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 returned 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.

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.

We refrain at this point from discussing how far a science which aspires to a spiritual understanding of nature, including material processes, 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.

The doubts which have arisen concerning events of this kind have their roots on the one hand in the apparent absence of such occurrences in our day, on the other in the fact that the laws of nature derived by science from the present condition of the world seem to rule them out.⁵ In the light of the concept of the world's 'ageing' which we have tried to develop here, not only do the relevant reports become 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.

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 preference 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 living plant. Ruskin's remark points directly to the new world-conception 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.

There is no record by Goethe himself of the nature of the phenomenon 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 extraordinary character of which made him fear that an earthquake had taken place somewhere. The valet's report makes us inclined to think 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.

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.)

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 illustrate this, let us take a few instances which are symptomatic of the higher degree of youthfulness which was characteristic in former times in particular of the element of Fire.

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 purpose 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.