Lecture II

This instinct arose in Schelling out of the entire disposition of his soul, and from this he acquired a principle. It would certainly be good if this became a kind of inner principle for every physician, became an inner principle so that the physician would coordinate his entire practical conception of the nature of the healthy and sick human being out of this principle. I quoted Schelling's own words, which show a kind of daring. He simply said, “To know nature means to create nature.” Generally what is first noticed when a genius comes forth with such an expression is its quite obvious absurdity, for no one seriously believes himself capable, as an earthly human being in the physical body, of creating anything out of nature simply by knowing nature. Obviously in technology there is continuous creation, but there it is not a matter of really creating something in the way that Schelling meant; rather, by putting things together, by a composition of the forces of nature, nature in turn is given the opportunity to create in a particular way and through a particular arrangement, and so on. With this sentence, therefore, we have fundamentally to do with an absurdity that a man of genius laid at the foundation of all his thinking.