6. Goethe's Way of Knowledge

On the one hand, theology demands the blind subjection of thinking to the statements of the church; on the other, science demands blind subjection to the statements of sense observation. Here as there, independent thinking that penetrates into the depths counts as nothing. The science of experience forgets only one thing. Thousands and thousands of people have looked at a sense-perceptible fact and passed it by without noting anything striking about it. Then someone came along who looked at it and became aware of an important law about it. How? This can only stem from the fact that the discoverer knew how to look differently than his predecessors. He saw the fact with different eyes than his fellow men. In looking, he had a definite thought as to how one must bring the fact into relationship with other facts, what is significant for it and what is not. And so, thinking, he set the matter in order and saw more than the others. He saw with the eyes of the spirit. All scientific discoveries rest on the fact that the observer knows how to observe in a way governed by the right thought. Thinking must naturally guide observation. It cannot do so if the researcher has lost his belief in thinking, if he does not know what to make of thinking's significance. The science of experience wanders helplessly about in the world of phenomena; the sense world becomes a confusing manifoldness for it, because it does not have enough energy in thinking to penetrate into the center.