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
Naïve Realism, with its fundamental principle of the reality of all
percepts, contradicts experience, which teaches us that the content of
percepts is of a transitory nature. The tulip I see is real to-day;
in a year it will have vanished into nothingness. What persists is
the species "tulip." This species is, however, for the Naïve Realist
merely an idea, not a reality. Thus this theory of the world finds
itself in the paradoxical position of seeing its realities arise and
perish, while that which, by contrast with its realities, it regards
as unreal endures. Hence Naïve Realism is compelled to acknowledge the
existence of something ideal by the side of percepts. It must include
within itself entities which cannot be perceived by the senses. In
admitting them, it escapes contradicting itself by conceiving their
existence as analogous to that of objects of sense. Such hypothetical
realities are the invisible forces by means of which the objects of
sense-perception act on one another. Another such reality is heredity,
the effects of which survive the individual, and which is the reason
why from the individual a new being develops which is similar to
it, and by means of which the species is maintained. The soul, the
life-principle permeating the organic body, is another such reality
which the naïve mind is always found conceiving in analogy to realities
of sense-perception. And, lastly, the Divine Being, as conceived by the
naïve mind, is such a hypothetical entity. The Deity is thought of as
acting in a manner exactly corresponding to that which we can perceive
in man himself, i.e., the Deity is conceived anthropomorphically.
Modern Physics traces sensations back to the movements of the
smallest particles of bodies and of an infinitely fine substance,
called ether. What we experience, e.g., as warmth is a movement of
the parts of a body which causes the warmth in the space occupied by
that body. Here again something imperceptible is conceived on the
analogy of what is perceptible. Thus, in terms of perception, the
analogon to the concept "body" is, say, the interior of a room, shut
in on all sides, in which elastic balls are moving in all directions,
impinging one on another, bouncing on and off the walls, etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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