Human Knowledge and Its Significance for Man and the Cosmos

In order to answer this question we must think about what has been said in many lectures on the subject of the nature of cognition, of knowledge, of truth, of wisdom. In the ordinary way we imagine that the only purpose of the knowledge we acquire is to enable us to have mental pictures of the external world, to know something about the external world. There are philosophical psychologists who are constantly bringing forward theories about the mysterious connection that exists between the nature of a concept or an idea and the object that is pictured by the idea. These theories all suffer from one common error. I can only make this error clear to you by means of a picture. Suppose a botanist or an horticulturist wished to make investigations into the nature of a grain of wheat. He would probably say to himself: ‘I will use chemistry and investigate the grain of wheat from the point of view of the food-value of wheatmeal. I will try to find out the constituents that are required for man's nourishment.’ He would, in other words, be investigating the nature of the grain of wheat from the point of view of wheat as a means of nourishment. He would be trying to discover the reason why certain constituents are contained in the wheat. Anyone who imagines that it is possible to find out something about the real nature of wheat by investigating to what extent it is valuable as a foodstuff, would be making a curious mistake. A grain of wheat comes into existence in the whole sphere of plant life as the fruit of the wheat-plant and we can only discover why the nature of the grain is as it is, by studying the process of the growth of a new wheat-plant out of the grain. The fact that a grain of wheat contains constituents of nutritive value for the human being, is an entirely secondary consideration so far as the real nature of the grain is concerned. Those who look at everything merely from the utilitarian standpoint and want to make this the essential aim of science will investigate the grain of wheat from the chemical point of view and find that here we have in Nature something that is of value as a foodstuff. But this has nothing whatever to do with the innermost purpose of the grain of wheat. If it were possible to ask the grain of wheat what its innermost and primary purpose is, it would not answer that it is there in order to nourish human beings but rather in order to make it possible for a new wheat plant to come into existence.