Man or Matter Part 4

The aversion to spiritism which Crookes met with in contemporary science was, from the standpoint of such a science, largely justified.

Science, in the form in which Crookes himself conceived it, took for granted that the relationship of human consciousness to the world was that of external onlooking. Accordingly, if the scientist remained within the limits thus prescribed for consciousness, it was only consistent to refuse to make anything beyond these limits an object of scientific research.

On the other hand, it says much for the courage and open mindedness of Crookes that he refused to be held back from what was for him the only possible way of extending the boundaries of science beyond the given physical world. Moreover, it was only natural that in his search for a world of a higher order than the physical he should, as a man of his time, first turn his attention to spiritistic occurrences, for spiritism, as it had come over to Europe from America in the middle of the nineteenth century, was nothing but an attempt by the onlooker-consciousness to learn something in its own way about the supersensible world. The spiritist expects the spirit to reveal itself in outwardly perceptible phenomena as if it were part of the physical world. Towards the end of his life Crookes confessed that if he were able to begin again he would prefer to study telepathic phenomena - the direct transference of thought from one person to another - rather than the purely mechanical, or so-called telekinetic, expressions of psychic forces. But although his interest was thus turning towards a more interior field of psychic investigation, he remained true to his times in still a.s.suming that knowledge about the world, whatever it might be, could be won only by placing oneself as a mere onlooker outside the object of research.

The stream of new discoveries which followed Crookes's work justified his conviction that in cathode ray phenomena we have to do with a frontier region of physical nature. Still, the land that lies on the other side of this frontier is not the one Crookes had been looking for throughout his life. For, instead of finding the way into the land whither man's soul disappears at death, Crookes had inadvertently crossed the border into another land - a land which the twentieth-century scientist is impelled to call 'the country that is not ours'.

The realm thrown open to science by Crookes's observations, which human knowledge now entered as if taking it by storm, was that of the radioactive processes of the mineral stratum of the earth. Many new and surprising properties of electricity were discovered there - yet the riddle of electricity itself, instead of coming nearer, withdrew into ever deeper obscurity.

The very first step into this newly discovered territory made the riddle still more bewildering. As we have said, Maxwell's use of a material a.n.a.logy as a means of formulating mathematically the properties of electro-magnetic fields of force had led to results which brought electricity into close conjunction with light. In his own way Crookes focused, to begin with, his attention entirely on the light-like character of electric effects in a vacuum. It was precisely these observations, however, as continued by Lenard and others, which presently made it necessary to see in electricity nothing else than a special manifestation of inert ma.s.s.

The developments leading up to this stage are recent and familiar enough to be briefly summarized. The first step was once more an accident, when Rontgen (or rather one of his a.s.sistants) noticed that a bunch of keys, laid down by chance on top of an unopened box of photographic plates near a cathode tube, had produced an inexplicable shadow-image of itself on one of the plates. The cathode tube was apparently giving off some hitherto unknown type of radiation, capable of penetrating opaque substances. Rontgen was an experimentalist, not a theorist; his pupils used to say privately that in publishing this discovery of X-rays he attempted a theoretical explanation for the first and only time in his life - and got it wrong!

However, this accidental discovery had far-reaching consequences. It drew attention to the fluorescence of minerals placed in the cathode tube; this inspired Becquerel to inquire whether naturally fluorescent substances gave off anything like X-rays, and eventually - yet again by accident - he came upon certain uranium compounds. These were found to give off a radiation similar to X-rays, and to give it off naturally and all the time. Soon afterwards the Curies succeeded in isolating the element, radium, an element which was found to be undergoing a continuous natural disintegration. The way was now clear for that long series of experiments on atomic disintegration which led finally to the splitting of the nucleus and the construction of the atomic bomb.

A typical modern paradox emerges from these results. By restricting his cognitive powers to a field of experience in which the concept of force as an objective reality was unthinkable, man has been led on a line of practical investigation the pursuit of which was bound to land him amongst the force-activities of the cosmos. For what distinguishes electric and sub-electric activities from all other forces of physical nature so far known to science, is that for their operation they have no need of the resistance offered by s.p.a.ce-bound material bodies; they represent a world of pure dynamics into which spatial limitations do not enter.

Equally paradoxical is the situation of theoretical thinking in face of that realm of natural being which practical research has lately entered. We have seen that this thinking, by virtue of the consciousness on which it is founded, is impelled always to clothe its ideas in spatial form. Wherever anything in the pure spatial adjacency of physical things remains inexplicable, resort is had to hypothetical pictures whose content consists once more of nothing but spatially extended and spatially adjacent items. In this way matter came to be seen as consisting of molecules, molecules of atoms, and atoms of electrons, protons, neutrons, and so forth.

In so far as scientific thought has held to purely spatial conceptions, it has been obliged to concentrate on ever smaller and smaller spatial sizes, so that the spatially conceived atom-picture has finally to reckon with dimensions wherein the old concept of s.p.a.ce loses validity.

When once thinking had started in this direction, it was electricity which once more gave it the strongest impulse to go even further along the same lines.

Where we have arrived along this path is brought out in a pa.s.sage in Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World. There, after describing the modern picture of electrons dancing round the atomic nucleus, he says: 'This spectacle is so fascinating that we have perhaps forgotten that there was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is.

This question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven round the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.' The only thing we can say about the electron, if we are not to deceive ourselves, Eddington concludes, is: 'Something unknown is doing we don't know what.'4

Let us add a further detail from this picture of the atom, as given in Eddington's Philosophy of Physical Science. Referring to the so-called positron, the positive particle regarded as the polar opposite of the negative electron, he remarks: 'A positron is a hole from which an electron has been removed; it is a bung-hole which would be evened up with its surroundings if an electron were inserted. ... You will see that the physicist allows himself even greater liberty than the sculptor. The sculptor removes material to obtain the form he desires.

The physicist goes further and adds material if necessary - an operation which he describes as removing negative material. He fills up a bung-hole, saying he is removing a positron.' Eddington thus shows to what paradoxical ideas the scientist is driven, when with his accustomed forms of thought he ventures into regions where the conditions necessary for such forms no longer exist; and he concludes his remarks with the following caution: 'Once again I would remind you that objective truth is not the point at issue.'

By this reminder Eddington shows how far science has reconciled itself to the philosophic scepticism at which man's thinking had arrived in the days of Hume. In so far as the above remark was intended to be a consolation for the bewildered student, it is poor comfort in the light of the actions which science has let loose with the help of those unknown ent.i.ties. For it is just this resignation of human thought which renders it unable to cope with the flood of phenomena springing from the sub-material realm of nature, and has allowed scientific research to outrun scientific understanding.

1 E. du Bois-Raymond: Investigations into Animal Electricity (1884).

Galvani published his discovery when the French Revolution had reached its zenith and Napoleon was climbing to power.

2 The above account follows A. J. von Oettingen's edition of Galvani's monograph, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari.

3 For what follows see The Life of Sir William Crookes, by E. E.

Fournier D'Albe (London, 1923).

4 Eddington's italics. See also, in this respect, Professor White head's criticism of the hypothetical picture of the electron and its behaviour.

PART II

Goetheanism - Whence and Whither?

CHAPTER V

The Adventure of Reason

In 1790, a year before Galvani's monograph, Concerning the Forces of Electricity, appeared, Goethe published his Metamorphosis of Plants, which represents the first step towards the practical overcoming of the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness in science. Goethe's paper was not destined to raise such a storm as soon followed Galvani's publication. And yet the fruit of Goethe's endeavours is not less significant than Galvani's discovery, for the progress of mankind. For in Goethe's achievement lay the seed of that form of knowing which man requires, if in the age of the electrification of civilization he is to remain master of his existence.

Among the essays in which Goethe in later years gave out some of the results of his scientific observation in axiomatic form, is one called 'Intuitive Judgment' ('Anschauende Urteilskraft'), in which he maintains that he has achieved in practice what Kant had declared to be for ever beyond the scope of the human mind. Goethe refers to a pa.s.sage in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant defines the limits of human cognitional powers as he had observed them in his study of the peculiar nature of the human reason. We must first go briefly into Kant's own exposition of the matter.1

Kant distinguishes between two possible forms of reason, the intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. By the first he means a reason 'which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts'.

According to Kant, such a reason lies outside human possibilities. In contrast to it, the intellectus ectypus peculiar to man is restricted to taking in through the senses the single details of the world as such; with these it can certainly construct pictures of their totalities, but these pictures never have more than a hypothetical character and can claim no reality for themselves. Above all, it is not given to such a thinking to think 'wholes' in such a way that through an act of thought alone the single items contained in them can be conceived as parts springing from them by necessity. (To ill.u.s.trate this, we may say that, according to Kant, we can certainly comprehend the parts of an organism, say of a plant, and out of its components make a picture of the plant as a whole; but we are not in a position to think that 'whole' of the plant which conditions the existence of its organism and brings forth its parts by necessity.) Kant expresses this in the following way:

'For external objects as phenomena an adequate ground related to purposes cannot be met with; this, although it lies in nature, must be sought only in the supersensible substrata of nature, from all possible insight into which we are cut off. Our understanding has then this peculiarity as concerns the judgment, that in cognitive understanding the particular is not determined by the universal and cannot therefore be derived from it.'

The attempt to prove whether or not another form of reason than this (the intellectus archetypus) is possible - even though declared to be beyond man - Kant regarded as superfluous, because the fact was enough for him 'that we are led to the Idea of it - which contains no contradiction - in contrast to our discursive understanding, which has need of images (intellectus ectypus), and to the contingency of its const.i.tution'.

Kant here brings forward two reasons why it is permissible to conceive of the existence of an extra-human, archetypal reason. On the one hand he admits that the existence of our own reason in its present condition is of a contingent order, and thus does not exclude the possible existence of a reason differently const.i.tuted. On the other hand, he allows that we can think of a form of reason which in every respect is the opposite of our own, without meeting any logical inconsistency.

From these definitions emerges a conception of the properties of man's cognitional powers which agrees exactly with those on which, as we have seen, Hume built up his whole philosophy. Both allow to the reason a knowledge-material consisting only of pictures - that is, of pictures evoked in consciousness through sense-perception, and received by it from the outer world in the form of disconnected units, whilst denying it all powers, as Hume expressed it, ever 'to perceive any real connections between distinct existences'.

This agreement between Kant and Hume must at first sight surprise us, when we recall that, as already mentioned, Kant worked out his philosophy precisely to protect the cognizing being of man from the consequences of Hume's thought. For, as he himself said, it was his becoming acquainted with Hume's Treatise that 'roused him out of his dogmatic slumber' and obliged him to reflect on the foundations of human knowing. We shall understand this apparent paradox, however, if we take it as a symptom of humanity's close imprisonment in recent centuries within the limits of its onlooker-consciousness.

In his struggle against Hume, Kant was not concerned to challenge his opponent's definition of man's reasoning power. His sole object was to show that, if one accepted this definition, one must not go as far as Hume in the application of this power. All that Kant could aspire to do was to protect the ethical from attack by the intellectual part of man, and to do this by proving that the former belongs to a world into which the latter has no access. For with his will man belongs to a world of purposeful doing, whereas the reason, as our quotations have shown, is incapable even in observing external nature, of comprehending the wholes within nature which determine natural ends. Still less can it do this in regard to man, a being who in his actions is integrated into higher purposes.

Kant's deed is significant in that it correctly drew attention to that polar division in human nature which, after all, was already established in Kant's own time. Kant demonstrated also that to win insight into the ethical nature of man with the aid of the isolated intellect alone implied a trespa.s.s beyond permissible limits. In order to give the doing part of the human being its necessary anchorage, however, Kant a.s.signed it to a moral world-order entirely external to man, to which it could be properly related only through obedient submission.

In this way Kant became the philosopher of that division between knowledge and faith which to this day is upheld in both the ecclesiastical and scientific spheres of our civilization.

Nevertheless, he did not succeed in safeguarding humanity from the consequences of Hume's philosophy; for man cannot live indefinitely in the belief that with the two parts of his own being he is bound up with two mutually unrelated worlds. The time when this was feasible is already over, as may be seen from the fact that ever greater ma.s.ses of men wish to determine their behaviour according to their own ideas, and as they see no alternative in the civilization around them but to form ideas by means of the discursive reason which inevitably leads to agnosticism, they determine their actions accordingly. Meanwhile, the ethical life as viewed by Kant accordingly shrinks ever further into a powerless, hole-and-corner existence.

It is Goethe's merit to have first shown that there is a way out of this impa.s.se. He had no need to argue theoretically with Kant as to the justification of denying man any power of understanding apart from the discursive, and of leaving the faculty of intuitive knowledge to a divinity somewhere outside the world of man. For Goethe was his own witness that Kant was mistaken in regarding man's present condition as his lasting nature. Let us hear how he expresses himself on this fact at the beginning of his essay written as an answer to Kant's statement:

'It is true, the author here seems to be pointing to an intellect not human but divine. And yet, if in the moral sphere we are supposed to lift ourselves up to a higher region through faith in G.o.d, Virtue and Immortality, so drawing nearer to the Primal Being, why should it not be likewise in the intellectual? By contemplation (Anschauen) of an ever-creative nature, may we not make ourselves worthy to be spiritual sharers in her productions? I at first, led by an inner urge that would not rest, had quite unconsciously been seeking for the realm of Type and Archetype, and my attempt had been rewarded: I had been able to build up a description, in conformity with Nature herself. Now therefore nothing more could hinder me from braving what the Old Man of the King's Hill2 himself calls the Adventure of Reason.'

Goethe started from the conviction that our senses as well as our intellect are gifts of nature, and that, if at any given moment they prove incapable through their collaboration of solving a riddle of nature, we must ask her to help us to develop this collaboration adequately. Thus there was no question for him of any restriction of sense-perception in order to bring the latter in line with the existing power of the intellect, but rather to learn to make an ever fuller use of the senses and to bring our intellect into line with what they tell.

'The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives', is one of his basic utterances concerning their respective roles in our quest for knowledge and understanding. As to the senses themselves, he was sure that 'the human being is adequately equipped for all true earthly requirements if he trusts his senses, and so develops them as to make them worthy of trust'.

There is no contradiction in the statement that we have to trust our senses, and that we have to develop them to make them trustworthy. For, 'nature speaks upwards to the known senses of man, downwards to unknown senses of his'. Goethe's path was aimed at wakening faculties, both perceptual and conceptual, which lay dormant in himself. His experience showed him that 'every process in nature, rightly observed, wakens in us a new organ of cognition'. Right observation, in this respect, consisted in a form of contemplating nature which he called a 're-creating (creating in the wake) of an ever-creative nature'

(Nachschaffen einer immer schaffenden Natur).

We should do Goethe an injustice if we measured the value of his scientific work by the amount of factual knowledge he contributed to one or other sphere of research. Although Goethe did bring many new things to light, as has been duly recognized in the scientific fields concerned, it cannot be gainsaid that other scientists in his own day, working along the usual lines, far exceeded his total of discoveries.

Nor can it be denied that, as critics have pointed out, he occasionally went astray in reporting his observations. These things, however, do not determine the value or otherwise of his scientific labours. His work draws its significance not so much from the 'what', to use a Goethean expression, as from the 'how' of his observations, that is, from his way of investigating nature. Having once developed this method in the field of plant observation, Goethe was able, with its aid, to establish a new view of animal nature, to lay the basis for a new meteorology, and, by creating his theory of light and colour, to provide a model for a research in the field of physics, free from onlooker-restrictions.

In the scientific work of Goethe his botanical studies have a special place. As a living organism, the plant is involved in an endless process of becoming. It shares this characteristic, of course, with the higher creatures of nature, and yet between it and them there is an essential difference. Whereas in animal and man a considerable part of the life-processes conceal themselves within the organism, in order to provide a basis for inner soul processes, the plant brings its inner life into direct and total outer manifestation. Hence the plant, better than anything, could become Goethe's first teacher in his exercise of re-creating nature.