The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thoughts on the History of the Earth's Development

[ 1 ] Through his occupation with mining in Ilmenau, Goethe was inspired to consider the realm of minerals, rocks and rock types, as well as the layered masses of the earth's crust. In July 1776, he accompanied Duke Karl August to Ilmenau. They wanted to see if the old mine could be set in motion again. Goethe continued to devote his attention to this mining matter. At the same time, he was increasingly driven by the desire to see how nature works in the formation of rock and mountain masses. He climbed the high peaks and crawled into the depths of the earth to "discover the next traces of the great shaping hand". On September 8, 1780, he told Frau von Stein from Ilmenau of his joy at getting to know the creative side of nature. "Now I am living with body and soul in Stein and the mountains and am very happy about the wide vistas that open up to me. These last two days have conquered a great deal for me and can reveal much. The world now has a new and tremendous reputation for me." His hope that he would succeed in spinning a thread that could lead through the subterranean labyrinths and provide an overview in the confusion grew stronger and stronger. (Letter to Frau von Stein dated June 12, 1784.) He gradually extended his observations to other areas of the earth's surface. On his travels in the Harz Mountains, he believes he recognizes how large inorganic masses are formed. He ascribes to them the tendency "to separate in multiple, regular directions so that parallelepipeds arise, which again have the tendency to intersect diagonally." (Cf. the essay "Gestaltung großer anorganischer Massen", Kürschner, vol. 34.) He imagines the stone masses to be traversed by an ideal latticework, six-sided in fact. As a result, cubic, parallelepipedal, rhombic, rhomboid, columnar and plate-shaped bodies are cut out of a basic mass. He imagines the effects of forces within this basic mass that separate them in the same way as the ideal latticework illustrates. As in organic nature, Goethe also seeks the effective ideal in the realm of stone. Here, too, he investigates with the eyes of the mind. Where the separation into regular forms does not appear, he assumes that it is ideally present in the masses. On a trip to the Harz Mountains in 1784, he had Kraus, the councilor accompanying him, make chalk drawings in which the invisible, the ideal, is clarified and visualized by the visible. He is of the opinion that the actual can only be truly depicted by the draughtsman if he pays attention to the intentions of nature, which often do not emerge clearly enough in the external appearance."... in the transition from the soft to the rigid, a separation arises, whether it now belongs to the whole or whether it occurs in the innermost part of the masses." (Kürschner, vol. 34, essay: "Gebirgs-Gestaltung im ganzen und einzelnen.") In Goethe's view, a sensual-supersensible archetype is vividly present in the organic forms; an ideal enters into sensual perception and permeates it. In the regular shaping of inorganic masses, an ideal is at work, which as such does not enter into the sensuous form, but nevertheless creates a sensuous form. The inorganic form in its appearance is not sensuous-supersensuous, but only sensuous; however, it must be understood as the effect of a supersensuous force. It is an intermediate thing between the inorganic process, whose course is still dominated by an ideal, but which receives a closed form from it, and the organic, in which the ideal itself becomes the sensuous form.

[ 2 ] Goethe imagines the formation of composite rocks to be brought about by the fact that the substances originally present only ideally in a mass are actually separated. In a letter to Leonhard, dated November 25, 1807, he writes: "Thus I readily confess that I still often see simultaneous effects where others already see successive ones; that in many a rock which others regard as a conglomerate, as something brought together and baked together from debris, I believe I see something that has been separated and separated from a heterogeneous mass in itself and then held fast by consolidation."

[ 3 ] Goethe did not get around to making these thoughts fruitful for a larger number of inorganic formations. It is in keeping with his way of thinking to explain the arrangement of geological strata from ideal principles of formation that are inherent in the substance, in its essence. He could not subscribe to Werner's geological views, which were widespread at the time, because he did not know such principles of formation, but attributed everything to the purely mechanical effects of water. Even more unsympathetic to him was the volcanism put forward by Hutton and defended by Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch and others, which explained the development of the individual periods of the earth by violent revolutions brought about by material causes. According to this view, volcanic forces cause large mountain systems to suddenly shoot up from the earth. Such immense feats of strength seemed to Goethe to contradict the nature of nature. He saw no reason why the laws of the earth's development should suddenly change at certain times and, after a long period of gradual activity, express themselves at a certain point in time through "lifting and pushing, rolling up and squeezing, flinging and hurling". Nature appeared to him to be consistent in all its parts, so that even a deity could not change its innate laws. He considered its laws to be immutable. The forces that are at work today in the formation of the earth's surface must, in essence, have been at work at all times.

[ 4 ] From this point of view, he also arrives at a natural view of the way in which the blocks of rock have reached their places, which are scattered in the vicinity of Lake Geneva and which, according to their nature, are separated from distant mountains. He was confronted with the opinion that these masses of rock had been hurled to their present location during the tumultuous uprising of the mountains far back in the country. Goethe searched for forces that could be observed at the present time and that could explain this phenomenon. He found such forces at work in the formation of glaciers. Now he only had to assume that the glaciers, which today still carry the rock from the mountains to the plains, once had an enormously greater extent than at present. They then carried the masses of rock much further away from the mountains than they do today. When the glaciers lost their extent again, these rocks were left behind. Goethe thought that the granite blocks lying around in the North German Plain must have reached their present locations in a similar way. In order to imagine that the parts of the country covered by erratic blocks were once covered by glacial ice, it is necessary to assume an epoch of extreme cold. This assumption became common scientific knowledge through Agassiz, who came up with it independently and presented it to the Swiss Society for Natural Research in 1837. In more recent times, this cold epoch, which broke over the continents of the earth when a rich animal and plant life had already developed, has become the favorite study of important geologists. What Goethe says in detail about the phenomena of this "ice age" is irrelevant compared to the observations made by later researchers.

[ 5 ] Just as Goethe's general view of nature led him to a correct view of the nature of fossilization, it also led him to the assumption of an epoch of great cold. Earlier thinkers had already recognized the remains of pre-worldly organisms in these formations. But this correct view was so slow to become generally accepted that Voltaire was still able to regard fossilized shells as natural games. Goethe soon recognized, after he had gained some experience in this field, that the fossils, as remains of organisms, are in a natural connection with the layers of earth in which they are found. This means that these organisms lived in the epochs of the earth in which the corresponding layers were formed. He speaks in this way about fossils in a letter to Merck dated October 27, 1782: "All the bone debris of which you speak and which are found everywhere in the upper sands of the earth are, as I am completely convinced, from the latest epoch, which is, however, immensely old compared to our usual chronology. In this period the sea had already receded; however, rivers still flowed in great breadth, but in relation to the level of the sea, not faster and perhaps not even as fast as now. At that time the sand, mixed with clay, settled in all the broad valleys, which were gradually abandoned by the water as the sea receded, and the rivers dug only small beds in their midst. At that time the elephants and rhinoceroses were at home on the denuded mountains near us, and their remains could easily be washed down by the forest streams into those large river valleys or lake areas, where they were more or less imbued with the stone juice and where we now dig them up with the plow or by other coincidences. In this sense I said before that they are found in the upper sand, namely in that which was washed down by the old rivers, since the main crust of the soil had already been completely formed. The time will soon come when fossils will no longer be jumbled up, but will be arranged in relation to the epochs of the world."

[ 6 ] Goethe has repeatedly been called a forerunner of the geology founded by Lyell. This, too, no longer assumes violent revolutions or catastrophes to explain the formation of one earth period from another. It traces the earlier changes in the earth's surface back to the same processes that are still taking place today. However, it should not be ignored that modern geology only uses physical and chemical forces to explain the formation of the earth. Goethe, on the other hand, assumes formative forces that are active within the masses and that represent a higher kind of formation principles than those known to physics and chemistry.