This is a new release of the original 1928 edition.

As the editor of Goethe's scientific writings during the 1880s, Rudolf Steiner became immersed in a worldview that paralled and amplified his own views in relation to epistemology, the interface between science and philosophy, the theory of how we know the world and ourselves. At the time, like much of the thinking today and the foundation of modern natural science, the predominant theories held that individual knowledge is limited to thinking that reflects objective, sensory perception. Steiner's view was eventually distilled in his Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts in 1924: There are those who believe that, with the limits of knowledge derived from sensory perception, the limits of all insight are given. Yet if they would carefully observe how they become conscious of these limits, they would find in the very consciousness of the limits the faculties to transcend them.

This year's volume is highlighted by a special section on Goethe's narrative events in addition to a range of other articles from emerging and established scholars.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

This study is the first to examine in detail the cultural significance of Goethe's scientific work. It explores the subtle distinctions he made between the Amateur and the Expert, and the interplay between Enlightenment science and Romanticism's 'Nature-Philosophy', and attempts to set Goethe's thinking into the context he consistently evoked, of the preceding three millennia of scientific thought. Analysing his complex perception of the cultural centrality of aesthetics, worked out in collaboration with his friend and fellow writer Schiller, the study concludes that Goethe's modes of thought differed from both the Enlightenment and the Romantic traditions, prefiguring the process-thinkers of the twentieth century.