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

which express its nature. But with living beings, they are characterised as much by their life span as by their size; they carve out an organism both in space and in time. The idea of the rose must comprise its whole development in time from seed and germination through unfolding of cotyledons to stems and leaves to the blossoming and fruiting. We are faced with the marvellous phenomena of metamorphosis from one form into another whilst together thay are the rose. An inner realm of manifoldness comes to ordered manifestation in time.

Mechanical events, such as the collision of billiard balls and their rebound movements, can be expressed mathematically in concepts related only externally to them. These are the laws of motion, the ideal component of the whole event. In the case of living organisms the ideal component, the law of their being and growth, is inwardly active and comes to manifestation in their metamorphoses, their growth and their life processes. The ideal element in a plant, which is thus an active reality manifesting outwardly in form, is not accessible to our ordinary intellectual consciousness in the same way as the laws of motion. Here is the first serious obstacle on our path. If we are to understand living organisms we must become able to grasp this ideal element with intensified powers of cognition. To these intensified cognitional capacities Steiner gave the name Imagination. He characterised in great detail their nature and the methods by which they can be cultivated. He also pointed to Goethe as that person who had pioneered this path to the scientific study of living creatures, comparing him to Galileo in the study of mechanics. For the manifoldness, the real ideal element of living things, Steiner used the terms Etheric body or body of formative forces.

It is important to realise that this Etheric body and the Etheric forces do not belong to the Euclidean space in which physical bodies and forces are studied. To these belong gravity and electro-magnetic forces and characteristically they relate pointwise, between one point and another. Gravity acts from the centre and so these forces diminish with distance according to strict mathematical law. The Etheric forces, on the contrary, act from the periphery and work suctionally, levitationally. Steiner indicated that the so-called Synthetic or Projective Geometry, brought to a certain perfection in the roth century

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