ExpO – meeting
Dr Hauschka gave four lectures on “The Nature of Substance in Agriculture.” Nitrogen, the nature of the legumes, the creation and annihilation of matter, substances as ‘virtues’, the spectrum of metals, agriculture as a true initiation for man, seeds in German and stock in Scotland and a play by the children of Clent Grove.
Dr Mier on the German Research ring’s issues and problems
How best to make peppers.
Dr Grohman and Mr Adams consider that the experimental circle urgently needs a scientific basis
Mr Clement remains Chair, Dr Meir Secretary
The report in News Sheet 14 also has a letter!
It is just a year since my election to the Experimental Circle. I well remember how I imagined the Circle would be. I thought of a comparatively few Members meeting together for intensive study and discussion of the Course or some other teaching of Dr Steiner’s, I imagined them pooling practical experience and wise thought in questions raised by their work and study, and then all going back to their holdings to carry out further study and experiments. I visualised study and experiment as the ‘breathing’ activity of the individual Members, and their meeting and return home as the equivalent rhythm of the Circle. It did not occur to me that there would be some members who took part in this process rarely or never.
Perhaps I idealised too much: perhaps the picture was one for another generation. Or possibly I was basing my ideas on the scientific method to which I was accustomed. And yet… Is all well with our Circle? Are we forging ahead of current scientific thought, and discovering facts that Science will be glad to acknowledge in years to come? Have we anything to our credit as a Circle in any way comparable to what George Adams and Olive Whicher are accomplishing? Surely, to deserve our existence we should be the spearhead of the Anthroposophical Agricultural Movement and should aim at evolving thoughts as far ahead of our own time as those of Koberwitz were ahead of the thought of 1924.
Dr Steiner was never one to hang on to institutions that had lost their spiritual justification. Have we reached the time when we should say: “The Experimental Circle in this country has lost its original impulse. It would be better to dissolve it, and metamorphose it into something new that has a greater creative urge,” ?
In putting forward such a suggestion one cannot but be very conscious of one’s own failings as a Member, and of one’s own inadequacy to take part in something more vital. But these things in a sense are beside the point. The question is always “What is our responsibility to the Spiritual world, and are we fulfilling it?” Beside this, all personal questions are insignificant, and if I have expressed myself too radically I beg Fellow Members not to take offence. My striving is only towards what we can achieve together in future. Whether we feel that something new can come to birth, or whether we feel that the present form is adequate, let us review our position together in the News Sheet. This vehicle exists for the strengthening of the Circle activity. Let us know, above all, if there are any who disagree with the premise that the Circle exists for intensive work between its members and that, failing in that, it fails as a Circle.
27th September 1949.
Hugh S Ellis