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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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324a. The Fourth Dimension (2024): On Higher-Dimensional Space 22 Oct 1908, Berlin

Rudolf Steiner
Just as one [piston] movement disappears when the opposite [piston movement] occurs, so the [molecular movement underlying the sensation] is extinguished by the opposite [molecular movement]. What happens when one piston movement extinguishes the other?
325. European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century: Lecture I 15 May 1921, Dornach
Translated by Harry Collison

Rudolf Steiner
About the middle of the century a very radical change came about in the development of thought. The mode of thinking and outlook of men underwent a metamorphosis. People began to ask questions about the nature of the impulses underlying social life in the past and present.
The two concepts had become practically synonymous. And above all there was no understanding of the meaning of ‘original sin.’ Let me now try to describe the idea men had of original sin before the days of the fifteenth century.
From birth until death the organism of the human being is permeated by forces of soul. And when we understand the nature of the laws and forces at work in the human organism, we know that they are not to be found in outer nature.
325. European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century: Lecture II 16 May 1921, Dornach
Translated by Harry Collison

Rudolf Steiner
And if you want to understand figures such as Jacob Boehme, who came later, Paracelsus and many others, then you must bear in mind that they sprang from people who had developed without any understanding of the Latin culture which passed over their heads, but who were in a certain way steeped in Orientalism.
And the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are primarily under the influence of thought born from out of the ancient Gothic Germanic way of life, clothed however in Roman formulae, in grammatical, rhetorical formulae.
We see how everywhere spirituality is driven back, how agnosticism becomes the formative reality. It is thus that we have to understand modern spiritual life. We shall only understand it aright if we follow its origin from the fourth century A.D.
325. Natural Science and the Historical Development of Humanity: Lecture I 21 May 1921, Stuttgart
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

Rudolf Steiner
He has emphasized the fact that, with our modern ideas, we can only go as far back as the Romans. Generally speaking, we can understand them, we can grasp with modern ideas what transpires with the Romans. If we go back however to the Greeks we see that already Pericles, Alcibiades, even Socrates or Plato, Aeschylus or Sophocles are shadowy beside our modern understanding; there is something foreign about them, if we approach them with modern ideas.
But this is only valid if we have so taken up the present mode of thought and condition of spirit that we are able to understand these as soul content. Quite different is it if we adopt the methods which to-day are alone purposeful.
I will give an instance and one will see how such details are to be understood on the basis of these general moods. The Chaldeans had fundamentally a highly developed astronomy.
325. Natural Science and the Historical Development of Humanity: Lecture II 22 May 1921, Stuttgart
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

Rudolf Steiner
There exist side by side on earth civilizations of different ages. One must go far back in time in order to understand modern Indian civilization, not so far back to understand the civilizations and literature of Western Asia, still less far back for the Egyptian and again still less to understand the Greco-Roman culture.
We have got to transcend a great crisis. And we can only understand the nature of this present crisis if we understand it in the light of a deep comprehension of human evolution. Together with this we will understand how a spiritual Science arises from out of Natural Science. This can only be understood through being able to grasp it from out of the entire spirit of human evolution.
325. Natural Science and the Historical Development of Humanity: Lecture III 23 May 1921, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
The emergence of Christianity has a profound significance for the later emergence of natural science. But this significance can only be understood if we first ask ourselves: Whatever it was that came into the world through Christianity, it could only understand the world of that time from its own ideas.
In the south, the most educated part of the population convulsively moved towards the supersensory, towards the imageless, towards merging with the soul in the All-One, in order to arrive at understanding. There, the further development of understanding, even in language, was fueled by the dead language of Latin.
This prepared the way for what led the human being who had come to understanding, that is, to his inwardness and then to the consciousness soul, in which he had only the shadow of understanding, back to what he had lost from mind: to nature.
325. Natural Science and the Historical Development of Humanity: Lecture IV 24 May 1921, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
Even if modern science believes itself to be independent, it is still under the influence of the dictate of the Church that man consists only of body and soul and has no spirit.
I have already mentioned that it was understood in the way that it could be understood by one or other school of thought. But today we are compelled to understand it anew. For a time it was understood in such a way that people did not want to admit that the intellect, going out into the void, could come to a new spiritual realization.
326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture I 24 Dec 1922, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth

Rudolf Steiner
As I said earlier, Nicholas probably understood himself quite well, but a latter-day observer finds him hard to understand. This becomes particularly evident when we see this defender of absolute papal power traveling from place to place and—if the words he then spoke are taken at face value—fanatically upholding the papistical Christianity of the West against the impending danger of a Turkish invasion.
Earlier, it had been in an embryonic state. Whoever wants to understand what led to the birth of Western science, must understand this century that lies between the Docta Ignorantia and the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. Even today, if we are to understand the true meaning of science, we must study the fructifications that occurred at that time in human soul life and the renunciations it had to experience.
326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture II 25 Dec 1922, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth

Rudolf Steiner
This backward glance into ancient times is necessary so that we can better understand the quest for knowledge that surfaced in the Fifteenth Century from the depths of the human soul.
He no longer heard anything original, anything gained by listening to the secrets of the cosmos. This man undertook long journeys and visited other mystery centers, but it was the same wherever he went. Already in the Eight Century B.C., only traditions of the ancient wisdom were preserved everywhere.
326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture III 26 Dec 1922, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth

Rudolf Steiner
If the character of scientific thinking is to be correctly understood, it must be through the special way in which man relates to mathematics and mathematics relates to reality.
Hence, proper mysticism was inwardly experienced in what is generally understood by this term; whereas mathesis, the other mysticism, as experienced by means of an inner experience of the body, as yet not lost.
Only in this way, out of the truly human element, can one understand what actually happened, what had to happen in recent times for science—so self-evident today—to come into being in the first place.

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