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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XIII 13 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

They computed these circling movements so as to understand the fact that the planets were at given places at given times. It is astonishing how accurate were the calculations of Ptolemy and his followers,—relatively speaking at least.
They were at pains to build a thought-system on another basis, and what is more, a piece of true knowledge under-lay their efforts; it is undeniable if we go into it historically. Modern man naturally says: We have advanced to the Copernican system, why bother about these ancient thinkers?
I must admit, at this point it is difficult to make oneself understood in the modern world. Man of to-day says to himself: “I think thus and thus about the world. I have my sense perceptions, thus or thus.
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XIV 14 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

To get nearer to this question we must once more compare the kind of outlook which under-lay the Ptolemaic system and the kind that underlies the Copernican world-system of today. What are we doing when we set to working the spirit of the latter system, and by dint of thinking, calculating and geometrising, figure out a world-system?
He then who wants to speak with care, who wants to reach the truth by scrupulous investigation, must begin by saying, whimsical as this may seem to our learned contemporaries: I look at three successive positions of what I call a heavenly body, and assume what underlies them to be identical. So for example I follow the Moon in its path, with the underlying hypothesis that it is always the same Moon.
Compare the tiny body of the embryo with this idea of the Moon which underlay the Ptolemaic system and you will have a notion of how they conceived it for it was analogous to this.
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XV 15 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

Today I will deal with some of the things that may be causing you difficulty in understanding what we have done hitherto. I will lead over from these difficulties into a realm of ideas which will show up the inadequacy of those lines of thought on which the people of our time, with all their comfortable mental habits, would gladly found their understanding of universal phenomena.
Once again—strange as it may sound—if with your understanding of any form in the human head you wish to make a transition to the understanding of a form in the human metabolic system then you will not be able to remain in space.
Think for example that there might be a phenomenon in celestial space,—we may call it "Moon" to begin with,—yet this phenomenon were not to be understood simply by saying: "This Moon is a body, here is its central point; we will investigate it on the understanding that it is a body and that its central point is here."
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XVI 16 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

If we would characterize any movement as an inherent and not a merely relative movement, we must perceive what the thing moved has undergone in some more inward sense. For this, a further factor will be needed, of which tomorrow. Today we will at least approach the problem.
We therefore have to look back into the time when what he underwent depended less upon his conscious life of soul than in his ordinary, by which I mean, post-natal life on Earth.
I know they have never been gone into thoroughly. The necessary researches have not been undertaken. And now another thing: You know that what is trivially called “fatigue” represents a highly complex sequence of events.
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XVII 17 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

The one draws the other after it: that is the underlying principle. Think of it in this way, and you will no longer need the somewhat questionable quality of gravitational and tangential forces, for they are here reduced to a single force.
The criterion may seem vague to many people, yet it is there and it can lead us to an understanding of the curves in question. We have to penetrate the secret: Why is it man has an inner need to lie down horizontally in sleep,—thus to escape in sleep from the connecting line of Earth and Sun?
Steiner's explanations, important for a general understanding of the lemniscatory curves, are reproduced apart from this.2.
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XVIII 18 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

If we place man into the world in such a way as to study head, limbs, etc., one by one and in a merely outward sense, it is as though we were to study a magnet-needle, tending as it does ever in the same direction, and seek the cause of this behaviour not in the magnetic pole of the Earth but inside the needle. To understand any fact or object, we must go to the totality from which alone it can be understood. What matters is in every case to look for the totality in question.
We can do so indeed. Even this system however,—we only understand it rightly if we admit the following. Suppose I managed to draw this lemniscatory system in a precise and finished form; it would at most be true of present time.
Again and again you will find yourself in contradiction to the phenomena if you conceive it after the same pattern as the planetary body. You will never understand the cometary body, in the way it moves—or seems to move—through cosmic space, if you regard it as you are accustomed to regard the planetary body.
324. Anthroposophy and Science: Lecture I 16 Mar 1921, Stuttgart
Translated by Walter Stuber, Mark Gardner

What would we do with a science like history if in every science there were only so much real knowledge as there is mathematics? How shall we understand and get the facts straight in matters of the human soul if we have to struggle to understand what modern psychology, by the use of mathematics, has developed in order also to secure certainty of understanding?
He did not mean by this that God just created with mathematics, or with five- or six-sided figures; rather, He creates with the force of which we can only make pictures to ourselves, in our mathematical abstract thinking. Therefore I believe that he who understands the place of mathematics in the whole field of the sciences, will also understand the correct place of spiritual science.
This can really happen if only we bring good will to the understanding of it.
324. Anthroposophy and Science: Lecture II 17 Mar 1921, Stuttgart
Translated by Walter Stuber, Mark Gardner

For most people it is distasteful nowadays to try to understand this kind of problem. Because we have become so used to an outer way of considering things, the three members of the human organism are considered spatially, as separate from one another.
The third dimension of depth does not stand ready-made before our soul independent of any mental activity. It confronts us as something we undergo as an inner operation of the mind when we supplement what we normally see as the surface of things with the depth dimension and thus obtain a three-dimensional body.
I wanted to use this particular example of the actual meaning of space because it will be useful in the future in leading us to an exact understanding of the mathematical facts from all sides. We will speak further of this tomorrow. 1.
324. Anthroposophy and Science: Lecture III 18 Mar 1921, Stuttgart
Translated by Walter Stuber, Mark Gardner

The important question is whether or not it is possible for the results of spiritual-scientific investigation to be understood without special capacities of higher vision. It is precisely this question that I would like to answer in the affirmative. The results of spiritual-scientific investigation are indeed intelligible to a sound human understanding. The only essential element is an openness to what spiritual science has to say, justifying itself from various points of view.
He may see all kinds of specters, but the spiritual entities of the world will not reveal their true form to him. On the other hand, the moment one undertakes in imagination to observe the human eye, one has exactly the same experience as one has in mathematical thought when applied to external nature.
324. Anthroposophy and Science: Lecture IV 19 Mar 1921, Stuttgart
Translated by Walter Stuber, Mark Gardner

We are quite clear that the strength of our soul which brings these memory pictures to consciousness is related to our ordinary bright, clear power of understanding. It is not itself the power of understanding, but it is related to it. One can say: What we have been striving to attain—that our consciousness will be illuminated by this imaginative cognition in all our activities as it is in mathematical activity—happens for us when we come to these memory pictures.
Thereby we come to a definite kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of how the power of understanding works. For we do not merely look back at our life: our life presents itself to us in mirror images.
Perhaps this is true today because of the way cognition is understood. But here it is not a matter of keeping the power of love just as it appears in ordinary life.

Results 5431 through 5440 of 6551

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