Description
The First Scientific Revolution, which started some 500 years ago, is well-known and well-documented. It is the story of scientific genius, most notab
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ly in the personalges of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Bohm, and the discovery of the fundamental laws governing inert nature. The knowledge gained from this first revolution has been influential in determining the course of Western culture, in particular through the harnessing of energy from matter using electric, magnetic and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The second revolution in science is more recent, a scant two centuries old, yet it has the potential to overshadow the first in scope and effect. This revolution has to do with the laws and principles governing vital nature, with the harnessing of energies before matter. It is a revolution about life itself, about health and illness. It has profound implications for the further development of science and culture. It is the story of great minds such as Goethe, Fichte, Brown, Röschlaub, Hufeland, Hahnemann, Steiner, Reich and others. These will one day be as well-known, and their works as influential, as the key figures of the prior scientific revolution.
There is a great conflict that has arisen as a result of this Second Scientific Revolution, a conflict between established inertial science and an emerging vital science. The conflict is over nothing less than the nature of Life itself. The presumption, and claim, of inertial science is that life is an epiphenomenon, the result of “the chance whirlings of unproductive particles” as one dynamic philosopher (Coleridge) characterized it. Life, from the perspective of inertial science, is an extension of physics and chemistry, and can be reduced to and understood by, for all intents and purposes, the same laws governing inert nature.
The Second Scientific Revolution recognizes and understands that vital nature exists in its own right, that it possesses a dynamic inside, governed by its own laws. And further, that the realm of vital nature is of a higher order, encompassing, but not limited to, the lower order occupied by inert nature.
To the extent that inert nature is operative in a living organism, it remains subject to inertial laws, but also operates within the context of the whole of the organism, which vital laws animate the inert realm. Man is more than a material entity, and the issues of health and illness cannot be fully understood or dealt with unless one is able to go beyond the chemical and electrical to the dynamic, energic aspects of being.
This work is intended to serve as a brief but conscise introduction to perhaps ‘the greatest scientific story never told’.
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