The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 5 ] Since, without the existence of forces, the particles of the postulated matter would never be set in motion, modern natural scientists also include the force among the elements from which they explain the world, and Du Bois-Reymond says: “Understanding nature… is the reduction of changes in the physical world to the motions of atoms, which are caused by their central forces independent of time, or the resolution of natural processes into the mechanics of atoms.” [op. cit., p. 10] With the introduction of the concept of force , mathematics transitions into mechanics. Today’s philosophers ^{103This was written in the early 1890s. What can be said about this today* [see note on p. 21].} are so heavily influenced by natural scientists that they have lost all courage to think independently. They accept the natural scientists’ assertions unreservedly. One of the most respected German philosophers, W. Wundt, states in his *Logic* (*Logic. [An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge and the Methods of Scientific Research]*, Vol. II [Methodology], Part 1, [2nd ed., Stuttgart 1894], p. 266): “Taking into account… and applying the principle that, due to the qualitative immutability of matter, all natural processes are ultimately movements, the goal of physics is regarded as their complete transformation into… applied mechanics.”

[ 6 ] Du Bois-Reymond observes: “It is a psychological fact of experience that, where such an explanation (of natural processes in atomic mechanics) is successful, our need for causality feels provisionally satisfied.” [op. cit., p. 10] That may be a fact of experience for Du Bois-Reymond. But it must be said that there are others who are by no means satisfied with a banal explanation of the physical world—such as the one Du Bois-Reymond has in mind.

[ 7 ] Among these other people is Goethe. Anyone whose need for causality is satisfied once they have succeeded in attributing natural phenomena to atomic mechanics lacks the capacity to understand Goethe.

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[ 8 ] Size, shape, position, motion, force, etc., are perceptions in exactly the same sense as light, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, heat, cold, etc. Anyone who isolates the size of a thing from its other properties and considers it on its own is no longer dealing with a real thing, but with an abstraction of the mind. It is the most absurd thing imaginable to attribute a different degree of reality to an abstraction derived from sensory perception than to a thing of sensory perception itself. Spatial and numerical relationships have no advantage over other sensory perceptions other than their greater simplicity and easier comprehensibility. The certainty of the mathematical sciences rests on this simplicity and comprehensibility. If the modern view of nature reduces all processes of the physical world to what can be expressed mathematically and mechanically, this is because the mathematical and the mechanical are easy and convenient for our thinking to handle. And human thinking tends toward convenience. This can be seen precisely in Ostwald’s lecture mentioned above. This natural scientist wishes to replace “matter” and “force” with “energy” . Listen: “What is the condition for one of our (sensory) organs to function? No matter how we look at the matter, we find nothing in common except this: The sensory organs react to differences in energy between themselves and their surroundings. In a world where the temperature were everywhere the same as that of our bodies, we would be unable to perceive heat in any way, just as we have no sensation of the constant atmospheric pressure under which we live; only when we create spaces with different pressures do we become aware of it.” (p. 2Sf. of the lecture.) And further (p. 29): “Imagine you were struck with a stick! What would you feel then—the stick or its energy? There can be only one answer: the energy. For the stick is the most harmless thing in the world as long as it is not swung. But we can also bump into a stationary stick! Quite right: what we perceive, as already emphasized, are differences in energy states relative to our sensory organs, and therefore it makes no difference whether the stick moves toward us or we move toward the stick. But if both have the same velocity in the same direction, then the stick no longer exists for our perception, for it cannot come into contact with us and effect an exchange of energy.” These omissions prove that Ostwald excludes energy from the realm of the perceptual world—that is, abstracts it from everything that is not energy. He reduces everything perceptible to a single property of the perceptible—the manifestation of energy—and thus to an abstract concept. Ostwald’s bias toward contemporary scientific conventions is clearly evident. He, too, if asked, could offer no justification for his method other than that it is a psychological fact of experience for him that his need for causality is satisfied once he has reduced natural processes to manifestations of energy . It is essentially irrelevant whether Du Bois-Reymond reduces natural processes to atomic mechanics, or Ostwald to expressions of energy. Both stem from the tendency of human thought toward convenience.

[ 9 ] Ostwald says at the end of his lecture (p. 34): “Is energy, as necessary and useful as it is for understanding nature, also sufficient for this purpose (namely, the explanation of the physical world)? Or are there phenomena that cannot be fully accounted for by the laws of energy known to date? . . . I believe I cannot better fulfill the responsibility I have assumed toward you today through my presentation than by emphasizing that this question must be answered with No . As immense as the advantages of the energetic worldview are over the mechanistic or materialistic one, it seems to me that even now we can identify certain points that are not covered by the known fundamental principles of energetics, and which therefore point to the existence of principles that go beyond them. Thermodynamics will continue to exist alongside these new principles. However, in the future it will no longer be—as we must still regard it today—the most comprehensive principle for understanding natural phenomena, but will likely appear as a special case of even more general relationships, the form of which we currently have hardly any inkling of.»

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[ 10 ] If our natural scientists were to read works by people outside their own circle, Prof. Ostwald would not have been able to make a remark like this. For I had already stated in 1891, in the aforementioned introduction to Goethe’s Theory of Colors, that we can indeed have an inkling—and more than just an inkling—of such “forms,” and that the task of future natural science lies in the further development of Goethe’s fundamental scientific concepts.

[ 11 ] Just as the processes of the physical world cannot be “reduced” to the mechanics of atoms, neither can they be “reduced” to energy relationships. Such an approach achieves nothing more than diverting attention from the content of the real sensory world and directing it toward an unreal abstraction, whose meager set of properties is, after all, drawn from that same sensory world. One cannot explain one group of properties of the sensory world—light, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, thermal conditions, etc.—by “reducing” them to another group of properties of the same sensory world: size, shape, position, number, energy, etc. The task of natural science cannot be the “resolution” of one type of property into another, but rather the search for relationships and connections between the perceptible properties of the sensory world. We then discover certain conditions under which one sensory perception necessarily entails another. We find that there is a more intimate connection between certain phenomena than between others. We no longer link these phenomena in the way they present themselves to casual observation. For we recognize that certain connections between phenomena are necessary . In contrast, other connections are accidental. Goethe calls these necessary connections between phenomena “Urphänomene.”

[ 12 ] The expression of a primordial phenomenon always consists in saying that a particular sensory perception necessarily gives rise to another. This expression is what is called a law of nature . When one says, “A body expands when heated,” one has expressed a necessary connection between phenomena of the sensory world (heat, expansion). One has recognized a primordial phenomenon and expressed it in the form of a law of nature . The primordial phenomena are the forms sought by Ostwald for the most general relationships in inorganic nature.

[ 13 ] The laws of mathematics and mechanics are just as much expressions of primordial phenomena as the laws that express other sensory relationships in a formula. When G. Kirchhoff says: “The task of mechanics is to describe the movements occurring in nature completely and in the simplest way ,” he is mistaken. Mechanics does not merely describe the motions occurring in nature in the simplest way and completely; rather, it seeks out certain necessary processes of motion, which it singles out from the sum of the motions occurring in nature, and articulates these necessary processes of motion as fundamental mechanical laws . It must be regarded as the height of thoughtlessness that Kirchhoff’s theorem is cited time and time again as something particularly significant, without any sense that the formulation of the simplest fundamental law of mechanics refutes it.

[ 14 ] The primordial phenomenon represents a necessary connection between elements of the perceptual world. Therefore, hardly anything could be more inaccurate than what H. Helmholtz put forward in his speech at the Weimar Goethe Conference on June 11, 1892: “ It is regrettable that Goethe, at that time, was unaware of the undulation theory of light already formulated by Huyghens ; this would have provided him with a much more accurate and vivid ˂primordial phenomenon˃ than the highly convoluted process—which was hardly suitable for this purpose—that he chose for this end in the colors of opaque media.” ^{104H. L. F. von Helmholtz, Goethe’s Premonitions of Future Scientific Ideas, etc.; Berlin 1892, p. 34.}

[ 15 ] Thus, the imperceptible undulatory movements—which the proponents of the modern view of nature assume to underlie the phenomena of light—are said to have provided Goethe with a much more accurate and vivid “primordial phenomenon” than the by no means complicated process—which unfolds right before our eyes—consisting in the fact that light, when viewed through a cloudy medium, appears yellow, while darkness, when viewed through a luminous medium, appears blue . The “reduction” of sensually perceptible processes to imperceptible mechanical movements has become so much of a habit for modern physicists that they seem to have no idea whatsoever that they are substituting an abstraction for reality. Statements such as Helmholtz’s will only be permissible once all of Goethe’s propositions of the following kind have been eliminated: “The highest achievement would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the fundamental law of chromaticism. Let us not seek anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the doctrine.” [“Sayings in Prose”; Natw. Schr., Vol. 4, Part 2, p. 376] Goethe remains within the world of appearances; modern physicists pick up a few scraps from the world of appearances and place them behind the phenomena, in order to then derive the phenomena of truly perceptible experience from these hypothetical realities.

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[ 16 ] Some younger physicists claim that they do not attribute any meaning to the concept of moving matter beyond what is supported by experience. One of them manages the remarkable feat of being a follower of both mechanical natural philosophy and Indian mysticism. Anton Lampa (see his *Nights of the Seeker*, Braunschweig 1893) remarks, in response to Ostwald’s arguments, that the latter “is waging a battle like the brave Manchaner of old against the windmills.” Where, then, is the giant of scientific (Ostwald means natural-scientific) materialism? It does not exist at all. There was once a so-called natural-scientific materialism espoused by Messrs. Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott—indeed, it still exists—but it does not exist within natural science itself, nor has it ever been at home there. Ostwald overlooked this; otherwise, he would have taken up arms solely against the mechanistic view, which—due to his misunderstanding—he does only in passing, but which he probably would not have done at all without this misunderstanding. Can one really believe that a natural science which follows the path laid out by Kirchhoff could conceive of the concept of matter in the same sense as materialism has done? That is impossible; it is a glaringly obvious contradiction. The concept of matter, just like that of force, can have only an empirical meaning—one that is specified by the requirement for the simplest possible description; in Kantian terms, it can have only an empirical meaning. And if any natural scientist attaches a meaning to the word “matter” that goes beyond this, he does so not as a natural scientist, but as a materialist philosopher.” (“Die Zeit,” Vienna, No. 61, Nov. 30, 1895).

[ 17 ] According to these words, Lampa must be regarded as the archetype of the modern natural scientist. He employs mechanical explanations of nature because they are convenient to use. However, he avoids reflecting on the true nature of this explanation of nature because he fears becoming entangled in contradictions that his mind feels unable to resolve.

[ 18 ] How can someone who values clear thinking attach any meaning to the concept of matter without going beyond the world of experience? In the world of experience, there are bodies of a certain size and location; there are movements and forces; and there are also the phenomena of light, color, heat, electricity, life, and so on. Experience says nothing about the fact that size, heat, color, etc., are inherent in matter. Matter cannot be found anywhere within the world of experience. Anyone who wishes to conceive of matter must add it to experience.

[ 19 ] This approach of adding matter to the phenomena of the empirical world can be observed in the physical and physiological considerations that have become established in modern natural philosophy under the influence of Kant and Johannes Müller . These considerations have led to the belief that the external processes that give rise to sound in the ear, light in the eye, heat in the organ of thermal sensation, and so on, have nothing in common with the sensation of sound, the sensation of light, the sensation of heat, and so on. Rather, these external processes are said to be certain movements of matter. The natural scientist then investigates what kind of external movements give rise to sound, light, color, etc., in the human mind. He concludes that nowhere outside the human organism, in the entire universe, can red, yellow, or blue be found; rather, there is only a wave-like movement of a fine, elastic substance—the ether—which, when perceived by the eye, appears as red, yellow, or blue. If there were no perceiving eye, there would be no color, but only moving ether, according to the modern natural philosopher. The ether is the objective reality; color is merely something subjective, formed within the human body. The Leipzig professor Wundt, who is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest philosophers of our time, therefore says of matter that it is a substrate, “which never becomes apparent to us in itself, but always only through its effects.” And he believes that “a consistent explanation of phenomena can only be achieved” if one assumes such a substrate (Logic, Vol. II, [Part 1, 2nd ed.], p. 445). Descartes’ delusion regarding clear and confused ideas has become the fundamental mode of thought in physics.*

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[ 20 ] Anyone whose imagination has not been thoroughly corrupted by Descartes, Locke, Kant, and modern physiology will never understand how one can regard light, color, sound, heat, etc., as merely subjective states of the human organism and yet still assert the existence of an objective world of events outside the organism. Anyone who makes the human organism the producer of sound, heat, color, and other such phenomena must also make it the producer of extension, size, position, motion, forces, and so on. For these mathematical and mechanical qualities are, in reality, inseparably linked to the rest of the content of the empirical world. The separation of spatial, numerical, and kinetic relationships, as well as manifestations of force, from heat, sound, color, and other sensory qualities is merely a function of abstract thought. The laws of mathematics and mechanics pertain to abstract objects and processes abstracted from the world of experience and can therefore only be applied within that world. But if mathematical and mechanical forms and relationships are also explained as merely subjective states, then nothing remains that could serve as the content of the concept of objective things and events. And no phenomena can be derived from an empty concept.

[ 21 ] As long as modern natural scientists and their followers, the modern philosophers, cling to the view that sensory perceptions are merely subjective states brought about by objective processes, sound reasoning will always counter that they are either playing with empty concepts or attributing to the objective a content that they borrow from the world of experience, which they have declared to be subjective. In a series of writings, I have demonstrated the absurdity of the claim regarding the subjectivity of sensory perceptions. ^{105“Outlines of a Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe’s Worldview, with Special Reference to Schiller” (1886), Complete Works, Dornach 1960; “Truth and Science: Prelude to a ‘Philosophy of Freedom’” (1892), Complete Edition, Dornach 1958; “Philosophy of Freedom: Outlines of a Modern Worldview” (1894), Complete Edition, Dornach 1972.}

[ 22 ] But I will set aside the question of whether the processes of motion and the forces that cause them—to which modern physics attributes all natural phenomena—are ascribed a different form of reality than sensory perceptions, or whether that is not the case. I simply want to ask what the mathematical-mechanical view of nature can achieve. Anton Lampa states (“Nights of the Seeker,” p. 92): “Mathematical method and mathematics are not identical, for the mathematical method can be carried out without the application of mathematics.” A classic example of this fact in physics is provided by the experimental investigations of electricity conducted by Faraday, who barely knew how to square a binomial. Mathematics is, after all, nothing more than a means of abbreviating logical operations and thus of carrying them out even in such complex cases where ordinary logical thinking would fail us. But at the same time, it accomplishes much more: by implicitly expressing its process of development in every formula, it builds a living bridge to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point of the investigation. However, a method that cannot make use of mathematics—which is always the case when the quantities involved in the investigation are not measurable—must, in order to be on a par with the mathematical method, not only be strictly logical but also devote particular care to the task of tracing phenomena back to their fundamental manifestations, since, lacking mathematical support, it can easily falter precisely here; but if it accomplishes this, it will rightly lay claim to the title of “mathematical,” insofar as this is intended to express the degree of exactness.”

[ 23 ] I would not devote so much attention to Anton Lampa were it not for the fact that he is a particularly suitable example of a contemporary natural scientist. He satisfies his philosophical needs through Indian mysticism and therefore does not, like others, taint the mechanical view of nature with all sorts of philosophical side notions. The natural philosophy he has in mind is, so to speak, the chemically pure view of nature prevalent today. I find that Lampa has completely disregarded a key characteristic of mathematics. It is true that every mathematical formula builds a “living bridge” to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point for the investigations. But these elementary phenomena are of the same nature as the non-elementary ones from which the bridge is built. The mathematician traces the properties of complex numerical and spatial structures, as well as their mutual relationships, back to the properties and relationships of the simplest numerical and spatial structures. The mechanical engineer does the same in his field. He traces complex motion processes and the effects of forces back to simple, easily comprehensible motions and force effects. In doing so, he makes use of mathematical laws, insofar as motions and the manifestation of forces can be expressed through spatial structures and numbers. In a mathematical formula that expresses a mechanical law, the individual terms no longer represent purely mathematical constructs, but rather forces and motions. The relationships between these terms are not determined by a purely mathematical regularity, but by the properties of the forces and motions. As soon as one disregards this specific content of the mechanical formulas, one is no longer dealing with mechanical regularity, but merely with mathematical regularity. Just as mechanics relates to pure mathematics, so does physics relate to mechanics. The physicist’s task is to trace complex phenomena in the fields of color, sound, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., back to simple occurrences within the same sphere . For example, he must trace complex color phenomena back to the simplest color phenomena. In doing so, he must make use of mathematical and mechanical laws, insofar as the color phenomena unfold in forms that can be defined spatially and numerically. It is not the reduction of phenomena such as color, sound, etc., to movements and force relationships within colorless and soundless matter, but rather the search for connections within the phenomena of color, sound, etc., that corresponds to the mathematical method in the field of physics.

[ 24 ] Modern physics disregards phenomena such as sound, color, and so on as such, and considers only invariant, attractive, and repulsive forces and motions in space. Under the influence of this way of thinking, physics has already become applied mathematics and mechanics, and the other fields of natural science are on their way to becoming the same.

[ 25 ] It is impossible to establish a “living bridge” between the fact that a certain process of motion of colorless matter prevails at this point in space and the other fact that a person sees red at this point. Movement can only be derived from movement. And from the fact that a movement acts upon a sensory organ and thereby upon the brain, it follows—according to mathematical and mechanical methods—only that the brain is prompted by the external world to carry out certain movement processes, but not that it perceives concrete sounds, colors, thermal phenomena, etc. Du Bois-Reymond also recognized this. See pp. 35 ff. of his *The Limits of Knowledge of Nature* (5th ed.): “What conceivable connection exists between, on the one hand, certain movements of certain atoms in my brain and, on the other hand, the facts that are original to me, cannot be further defined, and cannot be denied: I feel pain, I feel pleasure; I taste sweetness, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red” ... And on p. 34: “Motion can only produce motion.” Du Bois-Reymond therefore believes that this marks a limit to the understanding of nature.

[ 26 ] The reason why the fact “I see red” cannot be derived from a specific process of movement is, in my view, easy to explain. The quality “red” and a specific process of movement are, in reality, an inseparable unity. The separation of the two phenomena can only be a conceptual one, carried out in the mind. The process of movement corresponding to “red” has no reality in itself; it is an abstraction. Attempting to derive the fact “I see red” from a process of motion is just as absurd as deriving the real properties of a cube-shaped crystallized rock salt from a mathematical cube. It is not because a limit of cognition prevents us from deriving other sensory qualities from movements, but because such a demand makes no sense.

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[ 27 ] The tendency to overlook colors, sounds, phenomena of heat, etc., as such, and to consider only the mechanical processes corresponding to them, can only stem from the belief that the simple laws of mathematics and mechanics correspond to a higher degree of comprehensibility than the properties and interrelationships of the other entities in the world of perception. However, this is by no means the case. The simplest properties and relationships of spatial and numerical entities are readily called comprehensible because they can be easily and completely grasped. All mathematical and mechanical understanding is based on a reduction to simple facts that are self-evident upon immediate realization. The proposition that two quantities equal to a third must also be equal to each other is recognized through the immediate grasp of the fact it expresses. In the same sense, the simple phenomena of the world of sound and color and of the other sensory perceptions are also recognized through immediate intuition.

[ 28 ] Simply because they are misled by the prejudice that a simple mathematical or mechanical fact is more comprehensible than an elementary phenomenon of sound or color as such, modern physicists eliminate the specific characteristics of sound or color from the phenomena and consider only the processes of motion that correspond to sensory perceptions. And because they cannot conceive of motion without something that moves, they assume that matter—stripped of all sensory qualities—is the carrier of these motions. Anyone who is not bound by this prejudice of physicists must recognize that the processes of motion are states that are bound to sensory qualities. The content of the wave-like motions corresponding to sound phenomena is the sound qualities themselves. The same applies to the other sensory qualities. We recognize the content of the oscillating motions of the phenomenal world through direct perception, not by adding an abstract matter to the phenomena.

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[ 29 ] I know that with these views I am expressing something that sounds utterly impossible to the ears of contemporary physicists. However, I cannot adopt the standpoint of Wundt , who, in his *Logic* (Vol. 11, Part 1 [2nd ed., 1894]) presents the thought habits of modern natural scientists as binding logical norms. The thoughtlessness of which he is guilty in doing so becomes particularly clear in the passage where he discusses Ostwald’s experiment to substitute energy in oscillating motion for moving matter. Wundt argues as follows: “It follows … from the existence of interference phenomena that some kind of oscillating motion must be assumed. But since motion without a moving substrate is inconceivable, the derivation of light phenomena from a mechanical process is therefore an unavoidable requirement. However, Ostwald sought to avoid the latter assumption by not attributing “radiant energy” to the oscillations of a material medium, but rather by defining it as energy in oscillatory motion. Yet it is precisely this dual concept—composed of a concrete and a purely conceptual component—that seems to me to provide compelling proof that the concept of energy itself requires a decomposition that leads back to elements of intuition. A real motion can only be defined as the change in position of a real substrate given in space. This real substrate can reveal itself to us only through the effects of forces emanating from it, or through force functions, which we regard as being carried by it. But the fact that such force functions—which can be fixed merely conceptually—themselves move seems to me to be a requirement that cannot be fulfilled without postulating some kind of substrate . [op. cit., p. 410]

[ 30 ] Ostwald’s concept of energy is much closer to reality than Wundt’s supposedly “real” substrate. The phenomena of the perceptual world—light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc.—can be subsumed under the general concept of work, i.e., energy. When light, heat, etc., bring about a change in a body, a force is thereby exerted. By designating light, heat, etc., as energy, one has set aside what is specific to the individual sensory qualities and is considering a general property common to them all.

[ 31 ] Although this property does not encompass everything that exists in real things, it is a real property of these things. The concept of the properties, on the other hand, that matter —as hypothetically assumed by physicists and their philosophical defenders—is said to possess, contains a contradiction. These properties are borrowed from the sensory world and are nevertheless supposed to pertain to a substrate that does not belong to the sensory world.

[ 32 ] It is incomprehensible how Wundt can claim that the concept of “radiant energy” is impossible simply because it contains a intuitive and a conceptual component. The philosopher Wundt thus fails to recognize that every concept referring to an object of sensory reality must necessarily contain both a concrete and a conceptual component. After all, the concept of a “cube of rock salt” has the intuitive component of rock salt as perceived by the senses and the other purely conceptual component established by stereometry.

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[ 33 ] The development of the natural sciences over the past few centuries has led to the destruction of all concepts through which this science can be part of a worldview that satisfies higher human needs. It has led “modern” scientific minds to regard it as absurd to speak of concepts and ideas as belonging to reality just as much as the forces acting in space and the matter filling space. To these minds, concepts and ideas are merely a product of the human brain and nothing more. Even the Scholastics knew the truth of the matter. But Scholasticism is despised by modern science. It is despised, yet it is not understood. Above all, people do not know what is sound in Scholasticism and what is flawed. What is sound about it is that it had a sense that concepts and ideas are not merely figments of the imagination that the human mind devises to understand real things, but that they have something to do with the things themselves—indeed, more than matter and force. This sound intuition of the Scholastics is a legacy of the great worldviews of Plato and Aristotle . What is flawed about Scholasticism is the mingling of this intuition with the notions that crept into the medieval development of Christianity. This development locates the source of all that is spiritual—including concepts and ideas—in the unknowable God, who is outside the world. It requires faith in something that is not of this world. Healthy human thinking, however, remains grounded in this world. It concerns itself with no other. Yet at the same time, it spiritualizes this world. It perceives realities of this world in concepts and ideas just as it does in things and events perceptible through the senses. Greek philosophy is an outgrowth of this healthy thinking. Scholasticism still absorbed a glimmer of this healthy thinking. But it sought to reinterpret this insight in the light of the Christian belief in the afterlife. It was not concepts and ideas that were to be the deepest reality that human beings perceive in the events of this world, but God, or rather, the afterlife. Once one has grasped the idea of a thing, nothing compels one to search for a further “origin” of that thing. They have attained what satisfies the human need for knowledge. But what did the Scholastics care about the human need for knowledge? They wanted to preserve what they regarded as the Christian conception of God. They wanted to find the origin of the world in the God of the afterlife, even though their search for the inner nature of things yielded only concepts and ideas.

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[ 34 ] Over the course of the centuries, Christian concepts became more influential than the obscure notions inherited from ancient Greece. People lost their sense of the reality of concepts and ideas. But with that, people also lost faith in the Spirit itself. The worship of the purely material began: the Newtonian era in natural science dawned. Now there was no longer any talk of the unity that underlies the world’s diversity. Now all unity was denied; unity was reduced to a “human” concept. In nature, one saw only multiplicity, diversity. It was this general fundamental conception that led Newton to perceive not an original unity in light, but rather a composite. In his “Materials on the History of the Theory of Colors,” Goethe outlined part of the development of scientific concepts. From his account, it is evident that modern natural science, through the general concepts it employs to grasp nature, has arrived at unhealthy views in the theory of colors. This science has lost its understanding of what light is within the series of natural qualities. That is why it also does not know how, under certain conditions, light appears colored, or how color arises in the realm of light.