Glossary

Goethe's World-Conception in Anthroposophy

Goethe's World-Conception names the conviction, running through every page of Goethe's botany, optics and geology, that nature and the mind that knows nature are one continuous whole. Where Plato and...

Goethe the Scientist in Anthroposophy

Goethe the Scientist names the half of Goethe that schoolrooms forget. Beside Faust and the Roman Elegies stood decades of patient observation: dissecting a human jaw, walking the gardens of...

The Sense World and Thinking in Anthroposophy

The sense world and thinking name the two halves Rudolf Steiner refused to let drift apart. A colour, a sound, a weight arrives from outside as raw percept, silent about...

The Boundaries of Natural Science in Anthroposophy

The boundaries of natural science, in Rudolf Steiner's reading, are two. Toward one limit lies matter, which physics presupposes everywhere yet can never lay its hands on. Toward the other...

Exact Sensorial Imagination in Anthroposophy

Exact Sensorial Imagination is the trained inner capacity Goethe brought to the study of living things: after watching a plant or animal closely, the observer rebuilds that growth in the...

Delicate Empiricism in Anthroposophy

Delicate Empiricism in Anthroposophy is the manner of knowing Rudolf Steiner draws from Goethe in Goethe's World-Conception (GA 6, 1897): an observing so devoted that it grows one with its...