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 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precise field of sense-perception into which science has withdrawn in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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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