{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 20/l05/p006-p009","extent":"range","passage_number":6,"through":9,"paragraph_count":4,"first_locus":"GA 20/l05/p006","last_locus":"GA 20/l05/p009","lang":"en","edition":"MP1990","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"title":"New Perspectives","date":null,"location":null,"alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["MP1990"]},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":2.15,"band":"fuller_than_original","note":"This witness is longer than the original — paraphrastic or padded. That makes it a less faithful witness to wording, not a more complete one. Verify quotations against the original.","word_count":11574,"original_word_count":5381,"may_be_abridged":false},"site_heading":null,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05/p006-p009","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05/p006-p009.json","lecture_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05#p006","word_count":2062,"quote_safe":true,"passages":[{"passage_number":6,"locus":"GA 20/l05/p006","text":"Through its results in a certain direction, this natural scientific way of picturing things has demonstrated the efficacy of its cognitive means. One can already find this way of picturing things essentially prefigured in a thinker who was at work when its development began—in Galileo. (In his vice-chancellor's address to the Vienna University in 1894, the Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Laurenz Müllner discussed the significance of Galileo in the most beautiful way.) What was already indicated by Galileo reappears, in an evolved state, in the directions taken by the research of the adherents of the modern natural-scientific way of thinking. This way of thinking has attained its significance by letting the world phenomena arising in the field of sense observation speak purely for themselves, within their own lawful interconnections, and by wishing to allow nothing of what the human soul experiences from these phenomena to flow into what this way of thinking admits as knowledge. No matter what view one might hold about the natural-scientific picture of the world—whose fulfillment of the above cognitive demand is already possible or even achieved today—this cannot detract from one's recognition that this demand provides a sound basis for a valid picture of natural existence. If the adherent of an idealistic or spiritual-scientific world view takes a negative stance toward this demand today, he shows by this either that he does not understand the meanings of this demand, or that something of a natural-scientific way of picturing things are under the misconception that through such a world view something or other of the results of natural science is called into question.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":268,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05/p006","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":7,"locus":"GA 20/l05/p007","text":"To anyone who penetrates into the true meaning of modern natural science, it is clear that this science does not undermine knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather supports and ensures it. One will not be able to arrive at this clarity, however, by imagining oneself, through all kinds of theoretical arguments, to be an opponent of a knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather by turning one's gaze upon what makes the natural-scientific picture of the world sensible and meaningful. The natural-scientific way of picturing things excludes everything from what it studies that is experienced through the inner being of the human soul. It investigates how things and processes relate to each other. What the soul, through its inner being, can experience about things serves only to reveal how things are, irrespective of these inner experiences. This is how the picture of purely natural occurrences comes about. This picture will in fact fulfill its task all the better, the more it succeeds in excluding this inner life. But one must now consider the characteristic traits of this picture. What one presents to oneself in this way as a picture of nature—precisely in the case where it fulfills the ideal of natural-scientific knowledge—cannot bear within itself anything that could ever be perceived by a human being nor any other soul being. The natural-scientific way of picturing things must provide a picture of the world that explains the relationship of natural facts but whose content would have to remain unperceivable. If the world actually were as pure natural science must picture it, then this world could never arise within a consciousness as a content of mental pictures. Hamerling is of the opinion: “Certain oscillations of the air produce sound in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it.” Hamerling is wrong, because he has not grasped the determining factors of the natural-scientific picture of the world. If he did, he would say: When a sound arises, natural science must picture something that would not sound even if an ear were there ready to hear it sound. And natural science is acting correctly in this. In his lecture, “The Limits to Our Knowledge of Nature” (1872), the natural scientist, Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself quite aptly on this subject: “Silent and dark in itself, i.e., without any qualities” is the world for the view—gained by natural-scientific study—which, “instead of sound and light, knows only oscillations of a primal substance, without qualities, that has turned into weigh able matter here and into unweighable matter there”; but to this he adds the statement: “God's words in Moses' depiction—‘Let there be light’—are physiologically incorrect. Light first came into existence when the first red ‘eyespot’ of an infusorian [euglena] distinguished light from darkness for the first time. Without optical and aural substance this world around us, glowing with color and filled with sound, would be dark and silent.” No, this second statement cannot be made by someone who in fact understands the full implications of the first. For, *this* world, whose picture is correctly sketched out by natural science, would remain “silent and dark” even when confronted by optical and aural substance. One fools oneself about this only because the real world, from which one has gained the picture of a “silent and dark” world, does not actually remain silent and dark when one perceives in it. But I should no more expect this picture to correspond to the real world than I would expect the portrait of a friend to step out of his picture as a real person. Just look at the matter from all sides, without preconceptions, and you will certainly find that if the world were as natural science depicts it, no being would ever experience anything about it. To be sure, the world pictured by natural science *is* there, in a certain way, within the reality from which man perceives his sense world; but lacking in this picture is everything by which it could be perceived by some being. What this way of picturing things must posit as underlying light, sound, warmth does not shine, sound, or warm. Only by experience does one know that the pictures arrived at by this way of thinking were drawn from something shining, sounding, warming; one therefore lives in the belief that what one pictures is also something shining, sounding, and warming. This mistaken belief is the most difficult to penetrate when one is dealing with the sense of touch. There it *seems* to be enough that something material—precisely as something material—is spread out around us and, through its resistance, stimulates a tactile perception. But something material-spatial can also only exert pressure; the pressure, however, cannot be *felt*. What *seems* to be the case deceives us here the most. But one does have to do in fact only with what seems to be the case. What underlies tactile sensations also cannot be felt by touch. Let it be expressly stated here that we are not merely saying that the world lying behind sense impressions is in fact different from what our senses make out of it; we are emphasizing that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must think of this underlying world in such a way that our senses could make nothing out of it if it were in actuality as it was thought to be. From observation, natural science draws forth a world picture that through its own nature cannot be observed at all.[^1]","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":924,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05/p007","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":8,"locus":"GA 20/l05/p008","text":"What we are dealing with here came to light in a world historic moment of spiritual evolution: When Goethe, out of the world view of German idealism that lay in his whole nature, rejected Newton's color theory. (For nearly three decades, the present writer has sought in various writings to draw attention to this decisive point in the assessment of Goethe's color theory. But what he said in an 1893 lecture in Frankfurt's “Independent German Academy” still holds good today: “The time will come when even for this question the scientific prerequisites for an understanding among scientists will be present. Today, precisely the investigations of physics are heading in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking.”)","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":117,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05/p008","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":9,"locus":"GA 20/l05/p009","text":"Goethe understood that Newton's color theory could provide a picture representing only a world that is not luminous and does not shine forth in colors. Since Goethe did not involve himself in the demands of a purely natural-scientific world picture, his actual opposition to Newton went astray in many places. But the main thing is that he had a correct feeling for the fundamental issue. When a person, by means of light, observes colors, he is confronting a different world from the only one Newton is able to describe. And Goethe does observe the real world of colors. But if one enters a realm such as this—whether of colors or of other natural phenomena—one needs other ideas than those depicted in the “dark and silent world” imagined by the natural-scientific way of picturing things. In this picture, no reality is depicted that can be perceived. *Real* nature simply does in fact already contain within itself something that cannot be included in this picture. The “dark world” of the physicist could not be perceived by any eye; light is already spiritual. Within the sense-perceptible the spiritual holds sway.[^2] To wish to grasp this spiritual with the means of natural science is committing the same error as someone who demands of himself as a painter that he paint a man who can walk around in the world. For Goethe, even as a physicist, the ground on which he moved was the spiritual. The world view for which he used the term “in accordance with the spirit” ( *geistgemäss*) made it impossible for him to find in Newton's color theory anything in the way of ideas about real light and real colors. But with the natural scientific way of picturing things, one does not find the spirit in the sense world. That the world view of German idealism had a correct feeling about this is one of its essential characteristics. It may be that what one or another personality has said out of this feeling is only a first germ of a complete plant; but the germ is there and bears within itself the power to unfold. But to this insight—that in the sense world there is spirit which cannot be grasped by the natural-scientific way of picturing things—another insight must be added: modern natural science has already demonstrated, or is on its way to demonstrating, the dependency of ordinary human soul life—running its course in the sense world—upon the instrument of the body. One enters a realm here in which, as though by entirely obvious objections, one can seemingly be refuted in a crushing way if one declares one's belief in the existence of an independent spiritual world. For what could be clearer than that man's soul life, from childhood on, unfolds as the physical organs develop and declines to the extent that the organs age? What is clearer than that the crippling of certain parts of the brain also causes the loss of certain spiritual abilities? What seems clearer, therefore, than that everything of a soul-spiritual nature is bound to matter and without it can have no continued existence, at least not one about which man knows? One does not even need to take counsel on this from the brilliant results of modern natural science; De la Mettrie, in his book *Man: A Machine (L'homme Machine)* written in 1746, has already expressed in a sufficiently correct way what is so self-evident in this assertion. This French thinker says: “Since a feebleminded person, as one can usually observe, does not lack brains, his problem must be due to the faulty nature of this organ, its excessive softness, for example. The same applies to imbeciles; the flaws in their brains do not always remain hidden to our investigation; but if the causes of feeble-mindedness, imbecility, and so on are not always recognizable, where should one seek the causes for differences between all human spirits? These causes would escape lynx and Argus eyes. A nothing, a tiny fiber, a thing that even the finest anatomy cannot discover would have turned Erasmus and Fontenelle into two fools—an observation that Fontenelle himself makes in one of his best dialogues.” Now, the adherent of a world view in accordance with the spirit would show little insight if he did not acknowledge the telling and obvious force of such an assertion. He can take this assertion even further and say: Would the world ever have received what Erasmus's spirit accomplished if someone had killed him when he was still a child?","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":753,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/20/l05/p009","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. 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