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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture IV 30 Sep 1920, Dornach
Translated by Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber

Rudolf Steiner
We were able to show how Goethe, in establishing his mode of phenomenology, always strives to find the archetypal phenomenon while remaining within the phenomena themselves and that his search for die archetypal phenomenon that underlies complex phenomena is, inwardly, the same as the mathematician's search for the axiom underlying complex mathematical constructs.
At that time I sought to make two points absolutely clear, but at that time they were hardly understood. I tried above all to make clear that the most important thing about following such a cognitional path is the inner “schooling” [Erziehung] that we undertake.
We must renounce everything that would lead us to ethical content obtained according to the method of natural science; this ethical content must come forth freely out of super-sensible experience. I ventured to use a term that was little understood at the time but that absolutely must be posited if one enters this inner realm and wishes to understand freedom at all.
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture V 01 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber

Rudolf Steiner
Today it will be necessary to come to terms with a number of things that actually can be understood only if one is able to overcome certain prejudices that have long been cultivated and zealously inculcated right up to the present day.
On the other hand, I have shown you that if one wishes to come to an understanding of consciousness, one must not attempt, as Anglo-American associative psychology does, to penetrate into consciousness with ideas and concepts called forth by the natural world.
They intrude themselves especially strongly in individuals with healthy, or even conspicuously healthy, organizations—in individuals who have an open mind and a certain understanding for the manner in which modern scientific thinking proceeds. They experience modern science in this way, so that they cannot understand at all how such questions arise unconsciously thereby.
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture VI 02 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber

Rudolf Steiner
Just look at the relevant literature from the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries to see how human beings strove to understand what capital actually means within the social process, to see how that which human beings strove to understand in concepts has passed over into frightful struggles in the external world.
The impoverished concepts of barter and purchase, products of a discipline that fails to recognize the limits of natural science, shall never prove adequate to an understanding of commodities. Commodities, the products of human labor, exist in the relationship between several individuals, and if a solitary man undertakes to understand commodities “as such,” he is on the wrong track. Commodities must be understood as a function of the socially contracted majority of human beings, of association. Commodities must be understood in terms of association; they must exist in association.
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture VII 02 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber

Rudolf Steiner
Hence the precautionary measure strictly applied within the Eastern schools of wisdom: the neophyte was placed under an authority, but not any outward authority—fundamentally speaking, what we understand by “authority” First appeared in Western civilization.
Such people believed that through such a condensed version, in which everything occurs only once, they would gain a true understanding of what the Buddha had actually intended. From this it is clear that Western civilization has gradually lost all understanding of Eastern man.
And at this point you will perhaps allow me to relate a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean. I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my book, Philosophy of Freedom.
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture VIII 03 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber

Rudolf Steiner
And I showed how it was initially attempted not to understand through the word what one's fellow man wished to say, what one wants to understand from him, but to live within the words.
Now we are in the right frame of mind for our souls to undertake in a healthy way what I described yesterday, if only very briefly, as the path leading into Imagination.
If one experiences to the full the images formed in the way described above, this is something entirely real, and one begins to understand that one is encountering within oneself the spiritual element that actuates the processes of growth, that is the power of growth.
The Boundaries of Natural Science: Foreword
Translated by Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber

Saul Bellow
Inanimate nature, we are educated to believe, will eventually become transparently intelligible. It will yield all its secrets under scientific examination, and we will be able to describe it with mathematical lucidity. After we have conquered the inorganic we will proceed to master the organic world by the same means.
It has transformed the earth. Nevertheless it seems incapable of understanding its own deepest sources. Scientific method as we of the modern world define it can bring us only to the Ignorabimus because it is powerless to explain the consciousness that directs it.
The scientific examination of the external world awakens consciousness to clear concepts and it is by means of clear conceptual thinking that we become fully human. Spiritual development requires a full understanding of pure thought, and pure thought is thought devoid of sensory impressions. “Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist, but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense perception.
322. Natural Science and Its Boundaries: Natural Science and Its Boundaries 02 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, Charles Waterman

Rudolf Steiner
Without this knowledge there can be no real understanding of the religious creeds of the West, for when all is said and done they stem from Eastern wisdom.
During the first Christian centuries, however, the ways and means of understanding what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha were drawn entirely from Eastern wisdom. It was with this wisdom that the fundamental event of Christendom was first of all understood.
And at this point it may perhaps be permissible to speak about a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean. I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
322. Natural Science and Its Boundaries: Paths to the Spirit in East and West 03 Oct 1920, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, Charles Waterman

Rudolf Steiner
I showed how the attempt was first of all made not to hear and understand through the word what another person wished to say, but actually to live in the words themselves.
The degree of specialisation required to-day will alone account for the fact that a great deal of philosophising goes on nowadays without the remotest understanding of mathematical thinking. Philosophy is fundamentally impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking.
But warmth, light and sound are not to be understood in a merely physical sense. Through our sensory impressions we are conscious only of what I might call outer sound and outer colour.
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture I 01 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
Certain groups of sciences which are now comprised under various headings and are permitted to be represented under these headings, in our ordinary schools, will have to be taken out their grooves and be classified from quite other aspects.
But it is impossible to arrive at any really penetrating view of this matter today, because in the circles where these things are discussed one would scarcely be understood, and where an understanding might be forthcoming these things are not talked of because they are not of interest.
The two belong together, for the one is only the image of the other. if you understand nothing of Astronomy, you will never understand the forces which are at work in Embryology, and if you understand nothing of Embryology, you will never understand the meaning of the activities with which Astronomy has to deal.
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture II 02 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
He has no possibility of applying his specialized knowledge and experience to spheres which may lie near to hand but which will only have been presented to him from certain aspects, insufficient to give him a deeper understanding of their full significance. If it is true, as will emerge in these lectures, that we can only understand the successive stages in human embryonic development when we understand their counterpart, the phenomena of the Heavens; if this is a fact—and it will turn out to be so—then we cannot work at Embryology without working at Astronomy.
Now there is another very remarkable fact which I will only indicate today, so that we shall understand each other about the aim of these lectures. I shall speak further about it in succeeding lectures.
Then we should have to form a connection between true Chemistry and the processes undergone by matter within man, just as we see a connection between Astronomy and Embryology, or between Astronomy and the whole human form—the threefold being of man.

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