The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I attempted to show how an older human worldview—from which the modern scientific worldview subsequently emerged—still combined the qualitative and, I would say, also the figurative aspects of mathematics, including mathematics insofar as it is geometry, just as it still combined the quantitative with the qualitative. So that one can look back to a worldview in which experience was not merely, let’s say, a triangle or some other geometric figure, regardless of whether this geometric figure refers to the boundary of a solid or, for example, to the shape of a body’s trajectory, but one that still saw such a geometric figure—and also an arithmetic figure—as intimately connected to something experienced with intense quality: for example, a triangle emerging from a specific experience, a quadrilateral emerging from a specific experience.

[ 2 ] This view could only transform into another once people lost the awareness that everything quantitative—and thus also everything mathematical—was originally experienced by human beings directly in connection with the world, once they had come to separate this quantitative aspect from human experience. And we can indeed observe this separation quite clearly where every conception of space—as something in which human beings themselves stand—is replaced by the schematic conception of space common today, in which one takes as the starting point an arbitrary location through which one simply draws the three coordinate axes. Mathematics, in the form we have today and through which we seek to master so-called natural phenomena, only came into being in this form after it had been separated from the human experience. If I were to express myself more vividly, I would have to say: In earlier times, people experienced mathematics as something they lived through within themselves, together with their gods or their God, through which God ordered the world; and in light of this, it is no wonder that we now find the world in this very order. In contrast, relating a completely arbitrary spatial schema or some other mathematical concept to natural phenomena—even though one can identify it with essential aspects of these so-called natural phenomena— this relating of the abstract-mathematical to natural phenomena is something that cannot be connected in any fixed way to human experiences and therefore, in essence, cannot be fully understood, but can at most be stated as a fact. Therefore, it cannot in reality be the object of cognition. In fact, all one can ever say about this application of mathematics to natural phenomena is that one finds that what one has first conceived mathematically then fits the natural phenomena. But why this is so can no longer be discovered within this world of perception.

[ 3 ] Let us think back to that world of perception I have been speaking to you about these past few days, where everything physical was regarded as a reflection of the spiritual. There, one looked at the body and found in it a reflection of the spiritual. One then looked back at oneself, at what one finds—in union with one’s divine nature—as mathematical through one’s own physical constitution. And just as one finds the imprint of an artist’s ideas in a work of art, without encountering anything inscrutable in the process, so one finds in the bodies the mathematical images of what one has experienced together with one’s divine aspect, because these bodies out there in nature are themselves the images of the divine-spiritual. Thus, at the very moment when mathematics is separated from the human being and then nevertheless related to a physicality that is no longer an image of the spirit, something agnostic necessarily enters the entire conception.

[ 4 ] Let us consider the matter in concrete terms, by looking at the first phenomenon that confronts us following the emergence of the scientific way of thinking; let us consider the matter in light of the Copernican system. My aim today—and indeed throughout these lectures—is not to defend the old Ptolemaic system or to defend the Copernican system. I am speaking here, for the time being, merely from a historical perspective, taking a neutral stance toward both; my sole concern is with the fact that the Copernican system replaced the Ptolemaic one. Therefore, no one should conclude from what I have to say today that I wish to advocate for the old Ptolemaic system against the Copernican one. But with regard to its historical development, the following must be said. Let us transport ourselves back to the time when human beings experienced their own orientation in space—up and down, right and left, front and back. They could experience these only in relation to the Earth. For example, they could experience up and down in themselves only in relation to the direction of gravity. And they experienced right and left, front and back, in connection with the cardinal directions—toward which the Earth itself is oriented. But they also experienced this orientation in conjunction with the Earth by feeling firmly rooted on it. That is to say, human beings were not merely, in their thoughts, something that begins at their heads and ends at the soles of their feet; rather, they experienced themselves as something through which gravity passes—a force that has something to do with their very being but does not end at the soles of their shoes—so that, by feeling themselves to be within this gravitational entity, they felt themselves to be one with the Earth. Consequently, for his concrete experience, the Earth provided the starting point for his entire cosmic contemplation. This, however, justified the Ptolemaic model of the universe for him. It was only at the moment when humanity detached the mathematical construction from itself that the possibility arose to detach it from the Earth as well and to establish an astronomical system centered on the Sun. Humanity first had to lose the older experience of being within itself in order to accept a system’s center as lying outside the earthly realm. The emergence of the Copernican system is thus most intimately connected with the entire transformation in the spiritual disposition of civilized humanity. The emergence of modern scientific thinking cannot be separated from the rest of humanity’s mental and spiritual constitution, but must be viewed in connection with it.

[ 5 ] It is, of course, only natural that when such things are expressed, they initially seem absurd to contemporaries who believe in the current view of nature with a far greater intensity than ancient religious adherents ever believed in their dogmas. But in order to truly appreciate the scientific way of thinking—which, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, makes it more valuable for understanding the world than agnostics maintain—one must consider it within the context of the totality of the human psyche and its development.

[ 6 ] So there once was this Copernican worldview, this shifting of the cosmic center from the Earth to the Sun. And with that, in essence, the entire cosmic philosophy of Giordano Bruno—who was born in 1548 and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600—was already in place. Giordano Bruno appears, one might say, as the very embodiment of the modern view of nature—the one who glorifies Copernicanism. One must be thoroughly imbued with an understanding of the necessity for the emergence of this worldview in order to appreciate at all the entire manner—and especially the diction and tone—in which Giordano Bruno speaks and writes. One cannot help but notice that in his writings, Giordano Bruno speaks quite differently from both the adherents of the new scientific approach and the holdouts of the old, previously accepted way of presenting natural science. One might say that Giordano Bruno does not actually speak mathematically at all; rather, he speaks lyrically about the universe. One might find something musical in the way Giordano Bruno so often captivates with his articulation of the modern view of nature. Why is that? It is because Giordano Bruno is, in fact, rooted with his entire inner being in an older worldview, and with his outer intellect he tells himself: Given the way things have turned out in the course of human development, we have no choice but to accept the Copernican worldview. He simply understood the necessity that had arisen for humanity through the course of history. But, I would say, this Copernican worldview did not actually come to him as something he had worked out for himself, but rather as something that was given to him—something he found to be appropriate for his contemporaries. But he had no other choice, because, deep down, he belonged to an older worldview than the one he was to recognize—the one he was to accept as knowledge—and he experienced it inwardly. He still had that inner experience. He did not yet possess the scientific forms of that inner experience. And so he actually followed the lines of thought of the Copernican system—which he portrays so wonderfully—not in the way that Copernicus, or Galileo, or Kepler, or others, or even Newton, had followed them, but rather he pursued them in such a way that he attempted, entirely in the old manner—where one experienced the entire cosmos within oneself—to experience that as well. But in order to experience the cosmos in the old way, mathematics had to be mysticism at the same time—as I explained yesterday—and had to be an inner experience as well. For Giordano Bruno, it could not be so. That time had passed. And so this experiencing did not actually become a knowing experience; it became a poetic experience—or at least a semi-poetic experience. This is what gives Giordano’s writings their distinctive style. His atomism is still a monadology; for him, the atom is still something alive. The sum of cosmic laws still has something soulful about it, but not because, in the sense of an ancient mystic, he had truly experienced the soulful down to the smallest detail in a human way, or had experienced the mathematical regularity of the cosmos as the intention of the spirit; rather, because he mustered himself poetically to take that which, having once become external, could only exist externally—to admire it and, in admiration, to glorify it in a manner akin to science. There is truly something in the personality of Giordano Bruno that serves as a cornerstone of the two worldviews—the present one and the one of which people today can scarcely conceive, a worldview that extends back into the 15th century and in which, in a certain sense, everything that is cosmic is still experienced by human beings, that is cosmic—so that human beings did not yet distinguish between the subject within them and the cosmic object outside, so that the two actually still merged, and so that human beings did not yet speak of the three spatial dimensions, separate from their own orientation within their own bodies—up-down, right-left, front-back.

[ 7 ] For Copernicus, it was initially the astronomical aspect that he sought to grasp, now in conjunction with mathematics, which he conceived of as a separate entity. For Newton, mathematics—and here I do not mean individual mathematical derivations, but mathematical thinking in general, yet in isolation from human experience—now stands entirely on its own. Newton is actually—certainly, one must always describe things in terms of their main, radical points; there may be objections to what I describe, so to speak, in terms of these key points, but that is beside the point—Newton is more or less the first to approach natural phenomena with a distinct mathematical way of thinking. And thus Newton, as a sort of successor to Copernicus, becomes the true founder of the modern scientific way of thinking.

[ 8 ] Now it is interesting to see how, during this Newtonian era and the period that followed, civilized humanity was preoccupied with coming to terms with the immense shift that took place in the state of the soul—from the older mathematical-mystical worldview to the newer mathematical-scientific worldview. People actually find it difficult to cope with this massive shift. This becomes particularly clear when one looks closely at the details—at the challenges that one individual or another is grappling with. Take Newton, for example, as he presents his system of nature by seeking to relate it to mathematics as something separate from human beings; we find that he presupposes, for instance, time, place, space, and motion. He says in his *Principles of Natural Philosophy*: “I need not explain place, time, space, and motion, for every human being actually knows them.” Everyone knows what time is, what space is, what place is, what motion is, and so within my mathematical explanation of the world I use the concepts of space, time, place, and motion exactly as I take them from the trivial, popular way of thinking. It is not always the case that people fully grasp with their consciousness what they are saying. In fact, it is extremely rare in life for a person to truly penetrate with their consciousness everything they are expressing. This is not the case even with the greatest minds. And Newton, fundamentally, does not know why he takes place, time, space, and motion as his starting points—and does not explain them in any way, does not define them in any way—while in all his subsequent derivations he is thoroughly concerned with explaining everything and defining everything. Why is that? Well, it is for the reason that, when it comes to place, time, motion, and space, all cleverness and all thinking are of no help. For no matter how much one thinks about place, time, space, and motion, one never becomes any wiser than one was from the very beginning, when one first absorbed these very concepts and ideas in ordinary experience. These concepts are such that one experiences them through one’s immediate—I might say trivial—human nature and must retain them exactly as they are. One of Newton’s successors—who, admittedly, was more active in the philosophical realm but who is particularly characteristic of the struggles during the emergence of the scientific way of thinking—one of Newton’s successors, Berkeley, noticed this very clearly. He is otherwise not satisfied with Newton—we will hear more about that later—but what particularly struck him was that Newton took these concepts as a foundation without explaining them, saying: “I start from place, time, space, and motion; I do not define them, but rather base my mathematical and scientific considerations on them.” Berkeley said: “That is how it must be done.” One must take these concepts as the simplest person understands them, for there they are always clear. For the concepts of place, time, motion, and space do not become unclear out there in experience, but rather they become unclear in the minds of metaphysicians and philosophers. If one finds these four concepts in life, they are clear—so Berkeley argues—but if one finds them in the minds of metaphysicians and philosophers, they are always unclear.

[ 9 ] And it is indeed true that simply thinking about these concepts—which simply need to be experienced—doesn’t help. You can sense that, after all. That is why Newton only begins to juggle with them mathematically when he needs these concepts to explain the world. That is when he juggles with them. I don’t mean to say anything derogatory by this; I merely want to characterize, so to speak, Newton’s living skill. One of these concepts that Newton uses in this way is space. At first, he really does manipulate space in the same way that—well, to use a philistine expression—the common man simply imagines space. And within that there is still something of the lived experience. For to imagine the space of Cartesian mathematics—unless one is deceiving oneself—leads one’s thinking into a kind of whirl, a kind of vertigo, because this space, which has its center and its origin of coordinates arbitrarily placed anywhere, has something so indeterminate about it. One can, for example, speculate in the most ingenious way—without anything coming of it—about whether this space is finite or infinite, whereas the ordinary sense of space, which is still connected to what it means to be human, actually doesn’t care at all about finitude or infinity. It doesn’t care about that. Indeed, it is of the utmost irrelevance to a vibrant worldview whether space can be conceived as finite or infinite. So one can say: Newton takes trivial space as he finds it. But now he begins to mathematize. Yet, precisely because of the particular nature of thought in his era, he already has abstract mathematics—including abstract geometry—and by permeating spatial natural phenomena and processes with mathematics, he permeates them with an abstract mathematics. In doing so, he completely tears the natural phenomena themselves away from humanity. And indeed, in Newtonian physics we encounter for the first time conceptions of nature that are actually completely torn away from humanity. We need only go back to earlier times to find that nowhere are conceptions of nature so torn away from humanity as they are in Newtonian physics.

[ 10 ] If we were to turn back to a thinker—one can hardly call these people thinkers, because they have an inner life that is far more vibrant than mere intellectual activity, but let us say, nonetheless, to use the modern term, that we turn back to a thinker of the 4th or 5th century AD—we would find that he is entirely in line with the following view: I live; I experience space together with my God. I orient myself in space—up and down, right and left, front and back—but I live in that space together with my God. He marks out the directions, and I experience those directions. This was the case with such a thinker of the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. and even somewhat later—things did not actually change until the 14th century—so that when a person thought about space geometrically, he did not merely draw a triangle, but was conscious of this: “You draw this as a human being, but within you lives God, who draws along with you.” — Thus, he sketches both the qualitative aspects he has experienced and those placed within him by God, so that wherever mathematics was seen, the intentions of God were seen.

[ 11 ] Mathematics has now been separated. People have forgotten that mathematics was actually received as a divine inspiration. And Newton applies mathematics in this entirely separate way to the study of space. When he writes his *Principia Mathematica*, he simply sets out and applies this separate mathematics—that is, a constructed space—which he does not define, because he has a vague sense that if one begins to define space, nothing will come of it. — So he takes the trivial concept of space, but he treats it with abstract mathematics, tearing it away from inner experiences. This is how he speaks about the principles of nature. Later, this deepens somewhat with Newton. That is interesting. There—as one can quite clearly observe if one is well-versed in Newton’s writings—he becomes, I would say, somewhat uneasy when he contemplates his own conception of space. Later on, he cannot quite come to terms with this space torn away from humanity, this space entirely alienated from the spirit. And so he defines it: “Space is God’s sensorium.” It is a tremendously interesting fact that this man—who, at the very outset of modern natural science, was the first to fully mathematize space, to separate it entirely from humanity—should nevertheless define this space as God’s sensorium, that is, a kind of organ of perception for God’s mind. Newton had torn nature apart into space and the human being who experiences that space. He had torn it apart, but he felt a sense of unease within himself when he now contemplated this space—which had been torn away from humanity—that humanity had previously experienced together with its God, so that it could say to itself: “What my human sensory faculty experiences in space, I experience together with my God”; Newton felt a sense of unease because he had now torn space away from the human sensory faculty. In doing so, he had torn himself away from being permeated by the divine-spiritual. Space was now outside, with mathematics. And later, he refers to it as God’s sensory realm. True, he had first torn the whole thing away. As a result, it had become unspiritual and ungodly. But there is still so much feeling within Newton that he cannot allow space—which is now outside—to remain ungodly, and so he deifies it once again.

[ 12 ] Thus, humanity has scientifically severed itself from its God—and thereby from the Spirit—yet has outwardly reverted to embracing that Spirit once more. What transpired as a result also explains why a figure like Goethe could not, in fact, agree with Newton on any point at all. In the Theory of Colors, this becomes evident in just one particularly characteristic aspect. But this entire approach—first expelling the spiritual from within the human being, first separating it from the human being—contradicted Goethe’s very essence. From the very beginning, Goethe had a sense that human beings must experience everything, including what is cosmic within them; that the cosmic, even in relation to the three dimensions, is, so to speak, merely a continuation of what is experienced within the human being. And so, in his innermost being, Goethe was Newton’s adversary.

[ 13 ] Berkeley, who, though he lived later than Newton, certainly still belonged to the era of the struggles surrounding the emergence of the scientific way of thinking, Berkeley, as I said, was satisfied with Newton’s incorporation of place, space, time, and motion from common sense, but otherwise he was dissatisfied with the entire emerging natural science, above all with the interpretation of natural phenomena. For he was clear about this: a nature that is entirely separate from human beings cannot actually be experienced at all. One is merely deceiving oneself if one thinks it is experienced. — Therefore, Berkeley argued that there are, in fact, no bodies underlying sensory perceptions, but rather that reality is thoroughly spiritual, and that the world as it appears to us—even where it appears to us as physical—is precisely the manifestation of a universal spirit. In Berkeley’s work, these ideas appeared very strongly in the form of assertions, for he actually retained nothing of the old mysticism, and even less of the old pneumatology. He actually has no grounds for asserting this all-spiritual nature. He asserts it more out of the dogma of his religion, but he does assert it—and he asserts it so strongly that, for him, everything physical becomes merely a manifestation of the spiritual. So for him there is no possibility, for example, of saying: “Here I perceive a color somewhere, and behind this color there is vibrating motion that I do not perceive”—as the modern view of nature quite legitimately does—but Berkeley told himself: “I must not accept as a hypothesis anything that has even the slightest physical property, such as vibrating matter.” That which underlies the physical world of phenomena, I must experience spiritually, so that behind a perception of color—as the cause of this perception—there is a spiritual reality that I also experience within myself when I recognize myself as spirit. — Berkeley is certainly a spiritualist in the sense in which the term is used in German philosophy. Thus, Berkeley actually—I would say, albeit for dogmatic reasons, but with a certain justification—raises countless objections to the assumption of a nature that can be mathematized using a mathematics that has been torn away from immediate experience. For by regarding the entire cosmos as essentially spiritual, he also regarded mathematics as something that is shaped and formed together with the spirit of the cosmos, so that one actually experiences the intentions of the cosmic spirit—insofar as they are mathematically structured—but does not apply a mathematical concept to a physical entity in an external manner.

[ 14 ] From this perspective, Berkeley also becomes an opponent of what had become “mathematics” for Newton—and, at the same time, for Leibniz: differential and integral calculus. Please do not misunderstand me on this point either. Today’s lecture, as part of this lecture series, must be structured in such a way that—from the perspective of contemporary views—it will present points of contention in many respects. But as the subsequent lectures unfold, these points of contention will disappear for anyone willing to remain open-minded. Today, however, I would like to present the topics we will be addressing in a rather radical manner.

[ 15 ] Berkeley becomes an opponent of the entire field of infinitesimal calculus, as it was understood at that time. Certainly, he is an opponent of anything that cannot be experienced directly, and in this regard, Berkeley sometimes has a more subtle sense of things than he does, say, subtle thoughts. His feelings and sensations are more subtle than his thoughts are. He senses how the emergence of infinitesimal calculus introduces into the realm of mentally graspable quantities certain elements—namely, differentials—that only attain a certain definiteness in differential quotients; differentials that must actually be conceived in such a way that they, so to speak, always elude thought, so that thought does not engage in their complete comprehension. For Berkeley, this is something through which he simultaneously loses sight of reality; for since he relies on the experiential in all cognition, he cannot allow mathematical concepts to slip into the indeterminacy of differentials.

[ 16 ] What are we actually doing when we, say, seek differential equations for natural phenomena? In doing so, we are pointing everywhere toward that which actually eludes us in our lived experience. Now, of course, I know that a large number of my esteemed listeners may not be able to fully follow me as I describe this, but on the other hand, I cannot fully describe the entire nature of infinitesimal calculus here. I would nevertheless like to draw your attention to a few points, because this very topic leads directly into a consideration of the birth of modern natural science.

[ 17 ] This modern natural science, by paving the way for the desire to master natural phenomena through mathematics—but with a mathematics separated from human beings, no longer one experienced from within—precisely because it transitions to its separate mathematical conception, with its concepts torn from human beings, ends up being able to contemplate only the lifeless; by removing mathematics from experience, one can apply it only to the inanimate. It is impossible to apply mathematics to anything other than the inanimate once it has been torn away from the realm of experience. And so, precisely through the mathematical approach, modern natural science is confined exclusively to the inanimate. But in the universe, the lifeless manifests itself in decay, in atomization, in the dissolution into microscopically small parts—roughly speaking: in the disintegration into dust. The modern scientific worldview also follows this path. It grasps, through a mathematics torn away from lived experience, that which is disintegrating into dust and atomizing within the cosmos. From this point on, the possibility also arises of atomizing mathematics itself into differentials, so that with every kind of differential equation, with every differential analysis—even if one seeks to apply it to the liveliest of structures—one kills it in the imagination. To differentiate is to kill, and to integrate is to patch the dead back together into a schema, to reassemble the differentials into a whole. This does not bring them back to life once they have been killed; it merely produces dead ghosts, nothing alive anymore.

[ 18 ] This, for example, was how Berkeley viewed the entire prospect of what was to come through calculus. Had he expressed himself more concretely and vividly, he would probably have said: First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you reassemble its differentials into integrals, but you no longer have a world—only the afterimage of a world, the illusion of a world. — Every integral is actually an illusion in terms of its content—as Berkeley had already sensed—so that differentiation actually means killing, and integration means gathering the bones and dust to reassemble the old forms from the slain beings; yet this does not bring them back to life, but leaves them as mere dead schemata. One might say that such a perception on Berkeley’s part was ahead of its time. It certainly was, for the way of thinking that proceeds in this manner was bound to come, and anyone who might say that calculus should never have come about would, of course, not be a scientific thinker, but a fool. But on the other hand, one must also be clear that, at the starting point of this entire intellectual current, something like Berkeley’s sentiment is nevertheless understandable. He shuddered at what he sensed was emerging from the rise of the infinitesimal view of nature—a view that was no longer a contemplation of what had previously been regarded as nature, that which was connected with coming into being, but rather a contemplation of that which always dies in nature.

[ 19 ] People hadn’t even considered that in the past; it hadn’t interested them at all. In the past, they observed what was coming into being, what was sprouting; now they observe what is withering and, ultimately, disintegrating. Now our perception is moving toward atomism. Previously, it had sought the continuous in beings. Since, of course, the living in the world as it is initially given to us cannot exist without death—for the living must die—we must also find the dead in the world and must also comprehend the dead. That is to say, a science of the dead had to emerge. It was already necessary. And the era we are speaking of here is precisely the era in which humanity was ripe for the contemplation of this dead matter. But one must imagine how it must have gone against every intuition for someone like Berkeley, who still lived entirely in the old way.

[ 20 ] Today, we are still very much in the midst of the aftermath of what was born back then. We have witnessed the very triumphs of that kind of scientific work that made someone like Berkeley shudder. We have witnessed these triumphs; until Newtonian concepts were somewhat modified in modern relativity theory, we experienced the absolute dominance of these Newtonian concepts. For Goethe’s reaction against these ideas never really emerged, and in order to properly understand what has come to pass, one must look back to the starting points and observe how those minds who still had a living sense of the past were indeed filled with dread, or how they still upheld other sensibilities similar to the older ones.

[ 21 ] Giordano Bruno shudders at the thought of viewing the dead—which is now to be examined—as truly dead, using a purely mathematical approach. He animates the atoms into monads; he poeticizes the mathematical approach in order to keep it within the realm of the personal. Newton proceeds entirely mathematically at the outset. Then, I might say, he becomes stifled, and having first torn space entirely from within the human being through external mathematics, he turns it into God’s sensorium. Berkeley rejects the entire approach that arises from this, and as a radical thinker, he thereby rejects the entire trend of infinitesimal calculus as well.

[ 22 ] But today we find ourselves right in the midst of what Giordano Bruno initially sought to describe in poetic terms, in the very thing that made Newton himself feel somewhat uneasy, and in the very thing that Berkeley rejected entirely. For example, if we think scientifically in the modern sense, do we take seriously what Newton said—that space is God’s sensorium? After all, people today always allow themselves to regard the thinkers whose ideas they wish to embrace as great minds, but when something about them doesn’t sit right with them, well, then they feel immensely superior to them and think: “Well, on this point, he simply wasn’t as wise as I am.” This is exactly how those who consider Lessing an extraordinarily brilliant figure behave, yet later view with a certain indulgence the fact that, toward the end of his life, he came to believe in the repeated earthly lives of human beings.

[ 23 ] But precisely because we have no choice in the present but to grapple with the ideas that have emerged, we must return to their point of origin. For the issue is truly this: now that mathematics has been torn from humanity and nature has been grasped through this mathematics that has been torn away, the whole of nature has gradually been separated from humanity; the issue is that we must once again come to terms with finding ourselves in this nature, finding ourselves in some way. For we will not arrive at a consistent understanding of the spiritual until we have once again found the spirit within nature. And just as it is self-evident that the living human being—as a physical being on earth—will one day become a corpse, so too was it self-evident that, at some point in human development, a contemplation of the dead would have to emerge from the earlier, living contemplation. And certain things—which can only be recognized in a corpse—cannot be recognized by someone who refuses to examine the corpse, but only by someone who does examine it. And so certain mysteries of the world can only be discovered if one is able to take the scientific way of thinking of modern times seriously.

[ 24 ] Allow me, in closing, to make a somewhat personal remark. Precisely because this modern scientific approach must be taken seriously, I have never been an opponent of this way of thinking, but rather regard it as something that is an essential part of our time. But I have often had to speak out against precisely what this or that scientist—or so-called scientist—has made of what can result when one correctly examines what has been discovered by approaching the dead without prejudice. Yet what was discovered in this way has then been misinterpreted. I have taken a stand against such misinterpretations of the natural sciences. And I would like to emphasize strongly on this very occasion that I by no means wish to be regarded as an opponent of the natural scientific approach in any way, and that I would consider it detrimental to the entire anthroposophical endeavor if an incorrect opposition were to arise between what anthroposophy seeks on the spiritual path, and what natural science, out of the spirit of modern times—if I may use the word “spirit” here—must necessarily seek within its own field.

[ 25 ] I mention this explicitly, my esteemed audience and dear friends, because within our anthroposophical movement, a healthy debate must absolutely take place regarding the relationship between anthroposophy and the natural sciences. Anything that goes wrong in this regard can only cause anthroposophy considerable harm. This should really be avoided. I must mention this here because, as I have observed while preparing for these lectures, the debate on atomism in the anthroposophical journal *Die Drei* has recently been driven into a complete dead end, from which it must once again find a way out. For we will make no progress if we continue in this manner, driving everything into a dead end. Therefore, my esteemed audience and dear friends, I do not wish to hold back at all, but rather to state quite decisively that I must regard the back-and-forth polemic in *Die Drei* over atomism as something that threatens to drive the entire relationship between anthroposophy and natural science onto a dead-end track. My task is to keep anthroposophy alive, and I would have to stand up for this life—and against leading anthroposophy down a dead-end path—at any time, even if I were to stand alone. That is why I must not hold back when such insights present themselves to me, and that is why I will also attempt, particularly in these lectures, to breathe life into that which is once again in danger of being led down a dead-end path: namely, the reflections on the relationship between anthroposophy and the scientific way of thinking. — More on that tomorrow.