Two rival geological schools of Goethe's day: Neptunists traced every rock to water, Plutonists to fire. Steiner read the deadlock as a limit of geology.
Neptunists and Plutonists in Anthroposophy is the label Rudolf Steiner gives to the two rival schools of geology that divided Goethe's generation over how the earth's rocks were made. The Neptunists, led by the Freiberg mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner, held that every stratum, granite included, settled out of a universal watery envelope. The Plutonists answered that the planet condensed from a hot gaseous nebula, cooled from the outside inward, and still carries a fiery fluid interior betrayed by volcanoes and earthquakes. Steiner treated the dispute in his Berlin lecture of 9 February 1911, published in Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence (GA 60), and used it to mark a boundary: geology working from strata alone cannot decide the origin of the primal rock. Goethe, writing from a bare summit in his essay on granite, declined to choose, and Steiner counts that restraint the sounder scientific position.
Neptunists and Plutonists were the water party and the fire party of early geology, and Steiner brings them up not to settle the quarrel but to show where the quarrel ends. Both sides read the same strata; neither could reach behind granite to the condition that produced it. That gap is where spiritual science begins its own account of the earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
One of the principal supporters of the latter was the geologist Werner, who was also acquainted with Goethe. He held that, generally speaking, nothing that we are able to observe of the accumulated layers within the earth's crust can be traced back to any kind of action by fire, but that everything we can learn from investigations points to the earth having in effect consolidated out of nothing but a watery element, out of a watery form of the planet, that even the oldest strata are alluvial deposits from water and that, consequently, granite too owes its origin not to the action of seething fire, but to watery deposits ...
What it Means Today
The quarrel Steiner describes did not die with Werner. It came back in the twentieth century as the granite controversy, and it came back over the same rock. From the 1930s onward, magmatists held that granite crystallises from a silicate melt, while transformists, or granitisers, argued that granite forms in place when older rock is reworked in the solid state by migrating fluids. Herbert Harold Read, professor of geology at Imperial College London, collected his addresses on the question as The Granite Controversy in 1957, and left the discipline his working maxim: there are granites and granites. Field mapping, experimental petrology, and later isotope work settled the matter in the way Read had implied, by refusing the single answer. Granite has more than one road.
Thalira synthesis: the two-hundred-year pattern is the point. Every time geology has asked "water or fire?" about the primal rock, the honest answer has been that the question is shaped wrongly, and the field has had to widen its method rather than pick a winner. That is exactly Goethe's move in the granite essay, and it is why Steiner, in the Berlin lecture, treats the deadlock as an invitation rather than a scandal. For a reader today the practical use is small and sharp: when two explanations of an origin exhaust each other, check whether both are asking about a stage that neither can reach.
Where to Read More
- Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence, GA 60
- Find GA 60 at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]