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A characteristic of scientific inquiry, distinguishing it from man’s earlier ways of solving the riddles of the world, is that it admits as instruments 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.

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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 comparison such as the one used here is more than a mere external analogy.)

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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 relationship to the world than that of a spectator. For let us be clear that this peculiar relationship by no means belongs only to the scientifically engaged mind. Every adult in our age is, by virtue of his psycho-physical structure, more or less a world-spectator. What distinguishes the state of man’s mind when engaged in scientific observation is that it is restricted to a one-eyed colour-blind approach.

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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 distinguishable from its environment.

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In the year 1932, when the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary 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 inquiries into outer nature.

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‘Death is the price man has to pay for his brain and his personality’ – this is how a modern physiologist (A. Carrel in his aforementioned book, Man the Unknown) describes the connexion between 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 today to be true) that if ‘partial death’ gave rise to ordinary consciousness, 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.6 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.

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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 independence 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.

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‘Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation, almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints 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’.

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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.

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What we have here described as the emergence of an individual’s intellectual consciousness from the original, purely volitional condition 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.7 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.