The Hidden Forces in Mechanics

by George Adams

An article from the 1959 Edition of the Golden Blade

An Anthroposophical Journal

https://w ww.waldorflibrary.org/journals/164-golden-blade

Research into the underlying laws of physics, beginning with Newtonian mechanics, shows that the gulf between the living and the non-living is not unbridgeable. The modicum of cosmic life which even the “lifeless” material world contains is at least suggested by the forces of coherence: although to put this scientifically would certainly imply no little change from the theories which now prevail. By the coherence of its material, the seemingly dead wood of a beam or rafter withstands the stress it has to bear: it becomes dangerous only when reduced internally to powder by the woodworm, whose ravages suggest that some life remains in the wood long after the tree is felled. Even in the metallic parts of our buildings and machines we have the mysterious phenomenon known as the ” fatigue ” of metals, to which many a fatal accident has been due. It takes a living being, common sense would say to be fatigued.

This phenomenon, by no means yet understood, helps to emphasise what elastic strain and stress will show—namely, that in elastic coherence we have a manifestation of ethereal, not merely physical, forces. If “dust unto dust” be the formula of death, the converse too obtains. Wherever there is coherence, elastic give and take, the ” strength of materials ” on which the builder relies, there is at least an echo of the cosmic life to which all earthly materials owe their origin.

All life on Earth is due to the interplay of earthly or centric, and cosmic or peripheral forces. Such is the spatial quality of the two components of which I have so often written, in the Golden Blade and elsewhere—components both of the real forces of Nature and of the ideal structure of Space as such, poised as it is between centre and infinite expanse, between point and plane.

Now in quite unexpected ways this physical-ethereal polarity reveals itself even in the seemingly most material of sciences – in Mechanics. Of this I propose to tell in this essay. The fact that the science was developed as a theoretical system of exclusively centric forces (gravitation; inertia or momentum of point-centred material masses in movement) was due more to the historically prevailing thought-forms than to the real character of the phenomena. True, the mechanical domain is the one in which the centric element predominates, even as the peripheral and cosmic predominates in forms of life, so delicate and tender as to give an “ethereal” impression, to which we testify in our description o them. Yet the mechanical, for all its gravitating weight and pointcentred thrust, could not exist without the peripheral forces inter-penetrating and sustaining it, just as the forms of life, however some heavy matter, however little, to receive and embody them. Deeper research into many things long known to physics tends to confirm what Rudolf Steiner said long ago to his scientific pupils: nothing in Nature is absolutely dead, utterly without the cosmic and ethereal forces to which life is due.

Everyone has no doubt at one time or another admired the pure form of mighty engineering structure such as the Forth Bridge, or the more delicate lines of a suspension bridge. The form is due to the statical and dynamic balance of forces which the engineer must understand if he is to build reliably and economically. Under its own weight and that of the vehicles it carries, the bridge is subject to thrusts and tensions which its materials must withstand at every moment. Pressures or tensions of many thousands of pounds to the square inch are there in the girders, the wire ropes, the “struts and ties”, of which the structure is woven.

The form of the bridge is there as a reality in outer space to be seen and photographed, to be remembered in a mental picture. The inner stresses are invisible, impalpable. Their presence is only known to us by experience—not least, by the painful experience of disaster when they are underestimated. And yet their mutual balance and interplay are governed, no less than the outward form, by mathematical and geometrical law, to the faithful following of which the beauty and harmony of the structure are largely due.

Now the laws determining the relationship of extensive and visible form on the one hand, intensive and invisible forces on the other – the laws themselves are an example of the geometrical principle of polarity, which in its full manifestation concerns the living interplay of the physical and ethereal in Nature. So geometrically clear are these laws that the practical builder or engineer can often dispense with lengthy calculations, solving his dynamic problems by the more imaginative methods of the draughtsman— the methods generally known as “graphic statics”. The most elementary example, indeed the starting-point of the whole theory, is illustrated in Figure 1.

On the left is a picture of three forces holding each other in balance. They might be forces of tension, for example, pulling ng three cords that are knotted together. To balance one another, three forces acting on one and the same material body (in this case, the knot) must have their lines of action meeting in a point and also lying in a plane: it is a thing we reckon on almost unconsciously in many actions. It is significant that point and plane occur together in this way at the very outset. Moreover, the relative intensities of the forces must be adjusted to the angles between their lines of action. Here is already a relation between outward form and unseen force.

In the figure the intensities are in the ratio of 7 to 5 to 4. For instance, it might be a weight of 7 lb. hanging vertically downward; in the same vertical plane it is held by two oblique cords in which the tensions—measurable, for instance, by means of spring balances inserted along their lengths—would be equivalent to 51b. and 41b. respectively. The mutual adjustment of relative intensity and out ward form is such that if, as in the right-hand picture, a triangle is drawn with its sides parallel to the lines of force, the visible lengths of the sides are exactly proportional to the intensities of the forces.

This so-called “triangle of forces” is, of course, only another form of the more widely known “parallelogram of forces”. It should be borne in mind that this truth, mathematically transparent though it is, could not have been arrived at by any process of human reasoning. (There are unfortunately text-books in which this is not made clear.) It is an outcome of experience and of deliberate experiment.

Here at the very threshold we encounter what pervades the whole of science, in so far as it has to do with the material world at all and is expressible in mathematical form. Most of our science is now imbued with mathematical and geometrical forms of thought. Part of this mathematical element is indeed an outcome of pure reasoning. We do not have to make experiments to convince ourselves that twice two are four, or that the theorem of Pythagoras about right-angled triangles is true. Pure thinking tells us all the truths we know in geometry and arithmetic (in which, of course, algebra and so on are included). The same applies when we bring into geometry an element of time, thinking for instance of velocities and forms of movement. Thus we may add to arithmetic and geometry a third branch of science—the science known, from the Greek word for movement, as ” kinematics “. It is the theory of movement in its purely formal aspect, apart from any question of the things moved or of the forces producing or resulting from the movement. These three, therefore:

Arithemetic Geometry Kinematics

are sciences which man brings with him, potentially at least, all ready-made in his own inner life when he begins to investigate outer Nature. Of course they are never perfectly developed. Indeed, what Nature shows him, the puzzles she presents, may often stimulate him to pursue them further. But what he does know of them at any given stage, he knows by dint of thought pure and simple; his certainty does not depend on outward observations.

In thinking about Nature and in his practical dealings with her, man is continually counting, doing mental calculations, putting two and two together, reasoning geometrically and kinematically. He feels the more at home in Nature, in that she answers to his reasoning and confirms it. But in the realm of her material entities and forces—living or unliving—he finds ever so much that he can know only by observation and experiment. The remarkable thing is that here too—in the inorganic world, and as biologists are finding, in the living too to a large extent—Nature is ordered by mathematical laws. But these laws are only known, to begin with, in an external, empirical way. We may be full of wonder when we discover these mathematical harmonies; we rely on them base our calculations on them, but we must be aware that ultimately we owe our knowledge of them to experiment and observation, not to our own unaided thinking power.

At the very threshold of mechanics we meet this contrast, in that the kinematical movements too are governed by a triangle- or pallelogram-law, exactly similar in form to that which holds for forces. If a man walks from port to starboard along the deck of a moving ship, his movement relative to the nearby shore is determined by a parallelogram construction. The truth of this, however, unlike the parallelogram of forces, is evident by the pure light of reason, whereas the other is only known by experiment, though when once known our mathematical and reasoning faculty takes hold of it, feels at home in it and relies on it in practice. Since forces have to do with a dynamic realm, we may contrast the three sciences italicised above with the science above with the science of

Dynamics.

Of this we may say that it opens the gateway to physics proper, whereas the former three can be pursued, as indeed were for thousands of years before the birth of modern science, in realms of pure philosophy and dialectic.

In the years 1919-21, shortly after the opening of the first Waldorf School at Stuttgart, Rudolf courses to scientists and science teachers. One of the very things he pointed out was that there is a threshold of consciousness between Kinematics and Dynamics. It is not that the behaviour of material masses, weights and kindred forces is so much less imbued with mathematical harmony than pure geometry and forms of movement; it is that human consciousness is differently related to the two.

Simple reflections show that the whole realm of matter and weight contains a power, potentially ever present to obliterate human consciousness—not perhaps the highest spiritual conscious ness of the seer, but the every-day consciousness of which the body is the instrument. In this respect, too, matter is akin to darkness, as indeed the great majority of materials are impervious to light. So, too, it has the latent tendency to darken the light of our consciousness. It exerts pressure on our body. If we run acci dentally into a wall or are hit by a falling stone, the localised pressure is intense and gives rise to pain, but if the pressure goes beyond a certain measure, it renders us unconscious. Broadly speaking, all that is of the quality of light tends to awaken consciousness; darkness and matter to reduce it.

The mathematical harmonies of the world reveal themselves in two directions. To one of these our thinking consciousness is. This includes number and the pure structure of space and time. The other, by which our thinking consciousness is darkened, contains the seemingly impenetrable ” reality ” of matter and of the ponderomotive (literally, weight-moving) forces. The difference ultimately has to do with the polarity of Thought and Will in man. Our thinking lives in the light of wisdom, but with thought alone we are powerless to affect outer reality. Our will takes effect through our body—the limbs and the metabolism—but is effective only by descending into depths of organic life to which our consciousness is mercifully asleep. If it were not so, we should probably be suffering the greatest pain!

Insight into the laws of physics lead to the conviction that the polarity which manifests as “Thought and Will” in man is also a key to the structure of the Universe, in so far as this is manifest in space and time. The structure of pure space as such is based, as we have often pointed out, on the polarity of centre and periphery, or point and plane. In this polarity it is clear enough that the centre is more akin to dark matter. The laws of physics pertain above all to point-centres—centres of mass or of gravity, centres of pressure and of percussion, electric and magnetic poles as ideal centres, also the centric entities of atomic physics. The periphery on the other hand, the plane with its quality of expansion, is more akin to light, though at the present stage of science this is admittedly less easy to explain in detail. But there is more to it than that.

As far as pure space is concerned, the point and the plane are both accessible to geometrical imagination; so also is the wonderfully wise polarity which prevails between them. Yet even the laws of physics, reaching across the boundary between thought and will, or between form and the matter that fills the form, or between movement pure and simple and the forces involved when real matter is being moved – these laws contain a like polarity on a deeper level.

In the world-structure there is not only polarity; there are polarities of polarities, polarities within polarities, polarities as it were in different dimensions of being, interweaving with one another. Space in its very structure contains the potentiality of spaces positive and negative, physical and ethereal, or, as Dr. Steiner also called them, ” space and counter-space “. Yet this is also the key to what goes beyond mere spatial form—to the real processes of the visible and tangible Universe, processes that involve both form and force. For these two elements are always there. There is the extensive form of the crystal, or of the path of a satellite, or of a vortex movement in air or water. And in all these, inasmuch as they are real things and not mere forms of thought, there are the deeply hidden intensive realities of force.

The polarity is not only spatial; it has to do also with Time – with past and future. For in the forces of the material world there is always a potentially creative and destructive quality; the future is arising from the play of forces. The forms on the other hand— the form of every rock, every crystal, every tree, every leaf in summer-time—are evidence of past activity. Our contemplation of the forms of the world, when we see them m the starry heavens or in primeval mountain-ranges, evokes feelings of awe and wonder, recalling the deeds of the wise Gods reaching into the present from the distant past. Where we encounter the active forces of the world, or with our deeds and decisions take a hand in them our selves, we enter the dark womb of the future. The forms of to-day are evidence of the forces of yesterday; the forces of to-day make or mar the forms of to-morrow.

That there is inner kinship between the polarity of form and force (or past and future) and that of centre and periphery in spatial structure, is indicated even in the primitive example of Figure 1. Since shape and proportion are unaltered by rotation, the triangle may equally we be drawn with its sides at right angles to the lines of force, as in Figure 2, which in its form suggests a centric and peripheral relation.

There is far deeper significance in this than might appear at first sight. We see the three lines of force diverging radially, while those of the triangle, the extensive lengths of which picture the relative intensities of the forces, form the periphery of a triangular plane field. In an engineering structure there will be a number of junctures at which three or more girders, for example, meet. At each of these the several pressures or tensions must be holding each other in balance. In drawing the triangle of forces (or, if the lines are more than three, the polygon of forces) for each of these, it is not necessary to begin again with a separate figure for each point. In the 19th century they devised what is known as ” graphic statics”, or more particularly the method of “reciprocal force diagrams”—a method constantly in use by architects and engineers to this day. The main structure of a bridge spanning a ravine, in the lower half of Figure 3, is taken from the article on bridges in the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica’, to this I have added the force-diagram above.

The downward arrows indicate equal weights, approximately localised at the joints; the upward-slanting arrows the supporting thrusts at the abutments on either side. (There has been no attempt to adjust the lengths of the arrows to the proportions of these forces.) The upper picture, with every line at right angles – as in Figure 2—to the corresponding line of the real structure (including also the lines of the external forces), is the force-diagram.

The length of every line in this diagram is proportional to the relative intensity of force—pressure or tension—along the corresponding line in the lower. Hence, if the weights to be borne, indicated by the downward arrows, and the directions of the sup porting thrusts are assumed, the magnitudes of the latter and of me stresses in all the girders can be directly measured, according to the freely chosen scale of the upper diagram. There are simple methods of telling whether the stress in any given member is pressure or tension—whether, in other words, it is acting as a “strut” or as a” tie ”

The “radial and peripheral” relation of the two diagrams – the one representing the visible structure, the other picturing the relation of its unseen forces-is evident among other togs from the lettering. In both diagrams we see the same letters – A to J; L, M, N, P,Q,R; and O. But while the letters in the lower picture have been assigned to the plane fields – triangular or otherwise – enclosed between the girders, or between these external forces which they must ultimately bear, in the upper picture fields B and C in the lower picture they are assigned to the points.

The girder, for example, forming the boundary between the fields B and C in the lower picture corresponds to the points B and C in the upper. The relative length of this to tells us the magnitude of the thrust in this girder. From the force-diagram we see at a glance which of the which of the girders are most important, bearing the main thrusts or tensions, and as, for example, AB or CD, for these are very short lines in the upper picture. That this is so is more or less evident to common sense when looking at the form of the bridge, indeed, the method translates into scientific precision what a practical man will often know and allow for instinctively.

But it must be remembered the diagram is true only for the given distribution of weights. These, ultimately, are the given thing; the raison, d’être of the bridge is to bear them. The symmetry of the diagram is due to the symmetry, not of the bridge as such, but of the distribution of weights we assumed. If a heavy lorry is standing on the bridge, say at the point between M and N, the thrusts at the abutments will have to change direction to unsymmetrical resultant weight. A new diagram will have to be drawn to show what happens then, and this will certainly be unsymmetrical. What is invisible and intensive (not the the lorry, but its weight, and the thereby altered stresses) in the real event becomes outward form in the thought-picture; any asymmetry in the former, not seen but known and felt, becomes visible and geometrical
asymmetry in the latter.

It will also be noticed that the outer forces (weights and supporting thrusts), bearing radially in upon the actual structure, correspond to the lines forming the periphery, the enveloping triangle in the upper picture. Now the astonishing thing is that the relation of the upper and lower pictures in Figure 3 is in essence mutual. We might have lettered plane fields in the upper, points in the lower picture. Rightly interpreted and adapted, the upper picture might be taken to represent an engineering structure (not perhaps a very useful one in this instance, but one of which a working model could certainly be made), with certain external forces acting on it. The lengths of the lines in the lower picture would then tell the relative stresses in the upper. It is for this reason that the force-diagrams are called “reciprocal”. What in the one picture is invisible and intensive force, the other translates into outward form; but if the latter were the real thing, subjected to forces which it holds in balance, the former by its visible pro portions would represent the unseen stresses in this one.

The relation of an engineering structure to its force-diagram, though not identical with, is very closely related to the point-plane of Projective Geometry. After the method had first been devised by practical engineers, notably by R.H. bow in England, its theoretical foundations were then worked out by two of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. One was Clerk Maxwell, famous for his work on electricity and magnetism—the man who first foretold on theoretic grounds the existence of radio waves. The other was a pure mathematician—Luigi Cremona, to whose influence it was largely due that Italy for nearly a hundred years and to this day has become one of the focal points in the development of the new Geometry. Maxwell and Cremona used quite different methods. Maxwell’s leading directly to the perpendicular representation, as in Figures 2 and 3; Cremona’s to the parallel in Figure 1, which is more commonly used in practice. Both men derived the method from pure Projective Geometry.

But the relation of these things—wrongly look down on by some idealists as “merely mechanical and earthly” – to the spiritual structure of the Universe to which Man belongs, goes even deeper. It is, as I have indicated, a polarity of “Light & Darkness” which in its spatial aspect becomes expansion and contraction or periphery and centre, and in its temporal the striving of the world between past and future. The one aspect serves the other; nothing reveals it more clearly than the laws of mechanics, restated and interpreted in the light of 20th-century knowledge.

Another instance shows in an amazing way how the ethereal spaces, not only the physical, are here implicit. The instance I refer to is when all the outer forces, acting upon a mechanical structure, converge upon or diverge from a single point. They need not be materially connected with it—the point may be hovering in mid-air—but the their lines of action, if produced, must meet in a single point.

A simple example is illustrated in Figure 4. The framework, like a steep pyramid turned upside-down, might be made of light inextensible rods, or of wires bearing tensions. Againthe arrows indicate the outer forces. The vertical arrow might indicate weight suspended via the framework by four slanting wires attached somewhere above. Though they are only the pyramid, these five outward lines, if produced, will meet in the single point inside, which has been marked. Given the form of the structure, including the actual direction of the four slanting lines from which it is suspended, the magnitude of the suspended weight will determine both the sustaining forces and the tensions in all eight edges of the pyramid. This will be so even if the form is quite unsymmetrical.

Again there are graphic methods by which this can be worked out. One such method nd engineer of the mid-19th century, Macquorn Rankine of Glasgow.¹ I shall not give it here, but shall relate what is in fact equivalent, and not a little surprising.

We know that there is such a thing as ” ethereal space “. The space we are familiar with is in fact determined by a unique plane—the “infinitely distant plane”. It is the infinite sphere of the heavens. Though infinitely far away and to naïve earthly feeling mere empty nothing, it is in fact the most essential factor deter mining all earthly forms, and, what is more, involved in the balance of all earthly forces. (These things are indicated in my Space and the Light of the Creation [Full book to be published on Aether Force soon … link will be posted here once published], among other writings.) ” Ethereal” or ” negative space ” is like this kind of space turned inside-out, with point and plane, inside and outside interchanged not only in location but in the quality of form and of the way we see and judge it. Every ethereal space—in real Nature these are legion²—therefore requires in the innermost a point, acting like a seed or focus, functioning as infinitude, even as the outermost and “infinitely distant” plane does in their physical space which is the natural one for human imagination so long as we are living in a physical body. To learn to imagine ” ethereal space ” is indeed one of the ways in which we can grow rather less exclusively dependent on the physical body in our consciousness and feeling of ourselves and of the Universe around us.

Looking now at the real structure pictured in Figure 4, suppose we imagine it from the aspect of the ethereal space determined by the inner point—the point of convergence of the outer forces. It is the same form as before, but we shall judge it in a different way. First, we must now include in it what we probably did not think of to begin with—namely, the very plane, far away out in the cosmos, which from the physical point of view we call ” infinitely distant”, but which is now just the reverse. With our imagination we are in it—it is, so to speak, the naturally given “home field” of our cosmos, from which as planewise entities we shall be starting on our inward journeys. To include this plane in our idea of the engineering structure is not as unrealistic as might appear at first sight. We will include it now. The pyramid-framework in Figure 4 is made of eight lines; it is the relative tensions in these eight lines that we are wanting to know, among other things. Produced in both directions to yonder cosmic plane, the eight lines will then give eight “infinitely distant” points – points of the kind which delighted the young Rudolf Steiner, one and the same in two opposite directions.

So far so good. Now return for a moment to Figure 4, as seen by “common sense” in ordinary space. If the outer lines are produced to meet in the point within, it will be seen at once that the eight edge-lines of the pyramid, their corners thus joined to the inner point, result in eight triangular plane surfaces, all of the meeting in this one point. Each of these triangles has an area. Add to these the areas of the five surfaces of the pyramid (four of them triangular, the top one square or quadrangular), and we have thirteen areas, whose proportions we might measure. Now thirteen is just the number of forces, the mutual proportions of which we would like to know. The number is the same, but these areas would certainly not tell us.

If, on the other hand, we return to our inside-out, “ethereal” space, we shall perceive that here, too , we have thirteen, not planes but points, namely, the eight points in the cosmic place, of which we spoke just now, and the five corners of the pyramid. Now in the ethereal space, compared to physical, everything is inside-out. That is what makes it seemingly so difficult; we have to overcome deep-rooted habits of thought; we have to change the quality of deep-rooted habits of thought; we have to change the quality of our spatial thinking. Here in effect it is not planes, it is points that contain the areas – areas which can be estimated and precisely measured. These are intensive areas; they are described by moving planes pivoting on the points in question and in their movement tending to envelop the “infinitude within”.

The points in which the eight edges of the pyramid meet the cosmic plane tell, by the areas the bear, the tensions in these several edge-lines. The areas are trihedral – bounded by three planes (of which the cosmic plane is one) meeting in the given point – just as the plane areas were triangular. Each of the five corner-points of the pyramid carries another “intensive area”; this gives the intensity of the outer force acting on the structure at this point. The thirteen forces are thus accounted for.

In the ethereal space the areas can be measure, and their proportion tells directly and exactly the proportion of the intensive and outwardly unseen forces in the thirteen lines of the structure. It is really so. What we do not see when looking at the form in the ordinary extensive way – namely, the relative intensities of force which the form none the less determines – would be directly perceptible to us if we could learn to see it in ethereal space just as naturally as we see the outward form in ordinary space.

1 Rankine; Miscellaneous Scientific Papers, London, 1881, p. 564.

2 How naturally the concept of ethereal space enables us to interpret the morphological phenomena of life, and in particular the spatial function of a seed or other centre of germinating growth, has been shown in the books The Living Plant (1949) [To be published on Aether Force soon] and The Plant between Sun and Earth (1952) [Read on Aether Force here: https://www.aetherforce.energy/the-plant-between-sun-and-earth-by-george-adams-olive-whicher-chapter-1 or download full book here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/136BgjiRxgfqdXEqM1N9A9PRLbwtQu6QW/view?usp=sharing],
written by the author in collaboration with Olive Whicher and published by the Goethean Science Foundation. See especially, in the latter work, § § 16 and 19. The coexistence of many formative spaces of this kind is surely no more surprising than the interpenetration, without mutual interference, of countless optical and other radiations, long since assumed by science and in its outcome familiar in everyday life.

Now we can train our thinking in this direction, and by scientific methods we can actually measure the “intensive areas” in question.

It is characteristic that all this depends on the mutual relation of one cosmic plane—the ” plane at infinity ” which we now have “to include in our idea of the structure—and one earthly point or focus—namely, the point towards which the outer forces are directed. When this kind of interrelation is understood, the cosmic outlook of the scientific and technical age will change. It will be seen that to have human intercourse with the great universe of space it is not necessary to try to do everything with our physical bodies, hurling ourselves outward by an exaggeration of earthly forces, as men are hoping to do with rockets, artificial satellites and space-ships. Ethereally, we are already out in those vast reaches. Our earthly instruments, too, are sustained from thence.

The amazing fact which I have just tried to describe is scientific proof of what was taught by Rudolf Steiner in the language of occultism—that the mineral kingdom, too, has its supersensible members, such as the ” etheric body”, but that these are always working inward from the distant cosmos; they are not gathered close into the earthly body as in a living or animate creature. Figure 4 is, of course, only a very simple example; what Rankine taught and I have translated into modern terms applies to any kind of polyhedral structure (it might be a dodecahedron, for example, nor need it be at all regular), at the corners of which external forces are acting so that all the lines of force converge upon a single focus. Nor is there any doubt that a like principle will apply to more continuous structures.

The kind of science which these examples indicate will no longer be so remote from Man. For it is clear that the type of relation between periphery and centre and between past and future, revealed in these laws of mechanics, is at least akin to what is true physically as well as spiritually in human life. We are too apt to think of the kingdoms of Nature like storeys of a house, one above the other. Think of them rather in a circle, or as the four points of the compass. Man is more nearly related to the mineral kingdom than is the animal, not less so. And it is in the most spiritual part of his being that he comes nearest to it. It is in the realm of the mechanical forces, working in and through his limbs, that his spiritual Ego lives and acts.

Without knowledge of this, even the repeated earthly lives of man will not be understood in a fully modern form. Primitive as it is, the relation in Figure 3 of the thought-picture to the intensive forces concealed in the dark matter of the bridge below embodies the same cosmic principle which is at work when—also by a “turning inside-out”—the limbs of one incarnation are transmuted into the head for the next. It is not the external aspect of the limbs, it is the inner forces working in them which undergo transmutation. These inner forces are the gravity and other mechanical forces of the Earth-planet, which in the limbs of man come into the sphere of human responsibility. According to how he uses them, so will his faculties of thought be formed next time he comes to Earth. The metamorphosis from darkness to light from intensive and concealed to extensive and manifest, is then no longer a mere diagram; a mere thought-form; it is reality. feature and character, the given destiny of life.

“Celestial mechanics” in the 18th century carried earthly thought-forms far away out in the cosmos. Slowly, by dint of honest scientific work all through the 19th century and on into the present, these earthly thought-forms have been changing-changing in such a way as to awaken the human mind to the truly cosmic aspect of the Earth itself. Perhaps we are at the threshold of a new kind of earthly and celestial mechanics. It will be more than mechanical; it will speak a human language. It will contribute to a communion with the cosmos which the new generation of our time is intuitively seeking.

Goethean Science Foundation, Clent, Worchestershire. August, 1958

Editorial Note: Mr. Adams hopes to write a sequel to this a to this article for next years Golden Blade (1960).

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