Fire, Page Six

Mechanics has to do with forces, not mere movements. It is thus already a natural science. Arithmetic, geometry and kinematics are not yet natural sciences in the proper sense. Mechanics is the first of the natural sciences, and to reach it we must go beyond mere ideas and mental pictures. Science does not envision this distinction clearly, and so, equipped with arithmetic, geometry and kinematics, enhanced with a bit of mechanics, it tries to work out a mechanics of molecules and atoms, and to imagine that what is called matter is to be thus subdivided. Then, in terms of this molecular mechanics scientists try to conceive the phenomena of nature. The existence of molecules and atoms is not to be denied, and many marvelous discoveries can be had based on them, but they will never lead to a knowledge of nature, only to the mechanical workings of the lowest rung, the mineral kingdom. The plant, animal and human kingdoms will always lie beyond the grasp of such a science, for it can only understand the mineral kingdom that also dwells in these other kingdoms. And so it is with microscope, telescope and space programs. They are declaring the wonders, but in language that passes us by (Ps 19,1-4; Is 6,9-10; Rom 1,20-21).

What still presumes to call itself science is at pains to express everything in mechanical terms. But it will have to take the leap from what is not alive in nature to what is; from kinematics to mechanics and then from external, inorganic nature into those realms that are not accessible to calculation, where every attempted calculation breaks asunder and every potential is dissolved away. Calculation ceases where we want to understand what is alive.

To help us bridge the gap, Steiner writes down a certain familiar formula:

We immediately see from the equation that the bigger the mass, the bigger the force must be. But notice that on the right-hand side we have mass, which is the very thing we can never reach kinematically (theoretically or ideally). We can only get to know it by outer observation.

Or is there yet a bridge between the kinematical and the mechanical? Physics today cannot find the transition, and the consequences of this failure are immense. It has no real human science, no real physiology. It does not know the human being. When I write v² I have only something calculated as spatial movement—only the kinetic. When I write m on the other hand, I must first ask, "Is there anything in me myself to correspond also to this?"

The answer is yes, but the first step is to make yourself conscious of this. Press with your finger against something. Mass thus reveals itself through pressure. Try to exert pressure on some part of your body, and then go on making it ever more intense. At length you will lose consciousness from it. The loss of consciousness that you experience with a pressure stronger than you can endure is taking place partially and on a small scale whenever you come into any kind of contact with an effect of pressure from some mass. Our consciousness is dimmed at once. If this only happens to a slight degree we can still bear it, but if to a great extent we can bear it no longer. What underlies it is the same in either case.

When we write down m (mass), we are writing down what in nature, if it does unite with our consciousness, eliminates it. That is to say, it puts us partially to sleep. When we write down the above formula we must admit that our human experience contains the m no less than the v, but our normal consciousness does not enable us to seize the m. It at once sucks out, withdraws from us, the force of consciousness. Here you have the real relationship to the human being. To understand what is in nature, you must bring in the states of consciousness.

But while we cannot live with consciousness in all that is implied in the letter m, we do live in it after all with our full human nature. We live in it above all with our Will.

Steiner demonstrates this through Archimedes' principle, the law of buoyancy, whereby every body immersed in a liquid becomes as much lighter as the weight of the liquid it displaces. In a sense it withdraws itself from the downward pressure of weight. This is of great importance in the human constitution. The brain weighs about 1250 grams, or 2.76 pounds. However, it swims in cerebral fluid and displaces a weight of about 1230 grams, or 2.71 pounds, which leaves it actually weighing only 20 grams, or .044 pounds.

What does this signify? With our intelligence we live not in forces that pull downward but on the contrary, in forces that pull upward—a force of buoyancy. This applies, however, only to our brain (and the spinal cord), for the remaining portions of our body are only slightly in this condition. Taken as a whole their tendency is downward. Our Will, above all, lives in the downward pull. It has to unite with pressure. Precisely this deprives the rest of our body of consciousness and makes it all the time asleep.¹⁴ This indeed is the essential feature of the phenomenon of Will. As a conscious phenomenon it is blotted out, extinguished, because in fact the Will unites with the downward force of gravity or weight. Never could Intelligence arise if our soul's life were bound only to downward tending matter. Only a tiny portion of it, amounting to the twenty grams' pressure, manages to filter through to the Intelligence. Hence our Intelligence is to some extent permeated by Will.

With these thoughts, borrowed from his earlier lectures on light, Steiner differentiated between the mere kinematics applied by science and mass. Kinematics involves only time and space and can only be surveyed there because all persons on Earth are within time and space. If space were within us, it would matter not where we were, but we stand within time and space. Not so with mass, for it is within us, thus falling into a different category from time and space. Because we take it up into our being, we are not conscious of it. The processes of our Will are largely dependent upon processes of mass inside us, but we are unconscious-asleep-as to them.

Hold these thoughts on the nature of mass and its relationship to consciousness ever in mind. With this concept in place, we can now move into some important phenomena that point the way to an understanding of fire (heat).

Temperature changes correspond externally to a form. We are experiencing the dissolution and reestablishment of form. The gas dissolves form for us and the solid establishes form. And we experience this in a very interesting way. Liquid is the transitional state between solid and gaseous form. Surface inheres within the solid nature, relates in liquid to the center of the Earth (a liquid's upper surface being perpendicular to the Earth's radius at that point), and is completely absent in the gas nature. The solid thus encompasses within itself what in the case of water resides in its relationship with the whole Earth, while gas enters into no relationship with the Earth at all in terms of surface form. Thus, we have the ancient Greek perception of earth-water-air.

When a solid reaches its melting point, it loses its individuality.¹⁵ Water behaves peculiarly between zero and four degrees centigrade-the exception noted earlier to the general rule of expansion as temperature increases. Within this four-degree range it expands as temperature is lowered. Why? Steiner says it is because there it begins to struggle against the transition to an entirely different sphere. This relates to the phenomenon that heat disappears during the melting.¹⁶ Analogously, our bodily reality disappears for us when we rise to the sphere Steiner calls Imagination (a form of spiritual seeing unrelated to sensate sight).

We return to the general principle: fluid solidifies when brought below its melting point. In the case of water, this occurs at and below zero degrees centigrade. But remarkably, pressure applied to its solid condition can again liquefy it. Steiner illustrated this by hanging a weight upon a wire stretched across the top of a chunk of ice. It melts its way through the ice. But instead of falling in two, the ice rejoins behind the wire in the same manner that the air (gas) rejoins behind itself if you wave a pencil through it.

When different molten metals are mixed, they form an alloy; that is, they combine without chemical action so that each retains its individual character in the mixture. Steiner then demonstrates by experiment that when so alloyed, however, the melting point of the mixture is lower than that of any of its constituent metals. He leaves us to draw our own inferences from this. But it seems clear that in giving up something of their separate individualities through the process of mixing, the metals move back closer to the liquid condition of form, for less heat is then required to reduce them again to fluid. And this is true even though in the solid state, as an alloy, they may be made stronger than they were as separate metals.

What force lies behind solidification (crystallization)? Consider how solid earthly bodies behave when not connected with the Earth mass. When their support is removed, they fall in a line perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. As such, in toto they represent what is real in fluid bodies that seek an upper surface through the same force.

What is the significance of this? Solids thus give a picture of what is materially present in liquid—a direct image as it were. Water is always evaporating. Its lines of escape go off in all directions. Thus the surface tendency of water gives us a picture, an image, of what gas is as a material reality. Here we have a phenomenon in nature that clearly demonstrates the hermetic principle "As Above, So Below." Or, to use the biblical metaphor, the lower is created "in the image" of the higher. It is important to recognize that this principle both pervades the realm of materiality and does not stop at its threshold-where it meets the realm of nonmateriality. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that this is pronounced very early in the book of Genesis (Gen 1,26-27; also the earlier "according to its kind" passages, Gen 1,11,12,21,24,25).

We discover that in every state of aggregation downward (or upward if you like) from the solid, pictures of the preceding state develop. Thinking thus,

In solids we have the images of the fluid state
In fluids we have the images of the gaseous state
In gases we have the images of the warmth (fire) state

we have taken an important step giving us a picture of the nature of heat itself. But we must observe it rightly. Normal physics gets nowhere with it. While best observed in the gaseous condition, the being of heat does penetrate the liquid and solid states through the process of cooling.

The wire that was passed through the ice, and the pencil through the air, illustrated a similar thing, namely, that both solid and gas have in them a similar process, a "closing up," though acting in different realms. Thus, in states of materiality, however attenuated, there is a cohesive tendency, an attraction or coagulation, that seems to be countered only by an increase in heat.