Lecture XXI

GA 93a/1905-10-19/p021 ·1905-10-19 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Notizen von einem esoterischen Lehrgang» (Notes from an esoteric course). Rudolf Steiner Verlag Gesamtverzeichnis 2022, volume subtitle. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

Heraclitus and Hegel had freed themselves from their emotions to a greater degree than du Bois-Reymond, Herbert Spencer and Haeckel; they stand therefore at a higher level. There are different standpoints and conclusions, but not contradictory truths. Haeckel's truth crawls on the ground; the Vedanta wisdom ascends in passionless purity and surveys things from those heights. It does not contradict materialism, but has a higher standpoint. Goethe, in his ‘Metamorphoses of Plants’,[^2] tries to create a form as unemotional as that created by the mathematician. Through this he wished to create emotionally free thoughts and introduce the spirit of mathematics into higher regions. Only some degree of Yoga, some degree of purification of emotion, can make comprehensible what Goethe intends with his botany.

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Cite: GA 93a/1905-10-19/p021 · edition English