Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and ThoughtLehrs, Ernst
Religion
Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought
Lehrs, Ernst
Anthroposophy; Cosmology; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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