VI. The Present State of Philosophy and Science

— all these formulas apply to our immediate circumstances —, with these concepts he turns to absolute mechanics. In the ascent of his scientific system, Hegel has gone through the process from so-called finite mechanics to absolute mechanics, which he applies to the movement of the heavenly bodies. The formulas change so much that the formulas obtained from the steam engine, from our ordinary thermal conditions in the Helmholtz sense, simply cannot be applied to processes that involve larger spatial entities. But to even grasp such a thought, to grasp the possibility that one can ascend from a finite mechanics to an absolute one, requires an internally self-directing logic, which was precisely what 19th-century philosophy and Karl Rosenkranz lacked. For, despite all his objections, there is a strong and constant suggestion to which he is also subject, and which emanates from the overwhelming natural scientific conceptions of the 19th century. They suppress much thinking. To pierce through these natural scientific conceptions, one really needs self-directing thinking. I could easily prove that the correct understanding of the law of the so-called conservation of matter, which plays such a great role, is only possible if one knows the inner structure of thinking. I could show that this law, as it exists in physics today, is nothing more than a projection into space of one's own laws of thinking, whereby thinking still works with blunt weapons. Here we see what we know today in the field of spiritual science: that in higher spheres what appears to us objectively is what is within ourselves — I am not even talking about the conservation of energy — that in a broader sense what I myself have now stated with regard to the conservation of matter still applies. Thus we see how, through the suggestion of scientific findings, in contrast to which one should remain on purely factual ground, in this field the human element of thinking has proved dull, because philosophy was not in a position to pierce the cover that is formed not from scientific fact-finding, but from the interpretation of the facts that have been researched. Spiritual science is fully grounded in the facts of natural science. I would consider it one of the greatest shortcomings of spiritual science if it did not want to go hand in hand with genuine research into the facts of natural science. But the interpretation of the facts is something else. When natural scientists tell us what they have established in the laboratory as facts, then we must gratefully accept their findings. We are then accepting the utterances of nature itself, and to deny them would be to succumb to nonsense. If we do not surrender to them, then we show that we have no sense of truth. But if we were to take the so-called monistic considerations and let them impose themselves as facts, then we would be taking the opinions of men as facts. This happens, however, because the opinions of men have insidiously, I might say, crept into popular literature, but no one is to blame for this but fanatics. For twenty cents we can get not only scientific facts handed down to us, but also the opinions that appear as if they were facts, underlined in such a way that if a person does not believe in them, he does not believe in the scientific results. But one can hold on to the latter and still say that the interpretations are nothing more than interpretations made by blunt thinking weapons.