Fourth Lecture

So, in explaining the natural order, today's scientific trend, as it were, takes no account of that which is temporally apart, placing it side by side and thereby arriving at its abstraction. There the temptation is particularly great to simply place one thing next to the other: cause, effect; cause, effect; cause, effect – an abstract, illusory causal order! We know from the presentations that I gave you here last year and also already this year that you cannot look at nature in this way, that nature can only be explained if you look at it primarily as a reflection of a spiritual being. That is when you come to the true metamorphosis, that is when you come to real Goetheanism. In this way, the human head appears as an education that depicts the distant past; the organism of the extremities appears as that which points to a distant future. But what stands in the individual is not just next to each other according to causes, but it is imagination, an image of what stands behind it. We do not understand the human head if we understand it only as if it grew out of the rest of the human organism, whereas in truth it is formed out of the whole cosmos, and out of the cosmos in a different way than, for example, the organism of the extremities. In physics, everyone would find it ridiculous if someone were to explain that a magnetic needle always points north because it has the inner power to point north; instead, the explanation is that the cosmos, i.e., the earth's magnetism, is the guiding force for the magnetic needle in one pole and the other. Only in the case of humans or other organisms should everything grow out of itself in a straight line! Just as the magnetic needle points to the north for cosmic reasons on one side and to the south on the other, so man, for reasons of cosmic time, points with his head backwards into primeval, distant pasts, even into pasts in which the earth itself was metamorphosing, and he points with his limb organism into primeval, distant futures. He is temporally and cosmically oriented. And that will be the formation of the doctrine of metamorphoses, that is real Goetheanism: rising from the mere illusory causal order to the conception of nature through imagination. By recognizing that which one has before one as an image of another, one rises above mere illusion.