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, therefore, transpose ourselves once more into the condition of
the child who is still entirely volition, and thus experiences himself
as one with the world. Let us consider, from the point of view of this
condition, the process of lifting the body into the vertical position
and the acquisition of the faculty of maintaining it in this position;
and let us ask what the soul, though with no consciousness of itself,
experiences in all this. It is the child's will which wrestles in this
act with the dynamic structure of external space, and what his will
experiences is accompanied by corresponding perceptions through the
sense of movement and other related bodily senses. In this way the
parallelogram of forces becomes an inner experience of our organism at
the beginning of our earthly life. What we thus carry in the body's
will-region in the form of experienced geometry - this, together with
the freeing and crystallizing of part of our will-substance into our
conceptual capacity, is transformed into our faculty of forming
geometrical concepts, and among them the concept of the parallelogram
of movements.
Looked at in this way, the true relationship between the two
parallelogram-theorems is seen to be the very opposite of the one held
with conviction by scientific thinking up to now. Instead of the
parallelogram of forces following from the parallelogram of movements,
and the entire science of dynamics from that of kinematics, our very
faculty of thinking in kinematic concepts is the evolutionary product
of our previously acquired intuitive experience of the dynamic order of
the world.
If this is the truth concerning the origin of our knowledge of force
and its behaviour on the one hand, and our capacity to conceive
mathematical concepts in a purely ideal way on the other, what is it
then that causes man to dwell in such illusion as regards the
relationship between the two? From our account it follows that no
illusion of this kind could arise if we were able to remember
throughout life our experiences in early childhood. Now we know from
our considerations in Chapter VI that in former times man had such a
memory. In those times, therefore, he was under no illusion as to the
reality of force in the world. In the working of outer forces he saw a
manifestation of spiritual beings, just as in himself he experienced
force as a manifestation of his own spiritual being. We have seen also
that this form of memory had to fade away to enable man to find himself
as a self-conscious personality between birth and death. As such a
personality, Galileo was able to think the parallelogram of forces, but
he was unable to comprehend the origin of his faculty of mathematical
thinking, or of his intuitive knowledge of the mathematical behaviour
of nature in that realm of hers where she sets physical forces into
action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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