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
'But what if these profound disquisitions into the first principles of
human nature, do naturally and necessarily plunge a man into this abyss
of scepticism? May we not reasonably judge from what hath happened? Des
Cartes no sooner began to dig in this mine, than scepticism was ready
to break in upon him. He did what he could to shut it out. Malebranche
and Locke, who dug deeper, found the difficulty of keeping out this
enemy still to increase; but they laboured honestly in the design. Then
Berkeley, who carried on the work, despairing of securing all,
bethought himself of an expedient: By giving up the material world,
which he thought might be spared without loss, and even with advantage,
he hoped by an impregnable partition to secure the world of spirits.
But, alas! the Treatise of Human Nature wantonly sapped the foundation
of this partition and drowned all in one universal deluge.' (Chapter I,
Sections vi-vii.)
What Reid so pertinently describes here as the 'enchanted castle' is
nothing else than the human head, which knows of no occurrence beyond
its boundaries, because it has forgotten that it is only the
end-product of a living existence outside of, and beyond, itself. We
see here that Reid is gifted with the faculty of entering this castle
without forfeiting his memory of the world outside; and so even from
within its walls, he could recognize its true nature. To a high degree
this helped him to keep free of those deceptions to which the majority
of his contemporaries fell victim, and to which so many persons are
still subject to-day.
It is in this way that Reid could make it one of the cardinal
principles of his observations to test all that the head thinks by
relating it to the rest of human nature and to allow nothing to stand,
which does not survive this test. In this respect the argument he sets
over against the Cartesian, 'cogito ergo sum' is characteristic: ' "I
am thinking," says he, "therefore I am": and is it not as good
reasoning to say, I am sleeping, therefore I am? If a body moves, it
must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest, it must exist likewise.'
The following summarizes the position to which Reid is led when he
includes the whole human being in his philosophical inquiries.
Reid admits that, when the consciousness that has become aware of
itself surveys that which lies within its own horizon, it finds nothing
else there but transient pictures. These pictures in themselves bring
to the mind no experience of a lasting existence outside itself. There
is no firm evidence of the existence of either an outer material world
to which these pictures can be related, or of an inner spiritual entity
which is responsible for them. To be able to speak of an existence in
either realm is impossible for a philosophy which confines its
attention solely to the mere picture-content of the waking
consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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