Man or Matter Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought

In 1790, a year before Galvani's monograph, Concerning the Forces of Electricity, appeared, Goethe published his Metamorphosis of Plants, which represents the first step towards...

In this chapter we shall concern ourselves with a number of personalities from the more or less recent past of the cultural life of Britain, each of whom was a spiritual kinsman...

In the preceding chapter we gained a new insight into the relationship between mass and force. We have come to see that our concept of force is grounded on empirical observation...

When William Crookes chose as one of the titles of his paper on the newly discovered properties of electricity, 'The Fourth State of Matter', it was to express his belief that h...

When man in the state of world-onlooker undertook to form a dynamic picture of the nature of matter, it was inevitable that of all the qualities which belong to its existence he...

A fundamental achievement along our path of study was the recognition that a force of levity exists, polar to that of gravity, and that these two together represent a primary po...

has deliberately limited itself, draws attention to the fact that a full knowledge of the science of optics in its present form might be acquired merely through theoretical stud...

In the preceding chapter we drew attention to the fact that any spatially extended mass is under the sway of both gravity and levity. We then saw that with the transition of mat...

Three basic concepts form the foundation for the present-day scientific description of a vast field of optical phenomena, among them the occurrence of the spectral colours as a...

The last two chapters have served to show the impasse into which human perception and thinking have come - in so far as they have been used for scientific purposes - by virtue o...

At the present time the human mind is in danger of confusing the realm of dynamic events, into which modern atomic research has penetrated, with the world of the spirit; that is...

'As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time as myself; poets more excellent have lived before me, and others...

Immediacy of approach to certain essentials of nature as a result of their religious or artistic experience of the sense-world, is the characteristic of two more representatives...

Having made ourselves so far acquainted with the fundamentals of Goethe's approach to the outer phenomena of colour involved in the spectrum, we will leave this for a while to f...

The realization that Newton's explanation of the spectrum fails to meet the facts prompted Goethe to engage in all those studies which made him the founder of a modern optics ba...

The observation of our own visual process, which we began in the last chapter, will serve now to free us from a series of illusory concepts which have been connected by the onlo...

Thy functions are ethereal, As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind, Organ of vision! And a Spirit aëreal Informs the cell of Hearing, dark and blind. W. WORDSWORTH

In the year 1932, when the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's death, Professor W. Heisenberg, one of the foremost thinkers in the field of modern physics, de...

With the introduction, in Chapter X, of the peripheral type of force-field which appertains to levity as the usual central one does to gravity, we are compelled to revise our co...

If I introduce this book by relating how I came to encounter Rudolf Steiner and his work, more than twenty-five years ago, and what decided me not only to make his way of knowle...

In his isolation as world spectator, the modern philosopher was bound to reach two completely opposite views regarding the objective value of human thought. One of these was giv...

Our inquiries have led us to a picture of man as a sensible-supersensible organism composed of three dynamic aggregates - physical, etheric, astral. As three rungs of a spiritua...

Spiritual kinsmen of Goethe in the British sphere of human culture. Thomas Reid's philosophic discovery, its significance for the overcoming of the onlooker-standpoint in scienc...

The sentient (astral) forces of the cosmos as governors of the various interactions between levity and gravity. The astral aspect of the planetary system. Its reflexion in earth...

3 See also Eddington's more elaborate description of this fact in his New Pathways in Science. The above statement, like others of Eddington's, has been Contested from the side...

Thought - the sole reality and yet a pure non-entity for the modern spectator. Descartes and Hume. Robert Hooke's 'proof' of the non-reality of conceptual thinking. The modern p...