Man or Matter Part 10

'Who is able to speak worthily of the fullness of childhood? We cannot behold the little creatures which flit about before us otherwise than with delight, nay, with admiration; for they generally promise more than they perform and it seems that nature, among the other roguish tricks that she plays us, here also especially designs to make sport of us. The first organs she bestows upon children coming into the world, are adapted to the nearest immediate condition of the creature, which, una.s.suming and artless, makes use of them in the readiest way for its present purposes. The child, considered in and for itself, with its equals, and in relations suited to its powers, seems so intelligent and rational, and at the same time so easy, cheerful and clever, that one can hardly wish it further cultivation. If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.'9

We find further evidence in Goethe's account of an event in his seventh year, which shows how deeply his soul was filled at that time with the knowledge of its kinship with the realm from which nature herself receives its existence. This knowledge led him to approach the 'great G.o.d of Nature' through an act of ritual conceived by himself. The boy took a four-sectioned music stand and arranged on it all kinds of natural specimens, minerals and the like, until the whole formed a kind of pyramidal altar. On the top of this pyramid he placed some fumigating candles, the burning of which was to represent the 'upward yearning of the soul for its G.o.d'. In order to give nature herself an active part in the ritual, he contrived to kindle the candles by focusing upon them through a magnifying-gla.s.s the light of the rising sun. Before this symbol of the unity of the soul with the divine in nature the boy then paid his devotions.

'Unity of the soul with the divine in nature' - this was what lived vividly as a conviction in the seven-year-old boy, impelling him to act as 'nature's priest' (Wordsworth). The same impulse, in a metamorphosed form, impelled the adult to go out in quest of an understanding of nature which, as Traherne put it, was to bring back through highest reason what once had been his by way of primeval intuition.

1 The present writer's interest in Reid was first aroused by a remark of Rudolf Steiner, in his book A Theory of 'Knowledge according to Goethe's World Conception.

2 In a comment on a letter Carlyle had written to him, and in a note dealing with the contemporary philosophy in Germany.

3 This observation of Reid's shows that the origin of language is very different from what the evolutionists since Darwin have imagined it to be.

4 Confessions, Book I, Chapter 8.

5 As we have seen, the word had better luck with Goethe.

6 Wordsworth, with all his limitations, had a real affinity with Goethe in his view of nature. Mr. Norman Lacey gives some indication of this in his recent book, Wordsworth's View of Nature.

7 This same period of life played a decisive part in the spiritual evolution of Rudolf Steiner, as may be seen in his autobiography, The Story of My Life.

8 The difference in spelling between the prose and poetry excerpts arises from the fact that whereas we can draw on Miss Wade's new edition of the poems for Traherne's original spelling, we have as yet only Dobell's edition of the Centuries, in which the spelling is modernized.

9 Oxenford's translation.

CHAPTER VII

'Always Stand by Form'

Immediacy of approach to certain essentials of nature as a result of their religious or artistic experience of the sense-world, is the characteristic of two more representatives of British cultural life.

They are Luke Howard (1772-1864) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), both true readers in the book of nature. Like those discussed in the previous chapter they can be of especial help to us in our attempt to establish an up-to-date method of apprehending nature's phenomena through reading them.

At the same time we shall find ourselves led into another sphere of Goethe's scientific work. For we cannot properly discuss Howard without recognizing the importance of his findings for Goethe's meteorological studies or without referring to the personal connexion between the two men arising out of their common interest and similar approach to nature. We shall thus come as a matter of course to speak of Goethe's thoughts about meteorology, and this again will give opportunity to introduce a leading concept of Goethean science in addition to those brought forward already.

Of Ruskin only so much will appear in the present chapter as is necessary to show him as an exemplary reader in the book of nature. He will then be a more or less permanent companion in our investigations.

The following words of Ruskin from The Queen of the Air reveal him at once as a true reader in the book of nature:

'Over the entire surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by the power of the air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in clouds, plants and animals, all of which have reference in their action, or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them.' (II, 89.)

Here Ruskin in an entirely Goethean way points to form in nature as the element in her that speaks to human intelligence - meaning by form, as other utterances of his show, all those qualities through which the natural object under observation reveals itself to our senses as a whole.

By virtue of his pictorial-dynamic way of regarding nature, Ruskin was quite clear that the scientists' one-sided seeking after external forces and the mathematically calculable interplay between them can never lead to a comprehension of life in nature. For in such a search man loses sight of the real signature of life: form as a dynamic element. Accordingly, in his Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin does not answer the question: 'What is Life?' with a scientific explanation, but with the laconic injunction: 'Always stand by Form against Force.' This he later enlarges pictorially in the words: 'Discern the moulding hand of the potter commanding the clay from the merely beating foot as it turns the wheel.' (Lect. X.)

In thus opposing form and force to each other, Ruskin is actually referring to two kinds of forces. There exist those forces which resemble the potter's foot in producing mere numerically regulated movements (so that this part of the potter's activity can be replaced by a power-machine), and others, which like the potter's hand, strive for a certain end and so in the process create definite forms. Ruskin goes a step further still in The Queen of the Air, where he speaks of selective order as a mark of the spirit:

'It does not merely crystallize indefinite ma.s.ses, but it gives to limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other elements proper to them, and binding these elements into their own peculiar and adopted form. ...

'For the mere force of junction is not spirit, but the power that catches out of chaos, charcoal, water, lime and what not, and fastens them into given form, is properly called "spirit"; and we shall not diminish, but strengthen our cognition of this creative energy by recognizing its presence in lower states of matter than our own.' (II, 59.)1

When Ruskin wrote this pa.s.sage, he could count on a certain measure of agreement from his contemporaries that the essence of man himself is spirit, though certainly without any very exact notion being implied.

This persuaded him to fight on behalf of the spirit, lest its activity on the lower levels of nature should not be duly acknowledged. To-day, when the purely physical conception of nature has laid hold of the entire man, Ruskin might have given his thought the following turn: '... and we shall certainly attain to no real insight into this creative force (of the spirit) at the level of man, unless we win the capacity to recognize its activity in lower states of matter.'

What Ruskin is really pointing towards is the very thing for which Goethe formed the concept 'type'. And just as Ruskin, like Goethe, recognized the signature of the spirit in the material processes which work towards a goal, so he counted as another such signature what Goethe called Steigerung, though certainly without forming such a universally valid idea of it:

'The Spirit in the plant - that is to say, its power of gathering dead matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen shape - is of course strongest in the moment of flowering, for it then not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.' It is characteristic of Ruskin's conception of the relationship between man's mind and nature that he added: 'And where this life is in it at full power, its form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own senses.' (II, 60.)

Obviously, a mind capable of looking at nature in this way could not accept such a picture of evolution as was put forward by Ruskin's contemporary, Darwin. So we find Ruskin, in The Queen of the Air, opposing the Darwinistic conception of the preservation of the species as the driving factor in the life of nature:

'With respect to plants as animals, we are wrong in speaking as if the object of life were only the bequeathing of itself. The flower is the end and proper object of the seeds, not the seed of the flower. The reason for the seed is that flowers may be, not the reason of flowers that seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature which the spirit makes; only, in connection with its perfectedness, is placed the giving birth to its successor.' (II, 60.)

For Ruskin the true meaning of life in all its stages lay not in the maintenance of physical continuity from generation to generation, but in the ever-renewed, ever more enhanced revelation of the spirit.

He was never for a moment in doubt regarding the inevitable effect of such an evolutionary theory as Darwin's on the general social att.i.tude of humanity. Men would be led, he realized, to see themselves as the accidental products of an animal nature based on the struggle for existence and the preservation of the species. Enough has been said to stamp Ruskin as a reader in the book of nature, capable of deciphering the signature of the spirit in the phenomena of the sense-world.

Outwardly different from Ruskin's and yet spiritually comparable, is the contribution made by his older contemporary, Luke Howard, to the foundation of a science of nature based on intuition. Whereas Ruskin throws out a mult.i.tude of aphoristic utterances about many different aspects of nature, which will provide us with further starting-points for our own observation and thought, Howard is concerned with a single sphere of phenomena, that of cloud formation. On the other hand, his contribution consists of a definite discovery which he himself methodically and consciously achieved, and it is the content of this discovery, together with the method of research leading to it, which will supply us ever and again with a model for our own procedure. At the same time, as we have indicated, he will help us to become familiar with another side of Goethe, and to widen our knowledge of the basic scientific concepts formed by him.

Anyone interested to-day in weather phenomena is acquainted with the terms used in cloud cla.s.sification - Cirrus, c.u.mulus, Stratus, and Nimbus. These have come so far into general use that it is not easy to realize that, until Howard's paper, On the Modification of Clouds, appeared in 1803, no names for cla.s.sifying clouds were available.

Superficially, it may seem that Howard had done nothing more than science has so often done in grouping and cla.s.sifying and naming the contents of nature. In fact, however, he did something essentially different.

In the introduction to his essay, Howard describes the motives which led him to devote himself to a study of meteorological phenomena:

'It is the frequent observation of the countenance of the sky, and of its connexion with the present and ensuing phenomena, that const.i.tutes the ancient and popular meteorology. The want of this branch of knowledge renders the prediction of the philosopher (who in attending his instruments may be said to examine the pulse of the atmosphere), less generally successful than those of the weather-wise mariners and husbandmen.'

When he thus speaks of studying 'the countenance of the sky', Howard is not using a mere form of speech; he is exactly describing his own procedure, as he shows when he proceeds to justify it as a means to scientific knowledge. The clouds with their ever-moving, ever-changing forms are not, he says, to be regarded as the mere 'sport of the winds', nor is their existence 'the mere result of the condensation of vapour in the ma.s.ses of the atmosphere which they occupy'. What comes to view in them is identical, in its own realm, with what the changing expression of the human face reveals of 'a person's state of mind or body'. It would hardly be possible to represent oneself more clearly as a genuine reader in the book of nature than by such words. What is it but Ruskin's 'Stand by Form against Force' that Howard is here saying in his own way?

Before entering into a further description of Howard's system, we must make clear why we disregard the fact that modern meteorology has developed the scale of cloud-formation far beyond Howard, and why we shall keep to his own fourfold scale.

It is characteristic of Goethe that, on becoming acquainted with Howard's work, he at once gave a warning against subdividing his scale without limit. Goethe foresaw that the attempt to insert too many transitory forms between Howard's chief types would result only in obscuring that view of the essentials which Howard's original cla.s.sification had opened up. Obviously, for a science based on mere onlooking there is no objection to breaking up an established system into ever more subdivisions in order to keep it in line with an increasingly detailed outer observation. This, indeed, modern meteorology has done with Howard's system, with the result that, to-day, the total scale is made up of ten different stages of cloud-formation.

Valuable as this tenfold scale may be for certain practical purposes, it must be ignored by one who realizes that through Howard's fourfold scale nature herself speaks to man's intuitive judgment. Let us, therefore, turn to Howard's discovery, undisturbed by the extension to which modern meteorology has subjected it.

Luke Howard, a chemist by profession, knew well how to value the results of scientific knowledge above traditional folk-knowledge. He saw the superiority of scientifically acquired knowledge in the fact that it was universally communicable, whereas folk-wisdom is bound up with the personality of its bearer, his individual observations and his memory of them. Nevertheless, the increasing mathematizing of science, including his own branch of it, gave him great concern, for he could not regard it as helpful in the true progress of man's understanding of nature. Accordingly, he sought for a method of observation in which the practice of 'the weatherwise mariner and husbandman' could be raised to the level of scientific procedure. To this end he studied the changing phenomena of the sky for many years, until he was able so to read its play of features that it disclosed to him the archetypal forms of cloud-formation underlying all change. To these he gave the now well-known names (in Latin, so that they might be internationally comprehensible):

Cirrus: Parallel, flexuous or divergent fibres extensible in any and all directions.

c.u.mulus: Convex or conical heaps, increasing upwards from a horizontal base.

Stratus: A widely extended, continuous, horizontal sheet, increasing from below.

Nimbus: The rain cloud.

Let us, on the background of Howard's brief definitions, try to form a more exact picture of the atmospheric dynamics at work in each of the stages he describes.2

Among the three formations of cirrus, c.u.mulus and stratus, the c.u.mulus has a special place as representing in the most actual sense what is meant by the term 'cloud'. The reason is that both cirrus and stratus have characteristics which in one or the other direction tend away from the pure realm of atmospheric cloud-formation. In the stratus, the atmospheric vapour is gathered into a horizontal, relatively arched layer around the earth, and so antic.i.p.ates the actual water covering below which extends spherically around the earth's centre. Thus the stratus arranges itself in a direction which is already conditioned by the earth's field of gravity. In the language of physics, the stratus forms an equipotential surface in the gravitational field permeating the earth's atmosphere.