Goethe’s Concept of Light & Darkness and the Future of Science 

by George Adams

From the 1949 Edition of the Golden Blade

An Anthroposophical Journal

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/GoldenBlade_1949.pdf

 

An eminent physicist of our time, Werner Heisenberg, has pointed out that Goethe in his polemics with Newton was in reality opposing not only Newton’s theory of colour or of the spectral analysis of white light, but the whole trend of modern Physics. This was an historic conflict on a grand scale and will be remembered more in times to come than it is to-day. If we appreciate the hitherto unfathomed value of Goethe’s scientific outlook, we shall also not begrudge the accepted school of thought its continued triumphs. The underlying problem begins now to emerge in a wider and more human setting.

Present-day Physics, the one-sidedness of which has been so candidly described by Eddington and other writers, is threatening mankind not only by the political misuse of its inventions, but by its influence on the whole balance of our life and thought. Until about a century ago, the youthful urge of Science was sustained by Western man’s deep and unconscious belief in his own faculties of knowledge. This was a faith that had its roots in the religious inheritance of Europe, and it sustained the rationalists and agnostics no less than the avowed believers. In our time it has largely faded. Thought grows abstrusely formal; cold and impersonal technicalities become predominant.

If the robust materialism of i8th and 19th century Science has been transcended, along with it we have also lost the self-confident security of thought, which in the classical tradition was accepted, one might say, as an unconscious heritage from Divine sources. A 20th century philosopher would not enunciate with the same assurance, “I think, therefore I am.” Nor is there any new discovery or theory, however epoch-making, which by itself would restore what has been lost. One thing alone will renew the original and absolute enthusiasm. Man as a scientist must bring his own powers of cognition into the scope of his researches—not in the sense of mystical introspection or of an abstract epistemology, but by an all-round human science, which the developments of recent time have rendered possible. This is the way which Rudolf Steiner, who took his start from a more penetrative study of Goethe’s scientific writings, was able then to open out in the later, anthroposophical phase of his own life-work.

Let us consider for example the mathematical faculties with which we apprehend the idea of three-dimensional space. We owe them to the upright carriage and the clear three-dimensionality of our body. The creative forces of the great universe of space have so fashioned the human body that the indwelling spirit is able to behold the space-creating Ideas and understand all those things in the universe which belong to the crystal-mineral domain. That this is so, emerges from many details: from the comparative anatomy and dynamics of animal and man, from human embryo development and the gradual attainment of upright posture in early childhood, from the structure and function of the organ of balance in the inner ear, and from our knowledge of the inner bodily senses —the sense of balance and the sense of movement. These scientific evidences, together with a modern understanding of the geometry of Euclid, reveal how man by his whole bodily and spiritual constitution lives in such harmony with the creative Ideas which form the universe of space that he is able consciously to perceive them.

In like manner we should find that all our faculties of knowledge spring from the detailed relationship between the universe and man. The mathematical approach to Nature is not the only one; we get beyond this limitation of scientific method. In the texture of the universe many realms of wisdom interweave, nor is there reason to suppose that man has access to only one of these.

Even the growth of mathematics itself in the last century or two bears witness to this manifoldness of the world; the inner logic of the universe is not a one-way road. We will here deal a little further with one outstanding example—the modem, “projective” school of geometry and the new light it throws on the structure of space as such. For we believe that along this way Goethe’s intuitive perception, both in the Theory of Colour and in the Metamorphosis of Plants, will not only be vindicated but will provide a starting point for far-reaching scientific developments of the near future.

For normal consciousness it goes without saying that the point is the ultimate and indivisible element of space. Thus in geometry all other forms—lines, planes, surfaces and so on—are defined, to begin with, as assemblages of points. Our atomistic approach to Nature is a more outward and realistic version of this geometrical idea of space, which is indeed embodied in the axioms of Euclid. Modern geometry has, however, taken a big step forward in this respect, and though this modern geometry has not yet found its way into our understanding of external Nature, it promises to do so in the near future, notably in the fields of research which have been opened out through Rudolf Steiner’s work.

In effect Projective Geometry has discovered that the ideal structure of three-dimensional space does not proceed one-sidedly from the point alone but from two opposite entities—and plane—which play a fully equivalent part in the fundamental structure. A simple illustration will serve to show the spatial significance and mutual polarity of point and plane. Imagine a spherical surface expanding and contracting. At one extreme, it contracts into the central point; at the other, it expands into a plane that disappears into the infinite distances of space. We say, a
“plane” rather than “infinite sphere,” because as it expands the sphere grows ever flatter, and of necessity when the radius is infinite the curvature will vanish altogether; the sphere is then transformed into a plane. Space is thus bounded, as it were, by an infinitely distant plane; however, as the measures there prevailing are still spherical in character, we may also refer to this unique “plane at infinity” as the “infinite sphere” or ultimate “periphery” of space.

The process can also be modified so that the finite sphere from which we start, expanding e;:centrically, is transformed into any desired plane, passing through finite space. Thus the polarity of point and plane is really one of expansion and contraction, not only quantitative but qualitative. In this polarity the straight line plays the part of mediator, its formal relations to point and plane being equivalent on either hand. This polar equivalence of point and plane is the well-known “Principle of Duality” in projective geometry; it might perhaps better have been called a Principle of Polarity. The fundamental entities are in fact not two but three—point, line and plane.

I have written elsewhere of the interesting history of this new school. 1 Discovered and developed mainly in the 19th century it made no little impression on those who learned of its existence. I mention for example Wordsworth and Herbert Spencer. Rudolf Steiner, too, in his student days was overjoyed by what he felt to be a kind of spiritual liberation in this way of thinking about space. In later years he frequently insisted on its importance as a new beginning, also, for the science of external Nature.

Notably our ideas of “part” and “whole” are profoundly changed by the new geometry. Ordinarily we think of a plane, for example, as made up of infinitely many points; but we now learn. Vice-versa, to think of a point as made up of infinitely many planes. Though in the text-books it is not generally put so radically, the thought processes of the new geometry signify no less than this. Two polar aspects interweave. For the one—to physical consciousness self evident—the points that lie in a given plane are the infinitely many parts or members of the plane; the plane is whole, greater than any of its parts. For the other—paradoxical as it may seem to begin with—the point is the whole, and the planes that pass through it are parts or members of the point. We are here learning to do what Dr. Steiner once expressed in the words “to conceive the extensive intensively and the intensive extensively”. Science will take a great step forward when we learn this not only in abstract
mathematics but in our vision of external Nature.

The late G. H. Hardy, in his “Mathematician’s Apology,”2 mentions Projective Geometry among the truly significant branches of mathematics which are not outwardly useful. While sympathizing with Professor Hardy’s idealistic non-utilitarian outlook, we rather look for the saving of outer Science in its growing more akin to the pure mathematician’s ideal, than for the essence of pure mathematics in its remoteness from outward use. Of the true character of mathematics and its relation to natural science as a whole, Goethe, though a confessed non-mathematician, had a very clear idea. The reason why so beautiful and illuminating a discipline as the new geometry has had comparatively little application lies in another direction. Namely, the realm of Nature where it applies has scarcely yet been recognized by science. It is the realm of the “etheric,” the realm from which all living entities—plant, animal and man—and derive their etheric body or formative forces body. (I use the terminology of modem Spiritual Science, partly derived from old terminology of modern Spiritual Science, partly derived from old traditions but renewed in a scientific form by, Dr. Steiner.)

1 Space and the Light of Creation” (London, 1933); Strahlende Welt-gestaltung, published by the Mathematical and Astronomical Section of the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Introduction to this text can be read here: https://bit.ly/3BjCOE7

2 Cambridge University Press, 1940

If once we learn from his many detailed explanations what the great founder of modem Spiritual Science was referring to as the etheric, and if we undergo the training—in morphological thinking above all—which an imaginative study of the new geometry affords, we shall begin to see the kingdoms of Nature with newly opened eyes. Even in her material and sense-perceptible aspect. Nature is not only atomistic in structure. The atomistic, pointwise texture is shot through by quite another kind, which is to the atom as in pure Geometry the plane is to the point. In this we have an essential key to the morphology of life. The atomistic structure pertains above all to the inorganic world, though even here it does not exclusively prevail. It is the dual, physical-and-etheric structure of living things—analogous, as we shall find, to the duality of point and plane in geometry—which lifts and lightens the heavy weight and impervious texture of mere earthly matter. The inter-penetration of the two is life; their sundering is death. We gain a fundamental concept of the essence of living matter, and by this means
penetrate ever more deeply into its morphological varieties. This is no vague philosophic vitalism.

The atomistic aspect of matter is above all expressed in the forces which are so clearly described in the gravitational and other “field-theories” of Physics. These forces, typically physical, can always be conceived as issuing from point-centres—centres of gravity, electric and magnetic poles and so on. We may accordingly describe them as “centric forces.” The etheric forces, on the other hand, belonging as we here contend to the planar aspect of ideal space, may be described as **peripheral’* or *’cosmic.” Their manifestation in the realm of life is pregnantly described in the introductory chapters of the medical work; written by Rudolf Steiner towards the end of his life in collaboration with Dr. Ita Wegman :

“Observation shews, after all, that the phenomena of life have an altogether different orientation from those that run their course within the lifeless realm. Of the latter we shall be able to say, they reveal that they are subject to forces radiating outward from the essence of material substance, . . . from the relative centre to the periphery. But in the phenomena of life, the material substance appears subject to forces working from without inward towards the relative centre. . . . Now it is to the Earth that every earthly leaves its community with the Earth and is gathered up into the forces that ray inward to the Earth from all sides—from beyond the earthly realm. Whenever we see a substance or process unfold in forms of life, we must conceive it to be withdrawing from the forces that work upon it as from the centre of the Earth, and entering the domain of others, which have, not a centre, but a periphery.”‘

Bearing in mind that the universal periphery has the character of a plane at infinity, we are therefore to conceive forces issuing not from point-centres but from the very opposite—from entities of a planar character. Among the many points acting as centres of gravity on Earth there is a unique and archetypal one—the centre of the Earth. So too among the many planes of space there is an archetypal one—the “plane at infinity.” Such is the structure of the spatial universe to which the Earth belongs. If there be planar entities, sensitive to forces issuing from the celestial periphery, we shall expect them to tend up and outward, even as physical centres of gravity are drawn down towards the centre of the Earth.

To derive from projective geometry the precise idea of the type of space in which the etheric or peripheral forces have their field of action, however a further step is necessary. Projective geometry leads not immediately to the space of Euclid with its rigid measures of length and angle, but to a freer and more mobile space, known scientifically as “projective three-dimensional space,” for the projective space still has dimensionality. From this projective or “archetypal space,” as we may call it, the rigid three-dimensional space of Euclid is derived precisely by assuming that there is one unique plane-the infinitely distant plane already mentioned. (Within this plane we also have to assume the presence of an imaginary circle-as it were an echo of the pure form of the sphere, cf. p. 66 above. It is due to this imaginary circle that spherical trigonometry plays so great a part in mathematical astronomy. The measures that prevail in the infinitely distant plane are spherical, as we said before. )

The unique, “infinitely distant” plane is in the last resort an archetypal phenomenon or Ur-phenomenon—to use the Goethean expression—of the space of our normal experience. When we derive Euclidean Geometry from the projective point of view we must in other words assume this plane among our Axioms. Now, as in “archetypal space” there is the perfect polarity with respect to point and plane, the question will suggest itself: “Why is there not a type of space, specialized in the polar opposite way to that of Euclid—a space defined, that is to say, by a unique point, functioning as “infinitely distant,” instead of a unique plane ?” Our answer is: “There- is indeed, but its relation to ourselves is such that with our normal consciousness we fail to apprehend it.” Let us propound this, to begin with at any rate, as a working hypothesis;
it will apply to a wide field of research. Space with an infinitely distant point (not infinitely far away in the physical sense, but functioning as infinitely distant) will in effect be the type of space in which “etheric forces” work, and we shall look for its formative tendencies above all in the field of life.4

In such a space the relations of “inner and outer” will tend to be the very reverse of what they are in Euclid. The infinite will be within and not without. Physical forces, released in ordinary space, tend to lose themselves as their effects expand to the periphery ; so in this opposite or “negative” type of space forces will tend to lose themselves as they approach the centre. We have to think of forces issuing not from centres but from peripheries—ideally, from planar entities—and spending themselves as they approach the unique “point at infinity” of the space in which they work. They will be forces of suction rather than of pressure—of levitation rather than of gravitation. Forces of active buoyancy, we
might also call them.

There will be an untold number of such “etheric spaces”— with their formative activities coming into being and passing away again in the processes of life. Concretely speaking, an etheric space will have its “infinitude within” where there is anything in the nature of a seed or germinating centre. Seeds are minute, point-like entities. The very notion of a seed suggests a point, and to a lesser extent this applies wherever there is a concentration of germinating power, as in the “eye” or growing-point of a plant, and in the last resort in every living cell.

[A fuller description of how this type of space derives from modem Geometry, and also of its relation to the wide range of scientific tasks and problems arising out of Rudolf Steiner’s work, will, be found in the essay by the present writer on “Physical and Ethereal Spaces,” published in Anthroposophy Quarterly (edited by D. N. Dunlop), Vol. VIII, Nos. 3 and 4, 1933. Reference is there made to certain earlier mathematical
works (e.g. by Felix Klein, W. K. Clifford, and the late Prof. D. M. Y. Sommerville), in some of which the possibility of such a space is suggested. An elementary systematic treatment of this “negative Euclidean,” or as he calls it “polar-Euclidean” type of geometry is given
by the Swiss mathematician Prof. Louis Locher in his text-book, Projective Geometries published by Orell-Fiissli, Zurich, 1940. Professor Locher acknowledge his indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner.]

The polarities of space are interlocked; point and plane interchange their roles in more than one respect. The concrete objects of physical space are always point-centred bodies; they have the centres of gravity, etc., from which potential forces ray out. Yet the formation of this space is determined by a unique plane—the infinite, all-encompassing sphere. Conversely the real entities sources of force and activity—in the etheric spaces will be “peripheral” or planar, whilst the formation of such a space as a whole will always be determined by a unique “infinite point” within.

In this idea we have an exact mathematical way of access to the spiritual-scientific notion of etheric forces as explained by Rudolf Steiner. Indeed he spoke of them as working in this very way. Thus, in a lecture at the Hague, April, 1922: “It is as though there were surfaces or planes of force coming inward from the Universe from all sides, drawing near the Earth, and—from without —working plastically upon the different regions that are there over the Earth’s surface.” We cannot study the etheric forces or the etheric body of man, he went on to say, so long as we think only of the Euclidean type of space. We have to think of a space the very opposite of this, taking our start not from a point as ‘origin’ but from an infinite sphere. We can study the etheric body of man only “when we perceive how it is formed from the entire Universe;
when we perceive how from all sides these surfaces or planes of living force are drawing near the Earth, drawing near the human being too and from without are plastically forming the etheric body.”

We shall now have to recognize two distinct functions of a point-like centre. The living function of a point that acts as “infinitude within” for an etheric space is radically different from that of a centre of gravity or magnetic pole or other point-like source of physical forces. Its activity will be receptive rather than self- centred—active by virtue of what is around it, not within it. Seen with imaginative insight, a seed or germinating point acts not by virtue of the material amount or form that is centred in it. Such form as has already been achieved tends rather to be blotted out and chaoticized in this region.

A very interesting example is afforded by the pupation of the caterpillar, which some biologists have likened to a kind of second embryo-development. The well-known naturalist, Mr. E. L. Grant Watson, who has often witnessed the metamorphoses of the swallow-tail butterfly, describes it in these words:—Inside the chrysalis “a breaking down of tissues is taking place,” reducing most of the organs of the caterpillar “to a kind of non-cellular mush.” Yet at this stage “the shape and position of the organs of the butterfly are already stamped on the pupa. These marks are on the outside and there is nothing yet formed inside to correspond with them. . . . Although there is within the creature nothing but the old body of the larva, which is in process of breaking down, there is on the outside of the pupa the pattern of the perfect insect, with wings, legs, antennae, etc., which are later to be occupied by the as yet unformed organs. …” Mr. Grant Watson draws attention to the significance of these facts, which “will modify the accepted idea that development takes place always and only from a centre out
wards. Invisible forces outside the insect have stamped upon it the shape corresponding to that final-cause which is inherent in
its being.”5

In an essential germinating centre, therefore, relatively form less matter gives itself up to the inpouring forces, bearing a living archetype of fresh formation. Where there is life, matter resigns itself to the peripheral and cosmic forces, and it will do so the more effectively the less it “holds its own.” It is the liquid, watery phase which above dl proves capable of this resignation. Where living water thus resigns itself to the inpouring cosmic forces, the outcome is a process of buoyancy and expansion—in a word, what we experience as growth. The upward growth of plants is a phenomenon of suction from without rather than pressure from within; the intense pressures which result while overcoming earthly-material resistances are secondary.

When Goethe in his Theory of Colours uses the words “Light & Darkness” he has in mind ideal entities—not in themselves perceptible—which come to visible manifestation in the world of colour, including all the grades of black and white. We shall describe as “Light” in this ideal sense the essence of that ethereal world where the forces issue from the periphery, and as “Darkness*” the world of matter where the reverse is true. Admittedly, it is not very easy to use* the word “light” in this sense, for the prevailing theories (e.g., the electro-magnetic theory) make light itself appear as a manifestation of centric forces. It will be found, however, that the original essence of the light is peripheral, not centric. Goethe’s theory of colour remained a closed book to 19th century Physics because the latter aimed at including all the forces of Nature (even the hypothetical light-bearing ether) in the “centric” realm. The spatial polarities which it investigated were always those that work from point to point—from one point-centred pole to another, It had no inkling of the primary and far more qualitative polarity of forces, centric and peripherd respectively. The light that pours in upon the Earth from cosmic distances and calls forth the life
of plants is peripheral in nature. It does not “shoot” through space – it is not like the corpuscular bombardments known nowadays as “cosmic rays.” Matter as such is centric; the light in origin is planar and peripheral.

5 Quoted from the Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, Vol LXX 1938

The celestial light enveloping the Earth draws the life of plant up and outward with each returning spring and summer. We need to read the phenomena of Nature and we shall find that this is what they tell. Just as the iron filings reveal the presence of the magnetic field, so will the gesture of the spreading leaves and branches reveal the character of this ethereal field of light that surges round the Earth. The leaf in its unfoldment, broadly speaking, tends towards the plane. The myriad leaves that shimmer in the light filled air are like the organs which the Earth puts forth—organs responding to the buoyant forces from the plane of Heaven. The foliage of plants reveals a formative tendency the very opposite of that atomic, pulverizing structure which plays so great a part in inorganic matter. Even as matter has the tendency to fall asunder into atoms, so has the ether-the ideal negative of matter-the tendency to planar texture. This becomes visible where the material is raised and permeated with the etheric formative forces.

All life on Earth owes its existence to the green leaves of plants with their affinity to the cosmic light. Dust unto dust, Earth matter falls and crumbles; the Universe makes compensation in the leaves of plants that spread their buoyant surfaces and drink the light of Heaven. Where Light and Darkness, or Light and Matter—the centric principle and the peripheral—merge into one another, matter is lifted into living form, and where they fall apart is death. To spiritual sight, said Rudolf Steiner on one occasion, wings of ethereal light soar heavenward in autumn when the dead leaves fall and crumble.

The physical-ethereal polarity of space gives added meaning to the fact that we derive the idea of Eudidean right-angled space from the upright form and carriage of our body. The triaxial right-angled cross, which in geometry and analytical mechanics we postulate at will in every point of space, is like the earthly counterpart of a mobile triangle in the celestial plane.6 This archetypal triangle in the infinite periphery determines the pure form of space, i.e., the laws of Euclidean geometry pure and simple; its counterpart ‘in the realm of darkness—the threefold cross in each material centre —is no less essential to the play of earthly forces. In man, the same polarity is at work as in the great universe. The human trunk and limbs are mainly axial and radial in structure. The head on the other hand is spherical—like a minute image of the infinite sphere of Heaven. Even the ideal triangle in the celestial sphere has its tiny image in the three semi-circular canals, the organ of balance in the inner ear. Whatever man does in the earthly-spatial world by virtue of the three-dimensional radial formation of his
trunk and limbs, he is at once able to cognize by means of this spherically three-dimensional organ in his head. Thus he is able to think the world of space—geometrically, architecturally.

The correlation is, however, more than formal; it applies also to the forces that are at work in head and limbs. Our head is not only formed peripherally (spherically), but in our thinking activity we live and act within the realm of the peripheral forces—forces that work “from without inward.” Geometrically speaking, the domain of real forces within which we live when we are thinking is polar to the spatial objects of our thinking. The objects of ordinary thought are physical—that is, of paramountly pointwise form and structure,—yet in the very act of thinking them we live unconsciously in a planar, in other words, etheric realm. It is as though, whilst we conceive the cube-form of the “salt of Earth”, the octahedron pyramid 7 were to arise as a form of light in our head-nature. Yet this does not imply “inside the skull.” Inner and outer are interchanged for the etheric spaces. Inside the skull, the space-of-light in which we live as thinkers has at most its goal, or its infinitude. Such is the essence of the nerve-organs and the brain: they are the “infinitude within” towards which the ether-forces of cosmic thinking, pouring in from the wide-world circumference, are directed. When we conceive a geometrical form we all of us are living even spatially within the self-same archetype; we have our several heads, it is true, and at different places on the Earth; yet in our heads are but the cosmic germinating centres into which the one archetype is sending, as it-were, its fertilizing forces.

[ 6 Scientifically defined as a self-polar triangle, with respect to the fundamental imaginary circle.]
[ 7 The octahedron and the cube are mutually polar forms. When the one is in relation to the point-wise aspect of space, the other is in relation to the planar, and vice-versa.]

We are here indicating what will prove to be of fundamental significance for our theory of scientific knowledge. The realm of ethereal light, whose fundamental nature has been explained in this essay, is unknown to man precisely because as a knower that is, in the exercise of his faculties of cognition—he lives within it and is at one with it. In relation to this world of light the objects of his cognition must always be of the nature of darkness—shadows, or shadow-throwers. In the very act of throwing shadows they light up for his cognition. Just as the sunlight flooding the clear air is in itself invisible and yet illumines every particle, every dark object that comes into its way and by reflection thence appears to us as light, so is the world of essential light imperceptible to us. Imperceptible is the very light within the forces of which we live and weave in all our thinking, in all our conscious perceiving. Sensing and thinking, we feel our way through this sea of light until we touch the material, objective darkness; thereat we awaken to consciousness. Yet in its origin the darkness is akin to light; they are—as Goethe himself suggested—the sundering of a pristine Unity, antecedent to all the polarities of space. Thus we see light when we awaken to consciousness by the touch of darkness. Dark and material though they be, the objects of sense and thought light up for us in thinking.

It is characteristic of the “exact science” of our time, that it abandons itself completely to this world of darkness-in effect, to the material, atomistic, pointwise realm. Finding its satisfaction in the clear thoughts that there light up, it does not bethink itself on the origin of thought in man. Today, however, the ideal polarity of space discovered by modem geometry, combined with and all around phenomenological study of surrounding Nature, suggests a wider and far freer way. Only one further step is then essential: to place the human being himself-man as the knower—into the ‘midst of the process. We shall then feel encouraged to seek enhancement of our faculties of knowledge. By dint of a more imaginative, meditative, will-imbued thinking we presently awaken to enter realm of ether-light even without the help of the material shadow. True, it is imperceptible to our inherited “objective” consciousness. In this respect, however, mankind is at the threshold of a far reaching change.

In meditative thinking, we practice the power of thought without reference to outer objects, and as we do so it grows stronger. With thinking thus enhanced, and with ah ever-devoted interest in surrounding Nature, including all that is revealed by Science, we come to recognize that fuller world in which matter does not only surge from the dark teeming multitudes of atoms but is sustained by forces bearing inward from the Heavens. In this real world, dark matter with its outward thrust and the in-forming light—dark matter with its downward weight and the upward soaring force of light hold one another in rhythmic balance even in the normal play of Nature, making the surface of the Earth the home of man.

Even this cosmic balance of the life of Nature is to-day involved; one-sided science and technics threaten not only the equipoise of’man^s inner life. The frozen right-angled cross of the space of Euclid prevails most exclusively in the electro-magnetic phenomena of induction; so does the atomistic aspect of the world in the corpuscular electronic rays. In our electrotechnics we have made very close acquaintance with this hidden realm of the sub-earthly depths. Our equilibrium not only of soul and mind but of out ward culture—even of husbandry and economics—requires us to make acquaintance also with the other realm, the ether-light that has its source in the surrounding Heavens. Alike the mental and spiritual development of modern humanity and the more recent discoveries of science and mathematics indicate this direction. And when we take this path we shall find Goethe’s spirit at our side; we shall draw nearer to the great poet-scientist than the 19th century or even his contemporaries were able to in this respect.

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