The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific MethodsSteiner, Rudolf
Religion
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods
Steiner, Rudolf
Anthroposophy; Free will and determinism; Knowledge, Theory of; Life
The unreflective man regards his percepts, such as they appear to
his immediate apprehension, as things having a wholly independent
existence. When he sees a tree he believes that it stands in the form
which he sees, with the colours of all its parts, etc., there on the
spot towards which his gaze is directed. When the same man sees the
sun in the morning appear as a disc on the horizon, and follows the
course of this disc, he believes that the phenomenon exists and occurs
(by itself) exactly as he perceives it. To this belief he clings until
he meets with further percepts which contradict his former ones. The
child who has as yet had no experience of distance grasps at the moon,
and does not correct its first impression as to the real distance
until a second percept contradicts the first. Every extension of the
circle of my percepts compels me to correct my picture of the world. We
see this in everyday life, as well as in the mental development of
mankind. The picture which the ancients made for themselves of the
relation of the earth to the sun and other heavenly bodies, had to
be replaced by another when Copernicus found that it contradicted
percepts which in those early days were unknown. A man who had been
born blind said, when operated on by Dr. Franz, that the idea of
the size of objects which he had formed before his operation by his
sense of touch was a very different one. He had to correct his tactual
percepts by his visual percepts.
How is it that we are compelled to make these continual corrections
in our observations?
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