had not yet given his indications for the treatment of children needing
special care of soul and body, or for the renewal of the art of acting,
or for the conquest of materialistic methods in agricultural practice.
Nor did there yet exist the movement for religious renewal Which Dr.
Fr. Rittelmeyer later founded, with the help and advice of Rudolf
Steiner.


CHAPTER II

Where Do We Stand To-day?

In the year 1932, when the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary
of Goethe's death, Professor W. Heisenberg, one of the foremost
thinkers in the field of modern physics, delivered a speech before the
Saxon Academy of Science which may be regarded as symptomatic of the
need in recent science to investigate critically the foundations of its
own efforts to know nature.1 In this speech Heisenberg draws a picture
of the progress of science which differs significantly from the one
generally known. Instead of giving the usual description of this
progress as 'a chain of brilliant and surprising discoveries', he shows
it as resting on the fact that, with the aim of continually simplifying
and unifying the scientific conception of the world, human thinking, in
course of time, has narrowed more and more the scope of its inquiries
into outer nature.

'Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation,
almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints and
established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge accumulate, the
claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain