VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

In 1856, a Hegelian, Karl Rosenkranz, spoke out against this lecture. He brought to bear all the weapons he could muster from the arsenal of Hegelian philosophy. And anyone who knows Karl Rosenkranz, the sincere, one might say warmly sincere Hegelian, a little better, knows that Karl Rosenkranz is not to be taken as lightly as one very often wants to take him. He brought up everything he could muster from the arsenal of the Hegelian school. So we have the other current there, namely the one that took place in the line of thought. This ran in this direction, as I wanted to show. What physical thinking has come to can be seen in Helmholtz; where philosophical thinking has arrived, in Rosenkranz. There we see that important objections are raised against the mechanical theory of heat. Rosenkranz criticizes Helmholtz for thinking only in terms of analogies. His law must be abstracted from the processes that take place in a clock, a windbox or other things. It is true for the steam engine that some of the living forces that we evoke are lost to the environment and cannot be brought back. As long as we start from such processes, I might say from all sides provided with finite surroundings, so long we cannot avoid the conclusion that such results are achieved as Helmholtz achieved in his treatise on the mechanical theory of heat. Karl Rosenkranz rightly points out that it does not follow that as soon as we go beyond the immediate conditions on earth, there would be no possibility that the heat radiated into space would have to be lost in the same way as with the steam engine. Completely different facts could be present. Today I cannot go into what spiritual science has to say when it comes to the theory of heat. That is where the safe ground lies, which I was able to characterize in the lectures I have now given on the biblical creation story. The Hegelian remained barren because he could not find the transition to this ground. So warmth remained for him nothing more than an inner tremor. Nevertheless, with the concepts that are simply given when one thinks in the strictly disciplined way of so-called finite mechanics, which only applies to the immediate environment, with all its formulas, including the formulas