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Man or Matter

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This eBook was produced by Adam Kane.




MAN OR MATTER

Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature
on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought

by

ERNST LEHRS Ph. D.


Part I

SCIENCE AT THE THRESHOLD

I. INTRODUCTORY

The author's search for a way of extending the boundaries of scientific
understanding. A meeting with Rudolf Steiner, and with the work arising
from his teachings.

II. WHERE DO WE STAND TO-DAY?

The self-restriction of scientific inquiry to one-eyed colourblind
observation. Its effect: The lack of a true conception of 'force'.

III. THE ONLOOKER'S PHILOSOPHIC MALADY

Thought - the sole reality and yet a pure non-entity for the modern
spectator. Descartes and Hume. Robert Hooke's 'proof' of the
non-reality of conceptual thinking. The modern principle of
Indeterminacy - a sign that science is still dominated by the Humean
way of thinking.

IV. THE COUNTRY THAT IS NOT OURS

Electricity, man's competitor in modern civilization. The onlooker in
search of the soul of nature. Galvani and Crookes. Paradoxes in the
discovery of electricity. 'Something unknown is doing we don't know
what.'


Part II GOETHEANISM - WHENCE AND WHITHER

V. THE ADVENTURE OF REASON

Kant and Goethe. Goethe's study of the plant - a path toward seeing
with the eye-of-the-spirit. Nature a script that asks to be read.

VI. EXCEPT WE BECOME ...

Spiritual kinsmen of Goethe in the British sphere of human culture.
Thomas Reid's philosophic discovery, its significance for the
overcoming of the onlooker-standpoint in science. The picture of man
inherent in Reid's philosophy. Man's original gift of remembering his
pre-earthly life. The disappearance of this memory in the past, and its
re-appearance in modern times. Pelagius versus Augustine. Wordsworth
and Traherne. Traherne, a 'Reidean before Reid was born'.

VII. 'ALWAYS STAND BY FORM'

Ruskin and Howard - two readers in the book of nature. Goethe's
meteorological ideas. His conception of the urphenomenon. Goethe and
Howard.

VIII. DYNAMICS VERSUS KINETICS

The onlooker science - by necessity a 'pointer-reading' science. The
onlooker's misjudgment of the cognitive value of the impressions
conveyed by the senses. The Parallelogram of Forces - its fallacious
kinematic and its true dynamic interpretation. The roots in man of his
concepts 'mass' and 'force'. The formula F=ma. The origin of man's
faculty of mathematical thinking.

IX. PRO LEVITATE

(a) ALERTNESS CONTRA INERTNESS

Limitations of the validity of the concept 'inertia'. Restatement of
Newton's first law. Introduction of the term 'magical' as opposed to
mechanical. The phenomenon of the rising arm. Introduction of the term
'alertness' as opposed to 'inertness' (inertia).
Van Helmont's discovery of the gaseous state of matter. The four
Elements. The old concept of 'Chaos'. Young and old matter. The natural
facts behind the ancient fire rites. The event on Mount Sinai.

(b) LEVITY CONTRA GRAVITY

The Contra Levitatem maxim of the Florentine Academicians. Ruskin's
warning against science as an interpreter of its own observations. How
man's inner nature and the outer universe interpret one another. The
Solfatara phenomenon. The super-physical character of Levity.

X. THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER

The need of raising scientific inquiry to nature's upper border. The
laws of Conservation, their origin and their validity. Joule and Mayer.
Extension of the field-concept from the central to the peripheral
field-type. Natural phenomena brought about by the suctional effect of
the earth's levity-field. The different conditions of matter seen in
the light of the levity-gravity polarity. Heat, the fourth state of
matter. Procreation of physical substance - a natural fact. The case of
Tillandsia. The problem of the trace-elements. Homeopathy, an example
of the effect of dematerialized matter. The meteorological circuit of
water. The nature of lightning.

XI. MATTER AS PART OF NATURE'S ALPHABET

The origin of the scientific conception of the chemical element. Study
of some prototypes of physical substances in the light of the
levity-gravity polarity. The functional concept of matter. The complete
order of polarities - cold-warm, dry-moist - in the doctrine of the
four elements. The position of sulphur and phosphorus in this respect.
Vulcanism and snow-formation as manifestations of functional sulphur
and phosphorus respectively. The process of crystallization. Carbon as
a mediator between sulphur and phosphorus. The alchemical triad.

XII. SPACE AND COUNTER-SPACE

Geometrical considerations required by the recognition of levity. The
value in this respect of projective geometrical thinking. Geometrical
polarities of the first and second order.

XIII. 'RADIANT MATTER'

Electricity and magnetism as manifestations of interacting levity and
gravity. Electricity - a product of disintegrating matter. Modern
physics, no longer a 'natural' science. Eddington's question,'
Manufacture or Discovery?' Man's enhanced responsibility in the age of
physical science.

XIV. COLOURS AS 'DEEDS AND SUFFERINGS OF LIGHT'

Goethe's Farbenlehre - the foundation of an optical science based on
the colour-seeing faculty of the eye. The modern physicist's view of
the Newtonian interpretation of the spectrum. A short history of
Goethe's search for a satisfactory conception of Light and Colour. His
discovery of Newton's cardinal error. First results of his own studies.
The 'negative' spectrum.

XV. SEEING AS 'DEED' - I

Goethe's way of studying the totality of the act of seeing. The 'inner
light'.

XVI. SEEING AS 'DEED' - II

Extension of Goethe's inquiry to a pursuit of the act of seeing beyond
the boundaries of the body.

XVII. OPTICS OF THE DOER

Purging optics from its onlooker-concepts. The role of foregone
conclusions in the physical conception of light. The true aspect of the
so-called velocity of light.

XVIII. THE SPECTRUM AS A SCRIPT OF THE SPIRIT

Evaluation of the foregoing studies for a new understanding of the
prismatic phenomenon. The secret of the rainbow. Intimation of new
possibilities of experimental research guided by the new conception of
the spectrum.


Part III TOWARDS A NEW COSMOLOGY

XIX. THE COUNTRY IN WHICH MAN IS NOT A STRANGER

(a) INTRODUCTORY NOTE

From Goethe's seeing with the eye-of-the-spirit to Spiritual
Imagination. Levity (Ether) as revealed to Spiritual Imagination.

(b) - (e) WARMTH LIGHT SOUND LIFE

The four modifications of ether. Their relation to the four elements.

XX. PRO ANIMA

(a) THE WELL-SPRINGS OF NATURE'S DEEDS AND SUFFERINGS

The sentient (astral) forces of the cosmos as governors of the various
interactions between levity and gravity. The astral aspect of the
planetary system. Its reflexion in earthly substances. Beginnings of an
astral conception of the human organism in modern physiology.

(b) HEARING AS DEED

A Goetheanistic study of acoustic phenomena and of the sense of
hearing. From hearing with the ear-of-the-spirit to Spiritual
Inspiration.

(c) KEPLER AND THE 'MUSIC OF THE SPHERES'

Goethe's view of Kepler. Kepler's third law - a revelation of the
musical order of the universe.

XXI. KNOW THYSELF

INDEX


Illustrations

IN COLOUR

A The relation of the electrical polarity to Levity and Gravity

B The Spectrum phenomenon as conceived by Goethe

C Light under the action of a transverse field-gradient

MONOCHROME

I. Robert Hooke's 'proof' of the non-reality of human concepts

II. Leaf-metamorphosis

III. Leaf-metamorphosis

IV. Goethe's sketch of a cloud-formation

V. A Snow-Crystal

VI. A cluster of Calcite crystals

VII. Various species of bacteria

VIII. Various species of fresh-water algae


Author's Note

The author makes grateful acknowledgment of the help he has gained from
other works in the wide field opened up by Rudolf Steiner, and of his
debt to the friends who in various ways assisted him in preparing his
manuscript.

Quotations have been made from the following books by kind permission
of their respective publishers:

The Life of Sir William Crookes by E. E. Fournier d'Albe (Messrs.
Ernest Benn Ltd.);
Man the Unknown by A. Carrel (Messrs. Hamish Hamilton Ltd.);
The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature of The Physical
Worldly A.. Eddington (University Press, Cambridge);
Science and the Human Temperament by E. Schrödinger (Messrs. George Allen
and Unwin Ltd.);
Centuries of Meditations and Poetical Works by Th. Traherne (Messrs. P.
J. and A. E. Dobell).


Preface

In this book the reader will find expounded a method of investigating
nature by means of which scientific understanding can be carried across
the boundaries of the physical-material to the supersensible sources of
all natural events, and thereby into the realm where is rooted the true
being of man.

The beginnings of this method were worked out by Goethe more than 150
years ago. The nineteenth century, however, failed to provide any
fertile ground for the development of the seeds thus sown. It was left
to Rudolf Steiner, shortly before the end of the century, to recognize
the significance of 'Goetheanism' for the future development not only
of science but of human culture in general. It is to him, also, that we
owe the possibility of carrying on Goethe's efforts in the way required
by the needs of our own time.

The following pages contain results of the author's work along the path
thus opened up by Goethe and Rudolf Steiner - a work begun twenty-seven
years ago, soon after he had made the acquaintance of Rudolf Steiner.
With the publication of these results he addresses himself to everyone
- with or without a specialized scientific training - who is concerned
with the fate of man's powers of cognition in the present age.

*

The reader may welcome a remark as to the way in which this book needs
to be read.

It has not been the author's intention to provide an encyclopaedic
collection of new conceptions in various fields of natural observation.
Rather did he wish, as the sub-title of the book indicates, to offer a
new method of training both mind and eye (and other senses as well), by
means of which our modern 'onlooking' consciousness can be transformed
into a new kind of 'participating' consciousness. Hence it would be of
no avail to pick out one chapter or another for first reading, perhaps
because of some special interest in its subject-matter. The chapters
are stages on a road which has to be travelled, and each stage is
necessary for reaching the next. It is only through thus accepting the
method with which the book has been written that the reader will be
able to form a competent judgment of its essential elements.

E. L.

Hawkwood College Easter 1950


PART I

Science at the Threshold


CHAPTER I

Introductory

If I introduce this book by relating how I came to encounter Rudolf
Steiner and his work, more than twenty-five years ago, and what decided
me not only to make his way of knowledge my own, but also to enter
professionally into an activity inspired by his teachings, it is
because in this way I can most directly give the reader an impression
of the kind of spirit out of which I have written. I am sure, too, that
although what I have to say in this chapter is personal in content, it
is characteristic of many in our time.

When I first made acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner and his work, I was
finishing my academic training as an electrical engineer. At the end of
the 1914-18 war my first thought had been to take up my studies from
where I had let them drop, four years earlier. The war seemed to imply
nothing more than a passing interruption of them. This, at any rate,
was the opinion of my former teachers; the war had made no difference
whatever to their ideas, whether on the subject-matter of their
teaching or on its educational purpose. I myself, however, soon began
to feel differently. It became obvious to me that my relationship to my
subject, and therefore to those teaching it, had completely changed.
What I had experienced through the war had awakened in me a question of
which I had previously been unaware; now I felt obliged to put it to
everything I came across.

As a child of my age I had grown up in the conviction that it was
within the scope of man to shape his life according to the laws of
reason within him; his progress, in the sense in which I then
understood it, seemed assured by his increasing ability to determine
his own outer conditions with the help of science. Indeed, it was the
wish to take an active part in this progress that had led me to choose
my profession. Now, however, the war stood there as a gigantic social
deed which I could in no way regard as reasonably justified. How, in an
age when the logic of science was supreme, was it possible that a great
part of mankind, including just those peoples to whom science had owed
its origin and never-ceasing expansion, could act in so completely
unscientific a way? Where lay the causes of the contradiction thus
revealed between human thinking and human doing?

Pursued by these questions, I decided after a while to give my studies
a new turn. The kind of training then provided in Germany at the
so-called Technische Hochschulen was designed essentially to give
students a close practical acquaintance with all sorts of technical
appliances; it included only as much theory as was wanted for
understanding the mathematical calculations arising in technical
practice. It now seemed to me necessary to pay more attention to
theoretical considerations, so as to gain a more exact knowledge of the
sources from which science drew its conception of nature. Accordingly I
left the Hochschule for a course in mathematics and physics at a
university, though without abandoning my original idea of preparing for
a career in the field of electrical engineering. It was with this in
mind that I later chose for my Ph.D. thesis a piece of experimental
research on the uses of high-frequency electric currents.

During my subsequent years of stuffy, however, I found myself no nearer
an answer to the problem that haunted me. All that I experienced, in
scientific work as in life generally, merely gave it an even sharper
edge. Everywhere I saw an abyss widening between human knowing and
human action. How often was I not bitterly disillusioned by the
behaviour of men for whose ability to think through the most
complicated scientific questions I had the utmost admiration!

On all sides I found this same bewildering gulf between scientific
achievement and the way men conducted their own lives and influenced
the lives of others. I was forced to the conclusion that human
thinking, at any rate in its modern form, was either powerless to
govern human actions, or at least unable to direct them towards right
ends. In fact, where scientific thinking had done most to change the
practical relations of human life, as in the mechanization of economic
production, conditions had arisen which made it more difficult, not
less, for men to live in a way worthy of man. At a time when humanity
was equipped as never before to investigate the order of the universe,
and had achieved triumphs of design in mechanical constructions, human
life was falling into ever wilder chaos. Why was this?

The fact that most of my contemporaries were apparently quite unaware
of the problem that stirred me so deeply could not weaken my sense of
its reality. This slumber of so many souls in face of the vital
questions of modern life seemed to me merely a further symptom of the
sickness of our age. Nor could I think much better of those who, more
sensitive to the contradictions in and around them, sought refuge in
art or religion. The catastrophe of the war had shown me that this
departmentalizing of life, which at one time I had myself considered a
sort of ideal, was quite inconsistent with the needs of to-day. To make
use of art or religion as a refuge was a sign of their increasing
separation from the rest of human culture. It implied a cleavage
between the different spheres of society which ruled out any genuine
solution of social problems.

I knew from history that religion and art had once exercised a function
which is to-day reserved for science, for they had given guidance in
even the most practical activities of human society. And in so doing
they had enhanced the quality of human living, whereas the influence of
science has had just the opposite effect. This power of guidance,
however, they had long since lost, and in view of this fact I came to
the conclusion that salvation must be looked for in the first place
from science. Here, in the thinking and knowing of man, was the root of
modern troubles; here must come a drastic revision, and here, if
possible, a completely new direction must be found.

Such views certainly flew in the face of the universal modern
conviction that the present mode of knowledge, with whose help so much
insight into the natural world has been won, is the only one possible,
given once for all to man in a form never to be changed. But is there
any need, I asked myself, to cling to this purely static notion of
man's capacity for gaining knowledge? Among the greatest achievements
of modern science, does not the conception of evolution take a foremost
place? And does not this teach us that the condition of a living
organism at any time is the result of the one preceding it, and that
the transition implies a corresponding functional enhancement? But if
we have once recognized this as an established truth, why should we
apply it to organisms at every stage of development except the
.highest, namely the human, where the organic form reveals and serves
the self-conscious spirit?

Putting the question thus, I was led inevitably to a conclusion which
science itself had failed to draw from its idea of evolution. Whatever
the driving factor in evolution may be, it is clear that in the
kingdoms of nature leading up to man this factor has always worked on
the evolving organisms from outside. The moment we come to man himself,
however, and see how evolution has flowered in his power of conscious
thought, we have to reckon with a fundamental change.

Once a being has recognized itself as a product of evolution, it
immediately ceases to be that and nothing more. With its very first act
of self-knowledge it transcends its previous limits, and must in future
rely on its own conscious actions for the carrying on of its
development.

For me, accordingly, the concept of evolution, when thought through to
the end, began to suggest the possibility of further growth in man's
spiritual capacities. But I saw also that this growth could no longer
be merely passive, and the question which now beset me was: by what
action of his own can man break his way into this new phase of
evolution? I saw that this action must not consist merely in giving
outer effect to the natural powers of human thinking; that was
happening everywhere in the disordered world around me. The necessary
action must have inner effects; indeed, it had to be one whereby the
will was turned upon the thinking-powers themselves, entirely
transforming them, and so removing the discrepancy between the thinker
and the doer in modern man.

Thus far I could go through my own observation and reflexion, but no
further. To form a general idea of the deed on which everything else
depended was one thing; it was quite another to know how to perform the
deed, and above all where to make a start with it. Anyone intending to
make a machine must first learn something of mechanics; in the same
way, anyone setting out to do something constructive in the sphere of
human consciousness - and this, for me, was the essential point - must
begin by learning something of the laws holding sway in that sphere.
But who could give me this knowledge?

Physiology, psychology and philosophy in their ordinary forms were of
no use to me, for they were themselves part and parcel of just that
kind of knowing which had to be overcome. In their various accounts of
man there was no vantage point from which the deed I had in mind could
be accomplished, for none of them looked beyond the ordinary powers of
knowledge. It was the same with the accepted theory of evolution; as a
product of the current mode of thinking it could be applied to
everything except the one essential - this very mode of thinking.
Obviously, the laws of the development of human consciousness cannot be
discovered from a standpoint within the modern form of that
consciousness. But how could one find a viewpoint outside, as it were,
this consciousness, from which to discover its laws with the same
scientific objectivity which it had itself applied to discovering the
laws of physical nature?

It was when this question stood before me in all clarity that destiny
led me to Rudolf Steiner and his work. The occasion was a conference
held in 1921 in Stuttgart by the Anthroposophical Movement; it was one
of several arranged during the years 1920-2 especially for teachers and
students at the Hochschulen and Universities. What chiefly moved me to
attend this particular conference was the title of a lecture to be
given by one of the pupils and co-workers of Rudolf Steiner - 'The
Overcoming of Einstein's Theory of Relativity'.1

The reader will readily appreciate what this title meant for me. In the
circles where my work lay, an intense controversy was just then raging
round Einstein's ideas. I usually took sides with the supporters of
Einstein, for it seemed to me that Einstein had carried the existing
mode of scientific thinking to its logical conclusions, whereas I
missed this consistency among his opponents. At the same time I found
that the effect of this theory, when its implications were fully
developed, was to make everything seem so 'relative' that no reliable
world-outlook was left. This was proof for me that our age was in need
of an altogether different form of scientific thinking, equally
consistent in itself, but more in tune with man's own being.

What appealed to me in the lecture-title was simply this, that whereas
everyone else sought to prove Einstein right or wrong, here was someone
who apparently intended, not merely to add another proof for or against
his theory-there were plenty of those already - but to take some steps
to overcome it. From the point of view of orthodox science, of course,
it was absurd to speak of 'overcoming' a theory, as though it were an
accomplished fact, but to me this title suggested exactly what I was
looking for.

Although it was the title of this lecture that drew me to the Stuttgart
Conference (circumstances prevented me from hearing just this lecture),
it was the course given there by Rudolf Steiner himself which was to
prove the decisive experience of my life. It comprised eight lectures,
under the title: 'Mathematics, Scientific Experiment and Observation,
and Epistemological Results from the Standpoint of Anthroposophy'; what
they gave me answered my question beyond all expectation.

In the course of a comprehensive historical survey the lecturer
characterized, in a way I found utterly convincing, the present
mathematical interpretation of nature as a transitional stage of human
consciousness - a kind of knowing which is on the way from a past
pre-mathematical to a future post-mathematical form of cognition. The
importance of mathematics, whether as a discipline of the human spirit
or as an instrument of natural science, was not for a moment
undervalued. On the contrary, what Rudolf Steiner said about Projective
(Synthetic) Geometry, for instance, its future possibilities and its
role as a means of understanding higher processes of nature than had
hitherto been accessible to science, clearly explained the positive
feelings I myself had experienced - without knowing why - when I had
studied the subject.

Through his lectures and his part in the discussions - they were held
daily by the various speakers and ranged over almost every field of
modern knowledge - I gradually realized that Rudolf Steiner was in
possession of unique powers. Not only did he show himself fully at home
in all these fields; he was able to connect them with each other, and
with the nature and being of man, in such a way that an apparent chaos
of unrelated details was wrought into a higher synthesis. Moreover, it
became clear to me that one who could speak as he did about the stages
of human consciousness past, present and future, must have full access
to all of them at will, and be able to make each of them an object of
exact observation. I saw a thinker who was himself sufficient proof
that man can find within the resources of his own spirit the
vantage-ground for the deed which I had dimly surmised, and by which
alone true civilization could be saved. Through all these things I knew
that I had found the teacher I had been seeking.

Thus I was fully confirmed in my hopes of the Conference; but I was
also often astonished at what I heard. Not least among my surprises was
Rudolf Steiner's presentation of Goethe as the herald of the new form
of scientific knowledge which he himself was expounding. I was here
introduced to a side of Goethe which was as completely unknown to me as
to so many others among my contemporaries, who had not yet come into
touch with Anthroposophy. For me, as for them, Goethe had always been
the great thinker revealing his thoughts through poetry. Indeed, only
shortly before my meeting with Rudolf Steiner it was in his poetry that
Goethe had become newly alive to me as a helper in my search for a
fuller human experience of nature and my fellow-men. But despite all my
Goethe studies I had been quite unaware that more than a century
earlier he had achieved something in the field of science, organic and
inorganic alike, which could help modern man towards the new kind of
knowledge so badly needed to-day. This was inevitable for me, since I
shared the modern conviction that art and science were fields of
activity essentially strange to one another. And so it was again Rudolf
Steiner who opened the way for me to Goethe as botanist, physicist and
the like.

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