Man or Matter | Page 3

before the end of the century, to recognize the
significance of 'Goetheanism' for the future development not only of
science but of human culture in general. It is to him, also, that we owe
the possibility of carrying on Goethe's efforts in the way required by
the needs of our own time.
The following pages contain results of the author's work along the path
thus opened up by Goethe and Rudolf Steiner - a work begun
twenty-seven years ago, soon after he had made the acquaintance of
Rudolf Steiner. With the publication of these results he addresses
himself to everyone - with or without a specialized scientific training -
who is concerned with the fate of man's powers of cognition in the
present age.
*
The reader may welcome a remark as to the way in which this book
needs to be read.
It has not been the author's intention to provide an encyclopaedic
collection of new conceptions in various fields of natural observation.
Rather did he wish, as the sub-title of the book indicates, to offer a new
method of training both mind and eye (and other senses as well), by
means of which our modern 'onlooking' consciousness can be
transformed into a new kind of 'participating' consciousness. Hence it
would be of no avail to pick out one chapter or another for first reading,
perhaps because of some special interest in its subject-matter. The
chapters are stages on a road which has to be travelled, and each stage
is necessary for reaching the next. It is only through thus accepting the
method with which the book has been written that the reader will be
able to form a competent judgment of its essential elements.
E. L.
Hawkwood College Easter 1950

PART I
Science at the Threshold

CHAPTER I
Introductory
If I introduce this book by relating how I came to encounter Rudolf
Steiner and his work, more than twenty-five years ago, and what
decided me not only to make his way of knowledge my own, but also
to enter professionally into an activity inspired by his teachings, it is
because in this way I can most directly give the reader an impression of
the kind of spirit out of which I have written. I am sure, too, that
although what I have to say in this chapter is personal in content, it is
characteristic of many in our time.
When I first made acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner and his work, I
was finishing my academic training as an electrical engineer. At the
end of the 1914-18 war my first thought had been to take up my studies
from where I had let them drop, four years earlier. The war seemed to
imply nothing more than a passing interruption of them. This, at any
rate, was the opinion of my former teachers; the war had made no
difference whatever to their ideas, whether on the subject-matter of
their teaching or on its educational purpose. I myself, however, soon
began to feel differently. It became obvious to me that my relationship
to my subject, and therefore to those teaching it, had completely
changed. What I had experienced through the war had awakened in me
a question of which I had previously been unaware; now I felt obliged
to put it to everything I came across.
As a child of my age I had grown up in the conviction that it was within
the scope of man to shape his life according to the laws of reason

within him; his progress, in the sense in which I then understood it,
seemed assured by his increasing ability to determine his own outer
conditions with the help of science. Indeed, it was the wish to take an
active part in this progress that had led me to choose my profession.
Now, however, the war stood there as a gigantic social deed which I
could in no way regard as reasonably justified. How, in an age when
the logic of science was supreme, was it possible that a great part of
mankind, including just those peoples to whom science had owed its
origin and never-ceasing expansion, could act in so completely
unscientific a way? Where lay the causes of the contradiction thus
revealed between human thinking and human doing?
Pursued by these questions, I decided after a while to give my studies a
new turn. The kind of training then provided in Germany at the
so-called Technische Hochschulen was designed essentially to give
students a close practical acquaintance with all sorts of technical
appliances; it included only as much theory as was wanted for
understanding the mathematical calculations arising in technical
practice. It now seemed to me necessary to pay more attention to
theoretical considerations, so as to gain a more exact knowledge of the