If people once begin to reflect deeply enough in modern science—above all in physics—they will detect what an appallingly blind alley they are in. They will only emerge if they first take the trouble to find out the origin of all our kinetical, arithmetical and geometrical ideas. Whence do we get them? If we now go further and begin applying to what goes on in the outer world the ideas of "scientific" arithmetic and algebra, geometry and kinematics, we are applying ideas gained not from the outer world but spun out of our own inner life. Where then do these come from? Not from our intelligence that we apply when working up the ideas derived from sense perception, but rather from the intelligent part of our will—the volitional part of our soul.

There is an immense difference between the ideas we have as intelligent beings that are derived from our experience in the outer world, and those that are of a geometrical, arithmetical or kinematical nature. These latter arise from the unconscious part of us, from the will part that has its outer organ in the metabolism. And if you now apply these geometrical ideas to the phenomena of light or sound, you are connecting what arises from within you to what you are perceiving from without—yet the two things do not directly belong to one another.

All this elaboration of the outer world by means of these geometrical, mathematical and kinetical thought forms is in point of fact a dreaming about nature. Cool and sober as it may seem, it is a dream—a dreaming while awake. What people fondly believe to be the most exact of sciences is modern humanity's dream of nature.

But it is different when we get into the realm of electricity. For we then connect with what in outer nature is truly equivalent to the will in the human being. It is from this very realm of will that what we possess in our mathematics, geometry and kinematics arises. They are truly akin. And here for our pondering Steiner brings forward again the diagram from the Warmth Course as we first saw it in the "Fire" essay above:

However, human thinking has in our time not yet gone far enough to really think its way into these realms. Humanity today can dream nicely, but it is not yet able to enter with real mathematical perception into that realm of phenomena akin to human will where geometry and arithmetic originate. For this our geometrical and mathematical thinking must in themselves become more saturated with reality.

In recent times (in terms of centuries), physicists have had recourse to a new device, the calculus of probabilities. But this too will come to a point where it no longer works.

Reality today, especially in physics, often compels human beings to admit that with our thinking, our forming of ideas, we no longer fully penetrate into reality; we must begin again from another angle. For it is only when you rise to Intuition, which has its ground in the will, that you come into the region—even of the outer world—where electricity lives and moves. And when you do so you perceive that in these phenomena you are in a way confronted by the very opposite of the phenomena of sound or tone for instance.

Perceptions of sound and those of electricity are at very opposite poles (full chart I-22). When you perceive a sound with your ordinary body, you become aware of the undulations. You draw your etheric and astral bodies together so that they occupy only a portion of your space. You then enjoy what you are to experience of the sound as such in this inward and concentrated etheric-astral part of your being. It is quite different with electricity. With it you expand what you otherwise concentrated, thus driving your etheric and astral bodies out beyond your normal surface in order to perceive electrical phenomena.

Without including the human soul and spirit, it will be quite impossible to gain a true or realistic conception of the phenomena of physics. Ever increasingly we shall be obliged to think this way: the phenomena of sound and light are akin to the conscious element of thinking in ourselves, while those of electricity and magnetism are akin to the subconscious element of will. Warmth is between the two. Even as feeling is intermediate between thinking and willing, so is the outer warmth in nature intermediate between light and sound on the one hand, and electricity and magnetism on the other. As in the spiritual realm we differentiate between the Luciferic, akin to the quality of light, and the Ahrimanic, akin to electricity and magnetism, so also must we understand the structure of nature. Between the two lies what we meet with in the phenomena of warmth.

And so ends Steiner's Light Course.

Synthesis/Summation

Preliminary Remarks

We are at the point of reflection—with our own internal light. Consider where we are in the fractal dimension of human evolution just since the time of First Isaiah.

The most exalted Old Testament revelation, the only appearance in the canon of the lofty Seraphim (I-6), came to Isaiah "in the year that King Uzziah died" (Is 6) about 742 B.C. at the very beginning of the Cultural Age of Aries, the celestial Lamb.⁵⁵ First Isaiah was the eponymous founder of the school of prophets whence arose the one called Second Isaiah soon after the commencement of the former regency of the Archangel Michael. It was Michael who brought the later Zarathustra (Zoroaster, the great teacher of the magi), the middle period prophets of Israel (including even Second Isaiah) and Pythagoras to Babylon (Persia). It was Michael who installed the liberator Cyrus on the Persian throne. And it was Michael who introduced the fertile line of philosophers beginning with Heraclitus and Socrates who would prepare the cultural soil for the spreading of Christianity.⁵⁶

Until the time of Steiner Christendom had not, nor has it to this very day, awakened to the meaning of the great commission given First Isaiah (Is 6,9-13). The reader would do well to review its significance.⁵⁷ Time after time Steiner referred to the turn of the millennium, the close of a century both of great human turmoil and great material progress, as an enormously important time in human spiritual evolution. Over the last several centuries others of note have also called attention to it, but without the uniquely defining quality of Steiner's vision. What are the fractal dimensions it reflects?

The Cultural Age of the celestial Lamb (Aries; see I-19), foreseen by Moses in the account of the sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac (Gen 22,13-14), began in 747 B.C., whereupon Isaiah was immediately visited by the Seraphim. The Christ event on Earth, foretold by both First and Second Isaiah, took place one-third of the way through the Cultural Age of the celestial Lamb. The third millennium of the Christian (or Common) era is beginning as we approach the same one-third point in our present Cultural Age of the Consciousness Soul, the age of the Fishes, Pisces, so significant in the esoteric message of the Gospels. Our present Cultural Age began with the reawakening, literally the "rebirth" or Renaissance, of human consciousness in A.D. 1414 as it emerged from the valley of the shadow into which the Christ Incarnated.⁵⁸ As shown early in this essay, the first regency of the Archangel Michael (the leader of the archangels and the administrator of the divine intelligence) since the Christ event, began in 1879 and will run for approximately 354 years. The year A.D. 2000 is nearly one-third of the way through that regency.

The providential coincidence of these things should not be overlooked. Christendom, since the age of "Enlightenment" in the sixteenth century most ironically, has forgotten that the Archangel Michael is associated with the light of divine intelligence. It would be a spiritual tragedy of the most awful dimension imaginable if Christendom were to sleep through this time without awakening to the second coming of Christ that is already underway.⁵⁹ Michael appears to Daniel "in the third year of Cyrus king of Persia" (Dan 10,1),⁶⁰ and we then find the prophecy about this prince of Archangels in Dan 10,13,21, again in Jude 1,9 (wrestling with the legalistic Mosaic law and materialistic mode of understanding still heavy upon Christendom in our own time), and finally fighting against the materialistic deceiver of the world in Rev 12,7. Throughout spiritual history Michael has been associated with the spiritual light of Christ.