MAN OR MATTER

by Ernst Lehrs

Third Edition

Part I: Science at the Threshold

Chapter II: Where Do We Stand Today?

Download the full third edition HERE

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, delivered a speech before the Saxon Academy of Science which may be regarded as symptomatic of the need in recent science to investigate critically the foundations of its own efforts to know nature.¹ In this speech Heisenberg draws a picture of the progress of science which differs significantly from the one generally known. Instead of giving the usual description of this progress as ‘a chain of brilliant and surprising discoveries’, he shows it as resting on the fact that, with the aim of continually simplifying and unifying the scientific conception of the world, human thinking, in course of time, has narrowed more and more the scope of its inquiries into outer nature.

‘Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation, almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints and established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge accumulate, the claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain sense diminishes.’ Our justifiable admiration for the success with which the unending multiplicity of natural occurrences on earth and in the stars has been reduced to so simple a scheme of laws – Heisenberg implies – must therefore not make us forget that these attainments are bought at the price ‘of renouncing the aim of bringing the phenomena of nature to our thinking in an immediate and living way’.

In the course of his exposition, Heisenberg also speaks of Goethe, in whose scientific endeavours he perceives a noteworthy attempt to set scientific understanding upon a path other than that of progressive self-restriction.

‘The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most outstanding men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of Newtonian optics.’ There is only one thing for which Heisenberg criticizes Goethe: ‘If one should wish to reproach Goethe, it could only be for not going far enough – that is, for having attacked the views of Newton instead of declaring that the whole of Newtonian Physics-Optics, Mechanics and the Law of Gravitation – were from the devil.’

Although the full significance of Heisenberg’s remarks on Goethe will become apparent only at a later stage of our discussion, they have been quoted here because they form part of the symptom we wish to characterize. Only this much may be pointed out immediately, that Goethe – if not in the scientific then indeed in the poetical part of his writings – did fulfil what Heisenberg rightly feels to have been his true task.²

We mentioned Heisenberg’s speech as a symptom of a certain tendency, characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically its own epistemological foundations. A few years previous to Heisenberg’s speech, the need of such a survey found an eloquent advocate in the late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical theories, he insists that ‘if science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations’.

Among the scientists who have felt this need, and who have taken pains to fulfil it, the late Professor A. Eddington obtains an eminent position. Among his relevant utterances we will quote here the following, because it contains a concrete statement concerning the field of external observation which forms the basis for the modern scientific world-picture. In his Philosophy of Physical Science we find him stating that ‘ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have been reached by visual sensation alone – in fact by the simplest form of visual sensation, colourless and non-stereoscopic’.³ In other words, in order to obtain scientific cognition of the physical world, man has felt constrained to surrender the use of all his senses except the sense of sight, and to limit even the act of seeing to the use of a single, colour-blind eye.

Let us listen to yet another voice from the ranks of present-day science, expressing a criticism which is symptomatic of our time. It comes from the late physiologist, Professor A, Carrel, who, concerning the effect which scientific research has had on man’s life in general, says in his book, Man the Unknown: ‘The sciences of inert matter have led us into a country that is not ours. … Man is a stranger in the world he has created.’

Of these utterances, Eddington’s is at the present point of our discussion of special interest for us; for he outlines in it the precise field of sense-perception into which science has withdrawn in the course of that general retreat towards an ever more restricted questioning of nature which was noted by Heisenberg.

The pertinence of Eddington’s statement is shown immediately one considers what a person would know of the world if his only source of experience were the sense of sight, still further limited in the way Eddington describes. Out of everything that the world brings to the totality of our senses, there remains nothing more than mere movements, with certain changes of rate, direction, and so on. The picture of the world received by such an observer is a purely kinematic one. And this is, indeed, the character of the world-picture of modern physical science. For in the scientific treatment of natural phenomena all the qualities brought to us by our other senses, such as colour, tone, warmth, density and even electricity and magnetism, are reduced to mere movement-changes.

As a result, modern science is prevented from conceiving any valid idea of ‘force’. In so far as the concept ‘force’ appears in scientific considerations, it plays the part of an ‘auxiliary concept’, and what man naively conceives as force has come to be defined as merely a ‘descriptive law of behaviour’. We must leave it for later considerations to show how the scientific mind of man has created for itself the conviction that the part of science occupied with the actions of force in nature can properly be treated with purely kinematic concepts. It is the fact itself which concerns us here. In respect of it, note as a characteristic of modern text-books that they often simply use the term ‘kinetics’ (a shortening of kinematics) to designate the science of ‘dynamics’.⁴

In the course of our investigations we shall discover the peculiarity in human nature which – during the first phase, now ended, of man’s struggle towards scientific awareness – has caused this renunciation of all sense-experiences except those which come to man through the sight of a single colour-blind eye. It will then also become clear out of what historic necessity this self-restriction of scientific inquiry arose. The acknowledgment of this necessity, however, must not prevent us from recognizing the fact that, as a result of this restriction, modern scientific research, which has penetrated far into the dynamic substrata of nature, finds itself in the peculiar situation that it is not at all guided by its own concepts, but by the very forces it tries to detect. And in this fact lies the root of the danger which besets the present age.⁵

He who recognizes this, therefore, feels impelled to look for a way which leads beyond a one-eyed, colour-blind conception of the world. It is the aim of this book to show that such a way exists and how it can be followed. Proof will thereby be given that along this way not only is a true understanding achieved of the forces already known to science (though not really understood by it), but also that other forces, just as active in nature as for example electricity and magnetism, come within reach of scientific observation and understanding. And it will be shown that these other forces are of a kind that requires to be known to-day if we are to restore the lost balance to human civilization.

There is a rule known to physicians that ‘a true diagnosis of a case contains in itself the therapy’. No true diagnosis is possible, however, without investigation of the ‘history’ of the case. Applied to our task, this means that we must try to find an aspect of human development, both individual and historical, which will enable us to recognize in man’s own being the cause responsible for the peculiar narrowing of the scope of scientific inquiry, as described by the scientists cited above.

A characteristic of scientific inquiry, distinguishing it from man’s earlier ways of solving the riddles of the world, is that it admits as instruments of knowledge exclusively those activities of the human soul over which we have full control because they take place in the full light of consciousness. This also explains why there has been no science, in the true sense of the word, prior to the beginning of the era commonly called ‘modern’ – that is, before the fifteenth century. For the consciousness on which man’s scientific striving is based is itself an outcome of human evolution.

This evolution, therefore, needs to be considered in such a way that we understand the origin of modern man’s state of mind, and in particular why this state of mind cannot of itself have any other relationship to the world than that of a spectator. For let us be clear that this peculiar relationship by no means belongs only to the scientifically engaged mind. Every adult in our age is, by virtue of his psycho-physical structure, more or less a world-spectator. What distinguishes the state of man’s mind when engaged in scientific observation is that it is restricted to a one-eyed colour-blind approach.

‘Death is the price man has to pay for his brain and his personality’ – this is how a modern physiologist (A. Carrel in his aforementioned book, Man the Unknown) describes the connexion between man’s bodily functions and his waking consciousness. It is characteristic of the outlook prevailing in the nineteenth century that thinking was regarded as the result of the life of the body; that is, of the body’s matter-building processes. Hence no attention was paid at that time to the lonely voice of the German philosopher, C. Fortlage (1806-81), who in his System of Psychology as Empirical Science suggested that consciousness is really based on death processes in the body. From this fact he boldly drew the conclusion (known to us today to be true) that if ‘partial death’ gave rise to ordinary consciousness, then ‘total death’ must result in an extraordinary enhancement of consciousness. Again, when in our century Rudolf Steiner drew attention to the same fact, which he had found along his own lines of investigation, showing thereby the true role of the nervous system in regard to the various activities of the soul, official science turned a deaf ear to his pronouncement.⁶ To-day the scientist regards it as forming part of ‘unknown man’ that life must recede – in other words, that the organ-building processes of the body must come to a standstill – if consciousness is to come into its own.

With the recognition of a death process in the nervous system as the bodily foundation of consciousness, and particularly of man’s conceptual activities, the question arises as to the nature of those activities which have their foundation in other systems, such as that of the muscles, where life, not death, prevails. Here an answer must be given which will surprise the reader acquainted with modern theories of psycho-physical interaction; but if he meets it with an open mind he will not find it difficult to test.

Just as the conceptual activity has as its bodily foundation the brain, with the nervous appendages, so it is volitional activity which is based on processes taking place in the muscular region of the body and in those organs which provide the body’s metabolism.

A statement which says that man’s will is as directly based on the metabolic processes of the body, both inside and outside the muscles, as is his perceiving and thought-forming mind on a process in the nerves, is bound to cause surprise. Firstly, it seems to leave out the role commonly ascribed to the so-called motoric part of the nervous system in bringing about bodily action; and secondly, the acknowledgment of the dependence of consciousness on corporeal ‘dying’ implies that willing is an unconscious activity because of its being based on life processes of the body.

The first of these two problems will find its answer at a later stage of our discussion when we shall see what entitles us to draw a direct connexion between volition and muscular action. To answer the second problem, simple self-observation is required. This tells us that, when we move a limb, all that we know of is the intention (in its conceptual form) which rouses the will and gives it its direction, and the fact of the completed deed. In between, we accompany the movement with a dim awareness of the momentary positions of the parts of the body involved, so that we know whether or not they are moving in the intended manner. This awareness is due to a particular sense, the ‘sense of movement’ or ‘muscular sense’ – one of those senses whose existence physiology has lately come to acknowledge. Nothing, however, is known to us of all the complex changes which are set into play within the muscles themselves in order to carry out some intended movement. And it is these that are the direct outcome of the activity of our will.

Regarding man’s psycho-physical organization thus, we come to see in it a kind of polarity – a death-pole, as it were, represented by the nerves including their extension into the senses, and a life-pole, represented by the metabolic and muscular systems; and connected with them a pole of consciousness and one of unconsciousness – or as we can also say, of waking and sleeping consciousness. For the degree of consciousness on the side of the life-pole is not different from the state in which the entire human being dwells during sleep.

It is by thus recognizing the dependence of consciousness on processes of bodily disintegration that we first come to understand why consciousness, once it has reached a certain degree of brightness, is bound to suffer repeated interruptions. Every night, when we sleep, our nervous system becomes alive (though with gradually decreasing intensity) in order that what has been destroyed during the day may be restored. While the system is kept in this condition, no consciousness can obtain in it.

In between the two polarically opposite systems there is a third, again of clearly distinct character, which functions as a mediator between the two. Here all processes are of a strictly rhythmic nature, as is shown by the process of breathing and the pulsation of the blood. This system, too, provides the foundation for a certain type of psychological process, namely feeling. That feeling is an activity of the soul distinct from both thinking and willing, and that it has its direct counterpart in the rhythmic processes of the body, can be most easily tested through observing oneself when listening to music.

As one might expect from its median position, the feeling sphere of the soul is characterized by a degree of consciousness half-way between waking and sleeping. Of our feelings we are not more conscious than of our dreams; we are as little detached from them as from our dream experiences while these last; what remains in our memory of past feelings is usually not more than what we remember of past dreams.

This picture of the threefold psycho-physical structure of man will now enable us to understand the evolution of consciousness both in individual life and in the life of mankind. To furnish the foundation of waking consciousness, parts of the body must become divorced from life. This process, however, is one which, if we take the word in its widest sense, we may call, ageing. All organic bodies, and equally that of man, are originally traversed throughout by life. Only gradually certain parts of such an organism become precipitated, as it were, from the general organic structure, and they do so increasingly towards the end of that organism’s life-span.

In the human body this separation sets in gently during the later stages of embryonic development and brings about the first degree of independence of bones and nerves from the rest of the organism. The retreat of life continues after birth, reaching a certain climax in the nervous system at about the twenty-first year. In the body of a small child there is still comparatively little contrast between living and non-living organs. There is equally little contrast between sleeping and waking condition in its soul. And the nature of the soul at this stage is volition throughout. Never, in fact, does man’s soul so intensively will as in the time when it is occupied in bringing the body into an upright position, and never again does it exert its strength with the same unconsciousness of the goal to which it strives.

What, then, is the soul’s characteristic relationship to the world around at this stage? The following observations will enable us to answer this question.

It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as ‘animism’, by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes the child’s mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation of such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither experiences himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces the content of the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of using his imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from his own.

In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the child who beats himself because he has done something which makes him angry with himself.

In sharp contrast to this state of oneness of the child’s soul, in regard both to its own body and to the surrounding world, there stands the separatedness of the adult’s intellectual consciousness, severed from both body and world. What happens to this part of the soul during its transition from one condition to the other may be aptly described by using a comparison from another sphere of natural phenomena. (Later descriptions in this book will show that a comparison such as the one used here is more than a mere external analogy.)

Let us think of water in which salt has been dissolved. In this state the salt is one with its solvent; there is no visible distinction between them. The situation changes when part of the salt crystallizes. By this process the part of the salt substance concerned loses its connexion with the liquid and contracts into individually outlined and spatially defined pieces of solid matter. It thereby becomes optically distinguishable from its environment.

Something similar happens to the soul within the region of the nervous system. What keeps the soul in a state of unconsciousness as long as the body, in childhood, is traversed by life throughout, and what continues to keep it in this condition in the parts which remain alive after the separation of the nerves, is the fact that in these parts – to maintain the analogy – the soul is dissolved in the body. With the growing independence of the nerves, the soul itself gains independence from the body. At the same time it undergoes a process similar to contraction whereby it becomes discernible to itself as an entity distinguished from the surrounding world. In this way the soul is enabled, eventually, to meet the world from outside as a self-conscious onlooker.

What we have here described as the emergence of an individual’s intellectual consciousness from the original, purely volitional condition of the soul is nothing but a replica of a greater process through which mankind as a whole, or more exactly Western mankind, has gone in the course of its historical development. Man was not always the ‘brain-thinker’ he is to-day.⁷ Directly the separation of the nerve system was completed, and thereby the full clarity of the brain-bound consciousness achieved, man began to concern himself with science in the modern sense.

To understand why this science became restricted to one-eyed, colour-blind observation we need only apply to the human sense system, in particular, what we have learnt concerning man’s threefold being.

Sharply distinguished by their respective modes of functioning though they are, the three bodily systems are each spread out through the whole body and are thus to be found everywhere adjacent to each other. Hence, the corresponding three states of consciousness, the sleeping, dreaming and waking, are also everywhere adjacent and woven into one another. It is the predominance of one or other which imparts a particular quality of soul to one or other region of the body. This is clearly shown within the realm of sense activity, itself the most conscious part of the human being. It is sufficient to compare, say, the senses of sight and smell, and to notice in what different degree we are conscious of the impressions they convey, and how differently the corresponding elements of conception, feeling and willing are blended in each. We never turn away as instinctively from objectionable colour arrangement as from an unpleasant smell. How small a part, on the other hand, do the representations of odours play in our recollection of past experiences, compared with those of sight.⁸ The same is valid in descending measure for all other senses.

Of all senses, the sense of sight has in greatest measure the qualities of a ‘conceptual sense’. The experiences which it brings, and these alone, were suitable as a basis for the new science, and even so a further limitation was necessary. For in spite of the special quality of the sense of sight, it is still not free from certain elements of feeling and will – that is, from elements with the character of dream or sleep. The first plays a part in our perception of colour; the second, in observing the forms and perspective ordering of objects we look at.

Here is repeated in a special way the threefold organization of man, for the seeing of colour depends on an organic process apart from the nerve processes and similar to that which takes place between heart and lungs, whilst the seeing of forms and spatial vision depend upon certain movements of the eyeball (quick traversing of the outline of the viewed object with the line of sight, alteration of the angle between the two axes of sight according to distance), in which the eye is active as a sort of outer limb of the body, an activity which enters our consciousness as little as does that of our limbs. It now becomes clear that no world-content obtained in such more or less unconscious ways could be made available for the building of a new scientific world-conception. Only as much as man experiences through the sight of a single, colour-blind eye, could be used.⁹

If we would understand the role of science in the present phase of human development, we must be ready to apply two entirely different and seemingly contradictory judgments to one and the same historical phenomenon. The fact that something has occurred out of historical necessity – that is, a necessity springing from the very laws of cosmic evolution – does not save it from having a character which, in view of its consequences, must needs be called tragic.

In this era of advanced intellectualism, little understanding of the existence of true tragedy in human existence has survived. As a result, the word ‘tragedy’ itself has deteriorated in its meaning and is nowadays used mostly as a synonym for ‘sad event’, ‘calamity’ ‘serious event’, even ‘crime’ (Oxford Diet.). In its original meaning, however, springing from the dramatic poetry of ancient Greece, the word combines the concept of calamity with that of inevitability; the author of the destructive action was not held to be personally responsible for it, since he was caught up in a nexus of circumstances which he could not change.

This is not the place to discuss why tragedy in this sense forms part of man’s existence. It suffices to acknowledge that it does and, where it occurs, to observe it with scientific objectivity.

Our considerations, starting from certain statements made by some leading scientific thinkers of our time, have helped us not only to confirm the truth inherent in these statements, but to recognize the facts stated by them as being the outcome of certain laws of evolution and thereby having an historic necessity. This, however, does not mean that man’s scientific labours, carried out under the historically given restrictions, great and successful as these labours were and are, have not led to calamitous effects such as we found indicated by Professor Carrel. The sciences of matter have led man into a country that is not his, and the world which he has created by means of scientific research is not only one in which he is a stranger but one which threatens to-day to deprive him of his own existence. The reason is that this world is essentially a world of active forces, and the true nature of these is something which modern man, restricted to his onlooker-consciousness, is positively unable to conceive.

We have taken a first step in diagnosing man’s present spiritual condition. A few more steps are required to lead us to the point where we can conceive the therapy he needs.