Thirteenth Lecture
The course of development has been this way in these newer, in these most recent times: in what has been accepted as actual science, only those concepts have been formed with which one can comprehend external, dead nature. These concepts were quite unsuitable for grasping human life. But they wanted to use them to grasp human life. And so the official scientists applied these concepts to history, to social science, to social policy, and so on. But these concepts are not useful there, and so there is no useful concept for social life at all. As a result, the social life of the earth has become too much for people to handle, has become what it has become over the past four years. People will have to learn to condense their concepts and also to vitalize them.
Cite:
GA 174b/1918-02-24/p017 · edition English