Lecture I

All this, dear Friends, I have been saying to the end that we may understand how the relation is even of Man himself to all his study and contemplation of Nature.—We must be willing to bethink ourselves in this way, the more so as the time has come at last when the impossibility of the existing view of Nature is beginning to be felt—subconsciously, at least. In some respects there is at least a dawning insight that these things must change. People begin to see that the old view will serve no longer. No doubt they are still laughed at when they say so, but the time is not so distant when this derision too will cease. The time is not so very distant when even Physics will be such as to enable one to speak in Goethe's sense. Men will perhaps begin to speak of Colour, for example, more in Goethe's spirit when another rampart has been shaken, which, though reputed impregnable, is none the less beginning to be undermined. I mean the theory of Gravitation. Ideas are now emerging almost every year, shaking the old Newtonian conceptions about Gravitation, and bearing witness how impossible it is to make do with these old conceptions, built as they are on the exclusive mechanism of centric forces.