The Rudolf Steiner Archive

17. Goethe Against Atomism

[ 1 ] There is much talk today of the fruitful development of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century. I believe we can rightly speak only of significant scientific experiences that were made and of a transformation of practical living conditions as a result of these experiences. But as far as the basic ideas by which the modern view of nature seeks to comprehend the world of experience are concerned, I consider them unhealthy and inadequate for vigorous thinking. I have already spoken about this on p. 258ff. of this paper. Recently, a well-known contemporary natural scientist, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, has expressed the same view. ^{102"The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism"; lecture given at the 3rd general meeting of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians in Lübeck on September 20, 1895; Leipzig 1895. - This was written a short time after Ostwald's statements in question were made.} He says: "From the mathematician to the practical physician, every scientifically minded person, when asked how he thinks the world is formed "inwardly", will summarize his view to the effect that things are composed of moving atoms, and that these atoms and the forces acting between them are the ultimate realities of which the individual phenomena consist. In a hundredfold repetitions one can hear and read this sentence, that no other understanding can be found for the physical world than by tracing it back to the "mechanics of atoms"; matter and motion appear as the ultimate concepts to which the multiplicity of natural phenomena must be related. This view can be called scientific materialism." I have said in this paper p. 258ff. that the modern physical fundamental views are untenable. The same is expressed by Ostwald (p. 6. of his lecture) in the following words: "That this mechanistic view of the world does not fulfill the purpose for which it has been formed; that it conflicts with undoubted and generally known and recognized truths." The agreement between Ostwald's explanations and mine goes even further. I say (p. 274 of this paper): "The sensuous world picture is the sum of metamorphosing perceptual contents without an underlying matter." Ostwald says (p. 12 f.): "But if we consider that all we know of a certain substance is the knowledge of its properties, we see that the assertion that there is still a certain substance but that it no longer has any of its properties is not very far from pure nonsense. In fact, this purely formal assumption serves us only to unite the general facts of chemical processes, in particular the stoichiometric laws of mass, with the arbitrary concept of an unchanged matter." And on p. 256 of this work we read: "It is these considerations that forced me to reject as impossible any theory of nature that in principle goes beyond the realm of the perceived world, and to seek the sole object of natural science in the world of the senses alone." I find the same thing expressed in Ostwald's lecture on pp. 25 and 22: "What do we learn from the physical world? Obviously only that which our sensory instruments convey to us." "To relate realities, detectable and measurable quantities to each other in a certain way, so that, if the one is given, the other can be inferred, that is the task of science and it cannot be solved by underlaying some hypothetical picture, but only by proving mutual dependency relationships of measurable quantities." If one disregards the fact that Ostwald is speaking in the sense of a contemporary naturalist, and therefore sees nothing in the sense world but demonstrable and measurable sizes, then his view corresponds completely to mine, as I have expressed it, for example, in the sentence (p. 299): "The theory must extend to the. Perceptible and seek the connections within it."

[ 2 ] In my remarks on Goethe's Theory of Colors, I waged the same battle against the basic scientific ideas of the present as Prof. Ostwald in his lecture "The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism". What I have put in the place of these basic ideas, however, does not agree with Ostwald's statements. For the latter, as I will show below, proceeds from the same superficial premises as his opponents, the followers of scientific materialism. I have also explained that the basic ideas of the modern view of nature are the cause of the unhealthy assessment that Goethe's color theory has received and continues to receive.

[ 3 ] I would now like to take a closer look at the modern view of nature. From the goal that this view of nature has set itself, I seek to recognize whether it is a healthy one or not.

[ 4 ] It is not without reason that the basic formula by which the modern view of nature judges the world of perceptions has been seen in the words of Descartes: "I find, when I examine corporeal things more closely, that there is very little in them which I see clearly and clearly, namely size, or extension in length, depth, breadth, the shape which comes from the termination of this extension, the position which the variously shaped bodies have among themselves, and the movement or change of this position, to which one can add substance, duration and number. As for other things, such as light, colors, sounds, smells, taste sensations, warmth, cold and other qualities perceptible to the sense of touch (smoothness, roughness), they appear in my mind with such darkness and confusion that I do not know whether they are true or false, i.e. whether the ideas I have formed are true or false. i.e. whether the ideas which I conceive of these objects are in fact the ideas of any real things, or whether they merely represent chimerical beings which cannot exist." To think in terms of this Des- Cartesian proposition has become so habitual to the advocates of the modern view of nature that they hardly consider any other way of thinking worthy of consideration. They say: What is perceived as light is caused by a process of motion that can be expressed by a mathematical formula. When a color appears in the phenomenal world, they trace it back to a vibrating movement and calculate the number of vibrations in a given time. They believe that the entire sensory world will be explained when all perceptions can be traced back to relationships that can be expressed in such mathematical formulas. A mind that could give such an explanation would, according to these naturalists, have reached the utmost that is possible for man in terms of knowledge of natural phenomena. Du Bois-Reymond, a representative of these scholars, says of such a spirit: To him "the hairs of our head would be numbered, and without his knowledge no sparrow would fall to earth". ("Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens", [5th ed., Leipzig 1882] p. 13.) Turning the world into an example of calculation is the ideal of the modern view of nature.

[ 5 ] Since without the existence of forces the parts of the assumed matter would never be set in motion, modern naturalists also include force among the elements from which they explain the world, and Du Bois-Reymond says: "Recognizing nature . . is to attribute the changes in the world of bodies to movements of atoms caused by their central forces independent of time, or to resolve the processes of nature into mechanics of atoms." [op. cit., p. 10] Through the introduction of the concept of force, mathematics merges into mechanics. The philosophers of today ^{103wrote this at the beginning of the nineties of the last century. What can be said about it today* [cf. note p.21].} are so much under the influence of the naturalists that they have lost all courage to think independently. They unreservedly accept the positions of the naturalists. One of the most respected German philosophers, W. Wundt, says in his "Logic" ("Logik. [Eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien der Erkenntnis und die Methoden wissenschaftlicher Forschung]", II. vol. [Methodenlehre], 1. Abt., [2nd ed., Stuttgart 1894], p. 266): "With regard... and in application of the principle that because of the qualitative invariability of matter all natural processes are in the last instance movements, one regards as the aim of physics its complete transformation into ... applied mechanics. "

[ 6 ] Du Bois-Reymond finds: "It is a psychological fact of experience that, where such a resolution (of natural processes into the mechanics of atoms) succeeds, our need for causality feels satisfied for the time being." [This may be a fact of experience for Du Bois-Reymond. But it must be said that there are other people who do not feel satisfied by a banal explanation of the physical world - such as Du Bois-Reymond has in mind.

[ 7 ] Among these other people is Goethe. Whose need for causality is satisfied when he has succeeded in reducing natural processes to the mechanics of atoms, he lacks the organ to understand Goethe.

2.

[ 8 ] Size, shape, position, movement, force, etc. are perceptions in exactly the same sense as light, colors, sounds, smells, taste sensations, warmth, cold, etc. Whoever separates the size of a thing from its other properties and considers it for itself 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 abstract thing that has been subtracted from sensory perception than to a thing of sensory perception itself. The relations of space and number have nothing in common with other sensory perceptions except their greater simplicity and easier comprehensibility. The certainty of the mathematical sciences is based on this simplicity and clarity. If the modern view of nature traces all processes in the physical world back to mathematical and mechanical expressions, this is because the mathematical and mechanical are easy and convenient for our thinking. And human thinking tends towards convenience. This can be seen in Ostwald's above-mentioned lecture. This natural scientist wants to replace matter and force with energy. Listen: "What is the condition for one of our (sensory) tools to work? We may turn the matter around as we like, we find nothing in common but this: The sensory instruments react to differences in energy between them and the environment. In a world whose temperature was everywhere that of our body, we would not be able to experience anything of heat in any way, just as we have no sensation of the constant atmospheric pressure under which we live; only when we create spaces of a different pressure do we gain knowledge of it." (p. 2f. of the lecture.) And further (p. 29): "Imagine you were struck with a stick! What do you feel then, the stick or its energy? The answer can only be one: 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 feel are, as already emphasized, differences in the energy states against our sensory apparatus, and therefore it makes no difference whether the stick moves against us or we move against the stick. But if both have the same speed and the same direction, then the stick no longer exists for our feeling, because it cannot come into contact with us and bring about an exchange of energy." These omissions prove that Ostwald excludes energy from the realm of perception, i.e. abstracts it from everything that is not energy. It reduces everything perceptible to a single property of the perceptible, to the manifestation of energy, i.e. to an abstract concept. Ostwald's bias in the scientific habits of the present is clearly recognizable. If he were asked, he too could cite nothing to justify his procedure other than the fact that for him it is a psychological fact of experience that his need for causality is satisfied when he has resolved the natural processes into expressions of energy. It is essentially indifferent: whether Du Bois-Reymond resolves natural processes into the mechanics of atoms, or Ostwald into expressions of energy. Both arise from the tendency of human thought towards convenience.

[ 9 ] Ostwald says at the end of his lecture (p. 34): "Is energy, necessary and useful as it is for the understanding of nature, also sufficient for this purpose (namely, the explanation of the world of bodies)? Or are there phenomena which cannot be fully represented by the laws of energy known so far? . . . I believe that I can do no better justice to the responsibility which I have assumed towards you today by my exposition than by emphasizing that the answer to this question is no. As immense as the advantages are which the energetic view of the world has over the mechanistic or materialistic view, it seems to me that some points can already be identified which are not covered by the known main theorems of energetics, and which therefore point to the existence of principles which go beyond these. Energetics will continue to exist alongside these new theorems. Only in the future it will not be, as we must still regard it today, the most comprehensive principle for the management of natural phenomena, but will probably appear as a special case of even more general relationships, of whose form we currently have hardly any idea."

3.

[ 10 ] If our natural scientists had also read the writings of people outside their guild, Prof. Ostwald could not have made a remark like this. For as early as 1891, in the aforementioned introduction to Goethe's Theory of Colors, I stated that we can, however, have an idea of such "forms" and more than one, and that the task of natural science in the future lies in the expansion of Goethe's basic scientific ideas.

[ 11 ] As little as the processes of the physical world can be "resolved" into the mechanics of atoms, so little can they be "resolved" into energy relationships. Nothing more is achieved by such a procedure than that attention is diverted from the content of the real sense world and turned to an unreal abstract, whose poor foundation of properties is also only taken from the same sense world. One cannot explain one group of properties of the sense world: light, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, warmth, etc. by "dissolving" them into the other group of properties of the same sense world: size, shape, position, number, energy, etc. The task of natural science cannot be to "dissolve" one type of property into another, but rather to search for relationships and proportions between the perceptible properties of the sensory world. We then discover certain conditions under which one sensory perception necessarily entails the other. We find that there is a more intimate connection between certain phenomena than between others. We then no longer link the phenomena in the way they present themselves to chance observation. For we recognize that certain connections between phenomena are necessary. In contrast, other connections are random. Necessary connections between phenomena are what Goethe calls original phenomena.

[ 12 ] The expression of a primordial phenomenon always consists in saying of a certain sensory perception that it necessarily evokes another. This expression is what is called a law of nature. If one says: "Heating causes a body to expand", one has expressed a necessary connection between phenomena of the sensory world (heat, expansion). We have recognized a primal phenomenon and expressed it in the form of a law of nature. The primordial phenomena are the forms Ostwald sought for the most general conditions of inorganic nature.

[ 13 ] The laws of mathematics and mechanics are just as much expressions of primordial phenomena as the laws that bring other sensory relationships into 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 movements occurring in nature in the simplest and most complete way, but it seeks out certain necessary processes of movement which it singles out from the sum of the movements occurring in nature, and expresses these necessary processes of movement as mechanical fundamental laws. It must be described as the height of thoughtlessness that Kirchhoff's theorem is cited again and again as something particularly significant, without any sense of the fact that the statement of the simplest basic law of mechanics refutes it.

[ 14 ] The primordial phenomenon represents a necessary connection between elements of the world of perception. It is therefore hardly possible to say anything more inaccurate than what H. Helmholtz said in his speech at the Weimar Goethe Assembly on June 11, 1892: "The primordial phenomenon is a necessary connection between elements of the world of perception. June 1892: "It is to be regretted that Goethe at that time was not acquainted with the undulation theory of light already put forward by Huyghens; this would have given him a much more correct and descriptive ˂original phenomenon˃ than the hardly suitable and very complicated process which he chose for this end in the colors of turbid media." ^{104H. L. F. v. Helmholtz, Goethes Vorahnungen kommender wissenschaftlicher Ideen etc.; Berlin 1892, p. 34.}

[ 15 ] So the imperceptible undulations, which are thought to be part of the phenomena of light by the proponents of the modern view of nature, are said to have provided Goethe with a much more correct and descriptive "primordial phenomenon" , than the process, by no means intricate, but taking place before our eyes, which consists in light appearing yellow when seen through a cloudy medium, darkness blue when seen through an illuminated medium. The "dissolution" of sensually perceptible processes into imperceptible mechanical movements has become such a habit for modern physicists that they seem to have no idea that they are substituting an abstract concept for reality. Statements like Helmholtz's will only be allowed to be made when all Goethe's sentences of the following kind have been eliminated from the world: "The highest thing would be to realize that everything factual is already theory. The blueness of the sky reveals to us the basic law of chromatics. Just don't look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the lesson." ["Proverbs in Prose"; Natw. Schr., 4th vol., 2nd abb., 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 really perceptible experience from these hypothetical realities.

4.

[ 16 ] Some recent physicists claim that they do not attach any meaning to the concept of moving matter that goes beyond experience. One of them achieves the strange feat of being a follower of the mechanical theory of nature and Indian mysticism at the same time. Anton Lampa (cf. his "Nights of the Seeker", Brunswick 1893) remarks against Ostwald's statements that he is "fighting a battle like the brave Manchaner against the windmills. Where is the giant of scientific (Ostwald means natural scientific) materialism? There is no such thing. There was once a so-called scientific materialism of Messrs Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott, indeed it still exists, but it does not exist in natural science itself, nor was it ever at home in natural science. Ostwald overlooked this, otherwise he would merely have taken up arms against the mechanical approach, which he does only incidentally due to his misunderstanding, but which he probably would not have done at all without this misunderstanding. Is it possible to believe that a natural science that follows the path taken by Kirchhoff can grasp the concept of matter in the way that materialism does? That is impossible, it is an obvious contradiction. The concept of matter, like that of force, can only have a meaning that is specified by the demand for the simplest possible description, i.e. in Kantian terms, a merely empirical meaning. And if any natural scientist associates a meaning beyond this with the word matter, he does so not as a natural scientist, but as a materialist philosopher." ("Die Zeit", Vienna, No. 61 of Nov. 30, 1895).

[ 17 ] Lampa must, according to these words, be described as a type of the normal natural scientist of the present day. He uses the mechanical explanation of nature because it is easy to handle. However, he avoids thinking about the true character of this explanation of nature because he is afraid of becoming entangled in contradictions that his thinking does not feel up to.

[ 18 ] How can someone who loves clear thinking associate a meaning with the concept of matter without going beyond the world of experience? In the world of experience there are bodies of a certain size and position, there are movements and forces, furthermore the phenomena of light, color, heat, electricity, life, etc. exist. Experience says nothing about the fact that size, warmth, color, etc. adhere to matter. Matter is nowhere to be found within the world of experience. If you want to think matter, you have to think it in addition to experience.

[ 19 ] Such an addition of matter to the phenomena of the world of experience can be observed in the physical and physiological considerations that have become native to the modern theory of nature under the influence of Kant and Johannes Müller . These considerations have led to the belief that the external processes which produce sound in the ear, light in the eye, heat in the organs of the sense of heat, etc., have nothing in common with the perception of sound, light, heat, etc. Rather, these external processes are supposed to be certain movements of matter. The naturalist then investigates what kind of external motion processes give rise to sound, light, color, etc. in the human soul. He comes to the conclusion that outside the human organism there is no red, yellow or blue anywhere in the whole universe, but that there is only a wave-like movement of a fine, elastic matter, the ether, which, when perceived by the eye, presents itself as red, yellow or blue. If there were no perceiving eye, there would be no color, but only moving ether, according to the modern teacher of nature. The ether is the objective, the color merely something subjective, formed in the human body. The Leipzig professor Wundt, whom we sometimes hear praised as one of the greatest philosophers of our time, therefore says of matter that it is a substrate "that never becomes visible to us itself, but only in its effects." And he finds that "an explanation of phenomena without contradiction only succeeds" if one assumes such a substrate (Logik, II. Vol., [1st Dept., 2nd ed.], p. 445). The Descartesian delusion of clear and confused ideas has become the fundamental mode of conception in physics.*

5.

[ 20 ] Whose imagination has not been fundamentally corrupted by Descartes, Locke, Kant and modern physiology will never understand how light, color, sound, heat, etc. can be regarded merely as subjective states of the human organism and yet claim the existence of an objective world of processes outside the organism. Whoever makes the human organism the producer of sound, heat, color, etc. -He who makes the human organism the producer of sound, heat, color, etc., must also make it the producer of extension, size, position, movement, forces, etc.. For these mathematical and mechanical qualities are in reality inseparably connected with the other contents of the world of experience. The separation of the relations of space, number and motion, as well as the manifestations of force from the qualities of heat, sound, color and other sensory qualities is only a function of abstract thinking. The laws of mathematics and mechanics relate to abstract objects and processes that are removed from the world of experience and can therefore only be applied within the world of experience. But if the mathematical and mechanical forms and relationships are also declared to be merely subjective states, then nothing remains that could serve as content for the concept of objective things and events. And no phenomena can be derived from an empty concept.

[ 21 ] As long as the modern naturalists and their tow-bearers, the modern philosophers, maintain that sense perceptions are only subjective states caused by objective processes, sound thinking will always counter them that they are either playing with empty concepts or ascribing a content to the objective which they borrow from the world of experience declared to be subjective. In a series of writings I have demonstrated the absurdity of the assertion of the subjectivity of sensory perceptions. ^{105"Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller" (1886), Complete Edition Dornach 1960; "Wahrheit und Wissenschaft. Prelude to a "Philosophy of Freedom" (1892), Complete Edition Dornach 1958; "Philosophy of Freedom. Fundamentals of a modern worldview" (1894), complete edition Dornach 1972.}

[ 22 ] However, I will refrain from asking whether the processes of motion and the forces that cause them, to which modern physics attributes all natural phenomena, are attributed a different form of reality than sense perceptions, or whether this is not the case. I just want to ask what the mathematical-mechanical view of nature can achieve. Anton Lampa argues ("Nights of the Seeker", p. 92): "Mathematical method and mathematics are not identical, for the mathematical method is feasible without the application of mathematics. A classic example of this fact in physics is provided by the experimental investigations into electricity by Faraday, who was barely able to square a binomial. Mathematics is nothing more than a means of shortening logical operations and therefore still carrying them out in such complicated cases where ordinary logical thinking would let us down. But at the same time it does much more: by implicitly expressing its process of development, every formula builds a living bridge to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point of the investigation. The method, however, which cannot make use of mathematics - which is always the case when the quantities entering into the investigation are not measurable - must therefore, in order to be equal to the mathematical one, not only be strictly logical, but also take special care in the business of tracing back to the fundamental phenomena, since it can easily stumble here without mathematical support; but if it does this, it will probably rightly claim the title of a mathematical one, insofar as the degree of exactness is to be expressed by it."

[ 23 ] I would not deal with Anton Lampa in such detail if there were not one circumstance that makes him a particularly suitable example of a contemporary natural scientist. He satisfies his philosophical needs from Indian mysticism and therefore does not contaminate the mechanical view of nature with all kinds of philosophical side ideas as others do. The doctrine of nature he has in mind is, so to speak, the chemically pure view of nature of the present. I find that Lampa has completely ignored one of the main characteristics 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 kind as the non-elementary phenomena from which the bridge is built. The mathematician traces the properties of complicated numerical and spatial entities, as well as their mutual relationships, back to the properties and relationships of the simplest numerical and spatial entities. The mechanic does the same in his field. He traces compound motion processes and force effects back to simple, easily comprehensible movements and force effects. In doing so, he makes use of mathematical laws, insofar as movements and expressions of force can be expressed by spatial formations and numbers. In a mathematical formula that expresses a mechanical law, the individual elements are no longer purely mathematical entities, but forces and movements. The relationships between these elements are not determined by a purely mathematical law, but by the properties of the forces and movements. As soon as this particular content of mechanical formulas is disregarded, we are no longer dealing with mechanical laws, but only with mathematical laws. Physics relates to mechanics in the same way that mechanics relates to pure mathematics. The task of the physicist is to trace complicated processes in the field of color, sound, heat phenomena, electricity, magnetism, etc. back to simple events within the same sphere. For example, he traced complicated color phenomena back to the simplest color phenomena. In doing so, he must make use of mathematical and mechanical laws, insofar as the color processes take place in forms that can be determined spatially and numerically. Not the attribution of color, sound, etc. -processes to phenomena of motion and force relations within a colorless and toneless matter, but rather the investigation of the connections within the color, sound, etc. -phenomena corresponds to the mathematical method in the field of physics.

[ 24 ] Modern physics skips over sound, color, etc. phenomena as such and only considers unaffected phenomena. Modern physics skips sound, color, etc. phenomena as such and only considers unchanging attractive and repulsive forces and movements in space. Under the influence of this way of thinking, physics today 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 build a "living bridge" from the fact that a certain process of movement of colorless matter prevails at this place in space to the other fact that man sees red at this place. Movement can only be derived from movement. And from the fact that a movement acts on a sense organ and thereby on the brain, it follows - according to the mathematical and mechanical method - only that the brain is induced by the external world to perform certain processes of movement, but not that it perceives the concrete sounds, colors, heat phenomena, etc. Du Bois-Reym has also shown this. Du Bois-Reymond has also recognized this. Read p. 35 f. of his "Grenzen des Naturerkennens" (5th ed.): "What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the facts that are original to me, cannot be further defined, cannot be denied: I feel pain, feel pleasure; I taste sweetness, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red" ... And p. 34: "Movement can only produce movement." Du Bois-Reymond is therefore of the opinion that this marks a limit to the recognition of nature.

[ 26 ] In my opinion, the reason why the fact: "I see red" cannot be derived from a specific movement process is easy to state. The quality "red" and a certain movement process are in reality an inseparable unit. The separation of the two events 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. To want to derive the fact that "I see red" from a process of movement is just as absurd as deriving the real properties of a rock salt body crystallized in the form of a cube from the mathematical cube. It is not because a limit to cognition prevents us from deriving other sensory qualities from movements, but because such a demand makes no sense.

6.

[ 27 ] The striving to skip over colors, sounds, heat phenomena, etc. as such and to consider only the mechanical processes corresponding to them can only arise from the belief that the simple laws of mathematics and mechanics correspond to a higher degree of comprehensibility than the properties and reciprocal relationships of the other entities of the perceptual world. But this is by no means the case. The simplest properties and relationships of spatial and numerical entities are called comprehensible without further ado because they can be easily and completely grasped. All mathematical and mechanical understanding is reduced to simple facts that are immediately obvious. The proposition that two quantities which are equal to a third must also be equal to each other is recognized by directly perceiving the fact which it expresses. In the same sense, the simple occurrences of the world of sound and color and the other sensory perceptions are also recognized through direct perception.

[ 28 ] Only because they are seduced by the prejudice that a simple mathematical or mechanical fact is more comprehensible than an elementary occurrence of sound or color phenomena as such, modern physicists exclude the specifics 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 movement without something that moves, they assume that matter, stripped of all sensory properties, is the carrier of movement. Whoever is not caught up in this prejudice of the physicists must realize that the processes of movement are states that are bound to sensory qualities. The content of the wave-like movements, which correspond to the sound occurrences, are the sound qualities themselves. The same applies to the other sensory qualities. We recognize the content of the oscillating movements of the phenomenal world through direct introspection, not through the addition of abstract matter to the phenomena.

7.

[ 29 ] I know that with these views I am expressing something that sounds quite impossible to the physicist's ears of the present day. But I cannot take the standpoint of Wundt, who in his "Logic" (11th vol., 1st ed. [2nd ed. 1894]) presents the habits of thought of modern natural scientists as binding logical norms. The thoughtlessness of which he is guilty becomes particularly clear at the point where he discusses Ostwald's attempt to replace matter in motion with energy in oscillating motion. Wundt argues the following: "It follows ... from the existence of interference phenomena the necessity of the presupposition of some oscillating motion. But since motion is inconceivable without a substrate that moves, the derivation of light phenomena from a mechanical process is also an unavoidable requirement. However, Ostwald tried to avoid the latter assumption by not tracing the ˂radiating energy˃ back to the vibrations of a material medium, but by defining it as an energy in oscillating motion. It is precisely this double concept, composed of a descriptive and a purely conceptual component, that seems to me to prove conclusively that the concept of energy itself requires a decomposition that leads back to elements of perception. A real movement can only be defined as the change of position of a real substrate given in space. This real substrate can only reveal itself to us through force effects that emanate from it, or through force functions that we regard it as the carrier of. But that such merely conceptually fixable force-functions themselves move, this seems to me to be a requirement that cannot be fulfilled without thinking of some 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 world of perception, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., can be brought under the general concept of power, i.e. energy. When light, heat, etc. cause a change in a body, a power is thereby accomplished. When we refer to light, heat, etc. as energy, we have left aside what is specific to the individual sensory qualities and consider a general property common to them.

[ 31 ] This property does not exhaust everything that is present in the things of reality; but it is a real property of these things. The concept of properties, on the other hand, which the matter hypothesized by physicists and their philosophical defenders is supposed to have, includes a nonsense. These properties are borrowed from the sensory world and yet are supposed to be attributed 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 because it contains a conceptual and a conceptual component. The philosopher Wundt therefore does not realize that every concept that refers to a thing of sensory reality must necessarily contain a descriptive and a conceptual component. The term "rock salt cube" has the visual component of the sensually perceptible rock salt and the other purely conceptual component that stereometry establishes.

8.

[ 33 ] The development of natural science in recent centuries has led to the destruction of all ideas by which this science can be part of a conception of the world that satisfies higher human needs. It has led "modern" scientific minds to call it absurd to say that concepts and ideas belong to reality just as much as the forces acting in space and the matter filling space. To these minds, concepts and ideas are a product of the human brain and nothing more. Even the scholastics knew how this matter stood. But scholasticism is despised by modern science. It is despised, but it is not known. Above all, we do not know what is healthy and what is sick about scholasticism. What is healthy about it is that it had a feeling for the fact that concepts and ideas are not just figments of the human mind's imagination in order to understand real things, but that they have something, indeed more, to do with the things themselves than substance and force. This healthy feeling of the scholastics is an heirloom of the great worldview perspectives of Plato and Aristotle. What is ill about scholasticism is the mixture of this perception with the ideas that entered into the medieval development of Christianity. This development finds the source of everything spiritual, including concepts and ideas, in the unknowable, because otherworldly, God. It requires faith in something that is not of this world. Healthy human thinking, however, sticks to this world. It cares for no other. But at the same time it spiritualizes this world. It sees realities of this world in concepts and ideas as well as in things and events that can be perceived by the senses. Greek philosophy is an outgrowth of this healthy thinking. Scholasticism still absorbed an inkling of this healthy thinking. But it strove to reinterpret this intuition in the sense of the belief in the hereafter, which was regarded as Christian. It was not the concepts and ideas that were to be the most profound thing that man saw in the processes of this world, but God, the hereafter. Whoever has grasped the idea of a thing is not compelled to search for a further "origin" of the thing. He has achieved what satisfies the human need for knowledge. But what did the scholastics care about the human need for knowledge? They wanted to save what they saw as the Christian concept of God. They wanted to find the origin of the world in the otherworldly God, although their search for the interior of things only provided them with concepts and ideas.

9.

[ 34 ] In the course of the centuries, Christian ideas became more effective than the dark sensations inherited from Greek antiquity. People lost their sense of the reality of concepts and ideas. But they also lost faith in the spirit itself. The worship of the purely material began: the era of Newton in natural science began. Now there was no longer any talk of the unity underlying the diversity of the world. Now all unity was denied. Unity was degraded to a "human" concept. Only multiplicity, diversity, was seen in nature. It was this general basic idea that tempted Newton to see not an original unity in the light, but a composite. Goethe set out part of the development of scientific ideas in his "Materials for the History of the Theory of Colors". It can be seen from his account that the more recent natural science has arrived at unhealthy views in the theory of color due to the general ideas it uses to understand nature. This science has lost the understanding of what light is within the series of natural qualities. That is why it does not know how light appears colored under certain conditions, how color arises in the realm of light.