Faulty Hypotheses—Light Rays and Refractions

The truth is that where we have to do simply with images or pictures, physicists speak of all manner of other things—light rays etc. The "light rays" have become the very basis of materialistic thinking in this domain. Suppose I have a vessel (Figure 6) filled with water. On its bottom is a coin. The eye is as shown in the figures. Before the water is placed in the vessel, I look at the coin as in Figure 5. Such is the simple fact, but if I now begin explaining, "There is a ray of light proceeding from the object to the eye," I am already fancying all kinds of things that are not given.

Now fill the vessel with water. A peculiar thing happens. I see the object lifted to some extent, along also with the whole bottom of the vessel. When there was no water I could look straight to the bottom; between it and my eye was only air. Now my sight line impinges on the water, which does not let my force of sight go through as easily as the air does. It offers stronger resistance. It is as though it is more difficult for me to see through the water than through the air. Hence I must shorten the distance through which the force has to travel and so I myself draw the object upward. I shorten the distance the force has to work. If I could fill the vessel with a gas thinner than air (Figure 7), the object would be correspondingly lowered, since I would then encounter less resistance—so I would push it downward.

FIGURE 7

Instead of simply noting this fact, physicists will say that the ray is "refracted" in this direction. And then they go on to say a very curious thing. The eye, they say, having received information by this ray of light, produces it on and outward in the same straight line and so projects the object there. They want to leave the whole matter of resistance and sighting force of the eye out and to ascribe everything to the light alone, just as they say of the prism experiment that it is not the prism at all for the seven colors are there in the light all the time. Yet as we saw, the colors are really caused by what arises in the prism. This wedge of dimness is the cause. The colors are not due to the light as such.

We must be clear that we ourselves are being active with our eye. Finding increased resistance in the water, we are obliged to shorten the line of sight. The physicists, on the other hand, speak of rays of light being sent out and refracted. And now the beauty of it! The light, they say, reaches the eye by a bent and broken path, and then the eye projects the picture outward. So after all they end by attributing this activity to the eye: "The eye projects …" Only they then present us with a merely kinetical conception, remote from the given realities. It is at such points that you see most distinctly how abstract everything is made in our conventional physics. Thus in the first place they divest the eye of any kind of activity of its own. Yet in the last resort the eye is said to project what it receives. Surely we ought to begin with the activity of the eye from the very outset. We must be clear that the eye is an active organism.

The Eye and Inner Light

Let us now consider the nature of the human eye. Steiner draws a cross-section of it in Figure 8:

FIGURE 8

The spherical eyeball is seated in a bony cavity with a number of skins enveloping the inner portion. Outside these skins there is connective and fatty tissue. The first integument (covering) proper is the so-called sclerotic, of which the transparent portion is the cornea. The sclerotic is sinewy—of bony or cartilaginous consistency. A second layer is the so-called choroid, containing blood vessels. The third layer is the retina, which is continued into the optic nerve as you go farther into the skull. Thus there are three integuments of the eye. And now behind the cornea, which itself is embedded in the ciliary muscle, is a kind of lens. Between the cornea and the lens is the so-called aqueous humor. Thus light entering the eye first passes through the cornea, then the aqueous humor and then the lens, which is inherently movable by means of the ciliary muscles, and then comes to what is commonly known as the vitreous humor which fills the entire space of the eye. The sequence of light's passage inward is thus as follows:

1. Cornea

2. Aqueous humor

3. Lens

4. Vitreous humor

5. Retina

6. Optic Nerve

7. Brain

Now the eye reveals very remarkable features. The aqueous humor is very like any ordinary liquid from the outer world. Here therefore, the human body is quite a piece of the outer world. The lens too is to a high degree "objective" and unalive. Not so when we go on inward to the vitreous humor. It is not like any external fluid. In it there is decided vitality—life. Truth is, the farther back we go into the eye, the more life we find. Tracing the comparative development of the eye, the tissue of the outer parts, the aqueous humor and lens are formed from neighboring organs, not from within outward, while the vitreous humor grows from within outward to meet them. This is the noteworthy thing. In fact the outer light is at work bringing about that transformation whereby the aqueous humor and lens originate, to which the living being then reacts from within, thrusting outward a more living, vital organ in the vitreous humor. Notably in the eye, formations whose development is stimulated from without meet others stimulated from within in a very striking way.

Another thing about the eye is scarcely less remarkable. The retina is really the expanded optic nerve. The peculiar thing is that at the very point of entry of the optic nerve the eye is insensitive. There it is blind. We may begin by saying that it is surely the nerve which senses the light. Yet it is insensitive to light precisely at its point of entry. Take note of this.

While Steiner does not say so, should it not be of more than passing interest that the process of "seeing," as he outlines it above, is a seven-step procedure (Prov 9,1)? What is thus true with perceiving the light on physical objects must surely also be true of perceiving the spiritual light, or "seeing" as Isaiah speaks of it (Is 6,9-10). Even the structure of the eye carries out the sevenfold fractal nature of creation.