Goethe had the genius to develop his consciousness through observing intensively.
Rudolf Steiner was asked, as a young man, to edit all Goethe’s scientific writings and he articulated the method that Goethe had used.
By developing this method of research, Steiner created Spiritual Science (or Anthroposophy) a path of inner development through which the observer can become an imaginative, creative and intuitive participant in the observed – the ‘stepping back’ then no longer being a stepping out, into abstraction and intellectual models of understanding.