The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences

GA 76 — 6 April 1921, Dornach

4. Organic Natural Science and Medicine

The field I shall be discussing today is so extensive – even if it is to be illuminated from only a single point of view – that what I will be able to give today can only be a few brief indications, and I would ask you to take this into consideration. The point is that in the progression from the inorganic natural sciences to the organic natural sciences — and then further to psychological and spiritual observation — on the one hand, the necessity of spiritual-scientific anthroposophical observation arises more and more, but on the other hand, as this progression continues, it becomes more and more apparent how what is called spiritual science here can have a fertilizing effect on the individual specialized sciences.

What has been said about the nature of mathematics and the nature of the inorganic natural sciences was not so much to suggest that spiritual scientific observation could somehow bring about a completely different way of treating them and, in particular, a different content from that already present in our current scientific understanding. From the lectures on mathematics and inorganic natural science that have been presented so far, you have been able to discern a certain underlying theme that has been hinting at how, in both mathematics and the inorganic, the beginnings of the approach to these sciences that is meant here, can be found everywhere, even if it goes unnoticed by most. You have seen how one must point to the transition from the analytical treatment of geometry to the synthetic treatment, and how one finds that if one does not stop at the formal, but moves on to a living grasp of what is actually present, then continuing along this path leads to imaginative observation. And then, when a purely mathematical consideration was presented, you saw how a certain more lively treatment of the problems should lead to what is to be thought in the mathematical and inorganic natural sciences as being correct in the anthroposophical sense. To a certain extent, we have immersed ourselves in these sciences and have sought in them the points of strength in the directions in which we should proceed. The only thing is that in these sciences one remains strictly within the objective approach, which is the peculiarity of present-day human consciousness, and that one does not need to arrive at anything other than a certain how in the treatment of this observation.

The same situation does not apply to the organic natural sciences, although something similar is also present here in another respect. When we speak today of mathematics, of inorganic natural sciences, of photometry, mechanics and so on, we have to point out the way of thinking that needs to be reformed, as was the case yesterday. In the organic natural sciences, however, one begins by pointing out not what is to be rejected, but what is to be included. This begins already within the world of facts itself. Nothing substantial can be achieved by a mere reform of the way of thinking.

I would first like to present a brief historical consideration to clarify how to proceed in this area in order to arrive at a fruitful view. We have already pointed out in our reflections that in the progressive development of humanity, only since the 15th century of the Christian era has there emerged what we call the special nature of our present consciousness. All earlier ways of looking at things were fundamentally quite different. It was only from the aforementioned point in time that humanity truly grasped that form of consciousness which, on the one hand, leads to the use of freedom, but on the other hand, by referring man back to himself, throws him into an abstraction through which he becomes, in a certain sense, alienated from reality in relation to the world of being. It is the approach that adheres only to external observations and their description, to the arrangement of tests, of experiments and observation of their results, that is, the answers that nature provides when questions are asked not only theoretically but practically, in the experiment.

What is applied by the powers of the soul, in that science comes into being in this way, is the combining power of the mind. This combining power of mind is, I might say, the great practical-scientific problem for the time being. It becomes so when one raises the question of its correct applicability. And this question of the correct applicability of the power of mind or of ordinary reason—in observation, in summarizing observations, in experimenting—this question arose particularly for Goethe. And anyone who delves into what actually became a problem for Goethe — you can read about this in my “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, which is now almost forty years old — will find that Goethe did not want the power of understanding or reason to be applied that it gives science an actual content, that one says something about existence as such out of the power of understanding or reason, so to speak, but rather that this power of understanding or reason is used only to think of the phenomena in such an order that one phenomenon explains the other. Then, by using one's understanding or reason, one has contributed nothing to what the phenomena themselves express.

If one wants to apply pure reason, then one must proceed without reservation to a pure phenomenology, that is, use reason only to look at a phenomenon purely, to do nothing but just to bring it to pure looking, and then to place the other associated phenomenon next to it; so that through this arrangement of the phenomena - which is then also carried out in practice in the experiment - the phenomena themselves are caused to explain each other. The intellect, then, has only an ordering, a real methodological significance, so to speak, but no qualitative significance. In the Goethean sense, nothing may emerge from it that says anything about being itself.

I believe that this is a precise definition of what Goethe saw as the use of the power of understanding, and that is also what the general consciousness of humanity has been striving for since the first third of the 15th century. It may be said that not everyone has yet learned to resign themselves to a certain extent when it comes to understanding, as Goethe wanted to do in his own research, even if he did not fully implement it everywhere. But unconsciously this way of life of the intellect lives in the striving for knowledge, out of which spiritual science wants to go forth, but in a different way than through the intellect.

And what I am saying now is obvious when one sees the progress that has been made in natural scientific thinking, say, from the beginning of the 19th century. I am not referring to the natural philosophers, but with the empirical naturalists, for example, with the likes of Johannes Müller, up to Mach or even to Poincare and the others, or to Fritz Mauthner, who is certainly not a naturalist.

Anyone who really wants to get an idea of what is at stake here must familiarize themselves with something that still played a certain role in the first half of the 19th century, but which was then completely abandoned around the middle of the 19th century, and which is now emerging again in scientific observation in a strange form here and there. This is the idea of the life force, what is called vitalism in scientific life.

If we go back to the idea of vital force that was held in older times, we see that the supporters of the existence of this vital force said to themselves: When we look at a thing of inorganic nature, we find in this thing of organic nature, we find all kinds of forces, thermal energy, light energy, electrical energy, and so on; but when we look at a being in the organic world, we find, in addition to these forces that constitute inorganic nature, the vital force, the life force. This life force is present in every living being, just as magnetic force is present in a magnet. It takes possession, as it were, of the inorganic forces in order to combine them and to produce effects from them that they cannot achieve on their own.

This vital force was given the final push to resign through the presentation of an organic substance in a synthetic way by Wöhler and Liebig, and it was abandoned as such in the second half of the 19th century. But in the so-called neovitalism, it has recently emerged from obscurity because certain thinkers have come to realize: If we apply the methods we have developed to explain the inorganic with the help of inorganic forces to the organic, then we will not get anywhere; we have to look for something else in the organic. And, I would like to say, with a clear echo of the old life force, something like this emerges again in neovitalism for the explanation in the organic sciences.

But anyone who really engages critically with what still appears as life force in Johannes Müller's work will find that there is something in this life force that cannot be grasped as a concept in reality. And I would like to say that, due to the impossibility of grasping life force as a concept, it died in the course of the 19th century in scientific observation. It could not be grasped. And why could it not be grasped? If we look very carefully at the organic-scientific methodology of the 19th century, we will see that those who wrestle with the idea of this life force find that they cannot do anything with it. What they want to do with it disappears as soon as they approach the phenomenon with their idea. They do not get to the root of the matter. The reason they do not get to it is that they do not clearly define the actual function of intellectual activity.

In our age, intellectual activity tends to look at only the phenomenon and place it alongside another phenomenon, so that one phenomenon explains the other. But this cannot be done with the life force. With the life force, if you want to do anything at all, you always have to push something into the phenomenon from the intellectual activity. You have to, as it were, insinuate something into the phenomenon. And therein lies the cause of the gradual disquieting doubt that arose in the use of the idea of the life force. This doubt was the reason why the idea was finally abandoned and why a certain ideal arose in the widest circles, namely to regard living beings as a confluence, a combination of those forces that also prevail in inorganic nature.

In other words, the idea of the life force has actually become a kind of changeling. It was decided to look for the constitutive element in the sciences only in the phenomenon. The life force did not emerge as a phenomenon. One had to construct the vital force from the intellect, which was actually not permissible in this age of human development. That was the negative part of the development in which we find ourselves today. For in neovitalism nothing vivid occurs. What neovitalism puts in the place of an explanation of life phenomena that combines only the inorganic is nothing more than a kind of rehashing of old vitalism. And one could say that in the outer workings of scientific life there is clearly a kind of reflection of what is actually going on in the inner life of the spirit. Today I can only point to this reflection in a few isolated phenomena. But anyone who can look at the phenomena that are close together in such a way that they shed light on each other will also see the truth of what I am talking about. Until recently, until the middle of the 19th century, what was retained from an older way of looking at things, what the concepts and ideas held back from it, still figured quite unattractively as philosophy. And I tried to at least hint at what was going on with this philosophy in my first lecture in this series. But in the second half of the 19th century, there were already some strange phenomena in the field of philosophical life.

We can see how a very conscientious thinker, who was just not able to think the problems he raised through to their conclusion – I have mentioned him here in recent days – how Franz Brentano called for the scientific method in philosophy. He was given nothing but the scientific method as it was customary in the present. In a sense, this provided the guiding principle for all those who no longer wanted to reflect on a particular intellectual method, but who submitted to the general authority of popular scientific thinking. But then there were other phenomena. At some faculties, where, let us say, old Herbartians were working, it came about that they left their chairs, and there were then faculties which did not appoint philosophers in the old sense to these vacant chairs of philosophy, but people who thought scientifically. This was the case, for example, in Vienna, where Mach, the naturalist, had to take up the chair of philosophy that had become vacant. This was still somewhat uncomfortable, and so they called the subject he had to represent “inductive philosophy,” and so they gave him the chair of inductive philosophy, but placed next to it a man — I hold this man in very high regard, but I am now characterizing cultural phenomena objectively, and so personal opinion plays no role here — who had previously been a professor of Christian philosophy at the theological faculty of the new university. This was a way of documenting that what should be in philosophy was not taken from some new way of research, but from the old tradition. And what took place there, I would say, in a certain striking way, is taking place again and again. Apart from the fact that people who think entirely in terms of natural science are brought to the psychological chairs and introduce an entirely scientific way of thinking into an area previously regarded as philosophical, we also see otherwise how people who think scientifically today function quite officially as the bearers of philosophy. In such phenomena, what I have to suggest here is also expressed externally: with what has emerged in recent times as the combining mind, which in its purity can only be applied as Goethe wanted it to be applied, nothing can be made out about the phenomena of life.

Here again is the point where honesty and impartiality of scientific thinking must be strictly demanded. And the methods that research with the help of external observation, external experiment, with the help of this combining mind, they can, if they are really critical with themselves, if they, out of their considerations, if I may say so, gain a full awareness of their own scope, can do no other than say: we are applicable only to the field of inorganic natural science; there we belong, there we can magnify the method; but we must not, without changing the whole meaning of the method, also change the content of the method, ascend into the field of organic natural science. That must remain untouched by this method.

Spiritual science must now speak from the other side. Spiritual science must say: There is also the possibility of a development of consciousness corresponding to the path taken by those forms of consciousness that had still blossomed before the 14th century. Just as these forms of consciousness have been developed into a purely objective consciousness that should not get stuck in phenomenality, so today, in order to take a scientific approach to the organic, it is necessary to develop inwardly through the soul to the other forms of consciousness: imaginative consciousness, inspired consciousness, intuitive consciousness.

For if the intellect is to come to terms with life phenomena, then, for the intellect, what takes place within the realm of life phenomena must become observation, must become phenomenon. It cannot do so within sensory observation. The intellect cannot become constitutive for a content of the organic natural sciences. The intellect must also behave combinatively there. But the intuition must be supplied to it. This intuition is supplied to it in imaginative cognition. In the training of imaginative cognition, as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, apart from everything else that can be said about it, the possibility is gained of breaking with the old vitalism, which has provided a changeling of conceptuality, and of replacing it with the imaginative intuition of life.

Of course, the tremendously cheap objection that can now be made comes to mind. It can be said: Well, yes, but we normal people only have this combining mind. There may be some oddballs who progress to imagination, inspiration, and so on. We won't question that, but we don't have it. Therefore, a philosophy applies to us that rejects these contents of imagination and so on, that does not concern itself with taking these contents of imagination, inspiration and so on into itself as philosophy. This cheap objection can be refuted in the following way. I will clarify myself with an example that I have often mentioned. If spiritual research simply takes the facts that are already available to empirical organic science today, then, for example, in the study of the human heart, one comes to quite different views than those that are still held in popular science due to a false, traditional use of the mind that has been preserved from ancient times. There the heart is regarded as a kind of better pump that drives the blood through the organism. This view is only accepted as the “correct” one for the human being if reason is applied to the human organism as a living being, which is not applicable to it. As soon as one rises to imaginative contemplation, one comes to say to oneself: It is not the heart that drives the blood through the veins of the organism, but the movement of the heart is the result of the inner life of the blood. It is the blood itself, which, from its own intense life, centralized in the heart, causes this movement, so that the movement of the heart is the consequence of the movement of the blood, and not the other way around. This follows directly from the imaginative observation of the human and then also the animal organism. Now, anyone who sets out to teach about the heart and the movements of the heart without this imaginative observation must, if he is honest, come to find in this approach something inadequate to be relied upon. And if he then excludes what he himself has recognized as inadequate in his explanation, but retains the empirical knowledge of the facts, the entire world of facts of the human and animal organism, insofar as this world of facts relates to blood movement and heart movement, if he summarizes everything – spiritual science never shrinks from a truly thorough and conscientious examination by others — of what can be gained from the field of present-day anatomy, physiology, biology, etc., and especially, in explaining this problem, of what can be gained from embryology, he will say to himself: Now, the one who stands on the ground of imaginative knowledge gives this explanation. I know the facts; if I honestly presuppose the result of imaginative knowledge and test my well-known facts by it, then it is completely correct and there is every desirable reason to accept what is gained through imaginative knowledge.

As soon as progress is conscientiously and honestly made in this field in the direction of the development of scientific consciousness, the excuse can no longer be made that anyone who does not have imaginative knowledge himself does not need to recognize this imaginative knowledge. Instead, the other must take its place, that one says: I know well the facts that present themselves to sensory observation, but an explanation only comes to me from the side of imaginative insight. I can make sense of this explanation. The facts are understandable on this basis; so all the conditions for acceptance are met. — And basically, anyone who rejects supersensible knowledge in this area for the reason just given does not show that he does not have a command of supersensible knowledge. After all, it has not yet reached the point where it can be easily mastered. Rather, he proves that he cannot correctly evaluate the facts available to him. He proves the lack of his insight into the world of facts gained through sensory-empirical means. And this is most often the case in today's approach to organic natural science. The approach that is necessary for organic natural science is the one that rises from mere objective knowledge to imaginative knowledge. For it is only in imaginative knowledge that the secret of life is revealed.

Starting from pure phenomenology, which he wanted to see applied in the theory of colours and sounds, for example, Goethe strove towards what he called morphology, towards grasping the process of formation. He only came to a certain degree of knowledge. What he inaugurated must be continued. One can see how he only got to a certain point: after his approach had been sufficient to a high degree, if not completely, for the unconscious plant kingdom, he had to stop when he wanted to move from the plant kingdom to the consideration of the metamorphosis of the animal kingdom. Look at the treatises he wrote in relation to the metamorphosis of the animal kingdom. You will see everywhere how he, as a conscientious person, stops because it does not go any further, because from a certain moment of this Goethean morphology, if one wants to go further, one must arrive at something even more spiritual than mere form: at what the consciousness with the world of feeling and will can grasp inwardly – now in inspired knowledge.

If we look at it this way, then we will see that the essential thing is the way we look at it, the way we look at it, the way we develop the methodology. And, as I said, I can only hint at it today. If we look at the development of the theory of evolution from this point of view, we find the following: First, the series of living beings is followed empirically from the imperfect, so-called imperfect monad up to man, and it is proceeded in such a way that one always imagines the more perfect emerging from the more imperfect. If one proceeds in a somewhat different way, as Haeckel did to a certain extent, then one constructs, at least in the ancestral line of present-day beings, those which are in turn fairly accurate copies of present-day creatures. The constructed beings of the distant past in Haeckel's old family tree have the very character of what lives today.

But what presents itself to the imagination leads to a completely different way of looking at it. And I will – because the limited time available demands it – only sketch out this approach: If one starts from the standpoint of the imaginative way of looking at things, then, for example, the human head in relation to the spinal column can only be properly considered by saying: This human head formation, however dissimilar it may be in its outer form to the spinal column in its present metamorphosis, can only be imagined metamorphically as a transformation of the spinal column. One has to think that the nervous organization of the spinal cord is transformed, metamorphosed into what appears to us as the brain, and that the enclosing bones, the vertebrae of the spinal column, are also transformed into what becomes the skull.

But now it is important to bear the following in mind. One must imagine that in a certain respect what I have drawn here as a circle, in contrast to the line a-b, is, so to speak, a puffed-up dorsal spine and points to what it once was in an earlier metamorphosis: itself something like a dorsal spine, but under different external conditions. What I have drawn as a circle has, in a sense, developed out of a-b. But what is now the dorsal vertebra of the human organism only joined it later. In the case of humans, this is the later formation. After the skull had reformed from an arrangement of forces that now appears in a slightly different way in the dorsal vertebra, this dorsal vertebra joined it. What is less developed in the human being is therefore what is later, and what is more developed is what is earlier. And if we proceed in this way, we are led back to an age in which the forces that form the human head were already present in a different metamorphosis, but not the forces that form today's human spinal cord.

If, however, we consider these latter forces, then they are the same forces that we encounter, for example, in the animal kingdom, where skull formation is a process that exhibits only a lesser transformation compared to the spinal column than in humans. So we have to say: what is present in the human head points us back to older times as the earliest formation than what then already occurred as a human being with the dorsal spine, and also than what is present in the animal kingdom. In evolution, we do not have to derive man from the animal kingdom, but we have to say that an interpretation of the facts themselves shows us that man is an older being than animals, that animals originated later and that in only achieved in their evolution what is also found in humans today in their later form as a dorsal spine, but because they had a shorter time available, they did not manage to develop the skull metamorphosis in the human sense.

If you develop this idea, which I can only sketch out here, you will come to a truly analogous understanding of the theory of evolution. The magnificent facts that are available, which one only needs to be fully aware of, become explicable when based on this imaginative insight. And from these assumptions, one then arrives at very definite relationships and connections of what is presented in external science to our earthly conditions.

Do you think that by pursuing this thought further, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship between man and beast? But one can also proceed in this way and learn to recognize how man relates to the plant kingdom and ultimately to the mineral kingdom, which one can grasp in its phenomenal context through observation, experiment and the combining intellect.

With such a way of thinking, one comes to truly understand man's relationship to his environment, just as one comes to understand, in a certain way, the relationships of the fields that lead us to mathematical judgments in mathematical science. One comes to develop more and more what Goethe had in mind as an ideal when he said that his primeval plant had to become something in the idea, with which one can recognitively place every single plant in its corresponding character before the soul. Just as one, when one has the general concept of the triangle, also knows what occurs in any particular triangle. This metamorphosis of human knowledge into organic knowledge is what Goethe had in mind as an ideal.

But now I would like to illustrate myself again with an example. If we start from this point of view, we come to really take a closer look at what takes place in the human head as functions, for example. We learn to recognize how the functions of the human head, by undergoing evolution in the way I have described here, are already in the process of regressing today, how they have become the human head from other states, but how a mineralization process is taking place in the human head today through external influences. And this mineralization process is the parallel phenomenon to our intellectual knowledge, which also only knows how to grasp the mineral physical, because it is bound to a mineralization process in the human nerve-sense apparatus. One becomes familiar with how what one accomplishes in intellectual cognition is paralleled by a mineralization process that builds itself into the organic of the human being as its physical vehicle, a settling of the purely mineral within the organic. By settling this mineral within the organic, one comes to do for the soul what intellectual activity is for this human being. One comes to really understand the inner connection between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily, not just to talk about it in abstract terms, as the “psychophysical parallelists” and similar phraseurs in the field of psychology do.

This is the way in which the present state of organic natural science can be pointed out as the path it must take. One cannot stop at demanding a particular way of thinking; one can only look for what is propelled in the empirical facts themselves, and one must really let another way of thinking take the place of the existing one, namely that of imaginative cognition.

But then one also comes to a truly fruitful application of this knowledge. If one seeks something in the external world that, when transferred to the external world, corresponds to what goes on in the human head as a process of mineralization parallel to intellectual cognition, then one finds outside in nature what takes place between the forces in the earth and what goes on in the root of the plant, and one finds the inner relationship between what is constituent in the root formation of the plant and what is constituent for what goes on in the human head.

In a similar way, we can then find relationships between, for example, what is going on in the herbaceous, leafy part of the plant and what is going on in the human rhythmic system, in the human organic. And we can find relationships between the functions in the flowering and fruiting part of the plant and what is going on in the human metabolic system, in the human sexual system, and so on. From this point of view, one can gain an overview of plant life.

If one knows how what I have called the mineralization process works in the human organism, so that this mineralization process takes place internally, in contrast to the external mineralization process, which also takes place in the upper part of the plant, then one notices the connection between what is going on internally in the main organization and what is going on in the root formation process, namely in what occurs as a mineralizing process in the root formation process. One also notices that in a certain way there is an opposition – despite the similarity, an opposition – as it expresses itself, for instance, when I have three and three, the one positive, the other negative. Then I have three times three, but there is still an opposition in it. Thus there is something that is the same in a certain respect and yet is opposed: in the internal mineralization process of the human head and in the external one of the plant root formation, and also in the external mineralization process of the earth planet itself. From here, the therapeutic connection between what is external and what is internal in the human being can be found in a rational way. And the transition can be found via pathology to rational therapy.

I can only hint at this last point here. Further information on this chapter will be given to those concerned, as it already happened in a spring course for doctors and medical students last year. But the important thing will be that it will be possible to give birth to real science out of spiritual science – which is not just theory, but a pointer to fruitful action, to deed.

Today, humanity is faced with the necessity, especially in the scientific field, of making not a small but a great decision: the decision to enter into organic life by not merely modifying the content of the old way of thinking to some extent, but by introducing a new element into this old way of thinking itself, the element of supersensible knowledge. What still stands in the way of this decision today for the majority of those who should make it, is not some defect in human cognitive ability, but a lack, an understandable lack, of courage for this strong, radical change. People would much rather suffer than move forward into the new. They would rather stick to the old and just reform it in some critical or other way.

But light will not come into what is available here for our present civilization in the field of knowledge until one has the courage to move forward from the way of thinking that is usual to a different way of thinking. As long as people content themselves with the excuse that 'one cannot achieve imaginative thinking after all', nothing useful will come of it. Only when people realize that they must not remain inert inwardly if science is to progress fruitfully in its approach will there be a change. One must become inwardly active and diligent. A decision of the will, not merely a theoretical consideration, is necessary here. And since, as every psychologist knows, mankind is more difficult to bring to decisions of the will than to theoretical considerations, in which one can remain quietly within, modern mankind has the opportunity to show how it rise from adversity to greatness by deciding to take a bold new approach, not to mention small considerations, in the fields of knowledge and the spirit.