Many a conception which is taken for granted by modern man, and is therefore assumed to have been always obvious, was in fact established quite deliberately at a definite historical moment. We have seen how this applies to our knowledge of the gaseous state of matter; it applies also to the idea of the uniqueness of gravity. About half a century after van Helmont's discovery a treatise called Contra Levitatem was published in Florence by the Accademia del Cimento. It declares that a science firmly based on observation has no right to speak of Levity as something claiming equal rank with, and opposite to, Gravity.
This attitude was in accord with the state into which human consciousness had entered at that time. For a consciousness which is itself of the quality 'cold', because it is based on the contracting forces of the body, is naturally not in a position to take into consideration its very opposite. Therefore, to speak of a force of levity as one felt able to speak of gravity was indeed without meaning.
Just as there was historical necessity in this banishing of levity from science at the beginning of the age of the spectator-consciousness, so was there historical necessity in a renewed awareness of it arising when the time came for man to overcome the limitations of his spectator - relationship to the world. We find this in Goethe's impulse to search for the action of polarities in nature. As we shall see later, it comes to its clearest expression in Goethe's optical conceptions.
Another witness to this fact is Ruskin, through a remark which bears in more than one sense on our present subject. It occurs in his essay, The Storm-Cloud of the Ninteenth Century. In its context it is meant to warn the reader against treating science, which Ruskin praises as a fact-finding instrument, as an interpreter of natural facts. Ruskin takes Newton's conception of gravity as the all-moving cause of the universe, and turns against it in the following words:
'Take the very top and centre of scientific interpretation by the greatest of its masters: Newton explained to you - or at least was once supposed to explain, why an apple fell; but he never thought of explaining the exact correlative but infinitely more difficult question, how the apple got up there.'
This remark shows Ruskin once again as a true reader in nature's book. Looking with childlike openness and intensity of participation into the world of the senses, he allows nature's phenomena to impress themselves upon his mind without giving any preconceived preference to one kind or another. This enables him not to be led by the phenomenon of falling bodies to overlook the polarically opposite phenomenon of the upward movement of physical matter in the living plant. Ruskin's remark points directly to the new world-conception which must be striven for to-day - the conception in which death is recognized as a secondary form of existence preceded by life; in which levity is given its rightful place as a force polar to gravity; and in which, because life is bound up with levity as death is with gravity, levity is recognized as being of more ancient rank than gravity.
*
In proceeding now to a study of levity we shall not start, as might be expected, with plants or other living forms. We are not yet equipped to understand the part played by levity in bringing about the processes of life; we shall come to this later. For our present purpose we shall look at certain macrotelluric events - events in which large areas of the earth are engaged - taking our examples from meteorology on the one hand and from seismic (volcanic) processes on the other.
In pursuing this course we follow a method which belongs to the fundamentals of a Goetheanistic science. A few words about this method may not be out of place.
When we strive to read the book of nature as a script of the spirit we find ourselves drawn repeatedly towards two realms of natural phenomena. They are widely different in character, but studied together they render legible much that refuses to be deciphered in either realm alone. These realms are, on the one hand, the inner being of man, and, on the other, the phenomena of macrotelluric and cosmic character. The fruitfulness of linking together these two will become clear if we reflect on the following.