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
However correct the nominalistic conception of number may be in such a
case as that of numbering the five apples, it is wholly incorrect to
restrict the concept of number itself to one valid for this kind of
occurrence. We shall see this immediately if we take one of the apples
and cut it across. There we find the number five confronting us in the
well-known star-like figure, represented by the fivefold pericarp in
the centre of the apple. What man, restricted as he was to the mode of
understanding, has completely overlooked is this: although the act of
counting, by which we establish the number five, is the same in both
cases, the quality of the number five is totally different. For in the
case of the five pericarps this number is a quality immanent in the
apple, which it shares with the whole species of Rosaceae. The apple
itself is just as much 'five' as it is 'round', 'sweet', etc. In the
supersensible type which creates in the plant its own organ of
manifestation, the creation of a number - in the apple the number five
- is part of the form-creating activities characteristic of the type.
The numerical relationships which appear between natural phenomena
depend upon the way in which the chemical ether participates. This is
true equally of those discovered by chemistry in the sphere of
inorganic matter and used to-day with such great success.
Let us be quite clear that the relationship of unity to plurality in
the case of the five apples is totally different from what it is in the
fivefold pericarp. In the first case unity is the smallest quantity
represented by each of the five apples. There, the step from one to two
is made by joining together two units from outside. The path from one
to many is by way of continuous addition. In the second case the unity
is represented by the pericarp - i.e. by the one comprising the many,
the latter appearing as parts of the whole. In such a case two is part
of one and so are three, four, five, etc. Plurality arises from a
continuous process of division of unity.
The ancient world knew the idea of number only in the last-mentioned
form. There unity appeared as an all-embracing magnitude, revealed
through the Universe. The world's manifoldness was felt to be not a
juxtaposition of single things, externally connected, but the content
of this unity, and therefore derived from it. This was expressed by the
pre-Socratic Greek philosophers in the formula έν και παν (the One and the All).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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