6. Anthroposophy and Agnosticism

Now, anyone who sees more deeply into these matters must ask themselves the following: We once had to advance to that in the development of humanity, which I strictly defended on one of the last lecture evenings for the external natural sciences, especially the inorganic natural sciences; we had to advance to pure phenomenalism, as Goethe also demanded. To that pure phenomenalism, which no longer uses thinking to construct all kinds of atomic worlds behind sense perceptions that can no longer be perceived; which uses thinking merely to read sense perceptions, to remain within the phenomenal world, to arrange the phenomena in such a way that they appear to us as archetypal phenomena in the Goethean sense. All this has been done in the most diverse variations here in recent days. I do not want to deny that something of the kind does not live in a great number of people of the present time. Nevertheless, on the one hand, there is a definite tendency to theorize, where we, so to speak, once we have entered into thinking, pierce through the sensory carpet and continue with thinking for a while beyond sensory perception, where there is no longer anything for thinking to create. There we then posit atoms and all sorts of other things. This corresponds to a kind of law of inertia. Thinking will, in accordance with our present position, our present relationship to the world, actually only be applicable in such a way that we can apply it in the service of grouping, of interpreting phenomena in relation to one another, thus remaining within the phenomenal world, so to speak, reading the phenomenon and not underlying things with all kinds of explanations.