The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Gustav Theodor Fechner.

I just think that his experimental aesthetics are concerned with the exact measurement of things that are generally accepted as trivial truths; like trying to determine “exactly” how the rising and falling action in tragedy can be expressed in terms of time using numbers. The interesting thing about these things does not go as far as where measurement is possible, because that is where, more often than not, the triviality begins.

The overestimation of achievements such as Fechner's is ultimately based on a fundamental trait of the human mind, which, as a rule, is not satisfied with truths that can be fully understood in their derivation, but which wants truths that are based on deductions where the method is considered correct, but otherwise the result arises from the assumptions with a kind of natural necessity, like the sum of the addends that cannot be seen. The same is the case with all mathematical truths. There is always something like philosophical cowardice and faint-heartedness in such a way of thinking. One does not want to determine the truth from within oneself, from one's own personality, but through something else that is removed from the influence of the subjective: the method. One has too little intellectual backbone, so one creates a staff in the method to hold on to. This is nothing more than a relinquishment, a giving up of the subjective and the personal. The method is a crutch for lame thinkers.

Strong minds of noble thought know no method, only themselves and the object. Nothing comes between the two for them.

1. At present, much good is said in individual fields. But people have no conception of the great elementary facts. They cannot observe there. And so one separates the state of sleep from the state of waking, whereas the state of sleep also accompanies waking life as a partial life, and indeed in feeling and desire (will). Today one can work with microscopes and telescopes, but one does not observe what is immediately there.

2. Only the outside of the body is perceptible. Only the inside of the spirit. The breathing process is only conscious in dreams; but so is the process of imagination by the spirit. The metabolism remains completely unconscious: only its soul correlate in disposition, hunger, thirst, etc. becomes conscious; likewise, the emotional and volitional process from the spirit.

3. The scientific world view demands that people understand themselves. However, it has no means of doing so. Indeed, with its research it departs from the actual human being. Natural science and spiritual science can exchange their gifts.

4. Imagination is the surface of a real process that takes place in the formative forces.

5. Feeling is the surface of a real process that has to do with the coming into being and passing away of the human being itself. 6. Volition (desire) is the surface of a real process that is rooted in the eternal aspect of the human being.

At present, one is not understood when one speaks of the spirit. People believe that one then fantasizes. One fantasizes no more than the physiologist and the anatomist fantasize when they describe the physical processes that underlie the subjectively unconscious respiratory or metabolic processes. Mind, however, cannot be grasped by the microscope; but just as the microscope makes the small visible by enlarging it, so mind comes to perception when the soul powers are so strengthened that the soul makes use of its own being in order to perceive. The spiritual essence of a plant is perceived immediately if one adjusts oneself in such a way that one still experiences something, if one distracts oneself from sensory perception. When you look at the plant, like a word when you read. You can describe the word according to its letter forms. You can learn as little about the spirit through mere inner contemplation as you can learn about the stomach by contemplating the feeling of hunger or satiety. The imagination, feeling, etc. of the mystic is only based on the spiritual. He does not yet have it. The body must be anatomized in order to get to know the processes of metabolism, etc.; the spirit must be condensed, strengthened - in order to get to know it. One must seek how it carries the human being from an 'other' world, how it lets him arise and pass away; how it sustains him throughout physical life. If one gives oneself over to scientific conceptions, then one weans oneself from the contemplation of the spirit. But if the spirit is not paralyzed, it also comes into independent activity through this. Through natural science, human beings have, as it were, overcome their visionary illiteracy. —

Only an unfinished product enters into perception; one could not worry about perception if it produced a finished impression - man describes the unfinished remainder as matter.

Memory contains more than thought; we would have no memories if a physical process did not follow thinking. We speak of consciousness as we speak of a mirror. We mean something through which one cannot see and which yet reflects only the transformed memories like mirror images.

Anthroposophy seeks to understand matter in the human mind; and that of consciousness in the outside world.

An anthroposophical researcher can only be someone who is protected by healthy, realistic, vigorous thinking from falling into dreaming, hallucinating, hysterically indulging in their own physicality; and whose interest in the sensual outside world, cultivated through Goethe, prevents them from tearing shreds out of this outside world to patch together a natural philosophy with them.

[missing part of the manuscript] One is in pictorial-uniformity with heightened experience of one's own self. One experiences a reality that was hidden before. One has one's own self with its part of the world before consciousness. And this self is free of the body, i.e. free of the physical body. One experiences oneself in a reality in which the physical body is not. One experiences oneself in etheric reality. It becomes clear to consciousness that an etheric body underlies the physical body. One has broken through to etheric reality through abstract thinking. One now knows that thinking is rooted in this etheric reality and that ordinary thinking is the imprint of an etheric event in the physical body.

It is important to realize that one should not tap into the ether any more than one should into the dimensions and weight ratios of physical existence. For the latter, external instruments are required. To perceive in the ether, it requires a breakthrough to a reality that is measured, counted and weighed with inner forces. Thinking about the external world is only beneficial if it creates the conditions under which the world reveals itself through measure, number and weight. Likewise, thinking inwardly must be the mediator, not the dogmatist.

Through the development of the ability just described, the whole person becomes a sense organ. One must be completely clear about this fact. One experiences a great deal through the awakening of the imaginative power. But this is not the objective world. In relation to this objective world, everything is only an image. But as an image, it has reality. This reality can only be evaluated through vigorous thinking. Through orientation in the world of images, the inwardly effective and the outward are separated. One cannot keep the outward from the images, but one can distinguish between the inward and the outward through vigorous thinking.

Of the outer world, only the spiritual-soul remains in the human and animal kingdoms; the plants and minerals are lost from the field of vision that now exists. The latter two kingdoms of nature are still there as results of the etheric. The moon ceases to be a reality in the world now being viewed. By contrast, the sun appears to have been transformed. It becomes a force permeating the world.

[missing part of the manuscript]

The impression that a person makes is much more than what is captured by the senses. Think of someone who claims to have seen Bismarck. What is at work there, besides the image, and from within. Interest is aroused. Desires assert themselves. The memory is not caused by the power of the image, but by the power of the impression and by the interest from within.

The development of the imaginative faculty depends on the formation of that which leads to remembering apart from the sensory image. This points to forces of the human soul that lie fallow in ordinary life. They are stimulated by the external world, but not by the power of the will itself. The power of interest, which when heightened to the highest degree appears as love, and the power of allowing oneself to be stimulated by a content, can be aroused by one's own will.

In this way, one develops the ability on which remembering is based; but without remembering itself coming about. But something else comes about. The power arises in the soul to live in images, without external stimulus. This image-forming power must be developed for anthroposophical research.

The first requirement is the realization that in the ordinary life of an average person, inner experiences do not show their reality, but only images of this reality. The actual self, the “I”, does live in our daily life; but it lives as an image – any sleep can convince us of this –; this “I” does not live differently in our daily life than it does in deep sleep. – And thinking, feeling and willing, insofar as they are imagined, are like dreams.

In the world of perception, we experience the effect of an external world on our organism; in the impulses of the will, the inner world – that which is actually real – does not come to light. In the world of perception, reality is hidden from us; in the world of the will, it hides itself from us.

The nature of the world of perception means that science can never arrive at anything other than a view of the world that distances itself from true reality, which makes all its ideas feel like ingredients of reality. The nature of the world of will requires that man cannot understand himself, that he cannot form ideas out of the dark depths of his being; but ideas that cannot free themselves create instability and weakness of the inner being.

It is a matter of leading the hidden world of the inner being through the ceiling of the world of perception – just as the soul world hidden in the sleeping human being is placed in the environment of the outer world through awakening.

An awakening to a more intense soul life is taking place. The thinking consciousness is joined by the seeing consciousness.

It is sufficient for life to be informed of the results of the seeing consciousness, because these results justify themselves to the thinking being.

The ordinary life of the soul must be grasped by the hidden one. The corresponding science is acquired through inner soul work.

The beginnings for this are certainly there. — Goethe:

The blue gives us a feeling of cold, just as it also reminds us of the shade. Blue glass shows the objects in a sad light.

The effect of this color (red) is as unique as its nature. It gives an impression of both seriousness and dignity, as well as of grace and charm. It achieves the latter in its dark, condensed state, and the former in its light, diluted state.

Developing this beginning leads to an awakening of the soul in the external world. And to the realization that in ordinary perception through sense impression, something spiritual is hidden.

In this way, the soul can be pushed into another reality, just as one pushes the unconscious soul into the reality of the day when awakening. Another beginning lies in Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Blossom transformed plant.

In man, what is only imagined in the external world can be experienced.

Thus, what is hidden in the physical organism is found — supersensible forces that work on its structure —: these forces are the being that, from the moment man turns his senses to the external world, turn inwardly in creation — the not yet born man looks at his inner self a being that does not live in the outer world. Seen from the outside (with the inner self), death intervenes; seen from the inside (with the soul life rooted in the spiritual world), the becoming of the new human intervenes.

The faculties are acquired when:

1. When thinking becomes so strong that it is alive, lives independently, can then, as it were, be sent as a messenger into the world and bring back its experiences. (It must live without perception.

2. When the will becomes so spiritual that it develops its own consciousness, it then observes how the soul arises when the physical passes away.

1. Ordinary thinking lives in the perceptions of the senses with the strength it has discarded when it ceased to animate the organism.

2. The ordinary will develops a consciousness with the help of the organism in order to break away from it. It begins its life in the organism and continues it outside of it. (Thus: thinking becomes stronger to the point of having a life of its own; the will becomes more independent to the point of having a meaningful consciousness).

An inner sense of responsibility develops in thinking. One rejects certain thoughts, just as one rejects certain actions. One feels obliged to others to have them. This (alternately) accommodates: an experience of how one thought is fruitful, bearing, bearing reality; the other cancelling reality.

Learning knowledge: living with connecting in the emergence; living with distinguishing in the passing away. Adding: like an invigoration – subtracting: like a destruction.

Ideal: (valid for the experience of the spiritual world – and for this) – thoughts only for the development of the soul life.

Judging (in which the will lives) in such a way that one lets already existing experiences speak – lets only the facts judge –

1. Thoughts as causes: in this way thoughts lead into the spiritual world.

2. Judgments as results: in this way the spiritual world enters into consciousness.

2. You don't allow yourself any theories at all — you just watch. You switch yourself off: you observe how another judges. —

The point of view of another person becomes important to you – your own recedes. – The manifold points of view. – You learn to see that thinking from the outside must be met with something like speaking – and from the inside: understanding what has been said. –

Common sense: the will not just to dream life instinctively, but to understand it. –

Instinct: If one could let one's present will not speak about a present experience, but rather the matured one from an earlier period of development, which has become calm. —

What one experiences now, one does not know; one only knows what one experienced years ago – what one experiences now, one will only know in later years.

This inner mood gradually brings about that vision which is independent of us, the object of which is what cannot yet be seen, what death covers.

In being born, we are psychically ripe to see the world behind death; but it is only through physical life that we become aware of what can be seen.

With the development of thinking, all powers of imagination strive to unfold. With the development of the will, the powers of egoism and everything that furthers it unfold. When properly developed, thinking stops when it wants to lapse into fantasy. — And the will becomes lonely, alienated from the world.

The world is without the spirit
For man like a book
Written in a language
He cannot read
But of which he knows
That its content is life-determining
And spiritual science wants to strive for
The art of reading
She considers herself necessary
Because she must believe
That she is demanded by the life
Itself
Into which humanity
Through the developmental forces
Of the present
Has entered.

This edition is highlighting Dr. Steiner's letter to Friederich Theodor Vischer (mailed, June 20, 1882). This presentation was translated by Daniel Hafner, August 2005, and revised October, 2011.

Modern natural science regards Experience as the only source for the investigation of truth. And not wrongly, to be sure. Its area is the realm of outer, spatial things and temporal processes. How should one be able to make anything out about an object belonging to the outer world, without having gotten to know it by means of sense-perception, that is, the only manner of coming in contact with things spatial-temporal. First get to know the object,¹ and then theorize about it, so goes the maxim asserted by modern science over against the speculative systems of the philosophers of nature from the beginning of this century. This principle is completely justified, but by an erroneous conception, it has led science astray. The misunderstanding lies in the character attributed by the inductive method, and by the materialism and atomism issuing from it, to general concepts. For the person of understanding, there can be no doubt that the current state of natural science in its theoretical part is essentially influenced by concepts as they have become dominant through Kant. If we want to go into this relationship more closely, we must commence our consideration with him. Kant limited the scope of Recognition to Experience, because in the sensory material communicated by it, he found the only possibility of filling in the concept-patterns, the categories, inherent in our mental organization, by themselves quite empty. For him, sensory content was the only form of such a conceptual pattern. Thereby he had steered the world's judgment into other courses. If, earlier, one had thought of concepts and laws as belonging to the outer world, if one had ascribed to them objective validity, now they seemed to be given merely by the nature of the “I.” The outer world counted merely as raw material, to be sure, yet as that which alone reality was to be ascribed to. This standpoint was inherited from Kant by Inductive Science. It too counts the material world as the only thing real; for it, concepts and laws are justified only to the extent that they have that world as their content and mediate the recognizing of it. It regards concepts reaching beyond this realm as unreal. For it, general thoughts and laws are mere abstractions, derived from the agreements experienced in a series of observations. It knows mere subjective maxims, generalizations, no concrete concepts bearing their validity in themselves. This must be borne in mind if one wants to penetrate from a lot of murky concepts circulating nowadays through to complete clarity. One will first have to ask oneself:what then is Experience, really, gained of this or that object? In works on the philosophy of experience, one will search in vain for a matter-of-fact, satisfying answer to this certainly justified question.

Recognizing an object of the outer world in its essential being cannot, after all, possibly mean perceiving it with the senses, and as it presents itself to them, so drawing up a likeness of it. One will never see how, from something sensory, a corresponding conceptual photograph could come about, and what relation there could be between the two. An epistemology that starts from this standpoint can never get clear about the question of the connection of concept and object.² How is one to see the necessity of going beyond what is given immediately by the sense, to the concept, if in the former the essential being of an object of the sensory world were already given? Why the conceptual comprehending too, if the looking-at were already sufficient? At the least, the concept, if not a falsification, would be a highly unnecessary addition to the object. That is what one must arrive at, if one denies the concreteness of concepts and laws. Over against such pictorial explanations as, say, that of the Herbartian school, too: that the concept is the mental correlate of an object located outside us, and that the recognizing consists in acquiring such a picture, we now want to seek a reality explanation of recognizing. In keeping with the task we set ourselves, we here want to limit ourselves merely to the recognizing of the outer world. In this case, two things come into consideration in the act of recognizing: The confirmation^TR1 of thinking, and that of the senses. The former has to do with concepts and laws, the latter with sensory qualities and processes. The concept and the law are always something general, the sensory object something particular; the former can only be thought, the latter only looked at. The media through which the general appears to us as something particular are space and time. Every particular thing and every particular process must be able to be fitted into the conceptual content of the world, for whatever of it were not lawful and conceptual in nature does not come into consideration for our thinking at all. Hence, recognizing an object can only mean: giving what appears to our senses, in space, a place in the generality of the conceptual content of the world, indeed letting it merge into it completely. In the recognizing of a spatial-temporal object, we are thus given nothing else than a concept or law in a sense-perceptible way. Only by such a conception does one get over the previously mentioned unclearness. One must allow the concept its primariness, its own form of existence, built upon itself, and only recognize it again in another form in the sense-perceptible object. Thus we have reached a reality definition of Experience. The philosophy of induction can by its nature never reach a definition of this kind. For it would have to be shown in what way experience transmits concept and law. But since that philosophy sees these two as something merely subjective, its path to that is cut off from the beginning.

From this, one sees at the same time how unfruitful the undertaking would be to want to make out anything about the outer world without the help of perception. How can one gain possession of the concept in the form of viewing, without accomplishing the viewing itself? Only when one sees that what perception offers is concept and idea, but in an essentially other form than in pure thinking's form freed of all empirical content, and that this form is what makes the difference, does one comprehend that one must take the path of experience. But if one assumes the content to be what matters, then nothing can be put forth against the assertion that the same content could after all also be acquired in a manner independent of all experience. So experience must indeed be the maxim of the philosophy of nature, but at the same time, recognition of the concept in the form of outer experience. And here is where modern natural science, by seeking no clear concept of experience, got on the wrong track. In this point it has been attacked repeatedly, and is also easily open to attack. Instead of acknowledging the apriority of the concept, and taking the sense world as but another form of the same, it regards the same as a mere derivative of the outer world, which for it is an absolute Prior. The mere form of something is thus stamped the thing itself. Atomism, to the extent that it is materialistic, issues from this unclearness of the concepts. We want here, based on the preceding, to subject it to a careful, and—as I believe I can assume—the only possible, critique.

However opinions may diverge in the detail, atomism ultimately amounts to regarding all sensory qualities, such as: tone, warmth, light, scent, and so on, indeed, if one considers the way thermodynamics derives Boyle's law, even pressure, as mere semblance, mere function of the world of atoms. Only the atom counts as ultimate factor of reality. To be consistent, one must now deny it every sensory quality,because otherwise a thing would be explained out of itself. One did, to be sure, when one set about to build up an atomistic world system,attribute to the atom all kinds of sensory qualities, albeit only in quite meager abstraction.³ One regards it, now as extended and impenetrable, now as mere energy center, etc. But thereby one committed the greatest inconsistency, and showed that one had not considered the above, which shows quite clearly that no sensory characteristics whatsoever may be at tributed to the atom at all. Atoms must have an existence inaccessible to sensory experience. On the other hand, though, also, they themselves, and also the processes occurring in the world of atoms, especially movements, are not supposed to be something merely conceptual. The concept, after all, is something merely universal, which is without spatial existence. But the atom is supposed, even if not itself spatial, yet to be there in space, to present something particular. It is not supposed to be exhausted in its concept, but rather to have, beyond that, a form of existence in space. With that, there is taken into the concept of the atom a property that annihilates it. The atom is supposed to exist analogously to the objects of outer perception, yet not be able to be perceived.In its concept, viewability is at once affirmed and denied.

Moreover, the atom proclaims itself right away as a mere product of speculation. When one leaves out the previously mentioned sensory qualities quite unjustifiably attributed to it, nothing is left for it but the mere “Something,” which is of course unalterable, because there is nothing about it, so nothing can be destroyed, either. The thought of mere being, transposed into space, a mere thought-point, basically just the arbitrarily multiplied Kantian “thing in itself,” confronts us.

Against this, one could perhaps object that after all it is all the same what is understood by Atom, that one should let the scholar of natural history go ahead and operate with it—for in many tasks of mathematical physics, atomistic models are indeed advantageous—; that after all, the philosopher knows that one is not dealing with a spatial reality, but with an abstraction, like other mathematical notions. To oppose the assumption of the atom in this respect would indeed be mistaken. But that is not the issue. The philosophers are concerned with that atomism for which atom and causality⁴ are the only possible motivating forces of the world, which either denies all that is not mechanical, or else holds it to be inexplicable, as exceeding our cognitive ability.⁵ It is one thing to view the atom as a mere thought-point, another thing to want to see in it the fundamental principle of all existence. The former standpoint never goes beyond mechanical nature with it; the second holds everything to be a mechanical function.

If someone wanted to speak of the harmlessness of the atomistic notions, one could, to refute him, go ahead and hold up to him the consequences that have been derived from them. There are especially two necessary consequences: firstly, that the predicate of original existence is squandered on isolated substances void of spirit, quite indifferent toward one another, and otherwise wholly undefined, in whose interaction only mechanical necessity rules, so that the entire remainder of the world of phenomena exists as their empty haze, and has mere chance to thank for its existence; secondly, insurmountable limits to our recognizing result from this. For the human mind, the concept of the atom is, as we have shown, something completely empty, the mere “Something.” But since the atomists cannot be content with this content, but call for actual substance, yet determine this substance in a way in which it can nowhere be given, they must proclaim the unrecognizability of the actual essential being of the atom.

Concerning the other limit of knowledge, the following is to be noted. If one sees thinking too as a function of the interaction of complexes of atoms, which remain indifferent toward one another, it is not at all to be marveled at, why the connection between movement of the atoms on the one hand, and thinking and sensation on the other, is not to be comprehended,⁶ which atomism therefore sees as a limit of our recognition. Only, there is something to comprehend only where a conceptual passage over exists. But if one first so limits the concepts that in the sphere of the one, nothing is to be found that would make possible the passage to the sphere of the other, then comprehending is excluded from the start. Moreover, this passage would have to be indeed not of a merely speculative nature, but rather it would have to be a real process, thus permitting of being demonstrated. But this is again prevented by the non-sensoriness of atomistic motion. With the giving up of the concept of the atom, these speculations about the limit of our knowledge fall away by themselves. From nothing must one guard oneself more than from such determinations of boundary, for beyond the boundary there is then room for everything possible. The most irrational spiritism, as well as the most nonsensical dogma, could hide behind such assumptions. The same are quite easy to refute in every single case, by showing that at their foundation there always lies the mistake of seeing a mere abstraction for more than it is, or holding merely relative concepts to be absolute ones, and similar errors. A large number of false notions has come into circulation especially through the incorrect concepts of space and time.⁷

Hence we must subject these two concepts to a discussion. The mechanistic explanation of nature needs for the assumption of its world of atoms, besides the atoms in motion absolute space as well, that is, an empty vacuum, and an absolute time, that is, an unalterable measure of the One-After-Another.⁸ But what is space? Absolute extension can be the only answer. Only, that is only a characteristic of sensory objects, and apart from these a mere abstraction, existent only upon and with the objects, and not beside them as atomism must necessarily assume. If extension is to be present, something must be extended, and this cannot again be Extension. Here, for a proof of the absoluteness of space, one will be able to raise as an objection, say, the Kantian invention about the two gloves of the left and right hand. One says, their parts have, after all, the same relationship to one another, and yet one cannot make the two congruent. From this, Kant concludes that the relationship to absolute space is a different one, hence absolute space exists. But it is more obvious, after all, to assume that the relationship of the two gloves to one another is simply such that they cannot be made congruent. How should a relationship to absolute space be thought of, anyway? And even assuming it were possible, the relationships of the two gloves to absolute space would, however, only then establish in turn a relationship of the two gloves to one another. Why should this relationship not just as well be able to be a primary one? Space, apart from the things of the world of the senses, is an absurdity. As space is only something upon the objects, so time is also given only upon and with the processes of the world of the senses. It is inherent in them. By themselves, both are mere abstractions. Only the sensory things and processes are concrete items of the world of the senses. They present concepts and laws in the form of outer existence. Therefore they in their simplest form must be a fundamental pillar of the empirical study of nature. The simple sensory quality and not the atom, the fundamental fact and not the motion behind what is empirical, are the elements of the empirical study of nature. It is thereby given a direction which is the only possible one. If one takes that as a basis, one will not be tempted at all to speak of limits of recognizing, because one is not dealing with things to which one attributes arbitrary negative characteristics such as supersensible and the like, but rather with actually given concrete objects.

From these mentions, important conclusions will also result for epistemology. But foremost, it is certain that the atom and the motion behind the empirical must be exchanged for the fundamental sensory elements of outer experience, and henceforth can no longer count as principles of the study of nature.

• 1. Compare Vischer, Old and New, Part 3, pp. 51ff.
• 2. Compare with this the keen-minded discourses of John Rehmke in his sound work The World as Perception and Concept, Berlin, 1880.
• TR1. Translator Note: “confirmation” (Bestätigung) could be a mistake for “activation” (Betätigung).
• 3. Here belong the indications Du Bois-Reymond gives about such a system, as well as the experiments performed by Wiessner, Schramm. Translator's Note: “Schrann” is presumably a mistake for “Schramm” (Heinrich Schramm wrote The General Movement of Matter as Fundamental Cause of All Phenomena), and so I have changed it.
• 4. Compare Vischer, Old and New, Part 2.
• 5. This view is advocated by Du Bois-Reymond in Concerning the Limits of the Recognition of Nature and The Seven Riddles of the World, Leipzig, 1882.
• 6. Du Bois-Reymond: Concerning the Limits of the Recognition of Nature (see p. 4, footnote).
• 7. Vischer has repeatedly pronounced the necessity of a correction of our concept of time (Critical Passages, 1873, Old and New, Part 3).
• 8. Compare: Otto Liebmann,Thoughts and Facts, Strasbourg, 1882.

Rudolf Steiner's Original Letter to Friedrich Theodor Vischer:

Nov. 25, 1886

Three years ago, you were so kind as to give me your opinion, an opinion of surpassing value to me, about a short essay in which I treated the mistakes of atomism, and of modern natural science in general. I had submitted to you the mss. of the essay.

This incident encourages me to send you also the attached treatise about the theory of knowledge in Goethe's view of the world.

Though the essay refers to Goethe, I confess that my main concern was to provide a contribution to the theory of knowledge rather than to Goethean research.

In considering Goethe's Weltanschaung—view of the world—my concern was not as much with his positive presentation as with the direction of his way of looking at the world. Goethe's and Schiller's scientific disclosures are for me a middle for which the beginning and the end have to be sought.

The beginning: by an account of the fundamental principles which we must think of as supporting this view of the world; the end: by an exposition of the consequences which this method of viewing the world has for our view of the world, and of life.

If I tell you that I owe much of my philosophic education to the study of your writings, you will understand how desirable it is for me to find your approval of my own thinking.

Commending myself to your benevolence, I am, most sincerely,

Rudolf Steiner

First, we will call to mind the current doctrine of sense impressions, then point to contradictions contained in it, and to a view of the world more compatible with the idealistic understanding.

Current (1890) natural science thinks of the world-space as filled with an infinitely thin substance called ether. This substance consists of infinitely small particles, the ether atoms. This ether does not merely exist where there are no bodies, but also in the pores (pertaining) to bodies. The physicist imagines that each body consists of an infinite number of immeasurable small parts, like atoms. They are not in contact with each other, but they are separated by small interstices. They, in the turn, unite to larger forms, the molecules, which still cannot be discerned by the eye. Only when an infinite number of molecules unite, we get what our senses perceived as bodies.

We will explain this by an example. There is a gas in nature, called hydrogen, and another called oxygen. Hydrogen consists of immeasurable small hydrogen atoms, oxygen of oxygen atoms. The hydrogen atoms are given here as red circlets, the oxygen ones as blue circlets. So, the physicist would imagine a certain quantity of hydrogen, like a figure 1, a quantity of oxygen like figure 2. (See table)

Now we are able, by special processes, not interesting us here, to bring the oxygen in such a relation to the hydrogen that two hydrogen atoms combine with one oxygen atom, so that a composite substance results which we would have to show as indicated in figure 3.

Here, always two hydrogen atoms, together with one oxygen atom form one whole. And this still invisible, small formation, consists of two kinds of atoms, we call a molecule. The substance whose molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms, plus one oxygen atom is water.

It also can happen that a molecule consists of 3, 4, 5 different atoms. So one molecule of alcohol consists of atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

But we also see by this that for modern physics each substance (fluid, solid, and gaseous) consists of parts between which there exist empty spaces (pores).

Into these pores, there enter the ether atoms which fill the whole cosmos. So, if we draw the ether atoms as dots, we have to imagine a body like figure 4. (The red and blue circlets are substance atoms, the black dots are ether atoms.)

Now we have to imagine that both the substance-atoms and the ether-atoms are in a state of constant motion. The motion is swinging. We must think that each atom is moving back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.

Now in A (see figure 5) we imagine a body, the molecules of which are in constant motion. This motion is transferred also to the ether-atoms in the pores, and from there, to the ether outside of the body of B, e.g. to C. Let us assume in D a sense-organ e.g. the eye, then, the vibrations of the ether will reach the eye, and through it, the nerve N. There, they hit, and through the nerve-conduit L, they arrive at the brain G. Let us assume for instance that the body A is in such a motion that the molecule swings back and forth 461 billion times a second. Then, each ether-molecule also swings 461 billion times, and hits 461 billion times against the optic nerve (in H). The nerve-conduit L transfers these 461 billion vibrations to the brain, and here, we have a sensation: in this case high red. If there were 760 billion vibrations I could see violet, at 548 billion yellow, etc. To each color sensation there corresponds, in the outside world, a certain motion.

This is even simpler in the case of the sensations of sound. Here also the body-molecules vibrate. The medium transferring this to our ear is not the ether but the air. At 148 vibrations per second we perceive the tone D, at 371 the tone F sharp, etc.

Thus we see to what this whole interpretation leads: whatever we perceive in the world with our senses, colors, tones, etc., is said not to exist in reality, but only to appear in our brain when certain vibratory forms of motion are present in the outer world. If I perceive heat, I do so only because the ether around me is in motion, and because the ether atoms hit against the nerves of my skin; when I sense light, it is because the same ether atoms reach the nerve of my eye, etc.

Therefore, the modern physicist says: in reality, nothing exists except swinging, moving atoms; everything else is merely a creation of my brain, formed by it when it is touched by the movement in the outer world.

I do not have to paint how dismal such a view of the world is. Who would not be filled with the saddest ideas if for example, Hugo Magnus, who is quite caught in that way of thinking, exclaims, “This motion of the ether is the only thing which really and objectively exists of color in creation. Only in the human body, in the brain, these ether movements are transformed into images which we usually call red, green, yellow, etc. According to this, we must say: creation is absolutely colorless ... Only when these (colorless) ether movements are led to the brain by the eye, they are transformed to images which we call color.” (Hugo Magnus, Farben und Schöpfung, 8 lectures about the relation of color to man and to nature, Breslau, 1881, p. 16f.)

I am convinced that everyone whose thinking is based on sound ideas, and who has not been subjected from early youth to these strange jumpy thoughts, will consider this state of affairs as simply absurd.

This matter, however, has a much more dubious angle. If there is nothing in the real world except swinging atoms, then there cannot be any true objective ideas and ideals. For when I conceive an idea, I can ask myself, what does it mean outside of my consciousness?—Nothing more than a movement of my brain molecules. Because my brain molecules at that moment swing one way or another, my brain gives me the illusion of some idea. All reality in the world then is considered as movement, everything else is empty fog, result of some movement.

If this way of thinking were correct, then I would have to tell myself: man is nothing more than a mass of swinging molecules. That is the only thing in him that has reality. If I have a great idea and pursue it to its origin, I will find some kind of movement. Let us say I plan a good deed. I only can do that if a mass of molecules in my brain feels like executing a certain movement. In such a case, is there still any value in “good” or “evil”? I can't do anything except what results from the movement of my brain molecules.

From these causes came the pessimism of delle Grazie. She says: For what purpose is this illusionary world of ideas and ideals when they are nothing but movements of atoms. And she believes that current science is right. Because she could not transcend science, and could not, as apathetic people do, disregard the misery of this belief; she succumbed to pessimism.

(See Rudolf Steiner and Marie delle Grazie, Nature and Our Ideals, published by Mercury Press.)

The error underlying the theories of this science is so simple that one cannot understand how the scientific world of today could have succumbed to it.

We can clarify the issue by a simple example. Let us suppose someone sends me a telegram from the place A. When it reaches me, I get nothing but paper and lettering. But if I know how to read, I receive more than merely paper and printed signs, that is, a certain content of thought. Can I say now: I have created this content of thought only in my brain, and paper plus lettering are the only reality? Certainly not. For the content which is now in me is also present in the place A in the same manner. This is the best example one can choose. For in a visible way, nothing at all has come to me from A. Who could maintain that the telegraph wires carry the thought from one place to the other? The same is true about our sense impressions. If a series of ether particles, swinging 589 billion times a second, reach my eye and stimulate the optic nerve, it is true that I have the sensation green. But the ether waves as paper and written symbols for the telegram in the example above are only the carriers of “green”, which is real on the body. The mediator is not the reality of the matter.

As wire and electricity for the telegram, so the swinging ether is here used as mediator. But just because we apprehend “green” by means of the swinging ether, we cannot say: “green” is simply the same as the swinging ether.

This coarse mistaking of the mediator for the content that is carried to us, lies at the root of all current sciences.

We must assume “green” as a quality of bodies. This “green” causes a vibration of 589 billion vibrations per second, this vibration comes to the optic nerve which is so constructed that it knows: when 589 billion vibrations arrive, they can only come from a green surface.

The same holds true for all other mental representations. If I have a thought, an idea, an ideal, it of course must be present in my brain as a reality. That is only possible if the brain particles move in a certain way, for an entity existing in space cannot suffer any changes except by motions. But we would be deadly mistaken about the content of the idea as compared to the way it appears in the body, if we were to say: the motion itself is the idea. No—the motion only provides the possibility for the idea to gain form and spatial existence.

But there is another aspect. For us men, there is nothing [in] which we are completely present as in our ideas, our ideals and mental representations. For them we live, we weave.

When we are alone in the dark, in complete silence, so that we have no sense impressions,—of what are we totally and fully conscious?—Our thoughts and ideas! After these comes everything we can experience through the senses. That is given to me when I open my sense organs to the outer world and keep them receptive. Aside from ideas, ideals and sense impressions, nothing is given to me. Everything else can only be derived as existing and ideas on the basis of our sense impressions.

Can I make such an assumption about moving atoms? If motion occurs, there must be something that moves. By what do I recognize motion? Only by seeing that the bodies change their place in space. But what I see before me are bodies with all qualities of color, etc.

So what does the physicist want to explain? Let us say color. He says: it is motion. What moves? A colorless body. Or, he wants to explain warmth. He again says: it is motion. What moves? A body without warmth. In short: if we explain all qualities of bodies by motion, we finally have to assume that the moving objects have no qualities, as all qualities originate in motion.

To recapitulate. The physicist explains all sense-perceivable, all sense-perceptible qualities by motion. So, what moves cannot yet have qualities. But what has no qualities cannot move at all. Therefore, the atom assumed by physicists is a thing that dissolves into nothing if judged sharply.

So, the whole way of explanation falls. We must ascribe to color, warmth, sounds, etc., the same reality as to motion. With this, we have refuted the physicists, and have proved the objective reality of the world of phenomena and of ideas.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Six Questions about Some Basic Concepts of Natural Science. (Answered in 1919.)

(The exact questions no longer exist.)

1. Atoms are to be regarded as ideal contents of space. The contents are the results of force-directions meeting each other—e.g., directions of force.
   
   
   abc are active in space, and by their meeting a resultant force is carried which is effective as an atom of tetrahedral character.
   
   Elements are the expression of certain meetings of forces; that they manifest themselves as such is due to the fact that one force, in meeting another, produces a result, while other effects of forces on each other are without result.
   
   Crystals are the result of more complicated meetings of forces, atoms the result of simple meetings.
   
   Amorphic masses result from the neutralization of force-reactions.
2. Force is the revelation of spirit viewed in a one-sided way. One cannot say that force has an effect on matter, since matter consists merely in the affects of the force-rays when they meet. Never does one form of energy pass over into another one; as little as the activity of one man goes into that of another. What passes over is merely the arithmetical expression of measure. If mechanical energy passes over into warmth the real occurrence is as follows: a certain quantity of this revelation which reveals itself in warmth is stimulated in a spiritual being by a certain quantity of mechanical energy. (This is so in a healthy fashion with Mayer. It was only Helmholtz who botched up this matter.)
3. Neither sound, nor warmth, nor light, nor electricity are vibrations, just as little as a horse is a sum of gallop-paces. Sound, for instance, is an essential entity, and the effect of this real quality in its passage through the air is vibration. For man as a sensing being, the vibration is motivation to imitate the essential entity in himself; this constitutes the perception of sound. It is similar with others: light, etc.
4. Light is that by which it is perceived. (See my introduction to Goethe's Theory of Color.) The vibration is the revelation of light in the ether.
   
   The refraction of light is the result of the effect of a certain force-direction upon the light-direction. Newton's color rings (circles), phenomena of interference, are results of light-radiation (effect of light in the ether), and of the effects of other forces found in the path of light (weakening effects, gradually weakening affects of other forces). The same goes for phenomena of polarisation. One should not seek the polarisation figures in the structure of the essence of the light but in the structure of the medium which places itself in the path of light.
   
   The speed of transmission is the result of a kind of friction of the light against the medium.
5. Light is not to be considered as a function of electricity, but the latter is to be considered as a kind of corporeal carrier of light.
   
   Electrically charged matter: certain accumulations of force retain those accumulations of force which manifest as electricity.
6. Mathematics is the abstracted sum of the forces effective in space. If one says, “Mathematical propositions are valid a priori”, this comes from the fact that man exists within the same lines of force as the other beings, and that he can disassociate himself from everything that does not belong to the scheme of space, etc.

What is the origin of these caricatures?

They are little jokes, trifles jotted down on a piece of blank paper that happened to be at hand, or even a paper napkin, during moments of relaxation—such as at tea time or after lunch—when we were discussing certain cultural distortions of the times.

An admirer of such tasty samples was able to project them on a screen and when enlarged they had such a strong and exhilarating effect on the viewers that they wanted to take them home as a general remedy against the blues. But one can also detect in them that spark of genius which touched everything that Rudolf Steiner spoke or his hand formed.

Such jocularity might well have remained below the surface, for the situation provided little opportunity for leisurely meetings: constant traveling and demands on his time, changing residences—made an affectionate lingering with the little things of personal life hardly possible. Nevertheless these joking caricatures are evidence of the drawer’s sharp powers of observation and for his intuitive understanding of inner nature, even in its distortion. What the soul comprehends becomes subtle intuition and playfully converts it to form. Like Christian Morgenstern's "Gallows Humor", they tell us that profoundest earnestness can and must combine with humor.

Marie Steiner

[ 1 ] On August 18, 1787, Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy: “To judge by the plants and fish I have seen in Naples and Sicily, I would, if I were ten years younger, be very tempted to make a trip to India, not in order to discover something new, but in order to contemplate in my own way what has already been discovered.” In these words is to be found the point of view from which we have to look at Goethe's scientific works. With him it is never a matter of discovering new facts, but rather of opening up a new point of view, of looking at nature in a particular way. It is true that Goethe made a number of great single discoveries, such as the intermaxillary bone, the vertebral theory of the skull in osteology, the common identity of all plant organs with the leaf in botany, etc. But we have to regard as the life and soul of all these individual cases the magnificent view of nature by which they are carried; in the study of organisms we have to fix our attention above all on a magnificent discovery that overshadows everything else: that of the being or nature of the organism itself. Goethe has set forth the principle by which an organism is what it presents itself to be; he sets forth the causes whose results appear to us in the manifestations of life; he sets forth, in fact, everything we can ask about the manifestations of life from a point of view concerned with principles.¹

From the beginning, this is the goal of all his striving with respect to the organic natural sciences; in his pursuit of this goal, those particular discoveries arose for him as though of themselves. He had to find them if he did not want to be hindered in his further striving. Natural science before him—which, did not know the essential being of life phenomena, and which simply investigated organisms as compositions of parts, according to outer characteristics, just as one does with inorganic things—often had, along its way, to give these particulars an incorrect interpretation, to present them in a false light. One cannot of course see any such error in the particulars themselves. But we will recognize this only after we have first understood the organism, since the particulars in themselves, considered separately, do not bear within themselves the principle that explains them. They can be explained only by the nature of the whole, because it is the whole that gives them being and significance. Only after Goethe had discovered precisely this nature of the whole did these erroneous interpretations become evident to him; they could not be reconciled with his theory of living beings; they contradicted it. If he wanted to go further on his way, he would have to clear away such preconceptions. This was the case with the intermaxillary bone. Certain facts that are of value and interest only if one possesses just such a theory as that of the vertebral nature of the skull bone were unknown to that older natural science. All these hindrances had to be cleared away by means of individual discoveries. These, therefore, never appear in Goethe's case as ends in themselves; they must always be made in order to confirm a great thought, to confirm that central discovery. The fact cannot be denied that Goethe's contemporaries came to the same observations sooner or later, and that all of them would perhaps be known today even without Goethe's efforts; but even less can the fact be denied that no one until now has expressed his great discovery, encompassing all organic nature, independently of him in such an exemplary way ²—in fact, we still lack an even partially satisfactory appreciation of his discovery. Basically it does not matter whether Goethe was the first to discover a certain fact or only rediscovered it; the fact first gains its true significance through the way he fits it into his view of nature. This is what has been overlooked until now. The particular facts have been overly emphasized and this has led to polemics. One has indeed often pointed to Goethe's conviction about the consistency of nature, but one did not recognize that the main thing, in organic science for example, is to show what the nature is of that which maintains this consistency. If one calls it the typus, then one must say in what the being of the typus consists in Goethe's sense of the word.

[ 2 ] The significance of Goethe's view about plant metamorphosis does not lie, for example, in the discovery of the individual fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are identical organs, but rather in the magnificent building up in thought of a living whole of mutually interacting formative laws; this building up proceeds from his view of plant metamorphosis, and determines out of itself the individual details and the individual stages of plant development. The greatness of this idea, which Goethe then sought to extend to the animal world also, dawns upon one only when one tries to make it alive in one's spirit, when one undertakes to rethink it. One then becomes aware that this thought is the very nature of the plant itself translated into the idea and living in our spirit just as it lives in the object; one observes also that one makes an organism alive for oneself right into its smallest parts, that one pictures it not as a dead, finished object, but rather as something evolving, becoming, as something never at rest within itself.

[ 3 ] As we now attempt, in what follows, to present more thoroughly everything we have indicated here, there will become clear to us at the same time the true relationship of the Goethean view of nature to that of our own age, and especially to the theory of evolution in its modern form.

• 1. Whoever declares from the very beginning that such a goal is unattainable will never arrive at an understanding of the Goethean views of nature; on the other hand, whoever undertakes to study them without preconceptions, and leaves this question open, will certainly answer it affirmatively at the end. Doubts could very well arise for many a person through several remarks Goethe himself made, such as the following one, for example: “... without presuming to want to discover the primal mainsprings of nature's workings, we would have directed our attention to the manifestation of the forces by which the plant gradually transforms one and the same organ” But with Goethe such statements never direct themselves against the possibility, in principle, of knowing the being of things; he is only cautious enough about the physical-mechanical conditions underlying the organism not to draw any conclusions too quickly, since he knew very well that such questions can only be resolved in the course of time.
• 2. We do not mean in any way to say that Goethe has never been understood at all in this regard. On the contrary, we repeatedly take occasion in this very edition to point to a number of men who seem to us to carry on and elaborate Goethean ideas. Belonging among them are such names as: Voigt, Nees von Esenbeck, d'Alton (senior and junior), Schelver, C.G. Carus, and Martius, among others. But these men in fact built up their systems upon the foundation of the views laid down in the writings of Goethe, and, precisely about them, one cannot say that they would have arrived at their concepts even without Goethe, whereas to be sure, contemporaries of Goethe—Josephi in Göttingen, for example—did come independently upon the intermaxillary bone, and Oken upon the vertebral theory.

[ 1 ] If one traces the history of how Goethe's thoughts about the development of organisms arose, one can all too easily be come doubtful about the part one must ascribe to the early years of the poet, i.e., to the time before he went to Weimar. Goethe himself attached very little value to the natural-scientific knowledge he had in that period: “I had no idea what external nature actually means and not the slightest knowledge about its so-called three kingdoms.” On the basis of this statement, one usually thinks that his natural-scientific reflections began only after his arrival in Weimar. Nevertheless, it seems advisable to go back still further if one does not want to leave the whole spirit of his views unexplained. The enlivening power that guided his studies in the direction we want to describe later already manifests itself in earliest youth.

[ 2 ] When Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, that spirit was still entirely dominant in natural-scientific endeavors which is characteristic of a great part of the eighteenth century, and which sundered the whole of science into two extremes that one felt no need to unite. At one extreme there stood the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679–1754), which moved entirely within an abstract element; at the other stood the individual branches of science that lost themselves in the outer description of endless details, and that lacked any effort to seek out a higher principle within the world of their particular objects of study. Wolff's kind of philosophy could not find its way out of the sphere of his general concepts into the realm of immediate reality, of individual existence. There the most obvious things were treated with all possible thoroughness. One discovered that a thing is a something that has no contradiction in itself, that there are finite and infinite substances, etc. But if one approached the things themselves with these generalities, in order to understand their life and working, one stood there completely at a loss; one could find no application of those concepts to the world in which we live and which we want to understand. The things themselves, however, that surround us were described in rather non-principle terms, purely according to their looks, according to their outer features. On the one hand, there was a science of principles that lacked living content, that did not delve lovingly into immediate reality; on the other hand, a science without principles, lacking all ideal content; each confronted the other without mediation; each was unfruitful for the other. Goethe's healthy nature found itself repelled in the same way by both kinds of one-sidedness³ in his opposition to them, there developed within him the mental pictures that later led him to that fruitful grasp of nature in which idea and experience comprehensively interpenetrate each other, mutually enliven one another, and become one whole.

[ 3 ] The concept, therefore, that those two extremes could grasp the least emerged for Goethe as the very first: the concept of life. When we look at a living being according to its outer manifestation, it presents itself to us as a number of particulars manifesting as its members or organs. The description of these members, according to form, relative position, size, etc., can be the subject of the kind of extensive exposition to which the second of the two sciences we named devoted itself. But one can also describe in this same way any mechanical construction out of inorganic parts. One forgot completely that the main thing to keep in mind about the organism is the fact that here the outer manifestation is governed by an inner principle, that the whole works in every organ. That outer manifestation, the spatial juxtaposition of its parts, can also be observed after its life is destroyed, because it does still remain for a time. But what we have before us as a dead organism is in reality no longer an organism. That principle has disappeared which permeated all the particulars. In opposition to that way of looking at things which destroys life in order to know life Goethe early on established the possibility and need of a higher way. We see this already in a letter of July 14, 1770 from his Strassburg period, in which he speaks of a butterfly: “The poor creature trembles in the net, rubs off its most beautiful colours; and even if one captures it unharmed, it still lies there finally stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature; something else belongs to it, a main part, and in this case as in every other, a most major main part: its life ...” The words in Faust [Part I, Study] also have their origin, in fact, from this same view:

[ 4 ] Who'll know aught living and describe it well,⁴
Seeks first the spirit to expel.
He then has the component parts in hand
But lacks, alas! the spirit's bond.

[ 5 ] As one would fully expect from a nature like Goethe's, however, he did not stop with the negation of a view, but rather sought to develop his own view more and more; and we can very often find already in the indications we have about his thinking from 1769–1775 the germs of his later works. He was developing for himself the idea of a being in which each part enlivens the other, in which one principle imbues all the particulars. We read in Faust [Part I, Night]:

[ 6 ] Into the whole how all things blend,
Each in the other working, living!

[ 7 ] And in Satyros [Act 4]:

[ 8 ] How from no-thing the primal thing arose,
How power of light through the night did ring,
Imbuing the depths of the beings all;
Thus welled up desiring's surge.
And the elements disclosed themselves,
With hunger into one another poured,
All-imbuing, all-imbued.

[ 9 ] This being is conceived of as subject to continuous changes in time, but in all the stages of these changes only one being is always manifesting itself, a being that asserts itself as what endures, as what is constant within the change. About this primal thing (Urding), it is further stated in Satyros:

[ 10 ] And rolling up and down did go
The all and one eternal thing,
Ever changing, ever constant!

[ 11 ] Compare with this what Goethe wrote in 1807 as an introduction to his theory of metamorphosis: “But if we look at all forms, especially the organic ones, we find that nowhere is there anything enduring, anything at rest, anything complete, but rather it is far more the case that everything is in continuous motion and flux.” Over against this flux, Goethe there sets up the idea—or “a something held fast in the world of experience only for the moment”—as that which is constant. From the above passage from Satyros, one can see clearly enough that the foundation for Goethe's morphological ideas had already been laid before he came to Weimar.

[ 12 ] But we must firmly bear in mind that this idea of a living being is not applied right away to any single organism, but rather the entire universe is pictured as such a living being. What moves Goethe to this view, of course, is to be sought in his alchemistic studies with Fräulein von Klettenberg and in his reading of Theophrastus Paracelsus after his return from Leipzig (1768–69). Through one experiment or another, one sought to hold fast that principle which permeates the entire universe, to make it manifest within a substance.⁵ Nevertheless, this way of looking at the world, which borders on the mystical, represents only a passing episode in Goethe's development, and so on gives way to a healthier and more objective way of picturing things. But his view of the entire world as one great organism, as we find this indicated in the passages from Faust and from Satyros cited above, still stands until about 1780, as we shall see later from his essay on Nature. This view confronts us once more in Faust, at that place where the earth spirit is represented as that life principle which permeates the universal organism [Part I, Night]:

[ 13 ] In the tides of life, in actions' storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living.

[ 14 ] As definite views were thus developing in Goethe's mind, there came into his hand in Strassburg a book that sought to propound a world view that was the exact antithesis of his own. It was Holbach's Système de la Nature.⁶ Whereas until then he had only had to censure the fact that one described what is alive as though it were a mechanical accumulation of individual things, now he could get to know, in Holbach, a philosopher who really regarded what is alive as a mechanism. What, in the former case, sprang merely from an inability to know life down into its roots here leads to a dogma pernicious to life. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe says about this: “One matter supposedly exists from all eternity, and has moved for all eternity, and now with this motion supposedly brings forth right and left and on all sides, without more ado, the infinite phenomena of existence. We would indeed have been satisfied with this, if the author had really built up the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he might know as little about nature as we do, for as soon as he has staked up a few general concepts, he leaves nature at once, in order to transform what appears as something higher than nature, or as a higher nature in nature, into a nature that is material, heavy, moving, to be sure, but still without direction or shape, and he believes that he has gained a great deal by this.” Goethe could find nothing in this except “moving matter,” and in opposition to this, his concepts about nature took ever clearer form. We find these brought together and presented in his essay Nature, written about 1780. Since, in this essay, all Goethe's thoughts about nature—which until then we only find in scattered indications—are gathered together, it takes on special significance. The idea here confronts us of a being that is caught up in constant change and yet remains thereby ever the same: “All is new and ever the old.” “She (nature) transforms herself eternally, and there is within her no moment of standing still,” but “her laws are immutable.” We will see later that Goethe seeks the one archetypal plant within the endless multitude of plant forms. We also find this thought indicated here already: “Each of her (nature's) works has its own being, each of her manifestations has the most isolated concept, and yet all constitute one.” Yes, even the position he took later with respect to exceptional cases—namely, not to regard them simply as mistakes in development, but rather to explain them out of natural laws—is already very clearly expressed here: “Even the most unnatural is nature,” and “her exceptions are rare.”

[ 15 ] We have seen that Goethe had already developed for himself a definite concept of an organism before he came to Weimar. For, even though the above-mentioned essay Nature was written only long after his arrival there, it still contains for the most part earlier views of Goethe. He had not yet applied this concept to any particular genus of natural objects, to any individual beings. In order to do this he needed the concrete world of living beings within immediate reality. A reflection of nature, passed through the human mind, was absolutely not the element that could stimulate Goethe. His botanical conversations with Hofrat Ludwig in Leipzig remained just as much without any deeper effect as the dinner conversations with medical friends in Strassburg. With respect to scientific study, the young Goethe seems altogether to be like Faust, deprived of the freshness of firsthand beholding of nature, who expresses his longing for this in the words [Part I, Night]:

[ 16 ] Ah! Could I but on mountain height
Go onward in thy [the moon's] lovely light,
With spirits hover round mountain caves,
Weave over meadows thy twilight laves ...

[ 17 ] It seems a fulfillment of this longing when, with his arrival in Weimar, he is permitted “to exchange chamber and city air for the atmosphere of country, forest, and garden.”

[ 18 ] We have to regard as the immediate stimulus to his study of plants the poet's occupation of planting the garden given him by Duke Karl August. The acceptance of the garden by Goethe took place on April 21, 1776, and his diary, edited by R. Keil, informs us often from then on about Goethe's work in this garden, which becomes one of his favorite occupations. An added field for endeavors in this direction was afforded him by the forest of Thüringen, where he had the opportunity of acquainting himself also with the lower organisms in their manifestations of life. The mosses and lichens interest him especially. On October 31, 1777, he requests of Frau von Stein mosses of all sorts, with roots and damp, if possible, so that they can propagate themselves. We must consider it as highly significant that Goethe was already then occupying himself with this world of lower organisms and yet later derived the laws of plant organization from the higher plants. As we consider this fact, we should not attribute it, as many do, to Goethe's underestimation of the significance of less.

[ 19 ] From then on Goethe never leaves the plant realm. It is very possible that he took up Linnaeus' writings already quite early. We first hear of his acquaintance with them in letters to Frau von Stein in 1782.

[ 20 ] Linnaeus' endeavour was to bring a systematic overview into knowledge of the plants. A certain sequence was to be discovered, in which every organism has a definite place, so that one could easily find it at any time, so that one would have altogether, in fact, a means of orientation within the unlimited number of particulars. To this end the living beings had to be examined with respect to their degree of relatedness to each other and accordingly be arranged together in groups. Since the main point to all this was to know every plant and easily to find its place within the system, one had to be particularly attentive to those characteristics which distinguish one plant from another. In order to make it impossible to confuse one plant with another, one sought out primarily those distinguishing traits. In doing so, Linnaeus and his students regarded external traits—size, number, and location of individual organs—as characteristic. In this way the plants were indeed ordered sequentially, but just as one could also have ordered a number of inorganic bodies: according to characteristics taken, not from the inner nature of the plant, but from visual aspects. The plants appear in an external juxtaposition, without any inner necessary connection. Because of the significant concept he had of the nature of a living being, Goethe could not be satisfied by this way of looking at things. No effort was made there to seek out the essential being of the plant. Goethe had to ask himself the question: In what does that “something” consist which makes a particular being of nature into a plant? He had to recognize further that this something occurs in all plants in the same way. And yet the endless differentiation of the individual beings was there, needing to be explained. How does it come about that that oneness manifests itself in such manifold forms? These must have been the questions that Goethe raised in reading Linnaeus' writings, for he says of himself after all: “What he—Linnaeus—sought forcibly to keep apart had to strive for unity in accordance with the innermost need of my being.”

[ 21 ] Goethe's first acquaintance with Rousseau's botanical endeavors falls into about the same period as that with Linnaeus. On June 16, 1782, Goethe writes to Duke Karl August: “Among Rousseau's works there are some most delightful letters about botany, in which he presents this science to a lady in a most comprehensible and elegant way. It is a real model of how one should teach and it supplements Émile. I use it therefore as an excuse to recommend anew the beautiful realm of the flowers to my beautiful lady friends.” Rousseau's botanical endeavors must have made a deep impression on Goethe. The emphasis we find in Rousseau's work upon a nomenclature arising from the nature of the plants and corresponding to it, the freshness of his observations, his contemplation of the plants for their own sake, apart from any utilitarian considerations—all this was entirely in keeping with Goethe's way. And something else the two had in common was the fact that they had come to study the plant, not for any specific scientific purposes, but rather out of general human motives. The same interest drew them to the same thing.

[ 22 ] Goethe's next intensive observations in the plant world occur in the year 1784. Wilhelm Freiherr von Gleichen, called Russwurm, had published back then two works dealing with research of lively interest to Goethe: The Latest News from the Plant Realm⁷ and Special Microscopic Discoveries about Plants, Flowers and Blossoms, Insects, and other Noteworthy Things.⁸ Both works dealt with the processes of plant fertilization. Pollen, stamens, and pistil were carefully examined and the processes occurring there were portrayed in beautifully executed illustrations. Goethe now repeated these investigations. On January 12, 1785, he writes to Frau von Stein: “A microscope is set up in order, when spring arrives, to re-observe and verify the experiments of von Gleichen, called Russwurm.” During the same spring he also studies the nature of the seed, as a letter to Knebel on April 2, 1785 shows: “I have thought through the substance of the seed as far as my experiences reach.” For Goethe, the main thing in all these investigations is not the individual details; the goal of his efforts is to explore the essential being of the plant. On April 8, 1785, he reports to Merck that he “had made nice discoveries and combinations” in botany. The term “combinations” also shows us here that his intention is to construct for himself, through thinking, a picture of the processes in the plant world. His botanical studies now drew quickly near to a particular goal. To be sure, we must also now bear in mind that Goethe, in 1784, had already discovered the intermaxillary bone, which we will later discuss in detail, and that this discovery had brought him a significant step closer to the secret of how nature goes about its forming of organic beings. We must, moreover, bear in mind that the first part of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History⁹ was completed in 1784 and that conversations between Goethe and Herder on things of nature were very frequent at that time. Thus, Frau von Stein reports to Knebel on May 1, 1784: “Herder's new book makes it likely that we were first plants and animals ... Goethe is now delving very thoughtfully into these things, and everything that has once passed through his mind becomes extremely interesting.” We see from this the nature of Goethe's interest at that time in the greatest questions of science. Therefore his reflections upon the nature of the plant and the combinations he made about it during the spring of 1785 seem quite comprehensible. In the middle of April of this year he goes to Belvedere expressly for the purpose of finding a solution to his doubts and questions, and on June 15, he communicates to Frau von Stein: “I cannot express to you how legible the book of nature is becoming for me; my long efforts at spelling have helped me; now suddenly it is working, and my quiet joy is inexpressible.” Shortly before this, in fact, he wants to write a short botanical treatise for Knebel in order to win him over to this science.¹⁰ Botany draws him so strongly that his trip to Karlsbad, which he begins on June 20, 1785 in order to spend the summer there, turns into a journey of botanical study. Knebel accompanied him. Near Jena, they meet a seventeen-year-old youth, Friedrich Gottlieb Dietrich, whose specimen box showed that he was just returning from a botanical excursion. We hear more in detail about this interesting trip from Goethe's History of my Botanical Studies¹¹ and from some reports of Ferdinand Cohn in Breslau, who was able to borrow them from one of Dietrich's manuscripts. In Karlsbad then, botanical conversations quite often afford pleasant entertainment. Back home again, Goethe devotes himself with great energy to the study of botany; in connection with Linnaeus' Philosophia Botanica, he makes certain observations about mushrooms, mosses, lichens, and algae, as we see from his letters to Frau von Stein. Only now, after he himself has already thought and observed a great deal, does Linnaeus become more useful to him; in Linnaeus he finds enlightenment about many details that help him forward in his combinations. On November 9, 1785, he reports to Frau von Stein: “I continue to read Linnaeus; I have to; I have no other book. It is the best way to read a book thoroughly, a way I must often practice, especially since I do not easily read a book to the end. This one, however, is not principally made for reading, but rather for review, and it serves me now excellently, since I have thought over most of its points myself.” During these studies it becomes ever clearer to him, that it is after all only one basic form that manifests in the endless multitude of single plant individuals; this basic form itself was also becoming ever more perceptible to him; he recognized further, that within this basic form, there lies the potential for endless transformation, by which manifoldness is created out of oneness. On July 9, 1786, he writes to Frau von Stein: “It is a becoming aware the ... form with which nature is always only playing, as it were, and in playing brings forth its manifold life.” Now the most important thing of all was to develop this lasting, this constant element this archetypal form with which nature, as it were, plays—to develop it in detail into a plastic configuration. In order to do this, one needed an opportunity to separate what is truly constant and enduring in the form of plants from what is changing and inconstant. For observations of this kind, Goethe had as yet explored too small an area. He had to observe one and the same plant under different conditions and influences; for only through this does the changeable element really become visible. In plants of different kinds this changeable element is less obvious. The journey to Italy that Goethe had undertaken from Karlsbad on September 3 and that gave him such happiness brought him all this. He made many observations already with respect to the flora of the Alps. He found here not merely new plants that he had never seen before, but also plants he knew already, but changed. “Whereas in lower-lying regions, branches and stems were stronger and thicker, the buds closer to each other, and the leaves broad, highest in the mountains, branches and stems became more delicate, the buds moved farther apart so that there was more space between nodes, and the leaves were more lance-shaped. I noticed this in a willow and in a gentian, and convinced myself that it was not because of different species, for example. Also, near the Walchensee I noticed longer and more slender rushes than in the lowlands.”¹² Similar observations occurred repeatedly. By the sea near Venice, he discovers different plants that reveal characteristics that only the old salt of the sandy ground, but even more the salty air, could have given them. He found a plant there that looked to him like “our innocent coltsfoot, but here it was armed with sharp weapons, and the leaf was like leather, as were the seedpods and the stems also; everything was thick and fat.”¹³ Goethe there regarded all the outer characteristics of the plant, everything belonging to the visible aspect of the plant, as inconstant, as changing. From this he drew the conclusion that the essential being of the plant, therefore, does not lie in these characteristics, but rather must be sought at deeper levels. It was from observations similar to these of Goethe that Darwin also proceeded when he asserted his doubts about the constancy of the outer forms of genera and species. But the conclusions drawn by the two men are utterly different. Whereas Darwin believes the essential being of the organism to consist in fact only of these outer characteristics, and, from their changeability draws the conclusion that there is therefore nothing constant in the life of the plants, Goethe goes deeper and draws the conclusion that if those outer characteristics are not constant, then the constant element must be sought in something else that underlies those changeable outer aspects. It becomes Goethe's goal to develop this something else, whereas Darwin's efforts go in the direction of exploring and presenting the specific causes of that changeability. Both ways of looking at things are necessary and complement one another. It is completely erroneous to believe that Goethe's greatness in organic science is to be found in the view that he was a mere forerunner of Darwin. Goethe's way of looking at things is far broader; it comprises two aspects: 1. the typus, i.e., the lawfulness manifesting in the organism, the animalness of the animal, the life that gives form to itself out of itself, that has the power and ability—through the possibilities lying within it—to develop itself in manifold outer shapes (species, genera); 2. the interaction of the organism with inorganic nature and of the organisms with each other (adaptation and the struggle for existence). Darwin developed only the latter aspect of organic science. One cannot therefore say that Darwin's theory is the elaboration of Goethe's basic ideas, but rather that it is merely the elaboration of one aspect of his ideas. Darwin's theory looks only at those facts that cause the world of living beings to evolve in a certain way, but does not look at that “something” upon which those facts act determinatively. If only the one aspect is pursued, then it can also not lead to any complete theory of organisms; essentially, this must be pursued in the spirit of Goethe; the one aspect must be complemented and deepened by the other aspect of his theory. A simple comparison will make the matter clearer. Take a piece of lead; heat it into liquid form; and then pour it into cold water. The lead has gone through two states, two stages, one after the other; the first was brought about by the higher temperature, the second by the lower. Now the form that each stage takes does not depend only on the nature of warmth, but also depends quite essentially on the nature of the lead. A different body, if subjected to the same media, would manifest quite different states. Organisms also allow themselves to be influenced by the media surrounding them; they also, affected by these media, assume different states and do so, in fact, totally in accordance with their own nature, in accordance with that being which makes them organisms. And one does find this being in Goethe's ideas. Only someone who is equipped with an understanding for this being will be capable of grasping why organisms respond (react) to particular causes in precisely one way and in no other. Only such a person will be capable of correctly picturing to himself the changeability in the manifest forms of organisms and the related laws of adaptation and of the struggle for existence.¹⁴

[ 23 ] Goethe's thought about the archetypal plant (Urpflanze) takes on ever clearer and more definite shape in his mind. In the botanical garden in Padua (Italian Journey, September 27, 1786), where he goes about in a vegetation strange to him, “The thought becomes ever more alive to him that one could perhaps develop for oneself all the plant shapes out of one shape.” On November 17, 1786, he writes to Knebel: “My little bit of botany is for the first time a real pleasure to have, in these lands where a happier, less intermittent vegetation is at home. I have already made some really nice general observations whose consequences will also please you.” On February 19, 1787 (see Italian Journey), he writes in Rome that he is on his way “to discovering beautiful new relationships showing how nature achieves something tremendous that looks like nothing: out of the simple to evolve the most manifold.” On March 25, he asks that Herder be told that he will soon be ready with his archetypal plant. On April 17 (see Italian Journey) in Palermo? he writes down the following words about the archetypal plant: “There must after all be such a one! How would I otherwise know that this or that formation is a plant, if they were not all formed according to the same model.” He had in mind the complex of developmental laws that organizes the plant, that makes it into what it is, and through which, with respect to a particular object of nature, we arrive at the thought, “This is a plant”: all that is the archetypal plant. As such, the archetypal plant is something ideal something that can only be held in thought; but it takes on shape, it takes on a certain form, size, colour, number of organs, etc. This outer shape is nothing fixed, but rather can suffer endless transformations, which are all in accordance with that complex of developmental laws and follow necessarily from it. If one has grasped these developmental laws, this archetypal picture of the plant, then one is holding, in the form of an idea, that upon which nature as it were founds every single plant individual, and from which nature consequentially derives each plant and allows it to come into being. Yes, one can even invent plant shapes, in accordance with this law, which could emerge by necessity from the being of the plant and which could exist if the necessary conditions arose for this. Thus Goethe seeks, as it were, to copy in spirit what nature accomplishes in the forming of its beings. On May 17, 1787, he writes to Herder: “Furthermore, I must confide to you that I am very close to discovering the secret of plant generation and organization, and that it is the simplest thing one could imagine ... The archetypal plant will be the most magnificent creation in the world, for which nature itself will envy me. With this model and the key to it, one can then go on inventing plants forever that must follow lawfully; that means: which, even if they don't exist, still could exist, and are not, for example? the shadows and illusions of painters or poets but rather have an inner truth and necessity. The same law can be applied to all other living things.” A further difference between Goethe's view and that of Darwin emerges here, especially if one considers how Darwin's view is usually propounded.¹⁵ It assumes that outer influences work upon the nature of an organism like mechanical causes and change it accordingly. For Goethe, the individual changes are the various expressions of the archetypal organism that has within itself the ability to take on manifold shapes and that, in any given case, takes on the shape most suited to the surrounding conditions in the outer world. These outer conditions merely bring it about that the inner formative forces come to manifestation in a particular way. These forces alone are the constitutive principle, the creative element in the plant. Therefore, on September 6, 1787 (Italian Journey), Goethe also calls it a hen kai pan (a one and all) of the plant world.

[ 24 ] If we now enter in detail into this archetypal plant itself, the following can be said about it. The living entity is a self contained whole, which brings forth its states of being from out of itself. Both in the juxtaposition of its members and in the temporal sequence of its states of being, there is a reciprocal relationship present, which does not appear to be determined by the sense-perceptible characteristics of its members, nor by any mechanical-causal determining of the later by the earlier, but which is governed by a higher principle standing over the members and the states of being. The fact that one particular state is brought forth first and another one last is determined in the nature of the whole; and the sequence of the intermediary states is also determined by the idea of the whole; what comes before is dependent upon what comes after, and vice versa; in short, within the living organism, there is development of one thing out of the other, a transition of states of being into one another; no finished, closed-off existence of the single thing, but rather continuous becoming. In the plant, this determination of each individual member by the whole arises insofar as every organ is built according to the same basic form. On May 17, 1787 (Italian Journey)), Goethe communicates these thoughts to Herder in the following words: “It became clear to me, namely, that within that organ (of the plant) that we usually address as leaf, there lies hidden the true Proteus that can conceal and manifest itself in every shape. Any way you look at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ that one cannot think the one without the other.” Whereas in the animal that higher principle that governs every detail appears concretely before us as that which moves the organs and uses them in accordance with its needs, etc., the plant is still lacking any such real life principle; in the plant, this life principle still manifests itself only in the more indistinct way that all its organs are built according to the same formative type—in fact, that the whole plant is contained as possibility in every part and, under favorable conditions, can also be brought forth from any part. This became especially clear to Goethe in Rome when Councilor Reiffenstein, during a walk with him, broke off a branch here and there and asserted that if it were stuck in the ground it would have to grow and develop into a whole plant. The plant is therefore a being that successively develops certain organs that are all—both in their interrelationships and in the relationship of each to the whole—built according to one and the same idea. Every plant is a harmonious whole composed of plants.¹⁶ When Goethe saw this clearly, his only remaining concern was with the individual observations that would make it possible to set forth in detail the various stages of development that the plant brings forth from itself. For this also, what was needed had already occurred. We have seen that in the spring of 1785 Goethe had already made a study of seeds; on May 17, 1787, from Italy, he announces to Herder that he has quite clearly and without any doubt found the point where the germ (Keim) lies. That took care of the first stage of plant life. But the unity of structure in all leaves also soon revealed itself visibly enough. Along with numerous other examples showing this, Goethe found above all in fresh fennel a difference between the lower and upper leaves, which nevertheless are always the same organ. On March 25 (Italian Journey), he asks Herder to be informed that his theory about the cotyledons was already so refined that one could scarcely go further with it. Only one small step remained to be taken in order also to regard the petals, the stamens, and the pistil as metamorphosed leaves. The research of the English botanist Hill could lead to this; his research was becoming more generally known at that time, and dealt with the transformation of individual flower organs into other ones.

[ 25 ] As the forces that organize the being of the plant come into actual existence, they take on a series of structural forms in space. Then it is a question of the big concept that connects these forms backwards and forwards.

[ 26 ] When we look at Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, as it appears to us in the year 1790, we find that for Goethe this concept is one of calculating expansion and contraction. In the seed, the plant formation is most strongly contracted (concentrated). With the leaves there follows the first unfolding, the first expansion of the formative forces. That which, in the seed, is compressed into a plant now spreads out spatially in the leaves. In the calyx the forces again draw together around an axial point; the corolla is produced by the next expansion; stamens and pistil come about through the next contraction; the fruit arises through the last (third) expansion, whereupon the whole force of plant life (its entelechical principle) conceals itself again, in its most highly concentrated state, in the seed. Although we now can follow nearly all the details of Goethe's thoughts on metamorphosis up to their final realization in the essay that appeared in 1790, it is not so easy to do the same thing with the concept of expansion and contraction. Still one will not go wrong in assuming that this thought, which anyway is deeply rooted in Goethe's spirit, was also woven by him already in Italy into his concept of plant formation. Since a greater or lesser spatial development, which is determined by the formative forces, is the content of this thought, and since this content therefore consists in what the plant presents directly to the eye, this content will certainly arise most easily when one undertakes to draw the plant in accordance with the laws of natural formation. Goethe found now a bush-like carnation plant in Rome that showed him metamorphosis with particular clarity. He writes about this: “Seeing no way to preserve this marvelous shape, I undertook to draw it exactly, and in doing so attained ever more insight into the basic concept of metamorphosis.” Perhaps such drawings were often made and this could then have led to the concept we are considering.

[ 27 ] In September 1787, during his second stay in Rome, Goethe expounds the matter to his friend Moritz; in doing so he discovers how alive and perceptible the matter becomes through such a presentation. He always writes down how far they have gotten. To judge by this passage and by a few other statements of Goethe's, it seems likely that the writing down of his theory of metamorphosis—at least aphoristically occurred already in Italy. He states further: “Only in this way—through presenting it to Moritz—could I get something of my thoughts down on paper.” There is now no doubt about the fact that this work, in the form in which we now have it, was written down at the end of 1789 and the beginning of 1790; but it would be difficult to say how much of this latter manuscript was a mere editing and how much was added then. A book announced for the next Easter season, which could have contained something of the same thoughts, induced him in the autumn of 1789 to take his thoughts in hand and to arrange lot their publication. On November 20, he writes to the Duke that he is spurred on to write down his botanical ideas. On December 18, he sends the manuscript already to the botanist Batsch in Jena for him to look over; on the 20th, he goes there himself in order to discuss it with Batsch; on the 22nd, he informs Knebel that Batsch has given the matter a favorable reception. He returns home, works the manuscript through once more, and then sends it to Batsch again, who returns it to him on January 19, 1790. Goethe himself has recounted in detail the experiences undergone by the handwritten manuscript as well as by the printed edition. Later, in the section on “The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development,” we will deal with the great significance of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, as well as with the detailed nature of this theory.

• 3. See Poetry and Truth, part 2, book 6
• 4. All quotations from Faust are from George Madison Priest's translation.
• 5. Poetry and Truth, Part 2, Book 8.
• 6. Poetry and Truth, Part 3, book 11
• 7. Das Neueste aus dem Reiche der Pflanzen, (Nürnberg 1764)
• 8. Auserlesene mikroskopische Entdeckungen bei Pflanzen, Blumen und Blüten, Insekten und anderen Merkwürdigkeiten, (Nürnberg 1777-81)
• 9. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
• 10. “I would gladly send you a little botanical essay, if only it were already written.” (Letter to Knebel, April 2, 1785)
• 11. Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums
• 12. Italian Journey, October 8, 1786
• 13. Italian Journey, September 8, 1786
• 14. It is certainly unnecessary to state that the modern theory of evolution should not at all be placed in doubt by this, or that its assertions should be curtailed by it; on the contrary, only it provides a secure foundation for them.
• 15. What we have here is not so much the theory of evolution of those natural scientists who base themselves on sense-perceptible empiricism, but far more the theoretical foundations, the principles, that are laid into the foundations of Darwinism; especially by the Jena school, of course, with Haeckel in the vanguard; in this first-class mind, Darwin's teachings, in all their one-sidedness, have certainly found their consequential development.
• 16. We will have occasion at various places to demonstrate in what sense these individual parts relate to the whole. If we wanted to borrow a concept of modern science for such working together of living partial entities into one whole, we might take for example that of a “stock” in zoology. This is a kind of statehood of living entities, an individual that itself further consists of independent individuals, an individual of a higher sort.