From The Rediscovery of Meaning

There is a difference between ‘thinking’ and ‘thought’. One way of grasping this difference (which is of the utmost importance) is to consider the history of thinking and see how it differs from a history of thought. The following is intended to be a kind of digest of notes for a possible history of thinking — not of thought, but thinking — as it has developed in the Western world from the beginning of Greek civilisation down to our own day.

If we examine reflectively the manner in which we Europeans think today of the world about us, one of the first things we notice is that the concept of ‘Law’, explicit or implicit, as the case may be, plays an absolutely fundamental part in it. We might say that our thoughts take their whole shape and colour from this concept. The whole of what we respect as ‘science’, for example, is nothing but the investigation and revelation of ‘laws’, whether they be laws of nature in their stricter physical sense or the ‘laws’ which are assumed, albeit with somewhat less universal consent, to govern such regions as human behaviour, economic intercourse, etc. The familiar ‘law of supply and demand’ will do for an example of the latter kind. Nor is the idea merely one of those abstruse hypotheses which are deliberately adopted for the convenience of accurate scientific method. It is fixed, as a reality, quite as firmly — perhaps more firmly — in the head of the proverbial man in the street than it is in the specialised mind of the professor expounding logic or the expert pursuing scientific research.

When we have realised the ubiquity of this idea in modern European thought, we may for that reason be inclined to stop and ask ourselves more precisely what is meant by it. What do we all mean? Do we, for example, think of a law of nature as corresponding at all to a Hebraic ‘Law’, that is to say, as being a definite command of the Almighty? I believe that very few modern Europeans and Americans conceive of the laws of nature in that light. Do we think of it, then, as a kind of custom or tradition, which Nature keeps tactfully agreeing to follow, as though, when she was bringing to birth a litter of puppies, she would say to herself: Well, I suppose I had better make them as like the parent dogs as possible — after all, I always have done so? It would be absurd, No, it is only when we think of nature, life, reality, or whatever we call it, as being obliged to behave as it does, or — to translate the same idea from Latin into English — as being ‘bound’ to do so, that we begin to speak of ‘laws of nature’. A law of nature is to us a something, an x, which binds or connects together otherwise discrete phenomena.

Now a history of thinking differs from a history of thought in that, not content with obsessing that man began to think thus and thus at a certain time, it goes on to ask how they became able to think so. Enquiring on these lines, it is quite easy to discover that the concept ‘law’ arose out of human practices and institutions and was only afterwards transferred, by analogy, to nature, or to processes in general over which the human will is conceived to have no control. But human laws have been created and conceived of very differently at different times and places; so that we have still to enquire what particular kind of human law it was, which was adapted by analogy and became such an indispensable instrument of modern thought. Now, just as the Hebraic ‘Law’ was much more of a command than a law, as we understand it, so the Greek law, as the word νόμος (‘nomos’) suggests, was rather in the nature of what we understand by ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’. It is only in the Roman lex, with its etymological derivation from ‘binding’ (ob-lig-ation, etc.), that the modern meaning really begins to appear in human consciousness at all. Here, at last, distilled as it were from the formidably practical activity of generations of Roman soldiers and statesmen, we have the true legal conception of a relation between human beings, not based on blood or affectation or religion, but upon a purely abstract something which is ‘binding’ on them. This could be illustrated in an interesting manner from the meanings of all sorts of Latin words and English words derived from Latin. It could also be demonstrated, from such records as the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, old pictures of the Last Judgment, etc., that, as Steiner has pointed out, that peculiarly Roman conception of, and feeling for, law crept into all kinds of thought during the Dark and Middle Ages. But at the moment all this must be passed over. The question is, when did men first begin to think, in something like a modern manner, of ‘laws of nature’?

As far as I am aware, the first writer to draw the analogy in England (though it was not in the English language) was the lawyer-philosopher, Francis Bacon.¹ Moreover, Bacon’s place in the history of European thought makes it pretty certain that he was at least among the first to draw it at all. So that, in the history of thought, we have here a fairly definite point — round about the beginning of the seventeenth century — at which the concept of ‘laws of nature’ first begins to reveal itself as working in human minds. But now, if we wish to go on from a history of thought to a history of thinking, we shall have to ask ourselves: then, how did men think nature before they had acquired this concept? I purposely avoid saying, how did they think of nature, because (as I hope to show) to think of nature, as we do today, the concept of ‘law’ must to some extent have been already absorbed by the thinker at first or second hand. History of thought is illusory just because we tend to think back in this way in our own terms, to project into the minds of our ancestors a kind of thinking which was only made possible by the subsequent events of that very history. For history of thinking we have to be much more conscientious; and, once having perceived that such a concept as ‘law’ in its application to nature only entered into human consciousness at a certain period, we must try for all previous periods, as it were, to unthink that concept together with all its intellectual and psychological implications and consequences. This requires a very real effort of the imagination, besides a fairly intimate acquaintance with the customary processes of our own intellects.

Now one of the most significant passages in which Bacon makes this strikingly novel use of the word lex (for he was writing in Latin) runs as follows:²

It may be that nothing really exists except individual bodies, which produce real motion according to law; in science it is just that law, and the enquiry, discovery, and explanation of it, which are the fundamental requisite both for the knowledge and for the control of Nature. And it is that law, and its ‘clauses’, which I mean when I use (chiefly because of its current prevalence and familiarity) the word ‘forms’.

The writer has just been vigorously condemning the scholastic science of his day, which consisted almost entirely of efforts to discuss and expound these ‘forms’ of which he speaks. It will thus be seen that he actually substitutes the meaning of the word ‘law’ for the meaning then commonly attached, in philosophical circles, to the word ‘form’ (forma) and only refrains from substituting the word itself because of its unfamiliarity. But subsequently — from about the time of the Restoration — this was actually done, with the ultimate results which we have just observed; and the word ‘form’ was dropped altogether in that connection. Thus, there is some reason to suppose that, if we wish to grasp imaginatively the way in which men thought, before they had transferred concept of ‘law’ both to help and to hinder them in their mental processes, it may be worth while to investigate the old meaning of the term for which, in effect, it was substituted — I mean the word ‘form’. As soon, however, as we attempt to do this, we find ourselves plunged into the world of Greek thought, for the meaning attached to the word ‘form’ in the Middle Ages was a definite relic of Greek philosophy. And in the kind of history which I am attempting to sketch Greek thought takes its places as the result, or product, of Greek thinking. We must consider the latter, therefore, first.

The pervasive quality of Greek thinking, and of Greek consciousness as a whole — the characteristic which distinguishes it most from our own and most delights us — is that it was in a certain sense alive. As a thinker or knower, the Greek tended to be at home, as it were, in the coming-into-being, or becoming; whereas our own thought, built as it is on the secure but rigid framework of logic³ (which the Greeks did not succeed in evolving for us until Aristotle’s day), can only deal with the ‘become’, the finished product — except, of course, where it is willing to bring in the aid of poesy and metaphor. Ontologically — and dismissing all moral and aesthetic values — it is quite legitimate to correlate ‘alive’ with ‘becoming’ and ‘dead’ with ‘become’; and it is in this sense, as will appear more clearly, that I characterise Greek thinking as alive, when compared with our own. One casts about for a way in which one could try to convey this living quality of Greek thinking to those who had not had the opportunity of discovering it for themselves; and it must be confessed that it is not altogether easy. To take, however, a very homely example: the man of today knows quite well, of course, whether his hair is long or short; but if he examines this knowledge more closely, he will find that it is only knowledge of a result. Thus, he may look in the glass, he may see the snippets lying on the kind of surplice in which barbers envelop us, he may find that his new hat is now large enough to include his ears, or he may feel cold round the back of his neck as he goes out into the street. On the other hand, he may feel the heat or weight of long hair. But if we try to imagine that, instead of this way of knowledge, we could actually be conscious in the growing of our hair, could feel it as movement in something the same way that we still feel our breathing as movement, we should be making an approach towards the difference between Greek consciousness and Greek thinking, and our own. Consciousness and thinking are practically interchangeable here; for thinking, in this living sense, differs from thought in that it is not merely an intellectual operation connected with the brain, but involves the whole consciousness. Thought is only the result of this consciousness.

For this reason, history of thinking is often better revealed by the meaning of individual words (the study of which has been called Semantics) than by the parallel history of literature or philosophy. For the individual word is, in a sense, the point at which thinking becomes thought. Like thought, it is the product or result of thinking, and literature (apart from its redemption by poetry) and our thought, too, in so far as we have to think in words, is a kind of synthesis of these products. “It is only by recording our thoughts in language”, says a recent writer on Logic,⁴

that it becomes possible to distinguish between the process and the result of thought. Without language the act, and product of thinking would be identical and equally evanescent. But by carrying on the process in language and remembering or otherwise recording it, we obtain a result which may be examined according to the principles of Logic.

Thus, if we try to enter imaginatively into the meaning of many Greek words, comparing them with apparently similar words in our own language, we get all sorts of interesting results. In the case of long hair, for instance, we find that, besides the static, analytic method of statement, which arises from a knowledge of results only — ‘to have long hair’ — the Greek language in its early stages actually had a single verb to express this physical condition, a verb which is ex hypothesi untranslatable in modern English, and to which the nearest approach would perhaps be ‘to become long as to the hair’, ‘to bristle’, etc.

The important thing is to realise imaginatively the kind of underlying consciousness which would have expressed itself in such terms. I mention these few words less as evidence than as examples of the fact that the Greek manner of thinking was determined by direct experience of natura naturans, whereas our direct experience is always of natura naturata. The proposition that Greeks did in fact think in this manner is no more capable of experimental proof than the proposition that a manuscript of Hamlet contains something else beside a certain weight of paper plus a certain weight of ink. Those who combine, let us say, a dram of imagination with some knowledge of Greek art and literature must take the responsibility of deciding for themselves whether or no they can venture to agree.

The Greek youth of Homer’s day, as he approached manhood, did not ‘have a beard’, he did not even ‘grow a beard’; he did not require a substantive at all to express what was happening — he ‘foamed’! And again, in order to attribute youth, the Greek language did not require, as we do, the static, logical mode of copula and predicate — “So and so — is — young”; it could say “So and so ‘blossoms’ or ‘blooms’,” using the same word as it used for the flowers of the field. It cannot be too often insisted that this was not a poetical metaphor, but a bedrock element in the Greek language; it is we, when we use such expressions today, who are trying to get back, via poetic metaphor, into the kind of consciousness which the Greek had and could express quite naturally and straightforwardly.⁵

Nor is it merely a poetic fancy to connect in one’s mind the whole flavour and freshness of Greek thinking with a blossoming flower — a flower that is still moist, alive, in movement, becoming; and our own thought (again, in so far as it is not redeemed by the poetic) with the withered leaf and stalk of Autumn, the hard rind of the seed, the motionless, the dead, the ‘become’. We can even take the connection in its most literal sense, when we find that the popular names of so many English wild flowers — anemone, daffodil, bryony, celandine, cherry, etc. — the names by which we instinctively call them when we see them blowing in the field, are traceable to a Greek origin, while the same flowers only acquire Latin labels, when they begin to appear, as dead, dried up specimens, in the botanist’s scrapbook. In the same way one could consider all the medical terms that have come to us from Greek, or again all the medical terms that have come to us from Greek, or again the unsurpassed vitality and perfection of living form which breathes to us from the Elgin marbles, as revealing the manner in which Greek consciousness as a whole tended to be at home in the physically living, in the process of becoming.

It is only as a natural growth from this pre-existing soil, this instinctive kind of thinking, that the world of Greek thought proper can really be understood. Philosophy may be defined as the most wakeful part of a people’s consciousness. We find, accordingly, early Greek philosophy concerned precisely with this problem of ‘coming into being’ or generation. The kind of question which the first philosophers set themselves to solve would be expressed by us somewhat as follows: where, they would ask, is the flower’s ‘form’, the shape and beauty which our eyes will see clearly enough when it blossoms, now that they can see nothing but the bare earth or the dry seed? It is not too much to say that all the famous puzzles of Greek philosophy, the puzzles about the One and the Many, about Being and Not-Being, and whether Not-Being is, and so forth, begin to be intelligible in the light of this underlying ‘becoming’ quality of Greek thinking. Now it is one of our four fundamental ‘Laws of Thought’ that a thing cannot both be and not be, and so obvious does this appear to us that when we find Heraclitus maintaining the opposite, we are inclined to stigmatise him as a verbal quibbler. This is because we can only think ‘is’; we cannot really think ‘becomes’, except as a kind of cinematographic succession of states or ‘is’s’. Consequently Dr. Karl Unger, in an interesting article, has recently urged us to regard these so-called ‘laws’ of thought rather as subjective limitations to be overcome, and not as laws of Nature, in which sense they are sometimes accepted. We may thus compare them if we will with St. Paul’s conception of the Torah, whose strict observance at one time was not more necessary than its supersession at another by a new impulse of Life.

With the Greeks themselves there could be no question of having to overcome such laws of thought; for no such laws had been formulated. Even by the end of Plato’s career Greek consciousness had not yet succeeded in distinguishing either of the two opposed concepts of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ from a third concept of mere logical ‘predication’, as we do. The struggle to achieve this can actually be overheard, at an acute stage, in the dialogue called the Sophist. And if we go a little further back, we come to a period when the Greek mind had not even succeeded in distinguishing ‘being’ from ‘becoming’. For up to this point Greek consciousness had actually lived in this experience of ‘becoming’. And because of this the Greek mind could not at first be conscious of it as such. Thus, although the early Greek philosophers were indeed occupied with a problem which we are now able to name as that of ‘coming into being’ or ‘becoming’, they themselves could have no such name for it, for being conscious in it, they could not get outside it and be conscious of it. So that, in a sense, this too was the problem of early Greek philosophy — to acquire, as far as possible, the idea of such a world of becoming. And it began to do so, when Anaxagoras set over against the for-ever-changing world of growing and decaying substance (the ‘universal flux’) of Heraclitus the other principle of Nous or Mind. This was the beginning of the antithesis (hitherto unapprehended) between Spirit and Matter,⁶ and if enforced brevity may excuse a somewhat amateurish expression, it may be said that by Plato’s time the central problem of philosophy was how spirit, or nous ‘becomes’ matter, or how matter, at certain times and seasons imitates or takes the ‘form’ of spirit. It is no wonder that the Greeks were a nation of artists!

Note that our own problem tends to be the reverse of this: for we ask how (if at all) matter becomes spirit, and enquire into the ‘origin of reason’ which we often conceive of as having arisen at a certain point of time, in a world which previously consisted entirely of material substance.

We are therefore in a position to ask ourselves once more the question which was asked a few pages back: what were the ‘forms’ of which Bacon speaks, and which, by altering the meaning of the word, he wishes to eradicate from the men’s minds, putting in their place his own abstract ‘laws’? They were nothing else than the memory, so far as it had been retained by European thought since Plato’s and Aristotle’s day, of those elements, as it were, of νούς (‘nous’) — of the mind — or spiritual world, which the best Greek thinking could still apprehend in its time as living Beings. They were a faint, shadowy recollection of those Thought Beings, neither objective nor subjective, which Greek thinking could actually enshrine within itself — Beings, by whom the part of Nature which is perceptible to our senses is continually brought into being and again withdrawn, in the rhythm of the seasons and of life and death.

But by Bacon’s time most, if not all, men had already lost the power to think these Forms. They could only think of them, filling their minds with the abstract, subjective, ‘ideas’ of modern thought, which are at best no more than their shadows. Bacon transformed these ideas, already abstract in men’s minds, to the still more abstract idea of ‘laws’; and modern science has grown up since his day entirely as a system which deduces from sense-observation these laws, or rules for the changes which occur in the sense-perceptible part of nature.

Now to the most typical Greek thought this part of nature, as we saw, was itself but the sum of the accomplished deeds of another invisible part — that of the ‘Forms’ as well will call them. Indeed the Greek tended to lose interest in the Nature which had become, dwelling only on the Nature which was still in process of becoming. We may even characterise this as its weakness. The ‘law’ type of thought, on the contrary, if strictly observed, can only deal with a nature that has already, in the physical sense, become. To it, the seed is a congeries of minute particles, which are disposed in a certain relation by the ‘laws’ of their being, and which, as the year proceeds, draw other particles towards them, building up, again according to certain ‘laws’, the leaf, the blossom, and so forth. And the flower is nothing else than these particles — apart from the mysterious ‘laws’ which determine their changes of position.

But now if we ask again, as it was asked at the beginning of this chapter, what these ‘laws’ are, no scientist with a sense of his responsibilities can admit them to be more than the fact that certain changes have been constantly observed. He may, of course, add other ideas out of his religious or aesthetic convictions as a private individual, but that is the definition of ‘law’ which he has to observe in his work. He must deal with facts, and facts, alike in their real and their etymological significance, are simply — facta — ‘things which have been done’. Natural law is observable in its effects only.

The result is, of course, a purely static type of thought which can deal adequately only with the most static part of nature — the mineral, the inorganic, the dead. With that part it can deal in a marvellously skilful manner. The most elaborate machine which the Greeks ever even attempted would look like a drawing by Mr. Heath Robinson if it were placed beside the electrical installation that hums today in the power-house of a tiny Alpine village. That is the first result.

The second result is the modern civilisation which has arisen along with this static thought and the machinery which it has produced. But for those who see clearly how the institutions which make civilisation possible are but the bodies or husks of concrete creative thinking in the past, there is also a third result, as inevitable as the other two. It is the imminent disruption of this same civilisation. For this static, abstract thought has death in it. As far as being is concerned, it can give nothing; it can only classify what is there already and re-arrange somewhat its component parts.

For a long time our systems and institutions, grown up out of the ancient world in which this real thinking was still operative, have gone on working, as it were, by their own momentum. But the period which culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the Great War has altered the world out of all recognition. Is it not painfully obvious on all sides that, if the continuity of Western civilisation is to be preserved, we need fresh creative thinking, the power to create fresh forms out of life itself, that is to say, out of the part of Nature which is still coming into being, the Spiritual World?

Not that this power to think life into the world has ever been wholly lost from Europe. As religious inspiration, as art, as poetry, it has continued to manifest itself sporadically right down to our own day. But it is a very long time since it appeared anywhere with strength enough to be operative in the practical, scientific sense. And it is the development of scientific thought with which I am here particularly concerned; when we want to cure a man of tuberculosis, we go today, not to religion or art, but to science.

By the end of the eighteenth century, then, apart from these isolated exceptions, the power to think in a living way may be considered as having died right out. The man of the eighteenth century lived in a clockwork cosmos. And because this static, clockwork cosmos which he had spun out of his abstract, scientific fantasy was remote from the truth, and because he was honestly seeking for the truth, he had at last to dislodge it from its repose with the idea of ‘evolution’ — an attempt to get back again, in a new form, to the old notion of ‘gradually coming into being’. But it was as yet no more than a notion — even in its Lamarck-Bergson-Shaw evening-dress of ‘creative’ evolution it is not much more than an abstract shadow of the real life force, the true creative Logos, which was once not an idea for men but an experience and a Being. If ‘evolution’ today were not merely a theory for men, but an actual experience, it would be impossible for them, when speaking of it, to omit all reference to its meaning — which is the evolution of consciousness. The spellbound teachers and parents, who must go on inculcating this lifeless, repressive dogma, do not introduce Shakespeare to their children by repeating what psychologists have said about the causes of the impulse to clap hands. This is because the genius of Shakespeare is, not somebody else’s theory, invented to explain the repeated phenomenon of hand-clapping, but a concrete experience of the individual soul. There is no such experience of evolution.

How are we able to get back this experience, this which will alone enable us to impart fresh life to our decaying civilisation? There is no question of going backwards and trying to be little Greeks. The Greeks are not to be our models; they are merely interesting examples, historically close to us, of a people who possessed something which we need desperately ourselves, though in a different form. Indeed, our problem is essentially different from theirs. The task which their philosophers instinctively set themselves was, as we saw, to get outside a plane of consciousness in which they normally lived, so as to be able to conceive of it: to turn thinking into thought. Our problem is the converse of this. We are outside it already. Our task is twofold: first to realise that it is still there, and then to learn how to get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks never knew, and which could never have been ours if they had not laboured to turn thinking into thought. Thus, being normally outside it, it follows that we shall also be conscious of it as a different world, a world into which we can plunge at will. In this case, the Greeks did not have a word for it. We shall.

The first part of the problem has already been solved. Rudolf Steiner’s comprehensive work is enough and more than enough many times over to enable any really unprejudiced, unobsessed mind to realise that this great world of formative thinking is still there, awaiting us, if we have but the will to reach it. His book, The Philosophy of Freedom, for example, is a bridge, itself compacted of ordinary, logical thoughts, which leads beyond and away from such thoughts right up to this other world of creative thinking. And the name which, in other books, Steiner has given to this world is ‘etheric’.

But the second part of the problem is not solved, and it depends on ourselves, the men of this generation and the next. This is the problem of actually reaching the etheric in fully conscious experience of thinking. The preservation of continuity in Western Civilisation depends on how many and how active may be the spirits which shall succeed in doing this. For the futile inadequacy of our method of knowledge to the rapidly changing realities by which its dignified Roman nose is being tweaked on all sides at present simply shouts at us. We understand what is at rest and what has become, and we can deal with it as never before; but when we try to grasp what is in motion or alive, we merely gibber fantasies in a vacuum hermetically sealed from the truth. Thus, in Medicine, the whole of the surgical branch has reached a point little short of perfection; but when it is a question of treating malignant growths and, in general, diseases of the living organism, where are we? In this country, no one who has been brought into contact with even the outer fringe of medical controversy on these matters (I mean, of course, outside the wide area over which the British Medical Association extends its virtual censorship) will need to wait for an answer. Indeed, the healthiest sign of all, probably is the increasing number of doctors and others who are beginning to realise, and in some cases to admit, their helplessness. Not to admit it is to be led blindfold into a grotesque world of superstition in which our posterity will hardly be brought to believe, a world from which the sense of humour eloped long ago with the sense of proportion.

In 1924, when cancer research on orthodox bacteriological lines had been going on for more than twenty years and had already absorbed thousands and thousands of pounds, the Medical Correspondent of The Times (September 13th), in an article on a lecture, enumerated the following results, as “an important addition to knowledge”:

1. The first time a carcinoma has ever been produced in a guinea-pig.
2. The first demonstration that a mechanical irritant can produce cancer.
3. The first time a cancer of the glandular type has ever been produced experimentally.
4. The first demonstration that a pathological substance developed wholly within the living body (i.e. a gall-stone) can produce cancer by prolonged irritation or injury.

But, as though his readers might feel almost too triumphant at these startling results, he prefaced them with the remark that:

Rash conclusions cannot and must not be drawn. While mechanical irritation does cause cancer in the gall-bladder, there is no assurance that it will do this in other sites or in other animals. In all disease we have to consider the pathogenic agent on the one hand and the susceptible or refractory tissue on the other. Thus, if tar is applied to a mouse’s skins, a skin-cancer will eventually develop, but no amount of tar-application will cause cancer on a rat’s or a guinea-pig’s skin.

We must also, he said, face the fact that tar applied to the inside of the bowel in a mouse does not produce cancer. It is as though he held up a warning finger: Steady! Do not be too optimistic, my friend. We can produce cancer in some of the animals some of the time, but, remember, we cannot yet produce cancer in all the animals all the time! Not a word, be it observed, of any remedy! But this is the sole mode of thought which can only perceive the formative forces in their effects: first produce similar effects, and then hope you will somehow chance on a remedy; ignore throughout as irrelevant all specifically human impulses of decency and compassion.

Or one could take Economics. The economic life is today the real bond of the civilised world. The world is held together not by political or religious harmony, but by economic interdependence; and here again there is the same antithesis. Economic theory is bound hand and foot by the static, abstract character of modern thought. One the one hand, everything to do with industry and the possibility of substituting human labour by machinery has reached an unexampled pitch of perfection. But when it is a question of distributing this potential wealth, when it is demanded of us, therefore, that we think in terms of flow and rate of flow, we cannot even begin to rise to it. The result is that our ‘labour-saving’ machinery produces, not leisure, but its ghastly caricature, unemployment,⁷ while nearly every civilised and half-civilised nation of the world sits helplessly watching the steady growth within itself of a malignant tumour of social discontent. And this increasingly rancorous discontent is felt above all things by a cramping penury, a shortage of the means of livelihood, which arises, not out of the realities of nature, but out of abstract, inelastic thoughts about money!

It is a startling thing to go back to poetic writers such as Ruskin or Shelley and to find them forestalling already, out of the living thinking that was in them as artists, the most advanced and intelligent criticism that is being directed today upon the financial mechanism of distribution in our industrial civilisation. It is startling, but it is not very consoling. For what effect did their intuitive foreknowledge have on the problems upon which it was directed? About as much as Cassandra’s. It is no longer enough that an occasional artist here and there should see his parcel of truth and speak it out, while the actual direction taken by civilisation continues to be wholly determined by a soi-disant scientific method of knowledge. Science must itself become an art, and art a science; either they must mingle, or Western civilisation, as we know it, must perish, to make room for one that may have spirit enough to learn how to know God’s earth as He actually made it.

It is so intoxicating to go on repeating the word ‘must’, besides giving one a very pleasant sense of superiority. But this time it was not the result of ignorance. Flirtations, it is true, are common enough, but it would be difficult to exaggerate the repugnance with which artist and scientist alike are generally inclined at present to contemplate any such spiritual marriage as anthroposophy desiderates for them. Indeed, for those few who have as yet been brought by the circumstances of their lives to comprehend how desperately Europe needs what anthroposophy can give her, it is an experience more moving and at the same time very much more bitter than the spectacle of high tragedy to see the indifference, misunderstanding, antipathy, and cold suspicion, with which Rudolf Steiner’s work meets on every side. A kind of bigotry and arrogance is sometimes imputed to anthroposophists for their exclusive emphasis upon his work and their movement in so many different departments of life. The answer is in the facts themselves. Those who have accepted Steiner’s priceless gift are not the choice and picked ones of the earth: they are simply those who have felt out of the depths of their being the fearful need of this living, creative thinking. They are only too glad to take and use such thinking wherever they find it. But where do they find it? Does the traveller, dying of thirst, stop to complain because the torrent gushes from a single spring instead of oozing up out of every stone beneath his feet?

Owen Barfield

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