Man or Matter | Page 6

the title: 'Mathematics, Scientific Experiment and Observation,
and Epistemological Results from the Standpoint of Anthroposophy';
what they gave me answered my question beyond all expectation.
In the course of a comprehensive historical survey the lecturer
characterized, in a way I found utterly convincing, the present
mathematical interpretation of nature as a transitional stage of human
consciousness - a kind of knowing which is on the way from a past
pre-mathematical to a future post-mathematical form of cognition. The
importance of mathematics, whether as a discipline of the human spirit
or as an instrument of natural science, was not for a moment
undervalued. On the contrary, what Rudolf Steiner said about

Projective (Synthetic) Geometry, for instance, its future possibilities
and its role as a means of understanding higher processes of nature than
had hitherto been accessible to science, clearly explained the positive
feelings I myself had experienced - without knowing why - when I had
studied the subject.
Through his lectures and his part in the discussions - they were held
daily by the various speakers and ranged over almost every field of
modern knowledge - I gradually realized that Rudolf Steiner was in
possession of unique powers. Not only did he show himself fully at
home in all these fields; he was able to connect them with each other,
and with the nature and being of man, in such a way that an apparent
chaos of unrelated details was wrought into a higher synthesis.
Moreover, it became clear to me that one who could speak as he did
about the stages of human consciousness past, present and future, must
have full access to all of them at will, and be able to make each of them
an object of exact observation. I saw a thinker who was himself
sufficient proof that man can find within the resources of his own spirit
the vantage-ground for the deed which I had dimly surmised, and by
which alone true civilization could be saved. Through all these things I
knew that I had found the teacher I had been seeking.
Thus I was fully confirmed in my hopes of the Conference; but I was
also often astonished at what I heard. Not least among my surprises
was Rudolf Steiner's presentation of Goethe as the herald of the new
form of scientific knowledge which he himself was expounding. I was
here introduced to a side of Goethe which was as completely unknown
to me as to so many others among my contemporaries, who had not yet
come into touch with Anthroposophy. For me, as for them, Goethe had
always been the great thinker revealing his thoughts through poetry.
Indeed, only shortly before my meeting with Rudolf Steiner it was in
his poetry that Goethe had become newly alive to me as a helper in my
search for a fuller human experience of nature and my fellow-men. But
despite all my Goethe studies I had been quite unaware that more than a
century earlier he had achieved something in the field of science,
organic and inorganic alike, which could help modern man towards the
new kind of knowledge so badly needed to-day. This was inevitable for

me, since I shared the modern conviction that art and science were
fields of activity essentially strange to one another. And so it was again
Rudolf Steiner who opened the way for me to Goethe as botanist,
physicist and the like.
I must mention another aspect of the Stuttgart Conference which
Belongs to this picture of my first encounter with Anthroposophy, and
gave it special weight for anyone in my situation at that period. In
Stuttgart there were many different activities concerned with the
practical application of Rudolf Steiner's teachings, and so one could
become acquainted with teachings and applications at the same time.
There was the Waldorf School, founded little more than a year before,
with several hundred pupils already. It was the first school to undertake
the transformation of anthroposophical knowledge of man into
educational practice; later it was followed by others, in Germany and
elsewhere. There was one of the clinics, where qualified doctors were
applying the same knowledge to the study of illness and the action of
medicaments. In various laboratories efforts were made to develop new
methods of experimental research in physics, chemistry, biology and
other branches of science. Further, a large business concern had been
founded in Stuttgart in an attempt to embody some of Rudolf Steiner's
ideas for the reform of social life. Besides all this I could attend
performances of the new art of movement, again the creation of Rudolf
Steiner and called by him 'Eurhythmy', in which the astounded eye
could see how noble a speech can be uttered by the human body when
its limbs are moved in accordance with its inherent