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Man or Matter

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Title: Man or Matter

Author: Ernst Lehrs


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5641]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAN OR MATTER ***




This eBook was produced by Adam Kane.




MAN OR MATTER

Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature
on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought

by

ERNST LEHRS Ph. D.


Part I

SCIENCE AT THE THRESHOLD

I. INTRODUCTORY

The author's search for a way of extending the boundaries of scientific
understanding. A meeting with Rudolf Steiner, and with the work arising
from his teachings.

II. WHERE DO WE STAND TO-DAY?

The self-restriction of scientific inquiry to one-eyed colourblind
observation. Its effect: The lack of a true conception of 'force'.

III. THE ONLOOKER'S PHILOSOPHIC MALADY

Thought - the sole reality and yet a pure non-entity for the modern
spectator. Descartes and Hume. Robert Hooke's 'proof' of the
non-reality of conceptual thinking. The modern principle of
Indeterminacy - a sign that science is still dominated by the Humean
way of thinking.

IV. THE COUNTRY THAT IS NOT OURS

Electricity, man's competitor in modern civilization. The onlooker in
search of the soul of nature. Galvani and Crookes. Paradoxes in the
discovery of electricity. 'Something unknown is doing we don't know
what.'


Part II GOETHEANISM - WHENCE AND WHITHER

V. THE ADVENTURE OF REASON

Kant and Goethe. Goethe's study of the plant - a path toward seeing
with the eye-of-the-spirit. Nature a script that asks to be read.

VI. EXCEPT WE BECOME ...

Spiritual kinsmen of Goethe in the British sphere of human culture.
Thomas Reid's philosophic discovery, its significance for the
overcoming of the onlooker-standpoint in science. The picture of man
inherent in Reid's philosophy. Man's original gift of remembering his
pre-earthly life. The disappearance of this memory in the past, and its
re-appearance in modern times. Pelagius versus Augustine. Wordsworth
and Traherne. Traherne, a 'Reidean before Reid was born'.

VII. 'ALWAYS STAND BY FORM'

Ruskin and Howard - two readers in the book of nature. Goethe's
meteorological ideas. His conception of the urphenomenon. Goethe and
Howard.

VIII. DYNAMICS VERSUS KINETICS

The onlooker science - by necessity a 'pointer-reading' science. The
onlooker's misjudgment of the cognitive value of the impressions
conveyed by the senses. The Parallelogram of Forces - its fallacious
kinematic and its true dynamic interpretation. The roots in man of his
concepts 'mass' and 'force'. The formula F=ma. The origin of man's
faculty of mathematical thinking.

IX. PRO LEVITATE

(a) ALERTNESS CONTRA INERTNESS

Limitations of the validity of the concept 'inertia'. Restatement of
Newton's first law. Introduction of the term 'magical' as opposed to
mechanical. The phenomenon of the rising arm. Introduction of the term
'alertness' as opposed to 'inertness' (inertia).
Van Helmont's discovery of the gaseous state of matter. The four
Elements. The old concept of 'Chaos'. Young and old matter. The natural
facts behind the ancient fire rites. The event on Mount Sinai.

(b) LEVITY CONTRA GRAVITY

The Contra Levitatem maxim of the Florentine Academicians. Ruskin's
warning against science as an interpreter of its own observations. How
man's inner nature and the outer universe interpret one another. The
Solfatara phenomenon. The super-physical character of Levity.

X. THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER

The need of raising scientific inquiry to nature's upper border. The
laws of Conservation, their origin and their validity. Joule and Mayer.
Extension of the field-concept from the central to the peripheral
field-type. Natural phenomena brought about by the suctional effect of
the earth's levity-field. The different conditions of matter seen in
the light of the levity-gravity polarity. Heat, the fourth state of
matter. Procreation of physical substance - a natural fact. The case of
Tillandsia. The problem of the trace-elements. Homeopathy, an example
of the effect of dematerialized matter. The meteorological circuit of
water. The nature of lightning.

XI. MATTER AS PART OF NATURE'S ALPHABET

The origin of the scientific conception of the chemical element. Study
of some prototypes of physical substances in the light of the
levity-gravity polarity. The functional concept of matter. The complete
order of polarities - cold-warm, dry-moist - in the doctrine of the
four elements. The position of sulphur and phosphorus in this respect.
Vulcanism and snow-formation as manifestations of functional sulphur
and phosphorus respectively. The process of crystallization. Carbon as
a mediator between sulphur and phosphorus. The alchemical triad.

XII. SPACE AND COUNTER-SPACE

Geometrical considerations required by the recognition of levity. The
value in this respect of projective geometrical thinking. Geometrical
polarities of the first and second order.

XIII. 'RADIANT MATTER'

Electricity and magnetism as manifestations of interacting levity and
gravity. Electricity - a product of disintegrating matter. Modern
physics, no longer a 'natural' science. Eddington's question,'
Manufacture or Discovery?' Man's enhanced responsibility in the age of
physical science.

XIV. COLOURS AS 'DEEDS AND SUFFERINGS OF LIGHT'

Goethe's Farbenlehre - the foundation of an optical science based on
the colour-seeing faculty of the eye. The modern physicist's view of
the Newtonian interpretation of the spectrum. A short history of
Goethe's search for a satisfactory conception of Light and Colour. His
discovery of Newton's cardinal error. First results of his own studies.
The 'negative' spectrum.

XV. SEEING AS 'DEED' - I

Goethe's way of studying the totality of the act of seeing. The 'inner
light'.

XVI. SEEING AS 'DEED' - II

Extension of Goethe's inquiry to a pursuit of the act of seeing beyond
the boundaries of the body.

XVII. OPTICS OF THE DOER

Purging optics from its onlooker-concepts. The role of foregone
conclusions in the physical conception of light. The true aspect of the
so-called velocity of light.

XVIII. THE SPECTRUM AS A SCRIPT OF THE SPIRIT

Evaluation of the foregoing studies for a new understanding of the
prismatic phenomenon. The secret of the rainbow. Intimation of new
possibilities of experimental research guided by the new conception of
the spectrum.


Part III TOWARDS A NEW COSMOLOGY

XIX. THE COUNTRY IN WHICH MAN IS NOT A STRANGER

(a) INTRODUCTORY NOTE

From Goethe's seeing with the eye-of-the-spirit to Spiritual
Imagination. Levity (Ether) as revealed to Spiritual Imagination.

(b) - (e) WARMTH LIGHT SOUND LIFE

The four modifications of ether. Their relation to the four elements.

XX. PRO ANIMA

(a) THE WELL-SPRINGS OF NATURE'S DEEDS AND SUFFERINGS

The sentient (astral) forces of the cosmos as governors of the various
interactions between levity and gravity. The astral aspect of the
planetary system. Its reflexion in earthly substances. Beginnings of an
astral conception of the human organism in modern physiology.

(b) HEARING AS DEED

A Goetheanistic study of acoustic phenomena and of the sense of
hearing. From hearing with the ear-of-the-spirit to Spiritual
Inspiration.

(c) KEPLER AND THE 'MUSIC OF THE SPHERES'

Goethe's view of Kepler. Kepler's third law - a revelation of the
musical order of the universe.

XXI. KNOW THYSELF

INDEX


Illustrations

IN COLOUR

A The relation of the electrical polarity to Levity and Gravity

B The Spectrum phenomenon as conceived by Goethe

C Light under the action of a transverse field-gradient

MONOCHROME

I. Robert Hooke's 'proof' of the non-reality of human concepts

II. Leaf-metamorphosis

III. Leaf-metamorphosis

IV. Goethe's sketch of a cloud-formation

V. A Snow-Crystal

VI. A cluster of Calcite crystals

VII. Various species of bacteria

VIII. Various species of fresh-water algae


Author's Note

The author makes grateful acknowledgment of the help he has gained from
other works in the wide field opened up by Rudolf Steiner, and of his
debt to the friends who in various ways assisted him in preparing his
manuscript.

Quotations have been made from the following books by kind permission
of their respective publishers:

The Life of Sir William Crookes by E. E. Fournier d'Albe (Messrs.
Ernest Benn Ltd.);
Man the Unknown by A. Carrel (Messrs. Hamish Hamilton Ltd.);
The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature of The Physical
Worldly A.. Eddington (University Press, Cambridge);
Science and the Human Temperament by E. Schrödinger (Messrs. George Allen
and Unwin Ltd.);
Centuries of Meditations and Poetical Works by Th. Traherne (Messrs. P.
J. and A. E. Dobell).


Preface

In this book the reader will find expounded a method of investigating
nature by means of which scientific understanding can be carried across
the boundaries of the physical-material to the supersensible sources of
all natural events, and thereby into the realm where is rooted the true
being of man.

The beginnings of this method were worked out by Goethe more than 150
years ago. The nineteenth century, however, failed to 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.

*

The reader may welcome a remark as to the way in which this book needs
to be read.

It has not been the author's intention to provide an encyclopaedic
collection of new conceptions in various fields of natural observation.
Rather did he wish, as the sub-title of the book indicates, to offer a
new method of training both mind and eye (and other senses as well), by
means of which our modern 'onlooking' consciousness can be transformed
into a new kind of 'participating' consciousness. Hence it would be of
no avail to pick out one chapter or another for first reading, perhaps
because of some special interest in its subject-matter. The chapters
are stages on a road which has to be travelled, and each stage is
necessary for reaching the next. It is only through thus accepting the
method with which the book has been written that the reader will be
able to form a competent judgment of its essential elements.

E. L.

Hawkwood College Easter 1950


PART I

Science at the Threshold


CHAPTER I

Introductory

If I introduce this book by relating how I came to encounter Rudolf
Steiner and his work, more than twenty-five years ago, and what decided
me not only to make his way of knowledge my own, but also to enter
professionally into an activity inspired by his teachings, it is
because in this way I can most directly give the reader an impression
of the kind of spirit out of which I have written. I am sure, too, that
although what I have to say in this chapter is personal in content, it
is characteristic of many in our time.

When I first made acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner and his work, I was
finishing my academic training as an electrical engineer. At the end of
the 1914-18 war my first thought had been to take up my studies from
where I had let them drop, four years earlier. The war seemed to imply
nothing more than a passing interruption of them. This, at any rate,
was the opinion of my former teachers; the war had made no difference
whatever to their ideas, whether on the subject-matter of their
teaching or on its educational purpose. I myself, however, soon began
to feel differently. It became obvious to me that my relationship to my
subject, and therefore to those teaching it, had completely changed.
What I had experienced through the war had awakened in me a question of
which I had previously been unaware; now I felt obliged to put it to
everything I came across.

As a child of my age I had grown up in the conviction that it was
within the scope of man to shape his life according to the laws of
reason within him; his progress, in the sense in which I then
understood it, seemed assured by his increasing ability to determine
his own outer conditions with the help of science. Indeed, it was the
wish to take an active part in this progress that had led me to choose
my profession. Now, however, the war stood there as a gigantic social
deed which I could in no way regard as reasonably justified. How, in an
age when the logic of science was supreme, was it possible that a great
part of mankind, including just those peoples to whom science had owed
its origin and never-ceasing expansion, could act in so completely
unscientific a way? Where lay the causes of the contradiction thus
revealed between human thinking and human doing?

Pursued by these questions, I decided after a while to give my studies
a new turn. The kind of training then provided in Germany at the
so-called Technische Hochschulen was designed essentially to give
students a close practical acquaintance with all sorts of technical
appliances; it included only as much theory as was wanted for
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 stuffy, however, I found myself no nearer
an answer to the problem that haunted me. All that I experienced, in
scientific work as in life generally, merely gave it an even sharper
edge. Everywhere I saw an abyss widening between human knowing and
human action. How often was I not bitterly disillusioned by the
behaviour of men for whose ability to think through the most
complicated scientific questions I had the utmost admiration!

On all sides I found this same bewildering gulf between scientific
achievement and the way men conducted their own lives and 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?

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.

Once a being has recognized itself as a product of evolution, it
immediately ceases to be that and nothing more. With its very first act
of self-knowledge it transcends its previous limits, and must in future
rely on its own conscious actions for the carrying on of its
development.

For me, accordingly, the concept of evolution, when thought through to
the end, began to suggest the possibility of further growth in man's
spiritual capacities. But I saw also that this growth could no longer
be merely passive, and the question which now beset me was: by what
action of his own can man break his way into this new phase of
evolution? I saw that this action must not consist merely in giving
outer effect to the natural powers of human 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.

1 The speaker was the late Dr. Elizabeth Vreede, for some years leader
of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum, Dornach,
Switzerland.

2 The activities mentioned above do not exhaust the practical
possibilities of Spiritual Science. At that time (1921) Rudolf Steiner
had not yet given his indications for the treatment of children needing
special care of soul and body, or for the renewal of the art of acting,
or for the conquest of materialistic methods in agricultural practice.
Nor did there yet exist the movement for religious renewal Which Dr.
Fr. Rittelmeyer later founded, with the help and advice of Rudolf
Steiner.


CHAPTER II

Where Do We Stand To-day?

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'.

In the course of his exposition, Heisenberg also speaks of Goethe, in
whose scientific endeavours he perceives a noteworthy attempt to set
scientific understanding upon a path other than that of progressive
self-restriction.

'The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the
progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the
bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of
Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as
unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most 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.

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.

*

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.

*

'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.

Just as the conceptual activity has as its bodily foundation the brain,
with the nervous appendages, so it is volitional activity which is
based on processes taking place in the muscular region of the body and
in those organs which provide the body's metabolism.

A statement which says that man's will is as directly based on the
metabolic processes of the body, both inside and outside the muscles,
as is his perceiving and thought-forming mind on a process in the
nerves, is bound to cause surprise. Firstly, it seems to leave out the
role commonly ascribed to the so-called motoric part of the nervous
system in bringing about bodily action; and secondly, the
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.

What, then, is the soul's characteristic relationship to the world
around at this stage? The following observations will enable us to
answer this question.

It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object
against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as
'animism', by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his
experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his
surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes the
child's mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep
something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation
of such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither
experiences himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces
the content of the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of
using his imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from
his own.

In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world
as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his
relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the
same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has
stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the child
who beats himself because he has done something which makes him angry
with himself.

In sharp contrast to this state of oneness of the child's soul, in
regard both to its own body and to the surrounding world, there stands
the separatedness of the adult's intellectual consciousness, severed
from both body and world. What happens to this part of the soul during
its transition from one condition to the other may be aptly described
by using a comparison from another sphere of natural phenomena. (Later
descriptions in this book will show that a 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.

*

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.

To understand why this science became restricted to one-eyed,
colour-blind observation we need only apply to the human sense system,
in particular, what we have learnt concerning man's threefold being.

Sharply distinguished by their respective modes of functioning though
they are, the three bodily systems are each spread out through the
whole body and are thus to be found everywhere adjacent to each other.
Hence, the corresponding three states of consciousness, the sleeping,
dreaming and waking, are also everywhere adjacent and woven into one
another. It is the predominance of one or other which imparts a
particular quality of soul to one or other region of the body. This is
clearly shown within the realm of sense activity, 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.

This is not the place to discuss why tragedy in this sense forms part
of man's existence. It suffices to acknowledge that it does and, where
it occurs, to observe it with scientific objectivity.

Our considerations, starting from certain statements made by some
leading scientific thinkers of our time, have helped us not only to
confirm the truth inherent in these statements, but to recognize the
facts stated by them as being the outcome of certain laws of evolution
and thereby having an historic necessity. This, however, does not mean
that man's scientific labours, carried out under the historically given
restrictions, great and successful as these labours were and are, have
not led to calamitous effects such as we found indicated by Professor
Carrel. The sciences of matter have led man into a country that is not
his, and the world which he has created by means of scientific research
is not only one in which he is a stranger but one which threatens
to-day to deprive him of his own existence. The reason is that this
world is essentially a world of active forces, and the true nature of
these is something which modern man, restricted to his
onlooker-consciousness, is positively unable to conceive.

We have taken a first step in diagnosing man's present spiritual
condition. A few more steps are required to lead us to the point where
we can conceive the therapy he needs.

1 This address and another by the same author are published together
under the common title, Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der
Naturwissenschaft ('Changes in the foundations of Natural Science').
Heisenberg's name has become known above all by his formulation of the
so-called Principle of Indeterminacy.

2 See, in this respect, Faust's dispute with Mephistopheles on the
causes responsible for the geological changes of the earth. (Faust II,
Act 4)

3 See also Eddington's more elaborate description of this fact in his
New Pathways in Science. The above statement, like others of
Eddington's, has been Contested from the side of professional
philosophy as logically untenable. Our own further discussion will show
that it accords with the facts.

4 Both words, kinematics and kinetics, are derivatives of the Greek
word kinein, to move. The term 'kinematic' is used when motion is
considered abstractly without reference to force or mass. Kinetics is
applied kinematics, or, as pointed out above, dynamics treated with
kinematic concepts.

5 These last statements will find further illustration in the next two
chapters.

6 First published in 1917 in his book Von Seelenrätseln.

7 Homer's men still think with the diaphragm (phrenes). Similarly, the
ancient practice of Yoga, as a means of acquiring knowledge, shows that
at the time When it flourished man's conceptual activity was felt to be
seated elsewhere than in the head.

8 This must not be confused with the fact that a smell may evoke other
memories by way of association.

9 For one who endeavours to observe historical facts in the manner here
described, it is no mere play of chance that the father of scientific
atomism, John Dalton, was by nature colour blind. In fact, colour
blindness was known, for a considerable time during the last century,
as 'Daltonism', since it was through the publication of Dalton's
self-observations that for the first time general attention was drawn
to this phenomenon.


CHAPTER III

The Onlooker's Philosophic Malady

In his isolation as world spectator, the modern philosopher was bound
to reach two completely opposite views regarding the 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.

As we shall see in due course, Hume's mode of reasoning continues to
rule scientific thought even to-day, quite irrespective of the fact
that science itself claims to have its philosophical parent in Kant,
the very thinker who devoted his life's work to the refutation of Hume.

*

On the basis of his investigations into human consciousness Hume felt
obliged to reason thus: My consciousness, as I know it, has no contact
with the external world other than that of a mere outside 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.

A proof of this is to be found, for example, in the principle of
Indeterminacy which has arisen in modern physics.

*

The conception of Indeterminacy as an unavoidable consequence of the
latest phase of physical research is due to Professor W. 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.

1 In his book, Science and the Human Temperament (Dublin, 1935).


CHAPTER IV

The Country that is Not Ours

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.

*

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.

*

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 apparatus, as it resembles more the natural organ of the torpedo,
or of the electrical eel, than the Leyden Phial or the ordinary
electric batteries, I may call an artificial electric organ.'

This new method of producing continuous electrical effects had
far-reaching results, one of which was the discovery of the magnetic
properties of the electric current by the Dane, Oersted - once again a
purely accidental discovery, moving directly counter to the 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.


PART II

Goetheanism - Whence and Whither?


CHAPTER V

The Adventure of Reason

In 1790, a year before Galvani's monograph, Concerning the Forces of
Electricity, appeared, Goethe published his Metamorphosis of Plants,
which represents the first step towards the practical 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.

*

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.

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.

This is how Goethe studied the doing of the plant, and it is by this
method that he discovered the spiritual principle of all plant life,
and succeeded also in throwing a first light on the inner
life-principle of animals.

*

We chose the transformation of leaf forms into one another as the
starting-point of our observations, because the principle of
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.

The present part of our discussion may be concluded by the introduction
of a concept which Goethe formed for the organ of cognition attained
through contemplating nature in the state of becoming, as the plant had
taught him to do.

Let us look back once again on the way in which we first tried to build
up the picture of leaf metamorphosis. There we made use, first of all,
of exact sense-perceptions to which we applied the power of memory in
its function as their keeper. We then endeavoured to transform within
our mind the single memory pictures (leaf forms) into one another. By
doing so we applied to them the activity of mobile fantasy. In this way
we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective memory, which by nature
is static, with the dynamic properties of fantasy, and, on the other
hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is subjective, with the objective
character of memory. Now, for the new organ of cognition arising from
the union of these two polar faculties of the soul, Goethe coined the
significant expression, exact sensorial fantasy.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 Tightness of this thought, and set
about the task of relating the pollination process to the picture of
the plant which his investigations had already yielded. His way of
reporting the result shows how fully conscious he was of its
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.

By picturing the process in this way we are brought face to face with a
rule of nature which, once we have recognized it, proves to hold sway
at all levels of organic nature. In general terms it may be expressed
as follows:

In order that spiritual continuity may be maintained within the coming
and going multitude of nature's creations, the physical stream must
suffer discontinuity at certain intervals.

In the case of the plant this discontinuity is achieved by the 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.

This is as far as we can go in describing this mysterious process, at
least at the present stage of our considerations.

*

Our pursuit of Goethe's way of observing the life of the plant has
brought us to a point where it becomes possible to rectify a widespread
error concerning his position as an evolutionary theorist.

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.'

When we follow Goethe in this way he comes before us in characteristic
contrast to Robert Hooke. We remember Hooke's microscopic 'proof of the
unrelatedness of human thought to outer reality (Chapter III). There
can be no doubt how Goethe, if the occasion had arisen, would have
commented on Hooke's procedure. He would have pointed out that there
would be no such thing as a knife with its line-like edge unless man
were able to think the concept 'line', nor a needle with its point-like
end unless he were able to think the concept 'point'. In fact, knife
and needle are products of a human action which is guided by these two
concepts respectively. As such they are embodiments, though more or
less imperfect ones, of these concepts. Here too, therefore, just as
Goethe had discovered it through his way of observing the plant, we see
Ideas with our very eyes. What distinguishes objects of this kind from
organic entities, such as the plant, is the different relationship
between Object and Idea. Whereas in the case of an organism the Idea
actively indwells the object, its relationship to a man-made thing (and
similarly to nature's mineral entities) is a purely external one.

Hooke, so Goethe would have argued, allowed the microscope to confuse
his common sense. He would have seen in him an example confirming his
verdict that he who fails to let the eye of the spirit work in union
with the eye of the body 'risks seeing yet seeing past the thing'.

*

'Thus not through an extraordinary spiritual gift, not through
momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique, but through consistent
work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory results.' These words
of Goethe - they occur in his essay, History of my Botanical Studies,
which he wrote in later life as an account of his labours in this field
of science - show how anxious he was that it should be rightly
understood that the faculty of reading in the Book of Nature, as he
knew it, was the result of a systematic training of his mind. It is
important for our further studies to make clear to ourselves at this
point the nature of the change which man must bring to pass within
himself in order to brave Kant's 'adventure of reason'. Goethe's
concept for the newly acquired faculty of cognition, exact sensorial
fantasy, can give us the lead.

We remember that, to form this faculty, two existing functions of the
soul, as such polarically opposite, had to be welded together - memory
based on exact sense-perception and the freely working fantasy; one
connected with the nervous system of the body, the other with the
blood. We also know from earlier considerations (Chapter II) that in
the little child there is not yet any such polarization, in body or
soul, as there is in man's later life. Thus we see that training on
Goethe's lines aims at nothing less than restoring within oneself a
condition which is natural in early childhood.

In saying this we touch on the very foundations of the new pathway to
science discovered by Goethe. We shall hear more of it in the following
chapter.

1 Critique of Judgment, II, 11, 27. Goethe chose the title of his essay
so as to refute Kant by its very wording. Kant, through his inquiry
into man's Urteilskraft, arrived at the conclusion that man is denied
the power of Anschauung (intuition). Against this, Goethe puts his
Anschauende Urteilskraft.

2 'Der Alte vom Königsberge' - a play upon words with the name of Kant's
native town, Königsberg.

3 It is naturally to be expected that new light will also be thrown on
the various realms of knowledge as such dealt with in these pages.

4 Delphinium, in particular, has the peculiarity (which it shares with
a number of other species) that its calyx appears in the guise of a
flower, whilst the actual flower is quite inconspicuous.

5 Goethe also describes a proliferated pink.

6 The terms 'primeval' or 'primordial' sometimes suggested for
rendering the prefix 'ur' are unsuitable in a case like this. 'Primeval
plant', for instance, used by some translators of Goethe, raises the
misunderstanding - to which Goethe's concept has anyhow been subject
from the side of scientific botany - that by his ur-plant he had in
mind some primitive, prehistoric plant, the hypothetical ancestor in
the Darwinian sense of the present-day plant kingdom.

7 The following observation is not one made by Goethe himself. It is
presented here by the author as an example of the heuristic value of
Goethe's method of pictorial-dynamic contemplation of the sense-world.

8 'Exakte sinnliche Phantasie.'

9 Entdeckung eines trefflichen Vorarbeiters.


CHAPTER VI

Except We Become ...

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.

*

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.

'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:

'And, like the baseless fabric of this vision ... Leave not a rack
behind.

'I thought it unreasonable, upon the authority of philosophers, to
admit a hypothesis which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy, all
religion and virtue, and all common sense: and finding, that all the
systems which I was acquainted with, were built upon this hypothesis, I
resolved to enquire into this subject anew, without regard to any
hypothesis.'

The following passage from the first chapter of the Inquiry reveals
Reid as a personality who was not dazzled to the same extent as were
his contemporaries by the brilliance of the onlooker-consciousness:

'If it [the mind] is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes it,
I find I have been only in an enchanted castle, imposed upon by
spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how 1 have been
deluded; I am ashamed of my frame, and can hardly forbear 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.'

The following summarizes the position to which Reid is led when he
includes the whole human being in his philosophical inquiries.

Reid admits that, when the consciousness that has become aware of
itself surveys that which lies within its own horizon, it finds nothing
else there but transient pictures. These pictures in themselves bring
to the mind no experience of a lasting existence outside itself. There
is no firm evidence of the existence of either an outer material world
to which these pictures can be related, or of an inner spiritual entity
which is responsible for them. To be able to speak of an existence in
either realm is impossible for a philosophy which confines its
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 pen

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