Lecture IX

Many things, and here again I make a somewhat paradoxical statement, become manifest when we learn rightly to read what is often considered least significant. After all, this (here the letter i was first written on the blackboard without a dot, and later a dot was placed over it) is the principal part even of the material substance of this letter, but only the dot makes it the letter i. Consider how much less this dot contains than the other part even though it is the dot that makes the letter. The person who clings only to the material element in the evolution of humanity will also frequently see even in the material only what contains a hundred times as much as the dot and will fail entirely to see the dot. But one who observes more closely, who does not merely stare at the phenomena but reads them, will often learn to read things in the right way when a delicate suggestion is made. It is astonishing that in a biography of James Watt you will find mention of the following fact; I shall refer to it in a way that will seem utterly insane to every modern and intelligent person. But of course, you yourselves must first understand the interpretation of this fact. Watt could not at first accomplish what he intended through his invention, his steam engine. You see, its development stretched from 1712 to 1769. When once a man has invented something, others, of course, imitate it again and again. Thus much was constructed between these two dates. When Watt had finally made his machine really workable by means of other improvements, he had used a contrivance in it for which someone else held a patent; because of this, he could not proceed until he had thought out something different to replace it. He then discovered what he needed in a strange way. He was living, of course, in an age in which the Copernican view of the world had long been held, which I have characterized as something suitable for the spirit of our age alone. It actually occurred to him to construct his mobile apparatus in such a way that he could call it the “movement of the sun and the planets.” He spoke of it thus because he was really guided by what is conceived in the Copernican system as the revolution of the planets around the sun. He had actually brought down and concealed within the steam engine what had been learned in the modern age as the movement of the heavenly bodies.