The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Foreword to the first edition 1886

[ 1 ] When Prof. Kürschner gave me the honorable commission to publish Goethe's scientific writings for the Deutsche National-Literatur, I was well aware of the difficulties I would face in such an undertaking. I had to counter an opinion that had become almost universally accepted.

[ 2 ] While the conviction that Goethe's poems are the foundation of our entire education is becoming more and more widespread, even those who go furthest in recognizing his scientific endeavours see in them no more than premonitions of truths that have found their full confirmation in the later course of science. His ingenious eye is said to have succeeded here in divining natural laws, which were then found again by strict science independently of him. What one concedes to the fullest extent to Goethe's other activities, that every educated person has to deal with them, is rejected in his scientific view. It will certainly not be conceded that one can gain anything by studying the poet's scientific works that science would not offer today even without him.

[ 3 ] When I was introduced by K.J. Schröer, my much-loved teacher, introduced me to Goethe's view of the world, my thinking had already taken a direction that made it possible for me to turn beyond the poet's mere individual discoveries to the main thing: to the way in which Goethe inserted such an individual fact into the whole of his conception of nature, how he utilized it in order to arrive at an insight into the connection of natural beings or how he himself (in the essay "Anschauende Urteilskraft") ^{1Goethe, "Anschauende Urteilskraft": compare Goethe's Natural Science Writings, Volume I, page 115, in Kürschners Deutscher, National-Literatur.} to participate spiritually in the productions of nature. I soon realized that those achievements conceded to Goethe by today's science are the insignificant, while the significant is just overlooked. Those individual discoveries really would have been made without Goethe's research; but science will be deprived of his great conception of nature as long as it does not draw it directly from him. Thus the direction that the introductions to my edition have to take was given. They must show that every single view expressed by Goethe can be derived from the totality of his genius.^{2The way in which my views fit into the overall picture of Goethe's world view is discussed by Schröer in his preface to Goethe's Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (Kürschners National-Literatur, Vol. I, pp. I-XIV). (See also his Faust edition, Part II, 6th edition, Stuttgart 1926, page V.)}

[ 4 ] The principles according to which this is to be done are the subject of the present pamphlet. It is intended to show that what we present as Goethe's scientific views is also capable of independent justification.

[ 5 ] Thus, I have said everything that seemed to me necessary to preface the following essays. It only remains for me to fulfill a pleasant duty, namely to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Kürschner, who, in the extraordinarily benevolent manner in which he has always accommodated my scientific efforts, has also kindly lent his support to this little book.