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
Let us now heed the fact that nothing in this group of figures reveals
that in each one of these trios of lines there resides a definite and
identical geometrical order; nor do they convey anything that would
turn our thoughts to the parallelogram of velocities with the effect of
leading us to expect, by way of analogy, a similar order in these
figures. And this result, we note, is quite independent of our
particular way of procedure, whether we use, right from the start, a
measuring instrument, or whether we proceed as described above.
*
Having in this way removed the fallacious idea that the parallelogram
of forces can, and therefore ever has been, conceived by way of logical
derivation from the parallelogram of velocities, we must then ask
ourselves what it was, if not any act of logical reason, that led
Galileo to discover it.
History relates that on making the discovery he exclaimed: 'La natura è
scritta in lingua matematica!' ('Nature is recorded in the language of
mathematics.') These words reveal his surprise when he realized the
implication of his discovery. Still, intuitively he must have known
that using geometrical lengths to symbolize the measured magnitudes of
forces would yield some valid result. Whence came this intuition, as
well as the other which led him to recognize from the figures thus
obtained that in a parallelogram made up of any two of the three lines,
the remaining line came in as its diagonal? And, quite apart from the
particular event of the discovery, how can we account for the very fact
that nature - at least on a certain level of her existence - exhibits
rules of action expressible in terms of logical principles immanent in
the human mind?
*
To find the answer to these questions we must revert to certain facts
connected with man's psycho-physical make-up of which the
considerations of Chapter II have already made us aware.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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