Friedrich Schiller Illustration of Friedrich Schiller’s thought experiment involving a crystal

What god would a crystal imagine?

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), a German poet and dramatist, gives a prince a small thought experiment to propose in his novel Der Geisterseher. His companion is to allow a crystal, for a moment, a power people generally reserve for themselves. The stone is to form an idea of what the world exists for. What answer might it come up with if someone were to ask?

Building a universe from what one knows

Give the crystal the power of forming ideas. Its highest plan for the world will be crystallisation, its divinity the most beautiful form a crystal can take.

– Friedrich Schiller, Der Geisterseher, 1789, p. 216.[1]

The prince does not require a particularly rare gemstone. What interests him is an activity that would come as naturally to his imaginary stone as making judgements does to a human being. A crystal takes shape. If it could now conceive of perfection, what better answer would be ready to hand than its own shape brought to its most beautiful completion? Even the god of its little universe would have a recognisable form. A human reader will probably spot the objection to this reasoning quite quickly. The harder part comes when the same question is put to the reader’s own conception of the world.

What the other speaker asks

Schiller gives the comparison an immediate critic. If nobody can step outside their own centre, the prince’s companion asks, how can the prince know what rule nature follows? The question catches the very person who has just risen so confidently above the restricted outlook of the crystal. That is where the wit of the scene lies. A person may invent a philosophising stone and smile at the limits of its thought. As long as that person remains part of the conversation, someone else is free to ask a question in return.