Chapter XVIII: The Spectrum as a Script of the…
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 World 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).
Man the Unknown by A. Carrel (Messrs. Hamish Hamilton Ltd.);
The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature of The Physical World 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).
The beginnings of this method were worked out by Goethe more than 150 years ago. The nineteenth century, however, failed to provide 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 development 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.
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.
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 understanding 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 university, 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 piece of experimental research on the uses of high-frequency electric currents.
During my subsequent years of study, 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 influenced 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 symptom 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 implied 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 conviction 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?
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.
‘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’.
‘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 outstanding men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of Newtonian optics.’ There is only one thing for which Heisenberg criticizes 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.2
We mentioned Heisenberg’s speech as a symptom of a certain tendency, characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically its own epistemological foundations. A few years previous to Heisenberg’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 following, because it contains a concrete statement concerning the field of external observation which forms the basis for the modern scientific 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 of visual sensation, colourless and non-stereoscopic’.3 In other words, in 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, concerning 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 discussion 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.
In his isolation as world spectator, the modern philosopher was bound to reach two completely opposite views regarding the objective 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 modern 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 experience 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 universe – 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 scientist 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 microscopic 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 consciousness 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 concepts of point and straight line. Undoubtedly we are able to think these, but the naïve consciousness takes for granted that it also perceives 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 artificially 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 indubitable manner that thinking was entirely divorced from reality. It required only another century for philosophy to draw from this the unavoidable consequence. It appeared in the form of Hume’s philosophic system, the outcome of which was universal scepticism.
The 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.
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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 simultaneously 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 consumption 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 heaped 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 accumulation 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 technology; 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 playing 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 phenomena have become known has played fast and loose with mathematical thinking to an unparalleled degree. To recognize that in this sphere modern science owes its triumphs to a strange and often paradoxical mixture of outer accident and error in human thought, we need only review the history of the subject without prejudice.
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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 overcoming of the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness in science. Goethe’s paper was not destined to raise such a storm as soon followed Galvani’s publication. And yet the fruit of Goethe’s endeavours 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.
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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 maintains 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, proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such) 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 reality 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, according 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 conceive 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 possible 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 inconsistency.
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, however, 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 belongs 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.
In this chapter we shall concern ourselves with a number of personalities 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 stirred by Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, and, like Kant, set himself 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, notwithstanding 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 centuries 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 achievements contained in his first work. It is on the latter, therefore, that we shall chiefly draw for presenting Reid’s thoughts.
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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 Christian, a philosopher, and a man in possession of common sense, Reid had no doubt as to the absurdity and destructiveness of the conclusions 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 imprinted upon the mind, which are called impressions and ideas.
Immediacy of approach to certain essentials of nature as a result of their religious or artistic experience of the sense-world, is the characteristic 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 connexion 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.
‘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.)
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 resemble 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:
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 understanding 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.
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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 position 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 observation. 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 description 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 unveiling of certain illusions which the spectator-consciousness has woven round these two gifts of Galileo. This does not mean that their significance 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 became 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 illusion, 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.
*
In the preceding chapter we gained a new insight into the relationship 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 position, 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 observation. 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 consider 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 interrelated whole, all aggregations of mass are the manifestation of certain 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 aggregation 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 portion of matter.’ This represents a truth if it is taken to describe a certain 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 movement 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 instructive 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 characteristic 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 magnus, English might, much, also master). Henceforth we shall distinguish between ‘mechanical’ and ‘magical’ causation, the latter being a characteristic of the majority of happenings in the human, animal and plant organisms.1
*
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.
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. Further 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.2
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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 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.
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 fundamental change.
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 thinking; 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 themselves, 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. Anyone intending to make a machine must first learn something of mechanics; in the same way, anyone setting out to do something constructive 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 viewpoint 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 conference 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 Relativity’.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 Stuttgart 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 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 human consciousness – a kind of knowing which is on the way from a past pre-mathematical to a future post-mathematical form of cognition. 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 possibilities 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. Moreover, 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 sufficient 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 surprises was Rudolf Steiner’s presentation of Goethe as the herald of the new form of scientific knowledge which he himself was expounding. I was here introduced to a side of Goethe which was as completely unknown to me as to so many others among my contemporaries, 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 with 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 experience 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 knowledge 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 undertake 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.2
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 assembling to discuss matters of concern to the Anthroposophical Movement. 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 development of an understanding of nature of this kind.
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 system that served Einstein to derive his space-time concept. Some of them have been more or less fully worked out, while in certain instances 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
Now, the only sphere of nature-phenomena with a bipolar character 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 weightless electro-negative electrons moving round it.
Once scientific observation and thought are freed from the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness, both gravity and electricity appear 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?’ Instead 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 appearance. 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 processes 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 metamorphosis of the other. Our first task, therefore, will be to try to understand 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 extendedness 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 substance. 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 periphery. 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 inflammable, 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.
‘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 unprejudiced 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 dissections 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 overcoming 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 diffraction grating, invalidate Newton’s idea that the optical apparatus serves to reveal colours which are inherent in the original light. Today it is known that these colours are an outcome of the interference 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: ‘Curiously 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,2 for our present ideas regarding 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.’3 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’.
*
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.
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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 phenomena 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 polarization 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 originally 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
By expressing himself in this way in the Introduction to his Farbenlehre, 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 dealing 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 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 consciousness. 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.
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, wherever 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 synonymous with simple light, in distinction to ‘coloured’ light. And yet this has been customary with scientists from the time of Newton until today, 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 prevailing 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 influence on our consciousness. We feel how the light calls on the consciousness 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 distinct 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 conveying 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 surface 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 precisely 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 consists in a subjective ‘contrast’ impression of the eye – a red surface in red light looking brighter, a green surface darker, than its surroundings, 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 black. 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
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 concepts 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.
*
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 producing 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 reassembling of these parts into a whole. For in reality we have to do with realms of space uniformly filled with light, whether conical or cylindrical 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 consciousness 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-operation 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 between 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.
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 phenomenon 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 overcome 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 direction of the reading gaze differs from the usual one.
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 of force 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.
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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 rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system, as the bodily foundation of three different soul activities. These are the thought-forming activity 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 systems 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 organizations 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 organizations 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 psychical 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 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 picture 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 internal 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.
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 movements, 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 phenomena 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 considerations to show how the scientific mind of man has created for itself the conviction that the part of science occupied with the actions of force 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’.4
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 prevent 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.5
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 understanding. 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.
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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 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 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.
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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‘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.
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.
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 acknowledgment 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 conceptual 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, however, is known to us of all the complex changes which are set into play within the muscles themselves in order to carry out some intended 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 degree 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 processes 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 consciousness 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 between 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 psychological 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 between 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 gradually 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 intensively 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.
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 comparison 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 distinguishable 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 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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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.
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, itself 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.8 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 between 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 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.9
*
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 historical 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 nowadays 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 combines 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.
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 onlooker. 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 pictures ; and man can have no knowledge of any permanent reality outside 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 today. 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.
The conception of Indeterminacy as an unavoidable consequence of the latest phase of physical research is due to Professor W. Heisenberg. 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 conceptual expression in the language of mathematical formulae. Since, however, science was obliged to restrict itself to what could be observed 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 ultimate particles of the physical world which were under observation. In the search for these, guided chiefly by the study of electricity, the physicists 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 wavelength, is immeasurably smaller than the average magnitude of all microscopically visible objects. This ensures that they can be observed 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 directly – 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 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 philosophical 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 quantitative cognition of nature will always have this primitive and discontinuous 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 physics must hold the view that an infinite number of observations cannot 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 fundamentals of Hume’s philosophy. It is just as obvious, however, that the very principle thus re-affirmed at the latest stage of modern physical 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 discovers 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 mistrusts the eye, however, and with the help of the microscope ‘improves’ 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 Schrödinger, is nothing but the exact continuation of Humean scepticism.
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 scientific 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 distinction between them, he refers to the faculty of rubbed amber and of certain pieces of iron to attract other small pieces of matter. It required 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 electricity 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 Dutchmen, Musschenbroek and Cunaeus). The Leyden jar brought electrical 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 Englishman, 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 apparatus, and with the skill to use it.’ (Phil. Trans. 1773.)
Dare one believe that in electricity the soul of nature had been discovered? 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 accustomed 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 connexion 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 Galvani’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 fascinating 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 discharge. At each spark the frogs’ legs twitched. What Galvani saw with his own eyes seemed to be no less than the union of two phenomena, 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 enthusiasm to investigate systematically what accident had thus put into his hands.2 He wanted first to see whether changes occurring naturally 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 enclosed 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 atmosphere. 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 fruitless 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 purposes, 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 managed to keep the frog in continuous rhythmical movement.
Whereas Galvani had been rightly convinced by his earlier observations 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 hypothesis, 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 previously known in allowing for the first time the production of continuous 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 surpasses the virtue and power of these same batteries; as it has no need, like them, of being charged beforehand, by means of a foreign electricity; 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 counterpart 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 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 assumptions 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 interpretations of the phenomenon thus detected show that men were exploring the electrical realm as it were in the dark; it was a realm foreign 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 fundamental 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, however, is characteristic of the realm of nature to which electricity belongs; 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 Marconi 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 Maxwell’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 successors 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 Maxwell to account by exploiting the mechanical working of electricity in power-production, and its similarity to light in the wireless communication of thought, a new field of research, with entirely new practical possibilities, was suddenly opened up in the last third of the nineteenth 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 longing 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 decisive 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.3
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 familiar to science, that Crookes decided to devote himself to this scientific quest. Thus he first came into touch with that sphere of phenomena which is known as spiritualism, or perhaps more suitably, spiritism. Crookes now found himself before a special order of happenings 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 familiar with such things at seances arranged by his mediumistic acquaintance, he began to hope that he had found the way by which scientific research could overstep the limits of the physical world. Accordingly, 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 positively interested in his researches. But his first paper in this field, ‘On Phenomena called Spiritual’, was at once and almost unanimously 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 advance 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 scientifically, so in his subsequent scientific inquiries he was always something 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 phenomena he had observed during his spiritistic investigations. Besides this, there was the fact that light here showed itself susceptible to the magnetic 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 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 bedside 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 consistent 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 mindedness of Crookes that he refused to be held back from what was for him the only possible way of extending the boundaries of science beyond 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, 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 outwardly 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 telekinetic, 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 properties 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 inexplicable 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 experimentalist, not a theorist; his pupils used to say privately that in publishing this discovery of X-rays he attempted a theoretical explanation 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 restricting his cognitive powers to a field of experience in which the concept of force 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 distinguishes 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 consciousness on which it is founded, is impelled always to clothe its ideas in spatial form. Wherever anything in the pure spatial adjacency of physical things remains inexplicable, resort is had to hypothetical pictures whose content consists once more of nothing but spatially extended 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 conceptions, 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 perhaps forgotten that there was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. This question was never answered. No familiar conceptions 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.’4
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 conditions 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.’
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 intended to be a consolation for the bewildered student, it is poor comfort 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.
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.
2 The above account follows A. J. von Oettingen’s edition of Galvani’s monograph, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari.
3 For what follows see The Life of Sir William Crookes, by E. E. Fournier D’Albe (London, 1923).
4 Eddington’s italics. See also, in this respect, Professor White head’s criticism of the hypothetical picture of the electron and its behaviour.
Kant’s deed is significant in that it correctly drew attention to that polar division in human nature which, after all, was already established in Kant’s own time. Kant demonstrated also that to win insight into the ethical nature of man with the aid of the isolated intellect alone implied a trespass beyond permissible limits. In order to give the doing part of the human being its necessary anchorage, however, 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 ecclesiastical 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 Hill2 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 adequately. Thus there was no question for him of any restriction of 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, downwards to unknown senses of his’. Goethe’s path was aimed at wakening 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 introducing Goethe’s method. The following exposition, however, does not aim at rendering in detail Goethe’s own botanical researches, expounded by him in two extensive essays, Morphology and The Metamorphosis of Plants, as well as in a series of smaller writings. There are several excellent translations of the chief paper, the Metamorphosis, 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.3 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 independently of the data used by Goethe himself. Our choice was determined 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 concerned. 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.
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 roundness 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, we receive an impression of these incisions as ‘negative’ forms, because, 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 between the positive and negative forms has changed. A number of incisions, hardly yet indicated in the first leaf, have become quite conspicuous. 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 different 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 following 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 retrogressively, and so repeated forward and backward.
We chose the transformation of leaf forms into one another as the starting-point of our observations, because the principle of metamorphosis 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 transformation 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 different 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 unrest, 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 understanding 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 development: these are the calyx, the stamens, etc., and the seed.
In this succession, Goethe recognized a certain rhythm of expansion 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 metamorphosis 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 perfection. 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 beneath the calyx shows a form that differs little from that of a calyx itself, with its simple sepals. Only in its general geometrical arrangement 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’.4 In the topmost leaf the plant has already achieved something which, along the other line of metamorphosis, 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 between 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 immaterial in the plant may shine through its outer surface.
*
In this ‘climbing up the spiritual ladder’ Goethe learned to recognize one of nature’s basic principles. He termed it Steigerung (heightening). Thus he saw the plant develop through Metamorphosis 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 principle of Renunciation.
In the life of the plant this principle shows itself most conspicuously where the green leaf is heightened into the flower. While progressing 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 principle 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 precondition 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 formation of the flower, but undergo a complete transmutation, not gradually, 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 expansion, the active principle of the plant presses forth into visible appearance; 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 reproduction. In the end, however, nothing appears outwardly so unlike the actual plant as the little seed which, at the expense of all appearance, 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 propagated 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 upward.
A particular observation made by Goethe in this respect is of interest for methodological reasons. In the introduction to his treatise Metamorphosis of Plants, when referring to the regressive metamorphosis of stamens into petals as an example of an irregular metamorphosis, 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 outwardly to the fore in the more balanced condition of normal development, although they are equally part of the regular organic process.
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 number 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.5
*
Goethe’s observation of the single plant in statu agendi had trained him to recognize things of quite different outer appearance as identical 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 observations, 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.
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 member 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 scientific 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 intensely 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 recognized 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 inexpressible.’ 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.6
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 temperate 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 proliferated 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 to 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 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 following, 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 magnificence 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 contrary 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 reproach. 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 misunderstand 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 appearance, is seen to observe the very rule which we have found governing its action in the single plant – that of repeated expansion and contraction.7 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 horsetail) among the cryptogams, as coniferous tree among the gymnosperms, 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 successively 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 principle 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.
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.8 In terms of our knowledge of man’s psycho-physical make-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 process 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 analogous 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 Superintendent 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 pollination, an idea derived from nothing but the two principles of plant life: growth and formation.
Goethe immediately recognized the rightness 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 revolutionary 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 produces 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 different 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 requires 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 vertical 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 vertical and spiral tendencies work together.
In following the two growth-principles, Goethe saw that the vertical 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 reunion 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 coming together of the pollen with the seed, Goethe recognized a metamorphosis 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 characteristic 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 principle. Since in the normal plant both principles are inwardly connected, ‘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’ 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 hieroglyph, what act of the spiritual principle in the plant comes to expression 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 physical 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.
In the case of the plant this discontinuity is achieved by the breaking 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.
Goethe has been honourably mentioned as a predecessor of Darwin. 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 adaptation 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 inheritance Goethe saw single, accessory characteristics of a species being carried over from one generation to the next; but never could the reappearance 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 substance, in the sense of the theory of inheritance, to guarantee a continuance of the features of the species through successive generations, 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 reflexion 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 epistemologically 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 distasteful.
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: ‘I 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 philosophy 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,9 Goethe comments on certain views of the botanist, K. F. Wolff, regarding the relationships between 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 physical form in the seed, and simply grows out into space through physical 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 fundamental principle of all research that ‘nothing may be assumed, admitted 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 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 embryonic 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 seeing, that the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connection 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 microscope (and similarly the telescope), if thinking was not developed correspondingly but left at the mercy of these instruments. His concern over the state of affairs speaks from his utterance: ‘Microscopes and telescopes, in actual fact, confuse man’s innate clarity of mind.’
‘If this be true, supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the existence of anything else; my impressions and ideas are the only existences 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 hypothesis, 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:
‘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 hypothesis, I resolved to enquire into this subject anew, without regard to any hypothesis.’
‘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 I have been deluded; I am ashamed of my frame, and can hardly forbear expostulating 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 forbidden 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 laboured 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 beyond 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 principles 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.’
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 attention 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 common 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 conclusions 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 content 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 knowledge 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, tasting, 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 consciousness 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 intelligence. 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.3
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 sufficient detachment from his own thoughts. As he presents his observations in the Inquiry they seem to be nothing but a systematic description of the five senses, broken into continually by linguistic considerations 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 (keeping 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 variety 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 language. 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 imitation 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 conceptual 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 important 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 definite impoverishment in soul-experience. Reid puts this as follows:
‘It is by natural signs chiefly that we give force and energy to language; 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 continue 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 between 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 intellectual 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 earlier 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 sensations 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 perception, 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, nothing 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 conviction 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 within it. According as one or the other element prevails in man’s intercourse with nature, this intercourse will be either ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ – 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 consciousness turning to the latter and neglecting the actual sound-content 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 naturally 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 usefulness 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 philosophers!’ 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 conception 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 language 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 universally 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 impressions they received in earthly life through the senses (which in any case were far less intense than they are to-day), they remembered experiences 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 transition from the philosophy of Plato to that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato was convinced by clear knowledge that the soul possesses characteristics implanted in it before conception, Aristotle recognized a bodiless 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 required about twice four hundred years – from the fourth pre-Christian 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.
‘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?’4
On the grounds of such experience, Augustine was unable to picture 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 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 inherited 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 specific 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 appearance 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.
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.’
‘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 inheritance, 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 doctrines 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, uncomprehended 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 inability 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 ιδÎα (from ιδεá¿Î½, 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 perception. For Plato, knowing consisted in the soul’s raising itself to perceiving 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 modern 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 implication that an idea is a purely subjective item in human consciousness, 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 expressed himself with far greater exactitude and consistency.5 He was 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.6 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 experiencing, 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!
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!
The fact that Wordsworth in his later years gave no further indication 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.7
*
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 century 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 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 Traherne 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) biography she was able to detect by taking seriously Traherne’s indications 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 manuscripts 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.
‘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.)
‘Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. 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.)
‘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.’8
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.’8
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 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.)
Augustine refers to these words when he concludes that examination 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 humility 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 alteration 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 consciousness of Western Christianity and are usually taken to-day.
‘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 children, 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.)
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 smallness and helplessness of man as such, compared with the overwhelming 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 unbroken 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 receives the natural language of things.)
‘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.
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.”
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.”
The manuscript of this poem shows a small alteration in Traherne’s hand in the second of these two lines. Where we now read ‘true Ideas’, there originally stood ‘fair Ideas’. ‘Fair’ described Traherne’s experience as he immediately remembered it; the later alteration 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.
‘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 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 acknowledged. 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 characteristic 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.)
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 starting-points for our own observation and thought, Howard is concerned 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 leading 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 available. Superficially, it may seem that Howard had done nothing more than science has so often done in grouping and classifying and naming the contents of nature. In fact, however, he did something essentially different.
‘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 condensation 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 represent 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?
*
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 increasingly detailed outer observation. This, indeed, modern meteorology 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 fourfold 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 understanding of nature. Accordingly, he sought for a method of observation in which the practice of ‘the weatherwise mariner and husbandman’ 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):
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, relatively 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 physics, the stratus forms an equipotential surface in the gravitational field permeating the earth’s atmosphere.
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 surrounding 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 buoyantly 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 expansive 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 symmetrical system of forms, within which the two outer, dynamically regarded, represent the extreme tendencies of expansion and contraction, 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.)
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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 Linnaeus’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 position.’ 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.
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‘I compare the earth and her hygrosphere 3 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 (WasserBejahung). 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 (WasserVerneinung). 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 measurements of weather phenomena into their proper order of significance. 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 conditions 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 ‘explaining’ 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 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 observations, 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 phenomenal 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 density decreases with height. Observation of differences in cloud formation 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 alternating with phases of expansion.
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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 (Urphänomen). 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.
‘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-phenomena, 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.4 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 theorize. 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 barometric pressure.
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Once again we find Thomas Reid, along his line of intuitively guided observation, coming quite close to Goethe where he deals with the question of the apprehension of natural law by the human mind. He, too, was an opponent of the method of ‘explaining’ phenomena 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.5
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 phenomena, we may, by induction, trace out general phenomena, of which all the particular ones are necessary consequences.’6 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.’
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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 them coming to immediate expression in human speech.7 He therefore 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 honoured Howard as the first to ‘distinguish and suitably name’ the clouds.8
The reason why Goethe laid so much stress on Howard’s terminology 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 phenomenon 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),9 Goethe called man ‘the first conversation which Nature conducts with God’.