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
A single reflection supplies the answer to this question. When I stand
at one end of an avenue, the trees at the other end, away from me,
seem smaller and nearer together than those where I stand. But the
scene which I perceive changes when I change the place from which
I am looking. The exact form in which it presents itself to me is,
therefore, dependent on a condition which inheres, not in the object,
but in me, the percipient. It is all the same to the avenue where I
stand. But the picture of it which I receive depends essentially on
my standpoint. In the same way, it makes no difference to the sun and
the planetary system that human beings happen to perceive them from
the earth; but the picture of the heavens which human beings have is
determined by the fact that they inhabit the earth. This dependence
of our percepts on our points of observation is the easiest kind of
dependence to understand. The matter becomes more difficult when we
realise further that our perceptual world is dependent on our bodily
and mental organisation. The physicist teaches us that within the
space in which we hear a sound there are vibrations of the air, and
that there are vibrations also in the particles of the body which we
regard as the cause of the sound. These vibrations are perceived as
sounds only if we have normally constructed ears. Without them the
whole world would be for us for ever silent. Again, the physiologist
teaches us that there are men who perceive nothing of the wonderful
display of colours which surrounds us. In their world there are only
degrees of light and dark. Others are blind only to one colour,
e.g., red. Their world lacks this colour tone, and hence it is
actually a different one from that of the average man. I should
like to call the dependence of my perceptual world on my point of
observation "mathematical," and its dependence on my organisation
"qualitative." The former determines proportions of size and mutual
distances of my percepts, the latter their quality. The fact that I
see a red surface as red--this qualitative determination--depends on
the structure of my eye.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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