In the most manifold ways (as he has shown above) colors arise in and about the light. So also they arise, or subsist, in the so-called bodies. How then do we relate ourselves to the fleeting colors? We are in them with our astral body, our sense body (I-9). We are united with the colors with our astral body. When we see colors, we must realize that it is with our astral body that we are united with them. If we would reach any genuine knowledge we have no alternative but to say to ourselves, "The light remains invisible to us. We swim in it." It is the same as with space and time—we ought not to call them objective for we ourselves are swimming in them. So too we should regard light as an element common to us and to the things outside us, while in the colors we have to recognize something that can make its appearance only inasmuch as we through our astral body come into relation to what the light is doing there.

Let us make then the following tabulation of the things that, with our "Three Bodies" we swim in, and that should thus not be considered as part of the phenomena:

1. We are in space and time with our physical body.

2. We are in light with our etheric body.

3. We are in colors with our astral body.

(Steiner specifically states 2 & 3, but the meaning has to be the same in regard to 1, for in the very act of incarnating into mineral-physical being we have to become one with space and time.)

The spectrum is a phenomenon that takes its course purely within light and its perception must be referred to as an astral relation to light. But we may also have the phenomenon of color in the form of a colored surface. To begin with, we think rather crudely that the color extends beneath the surface also. But this is different from the spectrum in light itself. With the red surface of an apple we have an astral relation, but in that relationship we are separated by the bodily surface. In the spectrum we see colors in light as an astral relationship of a direct kind where nothing is interposed between us and the colors. When on the other hand we see the colors of bodily objects, something is interposed between us and our astral body, and through this something we nonetheless entertain astral relations to what we call bodily colors. These are basic concepts—very important ones—which we shall need to elaborate.

What is being said cannot be got from textbooks, nor from reading Goethe's "theory of color." Goethe died in 1832. What we are seeking is not a Goetheanism of the year 1832 but one for our time—further evolved and developed. Steiner considered the Fairy Tale⁴⁴ to represent the high-water mark of Goethe's spiritual vision. Something of the pathos of Pisgah (Deut 34) is reflected in Steiner's apotheosis of Goethe (Autobiography [AUTO], p. 125, fn mine):

I often upset those idealists by airing the conviction I gained by intimately studying Goethe's era—the conviction that Western culture had reached a high point, and that the height of that development had not been sustained. Our scientific age, which affects individuals as well as whole cultures, indicates a decline. Before it can progress further, it needs an entirely new spiritual impulse. To continue the spiritual trends followed thus far will lead only to a reversal. Goethe represents the peak of a certain evolution,⁴⁵ but its final stage rather than a beginning. He gathers the fruits of development that led up to him, and it culminated in him in its fullest form. Progress cannot, however, continue without far more original sources of spiritual experience than those contained in that development. This was my mood as I wrote the last part of my exposition on Goethe.

The whole way of thinking about the phenomena of physics today reaches hardly any farther back than the sixteenth century. Before then it was radically different. (Recall the earlier footnote about Aristotle's beliefs on color prevailing until the time of Newton.) Today it is extremely difficult for one to find one's way back to the pure facts.

Steiner next uses Figure 20 to again illustrate what physics calls the "refraction" of light with the eye's then "projection" of the image to a different (displaced) position. But he now goes on to say that it should be observed that not only is the object (the "lighter part") shifted upward (displaced) by the eye's "projection," but so also are its surrounding darker areas. In other words, the entire complex we are looking at is found to be displaced. Please take this well into account.

FIGURE 20

Physics speaks in a way that abstracts the one light patch from all its surroundings, as though it alone were displaced. Surely this is wrong! In point of fact, what is displaced in these optical phenomena can never be abstractly confined. Thus, in repeating Newton's experiment where the cone of light gets diverted by the prism, it simply is not true that the cone of light alone is diverted. Whatever the cone of light is bordering on—above it and below—is diverted too. We really ought never to speak of rays of light, but only of luminous pictures or spaces of light being diverted. For if the lighter part is shifted, the darker part is shifted too.

But now, what is this "dark?" You must take the dark seriously—as something real. The errors that have crept into modern physics since the sixteenth century were able to creep in only because these things were not observed spiritually at the same time. You will not deny that some light is more intense than other—there can be stronger light and less strong. How is this fact related to darkness? The ordinary physicist of today thinks there is stronger light and less strong, but he will only admit one darkness—darkness which is simply there when there is no light (essentially the dictionary definition, absence of light). Yet as untrue as it would be to say that there is only one kind of lightness, just as untrue is it to say that there is only one kind of darkness. Debt is debt and that is all there is to it—to analogize to modern physics' view of darkness—but in reality there are differences in the extent of debt. It is this failure to progress to a qualitative way of thinking that largely prevents our discovering the bridge between the soul-and-spirit on the one hand, and the bodily realm on the other. For just as when a space is filled with light it is always filled with light of a certain intensity, so likewise is it with darkness. We must conceive of a space that is not abstract but is in some specific way filled with light or negatively filled with darkness, in the one case "qualitatively positive" and in the other "qualitatively negative."⁴⁶

How does the positive filling of space differ for our perception from the negative? We need only compare our sensation when surrounded by darkness with that when we awaken from sleep and are surrounded by light, how we unite our subjective experience with the light that floods and surges around us. There is an essential difference between being given up to light-filled space and to a darkness-filled space. The feeling in relation to a light-filled space is that of a kind of in-drawing of the light, as though our soul were sucking in the light. We feel an enrichment when we draw the light into ourselves. How is it then with darkness? Precisely the opposite. We feel the darkness sucking at us. It sucks us out—we have to give something of ourselves to the darkness.⁴⁷

So too must we distinguish between the lighter and the darker colors. There is indeed another occasion in life when, as previously shown, we are somehow sucked out, this time in our consciousness, namely, when we fall asleep. It is like a cessation of consciousness when we move from the lighter colors nearer the darker ones.

And you will recall from that portion of the Light Course introduced in the "Fire" essay (in conjunction with the parallelograms of kinetics versus forces) what Steiner said a few days before about the relation of our life of soul to mass—how we are put to sleep by mass, how it sucks out our consciousness. We feel something very like this in the absorption of our consciousness by darkness. So we can discern the deep inner kinship between the condition of space when filled with darkness and the filling of space with what we call matter, which is expressed in "mass."

The following statement in Britannica's introductory paragraphs on "Light" (23 Brit 1) caught my attention. "When light energy ceases to move, because it has been absorbed by matter, it is no longer light." In the first three verses of Evangelist John's Gospel prologue, he identifies Christ as the Word by which all things made have been made, and he calls it first life and then light. Christ was both, but in the descending tree of life (I-22), the state closer to matter is the light ether, so that in reality all things have been made by light. While it must first pass through the fire state, when it is thereby absorbed, that is when it ceases to exist, matter takes its place—and that light can be restored only when that matter is dissolved again by fire. There is greater reality in the etheric conditions of fire and light than in their sensate conditions that abut matter. But there is a relationship between their etheric and sensate states.

Thus we shall have to seek the transition from the phenomena of light to the phenomena of material existence. The reader might find it worthwhile to consider again the diagrams from Steiner's Warmth Course, reproduced in the "Fire" essay, that show the different states of matter and the ethers and their interrelationship.