The nature of man : approached through the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner

with death and with its image the skeleton. There were dances of death, rituals of death, wrestling with the fact of death and its meaning. At the beginning of the new age of natural science the first text book of human anatomy to be based on accurate dissection of the human corpse was published by Vesalius in 1543 and marks the beginning of so-called scientific medicine. In the same year there was published Copernicus’ book of the anatomy of the corpse of the solar system. The methodology for pursuing this new view of things was established by Galileo and philosophically by Descartes. A division was established between what could be measured and weighed and those other properties of colour, tone, taste, smell and so on. The first were called primary qualities and considered to be real and objective, whereas the second were relegated as secondary qualities to being subjective, and ‘only in the mind’. The movement of human consciousness which from distant antiquity had progressively lost its awareness of the divine, spiritual world now curtailed yet further its scope by distinguishing that which could be known through the sense of touch from the content of all the other senses. Only what could be touched was real, that is to say in a crude way only matter. One recalls in passing how Dr. Johnson refuted Berkeley’s Idealism by kicking a stone. Science proceeded to turn colours and tones into vibrations and particles so as to be able to handle and measure them with its mechanical concepts, although in doing so it lost sight of and eliminated the very realities it was supposed to be studying. When Goethe opened the way to a scientific study of colour as such the scientific establishment showed and continues to show neither understanding nor interest. Science claims to be based exclusively on sense experience, but it has not only excluded all suprasensory experience; it has also excluded all the senses themselves with the sole exception of the sense of touch, to which it has rather mistakenly attributed objectivity. To be more precise, it interprets the other senses in terms of concepts related to touch, which enables all phenomena to be treated mechanically. It should be further noted that measurements of matter and motion are then developed by mathematical techniques; and there has been a tendency to regard these as indubitably clear and self-evident, as given a priori, although they are in fact based on self-contradictory fictions.

3