was it, then, which had prevented
Wolff from seeing things aright? 'However admirable may be Wolff's
method, through which he has achieved so much, the excellent man
never thought that there may be a difference between seeing and see-
ing, that the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living con-
nection with those of the body, for one otherwise risks seeing and yet
seeing past a thing (zu sehen und doch vorbeizusehen).'
Wolff's case was to Goethe a symptom of the danger which he
saw arising for science from the rapidly increasing use of the micro-
scope (and similarly the telescope), if thinking was not developed
correspondingly but left at the mercy of these instruments. His con-
cern over the state of affairs speaks from his utterance: 'Microscopes
and telescopes, in actual fact, confuse man's innate clarity of mind.'
When we follow Goethe in this way he comes before us in charac-
teristic contrast to Robert Hooke. We remember Hooke's micro-
scopic 'proof of the unrelatedness of human thought to outer reality
(Chapter III). There can be no doubt how Goethe, if the occasion had
arisen, would have commented on Hooke's procedure. He would
have pointed out that there would be no such thing as a knife with its
line-like edge unless man were able to think the concept 'line', nor a
needle with its point-like end unless he were able to think the concept
'point'. In fact, knife and needle are products of a human action
which is guided by these two concepts respectively. As such they are
embodiments, though more or less imperfect ones, of these concepts.
Here too, therefore, just as Goethe had discovered it through his way
of observing the plant, we see Ideas with our very eyes. What dis-
tinguishes objects of this kind from organic entities, such as the
plant, is the different relationship between Object and Idea. Whereas
in the case of an organism the Idea actively indwells the object, its
relationship to a man-made thing (and similarly to nature's mineral
entities) is a purely external one.
Hooke, so Goethe would have argued, allowed the microscope to
confuse his common sense. He would have seen in him an example
confirming his verdict that he who fails to let the eye of the spirit
work in union with the eye of the body 'risks seeing yet seeing past
the thing'.
*
'Thus not through an extraordinary spiritual gift, not through
momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique, but through con-
sistent work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory results.' These
words of Goethe—they occur in his essay, History of my Botanical
Studies, which he wrote in later life as an account of his labours in
this field of science—show how anxious he was that it should be
rightly understood that the faculty of reading in the Book of Nature,
as he knew it, was the result of a systematic training of his mind. It is
important for our further studies to make clear to ourselves at this
point the nature of the change which man must bring to pass within
himself in order to brave Kant's 'adventure of reason'. Goethe's con-
cept for the newly acquired faculty of cognition, exact sensorial fan-
tasy, can give us the lead.
We remember that, to form this faculty, two existing functions of
the soul, as such polarically opposite, had to be welded together—
memory based on exact sense-perception and the freely working
fantasy; one connected with the nervous system of the body, the
other with the blood. We also know from earlier considerations
(Chapter II) that in the little child there is not yet any such polariza-
tion, in body or soul, as there is in man's later life. Thus we see that
training on Goethe's lines aims at nothing less than restoring within
oneself a condition which is natural in early childhood.
In saying this we touch on the very foundations of the new pathway
to science discovered by Goethe. We shall hear more of it in the
following chapter.
CHAPTER VI
Except We Become . . .
In this chapter we shall concern ourselves with a number of per-
sonalities from the more or less recent past of the cultural life of
Britain, each of whom was a spiritual kinsman of Goethe, and so a
living illustration of the fact that the true source of knowledge in
man must be sought, and can be found, outside the limits of his
modern adult consciousness. Whilst none of them was a match for
Goethe as regards universality and scientific lucidity, they are all
characteristic of an immediacy of approach to certain essential
truths, which in the sense we mean is not found in Goethe. It enabled
them to express one or the other of these truths in a form that makes
them suitable as sign-posts on our own path of exploration. We shall
find repeated opportunity in the later pages of this book to remember
just what these men saw and thought.
* *
*
The first is Thomas Reid (1710-96), the Scottish philosopher and
advocate of common sense as the root of philosophy.1 After having
served for some years as a minister in the Church of Scotland, Reid
became professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen,
whence he was called to Glasgow as the successor of Adam Smith.
Through his birth in Strachan, Kincardine, he belonged to the same
part of Scotland from which Kant's ancestors had come. Two brief
remarks of Goethe show that he knew of the Scotsman's philosophy,
and that he appreciated his influence on contemporary philosophers.2
Reid, like his contemporary Kant, felt his philosophical conscience
1 The present writer's interest in Reid was first aroused by a remark of Rudolf
Steiner, in his book A Theory of 'Knowledge according to Goethe's World Conception.
2 In a comment on a letter Carlyle had written to him, and in a note dealing
with the contemporary philosophy in Germany.
stirred by Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, and, like Kant, set him-
self the task of opposing it. Unlike Kant, however, whose philosophic
system was designed to arrest man's reason before the abyss into
which Hume threatened to cast it, Reid contrives to detect the bridge
that leads safely across this abyss. Even though it was not granted to
him actually to set foot on this bridge (this, in his time, only Goethe
managed to do), he was able to describe it in a manner especially
helpful for our own purpose.
The first of the three books in which Reid set out the results of his
labours appeared in 1764 under the title, Inquiry into the Human Mind
on the Principles of Common Sense. The other two, Essays on the
Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man,
appeared twenty years later. In these books Reid had in view a more
all-embracing purpose than in his first work. The achievement of this
purpose, however, required a greater spiritual power than was
granted to him. Comparing his later with his earlier work, Reid's
biographer, A. Campbell Fraser, says:
'Reid's Essays form, as it were, the inner court of the temple of
which the Aberdonian Inquiry is the vestibule. But the vestibule is a
more finished work of constructive skill than the inner court, for the
aged architect appears at last as if embarrassed by accumulated
material. The Essays, greater in bulk, perhaps less deserve a place
among modern philosophical classics than the Inquiry, notwithstand-
ing its narrower scope, confined as it is to man's perception of the
extended world, as an object lesson on the method of appeal to
common sense.'
Whilst the ideas of Kant, by which he tried in his way to oppose
Hume's philosophy, have become within a short space of time the
common possession of men's minds, it was the fate of Reid's ideas to
find favour among only a restricted circle of friends. Moreover, they
suffered decisive misunderstanding and distortion through the efforts
of well-meaning disciples. This was because Kant's work was a late
fruit of an epoch of human development which had lasted for cen-
turies and in his time began to draw to its close, while Reid's work
represents a seed of a new epoch yet to come. Here lies the reason
also for his failure to develop his philosophy beyond the achieve-
ments contained in his first work. It is on the latter, therefore, that
we shall chiefly draw for presenting Reid's thoughts.
*
The convincing nature of Hume's argumentation, together with
the absurdity of the conclusions to which it led, aroused in Reid a
suspicion that the premises on which Hume's thoughts were built, and
which he, in company with all his predecessors, had assumed quite
uncritically, contained some fundamental error. For both as a Chris-
tian, a philosopher, and a man in possession of common sense, Reid
had no doubt as to the absurdity and destructiveness of the conclu-
sions to which Hume's reasoning had led him.
'For my own satisfaction, I entered into a serious examination of
the principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not
a little surprised to find that it leans with its whole weight upon a
hypothesis, which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally
received by philosophers, but of which I could find no solid proof.
The hypothesis I mean is, That nothing is perceived but what is in the
mind which perceives it: That we do not really perceive the things
that are external, but only certain images and pictures of them im-
printed upon the mind, which are called impressions and ideas.
'If this be true, supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist
presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the exist-
ence of anything else; my impressions and ideas are the only exist-
ences of which I can have any knowledge or conception; and they are
such fleeting and transitory beings, that they can have no existence at
all, any longer than I am conscious of them. So that, upon this hypo-
thesis, the whole universe about me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon,
stars, and earth, friends and relations, all things without exception,
which I imagined to have a permanent existence whether I thought of
them or not vanish at once:
'And, like the baseless fabric of this vision . . .
Leave not a rack behind.
'I thought it unreasonable, upon the authority of philosophers, to
admit a hypothesis which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy,
all religion and virtue, and all common sense: and finding, that all
the systems which I was acquainted with, were built upon this hypo-
thesis, I resolved to enquire into this subject anew, without regard to
any hypothesis.'
The following passage from the first chapter of the Inquiry reveals
Reid as a personality who was not dazzled to the same extent as were
his contemporaries by the brilliance of the onlooker-consciousness:
'If it [the mind] is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes
it, I find I have been only in an enchanted castle, imposed upon by
spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how 1 have been
deluded; I am ashamed of my frame, and can hardly forbear expostu-
lating with my destiny: Is this thy pastime, O Nature, to put such
tricks upon a silly creature, and then to take off the mask, and show
him how he hath been befooled? If this is the philosophy of human
nature, my soul enter thou not into her secrets. It is surely the for-
bidden tree of knowledge; I no sooner taste it, than I perceive myself
naked, and stript of all things—yea even of my very self. I see myself,
and the whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like
Epicurus's atoms, dance about in emptiness.
'But what if these profound disquisitions into the first principles of
human nature, do naturally and necessarily plunge a man into this
abyss of scepticism? May we not reasonably judge from what hath
happened? Des Cartes no sooner began to dig in this mine, than
scepticism was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to
shut it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the
difficulty of keeping out this enemy still to increase; but they lab-
oured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on the
work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an expedient:
By giving up the material world, which he thought might be spared
without loss, and even with advantage, he hoped by an impregnable
partition to secure the world of spirits. But, alas! the Treatise of
Human Nature wantonly sapped the foundation of this partition and
drowned all in one universal deluge.' (Chapter I, Sections vi-vii.)
What Reid so pertinently describes here as the 'enchanted castle' is
nothing else than the human head, which knows of no occurrence be-
yond its boundaries, because it has forgotten that it is only the end-
product of a living existence outside of, and beyond, itself. We see
here that Reid is gifted with the faculty of entering this castle without
forfeiting his memory of the world outside; and so even from within
its walls, he could recognize its true nature. To a high degree this
helped him to keep free of those deceptions to which the majority of
his contemporaries fell victim, and to which so many persons are still
subject to-day.
It is in this way that Reid could make it one of the cardinal prin-
ciples of his observations to test all that the head thinks by relating it
to the rest of human nature and to allow nothing to stand, which does
not survive this test. In this respect the argument he sets over against
the Cartesian, 'cogito ergo sum' is characteristic: ' "I am thinking,"
says he, "therefore I am": and is it not as good reasoning to say, I
am sleeping, therefore I am? If a body moves, it must exist, no doubt;
but if it is at rest, it must exist likewise.'
The following summarizes the position to which Reid is led when
he includes the whole human being in his philosophical inquiries.
Reid admits that, when the consciousness that has become aware
of itself surveys that which lies within its own horizon, it finds nothing
else there but transient pictures. These pictures in themselves bring to
the mind no experience of a lasting existence outside itself. There is no
firm evidence of the existence of either an outer material world to
which these pictures can be related, or of an inner spiritual entity
which is responsible for them. To be able to speak of an existence in
either realm is impossible for a philosophy which confines its atten-
tion solely to the mere picture-content of the waking consciousness.
But man is not only a percipient being; he is also a being of will,
and as such he comes into a relationship with the world which can be
a source of rich experience. If one observes this relationship, one is
bound to notice that it is based on the self-evident assumption that
one possesses a lasting individuality, whose actions deal with a lasting
material world. Any other way of behaviour would contradict the com-
mon sense of man; where we meet with it we are faced with a lunatic.
Thus philosophy and common sense seem to stand in irreconcilable
opposition to each other. But this opposition is only apparent. It
exists so long as philosophy thinks it is able to come to valid conclu-
sions without listening to the voice of common sense, believing itself
to be too exalted to need to do so. Philosophy, then, does not realize
'that it has no other root but the principles of Common Sense; it
grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them: severed
from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and
rots.' (I, 5.)
At the moment when the philosophical consciousness ceases to
regard itself as the sole foundation of its existence and recognizes
that it can say nothing about itself without considering the source
from which it has evolved, it attains the possibility of seeing the con-
tent of its experience in a new light. For it is no longer satisfied with
considering this content in the completed form in which it presents
itself. Rather does it feel impelled to investigate the process which
gives rise to this content as an end-product (the 'impressions' and
'ideas' of Hume and his predecessors).
Reid has faith in the fact—for his common sense assures him of it
—that a lasting substantiality lies behind the world of the senses, even
if for human consciousness it exists only so long as impressions of it
are received via the bodily senses. Similarly, he has faith in the fact
that his consciousness, although existing but intermittently, has as its
bearer a lasting self. Instead of allowing this intuitively given know-
ledge to be shaken by a mere staring at fugitive pictures, behind
which the real existence of self and world is hidden, he seeks instead
in both directions for the origin of the pictures and will not rest until
he has found the lasting causes of their transient appearances.
In one direction Reid finds himself led to the outer boundary of
the body, where sense perception has its origin. This prompts him to
investigate the perceptions of the five known senses: smelling, tast-
ing, hearing, touching and seeing, which he discusses in this order.In
the other direction he finds himself led—and here we meet with a
special attribute of Reid's whole philosophical outlook—to the realm
of human speech. For speech depends upon an inner, intelligent
human activity, which, once learnt, becomes a lasting part of man's
being, quite outside the realm of his philosophizing consciousness,
and yet forming an indispensable instrument for this consciousness.
The simplest human reasoning, prompted only by common sense,
and the subtlest philosophical thought, both need language for their
expression. Through his ability to speak, man lifts himself above an
instinctive animal existence, and yet he develops this ability at an
infantile stage, when, in so far as concerns the level of his conscious-
ness and his relationship to the world, he hardly rises above the level
of the animal. It requires a highly developed intelligence to probe the
intricacies of language, yet complicated tongues were spoken in
human history long before man awoke to his own individual intelli-
gence. Just as each man learns to think through speaking, so did
humanity as a whole. Thus speech can become a means for acquiring
insight into the original form of human intelligence. For in speech
the common sense of man, working unconsciously within him, meets
the fully awakened philosophical consciousness.1
1 This observation of Reid's shows that the origin of language is very different
from what the evolutionists since Darwin have imagined it to be.
The way in which the two paths of observation have here been set
out must not give rise to the expectation that they are discussed by
Reid in a similarly systematic form. For this, Reid lacked the suffi-
cient detachment from his own thoughts. As he presents his observa-
tions in the Inquiry they seem to be nothing but a systematic descrip-
tion of the five senses, broken into continually by linguistic considera-
tions of the kind indicated above. So, for example, many of his more
important statements about language are found in his chapter on
'Hearing'.
Our task will be to summarize Reid's work, taking from his
description, so often full of profound observations, only what is
essential to illustrate his decisive discoveries. This requires that (keep-
ing to Mr. Eraser's picture) we consider separately the two pillars
supporting the roof of the temple's forecourt: speech and sense-
impressions. We will start with speech.
*
Reid notes as a fundamental characteristic of human language that
it includes two distinct elements: first, the purely acoustic element,
represented by the sheer succession of sounds, and secondly the vari-
ety of meanings represented by various groups of sounds, meanings
which seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such. This state
of language, where the sound-value of the word and its value as a
sign to denote a thing signified by it, have little or nothing to do with
one another, is certainly not the primeval one. In the contemporary
state of language, which Reid calls artificial language, we must see a
development from a former condition, which Reid calls natural lan-
guage. So long as this latter condition obtained, man expressed in the
sound itself what he felt impelled to communicate to his fellows. In
those days sound was not merely an abstract sign, but a gesture,
which moreover was accompanied and supported by the gestures of
the limbs.
Even to-day man, at the beginning of his life, still finds himself in
that relationship to language which was natural to all men in former
times. The little child acquires the ability to speak through the imita-
tion of sounds, becoming aware of them long before it understands
the meaning accorded to the various groups of sounds in the artificial
state of contemporary adult speech. That the child's attention should
be directed solely to the sound, and not to the abstract meaning of
the individual words, is indeed the prerequisite of learning to speak.
If, says Reid, the child were to understand immediately the concep-
tual content of the words it hears, it would never learn to speak at
all.
When the adult of to-day uses language in its artificial state, words
are only signs for things signified by them. As he speaks, his attention
is directed exclusively towards this side of language; the pure sound
of the words he uses remains outside the scope of his awareness. The
little child, on the other hand, has no understanding of the meaning
of words and therefore lives completely in the experience of pure
sound. In the light of this, Reid comes to the conclusion, so impor-
tant for what follows, that with the emergence of a certain form of
consciousness, in this case that of the intellectual content of words,
another form submerges, a form in which the experience of the pure
sound of words prevails. The adult, while in one respect ahead of the
child, yet in another is inferior, for the effect of this change is a defin-
ite impoverishment in soul-experience. Reid puts this as follows:
'It is by natural signs chiefly that we give force and energy to lan-
guage ; and the less language has of them, it is the less expressive and
persuasive. . . . Artificial signs signify, but they do not express; they
speak to the understanding, as algebraic characters may do, but the
passions and the affections and the will hear them not: these con-
tinue dormant and inactive, till we speak to them in the language of
nature, to which they are all attention and obedience.'
We have followed Reid so far in his study of language, because it
is along this way that he came to form the concepts that were to
serve him as a key for his all-important findings in the realm of sense-
experience. These are the concepts which bear on the connexion be-
tween the sign and the thing signified; the distinction between the
artificial and the natural state of language; and the disappearance of
certain primeval human capacities for experience, of which Reid says
that they are brought by the child into the world, but fade as his in-
tellectual capacities develop.
*
As soon as one begins to study Reid's observations in the realm of
sense-experience, one meets with a certain difficulty, noticeable ear-
lier but not so strikingly. The source of it is that Reid was obliged to
relate the results of his observations only to the five senses known in
his day, whereas in fact his observations embrace a far greater field of
human sense-perception. Thus a certain disharmony creeps into his
descriptions and makes his statements less convincing, especially for
someone who does not penetrate to its real cause.
However this may be, it need not concern us here; what matter to
us are Reid's actual observations. For these led him to the important
distinction between two factors in our act of acquiring knowledge of
the outer world, each of which holds an entirely different place in
ordinary consciousness. Reid distinguishes them as 'sensation' and
'perception'. It is through the latter that we become aware of the
object as such. But we are mistaken if we regard the content of this
perception as identical with the sum total of the sensations which are
caused in our consciousness by the particular object. For these sen-
sations are qualitatively something quite different, and, although
without them no perception of the object is possible, they do not by
themselves convey a knowledge of the thing perceived. Only, because
our attention is so predominantly engaged by the object under per-
ception, we pay no heed to the content of our sensation.
To take an example, the impressions of roundness, angularity,
smoothness, roughness, colour, etc., of a table contain, all told, no-
thing that could assure us of the existence of the object 'table' as the
real content of an external world. How, then, do we receive the con-
viction of the latter's existence? Reid's answer is, by entering into an
immediate intuitive relationship with it. It is true that to establish this
relationship we need the stimuli coming from the impressions which
our mind receives through the various senses. Yet this must not induce
us to confuse the two.
When nature speaks to man through his senses, something occurs
exactly analogous to the process when man communicates with man
through the spoken word. In both cases the perception, that is, the
result of the process of perception, is something quite other than the
sum of sensations underlying it. Per-ceiving by means of the senses is
none other than a re-ceiving of nature's language; and this language,
just like human language, bears two entirely different elements with-
in it. According as one or the other element prevails in man's inter-
course with nature, this intercourse will be either 'natural' or 'arti-
ficial'—to use the terms by which Reid distinguished the two stages
of human speech.
Just as every human being must once have listened only to the pure
sound of the spoken word on a wholly sentient level in order to
acquire the faculty of speaking, so also, in order to learn nature's
language, the soul must once have been totally surrendered to the
pure impressions of the senses. And just as with time the spoken
word becomes a symbol for that which is signified by it, the con-
sciousness turning to the latter and neglecting the actual sound-con-
tent of the word, so also in its intercourse with nature the soul, with
its growing interest in the thing signified, turns its attention more and
more away from the actual experiences of the senses.
From this it follows that a philosophy which seeks to do justice to
man's whole being must not be satisfied with examining the given
content of human consciousness, but must strive to observe the actual
process to which this content owes its emergence. In practice this
means that a philosopher who understands his task aright must
strive to reawaken in himself a mode of experience which is natur-
ally given to man in his early childhood. Reid expresses this in the
Inquiry in the following way:
'When one is learning a language, he attends to the sounds, but
when he is master of it, he attends only to the sense of what he would
express. If this is the case, we must become as little children again, if
we will be philosophers: we must overcome habits which have been
gathering strength ever since we began to think; habits, the useful-
ness of which atones for the difficulty it creates for the philosopher in
discovering the first principles of the human mind.'
'We must become as little children again, if we will be philo-
sophers!' The phrase appears here almost in passing, and Reid never
came back to it again. And yet in it is contained the Open Sesame
which gives access to the hidden spirit-treasures of the world. In this
unawareness of Reid's of the importance of what he thus had found
we must see the reason for his incapacity to develop his philosophy
beyond its first beginnings. This handicap arose from the fact that in
all his thinking he was guided by a picture of the being of man which
—as a child of his time, dominated by the contemporary religious
outlook—he could never realize distinctly. Yet without a clear con-
ception of this picture no justice can be done to Reid's concept of
common sense. Our next task, therefore, must be to evoke this
picture as clearly as we can
* *
*
The following passage in Reid's Inquiry provides a key for the
understanding of his difficulty in conceiving an adequate picture of
man's being. In this passage Reid maintains that all art is based on
man's experience of the natural language of things, and that in every
human being there lives an inborn artist who is more or less crippled
by man's growing accustomed to the state of artificial language in his
intercourse with the world. In continuation of the passage quoted on
page 99 Reid says:
'It were easy to show, that the fine arts of the musician, the painter,
the actor, and the orator, so far as they are expressive; although the
knowledge of them requires in us a delicate taste, a nice judgment,
and much study and practice; yet they are nothing else but the lan-
guage of nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have
unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering
it.
'Abolish the use of articulate sounds and writing among mankind
for a century, and every man would be a painter, an actor, and an
orator. We mean not to affirm that such an expedient is practicable;
or if it were, that the advantage would counterbalance the loss; but
that, as men are led by nature and necessity to converse together they
will use every means in their power to make themselves understood;
and where they cannot do this by artificial signs, they will do it as far
as possible by natural ones: and he that understands perfectly the use
of natural signs, must be the best judge in all expressive arts.'
When Reid says that there are certain characteristics—and these
just of the kind whose development truly ennobles human life—
which the soul brings with it into the world, a picture of man is evoked
in us in which the supersensible part of his being appears as an entity
whose existence reaches further back than the moment of birth and
even the first beginnings of the body. Now such a conception of man
is in no way foreign to humanity, in more ancient times it was univer-
sally prevalent, and it still lives on to-day, if merely traditionally, in
the eastern part of the world. It is only in the West that from a certain
period it ceased to be held. This was the result of a change which
entered into human memory in historical times, just as the re-dawning
of the old knowledge of man's pre-existence, of which Reid is a
symptom, is a result of another corresponding alteration in the
memory-powers of man in modern times.
For men of old it was characteristic that alongside the impres-
sions they received in earthly life through the senses (which in any
case were far less intense than they are to-day), they remembered ex-
periences of a purely supersensible kind, which gave them assurance
that before the soul was knit together with a physical body it had
existed in a cosmic state purely spiritual in nature. The moment in
history when this kind of memory disappeared is that of the transi-
tion from the philosophy of Plato to that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato
was convinced by clear knowledge that the soul possesses character-
istics implanted in it before conception, Aristotle recognized a bodi-
less state of the soul only in the life after death. For him the beginning
of the soul's existence was identical with that of the body.
The picture of man, taught for the first time by Aristotle, still re-
quired about twice four hundred years—from the fourth pre-Chris-
tian to the fourth post-Christian century—before it became so far
the common possession of men that the Church Father Augustine
(354-430) could base his teaching on it—a teaching which moulded
man's outlook on himself for the coming centuries right up to our
own time.
The following passage from Augustine's Confessions shows clearly
how he was compelled to think about the nature of the little child:
'This age, whereof I have no remembrance, which I take on others'
words, and guess from other infants that I have passed, true though
the guess be, I am yet loath to count in this life of mine which I live
in this world. For no less than that which I lived in my mother's
womb, is it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness. But if I was
shapen in iniquity and in sin my mother did conceive me, where, I
beseech thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when, was I thy servant
guiltless? But lo! that period I pass by; and what have I to do with
that of which I can recall no vestige?'1
On the grounds of such experience, Augustine was unable to pic-
ture man's being in any other way than by seeing him, from the first
moment of his life, as subject to the condition of the human race
which resulted from the Fall. Thus he exclaims in his Confessions:
'Before Thee, O God, no-one is free from sin, not even the child
which has lived but a single day on the earth.' In so far as there was
any question of the soul's arising from this fallen state, it was deemed
unable to attain this by any effort of its own, but to depend on the
1 Confessions, Book I, Chapter 8.
gifts of grace which the Church was able to dispense through the
Sacraments.
Compare with this the present-day scientific conception of human
nature, as it dominates the thought of specialist and layman alike.
Here man appears, both in body and soul, as a sum of inherited
characteristics, of characteristics, that is to say, which have been
passed on by way of sexual propagation and gradually emerge into
full manifestation as the individual grows up. Apart from this in-
herited predestination the soul is held to present itself, in Locke's
classical phrase, as a tabula rasa upon which are stamped all manner
of external impressions.
The similarity between this modern picture of man and the earlier
theological one is striking. In both cases the central assumption is
that human development from child to man consists in the unfolding
of certain inherited characteristics which are capable of further speci-
fic modification under influences proceeding from outside. The only
difference between the two pictures is that in the modern one the
concepts of heredity and adaptation have been formed without
special application to the ethical characteristics of the soul.
It is clear that from both Augustine's and the modern scientific
viewpoint there is no sense in requiring—as Reid did—those who
seek the truth about themselves and the world to recover a condition
which had been theirs as children. Nor from this point of view is
there any justification to call on a Common Sense, innate in man, to
sit in judgment on the philosophical efforts of the adult reason.
*
That even in the days of Augustine the original conception of
human nature had not disappeared entirely, is shown by the appear-
ance of Augustine's opponent Pelagius, called the 'arch-heretic'. To
consider him at this point in our discussion will prove helpful for our
understanding of Reid's historic position in the modern age.
What interests us here in Pelagius's doctrine (leaving aside all ques-
tions concerning the meaning of the Sacraments, etc.), is the picture
of man which must have lived in him for him to teach as he did.
Leaving his Irish-Scottish homeland and arriving about the year
400 in Rome, where on account of the unusual purity of his being he
soon came to be held in the highest esteem, Pelagius found himself
obliged to come out publicly against Augustine, for he felt that
Augustine's teachings denied all free will to man. In the purely
passive surrender of man to the will of God, as Augustine taught it,
he could not but see danger for the future development of Christian
humanity. How radically he diverged from Augustine in his view of
man we may see from such of his leading thoughts as follow:
'Each man begins his life in the same condition as Adam.'
'All good or evil for which in life we are deserving of praise or
blame is done by ourselves and is not born with us.'
'Before the personal will of man comes into action there is nothing
in him but what God has placed there.'
'It is therefore left to the free will of man whether he falls into sin,
as also whether through following Christ he raises himself out of it
again.'
Pelagius could think in this way because he came from a part of
Europe where the older form of human memory, already at that time
almost extinct in the South, was in some degree still active. For him
it was therefore a matter of direct experience that the development of
man from childhood onwards was connected with a diminution of
certain original capacities of the soul. Yet he was so far a child of his
age as to be no longer capable of seeing whence these capacities
originated.
To provide the necessary corrective to Augustine's doctrine of in-
heritance, Pelagius would have had to be able to see in the first years
of life both a beginning of the earthly and a termination of the pre-
earthly existence of the soul. The imperfections of his picture of man,
however, led him to underestimate, even to deny, the significance of
heredity and so of original sin in human life. For an age which no
longer had any direct experience of the soul's pre-natal life, the doc-
trines of Augustine were undoubtedly more appropriate than those of
Pelagius; Augustine was in fact the more modern of the two.
And now, if we move forward a dozen centuries and compare
Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant from this same point of view, we
find the same conception of man again triumphant. But there is an
essential difference: Kant carried all before him because he based
himself on an age-old view of human nature, whereas Reid, uncom-
prehended up to our own day, pointed to a picture of man only just
then dawning on the horizon of the future. Just as through Pelagius
there sounded something like a last call to European humanity not to
forget the cosmic nature of the soul, so through Reid the memory of
this nature announced its first faint renewal. It is common to both
that their voices lacked the clarity to make themselves heard among
the other voices of their times; and with both the reason was the
same: neither could perceive in fullness—the one no longer, the other
not yet—the picture of man which ensouled their ideas.
The certainty of Reid's philosophical instinct, if such an expression
be allowed, and at the same time his tragic limitations, due to an in-
ability fully to understand the origin of this instinct, come out clearly
in the battle he waged against the 'idea' as his immediate predecessors
understood it. We know that Plato introduced this word into the
philosophical language of mankind. In Greek ίδέα (from ίδειν, to
see) means something of which one knows that it exists, because one
sees it. It was therefore possible to use the word 'to see' as Plato did,
because in his day it covered both sensible and supersensible percep-
tion. For Plato, knowing consisted in the soul's raising itself to per-
ceiving the objective, world-forming IDEAS, and this action comprised
at the same time a recollection of what the soul had seen while it
lived, as an Idea among Ideas, before its appearance on earth.
As long as Plato's philosophy continued to shape their thought,
men went on speaking more or less traditionally of Ideas as real
supersensible beings. When, however, the Aristotelian mode of
thinking superseded the Platonic, the term 'Idea' ceased to be used in
its original sense; so much so that, when Locke and other modern
philosophers resorted to it in order to describe the content of the
mind, they did so in complete obliviousness of its first significance.
It is thus that in modern philosophy, and finally in ordinary mod-
ern usage, 'idea' came to be a word with many meanings. Sometimes
it signifies a sense-impression, sometimes a mental representation,
sometimes the thought, concept or essential nature of a thing. The
only thing common to these various meanings is an underlying im-
plication that an idea is a purely subjective item in human conscious-
ness, without any assured correspondence to anything outside.
It was against this view of the idea that Reid took the field, going
so far as to label the philosophy holding it the 'ideal system'. He
failed to see, however, that in attacking the abstract use of the term
he was actually in a position to restore to it its original, genuine
meaning. If, instead of simply throwing the word overboard, he had
been able to make use of it in its real meaning, he would have ex-
pressed himself with far greater exactitude and consistency.1 He was
1 As we have seen, the word had better luck with Goethe.
prevented from doing this by his apparent ignorance of the earlier
Greek philosophers, Plato included. All he seems to have known of
their teachings came from inferior, second-hand reports of a later
and already decadent period.
* *
*
There are two historic personalities, both in England, who witness
to the fact that the emergence of Reid's philosophy on the stage of
history was by no means an accidental event but that it represents a
symptom of a general reappearance of the long-forgotten picture of
man, in which birth no more than death sets up an absolute limit to
human existence. They are Thomas Traherne (1638-74) and William
Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Wordsworth's work and character are so well known that there is
no need to speak of them here in detail.1 For our purpose we shall
pay special attention only to his Ode on Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood, where he shows himself in
possession of a memory (at any rate at the time when he wrote the
poem) of the pre-natal origin of the soul, and of a capacity for experi-
encing, at certain moments, the frontier which the soul crosses at
birth.
If, despite the widespread familiarity of the Ode, we here quote
certain passages from it, we do so because, like many similar things,
it has fallen a victim to the intellectualism of our time in being
regarded merely as a piece of poetic fantasy. We shall take the poet's
words as literally as he himself uttered them. We read:
'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
1 Wordsworth, with all his limitations, had a real affinity with Goethe in his
view of nature. Mr. Norman Lacey gives some indication of this in his recent
book, Wordsworth's View of Nature.
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended."
And later:
'Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.''
The fact that Wordsworth in his later years gave no further in-
dication of such experiences need not prevent us from taking quite
literally what he says here. The truth is that an original faculty faded
away with increasing age, somewhat as happened with Reid when he
could no longer continue his philosophical work along its original
lines. Wordsworth's Ode is the testament of the childhood forces
still persisting but already declining within him; it is significant that
he set it down in about the same year of life (his thirty-sixth) as that
in which Traherne died and in which Goethe, seeking renewal of his
being, took flight to Italy.1
*
Of Traherne, too, we shall say here only as much as our present
consideration and the further aims of this book require. We cannot
concern ourselves with the remarkable events which led, half a cen-
tury ago, to the discovery and identification of his long-lost writings
by Bertram Dobell. Nor can we deal with the details of the eventful
life and remarkable spiritual development of this contemporary of
the Civil War. These matters are dealt with in Dobell's introduction
to his edition of Traherne's poems, as also by Gladys I. Wade in her
work, Thomas Traherne. Our gratitude for the labours of these two
1 This same period of life played a decisive part in the spiritual evolution of
Rudolf Steiner, as may be seen in his autobiography, The Story of My Life.
writers by which they have provided mankind with the knowledge of
the character and the work of this unique personality cannot hinder
us, however, from stating that both were prevented by the premises of
their own view of the world from rightly estimating that side of Tra-
herne which is important for us in this book, and with which we shall
specially concern ourselves in the following pages.
Later in this chapter we shall discuss Dobell's philosophical
misinterpretation of Traherne, to which he fell victim because he
maintained his accustomed spectator standpoint in regard to his
object of study. Miss Wade has, indeed, been able to pay the right
tribute to Traherne, the mystic, whose inner (and also outer) bio-
graphy she was able to detect by taking seriously Traherne's indica-
tions concerning his mystical development. Her mind, however, was
too rigidly focused on this side of Traherne's life—his self-training by
an iron inner discipline and his toilsome ascent from the experience
of Nothingness to a state of Beatific Vision. This fact, combined with
her disinclination to overcome the Augustinian picture of man in
herself, prevented her from taking Traherne equally seriously where
he speaks as one who is endowed with a never interrupted memory of
his primeval cosmic consciousness—notwithstanding the fact that
Traherne himself has pointed to this side of his nature as the most
significant for his fellow-men.
Of the two works of Traherne which Dobell rescued from
oblivion, on both of which we shall draw for our exposition, one
contains his poems, the other his prose writings. The title of the latter
is Centuries of Meditations. The title page of one of the two manu-
scripts containing the collection of the poetical writings introduces
these as Poems of Felicity, Containing Divine Reflections on the
Native Objects of an Infant-Eye. As regards the title 'Centuries of
Meditations' we are ignorant of the meaning Traherne may have
attached to it, and what he meant by calling the four parts of the
book, 'First', 'Second', etc., Century. The book itself represents a
manual of devotion for meditative study by the reader.
Let our first quotation be one from the opening paragraph of the
third 'Century' in which Traherne introduces himself as the bearer of
certain uncommon powers of memory and, arising from these powers,
a particular mission as a teacher:
'Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and
that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day,
wherein I can see the Universe. By the gift of God they attended
me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them
till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could
bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain.
They are unattainable by books, and therefore I will teach them by
experience.' (Ill, 1.)
The picture thus remaining with him of his nature of soul in his
earliest years on earth he describes as follows:
'Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious ap-
prehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared
new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beau-
tiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was
saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was
Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostacy, I
collected again by the highest reason. I was entertained like an Angel
with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the
peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and
could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was
Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant
should be the heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which
the books of the learned never unfold?' (Ill, 1, 2.)
In a different form the same experience comes to expression in the
opening lines of Traherne's poem, Wonder:
'How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here I
When first among his Works I did appear
O how their GLORY did me crown!
The World resembled his ETERNITIE,
In which my Soul did Walk;
And evry Thing that I did see
Did with me talk.'1
The picture of man thus sketched by Traherne is as close to Reid's
as it is remote from Augustine's. This remoteness comes plainly to
expression in the way Traherne and Augustine regard the summons of
1 The difference in spelling between the prose and poetry excerpts arises from
the fact that whereas we can draw on Miss Wade's new edition of the poems for
Traherne's original spelling, we have as yet only Dobell's edition of the Centuries,
in which the spelling is modernized.
Christ to His disciples to become as little children, a summons to
which Reid was led, as we have seen, on purely philosophical
grounds. Let us first of all recall the words of Christ as recorded by
Matthew in his 18th and 19th chapters:
'And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst
of them, and said: Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and
become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of
Heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little
child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven.' (xviii, 2-4.)
'Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me:
for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.' (xix, 14.)
Augustine refers to these words when he concludes that examina-
tion of his childhood memories which he undertook in order to prove
the depravity of the soul from its first day on earth. He says: 'In the
littleness of children didst Thou, our king, give us a symbol of humil-
ity when Thou didst say: Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.'
If we glance back from what Augustine says here to the original
passages in the Gospel just quoted, we see what a remarkable altera-
tion he makes. Of the first passage only the last sentence is taken, and
this in Augustine's mind is fused into one with the second passage.
Thereby the admonition of Christ through one's own effort to become
as one once was as a child disappears completely. The whole passage
thus takes on a meaning corresponding to that passive attitude to the
divine will inculcated by Augustine and opposed by Pelagius, and it
is in this sense that the words of Christ have sunk into the conscious-
ness of Western Christianity and are usually taken to-day.
We may see how differently this injunction of Christ lived in Tra-
herne's consciousness from the following passage out of his Centuries:
'Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, ye must be born again and
become a little child that will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, is
deeper far than is generally believed. It is not only in a careless
reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little child-
ren, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of
our passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity
also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended.' (Ill, 5.)
With Traherne also the passage in question has been fused to-
gether with another utterance of Christ, from John's account of
Christ's conversation with Nicodemus:
'Verily, verily I say unto you, except a man be born again, he
cannot see the Kingdom of God.' (John iii, 3.)
What conception of the infant condition of man must have existed
in a soul for it to unite these two passages from the Gospels in this
way? Whereas for Augustine it is because of its small stature and
helplessness that the child becomes a symbol for the spiritual small-
ness and helplessness of man as such, compared with the overwhelm-
ing power of the divine King, for Traherne it is the child's nearness to
God which is most present to him, and which must be regained by
the man who strives for inner perfection.
Traherne could bear in himself such a picture of man's infancy
because, as he himself emphasizes, he was in possession of an un-
broken memory of the experiences which the soul enjoys before it
awakens to earthly sense-perception. The following passage from the
poem, My Spirit, gives a detailed picture of the early state in which
the soul has experiences and perceptions quite different from those of
its later life. (We may recall Reid's indication of how the child re-
ceives the natural language of things.)
'An Object, if it were before
Mine Ey, was by Dame Nature's Law
Within my Soul: Her Store
Was all at once within me; all her Treasures
Were my immediat and internal Pleasures;
Substantial Joys, which did inform my Mind.
'. . . / could not tell
Whether the Things did there
Themselvs appear,
Which in my Spirit truly seem'd to dwell:
Or whether my conforming Mind
Were not ev'n all that therein shin'd.'
Further detail is added to this picture by the description, given in
the poem The Praeparative, of the soul's non-experience of the body
at that early stage. The description is unmistakably one of an experi-
ence during the time between conception and birth.
'My Body being dead, my Limbs unknown;
Before I skill'd to prize
Those living Stars, mine Eys;
Before or Tongue or Cheeks I call'd mine own,
Before I knew these Hands were mine,
Or that my Sinews did my Members join;
When neither Nostril, Foot, nor Ear,
As yet could be discerned or did appear;
I was within
A House I knew not; newly cloath'd with Skin.
Then was my Soul my only All to me,
A living endless Ey,
Scarce bounded with the Sky,
Whose Power, and Act, and Essence was to see;
I was an inward Sphere of Light,
Or an interminable Orb of Sight,
Exceeding that which makes the Days,
A vital Sun that shed abroad its Rays:
All Life, all Sense,
A naked, simple, pure Intelligence.''
In the stanza following upon this, Traherne makes a statement
which is of particular importance in the context of our present dis-
cussion. After some additional description of the absence of all bodily
needs he says:
' Without disturbance then I did receiv
The tru Ideas of all Things'
The manuscript of this poem shows a small alteration in Tra-
herne's hand in the second of these two lines. Where we now read
'true Ideas', there originally stood 'fair Ideas'. 'Fair' described Tra-
herne's experience as he immediately remembered it; the later altera-
tion to 'true' shows how well aware he was that his contemporaries
might miss what he meant by 'Idea', through taking it in the sense
that had already become customary in his time, namely, as a mere
product of man's own mental activity.
This precaution, however, has not saved Traherne from being mis-
interpreted in our own day in precisely the way he feared—indeed,
by no less a person than his own discoverer, Dobell. It is the sympto-
matic character of this misinterpretation which prompts us to deal
with it here.
*
In his attempt to classify the philosophical mode of thought behind
Traherne's writings, Dobell, to his own amazement, comes to the
conclusion that Traherne had anticipated Bishop Berkeley (1684-
1753). They seemed to him so alike that he does not hesitate to call
Traherne a 'Berkeleyan before Berkeley was born'. In proof of this he
refers to the poems, The Praeparative and My Spirit, citing from the
latter the passage given above (page 112), and drawing special atten-
tion to its two concluding lines. Regarding this he says: 'I am much
mistaken if the theory of non-existence of independent matter, which
is the essence of Berkeley's system, is not to be found in this poem.
The thought that the whole exterior universe is not really a thing
apart from and independent of man's consciousness of it, but some-
thing which exists only as it is perceived, is undeniably found in My
Spirit:
The reader who has followed our exposition in the earlier parts of
this chapter can be in no doubt that, to find a philosophy similar to
Traherne's, he must look for it in Reid and not in Berkeley. Reid him-
self rightly placed Berkeley amongst the representatives of the 'ideal
system' of thought. For Berkeley's philosophy represents an effort of
the onlooker-consciousness, unable as it was to arrive at certainty
regarding the objective existence of a material world outside itself, to
secure recognition for an objective Self behind the flux of mental
phenomena. Berkeley hoped to do this by supposing that the world,
including God, consists of nothing but 'idea'-creating minds, operat-
ing like the human mind as man himself perceives it. His world
picture, based (as is well known) entirely on optical experiences, is
the perfect example of a philosophy contrived by the one-eyed, colour-
blind world-spectator.
We shall understand what in Traherne's descriptions reminded
Dobell of Berkeley, if we take into account the connexion of the soul
with the body at the time when, according to Traherne, it still enjoys
the untroubled perception of the true, the light-filled, Ideas of things.
In this condition the soul has only a dim and undifferentiated
awareness of its connexion with a spatially limited body ('I was
within a house I knew not, newly clothed with skin') and it certainly
knows nothing at all of the body as an instrument, through which the
will can be exercised in an earthly-spatial way ('My body being dead,
my limbs unknown'). Instead of this, the soul experiences itself
simply as a supersensible sense-organ and as such united with the far
spaces of the universe ('Before I skilled to prize those living stars,
mine eyes. . . . Then was my soul my only All to me, a living endless
eye, scarce bounded with the sky').
At the time when the soul has experiences of the kind described by
Traherne, it is in a condition in which, as yet, no active contact has
been established between itself and the physical matter of the body
and thereby with gravity. Hence there is truth in the picture which
Traherne thus sketches from actual memory. The same cannot be
said of Berkeley's world-picture. The fact that both resemble each
other in certain features need not surprise us, seeing that Berkeley's
picture is, in its own way, a pure 'eye-picture' of the world. As such,
however, it is an illusion—for it is intended for a state of man for
which it is not suited, namely for adult man going upright on the
earth, directing his deeds within its material realm, and in this way
fashioning his own destiny.
Indeed, compared with Berkeley's eye-picture of the world, that of
Reid is in every respect a 'limb-picture'. For where he seeks for the
origin of our naïve assurance that a real material world exists, there
he reverts—guided by his common sense—to the experiences avail-
able to the soul through the fact that the limbs of the body meet with
the resistant matter of the world. And whenever he turns to the
various senses in his search, it is always the will-activity of the soul
within the sense he is investigating—and so the limb-nature within it
—to which he first turns his attention. Because, unlike Berkeley, he
takes into account the experiences undergone by the soul when it
leaves behind its primal condition, Reid does not fall into illusion,
but discovers a fundamental truth concerning the nature of the
world-picture experienced by man in his adult age. This, in turn,
enables him to discover the nature of man's world picture in early
childhood and to recognize the importance of recovering it in later
life as a foundation for a true philosophy.
Assuredly, the philosopher who discovered that we must become
as little children again if we would be philosophers, is the one to
whom we may relate Traherne, but not Berkeley. And if we wish
to speak of Traherne, as Dobell tried to do, we speak correctly
only if we call him a 'Reidean before Reid was born'.
* *
*
A little more than a hundred years after Thomas Traherne taught
his fellow-men 'from experience' that there is an original condition of
man's soul, before it is yet able to prize 'those living stars, mine eyes',
in which it is endowed with the faculty to see 'the true (fair) Ideas of
all things', Goethe was led to the realization that he had achieved the
possibility of 'seeing Ideas with the very eyes'. Although he was him-
self not aware of it, the conception of the Idea was at this moment
restored through him to its true and original Platonic significance.
The present chapter has shown us how this conception of the Idea
is bound up with the view that is held of the relationship between
human nature in early childhood and human nature in later life. We
have seen that, when Plato introduced the term Idea as an expression
for spiritual entities having a real and independent existence, men
were still in possession of some recollection of their own pre-earthly
existence. We then found Traherne saying from his recollections that
in the original form of man's consciousness his soul is endowed with
the faculty of seeing 'true' Ideas, and we found Reid on similar
grounds fighting the significance which the term 'idea' had assumed
under his predecessors. By their side we see Goethe as one in whom
the faculty of seeing Ideas appears for the first time in adult man as a
result of a systematic training of observation and thought.
If our view of the interdependence of the Platonic conception of
the Idea with the picture man has of himself is seen rightly, then
Goethe must have been the bearer of such a picture. Our expectation
is shown to be right by the following two passages from Goethe's
autobiography, Truth and Fiction.
In that part of his life story where Goethe concludes the report
of the first period of his childhood (Book II), he writes:
'Who is able to speak worthily of the fullness of childhood? We
cannot behold the little creatures which flit about before us otherwise
than with delight, nay, with admiration; for they generally promise
more than they perform and it seems that nature, among the other
roguish tricks that she plays us, here also especially designs to make
sport of us. The first organs she bestows upon children coming into
the world, are adapted to the nearest immediate condition of the
creature, which, unassuming and artless, makes use of them in the
readiest way for its present purposes. The child, considered in and for
itself, with its equals, and in relations suited to its powers, seems so in-
telligent and rational, and at the same time so easy, cheerful and clever,
that one can hardly wish it further cultivation. If children grew up
according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.'1
1 Oxenford's translation.
We find further evidence in Goethe's account of an event in his
seventh year, which shows how deeply his soul was filled at that time
with the knowledge of its kinship with the realm from which nature
herself receives its existence. This knowledge led him to approach the
'great God of Nature' through an act of ritual conceived by himself.
The boy took a four-sectioned music stand and arranged on it all
kinds of natural specimens, minerals and the like, until the whole
formed a kind of pyramidal altar. On the top of this pyramid he
placed some fumigating candles, the burning of which was to repre-
sent the 'upward yearning of the soul for its God'. In order to give
nature herself an active part in the ritual, he contrived to kindle the
candles by focusing upon them through a magnifying-glass the light
of the rising sun. Before this symbol of the unity of the soul with the
divine in nature the boy then paid his devotions.
'Unity of the soul with the divine in nature'—this was what lived
vividly as a conviction in the seven-year-old boy, impelling him to
act as 'nature's priest' (Wordsworth). The same impulse, in a meta-
morphosed form, impelled the adult to go out in quest of an under-
standing of nature which, as Traherne put it, was to bring back
through highest reason what once had been his by way of pri-
meval intuition.
CHAPTER VII
'Always Stand by Form'
Immediacy of approach to certain essentials of nature as a result of
their religious or artistic experience of the sense-world, is the charac-
teristic of two more representatives of British cultural life. They are
Luke Howard (1772-1864) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), both true
readers in the book of nature. Like those discussed in the previous
chapter they can be of especial help to us in our attempt to establish
an up-to-date method of apprehending nature's phenomena through
reading them.
At the same time we shall find ourselves led into another sphere of
Goethe's scientific work. For we cannot properly discuss Howard
without recognizing the importance of his findings for Goethe's
meteorological studies or without referring to the personal con-
nexion between the two men arising out of their common interest and
similar approach to nature. We shall thus come as a matter of course
to speak of Goethe's thoughts about meteorology, and this again
will give opportunity to introduce a leading concept of Goethean
science in addition to those brought forward already.
Of Ruskin only so much will appear in the present chapter as is
necessary to show him as an exemplary reader in the book of nature.
He will then be a more or less permanent companion in our investi-
gations.
The following words of Ruskin from The Queen of the Air reveal
him at once as a true reader in the book of nature:
'Over the entire surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by
the power of the air under solar light, there is developed a series of
changing forms, in clouds, plants and animals, all of which have
reference in their action, or nature, to the human intelligence that
perceives them.' (II, 89.)
Here Ruskin in an entirely Goethean way points to form in nature
as the element in her that speaks to human intelligence—meaning by
form, as other utterances of his show, all those qualities through
which the natural object under observation reveals itself to our senses
as a whole.
By virtue of his pictorial-dynamic way of regarding nature, Ruskin
was quite clear that the scientists' one-sided seeking after external
forces and the mathematically calculable interplay between them can
never lead to a comprehension of life in nature. For in such a search
man loses sight of the real signature of life: form as a dynamic
element. Accordingly, in his Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin does not
answer the question: 'What is Life?' with a scientific explanation, but
with the laconic injunction: 'Always stand by Form against Force.'
This he later enlarges pictorially in the words: 'Discern the moulding
hand of the potter commanding the clay from the merely beating foot
as it turns the wheel.' (Lect. X.)
In thus opposing form and force to each other, Ruskin is actually
referring to two kinds of forces. There exist those forces which re-
semble the potter's foot in producing mere numerically regulated
movements (so that this part of the potter's activity can be replaced
by a power-machine), and others, which like the potter's hand, strive
for a certain end and so in the process create definite forms. Ruskin
goes a step further still in The Queen of the Air, where he speaks of
selective order as a mark of the spirit:
'It does not merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it gives to
limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other
elements proper to them, and binding these elements into their own
peculiar and adopted form. . . .
'For the mere force of junction is not spirit, but the power that
catches out of chaos, charcoal, water, lime and what not, and fastens
them into given form, is properly called "spirit"; and we shall
not diminish, but strengthen our cognition of this creative energy
by recognizing its presence in lower states of matter than our
own.' (II, 59.)1
When Ruskin wrote this passage, he could count on a certain
measure of agreement from his contemporaries that the essence of
1 These words should be weighed with the fact in mind that they were written
at the time when Crookes was intent on rinding the unknown land of the spirit
by means of just such 'a mere force of junction'.
man himself is spirit, though certainly without any very exact notion
being implied. This persuaded him to fight on behalf of the spirit, lest
its activity on the lower levels of nature should not be duly acknow-
ledged. To-day, when the purely physical conception of nature has
laid hold of the entire man, Ruskin might have given his thought the
following turn: '. . . and we shall certainly attain to no real insight
into this creative force (of the spirit) at the level of man, unless we
win the capacity to recognize its activity in lower states of matter.'
What Ruskin is really pointing towards is the very thing for which
Goethe formed the concept 'type'. And just as Ruskin, like Goethe,
recognized the signature of the spirit in the material processes which
work towards a goal, so he counted as another such signature what
Goethe called Steigerung, though certainly without forming such a
universally valid idea of it:
'The Spirit in the plant—that is to say, its power of gathering dead
matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen
shape—is of course strongest in the moment of flowering, for it then
not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.' It is character-
istic of Ruskin's conception of the relationship between man's mind
and nature that he added: 'And where this life is in it at full power,
its form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly delightful to
our own senses.' (II, 60.)
Obviously, a mind capable of looking at nature in this way could
not accept such a picture of evolution as was put forward by Ruskin's
contemporary, Darwin. So we find Ruskin, in The Queen of the Air,
opposing the Darwinistic conception of the preservation of the species
as the driving factor in the life of nature:
'With respect to plants as animals, we are wrong in speaking as if
the object of life were only the bequeathing of itself. The flower is the
end and proper object of the seeds, not the seed of the flower. The
reason for the seed is that flowers may be, not the reason of flowers
that seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature which the spirit
makes; only, in connection with its perfectedness, is placed the
giving birth to its successor.' (II, 60.)
For Ruskin the true meaning of life in all its stages lay not in the
maintenance of physical continuity from generation to generation,
but in the ever-renewed, ever more enhanced revelation of the spirit.
He was never for a moment in doubt regarding the inevitable
effect of such an evolutionary theory as Darwin's on the general
social attitude of humanity. Men would be led, he realized, to see
themselves as the accidental products of an animal nature based
on the struggle for existence and the preservation of the species.
Enough has been said to stamp Ruskin as a reader in the book of
nature, capable of deciphering the signature of the spirit in the
phenomena of the sense-world.
*
Outwardly different from Ruskin's and yet spiritually comparable,
is the contribution made by his older contemporary, Luke Howard,
to the foundation of a science of nature based on intuition. Whereas
Ruskin throws out a multitude of aphoristic utterances about many
different aspects of nature, which will provide us with further start-
ing-points for our own observation and thought, Howard is con-
cerned with a single sphere of phenomena, that of cloud formation.
On the other hand, his contribution consists of a definite discovery
which he himself methodically and consciously achieved, and it is the
content of this discovery, together with the method of research lead-
ing to it, which will supply us ever and again with a model for our
own procedure. At the same time, as we have indicated, he will help
us to become familiar with another side of Goethe, and to widen our
knowledge of the basic scientific concepts formed by him.
Anyone interested to-day in weather phenomena is acquainted
with the terms used in cloud classification—Cirrus, Cumulus, Stratus,
and Nimbus. These have come so far into general use that it is not
easy to realize that, until Howard's paper, On the Modification of
Clouds, appeared in 1803, no names for classifying clouds were avail-
able. Superficially, it may seem that Howard had done nothing more
than science has so often done in grouping and classifying and nam-
ing the contents of nature. In fact, however, he did something essen-
tially different.
In the introduction to his essay, Howard describes the motives
which led him to devote himself to a study of meteorological pheno-
mena:
'It is the frequent observation of the countenance of the sky,
and of its connexion with the present and ensuing phenomena, that
constitutes the ancient and popular meteorology. The want of this
branch of knowledge renders the prediction of the philosopher (who
in attending his instruments may be said to examine the pulse of the
atmosphere), less generally successful than those of the weather-wise
mariners and husbandmen.'
When he thus speaks of studying 'the countenance of the sky',
Howard is not using a mere form of speech; he is exactly describing
his own procedure, as he shows when he proceeds to justify it as a
means to scientific knowledge. The clouds with their ever-moving,
ever-changing forms are not, he says, to be regarded as the mere
'sport of the winds', nor is their existence 'the mere result of the con-
densation of vapour in the masses of the atmosphere which they
occupy'. What comes to view in them is identical, in its own realm,
with what the changing expression of the human face reveals of 'a
person's state of mind or body'. It would hardly be possible to repre-
sent oneself more clearly as a genuine reader in the book of nature
than by such words. What is it but Ruskin's 'Stand by Form against
Force' that Howard is here saying in his own way?
*
Before entering into a further description of Howard's system, we
must make clear why we disregard the fact that modern meteorology
has developed the scale of cloud-formation far beyond Howard, and
why we shall keep to his own fourfold scale.
It is characteristic of Goethe that, on becoming acquainted with
Howard's work, he at once gave a warning against subdividing his
scale without limit. Goethe foresaw that the attempt to insert too
many transitory forms between Howard's chief types would result
only in obscuring that view of the essentials which Howard's original
classification had opened up. Obviously, for a science based on mere
onlooking there is no objection to breaking up an established system
into ever more subdivisions in order to keep it in line with an in-
creasingly detailed outer observation. This, indeed, modern meteoro-
logy has done with Howard's system, with the result that, to-day, the
total scale is made up of ten different stages of cloud-formation.
Valuable as this tenfold scale may be for certain practical purposes,
it must be ignored by one who realizes that through Howard's four-
fold scale nature herself speaks to man's intuitive judgment. Let us,
therefore, turn to Howard's discovery, undisturbed by the extension
to which modern meteorology has subjected it.
Luke Howard, a chemist by profession, knew well how to value the
results of scientific knowledge above traditional folk-knowledge. He
saw the superiority of scientifically acquired knowledge in the fact
that it was universally communicable, whereas folk-wisdom is bound
up with the personality of its bearer, his individual observations and
his memory of them. Nevertheless, the increasing mathematizing of
science, including his own branch of it, gave him great concern, for
he could not regard it as helpful in the true progress of man's under-
standing of nature. Accordingly, he sought for a method of observa-
tion in which the practice of 'the weatherwise mariner and husband-
man' could be raised to the level of scientific procedure. To this end
he studied the changing phenomena of the sky for many years, until
he was able so to read its play of features that it disclosed to him the
archetypal forms of cloud-formation underlying all change. To these
he gave the now well-known names (in Latin, so that they might be
internationally comprehensible):
Cirrus:
Cumulus:
Stratus:
Nimbus:
Parallel, flexuous or divergent fibres extensible in any
and all directions.
Convex or conical heaps, increasing upwards from a
horizontal base.
A widely extended, continuous, horizontal sheet, in-
creasing from below.
The rain cloud.
Let us, on the background of Howard's brief definitions, try to
form a more exact picture of the atmospheric dynamics at work in
each of the stages he describes.1
Among the three formations of cirrus, cumulus and stratus, the
cumulus has a special place as representing in the most actual sense
what is meant by the term 'cloud'. The reason is that both cirrus and
stratus have characteristics which in one or the other direction tend
away from the pure realm of atmospheric cloud-formation. In the
stratus, the atmospheric vapour is gathered into a horizontal, rela-
tively arched layer around the earth, and so anticipates the actual
water covering below which extends spherically around the earth's
centre. Thus the stratus arranges itself in a direction which is already
conditioned by the earth's field of gravity. In the language of phy-
sics, the stratus forms an equipotential surface in the gravitational
field permeating the earth's atmosphere.
1 See also Goethe's sketch of the basic cloud forms on Plate IV.
As the exact opposite of this we have the cirrus. If in the stratus the
form ceases to consist of distinct particulars, because the entire
cloud-mass runs together into a single layer, in the cirrus the form
begins to vanish before our eyes, because it dissolves into the sur-
rounding atmospheric space. In the cirrus there is present a tendency
to expand; in the stratus to contract.
Between the two, the cumulus, even viewed simply as a form-type,
represents an exact mean. In how densely mounded a shape does the
majestically towering cumulus appear before us, and yet how buoy-
antly it hovers aloft in the heights! If one ever comes into the midst of
a cumulus cloud in the mountains, one sees how its myriads of single
particles are in ceaseless movement. And yet the whole remains
stationary, on windless days preserving its form unchanged for hours.
More recent meteorological research has established that in many
cumulus forms the entire mass is in constant rotation, although seen
from outside, it appears as a stable, unvarying shape. Nowhere in
nature may the supremacy of form over matter be so vividly observed
as in the cumulus cloud. And the forms of the cumuli themselves tell
us in manifold metamorphoses of a state of equilibrium between ex-
pansive and contractive tendencies within the atmosphere.
Our description of the three cloud-types of cirrus, cumulus and
stratus, makes it clear that we have to do with a self-contained sym-
metrical system of forms, within which the two outer, dynamically
regarded, represent the extreme tendencies of expansion and con-
traction, whilst in the middle forms these are held more or less in
balance. By adding Howard's nimbus formation to this system, we
destroy its symmetry. Actually, in the nimbus we have cloud in such
a condition that it ceases to be an atmospheric phenomenon in any
real sense of the word; for it now breaks up into single drops of water,
each of which, under the pull of gravity, makes its own independent
way to the earth. (The symmetry is restored as soon as we realize that
the nimbus, as a frontier stage below the stratus, has a counterpart in
a corresponding frontier stage above the cirrus. To provide insight
into this upper frontier stage, of which neither Howard nor Goethe
was at that time in a position to develop a clear enough conception
to deal with it scientifically, is one of the aims of this book.)
*
In order to understand what prompted Goethe to accept, as he did,
Howard's classification and terminology at first glance, and what per-
suaded him to make himself its eloquent herald, we must note from
what point Goethe's labours for a natural understanding of nature
had originated.
In his History of my Botanical Studies Goethe mentions, besides
Shakespeare and Spinoza, Linnaeus as one who had most influenced
his own development. Concerning Linnaeus, however, this is to be
understood in a negative sense. For when Goethe, himself searching
for a way of bringing the confusing multiplicity of plant phenomena
into a comprehensive system, met with the Linnaean system, he was,
despite his admiration for the thoroughness and ingenuity of Lin-
naeus's work, repelled by his method. Thus by way of reaction, his
thought was brought into its own creative movement: 'As I sought to
take in his acute, ingenious analysis, his apt, appropriate, though
often arbitrary laws, a cleft was set up in my inner nature: what he
sought to hold forcibly apart could not but strive for union according
to the inmost need of my own being.'
Linnaeus's system agonized Goethe because it demanded from
him 'to memorize a ready-made terminology, to hold in readiness a
certain number of nouns and adjectives, so as to be able, whenever
any form was in question, to employ them in apt and skilful selection,
and so to give it its characteristic designation and appropriate posi-
tion.' Such a procedure appeared to Goethe as a kind of mosaic, in
which one ready-made piece is set next to another in order to produce
out of a thousand details the semblance of a picture; and this was 'in
a certain way repugnant' to him. What Goethe awoke to when he met
Linnaeus's attempt at systematizing the plant kingdom was the old
problem of whether the study of nature should proceed from the
parts to the whole or from the whole to the parts.
Seeing, therefore, how it became a question for Goethe, at the very
beginning of his scientific studies, whether a natural classification of
nature's phenomena could be achieved, we can understand why he
was so overjoyed when, towards the end of his life, in a field of
observation which had meanwhile caught much of his interest, he
met with a classification which showed, down to the single names
employed, that it had been read off from reality.
*
The following is a comprehensive description of Goethe's meteoro-
logical views, which he gave a few years before his death in one of his
conversations with his secretary, Eckermann:
'I compare the earth and her hygrosphere1 to a great living being
perpetually inhaling and exhaling. If she inhales, she draws the
hygrosphere to her, so that, coming near her surface, it is condensed
to clouds and rain. This state I call water-affirmative (Wasser-
Bejahung). Should it continue for an indefinite period, the earth
would be drowned. This the earth does not allow, but exhales again,
and sends the watery vapours upwards, when they are dissipated
through the whole space of the higher atmosphere. These become so
rarefied that not only does the sun penetrate them with its brilliancy,
but the eternal darkness of infinite space is seen through them as a
fresh blue. This state of the atmosphere I call water-negative (Wasser-
Verneinung). For just as, under the contrary influence, not only does
water come profusely from above, but also the moisture of the earth
cannot be dried and dissipated—so, on the contrary, in this state not
only does no moisture come from above, but the damp of the earth
itself flies upwards; so that, if this should continue for an indefinite
period, the earth, even if the sun did not shine, would be in danger of
drying up.' (llth April 1827.)
Goethe's notes of the results of his meteorological observations
show how in them, too, he followed his principle of keeping strictly
to the phenomenon. His first concern is to bring the recorded meas-
urements of weather phenomena into their proper order of signific-
ance. To this end he compares measurements of atmospheric
temperature and local density with barometric measurements. He
finds that the first two, being of a more local and accidental nature,
have the value of 'derived' phenomena, whereas the variations in the
atmosphere revealed by the barometer are the same over wide areas
and therefore point to fundamental changes in the general condi-
tions of the earth. Measurements made regularly over long periods of
time finally lead him to recognize in the barometric variations of
atmospheric pressure the basic meteorological phenomenon.
In all this we find Goethe carefully guarding himself against 'ex-
plaining' these atmospheric changes by assuming some kind of
purely mechanical cause, such as the accumulation of air-masses over
a certain area or the like. Just as little would he permit himself
1 Goethe's Dunstkreis—meaning the humidity contained in the air and, as
such, spherically surrounding the earth. I had to make up the word 'hygro-
sphere' (after hygrometer, etc.) to keep clear the distinction from both atmo-
sphere and hydrosphere. Except for this term in the first two sentences, the above
follows Oxenford's translation (who, following the dictionaries, has rendered
Goethe's term inadequately by 'atmosphere').
lightly to assume influences of an extra-terrestrial nature, such as
those of the moon. Not that he would have had anything against such
things, if they had rested on genuine observation. But his own obser-
vations, as far as he was able to carry them, told him simply that the
atmosphere presses with greater or lesser intensity on the earth in
more or less regular rhythms. He was not abandoning the pheno-
menal sphere, however, when he said that these changes are results of
the activity of earthly gravity, or when he concluded from this
that barometric variations were caused by variations in the intensity
of the field of terrestrial gravity, whereby the earth sometimes drew
the atmosphere to it with a stronger, and sometimes with a weaker, pull.
He was again not departing from the realm of the phenomenal
when he looked round for other indications in nature of such an
alternation of drawing in and letting forth of air, and found them in
the respiratory processes of animated beings. (To regard the earth as
a merely physical structure was impossible for Goethe, for he could
have done this only by leaving out of account the life visibly bound
up with it.) Accordingly, barometric measurements became for him
the sign of a breathing process carried out by the earth.
Alongside the alternating phases of contraction and expansion
within the atmosphere, Goethe placed the fact that atmospheric den-
sity decreases with height. Observation of differences in cloud forma-
tion at different levels, of the boundary of snow formation, etc., led
him to speak of different 'atmospheres', or of atmospheric circles or
spheres, which when undisturbed are arranged concentrically round
the earth. Here also he saw, in space, phases of contraction alternat-
ing with phases of expansion.
*
At this point in our discussion it is necessary to introduce another
leading concept of Goethean nature-observation, which was for him
—as it will be for us—of particular significance for carrying over the
Goethean method of research from the organic into the inorganic
realm of nature. This is the concept of the ur-phenomenon (Ur-
phanomeri). In this latter realm, nature no longer brings forth related
phenomena in the ordering proper to them; hence we are obliged to
acquire the capacity of penetrating to this ordering by means of our
own realistically trained observation and thought.
From among the various utterances of Goethe regarding his gen-
eral conception of the ur-phenomenon, we here select a passage from
that part of the historical section of his Theory of Colour where he
discusses the method of investigation introduced into science by
Bacon. He says:
'In the range of phenomena all had equal value in Bacon's eyes.
For although he himself always points out that one should collect the
particulars only to select from them and to arrange them, in order
finally to attain to Universals, yet too much privilege is granted to the
single facts; and before it becomes possible to attain to simplification
and conclusion by means of induction (the very way he recommends),
life vanishes and forces get exhausted. He who cannot realize that
one instance is often worth a thousand, bearing all within itself; he who
proves unable to comprehend and esteem what we called ur-pheno-
mena, will never be in a position to advance anything, either to his
own or to others' joy and profit.'
What Goethe says here calls for the following comparison. We can
say that nature seen through Bacon's eyes appears as if painted on a
two-dimensional surface, so that all its facts are seen alongside each
other at exactly the same distance from the observer. Goethe, on the
other hand, ascribed to the human spirit the power of seeing the
phenomenal world in all its three-dimensional multiplicity; that is, of
seeing it in perspective and distinguishing between foreground and
background.1 Things in the foreground he called ur-phenomena.
Here the idea creatively determining the relevant field of facts comes
to its purest expression. The sole task of the investigator of nature, he
considered, was to seek for the ur-phenomena and to bring all other
phenomena into relation with them; and in the fulfilment of this task
he saw the means of fully satisfying the human mind's need to theor-
ize. He expressed this in the words, 'Every fact is itself already
theory'. In Goethe's meteorological studies we have a lucid example
of how he sought and found the relevant ur-phenomenon. It is the
breathing-process of the earth as shown by the variations of baro-
metric pressure.
*
Once again we find Thomas Reid, along his line of intuitively
guided observation, coming quite close to Goethe where he deals
1 We may here recall Eddington's statement concerning the restriction of
scientific observation to 'non-stereoscopic vision'.
with the question of the apprehension of natural law by the human
mind. He, too, was an opponent of the method of 'explaining' pheno-
mena by means of abstract theories spun out of sheer thinking, and
more than once in his writings he inveighs against it in his downright,
humorous way.1
His conviction that human thinking ought to remain within the
realm of directly experienced observation is shown in the following
words: 'In the solution of natural phenomena, all the length that the
human faculties can carry us is only this, that from particular pheno-
mena, we may, by induction, trace out general phenomena, of which
all the particular ones are necessary consequences.'2 As an example of
this he takes gravity, leading the reader from one phenomenon to the
next without ever abandoning them, and concluding the journey by
saying: 'The most general phenomena we can reach are what we call
laws of nature. So that the laws of nature are nothing else but the
most general facts relating to the operations of nature, which include
a great many particular facts under them.'
*
It was while on his way with the Grand Duke of Weimar to visit a
newly erected meteorological observatory that Goethe, in the course
of informing his companion of his own meteorological ideas, first
heard of Howard's writings about the formation of clouds. The Duke
had read a report of them in a German scientific periodical, and it
seemed to him that Howard's cloud system corresponded with what
he now heard of Goethe's thoughts about the force relationships
working in the different atmospheric levels. He had made no mistake.
Goethe, who immediately obtained Howard's essay, recognized at
first glance in Howard's cloud scale the law of atmospheric changes
which he himself had discovered. He found here, what he had always
missed in the customary practice of merely tabulating the results of
scientific measurements. And so he took hold of the Howard system
with delight, for it 'provided him with a thread which had hitherto
been lacking'.
Moreover, in the names which Howard had chosen for designating
the basic cloud forms, Goethe saw the dynamic element in each of
1 An example of this is Reid's commentary on existing theories about sight as
a mere activity of the optic nerve. (/«
2 See Inq., VI, 13. This is precisely what Kant had declared to be outside
human possibility.
them coming to immediate expression in human speech.1 He there-
fore always spoke of Howard's system as a 'welcome terminology'.
All this inspired Goethe to celebrate Howard's personality and his
work in a number of verses in which he gave a description of these
dynamic elements and a paraphrase of the names, moulding them
together into an artistic unity. In a few accompanying verses he hon-
oured Howard as the first to 'distinguish and suitably name' the
clouds.2
The reason why Goethe laid so much stress on Howard's termin-
ology was because he was very much aware of the power of names to
help or hinder men in their quest for knowledge. He himself usually
waited a long time before deciding on a name for a natural pheno-
menon or a connexion between phenomena which he had discovered.
The Idea which his spiritual eye had observed had first to appear so
clearly before him that he could clothe it in a thought-form proper to
it. Seeing in the act of name-giving an essential function of man (we
are reminded of what in this respect the biblical story of creation says
of Adam),3 Goethe called man 'the first conversation which Nature
conducts with God'.
It is characteristic of Goethe that he did not content himself with
knowing the truth which someone had brought forward in a field of
knowledge in which he himself was interested, but that he felt his
acquaintance with this truth to be complete only when he also knew
something about the personality of the man himself. So he introduces
his account of his endeavours to know more about Howard, the man,
with the following words: 'Increasingly convinced that everything
occurring through man should be regarded in an ethical sense, and
that moral value is to be estimated only from a man's way of life, I
asked a friend in London to find out if possible something about
Howard's life, if only the simplest facts.' Goethe was uncertain
whether the Englishman was still alive, so his delight and surprise
were considerable when from Howard himself he received an answer
in the form of a short autobiographical sketch, which fully confirmed
his expectations regarding Howard's ethical personality.
Howard's account of himself is known to us, as Goethe included a
translation of it in the collection of his own meteorological studies.
Howard in a modest yet dignified way describes his Christian faith,
1 Stratus means layer, cumulus—heap, cirrus—curl.
2 There exists no adequate translation of these verses.
3 Genesis ii, 19, 20.
his guide through all his relationships, whether to other men or to
nature.1 A man comes before us who, untroubled by the prevailing
philosophy of his day, was able to advance to the knowledge of an
objective truth in nature, because he had the ability to carry religious
experience even into his observation of the sense-world.
*
In view of all this, it is perhaps not too much to say that in the
meeting between Howard and Goethe by way of the spiritual bridge
of the clouds, something happened that was more than a mere event
in the personal history of these two men.
1 A fact which Howard did not mention, and which presumably remained
unknown to Goethe, was the work he had done as chairman of a relief committee
for the parts of Germany devastated by the Napoleonic wars. For this work
Howard received a series of public honours.
CHAPTER VIII
Dynamics versus Kinetics
At the present time the human mind is in danger of confusing the
realm of dynamic events, into which modern atomic research has
penetrated, with the world of the spirit; that is, the world whence
nature is endowed with intelligent design, and of which human
thinking is an expression in terms of consciousness. If a view of
nature as a manifestation of spirit, such as Goethe and kindred
minds conceived it, is to be of any significance in our time, it must
include a conception of matter which shows as one of its attributes its
capacity to serve Form (in the sense in which Ruskin spoke of it in
opposition to mere Force) as a means of manifestation.
The present part of this book, comprising Chapters VIII-XI, will
be devoted to working out such a conception of matter. An example
will thereby be given of how Goethe's method of acquiring under-
standing of natural phenomena through reading the phenomena
themselves may be carried beyond his own field of observation. There
are, however, certain theoretical obstacles, erected by the onlooker-
consciousness, which require to be removed before we can actually
set foot on the new path. The present chapter will in particular serve
this purpose.
*
Science, since Galileo, has been rooted in the conviction that the
logic of mathematics is a means of expressing the behaviour of
natural events. The material for the mathematical treatment of sense
data is obtained through measurement. The actual thing, therefore,
in which the scientific observer is interested in each case, is the posi-
tion of some kind of pointer. In fact, physical science is essentially, as
Professor Eddington put it, a 'pointer-reading science'. Looking at
this fact in our way we can say that all pointer instruments which
man has constructed ever since the beginning of science, have as their
model man himself, restricted to colourless, non-stereoscopic observa-
tion. For all that is left to him in this condition is to focus points in
space and register changes of their positions. Indeed, the perfect
scientific observer is himself the arch-pointer-instrument.
The birth of the method of pointer-reading is marked by Galileo's
construction of the first thermometer (actually, a thermoscope). The
conviction of the applicability of mathematical concepts to the de-
scription of natural events is grounded in his discovery of the so-called
Parallelogram of Forces. It is with these two innovations that we
shall concern ourselves in this chapter.
Let it be said at once that our investigations will lead to the unveil-
ing of certain illusions which the spectator-consciousness has woven
round these two gifts of Galileo. This does not mean that their signi-
ficance as fundamentals of science will be questioned. Nor will the
practical uses to which they have been put with so much success be
criticized in any way. But there are certain deceptive ideas which be-
came connected with them, and the result is that to-day, when man is
in need of finding new epistemological ground under his feet, he is
entangled in a network of conceptual illusions which prevent him
from using his reason with the required freedom.
A special word is necessary at this point regarding the term illu-
sion, as it is used here and elsewhere. In respect of this, it will be well
to remember what was pointed out earlier in connexion with the term
'tragedy' (Chapter II). In speaking of 'illusion', we neither intend to
cast any blame on some person or another who took part in weaving
the illusion, nor to suggest that the emergence of it should be thought
of as an avoidable calamity. Rather should illusion be thought of as
something which man has been allowed to weave because only by his
own active overcoming of it can he fulfil his destiny as the bearer of
truth in freedom. Illusion, in the sense used here, belongs to those
things in man's existence which are truly to be called tragic. It loses
this quality, and assumes a quite different one, only when man, once
the time has come for overcoming an illusion, insists on clinging to it.
As our further studies will show, the criticism to be applied here
does not only leave the validity of measurement and the mathematical
treatment of the data thus obtained fully intact, but by giving them
their appropriate place in a wider conception of nature it opens the
way to an ever more firmly grounded and, at the same time, enhanced
application of both.
*
Our primary knowledge of the existence of something we call
'warmth' or 'heat' is due to a particular sense of warmth which
modern research has recognized as a clearly definable sense. Natur-
ally, seen from the spectator-standpoint, the experiences of this sense
appear to be of purely subjective value and therefore useless for ob-
taining an objective insight into the nature of warmth and its effects
in the physical world. In order to learn about these, resort is had to
certain instruments which, through the change of the spatial position
of a point, allow the onlooker-observer to register changes in the
thermal condition of a physical object. An instrument of this kind is
the thermometer. In the following way an indubitable proof seems to
be given of the correctness of the view concerning the subjectivity of
the impressions obtained through the sense of warmth, and of the
objectivity of thermometrical measurement. A description of it is fre-
quently given in physical textbooks as an introduction to the chapter
on Heat.
To begin with, the well-known fact is cited that if one plunges one's
hands first into two different bowls, one filled with hot water and the
other with cold, and then plunges them together into a bowl of tepid
water, this will feel cold to the hand coming from the hot water and
warm to the hand coming from the cold. Next, it is pointed out that
two thermometers which are put through the same procedure will
register an equal degree of temperature for the tepid water. In this
way the student is given a lasting impression of the superiority of the
'objective' recording of the instrument over the 'subjective' character
of the experiences mediated by his sense of warmth.
Let us now test this procedure by carrying out the same experiment
with the help of thermometrical instruments in their original form,
that is, the form in which Galileo first applied them. By doing so we
proceed in a truly Goethean manner, because we divest the experi-
ment of all accessories which prevent the phenomenon from appear-
ing in its primary form.
To turn a modern thermometer into a thermoscope we need only
remove the figures from its scale. If we make the experiment with two
such thermoscopes we at once become aware of something which
usually escapes us, our attention being fixed on the figures recorded
by the two instruments. For we now notice that the two instruments,
when transferred from the hot and cold water into the tepid water,
behave quite differently. In one the column will fall, in the other it
will rise.
It is important to note that by this treatment of the two instru-
ments we have not changed the way in which they usually indicate
temperature. For thermometrical measurement is in actual fact never
anything else than a recording of the movement of the indicator from
one level to another. We choose merely to take a certain temperature
level—that of melting ice or something else—as a fixed point of
reference and mark it once for all on the instrument. Because we find
this mark clearly distinguished on our thermometers, and the scales
numbered accordingly, we fail to notice what lies ideally behind this
use of the same zero for every new operation we undertake.
What the zero signifies becomes clear directly we start to work
with thermometers not marked with scales. For in order to be used in
this form as real thermometers, they must be exposed on each
occasion first of all to some zero level of temperature, say, that
of melting ice. If we then take them into the region of temper-
ature we want to measure, we shall discern the difference of levels
through the corresponding movement of the column. The final posi-
tion of the column tells us nothing in itself. It is always the change
from one level to another that the thermometer registers—precisely
as does the sense of warmth in our hands in the experiment just
described.
Hence we see that in the ordinary operation with the thermometers,
and when we use our hands in the prescribed manner, we are dealing
with the zero level in two quite different ways. While in the/two instru-
ments the zero level is the same, in accordance with the whole idea of
thermometric measurement, we make a special arrangement so as to
expose our hands to two different levels. So we need not be surprised
if these two ways yield different results. If, after placing two thermo-
meters without scales in hot and cold water, we were to assign to each
its own zero in accordance with the respective height of its column,
and then graduate them from this reference point, they would neces-
sarily record different levels when exposed to the tepid water, in just
the same way as the hands do. Our two hands, moreover, will receive
the same sense-impression from the tepid water, if we keep them in it
long enough.
Seen in this light, the original experiment, designed to show the
subjective character of the impressions gained through the sense of
warmth, reveals itself as a piece of self-deception by the onlooker-
consciousness. The truth of the matter is that, in so far as there is any
subjective element in the experience and measurement of heat, it does
not lie on the side of our sense of warmth, but in our judgment of the
significance of thermometrical readings. In fact, our test of the
alleged proof of the absolute superiority of pointer-readings over the
impressions gained by our senses gives us proof of the correctness of
Goethe's statement, quoted earlier, that the senses do not deceive, but
the judgment deceives.
Let it be repeated here that what we have found in this way does not
lead to any depreciation of the method of pointer-reading. For the
direct findings of the senses cannot be compared quantitatively. The
point is that the idea of the absolute superiority of physical measure-
ment as a means of scientific knowledge, in all circumstances,
must be abandoned as false.
*
We now turn to Galileo's discovery known as the theorem of the
Parallelogram of Forces. The illusion which has been woven round
this theorem expresses itself in the way it is described as being con-
nected ideally with another theorem, outwardly similar in character,
known as the theorem of the Parallelogram of Movements (or Velo-
cities), by stating that the former follows logically from the latter.
This statement is to be found in every textbook on physics at the out-
set of the chapter on dynamics (kinetics), where it serves to establish
the right to treat the dynamic occurrences in nature in a purely kine-
matic fashion, true to the requirements of the onlooker-consciousness.1
The following description will show that, directly we free ourselves
from the onlooker-limitations of our consciousness in the way shown
by Goethe—and, in respect of the present problem, in particular also
by Reid—the ideal relationship between the two theorems is seen to
be precisely the opposite to the one expressed in the above statement.
The reason why we take pains to show this at the present point of our
discussion is that only through replacing the fallacious conception by
the correct one, do we open the way for forming a concrete concept
of Force and thereby for establishing a truly dynamic conception of
nature.
*
Let us begin by describing briefly the content of the two theorems
in question. In Fig. 1, a diagrammatical representation is given of the
parallelogram of movements. It sets out to show that when a point
moves with a certain velocity in the direction indicated by the arrow
1 As to the terms 'kinetic' and 'kinematic', see Chapter II, page 30, footnote.
a, so that in a certain time it passes from P to A, and when it simul-
taneously moves with a second velocity in the direction indicated by
b, through which alone it would pass to B in the same time, its
actual movement is indicated by c, the diagonal in the parallelo-
gram formed by a and b. An example of the way in which this
theorem is practically applied is the well-known case of a rower who
sets out from P in order to cross at right angles a river indicated by
the parallel lines. He has to overcome the velocity a of the water of
the river flowing to the right by steering obliquely left towards B in
order to arrive finally at C.
It is essential to observe that the content of this theorem does not
need the confirmation of any outer experience for its discovery, or to
establish its truth. Even though the recognition of the fact which it
expresses may have first come to men through practical observation,
yet the content of this theorem can be discovered and proved by
purely logical means. In this respect it resembles any purely geo-
metrical statement such as, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is
two right angles (180°). Even though this too may have first been
learnt through outer observation, yet it remains true that for the dis-
covery of the fact expressed by it—valid for all plane triangles—no
outer experience is needed. In both cases we find ourselves in the
domain of pure geometric conceptions (length and direction of
straight lines, movement of a point along these), whose reciprocal
relationships are ordered by the laws of pure geometric logic. So in
the theorem of the Parallelogram of Velocities we have a strictly
geometrical theorem, whose content is in the narrowest sense kine-
matic. In fact, it is the basic theorem of kinematics.
We now turn to the second theorem which speaks of an outwardly
similar relationship between forces. As is well known, this states that
two forces of different magnitude and direction, when they apply at
the same point, act together in the manner of a single force whose
magnitude and direction may be represented by the diagonal of a
parallelogram whose sides express in extent and direction the first
two forces. Thus in Fig. 2, R exercises upon P the same effect as
F1 and F2 together.
Expressed in another way, a force of this magnitude working in the
reverse direction (R') will establish an equilibrium with the other two
forces. In technical practice, as is well known, this theorem is used
for countless calculations, in both statics and dynamics, and indeed
more frequently not in the form given here but in the converse man-
ner, when a single known force is resolved into two component forces.
(Distribution of a pressure along frameworks, of air pressure along
moving surfaces, etc.)
It will now be our task to examine the logical link which is believed
to connect one theorem with the other. This link is found in the well-
known definition of physical force as a product of 'mass' and
'acceleration'—in algebraic symbols F=ma. We will discuss the
implications of this definition in more detail later on. Let us first see
how it is used as a foundation for the above assertion.
The conception of 'force' as the product of 'mass' and 'accelera-
tion' is based on the fact—easily experienced by anyone who cycles
along a level road—that it is not velocity itself which requires the
exertion of force, but the change of velocity—that is, acceleration or
retardation ('negative acceleration' in the sense of mathematical phy-
sics) ; also that in the case of equal accelerations, the force depends
upon the mass of the accelerated object. The more massive the object,
the greater will be the force necessary for accelerating it. This mass,
in turn, reveals itself in the resistance a particular object offers to
any change of its state of motion. Where different accelerations
and the same mass are considered, the factor m in the above formula
remains constant, and force and acceleration are directly proportional
to each other. Thus in the acceleration is discovered a measure for
the magnitude of the force which thereby acts.
Now it is logically evident that the theorem of the parallelogram of
velocities is equally valid for movements with constant or variable
velocities. Even though it is somewhat more difficult to perceive men-
tally the movement of a point in two different directions with two
differently accelerated motions, and to form an inner conception of
the resulting movement, we are nevertheless still within a domain
which may be fully embraced by thought. Thus accelerated move-
ments and movements under constant velocity can be resolved and
combined according to the law of the parallelogram of movements, a
law which is fully attainable by means of logical thought.
With the help of the definition of force as the product of mass and
acceleration it seems possible, indeed, to derive the parallelogram of
forces from that of accelerations in a purely logical manner. For it is
necessary only to extend all sides of an a parallelogram by means of
the same factor m in order to turn it into an F parallelogram. A
single geometrical figure on paper can represent both cases, since only
the scale needs to be altered in order that the same geometrical
length should represent at one time the magnitude a and on another
occasion ma. It is in this way that present-day scientific thought
keeps itself convinced that the parallelogram of forces follows with
logical evidence from the parallelogram of accelerations, and that the
discovery of the former is therefore due to a purely mental process.
Since the parallelogram of forces is the prototype of each further
mathematical representation of physical force-relationships in nature,
the conceptual link thus forged between it and the basic theorem of
kinematics has led to the conviction that the fact that natural events
can be expressed in terms of mathematics could be, and actually has
been, discovered through pure logical reasoning, and thus by the
brain-bound, day-waking consciousness 'of the world-spectator. Jus-
tification thereby seemed to be given for the building of a valid
scientific world-picture, purely kinematic in character.
The line of consideration we shall now have to enter upon for
carrying out our own examination of what is believed to be the link
between the two theorems may seem to the scientifically trained
reader to be of an all too elementary kind compared with the com-
plexities of thought in which he is used to engage in order to settle a
*
scientific problem. It is therefore necessary to state here that anyone
who wishes to help to overcome the tangle of modern theoretical
science must not be shy in applying thoughts and observations of
seemingly so simple a nature as those used both here and on other
occasions. Some readiness, in fact, is required to play where neces-
sary the part of the child in Hans Andersen's fairy-story of The
Emperor's New Clothes, where all the people are loud in praise of
the magnificent robes of the Emperor, who is actually passing
through the streets with no clothes on at all, and a single child's voice
exclaims the truth that 'the Emperor has nothing on'. There will
repeatedly be occasion to adopt the role of this child in the course of
our own studies.
In the scientific definition of force given above force appears
as the result of a multiplication of two other magnitudes. Now
as is well known, it is essential for the operation of multiplication that
of the two factors forming the product at least one should exhibit the
properties of a pure number. For two pure numbers may be multi-
plied together—e.g. 2 and 4—and a number of concrete things can
be multiplied by a pure number—e. g. 3 apples and the number 4—
but no sense can be attached to the multiplication of 3 apples by 4
apples, let alone by 4 pears! The result of multiplication is therefore
always either itself a pure number, when both factors have this pro-
perty ; or when one of the two factors is of the nature of a concrete
object, the result is of the same quality as the latter. An apple will
always remain an apple after multiplication, and what distinguishes
the final product (apples) from the original factor (apples) is only a
pure number.
If we take seriously what this simple consideration tells us of the
nature of multiplication, and if we do not allow ourselves to deviate
from it for whatever purpose we make use of this algebraic operation,
then the various concepts we connect with the basic measurements in
physics undergo a considerable change of meaning.
Let us test, in this respect, the well-known formula which, in the
conceptual language of physics, connects 'distance' (s), 'time' (?), and
'velocity' (c). It is written
*
In this formula, s has most definitely the meaning of a 'thing', for it
represents measured spatial distance. Of the two factors on the other
side of the second equation, one must needs have the same quality as
s: this is c. Thus for the other factor, t, there remains the property of
a pure number. We are, therefore, under an illusion if we assume the
factor c to represent anything of what velocity implies in outer cosmic
reality. The truth is that c represents a spatial distance just as s does,
with the difference only that it is a certain unit-distance. Just as little
does real time enter into this formula—nor does it into any other
formula of mathematical physics. 'Time', in physics, is always a pure
number without any cosmic quality. Indeed, how could it be other-
wise for a purely kinematic world-observation?
We now submit the formula F =ma to the same scrutiny. If we
attach to the factor a on the right side of the equation a definite
quality, namely an observable acceleration, the other factor in the
product is permitted to have only the properties of a pure number;
F, therefore, can be only of the same nature as a and must itself be an
acceleration. Were it otherwise, then the equation F =ma could
certainly not serve as a logical link between the Velocity and Force
parallelograms.
Our present investigation has done no more than grant us an in-
sight into the process of thought whereby the consciousness limited
to a purely kinematic experience has deprived the concept offeree of
any real content. Let us look at the equation F=ma as a means of
splitting of the magnitude F into two components m and a. The
equation then tells us that F is reduced to the nature of pure accelera-
tion, for that which resides in the force as a factor not observable by
kinematic vision has been split away from it as the factor m. For this
factor, however, as we have seen, nothing remains over but the
property of a pure number.
Let us note here that the first thinker to concern himself with a
comprehensive world-picture in which the non-existence of a real
concept of force is taken in earnest—namely, Albert Einstein—was
also the first to consider mass as a form of energy and even to pre-
dict correctly, as was proved later, the amount of energy represented
by the unit of mass, thereby encouraging decisively the new branch of
experimental research which has led to the freeing of the so-called
atomic energy. Is it then possible that pure numbers can effect what
took place above and within Nagasaki, Hiroshima, etc.? Here we are
standing once again before one of the paradoxes of modern science
which we have found to play so considerable a part in its develop-
ment.
To find an interpretation of the formula F=ma, which is free from
illusion, we must turn our attention first of all to the concepts 'force'
and 'mass' themselves. The fact that men have these two words in
their languages shows that the concepts expressed by them must be
based on some experience that has been man's long before he was
capable of any scientific reflexion. Let us ask what kind of experience
this is and by what part of his being he gathers it.
The answer is, as simple self-observation will show, that we know
of the existence offeree through the fact that we ourselves must exert
it in order to move our own body. Thus it is the resistance of our body
against any alteration of its state of motion, as a result of its being
composed of inert matter, which gives us the experience offeree both
as a possession of our own and as a property of the outer world. All
other references to force, in places where it cannot be immediately
experienced, arise by way of analogy based on the similarity of the
content of our observation to that which springs from the exertion of
force in our own bodies.
As we see, in this experience of force that of mass is at once im-
plied. Still, we can strengthen the latter by experimenting with some
outer physical object. Take a fairly heavy object in your hand,
stretch out your arm lightly and move it slowly up and down, watch-
ing intently the sensation this operation rouses in you.1 Evidently the
experience of mass outside ourselves, as with that of our own body,
comes to us through the experience of the force which we ourselves
must exert in order to overcome some resisting force occasioned by
the mass. Already this simple observation—as such made by means
of the sense of movement and therefore outside the frontiers of the
onlooker-consciousness—tells us that mass is nothing but a particular
manifestation of force.
Seen in the light of this experience, the equation F=ma requires
to be interpreted in a manner quite different from that to which
scientific logic has submitted it. For if we have to ascribe to F and m
the same quality, then the rule of multiplication allows us to ascribe
to a nothing but the character of a pure number. This implies that
1 For the sake of our later studies it is essential that the reader does not content
himself with merely following the above description mentally, but that he carries
out the experiment himself.
there is no such thing as acceleration as a self-contained entity,
merely attached to mass in an external way.
What we designate as acceleration, and measure as such, is nothing
else than a numerical factor comparing two different conditions of force
within the physical-material world.
Only when we give the three factors in our equation this meaning,
does it express some concrete outer reality. At the same time it for-
bids the use of this equation for a logical derivation of the parallelo-
gram of forces from that of pure velocities.
The same method which has enabled us to restore its true meaning
to the formula connecting mass and force will serve to find the true
source of man's knowledge of the parallelogram of forces. Accord-
ingly, our procedure will be as follows.
We shall engage two other persons, together with whom we shall
try to discover by means of our respective experiences of force the
law under which three forces applying at a common point may hold
themselves in equilibrium. Our first step will consist in grasping each
other by the hand and in applying various efforts of our wills to
draw one another in different directions, seeing to it that we do this in
such a way that the three joined hands remain undisturbed at the
same place. By this means we can get as far as to establish that,
when two persons maintain a steady direction and strength of pull,
the third must alter his applied force with every change in his own
direction in order to hold the two others in equilibrium. He will find
that in some instances he must increase his pull and in other instances
decrease it.
This, however, is all that can be learnt in this way. No possibility
arises at this stage of our investigation of establishing any exact
quantitative comparison. For the forces which we have brought
forth (and this is valid for forces in general, no matter of what kind
they are) represent pure intensities, outwardly neither visible nor
directly measurable. We can certainly tell whether we are intensifying
or diminishing the application of our will, but a numerical compari-
son between different exertions of will is not possible.
In order to make such a comparison, a further step is necessary.
We must convey our effort to some pointer-instrument—for instance,
a spiral spring which will respond to an exerted pressure or pull by a
change in its spatial extension. (Principle of the spring balance.) In
*
this way, by making use of a certain property of matter—elasticity—
the purely intensive magnitudes of the forces which we exert become ex-
tensively visible and can be presented geometrically. We shall therefore
continue our investigation with the aid of three spring balances, which
we hook together at one end while exposing them to the three pulls at
the other.
To mark the results of our repeated pulls of varying intensities and
directions, we draw on the floor on which we stand three chalk lines
outward from the point underneath the common point of the three
instruments, each in the direction taken up by one of the three per-
sons. Along these lines we mark the extensions corresponding to
those of the springs of the instruments.
By way of this procedure we shall arrive at a sequence of figures
such as is shown in Fig. 3.
This is all we can discover empirically regarding the mutual rela-
tionships of three forces engaging at a point.
Let us now heed the fact that nothing in this group of figures re-
veals that in each one of these trios of lines there resides a definite and
identical geometrical order; nor do they convey anything that would
turn our thoughts to the parallelogram of velocities with the effect of
leading us to expect, by way of analogy, a similar order in these fig-
ures. And this result, we note, is quite independent of our particular
way of procedure, whether we use, right from the start, a measuring
instrument, or whether we proceed as described above.
Having in this way removed the fallacious idea that the parallelo-
gram of forces can, and therefore ever has been, conceived by way of
logical derivation from the parallelogram of velocities, we must then
*
ask ourselves what it was, if not any act of logical reason, that led
Galileo to discover it.
History relates that on making the discovery he exclaimed: 'La
natura e scritta in lingua matematica!' ('Nature is recorded in the
language of mathematics.') These words reveal his surprise when he
realized the implication of his discovery. Still, intuitively he must have
known that using geometrical lengths to symbolize the measured
magnitudes offerees would yield some valid result. Whence came this
intuition, as well as the other which led him to recognize from the
figures thus obtained that in a parallelogram made up of any two of
the three lines, the remaining line came in as its diagonal? And,
quite apart from the particular event of the discovery, how can we
account for the very fact that nature—at least on a certain level of
her existence—exhibits rules of action expressible in terms of logical
principles immanent in the human mind?
To find the answer to these questions we must revert to certain
facts connected with man's psycho-physical make-up of which the
considerations of Chapter II have already made us aware.
Let us, therefore, transpose ourselves once more into the condition
of the child who is still entirely volition, and thus experiences himself
as one with the world. Let us consider, from the point of view of this
condition, the process of lifting the body into the vertical position
and the acquisition of the faculty of maintaining it in this position;
and let us ask what the soul, though with no consciousness of itself, ex-
periences in all this. It is the child's will which wrestles in this act
with the dynamic structure of external space, and what his will ex-
periences is accompanied by corresponding perceptions through the
sense of movement and other related bodily senses. In this way the
parallelogram offerees becomes an inner experience of our organism
at the beginning of our earthly life. What we thus carry in the body's
will-region in the form of experienced geometry—this, together with
the freeing and crystallizing of part of our will-substance into our
conceptual capacity, is transformed into our faculty of forming geo-
metrical concepts, and among them the concept of the parallelogram
of movements.
Looked at in this way, the true relationship between the two
parallelogram-theorems is seen to be the very opposite of the one held
with conviction by scientific thinking up to now. Instead of the
*
parallelogram of forces following from the parallelogram of move-
ments, and the entire science of dynamics from that of kinematics,
our very faculty of thinking in kinematic concepts is the evolutionary
product of our previously acquired intuitive experience of the
dynamic order of the world.
If this is the truth concerning the origin of our knowledge of force
and its behaviour on the one hand, and our capacity to conceive
mathematical concepts in a purely ideal way on the other, what is it
then that causes man to dwell in such illusion as regards the relation-
ship between the two? From our account it follows that no illusion of
this kind could arise if we were able to remember throughout life our
.experiences in early childhood. Now we know from our considera-
tions in Chapter VI that in former times man had such a memory. In
those times, therefore, he was under no illusion as to the reality of
force in the world. In the working of outer forces he saw a manifesta-
tion of spiritual beings, just as in himself he experienced force as a
manifestation of his own spiritual being. We have seen also that this
form of memory had to fade away to enable man to find himself as a
self-conscious personality between birth and death. As such a per-
sonality, Galileo was able to think the parallelogram offerees, but he
was unable to comprehend the origin of his faculty of mathematical
thinking, or of his intuitive knowledge of the mathematical behaviour
of nature in that realm of hers where she sets physical forces into
action.
Deep below in Galileo's soul there lived, as it does in every human
being, the intuitive knowledge, acquired in early childhood, that part
of nature's order is recordable in the conceptual language of mathe-
matics. In order that this intuition should rise sufficiently far into his
conscious mind to guide him, as it did, in his observations, the veil of
oblivion which otherwise separates our waking consciousness from
the experiences of earliest childhood must have been momentarily
lightened. Unaware of all this, Galileo was duly surprised when in
the onlooker-part of his being the truth of his intuition was con-
firmed in a way accessible to it, namely through outer experiment.
Yet with the veil immediately darkening again the onlooker soon be-
came subject to the illusion that for his recognition of mathematics as
a means of describing nature he was in need of nothing but what was
accessible to him on the near side of the veil.
Thus it became man's fate in the first phase of science, which fills
the period from Galileo and his contemporaries up to the present
time, that the very faculty which man needed for creating this science
prevented him from recognizing its true foundations. Restricted as he
was to the building of a purely kinematic world-picture, he had to
persuade himself that the order of interdependence of the two paral-
lelogram-theorems was the opposite of the one which it really is.
The result of the considerations of this chapter is of twofold signi-
ficance for our further studies. On the one hand, we have seen that
there is a way out of the impasse into which modern scientific theory
has got itself as a result of the lack of a justifiable concept of force,
and that this way is the one shown by Reid and travelled by Goethe.
'We must become as little children again, if we will be philosophers',
is as true for science as it is for philosophy. On the other hand, our
investigation of the event which led Galileo to the discovery that
nature is recorded in the language of mathematics, has shown us that
this discovery would not have been possible unless Galileo had in a
sense become, albeit unconsciously, a little child again. Thus the
event that gave science its first foundations is an occurrence in man
himself of precisely the same character as the one which we have
learnt to regard as necessary for building science's new foundations.
The only difference is that we are trying to turn into a deliberate and
consciously handled method something which once in the past hap-
pened to a man without his noticing it.
Need we wonder that we are challenged to do so in our day, when
mankind is several centuries older than it was in the time of Galileo?
*
CHAPTER IX
Pro Levitate
(a) ALERTNESS contra INERTNESS
In the preceding chapter we gained a new insight into the relation-
ship between mass and force. We have come to see that our concept
of force is grounded on empirical observation in no less a degree
than is usually assumed for our concept of number, or size, or posi-
tion, provided we do not confine ourselves to non-stereoscopic,
colourless vision for the forming of our scientific world-picture, but
allow other senses to contribute to it. As to the concept mass, our
discussion of the formula F= ma showed that force and mass, as
they occur in it, are of identical nature, both having the quality of
force. The factors F and m signify force in a different relationship to
space (represented by the factor a). This latter fact now requires
some further elucidation.
In a science based on the Goethean method of contemplating the
world of the senses, concepts such as 'mass in rest' and 'mass in
motion' lack any scientific meaning (though for another reason
than in the theory of Relativity). For in a science of this kind the
universe—in the sense propounded lately by Professor Whitehead
and others—appears as one integrated whole, whose parts must
never be considered as independent entities unrelated to the whole.
Seen thus, there is no mass in the universe of which one could say
with truth that it is ever in a state of rest. Nor is there any condition
of movement which could be rightly characterized by the attributes
'uniform' and 'straight line' in the sense of Newton's first law. This
does not mean that such conditions never occur in our field of obser-
vation. But as such they have significance only in relation to our
immediate surroundings as a system of reference. Even within such
limits these conditions are not of a kind that would allow us to con-
sider them as the basis of a scientific world-picture. For as such they
occur naturally only as ultimate, never as primeval conditions. All
masses are originally in a state of curvilinear movement whose rates
change continuously. To picture a mass as being in a state of rest, or
of uniform motion in a straight line, as the result of no force acting on
it, and to picture it undergoing a change in the rate and direction of
its motion as the result of some outer force working on it, is a sheer
abstraction. In so far as mass appears in our field of observation as
being in relative rest or motion of the kind described, this is always
the effect of some secondary dynamic cause.
If we wish to think with the course of the universe and not against
it, we must not start our considerations with the state of (relative)
rest or uniform motion in a straight line and derive our definition of
force from the assumption that there is a primary 'force-free' state
which is altered under the action of some force, but we must arrange
our definitions in such a way that they end up with this state. Thus
Newton's first law, for instance, would have to be restated somewhat
as follows: No physical body is ever in a state of rest or uniform motion
in a straight line, unless its natural condition is interfered with by the
particular action of some force.
Seen dynamically, and from the aspect of the universe as an inter-
related whole, all aggregations of mass are the manifestation of cer-
tain dynamic conditions within the universe, and what appears to us
as a change of the state of motion of such a mass is nothing but a
change in the dynamic relationship between this particular aggrega-
tion and the rest of the world. Let us now see what causes of such a
change occur within the field of our observation.
In modern textbooks the nature of the cause of physical movement
is usually defined as follows: 'Any change in the state of movement
of a portion of matter is the result of the action on it of another por-
tion of matter.' This represents a truth if it is taken to describe a cer-
tain kind of causation. In the axiomatic form in which it is given it is
a fallacy. The kind of causation it describes is, indeed, the only one
which has been taken into consideration by the scientific mind of
man. We are wont to call it 'mechanical' causation. Obviously, man's
onlooker-consciousness is unable to conceive of any other kind of
causation. For this consciousness is by its very nature confined to the
contemplation of spatially apparent entities which for this reason can
*
be considered only as existing spatially side by side. For the one-eyed,
colour-blind spectator, therefore, any change in the state of move-
ment of a spatially confined entity could be attributed only to the
action of another such entity outside itself. Such a world-outlook was
bound to be a mechanistic one.
We cannot rest content with this state of affairs if we are sincerely
searching for an understanding of how spirit moves, forms, and
transforms matter. We must learn to admit non-mechanical causes of
physical effects, where such causes actually present themselves to our
observation. In this respect our own body is again a particularly in-
structive object of study. For here mechanical and non-mechanical
causation can be seen working side by side in closest conjunction.
Let us therefore ask what happens when we move, say, one of our
limbs or a part of it.
The movement of any part of our body is always effected in some
way by the movement of the corresponding part of the skeleton. This
in turn is set in motion by certain lengthenings and contractions of
the appropriate part of the muscular system. Now the way in which
the muscles cause the bones to move falls clearly under the category
of mechanical causation. Certain portions of matter are caused to
move by the movement of adjacent portions of matter. The picture
changes when we look for the cause to which the muscles owe their
movements. For the motion of the muscles is not the effect of any
cause external to them, but is effected by the purely spiritual energy
of our volition working directly into the physical substance of the
muscles. What scientific measuring instruments have been able to
register in the form of physical, chemical, electrical, etc., changes of
the muscular substance is itself an effect of this interaction.
To mark the fact that this type of causation is clearly distinguished
from the type called mechanical, it will be well to give it a name of its
own. If we look for a suitable term, the word 'magical' suggests itself.
The fact that this word has gathered all sorts of doubtful associations
must not hinder us from adopting it into the terminology of a science
which aspires to understand the working of the supersensible in the
world of the senses. The falling into disrepute of this word is charac-
teristic of the onlooker-age. The way in which we suggest it should be
used is in accord with its true and original meaning, the syllable 'mag'
signifying power or might (Sanskrit maha, Greek megas, Latin mag-
nns, English might, much, also master). Henceforth we shall distin-
guish between 'mechanical' and 'magical' causation, the latter being
a characteristic of the majority of happenings in the human, animal
and plant organisms.1
Our next step in building up a truly dynamic picture of matter
must be to try to obtain a direct experience of the condition of
matter when it is under the sway of magical causation.
Let us first remember what is the outstanding attribute with which
matter responds to mechanical causation. This is known to be inertia.
By this term we designate the tendency of physical matter to resist
any outwardly impressed change of its existing state of movement.
This property is closely linked up with another one, weight. The
coincidence of the two has of late become a puzzle to science, and it
was Albert Einstein who tried to solve it by establishing his General
Theory of Relativity. The need to seek such solutions falls away in a
science which extends scientific understanding to conditions of matter
in which weight and inertia are no longer dominant characteristics.
What becomes of inertia when matter is subject to magical causation
can be brought to our immediate experience in the following way.
(The reader, even if he is already familiar with this experiment, is
again asked to carry it out for himself.)
Take a position close to a smooth wall, so that one arm and hand,
which are left hanging down alongside the body, are pressed over
their entire length between body and wall. Try now to move the arm
upward, pressing it against the wall as if you wanted to shift the
latter. Apply all possible effort to this attempt, and maintain the
effort for about one minute. Then step away quickly from the wall by
more than the length of the arm, while keeping the arm hanging
down by the side of the body in a state of complete relaxation. Pro-
vided all conditions are properly fulfilled, the arm will be found rising
by itself in accordance with the aim of the earlier effort, until it
reaches the horizontal. If the arm is then lowered again and left to
itself, it will at once rise again, though not quite so high as before.
This can be repeated several times until the last vestige of the auto-
matic movement has faded away.
Having thus ascertained by direct experience that there is a state of
1 In this sense Ruskin's description of the working of the spirit in the plant as
one that 'catches from chaos water, etc., etc., and fastens them into a given form'
points to magical action.
*
matter in which inertia is, to say the least, greatly diminished, we find
ourselves in need of giving this state (which is present throughout
nature wherever material changes are brought into existence magic-
ally) a name of its own, as we did with the two types of causation. A
word suggests itself which, apart from expressing adequately the
peculiar self-mobility which we have just brought to our experience,
goes well alongside the word 'inert' by forming a kind of rhyme with
it. This is the term 'alert'. With its help we shall henceforth distin-
guish between matter in the inert and alert conditions. We shall call
the latter state 'alertness', and in order to have on the other side a
word as similar as possible in outer form to alertness, we suggest
replacing the usual term inertia by 'inertness'. Thus we shall speak of
matter as showing the attribute of 'inertness', when it is subject to
mechanical causation, of 'alertness', when it is subject to magical
causation.
Anyone who watches attentively the sensation produced by the
rising arm in the above experiment will be duly impressed by the
experience of the alertness prevailing in the arm as a result of the
will's magical intervention.
In our endeavour to find a modern way of overcoming the concep-
tion of matter developed and held by science in the age of the
onlooker-consciousness, we shall be helped by noticing how this con-
ception first arose historically. Of momentous significance in this
respect is the discovery of the gaseous state of matter by the Flemish
physician and experimenter, Joh. Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644).
The fact that the existence of this state of ponderable matter was
quite unknown up to such a relatively recent date has been com-
pletely forgotten to-day. Moreover, it is so remote from current
notions that anyone who now calls attention to van Helmont's dis-
covery is quite likely to be met with incredulity. As a result, there is
no account of the event that puts it in its true setting. In what follows
pains are taken to present the facts in the form in which one comes to
know them through van Helmont's own account, given in his Ortus
Medicinae.
For reasons which need not be described here, van Helmont
studied with particular interest the various modifications in which
carbon is capable of occurring in nature—-among them carbon's
combustion product, carbon dioxide. It was his observations of
*
carbon dioxide which made him aware of a condition of matter
whose properties caused him the greatest surprise. For he found it to
be, at the same time, 'much finer than vapour and much denser than
air'. It appeared to him as a complete 'paradox', because it seemed to
unite in itself two contradictory qualities, one appertaining to the
realm of 'uncreated things', the other to the realm of 'created things'.
Unable to rank it with either 'vapour' or 'air' (we shall see presently
what these terms meant in van Helmont's terminology), he found
himself in need of a special word to distinguish this new state from
the other known states, both below and above it. Since he could not
expect any existing language to possess a suitable word, he felt he
must create one. He therefore took, and changed slightly, a word
signifying a particular cosmic condition which seemed to be imaged
in the new condition he had just discovered. The word was CHAOS.
By shortening it a little, he derived from it the new word GAS.
His own words explaining his choice are: 'Halitum ilium GAS vocavi
non longe a Chaos veterum secretum.' ('I have called this mist Gas,
owing to its resemblance to the Chaos of the ancients.')1
Van Helmont's account brings us face to face with a number of
riddles. Certainly, there is nothing strange to us in his describing
carbon dioxide gas as being 'finer than vapour and denser than air';
but why did he call this a 'paradox'? What prevented him from rank-
ing it side by side with air? As to air itself, why should he describe it
as belonging to the realm of the 'uncreated things'? What reason was
there for giving 'vapour' the rank of a particular condition of matter?
And last but not least, what was the ancient conception of Chaos
which led van Helmont to choose this name as an archetype for the
new word he needed?
To appreciate van Helmont's astonishment and his further pro-
cedure, we must first call to mind the meaning which, in accordance
with the prevailing tradition, he attached to the term Air. For van
Helmont, Air was one of the four 'Elements', EARTH, WATER,
AIR, and FIRE. Of these, the first two were held to constitute the
realm of the 'created things', the other two that of the 'uncreated
things'. A brief study of the old doctrine of the Four Elements is
necessary at this point in order to understand the meaning of these
concepts.
1 For Van Helmont, owing to the Flemish pronunciation of the letter G, the
two words sounded more alike than their spelling suggests.
*
The first systematic teaching about the four elementary constitu-
ents of nature, as they were experienced by man of old, was given by
Empedocles in the fifth century B.C. It was elaborated by Aristotle. In
this form it was handed down and served to guide natural observa-
tion through more than a thousand years up to the time of van Hel-
mont. From our earlier descriptions of the changes in man's con-
sciousness it is clear that the four terms, 'earth', 'water', 'air', 'fire',
must have meant something different in former times. So 'water' did
not signify merely the physical substance which modern chemistry
defines by the formula H2O; nor was 'air' the mixture of gases char-
acteristic of the earth's atmosphere. Man in those days, on account of
his particular relationship with nature, was impressed in the first
place by the various dynamic conditions, four in number, which he
found prevailing both in his natural surroundings and in his own
organism. With his elementary concepts he tried to express, therefore,
the four basic conditions which he thus experienced. He saw physical
substances as being carried up and down between these conditions.
At first sight some relationship seems to exist between the concept
'element' in this older sense and the modern view of the different
states of material aggregation, solid, liquid, aeriform. There is, how-
ever, nothing in this modern view that would correspond to the
element Fire. For heat in the sense of physical science is an immaterial
energy which creates certain conditions in the three material states,
but from these three to heat there is no transition corresponding to
the transitions between themselves. Heat, therefore, does not rank as
a fourth condition by the side of the solid, liquid and aeriform states,
in the way that Fire ranks in the older conception by the side of
Earth, Water and Air.
If we were to use the old terms for designating the three states of
aggregation plus heat, as we know them to-day, we should say that
there is a border-line dividing Fire from the three lower elements.
Such a border-line existed in the older conception of the elements as
well. Only its position was seen to be elsewhere—between Earth and
Water on the one hand, Air and Fire on the other. This was expressed
by saying that the elements below this line constituted the realm of
the 'created things', those above it that of the 'uncreated things'.
Another way of expressing this was by characterizing Earth and
Water with the quality Cold; Air and Fire with the quality Warm.
The two pairs of elements were thus seen as polar opposites of one
another.
The terms 'cold' and 'warm' must also be understood to have ex-
pressed certain qualitative experiences in which there was no dis-
tinction as yet between what is purely physical and what is purely
spiritual. Expressions such as 'a cold heart', 'a warm heart', to 'show
someone the cold shoulder', etc., still witness to this way of experi-
encing the two polar qualities, cold and warm. Quite generally we
can say that, wherever man experienced some process of contraction,
whether physical or non-physical, he designated it by the term 'cold',
and where he experienced expansion, he called it 'warm'. In this sense
he felt contractedness to be the predominant characteristic of Earth
and Water, expansiveness that of Air and Fire.
With the help of these qualitative concepts we are now in a position
to determine more clearly still the difference between the older and
the modern conceptions: in particular the difference between the
aeriform condition of matter, as we conceive of it to-day, and the
element Air. Contractedness manifests as material density, or the
specific weight of a particular substance. We know that this charac-
teristic of matter diminishes gradually with its transition from the
solid to the liquid and aeriform states. We know also that this last
state is characterized by a high degree of expansiveness, which is also
the outstanding property of heat. Thus there is reason to describe
also from the modern point of view the solid and liquid states as
essentially 'cold', and the aeriform state as 'warm'. But aeriform
matter still has density and weight, and this means that matter in
this state combines the two opposing qualities. Contrary to this,
Air, as the second highest element in the old sense, is characterized
by the pure quality, warm. Thus, when man of old spoke of 'air',
he had in mind something entirely free from material density and
weight.1
By comparing in this way the older and newer conceptions of 'air',
we come to realize that ancient man must have had a conception of
gravity essentially different from ours. If we take gravity in the
modern scientist's sense, as a 'descriptive law of behaviour', then this
behaviour is designated in the older doctrine by the quality 'cold'. If,
however, we look within the system of modern science for a law of
behaviour that would correspond to the quality 'warm', we do so in
vain. Polarity concepts are certainly not foreign to the scientific
mind, as the physics of electricity and magnetism show. Yet there is
1 In a later chapter we shall have opportunity to determine what distinguishes
Air from Fire, on the one hand, and Water from Earth on the other.
no opposite pole to gravity, as there is negative opposite to positive
electricity, etc.1
In the older conception, however, the gravitational behaviour
'cold' was seen to be counteracted by an autonomous anti-gravita-
tional behaviour 'warm'. Experience still supported the conviction
that as a polar opposite to the world subject to gravity, there was
another world subject to levity.
We refrain at this point from discussing how far a science which
aspires to a spiritual understanding of nature, including material pro-
cesses, needs a revival—in modern form—of the old conception of
levity. In our present context it suffices to realize that we understand
man's earlier view of nature, and with it the one still held by van
Helmont, only by admitting levity equally with gravity into his
world-picture. For the four elements, in particular, this meant that
the two upper ones were regarded as representing Levity, the two
lower ones Gravity.
In close connexion with this polar conception of the two pairs of
elements, there stands their differentiation into one realm of created,
another of uncreated, things. To understand what these terms imply,
we must turn to the ancient concept, Chaos, borrowed by van
Helmont.
To-day we take the word Chaos to mean a condition of mere
absence of order, mostly resulting from a destruction of existing
forms, whether by nature or by the action of man. In its original
sense the word meant the exact opposite. When in ancient times
people spoke of Chaos, they meant the womb of all being, the exalted
realm of uncreated things, where indeed forms such as are evident to
the eye in the created world are not to be found, but in place of them
are the archetypes of all visible forms, as though nurtured in a spiri-
tual seed-condition. It is the state which in the biblical narration of
the creation of the world is described as 'without form and void'.
From this Chaos all the four elements are born, one by one, with
the two upper ones retaining Chaos's essential characteristic in that
they are 'without form' and tend to be omnipresent, whilst the two
lower ones constitute a realm in which things appear in more or less
clearly outlined space-bound forms. This is what the terms 'un-
created' and 'created' imply.
1 It is this apparent uni-polarity of gravity which has given Professor Einstein
so much trouble in his endeavour to create a purely gravitational world-picture
with bipolar electricity and magnetism fitting into it mathematically.
How strictly these two realms were distinguished can be seen by
the occurrence of the concept 'vapour'. When with the increasing
interest in the realm of created things—characteristic of the spectator-
consciousness which, in view of our earlier description of it, we
recognize as being itself a 'created thing'—the need arose for pro-
gressive differentiation within this realm, the simple division of it into
'earth' and 'water' was no longer felt to be satisfactory. After all,
above the liquid state of matter there was another state, less dense
than water and yet presenting itself through more or less clearly dis-
tinguishable space-bound objects, such as the mists arising from and
spreading over ponds and meadows, and the clouds hovering in the
sky. For this state of matter the term 'vapour' had become customary,
and it was used by van Helmont in this sense. By its very properties,
Vapour belonged to the realm of the created things, whereas Air did
not. It was the intermediary position of the newly discovered state of
matter between Vapour and Air, that is, between the created and the
uncreated world, which caused van Helmont to call it a paradox; and
it was its strange resemblance, despite its ponderable nature, to
Chaos, which prompted him to name it—Gas.
Since it could not have been the gaseous state of matter in the form
discovered by van Helmont, what particular condition of nature was
it to which the ancients pointed when using the term Air? Let us see
how the scriptures of past human cultures speak of air.
In all older languages, the words used to designate the element
bound up with breathing, or the act of breathing, served at the same
time to express the relationship of man to the Divine, or even the
Divine itself. One need think only of the words Brahma and Atma of
the ancient Indians, the Pneuma of the Greeks, the Spiritus of the
Romans. The Hebrews expressed the same idea when they said that
Jehovah had breathed the breath of life into man and that man in
this way became a living soul.
What lies behind all these words is the feeling familiar to man in
those times, that breathing was not only a means of keeping the body
alive, but that a spiritual essence streamed in with the breath. So long
as this condition prevailed, people could expect that by changing
their manner of breathing they had a means of bringing the soul into
stronger relationship with spiritual Powers, as is attempted in East-
ern Yoga.
*
Remembering the picture of man's spiritual-physical evolution
which we have gained from earlier chapters, we are not astonished to
find how different this early experience of the breathing process was
from our own. Yet, together with the recognition of this difference
there arises another question. Even if we admit that man of old was
so organized that the experience of his own breathing process was an
overwhelmingly spiritual one, it was, after all, the gaseous substance
of the earth's atmosphere which he inhaled, and exhaled again in a
transformed condition. What then was it that prevented men—
apparently right up to the time of van Helmont—from gaining the
slightest inkling of the materiality of this substance? To find an
answer to this question, let us resort once more to our method of
observing things genetically, combined with the principle of not con-
sidering parts without considering the whole to which they organic-
ally belong.
In modern science the earth is regarded as a mineral body whereon
the manifold forms of nature appear as mere additions, arising more
or less by chance; one can very well imagine them absent without this
having any essential influence on the earth's status in the universe.
The truth is quite different. For the earth, with everything that exists
on it, forms a single whole, just as each separate organism is in its
own way a whole.
This shows that we have no right to imagine the earth without men,
and to suppose that its cosmic conditions of being would then remain
unaltered—any more than we can imagine a human being deprived
of some essential-organ and remaining human. Mankind, and all the
other kingdoms of nature, are bound up organically with the earth
from the start of its existence. Moreover, just as the highest plants,
seen with Goethe's eyes, are the spiritual originators of the whole
realm of plants—the creative Idea determining their evolution—so
we see man, the highest product of earth evolution, standing behind
this evolution as its Idea from the first, and determining its course.
The evolutionary changes which we observe in the earth and in man
are in fact a single process, working through a variety of manifested
forms.
From this conception of the parallel evolution of earth and man
light falls also on the historic event represented by van Helmont's
discovery. Besides being a symptom of a revolution in man's way of
experiencing the atmosphere, it speaks to us of some corresponding
change in the spiritual-physical condition of the atmosphere itself. It
was then that men not only came to think differently about air, but
inhaled and exhaled an air that actually was different. To find out
what kind of change this was, let us turn once more to man's own
organism and see what it has to say concerning the condition under
which matter is capable of being influenced by mechanical and
magical causation respectively, in the sense already described.
What is it in the nature of the bones that makes them accessible to
mechanical causation only, and what is it in the muscles that allows
our will to rouse them magically? Bones and muscles stand in a
definite genetic relationship to each other, the bones being, in relation
to the muscles, a late product of organic development. This holds
good equally for everything which in the body of living nature takes
the form of mineralized deposits or coverings. Every kind of organ-
ism consists in its early stages entirely of living substance; in the
course of time a part of the organism separates off" and passes over
into a more or less mineralized condition. Seen in this light, the dis-
tinction between bones and muscles is that the bones have evolved
out of a condition in which the muscles persist, though to a gradually
waning degree, throughout the life-time of the body. The substance
of the muscles, remaining more or less 'young', stands at the opposite
pole from the 'aged' substance of the bones. Hence it depends on the
'age' of a piece of matter whether it responds to magical or mechan-
cal causation.
Let us state here at once, that this temporal distinction has an
essential bearing on our understanding of evolutionary processes in
general. For if mineral matter is a late product of evolution—and
nothing in nature indicates the contrary—then to explain the origins
of the world (as scientific theories have always done) with the aid of
events similar in character to those which now occur in the mineral
realm, means explaining them against nature's own evidence. To find
pictures of past conditions of the earth in present-day nature, we
must look in the regions where matter, because it is still 'youthful', is
played through by the magical working of purposefully active spiritual
forces. Thus, instead of seeing in them the chance results of blind
volcanic and similar forces, we must recognize in the formation and
layout of land and sea an outcome of events more closely resembling
those which occur during the embryonic development of a living
organism.
What, then, does van Helmont's discovery of the gaseous state of
matter tell us, if we regard it in the light of our newly acquired insight
into the trend of evolution both within and without man? When, in
the course of its growing older, mankind had reached the stage which
is expressed by the emergence of the spectator-consciousness—con-
sciousness, that is, based on a nervous system which has grown more
or less independent of the life forces of the organism—the outer
elements had, in their way, arrived at such a state that man began to
inhale an air whose spiritual-physical constitution corresponded
exactly to that of his nervous system: on either side, Spirit and
Matter, in accordance with the necessities of cosmic evolution had
lost their primeval union.
•*• Our extension of the concept of evolution to the very elements of
nature, whether these are of material or non-material kind, and our
recognition of this evolution as leading in general from a more alert
to a more inert condition, at once open the possibility of including
in our scientific world-picture certain facts which have hitherto re-
sisted any inclusion. We mean those manifold events of 'miraculous'
nature, of which the scriptures and the oral traditions of old are full.
What is modern man to make of them?
The doubts which have arisen concerning events of this kind have
their roots on the one hand in the apparent absence of such occur-
rences in our day, on the other in the fact that the laws of nature de-
rived by science from the present condition of the world seem to rule
them out.1 In the light of the concept of the world's 'ageing' which
we have tried to develop here, not only do the relevant reports be-
come plausible, but it also becomes understandable why, if such
events have taken place in the past, they fail to do so in our own time.
To illustrate this, let us take a few instances which are symptom-
atic of the higher degree of youthfulness which was characteristic in
former times in particular of the element of Fire.
The role which Fire was capable of playing in man's life at a time
when even this element, in itself the most youthful of all, was more
susceptible to magic interference than of late, is shown by the mani-
fold fire-rites of old. In those days, when no easy means of fire-
lighting were available, it was usual for the needs of daily life to keen
a fire burning all the time and to kindle other fires from it. Only in
cases of necessity was a new fire lit, and then the only way was by the
tedious rubbing together of two pieces of dry wood.
1 See the 'Bishop Barnes' controversy of recent date.
*
Then both the maintenance of fires, and the deliberate kindling of
a new fire, played quite a special role in the ceremonial ordering of
human society. Historically, much the best known is the Roman
usage in the Temple of Vesta. On the one hand, the unintentional ex-
tinction of the fire was regarded as a national calamity and as the
gravest possible transgression on the part of the consecrated priestess
charged with maintaining the fire. On the other hand, it was thought
essential for this 'everlasting' fire to be newly kindled once a year.
This took place with a special ritual at the beginning of the Roman
year (1st March).
The conception behind such a ritual of fire-kindling will become clear
if we compare with it certain other fire-rites which were practised in
the northern parts of Europe, especially in the British Isles, until far
on in the Christian era. For example, if sickness broke out among the
cattle, a widespread practice was to extinguish all the hearth-fires in
the district and then to kindle with certain rites a new fire, from which
all the local people lit their own fires once more. Heavy penalties were
prescribed for anyone who failed to extinguish his own fire—a failure
usually indicated by the non-manifestation of the expected healing
influence. In Anglo-Saxon speaking countries, fires of this kind were
known as 'needfires'.
The spiritual significance of these fires cannot be expressed better
than by the meaning of the very term 'needfire'. This word does not
derive, as was formerly believed, from the word 'need', meaning a
'fire kindled in a state of need', but, as recent etymological research
has shown, from a root which appears in the German word nieten—
to clinch or rivet. 'Needfire' therefore means nothing less than a fire
which was kindled for 'clinching' anew the bond between earthly life
and the primal spiritual order at times when for one reason or another
there was a call for this.
This explanation of the 'needfire' throws light also on the Roman
custom of re-kindling annually the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta.
For the Romans this was a means of reaffirming year by year the
connexion of the nation with its spiritual leadership; accordingly,
they chose the time when the sun in its yearly course restores—'re-
clinches'—the union of the world-spirit with earthly nature, for
the rebirth of the fire which throughout the rest of the year was care-
fully guarded against extinction.
Just as men saw in this fire-kindling a way of bringing humanity
into active relation with spiritual powers, so on the other hand were
these powers held to use the fire element in outer nature for the pur-
pose of making themselves actively known to mankind. Hence we
find in the records of all ancient peoples a unanimous recognition of
lightning and thunder on the one hand, and volcanic phenomena on
the other, as means to which the Deity resorts for intervening in
human destiny. A well-known example is the account in the Bible of
the meeting of Moses with God on Mount Sinai. As occurrence in
the early history of the Hebrews it gives evidence that even in his-
torical times the fire element of the earth was sufficiently 'young' to
serve the higher spiritual powers as an instrument for the direct
expression of their will.
* *
*
(b) LEVITY contra GRAVITY
We said earlier in this chapter that a science which aspires to a
spiritual understanding of the physical happenings in nature must
give up the idea that inertness and weight are absolute properties of
matter. We were able at once to tackle the question of inertness by
bringing to our immediate observation matter in the state of dimin-
ished inertness, or, as we proposed to say, of alertness. We are now
in a position to go into the other question, that of weight or gravity.
Just as we found inertness to have its counterpart in alertness, both
being existing conditions of matter, so we shall now find in addition
to the force of gravity another force which is the exact opposite
of it, and to which therefore we can give no better name than 'levity'.
Already, indeed, the picture of nature which we gained from fol-
lowing Goethe's studies both of the plant and of meteorological hap-
penings has brought us face to face with certain aspects of levity.
For when Goethe speaks of systole and diastole, as the plant first
taught him to see them and as later he found them forming the basic
factors of weather-formation, he is really speaking of the ancient con-
cepts, 'cold' and 'warm'. Goethe's way of observing nature is, in fact,
a first step beyond the limits of a science which kept itself ignorant of
levity as a cosmic counterpart to terrestrial gravity. To recognize the
historical significance of this step, let us turn our glance to the
*
moment when the human mind became aware that to lay a proper
foundation for the science it was about to build, it had to exclude any
idea of levity as something with a real existence.
Many a conception which is taken for granted by modern man,
and is therefore assumed to have been always obvious, was in fact
established quite deliberately at a definite historical moment. We
have seen how this applies to our knowledge of the gaseous state of
matter; it applies also to the idea of the uniqueness of gravity. About
half a century after van Helmont's discovery a treatise called Contra
Levitatem was published in Florence by the Accademia del Cimento.
It declares that a science firmly based on observation has no right to
speak of Levity as something claiming equal rank with, and opposite
to, Gravity.
This attitude was in accord with the state into which human con-
sciousness had entered at that time. For a consciousness which is it-
self of the quality 'cold', because it is based on the contracting forces
of the body, is naturally not in a position to take into consideration
its very opposite. Therefore, to speak of a force of levity as one felt
able to speak of gravity was indeed without meaning.
Just as there was historical necessity in this banishing of levity
from science at the beginning of the age of the spectator-conscious-
ness, so was there historical necessity in a renewed awareness of it
arising when the time came for man to overcome the limitations of
his spectator-relationship to the world. We find this in Goethe's im-
pulse to search for the action of polarities in nature. As we shall see
later, it comes to its clearest expression in Goethe's optical concep-
tions.
Another witness to this fact is Ruskin, through a remark which
bears in more than one sense on our present subject. It occurs in his
essay, The Storm-Cloud of the Ninteenth Century. In its context it
is meant to warn the reader against treating science, which Ruskin
praises as a fact-finding instrument, as an interpreter of natural facts.
Ruskin takes Newton's conception of gravity as the all-moving cause
of the universe, and turns against it in the following words:
'Take the very top and centre of scientific interpretation by the
greatest of its masters: Newton explained to you—or at least was
once supposed to explain, why an apple fell; but he never thought of
explaining the exact correlative but infinitely more difficult question,
how the apple got up there.'
This remark shows Ruskin once again as a true reader in nature's
book. Looking with childlike openness and intensity of participation
into the world of the senses, he allows nature's phenomena to impress
themselves upon his mind without giving any preconceived prefer-
ence to one kind or another. This enables him not to be led by the
phenomenon of falling bodies to overlook the polarically opposite
phenomenon of the upward movement of physical matter in the liv-
ing plant. Ruskin's remark points directly to the new world-concep-
tion which must be striven for to-day—the conception in which
death is recognized as a secondary form of existence preceded by life;
in which levity is given its rightful place as a force polar to gravity;
and in which, because life is bound up with levity as death is with
gravity, levity is recognized as being of more ancient rank than
gravity.
In proceeding now to a study of levity we shall not start, as might
be expected, with plants or other living forms. We are not yet
equipped to understand the part played by levity in bringing about
the processes of life; we shall come to this later. For our present pur-
pose we shall look at certain macrotelluric events—events in which
large areas of the earth are engaged—taking our examples from
meteorology on the one hand and from seismic (volcanic) processes
on the other.
In pursuing this course we follow a method which belongs to the
fundamentals of a Goetheanistic science. A few words about this
method may not be out of place.
When we strive to read the book of nature as a script of the spirit
we find ourselves drawn repeatedly towards two realms of natural
phenomena. They are widely different in character, but studied to-
gether they render legible much that refuses to be deciphered in either
realm alone. These realms are, on the one hand, the inner being of
man, and, on the other, the phenomena of macrotelluric and cosmic
character. The fruitfulness of linking together these two will become
clear if we reflect on the following.
The field of the inner life of man allows us, as nothing else does,
to penetrate it with our own intuitive experience. For we ourselves
are always in some sense the cause of the events that take place there.
In order to make observations in this region, however, we need to
bring about a certain awakening in a part of our being which—so
*
long as we rely on the purely natural forces of our body—remains
sunk in more or less profound unconsciousness.
If this realm of events is more intimately related than any other to
our intuitive experience, it has also the characteristic of remaining
closed to any research by external means. Much of what lies beyond
the scope of external observation, however, reveals itself all the more
clearly in the realms where nature is active on the widest scale. Certain-
ly, we must school ourselves to read aright the phenomena which come
to light in those realms. And once more we must look to the way of
introspection, previously mentioned, for aid in investing our gaze with
the necessary intuitive force. If we succeed in this, then the heavens will
become for us a text wherein secrets of human nature, hidden from
mere introspection, can be read; while at the same time the intro-
spective way enables us to experience things which we cannot uncover
simply by observing the outer universe.
Apart from these methodological considerations, there is a further
reason for our choice. Among the instances mentioned earlier in this
chapter as symptoms of a greater 'youthfulness' prevailing in nature,
and particularly in the element Fire, at a comparatively recent date,
were the manifestations of the Divine-Spiritual World to man re-
ported in the Bible as the event on Mount Sinai. There, thunder and
lightning from above and volcanic action from below form the set-
ting for the intercourse of Jehovah with Moses. To-day the function
of these types of phenomena, though metamorphosed by the altered
conditions of the earth, is not essentially different. Here, more than
in any other sphere of her activities, nature manifests that side of her
which we are seeking to penetrate with understanding.
Let us start with an observation known to the present writer from
a visit to the Solfatara, a volcanic region near Naples.
The Solfatara itself is a trough surrounded by hilly mounds; its
smooth, saucepan-like bottom, covered with whitish pumice-sand, is
pitted with craters containing violently boiling and fuming mud—the
so-called/««go, famous for its healing properties. All around sulphur-
ous fumes issue from crevices in the rocks, and in one special place
the Solfatara reveals its subterranean activity by the emergence of
fine, many-coloured sand, which oozes up like boiling liquid from the
depths below. The whole region gives the impression of being in a
state of labile balance. How true this is becomes apparent if one drops
*
pieces of burning paper here and there on the ground: immediately a
cloud of smoke and steam rises. The effect is even more intense if a
burning torch is moved about over one of the boiling fango holes.
Then the deep answers instantly with an extraordinary intensification
of the boiling process. The hot mud seems to be thrown into violent
turmoil, emitting thick clouds of steam, which soon entirely envelop
the spectator near the edge.
The scientific mind is at first inclined to see in this phenomenon the
mechanical effect of reduced air-pressure, due to the higher tempera-
tures above the surface of the boiling mud, though doubts are raised
by the unusual intensity of the reaction. The feeling that the physical
explanation is inadequate is strengthened when the vapours have
thinned out and one is surprised to see that every crack and cranny in
the Solfatara, right up to the top of the trough, shows signs of in-
creased activity. Certainly, this cannot be accounted for by a cause-
and-effect nexus of the kind found in the realm of mechanical causa-
tion, where an effect is propagated from point to point and the total
effect is the sum of a number of partial effects. It looks rather as if the
impulse applied in one spot had called for a major impulse which was
now acting on the Solfatara as a whole.
As observers who are trying to understand natural phenomena by
recognizing their significance as letters in nature's script, we must
look now for other phenomena which can be joined with this one to
form the relevant 'word' we have set out to decipher.
All scientific theories concerning the causes of seismic occurrences,
both volcanic and tectonic, have been conceived as if the spatial
motion of mineral matter were the only happening that had to be
accounted for. No wonder that none of these theories has proved
really satisfactory even to mechanistically orientated thinking. Actual-
ly there are phenomena of a quite different kind connected with the
earth's seismic activities, and these need to be taken into equal
account.
There is, for instance, the fact that animals often show a premoni-
tion of volcanic or tectonic disturbances. They become restive and
hide, or, if domestic, seek the protection of man. Apparently, they
react in this way to changes in nature which precede the mechanical
events by which man registers the seismic occurrence.
Another such phenomenon is the so-called earthquake-sky, which
the present writer has had several occasions to witness. It consists of a
peculiar, almost terrifying, intense discoloration of the sky, and, to
those acquainted with it, is a sure sign of an imminent or actual earth-
quake somewhere in the corresponding region of the earth. This
phenomenon teaches us that the change in the earth's condition
which results in a violent movement of her crust, involves a region of
her organism far greater than the subterranean layers where the
cause of the purely mechanical events is usually believed to reside.1
That man himself is not excluded from experiencing directly the
super-spatial nature of seismic disturbances is shown by an event in
Goethe's life, reported by his secretary Eckermann, who himself
learnt the story from an old man who had been Goethe's valet at the
time.2
This is what the old man, whom Eckermann met by accident one
day near Weimar, told him: 'Once Goethe rang in the middle of the
night and when I entered his room I found he had rolled his iron bed
to the window and was lying there, gazing at the heavens. "Have you
seen nothing in the sky?" asked he, and when I answered "No", he
begged me to run across to the sentry and inquire of the man on duty
if he had seen nothing. He had not noticed anything and when I re-
turned I found the master still in the same position, gazing at the sky.
"Listen," he said, "this is an important moment; there is now an
earthquake or one is just going to take place." Then he made me sit
down on the bed and showed me by what signs he knew this.' When
asked about the weather conditions, the old man said: 'It was very
cloudy, very still and sultry.' To believe implicitly in Goethe was for
him a matter of course, 'for things always happened as he said they
would'. When next day Goethe related his observations at Court, the
women tittered: 'Goethe dreams' (^Goethe schwärmt'), but the Duke
and the other men present believed him. A few weeks later the news
reached Weimar that on that night (5th April, 1783) part of Messina
had been destroyed by an earthquake.
There is no record by Goethe himself of the nature of the pheno-
menon perceived by him during that night, except for a brief remark
in a letter to Mme de Stein, written the following day, in which he
claims to have seen a 'northern light in the south-east' the extra-
ordinary character of which made him fear that an earthquake had
taken place somewhere. The valet's report makes us inclined to think
1 To the same category belong the mighty thunderstorms which in some parts
of the world are known to occur in conjunction with earthquakes.
2 See Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann (translated by J. Oxenford),
13th November, 1823.
that there had been no outwardly perceptible phenomenon at all, but
that what Goethe believed he was seeing with his bodily eyes was the
projection of a purely supersensible, but not for that reason any less
objective, experience.
In a picture of the seismic activities of the earth which is to com-
prise phenomena of this kind, the volcanic or tectonic effects cannot
be attributed to purely local causes. For why, then, should the whole
meteorological sphere be involved, and why should living beings
react in the way described? Clearly, we must look for the origin of the
total disturbance not in the interior of the earth but in the expanse of
surrounding space. Indeed, the very phenomenon of the Solfatara,
if seen in this light, can reveal to us that at least the volcanic move-
ments of the earth's crust are not caused by pressure from within, but
by suction from without—that is, by an exceptional action of levity.
We recall the fact that the whole Solfatara phenomenon had its
origin in a flame being swayed over one of the fango holes. Although
it remains true that the suction arising from the diminished air press-
ure over the hole cannot account for the intense increase of ebullition
in the hole itself, not to speak of the participation of the entire region
in this increase, there is the fact that the whole event starts with a
suctional effect. As we shall see in the next chapter, any local produc-
tion of heat interferes with the gravity conditions at that spot by
shifting the balance to the side of levity. That the response in a place
like the Solfatara is what we have seen it to be, is the result of an
extraordinary lability of the equilibrium between gravity and levity,
a characteristic appertaining to the earth's volcanism in general.
For the people living near the Solfatara it is indeed common know-
ledge that there are times when this lability is so great that the slightest
local disturbance of the kind we have described can provoke destruc-
tive eruptions of great masses of subterranean mud. (At such times
access to the Solfatara is prohibited.) We shall understand such an
eruption rightly if we picture it as the counter-pole of an avalanche.
The latter may be brought about by a fragment of matter on a snow-
covered mountain, perhaps a little stone, breaking loose and in its
descent bringing ever-accumulating masses of snow down with it.
The levity-process polar to this demonstration of gravity is the pro-
duction of a mightily growing 'negative avalanche' by compara-
tively weak local suction, caused by a small flame.
*
Earlier in this chapter (page 150) we said that if we want to under-
stand how spirit moves, forms and transforms matter, we must recog-
nize the existence of non-mechanical (magical) causes of physical
effects. We have now found that the appearance of such effects in
nature is due to the operations of a particular force, levity, polar to
gravity. Observation of a number of natural happenings has helped
us to become familiar in a preliminary way with the character of this
force. Although these happenings were all physical in appearance,
they showed certain definitely non-physical features, particularly
through their peculiar relationship to three-dimensional space. More
characteristics of this kind will appear in the following pages.
In this way it will become increasingly clear that in levity we have
to do with something which, despite its manifesting characteristics of
a 'force' not unlike gravity and thereby resembling the latter, differs
essentially from anything purely physical. It is only by its interactions
with gravity that levity brings about events in the physical world—
events, however, which are themselves partly of a physical, partly of
a superphysical kind. Seeing things in this aspect, we are naturally
prompted to ask what causes there are in the world which make
gravity and levity interact at all. This question will find its answer in
due course. First, we must make ourselves more fully acquainted
with the various appearances of the gravity-levity interplay in nature.
CHAPTER X
The Fourth State of Matter
When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on
the newly discovered properties of electricity, 'The Fourth State of
Matter', it was to express his belief that he had found a state of
matter, additional to the three known ones, which represented 'the
borderland where matter and force seem to merge into one another,
the shadowy realm between known and unknown' for which his soul
had been longing ever since the death of his beloved brother.1 All
that has followed from his discovery, down to the transformation of
matter itself into freely working energy, shows that he was right in
thinking he had reached some borderland of nature. But the character
of the forces which are thus liberated makes it equally clear that this
is not the borderland he was looking for. Nature—by which we mean
physical nature—has in fact two borders, one touching the realm of
the intramaterial energies which are liberated by disrupting the
structure of atomic nuclei, the other leading over into creative
Chaos, the fountain-head of all that appears in nature as intelligent
design.
It was Crookes's fate to open the road which has brought man to
nature's lower border and even across it, although he himself was in
search of her upper border. What he was denied, we are in a position
to achieve to-day, provided we do not expect to succeed by methods
similar to those of atomic physics, and do not look for similar results.
To show that there is a fourth state of matter, rightly so called,
which represents in actual fact the upper border of nature, and to
point the way that leads to it and across it, is the purpose of this
chapter.
1 See Chapter IV. The other title of the paper, 'Radiant Matter', will gain
significance for us in a later context.
*
From our previous comparison of the older conception of the four
elementary conditions of nature with that now held of the three
states of ponderable matter, we may expect that the fourth state will
have something in common with heat. Heat is indeed the energy
which transforms matter by carrying it from the solid to the liquid
and gaseous states. Not so obvious is the fact that heat, apart from
being an agent working at matter in this way, is the very essence
underlying all material existence, out of which matter in its three
ponderable states comes into being and into which it is capable of
returning again. Such a conception of matter was naturally absent
from the age of the Contra-Levitatem orientation of the human
mind. To create this conception, a new Pro-Levitate orientation is
required.
Apart from producing liquefaction and vaporization, heat has also
the property of acting on physical matter so that its volume increases.
Both facts are linked together by science through the thermodynamic
conception of heat. As this conception firmly blocks the road to the
recognition of the role of heat as the fourth state of matter, our first
task will be to determine our own standpoint with regard to it. Fur-
ther obstacles on our way are the so-called Laws of Conservation,
which state that no matter and no energy—which for present-day
science have become one and the same thing—can ever disappear
into 'nothing' or come into being out of 'nothing'. This idea, also,
will therefore require our early attention.1
In the light of our previous studies we shall not find it difficult to
test the reality-value of the thermodynamic conception of heat.
As we know of mass through a definite sense-perception, so we
know of heat. In the latter case we rely on the sense of warmth. In
Chapter VIII we took the opportunity to test the objectivity of the
information received through this sense. Still, one-eyed, colour-blind
observation is naturally unable to take account of these sense-
messages. To this kind of observation nothing is accessible, we know,
except spatial displacements of single point-like entities. Hence we
find Bacon and Hooke already attributing the sensation of warmth to
1 Since the above was written, certain conclusions drawn from modern sub-
atomic research have led some astro-physicists to the idea that hydrogen is con-
tinuously created in the cosmos 'out of nothing'. This does not affect the con-
siderations of the present chapter.
*
minute fast-moving particles of matter impinging on the skin. Some
time later we find Locke taking up the same picture. We see from this
how little the mechanical theory of heat owes to empirical facts. For
even in Locke's time the connexion between heat and mechanical
action, as recognized to-day, was completely unknown.
With this idea firmly rooted in his mind, modern man had no
difficulty in using it to explain both thermal expansion and the effect
of heat on the different states of matter, and so, finally, these states
themselves. Thermal expansion was thus attributed to an increase in
the average distance between the assumed minute particles, caused by
an increase in their rate of movement; the liquid state was held to
differ from the solid, and similarly the gaseous from the liquid, by the
interspaces between the particles becoming relatively so great that the
gravitational pull between them became too weak to hold them
together.
Tested from a view-point outside the onlooker-consciousness, this
whole picture of the interaction between matter and heat appears to
run counter to the cosmic order of things in a way typical of other
spectator-theories. Ancient man, if confronted with this picture,
would have said that it means explaining the element Fire by the
quality Cold. For each of those minute particles, in its solidity and
state of spatial separation from the others, represents an effigy of the
earth and thereby the element Earth itself. He would be unable to
understand why phenomena of the 'warm' element Fire should be
explained by its very opposite. Moreover, Fire forms part of the ever
'youthful' realm of the world, whereas anything which exists as a
spatially discernible entity, capable of being moved about mechan-
ically, must have grown cosmically 'old'.
That Ruskin was as much on the alert in regard to this theory as
he was in regard to Newton's theory of gravitation, is shown by the
following utterance from his The Queen of the Air. Obviously stirred
by Tyndall's newly published treatise, Heat as a Mode of Motion,
Ruskin felt the need to criticize the endeavour of contemporary
science 'to simplify the various forms of energy more and more into
modes of one force, or finally into mere motion, communicable in
various states, but not destructible', by declaring that he would him-
self 'like better in order of thought1 to consider motion as a mode of
heat than heat as a mode of motion'.
These words of Ruskin touch also on the law of conservation of
1 Note the expression!
energy, of which we said that it also called for a preliminary examina-
tion. What we now have to find out is the factual basis on which this
law rests.
The conception of the law of conservation of energy arose from
the discovery of the constant numerical relation between heat and
mechanical work, known as the mechanical equivalent of heat. This
discovery was made at about the same time by Joule in England and
J. R. Mayer in Germany, although by entirely different routes. Joule,
a brewer, was a man of practical bent. Trained by Dalton, the
founder of the atomic theory, in experimental research, he continued
Rumford's and Davy's researches which they had undertaken to
prove that heat is not, as it was for a time believed to be, a ponder-
able substance, but an imponderable agent. As a starting-point he
took the heating effect of electric currents. The fact that these could
be generated by turning a machine, that is, by the expenditure of
mechanical energy, gave him the idea of determining the amount of
work done by the machine and then comparing this with the amount
of heat generated by the current. A number of ingenious experiments
enabled him to determine with increasing exactitude the numerical
relation between work and heat, as well as to establish the absolute
constancy of the relation.
This he regarded as proof of the mechanical theory of heat, which
he had taken from Rumford and Davy. What simpler explanation
could there be for the constant numerical relation between work and
heat than the conception that transformation of one form of energy
into another was simply a transmission of motion from one object to
another? From the quantitative equality of expended and generated
energy was it not natural to argue the qualitative similarity of the two
forms of energy, which only externally seemed different?
It was by quite a different path that the Heilbronn doctor, Mayer,
arrived at his results. To escape from the narrowness of his South
German home town, he went, while still a youth, as doctor to a
Dutch ship sailing to Java. When in the tropics he treated a number
of sailors by blood-letting, he observed that the venous blood was
much nearer in colour to the paler arterial blood than was usual at
home. This change in the colour he attributed to the diminished in-
tensity of bodily combustion, due, he believed, to the higher tempera-
ture of the tropics.
*
Scarcely had this thought passed through his mind than it induced
another—that of a universal interrelationship between all possible
forms of energy. This last idea so took possession of him that during
the return voyage, as he himself related, he could scarcely think of
anything but how to prove the correctness of his idea and what the
consequences would be for the general view of nature. From the
moment of his return he devoted his life to practical research into the
connexion between the various manifestations of energy. It was in
this way that he was led to the determination of the so-called mechan-
ical equivalent of heat, shortly before the same discovery was made
in a quite different manner by Joule.
If one considers how slender a connexion there was between
Mayer's observation on the sailors in Java and the idea of the quan-
titative equilibrium of all physical nature-forces, and if one contrasts
this with the fanaticism he showed during the rest of his life in
proving against all obstacles the correctness of his idea, one must feel
that the origin of the thought in Mayer's mind lay elsewhere than in
mere physical observations and logical deductions. Confirmation of
this may be found in what Mayer himself declared to be his view
concerning the actual grounds for the existence of a constant numer-
ical association between the various manifestations of natural energy.
So far as science allowed Mayer any credit for his work, this was
based on the opinion that through his discovery he had provided the
final vindication of the mechanical theory of heat. This judgment,
however, was only piling one wrong upon another. Mayer's destiny
was truly tragic. When he began to publicize his conviction of the
numerical equilibrium between spent and created energy, he met with
so much scepticism, even derision, that from sheer despair his mind
at times became clouded. When at last toward the end of his life he
received the recognition his discovery deserved (not before being
dragged through a painful priority dispute which Joule forced upon
him and lost), the scientists had begun to use his idea for bolstering
up a hypothesis directly counter to the idea which had led him to his
discovery, and for the sake of which he had accepted so much
suffering.
Mayer's spiritual kin are not to be found among the heat-theorists
of his time, such as Helmholtz and others, but among thinkers of the
stamp of Goethe, Howard and Ruskin. His basic idea of the inner
connexion between all forms of energy in nature corresponds en-
tirely with Goethe's idea of metamorphosis. Just as Goethe saw in
the ur-plant the Idea common to all plant-forms or, in the various
plant-organs, the metamorphosis of one and the same ur-organ, so
was Mayer convinced of the existence of an ur-force which expressed
itself in varying guises in the separate energy-forms of nature. In the
picture of the physical universe which hovered before him, the trans-
formation of one form of energy into another—such as mechanical
energy into electrical, this into chemical and so on—was somewhat
similar to Goethe's picture of the organic life of the earth, in which
the metamorphosis of one living form into another constantly
occurred. 'There is in nature', said Mayer, 'a specific dimension of
immaterial constitution which preserves its value in all changes taking
place among the objects observed, whereas its form of appearance
alters in the most manifold ways.'
For the physicist, accustomed to a purely quantitative observation
of nature, it is difficult to comprehend that Mayer could have arrived
at the thought of a constant quantitative relation between the various
manifestations of natural energy, without deriving from it the con-
viction of their qualitative indentity—i.e., without concluding from
the existence of the mechanical heat-equivalent that heat is itself
nothing else than a certain form of spatial movement. Mayer actually
had a picture directly contrary to the mechanistic conception. For
him, the arising of heat represented a disappearance of mechanical
energy.
If this, then, was Mayer's belief, what was it that convinced him of
the existence of a numerical balance between appearing and vanish-
ing energy, even before he had any experimental proof?
Later in this book there will be occasion to introduce a concept of
number in tune with our qualitative world-outlook. What led Mayer
to look upon number as an expression of existing spiritual associ-
ations in nature will then become clear. Let this much be said here,
that number in the universe has quite different functions from that of
serving merely as an expression for a total of calculable items, or as
a means of comparing spatial distances. It is in the nature of the
onlooker-consciousness that it is unable to interpret numerical equal-
ity between natural phenomena save as indicating the presence of an
equal number of calculable objects or of spatial movements of equal
magnitude. It was therefore consistent for such a consciousness to
regard the discovery by Mayer of the mechanical heat-equivalent as a
confirmation of the existing mechanical conception of heat.
For Mayer such an interpretation was not necessary. His convic-
tion of the existence of an ur-force, manifesting through metamor-
phosis in all natural forces, led him to expect a constant numerical
relation amongst these, without requiring him to deny the objective
existence of qualitative differences, as these displayed themselves in
the field of phenomena. He was spiritually akin to Goethe, also, in
that he guarded himself strictly against substituting for the contents
of our perception conveyed by nature purely hypothetical entities
which, while fashioned after the world of the senses, are, in principle,
imperceptible. Mayer sought after a truly empirically founded con-
cept offeree, and his method was that of reading from all the various
manifestations of force which were open to sense observation. One
such manifestation, capable of empirical determination, was the
balance between appearing and disappearing energy.
Science treated Mayer in the same way as it treated Howard. It
took from him what it wanted for its purpose without concerning it-
self with the epistemological principle which had led him to his dis-
covery. Thus it was that Mayer's discovery led to most important
consequences for the development of modern technical devices,
whereas it was the fate of his guiding idea to be first derided, then
misunderstood and finally forgotten. The consequence was that the
knowledge of the numerical equilibrium between created and ex-
pended energy in the economy of nature has widened more and more
the abyss separating spirit and matter in human life, instead of
leading, as indeed it might have done, to a bridging of the abyss. The
thought, therefore, regarding the appearing and disappearing of
measurable cosmic substance, to which we are led when following
Goethe's method of observing nature, stands in no sort of contradic-
tion to what Mayer himself conceived as the relation of the various
forms of energy to one another, and the maintenance of the numerical
balance between them.
Having thus determined our standpoint with regard to the thermo-
dynamic theory of heat and the law of conservation, we may proceed
to the study, first of the phenomenon of thermal expansion, and then
of the effect of heat on the various states of physical matter, by apply-
ing to them, unimpeded by any preconceived mechanistic idea, what
we have learnt through our previous studies. We must start by
developing a proper picture of the dynamic condition of matter in the
solid state.
*
In a solid body the material substance is centred on an inner point,
the so-called centre of gravity—a characteristic which such a body
shares with the earth as a whole. Likewise, two such bodies exert on
one another the same influence that the earth exerts on each of them:
they try to assume the shortest possible distance from each other.
Since the days of Faraday science has been accustomed to ascribe
these phenomena to the existence of certain fields of force, connected
with each body and working on one another through the intermediary
space. It is to this concept of the field of force that we must now give
special attention. For the field-concept, in the form introduced by
Faraday into scientific thinking, is one of the few scientific concepts
which have been obtained by being 'read' from the corresponding
phenomena themselves, and which therefore retain their validity in a
science which is based on the method of reading.
According to the field-concept, terrestrial manifestations of gravity
are due to the earth's being the bearer of a gravitational field centred
within the globe, and extending thence in all directions through
space, across and beyond the earth's body. Every point in space, both
inside and outside the earth, is characterized by a definite intensity of
this field, the so-called gravitational potential. This is subject to vari-
ations due to the presence of other physical masses, which carry their
own fields of gravity. What happens between such masses and that of
the earth, as well as mutually between such masses themselves, is
brought about by the particular conditions in space resulting from
the interpenetration of the various fields.
It is essential to realize that all fields dealt with by physical science,
the gravitational, electric, magnetic—however much they differ
otherwise—have this one characteristic in common, that they have a
centre where the field is at its highest intensity, diminishing as the
distance from the centre increases. Motion in such a field naturally
takes place from regions of lower to those of higher intensity—in
other words, it follows the rising potential of the field. This accounts
for the tendency of physical masses to arrive at the shortest possible
distance between them.
It was natural for the modern mind to picture a dynamic condition
of the kind just described, that is, one in which the centre and source,
as it were, is a point round which the dynamic condition spreads with
steadily diminishing strength as the distance from the point grows.
For such is the condition of man's head-bound consciousness. The
locus from which modern man watches the world is a point within
the field of this consciousness, and the intensity with which the world
acts on it diminishes with increasing spatial distance from this point.
This is the reason why levity was banished from scientific inquiry,
and why, when the field-concept was created by the genius of Faraday,
it did not occur to anyone that with it the way was opened to com-
prehend field-types other than the centric one characteristic of grav-
ity and kindred forces. To make use of the field-concept in this other
way is one of the tasks we have to undertake if we are to overcome
the impasse in which present-day scientific cognition finds itself.
To develop a picture of the type of field represented by levity, let
us recall certain results from the observations of the last chapter.
There the volcanic phenomenon, when taken in its wider impli-
cations, made us realize that the upward movement of physical
masses, in itself part of the total phenomenon, is due to a dyn-
amic cause which we had to describe, in contrast to centripetally
working pressure, as peripherally working suction. Of this concept of
suction we must now observe that we may apply it with justification
only if we realize that suction can be caused in two different ways. In
the sense in which we are wont to use the term, suction is the result
of a difference of pressure in adjacent parts of space, the action taking
place in the direction of the minor pressure. Apart from this, how-
ever, suction can occur also as a result of the outward-bound increase
of the strength of a levity-field.
It is in this sense that we may speak of the seismic movements of
the earth as being caused by suction acting from without. In the same
sense we may say that the upward movement of the saps in the plant
(to which Ruskin pointed as being responsible for the apple appear-
ing at the top of the tree) and with it the entire growth-phenomenon
in the plant world, is due to peripheral suction.
Considerations of this kind lead one to a picture in which the earth
is seen to be surrounded and penetrated by a field offeree which is in
every respect the polar opposite of the earth's gravitational field. As
the latter has its greatest intensity at its centre, which is identical with
the centre of the earth's globe, so has the levitational field its greatest
intensity at its circumference which is somewhere in the width of
the universal. (Later considerations will enable us to locate its posi-
tion more precisely.)
As the gravity-field decreases in strength with increasing distance
from the centre of the field, that is, in the outward direction, so does
the levity-field decrease in strength with increasing distance from its
periphery, or in the inward direction. In both fields the direction of
movement is from regions of lower to those of higher intensity. This
is why things 'fall' under the influence of gravity and 'rise' under the
influence of levity.1
*
How does thermal expansion read as a letter in nature's script
when seen in the light of the two contrasting field-concepts?
Let us, for simplicity's sake, imagine a spherically shaped metallic
body, say, a ball of copper, which we expose to the influence of heat.
As we have seen, it is the centrically orientated gravity-field which
gives the ball its permanency of shape. Consequently, the dynamic
orientation of the material constituting its body is directed towards
the interior of the body itself.
Now, the moment we bring heat to bear on the body we find its
surface moving in the outward direction. The whole mass is clearly
under the influence of some suction which is directed on to the body
from outside. Just as the plants grow in the anti-gravitational direc-
tion as a result of the suctional effect of levity (other factors which
account for its growing into a particular shape, etc., being left out of
consideration), so our copper ball grows in volume by being sucked
away from its centre of gravity. It is the action of heat which has
changed the ratio between gravity and levity at this spot in such a
way as to allow levity to produce this effect.2
What we have thus found to be the true nature of the event per-
ceived as a body's growth in volume under the influence of heat has a
definite effect on our conception of spatially extended matter as such.
For a physical body is always in some thermal state which may be
regarded as higher than another, and it may therefore be regarded as
being at all times thermally expanded to some extent. Hence, it is all
the time under the sway of both gravitational pressure and anti-
gravitational suction. In fact, we may say ideally that, if there were no
field working inwards from the cosmic periphery, the entire material
content of the earthly realm would be reduced by gravitation to a
spaceless point; just as under the sole influence of the peripheral field
of levity it would dissipate into the universe.
1 For a vivid description of the interplay of both types of force in nature, see
E. Carpenter's account of his experience of a tree in his Pagan and Christian
Creeds.
2 Note how this picture of thermal expansion fits in with the one obtained for
the Solfatara phenomenon when we took into account all that is implicit in the
latter,
To ordinary scientific thinking this may sound paradoxical, but in
reality it is not. Observation of the nature of solid matter has led
atomistic thought to regard a physical body as a heap of molecules so
far apart that by far the greater part of the volume occupied by the
body is just 'empty' space. In the scientific picture of molecules con-
stituting a physical body, of atoms constituting the molecules, of
electrons, protons, etc., constituting the atoms, all separated by spaces
far exceeding the size of the elementary particles themselves, we find
reflected, in a form comprehensible to the onlooker-consciousness,
the fact that matter, even in the solid state, is kept in spatial extension
by a field of force relating it to the cosmic periphery.
*
With this picture of solid matter as being held in spatial extension
by its subjection to gravity and levity alike, we proceed to a study of
the liquid and gaseous states of matter, while taking into account the
role of heat in bringing these states about.
Following out our method of seeking to gain knowledge of a
phenomenon by regarding it as part of a greater whole, let us ask
what sort of change a portion of physical substance undergoes in its
relation to the earth as a whole when, for instance, through the in-
fluence of heat, it passes from a solid to a liquid state. Here we must
keep in mind that it is part of the nature of a liquid to have no form
of its own. The only natural boundary of a liquid substance is its
upper surface. Since this surface always lies parallel with the surface of
the earth it forms part of a sphere, the centre point of which is iden-
tical with that of the gravitational centre of the earth. The passage of
a portion of matter from solid to liquid thus signifies that it ceases to
possess a centre of gravity of its own and is now merely obedient to
the general gravity-field of the earth. We can thus speak of a transi-
tion of matter from the individual to the planetary condition. This is
what heat brings about when a solid body melts.
A large part of the heat used in melting is known to be absorbed
by the substance during the process of melting. This is indicated by
the thermometer remaining at the temperature of the melting-point
once this has been reached, until the whole of the melting substance
has liquefied. Physics here speaks of 'free' heat becoming 'latent'.
From the Goethean point of view we see heat passing through a
metamorphosis. Whereas, previously, heat was perceptible to our sense
of warmth, it now manifests as a gravity-denying property of matter.
In order to obtain an idea of the liquid state of matter correspond-
ing to reality, we must take into account yet another of its character-
istics. When the heat becomes latent, it goes even further in contra-
dicting gravity than by robbing matter of its own point of gravity and
relating it to the earth's centre of gravity. This effect is shown in the
well-known urge of all liquids to evaporate. Hence we must say that
even where matter in a liquid state preserves its own surface, this does
not by any means represent an absolute boundary. Above the surface
there proceeds a continuous transition of substance into the next
higher condition through evaporation. We see here the activity of
heat going beyond the mere denial of gravity to a positive affirmation
of levity.
With the help of this conception of the integration of the liquid
state within the polarity of gravity and levity, we are now able to
draw a picture of the earth which, once obtained, answers many a
question left unanswered by current scientific notions, among them
the question why the earth's volcanic activity is confined to maritime
regions.
Regarding the distribution of land and water on the earth's surface,
we may say that to an observer in cosmic space the earth would not
look at all like a solid body. Rather would it appear as a gigantic
'drop' of water, its surface interspersed with solid formations, the
continents and other land masses. Moreover, the evidence assembled
ever since Professor A. Wegener's first researches suggests that the
continents are clod-like formations which 'float' on an underlying
viscous substance and are able to move (very slowly) in both the ver-
tical and horizontal directions. The oceanic waters are in fact separ-
ated from the viscous substratum by no more than a thin layer of
solid earth, a mere skin in comparison with the size of the planet.
Further, this 'drop' of liquid which represents the earth is in constant
communication with its environment through the perpetual evapora-
tion from the ocean, as well as from every other body of water.
This picture of the earth shows it lying under the twofold influence
of the compressive force of gravity and the sucking force of levity.
Wherever land meets sea, there levity tends to prevail over gravity. It
is in maritime regions, accordingly, that the inner strata of the earth
succumb most readily to those sudden changes in the gravity-levity
tension wherein we have recognized the origin of seismic occurrences.
*
Turning to the gaseous condition, we realize that although even
here matter retains traces of a connexion with terrestrial gravity,
levity is now the dominant factor. There are three characteristics of
the gaseous condition which bring this out. One is the extreme readi-
ness of gases to expand when heated; we see here how much easier
than with solid substances it is for heat to overcome the influence of
gravity. The second characteristic is the property of gases, peculiar to
them, of expanding spontaneously, even when not heated. Here we
find gaseous matter displaying a dynamic behaviour which at lower
stages occurs only under the stimulus of heat. The third characteristic
is shown by the fact that all gases, unlike solids or liquids, respond
with the same increase of volume to a given rise of temperature, how-
ever diverse their other qualities may be. Once gases are mixed, there-
fore, they cannot be separated merely by raising or lowering the
temperature. Here we find the unifying effect of the cosmic periphery
prevailing over the differentiating effect of terrestrial gravity.
At this point we may recall Goethe's reply to the botanist, Wolff,
who had ascribed the metamorphosis of plant-organs from root to
blossom to a gradual stunting or atrophy of their vegetative force,
whereas it was clear to Goethe that simultaneously with a physical
retrogression, there is a spiritual progress in the development of
the plant. The fact that all Wolff's efforts to see clearly did not save
him from 'seeing past the thing' seemed to Goethe an inevitable
result of Wolff's failure to associate with the eyes of the body those
of the spirit.
Exactly the same thing holds good for the sequence of physical
states of matter which we are considering here. Observation of this
sequence with the bodily eyes alone will show nothing but a reduction
of the specific gravity of the material concerned. He who is at pains
to observe also with the eye of the spirit, however, is aware of a posi-
tive increase of lightness going hand in hand with a decrease of
heaviness. Regarded thus, the three ponderable conditions form what
Goethe would have called a 'spiritual ladder'. As 'rungs' of such a
ladder they clearly point to a fourth rung—that is, a fourth state in
which levity so far prevails over gravity that the substance no longer
has any weight at all. This picture of the fourfold transformation of
matter calls for an inquiry into the transition between the third and
fourth states, corresponding to the well-known transitions between the
three ponderable states.
*
Our observations have led us to a concept of heat essentially different
from that held by modern science. Science looks on heat simply as a
condition of ponderable matter. We, on the contrary, are led to
recognize in heat a fourth condition into which matter may pass on
leaving the three ponderable conditions, and out of which it may
emerge on the way to ponderability.
Before showing that such transitions are actually known in nature,
it may be well to discuss here an objection which the customary
way of thinking might plausibly advance against our whole method.
It could be said that to assume a continuation of the sequence of the
three ponderable conditions in the manner suggested is justified only
if, as solids can be turned into liquids and these into gases, so
gases could be transformed into a fourth condition and, conversely,
be produced from the latter.
In reply it can be said that the fact of our not being able at present
to change gases artificially into pure heat does not justify the con-
clusion that this is in principle impossible. We know from previous
considerations that the earth has reached an evolutionary stage at
which all elements, including fire, have in certain degree grown
'old'. This applies in quite a special degree to the manipulations to
which man, led by his death-bound consciousness, has learnt to sub-
mit matter in his laboratories. To decide what is possible or not poss-
ible in nature, therefore, can by no means be left to the judgment of
laboratory research. As is shown by the following instance, taken
from the realm of vegetable life, a case of the creation of matter 'out
of nothing' is already known to biology—though biology, bound in
its concepts to the Law of Conservation, shows some natural reluc-
tance to recognize the true significance of the phenomenon.
The plant which performs this strange feat is the Tillandsia
usneoides, indigenous to tropical America, and generally known as
'Spanish Moss'. Its peculiarity is that it grows and flourishes without
taking from its support any material whatsoever for the building up
of its substance. Its natural habitat is the dry bark of virgin forest
trees. Since civilization invaded its home it has acquired the habit of
growing even on telegraph wires, which has given it the popular name
of 'telegraph tresses'. Chemical analysis of this plant shows the
presence of an average of 17 per cent iron, 36 per cent silicic acid and
1-65 per cent phosphoric acid. This applies to samples taken from
districts where the rainwater—the only source from which the plant
could extract these substances in physical form—contains at most
1-65 per cent iron, 0-01 per cent silicic acid and no phosphoric acid
at all.
The Tillandsia phenomenon is to a certain extent reminiscent of
another well-known plant activity. This is the process of assimilation
of carbon from the carbon dioxide of the air. If we leave aside the
change in the chemical combination which the carbon undergoes,
there remains the picture of the plant drawing this matter to itself
from its environment and at the same time subjecting it to a spatial
condensation. A similar but even more far-reaching process is ex-
hibited by the Tillandsia as regards the three substances referred to
above. From the conditions given, it follows that the plant cannot
possibly get these substances elsewhere than out of the surrounding
atmosphere, and that in drawing upon them it submits them to a
high degree of condensation. A special role, however, is played by
the phosphorus, which shows that the assimilative power of the plant
is sufficient to transform phosphorus from a physically not traceable
state into one of spatially bounded materiality. Following Goethe
in his coining of the concept of 'spiritual anastomosis' for the pollin-
ating process of plants, we can here speak of 'spiritual assimilation'.
In this respect Tillandsia provides an instance 'worth a thousand,
bearing all within itself. For what nature here unmistakably demon-
strates serves as an eye-opener to a universal fact of the plant king-
dom and of nature in general. The problem of the so-called trace-
elements may serve as an illustration of this.
Modern agricultural chemistry has found of a number of chemical
elements that their presence in the soil in scarcely traceable volume
is necessary in order to enable the plant to unfold healthily its latent
characteristics. All sorts of deficiencies in cultivated plants have led
to a recognition that the soil is impoverished of certain elements by
intensive modern cultivation, and that it is to the lack of these ele-
ments that the deficiencies are due. Much work has meanwhile been
done in classifying the various deficiencies and in devising ways of
giving the soil chemical substitutes for what is lacking.
A large part of the work here involved could be saved were it only
to be acknowledged that the soil owes the natural occurrence of the
proper elements to a process which the plants themselves bring about
in the soil, if men refrain from hindering them by cleverly thought-
out methods of cultivation which fail to reckon with the nature of a
living organism.
Let us be clear what it is that occurs when a plant exhibits any of
the observed abnormalities. Expressed in a Goethean manner, these
are the consequence of an insufficient direction of the organic pro-
cesses in the plant body by the spiritual plant-type underlying it. That
which Ruskin called the 'spirit' of the plant, and to which he drew
attention in his aphorism 'Stand by Form against Force' (by 'form'
all the peculiar qualities of the plant are to be understood), is unable
to express itself in full measure. Now we know that, in order to unfold
its activities on the physical plane, spirit requires 'young' matter—
that is, matter which is either in, or has just emerged from, a purely
dynamic state. Normally a definite spiritual type co-ordinates the
dynamic functions present in the superphysical sphere of nature in
the manner required to give the plant-organism its appropriate form.
As, through the action of the type, these functions are brought down
from the sphere of levity into that of gravity, they condense to the
corresponding material elements and thus reach the soil in material
form via the physical organism of the plant.
The pattern as usually seen is now reversed; the presence of the
various elements in the soil no longer appears as the origin of one or
another function in the building up of the plant-body, but quite the
reverse. The functions appear now as the cause, and the soil-elements
as the effect. We may thus recognize the value of the latter as symp-
toms from which we can read the existence of a healthy connexion
between the plant and the corresponding form-creating functions
working on it from its surroundings.
With this reversal of the relationship between cause and effect it is
not, however, intended to represent the commonly accepted order of
things as entirely incorrect. In the realm of life, cause and effect are
not so onesidedly fixed as in the realm of mechanical forces. We may
therefore admit that a reverse effect of the soil-elements upon the
plant does take place. This is plainly demonstrable in the case of
phosphorus which, however, by reason of its appearance in the soil
in proportions hardly to be called a mere 'trace', represents a border-
line case. What may apply within limits to phosphorus is wholly valid
for the trace-elements—namely, that they are playing their essential
role while they are themselves about to assume ponderable form.
It thus becomes clear how mistaken it is to attempt to cure defici-
encies in plants by adding to the soil chemical substitutes for the
trace-elements. In the condition in which this material is offered
to the plant, it is truly 'old' material. In order to be able to use it
functionally, the plant has first to convert it into the 'young' condi-
tion. This indeed happens whilst the material is rising in the plant
combined with the juices drawn by the plant from the soil under the
influence of levity-force. Only when this has occurred are the chem-
ical elements able to serve the plant functionally. Thus, by trying to
give help to the plant in this way, we injure it at the same time. For
by forcing it to perform the operation described, its general life-
forces are diminished. A seeming success brought about in this man-
ner, therefore, will not last long.1
There is, nevertheless, a way of helping the plant by adding to the
soil certain material substances, provided these are first brought into
a purely dynamic condition. That this can be done is a fact long since
known, even if not recognized in its true significance. So far then, as
serves the purpose of this book, we shall deal with it here.
*
The method in question is associated with the school of medicine
known as Homoeopathy, founded by the German doctor, Hahne-
mann. The word 'homoeopathy' means 'healing through like'; the
basic principle is to treat disease symptoms with highly diluted sub-
stances which produce similar symptoms if ingested in normal quan-
tity. Experience has in fact shown that the physiological effect of a
substance taken from external nature is reversed when the substance
is highly diluted.
The method of diluting, or 'potentizing', is as follows:
A given volume of the material to be diluted is dissolved in nine
times its volume of distilled water. The degree of dilution thus
arrived at is 1: 10, usually symbolized as Ix. A tenth part of this
solution is again mixed with nine times its bulk of water. The degree
of dilution is now 1: 100, or 2x. This process is continued as far as is
found necessary for a given purpose. Insoluble substances can be
dealt with in the same manner by first grinding them together with
corresponding quantities of a neutral powder, generally sugar of
milk. After a certain number of stages the powder can be dissolved in
water; the solution may then be diluted further in the manner
described. Here we have to do with transfer of the quality of a sub-
stance, itself insoluble, to the dissolving medium, and then with the
further treatment of the latter as if it were the original bearer of the
quality concerned.
1 This throws light also on the problem of the use of chemicals as artificial
fertilizers.
This fact alone shows that potentization leads into a realm of
material effects at variance with the ordinary scientific conception of
matter. Moreover, we can carry the dilutions as far as we please
without destroying the capacity of the substance to produce physio-
logical reactions. On the contrary, as soon as its original capacity is
reduced to a minimum by dilution, further dilution gives it the power
to cause actually stronger reactions, of a different and usually oppo-
site kind. This second capacity rises through stages to a variable
maximum as dilution proceeds.
A simple calculation shows—if we accept the ordinary scientific
view as to the size of a molecule—that not a single molecule of the
original substance will remain in the solution after a certain degree of
dilution has been reached. Yet the biological and other reactions con-
tinue long after this, and are even enhanced.
What this potentizing process shows is that, by repeated expan-
sions in space, a substance can be carried beyond the ponderable
conditions of matter into the realm of pure functional effect. The
potentizing of physical substances thus gains a significance far wider
than that of its medical use.1 There opens up, for example, the possi-
bility of stimulating deficient functions in the plant by giving it the
corresponding elements in homoeopathic doses. By this means the
plant is brought into direct connexion with the relevant spiritual
energy, and then left to carry out for itself the necessary process of
materialization, instead of being forced by mere chemical additions
to the soil first to potentize the substance itself.2
The same principle holds good for man and beast. They also need
'young material' for their nourishment, so that the type active in
them—which in animals is the group-soul of the species and in man
is the single individual—can express its true form and character. (We
saw earlier that the will requires 'young' material in order to pene-
trate into the material layers of the muscles, as happens when the
limbs are set in motion). In this respect, the difference between en-
souled creatures and plants is that, what is harmful to plants is
1 See L. Kolisko: Wirksamkeit kleinster Entitäten ('Effects of Smallest En-
tities'), Stuttgart, 1922, an account of a series of experiments undertaken by the
author at the Biological Institute of the Goetheanum following suggestions by
Rudolf Steiner. Her aim was to examine the behaviour of matter on the way to
and beyond the boundary of its ponderable existence.
2 Instead of using the trace-elements in mineral form, it is still better to use
parts of certain plants with a strong 'functional tendency', specially prepared.
This is done in the so-called Bio-Dynamic method of farming and gardening,
according to Rudolf Steiner's indications.
natural for men and animals: when taking nourishment the latter are
able to bring about quickly and purposefully a transformation of
matter into the purely dynamic state. Their metabolic system is de-
signed to enable them to take alien material from outer nature and to
transform it through the forces of the various digestive enzymes; in
the course of this process the material passes through a condition of
complete 'chaos'.
*
Having in this way established the existence of certain processes of
materialization and dematerialization in single organisms within the
earth's vegetable and other kingdoms, we shall now turn to the earth
as a whole to find out where—organic being that she herself is—she
manipulates corresponding processes on a macrotelluric scale.
In an age following van Helmont's discovery of the gaseous state
of matter and the statement of the Contra Levitatem maxim, men
were bound to think that the circulation of atmospheric moisture was
limited to the three stages of liquid, vaporous (peculiar to the clouds,
etc.) and the invisible aeriform condition. Yet the role played by
clouds in the myths of early peoples shows that they were once given
a quite different status, between the 'created' and 'uncreated' worlds.
Our observations lead to a corresponding conception, but along the
path of knowledge, guided by sense-perception, as befits our own
age.
In discussing Howard's discovery of the stages of cloud-formation
we found something lacking, for it was clear that the three stages of
cloud proper—stratus, cumulus and cirrus—have a symmetry which
is disturbed by the addition of a fourth stage, represented by the
nimbus. This showed that there was need for a fifth stage, at the top
of the series, to establish a balanced polarity. We can now clear up
this question of a fifth stage, as follows.
In the three actual cloud-forms, gravity and levity are more or less
in equilibrium, but in the nimbus gravity predominates, and the
atmospheric vapour condenses accordingly into separate liquid
bodies, the drops of rain. The polar opposite of this process must
therefore be one in which cloud-vapour, under the dominating in-
fluence of levity, passes up through a transitional condition into a
state of pure heat.
Such a conception by no means contradicts the findings of external
research. For meteorology has come to know of a heat-mantle sur-
rounding the earth's atmosphere for which various hypothetical ex-
planations have been advanced. Naturally, none of them envisages
the possibility of atmospheric substance changing into the heat-
condition and back again. But if we learn to look on the chain of
cloud-forms as a 'spiritual ladder', then we must expect the chain to
conclude with a stage of pure heat, lying above the cirrus-sphere.1
The line of consideration pursued in the last part of this chapter
has led us from certain observations in the plant kingdom, concern-
ing the coming into being of ponderable matter from 'nothing', to a
corresponding picture of the earth's meteorological sphere. When
discussing the plant in this respect we found as an instance 'worth a
thousand, bearing all within itself the case of Tillandsia and more
particularly the surprising appearance of phosphorus in it. Now, in
the meteorological realm it is once more phosphorus which gives us
an instance of this kind. For there is the well-known fact of the
presence of phosphorus in conspicuous quantities in snow without a
source being traceable in the atmosphere whence this substance can
have originated in ponderable condition. The phosphorus appearing
in snow, therefore, brings before our very eyes the fact that the
heights of the atmosphere are a realm of procreation of matter. (In
our next chapter we shall learn what it is in phosphorus that makes it
play this particular role in both fields of nature. What interests us
in the present context is the fact itself.)
*
The knowledge we have now gained concerning the disappearance
and appearance of physical water in the heights of the atmosphere
will enable us to shake off one of the most characteristic errors to
which the onlooker-consciousness has succumbed in its estimation of
nature. This is the interpretation of thunderstorms, and particularly
of lightning, which has held sway since the days of Benjamin
Franklin.
Before developing our own picture of a thunderstorm let us recog-
nize that science has found it necessary to reverse the explanation so
long in Vogue. Whereas it was formerly taken for granted—and the
assumption was supposed to rest upon experimental proof—that the
/
1 Note, in this respect, the close of Goethe's poem dedicated to the cirrus-
formation and the poem inspired by his sight of a waterfall in the Bernese Alps as
indications of the fact that he was himself aware of the water-rejuvenating process
in the higher reaches of the atmosphere.
condensing of atmospheric vapour which accompanied lightning was
the consequence of a release of electrical tension by the lightning, the
view now held is that the electrical tension responsible for the occur-
rence of lightning is itself the effect of a sudden condensing process of
atmospheric moisture.
The reason for this uncertainty is that the physical conditions in
the sphere where lightning occurs, according to other experiences of
electric phenomena, actually exclude the formation of such high
tensions as are necessary for the occurrence of discharges on the
scale of lightning. If we look at this fact without scientific bias we are
once again reminded of the Hans Andersen child. We cannot help
wondering how this child would behave in a physics class if the
teacher, after vainly trying to produce a lightning-flash in miniature
with the help of an electrical machine, explained that the moisture
prevalent in the air was responsible for the failure of the experiment,
and that he would have to postpone it to a day when the air was
drier. It would scarcely escape the Hans Andersen child that the con-
ditions announced by the teacher as unfavourable to the production
of an electric spark by the machine, prevail in a much higher degree
exactly where lightning, as a supposed electric spark, actually does
occur.
To conclude from the presence of electric tensions in the earth's
atmosphere as an accompaniment of lightning, in the way first ob-
served by Franklin, that lightning itself is an electrical process, is to
be under the same kind of illusion that led men to attribute electrical
characteristics to the human soul because its activity in the body was
found to be accompanied by electrical processes in the latter. The
identification of lightning with the electric spark is a case of a con-
fusion between the upper and lower boundaries of nature, character-
istic of the onlooker-consciousness. As such, it has stood in the way
of a real understanding both of non-electrical natural phenomena
and of electricity itself.
What we observe in lightning is really an instantaneous execution
of a process which runs its course continually in the atmosphere,
quietly and unnoticed. It is the process by which water reverts from
the imponderable to the ponderable condition, after having been
converted to the former through levity set in action by the sun (as
usually happens in a high degree just before a thunderstorm). We
form a true picture of the course of a storm if we say that nature
enables us to witness a sublime display of the sudden bringing to
birth of matter in earthbound form. What falls to the ground as
rain (or hail) is substantially identical with what was perceptible to
the eye, a moment before, as a majestic light-phenomenon. The
accompanying electrical occurrence is the appropriate counter-event
at nature's lower boundary. Since the two form part of a larger whole
they necessarily occur together; but the electrical occurrence must
not be identified with the event in the heavens. The reason for their
conjunction will become clear later, when we shall show how elec-
trical polarity arises from the polarity between gravity and levity.
If one learns to view a thunderstorm in this way, its spiritual con-
nexion with the earth's volcanic processes becomes manifest; there is
in fact a polar relationship between them. For just as in volcanic
activity heavy matter is suddenly and swiftly driven heavenwards
under the influence of levity, so in a storm does light matter stream
earthwards under the influence of gravity.
It is this combination of kinship and polar opposition which led
people of old to regard both lightning in the heights and seismic dis-
turbances in the depths as signs of direct intervention by higher
powers in the affairs of men. A trace of this old feeling lingers in the
Greek word θειον (theion), divine, which was used to denote both
lightning and sulphur. Influenced by the same conception, the
Romans regarded as holy a spot where lightning had struck the
earth; they even fenced it off to protect it from human contact. Note
in this respect also the biblical report of the event on Mount Sinai,
mentioned before, telling of an interplay of volcanic and meteoro-
logical phenomena as a sign of the direct intervention of the Godhead.
CHAPTER XI
Matter as Part of Nature's Alphabet
In the preceding chapter we drew attention to the fact that any
spatially extended mass is under the sway of both gravity and levity.
We then saw that with the transition of matter from the solid via the
liquid to the gaseous state, not only does the specific gravity of the
substance decrease, but at the same time an increase takes place of
what we might call 'specific levity'. In the gaseous state, therefore, we
find gravity-bound matter becoming so far levity-bound that it
assumes the property of actively expanding in space.
Having once adopted the Goethean way of thinking-in-polarities,
we may feel sure that there is somewhere in nature a phenomenon
which represents the polar opposite of the levity-gravity relationship
peculiar to the gaseous state. In this latter state we find ponderable
matter so far brought under the sway of levity that its behaviour is of
a kind which van Helmont, when he first observed it, could not help
describing as 'paradoxical'. Where, we must now ask, do we find im-
ponderable essence so much under the sway of gravity that it shows
the correspondingly paradoxical features? In other words, where does
nature show levity concentrated in a limited part of space—that is, in
a condition characteristic of ponderable matter?
Such concentrations of levity do indeed exist in varied forms. One is
the 'warmth-body' represented by the blood-heat of the higher animals
and man. There is, however, an occurrence of this kind also on the
purely mineral level of nature, and it is this which has particular sig-
nificance for our present study of matter. We meet it in all physical
substances which have the peculiarity of being combustible.
Our next task is to study certain fundamentals in regard to the
different ways in which levity and gravity are found to be inter-
twined in combustible substances, manifesting through the difference
of their relation to the process of combustion—that is, the process by
which levity is restored to its original condition. It is the aim of the
present chapter to show that by doing justice to the imponderable
aspect of combustion, the way is opened to a view of the 'elements',
as scientific chemistry understands them, which will be in line with
our dynamic conception of matter.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that a new conception of the
chemical element can arise from a re-study of the process of com-
bustion, if we remember that it was the picture of combustion, char-
acteristic of the spectator-consciousness, which determined the con-
ception of the chemical element as it prevails in modern science. Let
us see how this conception came to pass historically in order to find
where we stand to-day.
*
With the establishment of the knowledge of a state of physical
matter which, as the definition ran, 'neither results from a combina-
tion of other physical substances nor is resolvable into such', the
conviction arose that man's searching mind had reached 'rock-
bottom'. This conviction, however, was shaken when, with the dis-
covery of radium, an element became known whose property it is to
disintegrate into two other elements, helium and lead. Although this
did not force science to abandon the element-concept altogether, it
became necessary to find a new definition for it.
This definition was established by Professor W. Ostwald at the
beginning of the present century, when he stated that the chemical
element represents a condition of physical matter in which 'any
chemical change results in an increase of weight'. In this way, the
chemical concept of the element achieved a meaning which had actu-
ally been implicit in it from its first conception. For its very forma-
tion had been the outcome of the Contra-Levitatem maxim. The
following glance over the history of chemistry will show this.
The birth of chemistry as a science, in the modern sense, is closely
connected with a revolutionary change in the conception of what can
be called the chemical arch-process—combustion, or, to use a more
scientific term, oxidation. This change arose out of the Contra-
Levitatem maxim and the new conception of heat which this maxim
required. In the old doctrine of the four Elements, Heat had been
conceived as a manifestation of the element of Fire, and so, together
with Air, as belonging to the realm of the 'uncreated things'. Hence
the release of heat from created substance was always felt to be a
sacred act, as is shown by the fire rites of old.
Modern man's conception of the same process is revealed in the
answer one invariably receives from both layman and scientist when
they are asked what they understand by combustion. It is described
as a process through which oxygen combines with the combustible
substance. And yet this side of combustion, first observed by J. Priest-
ley (1771), is neither the one for the sake of which man produces com-
bustion in the service of his everyday life, nor is it at all observed by
ordinary sense-perception. Nevertheless, to describe the obvious fact,
that combustion is liberation of heat from the combustible substance,
will hardly occur to anyone to-day. This shows to what extent even
the scientifically untrained consciousness in our time turns instinc-
tively to the tangible or weighable side of nature, so that some effort
is required to confess simply to what the eye and the other senses
perceive.
During the first hundred years after the establishment of the Con-
tra-Levitatem maxim, man's situation was in a certain sense the
opposite of this. Then, people were struggling hard to get away from
the old concept which saw in combustion nothing but the liberation
of a super-terrestrial element from earthly fetters. This struggle found
expression in a theory of heat which at that time greatly occupied
scientific thinking. It is the so-called phlogiston-theory first proposed
by the chemist Stahl (1660-1734).
This theory reveals the great uncertainty into which man's thinking
about the world of the senses had arrived at that time. Clinging to
ideas inherited from antiquity, man's consciousness was already so
far restricted to the forming of pure matter-bound concepts that he
was tempted to conceive heat as a material element. To this heat-
substance the name 'phlogiston' was given. At the same time, under
the Contra-Levitatem maxim, it was impossible to conceive of sub-
stance except as ponderable substance. This led to the conviction that
whenever heat appears as a result of some treatment of matter (com-
bustion or friction), the material substance subject to this treatment
must lose weight.
The experiments of Lavoisier (1743-94), which he undertook fol-
lowing Priestley's discovery of the role of oxygen in combustion, put
an end to this theory. These experiments are rightly regarded as the
actual beginning of modern chemistry. In Lavoisier we find an obser-
ver of nature who was predominantly interested in what the scales
could tell about changes in substances. It was from this aspect that
he investigated the process of oxidation. What had already been ob-
served by a few others, though without being taken seriously by
them, he found confirmed—that, contrary to the phlogiston-theory,
matter does not lose weight through oxidation but gains weight.
Further experiments proved beyond doubt that in all chemical re-
actions the total weight of the components remained constant. How-
ever much the substance resulting from the chemical reaction of
others might differ from these, its weight always proved to be the
same as their total weight. What else could be concluded from the
apparent unchangeability of weight throughout all the chemical hap-
penings in nature than that the ponderable world-content was of
eternal duration? We see here how much modern chemistry and its
concept of the chemical element has been ruled right from the start
by the one-sided gravity concept of the onlooker-consciousness.
Together with the overcoming of the fallacy that heat is a ponder-
able substance (full certainty was indeed established only some time
later through the investigations of Davy and Rumford into heat
generated by friction)—human thinking was led into a one-sided con-
ception of combustion which was merely the opposite of the one held
earlier. Whereas formerly man's mind was pre-eminently occupied by
the liberation of the imponderable element through combustion, it
now turned entirely to what goes on in the ponderable realm.
As we have seen, one outcome of this one-sided view of combustion
was the modern concept of the chemical element. To-day our task is
to overcome this concept by taking a step corresponding to the one
that led to it, that is, by a study of combustibility which does justice
to both sides of the process involved.
*
As objects of our observation we choose three chemical elements
all of which have the property of combustibility: Sulphur, Phos-
phorus, and Carbon. As will become clear, our choice of these three
is determined by the fact that together they represent an instance
'worth a thousand, bearing all within itself.
We begin by comparing Sulphur and Phosphorus. In their element-
ary state they have in common the fact that any chemical change is
bound up with an increase in their weight. In this state both are com-
bustible. Apart from this similarity, there is a great difference be-
tween them, as the way of storing them illustrates. For while element-
ary sulphur needs only an ordinary container, phosphorus has to be
kept under cover of water in order to prevent the atmospheric oxygen
from touching it. The reason is that the combustible state is natural
for sulphur, but not for phosphorus, the latter's natural state being
the oxidized one. This different relationship of sulphur and phos-
phorus to the oxidizable (reduced) and the oxidized state manifests
itself in all their chemical reactions.
To object here that the different reactions of the two substances
are due only to the difference of their respective temperatures of
ignition, and that above these temperatures the difference will more
or less disappear (all combustible substances at a sufficiently high
temperature becoming more or less similar to phosphorus), would not
meet the argument. For what matters here is just how the particular
substance behaves at that level of temperature on which the earth un-
folds her normal planetary activity. To ignore this would be to violate
one of the principles we have adopted from Goethe, which is never
to derive fundamental concepts of nature from observations obtained
under artificial conditions.
Sulphur and phosphorus are thus seen to represent two polaric-
ally opposite tendencies with regard to the levity-gravity coherence
which breaks up when combustion occurs. In the case of sulphur, the
ponderable and imponderable entities appear to cling together; in the
case of phosphorus, they seem to be anxious to part. These two differ-
ent tendencies—which are characteristic of many other substances
and represent a basic factor in the chemical happenings of the earth—
are in their own way a pair of opposites. Since each of them repre-
sents in itself a relationship between two poles of a polarity—gravity
and levity—so in their mutual relationship they represent a 'polarity
of polarities'. In Fig. 4 an attempt has been made to represent this
fact by a symbolic diagram.
In this figure the shaded part represents the imponderable, the
black part the ponderable entity. In the left-hand symbol both are
shown in a relationship corresponding to the one characteristic of
sulphur; in the right-hand figure the relationship is characteristic of
phosphorus.
Here we have an instance of a kind of polarity which belongs to
the fundamentals of nature as much as does the levity-gravity polar-
ity itself. Wherever two poles of a polarity meet, they have the possi-
bility of being connected in two ways which in themselves are again
polarically opposite. Our further studies will bring up various other
instances of this kind, and will show us that part of the epistemo-
logical trouble in which science finds itself to-day results from the
fact that the scientific mind has been unable to distinguish between
the two kinds of polarity—that is, as we shall say henceforth, between
polarities of the first order (primary polarities) and polarities of the
second order (secondary polarities).
In actual fact, the distinction between the two orders of polarity
has been implicit in the descriptions given in this book right from the
start. Remember, in this respect, how the picture of the threefold
psycho-physical structure of man, which has proved a master-key for
unlocking the most varied scientific problems, was first built up.
There, 'body' and 'soul' represented a polarity which is obviously one
of the first order. By our observation of the human organism, in
relation both to the different functions of the soul and to the different
main organic systems, we further recognized the fact that the ways in
which body and soul are interrelated are polarically opposite in the
region of the brain and nerves and in the region of the metabolic pro-
cesses, which again results in two polarically opposite activities of the
soul, mental on the one hand, and volitional on the other. In what we
called the pole-of-consciousness and the pole-of-life we therefore
have a clear polarity of the second order, and so in everything that is
connected with these two, as our further discussions will show.
Remembering that our first occasion to concern ourselves overtly
with the concept of polarity was in connexion with the four elements,
we may now ask whether the old doctrine did not embrace some con-
ception of secondary polarity as well as of primary polarity, and if so,
whether this might not prove as helpful in clarifying our own con-
ceptions as was the primary polarity, cold-warm. That this is indeed
so, the following description will show.
Beside the two qualities cold and warm the doctrine of the four
elements pointed to two further qualities forming in themselves a pair
of opposites, namely, dry and moist. Just as the four elements were
seen as grouping themselves in two pairs, Fire-Air on the one hand,
Water-Earth on the other, the first being characterized by the quality
warm, the second by cold, so were they seen to form two opposing
groups, Fire-Earth and Air-Water, of which one was characterized by
the quality dry, the other by the quality moist. Fig. 5 shows how the
four elements in their totality were seen to arise out of the various
combinations of the four qualities.
In this diagram the element Earth appears as a combination of the
qualities Dry and Cold; Water of Cold and Moist; Air of Moist and
Warm; Fire of Warm and Dry. As a result, Earth and Fire, besides
representing opposite poles, are also neighbours in the diagram. Here
we encounter a picture characteristic of all earlier ways of looking at
the world: the members of a system of phenomena, when ranked in
due order of succession, were seen to turn back on themselves circle-
wise—or, more precisely, spiral-wise.
In what way do the qualities dry and moist form a polarity of the
second order, and how do they represent the chemical polarity charac-
teristic of sulphur and phosphorus as well as all the other secondary
polarities dealt with in this book? To understand this we must submit
the couple dry-moist to the same scrutiny as we applied to cold and
warm in our earlier discussion of the four elements.
It lies in the nature of things that we instinctively associate these
qualities with the solid and liquid states of matter respectively. This
certainly agrees with the diagram given above, where the elements
Earth and Water are distinguished precisely by their connexion with
these two characteristics. Yet, in addition to this, the qualities dry
and moist are found to be characteristic also of Fire and Air respec-
tively, though with the difference that they are linked not with the
quality cold, as in the case of the lower elements, but with the quality
warm. So we see that the concepts Dry and Moist, as they lived in the
old picturing of them, mean a good deal more than we understand by
them to-day.
That these two respective attributes do not belong exclusively to the
solid and the liquid states of matter can be seen at once by observing
the different reactions of certain liquids to a solid surface which they
touch. One need only recall the difference between water and quick-
silver. If water runs over a surface it leaves a trail; quicksilver does not.
Water clings to the side of a vessel; again, quicksilver does not. A
well-known consequence of this difference is that in a narrow tube
the surface of the liquid—the so-called meniscus—stands higher at
the circumference than at the centre in the case of water; with quick-
silver it is just the reverse. In the sense of the two qualities, dry and
moist, water is a 'moist' liquid; quicksilver a 'dry' one. On the other
hand, the quality of moistness in a solid substance appears in the
adhesive power of glue.
Let us now see how, in accordance with the scheme given in Fig. 5,
the four qualities in their respective combinations constitute the four
elements. From the description we shall give here it will be realized
how little such ancient schemes were based on abstract thoughts, and
how much they were read from the facts of the world. Moreover, a
comparison with our description of the four stages of matter, given in
the previous chapter, would show how far the conceptual content of
the old doctrine covers the corresponding facts when they are read by
the eye of the modern reader in nature, notwithstanding the changes
nature has undergone in the meantime.
The element Fire reveals its attributes of warm and dry in a behav-
iour which combines a tendency to dynamic expansion with a dis-
inclination to enter into lasting combination with the other elements.
Correspondingly, the behaviour of the element Earth unites a ten-
dency to contraction with an inclination to fall out of conjunction
with the other elements. Thus the«attribute, dry, belongs equally to
pure flame and sheer dust, though for opposite reasons. Distinct from
both these elements are the middle elements Water and Air; with
them the attribute, moist, comes to expression in their tendency both
to interpenetrate mutually and to absorb their neighbours—the
liquid element absorbing solid matter and the aeriform element tak-
ing up heat. What distinguishes them is that water has a 'cold' nature,
from which it gains its density; while air has a 'warm' nature, to
which it owes its tendency to expand.
In the most general sense, the quality 'moist' applies wherever two
different entities are drawn into some kind of intimate relationship
with one another; 'dry' applies where no such relationship prevails.
Seen thus, they reveal themselves as a true polarity of the second
order, for they describe the relationship between two entities which
already exists, and, in the case of the four elements, are themselves a
polarity. As such, they characterize precisely those polar relation-
ships of the second order on which the threefold structure of man, we
found, is based. For from the physical, as much as from the super-
physical aspect the nerve-system represents the 'dry' part, and the
metabolic system the 'moist' part of man's being. The same is true of
the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world at both
poles. Here we have the antithesis between the 'dry' onlooker-rela-
tionship of the intellect to the world, conceived as a mere picture
whose essence remains outside the boundaries of the soul, and the
'moist' intermingling of the will-force with the actual forces of the
world.
*
It needs no further explanation to realize that sulphur and phos-
phorus, by the way in which levity and gravity are interlinked in each
of them, are representatives of these very qualities 'moist' and 'dry'.
As such they are universally active bearers of these qualities in every
realm of nature's varied activities, as their physical presence in such
cases confirms. Consequently, sulphur is found in the protein-sub-
stances of the human body wherever they are bearers of metabolic
processes, while the presence of phosphorus is characteristic of the
nerves and bones. (Although its full significance will become clear to
us only later, the fact may here be mentioned that the composition of
the bone-material in the different parts of man's skeleton, as scientific
analysis has shown, is such that the content of phosphate of calcium
in proportion to carbonate of calcium is higher in all those parts
which are spherically shaped, such as the upper parts of the skull and
the upper ends of the limb-bones.)
In particular the plant reveals clearly the functional significance of
phosphorus as the bearer of the quality 'dry'. For its healthy growth
the plant needs the quality 'dry' in two places: at the root, where it
unites with the element earth, and in the flower, where it opens itself
to the fire element. Root and flower as distinct from the middle parts
of the plant are both 'dry' formations. In a still higher degree this
applies to the seed, which must separate itself from the mother plant
to produce a separate new organism. All these are functions in the
plant which, as was mentioned in the last chapter, require phos-
phorus for their healthy performance.
Our examination of phosphorus and sulphur from the functional
point of view throws light also on their effect on the alternating con-
ditions of waking and sleeping, necessary for the life of the higher
organisms. This rhythmic change, which affects especially the nervous
system, is an alternation between the qualities dry and moist. Dis-
turbance of this alternation in one direction or the other makes it
difficult for the organism to react in full wakefulness or normal sleep.
It follows that treatment with phosphorus or sulphur in suitable pre-
parations, according to the nature of the disturbance, can be bene-
ficial.
If we study the functional properties of such substances we see that
they can teach us a rational understanding of therapeutic practices,
which otherwise must remain mere results of trial and error. The same
applies to phosphorus and sulphur treatment in cases where in the
functionally 'dry' bone system or in the functionally 'moist' metabolic
system of the organism the wrong quality predominates. If the bones
remain too 'moist' there is a tendency to rickets; against this, certain
fish-oils are a well-known remedy on account of their highly phos-
phoric nature. Conversely, the application of sulphur can help where
weakness of the metabolic forces produces rheumatic or gouty sedi-
ments in parts of the body whose function is to serve by their mobility
the activities of the will. In this case the abnormal predominance of
the quality 'dry' can be counteracted by the medical application of
sulphur.
*
Having observed the action of sulphur and phosphorus in the
laboratory and in living organisms, we will now turn to phenomena
of a macrotelluric nature which reveal the participation of sulphur
and phosphorus. There, sulphur points unmistakably to the earth's
volcanism. It is a fact that, wherever mineral sulphur occurs in the
earth, there we find a spot of former or present volcanic activity.
Similarly, there is no such spot on the earth without sulphur being
present in one form or another. Hence the name Solfatara for the
fumarole described in Chapter IX.
Once again it is the Solfatara which offers us a phenomenon, this
time in connexion with the special role sulphur plays in its activities,
which, regarded with the eye of the spirit, assumes the significance of
an instance 'worth a thousand'.
In spite of the very high temperature of the sulghurous fumes
emitted from various crevices on the edge of the Solfatara, it is poss-
ible, thanks to the complete dryness of the fumes, to crawl a little way
into the interior of these crevices. Not far away from the opening of
the crevice, where the hot fumes touch the cooler rock surface, one is
met by a very beautiful spectacle—namely, the continual forming,
out of nothing as it seems, of glittering yellow sulphur crystals, sus-
pended in delicate chains from the ceiling.
In this transformation of sulphurous substance from a higher
material state, nearer to levity, to that of the solid crystal, we may
behold an image of the generation of matter. For every physical sub-
stance and, therefore, every chemical element, exists originally as a pure
function in the dynamic processes of the universe. Wherever, as a result
of the action of gravity, such a function congeals materially, there
we meet it in the form of a physical-material substance. In the same
sense, sulphur and phosphorus, in their real being, are pure functions,
and where they occur as physical substances, there we meet these
functions in their congealed state.
One of the characteristics of the volcanic regions of the earth is the
healing effect of substances found there. Fango-mud, for instance,
which was mentioned in the last chapter, is a much-used remedy
against rheumatism. This is typical of functional sulphur. We may
truly characterize the earth's volcanism as being qualitatively sul-
phurous. It is the sulphur-function coming to expression through a
higher degree of 'moistness' in the relationship between gravity and
levity which distinguishes volcanic regions from the rest of the other-
wise 'dry' earth's crust.
*
To develop a corresponding picture of the function of phosphorus,
we must try to find the macrotelluric sphere where this function
operates similarly to that of sulphur in volcanism. From what has
been said in the last chapter it will be evident that we must look to
the atmosphere, as the site of snow-formation. It is this process which
we must now examine more closely.
In the atmosphere, to begin with, we find water in a state of vapour,
in which the influence of the terrestrial gravity-field is comparatively
weak. Floating in this state, the vapour condenses and crystallization
proceeds. Obeying the pull of gravity, more and more crystals unite
in their descent and gradually form flakes of varying sizes. The
nearer they come to earth, the closer they fall, until at last on the
ground they form an unbroken, more or less spherical, cover.
Imagine a snow-covered field glistening in the sun on a clear, quiet
winter's day. As far as we can see, there is no sign of life, no move-
ment. Here water, which is normally fluid and, in its liquid state,
serves the ever-changing life-processes, covers the earth in the form of
millions of separate crystals shaped with mathematical exactitude,
each of which breaks and reflects in a million rays the light from the
sun (Plate V). A contrast, indeed, between this quiet emergence of
forms from levity into gravity, and the form-denying volcanism surg-
ing up out of gravity into levity, as shown by the ever-restless activity
of the Solfatara. As we found volcanism to be a macrotelluric mani-
festation of functional sulphur, we find in the process of snow-forma-
tion a corresponding manifestation of functional phosphorus.
In the formation of snow, nature shows us in statu agendi a process
which we otherwise meet in the earth only in its finished results,
crystallization. We may, therefore, rightly look upon snow-formation
as an ur-phenomenon in this sphere of nature's activities. As such it
allows us to learn something concerning the origin in general of the
crystalline realm of the earth; and, vice versa, our insight into the
'becoming' of this realm will enable us to see more clearly the
universal function of which phosphorus is the main representative
among the physical substances of the earth.
It has puzzled many an observer that crystals occur in the earth
with directions of their main axes entirely independent of the direc-
tion of the earthly pull of gravity. Plate VI shows the photograph
of a cluster of Calcite crystals as an example of this phenomenon.
It tells us that gravity can have no effect on the formation of the
crystal itself. This riddle is solved by the phenomenon of snow-
formation provided we allow it to speak to us as an ur-phenomenon.
For it then tells us that matter must be in a state of transition from
lightness into heaviness if it is to appear in crystalline form. The
crystals in the earth, therefore, must have originated at a time when
the relation between levity and gravity on the earth was different
from what it is, in this sphere, to-day.
The same language is spoken by the property of transparency
which is so predominant among crystals. One of the fundamental
characteristics of heavy solid matter is to resist light—in other words,
to be opaque. Exposed to heat, however, physical substance loses this
feature to the extent that at the border of its ponderability all matter
becomes pervious to light. Now, in the transparent crystal matter
retains this kinship to light even in its solid state.
A similar message comes from the, often so mysterious, colouring
of the crystals. Here again nature offers us an instance which, 'worth
a thousand', reveals a secret that would otherwise remain veiled.
We refer to the pink crystals of tourmaline, whose colour comes
from a small admixture of lithium. This element, which belongs
to the group of the alkaline metals, does not form coloured salts (a
property only shown by the heavier metals). If exposed to a flame,
however, it endows it with a definite colour which is the same as that
of the lithium-coloured tourmaline. Read as a letter in nature's
script, this fact tells us that precious stones with their flame-like
colours are characterized by having kept something of the nature that
was theirs before they coalesced into ponderable existence. In fact,
they are 'frozen flames'.
It is this fact, known from ancient intuitive experience, which
prompted man of old to attribute particular spiritual significance to
the various precious stones of the earth and to use them correspond-
ingly in his rituals.
Crystallization, seen thus in its cosmic aspect, shows a dynamic
orientation which is polarically opposite to that of the earth's seismic
activities. Just as in the latter we observe levity taking hold of pon-
derable matter and moving it in a direction opposite to the pull of
gravity, so in crystallization we see imponderable matter passing over
from levity into gravity. And just as we found in volcanism and re-
lated processes a field of activity of 'functional sulphur', so we found
in snow-formation and related processes a field of activity of 'func-
tional phosphorus'. Both fields are characterized by an interaction
between gravity and levity, this interaction being of opposite nature
in each of them.
Here, again, sulphur and phosphorus appear as bearers of a polar-
ity of the second order which springs from the two polarically oppo-
site ways of interaction between the poles of the polarity of the first
order: levity-gravity.
*
As in man there is a third system, mediating between the two polar
systems of his organism, so between sulphur and phosphorus there is
a third element which in all its characteristics holds a middle place
between them and is the bearer of a corresponding function. This
element is carbon.
To see this we need only take into consideration carbon's relation-
ship to oxidation and reduction respectively. As it is natural for sul-
phur to be in the reduced state, and for phosphorus to be in the
oxidized state, so it is in the nature of carbon to be related to both
states and therefore to oscillate between them. By its readiness to
change over from the oxidized to the reduced state, it can serve the
plant in the assimilation of light, while by its readiness to make the
reverse change it serves man and animal in the breathing process. We
breathe in oxygen from the air; the oxygen circulates through the
blood-stream and passes out again in conjunction with carbon, as
carbon dioxide, when we exhale. In the process whereby the plants
reduce the carbon dioxide exhaled by man and animal, while the lat-
ter again absorb with their food the carbon produced in the form of
organic matter by the plant, we see carbon moving to and fro between
the oxidized and the reduced conditions.
Within the plant itself, too, carbon acts as functionary of the
alternation between oxidation and reduction. During the first half of
the year, when vegetation is unfolding, there is a great reduction
process of oxidized carbon, while in the second half of the year,
when the withering process prevails, a great deal of the previously
reduced carbon passes into the oxidized condition. As this is con-
nected with exhaling and inhaling of oxygen through carbon, carbon
can be regarded as having the function of the lung-organ of the earth.
Logically enough, we find carbon playing the same role in the middle
part of the threefold human organism.
Another indication of the midway position of carbon is its ability
to combine as readily with hydrogen as with oxygen, and, in these
polar combinations, even to combine with itself. In this latter form it
provides the basis of the innumerable organic substances in nature,
and serves as the 'building stones' of the body-substances of living
organisms. Among these, the carbohydrates produced by the plants
show clearly the double function of carbon in the way it alternates
between the states of starch and sugar.
When the plant absorbs through its leaves carbonic acid from the
air and condenses it into the multiple grains of starch with their pecu-
liar structure characteristic for each plant species, we have a bio-
logical event which corresponds to the formation of snow in the
meteorological realm. Here we see carbon at work in a manner func-
tionally akin to that of phosphorus. Sugar, on the other hand, has its
place in the saps of the plants which rise through the stems and carry
up with them the mineral substances of the earth. Here we find carbon
acting in a way akin to the function of sulphur.
This twofold nature of carbon makes itself noticeable down to the
very mineral sphere of the earth. There we find it in the fact that
carbon occurs both in the form of the diamond, the hardest of all
mineral substances, and also in the form of the softest, graphite.
Here also, in the diamond's brilliant transparency, and in the dense
blackness of graphite, carbon reveals its twofold relation to light.
In Fig. 6 an attempt has been made to represent diagrammatically
the function of Carbon in a way corresponding to the previous
representation of the functions of Sulphur and Phosphorus.
*
By adding carbon to our observations on the polarity of sulphur
and phosphorus we have been led to a triad of functions each of
which expresses a specific interplay of levity and gravity. That we
encounter three such functions is not accidental or arbitrary. Rather
is it based on the fact that the interaction offerees emanating from a
polarity of the first order, produces a polarity of the second order,
whose poles establish between them a sphere of balance.
Through our study of levity and gravity in the matter-processes of
the earth, a perspective thus opens up into a structural principle of
nature which is actually not new to us. We encountered it at the very
beginning of this book when we discussed the threefold psycho-
physical order of man's being.
In the days of an older intuitive nature-wisdom man knew of a
basic triad of functions as well as he knew of the four elementary
qualities. We hear a last echo of this in the Middle Ages, when people
striving for a deeper understanding of nature spoke of the trinity of
Salt, Mercury and Sulphur. What the true alchemists, as these seekers
of knowledge called themselves, meant by this was precisely the same
as the conception we have here reached through our own way of
studying matter ('Salt' standing for 'functional phosphorus', 'Mer-
cury' for 'functional carbon'). Only the alchemist's way was a dif-
ferent one.
This is not the place to enter into a full examination of the meaning
and value of alchemy in its original legitimate sense (which must not
be confused with activities that later on paraded under the same
name). Only this we will say—that genuine alchemy owes its origin to
an impulse which, at a time when the onlooker-consciousness first
arose, led to the foundation of a school for the development of an
intuitive relationship of the soul with the world of the senses. This
was to enable man to resist the effects of the division which evolution
was about to set up in his soul-life—the division which was to give
him, on the one hand, an abstract experience of his own self, divorced
from the outer world, and on the other a mere onlooker's experience
of that outer world. As a result of these endeavours, concepts were
formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to out-
wardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiri-
tual functions represented by those substances, both within and out-
side the human organism.
Thus the alchemist who used these concepts thought of them first
as referring to his own soul, and to the inner organic processes corre-
sponding to the various activities of his soul. When speaking of Salt
he meant the regulated formative activity of his thinking, based on
the salt-forming process in his nervous system. When he spoke of
Mercury he meant the quickly changing emotional life of the soul and
the corresponding activities of the rhythmic processes of the body.
Lastly, Sulphur meant the will activities of his soul and the corre-
sponding metabolic processes of the body. Only through studying
these functions within himself, and through re-establishing the har-
mony between them which had been theirs in the beginning, and
from which, he felt, man had deviated in the course of time, did the
alchemist hope to come to an understanding of their counterparts in
the external cosmos.
Older alchemical writings, therefore, can be understood only if pre-
scriptions which seem to signify certain chemical manipulations are
read as instructions for certain exercises of the soul, or as advices for
the redirection of corresponding processes in the body. For instance,
if an alchemist gave directions for a certain treatment of Sulphur,
Mercury and Salt, with the assertion that by carrying out these
directions properly, one would obtain Aurum (gold), he really spoke
of a method to direct the thinking, feeling and willing activities of the
soul in such a way as to gain true Wisdom.1
*
1 Roger Bacon in the thirteenth, and Berthold Schwartz in the fourteenth
century, are reputed to have carried out experiments by mixing physical salt (in
the form of the chemically labile saltpetre) with physical sulphur and—after
some initial attempts with various metals—-with charcoal, and then exposing the
mixture to the heat of physical fire. The outcome of this purely materialistic
interpretation of the three alchemical concepts was not the acquisition of wisdom,
or, as Schwartz certainly had hoped, of gold, but of ... gunpowder!
As in the case of the concepts constituting the doctrine of the four
elements, we have represented here the basic alchemical concepts not
only because of their historical significance, but because, as ingredi-
ents of a still functional conception of nature, they assume new signi-
ficance in a science which seeks to develop, though from different
starting-points, a similar conception. As will be seen in our further
studies, these concepts prove a welcome enrichment of the language
in which we must try to express our readings in nature.
CHAPTER XII
Space and Counter-Space
With the introduction, in Chapter X, of the peripheral type of force-
field which appertains to levity as the usual central one does to
gravity, we are compelled to revise our conception of space. For in a
space of a kind we are accustomed to conceive, that is, the three-
dimensional, Euclidean space, the existence of such a field with its
characteristic of increasing in strength in the outward direction is a
paradox, contrary to mathematical logic.
This task, which in view of our further observations of the actions
of the levity-gravity polarity in nature we must now tackle, is, how-
ever, by no means insoluble. For in modern mathematics thought-
forms are already present which make it possible to develop a space-
concept adequate to levity. As referred to in Chapter I, it was Rudolf
Steiner who first pointed to the significance in this respect of the
branch of modern mathematics known as Projective Geometry. He
showed that Projective Geometry, if rightly used, carries over the
mind from the customary abstract to a new concrete treatment of
mathematical concepts. The following example will serve to explain,
to start with, what we mean by saying that mathematics has hitherto
been used abstractly.
One of the reasons why the world-picture developed by Einstein in
his Theory of Relativity deserves to be acknowledged as a step for-
ward in comparison with the picture drawn by classical physics, lies
in the fact that the old conception of three-dimensional space as a
kind of 'cosmic container', extending in all directions into infinity
and filled, as it were, with the content of the physical universe, is re-
placed by a conception in which the structure of space results from
the laws interrelating this content. Our further discussion will show
that this indeed is the way along which, to-day, mathematical thought
must move in order to cope with universal reality.
However, for reasons discussed earlier, Einstein was forced to
conceive all events in the universe after the model of gravity as
observable on the earth. In this way he arrived at a space-structure
which possesses neither the three-dimensionality nor the rectilinear
character of so-called Euclidean space—a space-picture which,
though mathematically consistent, is incomprehensible by the human
mind. For nothing exists in our mind that could enable us to experi-
ence as a reality a space-time continuum of three dimensions which is
curved within a further dimension.
This outcome of Einstein's endeavours results from the fact that he
tried by means of gravity-bound thought to comprehend universal
happenings of which the true causes are non-gravitational. A think-
ing that has learnt to acknowledge the existence of levity must indeed
pursue precisely the opposite direction. Instead of freezing time down
into spatial dimension, in order to make it fit into a world ruled by
nothing but gravity, we must develop a conception of space suffi-
ciently fluid to let true time have its place therein. We shall see how
such a procedure will lead us to a space-concept thoroughly conceiv-
able by human common sense, provided we are prepared to overcome
the onlooker-standpoint in mathematics also.
Einstein owed the possibility of establishing his space-picture to a
certain achievement of mathematical thinking in modern times. As
we have seen, one of the peculiarities of the onlooker-consciousness
consists in its being devoid of all connexion with reality. The process
of thinking thereby gained a degree of freedom which did not exist in
former ages. In consequence, mathematicians were enabled in the
course of the nineteenth century to conceive the most varied space-
systems which were all mathematically consistent and yet lacked all
relation to external existence. A considerable number of space-
systems have thus become established among which there is the sys-
tem that served Einstein to derive his space-time concept. Some of
them have been more or less fully worked out, while in certain in-
stances all that has been done is to show that they are mathematically
conceivable. Among these there is one which in all its characteristics
is polarically opposite to the Euclidean system, and which is destined
for this reason to become the space-system of levity. It is symptomatic of
the remoteness from reality of mathematical thinking in the onlooker-
age that precisely this system has so far received no special attention.1
1 For further details, see the writings of G. Adams and L. Locher-Ernst
who, each in his own way, have made a beginning with applying projective
geometry on the lines indicated by Rudolf Steiner. Professor Locher-Ernst was
the first to apply the term 'polar-Euclidean' to the space-system corresponding
to levity.
For the purpose of this book it is not necessary to expound in
detail why modern mathematical thinking has been led to look for
thought-forms other than those of classical geometry. It is enough to
remark that for quite a long time there had been an awareness of the
fact that the consistency of Euclid's definitions and proofs fails as
soon as one has no longer to do with finite geometrical entities, but
with figures which extend into infinity, as for instance when the
properties of parallel straight lines come into question. For the con-
cept of infinity was foreign to classical geometrical thinking. Prob-
lems of the kind which had defeated Euclidean thinking became
soluble directly human thinking was able to handle the concept of
infinity.
We shall now indicate some of the lines of geometrical thought
which follow from this.
*
Let us consider a straight line extending without limits in either
direction. Projective geometry is able to state that a point moving
along this line in one direction will eventually return from the other.
To see this, we imagine two straight lines a and b intersecting at P.
One of these lines is fixed (a); the other (b) rotates uniformly about
C. Fig. 7 indicates the rotation of b by showing it in a number of
positions with the respective positions of its point of intersection with
a (P1, P2. . .). We observe this point moving along a, as a result of the
rotation of b, until, when both lines are parallel, it reaches infinity.
As a result of the continued rotation of b, however, P does not
remain in infinity, but returns along a from the other side.
We find here two forms of movement linked together—the rota-
tional movement of a line (b) on a point (C), and the progressive
movement of a point (P) along a line (a). The first movement is con-
tinuous, and observable throughout within finite space. Therefore
the second movement must be continuous as well, even though it
partly escapes our observation. Hence, when P disappears into infin-
ity on one side of our own point of observation, it is at the same time
in infinity on the other side. In order words, an unlimited straight
line has only one point at infinity.
It is clear that, in order to become familiar with this aspect of
geometry, one must grow together in inward activity with the happen-
ing which is contained in the above description. What we therefore
intend by giving such a description is to provide an opportunity for a
particular mental exercise, just as when we introduced Goethe's
botany by describing a number of successive leaf-formations. Here,
as much as there, it is the act of 're-creating' that matters.
The following exercise will help us towards further clarity concern-
ing the nature of geometrical infinity.
We imagine ourselves in the centre of a sphere which we allow to
expand uniformly on all sides. Whilst the inner wall of this sphere
withdraws from us into ever greater distances, it grows flatter and
flatter until, on reaching infinite distance, it turns into a plane. We
thus find ourselves surrounded everywhere by a surface which, in the
strict mathematical sense, is a plane, and is yet one and the same sur-
face on all sides. This leads us to the conception of the plane at in-
finity as a self-contained entity although it expands infinitely in all
directions.
This property of a plane at infinity, however, is really a property of
any plane. To realize this, we must widen our conception of infinity
by freeing it from a certain one-sidedness still connected with it. This
we do by transferring ourselves into the infinite plane and envisag-
ing, not the plane from the point, but the point from the plane. This
operation, however, implies something which is not obvious to a
mind accustomed to the ordinary ways of mathematical reasoning. It
therefore requires special explanation.
In the sense of Euclidean geometry, a plane is the sum-total of
innumerable single points. To take up a position in a plane, therefore,
means to imagine oneself at one point of the plane, with the latter
extending around in all directions to infinity. Hence the journey
from any point in space to a plane is along a straight line from one
point to another. In the case of the plane being at infinity, it would
be a journey along a radius of the infinitely large sphere from its
centre to a point at its circumference.
In projective geometry the operation is of a different character.
Just as we arrived at the infinitely large sphere by letting a finite
sphere grow, so must we consider any finite sphere as having grown
from a sphere with infinitely small extension; that is, from a point.
To travel from the point to the infinitely distant plane in the sense of
projective geometry, therefore, means that we have first to identify
ourselves with the point and 'become' the plane by a process of
uniform expansion in all directions.
As a result of this we do not arrive at one point in the plane, with
the latter extending round us on all sides, but we are present in the
plane as a whole everywhere. No point in it can be characterized as
having any distance, whether finite or infinite, from us. Nor is there
any sense in speaking of the plane itself as being at infinity. For any
plane will allow us to identify ourselves with it in this way. And any
such plane can be given the character of a plane at infinity by relat-
ing it to a point infinitely far away from it (i.e. from us).
Having thus dropped the one-sided conception of infinity, we must
look for another characterization of the relationship between a point
and a plane which are infinitely distant from one another. This re-
quires, first of all, a proper characterization of Point and Plane in
themselves.
Conceived dynamically, as projective geometry requires, Point and
Plane represent a pair of opposites, the Point standing for utmost
contraction, the Plane for utmost expansion. As such, they form a
polarity of the first order. Both together constitute Space. Which sort
of space this is, depends on the relationship in which they are en-
visaged. By positing the point as the unit from which to start, and
deriving our conception of the plane from the point, we constitute
Euclidean space. By starting in the manner described above, with the
plane as the unit, and conceiving the point from it, we constitute
polar-Euclidean space.
The realization of the reversibility of the relationship between
Point and Plane leads to a conception of Space still free from any
specific character. By G. Adams this space has been appositely called
archetypal space, or ur-space. Both Euclidean and polar-Euclidean
space are particular manifestations of it, their mutual relationship
being one of metamorphosis in the Goethean sense.
Through conceiving Euclidean and polar-Euclidean space in this
manner it becomes clear that they are nothing else than the geo-
metrical expression of the relationship between gravity and levity.
For gravity, through its field spreading outward from an inner centre,
establishes a point-to-point relation between all things under its
sway; whereas levity draws all things within its domain into common
plane-relations by establishing field-conditions wherein action takes
place from the periphery towards the centre. What distinguishes in
both cases the plane at infinity from all other planes may be best
described by calling it the all-embracing plane; correspondingly the
point at infinity may be best described as the all-relating point.
In outer nature the all-embracing plane is as much the 'centre' of
the earth's field of levity as the all-relating point is the centre of her
field of gravity. All actions of dynamic entities, such as that of the ur-
plant and its subordinate types, start from this plane. Seeds, eye-
formations, etc., are nothing but individual all-relating points in
respect of this plane. All that springs from such points does so be-
cause of the point's relation to the all-embracing plane. This may
suffice to show how realistic are the mathematical concepts which we
have here tried to build up.
*
When we set out earlier in this book (Chapter VIII) to discover the
source of Galileo's intuition, by which he had been enabled to find
the theorem of the parallelogram of forces, we were led to certain
experiences through which all men go in early childhood by erecting
their body and learning to walk. We were thereby led to realize that
man's general capacity for thinking mathematically is the outcome of
early experiences of this kind. It is evident that geometrical concepts
arising in man's mind in this way must be those of Euclidean geo-
metry. For they are acquired by the will's struggle with gravity. The
dynamic law discovered in this way by Galileo was therefore bound
to apply to the behaviour of mechanical forces—that is, of forces
acting from points outward.
In a similar way we can now seek to find the source of our capacity
to form polar-Euclidean concepts. As we were formerly led to experi-
ences of man's early life on earth, so we are now led to his embryonic
and even pre-embryonic existence.
Before man's supersensible part enters into a physical body there is
no means of conveying to it experiences other than those of levity,
and this condition prevails right through embryonic development.
For while the body floats in the mother's foetal fluid it is virtually
exempt from the influence of the earth's field of gravity.
History has given us a source of information from these early
periods of man's existence in Traherne's recollections of the time
when his soul was still in the state of cosmic consciousness. Among
his descriptions we may therefore expect to find a picture of levity-
space which will confirm through immediate experience what we have
arrived at along the lines of realistic mathematical reasoning. Among
poems quoted earlier, his The Praeparative and My Spirit do indeed
convey this picture in the clearest possible way. The following are
relevant passages from these two poems.
In the first we read:
'Then was my Soul my only All to me,
A living endless Ey,
Scarce bounded with the Sky
Whose Power, and Act, and Essence was to see:
I was an inward Sphere of Light,
Or an interminable Orb of Sight,
Exceeding that which makes the Days . . .'
In the second poem the same experience is expressed in richer
detail. There he says of his own soul that it—
. . . being Simple, like the Deity,
In its own Centre is a Sphere,
Not limited but everywhere.
It acts not from a Centre to
Its Object, as remote;
But present is, where it doth go
To view the Being it doth note . . .
A strange extended Orb of Joy
Proceeding from within,
Which did on ev'ry side display
Its force; and being nigh of Kin
To God, did ev'ry way
Dilate its Self ev'n instantaneously,
Yet an Indivisible Centre stay,
In it surrounding all Eternity.
'Twas not a Sphere;
Yet did appear
One infinite: 'Twas somewhat everywhere.'
Observe the distinct description of how the relation between cir-
cumference and centre is inverted by the former becoming itself an
'indivisible centre'. In a space of this kind there is no Here and There,
as in Euclidean space, for the consciousness is always and immedi-
ately at one with the whole space. Motion is thus quite different from
what it is in Euclidean space. Traherne himself italicized the word
'instantaneous', so important did he find this fact. (The quality of
instantaneousness—equal from the physical point of view to a velo-
city of the value ∞—will occupy us more closely as a characteristic of
the realm of levity when we come to discuss the apparent velocity of
light in connexion with our optical studies.)
By thus realizing the source in man of the polar-Euclidean thought-
forms, we see the discovery of projective geometry in a new light. For
it now assumes the significance of yet another historical symptom of
the modern re-awakening of man's capacity to remember his pre-
natal existence.
*
We know from our previous studies that the concept of polarity is
not exhausted by conceiving the world as being constituted by polari-
ties of one order only. Besides primary polarities, there are secondary
ones, the outcome of interaction between the primary poles. Having
conceived of Point and Plane as a geometrical polarity of the first
order, we have therefore to ask what formative elements there are in
geometry which represent the corresponding polarity of the second
order. The following considerations will show that these are the
radius, which arises from the point becoming related to the plane,
and the spherically bent surface (for which we have no other name
than that again of the sphere), arising from the plane becoming
related to the point.
In Euclidean geometry the sphere is defined as 'the locus of all
points which are equidistant from a given point'. To define the sphere
in this way is in accord with our post-natal, gravity-bound conscious-
ness. For in this state our mind can do no more than envisage the
surface of the sphere point by point from its centre and recognize the
equal distance of all these points from the centre. Seen thus, the
sphere arises as the sum-total of the end-points of all the straight
lines of equal length which emerge from the centre-point in all
directions. Fig. 8 indicates this schematically. Here the radius, a
straight line, is clearly the determining factor.
We now move to the other pole of the primary polarity, that is to
the plane, and let the sphere arise by imagining the plane approach-
ing an infinitely distant point evenly from all sides. We view the pro-
cess realistically only by imagining ourselves in the plane, so that we
surround the point from all sides, with the distance between us and
the point diminishing gradually. Since we remain all the time on the
surface, we have no reason to conceive any change in its original
position; that is, we continue to think of it as an all-embracing plane
with regard to the chosen point.
The only way of representing the sphere diagrammatically, as a
unit bearing in itself the character of the plane whence it sprang, is as
shown in Fig. 9, where a number of planes, functioning as tangen-
tial planes, are so related that together they form a surface which
possesses everywhere the same distance from the all-relating point.
Since Point and Plane represent in the realm of geometrical con-
cepts what in outer nature we find in the form of the gravity-levity
polarity, we may expect to meet Radius and Sphere as actual forma-
tive elements in nature, wherever gravity and levity interact in one
way or another. A few observations may suffice to give the necessary
evidence. Further confirmation will be furnished by the ensuing
chapters.
The Radius-Sphere antithesis appears most obviously in the human
body, the radial element being represented by the limbs, the spherical
by the skull. The limbs thus become the hieroglyph of a dynamic
directed from the Point to the Plane, and the skull of the opposite.
This indeed is in accord with the distribution in the organism of the
sulphur-salt polarity, as we learnt from our physiological and psycho-
logical studies. Inner processes and outer form thus reveal the same
distribution of poles.
In the plant the same polarity appears in stalk and leaf. Obviously
the stalk represents the radial pole. The connexion between leaf and
sphere is not so clear: in order to recognize it we must appreciate that
the single plant is not a self-contained entity to the same degree as is
the human being. The equivalent of the single man is the entire
vegetable covering of the earth. In man there is an individual centre
round which the bones of his skull are curved; in the plant world the
equivalent is the centre of the earth. It is in relation to this that we
must conceive of the single leaves as parts of a greater sphere.
In the plant, just as in man, the morphological polarity coincides
with the biological. There is, on the one hand, the process of assimi-
lation (photosynthesis), so characteristic of the leaf. Through this
process matter passes over from the aeriform condition into that of
numerous separate, characteristically structured solid bodies—the
starch grains. Besides this kind of assimilation we have learnt to
recognize a higher form which we called 'spiritual assimilation'. Here,
a transition of substance from the domain of levity to that of gravity
takes place even more strikingly than in ordinary (physical) assimila-
tion (Chapter X).
The corresponding process in the linear stalk is one which we may
call 'sublimation'—again with its extension into 'spiritual sublima-
tion'. Through this process matter is carried in the upward direction
towards ever less ponderable conditions, and finally into the formless
state of pure 'chaos'. By this means the seed is prepared (as we have
seen) with the help of the fire-bearing pollen, so that after it has fallen
to the ground, it may serve as an all-relating point to which the plant's
Type can direct its activity from the universal circumference.
In order to find the corresponding morphological polarity in the
animal kingdom, we must realize that the animal, by having the main
axis of its body in the horizontal direction, has a relationship to the
gravity-levity fields of the earth different from those of both man and
plant. As a result, the single animal body shows the sphere-radius
polarity much less sharply. If we compare the different groups of the
animal kingdom, however, we find that the animals, too, bear this
polarity as a formative element. The birds represent the spherical
(dry, saline) pole; the ruminants the linear (moist, sulphurous) pole.
The carnivorous quadrupeds form the intermediary (mercurial)
group. As ur-phenomenal types we may name among the birds the
eagle, clothed in its dry, silicic plumage, hovering with far-spread
wings in the heights of the atmosphere, united with the expanses of
space through its far-reaching sight; among the ruminants, the cow,
lying heavily on the ground of the earth, given over entirely to the
immensely elaborated sulphurous process of its own digestion. Be-
tween them comes the lion—the most characteristic animal for the
preponderance of heart-and-lung activities in the body, with all the
attributes resulting from that.
Within the scope of this book it can only be intimated briefly, but
should not be left unmentioned for the sake of those interested in a
further pursuit of these lines of thought, that the morphological mean
between radius and sphere (corresponding to Mercurius in the
alchemical triad) is represented by a geometrical figure known as the
'lemniscate', a particular modification of the so-called Cassinian
curves.1
1 For particulars of the lemniscate as the building plan of the middle part of
man's skeleton, see K. König, M.D.: Beitrage zu einer reinen Anatomic des
menschlichen Knochenskeletts in the periodical Natura (Dornach, 1930-1). Some
projective-geometrical considerations concerning the lemniscate are to be found
in the previously mentioned writings of G. Adams and L. Locher-Ernst.
CHAPTER XIII
'Radiant Matter'
When man in the state of world-onlooker undertook to form a
dynamic picture of the nature of matter, it was inevitable that of all
the qualities which belong to its existence he should be able to envis-
age only those pertaining to gravity and electricity. Because his con-
sciousness, at this stage of its evolution, was closely bound up with
the force of gravity inherent in the human body, he was unable to
form any conception of levity as a force opposite to gravity. Yet,
nature is built bipolarically, and polarity-concepts are therefore in-
dispensable for developing a true understanding of her actions. This
accounts for the fact that the unipolar concept of gravity had eventu-
ally to be supplemented by some kind of bipolar concept.
Now, the only sphere of nature-phenomena with a bipolar char-
acter accessible to the onlooker-consciousness 'was that of electricity.
It was thus that man in this state of consciousness was compelled to
picture the foundation of the physical universe as being made up of
gravity and electricity, as we meet them in the modern picture of the
atom, with its heavy electro-positive nucleus and the virtually weight-
less electro-negative electrons moving round it.
Once scientific observation and thought are freed from the limita-
tions of the onlooker-consciousness, both gravity and electricity ap-
pear in a new perspective, though the change is different for each of
them. Gravity, while it becomes one pole of a polarity, with levity as
the opposite pole, still retains its character as a fundamental force of
the physical universe, the gravity-levity polarity being one of the first
order. Not so electricity. For, as the following discussion will show,
the electrical polarity is one of the second order; moreover, instead of
constituting matter as is usually believed, electricity turns out to be in
reality a product of matter.
*
We follow Goethe's line when, in order to answer the question,
'What is electricity?' we first ask, 'How does electricity arise?' In-
stead of starting with phenomena produced by electricity when it is
already in action, and deriving from them a hypothetical picture, we
begin by observing the processes to which electricity owes its appear-
ance. Since there is significance in the historical order in which facts
of nature have come to man's knowledge in the past, we choose as
our starting-point, among the various modes of generating electricity,
the one through which the existence of an electric force first became
known. This is the rousing of the electric state in a body by rubbing
it with another body of different material composition. Originally,
amber was rubbed with wool or fur.
By picturing this process in our mind we become aware of a certain
kinship of electricity with fire, since for ages the only known way of
kindling fire was through friction. We notice that in both cases man
had to resort to the will-power invested in his limbs for setting in
motion two pieces of matter, so that, by overcoming their resistance
to this motion, he released from them a certain force which he could
utilize as a supplement to his own will. The similarity of the two pro-
cesses may be taken as a sign that heat and electricity are related to
each other in a certain way, the one being in some sense a metamor-
phosis of the other. Our first task, therefore, will be to try to un-
derstand how it is that friction causes heat to appear in manifest
form.
There is no friction unless the surfaces of the rubbed bodies have a
structure that is in some way interfered with by the rubbing, while at
the same time they offer a certain resistance to the disturbance. This
resistance is due to a characteristic of matter, commonly called
cohesion. Now we know that the inner coherence of a physical body
is due to its point-relationship, that is to the gravitational force
bound up with it. Indeed, cohesion increases as we pass from the
gaseous, through the liquid, to the solid state of matter.
Whilst a body's cohesion is due to gravity, its spatial extended-
ness is, as we have seen, due to levity. If we reduce the volume of a
piece of physical matter by means of pressure, we therefore release
levity-forces previously bound up in it, and these, as always happens
in such cases, appear in the form of free heat. Figuratively speaking,
we may say that by applying pressure to matter, latent levity is
pressed out of it, somewhat like water out of a wet sponge.
The generation of free heat by friction rests on quite similar
grounds. Obviously, friction always requires a certain pressure. This
alone, however, would not account for the amount of heat easily
produced by friction. To the pressure there is in this case added a
certain measure of encroachment upon the unity of the material sub-
stance. In the case of friction between two solid bodies, this may go
so far that particles of matter are completely detached from the
cohesive whole. The result is an increase in the number of single
mass-centres on the earth, as against the all-embracing cosmic peri-
phery. This diminishes the hold of levity on the total amount of
physical matter present on the earth. Again, the levity thus becoming
free appears as external heat. (In the reverse case when, for instance
through melting, a number of single physical bodies become one,
free heat becomes latent.)
Both the diminishing of spatial extension and the breaking up of a
whole into parts entail an increase in the quality 'dry'. This applies
not only in the sense that the parts which have become independent
units are 'dry' in relation to each other—formerly coherent matter
being turned into dust—but also in the other sense, and one valid in
both cases, that levity and gravity are losing part of their previous
inter-connexion. If this twofold process of 'becoming dry' reaches a
certain intensity, the substances concerned, provided they are inflam-
mable, begin to burn, with the result that dry heat escapes and dry
ash is formed. We note that in each case we are dealing with a change
in the relationship between the poles of a polarity of the first order.
We will now apply this picture of the process of friction to the
instance when, as a result of this action, electricity appears.
Originally the evoking of the electric condition was ascribed solely
to the nature of amber, the only substance known to possess this
property. To-day we know that not the amber alone, but its coming
together with another substance of different nature, in this instance an
animal substance of the nature of hair or silk, is required. Whatever
substances we use for friction, they must always be different in nature,
so as to allow both kinds of electricity to appear at once. Which of
the two kinds imposes its presence the more strongly upon the
observer depends on purely extraneous conditions which have
nothing to do with the process itself.
Obviously, if we wish to understand the qualitative difference be-
tween the two kinds of electricity, we must investigate the qualitative
difference in the material substances, which give rise to electricity
when they are rubbed together. We shall again follow the historical
line by examining the two substances which first taught man the
polar nature of electricity. They are glass and resin, after which,
as we mentioned, the two electricities were even named in the begin-
ning.
Our functional conception of matter, developed earlier (Chapter
XI), allows us to recognize in these two substances representatives of
the Salt-Sulphur polarity. Indeed, glass as a mineral substance,
which actually owes its specific character to the presence of silicon in
it, clearly stands on the phosphoric-crystalline side, while resin, being
itself a sort of 'gum', on the sulphurous-volcanic side. In fact, sulphur
itself was soon found to be a particularly suitable substance for pro-
ducing 'resin'-electricity.
Now the usual way of producing one kind of electricity is by rub-
bing resin (or sulphur, or ebonite) with wool or fur, and the other by
rubbing glass with leather. At first sight, it does not seem as if the two
counter-substances represent the required alchemic counter-poles to
resin and glass. For both hair and leather are animal products and
therefore seem to be of like nature. Closer inspection, however, shows
that they do obey the rule. For hair, like all horny substances, is a
dead product of external secretion by the animal organism. An ur-
phenomenal example of it, showing its kinship to glass-like sub-
stances, is the transparent cornea of the eye, close to the crystal-lens.
Leather, on the other hand, is a product of the hypodermic part of
the body and, as such, belongs to those parts of the organism which
are filled with blood, and, therefore, permeated with life. (Note as a
characteristic of leather that it requires a special treatment, tanning,
to make it as immune from decay as hair is by nature.) Hair and
leather, therefore, represent in themselves a salt-sulphur polarity,
and thus fulfil the corresponding function when brought together
with resin or glass respectively.
What is true for the particular substances which originally led man
to discover the dual nature of electricity, holds good equally for any
pair of substances capable of assuming the electric state when rubbed
against each other. If we examine from this point of view the series of
such substances, as usually given in the textbooks on electricity, we
shall always find a substance of extreme salt-character at the one end,
and one of extreme sulphur-character at the other, the substances as
a whole forming a gradual transition from one extreme to the other.
Which kind of electricity appears on each, when submitted to friction,
depends on whether the counter-substance stands on its right or left,
in the series. It is the particular relation between the two which
makes them behave in one way or the other.
There are cases which seem to elude this law, and investigation has
shown that other characteristics of the rubbed bodies, such as surface
quality, can have a modifying influence. For lack of a guiding idea
they are treated in the textbooks as 'irregularities'. Observation led
by a true polarity concept shows that in these cases also the rule is not
violated. In this respect, interesting information can be gained from
the observations of J. W. Ritter (1776-1810), an ingenious Natur-
philosoph from the circle round Goethe, but to whom, also, physical
science is indebted for his discovery of the ultra-violet part of the
spectrum and of galvanic polarization. Among his writings there is a
treatise on electricity, giving many generally unknown instances of
frictional electricity which are in good accord with our picture and
well worth investigating. According to Ritter, even two crystalline
substances of different hardness, such as Calcite and quartz, become
electric when rubbed together, the softer playing the part of 'resin'
and the harder that of 'glass'.
These few facts connected with the generation of frictional electri-
city are enough to allow us to form a picture of the nature of the
polarity represented by the two kinds of electricity.
We remember that in the case of the generation of heat through
friction, as a result of an encroachment upon the cohesion of the
material body involved, the relationship between levity and gravity in
it changes from 'moist' to 'dry' and that the effect of this is the appear-
ance of 'fire' and 'dust' as poles of a primary polarity. This process,
however, is altered when the bodies subjected to friction are opposed
to each other in the sense of a salt-sulphur polarity. The effect then is
that the liberated levity, under the influence of the peculiar tension
between the two bodies, remains bound in the realm of substance and
becomes itself split up polarically.
Clearly, then, in the case of electrical polarity we encounter a cer-
tain form of gravity-bound levity, and this in a twofold way. Owing to
the contrasting nature of the two bodies involved in the process, the
coupling of gravity and levity is a polar one on both sides. The
electrical polarity thus turns out to be itself of the nature of a
secondary polarity.
Two more recently discovered means of evoking the electric con-
dition in a piece of matter confirm this picture. They are the so-called
piezoelectricity and pyro-electricity. Both signify the occurrence of
the electrical polarity at the two ends of an asymmetrically built
(hemimorphous) crystal, as the result of changing the crystal's spatial
condition. In piezo-electricity the change consists in a diminution of
the crystal's volume through pressure; in pyro-electricity, in an in-
crease of the crystal volume by raising its temperature. The asym-
metry of the crystal, due to a one-sided working of the forces of
crystallization, plays the same role here as does the alchemic opposi-
tion between the two bodies used for the production of frictional
electricity.
*
It is typical of the scientist of the past that he was dependent on
phenomena brought about by a highly developed experimental tech-
nique for becoming aware of certain properties of the electrical force,
whereas for the realistic observer these properties are revealed at once
by the most primitive electric phenomena. We remember Eddington's
description of the positron as 'negative material', and his subsequent
remarks, which show the paradoxical nature of this concept if
applied to the hypothetical interior of the atom (Chapter IV). The
quite primitive phenomenon of electrical repulsion and attraction
shows us the same thing in a manner of which it is not difficult to
form a conception.
Modern physics itself, with the help of Faraday's field-concept,
describes these phenomena as caused by pressure—resulting from
the meeting in space of two similar electrical fields—and suction—
resulting from the meeting of two dissimilar fields. In the first case
the space between the two electrically charged bodies assumes a de-
gree of density, as if it were filled with some elastic material. In the
second instance the density of the space where the two fields inter-
mingle is lower than that of its surroundings. Here, clearly, we have
a state of negative density which acts on the electrically charged
bodies just as a lowering of pressure acts on a gas: in both cases
movement occurs in the direction leading from the higher to the
lower density. Electricity thus shows itself capable of producing both
gravity and levity effects, thereby once more confirming our picture
of it.
*
Our next task will be to examine the galvanic form of generating;
electricity, in order to gain further light on our picture of the elec-
trical polarity.
Galvanism, as it became established through Volta's work, rests on
certain properties of the metallic substances of the earth. Compared
with the substances which may be used for producing electricity
through friction, the metals hold a mid-position. They are all essen-
tially mercurial substances. (In quicksilver, which for this reason was
given the name 'mercury' by the alchemists, this fact comes to an ur-
phenomenal appearance.) Among the many facts proving the mer-
curial nature of the metals, there is one of particular interest to us.
This is their peculiar relationship to the processes of oxidation and
reduction.
Metals, in their metallic state, are bearers of latent levity, which
can be set free either through combustion or through corrosion. They
differ from one another by their relative degree of eagerness to enter
into and remain in the metallic, that is, the reduced state, or to
assume and keep the state of the oxide (in which form they are found
in the various metallic oxides and salts). There are metals such as
gold, silver, etc., for which the reduced state is more or less natural;
others, such as potassium, sodium, etc., find the oxidized state natural
and can be brought into and kept in the reduced state only by artifi-
cial means. Between these extremes there are all possible degrees of
transition, some metals more nearly resembling the 'noble', others
more nearly the 'corrosive', metals.
We remember that it was the different relationship of sulphur and
phosphorus to reduction and oxidation which led us to envisage them
as ur-phenomenal representatives of the alchemic polarity. We may
therefore say that there are metals which from the alchemic point of
view more nearly resemble sulphur, others more nearly phosphorus,
whilst others again hold an intermediary position between the ex-
tremes. It is on these differences among the various metals that their
galvanic properties are based.
Let us from this point of view contemplate the following series of
chemical elements, which is a representation of the so-called voltaic
series:
Graphite, Platinum, Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron, Tin, Lead, Zinc,
Aluminium, Magnesium, Sodium, Potassium.
Any two of these metals constitute a voltaic cell. Its electromotive
force is determined by the distance in the series between the metals
used. Just as in the case of frictional electricity, the kind of electricity
which is supplied by a certain metal depends on whether the other
metal with which it is coupled stands to the right or to the left of it in
the series.1
Let us now see what happens in a galvanic cell when the two
different metals are simultaneously exposed to the chemical action of
the connecting fluid. Each metal by itself would undergo oxidation
with greater or less intensity, and the calorific energy hidden in it
would become free in the form of heat. This process suffers a certain
alteration through the presence of the second metal, which sets up an
alchemic tension between the two. Instead of a proper segregation of
the primary polarity, heat—dust (in this case, heat—oxide), the heat
remains matter-bound and appears on the surface of the two metals
in a secondarily split form as positive and negative electricity.
The similarity between this process and the frictional generation of
electricity is evident.
*
Our observations have shown that the emergence of the electric
state, whether it be caused by friction or galvanically, depends on
matter entering into a condition in which its cohesion is loosened—
or, as we also put it, on its being turned into 'dust'—and this in such
a way that the escaping levity remains dust-bound. This picture of
electricity now enables us to give a realistic interpretation of certain
phenomena which, in the interpretation which the physicist of the
past was bound to give them, have contributed much to the tightening
of the net of scientific illusion.
Some sixty years after Dalton had established, purely hypothetic-
ally, the theory of the atomistic structure of matter, scientific research
was led to the observation of actual atomistic phenomena. Crookes
found electricity appearing in his tubes in the form of discrete par-
ticles, with properties hitherto known only as appertaining to mass.
What could be more natural than to take this as evidence that the
method of thought developed during the past era of science was on
the right course?
The same phenomena appear in quite a different light when we
view them against the background of the picture of electricity to
1 Note that the series starts on the left with graphite, i.e. with carbon. This
substance appears here as a metal among metals, and indeed as the most 'noble'
of all. Electricity in this way reveals a secret of carbon well known to the medi-
aeval alchemist and still known in our day to people in the Orient.
which our observations have led. Knowing that the appearance of
electricity depends on a process of atomization of some sort, we shall
expect that where electricity becomes freely observable, it will yield
phenomena of an atomistic kind. The observations of electricity in a
vacuum, therefore, yield no confirmation whatsoever of the atomistic
view of matter.
The same is true of the phenomena bound up with radioactivity,
which were discovered in direct consequence of Crookes's work. We
know that the naturally radioactive elements are all in the group of
those with the highest atomic weight. This fact, seen together with the
characteristics of radioactivity, tells us that in such elements gravity
has so far got the upper hand of levity that the physical substance is
unable to persist as a spatially extended, coherent unit. It therefore
falls asunder, with the liberated levity drawn into the process of dis-
persion. Seen thus, radioactivity becomes a symptom of the earth's
old age.
*
Before entering into a discussion of the question, which naturally
arises at this point, as to how levity and gravity by their two possible
ways of interaction—'sulphurous' or 'saline'—determine the pro-
perties of so-called positive and negative electricity, we shall first
study the third mode of generating electricity, namely, by electro-
magnetic induction. Along this way we shall arrive at a picture of the
magnetic force which corresponds to the one already obtained of
electricity. This will then lead us to a joint study of the nature of
electric polarity and magnetic polarity.
The discovery of the phenomena we call electromagnetic depended
on the possibility of producing continuous electrical processes. This
arose with Volta's invention. When it became necessary to find a con-
cept for the process which takes place in an electric conductor between
the poles of a galvanic cell, the concept of the 'current', borrowed
from hydrodynamics, suggested itself. Ever since then it has been the
rule to speak of the existence of a current within an electric circuit;
its strength or intensity is measured in terms of a unit named in
honour of Ampere.
This concept of the current has had a fate typical of the whole rela-
tion of human thought to the facts connected with electricity. Long
after it had been coined to cover phenomena which in themselves
betray no movement of any kind between the electrical poles, other
phenomena which do in fact show such movements became known
through Crookes's observations. Just as in the case of atomism, they
seemed to prove the validity of the preconceived idea of the current.
Soon, however, radiant electricity showed properties which contra-
dicted the picture of something flowing from one pole to the other.
The cathode rays, for instance, were found to shoot forth into space
perpendicularly from the surface of the cathode, without regard to
the position of the anode. At the same time Maxwell's hydrodynamic
analogy (as our historical survey has shown) led to a view of the
nature of electricity by which this very analogy was put out of court.
By predicting certain properties of electricity which come to the fore
when its poles alternate rapidly, he seemed to bring electricity into
close kinship with light. Mathematical treatment then made it neces-
sary to regard the essential energy process as occurring, not from one
pole to the other, but at right angles to a line joining the poles
(Poynting's vector). This picture, however, satisfactory though it was
in the realm of high frequency, failed as a means of describing so-
called direct-current processes.
As a result of all this the theory of electricity has fallen apart into
several conceptual realms lying, as it were, alongside one another,
each consistent in itself but lacking any logical connexion with the
others. Although the old concept of the electric current has long lost
its validity, scientific thought (not to speak of the layman's) has not
managed to discard it. To do this must therefore be our first task, if
we want to attain to a realistic picture of electromagnetism.
*
While keeping strictly to the historical order of things, we shall try
first to form a picture of what happens when we connect two electric-
ally charged bodies by a conductor. We know that we rightly describe
the change of the dynamic properties of the part of space, in which
the two bodies are present, by saying that a certain electric field pre-
vails in it. This field possesses different 'potentials' at its various
points and so there exists a certain potential difference between the
two electric charges. What then happens when a so-called 'conductor'
is brought into such a field?
From the point of view of the field-concept, conductivity consists
in the property of a body not to allow any change of potential along
its surface. Such a surface, therefore, is always an equipotential plane.
In the language of alchemy, conductivity is a mercurial property. In
the presence of such a body, therefore, no Salt-Sulphur contrasts can
obtain. In view of what we found above as the mean position of the
metals in the alchemic triad, it is significant that they, precisely,
should play so outstanding a role as electrical conductors.
If we keep to pure observation, the only statement we can make
concerning the effect produced by the introduction of such a body
into the electric field is that this field suddenly disappears. We shall
see later in which direction this vanishing occurs. For the present it is
sufficient to have formed the picture of the disappearance of the
electrical condition of space as a result of the presence of a body with
certain mercurial properties.
Nothing else, indeed, happens when we make the process continu-
ous by using a galvanic source of electricity. All that distinguishes a
galvanic cell from the sources of electricity used before the time of
Volta is its faculty of immediately re-establishing the field which pre-
vails between its poles, whenever this field becomes extinguished by
the presence of a conductor. Volta himself saw this quite correctly. In
his first account of the new apparatus he describes it as 'Leyden jars
with a continuously re-established charge'. Every enduring electrical
process, indeed, consists in nothing but a vanishing and re-establish-
ment of the electrical field with such rapidity that the whole process
appears continuous.
Here, also, pure observation of the effect of a conductor in an
electric field tells us that its action consists in the annihilation of the
field. There is no phenomenon which allows us to state that this pro-
cess takes place along the axis of the conductor. If we wish to obtain
a picture of the true direction, we must consider the condition of
space which arises in place of the electric condition that has dis-
appeared.
With the possibility of turning the cancellation of the electrical
condition of space into a continuous process, it became possible to
observe that the neutralization of electric charges entails the appear-
ance of heat and magnetism. We must now ask which are the quali-
ties of electricity on the one hand, and of heat and magnetism on the
other, which account for the fact that where electricity disappears,
the two latter forces are bound to appear. Since magnetism is the still
unknown entity among the three, we must now deal with it.
*
Unlike electricity, magnetism was first known in the form of its
natural occurrence, namely as a property of certain minerals. If we
follow the same course which led us to start our study of electricity
with the primitive process of generating it, we shall turn now to the
basic phenomenon produced by a magnetic field already in existence.
(Only when we have learnt all we can from this, shall we proceed to
ask how magnetism comes into being.) Obviously, we shall find this
basic phenomenon in the effect of a magnet on a heap of iron filings.
Let us, to begin with, compare a mass of solid iron with the same
quantity of it in powdered form. The difference is that the powder
lacks the binding force which holds the solid piece together. Now lei
us expose the powdered iron to the influence of a magnet. At once a
certain ordering principle takes hold of the single particles. They no
longer lie at random and unrelated, apart from the inconspicuous
gravitational effect they exert on one another, but are drawn into a
coherent whole, thus acquiring properties resembling those of an
ordinary piece of solid matter.
Read thus, the phenomenon tells us that a part of space occupied
by a magnetic field has qualities which are otherwise found only
where a coherent solid mass is present. A magnetic piece of solid iron,
therefore, differs from a non-magnetic piece by giving rise in its sur-
roundings to dynamic conditions which would otherwise exist only
in its interior. This picture of the relatedness of magnetism to solidity
is confirmed by the fact that both are cancelled by heat, and increased
by cold.1
By its magnetic properties iron thus reveals itself as a substance
capable of assuming the condition of solid matter to a degree sur-
passing ordinary solidity. As an exceptional kind of metal it forms
the counter-pole to mercury, in which the solid-fluid condition char-
acteristic of all metallic matter is as much shifted towards the fluid as
in iron it is to the solid. (Note in this respect the peculiar resistance of
iron to the liquefying effect which mercury has on the other metals.)
This picture of magnetism enables us to understand at once why it
must occur together with heat at the place where an electric polarity
has been cancelled by the presence of a conductor. We have seen that
electricity is levity coupled in a peculiar way with gravity; it is polar-
ized levity (accompanied by a corresponding polarization of gravity).
An electric field, therefore, always has both qualities, those of levity
and of gravity. We saw a symptom of this in electrical attraction and
1 There is even a gas which assumes magnetic properties when exposed to
extreme cold—oxygen in the solid state.
repulsion, so called; the attraction, we found, was due to negative
density, the repulsion to positive density, imparted to space by the
electrical fields present there. Now we see that when, through the
presence of a conductor, the electrical field round the two opposing
poles vanishes, in its place two other fields, a thermal and a magnetic,
appear. Clearly, one of them represents the levity-part, the other the
gravity-part, of the vanished electric field. The whole process reminds
one of combustion through which the ponderable and imponderable
parts, combined in the combustible substance, fall apart and appear
on the one hand as heat, and on the other as oxidized substance
('ash'). Yet, between these two manifestations of heat there is an
essential qualitative difference.
Although, from our view-point, magnetism represents only one
'half of a phenomenon, the other half of which is heat, we must not
forget that it is itself a bipolar force. Thus, despite its apparent rela-
tion to gravity it does not represent, as gravity does, one pole of a
primary polarity, with heat as the other pole. Rather must it carry
certain qualities of levity which, together with those of gravity,
appear in a polarically opposite manner at its two poles. (Details of
this will be shown later when we come to investigate the individual
qualities of the two poles of magnetism and electricity.) Hence the
heat that forms the counterpart to magnetism cannot be pure levity
either. As the result of a certain coupling with gravity, it too has
somehow remained polarically split.
This can easily be seen by considering the following. Unlike the
levity-gravity polarity, in which one pole is peripheral and the other
point-centred, both Doles of the electrical polarity are point-centred;
both are located in physical space, and thereby determine a definite
direction within this space. It is this direction which remains a
characteristic of both the magnetic and the thermal fields. The dir-
ection of the thermal field as much as that of the magnetic is deter-
mined by its having as its axis the conductor joining the poles of the
antecedent electrical field. Both fields supplement each other in that
the thermal radiation forms the radii which belong to the circular
magnetic lines-of-force surrounding the conductor.1
Our picture of the process which is commonly called an electric
1 By watering plants with water that had been exposed to heat from differ-
ent sources, E. Pfeiffer has shown in the chemical laboratory of the Goetheanum
that heat engendered by means of electricity is 'dead' heat. It follows that it
is not the same for human health whether the heat used for cooking or heating
purposes is obtained by burning wood or coal, or by means of electricity.
current is now sufficiently complete to allow us to make a positive
statement concerning the direction in which it takes place. Let us once
more sum up: In order that this process may occur, there must be
present in an electrically excited part of space a body which does not
suffer the particular polarization of space bound up with such a field.
As a result, the electrical field disappears, and in place of it appear a
thermal field and a magnetic field, both having as their axis the line
connecting the two poles. Each of them spreads out in a direction at
right angles to this fine. Obviously, therefore, it is in this radial direc-
tion that the transformation of the electrical into the thermo-magnetic
condition of space must take place.
This picture of the electro-thermo-magnetic happening, as regards
its direction, is in complete accord with the result obtained (as indi-
cated earlier) by the mathematical treatment of 'high-frequency
phenomena. Once more we see that quite primitive observations,
when properly read, lead to findings for which scientific thought had
to wait until they were forced on it by the progress of experimental
technique—as even then science was left without a uniformly valid
picture of the dynamic behaviour of electricity.
Further, we can now see that when we apply electricity to practical
purposes, we are in fact seldom using electricity itself, but other
forces (that is, other combinations of gravity and levity) which we
make effective by making electricity disappear. The same is true of
most of the methods of measuring electricity. As a rule, the force
which sets the instrument in motion is not electricity but another
force (magnetism, heat, etc.) which appears in the place of the vanish-
ing electricity. Thus the so-called intensity of an electric current is
actually the intensity with which the electricity in question dis-
appears! Electricity serves us in our machines in the same way that
food serves a living organism: it gets itself digested, and what matters
is the resulting secondary product.
Just as alterations in the electrical condition of space give rise to
the appearance of a magnetic field, any alteration of the magnetic
state of space gives rise to the appearance of an electrical field. This
process is called electromagnetic induction. With its discovery, the
generation of electricity through friction and in the galvanic way was
supplemented by a third way. By this means the practical use of
electricity on a large scale became possible for the first time. If our
picture of the two earlier processes of generating electricity is correct,
then this third way must also fit into the picture, although in this case
we have no longer to do with any direct atomization of physical mat-
ter. Our picture of magnetism will indeed enable us to recognize in
electromagnetic induction the same principle on which we found the
two other processes to rest.
Magnetism is polarized gravity. Hence it has the same character-
istic of tending always to maintain an existent condition. In bodies
subject to gravity, this tendency reveals itself as their inertia. It is the
inertia inherent in magnetism which we employ when using it to
generate electricity. The simplest example is when, by interrupting a
'primary current', we induce a 'secondary current' in a neighbouring
circuit. By the sudden alteration of the electric condition on the pri-
mary side, the magnetic condition of the surrounding space is exposed
to a sudden corresponding change. Against this the magnetic field
'puts up' a resistance by calling forth, on the secondary side, an
electrical process of such direction and strength that the entire mag-
netic condition remains first unaltered and then, instead of changing
suddenly, undergoes a gradual transformation which ideally needs an
infinite time for its accomplishment (asymptotic course of the ex-
ponential curve). This principle rules every process of electromagnetic
induction, whatever the cause and direction of the change of the
magnetic field.
We know that electromagnetic induction takes place also when a
conductor is moved across a magnetic field in such a way that, as the
technical term goes, it 'cuts' the field's lines of force. Whereas the pro-
cess discussed above is employed in the transformer, this latter pro-
cess is used in generation of electricity by dynamo. We have seen that
a magnetic field imparts to the relevant part of space qualities of den-
sity which otherwise prevail only in the interior of solid masses. We
remember further that the appearance of electricity, in the two other
modes of generating it, is caused by the loosening of the coherence of
the material substance. A similar loosening of the coherence of the
magnetic field takes place when its field-lines are cut by the move-
ment of the conductor across it. Just as heat occurs when we move a
solid object through a liquid, electricity occurs when we move a con-
ductor across a magnetic field. In each case we interfere with an
existing levity-gravity relationship.
*
Having established thus far the picture of both electricity and mag-
netism which shows each as an outcome of certain levity-gravity inter-
actions, we now ask how, in particular, negative and positive elec-
tricity on the one hand and north and south magnetism on the other
are determined by these interactions. Let us again begin with elec-
tricity.
We remember that Galvani was led to his observations by the
results of Walsh's study of the electric fishes. While Galvani clung to
the view that in his own experiments the source of the electrical force
lay within the animal bodies, Volta saw the fallacy of that. He then
conceived the idea of imitating with purely inorganic substances the
set-up which Galvani had come upon by accident. The paradoxical
result—as he himself noticed with surprise—was that his apparatus
turned out to be a close replica of the peculiar organ with which the
electric fishes are endowed by nature. We must now take a closer view
of this organ.
The electric organ of such a fish consists of many thousands of
little piles, each made up of a very great number of plates of two
different kinds, arranged in alternating layers. The two kinds differ in
substance: in one case the plate is made from a material similar to
that present in the nervous system of animals; in the other the re-
semblance is to a substance present in the muscular system, though
only when the muscles are in a state of decay. In this way the two
opposing systems of the animal body' seem to be brought here into
direct contact, repeated many thousands of times.
In the electric fishes, accordingly, sensation and will are brought
into a peculiar interrelation. For the will-pole is related to its bodily
foundation in a manner which otherwise obtains only between the
nervous system and the psychological processes co-ordinated with it.
These fishes then have the capacity to send out force-currents which
produce in other animals and in man 'concussion of the limbs', or in
extreme cases paralysis and even death. Through describing the pro-
cess in this way we realize that electricity appears here as metamor-
phosed animal will, which takes this peculiar form because part of the
animal's volitional system is assimilated to its sensory system in an
exceptional manner.
It is known to-day that what nature reveals so strikingly in the case
of the electric fish, is nothing but the manifestation of a principle at
work in the bodies of all beings endowed with sensation and volition
—in corporeal terms, with the duality of a nervous and a muscular
system—and therefore at work also in the human body. Observation
has shown that the activities of these two systems in man and animal
are accompanied by the occurrence of different electric potentials in
different parts of the body. Plate A, Fig. iii, shows the distribution
of the two polar electric forces in the human body. The bent lines in
the diagram stand for curves of equal electric potential. The straight
line between them is the neutral zone. As might be expected, this line
runs through the heart. What seems less obvious is its slanting posi-
tion. Here the asymmetry, characteristic of the human body, comes
to expression.
If we remember that the nervous system represents the salt-pole,
and the metabolic system the sulphur-pole, of the human organism,
and if we take into account the relationship between levity and grav-
ity at the two poles, we can see from the distribution of the two
electricities that the coupling of levity and gravity at the negative pole
of the electrical polarity is such that levity descends into gravity,
while at the positive pole gravity rises into levity. Negative electricity
therefore must have somehow a 'spherical' character, and positive
electricity a 'radial'.
This finding is fully confirmed by electrical phenomena in the
realm of nature most remote from man (though it was an effort to
solve the enigma of man which led to the discovery of this realm).
Since Crookes's observations of the behaviour of electricity in a
vacuum it is common knowledge that only the negative kind of
electricity occurs as a freely radiating force (though it retains some
properties of inertia), whereas positive electricity seems to be much
more closely bound to minute particles of ponderable matter. Here
again we find gravity-laden levity on the negative side, levity-raised
gravity on the positive.
The same language is spoken by the forms in which the luminous
phenomena appear at the two poles of a Crookes tube. Fig. i on Plate
A represents the whole phenomenon as far as such a diagram allows.
Here we see on the positive side radial forms appear, on the negative
side planar-spherical forms. As symbols of nature's script, these forms
tell us that cosmic periphery and earthly centre stand in a polar rela-
tion to each other at the two ends of the tube. (Our optical studies
will later show that the colours which appear at the anode and cathode
are also in complete accord with this.)
At this point in our discussion it is possible to raise, without risk of
confusing the issue, the question of the distribution of the two
electric forces over the pairs of substances concerned in the genera-
tion of electricity both by friction and in the galvanic way. This dis-
tribution seems to contradict the picture to which the foregoing ob-
servations have led us, for in both instances the 'sulphurous' sub-
stances (resin in one, the nobler metals in the other) become bearers
of negative electricity; while the 'saline' substances (glass and the
corrosive metals) carry positive electricity. Such a criss-crossing of
the poles—surprising as it seems at first sight—is not new to us. We
have met it in the distribution of function of the plant's organs of
propagation, and we shall meet a further instance of it when studying
the function of the human eye. Future investigation will have to find
the principle common to all instances in nature where such an inter-
change of the poles prevails.
While the electric field arising round an electrified piece of matter
does not allow any recognition of the absolute characteristics of the
two opposing electrical forces, we do^find them revealed by the distri-
bution of electricity in the human body. Something similar holds good
for magnetism. Only, to find the phenomena from which to read the
absolute characteristics of the two sides of the magnetic polarity, we
must not turn to the body of man but to that of the earth, one of
whose characteristics it is to be as much the bearer of a magnetic
field as of gravitational and levitational fields. There is significance in
the fact that even to-day, when the tendency prevails to look for
causes of natural phenomena not in the macrocosmic expanse, but in
the microscopic confines of space, the two poles of magnetism are
named after the magnetic poles of the earth. It indicates the degree to
which man's feeling instinctively relates magnetism to the earth as a
whole.
In our newly developed terminology we may say that magnetism,
as a polarity of the second order, represents a field of force both of
whose poles are situated within finite space, and that in the macro-
telluric mother-field this situation is such that the axis of this field
coincides more or less with the axis of the earth's physical body. Thus
the magnetic polarization of the earth as a letter in nature's script
bids us rank it alongside other phenomena which in their way are an
expression of the earth's being polarized in the north-south direc-
tion.
The Austrian geographer, E. Suess, in his great work The Counten-
ance of the Earth, first drew attention to the fact that an observer
approaching the earth from outer space would be struck by the one-
sided distribution and formation of the earth's continents. He would
notice that most of the dry land is in the northern hemisphere, leaving
the southern hemisphere covered mainly with water. In terms of the
basic elementary qualities, this means that the earth is predominantly
'dry' in its northern half, and 'moist' in its southern.
In this fact we have a symbol which tells us that the earth repre-
sents a polarity of the second order, with its 'salt'-pole in the north
and its 'sulphur'-pole in the south. Hence the magnetism called
'North' must be of saline and therefore spherical nature, correspond-
ing to the negative pole in the realm of electricity, while 'South'
magnetism must be of sulphurous—i.e. radial—nature, correspond-
ing to positive electricity. Moreover, this must hold good equally for
the fields of magnetic force generated by naturally magnetic or artifi-
cially magnetized pieces of iron. For the circumstance that makes a
piece of matter into a magnet is simply that part of the general mag-
netic field of the earth has been drawn into it. Of especial interest in
this respect is the well-known dependence of the direction of an
electrically produced magnetic field on the position of the poles of
the electric field.
*
The insight we have now gained into the nature of electricity has
led us to the realization that with every act of setting electromagnetic
energies in motion we interfere with the entire levity-gravity balance
of our planet by turning part of the earth's coherent substance into
cosmic 'dust'. Remembering our picture of radioactivity, in which we
recognized a sign of the earth's old age, we may say that whenever we
generate electricity we speed up the earth's process of cosmic ageing.
Obviously this is tremendously enhanced by the creation of artificial
radioactivity along the lines recently discovered, whereby it has now
become possible to transmute chemical elements into one another, or
even to cancel altogether their gravity-bound existence.
To see things in this light is to realize that with our having become
able to rouse electricity and magnetism from their dormant state and
make them work for us, a gigantic responsibility has devolved upon
mankind. It was man's fate to remain unaware of this fact during the
first phase of the electrification of his civilization; to continue now in
this state of unawareness would spell peril to the human race.
The fact that modern science has long ceased to be a 'natural'
science is something which has begun to dawn upon the modern
scientific researcher himself. What has thus come to him as a question
finds a definite answer in the picture of electricity we have been able
to develop. It is again Eddington who has drawn attention particu-
larly to this question: see the chapter, 'Discovery or Manufacture?'
in his Philosophy of Physical Science. It will be appropriate at this
point to recall his remarks, for they bear not only on the outcome of
our own present discussion, but also, as the next chapter will show,
on the further course of our studies.
Eddington starts by asking: 'When Lord Rutherford showed us the
atomic nucleus, did he find it or did he make it?' Whichever answer
we give, Eddington goes on to say, makes no difference to our admira-
tion for Rutherford himself. But it makes all the difference to our
ideas on the structure of the physical universe. To make clear where
the modern physicist stands in this respect, Eddington uses a striking
comparison. If a sculptor were to point in our presence to a raw
block of marble saying that the form of a human head was lying hid-
den in the block, 'all our rational instinct would be roused against
such an anthropomorphic speculation'. For it is inconceivable to us
that nature should have placed such a form inside the block. Roused
by our objection, the artist proceeds to verify his theory experiment-
ally—'with quite rudimentary apparatus, too: merely using a chisel
to separate the form for our inspection, he triumphantly proves his
theory.'
'Was it in this way', Eddington asks, 'that Rutherford rendered
concrete the nucleus which his scientific imagination had created?'
One thing is certain: 'In every physical laboratory we see ingeniously
devised tools for executing the work of sculpture, according to the
designs of the theoretical physicist. Sometimes the tool slips and
carves off an odd-shaped form which he had not expected. Then we
have a new experimental discovery,'
To this analogy Eddington adds the following even more drastic
one: 'Procrustes, you will remember,' he says, 'stretched or chopped
down his guests to fit the bed he constructed. But perhaps you have
not heard the rest of the story. He measured them up before they left
the next morning, and wrote a learned paper On the Uniformity of
Stature of Travellers for the Anthropological Society of Attica.'
*
Besides yielding a definite answer to the question of how far the
seemingly discovered facts of science are manufactured facts, our
newly won insight into the nature of the electric and magnetic polar-
ties throws light also on the possibility of so handling both that their
application will lead no longer to a cancellation, but to a true con-
tinuation, of nature's own creative deeds.
An example of this will appear in the next part of our studies,
devoted to observations in the field of optics.
CHAPTER XIV
Colours as 'Deeds and Sufferings of Light'
'As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it whatever.
Excellent poets have lived at the same time as myself; poets more
excellent have lived before me, and others will come after me. But
that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the
difficult science of colours—of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and
here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.'
In these words spoken to his secretary, Eckermann, in 1829, a few
years before his death, Goethe gave his opinion on the significance of
his scientific researches in the field of optical phenomena. He knew
that the path he had opened up had led him to truths which belong to
the original truths of mankind. He expressed this by remarking that
his theory of colour was 'as old as the world'.
If in this book we come somewhat late to a discussion of Goethe's
colour-theory, in spite of the part it played in his own scientific
work, and in spite of its significance for the founding of a physics
based on his method, the reasons are these. When Goethe undertook
his studies in this field he had not to reckon with the forms of thought
which have become customary since the development of mechanistic
and above all—to put it concisely—of 'electricalistic' thinking. Before
a hearing can be gained in our age for a physics of Light and Colour
as conceived by Goethe, certain hindrances must first be cleared away.
So a picture on the one hand of matter, and on the other of electricity,
such as is given when they are studied by Goethean methods, had
first to be built up; only then is the ground provided for an unpreju-
diced judgment of Goethe's observations and the deductions that can
be made from them to-day.
As Professor Heisenberg, in his lecture quoted earlier (Chapter II),
rightly remarks, Goethe strove directly with Newton only in the
realms of colour-theory and optics. Nevertheless his campaign was
not merely against Newton's opinions in this field. He was guided
throughout by the conviction that the fundamental principles of the
whole Newtonian outlook were at stake. It was for this reason that
his polemics against Newton were so strongly expressed, although he
had no fondness for such controversies. In looking back on that part
of the Farbenlehre which he had himself called 'Polemical' in the
title, he said to Eckermann: 'I by no means disavow my severe dissec-
tions of the Newtonian statements; it was necessary at the time and
will also have its value hereafter; but at bottom all polemical action
is repugnant to my nature, and I can take but little pleasure in it.'
The reason why Goethe chose optics as the field of conflict, and
devoted to it more than twenty years of research and reflexion, amidst
all the other labours of his rich life, lay certainly in his individual
temperament—'zum Sehen geboren, zum Schauen bestellt'.1 At the
same time one must see here a definite guidance of humanity. Since
the hour had struck for mankind to take the first step towards over-
coming the world-conception of the one-eyed, colour-blind onlooker,
what step could have been more appropriate than this of Goethe's,
when he raised the eye's capacity for seeing colours to the rank of an
instrument of scientific cognition?
In point of fact, the essential difference between Goethe's theory of
colour and the theory which has prevailed in science (despite all
modifications) since Newton's day, lies in this: While the theory of
Newton and his successors was based on excluding the colour-
seeing faculty of the eye, Goethe founded his theory on the eye's
experience of colour.
*
In view of the present scientific conception of the effect which a
prismatic piece of a transparent medium has on light passing through
it, Goethe's objection to Newton's interpretation and the conclusions
drawn from it seems by no means as heretical as it did in Goethe's
own time and for a hundred years afterwards. For, as Lord Rayleigh
and others have shown, the facts responsible for the coming into
being of the spectral colours, when these are produced by a diffrac-
tion grating, invalidate Newton's idea that the optical apparatus
serves to reveal colours which are inherent in the original light. To-
day it is known that these colours are an outcome of the interference
1 'To see is my dower, to look my employ.' Words of the Tower-Watcher in
Faust, II, 5, through which Goethe echoes his own relation to the world.
of the apparatus (whether prism or grating) with the light. Thus we
find Professor R. W. Wood, in the opening chapter of his Physical
Optics, after having described the historical significance of Newton's
conception of the relation between light and colour, saying: 'Curi-
ously enough, this discovery, which we are taking as marking the
beginning of a definite knowledge about light, is one which we shall
demolish in the last chapter of this book,1 for our present ideas re-
garding the action of the prism more nearly resemble the idea held
previous to Newton's classical experiments. We now believe that the
prism actually manufactures the coloured light.'
We find ourselves faced here with an instance of the problem,
'Discovery or Manufacture?' dealt with by Eddington in the manner
described in our previous chapter. This very instance is indeed used
by Eddington himself as a case in which the answer is definitely in
favour of 'manufacture'. Nevertheless, Eddington complains, experts,
in spite of knowing better, keep to the traditional way of speaking
about the spectral colours as being originally contained in the light.
'Such is the glamour of a historical experiment.'2 It is for the same
reason that Goethe's discovery continues to be unrecognized by the
majority of scientists, who prefer, instead of examining the question
for themselves, to join in the traditional assertion that 'Goethe never
understood Newton'.
*
As Goethe relates at the conclusion of the 'historical' part of his
Farbenlehre,3 he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some
knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics. He felt too close to
poetry to be able to study it with sufficient detachment, so he turned
to painting—an art with which he felt sufficiently familiar without
being connected with it creatively—hoping that if he could discover
the laws of one art they would prove applicable to others.
His visit to Italy, a land rich both in natural colour and in works of
art, gave him a welcome opportunity to pursue this inquiry, but for a
long time he made no headway. The paintings he saw suggested no
inherent law in their arrangement of colours, nor could the painters
he questioned tell him of one. The only qualitative distinction
1 The last chapter but two in the edition of 1924.
2 For the drastic and as such very enlightening way in which Eddington
presents the problem, the reader is referred to Eddington's own description.
3 Konfession des Verfassers.
they seemed to recognize was between 'cold' and 'warm' colours.
His own observations led him to a definite experience of the quality
of the colour blue, for which he coined the phrase 'feebleness of blue'
('Ohnmacht des Blau'). In some way this colour seemed to him to be
related to black. In order to rouse his artist friends and to stimulate
their reflexions, he liked to indulge in paradoxes, as when he asserted
that blue was not a colour at all. He found, however, as time went on,
that in this way he came no nearer his goal.
Although the splendour of colour in the Italian sky and the Italian
landscape made a powerful impression on Goethe, he found not
enough opportunity for systematic study to allow him to arrive at
more than a dim surmise of some law underlying the occurrence of
colour in nature. Still, there was one thing he took home with him as
a result of his labours. He had grown convinced that 'the first ap-
proach to colours as physical phenomena had to be sought from the
side of their occurrence in nature, if one would gain an understanding
of them in relation to art'.
Back at home, he strove to recollect the theory of Newton as it was
being taught in schools and universities—namely, that 'colours in
their totality are contained in light'. Hitherto he had had no occasion
to doubt the correctness of this theory. Like everyone else, he had
heard it expounded in lectures as an incontestable result of empirical
observation, though without this ever having been shown to him by
way of experiment. He convinced himself by consulting a manual that
his recollection was correct, but at the same time he found that the
theory there set forth gave no help in answering his questions.1 So he
decided to examine the phenomena for himself.
For this purpose he borrowed a set of prisms from a friend living
in near-by Jena, the physicist, Büttner. Since, however, he had at that
time no opportunity of arranging a dark chamber on Newton's lines,
where the necessary ray of light from a tiny hole in the window-cover-
ing was sent through a prism, he postponed the whole thing, until in
the midst of all his many other interests and duties it was forgotten.
In vain Büttner pressed many times for the return of the prisms; at
last he sent a mutual acquaintance with the injunction not to return
without them. Goethe then searched for the long-neglected apparatus
and determined to take a rapid glance through one of the prisms
before he gave them back.
1 Colour as quality being no essential factor in the scientific explanation of the
spectrum.
He recalled dimly his pleasure as a boy at the vision of the world
given him through a bit of similarly shaped glass. 'I well remember
that everything looked coloured, but in what manner I could no
longer recollect. I was just then in a room completely white; remem-
bering the Newtonian theory, I expected, as I put the prism to my
eye, to find the whole white wall coloured in different hues and to see
the light reflected thence into the eye, split into as many coloured
lights.
'But how astonished was I when the white wall seen through the
prism remained white after as before. Only where something dark
came against it a more or less decided colour was shown, and at last
the window-bars appeared most vividly coloured, while on the light-
grey sky outside no trace of colouring was to be seen. It did not need
any long consideration for me to recognize that a boundary or edge is
necessary to call forth the colours, and I immediately said aloud, as
though by instinct, that the Newtonian doctrine is false.'
For Goethe, there could be no more thought of sending back the
prisms, and he persuaded Büttner to leave them with him for some
time longer.
Goethe adds a short account of the progress of the experiments he
now undertook as well as of his efforts to interest others in his dis-
covery. He makes grateful reference to those who had brought him
understanding, and who had been helpful to him through the ex-
change of thoughts. Among these, apart from Schiller, whom Goethe
especially mentions, we find a number of leading anatomists, chem-
ists, writers and philosophers of his time, but not a single one of the
physicists then active in teaching or research. The 'Guild' took up an
attitude of complete disapproval or indifference, and so have things
remained till a hundred years after his death, as Goethe himself
prophesied.
One of the first systematic pieces of work which Goethe undertook
in order to trace the cause of the Newtonian error was to go through
Book I of Newton's Optics, sentence by sentence, recapitulate New-
ton's experiments and rearrange them in the order which seemed to
him essential. In so doing he gained an insight which was funda-
mental for all future work, and often proved very beneficial in the
perfecting of his own methods. His examination of the Newtonian
procedure showed him that the whole mistake rested on the fact that
'a complicated phenomenon should have been taken as a basis, and
the simpler explained from the complex'. Nevertheless, it still needed
'much time and application in order to wander through all the laby-
rinths with which Newton had been pleased to confuse his successors'.
*
It seems a small thing, and yet it is a great one, which Goethe, as
the above description shows, discovered almost by chance. This is
shown by the conclusions to which he was led in the systematic
prosecutions of his discovery. An account of them is given in his
Beiträge zur Optik,1 published in 1791, the year in which Galvani
came before the public with his observations in the sphere of
electricity.
Goethe describes in this book the basic phenomena of the creation
of the prismatic colours, with particulars of a number of experiments
so arranged that the truth he had discovered, contrary to Newton's
view, comes to light through the very phenomena themselves. Only
much later, in the year 1810, and after he had brought to a certain
conclusion four years previously the researches which he had pursued
most carefully the whole time, did he make public the actual master-
piece, Entwurf einer Farbenlehre* (An English translation of the
didactic part appeared about ten years after Goethe's death.)
While leaving a more detailed description of the composition of
Goethe's Entwurf for our next chapter, we shall here deal at once with
some of the essential conclusions to which the reader is led in this
book. As already mentioned, Goethe's first inspection of the colour-
phenomenon produced by the prism had shown him that the pheno-
menon depended on the presence of a boundary between light and
darkness. Newton's attempt to explain the spectrum out of light
alone appeared to him, therefore, as an inadmissible setting aside of
one of the two necessary conditions. Colours, so Goethe gleaned dir-
ectly from the prismatic phenomenon, are caused by both light and
its counterpart, darkness. Hence, to arrive at an idea of the nature of
colour, which was in accord with its actual appearance, he saw him-
self committed to an investigation of the extent to which the qualita-
tive differences in our experience of colours rests upon their differing
proportions of light and darkness.
It is characteristic of Goethe's whole mode of procedure that he at
once changed the question, 'What is colour?' into the question,
'How does colour arise?' It was equally characteristic that he did not,
as Newton did, shut himself into a darkened room, so as to get hold
1 Contributions to Optics. 2 Outline of a Theory of Colour.
of the colour-phenomenon by means of an artificially set-up appara-
tus. Instead, he turned first of all to nature, to let her give him the
answer to the questions she had raised.
It was clear to Goethe that to trace the law of the genesis of colour
in nature by reading her phenomena, he must keep a look-out for
occurrences of colours which satisfied the conditions of the Ur-
phänomen, as he had learned to know it. This meant that he must ask
of nature where she let colours arise out of light and darkness in such
a way that no other conditions contributed to the effect.
He saw that such an effect was presented to his eye when he turned
his gaze on the one hand to the blue sky, and on the other to the
yellowish luminous sun. Where we see the blue of the heavens, there,
spread out before our eyes, is universal space, which as such is dark.
Why it does not appear dark by day as well as by night is because we
see it through the sun-illumined atmosphere. The opposite role is
played by the atmosphere when we look through it to the sun. In the
first instance it acts as a lightening, in the second as a darkening,
medium. Accordingly, when the optical density of the air changes as a
result of its varying content of moisture, the colour-phenomenon
undergoes an opposite change in each of the two cases. Whilst with
increasing density of the air the blue of the sky brightens up and
gradually passes over into white, the yellow of the sun gradually
darkens and finally gives way to complete absence of light.
The ur-phenomenon having once been discovered in the heavens,
could then easily be found elsewhere in nature on a large or small
scale—as, for instance, in the blue of distant hills when the air is
sufficiently opaque, or in the colour of the colourless, slightly milky
opal which looks a deep blue when one sees it against a dark back-
ground, and a reddish yellow when one holds it against the light. The
same phenomenon may be produced artificially through the clouding
of glass with suitable substances, as one finds in various glass handi-
craft objects. The aesthetic effect is due to the treated glass being so
fashioned as to present continually changing angles to the light, when
both colour-poles and all the intermediate phases appear simultane-
ously. It is also possible to produce the ur-phenomenon experiment-
ally by placing a glass jug filled with water before a black back-
ground, illuminating the jug from the side, and gradually clouding the
water by the admixture of suitable substances. Whilst the brightness
appearing in the direction of the light goes over from yellow and orange
to an increasingly red shade, the darkness of the black background
brightens to blue, which increases and passes over to a milky white.
It had already become clear to Goethe in Italy that all colour-
experience is based on a polarity, which he found expressed by
painters as the contrast between 'cold' and 'warm' colours. Now that
the coming-into-being of the blue of the sky and of the yellow of the
sun had shown themselves to him as two processes of opposite char-
acter, he recognized in them the objective reason why both colours
are subjectively experienced by us as opposites. 'Blue is illumined
darkness—yellow is darkened light'—thus could he assert the ur-
phenomenon, while he expressed the relation to Light of colours in
their totality by saying: 'Colours are Deeds and Sufferings of Light.'
With this, Goethe had taken the first decisive step towards his goal
—the tracing of man's aesthetic experience to objective facts of nature.
If we use the expressions of preceding chapters, we can say that
Goethe, in observing the coloured ur-phenomenon, had succeeded in
finding how from the primary polarity, Light—Dark, the opposition
of the yellow and blue colours arises as a secondary polarity. For such
an interplay of light and darkness, the existence of the air was seen to
be a necessary condition, representing in the one case a lightening, in
the other, a darkening element. That it was able to play this double
role arose from its being on the one hand pervious to light, while yet
possessing a certain substantial density. For a medium of such a
nature Goethe coined the expression triibes Medium.
There seems to be no suitable word in English for rendering the
term triibe in the sense in which Goethe used it to denote the optical
resistance of a more or less transparent medium. The following re-
marks of Goethe's, reported by his secretary Riemer, will give the
reader a picture of what Goethe meant by this term, clear enough to
allow us to use the German word. Goethe's explanation certainly
shows how inadequate it is to translate triibe by 'cloudy' or 'semi-
opaque' as commentators have done. 'Light and Dark have a com-
mon field, a space, a vacuum in which they are seen to appear. This
space is the realm of the transparent. Just as the different colours are
related to Light and Dark as their creative causes, so is their corpor-
eal part, their medium, Trübe, related to the transparent. The first
diminution of the transparent, i.e. the first slightest filling of space,
the first disposition, as it were, to the corporeal, i.e. the non-trans-
parent—this is Triibe.'1
1 See Rudolf Steiner's edition of Goethe's Farbenlehre under Paralipomena zur
Chromatik, No. 27.
After Goethe had once determined from the macrotelluric pheno-
menon that an interplay of light and darkness within Trübe was
necessary for the appearance of colour in space, he had no doubt that
the prismatic colours, too, could be understood only through the
coming together of all these three elements. It was now his task to
examine in what way the prism, by its being triibe, brings light and
darkness, or, as he also expressed it, light and shadow, into interplay,
when they meet at a boundary.
We must remember that on first looking through the prism Goethe
had immediately recognized that the appearance of colour is always
dependent on the existence of a boundary between light and darkness
—in other words, that it is a border phenomenon. What colours
appear on such a border depends on the position of light and dark-
ness in relation to the base of the prism. If the lighter part is nearer to
the base, then blue and violet tints are seen at the border, and with
the reverse position tints of yellow and red (Plate B, Fig. i). Along
this path of study Goethe found no reason for regarding the spectrum-
phenomenon as complete only when both kinds of border-phenomena
appear simultaneously (let alone when—as a result of the smallness of
the aperture through which the light meets the prism—the two edges
lie so close that a continuous band of colour arises). Hence we find
Goethe—unlike Newton—treating the two ends of the spectrum as
two separate phenomena.
In this way, the spectrum phenomenon gave Goethe confirmation
that he had succeeded in expressing in a generally valid form the law
of the origin of the blue and the yellow colours, as he had read it from
the heavens. For in the spectrum, too, where the colour blue appears,
there he saw darkness being lightened by a shifting of the image of the
border between light and dark in the direction of darkness; where
yellow appears, he saw light being darkened by a shifting of the
image in the direction of light. (See the arrow in Fig. i.)
In the colours adjoining these—indigo and violet on the blue side,
orange and red on the yellow side—Goethe recognized 'heightened'
modifications of blue and yellow. Thus he had learnt from the macro-
telluric realm that with decreasing density of the corporeal medium,
the blue sky takes on ever deeper tones, while with increasing density
of the medium, the yellow of the sunlight passes over into orange and
finally red. Prismatic phenomenon and macrotelluric phenomenon
were seen to correspond in this direction, too.
Faithful to his question, 'How does colour arise?' Goethe now pro-
ceeded to investigate under what conditions two borders, when
placed opposite each other, provide a continuous band of colour—
that is, a colour-band where, in place of the region of uncoloured
light, green appears. This, he observed, came about if one brought
one's eye, or the screen intercepting the light, to that distance from
the prism where the steadily widening yellow-red and the blue-violet
colour-cones merge (Fig. ii).1 Obviously, this distance can be
altered by altering the distance between the two borders. In the case
of an extremely narrow light-space, the blue and yellow edges will
immediately overlap. Yet the emergence of the green colour will
always be due to a union of the blue and yellow colours which spread
from the two edges. This convinced Goethe that it is inadmissible to
place the green in the spectrum in line with the other colours, as is
customary in the explanation of the spectrum since Newton's
time.
This insight into the relation of the central colour of the continuous
spectrum to its other colours still further strengthened Goethe's con-
viction that in the way man experiences nature in his soul, objective
laws of nature come to expression. For just as we experience the
colours on the blue side of the spectrum as cold colours, and those on
the yellow side as warm colours, so does green give man the im-
pression of a neutral colour, influencing us in neither direction. And
just as the experience of the two polar colour-ranges is an expression
of the objective natural law behind them, so too is the experience of
green, the objective conditions of whose origin give it a neutral posi-
tion between the two. With this it also became clear why the vegeta-
tive part of the plant organism, the region of leaf and stem formation,
where the light of the sun enters into a living union with the density of
earthly substance, must appear in a garment of green.
*
Having in this way found the clue to the true genesis of the spect-
rum, Goethe could not fail to notice that it called for another—a
'negative' spectrum, its polar opposite—to make the half into a whole.
For he who has once learnt that light and darkness are two equally
essential factors in the birth of colour, and that the opposing of two
borders of darkness so as to enclose a light is a 'derived' (abgeleitet)
experimental arrangement, is naturally free to alter the arrangement
1 Goethe's own representation of the phenomenon. (The diagram is simplified
by omitting one colour on each side.)
and to supplement it by reversing the order of the two borders, thus
letting two lights enclose a darkness between them.
If one exposes an arrangement like this to the action of the prism,
whose position has remained unchanged, colours appear on each of
the two edges, as before, but in reverse order (Fig. iii). The spectral
phenomenon now begins at one side with light blue and passes into
indigo and violet, with uncoloured darkness in the centre. From this
darkness it emerges through red and passes through orange to yellow
at the other end.
Again, where the two interior colour-cones merge, there an addi-
tional colour appears. Like green, it is of a neutral character, but at
the same time its quality is opposite to that of green. In Newtonian
optics, which assumes colour to be derived from light only, this
colour has naturally no existence. Yet in an optics which has learnt
to reckon with both darkness and light as generators of colour, the
complete spectrum phenomenon includes this colour equally with
green. For lack of an existing proper name for it, Goethe termed it
'pure red' (since it was free from both the blue tinge of the mauve,
and the yellow tinge of the red end of the ordinary spectrum), or
'peach-blossom' (pfirsichblüt), or 'purple' (as being nearest to the
dye-stuff so called by the ancients after the mollusc from which it was
obtained).1
It needs only a glance through the prism into the sunlit world to
make one convinced of the natural appearing of this delicate and at
the same time powerfully luminous colour. For a narrow dark object
on a light field is a much commoner occurrence in nature than the
enclosing by two broad objects of a narrow space of light, the condi-
tion necessary for the emergence of a continuous colour-band with
green in the middle. In fact, the spectrum which science since the time
of Newton regards as the only one, appears much more rarely among
natural conditions than does Goethe's counter-spectrum.
With the peach-blossom a fresh proof is supplied that what man
experiences in his soul is in harmony with the objective facts of nature.
As with green, we experience peach-blossom as a colour that leaves us
in equilibrium. With peach-blossom, however, the equilibrium is of a
different kind, owing to the fact that it arises from the union of the
colour-poles, not at their original stage but in their 'heightened' form.
And so green, the colour of the plant-world harmony given by nature,
1 This is not to be confused with the meaning of 'purple' in modern English
usage.
stands over against 'purple', the colour of the human being striving
towards harmony. By virtue of this quality, purple served from anti-
quity for the vesture of those who have reached the highest stage of
human development for their time. This characteristic of the middle
colours of the two spectra was expressed by Goethe when he called
green 'real totality', and peach-blossom 'ideal totality'.
From this standpoint Goethe was able to smile at the Newtonians.
He could say that if they persisted in asserting that the colourless, so-
called 'white' light is composed of the seven colours of the ordinary
spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—then they
were in duty bound to maintain also that the colourless, 'black' dark-
ness is composed of the seven colours of the inverted spectrum—
yellow, orange, red, purple, violet, indigo, blue.
Despite the convincing force of this argument, the voice of the
Hans Andersen child speaking through Goethe failed to gain a hear-
ing among the crowd of Newtonian faithful. So has it been up to the
present day—regardless of the fact that, as we have shown, modern
physics has reached results which make a contradiction of the New-
tonian concept of the mutual relation of light and colour no longer
appear so heretical as it was in Goethe's time.
*
When we compare the way in which Goethe, on the one hand, and
the physical scientist, on the other, have arrived at the truth that
what Newton held to be 'discovery' was in actual fact 'manufacture',
we find ourselves faced with another instance of a fact which we have
encountered before in our study of electricity. It is the fact that a
truth, which reveals itself to the spectator-scientist only as the result
of a highly advanced experimental research, can be recognized
through quite simple observation when this observation is carried out
with the intention of letting the phenomena themselves speak for
their 'theory'.
Furthermore, there is a corresponding difference in the effect the
knowledge of such truth has on the human mind. In the field of
electricity we saw that together with the scientist's recognition of the
absolute qualities of the two polar forms of electricity a false semb-
lance of reality was lent to the hypothesis of the atomic structure of
matter. Something similar has occurred in the field of optics. Here,
after having been forced to recognize the fallacy of Newton's theory,
the spectator's mind has been driven to form a concept of the nature
of light which is further than ever from the truth. For what then re-
mains of light is—in Eddington's words—a 'quite irregular disturb-
ance, with no tendency to periodicity', which means that to light is
assigned the quality of an undefined chaos (in the negative sense of
this word) sprung from pure chance.
Moreover, as Eddington shows, the question whether the optical
contrivance 'sorts out' from the chaotic light a particular periodicity,
or whether it 'impresses' this on the light, becomes just 'a matter of
expression'.1 So here, too, the modern investigator is driven to a
resigned acknowledgment of the principle of Indeterminacy.
No such conclusions are forced upon the one who studies the
spectrum phenomenon with the eyes of Goethe. Like the modern
experimenter, he, too, is faced with the question 'Discovery or Manu-
facture?' and he, too, finds the answer to be 'Manufacture'. But to
him nature can disclose herself as the real manufacturer, showing
him how she goes to work in bringing about the colours, because in
following Goethe he is careful to arrange his observations in such a
way that they do not veil nature's deeds.
1 This follows from the application of Fourier's Theorem, according to which
every vibration of any kind is divisible into a sum of periodic partial vibrations,
and therefore is regarded as compounded of these.
CHAPTER XV
Seeing as 'Deed'—I
.Having made ourselves so far acquainted with the fundamentals
of Goethe's approach to the outer phenomena of colour involved in
the spectrum, we will leave this for a while to follow Goethe along
another no less essential line of inquiry. It leads us to the study of
our own process of sight, by means of which we grow aware of the
optical facts in outer space.
*
The importance which Goethe himself saw in this aspect of the
optical problem is shown by the place he gave it in the didactic part
of his Farbenlehre. The first three chapters, after the Introduction, are
called 'Physiological Colours', 'Physical Colours', and 'Chemical
Colours'. In the first chapter, Goethe summarizes a group of pheno-
mena which science calls 'subjective' colours, since their origin is
traced to events within the organ of sight. The next chapter deals with
an actual physics of colour—that is, with the appearance of colours
in external space as a result of the refraction, diffraction and polari-
zation of light. The third chapter treats of material colours in relation
to chemical and other influences. After two chapters which need not
concern us here comes the sixth and last chapter, entitled 'Physical-
Moral Effect of Colour' ('Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farben'),
which crowns the whole. There, for the first time in the history of
modern science, a bridge is built between Physics, Aesthetics and
Ethics. We remember it was with this aim in view that Goethe had
embarked upon his search for the solution of the problem of colour.
In this chapter the experiencing of the various colours and their
interplay through the human soul is treated in many aspects, and
Goethe is able to show that what arises in man's consciousness as
qualitative colour-experience is nothing but a direct 'becoming-
inward' of what is manifested to the 'reader's' eye and mind as the
objective nature of colours. So, in one realm of the sense-world,
Goethe succeeded in closing the abyss which divides existence and
consciousness, so long as the latter is restricted to a mere onlooker-
relationship towards the sense-world.
If we ask what induced Goethe to treat the physiological colours
before the physical colours, thus deviating so radically from the
order customary in science, we shall find the answer in a passage from
the Introduction to his Entwurf. Goethe, in giving his views on the
connexion between light and the eye, says: 'The eye owes its existence
to light. Out of indifferent auxiliary animal organs the light calls
forth an organ for itself, similar to its own nature; thus the eye is
formed by the light, for the light, so that the inner light can meet the
outer.' In a verse, which reproduces in poetic form a thought origin-
ally expressed by Plotinus, Goethe sums up his idea of the creative
connexion between eye and light as follows:
' Unless our eyes had something of the sun,
How could we ever look upon the light?
Unless there lived within us God's own might,
How could the Godlike give us ecstasy?''1
(Trans. Stawell-Dickinson)
By expressing himself in this way in the Introduction to his Farben-
lehre, Goethe makes it clear from the outset that when he speaks of
'light' as the source of colour-phenomena, he has in mind an idea
of light very different from that held by modern physics. For in deal-
ing with optics, physical science turns at once to phenomena of light
found outside man—in fact to phenomena in that physical realm from
which, as the lowest of the kingdoms of nature, the observations of
natural science are bound to start. Along this path one is driven, as
we have seen, to conceive of light as a mere 'disturbance' in the
universe, a kind of irregular chaos.
In contrast to this, Goethe sees that to gain an explanation of
natural physical phenomena which will be in accord with nature, we
must approach them on the path by which nature brings them into
1Wär' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Wie konnten wir das Licht erblickern
Lebt' nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzucken!
being. In the field of light this path is one which leads from light as
creative agent to light as mere phenomenon. The highest form of
manifestation of creative light most directly resembling its Idea is
within man. It is there that light creates for itself the organ through
which, as manifest light, it eventually enters into human conscious-
ness. To Goethe it was therefore clear that a theory of light, which is
to proceed in accord with nature, should begin with a study of the
eye: its properties, its ways of acting when it brings us information of
its deeds and sufferings in external nature.
The eye with its affinity to light comes into being in the apparently
dark space of the mother's womb. This points to the possession by
the human organism of an 'inner' light which first forms the eye from
within, in order that it may afterwards meet the light outside. It is this
inner light that Goethe makes the starting-point of his investigations,
and it is for this reason that he treats physiological colours before
physical colours.
*
Of fundamental significance as regards method is the way in which
Goethe goes on from the passage quoted above to speak of the
activity of the inner light: 'This immediate affinity between light and
the eye will be denied by none; to consider them identical in sub-
stance is less easy to comprehend. It will be more intelligible to assert
that a dormant light resides in the eye, and that this light can be ex-
cited by the slightest cause from within or from without. In darkness
we can, by an effort of imagination, call up the brightest images; in
dreams, objects appear to us as in broad daylight; if we are awake,
the slightest external action of light is perceptible, and if the organ
suffers a mechanical impact light and colours spring forth.'
What Goethe does here is nothing less than to follow the develop-
ment of sight to where it has its true origin. Let us remember that a
general source of illusion in the modern scientific picture of the world
lies in the fact that the onlooker-consciousness accepts itself as a self-
contained ready-made entity, instead of tracing itself genetically to
the states of consciousness from which it has developed in the course
of evolution. In reality, the consciousness kindled by outer sense-
perception was preceded by a dreaming consciousness, and this by a
sleeping consciousness, both for the individual and for humanity as a
whole. So, too, outer vision by means of the physical apparatus of
the eye was preceded by an inner vision. In dreams we still experience
this inner vision; we use it in the activity of our picture-forming
imagination; and it plays continuously upon the process of external
sight. Why we fail to notice this when using our eye in the ordinary
way, is because of that dazzling process mentioned earlier in this
book. Goethe's constant endeavour was not to become the victim of
this blindness—that is, not to be led by day-time experience to forget
the night-side of human life. The passage quoted from the Introduc-
tion to his Farbenlehre shows how, in all that he strove for, he kept
this goal in view.
How inevitably a way of thinking that seeks an intuitive under-
standing of nature is led to views like those of Goethe is shown by
the following quotations from Reid and Ruskin, expressing their view
of the relationship between the eye, or the act of seeing, and external
optical phenomena. In his Inquiry, at the beginning of his review of
visual perceptions, Reid says:
'The structure of the eye, and of all its appurtenances, the admir-
able contrivances of nature for performing all its various external and
internal motions and the variety in the eyes of different animals,
suited to their several natures and ways of life, clearly demonstrate
this organ to be a masterpiece of nature's work. And he must be very
ignorant of what hath been discovered about it, or have a very strange
cast of understanding, who can seriously doubt, whether or not the
rays of light and the eye were made for one another with consummate
wisdom, and perfect skill in optics.''1
The following passage from Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust (Lecture X)
brings out his criticism of the scientific way of treating of optical
phenomena:
'With regard to the most interesting of all their [the philosophers']
modes of force—light; they never consider how far the existence of it
depends on the putting of certain vitreous and nervous substances
into the formal arrangement which we call an eye. The German
philosophers began the attack, long ago, on the other side, by telling
us there was no such thing as light at all, unless we choose to see it.2
Now, German and English, both, have reversed their engines, and
insist that light would be exactly the same light that it is, though
nobody could ever see it. The fact being that the force must be there,
and the eye there, and 'light' means the effect of the one on the other—
1 Inquiry, VI, 1. The italics are Reid's.
2 Presumably Kant and his school. Schopenhauer was definitely of this
opinion.
and perhaps, also—(Plato saw farther into that mystery than anyone
has since, that I know of)—on something a little way within the
eyes.'
Remarks like these, and the further quotation given below, make
it seem particularly tragic that Ruskin apparently had no knowledge
of Goethe's Farbenlehre. This is the more remarkable in view of the
significance which Turner, with whom Ruskin stood in such close
connexion, ascribed to it from the standpoint of the artist. For the
way in which Ruskin in his Modern Painters speaks of the effect of
the modern scientific concept of colours upon the ethical-religious
feeling of man, shows that he deplores the lack of just what Goethe
had long since achieved in his Farbenlehre where, starting with purely
physical observations, he had been able to develop from them a
'physical-moral' theory of colour.
Ruskin's alertness to the effect on ethical life of a scientific world-
picture empty of all qualitative values led him to write:
'It is in raising us from the first state of inactive reverie to the
second of useful thought, that scientific pursuits are to be chiefly
praised. But in restraining us at this second stage, and checking the
impulses towards higher contemplation, they are to be feared or
blamed. They may in certain minds be consistent with such contem-
plation, but only by an effort; in their nature they are always adverse
to it, having a tendency to chill and subdue the feelings, and to re-
solve all things into atoms and numbers. For most men, an ignorant
enjoyment is better than an informed one, it is better to conceive the
sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden
throne than a sleety mist. I much question whether anyone who
knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree
the pleasure and reverence an unlettered peasant may feel at the
sight of a rainbow.'
What Ruskin did not guess was that the rudiments of the 'moral
theory of light' for which he craved, as this passage indicates, had
been established by Goethe long before.
*
In the section of his Farbenlehre dealing with 'physiological
colours', Goethe devotes by far the most space to the so-called 'after-
images' which appear in the eye as the result of stimulation by ex-
ternal light, and persist for some little time. To create such an after-
image in a simple way, one need only gaze at a brightly lit window
and then at a faintly lit wall of the room. The picture of the window
appears there, but with the light-values reversed: the dark cross-bar
appears as light, and the bright panes as dark.
In describing this phenomenon Goethe first gives the usual ex-
planation, that the part of the retina which was exposed to the light
from the window-panes gets tired, and is therefore blunted for fur-
ther impressions, whereas the part on which the image of the dark
frame fell is rested, and so is more sensitive to the uniform impression
of the wall. Goethe, however, at once adds that although this explana-
tion may seem adequate for this special instance, there are other
phenomena which can be accounted for only if they are held to
derive from a 'higher source'. Goethe means experiences with col-
oured after-images. This will be confirmed by our own discussion of
the subject.
What we first need, however, is a closer insight into the physiologi-
cal process in the eye which causes the after-images as such. Wherever
Goethe speaks of a simple activity of the retina, we are in fact con-
cerned with a co-operation of the retina with other parts of our organ
of sight. In order to make this clear, let us consider how the eye
adapts itself to varying conditions of light and darkness.
It is well known that if the eye has become adjusted to darkness it
is dazzled if suddenly exposed to light, even though the light be of no
more than quite ordinary brightness. Here we enter a border region
where the seeing process begins to pass over into a pathological con-
dition.1 A 'secret' of the effect of light on the eye is here revealed
which remains hidden in ordinary vision, for normally the different
forces working together in the eye hold each other in balance, so that
none is able to manifest separately. This equilibrium is disturbed,
however, when we suddenly expose the eye to light while it is adapted
to darkness. The light then acts on the eye in its usual way, but with-
out the immediate counter-action which normally restores the bal-
ance. Under these conditions we notice that the sudden dazzling has
a painful influence on the eye—that is, an influence in some way
destructive. This will not seem surprising if we remember that when
light strikes on the background of the eye, consciousness is quick-
ened, and this, as we know, presupposes a breaking down of sub-
stance in some part of the nervous system. Such a process does in fact
1 As regards the principle underlying the line of consideration followed here,
see the remark made in Chapter V in connexion with Goethe's study of the
'proliferated rose' (p. 76/.).
occur in the retina, the nerve-part of the eye, when external light falls
upon it. If the eye were solely a structure of nerves, it would be so far
destroyed by the impact of light that it could not be restored even by
sleep, as are the more inward parts of the nervous system. But the
eye receives also a flow of blood, and we know that throughout the
threefold human organism the blood supplies the nervous system
with building-up forces, polarically opposite to the destructive ones.
In sleep, as we have already seen, the interruption of consciousness
allows the blood to inundate the nervous system, as it were, with its
healing, building-up activity. It is not necessary, however, for the
whole of the body to pass into a condition of sleep before this activity
can occur. It functions to some extent also in the waking state, especi-
ally in those parts of the organism which, like the eye, serve in the
highest degree the unfolding of consciousness.
Having established this, we have a basis for an understanding of
the complete process of vision. We see that it is by no means solely
the nerve part of the eye which is responsible for vision, as the
spectator-physiology was bound to imagine. The very fact that the
place where the optic nerve enters the eye is blind indicates that the
function of mediating sight cannot be ascribed to the nerve alone.
What we call 'seeing' is far more the result of an interplay between
the retina carrying the nerves, and the choroid carrying the blood-
vessels. In this interplay the nerves are the passive, receptive organ
for the inworking of external light, while the blood-activity comes to
meet the nerve-process with a precisely correlated action. In this
action we find what Goethe called the 'inner light'.
The process involved in adaptation now becomes comprehensible.
The cause of the dazzling effect of light of normal intensity on an eye
adapted to the dark, is that in such an eye the blood is in a state of
rest, and this prevents it from exercising quickly enough the necessary
counter-action to the influence of the light. A corresponding effect
occurs when one suddenly exposes to darkness the eye adapted to
light. One can easily observe what goes on then, if, after looking for
a time at an undifferentiated light surface such as the evenly luminous
sky, one covers the opened eyes with the hollowed hands. It will then
be found that the space before the eyes is filled by a sort of white
light, and by paying close attention one recognizes that it streams
from the eyes out into the hollowed space. It may even be several
minutes before the field of vision really appears black, that is, before
the activity of the inner light in the choroid has so far died away that
equilibrium prevails between the non-stimulated nerves and the non-
stimulated blood.
With this insight into the twofold nature of the process of vision
we are now able to describe more fully the negative after-image.
Although in this case, as Goethe himself remarked, the ordinary ex-
planation seems to suffice, yet in view of our later studies it may be
well to bring forward here this wider conception.
On the basis of our present findings it is no longer enough to trace
the appearing of the after-image solely to a differential fatigue in the
retina. The fact is that as long as the eye is turned to the bright
window-pane a more intensive blood-activity occurs in the portions
of the eye's background met by the light than in those where the
dark window-bar throws its shadow on the retina. If the eye so influ-
enced is then directed to the faintly illumined wall of the room, the
difference in the activity of the blood persists for some time. Hence in
the parts of the eye adapted to darkness we experience the faint
brightness as strongly luminous, even dazzling, whereas in the parts
more adapted to light we feel the same degree of brightness to be
dark. That the action of the inner light is responsible for the differ-
ences becomes clear if, while the negative after-image is still visible,
we darken the eye with the hollowed hands. Then at once in the dark
field of vision the positive facsimile of the window appears, woven by
the activity of the blood which reproduces the outer reality.
Having traced the colourless after-image to 'higher sources'—that
is, to the action of the blood-—let us now examine coloured after-
images. We need first to become conscious of the colour-creating
light-activity which resides in the blood. For this purpose we expose
the eyes for a moment to an intense light, and then darken them for a
sufficient time. Nothing in external nature resembles in beauty and
radiance the play of colour which then arises, unless it be the colour
phenomenon of the rainbow under exceptionally favourable circum-
stances.
The physiological process which comes to consciousness in this
way as an experience of vision is exactly the same as the process
which gives us experiences of vision in dreams. There is indeed
evidence that when one awakens in a brightly lit room out of vivid
dreaming, one feels less dazzled than on waking from dreamless
sleep. This indicates that in dream vision the blood in the eye is
active, just as it is in waking vision. The only difference is that in
waking consciousness the stimulus reaches the blood from outside,
through the eye, whereas in dreams it comes from causes within the
organism. The nature of these causes does not concern us here; it will
be dealt with later. For the moment it suffices to establish the fact
that our organism is supplied with a definite activity of forces which
we experience as the appearance of certain images of vision, no mat-
ter from which side the stimulus comes. All vision, physiologically
considered, is of the nature of dream vision; that is to say, we owe
our day-waking sight to the fact that we are able to encounter the
pictures of the outer world, brought to us by the light, with a dream-
ing of the corresponding after-images.
Just as the simple light-dark after-image shows a reversal of light-
values in relation to the external picture, so in the coloured after-
images there is a quite definite and opposite relationship of their
colours to those of the original picture. Thus, if the eyes are exposed
for some time to an impression of the colour red, and then directed
to a neutral surface, not too brightly illuminated, one sees it covered
with a glimmering green. In this way there is a reciprocal correspon-
dence between the colour-pairs Red-Green, Yellow-Violet, Blue-
Orange. To whichever of these six colours one exposes the eye, an
after-image always appears of its contrast colour, forming with it a
pair of opposites.
We must here briefly recall how this phenomenon is generally ex-
plained on Newtonian lines. The starting-point is the assumption that
the eye becomes fatigued by gazing at the colour and gradually be-
comes insensitive to it. According to Newton's theory, if an eye thus
affected looks at a white surface, the sum of all the colours comes
from there to meet it, while the eye has a reduced sensitivity to the
particular colour it has been gazing at. And so among the totality of
colours constituting the 'white' light, this one is more or less non-
existent for the eye. The remaining colours are then believed to cause
the contrasting colour-impression.
If we apply the common sense of the Hans Andersen child to this,
we see where it actually leads. For it says no less than this: as long as
the eye is in a normal condition, it tells us a lie about the world, for it
makes white light seem something that in reality it is not. For the
truth to become apparent, the natural function of the eye must be
reduced by fatigue. To believe that a body, functioning in this way, is
the creation of God, and at the same time to look on this God as a
Being of absolute moral perfection, would seem a complete contra-
diction to the Hans Andersen child. In this contradiction and others
of the same kind to which nowadays every child is exposed repeatedly
and willy-nilly in school lessons and so on—we must seek the true
cause of the moral uncertainty so characteristic of young people to-
day. It was because Ruskin felt this that he called for a 'moral'
theory of light.
Since Goethe did not judge man from artificially devised experi-
ments, but the latter from man, quite simple reflexions led him to
the following view of the presence of the contrasting colour in the
coloured after-images. Nature outside man had taught him that life
on all levels takes it course in a perpetual interplay of opposites,
manifested externally in an interplay of diastole and systole compar-
able to the process of breathing. He, therefore, traced the interchange
of light-values in colourless after-images to a 'silent resistance which
every vital principle is forced to exhibit when some definite condition
is presented to it. Thus, inhalation presupposes exhalation; thus
every systole, its diastole. When darkness is presented to the eye, the
eye demands brightness, and vice versa: it reveals its vital energy, its
fitness to grasp the object, precisely by bringing forth out of itself
something contrary to the object.'
Consequently he summarizes his reflexions on coloured after-
images and their reversals of colour in these words: 'The eye demands
actual completeness and closes the colour-circle in itself.' How true
this is, the law connecting the corresponding colours shows, as may
be seen in the following diagram. Here, red, yellow and blue as three
primary colours confront the three remaining colours, green, violet
and orange in such a way that each of the latter represents a mixture
of the two other primary colours. (Fig. 10.)
Colour and contrast-colour are actually so related that to what-
ever colour the eye is exposed it produces a counter-colour so as to
have the sum-total of all the three primary colours in itself. And so,
in consequence of the interplay of outer and inner light in the eye,
there is always present in it the totality of all the colours.
It follows that the appearance of the contrast-colour in the field of
vision is not, as the Newtonian theory asserts, the result of fatigue,
but of an intensified activity of the eye, which continues even after
the colour impression which gave rise to it has ceased. What is seen
on the neutral surface (it will be shown later why we studiously avoid
speaking of 'white light') is no outwardly existing colour at all. It is
the activity of the eye itself, working in a dreamlike way from its
blood-vessel system, and coming to our consciousness by this means.
Here again, just as in the simple opposition of light and dark, the
perception of coloured after-images is connected with a breaking-
down process in the nerve region of the eye, and a corresponding
building-up activity coming from the blood. Only in this case the eye
is not affected by simple light, but by light of a definite colouring. The
specific destructive process caused by this light is answered with a
specific building-up process by the blood. Under certain conditions
we can become dreamily aware of this process which normally does
not enter our consciousness. In such a case we see the contrasting
colour as coloured after-image.
' Only by representing the process in this way do we do justice to a
fact which completely eludes the onlooker-consciousness—namely,
that the eye produces the contrasting colour even while it is still ex-
posed to the influence of the outer colour. Since this is so, all colours
appearing to us in ordinary vision are already tinged by the subdued
light of the opposite colour, produced by the eye itself. One can easily
convince oneself of this through the following experiment. Instead of
directing the eye, after it has been exposed to a certain colour, to a
neutral surface, as previously, gaze at the appropriate contrasting
colour. (The first and second coloured surfaces should be so arranged
that the former is considerably smaller than the latter.) Then, in the
middle of the second surface (and in a field about the size of the first),
its own colour appears, with a strikingly heightened intensity.
Here we find the eye producing, as usual, a contrast-colour from
out of itself, as an after-image, even while its gaze is fixed on the
same colour in the outer world. The heightened brilliance within the
given field is due to the addition of the after-image colour to the
external colour.
The reader may wonder why this phenomenon is not immediately
adduced as a decisive proof of the fallacy of the whole Newtonian
theory of the relation of 'white' light to the various colours. Although
it does in fact offer such a proof, we have good reason for not making
this use of it here. Throughout this book it is never our intention to
enter into a contest of explanations, or to defeat one explanation by
another. How little this would help will be obvious if we realize that
research was certainly not ignorant of the fact that the opposite colour
arises even when the eye is not turned to a white surface. In spite of
this, science did not feel its concept of white light as the sum of all
the colours to be an error, since it has succeeded in 'explaining' this
phenomenon too, and fitting it into the prevailing theory. To do so is
in thorough accord with spectator-thinking. Our own concern, how-
ever, as in all earlier cases, is to replace this thinking with all its
'proofs' and 'explanations' by learning to read in the phenomena
themselves. For no other purpose than this the following facts also
are now brought forward.
*
Besides Rudolf Steiner's fundamental insight into the spiritual-
physical nature of the growing human being, through which he laid
the basis of a true art of education, he gave advice on many practical
points. For example, he indicated how by the choice of a suitable
colour environment one can bring a harmonizing influence to bear on
extremes of temperament in little children. To-day it is a matter of
practical experience that excitable children are quietened if they are
surrounded with red or red-yellow colours, or wear clothes of these
colours, whereas inactive, lethargic children are roused to inner
movement if they are exposed to the influence of blue or blue-green
colours.
This psychological reaction of children to colour is not surprising
if one knows the role played by the blood in the process of seeing,
and how differently the soul-life of man is connected with the blood-
nerve polarity of his organism in childhood and in later life. What we
have described as the polar interplay of blood and nerve in the act of
sight is not confined to the narrow field of the eye. Just as the nerve
processes arising in the retina are continued to the optic centre in the
cerebrum, so must we look for the origin of the corresponding blood
process not in the choroid itself, but in the lower regions of the
organism. Wherever, therefore, the colour red influences the whole
nerve system, the blood system as a whole answers with an activity of
the metabolism corresponding to the contrasting colour, green.
Similarly it reacts as a whole to a blue-violet affecting the nerve sys-
tem, this time with a production corresponding to yellow-orange.
The reason why in later years we notice this so little lies in a fact
we have repeatedly encountered. The consciousness of the grown
man to-day, through its one-sided attachment to the death-processes
in the nerve region, pays no attention to its connexion with the life-
processes centred in the blood system. In this respect the condition of
the little child is quite different. Just as the child is more asleep in its
nerve system than the grown-up person, it is more awake in its blood
system. Hence in all sense-perceptions a child is not so much aware
of how the world works on its nerve system as how its blood system
responds. And so a child in a red environment feels quietened because
it experiences, though dimly, how its whole blood system is stimu-
lated to the green production; bluish colours enliven it because it
feels its blood answer with a production of light yellowish tones.
From the latter phenomena we see once more the significance of
Goethe's arrangement of his Farbenlehre. For we are now able to
realize that to turn one's attention to the deeds and sufferings of the
inner light means nothing less than to bring to consciousness the pro-
cesses of vision which in childhood, though in a dreamlike way,
determine the soul's experience of seeing. Through placing his exam-
ination of the physiological colours at the beginning of his Farben-
lehre, Goethe actually took the path in scientific research to which
Thomas Reid pointed in philosophy. By adapting Reid's words we
can say that Goethe, in his Farbenlehre, proclaims as a basic principle
of a true Optics: that we must become again as little children if we
would reach a philosophy of light and colours.
CHAPTER XVI
Seeing as 'Deed'—II
1 he observation of our own visual process, which we began in the
last chapter, will serve now to free us from a series of illusory con-
cepts which have been connected by the onlooker-consciousness with
the phenomena brought about by light.
There is first the general assumption that light as such is visible. In
order to realize that light is itself an invisible agent, we need only
consider a few self-evident facts—for instance, that for visibility to
arise light must always encounter some material resistance in space.
This is, in fact, an encounter between light, typifying levity, and the
density of the material world, typifying gravity. Accordingly, wher-
ever visible colours appear we have always to do with light meeting
its opposite.
Optics, therefore, as a science of the physically perceptible is never
concerned with light-alone, but always with light and its opposite
together. This is actually referred to in Ruskin's statement, quoted in
the last chapter, where he speaks of the need of the 'force' and of the
intercepting bodily organ before a science of optics can come into
existence. Ruskin's 'light', however, is what we have learnt with
Goethe to call 'colour', whereas that for which we reserve the term
'light' is called by him simply 'force'.
All this shows how illusory it is to speak of 'white' light as synony-
mous with simple light, in distinction to 'coloured' light. And yet this
has been customary with scientists from the time of Newton until to-
day, not excluding Newton's critic, Eddington. In fact, white exists
visibly for the eye as part of the manifested world, and is therefore
properly characterized as a colour. This is, therefore, how Goethe
spoke of it. We shall see presently the special position of white (and
likewise of black), as a colour among colours. What matters first of
all is to realize that white must be strictly differentiated from light as
such, for the function of light is to make visible the material world
without itself being visible.
To say that light is invisible, however, does not mean that it is
wholly imperceptible. It is difficult to bring the perception of light
into consciousness, for naturally our attention, when we look out into
light-filled space, is claimed by the objects of the illuminated world,
in all their manifold colours and forms. Nevertheless the effect of
pure light on our consciousness can be observed—during a railway
journey, for instance, when we leave a tunnel that has been long
enough to bring about a complete adaptation of the eyes to the pre-
vailing darkness. Then, in the first moments of the lightening of the
field of vision, and before any separate objects catch the attention, we
can notice how the light itself exercises a distinctly expanding influ-
ence on our consciousness. We feel how the light calls on the con-
sciousness to participate, as it were, in the world outside the body.
It is possible also to perceive directly the opposite of light. This is
easier than the direct perception of light, for in the dark one is not
distracted by the sight of surrounding objects. One need only pay
attention to the fact that, after a complete adapting of the eyes to the
dark, one still retains a distinct experience of the extension of the
field of vision of both eyes. We find here, just as in the case of light,
that our will is engaged within the eye in a definite way; a systolic
effect proceeds from dark, a diastolic effect from light. We have a dis-
tinct perception of both, but not of anything 'visible' in the ordinary
sense.
With regard to our visual experience of white and black, it is quite
different. We are concerned here with definite conditions of corporeal
surfaces, just as with other colours, although the conditions convey-
ing the impressions of white or black are of a special character. A
closer inspection of these conditions reveals a property of our act of
seeing which has completely escaped scientific observation, but
which is of fundamental importance for the understanding of optical
phenomena dynamically.
It is well known that a corporeal surface, which we experience as
white, has the characteristic of throwing back almost all the light that
strikes it, whereas light is more or less completely absorbed by a sur-
face which we experience as black. Such extreme forms of interplay
between light and a corporeal surface, however, do not only occur
when the light has no particular colour, but also when a coloured
surface is struck by light of the same or opposite colour. In the first
instance complete reflexion takes place; in the second, complete
absorption. And both these effects are registered by the eye in pre-
cisely the same manner as those mentioned before. For example, a
red surface in red light looks simply white; a green surface in red
light looks black.
The usual interpretation of this phenomenon, namely, that it con-
sists in a subjective 'contrast' impression of the eye—a red surface in
red light looking brighter, a green surface darker, than its surround-
ings, and thereby causing the illusion of white or black—is a typical
onlooker-interpretation against which there stands the evidence of
unprejudiced observation. The reality of the 'white' and the 'black'
seen in such cases is so striking that a person who has not seen the
colours of the objects in ordinary light can hardly be persuaded to
believe that they are not 'really' white or black. The fact is that the
white and the black that are seen under these conditions are just as
real as 'ordinary' white and^>lack. When in either instance the eye
registers 'white' it registers exactly the same event, namely, the total
reflexion of the light by the surface struck by it. Again, when the eye
registers 'black' in both cases it registers an identical process, namely,
total absorption of the light.1
Seen thus, the phenomenon informs us of the significant fact that
our eye is not at all concerned with the colour of the light that enters
its own cavity, but rather with what happens between the light and
the surface on which the light falls. In other words, the phenomenon
shows that our process of seeing is not confined to the bodily organ
of the eye, but extends into outer space to the point where we
experience the visible object to be.2
This picture of the visual process, to which we have been led here
by simple optical observation, was reached by Thomas Reid through
his own experience of how, in the act of perceiving the world, man is
linked intuitively with it. We remember that he intended in his philo-
sophy to carry ad absurdum the hypothesis that 'the images of the
external objects are conveyed by the organs of sense to the brain and
are there perceived by the mind'. Common Sense makes Reid speak
as follows: 'If any man will shew how the mind may perceive images
of the brain, I will undertake to shew how it may perceive the most
1 It will be well to remember here the discussion of our experience of tempera-
ture through the sense of warmth in Chapter VIII (p. 134/.).
2 Along these lines the true solution of the problem of the so-called coloured
shadows will be found, Goethe studied this without finding, however, a satis-
factory answer.
distant objects; for if we give eyes to the mind, to perceive what is
transacted at home in its dark chamber, why may we not make the
eyes a little longer-sighted? And then we shall have no occasion for
that unphilosophical fiction of images in the brain.' (Inq., VI, 12.)
Reid proceeds to show this by pointing out, first, that we must only
use the idea of 'image' for truly visual perceptions; secondly, that the
sole place of this image is the background of the eye, and not any part
of the nervous system lying beyond; thirdly, that even this retina-
image, as such, does not come to our consciousness, but serves only
to direct the consciousness to the cause of the image, namely, the
external object itself. In what follows we shall deal with an observa-
tion which will show how right Reid was in this respect.
Those familiar with this observation (well known indeed to those
living in the hilly and mountainous districts both here and on the
Continent) know that when distant features of the landscape, in an
otherwise clear and sunlit atmosphere, suddenly seem almost near
enough to touch, rainy weather is approaching. Likewise a conspicu-
ous increase in distance, while the sky is still overcast, foreshadows
fine weather.
This effect (the customary 'explanation' of which is, as usual, of no
avail to us and so need not concern us here) ranks with phenomena
described in optics under the name of 'apparent optical depth', a
subject we shall discuss more fully in the next chapter. It suffices here
to state that it is the higher degree of humidity which, by lending the
atmosphere greater optical density (without changing its clarity),
makes distant objects seem to be closer to the eye, and vice versa. (If
we could substitute for the air a much lighter gas—say, hydrogen—
then the things we see through it would look farther off than they
ever do in our atmosphere.)
Observations such as these show us that (a) when external light
strikes the retina of our eye, our inner light is stimulated to move out
of the eye towards it; (b) in pressing outward, this inner light meets
with a certain resistance, and the extent of this determines at what
distance from the eye our visual ray comes to rest as the result of a
kind of exhaustion. Just as the outer light reaches an inner boundary
at our retina, so does the inner light meet with an outer boundary,
set by the optical density of the medium spread out before the eye,
Outer and inner light interpenetrate each other along the whole tract
between these two boundaries, but normally we are not conscious of
this process. We first become conscious of it where our active gaze—
that is, the inner light sent forth through the eye—reaches the limit of
its activity. At that point we become aware of the object of our gaze.
So here we find confirmed a fact noted earlier, that consciousness—
at least at its present state of evolution—arises where for some
reason or other our volition conies to rest.
*
The foregoing observations have served to awaken us in a pre-
liminary way to the fact that an essential part of our act of seeing
takes place outside our bodily organ of vision and that our visual
experience is determined by what happens out there between our
gaze and the medium it has to penetrate. Our next task will be to find
out how this part of our visual activity is affected by the properties of
the different colours. We shall thereby gain a further insight into the
nature of the polarity underlying all colour-phenomena, and this
again will enable us to move a step further towards becoming con-
scious of what happens in our act of seeing.
We shall start by observing what happens to the two sides of the
colour-scale when the optical medium assumes various degrees of
density.
For the sky to appear blue by day a certain purity of the atmo-
sphere is needed. The more veiled the atmosphere becomes the more
the blue of the sky turns towards white; the purer and rarer the atmo-
sphere, the deeper the blue, gradually approaching to black. To
mountain climbers and those who fly at great heights it is a familiar
experience to see the sky assume a deep indigo hue. There can be no
doubt that at still higher altitudes the colour of the sky passes over
into violet and ultimately into pure black. Thus in the case of blue the
field of vision owes its darkening to a decrease in the resistance by
which our visual ray is met in the optical medium. It is precisely the
opposite with yellow. For here, as the density of the medium in-
creases, the colour-effect grows darker by yellow darkening first to
orange and then to red, until finally it passes over into complete
darkness.
This shows that our visual ray is subject to entirely different dyn-
amic effects at the two poles of the colour-scale. At the blue pole, the
lightness-effect springs from the resistant medium through which we
gaze, a medium under the influence of gravity, while the darkness is
provided by the anti-gravity quality of cosmic space, which as a
'negative' resistance exercises a suction on the eye's inner light. At
the yellow pole it is just the reverse. Here, the resistant medium brings
about a darkening of our field of vision, while the lightness-effect
springs from a direct meeting of the eye with light, and so with the
suctional effect of negative density.
Our pursuit of the dynamic causes underlying our apperception of
the two poles of the colour-scale has led us to a point where it be-
comes necessary to introduce certain new terms to enable us to go
beyond Goethe's general distinction between Finsternis (darkness)
and Licht (light). Following Goethe, we have so far used these two
terms for what appears both in blue and yellow as the respective light
and dark ingredients. This distinction cannot satisfy us any more. For
through our last observations it has become clear that the Finsternis
in blue and the Licht in yellow are opposites only in appearance, be-
cause they are both caused by Levity, and similarly that the lighten-
ing effect in blue and the darkening effect in yellow are both effected
by Gravity. Therefore, to distinguish between what appertains to the
primary polarity, Levity-Gravity, on the one hand, and their visible
effects in the secondary polarity of the colours, on the other, we shall
henceforth reserve the term darkness and, with it, lightness for in-
stances where the perceptible components of the respective colours
are concerned, while speaking of Dark and Light where reference is
made to the generating primary polarity.
*
If we are justified in thus tracing the colour-polarity to a polarically
ordered interplay between levity and gravity, we may then pursue the
following line of thought. We know from earlier considerations that
wherever such an interplay between the poles of the primary polarity
takes place, we have to do, in geometric terms, with the polarity of
sphere and radius. We may therefore conclude that the same charac-
teristics will apply to the way in which the blue of the sky and the
yellow of the sunlight are encountered spatially. Now we need only
observe how the blue heavens arch over us spherically, on the one
hand, and how the yellow brightness of the sun penetrates the air ray-
wise, on the other, in order to realize that this really is so.
Having thus established the connexion of the two poles of the
colour-scale with the spherical and radial structure of space, we are
now able to express the Goethean ur-phenomenon in a more dynamic
way as follows: On the one hand, we see the blue of the heavens
emerging when levity is drawn down by gravity from its primal in-
visibility into visible, spherical manifestation. In the yellow of the
sunlight, on the other hand, we see gravity, under the influence of
the sun's levity, gleaming up radially into visibility. The aspect of the
two colour-poles which thus arises before us prompts us to replace
Goethe's 'lightened Dark' by Earthward-dawning-Levity, and his
'darkened Light' by Heavenward-raying-Gravity.
We have now to show that this picture of the dynamic relationship
which underlies the appearance of the colour-polarity in the sky is
valid also for other cases which are instances of the ur-phenomenon
of the generation of colour in Goethe's sense, but seem not to lend
themselves to the same cosmic interpretation. Such a case is the
appearance of yellow and blue when we look through a clouded trans-
parent medium towards a source of light or to a black background.
There is no special difficulty here in bringing the appearance of yellow
into line with its macrotelluric counterpart, but the appearance of
blue requires some consideration.
We have seen that a corporeal surface appears as black if light
striking it is totally absorbed by it. Thus, wherever our eye is met by
the colour black, our visual ray is engaged in a process whereby light
disappears from physical space. Now we need only bring this process
into consciousness—as we have tried to do before in similar instances
—to realize that what happens here to the visual ray is something
similar to what it undergoes when it is directed from the earth into
cosmic space.
Note, in this respect, the principle of the mirror as another instance
of the fact that the interplay between light and an illumined surface
can have on the visual ray an effect similar to that of external space.
For the optical processes which occur on the surface of a mirror are
such that, whilst taking place on a two-dimensional plane, they evoke
in our consciousness pictures of exactly the same nature as if we were
looking through the mirror into the space behind it.
*
The value of our picture of the colour-polarity is shown further if
we observe how natural phenomena based on the same kind of polar-
ity in other realms of nature fit in with it. We remember that one of
Goethe's starting-points in his investigation of the riddle of colour
was the observation that of the totality of colours one part is experi-
enced as 'warm' and the other as 'cold'. Now we can go further and
say that the colours of the spherical pole are experienced as cold,
those of the radial pole as warm. This corresponds precisely to the
polarity of snow-formation and volcanic activity. The former, being
the spherically directed process, requires physically low tempera-
tures; the latter, being the radially directed process, requires high
temperatures. Here, once more, we see with what objectivity the
human senses register the facts of the outer world.
Another realm of phenomena based on a similar polar order is
that of electricity. When we studied the negative and positive poles of
the vacuum tube, with regard to the polar distribution of radius and
sphere, our attention was drawn to the colours appearing on the two
electrodes—red at the (positive) anode, blue at the (negative) cathode.
Again we find a coincidence with the natural order of the colours.
Note how the qualitative dynamic method employed here brings
into direct view the relationship between light and electricity, while it
precludes the mistake of tracing light processes to those of electricity,
as modern science does. Nor are electric processes 'explained' from
this point of view merely as variations of light processes. Rather is
the relation between light and electricity seen to be based on the fact
that all polarities arising perceptibly in nature are creations of the
same primeval polarity, that of Levity and Gravity. The interplay of
Levity and Gravity can take on many different forms which are dis-
tinguished essentially by differences in cosmic age. Thus the colour-
polarity in its primal form, made manifest by the heavens, differs as
much from the corresponding polarity shown by the vacuum tube, as
does the lightning in the heights from the electric spark.
*
With the aid of what we have learnt here concerning outer light-
processes we shall turn once more to the activity of our own inner
light.
We may expect by now that our eye is fitted with two modes of
seeing activity, polar to each other, and that the way in which they
come into operation depends on whether the interplay of positive and
negative density outside the eye leads to the appearance of the blue-
violet or of the yellow-red side of the colour-scale. Such a polarity in
the activity of the eye can indeed be established. Along with it goes a
significant functional difference between the two eyes (not unlike that
shown of the two hands).
To observe this we need simply to compare the two eyes of a person
in a photograph by covering alternately the right and the left half of
the face. Nearly always it will be found that the right eye looks out
clearly into the world with an active expression, and the left eye with
a much gentler one, almost held back. Artists are well aware of this
asymmetry, as of others in the human countenance, and are careful to
depict it. An outstanding example is Raphael's Sistine Madonna,
where in the eyes and whole countenance both of Mother and Child
this asymmetry can be studied in a specially impressive way.
Inner observation leads to a corresponding experience. A conveni-
ent method is to exercise the two eyes in complete darkness, in the
following way. One eye is made to look actively into the space in
front of it, as if it would pierce the darkness with its visual ray, while
the activity of the other eye is held back, so that its gaze rests only
superficially, as it were, on the darkness in front of it. Experience
shows that most people find it natural to give the active note to the
right eye, and the passive note to the left.
Once one has grown conscious of this natural difference between
the two eyes, it is quite easily detected while one is looking normally
into the light-filled environment. We thereby realize that for the two
eyes to act differently in this way is the usual thing.
As an instance where this fact is well observed and effectively
made use of, that of shooting may be mentioned here, especially
shooting at flying game. Those who train in this sport learn to make
a completely different use of the two eyes in sighting the target. The
naturally more active eye—only once in about fifty cases is it the left
—is called by them the 'master-eye'. Whilst the less actively gazing
eye is usually employed for surveying the field as a whole into which
the target is expected to enter, the master-eye is used for making
active contact with the target itself ('throwing' oneself on the target
'through' the eye).
One further observation may be added. If one looks with rested
eyes and in very faint daylight (perhaps in the early morning on
awakening) at a white surface, while opening and closing the eyes
alternately, then the white surface looks faintly reddish to the
'master-eye', and faintly bluish to the other.
*
Following the lines of our treatment of after-images in the last
chapter, we will next inquire into the anatomical and physiological
basis of the two opposite sight-activities. In the previous instance we
found this in the polarity of nerve and blood. This time we must look
for it in a certain twofold structure of the eye itself. We shall best
perceive this by watching the 'becoming' of the eye, thus again fol-
lowing a method first shown by Goethe.
Fig. 11 shows the human eye in different stages of its embryonic
formation. The eye is clearly seen to consist of two parts essentially
different in origin. Growing out from the interior of the embryonic
organism is a structure that is gradually pushed in, and in its further
development becomes the entire posterior part of the eye, destined to
carry its life-imbued functions. A second independent part grows to-
wards this from outside; this is at first a mere thickening of the
embryonic skin formation, but later it loosens itself and presses for-
ward into the interior of the cup-shaped structure. It is gradually
enclosed by this, and evolves finally into that part of the finished eye
which embodies the optical apparatus functioning according to
purely physical laws.
This series of forms shows that in the embryonic formation of the
eye we are confronted with two processes, one of spherical, and the
other of radial orientation. Consequently the two parts of the eye
are differentiated in such a way that the posterior part, which has
grown forth radially from the embryonic organism, as the life-filled
element represents the sulphur-pole of the total eye, while the anterior
part, with its much more crystalline nature, having grown spherically
towards the organism, represents the eye's salt-pole.
Closer inspection into the connexion of the two visual activities of
the eye with its basic corporeal parts reveals that here, at the outer-
most boundary of the human organism, we encounter once more that
peculiar reversal of functions which we have already several times
met in various realms of nature. For the anterior part of the eye—its
salt-pole—which has come into being through a spherically directed
formative process, seems to be the one through which we exercise the
perceptive activity streaming out radially from the eye, whilst the
posterior part—the eye's sulphur-pole—which has come into being
through radially directed formative action, serves that form of seeing
which is more receptive and is carried out in a plane-wise manner.
Considerations of this kind, and they alone, enable us also to draw
true comparisons between the different sense-organs. Take the organ
of hearing. Usually the ear is assumed to fill the same role in the field
of hearing as does the eye in the field of seeing. In fact the ear corre-
sponds to only one half of the eye; the other half must be looked for
in the larynx. In other words, the two parts of the eye are represented
in the realm of hearing by two separate organs, ear and larynx. Speak-
ing from the aspect of metamorphosis, the vital part of our eye may
be regarded as our 'light-ear'; the crystalline part, as our 'light-
larynx'. In order to come consciously to a perception of sight we must
'listen' to the 'deeds and sufferings' of light, while at the same time
we meet them with the help of the 'speaking' of our inner light. Some-
thing similar holds good for hearing. In fact, observation reveals that
we take in no impression of hearing unless we accompany it with an
activity of our larynx, even though a silent one. The significance of
this fact for the total function of hearing will occupy us more fully
later.
*
Our insight into the polar nature of visual activity will enable us
now to link the external interplay of Light and Dark—to which the
physical colours owe their existence—to that play offerees which we
ourselves set in motion when our eye meets the world of colours in
their polar differentiation.
We established earlier that in the cold colours the role of darkness
belongs to the pole of levity or negative density, and the role of light-
ness to the pole of gravity or positive density, whereas in the case of
the warm colours the roles are reversed. Let us now unite with this the
insight we have meanwhile gained into the two kinds of activity in
seeing—the receptive, 'left-eyed' and the radiating, 'right-eyed'—
which mediate to us the experience of the positive or negative density
of space spread out before our eyes. Taking together the results of
outer and inner observation, we can express the polarity ruling in the
realm of colour as follows.
If lightness and darkness as elements of colour, meet us in such a
way that lightness, by reason of its positive density, calls forth 'left-
eyed' activity, and darkness, by reason of its negative density, 'right-
eyed' activity, then our soul receives the impression of the colour blue
and colours related to blue. If lightness and darkness meet us so that
we see the former in a 'right-eyed', and the latter in a 'left-eyed' way,
then we experience this as the presence of yellow and the colours re-
lated to it.
The reason why we usually fail to observe the different kinds of
interplay of the two modes of seeing, when we perceive one or other
of the two categories of colour, is because in ordinary sight both eyes
exercise each of the two activities without our becoming aware which
is the leading one in a particular eye. If, however, one has come to a
real experience of the inner polarity of the visual act, one needs only
a little practice to realize the distinction. For example, if one looks at
the blue sky, notably at noon-time, on the side away from the sun, or
at the morning or evening sky, shining yellow and red, one quickly
becomes conscious of how our eyes take hold of the particular con-
tribution which Light and Dark make to one or other of the two
colour appearances.
*
In the natural course of our argument we had to keep at first to
the appearance of colours as they come freely before us in space.
The results we have obtained, however, hold good equally well for
the permanent tints of material objects, as the following example will
show.
A fact known to science is that red and blue surface colours, when
illumined by light of steadily diminishing intensity, are seen to reverse
their normal ratio of brightness. This phenomenon can be seen in
nature, if, for instance, one observes a bed of blue and red flowers in
the fading evening light and compares the impression with that
which the same flowers make in bright daylight. If the phenomenon
is reproduced artificially, the actual transition from one state to the
other can be clearly observed. The easiest way is to place a red and a
blue surface side by side under an electric light whose intensity can be
gradually lessened by means of a sliding resistance. Here, as much as
in the natural phenomenon, our reason finds it difficult to acknow-
ledge that the surface gleaming in a whitish sheen should be the one
which ordinarily appears as darkling blue, and that the one disappear-
ing into darkness should be the surface which normally presents itself
as radiant red.
This riddle is readily solved if we apply what we have learnt about
the particular shares of lightness and darkness in these two colours,
and if we link this up with the respective forms of seeing exercised by
our two eyes. To the dim light, clearly, our eyes will respond more
with the 'left-eyed' than with the 'right-eyed' form of vision. Now we
know that it is 'left-eyed' vision which is roused by the lightness-
component in blue and the darkness-component in red. It is only
to be expected, therefore, that these elements should become con-
spicuous when in the dim light our seeing is mainly 'left-eyed'. This
solution of the problem makes us realize further, that the laws which
Goethe first found for the coming into appearance of colours freely
hovering in space are indeed applicable to the fixed material colours
as well.
CHAPTER XVII
Optics of the Doer
Three basic concepts form the foundation for the present-day
scientific description of a vast field of optical phenomena, among
them the occurrence of the spectral colours as a result of light passing
through a transparent medium of prismatic shape. They are: 'optical
refraction', 'light-ray', and 'light-velocity'—the latter two serving to
explain the first. In a science of optics which seeks its foundation in
the intercourse between man's own visual activity and the doings and
sufferings of light, these three concepts must needs undergo a decisive
change, both in their meaning and in their value for the description
of the relevant optical phenomena. For they are all purely kinematic
concepts typical of the onlooker-way of conceiving things—concepts,
that is, to which nothing corresponds in the realm of the actual
phenomena.
Our next task, therefore, will be, where possible, to fill these con-
cepts with new meaning, or else to replace them by other concepts
read from the actual phenomena. Once this is done the way will be
free for the development of the picture of the spectrum phenomenon
which is in true accord with the Goethean conception of Light and
Colour.
*
The first to be brought in this sense under our examination is the
concept of the 'light-ray'.
In present-day optics this concept signifies a geometrical line of
infinitely small width drawn, as it were, by the light in space, while the
cone or cylinder of light actually filling the space is described as being
composed of innumerable such rays. In the same way the object pro-
ducing or reflecting light is thought of as composed of innumerable
single points from which the light-rays emerge. All descriptions of
optical processes are based upon this conception.
Obviously, we cannot be satisfied with such a reduction of wholes
into single geometrically describable parts, followed by a reassemb-
ling of these parts into a whole. For in reality we have to do with
realms of space uniformly filled with light, whether conical or cylin-
drical in form, which arise through certain boundaries being set to
the light. In optical research we have therefore always to do with
pictures, spatially bounded. Thus what comes before our conscious-
ness is determined equally by the light calling forth the picture, and
by the unlit space bordering it.
Remembering the results of our earlier study, we must say further
of such a light-filled realm that it lacks the quality of visibility and
therefore has no colour, not even white. Goethe and other 'readers',
such as Reid and Ruskin, tried continually to visualize what such a
light-filled space represents in reality. Hence they directed their
attention first to those spheres where light manifests its form-creative
activity, as in the moulding of the organ of sight in animal or man, or
in the creation of the many forms of the plant kingdom—and only
then gave their mind to the purely physical light-phenomena. Let us
use the same method to form a picture of a light-filled space, and to
connect this with the ideas we have previously gained on the co-opera-
tion in space of levity and gravity.
Suppose we have two similar plant-seeds in germ; and let one lie in
a space filled with light, the other in an unlit space. From the different
behaviour of the two seeds we can observe certain differences be-
tween the two regions of space. We note that within the light-filled
region the spiritual archetype of the plant belonging to the seed is
helped to manifest itself physically in space, whereas in the dark
region it receives no such aid. For in the latter the physical plant,
even if it grows, does not develop its proper forms. This tells us, in
accordance with what we have learnt earlier, that in the two cases
there is a different relation of space to the cosmically distant, all-
embracing plane. Thus inside and outside the light-region there
exists a quite different relation of levity and gravity—and this relation
changes abruptly at the boundaries of the region. (This fact will be of
especial importance for us when we come to examine the arising of
colours at the boundary of Light and Dark, when light passes
through a prism.)
*
After having replaced the customary concept of the light-bundle
composed of single rays by the conception of two dynamically polar
realms of space bordering each other, we turn to the examination of
what is going on dynamically inside these realms. This will help us to
gain a proper concept of the propagation of light through space.
In an age when the existence of a measurable light-velocity seems
to belong to the realm of facts long since experimentally proved;
when science has begun to measure the universe, using the magnitude
of this velocity as a constant, valid for the whole cosmos; and when
entire branches of science have been founded on results thus gained,
it is not easy, and yet it cannot be avoided, to proclaim that neither
has an actual velocity of light ever been measured, nor can light as such
ever be made subject to such measurement by optical means—and that,
moreover, light, by its very nature, forbids us to conceive of it as
possessing any finite velocity.
With the last assertion we do not mean to say that there is nothing
going on in connexion with the appearance of optical phenomena to
which the concept of a finite velocity is applicable. Only, what is
propagated in this way is not the entity we comprise under the con-
cept of 'light'. Our next task, therefore, will be to create a proper dis-
tinction between what moves and what does not move spatially when
light is active in the physical world. Once more an historical retro-
spect will help us to establish our own standpoint with regard to the
existing theories.
The first to think of light as possessing a finite velocity was Galileo,
who also made the first, though unsuccessful, attempt to measure it.
Equally unsuccessful were attempts of a similar nature made soon
afterwards by members of the Accademia del Cimento. In both cases
the obvious procedure was to produce regular flashes of light and to
try to measure the time which elapsed between their production and
their observation by some more or less distant observer. Still, the
conviction of the existence of such a velocity was so deeply ingrained
in the minds of men that, when later observations succeeded in estab-
lishing a finite magnitude for what seemed to be the rate of the light's
movement through space, these observations were hailed much more
as the quantitative value of this movement than as proof of its exis-
tence, which was already taken for granted.
A clear indication of man's state of mind in regard to this question
is given in the following passage from Huygens's famous Traité de la
Lumière, by which the world was first made acquainted with the con-
cept of light as a sort of undulatory movement.
'One cannot doubt that light consists in the movement of a certain
substance. For if one considers its production one finds that here on
the earth it is chiefly produced by fire and flame, which without
doubt contain bodies in rapid motion, for they dissolve and melt
numberless other bodies. Or, if one considers its effects, one sees that
light collected, for instance, by a concave mirror has the power to
heat like fire, i.e. to separate the parts of the bodies; this assuredly
points to movement, at least in true philosophy in which one traces
all natural activity to mechanical causes. In my opinion one must do
this, or quite give up all hope of ever grasping anything in physics.'
In these words of Huygens it must strike us how he first provides
an explanation for a series of phenomena as if this explanation were
induced from the phenomena themselves. After he has drawn quite
definite conclusions from it, he then derives its necessity from quite
other principles—namely, from a certain method of thinking, accept-
ing this as it is, unquestioned and unalterably established. We are
here confronted with an 'unlogic' characteristic of human thinking
during its state of isolation from the dynamic substratum of the
world of the senses, an unlogic which one encounters repeatedly in
scientific argumentation once one has grown aware of it. In circles of
modern thinkers where such awareness prevails (and they are growing
rapidly to-day) the term 'proof of a foregone conclusion' has been
coined to describe this fact.1
'Proof of a foregone conclusion' is indeed the verdict at which one
arrives in respect of all the observations concerned with the velocity
of light—whether of existing phenomena detectable in the sky or of
terrestrial phenomena produced artificially—if one studies them with
the attitude of mind represented by the child in Hans Andersen's
story. In view of the seriousness of the matter it will not be out of
place if we discuss them here as briefly as possible, one by one.2
The relevant observations fall into two categories: observations of
certain astronomical facts from which the existence of a finite velocity
of light and its magnitude as an absolute property of it has been in-
ferred ; and terrestrial experiments which permitted direct observa-
1 Compare with this our account in Chapter X of the rise of the atomistic-
kinematic interpretation of heat.
2 The following critical study leaves, of course, completely untouched our
recognition of the devotion which guided the respective observers in their work,
and of the ingenuity with which some of their observations were devised and
carried out.
tion of a process of propagation connected with the establishment of
light in space resulting in the measurement of its speed. To the latter
category belong the experiments of Fizeau (1849) and Foucault (1850)
as well as the Michelson-Morley experiment with its implications for
Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The former category is represented
by Roemer's observations of certain apparent irregularities in the
times of revolution of one of Jupiter's moons (1676), and by Bradley's
investigation into the reason for the apparent rhythmic changes of
the positions of the fixed stars (1728).
We shall start with the terrestrial observations, because in their case
alone is the entire path of the light surveyable, and what is measured
therefore is something appertaining with certainty to every point of
the space which spreads between the source of the light and the
observer. For this reason textbooks quite rightly say that only the
results drawn from these terrestrial observations have the value of
empirically observed facts. (The interpretation given to these facts is
another question.)
Now, it is a common feature of all these experiments that by neces-
sity they are based on an arrangement whereby a light-beam can be
made to appear and disappear alternately. In this respect there is no
difference between the first primitive attempts made by Galileo and
the Academicians, and the ingeniously devised experiments of the
later observers, whether they operate with a toothed wheel or a
rotating mirror. It is always a flash of light—and how could it be
otherwise?—which is produced at certain regular intervals and used
for determining the speed of propagation.
Evidently what in all these cases is measured is the speed with which
a beam of light establishes itself in space. Of what happens within the
beam, once it is established, these observations tell nothing at all. The
proof they are held to give of the existence of a finite speed of light,
as such, is a 'proof of a foregone conclusion'. All they tell us is that
the beam's front, at the moment when this beam is first established,
travels through space with a finite velocity and that the rate of this
movement is such and such. And they tell us nothing at all about other
regions of the cosmos.
That we have to do in these observations with the speed of the
light-front only, and not of the light itself, is a fact fully acknowledged
by modern physical optics. Since Lord Rayleigh first discussed this
matter in the eighties of the last century, physicists have learnt to dis-
tinguish between the 'wave-velocity' of the light itself and the velocity
of an 'impressed peculiarity', the so-called 'group-velocity', and it has
been acknowledged that only the latter has been, and can be, directly
measured. There is no possibility of inferring from it the value of the
'wave-velocity' unless one has a complete knowledge of the proper-
ties of the medium through which the 'groups' travel. Nevertheless,
the modern mind allows itself to be convinced that light possesses a
finite velocity and that this has been established by actual measure-
ment. We feel reminded here of Eddington's comment on Newton's
famous observations: 'Such is the glamour of a historical experi-
ment.' (Chapter XIV.)1
Let us now turn to Roemer and Bradley. In a certain sense Roe-
mer's observations and even those of Bradley rank together with the
terrestrial measurements. For Roemer used as optical signals the
appearance and disappearance of one of Jupiter's moons in the
course of its revolution round the planet; thus he worked with light-
flashes, as the experimental investigations do. Hence, also, his
measurements were concerned—as optical science acknowledges—
with group-velocity only. In fact, even Bradley's observations,
although he was the only one who operated with continuous light-
phenomena, are exposed to the charge that they give information of
the group-velocity of light, and not of its wave-velocity. However, we
shall ignore these limitations in both cases, because there are quite
other factors which invalidate the proofs they are held to give, and to
gain a clear insight into these factors is of special importance for us.
Roemer observed a difference in the length of time during which a
certain moon of Jupiter was occulted by the planet's body, and found
that this difference underwent regular changes coincident with the
changes in the earth's position in relation to Jupiter and the sun.
Seen from the sun, the earth is once a year in conjunction with
Jupiter, once in opposition to it. It seemed obvious to explain the
time-lag in the moon's reappearance, when the earth was on the far
side of the sun, by the time the light from the moon needed to cover
the distance marked by the two extreme positions of the earth—that
is, a distance equal to the diameter of the earth's orbit. On dividing
the observed interval of time by the accepted value of this distance,
Roemer obtained for the velocity of light a figure not far from the one
found later by terrestrial measurements.
We can here leave out of account the fact that Roemer's reasoning
1 The assumption is that the wave-velocity differs from the group-velocity, if
at all, by a negligible amount.
is based on the assumption that the Copernican conception of the
relative movements of the members of our solar system is the valid
conception, an assumption which, as later considerations will show,
cannot be upheld in a science which strives for a truly dynamic
understanding of the world. For the change of aspect which becomes
necessary in this way does not invalidate Roemer's observation as
such; it rules out only the customary interpretation of it. Freed from
all hypothetical by-thought, Roemer's observation tells us, first, that
the time taken by a flash of light travelling from a cosmic light-source
to reach the earth varies to a measurable extent, and, secondly, that
this difference is bound up with the yearly changes of the earth's
position in relation to the sun and the relevant planetary body.
We leave equally out of account the fact that our considerations of
the nature of space in Chapter XII render it impermissible to con-
ceive of cosmic space as something 'across' which light (or any other
entity) can be regarded as travelling this or that distance in this or
that time. What matters to us here is the validity of the conclusions
drawn from Roemer's discovery within the framework of thought in
which they were made.
Boiled down to its purely empirical content, Roemer's observation
tells us solely and simply that within the earth's cosmic orbit light-
flashes travel with a certain measurable speed. To regard this infor-
mation as automatically valid, firstly for light which is continuously
present, and secondly for everywhere in the universe, rests again on
nothing but a foregone conclusion.
Precisely the same criticism applies to Bradley's observation, and
to an even higher degree. What Bradley discovered is the fact that
the apparent direction in which we see a fixed star is dependent on the
direction in which the earth moves relatively to the star, a pheno-
menon known under the name of 'aberration of light'. This pheno-
menon is frequently brought to students' understanding by means of
the following or some similar analogy.
Imagine that a machine-gun in a fixed position has sent its projec-
tile right across a railway-carriage so that both the latter's walls are
pierced. If the train is at rest, the position of the gun could be deter-
mined by sighting through the shot-holes made by the entrance and
exit of the bullet. If, however, the train is moving at high speed, it
will have advanced a certain distance during the time taken by the
projectile to cross the carriage, and the point of exit will be nearer the
rear of the carriage than in the previous case. Let us now think of an
observer in the train who, while ignorant of the train's movement,
undertook to determine the gun's position by considering the direc-
tion of the line connecting the two holes. He would necessarily locate
the gun in a position which, compared with its true position, would
seem to have shifted by some distance in the direction of the train's
motion. On the other hand, given the speed of the train, the angle
which the line connecting the two holes forms with the true direction
of the course of the projectile—the so-called angle of aberration—
provides a measure of the speed of the projectile.
Under the foregone conclusion that light itself has a definite velo-
city, and that this velocity is the same throughout the universe, Brad-
ley's observation of the aberration of the stars seemed indeed to
make it possible to calculate this velocity from the knowledge of the
earth's own speed and the angle of aberration. This angle could be
established by comparing the different directions into which a tele-
scope has to be turned at different times of the year in order to focus
a particular star. But what does Bradley's observation tell us, once
we exclude all foregone conclusions?
As the above analogy helps towards an understanding of the con-
cept of aberration, it will be helpful also to determine the limits up to
which we are allowed to draw valid conclusions from the supposed
occurrence itself. A mind which is free from all preconceived ideas
will not ignore the fact that the projectile, by being forced to pierce
the wall of the carriage, suffers a considerable diminution of its
speed. The projectile, therefore, passes through the carriage with a
speed different from its speed outside. Since, however, it is the speed
from hole to hole which determines the angle of aberration, no con-
clusion can be drawn from the latter as to the original velocity of the
projectile. Let us assume the imaginary case that the projectile was
shot forth from the gun with infinite velocity, and that the slowing-
down effect of the wall was great enough to produce a finite speed of
the usual magnitude, then the effect on the position of the exit hole
would be precisely the same as if the projectile had moved all the time '
with this speed and not been slowed down at all.
Seeing things in this light, the scientific Andersen child in us is
roused to exclaim: 'But all that Bradley's observation informs us of ,
with certainty is a finite velocity of the optical process going on inside i
the telescope!' Indeed, if someone should claim with good reason (as
we shall do later on) that light's own velocity is infinite, and (as we
shall not do) that the dynamic situation set up in the telescope had
the effect of slowing down the light to the measured velocity—there
is nothing in Bradley's observation which could disprove these
assertions.
*
Having thus disposed of the false conclusions drawn by a kine-
matically orientated thinking from the various observations and
measurements of the velocity which appears in connexion with light,
we can carry on our own studies undisturbed. Two observations stand
before us representing empirically established facts: one, that in so
far as a finite velocity has been measured or calculated from other
observations, nothing is known about the existence or magnitude of
such a velocity except within the boundaries of the dynamic realm con-
stituted by the earth's presence in the universe; the other, that this
velocity is a 'group'—velocity, that is, the velocity of the front of a
light-beam in process of establishment. Let us see what these two
facts have to tell us when we regard them as letters of the 'word'
which light inscribes into the phenomenal world as an indication of
its own nature.
Taking the last-named fact first, we shall make use of the following
comparison to help us realize how little we are justified in drawing
from observations of the front speed of a light-beam any conclusions
concerning the kinematic conditions prevailing in the interior of the
beam itself. Imagine the process of constructing a tunnel, with all the
efforts and time needed for cutting its passage through the resisting
rock. When the tunnel is finished the activities necessary to its pro-
duction are at an end. Whereas these continue for a limited time only,
they leave behind them permanent traces in the existence of the tun-
nel, which one can describe dynamically as a definite alteration in the
local conditions of the earth's gravity. Now, it would occur to no one
to ascribe to the tunnel itself, as a lasting quality, the speed with which
it had been constructed. Yet something similar happens when, after
observing the velocity required by light to lay hold on space, this
velocity is then attributed to the light as a quality of its own. It was
reserved for a mode of thought that could form no concept of the
real dynamic of Light and Dark, to draw conclusions as to the quali-
ties of light from experiences obtained through observing its original
spreading out into space.
To speak of an independently existing space within which light
could move forward like a physical body, is, after what we have
learnt about space, altogether forbidden. For space in its relevant
structure is itself but a result of a particular co-ordination of levity
and gravity or, in other words, of Light and Dark. What we found
earlier about the qualities of the two polar spaces now leads us to
conceive of them as representative of two limiting conditions of velo-
city: absolute contraction representing zero velocity; absolute ex-
pansion, infinite velocity (each in its own way a state of 'rest'). Thus
any motion with finite velocity is a mean between these two extremes,
and as such the result of a particular co-ordination of levity and
gravity. This makes it evident that to speak of a velocity taking its
course in space, whether with reference to light or to a physical body
in motion, is something entirely unreal.
Let us now see what we are really told by the number 186,000 miles
a second, as the measure of the speed with which a light-impulse
establishes itself spatially. In the preceding chapter we learnt that the
earth's field of gravity offers a definite resistance to our visual ray.
What is true for the inner light holds good equally for the outer light.
Using an image from another dynamic stratum of nature we can say
that light, while appearing within the field of gravity, 'rubs' itself on
this. On the magnitude of this friction depends the velocity with
which a light-impulse establishes itself in the medium of the resisting
gravity. Whereas light itself as a manifestation of levity possesses in-
finite velocity, this is forced down to the known finite measure by the
resistance of the earth's field of gravity. Thus the speed of light which
has been measured by observers such as Fizeau and Foucault reveals
itself as a function of the gravitational constant of the earth, and
hence has validity for this sphere only.1 The same is true for Roemer's
and Bradley's observations, none of which, after what we have stated
earlier, contradicts this result. On the contrary, seen from this view-
point, Roemer's discovery of the light's travelling with finite speed
within the cosmic realm marked by the earth's orbit provides an
important insight into the dynamic conditions of this realm.
*
Among the experiments undertaken with the aim of establishing
the properties of the propagation of light by direct measurements,
1 Once this is realized there can be no doubt that with the aid of an adequate
mathematical calculus (which would have to be established on a realistic under-
standing of the respective properties of the fields offeree coming into play) it will
become possible to derive by calculation the speed of the establishment of light
within physical space from the gravitational constant of the earth.
quoted earlier, we mentioned the Michelson-Morley experiment as
having a special bearing on Einstein's conceptual edifice. It is the one
which has formed the foundation of that (earlier) part of Einstein's
theory which he himself called the Special Theory of Relativity. Let
us see what becomes of this foundation—and with it the conceptual
edifice erected upon it—when we examine it against the background
of what we have found to be the true nature of the so-called velocity
of light.
It is generally known that modern ideas of light seemed to call for
something (Huygens's 'certain substance') to act as bearer of the
movement attributed to light. This led to the conception of an im-
ponderable agency capable of certain movements, and to denote this
agency the Greek word ether was borrowed. (How this word can be
used again to-day in conformity with its actual significance will be
shown in the further course of our discussions.) Nevertheless, all
endeavours to find in the existence of such an ether a means of ex-
plaining wide fields of natural phenomena were disappointed. For
the more exact concepts one tried to form of the characteristics of
this ether, the greater the contradictions became.
One such decisive contradiction arose when optical means were
used to discover whether the ether was something absolutely at rest
in space, through which physical bodies moved freely, or whether it
shared in their movement. Experiments made by Fizeau with running
water seemed to prove the one view, those of Michelson and Morley,
involving the movement of the earth, the other view. In the celebrated
Michelson-Morley experiment the velocity of light was shown to be
the same, in whatever direction, relative to the earth's own motion,
it was measured. This apparent proof of the absolute constancy of
light-velocity—which seemed, however, to contradict other observa-
tions—induced Einstein to do away with the whole assumption of a
bearer of the movement underlying light, whether the bearer were
supposed to be at rest or itself in motion. Instead, he divested the
concepts of space and time, from which that of velocity is usually
derived, of the absoluteness hitherto attributed to them, with the
result that in his theory time has come to be conceived as part of a
four-dimensional 'space-time continuum'.
In reality the Michelson-Morley experiment presents no problem
requiring such labours as those of Einstein for its solution. For by this
experiment nothing is proved beyond what can in any event be
known—namely, that the velocity of the propagation of a light-
impulse is constant in all directions, so long as the measuring is con-
fined to regions where the density of terrestrial space is more or less
the same. With the realization of this truth, however, Einstein's
Special Theory loses its entire foundation. All that remains to be said
about it is that it was a splendid endeavour to solve a problem which,
rightly considered, does not exist.1
*
Now that we have realized that it is inadmissible to speak of light
as consisting of single rays, or to ascribe to it a finite velocity, the
concept of the refraction of light, as understood by optics to-day and
employed for the explanation of the spectrum, also becomes unten-
able. Let us find out what we must put in its place.
The phenomenon which led the onlooker-consciousness to form
the idea of optical refraction has been known since early times. It
consists in the fact, surprising at first sight, that an object, such as a
coin, which lies at the bottom of a vessel hidden from an observer by
the rim, becomes visible when the vessel is filled with water. Modern
optics has explained this by assuming that from the separate points of
the floor of the vessel light-rays go out to all sides, one ray falling in
the direction of the eye of the observer. Hence, because of the posi-
tions of eye and intercepting rim there are a number of points from
which no rays can reach the eye. One such point is represented by the
coin (P in Fig. 12a). Now if the vessel is filled with water, light-rays
emerging from it are held to be refracted, so that rays from the points
hitherto invisible also meet the eye, which is still in its original posi-
tion. The eye itself is not conscious of this 'break' in the light-rays,
1 The grounds of Einstein's General Theory were dealt with in our earlier
discussions.
because it is accustomed to 'project' all light impressions rectilinearly
out into space (Fig. 12b.). Hence, it sees P in the position of P'. This
is thought to be the origin of the impression that the whole bottom of
the vessel is raised.
This kind of explanation is quite in line with the peculiarity of the
onlooker-consciousness, noted earlier, to attribute an optical illusion
to the eye's way of working, while charging the mind with the task of
clearing up the illusion. In reality it is just the reverse. Since the intel-
lect can form no other idea of the act of seeing than that this is a pas-
sive process taking place solely within the eye, it falls, itself, into
illusion. How great is this illusion we see from the fact that the intel-
lect is finally obliged to make the eye somehow or other 'project' into
space the impressions it receives—a process lacking any concrete
dynamic content.
Once more, it is not our task to replace this way of 'explaining' the
phenomenon by any other, but rather to combine the phenomenon
given here with others of kindred nature so that the theory contained
in them can be read from them direct. One other such phenomenon is
that of so-called apparent optical depth, which an observer encoun-
ters when looking through transparent media of varying optical den-
sity. What connects the two is the fact that the rate of the alteration
of depth, and the rate of change of the direction of light, are the
same for the same media.
In present-day optics this phenomenon is explained with reference
to the former. In proceeding like this, optical science makes the very
mistake which Goethe condemned in Newton, saying that a compli-
cated phenomenon was made the basis, and the simpler derived from
the complex. For of these two phenomena, the simpler, since it is
independent of any secondary condition, is the one showing that our
experience of depth is dependent on the density of the optical medium.
The latter phenomenon we met once before, though without refer-
ence to its quantitative side, when in looking at a landscape we found
how our experiences of depth change in conformity with alterations
in atmospheric conditions. This, then, served to make us aware that
the way we apprehend things optically is the result of an interplay
between our visual ray and the medium outside us which it meets.
It is exactly the same when we look through a vessel filled with
water and see the bottom of it as if raised in level. This is in no sense
an optical illusion; it is the result of what takes place objectively and
dynamically within the medium, when our eye-ray passes through it.
Only our intellect is under an illusion when, in the case of the coin
becoming visible at the bottom of the vessel, it deals with the coin as
if it were a point from which an individual ray of light went out.. ..
etc., instead of conceiving the phenomenon of the raising of the
vessel's bottom as one indivisible whole, wherein the coin serves only
to link our attention to it.
*
Having thus cleared away the kinematic interpretation of the coin-
in-the-bowl phenomenon, we may pass on to discuss the optical effect
through which the so-called law of refraction was first established in
science. Instead of picturing to ourselves, as is usually done, light-
rays which are shifted away from or towards the perpendicular at the
border-plane between two media of different optical properties, we
shall rather build up the picture as light itself designs it into space.
We have seen that our inner light, as well as the outer light, suffers
a certain hindrance in passing through a physical medium—even such
as the earth's gravity-field. Whilst we may not describe this retarda-
tion, as is usually done, in terms of a smaller velocity of light itself
within the denser medium, we may rightly say that density has the
effect of lessening the intensity of the light. (It is the time required for
the initial establishment of a light-filled realm which is greater within
such a medium than outside it.) Now by its very nature the intensity
of light cannot be measured in spatial terms. Yet there is a pheno-
menon by which the decrease of the inner intensity of the light be-
comes spatially apparent and thus spatially measurable. It consists in
the alteration undergone by the aperture of a cone of light when
passing from one optical medium to another.
If one sets in the path of a luminous cone a glass-walled trough
filled with water, then, if both water and surrounding air are slightly
clouded, the cone is seen to make a more acute angle within the water
than outside it (Fig. 13). Here in an external phenomenon we meet
the same weakening in the light's tendency to expand that we recog-
nized in the shortening of our experience of depth on looking through
a dense medium. Obviously, we expect the externally observable nar-
rowing of the light-cone and the subjectively experienced change of
optical depth to show the same ratio.
In order to compare the rate of expansion of a luminous cone in-
side and outside water, we must measure by how much less the width
of the cone increases within the water than it does outside. (To be
comparable, the measurements must be based upon the same dis-
tances on the edge of the cone, because this is the length of the way
the light actually travels.) In Fig. 13 this is shown by the two dis-
tances, a-b and a'-b'. Their ratio is the same as that by which the
bottom of a vessel appears to be raised when the vessel is filled with
water (4: 3).
Thus by means of pure observation we have arrived at nothing less
than what is known to physical optics as Snell's Law of Refraction.
This law was itself the result of pure observation, but was clothed in
a conceptual form devoid of reality. In this form it states that a ray of
light in transition between two media of different densities is re-
fracted at their boundary surface so that the ratio of the angle which
is formed by the ray in either medium with a line at right angles to the
boundary surface is such that the quotient of the sines of both angles
is for these media a constant factor. In symbols
It will be clear to the reader familiar with trigonometry that this
ratio of the two sines is nothing else but the ratio of the two distances
which served us as a measure for the respective apertures of the cone.
But whereas the measurement of these two distances is concerned
with something quite real (since they express an actual dynamic
alteration of the light), the measuring of the angle between the ray of
light and the perpendicular is founded on nothing real. It is now
clear that the concept of the ray, as it figures in the usual picture of
refraction, is in reality the boundary between the luminous space and
its surroundings. Evidently the concept of the perpendicular on the
boundary between the two media is in itself a complete abstraction,
since nothing happens dynamically in its direction.
To a normal human understanding it is incomprehensible why a
ray of light should be related to an external geometrical line, as stated
by the law of refraction in its usual form. Physical optics, in order to
explain refraction, had therefore to resort to light-bundles spatially
diffused, and by use of sundry purely kinematic concepts, to read into
these light-bundles certain processes of motion, which are not in the
least shown by the phenomenon itself. In contrast to this, the idea
that the boundary of a luminous cone is spatially displaced when its
expansion is hindered by an optical medium of some density, and
that the measure of this displacement is equal to the shortening of
depth which we experience in looking through this medium, is dir-
ectly evident, since all its elements are taken from observation.
*
From what we have here found we may expect that in order to
explain the numerical relationships between natural phenomena (with
which science in the past has been solely concerned), we by no means
require the artificial theories to which the onlooker in man, confined
as he is to abstract thinking, has been unavoidably driven. Indeed, to
an observer who trains himself on the lines indicated in this book,
even the quantitative secrets of nature will become objects of intuitive
judgment, just as Goethe, by developing this organ of understanding,
first found access to nature's qualitative secrets. (The change in our
conception of number which this entails will be shown at a later stage
of our discussions.)
CHAPTER XVIII
The Spectrum as a Script of the Spirit
1 he realization that Newton's explanation of the spectrum fails
to meet the facts prompted Goethe to engage in all those studies
which made him the founder of a modern optics based on intuitive
participation in the phenomena. In spite of all that he achieved, how-
ever, he never reached a real solution of the riddle of the colour-
phenomenon produced when light passes through a transparent body
of prismatic shape. For his assumption of certain 'double images',
which are supposed to appear as a result of the optical displacement
of the boundaries between the Light-filled and the Dark-filled parts
of space and the mutual superposition of which he believed to be
responsible for the appearance of the respective colours, does not
solve the problem.1
What hindered Goethe in this field was his limited insight into
the nature of the two distinct kinds offerees which, as we have noted
in the course of our own inquiries, correspond to his concepts of
Licht and Finsternis.
With the aid of this distinction—which we have indeed established
through a consistent application of Goethe's method—we shall now
be able to develop precisely that insight into the coming-into-being
of the spectral colours which Goethe sought.2
*
Dynamically, the process of the formation of the spectrum by
light that passes through a prism divides into two clearly distinguish-
able parts. The first consists in the influence which the light undergoes
1 See, in Rudolf Steiner's edition of Goethe's scientific writings, his footnote
to Goethe's criticism of Nuguet's theory of the spectrum in the historical part of
the Farbenlehre (Vol. IV, p. 248, in Kürschner's edition).
2 It is obvious that the reader who wishes to appreciate fully the significance of
the observations described in the following paragraphs, must, as in previous
cases, carry out these observations himself.
inside the prism as a result of the latter's special shape, the other, in
what happens outside the prism at the boundary between the Light-
space—influenced by the shape of the prism—and the surrounding
Dark-space. Accordingly, we shall study these two parts of the pro-
cess separately.
As an aid to distinguishing clearly one process from the other, we
shall suppose the prism experiment to be so arranged that the light
area is larger than the width of the prism, which will then lie com-
pletely within it. We shall further suppose the dimensions of the whole
to be such that the part observable on the screen represents only a
portion of the total light-realm situated between the boundaries of
the prism. The result is that the screen depicts a light-phenomenon in
which there is no trace of colour. For normal eyesight, the pheno-
menon on the screen differs in no way from what it would be if no
prism intervened in the path of the light.
These two seemingly identical light-phenomena reveal at once their
inner dynamic difference if we narrow the field of light from either
side by introducing into it an object capable of casting shadow. If
there is no prism we see simply a black shadow move into the illum-
ined area on the screen, no matter from which side the narrowing
comes. If, however, the light has come through a prism (arranged as
described above) certain colours appear on the boundary between the
regions of light and shadow, and these differ according to the side
from which the darkening is effected. The same part of the light area
may thus be made to display either the colours of the blue pole of the
colour-scale, or those of the yellow pole. This shows that the inner
dynamic condition of the light-realm is altered in some way by being
exposed to an optically resistant medium of prismatic shape. If we
are to find the cause and nature of this alteration we must revert to
the prism itself, and inquire what effect it has on light in the part of
space occupied by it. By proceeding in this way we follow Goethe's
model: first, to keep the two border-phenomena separate, and,
secondly, not to ascribe to the light itself what is in fact due to certain
boundary conditions.
In order to realize what happens to the light in passing through the
prism, let us remember that it is a characteristic of an ordinary light-
beam to direct itself through space in a straight line if not interfered
with, and to illuminate equally any cross-section of the area it fills.
Both these features are altered when the light is exposed to a trans-
parent medium of prismatic shape—that is, to an optically resistant
medium so shaped that the length of the light's passage through it
changes from one side of the beam to the other, being least at the so-
called refracting edge of the prism, greatest at the base opposite to
that. The dimming effect of the medium, therefore, has a different
magnitude at each point of the width of the beam. Obviously, the
ratio between levity and gravity inside such a light-realm, instead of
being constant, varies from one side to the other. The result is a
transverse dynamic impulse which acts from that part of the light-
realm where the weakening influence of the prism is least towards
the part where it is strongest (see long arrow in Plate C, Fig. i).
This impulse manifests in the deflection of the light from its original
course. Apart from this, nothing is noticeable in the light itself when
caught by an observation screen, the reason being that the transverse
impulse now immanent in the light-realm has no effect on the reflect-
ing surface.
The situation changes when the light-realm is narrowed down from
one side or the other—in other words, when an abrupt change of the
field-conditions, that is, a sudden leap from light to dark or from
dark to light, is introduced within this realm. In this case, clearly, the
effect of the transverse field-gradient on such a leap will be different,
depending on the relation between the directions of the two (see
small arrows in Fig. i). Our eyes witness to this difference by seeing
the colours of the blue pole of the colour-scale appear when the field-
gradient is directed towards the leap (a), and the colours of the yellow
pole when the gradient is directed away from it (b).
For our further investigation it is very important to observe how
the colours spread when they emerge at the edge of the shadow-
casting object thus introduced into the light-realm from the one side or
the other. Figs, ii and iii on Plate C show, closely enough for our pur-
pose, the position of the colour-bearing areas in each case, with the
dotted line indicating the direction which the light would have at the
place of origin of the colours if there were no object interfering with
its free expansion.2 We observe a distinct difference in the widening
1 In this and the two following diagrams the light-realm has been represented
as being less wide than the space obtained by the prism. To avoid unnecessary
complexity the colours which, in such a case, actually appear at the border of the
light-realm where it emerges from the prism are not shown in any of the diagrams.
2 This direction can be established with sufficient exactitude by holding a very
thin object right in front of the prism and marking with a stretched thread the
direction which leads from the object to its shadow on the screen. The colour-
producing edge must then be introduced from either side so that it just touches
the thread.
out of the two colour-areas on both sides of the original direction of
the light: in each case the angle which the boundary of the colour-area
forms with this direction is smaller on the side of the colours nearest
the light-realm (blue and yellow respectively) than on the opposite
side (violet and red).
Remembering what we have learnt about the dynamic character-
istics of the two colour-poles, we are now in a position to state the
following. When a light-area subject to a lateral gradient is narrowed
down, so that the gradient is directed towards the narrowing object,
colours arise in which the interaction between the two polarically
opposite forms of density is such that positive density makes for
lightness, and negative density for darkness. Whereas, when the bor-
der is so situated that the gradient is directed away from it, the inter-
action is such that positive density makes for darkness, and negative
density for lightness. Further, the fact that on both occasions the
darkness element in the colour-band increases in the outward direc-
tion tells us that in this direction there is on the blue-violet side a
gradual decrease in positive, and increase in negative, density, while
on the opposite side we find just the reverse. We note again that both
processes occupy a considerable part of the space originally outside
the boundaries of the light-area—that is, at the violet end the part
towards which the light-beam is deflected, and at the red end the part
from which it turns away.
The visual ray, when penetrating actively into the two colour-
phenomena thus described, receives evidence of a dynamic happen-
ing which may be expressed as follows.
Where the transverse impulse, which is due to the varying degree of
Trübung in the light-realm, is directed towards the latter's edge, the
intermingling of the Dark-ingredient and the Light-ingredient, con-
tained in that realm, is such that Dark follows Light along its already
existing gradient, thereby diminishing steadily. Hence our visual ray,
meeting conditions quite similar to those occurring when we look
across the light-filled atmosphere into universal space, notifies us of
the presence of the blue-violet colour-pole. If, on the other hand, the
edge is in the wake of the transverse impulse, then a kind of dynamic
vacuum arises in that part of space from which the beam is deflected,
with the effect that the Dark-ingredient, imprinted on the light within
the prism, is drawn into this vacuum by following a kind of suctional
influence. Consequently Dark and Light here come to oppose one
another, and the former, on its way out of the light-area, gains in
relative strength. On this side our visual ray meets conditions re-
sembling those which occur when we look across the darkening
atmosphere into the sun. Accordingly our optical experience tells us
of the presence of the yellow-red colour-pole.
From our description of the two kinds of dynamic co-ordination of
positive and negative density at the two ends of the spectrum it fol-
lows that the spatial conditions prevailing at one end must be quite
different from those at the other. To see this by way of actual percep-
tion is indeed not difficult. In fact, if we believe that we see both ends
of the spectrum lying, as it were, flatly on the surface of the observa-
tion screen, this is merely an illusion due to our superficial way of
using our eyes. If we gaze with our visual ray (activated in the man-
ner previously described) into the two sides of the spectrum, while
turning our eyes alternately in one or other direction, we soon notice
that the colours of the yellow-red rise towards the eye so as to give
the impression of protruding almost corporeally from the surface of
the screen. We feel: Density obtains here in a state of fiery radiation.
When turning to the other side we feel our visual ray, instead of being
as before caught up in the colours, passing freely across the colours
as if carried by them into the infinite. On the blue-violet side, space
itself seems to fluoresce mysteriously1. Following Goethe's concep-
tion of the physical-moral effect of colours, we may describe the ex-
perience received thus from the two poles of the spectrum by saying
that an 'other-worldly' character belongs to the colours of the blue-
violet pole; an 'earthly' character to those of the yellow-red; while
that of green, which appears when both sides are made to overlap,
witnesses to its mediating nature between the two.
*
In our endeavour to view the fundamental experiment of Newton-
ian optics with the eyes of Goethe we have been led from the wide
expanse of the earth's sunlit periphery into the confines of the dark-
ened experimental chamber. With the aid of the results gained from
studying the artificially produced spectrum phenomenon, we shall now
return to our original field of observation in order to study the same
1 The difference in character of the various parts of the spectrum, as described
above, comes out particularly impressively if for capturing the colour-pheno-
menon one uses instead of a flat white surface, a clear crystal of not too small
size, or else a cluster of crystals—moving it slowly along the coloured band from
one end to the other. (I am indebted to Fr. Julius, teacher of Natural Science at
the Free School in The Hague, for this suggestion.)
phenomenon in nature. There it meets us in the form of the rainbow,
which we shall now be able to read as a chapter in the great book of
nature.
From what we have learnt already we can say at once that the rain-
bow must represent some sort of border-phenomenon, thus pointing
to the existence of a boundary between two space-regions of differing
illumination. Our question therefore must be: what is the light-image
whose boundary comes to coloured manifestation in the phenomenon
of the rainbow? There can be no doubt that the image is that of the
sun-disk, shining in the sky. When we see a rainbow, what we are
really looking at is the edge of an image of the sun-disk, caught and
reflected, owing to favourable conditions, in the atmosphere. (Ob-
serve in this respect that the whole area inside the rainbow is always
considerably brighter than the space outside.)
Once we realize this to be the true nature of the rainbow, the pecu-
liar order of its colours begins to speak a significant language. The
essential point to observe is that the blue-violet part of the spec-
trum lies on the inner side of the rainbow-arch—the side immedi-
ately adjoining the outer rim of the sun-image—while the yellow-red
part lies on the outer side of the arch—the side turned away from the
sun-image. What can we learn from this about the distribution of
positive and negative density inside and outside the realm occupied
by the sun-disk itself in the cosmos?
We remember that along the gradient from blue to violet, negative
density (Light) increases and positive density (Dark) decreases, while
from yellow to red it is just the reverse—positive density increases and
negative density decreases. The rainbow therefore indicates a steady
increase of Dark towards the outer rim, and of Light towards the
inner. Evidently, what the optical image of the sun in the atmosphere
thus reveals concerning the gradation of the ratio between Light and
Dark in the radial direction, is an attribute of the entire light-realm
which stretches from the sun to that image. And again, the attribute
of this realm is but an effect of the dynamic relation between the sun
itself and the surrounding cosmic space.
The rainbow thus becomes a script to us in which we read the re-
markable fact that the region occupied by the sun in the cosmos is a
region of negative density, in relation to which the region surrounding
the sun is one of positive density. Far from being an accumulation of
ponderable matter in a state of extremely high temperature, as science
supposes, the sun represents the very opposite of ponderability. (It
would be beyond the scope of this book to show how in the light of
this fact one learns to re-read the various solar phenomena known to
science.)
Once we realize this, our judgment of all that our terrestrially
devised optical instruments, such as the telescope and spectroscope,
tell us about the nature of the sun and its surroundings, will change
accordingly. For it becomes clear that for the interpretation of solar
phenomena shown by these instruments we cannot properly use con-
cepts derived from observations within the earth's realm of positive
density.
To compare adequately solar and terrestrial phenomena, we must
keep in mind that they are in every respect polar opposites. For in-
stance, the fact that the spectroscope reveals phenomena in the sun's
light which are strikingly similar to others occurring when earthly
matter is first caused to emit light—that is, brought near the upper
border of its ponderable existence—and then studied spectroscopic-
ally, should not impose on us the illusion that the sun consists of mat-
ter in this same condition. On the contrary, the similarity should tell
us that imponderable substance, while on its way between sun and
earth to ponderable existence, assumes, at the point of transition,
aspects exactly like those revealed by ponderable substance at the
corresponding point in its upward transformation.
What we observe, when we study the sun through a spectroscope,
is not the sun itself, but the conditions obtaining in this border-
region, where imponderable substance enters the earth-realm.
The rainbow, directly we learn to see it as the border-phenomenon
that it is, tells us something of itself which revives in modern form
a conception held generally in former ages, when it was seen as
a mediator between the cosmic-divine and the earthly-human
worlds. Thus the Bible speaks of it as a symbol of God's recon-
ciliation with the human race after the great Flood. Thus the Greeks
beheld it when they saw it as the bridge of Iris, messenger of the
Gods; and similarly the Germanic mythology speaks of it as the
pathway along which the souls of the fallen warriors draw near to
Valhalla. By recovering this old conception in a new and scientifically
grounded form we are enabled also to rectify the misunderstanding
from which the ancient bridge-conception of the rainbow has suffered
in later days, when tradition had begun to replace direct insight into
the truth.
When with the rise of man's onlooker-relation to the world of the
senses, the rainbow could appear to him only as a form flattened
against the sky, people began to think that the ancient picture of it
as a bridge had been derived from its likeness to the latter's arched
form. Representations of the rainbow from these times indeed show
supersensible beings, such as the souls of the dead, moving upwards
and downwards along the two halves of the arch. It is not in this
abstract way that ancient man formed his cosmic imagery. What was
seen going on between the upper and nether worlds when a rainbow
appeared in the heights of the atmosphere was no traffic over the
arch, but an interplay across the rainbow between the realm of levity,
glimmering down in the rainbow's violet border, and the realm of
gravity glowing up from the red. And this is how we have now learnt
to see it again.
*
At one point in our optical studies (page 259) we referred to some
words of Ruskin in which he deplored the influence exerted on the
soul-life of modern man by the world-conception of science. He illus-
trated this by showing how much less inspiration a man trained in the
science of optics receives from the sight of a rainbow than does a
'simple peasant'. One lesson of our studies is that training in optics, if
it proceeds on Goethean lines, has no such detrimental effect. There
is, however, a further problem, outside Ruskin's scope, which we are
now able to approach in the same healthy way.
Ruskin distinguishes between three possible stages in man's rela-
tion to the world of the senses. The first stage he calls that of 'inactive
reverie'; the second—in a certain respect more advanced—that of
'useful thought', the stage of scientifically awakened man to whom all
things disintegrate into countable and nothing but countable parts.
Beyond this, Ruskin conceives of a third, still higher stage, in which
man becomes capable of raising himself through 'higher contempla-
tion' into an artistic-ethical relation to the content of the sense-
world. Now, in the way Ruskin represents the second and third stages
they seem to be exclusive of one another. That was as far as he could
go, in his own day. Natural observation along Goethean lines leads
to a form of higher contemplation which unites the second and third
stages by nourishing man's ethical being and at the same time furnish-
ing him with useful knowledge—knowledge, that is, which enables
him to improve the conditions of the human race on the earth. The
following is an example of the practical possibilities that open up in
the field we are discussing if we apply the knowledge gained through
our new approach to the forces working in nature.
We shall speak here of a task of experimental research which was
mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in connexion with the renewal of
natural science.
. Rudolf Steiner felt the need for pioneers who, by advancing along
the paths opened up by Goethe, would press forward into the realm
of undiscovered phenomena on the upper border of nature, and this
prompted him to give to those who were ready to listen various
pointers towards new ways of experimental research. In so far as
practical results have already been reached along these lines, they lie
in the fields of biology and physiology (and of chemistry, in a certain
respect) rather than in that of physics. Now, among the indications
given in this latter field, and not yet worked out, there is one which
deals with a way, unknown to-day, of influencing the spectrum by the
magnet.
The possibility of a magnetic influence on the spectrum is, in itself,
not unknown to modern physics. It was the Dutchman, Zeeman, who
first observed a change in the appearance of certain spectral lines as a
result of light passing through a magnetic field. This discovery, how-
ever, is in two respects typical of modern science. The Zeeman effect
consists in the splitting up of certain spectral lines into other lines—
hence, of a breaking up of a whole into parts. And by seemingly pro-
viding a decisive confirmation of contemporary views concerning the
electromagnetic nature of light, Zeeman's discovery has formed one
of the milestones in the progress of modern physical thought—with
the usual result that an enlargement of man's knowledge of the be-
haviour of natural forces has served to entangle his conception of
nature still more deeply in illusion.
Apart from the fact that our own way of combining observation
and thought guards us against drawing theoretical conclusions from
Zeeman's discovery, Rudolf Steiner's indication opens up the pros-
pect of achieving quite practical results, opposite in character to those
of the Zeeman effect. For in contradistinction to the use of a magnetic
field for splitting the spectrum, Rudolf Steiner has made us aware of
the possibility of uniting into a higher synthesis parts of the spectrum
which normally appear in separated form. His indication points to
nothing less than a leading over of the optically produced spectrum
from its usual linear form, with two boundaries on either side, into a
closed circular form, and of doing this by an adequate application—
as yet undiscovered—of magnetic force. Further, according to his
statement, the point where the two ends of the spectrum meet will
prove to be a fountain-head of certain higher natural forces which
otherwise are not directly accessible.
In order to understand how this is possible, we must remember
that in two respects the spectrum is not a complete phenomenon.
There is, to begin with, the fact that the colour-band visible on the
observation screen is only apparently confined to the surface of the
screen. For, as we have seen, because of the differing co-ordination of
levity and gravity at the two ends of the spectrum, the conditions of
space prevailing at each are polarically opposite. Negative space
opens up spherically behind the blue-violet colours on one side, while
positive space, filled by the radially shining yellow-red colours, arises
on the other. So we see that what we found earlier for the two poles of
magnetism and electricity holds good also for the spectrum. That is,
the two processes bringing about the relevant phenomena are not
confined to the part of space which these phenomena seem to occupy;
for the whole positive and negative realms of the universe share in
them. Hence the spectrum, though apparently bounded at its two
ends, proves by its very nature to be part of a greater whole.
Once before we were led to recognize—though from a different
aspect—that the spectrum is a phenomenon which, when rightly
viewed, calls for a certain completion. In following Goethe's initial
observations we realized that the known spectrum, extending from
red via green to violet, has a counterpart extending from violet via
peach-blossom to red. The reader may have wondered why we never
returned to this other spectrum, in spite of the role it played in mak-
ing Goethe aware of Newton's error. The reason was that in order to
gain the understanding we needed of the spectrum, we had to observe
the two border-phenomena independently—that is, without regard to
their relative positions. Moreover, with ordinary optical means it is
possible to produce only one type of spectrum at a time, so that each
is left in need of being complemented by the other. In order to have
both together in finite space, as part of one and the same phenomenon,
space itself must be dynamically transformed in such a way that the
continuation of the finite spectral band running through infinity
enters into the finite as well.
Our understanding of magnetism as a specific representation of the
polarity of the second order enables us to comprehend, at least in
principle, how magnetism might influence—not light itself, as present-
day physics erroneously believes—but the secondary polarity of the
spectral colours formed out of the primary polarity Light and Dark.
To see this in all necessary detail is a task of the future, beyond the
scope of this book. We have here to continue our account of Rudolf
Steiner's statement by communicating what he indicated concerning
the particular nature of the new source of force which would appear
in the normally infinite part of the spectrum, if this were brought into
the region of the finite.
In order to understand the significance of this indication we must
turn our attention to parts of the ordinary spectrum, well known in
themselves, which we have purposely left out of our study so far.
These are the regions of the ultra-violet and the infra-red, invisible in
themselves, but forming part of the spectrum as a whole. The ultra-
violet manifests through chemical effects, the infra-red through ther-
mal effects. We have left them out of our considerations because
these regions of the spectrum differ from the visible part not only
quantitatively, as present-day science believes, but qualitatively also,
and in a fundamental way. We must regard them as dynamic realms
of particularly extreme spherical and radial activities. As such they
represent metamorphoses, in the Goethean sense, of the levity-gravity
interaction represented by the optically visible part of the spectrum.
In this way the spectrum discloses a threefold differentiation of that
region of force, which up to now we have called simply levity, into
activities producing chemical, optical and thermal effects.
So far physical investigation is able to lead us, but no further. If,
however, we let nature herself speak to us, while holding this differ-
entiated concept of levity in mind, she tells us that beyond the three
metamorphoses envisaged so far, there must be a fourth.
Let us remember that it was certain phenomena of life which first
made us aware of the existence of a realm offerees with the attributes
of anti-gravity, and that these forces revealed themselves first as
creators of form. Now it is obvious that warmth, light and chemical
energy, though they all play an essential part in living organisms,
could never by themselves bring about that 'catching from chaos,
carbon, water, lime and what not and fastening them into a given
form' which Ruskin describes as the activity of the spirit in the plant.
In order to be in this sense an instrument of the spirit active in nature,
levity must be capable of yet another metamorphosis into an activity
which controls the other three, so that through their action, definitely
shaped organic structures may come into being.
The reason why this fourth and highest metamorphosis of Light
does not appear in the ordinary spectrum is because it is of too
spiritual a quality to be caught by the optical apparatus. In nature
herself a creative life-process requires always the presence of a germ
already imbued with life. And so, in order to call this fourth meta-
morphosis of Light into the spectrum, stronger means are needed
than the mere optical transformation of light-filled spaces. This
stronger agent, according to Rudolf Steiner, is magnetism. With the
aid of this it will be possible to organize together round a common
spatial centre that part of the activity of levity which escapes the
optical instrument and thus remains cosmic, and that part which
appears by itself in terrestrial space.
Once this is practically carried out, we may expect a complete
colour-circle to appear as already divined by Goethe. The full circle
consists of twelve discernible colours, with the Goethean peach-
blossom diametrically opposite the green. It is in this region of the
peach-blossom that—again according to Rudolf Steiner—we shall
find a source of actively working life-forces, springing from the
fourth metamorphosis of levity. Such is the prospect for research
work guided on the new lines.
POSTSCRIPT
The fact of our having disclosed here one of Rudolf Steiner's in-
dications concerning as yet undetected possibilities of scientific re-
search, makes it necessary to deal with an objection which may be
raised, particularly by some readers who already know this indication
through their own relation to Rudolf Steiner's work. They may
object to a discussion of the subject in a publication such as this,
feeling it dangerous to hand over to the world information which in
the economic battles of to-day might be used in a sense contrary to
the social-moral aims to which the work of Rudolf Steiner was
dedicated.
In reply it may be said that all we have gone through in this book
has shown that concrete knowledge of the world cannot be gained
without a certain ethical effort by the seeker. Therefore, anyone who
receives such knowledge with a passive attitude of soul will find it
meaningless, and will be quite unable to turn it to practical account.
We may therefore rest assured that the solution of the problem
related here, as of any other experimental task set by Rudolf Steiner,
will contain in itself a guarantee that no use will be made of it
detrimental to the true progress of mankind.
On the other hand, the present world-situation, which to so high
a degree is determined by the vast liberation of the sub-physical forces
of the earth, makes one feel it is essential not to close the considera-
tions of the fields of knowledge dealt with in these chapters, without a
hint at the practical possibilities which arise from a continuation of
Goethe's strivings in this field.
PART III
Towards a New Cosmosophy
CHAPTER XIX
The Country in which Man is not a Stranger
I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I ques-
tion a window concerning sight. I look through it and not with it.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
(a) INTRODUCTORY NOTE
A fundamental achievement along our path of study was the
recognition that a force of levity exists, polar to that of gravity, and
that these two together represent a primary polarity in nature which
in turn is the source of nature's manifold secondary polarities.
In the last part of these studies a vista opened up of an inner differ-
entiation of levity itself into warmth, light, chemical action and the
formative activity of life. Our next task will be to develop a clearer
conception of these four modes of action of levity.
In undertaking this task, however, we shall have to extend our
observations of nature beyond the frontier that can be reached by
using only what we can learn from Goethe. It is here that Rudolf
Steiner comes to our aid by what he was able to impart through his
researches in the realm of the supersensible itself.
This turning to information given by another mind, whose sources
of knowledge are beyond our own immediate reach, seems at first
sight to be incompatible with the principles guiding all our studies
hitherto; for in gaining insight into the How and Whence of a pheno-
menon of the sense-world we have up to now admitted only what is
yielded by an observation of the phenomenon per se (though with the
aid of the 'eye of the spirit') and of other phenomena related to it.
This is what we have called 'reading in the book of nature', and we
have found it to be the method on which a science aspiring to over-
come the onlooker-picture of the universe must be based. So we must
first make sure that the step we now propose to take does not violate
this principle.
*
The assurance we want will be found in two characteristics of the
communications made by Rudolf Steiner from his researches. The
content of these communications was acquired by way of a 'reading'
which is nothing but a higher metamorphosis of the reading first
employed by Goethe; and the acceptance of this content by another
mind is itself nothing but another act of reading, save that the direc-
tion of the reading gaze differs from the usual one.
In order to understand this we must go back to what we learnt in
the course of our optical studies as to the two forms of vision arising
from the activity of the eye's inner light—the dream-vision and the
seeing of after-images. Of these two, seeing in dream is in a certain
sense the purer form of inner seeing in that it arises without any outer
stimulus exercised upon the physical organ of sight. On the other
hand, it lacks that objective conformity to law characteristic of the
after-images which mirror the order of the external world. There is
an arbitrary, enigmatic element in dream-pictures, and their logic
often seems to run counter to that of waking consciousness. A further
characteristic of dream-perception is that we are tied to the level of
consciousness prevailing in the dream. While we are dreaming we
cannot awaken to the extent of being able to make the pictures the
object of conscious observation.
With the after-images it is different. Although to begin with they
are present in our consciousness with a clarity no greater than that of
the dream-pictures, nevertheless we are able so to enhance our con-
sciousness of them as to bring them under observation like any ex-
ternal phenomenon. As previously shown, it is possible, even while
the eye is riveted on an impression from outside, to develop such
awareness in the activity of the inner light called forth by this im-
pression, that together with the results of the deeds and sufferings of
the light we can perceive something of these deeds and sufferings
themselves. Perception of the after-images thus turns into what we
may call perception of simultaneous images. (This activity of the eye
corresponds with what Goethe, in a different connexion, called an
'alliance of the eyes of spirit with the eyes of the body'.)
These two forms of visual perception—which we may briefly call:
(1) perception of post-images, and (2) perception of co-images—
represent successive rungs on a 'spiritual ladder' pointing beyond
themselves to a further rung. By the logic of succession this may be
expected to consist in some sort of seeing of pre-images, with the
characteristic of being a still less physical mode of seeing than the
two others. This seeing must be based on an activity of the inner light
which will be similar to that in dream by its arising without any
stimulus from external light-impressions, yet at the same time there
must be no arbitrariness in the contents of this perception. Further,
our consciousness in this perceptive activity must be such as to allow
us to be in full control of it, as we are of ordinary day-waking seeing.
This kind of pure sense-free perception does indeed exist, and it
can be aroused by means of a well-ordered training from the dormant
state in which it is present in every human being. Anyone who learns
to see in this way gains perception of the activity of cosmic light, con-
tacting it directly with his own inner light—that is to say, without
mediation of his corporeal eye which is subject to gravity. So this eye-
of-the-spirit becomes capable of perceiving the levity-woven arche-
types (ur-images), which underlie all that the physical eye discerns in
the world of ordinary space.
In respect of the intrinsic character of the world-content thus per-
ceived, Rudolf Steiner called this mode of perception, Imaginative
perception, or, simply, Imagination. By so doing he invested this
word with its due and rightful meaning.
From what we found in our optical studies concerning the nature
of after-images (Chapter XV), it is clear that the acquisition of
Imaginative perception rests on a re-awakening in the eye (and thus
in the total organism behind the eye) of certain 'infant' forces which
have grown dormant in the course of the growing up of the human
being. It thus represents a fulfilment of Thomas Reid's philosophic
demand. Consequently we find among the descriptions which Tra-
herne gives of the mode of perception peculiar to man when the inner
light, brought into this world at birth, is not yet absorbed by the
physical eye, many helpful characterizations of the nature of Imag-
inative perception, some of which may be quoted here.
Consider, in this respect, the following passage from Traherne's
poem The Praeparative, quoted earlier. In describing the state of soul
at a time when the physical senses are not yet in operation, Traherne
says:
'Then was my Soul my only All to me,
A living, endless Ey,
Whose Power, and Act, and Essence was to see:
I was an inward Sphere of Light
Or an interminable Orb of Sight,
Exceeding that which makes the Days,
A vital sun that shed abroad its Rays:
All Life, all Sense,
A naked, simple, pure Intelligence.''
This is the condition of soul of which Traherne says in the same
poem that through it a man is still a recipient of the 'true Ideas of all
things'. In this condition the object of sight is not the corporeal
world which reflects the light, but light itself, engaged in the weaving
of the archetypal images. In a later passage of the same poem Tra-
herne expresses this by saying:
'775 not the Object, but the Light
That maketh Hev'n. . . .'
And more clearly still in the following part of his poem An Infant Eye:
'A simple Light from all Contagion free,
A Beam that's purely Spiritual, an Ey
Thai's altogether Virgin, Things doth see
Ev'n like unto the Deity;
That is, it shineth in an hevenly Sense,
And round about (Unmov'd) its Light dispense.
'The visiv Rays are Beams of Light indeed,
Refined, subtil, piercing, quick and pure;
And as they do the sprightly winds exceed,
Are worthy longer to endure;
They far out-shoot the Reach of Grosser Air,
With which such Excellence may not compare.
But being once debas'd, they soon becom
Less activ than they were before.'
How at this stage the soul experiences the act of perception in
itself is shown in the following passage from the poem Wonder:
'A Nativ Health and Innocence
Within my Bones did grow
And while my God did all his Glories show
I felt a vigour in my Sense
That was all SPIRIT: I within did flow
With seas of Life like Wine.'
Utterances of this kind illustrate the fact that perception of the ur-
images of the world consists in a reading with the eye-of-the-spirit,
which has been rendered so strong that for its action no support from
the physical eye is any longer required. This faculty of spiritual
Imagination (which Rudolf Steiner was able to exercise in advance of
other human beings) is acquired on a path of training which is the
direct continuation of the Goethean path.1
It remains to show that acceptance of information obtained
through spiritual Imagination, without ourselves being as yet in
actual command of it, is not in contradiction with the principles of
'reading'. Let us, to this end, think of reading in the ordinary sense of
this word, calling to mind that for the acquisition of this faculty we
depend on someone who can teach it because he already has it.
Exactly the same holds good for the reading with which we are here
concerned. Here, too, a teacher already possessing this faculty is re-
quired. Thus Goethe became for us a teacher of reading, and it would
be a mistake to imagine that he, for his part, needed no teacher. In
his case this function was fulfilled partly by what he learned through
his studies of the earlier fruits of man's spiritual activity, that is, from
an epoch when vestiges at least of the original, instinctive faculty of
spiritual Imagination were still extant. A similar function on our own
path of study was performed by our occupation with the old doctrine
of the four elements and the basic concepts of alchemy.
Indispensable as is such a training in reading by turning to past
conceptions of man, it does not suffice to meet the present-day de-
mands of a scientific understanding of the universe. For this, we need
a 'technique' of reading that cannot be attained along these lines
alone. Awareness of this fact led Rudolf Steiner to pursue his spiritual-
scientific investigations and to communicate the results in such a way
that they can be a 'school of reading' for those who study them.2 In
point of fact we have already made use in this sense of one of the
results of Rudolf Steiner's researches, for at the very beginning of
1 To avoid misunderstandings, it should be emphasized that spiritual Imagina-
tion is not attained by any exercise involving directly the sense of sight and its
organ, the eye, but by purely mental exercises designed to increase the 'seeing'
faculty of the mind.
2 Indeed, it is a misunderstanding of the whole meaning of Anthroposophy
when its contents are quoted—as they sometimes are even by adherents—in such
a way as to suggest that by their help a better 'explanation' may be gained of
matters for which there is otherwise no, or at least no satisfactory, explanation.
The question: 'How does Anthroposophy explain this or that?' is quite wrongly
put. We ought rather to ask: 'How does Anthroposophy help us to read more
clearly this or that otherwise enigmatical chapter of the script of existence?'
this book his picture of the threefold psycho-physical organism of
man was taken as the basis of our own investigations. The reason why
the present remarks were not then included is that the relevant results
of higher research were in that case of such a nature that, once
known, they could be confirmed by the simplest kind of self-observa-
tion. The fact, however, remains that from the very beginning we
have called upon one fully trained in reading, to help in deciphering
certain facts of nature—in this case of human nature.
A similar need, though now in an amplified form, arises at the
present stage of our studies. And here, out of the wealth of know-
ledge conveyed by Rudolf Steiner from the realm of supersensible
Imagination, it is his characterization of the four modifications of
levity which will now give the guidance necessary for our own obser-
vation. Adopting the terminology chosen by him for the description
of this sphere, we shall in future speak of it as of the 'Ether' pervad-
ing the universe (thus using this word also in its true and original
meaning). Accordingly, we shall refer to its fourfold differentiation as
to the four kinds of ether: Warmth-Ether, Light-Ether, Chemical
Ether and Life-Ether.
* *
*
(b) WARMTH
We begin with the warmth-ether as the only modification of ether
which combines certain etheric with certain physical properties.
Constituting as it does a border-condition between the two worlds,
the warmth-ether has, on the one hand, the function of receiving the
picture-weaving transmitted to it by the higher ethers, and, on the
other, of bringing physical matter into the state where it becomes
receptive to the working of the etheric forces. The warmth-ether
achieves this by freeing matter from being controlled one-sidedly by
the centre-bound forces of the earth. It thus calls forth, when acting
physically, the processes of melting of solids and of evaporation of
liquids: phenomena which yielded the initial observations for our
introduction of the concept of levity. In processes of this kind we now
recognize the physical manifestation of a universal function of the
warmth-ether, namely, to divest matter of all form and to lead it
over from the realm dominated by gravity into that of levity. Pro-
vided we attach the right meaning to the word, we may say that the
function of the warmth-ether is to bring about chaos at the upper
border of physical nature. It is thus that we have already found it
working in the plant, when through the union of the pollen with the
seed a state of chaos is produced within the seed, which enables the
type to impress anew its form-principle into it.
Another instance of the warmth-ether's anti-gravitational effect,
also discussed earlier, is the earth's seismic activity. True, it appears
at first sight as if little were gained by speaking of warmth-ether,
instead, as we did previously, of levity in general. But it must not be
forgotten that in the ether-realm as a whole, warmth—that is, the
overcoming of earthly gravity—is only one of the four modes of
etheric action, albeit the one which enables the other three to work
into the physical world. We shall see, later on, that only by taking
into account the action of the higher modifications of the ether is it
possible to gain insight into the true causes of the apparently so arbi-
trary occurrences of volcanic and kindred phenomena. Here, too, it is
the function of the warmth-ether to produce in the physical sphere
the chaos which is necessary to make the physical sphere receptive to
the activities going on in higher spheres.
In view of this universal function of the warmth-ether, which dis-
tinguishes it from the other modifications of ether, we may give it as a
second name that of 'chaoticizing ether'.
* *
*
(c) LIGHT
The function of the light-ether, the second of the four modes of
ether, can best be envisaged by thinking of the difference between a
plant growing in darkness (perhaps a potato sprouting in a cellar)
and another of the same species exposed to the influence of the light.
On Plates VII and VIII two kinds of unicellular organisms are shown,
of one which—the green algae—is accustomed to live in light, the other
—the bacilli—in darkness. These things are, of course, well-known
facts. Our purpose here, however, is not merely to record them as
'fact', but, by re-creating them within ourselves, to use them to gain
an experi-ence of the function of the light-ether.
The following passages from Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants
are a classical example of observation of the activity of the light-ether
in the plant. They are taken from the second part of the essay, where
Goethe is describing leaf-development:
'While the leaves owe their first nourishment principally to the
more or less modified watery parts, which they draw from the stem,
they are indebted for their increased perfection and refinement to the
light and air. The cotyledons which are formed beneath the closed
seed-sheath are charged, so to speak, with only a crude sap; they are
scarcely and but rudely organized and quite undeveloped. In the same
way the leaves are more rudely organized in plants which grow under
water than in others which are exposed to the open air. Indeed, even
the same species of plant develops smoother and less intricately
formed leaves when growing in low damp places, whereas, if trans-
planted to a higher region, it will produce leaves which are rough,
hairy and more delicately finished.'
'So it is also with the anastomosis of the vessels which spring forth
from the larger veins, seeking each other with their ends and coales-
cing, and thus providing the necessary basis for the leaf-skin or
cuticle. All this, if not entirely caused by subtle forms of air, is at
least very much furthered by them. If the leaves of many water-
plants are thread-like or assume the form of antlers, we are inclined
to attribute it to lack of complete anastomosis. The growth of the
water buttercup, Ranunculus aquatilis, shows this quite obviously,
with its aquatic leaves consisting of mere thread-like veins, while in
the leaves developed above water the anastomosis is complete and a
connected plane is formed. Occasionally, indeed, in this plant, the
transition may be still more definitely observed, in leaves which are
half anastomosed and half thread-like.'
The second of these paragraphs describes the phenomenon of vas-
cular anastomosis which, having already been more than once an
object of our study, here reveals a new meaning. If, following Goethe's
method, we re-create in our mind the repeated separations and re-
unions of the sap-vessels, while keeping in view the fact that the leaf's
outer form is the result of a purposive, many times repeated anasto-
mosis, then the picture of the activity of weaving arises before our
mind's eye. (Hence the word 'tissue' for the flesh of a living being.)
In truth all nature's forms are woven of light, including the crystals.1
How clear a picture Goethe had of the conformity of man's act of
thinking with nature's way of producing her forms—both being an
act of supersensible weaving—is shown by the following two verses.
That on the left is a passage from Faust, from the scene in which
1 See Space and the Light of Creation, by G. Adams, where this 'weaving' is
shown with the help of projective geometry.
Mephisto (disguised as Faust) instructs the young Scholar. The other
is an altered version of it, written by Goethe at a later time to con-
clude an essay (Bedenken und Ergebung) in which he deals with the
problem of the relation between Experience and Idea:
Truly, when men their thoughts conceive So with a modest eye perceive
'Tis as if some masterpiece they weave. Her masterpiece Dame Nature weave.
One thread, and a thousand strands take One thread, and a thousand strands
flight, take flight,
Swift to and fro the shuttles going, Swift to and fro the shuttles going,
All unseen the threads a-flowing, Each to the other the threads a-flowing,
One stroke, and a thousand close unite.1 One stroke, and a thousand close unite.1-
What Goethe wants to show here by applying to the activity of
nature the same image which he used originally to depict the act of
thinking, we can express to-day by saying that it is the identity of the
activity of the light-ether in human thinking and in external nature
which is responsible for the fact that the objective ideas operating in
nature can become the content of man's consciousness in the form of
thoughts.2
Following our previous procedure when we gave the warmth-ether
a second name by calling it chaoticizing ether, we can denote the
light-ether also as 'weaving ether'.
*
If at this point in our discussion we revert once more to the realm
of physical manifestations of light, dealt with in the preceding chap-
ters, we do so because by studying them in the present context we
shall gain further insight into the fact that one plane of nature pro-
vides illustrations of processes which on another plane remain more
or less veiled. At the same time this will help us to learn more about
the properties of levity-space. The optical phenomenon which we shall
discuss in this sense is that of the so-called pin-hole camera. (The pin-
hole camera effect is easily produced by a keyhole in a closed door
which on one side faces a window and on the other leads to a com-
paratively dark room.)
The usual explanation of the appearance of the optical image on
the back inside wall of such a camera is that light-rays, emanating
from every point outside, cross each other in the aperture of the cam-
era and so—again point by point—create the inverted image. No such
1 Translation by J. Darrell.
2 We may recall here also the passage from Ruskin's The Queen of the Air,
quoted earlier, p. 118).
explanation, clearly, is open to us. For the world of external objects
is a whole, and so is its image appearing in the camera. Equally, the
light entering the camera is not a sum of single rays. Pure observation
leads to the following description of the optical process.
By surveying the path which the light takes from the illuminated
surface of the outer objects via the pin-hole to the optical image in-
side the camera, we realize that the light-realm engaged in this pro-
cess has the shape of a double cone, with its apex in the opening of
the camera. Within this cone the light carries the image across the
space stretching in front of the light-reflecting objects up to the point
where the image becomes visible by being caught on the back wall of
the camera.
Thus in every section of the cone the image is present in its totality
—even in the very apex of the cone. There, too, the image in all its
details is present as a whole, though without (ideally) any spatial ex-
tension. Seen thus, on this level of its action the light-ether reveals as
one of its characteristics the faculty of making present in a spaceless
point an image originally expanded in space, and of letting it emerge
from this point in spatial expansion.
Further, there is the fact that, wherever we set up a pin-hole
camera, the aperture in its front will cause the formation of an optical
image inside it. This shows that each point in space filled with light is
the bearer of an optical image, contracted to a point, of the entire
world of light-reflecting objects surrounding it. All we do with such
a camera is to select a particular image and bring it to separate
visibility.
Through these observations we grow aware of light's faculty of
communicating simultaneously to space as a whole, and to each point
in it, a potential image of the light-reflecting object.
What we observe here in the sphere of physical light-activity is
exactly what the light-ether performs on a higher level of nature
when with its help the spiritual archetype of a plant takes on spatial
appearance. For to this end the archetype, itself without spatial limi-
tations, imprints its image into the tiny seed, whence the growing
plant organism carries it again into space. And there is in principle no
limitation to the number of such seeds, each of which will bear the
complete image of the archetype.
* *
*
(d) SOUND
The characteristics of the third modification of ether are such that
they prompted Rudolf Steiner to give it as a second name, besides
chemical ether, that of sound-ether. In view of the fact, stressed at the
beginning of this chapter, that perception of the ether is achieved by
a heightening of the power of the spirit-eye, it must cause surprise to
learn that a certain mode of activity of the ether has a quality which
makes appeal to aural experiences. The full answer to this riddle must
await the discussion that follows this chapter. Two points, however,
may be brought forward at once. Firstly, where gravity, with its ten-
dency to individualize, is absent, no such sharp distinctions exist be-
tween one form of perception and another as are found in the sphere
of the physical senses.1 Secondly, even in ordinary sense-perception a
certain overlapping of visual and aural experiences is known to us.
We need only think how common it is to give musical attributes, such
as 'consonant' and 'dissonant' to colours, and to describe tones as
'light' and 'dark'. The reason is that subconsciously we accompany
visual experiences with tone-sensations, and vice versa. Cases are
even known of human beings in whom the secondary sensation occurs
with such intensity as to equal the primary one. Such people say that
they 'see' sounds and 'hear' colours.
*
Everything that is true of the supersensible sphere we may expect
to come to expression in some form in the world of sense-perception.
The sphere of the ether is the sphere of the creative archetypes of the
world, and when we learn that to one part of this world the character
of sound is attributed, we must search for a phenomenon, perceptible
to our senses, which reveals to us the secret of the sound's form-
creating power. This we have in the so-called sound-figures, discov-
ered by the German physicist Chladni (1756-1827) and called after
him 'Chladni's sound-figures'. A short description of how they are
produced will not be out of place.
A round or square plate of glass or brass, fixed at its centre so that
it can vibrate freely at its edges, is required. It is evenly and not too
1 That the ether, apart from being supersensibly seen, is also heard, was
empirically known to Goethe. See the opening words of the 'Prologue in Heaven"
(Faust, I) and the call of the Spirit of the Elements in the first scene of the Second
Part of the drama, which follow upon the stage direction: 'The sun announces his
approach with overwhelming noise.'
thickly covered with fine sand or lycopodium powder and then
caused to vibrate acoustically by the repeated drawing of a violin-
bow with some pressure across the edge of the plate until a steady
note becomes audible. Through the vibrations thus caused within the
plate, the particles of sand or powder are set in movement and caused
to collect in certain stationary parts of the plate, thereby creating
figures of very regular and often surprising form. By stroking the
plate at different points on the edge, and at the same time damping
the vibrations by touching the edge at other points with the finger,
notes of different pitch can be produced, and for each of these notes
a characteristic figure will appear (Fig. 14).1
1 By attending Chladni's lectures on his discovery in Paris the French physicist
Savart became acquainted with this phenomenon and devoted himself to its
study. Chladni and Savart together published a great number of these figures.
The significance for us of Chladni's experiment will emerge still
more clearly if we modify it in the following way. Instead of directly
setting the plate with the powder into vibration by stroking it with
the bow, we produce a corresponding movement on a second plate
and let it be transmitted to the other by resonance. For this purpose
the two plates must be acoustically tuned to each other and placed
not too far apart. Let us imagine, further, that the whole experiment
was arranged—as it well might be—in such a way that the second
plate was hidden from a spectator, who also lacked the faculty of
hearing. This gives us a picture of the situation in which we find our-
selves whenever the higher kinds of ether by way of a tone-activity
inaudible to our physical ear, cause shapeless matter to assume regu-
larly ordered form.
*
This comparison of the activity of the sound-ether, as the form-
creating element in nature, with Chladni's phenomenon is drawn
correctly only if we recognize that the conception of form, as an ex-
pression of that which is called forth through the etheric forces in
nature, comprises more than the external spatially bounded shape of
an organic or inorganic entity. Apart from the fact already indicated,
that for the formation of such entities the co-operation also of life-
ether is necessary, we can judge the activity of sound-ether correctly
only if we conceive it as a much more inward activity, compared with
the formation in external space of Chladni's figures. In the latter
case, the reason why the influence of sound causes nothing beyond
the ordering of form in outer space is because on this plane of nature
the only changes that can occur are changes in the positions of separ-
ate physical bodies. Where the forces of sound in ether-form are able
to take hold of matter from within, they can produce changes of
form of a quite different kind. This effect of the activity of sound-
ether has given it its other name: chemical ether.
We have mentioned once before that our conception of 'form' in
organically active nature must not be limited merely to that of a
body's spatial outline. This was in connexion with Ruskin's definition
of the spiritual principle active in plant-formation as 'the power that
catches out of chaos charcoal, water, lime and what not, and fastens
them down into a given form'. Besides the external order of nature
revealed in space-form, there exists also an inner qualitative order
expressed in a body's chemical composition. Upon this inner chem-
ical order is based all that we encounter as colour, smell, taste, etc.,
of a substance, as well as its nourishing, healing or harmful proper-
ties. Accordingly, all these parts of an organism, both in the plant-
kingdom and within the higher organisms, have a certain inner
material order, apart from their characteristic space-structure. The
one is never present without the other, and in some way they are
causally connected.
In this inner order of substance we must see in the very first place
the work of the sound or chemical ether. And we should be aware
that by the word 'chemistry' in this connexion we mean something
much more far-reaching than those chemical reactions which we can
bring about by the reciprocal affinity of physical substances, however
complicated these reactions may be. A few examples will illustrate
the difference between chemical processes caused by direct influence
of the chemical ether, and others in which only the physical conse-
quences of the ether are effective.
In his book, Man the Unknown, Professor Carrel shows very im-
pressively, by an example from the human organism, the difference of
quantitative ratio in externally similar processes, one of which occurs
within the domain of life, the other, outside it. He compares the
quantity of liquid necessary to keep artificially alive a piece of living
tissue which has been reduced to pulp, with the quantity of blood
doing the same within the living organism. If all the tissues of a
human body were treated in this way, it would take 45,000 gallons of
circulating fluid to keep them from being poisoned in a few days by
their own waste products. Within the living organism the blood
achieves the same task with 1J gallons.
Very many chemical changes within living organisms are effected
by the two polar processes of oxidation and reduction. We have dis-
cussed them repeatedly as hieroglyphs of much that occurs in nature
by way of polarity. In accordance with the principle ruling the phy-
sical plane of nature, that differences of level tend to disappear,
oxidation can occur by itself, whereas reduction requires the expendi-
ture of energy. Let us from this point of view compare the transfor-
mation of oxidized into reduced iron, as it takes place inside and
outside the realm of life.
An example of this process in its purely physical form is the reduc-
tion of iron-ore to metallic iron in blast-furnaces, where, with the
help of high temperature and high pressure, carbon is made to com-
bine with the oxygen ingredient of the ore and to impart to it its own
imponderable energy. Precisely the same process is going on con-
tinuously and unobtrusively within the human body under normal
bodily conditions of temperature and pressure, when the oxy-
haemoglobin of the arterial blood changes over into the haemoglobin
of the venous blood. A macrotelluric counterpart of this is the trans-
formation of the red river-mud into the blue-black continental mud
at the bottom of the sea, around the continental shores. Here, again,
reduction takes place without those preliminaries that are necessary
for carrying through the process by technical means.
Through examples of this kind we gain insight into the nature of
the chemical ether as a 'magic' force (in the sense in which we have
introduced this term at the beginning of the book). What the chemical
ether is capable of effecting in a gentle manner, so to speak, in co-
operation with the inertness-overcoming power of the warmth-ether,
can be imitated physically only by an extraordinary concentration of
external energy and the use of masses of material substance. At the
same time the imitation is never complete. For to all that happens
through the action of the chemical ether there belongs the quality of
cosmic youth, while everything brought about in a purely physical
manner is of necessity cosmically old.1
Of all the provinces of nature towards which man's exploring eye
has turned since the dawn of the onlooker-consciousness, none has
furthered his purely quantitative thinking more than chemistry, ever
since the discovery that the chemical reactions of the various sub-
stances are conditioned by a quite definite and constant numerical
relationship. It was these relationships which impelled the rise of the
atomic conception of matter and all its consequences. For since the
onlooker-consciousness is quite unable to conceive the existence of
numerical relationships in the physical world except as sums of com-
putable units in space, it was natural for this type of consciousness to
reduce all empirically established numerical relationships to corre-
1 Understanding the attributes of the chemical ether enables us to see in their
right perspective Rudolf Steiner's suggestions to farmers for the preparation of
the soil and for keeping healthy the crops growing on it. Attempts have been
made to dismiss these suggestions by calling them 'mysticism' and 'mediaeval
magic'. Both terms are titles of honour if we understand by the one the form of
insight into the supersensible realm of nature acquired by the higher mode of
reading, and by the other a faculty of nature herself, whose magic wand is the
chemical or sound-ether.
spending relationships among quantities of the smallest possible
material or matter-like units.
Scientific thinking, if guided by knowledge of the existence of
etheric forces and their action, has no need of such an interpretation
of the numerical relationships revealed in the physical world; for it
knows them to be nothing but the last expression of the action of the
chemical ether (hence occasionally also called 'number-ether' by
Rudolf Steiner). To do justice to the appearance of measurable
numerical relationships in nature, in whatever sphere, it is necessary
to free ourselves from the abstract conception of number which
governs modern scientific thought and to replace it by a more con-
crete one. We shall rind that for the existence of a certain number
there may be two quite different reasons, although the method of
establishing the number itself is the same in each case. A simple
example will illustrate this.
Let us look at a number of similar objects, say a group of five
apples. We observe that the relation of the number five to the group
of objects in front of us is purely external and accidental. In applying
to it the conception 'five' we combine the single objects into a group
and give it a name, or numerical label, which has nothing to do with
the nature of the items making up the group. This way of thinking,
we may observe, is of exactly the kind which the nominalists of the
Middle Ages attributed to every conception formed by the human
mind. In fact, the process of counting is a process of pure abstraction.
The more differentiated are the things which we want to combine into
a group through the process of counting, the further this abstraction
has to go. We can count apples and pears together under the collec-
tive conception of 'fruit'; if turnips are added, we must help ourselves
out with the conception 'vegetable products'; until finally we deal
only with 'things', without considering any qualitative differentiation.
Thus the conception of number is created solely within the human
mind, which applies it to things from outside.
From the moment when human consciousness was unable to attri-
bute to itself any other than a purely nominalistic mode of compre-
hension it was inevitable that all explanations of natural phenomena
would have two results: (1) the exclusion from observation of every-
thing that could not be conceived in terms of numbers, and (2) an
endeavour to find for every numerical relationship capable of empiri-
cal proof an explanation which could be interpreted as the result
of taking qualitatively identical units and counting them. For this
method of forming conceptions is the only one which nominalism
can accept with a good conscience. The fact that in so doing it is led
ad absurdum has only quite lately occurred to it. For if by the logical
following of this path—as in modern theoretical physics—the whole
universe is dissolved into units which can no longer be distinguished
from each other, then it will become impossible to count these parts,
for it cannot be established whether any given one of these hypo-
thetical elemental particles has been counted or not. None the less,
Eddington claimed to have found the exact number of particles
composing the universe—a number with 80 figures—by using a
special calculus, but this number is valid only on the supposition
that the particles cannot be counted because they are indistinguish-
able!1
However correct the nominalistic conception of number may be in
such a case as that of numbering the five apples, it is wholly incorrect
to restrict the concept of number itself to one valid for this kind of
occurrence. We shall see this immediately if we take one of the apples
and cut it across. There we find the number five confronting us in the
well-known star-like figure, represented by the fivefold pericarp in
the centre of the apple. What man, restricted as he was to the mode
of understanding, has completely overlooked is this: although the
act of counting, by which we establish the number five, is the same in
both cases, the quality of the number five is totally different. For in
the case of the five pericarps this number is a quality immanent in the
apple, which it shares with the whole species of Rosaceae. The apple
itself is just as much 'five' as it is 'round', 'sweet', etc. In the super-
sensible type which creates in the plant its own organ of manifesta-
tion, the creation of a number—in the apple the number five—is part
of the form-creating activities characteristic of the type. The numer-
ical relationships which appear between natural phenomena depend
upon the way in which the chemical ether participates. This is true
equally of those discovered by chemistry in the sphere of inorganic
matter and used to-day with such great success.
Let us be quite clear that the relationship of unity to plurality in
the case of the five apples is totally different from what it is in the
fivefold pericarp. In the first case unity is the smallest quantity repre-
sented by each of the five apples. There, the step from one to two is
1 See Eddington's humorous and at the same time serious treatment of this
problem in his Philosophy of Physical Science.
made by joining together two units from outside. The path from one
to many is by way of continuous addition. In the second case the
unity is represented by the pericarp—i.e. by the one comprising the
many, the latter appearing as parts of the whole. In such a case two
is part of one and so are three, four, five, etc. Plurality arises from a
continuous process of division of unity.
The ancient world knew the idea of number only in the last-men-
tioned form. There unity appeared as an all-embracing magnitude,
revealed through the Universe. The world's manifoldness was felt to
be not a juxtaposition of single things, externally connected, but the
content of this unity, and therefore derived from it. This was ex-
pressed by the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers in the formula έν
και παν (the One and the All).
With the appearance of the Arabs on the scene of history, human
thought turned to the additive concept of number, and the original
distributive concept receded gradually into oblivion. The acceptance
of the new concept made it possible for the first time to conceive the
zero. It is clear that by a continuous division of unity one is carried
to a constantly growing number of constantly diminishing parts, but
without ever reaching the nothing represented by the number zero.
To-day we should say that in this way we can reach zero only by an
infinite series of steps. Yet the idea of the infinite did not exist in this
form for ancient man. On the other hand, in the arabic conception of
number the steps necessary to reach zero are finite. For just as by the
external addition of unities we can step forward from one number to
the next, so we can also step back on the same path by repeated sub-
tractions of unities. Having thus reached One, nothing can stop us
from going beyond it by one more such step. The arabic numeral
system, therefore, is the only one to possess its own symbol for
zero.
It has been correctly noted that the penetration into European
thought of this additive concept of number was responsible for
developing the idea of the machine; for it accustomed human beings
to think calmly of zero as a quantity existing side by side with the
others. In ancient man the idea of nothingness, the absolute void,
created fear; he judged nature's relation to the void accordingly,
as the phrase 'natura abhorret vacuum' indicates. His capacity to
think fearlessly of this vacuum and to handle it thus had to be
developed in order to bring about the Machine Age, and particularly
the development of efficient steam engines. Consider also the decisive
part played by the vacuum in Crookes's researches, through which
the path to the sub-physical realm of nature was laid open.
Yet nature makes use of number as a regulating factor in quite a
different way from its appearance in the purely electrical and gravi-
tational connexions of inorganic matter, namely where sound-ether
from the upper boundary of nature so regulates nature's dynamic
that the manifold sense-qualities appear in their time-and-space
order. When we interpret the arrangement of numbers found there
on a nominalistic basis, as is done when the axis- and angle-relation-
ships of crystals are reduced to a mere propinquity of the atoms dis-
tributed like a grid in space, or when the difference in angle of the
position of the various colours in the spectrum is reduced to mere
differences in frequency of the electromagnetic oscillations in a hypo-
thetical ether—then we bar the way to the comprehension not only
of number itself, as a quality among qualities, but also of all other
qualities in nature.
*
(e) LIFE
As already mentioned, the three kinds of ether, warmth, light and
sound, are not sufficient in themselves to bring into existence what in
its proper sense we call 'life' in nature, i.e. the formation of single
living organisms. This requires the action of a fourth kind of ether,
the life-ether, ranged above the other three. We can best comprehend
the life-ether's contribution to the total activity of the ether in nature
by considering the interaction of the four kinds of ether with the four
physical elements.
We have seen that the warmth-ether has the double function of
being at once the lowest ether and the highest physical element, thus
acting as a sphere of reflexion for the other kinds of ether and the
elements respectively. Each stage in the etheric has its reflexion in
the physical, as the above table shows. Thus to the physical air the
etheric light is related. (The affinity of light and air is best seen in
the plant and its leaf-formation.) To bring about real changes in the
material composition of the physical world requires the stronger
powers of the chemical ether. Therefore it is also the first ether of
which we had to speak as 'magical' ether. Its effects reach into the
watery element which is already bound up with gravity, but by its
own strength it cannot penetrate beyond that. The causation of
material changes in the liquid sphere would in fact be all that these
three kinds of ether could achieve together.
Only when the power of the life-ether is added to the three others
can etheric action reach as far as the sphere of solid matter. Thus the
life-ether is responsible for all solid formation in nature, both in her
organic and inorganic fields (the latter—crystal-formation—being
the effect of external ether-action).1 It is to the action of the life-ether
that nature owes the existence in her different realms of multitudes of
separate solid forms. To mention an instance from our previous
studies: in the same way as volcanic phenomena manifest the warmth-
ether's gravity-overcoming power on a macrotelluric scale, so snow-
formation illustrates the life-ether's matter-shaping might.
Through its power to bind flowing action into solid form, the life-
ether is related to the sound-ether in the same way as the articulated
word formed by human speaking is related to the mere musical tone.
The latter by itself is as it were fluid. In human speech this fluidity is
represented by the vowels. With a language consisting only of vowels
man would be able to express feelings, but not thoughts. To let the
word as carrier of thought arise out of sound, human speech possesses
the consonants, which represent the solid element in it.
The emergence of the sense-bearing word from the merely ringing
sound is an exact counterpart to what takes place in nature when the
play of organic liquids, regulated by the chemical ether, is caused by
the life-ether to solidify into outwardly perceptible form. By reading
in this way the special function of the life-ether among the other
three, we are led to the term ' Word-ether' as an appropriate second
1 Of the difference between external and internal ether-action more will be
said in the concluding chapter.
name for it, corresponding to the term sound-ether for the chemical
ether.
*
Thus Levity presents itself to us as being engaged in the fourfold
activity of Chaoticizing, Weaving, Sounding and, lastly, Speaking
the form-creative Cosmic Word into the realm of Gravity.
CHAPTER XX
Pro Anima
Thy functions are ethereal,
As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind,
Organ of vision! And a Spirit aëreal
Informs the cell of Hearing, dark and blind.
W. WORDSWORTH
(a) THE WELL-SPRINGS OF NATURE'S DEEDS AND
SUFFERINGS
As our observations have shown, gravity and levity not only exist
side by side as a primary polarity; the manifold interaction of their
fields gives rise to all sorts of secondary polarities. Obviously, this
interaction must be brought about by a further kind offeree to which
gravity and levity are subordinate.
In what follows we shall try, so far as is possible within the scope
of this book, to throw light on the nature of this force. Since the
direct experience of the dynamic realm constituted by it is based on
faculties of the mind other than those needed for the Imaginative
perception of the etheric realm, we shall have to examine also the
nature and origin of these faculties. This will lead us again to the
study of one of man's higher senses, this time his sense of hearing,
with the aim of finding the spiritual function that is hidden in it. But
our order of procedure will have to differ from the one followed in
the last chapter, because it will be necessary first to make ourselves
acquainted with the nature of the new force and then to turn to an
examination of the sense-activity concerned.
*
Let our first object of observation be man himself in so far as he
illustrates a polarity of the second order.
When studying man's nature with the idea of understanding the
genesis of his onlooker-consciousness, it will be remembered, we had
to examine the ordering of his consciousness into waking, dreaming
and sleeping in the different members of his organism. We recognized
three different organic systems, the sensory-nerve system, the rhyth-
mic system and the metabolic-limb system, as the bodily foundation
of three different soul activities. These are the thought-forming acti-
vity which belongs to waking consciousness; the feeling activity
which belongs to dream consciousness; and the willing activity which
belongs to sleep consciousness. We then saw in these three sys-
tems representatives of the three alchemical functions—'sulphurous'
in the metabolic, 'saline' in the nervous, 'mercurial' in the mediating
rhythmic system.
Regarded thus, man's nature reveals itself as being endowed with
a physical organization, and an etheric organization, which are
brought into different relationships by being acted upon by a third
organization consisting of forces of the kind here to be studied. At
his lower pole these forces co-ordinate the ether and physical organi-
zations in a manner corresponding to the function of the 'sulphur'-
pole of the alchemical triad. Here, therefore, the warmth-ether takes
the lead and acts in such a way that the higher kinds of ether are able to
come to expression in material processes of the body. At the upper
pole corresponding forces co-ordinate the physical and ether organi-
zations in a way characteristic of the 'salt'-pole. This gives the lead to
the life-ether, so that the physical organism provides the foundation
for the activity of the ether-forces without, however, being actually
penetrated by them (at least after completion of the embryonic and
first post-embryonic development). As a result, consciousness lights
up in this part of the body. The rhythmic sphere, being the 'mercurial'
middle, is distinguished by an alternation of the two conditions
described. With each diastole it becomes more akin to the pole
below, and with each systole more akin to the pole above. Here,
therefore, the lighting up of consciousness is only partial.
By means of these observations we realize that the third type of
force, in so far as it is active in man, has the capacity, by co-ordinating
the physical and etheric parts of the organism in one way or another,
to promote happenings either of a more corporeal or a more psy-
chical nature—namely, motion at one pole, sensation at the other,
and feeling in the middle between them.1 Remembering Goethe's
formula, 'colours are deeds and sufferings of light', we realize how
1 We must here distinguish sensation from feeling proper, in which sensation
and motion merge in mercurial balance.
deeply true the concepts were to which he was led by his way of
developing observation and thought.
What we have now brought to our awareness by studying man,
holds good in some sense also for the animal. The animal, too, is
polarized into motion and sensation. (What makes the animal differ
from man need not concern us here, for it belongs to a dynamic
realm other than the one we are now studying. This other realm will
come under consideration in the next chapter.) Quite a different pic-
ture arises when we turn to the plant. The plant, too, is characterized
by a threefold structure, root, stem with leaves, and florescence, which
in their way represent the three alchemical functions. Consequently,
there is also motion in the plant, although this is confined to in-
ternal movements leading to growth and formation. And at the
opposite pole there is sensation, though again very different from the
sensation experienced by higher living beings. What we mean here by
'sensation' can be best expressed by quoting the following passage
from Ruskin's The Queen of the Air, in which the dual activity of the
dynamic which we seek to understand is brought out particularly
clearly.
In describing the forming of blossom in the plant as the climax of
the 'spirit' active in it, Ruskin says: 'Its (the plant's) form becomes
invested with aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own human
passions; namely, first, with the loveliest outlines of shape and,
secondly, with the most brilliant phases of the primary colours, blue,
yellow, red or white, the unison of all; and to make it more strange,
this time of peculiar and perfect glory is associated with relations of
the plants or blossoms to each other, correspondent to the joy of love
in human creatures and having the same object in the continuance of
the race.'1
If we wish to understand why the same dynamic action working on
the physical and etheric organisms of the plant, on the one hand, and
of man and the animal, on the other, brings about effects so different,
we must turn to the realm whence this action originates in both cases.
For the animal and for man this realm is situated within their organ-
isms because in addition to their individual physical and etheric
organizations they are endowed also with an individual organization
of the higher kind. Not so with the plant. For the rhythms of its
1 Note how for Ruskin the gulf which for the onlooker-consciousness lies be-
tween subject and object is bridged here—as it was for Goethe in his representa-
tion of the physico-moral effect of colour.
growth, the successive formation of its various organs, the produc-
tion of its colours, etc., the plant depends on outer conditions.
What strikes us first in this respect is the plant's dependence on the
succession of the seasons. These in turn are an outcome of the chang-
ing mutual positions of earth and sun. That which forms part of the
individual organism in higher living beings is located in the cosmic
surroundings of the plant. In fact, it is our planetary system
which provides the forces that stir the etheric and physical forces of
the earth to their various interactions, thus bringing about all the
manifold secondary polarities.
*
Before we embark on a description of further phenomena which
testify to the cosmic nature of the forces with which we are here con-
cerned, it will be well (following a principle applied before) to estab-
lish the historical antecedents of the conception of the universe we
are about to develop.
We realize that the type of force with which we are here seeking to
become familiar is the one responsible for the existence of what we
commonly call 'soul'. The creation of a body-bound soul, however, is
only one particular form of the activity of these forces. Another is
the one which we have just seen manifest in the plant. In yet another
way the same forces function as movers and stirrers of the macro-
telluric processes of the earth, and beyond this of the happenings in
the body of our planetary system, including the movements of the
various planets.
This is an aspect which was by no means unfamiliar to ancient
man. It was naturally lost when the onlooker-consciousness awoke.
In this respect it is of historical significance that the same man, G. A.
Borelli (1608-79), a member of the Florentine Academy, who was the
first to inquire into the movements of the animal and human body
from a purely mechanical point of view, made the first attempt to
deduce the planetary movements from a purely physical cause.1
Through this fact an impulse comes to expression which we may
term Contra Animam, and against which we have to put our Pro
Anima, in much the same way that we put our Pro Levitate against
the Contra Levitatem call of the Florentine Academicians.
*
1 De motu animalium and Theoria mediceorum planetarum ex causis physicis
deducta.
It will help our further descriptions if we introduce at this point the
name which Rudolf Steiner adopted for the type of forces we are
concerned with here. In view of the fact that their origin lies in the
extra-terrestrial realm of the universe, he called them 'astral' forces,
thereby giving back to this term, also, its true and original meaning.
It is under this name that we shall speak of them henceforth. To make
ourselves more familiar with the character of the astral forces, it will
be well to observe them first of all in their macrotelluric form of
activity.
There is, as already mentioned, the rhythmic occurrence of the
seasons in connexion with the varying relative positions of earth and
sun. Alongside this we may put the rhythm of the tides, coincident
with the phases of the moon. Just as the solar rhythm manifests in an
alternating rise and fall of the saps in the plants, so also does the
lunar rhythm.1 (Note how this fact actually vitiates the usual explana-
tion that the tidal rhythm of the sea is caused by a gravitational pull
exerted by the moon's body on the oceanic water.) In neither instance
is the change of position of the relevant cosmic body—in our examples
that of the sun or moon in relation to the earth—the 'cause' of the
corresponding rhythmic events on the earth. Together with all other
rhythmic events of equal periodicity, it is itself the effect of the
activity of a force-sphere constituting the cosmic realm to which the
relevant planetary body belongs.
From this statement three major questions arise, which need to be
answered before we can carry on our description of the astral forces
themselves:
Firstly, by the way we have spoken of the varying relations of the
sun and moon to the earth, seeing in them the effects of certain astral
activities, we have treated them as if they were of like nature, namely,
resulting from a movement of the relevant heavenly body round the
earth. According to the Copernican conception, however, only the
moon rotates round the earth, whereas the apparent yearly progres-
sion of the sun is actually caused by the earth's motion round the sun.
This raises the question of how far the Copernican, heliocentric
aspect is valid in a science which strives to embrace the astral realm
of the universe in its inquiries.
1 Knowledge of this biological rhythm is still preserved among native peoples
to-day and leads them to take account of the phases of the moon in their treat-
ment of plants. A cosmic nature-wisdom of this kind has been reopened for us in
modern form by Rudolf Steiner, and has since found widespread practical
application in agriculture. See L. Kolisko, The Moon and Plant Growth.
Secondly, what roles do the other members of our planetary system
play as compared with those of the sun and the moon?
Thirdly, if it is true that the essential solar and lunar effects—and
presumably the effects of the other planets—on the earth do not
spring from physical influence exerted by the visible bodies of the
planets concerned, but from certain astral force-fields of which these
bodies themselves form part, what is the significance of such a body
within the planet's dynamic whole?
Starting with the answer to the first question, we shall quote the
following passage from a lecture on theoretical physics given by Pro-
fessor Planck in 1909 at the Columbia University, New York:
'Only the hypothesis of the general value of the principle of Rela-
tivity in mechanics could admit the Copernican system into physics,
since this principle guarantees the independence of all processes on
the earth from the progressive motion of the earth. For, if we had to
make allowance for this motion, then I should, for instance, have to
reckon with the fact that the piece of chalk in my hand possesses the
enormous kinetic energy corresponding to a velocity of about 30
km/sec.'
The implications for us of these remarks by an eminent physicist
can be expressed as follows:
In a science which knows how to deal with movement as an event
of absolute dynamic reality, the Copernican aspect loses its signifi-
cance as the only valid aspect of our cosmic system. For its applica-
tion as a means of describing the dynamic happenings within this
system presupposes the acceptance of Einstein's relativistic concep-
tion of motion. Indeed, for the building up of a picture of the dyna-
mic structure of our system, the Copernican view-point is inadequate.
This statement must not be taken to deny all justification to the
heliocentric view-point. There is, after all, the fact that the orbits
which the heavenly bodies appear to follow when viewed in this way,
assume a particular geometrical character which cannot be accidental.
And more than that, when the heliocentric aspect is seen in its true
setting, it forms (as will be shown later) an extremely revealing part
of the script which tells us of the nature of the astral forces. All that
is required is that the heliocentric picture be taken for what it is,
namely, a purely kinematic aspect of the true dynamic ordering of our
cosmic system, which in itself calls for quite other means of concep-
tual representation.
From the point of view of the astral order of the universe, the
earth appears in the centre of a number of force-fields which pene-
trate each other and in their peripheral region extend beyond one
another in accordance with the respective orbits of the various planet-
ary bodies. How many force-fields there are, and what is the respec-
tive character of each, will become clear from the following consider-
ation, which will also provide the answer to the second of our three
questions.
As the originator of the secondary polarities in earthly nature the
astral realm must undoubtedly itself be structured polarically, one
part of it forming the cause of all the happenings by which levity is
brought into interaction with gravity, the other of all the happenings
by which gravity is brought into interaction with levity. There must
be a further part which is responsible for the establishment of the
'mercurial' mean between the two poles of the secondary polarity.
This leads us to a threefold aspect of the astral realm.
Closer inspection reveals a repetition of this threefold order within
each of the two polar regions. In Chapter XII we learnt to distinguish
the material happenings at the two poles of the secondary polarity by
observing their appearance in the plant as 'sublimation', on the one
hand, and 'assimilation' on the other. Of the former process, by
which matter is carried from its gravity-bound to its gravity-free con-
dition, we know that it takes place in three stages, of which the first
implies the lifting of matter from the solid to the liquid condition, the
second from the liquid to the aeriform condition, and the third to the
condition of pure heat. There are three corresponding stages by
which ether becomes susceptible to gravity. It is in their nature that
they are not in the same degree manifest as are their polar opposites.
Still, properly guided observation is able to detect them and enables
us to describe them as follows. At the first stage, ether, which in itself
has a purely peripheral orientation, becomes linked to some all-
relating point; at the second stage, the various ether-activities,
already point-related, are brought into some characteristic inter-
relationship so as to become the cause of a particular formative action
in the material realm; at the third stage, the etheric aggregate thus
organized receives the impulse to link itself with some particular por-
tion of ponderable matter.
In these six forms of astral activity, observation, if guided by
modern spiritual science, recognizes the characteristics of the six
planetary spheres, known as 'Moon', 'Mercury', 'Venus', on the one
hand, 'Saturn', 'Jupiter', 'Mars', on the other. In the same way the
dynamic sphere of the 'Sun' is found to provide the astral activity
which mediates between the two groups of planetary spheres.1 The
following observations may help us to become familiar with the
different modes of activity of the force-spheres.
Let us start with the astral forces corresponding to the three cosmic
bodies nearest to the earth—Moon, Mercury, Venus. Their activity
can be discerned, for example, by watching the successive stages of
plant development—the formation of the sap-bearing parts; the
flower-substance already partly transformed into aeriform condition;
finally the propagating processes which belong essentially to the
sphere of activity of the warmth-ether.2 In the human organism we
find the same sequence in the step-by-step transformation of nutri-
ment right up to the moment when earthly form passes into chaos, as
we learnt previously. The so-called enzyme action, ascribed by physi-
ology to the various digestive juices, is in reality the product of an
activity of the lower part of man's astral organization, for which the
relevant juices exercise the function of physical 'carriers'. In the field
of macrotelluric phenomena, the metamorphosis of the atmospheric
moisture extending beyond the different cloud-stages up to the stage
of pure warmth is an example of the activity of the same forces.
Within all three-stage transitions of this kind, the astral forces con-
nected with the Moon preponderate during the first stage, those
connected with Mercury during the second, those connected with
Venus during the third. We have already come across some examples
of the outstanding share taken by the Moon in the events of the
earth's watery sphere. To these phenomena, which show by their
rhythm their connexion with the Moon, we may add the fertility
rhythm in the female human organism which coincides, not in phase
but in duration, with the rhythm set by the Moon's course in the
heavens. If we consider that the formation of a new human body in
the womb needs the play of formative forces from out of the whole
world environment, and that for this purpose matter must be brought
into a receptive condition for these forces, then we can better under-
1 In the order of names given above we follow the ancient usage for the two
planets nearest to the sun, not the reversed order in which they are used to-day.
This is necessary in a cosmology which aspires at a qualitative understanding of
the universe, in view of the qualities represented by these names. Note also the
absence of the three most distant planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. They are
not to be considered as parts of the indigenous astral structure of our cosmic
system—any more than radioactivity is an original feature of the earth.
2 Note the 'Venus' character of Ruskin's description of the plant's state of
florescence quoted above (p. 336).
stand the preparatory part played by the Moon-forces. In order, how-
ever, that the substance of the female germ should reach that condi-
tion of chaos suitable for embryonic development, there is still
necessary the influence of the supra-lunar astral forces. Entry for
these is provided by the union of the germ-cell with the male sperm-
cell.1
As the three sub-solar planetary spheres are responsible for events
of a 'sulphurous' (radial) character, so are the three supra-solar
spheres responsible for those of a 'saline' (spherical) character. For
example, we meet with Saturn-activity in everything which radiates
from the human head and brings about the hardening both of the
head itself and of the entire skeleton. Observation has shown that,
even if the human being, as usually happens, stops growing in the
early twenties, so that the skeleton undergoes no further lengthening,
it nevertheless reaches its final shape and its final hardening only be-
tween the twenty-eighth and thirtieth years. This is the time in man's
life when Saturn returns for the first time to the position in which it
stood relatively to the earth at his birth, or, more correctly, at his
conception.
If the activity of the Saturn-force is most clearly manifest in the
formation of the hard skull, that of Jupiter, the planet of 'Wisdom',
is shown in the formation of the complicated structure of the brain,
which enables it to co-ordinate the bodily and psychic functions of
the entire man. In the realm of physical nature, man's brain is indeed
the most perfect example of cosmic Intelligence at work in a manner
resembling that activity of human intelligence which one usually
understands by 'organizing'.
In order that Form should come about, the forces of Saturn are
required; for the formative process to take place in Wisdom-filled
order, Jupiter's forces are necessary. If form and order are to become
manifest in the realm of earthly substance, both require the assistance
of Mars. We can best form an idea of the part which Mars contributes
to the coming into being of the world of Form in nature if we observe
1 As to the time-scale of the processes brought about by Mercury and Venus
respectively, experience shows that they reveal the cosmic rhythms less clearly
than those for which the Moon-activity is responsible. The same is found at the
opposite pole. There it is the Saturn-generated processes which show the cosmic
rhythm more conspicuously than those engendered by Jupiter and Mars. To
learn to recognize rhythmic events in nature and man as reflexions of correspond-
ing planetary rhythms is one of the tasks which future scientific research has to
tackle. A practical example of this kind will appear in the further course of this
chapter.
what takes place when we make use of speech as a medium for ex-
pressing our thoughts. In order to be able to shape a thought we have
to participate in the formative force of Saturn. We depend upon
Jupiter to bring about logical connexion between the single thoughts.
To announce them to the world, we need the motive force of Mars,
which enables us so to set external matter in motion that it becomes
a carrier and relayer of our thoughts. (We here touch upon the field
of the acoustic movements of the air which will occupy us more
closely later on.)
Many examples of the activity of the force-spheres represented by
the three exterior planets are to be found also in nature external to
man. From the realm of plant life we may take the woody and bark-
like formation of the trees as representing the operation of Saturn-
forces. Similarly, all that goes on in the organizing of the single leaf,
and particularly in the organization of the countless separate leaves
which make up the foliage of a tree into a unified whole, the charac-
teristic crown of a tree, is an example of the work of Jupiter. Both
activities are assisted by the force of Mars, which directs them from
the cosmic periphery toward the single physical object.
Between the two groups of astral force operating in this manner,
the Sun acts as a mediating element through its double function of
supporting the activity of the three lower planets by means of its heat
and of conveying to the earth, through its light, the forces of the
three higher planets. In the human microcosm the Sun-forces accom-
plish a corresponding task by means of the influences which radiate
from the heart through the body along the paths taken by the blood.
*
In what follows we shall point to a group of phenomena which
show the astral interconnexion between earth and universe; we owe
our knowledge of them to Rudolf Steiner. It is due to him, also, that
experimental research into the relevant facts became possible. They
concern the reflexion of the various planetary movements, observable
in the sky, in the behaviour of certain mineral substances of the
earth.
In connexion with our discussion of electricity (Chapter XIII) we
spoke of the special function of the metals as bearers of the 'mer-
curial' quality (in the alchemical sense of the term). As one of the
characteristics which reveal this function we mentioned the peculiar
capacity of metals to behave as 'solid fluids'. This exceptional place
among the mineral substances of the earth, the metals owe to their
close association with the extra-terrestrial astral forces of the world.
In this field, too, modern spiritual investigation has recovered
something which was known to people of old—that among the metals
there are seven which have a distinctive character, for each stands in
a special relation to one of the seven planets (that is, the planetary
force-spheres) of our cosmic system. This is shown in the following
table:
As compared with these seven, the other metals are products of
combinations of various planetary forces. A comparison of the role
of Saturn as the outermost planet of our cosmic system with the role
played by its metal, lead, as a final product of radioactive disintegra-
tion, leads one to conceive of the radioactive sphere of the earth as
being related especially to the planets outside the orbit of Saturn,
namely, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
Thanks to the work of L. Kolisko who, in following Rudolf
Steiner's indications, observed for many years the behaviour of the
seven metals singly and in combination by submitting their salts to
certain capillary effects, we know to-day that the" earth bears in her
womb substances whose dynamic condition follows exactly the events
in the planetary realm of the universe.1
*
The picture of the universe which has thus arisen before our mind's
eye is a startling one only so long as we keep comparing it with its
heliocentric predecessor. How wrong it would be to regard it as
something inconceivable for the modern mind, is shown by the fact
that the modern physiologist has already been driven to form quite a
similar picture of the human organism, as far as it concerns glandular
action in this organism. His observations have taught him to distin-
1 See L. Kolisko: Working of the Stars in Earthly Substances, and other
publications by the same author.
guish between the gland as a spatially limited physical organ and the
gland as a functional sphere, and to conceive of the latter as the
essential gland. Seen thus, 'the spatial and temporal dimensions of
each gland are equal to those of the entire organism' (A. Carrel).
In this way we come to see the human organism as a realm of inter-
penetrating spheres of distinctive physiological activities. Each of
these activities is anchored somewhere in the physical body by the
anatomically discernible gland-body, and the latter's relationship to
the functional sphere is such that a gland's 'physiological individu-
ality is far more comprehensive than its anatomical individuality'.
We need only translate this statement into its macrocosmic coun-
terpart to obtain another statement which expresses fittingly the rela-
tionship of the visible body of a planet to the functional (astral)
sphere indicated by its orbit. Then we shall say that 'a planet's astral
individuality is far more comprehensive than its astronomical in-
dividuality'.
It should be observed that the step we have here taken, by using a
conception obtained through microcosmic observation to help us to
find the answer to a question put to us by the macrocosm, complies
with one of the fundamentals of our method of research, namely, to
allow 'the heavens to explain the earth, and the earth the heavens'
(R. St.).
* *
*
(b) HEARING AS DEED
In the introductory part of the last chapter we said that we have
the right to employ results of investigation carried out by higher
faculties of spiritual perception without contradicting our principle of
seeking to understand the phenomenal world by reading it, provided
our doing so helps to enhance our own reading activity, and provided
it can be shown that the acquisition of the higher faculties of percep-
tion is a direct continuation of the training we have to apply to our
mind and senses to make them capable of such reading. As regards
the forces of astral character, the first of these two conditions has
been fulfilled by the observations we have already worked through in
this chapter. We have still to show that the second condition is
equally fulfilled.
The faculty of the mind which permits direct investigation of the
astral realm was called (spiritual) Inspiration by Rudolf Steiner, who
thereby restored to this term, also, its proper meaning. We have
already indicated that this faculty resides in the sense of hearing in
the same way that the faculty of Imagination—as we have found—
resides in the sense of seeing. In order to understand why it is this
particular sense which comes into consideration here, we have to
consider that the phenomena through which the astral world mani-
fests most directly are all of a rhythmic nature. Now, the sense
through which our soul penetrates with direct experience into some
outer rhythmic activity is the sense of hearing, our aural perceptions
being conveyed by certain rhythmic movements of the air. In what
follows we shall see how the study of both the outer acoustic pheno-
mena and our own psycho-physical make-up in the region of the
acoustic sense, leads to an understanding of the nature of Inspiration
and of how it can be trained.
*
Among all our sense-perceptions, sound is unique in making itself
perceptible in two quite different ways—via the ear as a direct sense
experience and via the eye (potentially also via the senses of touch
and movement) in the form of certain mechanical movements, such
as those of a string or a tuning fork. Hence the world-spectator, as
soon as he began to investigate acoustic phenomena scientifically,
found himself in a unique position. In all other fields of perception,
with the exception of the purely mechanical processes, the transition
to non-stereoscopic colourless observation had the effect that the
world-content of the naive consciousness simply ceased to exist,
leaving the ensuing hiatus to be filled in by a pattern of imagined
kinematic happenings—for example, colour by 'ether'-vibrations,
heat by molecular movements. Not so in the sphere of acoustics. For
here a part of the entire event, on account of its genuine kinetic
character, remains a content of actual observation.
In consequence, the science of acoustics became for the scientific
mind of man a model of the required division between the 'subjective'
(that is, for scientific considerations non-existent) and the 'objective'
(that is, the purely kinematic) part of observation. The field of aural
perception seemed to justify the procedure of collecting a mass of
phenomena, stripped of all that is experienced by man's soul in meet-
ing them, and of assembling them under a purely abstract concept,
'sound'.
Professor Heisenberg, in his lecture (quoted at the beginning of
Chapter II) on the way in which the scientific interrogation of nature
has deliberately limited itself, draws attention to the fact that a full
knowledge of the science of optics in its present form might be
acquired merely through theoretical study by one born blind, yet
without his ever getting to know what light is. Heisenberg could, of
course, have said the same of the science of acoustics in regard to one
born deaf. But we can go a step further by asking how far a deaf and
a blind person could get towards establishing the respective science.
The answer must be that, whereas the person lacking sight would not
of himself be in a position to establish a science of optics, it would be
well within the scope of the deaf man to establish a science of acous-
tics. For all the processes essential to a physical acoustics are access-
ible to the eye and other senses.
In order to make our experience of hearing a finger-post pointing
the way to an understanding of the faculty of Inspiration innate in
man, we must first of all seek to transform acoustics from a 'deaf
into a 'hearing' science, just as Goethe turned the theory of colour
from a colour-blind into a colour-seeing science.
*
Following our procedure in the case of optics, we select from the
total field of acoustic phenomena a defined realm specially suited to
our purpose. As it was then the spectrum, so it will be now the so-
called quality of sound, or tone-colour.
By this term in acoustics is understood a property possessed by
sound apart from pitch and volume, and dependent on the nature of
the source from which a tone is derived. It is the tone-colour by
which the tone of a violin, for instance, is distinguished from a tone
of equal intensity and pitch produced by a flute. Similarly, two
musical instruments of the same kind are distinguished from each
other by tone-colour.
Tone-colour plays a specially significant part in human and animal
voices. Not only has each individual voice its unique colour, but the
colour varies in one and the same person or animal, according to the
prevailing mood. Moreover, by uttering the various vowels of his
language, man is able to impart varying colour to the sounds of his
speech. For the difference we experience when a tone is sung on the
vowel 'a' or the vowel 'e', etc., derives from the particular colour
given by the vowel to that tone.
Among the discoveries of the last century in the realm of acoustics,
there is one which especially helped to establish a purely kinematic
conception of sound. Helmholtz showed that tones which to our ears
seem to have a clear and definite pitch may be split up by a series of
resonators into a number of different tones, each of them sounding at
a different pitch. The lowest of these has the pitch which our ears
attach to the entire tone. Thus in any ordinary tone there may be dis-
tinguished a 'fundamental' tone and a series of 'overtones'. Helm-
holtz further showed that the particular series of overtones into which
a tone can be resolved is responsible for the colour of that tone as a
whole. Naturally, this meant for the prevailing mode of thinking that
the experience of the colour of a tone had to be interpreted as the
effect of a kind of acoustical adding together of a number of single
tone perceptions (very much as Newton had interpreted 'white' light
as the outcome of an optical adding together of a certain number of
single colour perceptions).
The picture becomes different if we apply to the aural experience
Goethe's theorem that, in so far as we are deluded, it is not by our
senses but by our own reasoning. For we then realize that sounds
never occur of themselves without some tone-colour, whilst physic-
ally 'pure' tones—those that represent simple harmonic motions—
exist only as an artificial laboratory product. The colour of a tone,
therefore, is an integral part of it, and must not be conceived of as an
additional attribute resulting from a summing up of a number of
colourless tone experiences.
Further, if we compare our experiences of the two kinds of tone,
they tell us that through the quality or colour of the natural tone
something of a soul-nature, pleasant or unpleasant, speaks to us,
whereas 'pure' tones have a soulless character.
Resolving normal tones by Helmholtz's method (useful as it is for
certain purposes) amounts to something like dissecting a living, en-
souled organism into its members; only the parts of the corpse
remain in our hands.
*
Having thus established that the psychic content of aural experi-
ence forms an integral part of the tone-phenomenon as such, we must
seek to understand how the kinetic process which is indispensable for
its appearance comes to be the vehicle for the manifestation of 'soul'
in the manner described.
To this end we must first of all heed the fact that the movement
which mediates aural sensation is one of alternating expansion and
contraction. Expressed in the language of the four Elements, this
means that the air thus set in vibration approaches alternately the
condition of the watery element beneath it and of the element of fire
(heat) above it. Thus, in a regular rhythm, the air comes near the
border of its ponderable existence. Purely physical considerations
make us realize that this entails another rhythmic occurrence in the
realm of heat. For with each expansion of the air heat is absorbed by
it and thereby rendered space-bound, while with every contraction of
the air heat is set free and returns to its indigenous condition—that is,
it becomes free from spatial limitations.
This picture of the complete happenings during an acoustic event
enables us to understand how such a process can be the vehicle for
conveying certain astral impulses in such a way that, when met by
them, we grow aware of them in the form of a direct sensation. Tak-
ing as a model the expression 'transparent' for the perviousness of a
substance to light, we may say that the air, when in a state of acoustic
vibration, becomes 'trans-audient' for astral impulses, and that the
nature of these vibrations determines which particular impulses are
let through.
What we have here found to be the true role of the kinetic part of
the acoustic process applies equally to sounds which are emitted by
living beings, and to those that arise when lifeless material is set
mechanically in motion, as in the case of ordinary noises or the
musical production of tone. There is only this difference: in the first
instance the vibrations of the sound-producing organs have their
origin in the activity of the astral part of the living being, and it is this
activity which comes to the recipient's direct experience in the form
of aural impressions; in the second instance the air, by being brought
externally into a state of vibration, exerts a kind of suction on the
astral realm which pervades the air, with the result that parts of this
realm become physically audible. For we are constantly surrounded
by supersensible sounds, and the state of motion of the air determines
which of them become perceptible to us in our present state of con-
sciousness.
At this point our mind turns to a happening in the macrotelluric
sphere of the earth, already considered in another connexion, which
now assumes the significance of an ur-phenomenon revealing the
astral generation of sound. This is the thunder-storm, constituted for
our external perception by the two events: lightning and thunder.
Remembering what we have found earlier (Chapter X) to be the
nature of lightning, we are now in a position to say: a supraterrestrial
astral impulse obtains control of the earth's etheric and physical
spheres of force in such a way that etheric substance is thrown into
the condition of space-bound physical matter. This substance is con-
verted by stages from the state of light and heat via that of air into
the liquid and, in certain cases, into the solid state (hail). To this we
now add that, while in lightning the first effect of the etheric-physical
interference of the astral impulse appears before our eyes, our ears
give us direct awareness of this impulse in the form of thunder. It is
this fact which accounts for the awe-inspiring character of thunder-
storms.
*
The picture we have thus received of the outer part of the acoustic
process has a counterpart in the processes inside the organ of hearing.
Hearing, like seeing, depends upon the co-operation of both poles
of the human organism—nerve and blood. In the case of hearing,
however, they play a reversed role. In the eye, the primary effect of
light-impressions is on the nervous part; a secondary response to
them comes from the blood organization. In the ear, the receptive
organ for the astral impulses pressing in upon it is a part which be-
longs to the body's limb system, while it is the nervous organization
which functions as the organ of response. For in the ear the sound-
waves are first of all taken over by the so-called ossicles, three small
bones in the middle ear which, when examined with the Goethean
eye, appear to be a complete metamorphosis of ah arm or a leg. They
are instrumental in transferring the outer acoustic movements to the
fluid contained in the inner ear, whence these are communicated to
the entire fluid system of the body and lastly to the muscular system.1
We shall speak of this in detail later on. Let it be stated here that the
peculiar role played by the larynx in hearing, already referred to by us
in Chapter XVI, is one of the symptoms which tells of the participa-
tion of the muscular system in the internal acoustic process.
Psychologically, the difference between ear and eye is that aural
perceptions work much more directly on the human will—that is, on
the part of our astral organization connected with the limb system.
Whereas eye-impressions stimulate us in the first place to think, ear-
1 The close connexion between the ear and the motor system of the body is
shown in another way by the fact that part of the ear serves as an organ for the
sense of balance.
impressions stimulate us to ... dance. The whole art of dancing, from
its original sacred character up to its degenerate modern forms, is
based upon the limb system being the recipient of acoustic impressions.
In order to understand how the muscles respond to the outer astral
impulses which reach us through our ear, we must first understand
what happens in the muscles when our will makes use of them for
bodily motion. In this case, too, the muscular system is the organ
through which certain astral impulses, this time arising out of the
body's own astral member, come to expression. Moreover, the move-
ment of the muscles, though not outwardly perceptible, is quite similar
to acoustic movements outside the body. For whenever a muscle is
caused to alter its length, it will perform some kind of vibration—a
vibration characterized even by a definite pitch, which differs in dif-
ferent people. Since throughout life our body is never entirely with-
out movement, we are thus in a constant state of inward sounding.
The muscular system is capable of this vibration because during the
body's initial period of growth the bones increase in length to a much
greater extent than do the sinews and muscles. Hence the latter arrive
at a condition of elastic tension not unlike that of the strings of a
musical instrument.i
In the case of bodily movement, therefore, the muscles are tone-
producers, whereas in acoustic perceptions they are tone-receivers.
What, then, is it that prevents an acoustic perception from actually
setting the limbs in motion, and, instead, enables our sentient being
to take hold of the astral impulse invading our muscles?
This impediment comes from the contribution made by the nervous
system to the auditory process. In order to understand the nature of
this contribution we must remember the role played by the blood in
seeing. It was found by us to consist in the bringing about of that
state of equilibrium without which we should experience light merely
as a pain-producing agent. Similarly, the perception of sound re-
quires the presence of a certain state of equilibrium between the
nerve-system and the limb-system. In this case, however, a lack of
1 The muscle-tone can be made audible by the following means. In a room
guarded against noise, press the thumbs lightly upon the ears and tense the
muscles of the hands and arms—say by pressure of the fingers against the palms
or by contracting the muscle of the upper arms. If this is done repeatedly, the
muscle-tone will be heard after some practice with increasing distinctness. It is
easily distinguished from the sound of the circulating blood as it is much higher.
(As an example: the author's muscular pitch, not a particularly high one, has a
frequency of approx. 630 per sec., which puts it between Treble D sharp and E.)
equilibrium would result not in pain, but in ecstasy. For if acoustic
impressions played directly into our limb-system, with nothing to
hold them in check, every tone we encounter would compel us to an
outward manifestation of astral activity. We should become part of
the tone-process itself, forced to transform it by the volitional part of
our astral organization into spatial movement. That this does not
happen is because the participation of the nervous system serves to
damp down the potential ecstasy. Hence it is more or less left to the
sentient part of the astral organization—that is, the part free from the
physical body—to partake in the astral processes underlying the tone
occurrences.
*
Our discussion has reached a point where we are able to answer a
question which first arose in the course of our study of the four
ethers, and which arises here anew.
In studying the chemical or sound ether we were faced with the
fact that part of the etheric realm, although in itself accessible to the
spiritual part of the sense of sight, offers supersensible experience
comparable to the perception of sound. Conversely, we are now met
by the fact that it is spiritual hearing which gives access to the im-
mediate perception of a realm of forces which is not only the source
of acoustic phenomena, but the origin of all that manifests in nature
in the form of sulphurous, saline and mercurial events, such as the
world of colours, electricity, magnetism, the manifold rhythmic
occurrences on the earth (both taken as a whole .and in single organ-
isms), etc.—all of which are taken hold of by quite other senses than
that of hearing.
At our first encounter with this problem we remarked that in the
supersensible no such sharp distinctions exist between different sense-
spheres as are found in body-bound sense-perception. At the same
time we remembered that even in physical perception we are inclined
to attach acoustic attributes to colours and optical attributes to
tones. In fact, it was precisely an instance of this kind of experience,
namely, our conception of tone-colour, which gave us our lead in
discussing the acoustic sphere in general. Our picture of the particular
interaction of the two polar bodily systems in the acts of seeing and
hearing now enables us to understand more clearly how these two
spheres of perception overlap in man. For we have seen how the
system which in seeing is the receiving organ, works in hearing as the
responding one, and vice versa. As a result, optical impressions are
accompanied by dim sensations of sound, and aural impressions by
dim sensations of colour.
What we are thus dimly aware of in physical sense activity, be-
comes definite experience when the supersensible part of the senses
concerned can work unfettered by the bodily organ. Clear testimony
of this is again given to us by Traherne in a poem entitled Dumnesse.
This poem contains an account of Traherne's recollection of the
significant fact that the transition from the cosmic to the earthly
condition of his consciousness was caused by his learning to speak.
The following is a passage from the description of the impressions
which were his before his soul was overcome by this change:
'Then did I dwell within a World of Light
Distinct and Seperat from all Mens Sight,
Where I did feel strange Thoughts, and such Things see
That were, or seemd, only reveald to Me…
'…A Pulpit in my Mind
A Temple, and a Teacher I did find,
With a large Text to comment on. No Ear,
But Eys them selvs were all the Hearers there.
And evry Stone, and Evry Star a Tongue,
And evry Gale of Wind a Curious Song.'1
*
We have obtained a sufficiently clear picture of the organization of
our sense of hearing to see where the way lies that leads from hearing
with the ears of the body to hearing with the ears of the spirit,
that is, to the inspirative perception of the astral world.
In the psycho-physical condition which is characteristic of our
present day-consciousness, the participation of our astral organiza-
tion in any happenings of the outer astral world depends on our cor-
poreal motor system being stimulated by the acoustic motions of the
air, or of some other suitable medium contacting our body. For it is
only in this way that our astral organization is brought into the sym-
pathetic vibrations necessary for perceiving outer astral happenings.
In order that astral events other than those manifesting acoustically
may become accessible to our consciousness, our own astral being
1 Compare also the beginning of Traherne's poem Wonder, quoted in
Chapter VI (p. 110), where he says that everything he saw 'did with me talk'.
must become capable of vibrating in tune with them, just as if we were
hearing them—that is, we must be able to rouse our astral forces to an
activity similar to that of hearing, yet without any physical stimulus.
The way to this consists in training ourselves to experience the deeds
and sufferings of nature as if they were the deeds and sufferings of a
beloved friend.
It is thus that we shall learn to hear the soul of the universe directly
speaking to us, as Lorenzo divined it, when his love for Jessica made
him feel in love with all the world, and he exclaimed:
'There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim,—
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay "~ 7 .
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.'
* *
*
(c) KEPLER AND THE 'MUSIC OF THE SPHERES'
'One must choose one's saints .. . and so I have chosen mine, and
before all others, Kepler. In my ante-room he has ever a niche of his
own, with his bust in it.'
This opinion of Goethe's must surprise us in view of the fact that
Kepler was the discoverer of the three laws called after him, one of
which is supposed to have laid the foundation for Newton's mechan-
ical conception of the universe. In what follows it will be shown how
wrong it is to see in Kepler a forerunner of the mechanistic concep-
tion of the world; how near, in reality, his world-picture is to the one
to which we are led by working along Goetheanistic lines; and how
right therefore Goethe was in his judgment on Kepler.
Goethe possessed a sensitive organ for the historical appropriate-
ness of human ideas. As an illustration of this it may be mentioned
how he reacted when someone suggested to him that Joachim Jungius
—an outstanding German thinker, contemporary of Bacon, Van
Helmont, etc.—had anticipated his idea of the metamorphosis of the
plant. This remark worried Goethe, not because he could not endure
the thought of being anticipated (see his treatment of K. F. Wolff),
but because this would have run counter to the meaning of man's
historical development as he saw it. 'Why do I regard as essential the
question whether Jungius conceived the idea of metamorphosis as we
know it? My answer is, that it is most significant in the history of the
sciences, when a penetrating and vitalizing maxim comes to be uttered.
Therefore it is not only of importance that Jungius has not expressed
this maxim; but it is of highest significance that he was positively
unable to express it—as we boldly assert.'1
For the same reason Goethe knew it would be historically unjusti-
fied to expect that Kepler could have conceived an aspect of the uni-
verse implicit in his own conception of nature. Hence it did not dis-
turb him in his admiration for Kepler, that through him the Coper-
nican aspect of the universe had become finally established in the
modern mind—that is, an aspect which, as we have seen, is invalid as
a means of forming a truly dynamic conception of the world.
In forming his picture of the universe, it is true, Copernicus was
concerned with nothing but the spatial movements of the luminous
entities discernible in the sky, without any regard to their actual
nature and dynamic interrelationships. Hence his world-picture—as
befits the spectator-form of human consciousness which was coming
to birth in his own time—is a purely kinematic one. As such it has
validity for a certain sphere of human observation.
When Kepler, against the hopes of his forerunner and friend, Tycho
Brahe, accepted the heliocentric standpoint and made it the basis of
his observations, he did so out of his understanding of what was the
truth for his own time. Kepler's ideal was to seek after knowledge
through pure observation. In this respect Goethe took him as his
model. Kepler's discoveries were a proof that man's searching mind
is given insight into great truths at any stage of its development, pro-
vided it keeps to the virtue of practising pure observation.
It has been the error of Newton and his successors up to our own
day, to try to conceive the world dynamically within the limits of
their spectator-consciousness and thus to form a dynamic interpreta-
tion of the universe based on its heliocentric aspect. This was just as
repellent to Goethe as Kepler's attitude was attractive.
But by so sharply distinguishing between Newton and Kepler, do
we not do injustice to the fact that, as the world believes, Kepler's
third law is the parent of Newton's law of gravitation? The following
will show that this belief is founded on an illusory conception of the
kind we met before. As we shall see, Kepler's discovery, when treated
in a Keplerian way, instead of leading to Newton, is found to be in
1 For the particular reasons by which Goethe justifies his assertion, see his
essay Leben und Verdienste des Doktor Joachim Jungius.
full agreement with the very world-picture to which our own observa-
tions have led us.
*
It is an established conviction of the mathematical scientist that,
once an observed regularity in nature has been expressed as a
mathematical equation, this equation may be transformed in any
mathematically valid way, and the resulting formula will still apply to
some existing fact in the world. On innumerable occasions this prin-
ciple has been used in the expectation of providing further insight
into the secrets of nature. We came across a typical instance of this in
discussing the basic theorem of kinematics and dynamics (Chapter
VIII). Another example is Newton's treatment of Kepler's third law,
or—more precisely—the way in which Newton's law of gravitation
has been held to confirm Kepler's observations, and vice versa,
It will be our task to analyse the Kepler-Newton case on the very
lines of our treatment of the two parallelogram theorems. This analy-
sis will give us insight into a truth which we have to regard as one of
the basic maxims of the new science. It says that whether a given
formula, derived mathematically from one that was first read from
nature, still expresses some fact of nature, cannot be decided by pure
mathematical logic, but only by testing it against truly observable
phenomena.
Through Kepler's third law a certain relation is expressed between
the spatial dimensions of the different planetary spheres and the time
needed by the relevant planet to circle once round the circumference
of its own sphere. It says: 'The squares of the periodic times of the
planets are always in the same proportion as the cubes of their mean
distances from the sun.'
In mathematical symbols this reads:
We shall see later how Kepler arrived at this law. The point is that
there is nothing in it which is not accessible to pure observation.
Spatial distances and lengths of time are measured and the results
compared. Nothing, for instance, is said about the dynamic cause of
the movements. The assertion is restricted—and this is true also of
the first and second law—to a purely kinematic content, and so pre-
cisely to what the earthly onlooker can apprehend.
Now it is said that Kepler's third law is a necessary consequence of
Newton's law of gravitation, and that—since it is based on pure
observation—it therefore establishes the truth of Newton's concep-
tion. In this assertion we encounter a misconception exactly like the
one in the statement that the theorem of the parallelogram of forces
follows by logical necessity from the theorem of the parallelogram of
velocities. For:
(a) The law of gravitation itself derives from Newton's formula
for the centripetal force acting at a point which moves along a circle,
this formula being itself the result of an amplification of the formula
for centripetal acceleration by the factor 'mass' (as if the latter were
a pure number) :
Centripetal acceleration:
Centripetal force:
(b) The formula for centripetal acceleration—and the concept of
such acceleration itself—is the result of splitting circular movement
into two rectilinear movements, one in the direction of the tangent,
the other in the direction of the radius, and of regarding it—by a
mode of reasoning typical of spectator-thinking—as composed of
the two. This procedure, however, useful as it may be for the purpose
of calculation, is contrary to observation. For, as we have pointed
out earlier, observation tells us that all original movement—and
what can be more original than the movements of the planetary
bodies—is curvilinear. No insight into the dynamic reality of cosmic
movement, therefore, can ever be gained by handling it mathematic-
ally in this way.
(c) The transformation of Kepler's formula which is necessary in
order to give it a form representing the nucleus of Newton's formula,
is one which, though mathematically justified, deprives Kepler's for-
mula of any significance as expression of an observed fact. The
following analysis will show this.
Kepler's formula—
may be written also
and this again in the generalized form:
Obviously, by each of these steps we diminish the reality-value of the
formula. In its original form, we find spatial extension compared
with spatial extension, and temporal extension with temporal exten-
sion. Each of the two comparisons is a fully concrete one, because we
compare entities of like nature, and only then test the ratios of the
two—that is, two pure numbers against each other—to find that they
are identical. To compare a spatial and a temporal magnitude, as is
done by the formula in its second form, requires already a certain
degree of abstraction. Still, it is all spectator's work, and for the
spectator time is conceivable and measurable only as a rate of spatial
displacement. Hence the constant number c, by representing the
ratio between the spatial extension of the realm inside a planet's orbit
and the time needed by it to perform one round on this orbit—a
ratio which is the same for all planets—represents a definite structural
element of our cosmic system.
By this last operation our equation has now achieved a form which
requires only one more transformation to bring it into line with
Newton's formula.
Instead of writing:
we write:
All that now remains to be done amounts to an amplification of this
equation by the factor 4π2m, and a gathering of the constant product
4π2c under a new symbol, for which we choose the letter f. In this
way we arrive at:
and finally :
which is the expression of the gravitational pull believed to be exerted
by the sun on the various planetary bodies.
Nothing can be said against this procedure from the point of view
of mathematical logic. For the latter the equation
is still an
expression of Kepler's observation. Not so for a logic which tries to
keep in touch with concrete reality. For what meaning, relevant to
the phenomenal universe as it manifests in space and time to physical
perception, is there in stating—as the equation in this form does—
that: the ratio between a planet's distance from the sun and the
square of its period is always proportional to the reciprocal value of
the area lying inside its orbit?
*
Once we have rid ourselves of the false conception that Kepler's
law implies Newton's interpretation of the physical universe as a
dynamic entity ruled by gravity, and gravity alone, we are free to ask
what this law can tell us about the nature of the universe if in examin-
ing it we try to remain true to Kepler's own approach.
To behave in a Keplerian (and thus in a Goethean) fashion regard-
ing a mathematical formula which expresses an observed fact of
nature, does not mean that to submit such a formula to algebraic
transformation is altogether impermissible. All we have to make sure
of is that the transformation is required by the observed facts them-
selves : for instance, by the need for an even clearer manifestation of
their ideal content. Such is indeed the case with the equation which
embodies Kepler's third law. We said that in its original form this
equation contains a concrete statement because it expresses compari-
sons between spatial extensions, on the one hand, and between tem-
poral extensions, on the other. Now, in the form in which the spatial
magnitudes occur, they express something which is directly conceiv-
able. The third power of a spatial distance (r3) represents the measure
of a volume in three-dimensional space. The same cannot be said of
the temporal magnitudes on the other side of the equation (/2). For
our conception of time forbids us to connect any concrete idea with
'squared time'. We are therefore called upon to find out what form
we can give this side of the equation so as to express the time-factor
in a manner which is in accord with our conception of time, that is, in
linear form.1 This form readily suggests itself if we consider that we
have here to do with a ratio of squares. For such a ratio may be
resolved into a ratio of two simple ratios.
In this way the equation—
assumes the form—
1 The natural question why Kepler himself did not take this step, will be
answered later on.
The right-hand side of the equation is now constituted by the double
ratio of the linear values of the periods of two planets, and this is
something with which we can connect a quite concrete idea.
To see this, let us choose the periods of two definite planets—say,
Earth and Jupiter. For these the equation assumes the following
form ('J' and 'E' indicating 'Jupiter' and 'Earth' respectively):
Let us now see what meaning we can attach to the two expressions
During one rotation of Jupiter round the sun the earth circles 12
times round it. This we are wont to express by saying that Jupiter
needs 12 earth-years for one rotation; in symbols:
To find the analogous expression for the reciprocal ratio:
we must obviously form the concept 'Jupiter-year', which covers one
rotation of Jupiter, just as the concept 'earth-year' covers one rota-
tion of the earth (always round the sun). Measured in this time-scale,
the earth needs for one of her rotations—of a Jupiter-year.
With the help of these concepts we are now able to express the
double ratio of the planetary periods in the following simplified way.
If we suppose the measuring of the two planetary periods to be car-
ried out not by the same time-scale, but each by the time-scale of the
other, the formula becomes:
Interpreted in this manner, Kepler's third law discloses an intimate
interrelatedness of each planet to all the others as co-members of the
same cosmic whole. For the equation now tells us that the solar times
of the various planets are regulated in such a way that for any two of
them the ratio of these times, measured in their mutual time-units, is
the same as the ratio of the spaces swept out by their (solar) orbits.
Further, by having the various times of its members thus tuned to
one another, our cosmic system shows itself to be ordered on a prin-
ciple which is essentially musical. To see this, we need only recall that
the musical value of a given tone is determined by its relation to
other tones, whether they sound together in a chord, or in succession
as melody. A 'C' alone is musically undefined. It receives its character
from its interval-relation to some other tone, say, 'G', together with
which it forms a Fifth. As the lower tone of this intveral, 'C' bears a
definite character; and so does 'G' as the upper tone.
Now we know that each interval represents a definite ratio be-
tween the periodicities of its two tones. In the case of the Fifth the
ratio is 2 : 3 (in the natural scale). This means that the lower tone
receives its character from being related to the upper tone by the
ratio 2:3. Similarly, the upper tone receives its character from the
ratio 3 : 2. The specific character of an interval arising out of the
merging of its two tones, therefore, is determined by the ratio of their
ratios. In the case of the Fifth this is 4 : 9. It is this ratio, therefore,
which underlies our experience of a Fifth.
The cosmic factor corresponding to the periodicity of the single
tone in music is the orbital period of the single planet. To the musical
interval formed by two tones corresponds the double ratio of the
periods of any two planets. Regarded thus, Kepler's law can be
expressed as follows: The spatial ordering of our planetary system is
determined by the interval-relation in which the different planets stand
to each other.
By thus unlocking the ideal content hidden in Kepler's third law,
we are at the same time enabled to do justice to the way in which he
himself announced his discovery. In textbooks and encyclopaedias it
is usually said that the discovery of the third law was the surprising
result of Kepler's fantastic attempt to prove by external observation
what was once taught in the school of Pythagoras, namely, that (in
Wordsworth's language):
'By one pervading spirit
Of tones and numbers all things are controlled.'
Actually, Kepler's great work, Harmonices Mundi, in the last part of
which he announces his third law, is entirely devoted to proving the
truth of the Pythagorean doctrine that the universe is ordered accord-
ing to the laws of music. This doctrine sprang from the gift of spiri-
tual hearing still possessed by Pythagoras, by which he could perceive
the harmonies of the spheres. It was the aim of his school to keep this
faculty alive as long as possible, and with its aid to establish a com-
municable world-conception. The Pythagorean teaching became the
foundation of all later cosmological thinking, right up to the age
which was destined to bring to birth the spectator-relationship of
man's consciousness with the world. Thus it was left to Copernicus to
give mankind the first truly non-Pythagorean picture of the universe.
When Kepler declared himself in favour of the heliocentric aspect,
as indicated by Copernicus, he acknowledged that the universe had
grown dumb for man's inner ear. Yet, besides his strong impulse to
meet the true needs of his time, there were inner voices telling him of
secrets that were hidden behind the veil woven by man's physical per-
ceptions. One of these secrets was the musical order of the world.
Such knowledge, however, could not induce him to turn to older
world-conceptions in his search for truth. He had no need of them,
because there was yet another voice in him which told him that the
spiritual order of the world must somehow manifest itself in the body
of the world as it lay open to physical perception. Just as a musical in-
strument, if it is to be a perfect means of bringing forth music, must
bear in its build the very laws of music, so must the body of the uni-
verse, as the instrument on which the harmonies of the spheres play
their spiritual music, bear in its proportions a reflexion of these har-
monies. Kepler was sure that investigation of the world's body, pro-
vided it was carried out by means of pure observation, must needs
lead to a re-establishment of the ancient truth in a form appropriate
to the modern mind. Thus Kepler, guided by an ancient spiritual
conception of the world, could devote himself to confirming its truth
by the most up-to-date methods of research. That his search was not
in vain, our examination of the third law has shown.
One thing, however, remains surprising—that Kepler announced
his discovery in the form in which it has henceforth engraved itself in
the modern mind, while refraining from that analysis of it which we
have applied to it here. Yet, in this respect also Kepler proves to have
remained true to himself. There is, on the one hand, the form in
which Kepler pronounced his discovery; there is, on the other, the
context in which he made this pronouncement. We have already
pointed out that the third law forms part of Kepler's comprehensive
work, Harmonices Mundi. To the modern critic's understanding it
appears there like an erratic block. For Kepler this was different.
While publishing his discovery in precisely the form in which it is
conceived by a mind bent on pure observation, he gave it a setting by
which he left no doubt as to his own conception of its ideal content.
And as a warning to the future reader not to overlook the message
conveyed by this arrangement, he introduced the section of his book
which contains the announcement of the law, with the mysterious
words about himself: 'I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyp-
tians from which to furnish for my God a holy shrine far from
Egypt's confines.'
CHAPTER XXI
Know Thyself
Our inquiries have led us to a picture of man as a sensible-super-
sensible organism composed of three dynamic aggregates—physical,
etheric, astral. As three rungs of a spiritual ladder they point to a
fourth, which represents that particular power in man by which he
distinguishes himself from all other beings in nature. For what makes
man differ from all these is that he is not only fitted, as they are, with
a once-for-all given mode of spiritual-physical existence peculiar to
himself, but that he is endowed with the possibility of transforming
his existence by dint of his free will—that indeed his manhood is
based on this capacity for self-willed Becoming.
To this fourth principle in man we can give no better name than
that which every human being can apply to himself alone and to no
other, and which no other can apply to him. This is the name, /. In
truth, we describe man in his entirety only if we ascribe to him, in
addition to a physical, etheric and astral body, the possession of an I
(Ego).
Naturally, our previous studies have afforded many opportunities
for observing the nature and mode of activity of the I. Still, at the
conclusion of these studies it is not redundant to form a concise
picture of this part of man's being, with particular regard to how
it works within the three other principles as its sheaths. For in modern
psychology, not excluding the branch of it where efforts are made to
penetrate into deeper regions of man's being, nothing is less well
understood than the true nature of man's egoity.
*
In order to recognize the peculiar function of the I in man, we must
first be clear as to how he differs from the other kingdoms of nature,
and how they differ from one another with respect to the mode of
action of the physical, etheric and astral forces.
The beings of all the kingdoms of nature are endowed with an
aggregate of physical forces in the form of a material body subject to
gravity. The same cannot be said of the etheric forces. Only where
life is present as an inherent principle—that is, in plant, animal and
man—is ether at work in the form of an individual etheric organiza-
tion, while the mineral is formed by the universal ether from out-
side. Where life prevails, we are met by the phenomena of birth and
death. When a living organism comes to birth, an individual ether-
body is formed out of the general etheric substance of the universe.1
The death of such an organism consists in the separation of the
etheric from the physical body and the dissolution of both in their
respective mother-realms. So long as an organism is alive, its form is
maintained by the ether-body present in it.
Our studies have shown that the plant is not devoid of the opera-
tion of astral forces. In the plant's life-cycle this comes to clearest ex-
pression in its florescence. But it is a working of the astral forces from
outside, very much as the ether works on the mineral. As a symptom
of this fact we may recall the dependence of the plant on the various
outer astronomical rhythms.
It is only in animal and man that we find the astral forces working
in the form of separate astral bodies. This accounts for their capacity
for sensation and volition. Besides the alternation of birth and death,
they experience the rhythm of sleeping and waking. Sleep occurs
when the astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies in order
to expand into its planetary mother-sphere, whence it gathers new
energy. During this time its action on the physical-etheric aggregate
remaining upon earth is similar to that of the astral cosmos upon the
plant.
Again, in the animal kingdom the ego-principle works as an ex-
ternal force in the form of various group-soul activities which con-
trol and regulate the life of the different animal species. It is in the
group-ego of the species that we have to look for the source of the
wisdom-filled instincts which we meet in the single animals.
Only in man does the ego-principle enter as an individual entity
1 The word 'body' is here used in a sense no different from our earlier use of it,
when in connexion with our study of combustion (Chapter XI) we referred to the
'warmth-body' as a characteristic of the higher animals and man. Such a warmth-
body is nothing else but the warmth-ether part of an ether-body. To use the word
body for aggregations of etheric or astral forces is legitimate if one considers the
fact that the physical body also is really a purely dynamic entity, that is, a certain
aggregate of forces more or less self-contained.
into the single physico-etheric-astral organism. Here, however, the
succession of stages we have outlined comes to a conclusion. For with
the appearance of the I as an individual principle, the preceding
evolutionary process—or, more correctly, the involutionary process
—begins to be reversed. In moving up from one kingdom to the next,
we find always one more dynamic principle appearing in a state of
separation from its mother-sphere; this continues to the point where
the I, through uniting itself with a thus emancipated physico-etheric-
astral organism, arrives at the stage of self-consciousness. Once this
stage has been reached, however, it falls to the I to reverse the pro-
cess of isolation, temporarily sanctioned by the cosmos for the sake
of man.
That it is not in the nature of the I to leave its sheaths in the condi-
tion in which it finds them when entering them at the beginning of
life, can be seen from the activities it performs in them during the
first period after birth. Indeed, in man's early childhood we meet a
number of events in which we can perceive something like ur-deeds of
the I. They are the acquisition of the faculties of walking, speaking
and thinking. What we shall here say about them has, in essentials,
already been touched upon in earlier pages. Here, however, we are
putting it forward in a new light.
Once again we find our attention directed to the.threefold structure
of man's physical organism. For the faculty of upright walking is a
result of the I's activity in the limb-system of the body; the acquisi-
tion of speech takes place in the rhythmic system; and thinking is a
faculty based on the nerve-system. Consequently, each of the three
achievements comes to pass at a different level of consciousness—
sleeping, dreaming, waking. All through the struggle of erecting the
body against the pull of gravity, the child is entirely unaware of the
activities of his own I. In the course of acquiring speech he gains a
dim awareness, as though in dream, of his efforts. Some capacity of
thinking has to unfold before the first glimmer of true self-conscious-
ness is kindled. (Note that the word 'I' is the only one that is not
added to the child's vocabulary by way of imitation. Otherwise he
would, as some mentally inhibited children do, call all other people
'I' and himself 'you'.)
This picture of the three ur-deeds of the I can now be amplified in
the following way. We know that the region of the bodily limbs is
that in which physical, etheric and astral forces interpenetrate most
deeply. Consequently, the I can here press forward most powerfully
into the physical body and on into the dynamic sphere to which the
body is subject. Here the I is active in a way that is 'magic' in the
highest degree. Moreover, there is no other action for which the I
receives so little stimulus from outside. For, in comparison, the acti-
vity that leads to the acquisition of speech is much more of the nature
of a reaction to stimuli coming from outside—the sounds reaching
the child from his environment. And it is also with the first words of
the language that the first thoughts enter the child's mind. Nothing
of the kind happens at the first stage. On the contrary: everything
that confronts the I here is of the nature of an obstacle that is to be
overcome.
There is no learning to speak without the hearing of uttered sounds.
As these sounds approach the human being they set the astral body
in movement, as we have seen. The movements of the astral body flow
towards the larynx, where they are seized by the I; through their help
the I imbues the larynx with the faculty of producing these sounds
itself. Here, therefore, the I is active essentially within the astral body
which has received its stimulus from outside. In order to understand
what impels the I to such action, we must remember the role played
by speech in human life: without speech there would be no commun-
ity among human individuals on earth.
An illustration of what the I accomplishes as it enters upon the
third stage is provided by the following episode, actually observed.
Whilst all the members of a family were sitting at table taking their
soup, the youngest member suddenly cried out: 'Daddy spoon . . .
mummy spoon.. ..' (everyone in turn spoon) '... all spoon!'At this
moment, from merely designating single objects by names learnt
through imitation, the child's consciousness had awakened to con-
nective thinking. That this achievement was a cause of inner satisfac-
tion could be heard in the joyful crescendo with which these ejacula-
tions were made.
We know that the presence of waking consciousness within the
nerves-and-senses organism rests upon the fact that the connexion
between physical body and etheric body is there the most external of
all. But precisely because this is so, the etheric body is dominated
very strongly by the forces to which the physical head owes its forma-
tion. This, too, is not fundamentally new to us. What can now be
added is that, in consequence, the physical brain and the part of the
etheric body belonging to it—the etheric brain—assume a function
comparable with that of a mirror, the physical organ representing the
reflecting mass and the etheric organ its metallic gloss. When, within
the head, the etheric body reflects back the impressions received from
the astral body, the I becomes aware of them in the form of mental
images (the 'ideas' of the onlooker-philosopher). It is also by way of
such reflexion that the I first grows aware of itself—but as nothing
more than an image among images. Here, therefore, it is itself least
active.
If, once again, we compare the three happenings of learning to
walk, to speak and to think, we find ourselves faced with the remark-
able fact that the progressive lighting up of consciousness from one
stage to the next, goes hand in hand with a retrogression in the acti-
vity of the I itself. At the first stage, where the I knows least of itself,
it is alive in the most direct sense out of its own being; at the second
stage, where it is in the dreaming state, it receives the impetus of
action through the astral body; at the third stage, where the I wakens
to clear self-consciousness, it assumes merely the role of onlooker at
the pictures moving within the etheric body.
Compare with this the paths to higher faculties of knowledge,
Imagination and Inspiration, as we learnt to know them in our pre-
vious studies. The comparison shows that exactly the same forces
come into play at the beginning of life, when the I endeavours to
descend from its pre-earthly, cosmic environment to its earthly exist-
ence, as have to be made use of for the ascending of the I from
earthly to cosmic consciousness. Only, as is natural, the sequence of
steps is reversed. For on the upward way the first deed of the I is that
which leads to a wakening in the etheric world: it is a learning to set
in motion the etheric forces in the region of the head in such a way
that the usual isolation of this part of the etheric body is overcome.
Regarded thus, the activity of the I at this stage reveals a striking
similarity to the activity applied in the earliest period of childhood
at the opposite pole of the organism. To be capable of imaginative
sight actually means to be able to move about in etheric space by
means of the etheric limbs of the eyes just as one moves about in
physical space by means of the physical limbs.
Similarly, the acquisition of Inspiration is a resuming on a higher
level of the activity exercised by the I with the help of the astral body
when learning to speak. And here, too, the functions are reversed.
For while the child is stimulated by the spoken sounds he hears to
bring his own organ of speech into corresponding movements, and so
gradually learns to produce speech, the acquisition of Inspiration, as
we have seen, depends on learning to bring the supersensible forces of
the speech-organ into movement in such a way that these forces
become the organ for hearing the supersensible language of the
universe.
Our knowledge of the threefold structure of man's organism leads
us to seek, besides the stages of Imagination and Inspiration, a third
stage which is as much germinally present in the body's region of
movement, as the two others are in the regions of thought and speech.
After what we have learnt in regard to these three, we may assume
that the path leading to this third stage consists in producing a con-
dition of wide-awake, tranquil contemplation in the very region
where the I is wont to unfold its highest degree of initiative on the
lowest level of consciousness.
In an elementary manner this attitude of soul was practised by us
when, in our earlier studies, we endeavoured to become inner obser-
vers of the activity of our own limbs, with the aim of discovering the
origin of our concept of mass. It was in this way that a line of obser-
vation opened up to us which led to the recognition of the physical
substances of the earth as congealed spiritual functions or, we may
say, congealed utterances of cosmic will.
Cosmic Will, however, does not work into our existence only in
such a way that, in the form of old and therefore rigid Will, it puts up
resistance against the young will-power of the I, so that in overcom-
ing this resistance the I may waken to self-activity. Cosmic Will is
also present in us in an active form. We point here to the penetration
by the higher powers of the universe into the forming of the destiny of
humanity and of individual man. And here Rudolf Steiner has shown
that to a man who succeeds in becoming a completely objective ob-
server of his own existence while actively functioning within it (as in
an elementary way we endeavoured to become observers of our limb
actions while engaged in performing them) the world begins to reveal
itself as an arena of the activities of divine-spiritual Beings, whose
reality and acts he is now able to apprehend through inner awareness.
Herewith a third stage of man's faculty of cognition is added to the
stages of Imagination and Inspiration. When Rudolf Steiner chose
for it the word Intuition he applied this word, also, in its truest
meaning.
*
While through Imagination man comes to know of his ether-body
as part of his make-up, and correspondingly through Inspiration of
his astral body, and thereby recognizes himself as participant in the
supersensible forces of the universe, it is through Intuition that he
grows into full awareness of his I as a spirit-being among spirit-
beings—
God-begotten, God-companioned,
for ever God-ward striving.
Index
(See also the summary on pp. 7-11)
Aberdeen, 92
Aberration, 287 seq.
Abnormal conditions, 79, 260
Accademia del Cimento, 163, 283,
337
Acceleration, 138 seq., 143
Acoustics, 323 seq., 346 seq.
Adam, G. 130
Adams, 211 n., 214, 220 n., 320 n.
Adaptation, biological, 86, 104;
optical, 260 seq.
After-images, 259 seq., 314
Agnosticism, 68
Aged material, 159, 185
Agriculture, 25 n., 187 n., 327 n.
Alchemy (polarity; triad), 207, 219,
224 seq., 211 seq., 317, 335,
342, 352
Alertness, 148, 152 seq.
Alga, 80, 319
All-embracing plane, 215 seq., 223,
282
All-relating point, 215 seq.
Alpine regions, 77
Amber, 48, 223
Ampere, 229
Anastomosis, 84, 85, 184, 320
Andersen, Hans, see Child
Animism, 34
Anthroposophy, 23, 25, 26, 317 n.
Apparent depth, 271 seq., 293
Appearance, 75, 80
Apple,.163, 178, 328
Archetype, 68, 77
Aristotle, 103, 154
Arm (rising), 151 seq.
Art, 21, 102
Assimilation, 184, 205, 219, 319
Astral, 338 seq.
Atma, 157
Atomic (bomb, energy, etc.), 59,
141, 170, 240
Atomism, 60, 171 seq., 180, 228
seq., 253, 281, 284, 327
Attraction, 226, 232
Augustine, St., 103 seq., 110 seq.
Aurum, 208
Avalanche, 168
Bacon, Francis, 128, 171, 354
Bacon, Roger, 208 n.
Barnes, Bishop, 160 n.
Becoming, 70, 111, 203, 214, 277
Becquerel, 59
Being, 75
Berkeley, 95, 114 seq.
Bible, 162, 165, 303
Bio-dynamics, 187 n., 327 n.
Biology, 80, 82
Black, 253, 268 seq., 274
Blake, 313
Blood, 33, 82, 91, 173, 261 seq., 326,
327, 350
Body, warmth, 192; etheric, astral,
365 seq.
Border, upper and lower, 58, 170,
190, 303
Borderland, 57
Borelli, G. A., 337
Bradley, 285, 287 seq.
Brahe, Tycho, 355
Brahma, 157
Brain, 31 seq., 139
Breath (breathing), 33, 127 seq.,
157, 264
British Association, 56
Butterfly, 75
Büttner, 245
Calcite, 204
Campbell-Fraser, A., 93
Carbohydrates, 206
Carbon, 152, 184, 195, 205 seq.,228
Carlisle, 92 n.
Carpenter, E., 179 n.
Carrel, Alexis, 29, 31, 37, 326, 345
Cassinian curves, 220
Caterpillar, 75
Cathode rays, 54, 58
Causation, magical, 150, 159, 169;
mechanical, 150, 159, 166
Centripetal force, 357
Chance, 43, 159
Chaos, 20, 43, 45, 153, 156 seq.,
170, 219, 254, 319, 342
Chaoticizing ether, 319
Chemical element, see Element
Chemical ether, 323 seq.
Chemical fertilizer, 186 n.
Chemistry, 25, 184, 193 seq., 326
Child, in Andersen's story, 140,
190, 253, 263, 288
to become, 101, 111, 147, 261
behaviour of, 34, 145
in Galileo, 146
nature of, 34, 91, 98, 101, 116,
145, 146, 215, 266, 366
Chladni, 323 seq.
Choroid, 261
Cirrus, see Clouds
Classification, 125
Clouds, 121 seq., 188, 259
Coherence, 235
Cohesion, 222, 225, 228
Co-images, 314
Cold, 154, 162, 172, 198, 249, 274
Colour, 36, 126, 128, 242 seq.
Colour-blindness, 37 n.
Colour circle, 306
Coloured shadows, 270 n.
Combustion, 192 seq., 227
Common sense, 96, then passim
Conductor, 230 seq.
Consciousness, passim
Contra Levitatem, 163, then passim
Contraction (contractedness), 73,
75, 80, 127, 155, 214, 290, 349
Contrast Colours, 263 seq.
Convolvulus, 83
Copernicus, 287
Corrosion, 227
Cosmic consciousness, 109, 216,
353
Counter-space, 210 seq.
Counter-spectrum, 252
Cow, 220
Creation 'out of nothing', 171, 183,
189
Crookes, Sir William, 55 seq., 119,
170, 228 seq., 331
Crystallization, 35, 203
Cumulus, see Clouds
Cunaeus, 49
Curie, 59
Current, 229 seq.
Dalton, 37, 173, 228
Dark, 249, then passim
Darwin, 79, 86, 120, 121
Davy, Humphrey, 173, 195
Death, 31, 55, 57, 183, 365
Deficiency, 184 seq.
Delphinium, 70 seq.
Density, 126, 155, 226, 233, 271
seq., 293, 300 seq., 302
Descartes, 39, 95
Devil, 21
Diagnosis, 30 seq.
Diamond, 207
Diaphragm, 35
Diastole, see also Expansion, 162,
264, 269, 335
Diffraction, 243
Disappearance (of energy), 175,
231 seq.
Discontinuity, 86
Dobell, P., 108, 113
Doing, 72, 73
Double-images, 297
Doubling flowers, 72
Dream (dreaming), 33, 257, 259,
263, 374
Dry, 198, 223, 239
Doubois-Reymond, E., 50 n.
Dufais, 49
Duke of Weimar, 129, 167
Dynamic, Dynamics, 30, 46, 81,
123, 132 seq., 146, 176, 185,
214, 221, 339
Eagle, 220
Ear, 278 (see also Hearing)
Earth, picture of, 158, 181, 238
Earthquake sky, 166
Ebonite, 224
Eckermann, 125, 167, 242
Economic production, 20, 46
Eddington, Sir Arthur, 28 seq., 60,
128, 132, 226, 240, 244, 254,
268, 286, 329
Education, 25, 266
Ego, 364 seq.
Egypt, 363
Einstein, Albert, 23, 141, 151, 156,
210 seq., 285, 291 seq.
Electricity (electrical), 26, 29, 42,
46 seq., 155, 190, 221 seq., 275,
306, 343
Electron, 60, 221
Elements, chemical, 186 seq., 192
seq.;
Four, 153, then passim
Embryonic condition (develop-
ment), 33, 88, 215
Empedocles, 154
έν και παν, 330
Enzyme action, 341
Ether, hypothetical, 291;
real, 318 seq.
Eucledian space, 210 seq.
Eurhythmy, 25
Evolution, 21, 33, 37, 86, 146, 158,
160, 366
Exact sensorial fantasy, 81, 90
Expansion (expansiveness), 73, 75,
80,127,155,172,290; thermal,
176 seq., 214
Eye, 36, 224, 256, 277
Faith, 97
Fango, 166, 202
Fantasy, 41, 81, 82, 90
Faraday, 53, 177, 226
Faust, 28 n., 320, 323 n.
Feeling, 33
Fertilization, 75 seq., 82 seq.
Fertilizer, 186 n.
Field gradient (optical), 299 seq.
Field of Force, 177 seq., 210, 230
Fire, 160, 172, 193, 222; see also
Elements
Fire rites, 161
Fish, electric, 49, 236
Fizeau, 285, 291
Force, experience, 142
Form against, 119, 185
lack of true concept, 29, 136, 141
Parallelogram, 133,1365^.
superphysical, 169
Foregone conclusion, 284 seq.
Form, 70 seq., 78, 119,325
Fortlage, C., 31
Foucault, 285
Fourier, 254
Franklin, 49, 189 seq.
Free Will, 104
French Revolution, 50 n.
Friction, 222, 237
Function, 185, 201 seq.
Fur, 224
Galileo, 42, 132, 136, 146, 215, 283
Galvani (Galvanism), 48 seq., 65,
78, 227, 236, 237
Gas, 153, 157
Gaseous state, 163 seq.
Gaze, active, 271 seq.
Geometry, experienced, 145, 215;
projective (synthetic), 24, 210
seq.
Geometrical concepts, 40
Gilbert, 49
Glasgow, 92
Glass, 224
Gloxinia, 76
Guericke, 49
Goethe, passim
Goetheanum, 23, 187, 233
Gold, 208
Gout, 201
Graphite, 207, 228
Gravity, 123, then passim
Green, 251
Group soul, 187, 365
Group velocity, 286
Growth principles, 83
Guild, 246
Gunpowder, 208
Hahnemann, Dr., 186
Hair, 223
Harmonices Mundi, 361
Hearing, 98, 278, 334
Heat, 134; mechanical equivalent,
174; latent, 180, 222, 233
Heat mantle, 188
Heightening, see Steigerung
Heisenberg, W., 27 seq., 42, 48,
242, 346
Helmholtz, 174, 348
Herder, 79
Hertz, 54
High frequency, 20, 26, 234
Homer, 35
Homoeopathy, 186 seq.
Hooke, Robert, 39 seq., 89, 171
How, 69
Howard, Luke, 118, 121 seq., 174
seq., 188
Hume, David, 41 seq., 61, 66, 93
Huygens, 283, 291
Hydrogen, 171, 206, 276
Hydrodynamics, 229 seq.
Idea, abstract, 88, 94, 95 seq., 315,
368;
concrete, 78, 82, 88, 90, 106, 113,
114, 116, 130, 158, 175
Ideal system, 114
Illusion, 115, 133, 142, 146, 228,
257, 293, 303, 305
Imagination (spiritual), 315, 368
Impressed peculiarity, 286
Indeterminacy, 27, 42 seq.
Induction, 229, 234
Inertia, inertness, 151 seq.
Infinity, 212 seq.
Infra-red, 307
Inheritance, 86, 104
Inspiration (spiritual), 345, 368
Intellect, 65, 68, 99
Intelligence, 47, 97, 118, 132
Intuition, 65, 100, 146, 164, 215,
258, 369
Intuitive judgment, 65, 87
Iris, 303
Italy, 77, 244
Jena, 82, 87, 244
Joule, 173
Julius, Fr., 301
Jungius, J., 354
Jupiter, 285, 340, 344
Kant, 65, 90, 92 seq., 105, 129, 258
Kepler, 354 seq.
Kinematics (Kinetics), 29, 30, 139,
141, 146, 281, 339, 356
Kleist, von, 49
Kolisko, L., 187 n., 338 n., 344
König, Dr. K., 220 n.
Königsberg, 68 n.
Lacey, Norman, 107 n.
Language, 97 seq.
Larynx, 278, 350
Lateral gradient, 300
Lavoisier, 194
Law of Conservation, 176 seq.
Leap, 75, 299 '
Leather, 224
Left-eyed vision, 278
Lemniscate, 220
Lennard, 58
Lens, 244
Levity, 156, then passim
Leyden jar (phial), 52 seq.
Life, passim
Light, inner, 257, 275, 314
outer, 249 seq.
ray, 281
refraction, 281, 292 seq.
velocity, 281 seq.
visibility, 268, 282
Lightning, 51, 162, 189, 275, 349
Linnaeus, 125
Lion, 220
Liquid state, 180 seq.
Lithium, 204
Locher-Ernst L., 211 n., 220 n.
Locke, 95, 104, 106, 172
Lorenzo, 354
Magic (magical), 150, then passim
Magnetism, 53, 155, 231, 238, 306
Malady, 41 seq.
Malebranche, 95
Mallow, 73
Man (threefold), 33 seq., 207, 334,
366
Marconi, 54
Mars, 340
Mass, 58, then passim
Master-eye, 276
Mathematics, passim
Maxwell, 53, 230
Mayer, J. R., 173 seq.
Memory, 36, 71, 81, 90, 109, 146
Mercury, metal, 232, 344; planet,
340; see also Alchemy
Messina, see Earthquake sky
Metabolism (metabolic system), 32,
75, 188, 201, 335
Metals, 227, 344
Metamorphosis, geometrical, 214
of energy, 174 seq.
of heat, 180
of plants, 65,70,76, 319
Meteorology, 118, 188
Michelson-Morley, 285, 291
Microscope, 39, 89
Miracle, 160
Mirror, 274, 367
Moist, see Dry
Molecule, 60, 180, 187
Moon, 338, 340, 344
Motion, movement, 29, 217, 339,
see also Senses
Multiplication, 140, 142
Muscles, 32, 51, 150, 159, 187, 236;
muscle tone, 251
Musschenbroek, 49
Napoleon, 50 n., 131 n.
Negative, avalanche, 168
density, 226, 233, 278, 302
form, 71
material, 60, 226
resistance, 272
space, 306, see also Counter-
space
spectrum, see Counter-spectrum
Needfire, 161
Nervous system, 32, 75, 82, 90,160,
201, 236. 260, 266, 350
Newton, 28, 42, 148, 149, 163, 172,
242, 268, 286, 293, 357
Nicodemus, 111
Nimbus, see Clouds
Nuguet, 297 n.
Number, 175, 328 seq.
Oersted, 53
Oettingen, von, 51 n.
One, 330
One-eyed, colour-blind vision, 30,
then passim
Onlooker, 31, then passim
Open Sesame, 101
Optics, 28, 242 seq.
Order, 325
Ostwald, W., 193
Overcoming, 22, then passim
Oxidization, 205, 227, 326
Oxygen, 194, 206, 232
Padua, 78
Palermo, 79
Paradox (paradoxical), 48, 53, 59,
141, 153, 192, 236
Parallelogram, Theorems of, 133
seq., 215
Particles, 42, 172, 223, 228 237
Pattern, 71
Peach-blossom, 252, 307
Pelagius, 104 seq.
Perception, 81, then passim
Pfeiffer, E., 233 n.
Philosophy, 22, 29, 88, 96 seq., 106
Phlogiston, 194
Phosphorus, 184, 189, 195 seq., 227
Photo-electric cell, 47
Physiology, 22
Physics, 22, 26, 27, 42
Piezo-electricity, 226
Pin-hole Camera, 321
Pink, 77 n.
Pitch, 347 seq.
Planck, 339
Plane at Infinity, 213 seq.
Planetary condition, 180
Planets, 341 seq.
Plato, 103, 106, 116,259
Pliny, 48
Plotinus, 256
Pneuma, 157
Point and Line, 40, 90
Point and Plane, 213 seq.
Point at Infinity, 214
Pointer-reading, 132, 136, 143
Polar-Eucledean Space, 211 seq.
Polarity, passim
Polarization (galvanic), 225
Pollination, 82, 84, 184
Positron, 60, 226
Post-Images, 314, see also After-
images
Poynting's vector, 230
Potentization, see Homoeopathy
Precious stones, 204
Predestination, 104
Pre-existence, 102, 107
Pre-Images, 314
Preservation of species, 120
Pressure, 222, 226
Priestley, 194
Principia, 42
Prism, 244, then passim
Procrustes, 240
Proliferated rose, 77, 79
Psychology, 22
Psychical research, 56
Purple, 252
Pyro-electricity, 226
Pythagorean doctrine, 362
Quicksilver, 199, 227
Quotations:
Augustine, 103
Blake, 313
Campbell-Fraser, 93
Carrel, 29, 31,345
Crookes, 56, 57
Descartes, 39
Dobell, 114
Dubois-Reymond, 50
Eddington, 28, 60, 244, 254
Galileo, 145
Galvani, 50, 51
Goethe, 68, 69, 74, 76, 78, 79, 87,
88, 89, 90, 116, 117, 125, 128,
130, 242, 243, 246, 256, 257,
264, 320, 354
Heisenberg, 27, 28
Howard, 121
Hume, 41
Huygens, 284
John, 112
Kant, 66
Kepler, 363
Mayer, 175
Matthew, 111
Oxford Dictionary, 37
Pelagius, 105
Planck, 339
Reid, 94, 95, 96, 101, 102, 129,
258, 270
Ruskin, 119, 120, 163, 258, 259,
325, 336
Schrödinger, 44
Shakespeare,. 354
Traherne, 109, 110, 111, 112,
113, 353
Van Helmont, 153
Volta, 52, 53
Walsh, 49
Whitehead, 28
Wood, 244
Wordsworth, 107, 334
Radioactivity, 58, 229
Radium, 59, 193
Radius and Sphere, 217 seq., 273
Raffael, 276
Rainbow, 259, 302
Ray, see Light
Rayleigh, 243, 285
Reader (reading) in the Book of
Nature, 78, 90, 118, 121, 122,
125, 164, 165, 176, 177, 209,
256, 266, 282, 313, 317
Recollection, see Memory
Reduction, see Oxidization
Refraction, see Light
Reid, Thomas, 92 seq., 128, 258,
267, 270, 282, 315
Religion, 21
Renunciation, 27, 30
Repulsion, see Attraction
Resin, 224 seq.
Rest, 290
Retina, 260
Rheumatism, 201 seq.
Rhythm (rhythmic system), 33, 73,
335, 342
Rickets, 201
Riemer, 249
Right-eyed vision, 278
Rittelmeyer, Fr., 25 n.
Ritter, J. W., 225
Roemer, 285
Röntgen, 59
Rosaceae, 329
Rose, 72, 77, 79, 80
Royal Institution, 56
Rumford, 173, 195
Ruskin, John, 118 seq., 151, 163,
172, 174, 178, 185, 258 seq.,
264, 282, 304, 321, 325, 336
Rutherford, 240
Salt, see Alchemy
Saturn, 340, 344
Savart, 324 n.
Scepticism, 41
Schelver, 82
Schiller, 87, 246
Schopenhauer, 258
Schrödinger, Erwin, 44
Schwartz, Berthold, 208
Self-consciousness, 366
Sensation, 100, 236, 335
Senses, general, 68, 99
of balance, 350
of movement, 32
of warmth, 134, 136, 171, 180,
270
level of consciousness, 36
Sexuality, 82
Sexual propagation, 104
Shakespeare, 125
Sidalcea, 70
Sight, 36, 255 seq.
Silicon, 224
Silk, 223
Sin, 103 seq.
Sinai, 162, 165, 191
Skeleton, 201, 220
Sleep, 33, 261
Smith, Adam, 92
Snell's law, 295
Snow, 189, 275
Solfatara, 165 seq., 179, 202
Solid state, 177
Sound-figures, 323
Space systems, 211
Spanish Moss, see Tillandsia
Specific gravity, 182
Specific levity, 192
Spectator, as Onlooker
Spectrum, 243, 281
Speech, 97, 367
Sphere, see Radius
Spinoza, 125
Spiral tendency, 83
Spiritual ladder, 182, 189, 314
Spiritual science, 25
Spiritism, 55
Spiritus, 157
Stahl, 194
Steam engine, 47
Steigerung, 74, 120, 250
Stein, Mme. de, 167
Steiner, Rudolf, 19 seq., 31, 32, 92,
108, 187, 210, 249, 266, 297,
305 seq., 313 seq., 327, 338,
345, 369
Stuttgart, 23
Sublimation, 219
Suction, 178, 226, 272
Suess, Eduard, 238
Sugar, 206
Suicide (intellectual), 42
Sulphur, 195 seq., 224
Sun, passim
Superphysical force, 169
Supra-spatial action, 166 seq.
Systole (see also Contraction), 162,
264, 269, 335
Switzerland, 77
Tabula rasa, 104
Telepathy, 58
Terminology, 130
Thermal expansion, 176 seq.
Thermodynamics, 171, 176
Thermometer, 133
Thunderstorm, 167, 189, 349
Tides, 338
Tillsandia, 183, 189
Time, passim
Tissue, 320
Tone colour, 347
Trace elements, 185 seq.
Tragedy, 37, 133
Traherne, 107 seq., 216, 315, 353
Transparency, 204, 207
Transverse impulse, 299
Tree, 81, 179
of Knowledge, 95
Trigonometry, 296
Trübe, 249, then passim
Tunnel, 289
Tyndal, 172
Type, 81, 85, 120, 185, 319
Ultra-violet, 225, 307
Unlogic, 284
Urdeeds, 366
Urforce, 175 seq.
Urimage, 315
Urspace, 214
Urphenomenon, 127, 204, 248
Urplant, 79, 175^.
Valhalla, 303
Van Helmont, 152, 163, 188, 192,
354
Vapour, 153
Velocity, formula, 140
parellelogram of, 136
of light, see Light
Venus, 340, 344
Vertical tendency, 83
Vesta, 161
Vine, 84
Visibility, see Light
Volcanism, 162, 164, 181, 191, 202.
275, 319
Volition, see Will
Volta, 52, 227, 229, 236
Voltaic series, 227
Vowels, 347
Vreede, E., 23 n.
Wade, Gl. I., 108
Waldorf School, 25, 26
Walsh, J., 49, 50, 236
Warm, see Cold
Warmth-body, 192, 365
Water power, 47
Wave-velocity, 285
Weaving, 320 seq.
Wegener, Alfred, 181
Weight, 151, 155, 194
Weimar, 77, 79, 84, 87, 129, 167
White, 268 seq.
Whitehead, A. N., 28, 60, 148
Will, 47, 96,143,145,187,202,236,
350, 369
Wolff, K. F., 88 seq., 182, 354
Wood, 244
Wool, 224
Wordsworth, 107 seq., 334
X-rays, 43, 59
Yoga, 35, 157
Young (youthful) condition, etc.,
159, 165, 172, 185, 187
Zeeman, 305
Zero, 135, 330