Lecture V

And so it came about after the middle of the fifteenth century that human beings inwardly experienced a dead thinking once puberty was passed. They were filled out with the corpse of thinking. Go really deeply and seriously into this idea and you will understand that it is only since that time that an inorganic natural science could arise, because the human being began to grasp purely inorganic laws. Now for the first time man could grasp what is dead in the way striven for since Galileo and Copernicus. The living had first to die inwardly. When man was still inwardly alive in his thinking, he could not grasp the dead in an external way for the living kind of knowledge imparted itself to what was external. Natural science became increasingly pure science and nothing more, and this continued until, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was well-nigh only mathematics. That was the ideal towards which it strove—it strove to be Phoronomy, a kind of system of pure mechanics.