VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

But now we ask ourselves: how is it that, after it was believed that Hegelism had been done away with, 19th-century thinking in all civilized countries could not rise to such a philosophical processing of the thinking in our subject of knowledge – how did that come about? It is not my intention to go into the profound cultural-historical reasons for this — I do so in some places — but today I would like to remain in the realm of purely philosophical characterization. This is because facts have taken place, that anyone who has attentively followed the course of intellectual life in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s cannot fail to notice how, basically, only in one single area of intellectual development in the 19th century has thinking itself remained strong, while everywhere else it has become too dull to draw the conclusions that lie within itself. Only in one single field does the science of the nineteenth and early twentieth century demand the greatest respect even from the strict thinking of the spiritual scientist, and this is none other than mathematics. Everything that has been achieved in the field of mathematics bears the traces of sharp, penetrating thinking. Therefore, even those who, for example, did their scientific theoretical studies in theoretical physics and chemistry towards the end of the 19th century could feel that it was not the mathematicians' fault that complicated formulas were handed down to them, which they had to complete when they approached, for example, the theory of heat, the vibration theory, the Clausius theory, and so on. If you had gone through that, had a philosophical mind, you had the feeling: it's not the mathematicians' fault — mathematics had become a wonderful instrument for working out everything in finely chiseled systems; but the intellectual weapons were blunt. So when you worked with mathematical formulas in the various fields of physics and chemistry, you could have the feeling that as long as you remained purely within the mathematical, you felt secure everywhere, but as soon as you came to the philosophical characteristic of what you were actually calculating, the ground was shaky everywhere. Thus he proved himself to be out of touch with the minds of those who spoke philosophically at the time. There was no sense of anything other than the purest philosophical dilettantism, which was particularly evident when natural scientists began to philosophize, as for example Da Bois-Reymond did in his “Seven World Mysteries” or in his lecture “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”. But that has not improved. So we may say: We have experienced the peculiar phenomenon that the thinking, as it must necessarily be demanded of spiritual science, has remained strong and exact only within mathematics. — The strict demands on thinking are not satisfied today in any other field of research — the strict demands that we make from the spiritual-scientific point of view — than in the mathematical field.