Man or Matter | Page 7

spiritual laws. Thus,
in all the many things that were going on besides the lectures, one
could find direct proof of the fruitfulness of what one heard in them.2
Under the impression of this Conference I soon began to study the
writings of Rudolf Steiner. Not quite two years later, I decided to join
professionally with those who were putting Anthroposophy into outer
practice. Because it appeared to me as the most urgent need of the time
to prepare the new generation for the tasks awaiting it through an
education shaped on the entire human being, I turned to Rudolf Steiner
with the request to be taken into the Stuttgart School as teacher of
natural science. On this occasion I told him of my general scientific

interests, and how I hoped to follow them up later on. I spoke of my
intended educational activity as something which might help me at the
same time to prepare myself for this other task. Anyone who learns so
to see nature that his ideas can be taken up and understood by the living,
lively soul of the growing child will thereby be training himself, I
thought, in just that kind of observation and thinking which the new
science of nature demands. Rudolf Steiner agreed with this, and it was
not long afterwards that I joined the school where I was to work for
eleven years as a science master in the senior classes, which activity I
have since continued outside Germany in a more or less similar form.
This conversation with Rudolf Steiner took place in a large hall where,
while we were talking, over a thousand people were assembling to
discuss matters of concern to the Anthroposophical Movement. This
did not prevent him from asking me about the details of my
examination work, in which I was still engaged at that time; he always
gave himself fully to whatever claimed his attention at the moment. I
told him of my experimental researches in electrical high-frequency
phenomena, briefly introducing the particular problem with which I
was occupied. I took it for granted that a question from such a
specialized branch of physics would not be of much interest to him.
Judge of my astonishment when he at once took out of his pocket a
note-book and a huge carpenter's pencil, made a sketch and proceeded
to speak of the problem as one fully conversant with it, and in such a
way that he gave me the starting point for an entirely new conception of
electricity. It was instantly borne in on me that if electricity came to be
understood in this sense, results would follow which in the end would
lead to a quite new technique in the use of it. From that moment it
became one of my life's aims to contribute whatever my circumstances
and powers would allow to the development of an understanding of
nature of this kind.
1 The speaker was the late Dr. Elizabeth Vreede, for some years leader
of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum,
Dornach, Switzerland.
2 The activities mentioned above do not exhaust the practical

possibilities of Spiritual Science. At that time (1921) Rudolf Steiner
had not yet given his indications for the treatment of children needing
special care of soul and body, or for the renewal of the art of acting, or
for the conquest of materialistic methods in agricultural practice. Nor
did there yet exist the movement for religious renewal Which Dr. Fr.
Rittelmeyer later founded, with the help and advice of Rudolf Steiner.
CHAPTER II
Where Do We Stand To-day?
In the year 1932, when the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary
of Goethe's death, Professor W. Heisenberg, one of the foremost
thinkers in the field of modern physics, delivered a speech before the
Saxon Academy of Science which may be regarded as symptomatic of
the need in recent science to investigate critically the foundations of its
own efforts to know nature.1 In this speech Heisenberg draws a picture
of the progress of science which differs significantly from the one
generally known. Instead of giving the usual description of this
progress as 'a chain of brilliant and surprising discoveries', he shows it
as resting on the fact that, with the aim of continually simplifying and
unifying the scientific conception of the world, human thinking, in
course of time, has narrowed more and more the scope of its inquiries
into outer nature.
'Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation,
almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints and
established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge accumulate, the
claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain sense
diminishes.' Our justifiable admiration for the success with which the
unending multiplicity of natural occurrences on earth and in the