Lecture I

What really lives in us when we strive in this direction, when we don't want to remain standing still, habitually combining the outer facts with general rules, when we permeate the given facts with what we have formulated in full consciousness mathematically as objects in our soul life? It is clear that anyone who has experience in the field of objective observation will admit that the whole of nature surrounding his own being is felt, in regard to its materiality, as something foreign. Please notice that, in a sense, we can submerge ourselves into what we feel as a foreign material element, with the help of what we have ourselves inwardly constructed as mathematical formulas. What we describe in a mathematical way actually seems as if what happens in nature has occurred according to the mathematical formula that we have constructed. What is at the basis of this perception? It is the fact that we desire above all else to become one with what we perceive at first as foreign surroundings. We group what is presented to us externally in order to be able to reconstruct it in the same way that we construct something in the purely mathematical realm. We strive to experience what presents itself to us externally in an inwardly exact manner.