For a long time science stopped short of entering the organic realm.
It considered its methods to be insufficient for understanding life
and its manifestations. It believed altogether, in fact, that all
lawfulness such as that at work in inorganic nature ceased here. What
was acknowledged to be the case in the inorganic worldthat a
phenomenon becomes comprehensible to us when we know its natural
preconditionswas simply denied here. One thought of the organism
as having been purposefully constructed according to a particular
design of the creator. Every organ's use was supposedly predetermined;
all questioning here could relate only to what the purpose of this or
that organ might be, to why this or that is present. Whereas in the
inorganic world one turned to the prerequisites of a thing, one
considered these to be of no consequence at all for facts about life,
and set the primary value on the purpose of a thing. With respect to
the processes accompanying life one also did not ask, as in the case
of physical phenomena, about the natural causes, but rather believed
one had to ascribe these processes to a particular life force. One
thought that what takes form there in the organism was the product of
this force that simply disregards the other natural laws. Right up to
the beginning of the nineteenth century science did not know how to
deal with organisms. It was limited solely to the domain of the
inorganic world.
Insofar as one sought the lawfulness of the organic, not in the nature
of the objects but rather in the thought the creator follows in
forming them, one also cut off any possibility of an explanation. How
is that thought to become known to me? I am, after all, limited to
what I have before me. If this itself does not reveal its laws to me
within my thinking, then my scientific activity in fact comes to an
end. There can be no question, in a scientific sense, of guessing the
plans of a being standing outside.
At the end of the eighteenth century the universally prevailing view
was that there was no science to explain living phenomena in the sense
in which physics, for example, is a science that explains things.
Kant, in fact, tried to establish a philosophical basis for this view.
He considered our intellect to be such that it could go only from the
particular to the general. The particular, the individual, things are
given to him, and from them he abstracts his general laws. Kant calls
this kind of thinking discursive, and considers it to be
the only kind granted to the human being. Thus, in his view there is a
science only for the kinds of things where the particular, taken in
and for itself, is entirely without concept and is only summed up
under an abstract concept. In the case of organisms Kant did not find
this condition fulfilled. Here the single phenomenon betrays a
purposeful, i.e., a conceptual arrangement. The particular bears
traces of the concept. But, according to the Konigsberg philosopher,
we lack any ability to understand such beings. Understanding is
possible for us only in the case where concept and individual thing
are separated, where the concept represents something general, and the
individual thing represents something particular. Thus there is
nothing left us but to base our observations about organisms upon the
idea of purposefulness: to treat living beings as though a system of
intentions underlay their manifestation. Thus Kant has here
established non-science scientifically, as it were.
Now Goethe protested vigorously against such unscientific conduct. He
could never see why our thinking should not also be adequate to ask
where an organ of a living being originates instead of what purpose it
serves. Something in his nature always moved him to see every being in
its inner completeness. It seemed to him an unscientific way of
looking at things to bother only about the outer purposefulness of an
organ, i.e., about its use for something other than it self What
should that have to do with the inner being of a thing? The point for
him is never what purpose something serves but always how it develops.
He does not want to consider an object as a thing complete in itself
but rather in its becoming, so that he might know its origins. He was
particularly drawn to Spinoza through the fact that Spinoza did not
credit organs and organisms with outer purposefullness. For the
activity of knowing the organic world, Goethe demanded a method that
was scientific in exactly the same sense as the method we apply to the
inorganic world. Although not with as much genius as in Goethe, yet no
less urgently, the need for such a method has arisen again and again
in natural science. Today only a very small fraction of scientists
doubt any longer the possibility of this method. Whether the attempts
made here and there to introduce such a method have succeeded is, to
be sure, another question.
Above all, one has committed a serious error in this. One believed
that the method of inorganic science should simply be taken over into
the realm of organisms. One considered the method employed here to be
altogether the only scientific one, and thought that for
organics to be scientifically possible, it would
have to be so in exactly the same sense in which physics is, for
example. The possibility was forgotten, however, that perhaps the
concept of what is scientific is much broader than the
explanation of the world according to the laws of the physical
world. Even today one has not yet penetrated through to this
knowledge. Instead of investigating what it is that makes the approach
of the inorganic sciences scientific, and of then seeing a method that
can be applied to the world of living things while adhering to the
requirements that result from this investigation, one simply declared
that the laws gained upon this lower stage of existence are universal.
Above all, however, one should investigate what the basis is for any
scientific thinking. We have done this in our study. In the preceding
chapter we have also recognized that inorganic lawfulness is not the
only one in existence but is only a special case of all possible
lawfulness in general. The method of physics is simply one particular
case of a general scientific way of investigation in which the nature
of the pertinent objects and the region this science serves are taken
into consideration. If this method is extended into the organic, one
obliterates the specific nature of the organic. Instead of
investigating the organic in accordance with its nature, one forces
upon it a lawfulness alien to it. In this way, however, by denying the
organic, one will never come to know it. Such scientific conduct
simply repeats, upon a higher level, what it has gained upon a lower
one; and although it believes that it is bringing the higher form of
existence under laws established elsewhere, this form slips away from
it in its efforts, -because such scientific conduct does not know how
to grasp and deal with this form in its particular nature.
All this comes from the erroneous view that the method of a science is
extraneous to its objects of study, that it is not determined by these
objects but rather by our own nature. It is believed that one must
think in a particular way about objects, that one must indeed think
about all objects throughout the entire universe in the
same way. Investigations are undertaken that are supposed to show
that, due to the nature of our spirit, we can think only inductively
or deductively, etc.
In doing so, however, one overlooks the fact that the objects perhaps
will not tolerate the way of looking at them that we want to apply to
them.
A look at the views of Haeckel, who is certainly the most significant
of the natural-scientific theoreticians of the present day, shows us
that the objection we are making to the organic natural science of our
day is entirely justified: namely, that it does not carry over into
organic nature the principle of scientific contemplation in the
absolute sense, but only the principle of inorganic nature.
When he demands of all scientific striving that the causal
interconnections of phenomena become recognized everywhere, when
he says that if psychic mechanics were not so infinitely
complex, if we were also able to have a complete overview of the
historical development of psychic functions, we would then be able to
bring them all into a mathematical soul formula, then one can
see clearly from this what he wants: to treat the whole world
according to the stereotype of the method of the physical sciences.
This demand, however, does not underlie Darwinism in its original form
but only in its present-day interpretation. We have seen that to
explain a process in inorganic nature means to show its lawful
emergence out of other sense-perceptible realities, to trace it back
to objects that, like itself, belong to the sense world. But how does
modern organic science employ the principles of adaptation and the
struggle for existence (both of which we certainly do not doubt are
the expression of facts)? It is believed that one can trace the
character of a particular species directly back to the outer
conditions in which it lived, in somewhat the same way as the heating
of an object is traced back to the rays of the sun falling upon it.
One forgets completely that one can never show a species' character,
with all its qualities that are full of content, to be the result of
these conditions. The conditions may have a determining influence, but
they are not a creating cause. We can definitely say that under the
influence of certain circumstances a species had to evolve in such a
way that one or another organ became particularly developed; what is
there as content, however, the specifically organic, cannot be derived
from outer conditions. Let us say that an organic entity has the
essential characteristics a b c; then, under the influence of
certain outer conditions, it has evolved. Through this, its
characteristics have taken on the particular form a'b'c'. When
we take these influences into account we will then understand that
a has evolved into the form of a', b into
b', c into c'. But the specific nature of a,
b, and c can never arise as the outcome of external
conditions.
One must, above all, focus one's thinking on the question: From what
do we then derive the content of that general something of
which we consider the individual organic entity to be a specialized
case? We know very well that the specialization comes from external
influences. But we must trace the specialized shape itself back to an
inner principle. We gain enlightenment as to why just this particular
form has evolved when we study a being's environment. But this
particular form is, after all, something in and of itself; we see that
it possesses certain characteristics. We see what is essential. A
content, configurated in itself, confronts the outer phenomenal
world, and this content provides us with what we need in tracing those
characteristics back to their source. In inorganic nature we perceive
a fact and see, in order to explain it, a second, a third fact and so
on; and the result is that the first fact appears to us to be the
necessary consequence of the other ones. In the organic world this is
not so. There, in addition to the facts, we need yet another factor.
We must see what works in from outer circumstances as confronted by
something that does not passively allow itself to be determined by
them but rather determines itself, actively, out of itself, under the
influence of the outer circumstances.
But what is that basic factor? It can, after all, be nothing other
than what manifests in the particular in the form of the general. In
the particular, however, a definite organism always manifests. That
basic factor is therefore an organism in the form of the general: a
general image of the organism, which comprises within itself all the
particular forms of organisms.
Following Goethe's example, let us call this general organism typus.
Whatever the word typus might mean etymologically, we are using it in
this Goethean sense and never mean anything else by it than what we
have indicated. This typus is not developed in all its completeness in
any single organism. Only our thinking, in accordance with reason, is
able to take possession of it, by drawing it forth, as a general
image, from phenomena. The typus is therewith the idea of the
organism: the animalness in the animal, the general plant in the
specific one.
One should not picture this typus as anything rigid. It has nothing at
all to do with what Agassiz, Darwin's most significant opponent,
called an incarnate creative thought of God's. The typus
is something altogether fluid, from which all the particular species
and genera, which one can regard as subtypes or specialized types, can
be derived. The typus does not preclude the theory of evolution. It
does not contradict the fact that organic forms evolve out of one
another. It is only reason's protest against the view that organic
development consists purely in sequential, factual (sense-perceptible)
forms. It is what underlies this whole development. It is what
establishes the interconnection in all this endless manifoldness. It
is the inner aspect of what we experience as the outer forms of living
things. The Darwinian theory presupposes the typus.
The typus is the true archetypal organism; according to how it
specializes ideally, it is either archetypal plant or archetypal
animal. It cannot be any one, sense-perceptibly real living being.
What Haeckel or other naturalists regard as the archetypal form is
already a particular shape; it is, in fact, the simplest shape of the
typus. The fact that in time the typus arises in its simplest form
first does not require the forms arising later to be the result of
those preceding them in time. AR forms result as a consequence of the
typus; the first as well as the last are manifestations of it. We must
take it as the basis of a true organic science and not simply
undertake to derive the individual animal and plant species out of one
another. The typus runs like a red thread through all the
developmental stages of the organic world. We must hold onto it and
then with it travel through this great realm of many forms. Then this
realm will become understandable to us. Otherwise it falls apart for
us, just as the rest of the world of experience does, into an
unconnected mass of particulars. In fact, even when we believe that we
are leading what is later, more complicated, more compound, back to a
previous simpler form and that in the latter we have something
original, even then we are deceiving ourselves, for we have only
derived a specific form from a specific form.
Friedrich Theodor Vischer once said of the Darwinian theory that it
necessitates a revision of our concept of time. We have now arrived at
a point that makes evident to us in what sense such a revision would
have to occur. It would have to show that deriving something later out
of something earlier is no explanation, that what is first in time is
not first in principle. All deriving has to do with principles, and at
best it could be shown which factors were at work such that one
species of beings evolved before another one in time.
The typus plays the same role in the organic world as natural law does
in the inorganic. Just as natural law provides us with the possibility
of recognizing each individual occurrence as a part of one great
whole, so the typus puts us in a position to regard the individual
organism as a particular form of the archetypal form.
We have already indicated that the typus is not a completed frozen
conceptual form, but that it is fluid, that it can assume the most
manifold configurations. The number of these configurations is
infinite, because that through which the archetypal form is a single
particular form has no significance for the archetypal form itself It
is exactly the same as the way one law of nature governs infinitely
many individual phenomena, because the specific conditions that arise
in an individual case have nothing to do with the law.
Nevertheless, we have to do here with something essentially different
than in inorganic nature. There it was a matter of showing that a
particular sense-perceptible fact can occur in this and in no other
way, because this or that natural law exists. The fact and the law
confront each other as two separate factors, and absolutely no further
spiritual work is necessary except, when we become aware of a fact, to
remember the law that applies. This is different in the case of a
living being and its manifestations. Here it is a matter of
developing, out of the typus that we must have grasped, the individual
form arising in our experience. We must carry out a spiritual process
of an essentially different kind. We may not simply set the typus, as
something finished in the way the natural law is, over against the
individual phenomenon.
The fact that every object, if it is not prevented by incidental
circumstances, falls to the earth in such a way that the distances
covered in successive intervals of time are in the ratio 1:3:5:7,
etc., is a definite law that is fixed once and for all. It is an
archetypal phenomenon that occurs when two masses (the earth and an
object upon it) enter into interrelationship. If now a specific case
enters the field of our observation to which this law is applicable,
we then need only look at the facts observable to our senses in the
connection with which the law provides us, and we will find this law
to be confirmed. We lead the individual case back to the law. The
natural law expresses the connection of the facts that are separated
in the sense world; but it continues to exist as such over against the
individual phenomenon.
With the typus we must develop the particular case confronting us out
of the archetypal form. We may not place the typus over against the
individual form in order to see how it governs the latter; we must
allow the individual form to go forth out of the typus. A law governs
the phenomenon as something standing over it; the typus flows into the
individual living being; it identifies itself with it.
If an organic science wants to be a science in the sense that
mechanics or physics is, it must therefore know the typus to be the
most general form and must then show it also in diverse, ideal,
separate shapes. Mechanics is indeed also a compilation of diverse
natural laws where the real determinants are altogether hypothetically
assumed. It must be no different in organic science. Here also one
would have to assume hypothetically determined forms in which the
typus develops itself if one wanted to have a rational science. One
would then have to show how these hypothetical configurations can
always be brought to a definite form that exists for our observation.
Just as in the inorganic we lead a phenomenon back to a law, so here
we develop a specific form out of the archetypal form. Organic science
does not come about by outwardly juxtaposing the general and the
particular, but rather by developing the one form out of the other.
Just as mechanics is a system of natural laws, so organic science is
meant to be a series of developmental forms of the typus. It is just
that in mechanics we must bring the individual laws together and order
them into a whole, whereas here we must allow the individual forms to
go forth from one another in a living way.
It is possible to make an objection here. If the typical form is
something altogether fluid, how is it at all possible to set up a
chain of sequential, particular types as the content of an organic
science? One can very well picture to oneself that, in every
particular case one observes, one recognizes a specific form of the
typus, but one cannot, after all, for the purposes of science merely
collect such real observed cases.
One can do something else, however. One can let the typus run through
its series of possibilities and then always (hypothetically) hold fast
to this or that form. In this way one gains a series of forms, derived
in thought from the typus, as the content of a rational organic
science.
An organic science is possible which, like mechanics, is science in
altogether the strictest sense. It is just that the method is a
different one. The method of mechanics is to prove things. Every proof
is based upon a certain principle. There always exists a particular
presupposition (i.e., potentially experienceable conditions are
indicated), and it is then determined what happens when these
presuppositions occur. We then understand the individual phenomenon by
applying the underlying law. We think about it like this: Under these
conditions, a phenomenon occurs; the conditions are there, so the
phenomenon must occur. This is our thought process when we approach an
event in the inorganic world in order to explain it. This is the
method that proves things. It is scientific because it completely
permeates a phenomenon with a concept, because, through it, perception
and thinking coincide.
But we can do nothing with this proving method in organic science. The
typus, in fact, does not bring it about that under certain conditions
a particular phenomenon will occur; it determines nothing about a
relationship of parts that are alien to each other, that confront each
other externally. It determines only the lawfulness of its own parts.
It does not point, like a natural law, beyond itself. The particular
organic forms can therefore be developed only out of the general typus
form, and the organic beings that arise in experience must coincide
with one such derivative form of the typus. The developmental method
must here take the place of the proving one. One establishes here not
that outer conditions affect each other in a certain way and thereby
have a definite result, but rather that under definite outer
circumstances a particular form has developed out of the typus. This
is the far-reaching difference between inorganic and organic science.
This difference underlies no investigative approach as consistently as
the Goethean one. No one has recognized better than Goethe that an
organic science, without any dark mysticism, without teleology,
without assuming special creative thoughts, must be possible. But
also, no one has more vigorously rejected the unwarranted expectation
of being able to accomplish anything here with the methods of
inorganic science. (8) The typus, as we have seen, is a fuller
scientific form than the archetypal phenomenon. It also presupposes a more a
intensive activity of our spirit than the archetypal phenomenon does.
As we reflect upon the things of inorganic nature, sense perception
supplies us with the content. Our sense organization already supplies
us here with that which in the organic realm we receive only through
our spirit. In order to perceive sweet, sour, warmth, cold, light,
color, etc., one need only have healthy senses. We have only to find,
in thinking, the form for the matter. In the typus, however, content
and form are closely bound to each other. Therefore the typus does not
in fact determine the content purely formally the way a law does but
rather permeates the content livingly, from within outward, as its
own.
Our spirit is confronted with the task of participating productively
in the creation of the content along with the formal element.
The kind of thinking in which the content appears in direct connection
with the formal element has always been called intuitive.
Intuition appears repeatedly as a scientific principle. The English
philosopher Reid calls it an intuition if, out of our perception of
outer phenomena (sense impressions), we were to acquire at the same
time a conviction that they really exist. Jacobi thought that in our
feeling of God we are given not only this feeling itself but at the
same time the proof that God is. This judgment is also called
intuitive. What is characteristic of intuition, as one can see, is
always that more is given in the content than this content itself; one
knows about a thought-characterization, without proof, merely through
direct conviction. One believes it to be unnecessary to prove one's
thought-characterizations (real existence, etc.) about the
material of perception; in fact, one possesses them in
unseparated unity with the content.
With the typus this is really the case. Therefore it can offer no
means of proof but can merely provide the possibility of developing
every particular form out of itself. Our spirit, consequently, must
work much more intensively in grasping the typus than in grasping a
natural law. It must produce the content along with the form. It must
take upon itself an activity that the senses carry out in inorganic
science and that we call beholding (Anschauang). At this higher
level, the spirit itself must therefore be able to behold. Our power
of judgment must be a thinking beholding, and a beholding thinking. We
have to do here, as was expounded for the first time by Goethe, with a
power to judge in beholding (anschauende Urteilskraft). Goethe
thereby revealed as a necessary form of apprehension in the human
spirit that which Kant wanted to prove was something the human being,
by his whole make-up, is not granted.
Just as in organic nature the typus takes the place of the natural law
(archetypal phenomenon) of inorganic nature, so intuition (the power
to judge in beholding) takes the place of the proving (reflecting)
power of judgment. Just as one believed that one could apply to
organic nature the same laws that pertain to a lower stage of
knowledge, so also one supposed that the same methods are valid here
as there. Both are errors.
One has often treated intuition in a very belittling way in science.
One regarded it as a defect in Goethe's spirit that he wanted to
attain scientific truths by intuition. What is attained in an
intuitive way is, in fact, considered by many to be quite important
when it is a matter of a scientific discovery. There, one says, an
inspiration often leads further than a methodically trained thinking.
One frequently calls it intuition, in fact, when someone by chance has
hit upon something right, whose truth the researcher must first
convince himself of by roundabout means. But it is always denied that
intuition itself could be a principle of science. What occurs to
intuition must afterward first be proved so it is thought
if it is to have any scientific value.
Thus one also considered Goethe's scientific achievements to be
brilliant inspirations that only afterward received credibility
through strict science.
But for organic science, intuition is the right method. It follows
quite clearly from our considerations, we think, that Goethe's spirit
found the right path in the organic realm precisely because it was
intuitively predisposed. The method appropriate to the organic realm
coincided with the constitution of his spirit. Because of this it only
became all the more clear to him the extent to which this method
differs from that of inorganic science. The one became clear to him
through the other. He therefore could also sketch the nature of the
inorganic in clear strokes.
The belittling way in which intuition is treated is due in no small
measure to the fact that one believes the same degree of credibility
cannot be attributed to its achievements as to those of the proving
sciences. One often calls knowing only that which has been
proved, and everything else faith.
One must bear in mind that intuition means something completely
different within our scientific direction which is convinced
that in thinking we grasp the core of the world in its essential being
than in that direction which shifts this core into a beyond we
cannot investigate. A person who sees in the world lying before us
insofar as we either experience it or penetrate it with our
thinking nothing more than a reflection (an image of some
other-worldly, unknown, active principle that remains hidden behind
this shell not only to one's first glance but also to all scientific
investigation) such a person can certainly regard the proving method
as nothing but a substitute for the insight we lack into the essential
being of things. Since he does not press through to the view that a
thought-connection comes about directly through the essential content
given in thought, i.e., through the thing itself, he believes himself
able to support this thought-connection only through the fact that it
is in harmony with several basic convictions (axioms) so simple that
they are neither susceptible to proof nor in need thereof. If such a
person is then presented with a scientific statement without proof, a
statement, indeed, that by its very nature excludes the proving
method, then it seems to him to be imposed from outside. A truth
approaches him without his knowing what the basis of its validity is.
He believes he has no knowledge, no insight into the matter; he
believes he can only give himself over to the faith that, outside his
powers of thought, some basis or other for its validity exists.
Our world view is in no danger of having to regard the limits of the
proving method as at the same time the limits of scientific
conviction. It has led us to the view that the core of the world flows
into our thinking, that we do not think about the essential being of
the world, but rather that thinking is a merging with the essential
being of reality. With intuition a truth is not imposed upon us from
outside, because, from our standpoint, there is no inner and outer in
the sense assumed by the scientific direction just characterized and
that is in opposition to our own. For us, intuition is a direct
being-within, a penetrating into the truth that gives us everything
that pertains to it at all. It merges completely with what is given to
us in our intuitive judgment. The essential characteristic of faith is
totally absent here, which is that only the finished truth is given us
and not its basis and that penetrating insight into the matter under
consideration is denied us. The insight gained on the path of
intuition is just as scientific as the proven insight.
Every single organism is the development of the typus into a
particular form. Every organism is an individuality that governs and
determines itself from a center. It is a selfenclosed whole,
which in inorganic nature is only the case with the cosmos.
The ideal of inorganic science is to grasp the totality of all
phenomena as a unified system, so that we approach every phenomenon
with the consciousness of recognizing it as a part of the cosmos. In
organic science, on the other hand, the ideal must be, in the typus
and in its forms of manifestation, to have with the greatest possible
perfection what we see develop in the sequence of single beings.
Leading the typus through all the phenomena is what matters here. In
inorganic science it is the system; in organic science it is
comparison (of each individual form with the typus).
Spectral analysis and the perfecting of astronomy are extending out to
the universe the truths gained in the limited region of the earth.
They are thereby approaching the first ideal. The second ideal will be
fulfilled when the comparing method employed by Goethe is recognized
in all its implications.
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