PART II

This eBook was produced by Adam Kane.

MAN OR MATTER

Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature

on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought

by

ERNST LEHRS Ph. D.

Part I

SCIENCE AT THE THRESHOLD

I. INTRODUCTORY

The author's search for a way of extending the boundaries of scientific

understanding. A meeting with Rudolf Steiner, and with the work arising

from his teachings.

II. WHERE DO WE STAND TO-DAY?

The self-restriction of scientific inquiry to one-eyed colourblind

observation. Its effect: The lack of a true conception of 'force'.

III. THE ONLOOKER'S PHILOSOPHIC MALADY

Thought - the sole reality and yet a pure non-entity for the modern

spectator. Descartes and Hume. Robert Hooke's 'proof' of the

non-reality of conceptual thinking. The modern principle of

Indeterminacy - a sign that science is still dominated by the Humean

way of thinking.

IV. THE COUNTRY THAT IS NOT OURS

Electricity, man's competitor in modern civilization. The onlooker in

search of the soul of nature. Galvani and Crookes. Paradoxes in the

discovery of electricity. 'Something unknown is doing we don't know

what.'

Part II GOETHEANISM - WHENCE AND WHITHER

V. THE ADVENTURE OF REASON

Kant and Goethe. Goethe's study of the plant - a path toward seeing

with the eye-of-the-spirit. Nature a script that asks to be read.

VI. EXCEPT WE BECOME ...

Spiritual kinsmen of Goethe in the British sphere of human culture.

Thomas Reid's philosophic discovery, its significance for the

overcoming of the onlooker-standpoint in science. The picture of man

inherent in Reid's philosophy. Man's original gift of remembering his

pre-earthly life. The disappearance of this memory in the past, and its

re-appearance in modern times. Pelagius versus Augustine. Wordsworth

and Traherne. Traherne, a 'Reidean before Reid was born'.

VII. 'ALWAYS STAND BY FORM'

Ruskin and Howard - two readers in the book of nature. Goethe's

meteorological ideas. His conception of the urphenomenon. Goethe and

Howard.

VIII. DYNAMICS VERSUS KINETICS

The onlooker science - by necessity a 'pointer-reading' science. The

onlooker's misjudgment of the cognitive value of the impressions

conveyed by the senses. The Parallelogram of Forces - its fallacious

kinematic and its true dynamic interpretation. The roots in man of his

concepts 'mass' and 'force'. The formula F=ma. The origin of man's

faculty of mathematical thinking.

IX. PRO LEVITATE

(a) ALERTNESS CONTRA INERTNESS

Limitations of the validity of the concept 'inertia'. Restatement of

Newton's first law. Introduction of the term 'magical' as opposed to

mechanical. The phenomenon of the rising arm. Introduction of the term

'alertness' as opposed to 'inertness' (inertia).

Van Helmont's discovery of the gaseous state of matter. The four

Elements. The old concept of 'Chaos'. Young and old matter. The natural

facts behind the ancient fire rites. The event on Mount Sinai.

(b) LEVITY CONTRA GRAVITY

The Contra Levitatem maxim of the Florentine Academicians. Ruskin's

warning against science as an interpreter of its own observations. How

man's inner nature and the outer universe interpret one another. The

Solfatara phenomenon. The super-physical character of Levity.

X. THE FOURTH STATE OF MATTER

The need of raising scientific inquiry to nature's upper border. The

laws of Conservation, their origin and their validity. Joule and Mayer.

Extension of the field-concept from the central to the peripheral

field-type. Natural phenomena brought about by the suctional effect of

the earth's levity-field. The different conditions of matter seen in

the light of the levity-gravity polarity. Heat, the fourth state of

matter. Procreation of physical substance - a natural fact. The case of

Tillandsia. The problem of the trace-elements. Homeopathy, an example

of the effect of dematerialized matter. The meteorological circuit of

water. The nature of lightning.

XI. MATTER AS PART OF NATURE'S ALPHABET

The origin of the scientific conception of the chemical element. Study

of some prototypes of physical substances in the light of the

levity-gravity polarity. The functional concept of matter. The complete

order of polarities - cold-warm, dry-moist - in the doctrine of the

four elements. The position of sulphur and phosphorus in this respect.

Vulcanism and snow-formation as manifestations of functional sulphur

and phosphorus respectively. The process of crystallization. Carbon as

a mediator between sulphur and phosphorus. The alchemical triad.

XII. SPACE AND COUNTER-SPACE

Geometrical considerations required by the recognition of levity. The

value in this respect of projective geometrical thinking. Geometrical

polarities of the first and second order.

XIII. 'RADIANT MATTER'

Electricity and magnetism as manifestations of interacting levity and

gravity. Electricity - a product of disintegrating matter. Modern

physics, no longer a 'natural' science. Eddington's question,'

Manufacture or Discovery?' Man's enhanced responsibility in the age of

physical science.

XIV. COLOURS AS 'DEEDS AND SUFFERINGS OF LIGHT'

Goethe's Farbenlehre - the foundation of an optical science based on

the colour-seeing faculty of the eye. The modern physicist's view of

the Newtonian interpretation of the spectrum. A short history of

Goethe's search for a satisfactory conception of Light and Colour. His

discovery of Newton's cardinal error. First results of his own studies.

The 'negative' spectrum.

XV. SEEING AS 'DEED' - I

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

light'.

XVI. SEEING AS 'DEED' - II

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

the boundaries of the body.

XVII. OPTICS OF THE DOER

Purging optics from its onlooker-concepts. The role of foregone

conclusions in the physical conception of light. The true aspect of the

so-called velocity of light.

XVIII. THE SPECTRUM AS A SCRIPT OF THE SPIRIT

Evaluation of the foregoing studies for a new understanding of the

prismatic phenomenon. The secret of the rainbow. Intimation of new

possibilities of experimental research guided by the new conception of

the spectrum.

Part III TOWARDS A NEW COSMOLOGY

XIX. THE COUNTRY IN WHICH MAN IS NOT A STRANGER

(a) INTRODUCTORY NOTE

From Goethe's seeing with the eye-of-the-spirit to Spiritual

Imagination. Levity (Ether) as revealed to Spiritual Imagination.

(b) - (e) WARMTH LIGHT SOUND LIFE

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

XX. PRO ANIMA

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

The sentient (astral) forces of the cosmos as governors of the various

interactions between levity and gravity. The astral aspect of the

planetary system. Its reflexion in earthly substances. Beginnings of an

astral conception of the human organism in modern physiology.

(b) HEARING AS DEED

A Goetheanistic study of acoustic phenomena and of the sense of

hearing. From hearing with the ear-of-the-spirit to Spiritual

Inspiration.

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

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

musical order of the universe.

XXI. KNOW THYSELF

INDEX

Illustrations

IN COLOUR

A The relation of the electrical polarity to Levity and Gravity

B The Spectrum phenomenon as conceived by Goethe

C Light under the action of a transverse field-gradient

MONOCHROME

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

II. Leaf-metamorphosis

III. Leaf-metamorphosis

IV. Goethe's sketch of a cloud-formation

V. A Snow-Crystal

VI. A cluster of Calcite crystals

VII. Various species of bacteria

VIII. Various species of fresh-water algae

Author's Note

The author makes grateful acknowledgment of the help he has gained from

other works in the wide field opened up by Rudolf Steiner, and of his

debt to the friends who in various ways assisted him in preparing his

manuscript.

Quotations have been made from the following books by kind permission

of their respective publishers:

The Life of Sir William Crookes by E. E. Fournier d'Albe (Messrs.

Ernest Benn Ltd.);

Man the Unknown by A. Carrel (Messrs. Hamish Hamilton Ltd.);

The Philosophy of Physical Science and The Nature of The Physical

Worldly A.. Eddington (University Press, Cambridge);

Science and the Human Temperament by E. Schrödinger (Messrs. George Allen

and Unwin Ltd.);

Centuries of Meditations and Poetical Works by Th. Traherne (Messrs. P.

J. and A. E. Dobell).

Preface

In this book the reader will find expounded a method of investigating

nature by means of which scientific understanding can be carried across

the boundaries of the physical-material to the supersensible sources of

all natural events, and thereby into the realm where is rooted the true

being of man.

The beginnings of this method were worked out by Goethe more than 150

years ago. The nineteenth century, however, failed to provide any

fertile ground for the development of the seeds thus sown. It was left

to Rudolf Steiner, shortly before the end of the century, to recognize

the significance of 'Goetheanism' for the future development not only

of science but of human culture in general. It is to him, also, that we

owe the possibility of carrying on Goethe's efforts in the way required

by the needs of our own time.

The following pages contain results of the author's work along the path

thus opened up by Goethe and Rudolf Steiner - a work begun twenty-seven

years ago, soon after he had made the acquaintance of Rudolf Steiner.

With the publication of these results he addresses himself to everyone

- with or without a specialized scientific training - who is concerned

with the fate of man's powers of cognition in the present age.

*

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

to be read.

It has not been the author's intention to provide an encyclopaedic

collection of new conceptions in various fields of natural observation.

Rather did he wish, as the sub-title of the book indicates, to offer a

new method of training both mind and eye (and other senses as well), by

means of which our modern 'onlooking' consciousness can be transformed

into a new kind of 'participating' consciousness. Hence it would be of

no avail to pick out one chapter or another for first reading, perhaps

because of some special interest in its subject-matter. The chapters

are stages on a road which has to be travelled, and each stage is

necessary for reaching the next. It is only through thus accepting the

method with which the book has been written that the reader will be

able to form a competent judgment of its essential elements.

E. L.

Hawkwood College Easter 1950

PART I

Science at the Threshold

CHAPTER I

Introductory

If I introduce this book by relating how I came to encounter Rudolf

Steiner and his work, more than twenty-five years ago, and what decided

me not only to make his way of knowledge my own, but also to enter

professionally into an activity inspired by his teachings, it is

because in this way I can most directly give the reader an impression

of the kind of spirit out of which I have written. I am sure, too, that

although what I have to say in this chapter is personal in content, it

is characteristic of many in our time.

When I first made acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner and his work, I was

finishing my academic training as an electrical engineer. At the end of

the 1914-18 war my first thought had been to take up my studies from

where I had let them drop, four years earlier. The war seemed to imply

nothing more than a passing interruption of them. This, at any rate,

was the opinion of my former teachers; the war had made no difference

whatever to their ideas, whether on the subject-matter of their

teaching or on its educational purpose. I myself, however, soon began

to feel differently. It became obvious to me that my relationship to my

subject, and therefore to those teaching it, had completely changed.

What I had experienced through the war had awakened in me a question of

which I had previously been unaware; now I felt obliged to put it to

everything I came across.

As a child of my age I had grown up in the conviction that it was

within the scope of man to shape his life according to the laws of

reason within him; his progress, in the sense in which I then

understood it, seemed assured by his increasing ability to determine

his own outer conditions with the help of science. Indeed, it was the

wish to take an active part in this progress that had led me to choose

my profession. Now, however, the war stood there as a gigantic social

deed which I could in no way regard as reasonably justified. How, in an

age when the logic of science was supreme, was it possible that a great

part of mankind, including just those peoples to whom science had owed

its origin and never-ceasing expansion, could act in so completely

unscientific a way? Where lay the causes of the contradiction thus

revealed between human thinking and human doing?

Pursued by these questions, I decided after a while to give my studies

a new turn. The kind of training then provided in Germany at the

so-called Technische Hochschulen was designed essentially to give

students a close practical acquaintance with all sorts of technical

appliances; it included only as much theory as was wanted for

understanding the mathematical calculations arising in technical

practice. It now seemed to me necessary to pay more attention to

theoretical considerations, so as to gain a more exact knowledge of the

sources from which science drew its conception of nature. Accordingly I

left the Hochschule for a course in mathematics and physics at a

university, though without abandoning my original idea of preparing for

a career in the field of electrical engineering. It was with this in

mind that I later chose for my Ph.D. thesis a piece of experimental

research on the uses of high-frequency electric currents.

During my subsequent years of stuffy, however, I found myself no nearer

an answer to the problem that haunted me. All that I experienced, in

scientific work as in life generally, merely gave it an even sharper

edge. Everywhere I saw an abyss widening between human knowing and

human action. How often was I not bitterly disillusioned by the

behaviour of men for whose ability to think through the most

complicated scientific questions I had the utmost admiration!

On all sides I found this same bewildering gulf between scientific

achievement and the way men conducted their own lives and influenced

the lives of others. I was forced to the conclusion that human

thinking, at any rate in its modern form, was either powerless to

govern human actions, or at least unable to direct them towards right

ends. In fact, where scientific thinking had done most to change the

practical relations of human life, as in the mechanization of economic

production, conditions had arisen which made it more difficult, not

less, for men to live in a way worthy of man. At a time when humanity

was equipped as never before to investigate the order of the universe,

and had achieved triumphs of design in mechanical constructions, human

life was falling into ever wilder chaos. Why was this?

The fact that most of my contemporaries were apparently quite unaware

of the problem that stirred me so deeply could not weaken my sense of

its reality. This slumber of so many souls in face of the vital

questions of modern life seemed to me merely a further symptom of the

sickness of our age. Nor could I think much better of those who, more

sensitive to the contradictions in and around them, sought refuge in

art or religion. The catastrophe of the war had shown me that this

departmentalizing of life, which at one time I had myself considered a

sort of ideal, was quite inconsistent with the needs of to-day. To make

use of art or religion as a refuge was a sign of their increasing

separation from the rest of human culture. It implied a cleavage

between the different spheres of society which ruled out any genuine

solution of social problems.

I knew from history that religion and art had once exercised a function

which is to-day reserved for science, for they had given guidance in

even the most practical activities of human society. And in so doing

they had enhanced the quality of human living, whereas the influence of

science has had just the opposite effect. This power of guidance,

however, they had long since lost, and in view of this fact I came to

the conclusion that salvation must be looked for in the first place

from science. Here, in the thinking and knowing of man, was the root of

modern troubles; here must come a drastic revision, and here, if

possible, a completely new direction must be found.

Such views certainly flew in the face of the universal modern

conviction that the present mode of knowledge, with whose help so much

insight into the natural world has been won, is the only one possible,

given once for all to man in a form never to be changed. But is there

any need, I asked myself, to cling to this purely static notion of

man's capacity for gaining knowledge? Among the greatest achievements

of modern science, does not the conception of evolution take a foremost

place? And does not this teach us that the condition of a living

organism at any time is the result of the one preceding it, and that

the transition implies a corresponding functional enhancement? But if

we have once recognized this as an established truth, why should we

apply it to organisms at every stage of development except the

.highest, namely the human, where the organic form reveals and serves

the self-conscious spirit?

Putting the question thus, I was led inevitably to a conclusion which

science itself had failed to draw from its idea of evolution. Whatever

the driving factor in evolution may be, it is clear that in the

kingdoms of nature leading up to man this factor has always worked on

the evolving organisms from outside. The moment we come to man himself,

however, and see how evolution has flowered in his power of conscious

thought, we have to reckon with a fundamental change.

Once a being has recognized itself as a product of evolution, it

immediately ceases to be that and nothing more. With its very first act

of self-knowledge it transcends its previous limits, and must in future

rely on its own conscious actions for the carrying on of its

development.

For me, accordingly, the concept of evolution, when thought through to

the end, began to suggest the possibility of further growth in man's

spiritual capacities. But I saw also that this growth could no longer

be merely passive, and the question which now beset me was: by what

action of his own can man break his way into this new phase of

evolution? I saw that this action must not consist merely in giving

outer effect to the natural powers of human thinking; that was

happening everywhere in the disordered world around me. The necessary

action must have inner effects; indeed, it had to be one whereby the

will was turned upon the thinking-powers themselves, entirely

transforming them, and so removing the discrepancy between the thinker

and the doer in modern man.

Thus far I could go through my own observation and reflexion, but no

further. To form a general idea of the deed on which everything else

depended was one thing; it was quite another to know how to perform the

deed, and above all where to make a start with it. Anyone intending to

make a machine must first learn something of mechanics; in the same

way, anyone setting out to do something constructive in the sphere of

human consciousness - and this, for me, was the essential point - must

begin by learning something of the laws holding sway in that sphere.

But who could give me this knowledge?

Physiology, psychology and philosophy in their ordinary forms were of

no use to me, for they were themselves part and parcel of just that

kind of knowing which had to be overcome. In their various accounts of

man there was no vantage point from which the deed I had in mind could

be accomplished, for none of them looked beyond the ordinary powers of

knowledge. It was the same with the accepted theory of evolution; as a

product of the current mode of thinking it could be applied to

everything except the one essential - this very mode of thinking.

Obviously, the laws of the development of human consciousness cannot be

discovered from a standpoint within the modern form of that

consciousness. But how could one find a viewpoint outside, as it were,

this consciousness, from which to discover its laws with the same

scientific objectivity which it had itself applied to discovering the

laws of physical nature?

It was when this question stood before me in all clarity that destiny

led me to Rudolf Steiner and his work. The occasion was a conference

held in 1921 in Stuttgart by the Anthroposophical Movement; it was one

of several arranged during the years 1920-2 especially for teachers and

students at the Hochschulen and Universities. What chiefly moved me to

attend this particular conference was the title of a lecture to be

given by one of the pupils and co-workers of Rudolf Steiner - 'The

Overcoming of Einstein's Theory of Relativity'.1

The reader will readily appreciate what this title meant for me. In the

circles where my work lay, an intense controversy was just then raging

round Einstein's ideas. I usually took sides with the supporters of

Einstein, for it seemed to me that Einstein had carried the existing

mode of scientific thinking to its logical conclusions, whereas I

missed this consistency among his opponents. At the same time I found

that the effect of this theory, when its implications were fully

developed, was to make everything seem so 'relative' that no reliable

world-outlook was left. This was proof for me that our age was in need

of an altogether different form of scientific thinking, equally

consistent in itself, but more in tune with man's own being.

What appealed to me in the lecture-title was simply this, that whereas

everyone else sought to prove Einstein right or wrong, here was someone

who apparently intended, not merely to add another proof for or against

his theory-there were plenty of those already - but to take some steps

to overcome it. From the point of view of orthodox science, of course,

it was absurd to speak of 'overcoming' a theory, as though it were an

accomplished fact, but to me this title suggested exactly what I was

looking for.

Although it was the title of this lecture that drew me to the Stuttgart

Conference (circumstances prevented me from hearing just this lecture),

it was the course given there by Rudolf Steiner himself which was to

prove the decisive experience of my life. It comprised eight lectures,

under the title: 'Mathematics, Scientific Experiment and Observation,

and Epistemological Results from the Standpoint of Anthroposophy'; what

they gave me answered my question beyond all expectation.

In the course of a comprehensive historical survey the lecturer

characterized, in a way I found utterly convincing, the present

mathematical interpretation of nature as a transitional stage of human

consciousness - a kind of knowing which is on the way from a past

pre-mathematical to a future post-mathematical form of cognition. The

importance of mathematics, whether as a discipline of the human spirit

or as an instrument of natural science, was not for a moment

undervalued. On the contrary, what Rudolf Steiner said about Projective

(Synthetic) Geometry, for instance, its future possibilities and its

role as a means of understanding higher processes of nature than had

hitherto been accessible to science, clearly explained the positive

feelings I myself had experienced - without knowing why - when I had

studied the subject.

Through his lectures and his part in the discussions - they were held

daily by the various speakers and ranged over almost every field of

modern knowledge - I gradually realized that Rudolf Steiner was in

possession of unique powers. Not only did he show himself fully at home

in all these fields; he was able to connect them with each other, and

with the nature and being of man, in such a way that an apparent chaos

of unrelated details was wrought into a higher synthesis. Moreover, it

became clear to me that one who could speak as he did about the stages

of human consciousness past, present and future, must have full access

to all of them at will, and be able to make each of them an object of

exact observation. I saw a thinker who was himself sufficient proof

that man can find within the resources of his own spirit the

vantage-ground for the deed which I had dimly surmised, and by which

alone true civilization could be saved. Through all these things I knew

that I had found the teacher I had been seeking.

Thus I was fully confirmed in my hopes of the Conference; but I was

also often astonished at what I heard. Not least among my surprises was

Rudolf Steiner's presentation of Goethe as the herald of the new form

of scientific knowledge which he himself was expounding. I was here

introduced to a side of Goethe which was as completely unknown to me as

to so many others among my contemporaries, who had not yet come into

touch with Anthroposophy. For me, as for them, Goethe had always been

the great thinker revealing his thoughts through poetry. Indeed, only

shortly before my meeting with Rudolf Steiner it was in his poetry that

Goethe had become newly alive to me as a helper in my search for a

fuller human experience of nature and my fellow-men. But despite all my

Goethe studies I had been quite unaware that more than a century

earlier he had achieved something in the field of science, organic and

inorganic alike, which could help modern man towards the new kind of

knowledge so badly needed to-day. This was inevitable for me, since I

shared the modern conviction that art and science were fields of

activity essentially strange to one another. And so it was again Rudolf

Steiner who opened the way for me to Goethe as botanist, physicist and

the like.

I must mention another aspect of the Stuttgart Conference which Belongs

to this picture of my first encounter with Anthroposophy, and gave it

special weight for anyone in my situation at that period. In Stuttgart

there were many different activities concerned with the practical

application of Rudolf Steiner's teachings, and so one could become

acquainted with teachings and applications at the same time. There was

the Waldorf School, founded little more than a year before, with

several hundred pupils already. It was the first school to undertake

the transformation of anthroposophical knowledge of man into

educational practice; later it was followed by others, in Germany and

elsewhere. There was one of the clinics, where qualified doctors were

applying the same knowledge to the study of illness and the action of

medicaments. In various laboratories efforts were made to develop new

methods of experimental research in physics, chemistry, biology and

other branches of science. Further, a large business concern had been

founded in Stuttgart in an attempt to embody some of Rudolf Steiner's

ideas for the reform of social life. Besides all this I could attend

performances of the new art of movement, again the creation of Rudolf

Steiner and called by him 'Eurhythmy', in which the astounded eye could

see how noble a speech can be uttered by the human body when its limbs

are moved in accordance with its inherent spiritual laws. Thus, in all

the many things that were going on besides the lectures, one could find

direct proof of the fruitfulness of what one heard in them.2

Under the impression of this Conference I soon began to study the

writings of Rudolf Steiner. Not quite two years later, I decided to

join professionally with those who were putting Anthroposophy into

outer practice. Because it appeared to me as the most urgent need of

the time to prepare the new generation for the tasks awaiting it

through an education shaped on the entire human being, I turned to

Rudolf Steiner with the request to be taken into the Stuttgart School

as teacher of natural science. On this occasion I told him of my

general scientific interests, and how I hoped to follow them up later

on. I spoke of my intended educational activity as something which

might help me at the same time to prepare myself for this other task.

Anyone who learns so to see nature that his ideas can be taken up and

understood by the living, lively soul of the growing child will thereby

be training himself, I thought, in just that kind of observation and

thinking which the new science of nature demands. Rudolf Steiner agreed

with this, and it was not long afterwards that I joined the school

where I was to work for eleven years as a science master in the senior

classes, which activity I have since continued outside Germany in a

more or less similar form.

This conversation with Rudolf Steiner took place in a large hall where,

while we were talking, over a thousand people were assembling to

discuss matters of concern to the Anthroposophical Movement. This did

not prevent him from asking me about the details of my examination

work, in which I was still engaged at that time; he always gave himself

fully to whatever claimed his attention at the moment. I told him of my

experimental researches in electrical high-frequency phenomena, briefly

introducing the particular problem with which I was occupied. I took it

for granted that a question from such a specialized branch of physics

would not be of much interest to him. Judge of my astonishment when he

at once took out of his pocket a note-book and a huge carpenter's

pencil, made a sketch and proceeded to speak of the problem as one

fully conversant with it, and in such a way that he gave me the

starting point for an entirely new conception of electricity. It was

instantly borne in on me that if electricity came to be understood in

this sense, results would follow which in the end would lead to a quite

new technique in the use of it. From that moment it became one of my

life's aims to contribute whatever my circumstances and powers would

allow to the development of an understanding of nature of this kind.

1 The speaker was the late Dr. Elizabeth Vreede, for some years leader

of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum, Dornach,

Switzerland.

2 The activities mentioned above do not exhaust the practical

possibilities of Spiritual Science. At that time (1921) Rudolf Steiner

had not yet given his indications for the treatment of children needing

special care of soul and body, or for the renewal of the art of acting,

or for the conquest of materialistic methods in agricultural practice.

Nor did there yet exist the movement for religious renewal Which Dr.

Fr. Rittelmeyer later founded, with the help and advice of Rudolf

Steiner.

CHAPTER II

Where Do We Stand To-day?

In the year 1932, when the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary

of Goethe's death, Professor W. Heisenberg, one of the foremost

thinkers in the field of modern physics, delivered a speech before the

Saxon Academy of Science which may be regarded as symptomatic of the

need in recent science to investigate critically the foundations of its

own efforts to know nature.1 In this speech Heisenberg draws a picture

of the progress of science which differs significantly from the one

generally known. Instead of giving the usual description of this

progress as 'a chain of brilliant and surprising discoveries', he shows

it as resting on the fact that, with the aim of continually simplifying

and unifying the scientific conception of the world, human thinking, in

course of time, has narrowed more and more the scope of its inquiries

into outer nature.

'Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation,

almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints and

established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge accumulate, the

claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain

sense diminishes.' Our justifiable admiration for the success with

which the unending multiplicity of natural occurrences on earth and in

the stars has been reduced to so simple a scheme of laws - Heisenberg

implies - must therefore not make us forget that these attainments are

bought at the price 'of renouncing the aim of bringing the phenomena of

nature to our thinking in an immediate and living way'.

In the course of his exposition, Heisenberg also speaks of Goethe, in

whose scientific endeavours he perceives a noteworthy attempt to set

scientific understanding upon a path other than that of progressive

self-restriction.

'The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the

progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the

bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of

Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as

unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most outstanding

men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of

Newtonian optics.' There is only one thing for which Heisenberg

criticizes Goethe: 'If one should wish to reproach Goethe, it could

only be for not going far enough - that is, for having attacked the

views of Newton instead of declaring that the whole of Newtonian

Physics-Optics, Mechanics and the Law of Gravitation - were from the

devil.'

Although the full significance of Heisenberg's remarks on Goethe will

become apparent only at a later stage of our discussion, they have been

quoted here because they form part of the symptom we wish to

characterize. Only this much may be pointed out immediately, that

Goethe - if not in the scientific then indeed in the poetical part of

his writings - did fulfil what Heisenberg rightly feels to have been

his true task.2

We mentioned Heisenberg's speech as a symptom of a certain tendency,

characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically its

own epistemological foundations. A few years previous to Heisenberg's

speech, the need of such a survey found an eloquent advocate in the

late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern

World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical

theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a

medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter

upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations'.

Among the scientists who have felt this need, and who have taken pains

to fulfil it, the late Professor A. Eddington obtains an eminent

position. Among his relevant utterances we will quote here the

following, because it contains a concrete statement concerning the

field of external observation which forms the basis for the modern

scientific world-picture. In his Philosophy of Physical Science we find

him stating that 'ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have

been reached by visual sensation alone - in fact by the simplest form

of visual sensation, colourless and non-stereoscopic'.3 In other words,

in order to obtain scientific cognition of the physical world, man has

felt constrained to surrender the use of all his senses except the

sense of sight, and to limit even the act of seeing to the use of a

single, colour-blind eye.

Let us listen to yet another voice from the ranks of present-day

science, expressing a criticism which is symptomatic of our time. It

comes from the late physiologist, Professor A, Carrel, who, concerning

the effect which scientific research has had on man's life in general,

says in his book, Man the Unknown: 'The sciences of inert matter have

led us into a country that is not ours. ... Man is a stranger in the

world he has created.'

Of these utterances, Eddington's is at the present point of our

discussion of special interest for us; for he outlines in it the

precise field of sense-perception into which science has withdrawn in

the course of that general retreat towards an ever more restricted

questioning of nature which was noted by Heisenberg.

The pertinence of Eddington's statement is shown immediately one

considers what a person would know of the world if his only source of

experience were the sense of sight, still further limited in the way

Eddington describes. Out of everything that the world brings to the

totality of our senses, there remains nothing more than mere movements,

with certain changes of rate, direction, and so on. The picture of the

world received by such an observer is a purely kinematic one. And this

is, indeed, the character of the world-picture of modern physical

science. For in the scientific treatment of natural phenomena all the

qualities brought to us by our other senses, such as colour, tone,

warmth, density and even electricity and magnetism, are reduced to mere

movement-changes.

As a result, modern science is prevented from conceiving any valid idea

of 'force'. In so far as the concept 'force' appears in scientific

considerations, it plays the part of an 'auxiliary concept', and what

man naively conceives as force has come to be defined as merely a

'descriptive law of behaviour'. We must leave it for later

considerations to show how the scientific mind of man has created for

itself the conviction that the part of science occupied with the

actions of force in nature can properly be treated with purely

kinematic concepts. It is the fact itself which concerns us here. In

respect of it, note as a characteristic of modern text-books that they

often simply use the term 'kinetics' (a shortening of kinematics) to

designate the science of 'dynamics'.4

In the course of our investigations we shall discover the peculiarity

in human nature which - during the first phase, now ended, of man's

struggle towards scientific awareness - has caused this renunciation of

all sense-experiences except those which come to man through the sight

of a single colour-blind eye. It will then also become clear out of

what historic necessity this self-restriction of scientific inquiry

arose. The acknowledgment of this necessity, however, must not prevent

us from recognizing the fact that, as a result of this restriction,

modern scientific research, which has penetrated far into the dynamic

substrata of nature, finds itself in the peculiar situation that it is

not at all guided by its own concepts, but by the very forces it tries

to detect. And in this fact lies the root of the danger which besets

the present age.5

He who recognizes this, therefore, feels impelled to look for a way

which leads beyond a one-eyed, colour-blind conception of the world. It

is the aim of this book to show that such a way exists and how it can

be followed. Proof will thereby be given that along this way not only

is a true understanding achieved of the forces already known to science

(though not really understood by it), but also that other forces, just

as active in nature as for example electricity and magnetism, come

within reach of scientific observation and understanding. And it will

be shown that these other forces are of a kind that requires to be

known to-day if we are to restore the lost balance to human

civilization.

*

There is a rule known to physicians that 'a true diagnosis of a case

contains in itself the therapy'. No true diagnosis is possible,

however, without investigation of the 'history' of the case. Applied to

our task, this means that we must try to find an aspect of human

development, both individual and historical, which will enable us to

recognize in man's own being the cause responsible for the peculiar

narrowing of the scope of scientific inquiry, as described by the

scientists cited above.

A characteristic of scientific inquiry, distinguishing it from man's

earlier ways of solving the riddles of the world, is that it admits as

instruments of knowledge exclusively those activities of the human soul

over which we have full control because they take place in the full

light of consciousness. This also explains why there has been no

science, in the true sense of the word, prior to the beginning of the

era commonly called 'modern' - that is, before the fifteenth century.

For the consciousness on which man's scientific striving is based is

itself an outcome of human evolution.

This evolution, therefore, needs to be considered in such a way that we

understand the origin of modern man's state of mind, and in particular

why this state of mind cannot of itself have any other relationship to

the world than that of a spectator. For let us be clear that this

peculiar relationship by no means belongs only to the scientifically

engaged mind. Every adult in our age is, by virtue of his

psycho-physical structure, more or less a world-spectator. What

distinguishes the state of man's mind when engaged in scientific

observation is that it is restricted to a one-eyed colour-blind

approach.

*

'Death is the price man has to pay for his brain and his personality' -

this is how a modern physiologist (A. Carrel in his aforementioned

book, Man the Unknown) describes the connexion between man's bodily

functions and his waking consciousness. It is characteristic of the

outlook prevailing in the nineteenth century that thinking was regarded

as the result of the life of the body; that is, of the body's

matter-building processes. Hence no attention was paid at that time to

the lonely voice of the German philosopher, C. Fortlage (1806-81), who

in his System of Psychology as Empirical Science suggested that

consciousness is really based on death processes in the body. From this

fact he boldly drew the conclusion (known to us today to be true) that

if 'partial death' gave rise to ordinary consciousness, then 'total

death' must result in an extraordinary enhancement of consciousness.

Again, when in our century Rudolf Steiner drew attention to the same

fact, which he had found along his own lines of investigation, showing

thereby the true role of the nervous system in regard to the various

activities of the soul, official science turned a deaf ear to his

pronouncement.6 To-day the scientist regards it as forming part of

'unknown man' that life must recede - in other words, that the

organ-building processes of the body must come to a standstill - if

consciousness is to come into its own.

With the recognition of a death process in the nervous system as the

bodily foundation of consciousness, and particularly of man's

conceptual activities, the question arises as to the nature of those

activities which have their foundation in other systems, such as that

of the muscles, where life, not death, prevails. Here an answer must be

given which will surprise the reader acquainted with modern theories of

psycho-physical interaction; but if he meets it with an open mind he

will not find it difficult to test.

Just as the conceptual activity has as its bodily foundation the brain,

with the nervous appendages, so it is volitional activity which is

based on processes taking place in the muscular region of the body and

in those organs which provide the body's metabolism.

A statement which says that man's will is as directly based on the

metabolic processes of the body, both inside and outside the muscles,

as is his perceiving and thought-forming mind on a process in the

nerves, is bound to cause surprise. Firstly, it seems to leave out the

role commonly ascribed to the so-called motoric part of the nervous

system in bringing about bodily action; and secondly, the

acknowledgment of the dependence of consciousness on corporeal 'dying'

implies that willing is an unconscious activity because of its being

based on life processes of the body.

The first of these two problems will find its answer at a later stage

of our discussion when we shall see what entitles us to draw a direct

connexion between volition and muscular action. To answer the second

problem, simple self-observation is required. This tells us that, when

we move a limb, all that we know of is the intention (in its conceptual

form) which rouses the will and gives it its direction, and the fact of

the completed deed. In between, we accompany the movement with a dim

awareness of the momentary positions of the parts of the body involved,

so that we know whether or not they are moving in the intended manner.

This awareness is due to a particular sense, the 'sense of movement' or

'muscular sense' - one of those senses whose existence physiology has

lately come to acknowledge. Nothing, however, is known to us of all the

complex changes which are set into play within the muscles themselves

in order to carry out some intended movement. And it is these that are

the direct outcome of the activity of our will.

Regarding man's psycho-physical organization thus, we come to see in it

a kind of polarity - a death-pole, as it were, represented by the

nerves including their extension into the senses, and a life-pole,

represented by the metabolic and muscular systems; and connected with

them a pole of consciousness and one of unconsciousness - or as we can

also say, of waking and sleeping consciousness. For the degree of

consciousness on the side of the life-pole is not different from the

state in which the entire human being dwells during sleep.

It is by thus recognizing the dependence of consciousness on processes

of bodily disintegration that we first come to understand why

consciousness, once it has reached a certain degree of brightness, is

bound to suffer repeated interruptions. Every night, when we sleep, our

nervous system becomes alive (though with gradually decreasing

intensity) in order that what has been destroyed during the day may be

restored. While the system is kept in this condition, no consciousness

can obtain in it.

In between the two polarically opposite systems there is a third, again

of clearly distinct character, which functions as a mediator between

the two. Here all processes are of a strictly rhythmic nature, as is

shown by the process of breathing and the pulsation of the blood. This

system, too, provides the foundation for a certain type of

psychological process, namely feeling. That feeling is an activity of

the soul distinct from both thinking and willing, and that it has its

direct counterpart in the rhythmic processes of the body, can be most

easily tested through observing oneself when listening to music.

As one might expect from its median position, the feeling sphere of the

soul is characterized by a degree of consciousness half-way between

waking and sleeping. Of our feelings we are not more conscious than of

our dreams; we are as little detached from them as from our dream

experiences while these last; what remains in our memory of past

feelings is usually not more than what we remember of past dreams.

This picture of the threefold psycho-physical structure of man will now

enable us to understand the evolution of consciousness both in

individual life and in the life of mankind. To furnish the foundation

of waking consciousness, parts of the body must become divorced from

life. This process, however, is one which, if we take the word in its

widest sense, we may call, ageing. All organic bodies, and equally that

of man, are originally traversed throughout by life. Only gradually

certain parts of such an organism become precipitated, as it were, from

the general organic structure, and they do so increasingly towards the

end of that organism's life-span.

In the human body this separation sets in gently during the later

stages of embryonic development and brings about the first degree of

independence of bones and nerves from the rest of the organism. The

retreat of life continues after birth, reaching a certain climax in the

nervous system at about the twenty-first year. In the body of a small

child there is still comparatively little contrast between living and

non-living organs. There is equally little contrast between sleeping

and waking condition in its soul. And the nature of the soul at this

stage is volition throughout. Never, in fact, does man's soul so

intensively will as in the time when it is occupied in bringing the

body into an upright position, and never again does it exert its

strength with the same unconsciousness of the goal to which it strives.

What, then, is the soul's characteristic relationship to the world

around at this stage? The following observations will enable us to

answer this question.

It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object

against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as

'animism', by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his

experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his

surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes the

child's mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep

something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation

of such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither

experiences himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces

the content of the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of

using his imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from

his own.

In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world

as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his

relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the

same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has

stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the child

who beats himself because he has done something which makes him angry

with himself.

In sharp contrast to this state of oneness of the child's soul, in

regard both to its own body and to the surrounding world, there stands

the separatedness of the adult's intellectual consciousness, severed

from both body and world. What happens to this part of the soul during

its transition from one condition to the other may be aptly described

by using a comparison from another sphere of natural phenomena. (Later

descriptions in this book will show that a comparison such as the one

used here is more than a mere external analogy.)

Let us think of water in which salt has been dissolved. In this state

the salt is one with its solvent; there is no visible distinction

between them. The situation changes when part of the salt crystallizes.

By this process the part of the salt substance concerned loses its

connexion with the liquid and contracts into individually outlined and

spatially defined pieces of solid matter. It thereby becomes optically

distinguishable from its environment.

Something similar happens to the soul within the region of the nervous

system. What keeps the soul in a state of unconsciousness as long as

the body, in childhood, is traversed by life throughout, and what

continues to keep it in this condition in the parts which remain alive

after the separation of the nerves, is the fact that in these parts -

to maintain the analogy - the soul is dissolved in the body. With the

growing independence of the nerves, the soul itself gains independence

from the body. At the same time it undergoes a process similar to

contraction whereby it becomes discernible to itself as an entity

distinguished from the surrounding world. In this way the soul is

enabled, eventually, to meet the world from outside as a self-conscious

onlooker.

*

What we have here described as the emergence of an individual's

intellectual consciousness from the original, purely volitional

condition of the soul is nothing but a replica of a greater process

through which mankind as a whole, or more exactly Western mankind, has

gone in the course of its historical development. Man was not always

the 'brain-thinker' he is to-day.7 Directly the separation of the nerve

system was completed, and thereby the full clarity of the brain-bound

consciousness achieved, man began to concern himself with science in

the modern sense.

To understand why this science became restricted to one-eyed,

colour-blind observation we need only apply to the human sense system,

in particular, what we have learnt concerning man's threefold being.

Sharply distinguished by their respective modes of functioning though

they are, the three bodily systems are each spread out through the

whole body and are thus to be found everywhere adjacent to each other.

Hence, the corresponding three states of consciousness, the sleeping,

dreaming and waking, are also everywhere adjacent and woven into one

another. It is the predominance of one or other which imparts a

particular quality of soul to one or other region of the body. This is

clearly shown within the realm of sense activity, itself the most

conscious part of the human being. It is sufficient to compare, say,

the senses of sight and smell, and to notice in what different degree

we are conscious of the impressions they convey, and how differently

the corresponding elements of conception, feeling and willing are

blended in each. We never turn away as instinctively from objectionable

colour arrangement as from an unpleasant smell. How small a part, on

the other hand, do the representations of odours play in our

recollection of past experiences, compared with those of sight.8 The

same is valid in descending measure for all other senses.

Of all senses, the sense of sight has in greatest measure the qualities

of a 'conceptual sense'. The experiences which it brings, and these

alone, were suitable as a basis for the new science, and even so a

further limitation was necessary. For in spite of the special quality

of the sense of sight, it is still not free from certain elements of

feeling and will - that is, from elements with the character of dream

or sleep. The first plays a part in our perception of colour; the

second, in observing the forms and perspective ordering of objects we

look at.

Here is repeated in a special way the threefold organization of man,

for the seeing of colour depends on an organic process apart from the

nerve processes and similar to that which takes place between heart and

lungs, whilst the seeing of forms and spatial vision depend upon

certain movements of the eyeball (quick traversing of the outline of

the viewed object with the line of sight, alteration of the angle

between the two axes of sight according to distance), in which the eye

is active as a sort of outer limb of the body, an activity which enters

our consciousness as little as does that of our limbs. It now becomes

clear that no world-content obtained in such more or less unconscious

ways could be made available for the building of a new scientific

world-conception. Only as much as man experiences through the sight of

a single, colour-blind eye, could be used.9

*

If we would understand the role of science in the present phase of

human development, we must be ready to apply two entirely different and

seemingly contradictory judgments to one and the same historical

phenomenon. The fact that something has occurred out of historical

necessity - that is, a necessity springing from the very laws of cosmic

evolution - does not save it from having a character which, in view of

its consequences, must needs be called tragic.

In this era of advanced intellectualism, little understanding of the

existence of true tragedy in human existence has survived. As a result,

the word 'tragedy' itself has deteriorated in its meaning and is

nowadays used mostly as a synonym for 'sad event', 'calamity' 'serious

event', even 'crime' (Oxford Diet.). In its original meaning, however,

springing from the dramatic poetry of ancient Greece, the word combines

the concept of calamity with that of inevitability; the author of the

destructive action was not held to be personally responsible for it,

since he was caught up in a nexus of circumstances which he could not

change.

This is not the place to discuss why tragedy in this sense forms part

of man's existence. It suffices to acknowledge that it does and, where

it occurs, to observe it with scientific objectivity.

Our considerations, starting from certain statements made by some

leading scientific thinkers of our time, have helped us not only to

confirm the truth inherent in these statements, but to recognize the

facts stated by them as being the outcome of certain laws of evolution

and thereby having an historic necessity. This, however, does not mean

that man's scientific labours, carried out under the historically given

restrictions, great and successful as these labours were and are, have

not led to calamitous effects such as we found indicated by Professor

Carrel. The sciences of matter have led man into a country that is not

his, and the world which he has created by means of scientific research

is not only one in which he is a stranger but one which threatens

to-day to deprive him of his own existence. The reason is that this

world is essentially a world of active forces, and the true nature of

these is something which modern man, restricted to his

onlooker-consciousness, is positively unable to conceive.

We have taken a first step in diagnosing man's present spiritual

condition. A few more steps are required to lead us to the point where

we can conceive the therapy he needs.

1 This address and another by the same author are published together

under the common title, Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der

Naturwissenschaft ('Changes in the foundations of Natural Science').

Heisenberg's name has become known above all by his formulation of the

so-called Principle of Indeterminacy.

2 See, in this respect, Faust's dispute with Mephistopheles on the

causes responsible for the geological changes of the earth. (Faust II,

Act 4)

3 See also Eddington's more elaborate description of this fact in his

New Pathways in Science. The above statement, like others of

Eddington's, has been Contested from the side of professional

philosophy as logically untenable. Our own further discussion will show

that it accords with the facts.

4 Both words, kinematics and kinetics, are derivatives of the Greek

word kinein, to move. The term 'kinematic' is used when motion is

considered abstractly without reference to force or mass. Kinetics is

applied kinematics, or, as pointed out above, dynamics treated with

kinematic concepts.

5 These last statements will find further illustration in the next two

chapters.

6 First published in 1917 in his book Von Seelenrätseln.

7 Homer's men still think with the diaphragm (phrenes). Similarly, the

ancient practice of Yoga, as a means of acquiring knowledge, shows that

at the time When it flourished man's conceptual activity was felt to be

seated elsewhere than in the head.

8 This must not be confused with the fact that a smell may evoke other

memories by way of association.

9 For one who endeavours to observe historical facts in the manner here

described, it is no mere play of chance that the father of scientific

atomism, John Dalton, was by nature colour blind. In fact, colour

blindness was known, for a considerable time during the last century,

as 'Daltonism', since it was through the publication of Dalton's

self-observations that for the first time general attention was drawn

to this phenomenon.

CHAPTER III

The Onlooker's Philosophic Malady

In his isolation as world spectator, the modern philosopher was bound

to reach two completely opposite views regarding the objective value of

human thought. One of these was given expression in Descartes' famous

words: Cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am'). Descartes

(1596-1650), rightly described as the inaugurator of modern philosophy,

thus held the view that only in his own thought-activity does man find

a guarantee of his own existence.

In coming to this view, Descartes took as his starting-point his

experience that human consciousness contains only the thought pictures

evoked by sense-perception, and yet knows nothing of the how and why of

the things responsible for such impressions. He thus found himself

compelled, in the first place, to doubt whether any of these things had

any objective existence, at all. Hence, there remained over for him

only one indubitable item in the entire content of the universe - his

own thinking; for were he to doubt even this, he could do so only by

again making use of it. From the 'I doubt, therefore I am', he was led

in this way to the 'I think, therefore I am'.

The other conception of human thought reached by the

onlooker-consciousness was diametrically opposed to that of Descartes,

and entirely cancelled its conceptual significance. It was put forward

- not long afterwards - by Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the first

scientist to make systematic use of the newly invented microscope by

means of which he made the fundamental discovery of the cellular

structure of plant tissues. It was, indeed, on the strength of his

microscopic studies that he boldly undertook to determine the

relationship of human thought to objective reality. He published his

views in the introduction to his Micrographia, the great work in which,

with the lavish help of carefully executed copper engravings, he made

his microscopic observations known to the world.

Hooke's line of thought is briefly as follows: In past ages men

subscribed to the naive belief that what they have in their

consciousness as thought pictures of the world, actually reproduces the

real content of that world. The microscope now demonstrates, however,

how much the familiar appearance of the world depends on the structure

of our sense apparatus; for it reveals a realm just as real as that

already known to us, but hitherto concealed from us because it is not

accessible to the natural senses. Accordingly, if the microscope can

penetrate through the veil of illusion which normally hides a whole

world of potentially visible phenomena, it may be that it can even

teach us something about the ideas we have hitherto formed concerning

the nature of things. Perhaps it can bring us a step nearer the truth

in the sphere of thought, as it so obviously has done in that of

observation.

Of all the ideas that human reason can form, Hooke considered the

simplest and the most fundamental to be the geometrical concepts of

point and straight line. Undoubtedly we are able to think these, but

the naïve consciousness takes for granted that it also perceives them as

objective realities outside itself, so that thoughts and facts

correspond to each other. We must now ask, however, if this belief is

not due to an optical deception. Let us turn to the microscope and see

what point and line in the external world look like through it.

For his investigation Hooke chose the point of a needle and a

knife-edge, as providing the best representatives among physical

objects of point and straight line. In the sketches here reproduced we

may see how Hooke made clear to his readers how little these two

things, when observed through the microscope, resemble what is seen by

the unaided eye. This fact convinced Hooke that the apparent agreement

between the world of perception and the world of ideas rests on nothing

more solid than an optical limitation (Plate I).

Compared with the more refined methods of present-day thought, Hooke's

procedure may strike us as somewhat primitive. Actually he did nothing

more than has since been done times without number; for the scientist

has become more and more willing to allow artificially evoked

sense-perceptions to dictate the thoughts he uses in forming a

scientific picture of the world.

In the present context we are concerned with the historical import of

Hooke's procedure. This lies in the fact that, immediately after

Descartes had satisfied himself that in thinking man had the one sure

guarantee of his own existence, Hooke proved in a seemingly indubitable

manner that thinking was entirely divorced from reality. It required

only another century for philosophy to draw from this the unavoidable

consequence. It appeared in the form of Hume's philosophic system, the

outcome of which was universal scepticism.

As we shall see in due course, Hume's mode of reasoning continues to

rule scientific thought even to-day, quite irrespective of the fact

that science itself claims to have its philosophical parent in Kant,

the very thinker who devoted his life's work to the refutation of Hume.

*

On the basis of his investigations into human consciousness Hume felt

obliged to reason thus: My consciousness, as I know it, has no contact

with the external world other than that of a mere outside onlooker.

What it wins for its own content from the outer world is in the nature

of single, mutually unrelated parts. Whatever may unite these parts

into an objective whole within the world itself can never enter my

consciousness; and any such unifying factor entertained by my thought

can be only a self-constructed, hypothetical picture. Hume summed up

his view in two axioms which he himself described as the alpha and

omega of his whole philosophy. The first runs: 'All our distinct

perceptions are distinct existences.' The other: 'The Mind never

perceives any real connexions between distinct existences.' (Treatise

of Human Nature.)

If once we agree that we can know of nothing but unrelated thought

pictures, because our consciousness is not in a position to relate

these pictures to a unifying reality, then we have no right to ascribe,

with Descartes and his school, an objective reality to the self. Even

though the self may appear to us as the unifying agent among our

thoughts, it must itself be a mental picture among mental pictures ;

and man can have no knowledge of any permanent reality outside this

fluctuating picture-realm. So, with Hume, the onlooker-consciousness

came to experience its own utter inability to achieve a knowledge of

the objective existence either of a material world be - behind all

external phenomena, or of a spiritual self behind all the details of

its own internal content.

Accordingly, human consciousness found itself hurled into the abyss of

universal scepticism. Hume himself suffered unspeakably under the

impact of what he considered inescapable ideas - rightly described from

another side as the 'suicide of human intelligence' - and his

philosophy often seemed to him like a malady, as he himself called it,

against whose grip he could see no remedy. The only thing left to him,

if he was to prevent philosophical suicide from ending in physical

suicide, was to forget in daily life his own conclusions as far as

possible.

What Hume experienced as his philosophical malady, however, was the

result not of a mental abnormality peculiar to himself, but of that

modern form of consciousness which still prevails in general today.

This explains why, despite all attempts to disprove Hume's philosophy,

scientific thought has not broken away from its alpha and omega in the

slightest degree.

A proof of this is to be found, for example, in the principle of

Indeterminacy which has arisen in modern physics.

*

The conception of Indeterminacy as an unavoidable consequence of the

latest phase of physical research is due to Professor W. Heisenberg.

Originally this conception forced itself upon Heisenberg as a result of

experimental research. In the meantime the same idea has received its

purely philosophical foundation. We shall here deal with both lines of

approach.

After the discovery by Galileo of the parallelogram of forces, it

became the object of classical physics - unexpressed, indeed, until

Newton wrote his Principia - to bring the unchanging laws ruling nature

into the light of human consciousness, and to give them conceptual

expression in the language of mathematical formulae. Since, however,

science was obliged to restrict itself to what could be observed with a

single, colour-blind eye, physics has taken as its main object of

research the spatio-temporal relationships, and their changes, between

discrete, ideally conceived, point-like particles. Accordingly, the

mathematically formulable laws holding sway in nature came to mean the

laws according to which the smallest particles in the material

foundation of the world change their position with regard to each

other. A science of this kind could logically maintain that, if ever it

succeeded in defining both the position and the state of motion, in one

single moment, of the totality of particles composing the universe, it

would have discovered the law on which universal existence depends.

This necessarily rested on the presupposition that it really was the

ultimate particles of the physical world which were under observation.

In the search for these, guided chiefly by the study of electricity,

the physicists tracked down ever smaller and smaller units; and along

this path scientific research has arrived at the following peculiar

situation.

To observe any object in the sense world we need an appropriate medium

of observation. For ordinary things, light provides this. In the sense

in which light is understood to-day, this is possible because the

spatial extension of the single light impulses, their so-called

wavelength, is immeasurably smaller than the average magnitude of all

microscopically visible objects. This ensures that they can be observed

clearly by the human eye. Much smaller objects, however, will require a

correspondingly shorter wave-length in the medium of observation. Now

shorter wave-lengths than those of visible light have been found in

ultra-violet light and in X-rays; and these, accordingly, are now often

used for minute physical research.

In this way, however, we are led by nature to a definite boundary; for

we now find ourselves in a realm where the dimensions of the

observation medium and the observed object are more or less the same.

The result, unfortunately, is that when the 'light' meets the object,

it changes the latter's condition of movement. On the other hand, if a

'light' is used whose wave-length is too big to have any influence on

the object's condition of movement, it precludes any exact

determination of the object's location.

Thus, having arrived at the very ground of the world - that is, where

the cosmic laws might be expected to reveal themselves directly - the

scientist finds himself in the remarkable situation of only being able

to determine accurately either the position of an observed object and

not its state of motion, or its state of motion and not its position.

The law he seeks, however, requires that both should be known at the

same time. Nor is this situation due to the imperfection of the

scientific apparatus employed, but to its very perfection, so that it

appears to arise from the nature of the foundation of the world - in so

far, at least, as modern science is bound to conceive it.

If it is true that a valid scientific knowledge of nature is possible

only in the sphere open to a single-eyed, colour-blind observation, and

if it is true - as a science of this kind, at any rate, is obliged to

believe - that all processes within the material foundation of the

world depend on nothing but the movements of certain elementary

particles of extremely small size, then the fact must be faced that the

very nature of these processes rules out the discovery of any stable

ordering of things in the sense of mathematically formulable laws. The

discovery of such laws will then always be the last step but one in

scientific investigation; the last will inevitably be the dissolution

of such laws into chaos. For a consistent scientific thinking that goes

this way, therefore, nothing is left but to recognize chaos as the only

real basis of an apparently ordered world, a chaos on whose surface the

laws that seem to hold sway are only the illusory picturings of the

human mind. This, then, is the principle of Indeterminacy as it has

been encountered in the course of practical investigation into the

electrical processes within physical matter.

In the following way Professor Schrödinger, another leading thinker among

modern theoretical physicists, explains the philosophical basis for the

principle of Indeterminacy, which scientists have established in the

meantime:1

'Every quantitative observation, every observation making use of

measurement, is by nature discontinuous. ... However far we go in the

pursuit of accuracy we shall never get anything other than a finite

series of discrete results. ... The raw material of our quantitative

cognition of nature will always have this primitive and discontinuous

character. ... It is possible that a physical system might be so simple

that this meagre information would suffice to settle its fate; in that

case nature would not be more complicated than a game of chess. To

determine a position of a game of chess thirty-three facts suffice. ...

If nature is more complicated than a game of chess, a belief to which

one tends to incline, then a physical system cannot be determined by a

finite number of observations. But in practice a finite number of

observations is all that we could make.'

Classical physics, the author goes on to show, held that it was

possible to gain a real insight into the laws of the universe, because

in principle an infinite number of such discrete observations would

enable us to fill in the gaps sufficiently to allow us to determine the

system of the physical world. Against this assumption modern physics

must hold the view that an infinite number of observations cannot in

any case be carried out in practice, and that nothing compels us to

assume that even this would suffice to furnish us with the means for a

complete determination, which alone would allow us to speak of 'law' in

nature. 'This is the direction in which modern physics has led us

without really intending it.'

What we have previously said will make it clear enough that in these

words of a modern physicist we meet once more the two fundamentals of

Hume's philosophy. It is just as obvious, however, that the very

principle thus re-affirmed at the latest stage of modern physical

science was already firmly established by Hooke, when he sought to

prove to his contemporaries the unreality of human ideas.

Let us recall Hooke's motives and results. The human reason discovers

that certain law-abiding forms of thought dwell within itself; these

are the rules of mathematical thinking. The eye informs the reason that

the same kind of law and order is present also in the outer world. The

mind can think point and line; the eye reports that the same forms

exist in nature outside. (Hooke could just as well have taken as his

examples the apex and edge of a crystal.) The reason mistrusts the eye,

however, and with the help of the microscope 'improves' on it. What

hitherto had been taken for a compact, regulated whole now collapses

into a heap of unordered parts; behind the illusion of law a finer

observation detects the reality of chaos!

Had science in its vehement career from discovery to discovery not

forgotten its own beginnings so completely, it would not have needed

its latest researches to bring out a principle which it had in fact

been following from the outset - a principle which philosophy had

already recognized, if not in quite the same formulation, in the

eighteenth century. Indeterminacy, as we have just seen it explained by

Schrödinger, is nothing but the exact continuation of Humean scepticism.

1 In his book, Science and the Human Temperament (Dublin, 1935).

CHAPTER IV

The Country that is Not Ours

The last two chapters have served to show the impasse into which human

perception and thinking have come - in so far as they have been used

for scientific purposes - by virtue of the relationship to the world in

which man's consciousness found itself when it awoke to itself at the

beginning of modern times. Now although the onlooker in man, especially

in the earliest stage of our period, gave itself up to the conviction

that a self-contained picture of the universe could be formed out of

the kind of materials available to it, it nevertheless had a dim

inkling that this picture, because it lacked all dynamic content, had

no bearing on the real nature of the universe. Unable to find this

reality within himself, the world-onlooker set about searching in his

own way for what was missing, and turned to the perceptible world

outside man. Here he came, all unexpectedly, upon ... electricity.

Scarcely was electricity discovered than it drew human scientific

thinking irresistibly into its own realm. Thereby man found himself,

with a consciousness completely blind to dynamics, within a sphere of

only too real dynamic forces. The following description will show what

results this has had for man and his civilization.

*

First, let us recall how potent a role electricity has come to play in

social life through the great discoveries which began at the end of the

eighteenth century. To do this we need only compare the present

relationship between production and consumption in the economic sphere

with what it was before the power-machine, and especially the

electrically driven machine, had been invented. Consider some major

public undertaking in former times - say the construction of a great

mediaeval cathedral. Almost all the work was done by human beings, with

some help, of course, from domesticated animals. Under these

circumstances the entire source of productive power lay in the

will-energies of living beings, whose bodies had to be supplied with

food, clothing and housing; and to provide these, other productive

powers of a similar kind were required near the same place.

Accordingly, since each of the power units employed in the work was

simultaneously both producer and consumer, a certain natural limit was

placed on the accumulation of productive forces in any one locality.

This condition of natural balance between production and consumption

was profoundly disturbed by the introduction of the steam engine; but

even so there were still some limits, though of a quite different kind,

to local concentrations of productive power. For steam engines require

water and coal at the scene of action, and these take up space and need

continual shifting and replenishing. Owing to the very nature of

physical matter, it cannot be heaped up where it is required in

unlimited quantities.

All this changed directly man succeeded in producing energy

electro-magnetically by the mere rotation of material masses, and in

using the water-power of the earth - itself ultimately derived from the

cosmic energies of the sun - for driving his dynamos. Not only is the

source of energy thus tapped practically inexhaustible, but the

machines produce it without consuming on their own account, apart from

wear and tear, and so make possible the almost limitless accumulation

of power in one place. For electricity is distinguished from all other

power-supplying natural forces, living or otherwise, precisely in this,

that it can be concentrated spatially with the aid of a physical

carrier whose material bulk is insignificant compared with the energy

supplied.

Through this property of electricity it has been possible for man to

extend the range of his activity in all directions, far and near. So

the balance between production and consumption, which in previous ages

was more or less adequately maintained by natural conditions, has been

entirely destroyed, and a major social-economic problem created.

In yet another way, and through quite another of its properties,

electricity plays an important part in modern life. Not only does it

compete with the human will; it also makes possible automatically

intelligent operations quite beyond anything man can do on his own.

There are innumerable examples of this in modern electrical technology;

we need mention here only the photo-electric cell and the many devices

into which it enters.

To an ever-increasing, quite uncontrolled degree - for to the mind of

present-day man it is only natural to translate every new discovery

into practice as soon and as extensively as possible - electricity

enters decisively into our modern existence. If we take all its

activities into account, we see arising amongst humanity a vast realm

of labour units, possessed in their own way not only of will but of the

sharpest imaginable intelligence. Although they are wholly remote from

man's own nature, he more and more subdues his thoughts and actions to

theirs, allowing them to take rank as guides and shapers of his

civilization.

Turning to the sphere of scientific research, we find electricity

playing a role in the development of modern thinking remarkably similar

to its part as a labour-force in everyday life. We find it associated

with phenomena which, in Professor Heisenberg's words, expose their

mutual connexions to exact mathematical thinking more readily than do

any other facts of nature; and yet the way in which these phenomena

have become known has played fast and loose with mathematical thinking

to an unparalleled degree. To recognize that in this sphere modern

science owes its triumphs to a strange and often paradoxical mixture of

outer accident and error in human thought, we need only review the

history of the subject without prejudice.

*

The discovery of electricity has so far been accomplished in four

clearly distinct stages. The first extends from the time when men first

knew of electrical phenomena to the beginning of the natural scientific

age; the second includes the seventeenth and the greater part of the

eighteenth centuries; the third begins with Galvani's discovery and

closes with the first observations of radiant electricity; and the

fourth brings us to our own day. We shall here concern ourselves with a

few outstanding features of each phase, enough to characterize the

strange path along which man has been led by the discovery of

electricity.

Until the beginning of modern times, nothing more was known about

electricity, or of its sister force, magnetism, than what we find in

Pliny's writings. There, without recognizing a qualitative distinction

between them, he refers to the faculty of rubbed amber and of certain

pieces of iron to attract other small pieces of matter. It required the

awakening of that overruling interest in material nature,

characteristic of our own age, for the essential difference between

electric and magnetic attraction to be recognized. The first to give a

proper description of this was Queen Elizabeth's doctor, Gilbert. His

discovery was soon followed by the construction of the first electrical

machine by the German Guericke (also known through his invention of the

air pump) which opened the way for the discovery that electricity could

be transmitted from one place to another.

It was not, however, until the beginning of the eighteenth century that

the crop of electrical discoveries began to increase considerably:

among these was the recognition of the dual nature of electricity, by

the Frenchman, Dufais, and the chance invention of the Leyden jar (made

simultaneously by the German, von Kleist, and two Dutchmen,

Musschenbroek and Cunaeus). The Leyden jar brought electrical effects

of quite unexpected intensity within reach. Stimulated by what could be

done with electricity in this form, more and more people now busied

themselves in experimenting with so fascinating a force of nature,

until in the second third of the century a whole army of observers was

at work, whether by way of profession or of hobby, finding out ever new

manifestations of its powers.

The mood that prevailed in those days among men engaged in electrical

research is well reflected in a letter written by the Englishman,

Walsh, after he had established the electric nature of the shocks given

by certain fishes, to Benjamin Franklin, who shortly before had

discovered the natural occurrence of electricity in the atmosphere:

'I rejoice in addressing these communications to You. He, who predicted

and shewed that electricity wings the formidable bolt of the

Atmosphere, will hear with attention that in the deep it speeds a

humbler bolt, silent and invisible; He, who analysed the electrical

Phial, will hear with pleasure that its laws prevail in animate Phials;

He, who by Reason became an electrician, will hear with reverence of an

instinctive electrician, gifted in his birth with a wonderful

apparatus, and with the skill to use it.' (Phil. Trans. 1773.)

Dare one believe that in electricity the soul of nature had been

discovered? This was the question which at that time stirred the hearts

of very many in Europe. Doctors had already sought to arouse new

vitality in their patients by the use of strong electric shocks;

attempts had even been made to bring the dead back to life by such

means. . In a time like ours, when we are primarily concerned with the

practical application of scientific discoveries, we are mostly

accustomed to regard such flights of thought from a past age as nothing

but the unessential accompaniment of youthful, immature science, and to

smile at them accordingly as historical curiosities. This is a mistake,

for we then overlook how within them was hidden an inkling of the

truth, however wrongly conceived at the time, and we ignore the role

which such apparently fantastic hopes have played in connexion with the

entry of electricity into human civilization. (Nor are such hopes

confined to the eighteenth century; as we shall see, the same impulse

urged Crookes a hundred years later to that decisive discovery which

was to usher in the latest phase in the history of science, a phase in

which the investigating human spirit has been led to that boundary of

the physical-material world where the transition takes place from inert

matter into freely working energy.)

If there was any doubt left as to whether in nature the same power was

at work which, in animal and man, was hidden away within the soul, this

doubt seemed finally to have been dispelled through Galvani's discovery

that animal limbs could be made to move electrically through being

touched by two bits of different metals. No wonder that 'the storm

which was loosed in the world of the physicists, the physiologists and

the doctors through Galvani's publication can only be compared with the

one crossing the political horizon of Europe at the same time. Wherever

there happened to be frogs and two pieces of different metals

available, everyone sought proof with his own eyes that the severed

limbs could be marvellously re-enlivened.'1

Like many of his contemporaries, Galvani was drawn by the fascinating

behaviour of the new force of nature to carry on electrical experiments

as a hobby alongside his professional work, anatomical research. For

his experiments he used the room where his anatomical specimens were

set out. So it happened that his electrical machine stood near some

frogs' legs, prepared for dissection. By a further coincidence his

assistant, while playing with the machine, released a few sparks just

when some of the specimens were in such contact with the surface

beneath them that they were bound to react to the sudden alteration of

the electric field round the machine caused by its discharge. At each

spark the frogs' legs twitched. What Galvani saw with his own eyes

seemed to be no less than the union of two phenomena, one observed by

Franklin in the heights of the atmosphere, the other by Walsh in the

depths of the sea.

Galvani, as he himself describes, proceeded with immense enthusiasm to

investigate systematically what accident had thus put into his hands.2

He wanted first to see whether changes occurring naturally in the

electrical condition of the atmosphere would call forth the same

reaction in his specimens. For this purpose he fastened one end of an

iron wire to a point high up outside his house; the lower end he

connected with the nervous substance of a limb from one of his

specimens, and to the foot of this he attached a second wire whose

other end he submerged in a well. The specimen itself was either

enclosed in a glass flask in order to insulate it, or simply left lying

on a table near the well. And all this he did whenever a thunderstorm

was threatening. As he himself reported: 'All took place as expected.

Whenever the lightning flashed, all the muscles simultaneously came

into repeated and violent twitchings, so that the movements of the

muscles, like the flash of the lightning, always preceded the thunder,

and thus, as it were, heralded its coming.' We can have some idea of

what went on in Galvani's mind during these experiments if we picture

vividly to ourselves the animal limbs twitching about every time the

lightning flashed, as if a revitalizing force of will had suddenly

taken possession of them.

In the course of his investigations - he carried them on for a long

time - Galvani was astonished to observe that some of his specimens,

which he had hung on to an iron railing by means of brass hooks,

sometimes fell to twitching even when the sky was quite clear and there

was no sign of thunder. His natural conclusion was that this must be

due to hitherto unnoticed electrical changes in the atmosphere.

Observations maintained for hours every day, however, led to no

conclusive result; when twitchings did occur it was only with some of

the specimens, and even then there was no discoverable cause. Then it

happened one day that Galvani, 'tired out with fruitless watching',

took hold of one of the brass hooks by which the specimens were hung,

and pressed it more strongly than usual against the iron railing.

Immediately a twitching took place. 'I was almost at the point of

ascribing the occurrence to atmospheric electricity,' Galvani tells us.

All the same he took one of the specimens, a frog, into his laboratory

and there subjected it to similar conditions by putting it on an iron

plate, and pressing against this with the hook that was stuck through

its spinal cord. Immediately the twitching occurred again. He tried

with other metals and, for checking purposes, with non-metals as well.

With some ingenuity he fixed up an arrangement, rather like that of an

electric bell, whereby the limbs in contracting broke contact and in

relaxing restored it, and so he managed to keep the frog in continuous

rhythmical movement.

Whereas Galvani had been rightly convinced by his earlier observations

that the movement in the specimens represented a reaction to an

electric stimulus from outside, he now changed his mind. In the very

moment of his really significant discovery he succumbed to the error

that he had to do with an effect of animal electricity located

somewhere in the dead creature itself, perhaps in the fashion of what

had been observed in the electric fishes. He decided that the metal

attachment served merely to set in motion the electricity within the

animal.

Whilst Galvani persisted in this mistake until his death, Volta

realized that the source of the electric force, as in the first of

Galvani's observations, must still be sought outside the specimens, and

himself rightly attributed it to the contacting metals. Guided by this

hypothesis, Volta started systematic research into the Galvanic

properties of metals, and presently succeeded in producing electricity

once more from purely mineral substances, namely from two different

metals in contact with a conductive liquid.

This mode of producing electricity, however, differed from any

previously known in allowing for the first time the production of

continuous electrical effects. It is this quality of the cells and

piles constructed by Volta that laid open the road for electric force

to assume that role in human civilization which we have already

described. That Volta himself was aware of this essentially new factor

in the Galvanic production of electricity is shown by his own report to

the Royal Society:

'The chief of my results, and which comprehends nearly all the others,

is the construction of an apparatus which resembles in its effects,

viz. such as giving shocks to the arms, &c, the Leyden phial, and still

better electric batteries weakly charged; . . . but which infinitely

surpasses the virtue and power of these same batteries; as it has no

need, like them, of being charged beforehand, by means of a foreign

electricity; and as it is capable of giving the usual commotion as

often as ever it is properly touched.'

Whilst Volta's success was based on avoiding Galvani's error, his

apparatus nevertheless turned out inadvertently to be a close

counterpart of precisely that animal organ which Galvani had in mind

when misinterpreting his own discoveries! That Volta himself realized

this is clear from the concluding words in his letter:

'This apparatus, as it resembles more the natural organ of the torpedo,

or of the electrical eel, than the Leyden Phial or the ordinary

electric batteries, I may call an artificial electric organ.'

This new method of producing continuous electrical effects had

far-reaching results, one of which was the discovery of the magnetic

properties of the electric current by the Dane, Oersted - once again a

purely accidental discovery, moving directly counter to the assumptions

of the discoverer himself. About to leave the lecture room where he had

just been trying to prove the non-existence of such magnetic properties

(an attempt seemingly crowned with success), Oersted happened to glance

once more at his demonstration bench. To his astonishment he noticed

that one of his magnetic needles was out of alignment; evidently it was

attracted by a magnetic field created by the current running through a

wire he had just been using, which was still in circuit. Thus what had

escaped Oersted throughout his planned researches - namely, that the

magnetic force which accompanies an electric current must be sought in

a direction at right angles to the current - a fortuitous event enabled

him to detect.

These repeated strokes of chance and frequently mistaken

interpretations of the phenomenon thus detected show that men were

exploring the electrical realm as it were in the dark; it was a realm

foreign to their ordinary ideas and they had not developed the forms of

thought necessary for understanding it. (And this, as our further

survey will show, is still true, even to-day.)

In our historical survey we come next to the researches of Faraday and

Maxwell. Faraday was convinced that if electrical processes are

accompanied by magnetic forces, as Oersted had shown, the reverse must

also be true - magnetism must be accompanied by electricity. He was led

to this correct conviction by his belief in the qualitative unity of

all the forces of nature - a reflexion, as his biography shows, of his

strongly monotheistic, Old Testament faith. Precisely this view,

however - which since Faraday natural science has quite consciously

adopted as a leading principle - will reveal itself to us as a

fundamental error.

It seems paradoxical to assert that the more consistently human thought

has followed this error, the greater have been the results of the

scientific investigation of electricity. Precisely this paradox,

however, is characteristic of the realm of nature to which electricity

belongs; and anyone earnestly seeking to overcome the illusions of our

age will have to face the fact that the immediate effectiveness of an

idea in practice is no proof of its ultimate truth.

Another eloquent example of the strange destiny of human thought in

connexion with electricity is to be found in the work of Clark Maxwell,

who, starting from Faraday's discoveries, gave the theory of

electricity its mathematical basis. Along his purely theoretical line

of thought he was led to the recognition of the existence of a form of

electrical activity hitherto undreamt of - electro-magnetic vibrations.

Stimulated by Maxwell's mathematical conclusions, Hertz and Marconi

were soon afterwards able to demonstrate those phenomena which have led

on the one hand to the electro-magnetic theory of light, and on the

other to the practical achievements of wireless communication.

Once again, there is the paradoxical fact that this outcome of

Maxwell's labours contradicts the very foundation on which he had built

his theoretical edifice. For his starting-point had been to form a

picture of the electro-magnetic field of force to which he could apply

certain well-known formulae of mechanics. This he did by comparing the

behaviour of the electrical force to the currents of an elastic fluid -

that is, of a material substance. It is true that both he and his

successors rightly emphasized that such a picture was not in any way

meant as an explanation of electricity, but merely as an auxiliary

concept in the form of a purely external analogy. Nevertheless, it was

in the guise of a material fluid that he thought of this force, and

that he could submit it to mathematical calculation. Yet the fact is

that from this starting-point the strict logic of mathematics led him

to the discovery that electricity is capable of behaviour which makes

it appear qualitatively similar to ... light!

Whilst practical men were turning the work of Faraday and Maxwell to

account by exploiting the mechanical working of electricity in

power-production, and its similarity to light in the wireless

communication of thought, a new field of research, with entirely new

practical possibilities, was suddenly opened up in the last third of

the nineteenth century through the discovery of how electricity behaves

in rarefied air. This brings us to the discovery of cathode rays and

the phenomena accompanying them, from which the latest stage in the

history of electricity originated. And here once more, as in the

history of Galvani's discoveries, we encounter certain undercurrents of

longing and expectation in the human soul which seemed to find an

answer through this sudden, great advance in the knowledge of

electricity - an advance which has again led to practical applications

of the utmost significance for human society, though not at all in the

way first hoped for.

Interest in the phenomena arising when electricity passes through gases

with reduced pressure had simultaneously taken hold of several

investigators in the seventies of the nineteenth century. But the

decisive step in this sphere of research was taken by the English

physicist, William Crookes. He was led on by a line of thought which

seems entirely irrelevant; yet it was this which first directed his

interest to the peculiar phenomena accompanying cathode rays; and they

proved to be the starting-point of the long train of inquiry which has

now culminated in the release of atomic energy.3

In the midst of his many interests and activities, Crookes was filled

from his youth with a longing to find by empirical means the bridge

leading from the world of physical effects to that of superphysical

causes. He himself tells how this longing was awakened in him by the

loss of a much-beloved brother. Before the dead body he came to the

question, which thereafter was never to leave him, whether there was a

land where the human individuality continues after it has laid aside

its bodily sheath, and how that land was to be found. Seeing that

scientific research was the instrument which modern man had forged to

penetrate through the veil of external phenomena to the causes

producing them, it was natural for Crookes to turn to it in seeking the

way from the one world into the other.

It was after meeting with a man able to produce effects within the

corporeal world by means of forces quite different from those familiar

to science, that Crookes decided to devote himself to this scientific

quest. Thus he first came into touch with that sphere of phenomena

which is known as spiritualism, or perhaps more suitably, spiritism.

Crookes now found himself before a special order of happenings which

seemed to testify to a world other than that open to our senses;

physical matter here showed itself capable of movement in defiance of

gravity, manifestations of light and sound appeared without a physical

source to produce them. Through becoming familiar with such things at

seances arranged by his mediumistic acquaintance, he began to hope that

he had found the way by which scientific research could overstep the

limits of the physical world. Accordingly, he threw himself eagerly

into the systematic investigation of his new experiences, and so became

the father of modern scientific spiritism.

Crookes had hoped that the scientists of his day would be positively

interested in his researches. But his first paper in this field, 'On

Phenomena called Spiritual', was at once and almost unanimously

rejected by his colleagues, and as long as he concerned himself with

such matters he suffered through their opposition. It passed his

understanding as a scientist why anything should be regarded in advance

as outside the scope of scientific research. After several years of

fruitless struggle he broke off his investigations into spiritism,

deeply disillusioned at his failure to interest official science in it.

His own partiality for it continued, however (he served as President of

the Society for Psychical Research from 1896-9), and he missed no

opportunity of confessing himself a pioneer in the search for the

boundary-land between the worlds of matter and spirit. Through all his

varied scientific work the longing persisted to know more of this land.

Just as Crookes had once sought to investigate spiritism

scientifically, so in his subsequent scientific inquiries he was always

something of a spiritist. He admitted, indeed, that he felt specially

attracted by the strange light effects arising when electricity passes

through rarefied gases, because they reminded him of certain luminous

phenomena he had observed during his spiritistic investigations.

Besides this, there was the fact that light here showed itself

susceptible to the magnetic force in a way otherwise characteristic

only of certain material substances. Accordingly, everything combined

to suggest to Crookes that here, if anywhere, he was at the boundary

between the physical and the superphysical worlds. No wonder that he

threw himself into the study of these phenomena with enthusiasm.

He soon succeeded in evoking striking effects - light and heat, and

also mechanical - along the path of electricity passing invisibly

through the tube later named after him. Thus he proved for the first

time visibly, so to say, the double nature - material and supermaterial

- of electricity. What Crookes himself thought about these discoveries

in the realm of the cathode rays we may judge from the title, 'Radiant

Matter', or 'The Fourth State of Matter', which he gave to his first

publication about them. And so he was only being consistent when, in

his lectures before the Royal Institution in London, and the British

Association in Sheffield in 1879, after showing to an amazed scientific

audience the newly discovered properties of electricity, he came to the

climax of his exposition by saying: 'We have seen that in some of its

properties Radiant Matter is as material as this table, whilst in other

properties it almost assumes the character of Radiant Energy. We have

actually touched here the borderland where Matter and Force seem to

merge into one another, the shadowy realm between Known and Unknown,

which for me has always had peculiar temptations.' And in boldly

prophetic words, which time has partly justified, he added, 'I venture

to think that the greatest scientific problems of the future will find

their solution in this Borderland, and even beyond; here, it seems to

me, lie Ultimate Realities, subtle, far-reaching, wonderful.'

No one can read these words of Crookes without hearing again, as an

undertone, the question which had forced itself on him at the bedside

of his dead brother, long before. All that is left of the human being

whom death has taken is a heap of substances, deserted by the force

which had used them as the instrument of its own activity. Whither

vanishes this force when it leaves the body, and is there any

possibility of its revealing itself even without occupying such a body?

Stirred by this question, the young Crookes set out to find a world of

forces which differ from the usual mechanical ones exercised by matter

on matter, in that they are autonomous, superior to matter in its inert

conglomeration, yet capable of using matter, just as the soul makes use

of the body so long as it dwells within it. His aim was to secure proof

that such forces exist, or, at any rate, to penetrate into the realm

where the transition from matter to pure, matter-free force takes

place. And once again, as in Galvani's day, electricity fascinated the

eyes of a man who was seeking for the land of the soul. What spiritism

denied, electricity seemed to grant.

The aversion to spiritism which Crookes met with in contemporary

science was, from the standpoint of such a science, largely justified.

Science, in the form in which Crookes himself conceived it, took for

granted that the relationship of human consciousness to the world was

that of external onlooking. Accordingly, if the scientist remained

within the limits thus prescribed for consciousness, it was only

consistent to refuse to make anything beyond these limits an object of

scientific research.

On the other hand, it says much for the courage and open mindedness of

Crookes that he refused to be held back from what was for him the only

possible way of extending the boundaries of science beyond the given

physical world. Moreover, it was only natural that in his search for a

world of a higher order than the physical he should, as a man of his

time, first turn his attention to spiritistic occurrences, for

spiritism, as it had come over to Europe from America in the middle of

the nineteenth century, was nothing but an attempt by the

onlooker-consciousness to learn something in its own way about the

supersensible world. The spiritist expects the spirit to reveal itself

in outwardly perceptible phenomena as if it were part of the physical

world. Towards the end of his life Crookes confessed that if he were

able to begin again he would prefer to study telepathic phenomena - the

direct transference of thought from one person to another - rather than

the purely mechanical, or so-called telekinetic, expressions of psychic

forces. But although his interest was thus turning towards a more

interior field of psychic investigation, he remained true to his times

in still assuming that knowledge about the world, whatever it might be,

could be won only by placing oneself as a mere onlooker outside the

object of research.

*

The stream of new discoveries which followed Crookes's work justified

his conviction that in cathode ray phenomena we have to do with a

frontier region of physical nature. Still, the land that lies on the

other side of this frontier is not the one Crookes had been looking for

throughout his life. For, instead of finding the way into the land

whither man's soul disappears at death, Crookes had inadvertently

crossed the border into another land - a land which the

twentieth-century scientist is impelled to call 'the country that is

not ours'.

The realm thrown open to science by Crookes's observations, which human

knowledge now entered as if taking it by storm, was that of the

radioactive processes of the mineral stratum of the earth. Many new and

surprising properties of electricity were discovered there - yet the

riddle of electricity itself, instead of coming nearer, withdrew into

ever deeper obscurity.

The very first step into this newly discovered territory made the

riddle still more bewildering. As we have said, Maxwell's use of a

material analogy as a means of formulating mathematically the

properties of electro-magnetic fields of force had led to results which

brought electricity into close conjunction with light. In his own way

Crookes focused, to begin with, his attention entirely on the

light-like character of electric effects in a vacuum. It was precisely

these observations, however, as continued by Lenard and others, which

presently made it necessary to see in electricity nothing else than a

special manifestation of inert mass.

The developments leading up to this stage are recent and familiar

enough to be briefly summarized. The first step was once more an

accident, when Röntgen (or rather one of his assistants) noticed that a

bunch of keys, laid down by chance on top of an unopened box of

photographic plates near a cathode tube, had produced an inexplicable

shadow-image of itself on one of the plates. The cathode tube was

apparently giving off some hitherto unknown type of radiation, capable

of penetrating opaque substances. Röntgen was an experimentalist, not a

theorist; his pupils used to say privately that in publishing this

discovery of X-rays he attempted a theoretical explanation for the

first and only time in his life - and got it wrong!

However, this accidental discovery had far-reaching consequences. It

drew attention to the fluorescence of minerals placed in the cathode

tube; this inspired Becquerel to inquire whether naturally fluorescent

substances gave off anything like X-rays, and eventually - yet again by

accident - he came upon certain uranium compounds. These were found to

give off a radiation similar to X-rays, and to give it off naturally

and all the time. Soon afterwards the Curies succeeded in isolating the

element, radium, an element which was found to be undergoing a

continuous natural disintegration. The way was now clear for that long

series of experiments on atomic disintegration which led finally to the

splitting of the nucleus and the construction of the atomic bomb.

*

A typical modern paradox emerges from these results. By restricting his

cognitive powers to a field of experience in which the concept of force

as an objective reality was unthinkable, man has been led on a line of

practical investigation the pursuit of which was bound to land him

amongst the force-activities of the cosmos. For what distinguishes

electric and sub-electric activities from all other forces of physical

nature so far known to science, is that for their operation they have

no need of the resistance offered by space-bound material bodies; they

represent a world of pure dynamics into which spatial limitations do

not enter.

Equally paradoxical is the situation of theoretical thinking in face of

that realm of natural being which practical research has lately

entered. We have seen that this thinking, by virtue of the

consciousness on which it is founded, is impelled always to clothe its

ideas in spatial form. Wherever anything in the pure spatial adjacency

of physical things remains inexplicable, resort is had to hypothetical

pictures whose content consists once more of nothing but spatially

extended and spatially adjacent items. In this way matter came to be

seen as consisting of molecules, molecules of atoms, and atoms of

electrons, protons, neutrons, and so forth.

In so far as scientific thought has held to purely spatial conceptions,

it has been obliged to concentrate on ever smaller and smaller spatial

sizes, so that the spatially conceived atom-picture has finally to

reckon with dimensions wherein the old concept of space loses validity.

When once thinking had started in this direction, it was electricity

which once more gave it the strongest impulse to go even further along

the same lines.

Where we have arrived along this path is brought out in a passage in

Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World. There, after describing

the modern picture of electrons dancing round the atomic nucleus, he

says: 'This spectacle is so fascinating that we have perhaps forgotten

that there was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is.

This question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven

round the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.' The only thing we

can say about the electron, if we are not to deceive ourselves,

Eddington concludes, is: 'Something unknown is doing we don't know

what.'4

Let us add a further detail from this picture of the atom, as given in

Eddington's Philosophy of Physical Science. Referring to the so-called

positron, the positive particle regarded as the polar opposite of the

negative electron, he remarks: 'A positron is a hole from which an

electron has been removed; it is a bung-hole which would be evened up

with its surroundings if an electron were inserted. ... You will see

that the physicist allows himself even greater liberty than the

sculptor. The sculptor removes material to obtain the form he desires.

The physicist goes further and adds material if necessary - an

operation which he describes as removing negative material. He fills up

a bung-hole, saying he is removing a positron.' Eddington thus shows to

what paradoxical ideas the scientist is driven, when with his

accustomed forms of thought he ventures into regions where the

conditions necessary for such forms no longer exist; and he concludes

his remarks with the following caution: 'Once again I would remind you

that objective truth is not the point at issue.'

By this reminder Eddington shows how far science has reconciled itself

to the philosophic scepticism at which man's thinking had arrived in

the days of Hume. In so far as the above remark was intended to be a

consolation for the bewildered student, it is poor comfort in the light

of the actions which science has let loose with the help of those

unknown entities. For it is just this resignation of human thought

which renders it unable to cope with the flood of phenomena springing

from the sub-material realm of nature, and has allowed scientific

research to outrun scientific understanding.

1 E. du Bois-Raymond: Investigations into Animal Electricity (1884).

Galvani published his discovery when the French Revolution had reached

its zenith and Napoleon was climbing to power.

2 The above account follows A. J. von Oettingen's edition of Galvani's

monograph, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari.

3 For what follows see The Life of Sir William Crookes, by E. E.

Fournier D'Albe (London, 1923).

4 Eddington's italics. See also, in this respect, Professor White

head's criticism of the hypothetical picture of the electron and its

behaviour.

PART II

Goetheanism - Whence and Whither?