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
Following the lines of our treatment of after-images in the last
chapter, we will next inquire into the anatomical and physiological
basis of the two opposite sight-activities. In the previous instance we
found this in the polarity of nerve and blood. This time we must look
for it in a certain twofold structure of the eye itself. We shall best
perceive this by watching the 'becoming' of the eye, thus again
following a method first shown by Goethe.
Fig. 11 shows the human eye in different stages of its embryonic
formation. The eye is clearly seen to consist of two parts essentially
different in origin. Growing out from the interior of the embryonic
organism is a structure that is gradually pushed in, and in its further
development becomes the entire posterior part of the eye, destined to
carry its life-imbued functions. A second independent part grows
towards this from outside; this is at first a mere thickening of the
embryonic skin formation, but later it loosens itself and presses
forward into the interior of the cup-shaped structure. It is gradually
enclosed by this, and evolves finally into that part of the finished
eye which embodies the optical apparatus functioning according to
purely physical laws.
This series of forms shows that in the embryonic formation of the eye
we are confronted with two processes, one of spherical, and the other
of radial orientation. Consequently the two parts of the eye are
differentiated in such a way that the posterior part, which has grown
forth radially from the embryonic organism, as the life-filled element
represents the sulphur-pole of the total eye, while the anterior part,
with its much more crystalline nature, having grown spherically towards
the organism, represents the eye's salt-pole.
Closer inspection into the connexion of the two visual activities of
the eye with its basic corporeal parts reveals that here, at the
outermost boundary of the human organism, we encounter once more that
peculiar reversal of functions which we have already several times met
in various realms of nature. For the anterior part of the eye - its
salt-pole - which has come into being through a spherically directed
formative process, seems to be the one through which we exercise the
perceptive activity streaming out radially from the eye, whilst the
posterior part - the eye's sulphur-pole - which has come into being
through radially directed formative action, serves that form of seeing
which is more receptive and is carried out in a plane-wise manner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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