Lecture VII

On one occasion I met a schoolfellow of mine, after we had for some time been separated and had gone our several ways. We had been at the same primary school together; I then went to the Grammar School ( Realschule) and he to the Teachers' Training College, and what is more to a Hungarian College—and that meant something in the seventies. After some years we met and had a conversation about light. I had already learnt what could be learnt in ordinary physics, that light has something to do with ether waves, and so on. This could at least be regarded as a cause of light. My former schoolfellow then added: “We have also learnt what light is. Light is the cause of sight!” A hotchpotch of words! It is thus that concepts become mere verbal explanations. And we can imagine what sort of things the pupils were told when we learn that the gentleman in question had later to teach a large number of pupils, until at last he was pensioned off. We must get away from the words and come to the spirit of things. If we want to understand something we must not immediately think of the word each time, but we must seek the real connections. If we look up the derivation of the word Geist (spirit) in Fritz Mauthner's History of Language to discover what its original form was, we shall find it is related to Gischt (“froth” or “effervescence”) and to “gas.” These relationships do exist, but we should not get very far by simply building on them. But unfortunately this method is covertly applied to the Bible and therefore with most people, and especially present-day theologies, the Bible is less understood than any other book.