The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What yesterday I particularly wanted to make clear in connection with Goethe's is “Faust” was that more goes to the making of man's being than can be known or fathomed either by the understanding or by other forces of the human soul. Goethe himself felt deeply that the spiritual forces,that can be developed today in man's conscious life, cannot go so far as man by nature reaches. Those who believe that what is today called science needs only to be extended in order to know, to a certain measure, the possible and the impossible, simply say: It is true that, with what science offers today, one gains only a very limited knowledge of man. But this science will be widened, it will press on over further and further, and then we shall come increasingly near to the knowledge of man.

This is a very short-sighted outlook and is untrue. Knowledge of man does not depend upon whether the scientific outlook accepted today extends more and more widely, but to our having recourse to forces and faculties for knowledge different from any of those applied by modern science. However far modern science may advance on its own lines, what Goethe felt to be unknowable within the being of man can, in no case, ever be penetrated by it.

All science, my dear friends, all officially accepted science that deals with the spiritual, in reality relates only to earthly being—what has being on the earth-planet. What is called science today can never pronounce judgment on anything beyond the processes of the earth-planet. But man is not earthly man alone. As earth-man he has behind him the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and within him is the germinal basis of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions. Science can know nothing of the different planetary life-forms beyond the earthly; for the laws of science apply only to what is earthly. Man in his entirety, therefore, cannot be known by these laws; he can only be know if knowledge, be extended beyond what is earthly.

Now yesterday I pointed out how man exists in states of consciousness lying, as it were, both below and above the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Below the threshold of ordinary consciousness lies much from the regions of which dream experiences spring. But beneath this threshold of consciousness there also lies a very great deal of what a men experiences in waking, life, between waking and falling asleep. For even a little reflection will show you that men would know far more about their dreams if they exerted themselves to know a little more about waking. If they would make an effort to know something about being awake, they would find that, during this waking time, they do a great more dreaming then they suppose. The fixed and solid boundary between waking and sleeping is really only apparent. We might say that not only do men dream during their waking hours, they sleep too—sleep as regards a very great many things. As we all know, we are in a genuinely waking condition only as regards our ideas and part of our feelings, while the greater part of our life of feeling, and above all of our life of will, is wrapped in dreams and sleep. Sleep-life projects itself into waking life. We could be far clearer about dream-life, if we tried to perceive the distinction between those ideas that surge to and fro, evoking all kinds of images as they come and go, ideas that might easily be mistaken for dreams, and those other ideas, in which man is active with his whole will. Only in a small part of the whole world of human ideas does a man find that he uses his will to connect one idea with another; whereas, in his waking life, very often there are moments when he abandons himself to the flow and the caprice of his ideas. Consider how, when you give yourself up in this way to the flow of your ideas, one idea calls up another, how you recall things long forgotten. You begin with an idea which has to do with the present, and this evokes long-forgotten experiences. That is a process often not very distinct from dreaming. Because men have so little inner, technical thinking power, with which rightly to follow their daily waking life, few are able to set the right value on sleep-life and the dream-life arising from it. Nevertheless, my dear friends, we know there are scientifically conceived theories about dreams that maintain something like the following. Freud's school and others, mostly, though not all disciples of the psycho-analysts, say of dreams that they are images evoked in man by certain wishes in his life not having been fulfilled. A man goes throughout life wishing all kinds of things, but—say these people—it is undeniable that many of our wishes are not fulfilled. Then, when consciousness is dimmed, these wishes appear before the soul, and because they cannot be fulfilled in reality, they are fulfilled in idea. So that in the opinion of many people today dreams are wishes fulfilled in phantasy. I should like the people who maintain this just to consider how they manage to dream they have been beheaded. All such things, so often today forming the content of theories, are terribly one-sided. And men's heads are bound to be full of this one-sidedness unless they turn to the investigations of Spiritual Science—investigations into worlds unknown both to the external world of the senses and to external intellectual thinking, and yielding conclusions beyond the grasp of human senses or human intellect.

From what was said yesterday, however, you can gather one thing concerning dreams with the utmost surety, namely, that in them something is living and weaving which is connected with our human past, with the past when we had an existence still associated with earth-fire and water-air. While unconscious in sleep, to a certain extent we call back our past. Today with our brain consciousness and our ordinary free-will, we are not in the position consciously to transport ourselves into that world. While passing through the earlier stages of our evolution we were indeed unconscious or subconscious. Yet relatively it is not particularly difficult to have this experience. If you follow up your dream life, you will certainly find it extraordinarily difficult to give a clear interpretation of your dream pictures. The way they follow one after another is generally completely chaotic. But this chaotic character is only superficial; below the surface man is living in an element that is by no means chaotic, it is merely different, totally different, from the experiences of waking life. We shall immediately see the profound difference if we are clear in just one case as to how far dream-life differs from waking life. It would be very unpleasant if our relations with other people were the same in waking life as they are in dreams. For in dreams we are aware of a bond uniting us with almost all those karmically connected with us; we experience a link with all the human beings with whom we have any karmic connection. From the moment you begin to fall asleep till you wake, a force goes forth from you to innumerable people, and from innumerable people forces come to you. I cannot say that you speak, for speaking is only learnt in waking day life, but if you will not misunderstand me, if you will apply what I am going to say to the communications we have in sleep, then you will know what I mean by saying: In sleep you speak to innumerable people and they speak to you. And what you experience in your soul during your sleep is imparted to you by innumerable people; and what you do during your sleep is to send thoughts to innumerable people. The union between men in sleep is very intimate. It would be highly distressing if this were continued into waking life. You see, it is the beneficent act of the Guardian of the Threshold that he hides from man what is beneath the level of human consciousness. In sleep, as a rule, you know if anyone is lying, you know as a rule if anyone has evil thoughts about you. On the whole, men know one another in sleep comparatively well, but with dimmed consciousness. That is all covered up in waking consciousness, and it must be so, for the simple reason that man would never attain the ego-conscious thinking he is to learn during his earth-mission, nor be able to manage the free will he is to acquire, if he were to continue to live as he lived during the periods of Saturn, Sun, and especially the Moon period. Then, in his external life, he lived as he now lives from falling asleep to waking.

But now we come to something else significant. Out of the unconscious life between falling asleep and waking, dreams emerge. Why then are they not a true picture of life below the threshold of consciousness? Ah! were these dreams direct and true reflections, they would be every possible thing. In the first place they would impart significant knowledge concerning our relation to the world and to men; they would also be stern monitors. They would speak dreadfully severely to our conscience about the various things in life about which we are so willing to give ourselves up to illusion. I might almost say that we are protected from the effect these dreams might have upon us if they were true reflections of life below the threshold of consciousness—we are protected by our waking life permeating us with forces so strongly that a shadow is cast over the whole life of dreams. Thus, we carry the ideas, the images, of waking life into our dream-life, into the life of sleep, and through this dreams arise. Suppose, for instance, you were to dream of some personality who took it upon himself to impress upon you that you had done something really tactless—unfitting. That happens sometimes. Others, too, might admonish us during sleep, and might speak to our conscience. The experiences and customs of waking life have given you the wish—I might even say the strong desire—not to listen to this; during sleep you don't want to hear anything this person says to you. Well then, the wish is transformed into a darkening of experience. But if at the same time, there is such intense activity of the soul that the picture surges up, then something else from waking life is superimposed upon what you were to have experienced as a picture, something said by a kind friend to whom you would rather listen than to the admonisher—What a splendid fellow you are, always ready to will and do what is best and most pleasant!—Sometimes, from waking life and its reminiscences, the very opposite can be hung over what is being experienced. Actually, waking life is the cause of all the illusions and deceptions arising during the life of dreams.

Furthermore it is possible for a man today, in the present cycle of evolution, to come to a knowledge of Spiritual Science. There are, I know, many who do so and say: I have been studying Spiritual Science for many years, and yet am no whit advanced. I am told that I can achieve this or that through Spiritual Science, but it does not help me forward.—I have often emphasized that this thought is not the right one. Spiritual Science brings progress to everyone, even when it does not develop an esoteric life. The thoughts of Spiritual Science on themselves bring progress. But we must be careful about subjective experiences that take place really in the soul, for it is strange that what springs up as new, in the path of anyone beginning to study Spiritual Science, in its picture character is, at first, no different from the world of dreams. What we experience, my dear friends, when we become anthroposophists, appears to differ very little from the world of dreams. But a more subtle differentiation shows a most important distinction between ordinary dreams and those perceptions that flow through spiritual life, when consciously admitted into thought.

Much that is chaotic may also appear in the dream-pictures experienced in the soul of a spiritual scientist. But if these pictures are analysed according to the guidance Spiritual Science can give, they will be found to become, especially as they progress ever truer reflections of man's inner experience. And we must pay heed to this layer of experience, hidden as it is from ordinary understanding and from the ordinary life of the senses. This experience runs its course like a meditation, a meditative dream, yet is full of meaning and, rightly regarded, throws much light on spiritual secrets. We must mark how it gradually creeps into the life of ordinary ideas—this layer of life that closely resembles dreams, but that can lead us into the spiritual world. But we must not merely look at its single pictures, we must look at the meaningful course these pictures take. If we pay attention to such things, we come to the differentiation of the three layers of consciousness which I showed you yesterday. Goethe divined it in a beautiful way. One of these layers of consciousness appears, without any help of ours, when we dream in the ordinary way; if we are not interpreters of dreams, if we are not superstitious but try honestly to find what lies behind the dream-pictures, then this dream-world will be able to reveal that, before these earth-lives, as men we passed through earlier stages of evolution.

And then we have the ordinary waking day consciousness we know, or at least think we know. We know the fact of its existence, we do not always venture to explain it fully but we know it exists.

The third layer is where supersensible knowledge enters in. For the reasons already mentioned, supersensible knowledge is of course something for which man has to strive, both now and into the future.

I pointed out to you yesterday how, in the first half of the scene in the scene in the second part of Faust, which we are now to consider, Goethe embodies the characteristic features of dream-life. And the moment the Oread begins to speak to Mephistopheles, and the philosophers appear, we have to do with the world of ordinary daytime reality. The moment the Dryads point out the Phorkyads to Mephistopheles, we are dealing with a reference to conscious supersensible knowledge. Goethe is directing his thoughts and ideas to the three layers of consciousness when he asks himself the question: How will Homunculus, to whom human knowledge is accessible, become a Homo?—Not through the ordinary knowledge of the understanding of the senses, but only by having recourse to other layers of consciousness. For man in his being is wider than the earth, and intelligence and the senses are adapted only to earthly things. But we explained yesterday how the equilibrium of the Sphinx fails when man plunges into the world of antiquity, how man really feels insecure in it, how Homunculus feels himself insecure. For man knows little more about himself—forgive me but this is true—he knows little more about himself than he does about a Homunculus; and about a Homo he knows nothing. And Homunculus, as Goethe pictures him, does not enter into all the whirl of the Sirens, the Seismos, and so on, because he is afraid of the stormy, surging element into which man dives when he forsakes the world of the senses to enter the world from which dreams arise. Homunculus does not dare to enter there, but wants to find an easier way to become Homo. He is on the track of two philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, from whom he hopes to learn how it is possible to put more into his human nature that can't be given him in a laboratoryby a Wagner. This is what he wants. We already know that Goethe had little hope of what could be experienced through the new philosophers, and had no wish at all to test people's patience by, perhaps, taking Homunculus to Königsberg to get information from Kant on how to become a complete human being, how to widen human nature. But Goethe sought to live himself into the world of the Greeks, believing that by so living in their more pliable and flexible ideas, he could grasp human life out of another layer of consciousness better than through what the more recent philosophers could produce out of understanding and the consciousness of the senses. Thus, he does not introduce Homunculus into the society of Kant, or of Leibnitz, Hume or Locke, but brings him into the company of those philosophers who came nearer the older outlook, the outlook of the ancient Mysteries, where something of man's nature could be known, if not with such clearly experienced consciousness as today, yet with a more all-embracing consciousness. But, at heart, Anaxagoras and Thales our only imitators of the old Mystery wisdom. Everything said by Anaxagoras in this scene, however, goes to show that it is he who has the more knowledge of ancient Mystery wisdom. Thales is really the inaugurator, the initiator, the beginner, of the new tendency in science, and knows but little of the old secrets. Naturally he knows more than his later philistine followers because he lived nearer the time of the ancient Mysteries, but he knows less than Anaxagoras. From what he says we can gather that Thales can only give information about what occurs in the world of the senses around him, how mountain ranges and such physical features were formed by slow and gradual processes. You might think it was Lyell, the modern geologist, speaking. Anaxagoras would explain the present out of the past, explain the earthly from what went before, when earth was not yet earth. He wants to find his explanation in those times to which, in their nature, the ants, the comets, and also the Pigmies belonged. I referred to this yesterday. Anaxagoras lives entirely in that world which today is a supersensible, or if you like, subsensible world, without knowledge of which, however, we cannot understand what has to do with the senses. Anaxagoras here reflects one of Goethe's deep convictions. For Goethe has put this point beautifully into one of his aphorisms, where he says: “What no longer arises, we cannot think of as arising. What has already arisen, we cannot understand”. And in another place: “Reason as applied to what is becoming, understanding to what has become”.

What Thales sees around him is what has become. Anaxagoras enters into all that has gone before the becoming—the actual arising. Hence Goethe distinguishes strictly between understanding that is directed to what is nowadays regarded as the object of science, and reason that extends beyond the obvious and intellectual, to the supersensible, even the supersensible that held sway before the existing conditions of the earth. In Anaxagoras, Goethe sees the representative of a knowledge, a science, that devotes itself to what is still coming into being, and is at home and all that is done by Pigmies, that is to say, at home in all that such beings do that certainly today develop a physical existence, but like the emmets, for example, really belonged by nature to a previous age.

So when Anaxagoras meets with Homunculus' request, he would like to give him the opportunity to enrich human nature through his own (Anaxagoras') knowledge; he wants to take Homunculus into the world of the Pigmies, the emmets, and so forth, and even wants to make him king there. It is already clear to Anaxagoras that the world of which Thales speaks, the world of present conditions, cannot be much help in changing Homunculus into Homo. Could entrance be made into the world of becoming, however, into the world preceding ours, something might be achieved towards that end. But Homunculus is undecided: “What says my Thales?” He still thinks he will not venture into that world. When he encountered it as a dream-world, he dared not enter it, and now it confronts him as the thought of Anaxagoras he still does not summon up sufficient courage, or at least he would first have Thales' advice. And Thales deters him from plunging into the world of Anaxagoras' thought. What kind of world is this? Fundamentally, it is the world of the ancient Mysteries, but flattened, levelled down, for human understanding. It is the shadow form of the concepts of the ancient Mysteries. That is why they cannot hold their own against the world. If we have real, living concepts of becoming, we can arrive at an understanding of this world—grow into it. But Anaxagoras' shadow concepts are no match for Thales' objections, for these come from the present sense-world. And just as fleeting dreams, that are reflections of higher spiritual worlds, fade away from man when a cock crows or a door slams, so everything in the thought-world of Anaxagoras fades when it meets other thoughts drawn from the present world of the senses. Thales has only to draw attention to the presence of the sense-world, and he does this very forcibly. As the present world kills the preceding world that arises before us in dreams, so do the cranes strike dead the Pigmies and the emmets. This is merely an image. Anaxagoras first turns to the world that re-appears in the vague experience of dreams. When he is obliged to realise that this world will be of no advantage to Homunculus, he then turns to the higher world. To begin with, in wonderful words, he invokes among heavenly phenomena, all that has remained of a previous period of he earth—he invokes the Moon. After he has widened his thoughts and ideas concerning what is left over from the Moon period—emmets, pigmies, creatures of a lower kind, and all this has proved useless to Homunculus, he looks upward to where the Moon has still remained from the old Moon period.

Think how clearly in this scene Goethe actually points to all these secrets lying at the basis of earthly evolution. He even makes Anaxagoras address an invocation to the Moon, out of the ancient Mystery-wisdom. It is a wonderful passage in which Anaxagoras turns toward the Moon. It shows most distinctly how, in Anaxagoras, Goethe was wishing to portray a personality standing within the spiritual world but only with his understanding, the understanding that only studying the present can never reach the spiritual at all, but, in Anaxagoras, still preserves the spiritual out of the old Mysteries. Anaxagoras says:

“The powers subterene erstwhile adoring,
This crisis in, I turn above, imploring,
O Thou, that agest not eternally,
Three-named, three-formed, enthroned supernally,
Thee in my people's woe I call on Thee!
Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom-lightener [or bosom-widener], deeply pensive one!
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty intensive one!
Open thy shadows' awful gulf alone!
Thine ancient might without a spell make known.”

But he has still only shadows; instead of achieving anything for Homunculus, he perceives how from the Moon desolation falls upon the earth, and how all the life still left there is destroyed by a phenomenon of the elements. As being characteristic of Anaxagoras it is significant that he addresses the Moon, this remnant of a previous period of the earth, as “Luna, Diana, Hecate ...”

For Anaxagoras, therefore, the Moon is not a unity but a trinity. In so far as it fulfils its course above in the heavens, it is Luna. In so far as it is active in the earth itself, it is Diana. The forces working cosmically through the Moon as it circles the heavens, have—one might say—for brothers and sisters the earthly forces; the Moon is not only present cosmically, it exists also in an earthly way. The same forces that are cosmically associated with the circling Moon in the heavens, also live and weave through what is earthly, and belong to significant subconscious forces in man. They work in man's nature and belong to forces in him that are subconscious but important. What works within the earth through man having a certain relation to Nature out of his subconscious, that never comes to complete consciousness, was called by the Greeks Diana. Diana is generally said to be the goddess of the chase. Certainly she is that too, because this subconscious holds sway in the pleasures of the chase; it does so, however, in countless other human feelings and will-impulses. Diana is not only goddess of the chase, she is the working, creating goddess of all half unconscious, half subconscious striving, such as is gratified in hunting. Man does much of this kind in life, and this is one of the ways.

Then there dwells in man, but also especially in the earth, a third figure, the figure of Hecate, the sub-earthly state of the Moon. It is from within the earth, from what is sub-earthly in it, that those forces work upwards, which—so far as the Moon is a heavenly body, work in her from above downwards. All that the man of today knows of this Moon is the abstract mineral ball he believes to revolve out there, round the earth in four weeks. The Greeks knew a threefold Moon—Luna, Diana, Hecate. And being a microcosm is an image of every trinity, and image of Luna, Diana, Hecate, as the threefold Moon. And we have learnt to know the threefold man. We know the man of the head; this man of the head, since he is the product of the periods of Saturn, Sun, and Moon, the product of all previous ages, can be brought into relation with the heavenly survival, with Luna. So that the head in man would, as a microcosm, correspond to the macrocosm Luna. The man of the centre, the breast, would correspond to Diana; it is in the heart that those subconscious impulses arise of which Diana is the goddess. And all that plays out of the extremity-man and is continued into the sex-man, all the dark, purely organic, bodily feelings and impulses, prevailing in the human being, come from the sub-earthly power of Hecate. And Goethe lets all this sound forth, making it all quite clear for those who wish to hear. To the realm of Hecate belongs, for instance, Empusa who appears in this scene among the Lamiae around Mephistopheles. The Lamiae express rather what belongs to Diana, whereas, in Empusa, all that belongs to the sub-earthly is working, all that dwells microcosmically in the lower nature of man, and is to be awakened in Mephistopheles. This is what Goethe makes ring out for us.

Anaxagoras wishes to show his science to better advantage than he did when alluding to the earthly, to earthly survivals, to the emmets, his myrmidons as he calls them. He turns to the threefold Moon that as macrocosm is the same as man as microcosm. And we ask: Had Goethe a presentiment that, in the threefold Moon, the head-man, chest-man, and limb-man were microcosmically present? Well, my dear friends, read the following lines:

“Thou bosom-widener, (Diana)
Profoundly pensive one, (Luna)
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty, intensive one!” (Hecate)

Here you have, fully expressed by Goethe and made obvious by his description of the middle one as “breast-widener”, the three qualities of Luna, Diana, and Hecate, in so far as these three also apply to threefold man.

You see, my dear friends, there are good grounds for maintaining that Goethe's foreseeing knowledge penetrated deeply in the truths on Spiritual Science. What, however, is written in a work like Goethe's Faust has to be taken in its true character. It when you consider Goethe's characteristic attitude with its foreseeing perception of the truths of Spiritual Science, that you can understand how in a certain sense he repeatedly felt the spiritual, the supersensible—but never the less as something uncanny. As I said yesterday, he lived within his northern world, and felt in sympathy with what this environment offered him in the way on ideas and concepts. However great a genius a man may be, he con only have the same concepts as his fellows; he can combine them differently but he cannot have different concepts. The two layers of consciousness, the subconscious and the superconscious, cannot be approached in this way. The ordinary philistine, my dear friends, can make nothing of all this, and is glad if he is not obliged to deal with the other layers of consciousness. But Goethe, who strove with every fibre of his soul, to penetrate the being of man, often felt it a grievous human limitation that he should have no ideas, no concepts, with which he could see into the would whence man arises, into which, however, no one can look with his understanding or his ordinary knowledge. And then, from all he had felt through his natural ability, or that he had experienced in other ways, and through what he had particularly noticed in Grecian art in Italy, there arose in Goethe the thought that, were man to steep himself in the ideas and life of Greece, he would come nearer to the supersensible than with modern ideas. This was so deeply rooted in Goethe that, from the year 1780 onwards he continually strove to make his ideas as supple as were those of the Greeks. He hoped in this way to reach the supersensible world. But what arose out of this? There arose his strenuous endeavour to come to knowledge of the supersensible world not from the outlook of Greek life, but by gaining ideas through which he would be able to grasp the supersensible world in the life of soul. It is interesting how, while he was writing this scene, Goethe was steeping himself in everything possible to bring Greek life vividly before his soul. Today we are no nearer to Greek life than men were in Goethe's days. And yet such a work as Schlosser's Universal Survey of the History of the Ancient World and its Culture, published in 1826, and immediately read by Goethe among many other works transplanting him into the life of Greece, enabled him, by his sympathetic attitude towards Greek life, to bring it vividly before his soul. But what idea had he in all this? Just think! he writes: We are called upon to look back on what is most universal, but utterly past, in ancient history—what cannot be brought back; and from there to let the different peoples gradually surge up beneath out gaze.

In the last twenty years of the eighteenth century during which these scenes of Faust were being created, Goethe occupied himself intensively with studies that should bring vividly before his spirit the far distant past and show him how it flows into the present. Goethe is not one of those who make poems by a turn of the hand; he plunges deeply into the world leading to the supersensible, so that as a poet he can give tidings of it. And his belief in the Greek world changed to a certain extent his way of representation. Because in his very soul he sought Greek life, the concept of truth, the concept of good, drew near the concept of beauty. And the concept of evil approached the concept of ugliness. That is difficult for present-day man to understand. In Greek thought it was different. Cosmos is a word meaning beautiful world-order, as well as true world-order. Today men no longer think, as did the Greeks, that beauty is so closely allied to truth, and ugliness to evil. For the Greeks, beauty melted into truth, ugliness into error and evil. Through his attitude to the Greek world Goethe acquired the feeling that anyone organised like the Greeks, who stood in such close relation to the supersensible world, would experience the untrue and evil as ugly, and would turn away from this because of his experience of beauty, while he would feel truth to be beautiful. This feeling was developed by Goethe. And he believed he might perhaps draw nearer the supersensible by saturating himself with feeling for the beauty of the world. But just as one can only know light by its shadow, one must also be saturated with feeling for the ugliness of the world. And that too Goethe sought.

For this reason he sets Mephistopheles, who is of course only another side of Faust's life, among the prototypes of gliness, the Phorkyads, who are in very truth the prototypes of what is hideous. And in so doing, my dear friends, Goethe touches on a great mystery of existence. You will have realised, from the lectures I have given here from time to time, that even today there are people in possession of certain secrets. Particularly the leaders of Roman Catholicism, for example, the leaders, are in possession of certain secrets. What matters is how these secrets are used. But certain initiates of the English-speaking peoples are also acquainted with mysteries. Out of a profound misunderstanding, does not only the Roman Church—that is, its leaders—keep these secrets from its adherents, but certain esoteric initiates of the English-speaking peoples do the same. They have various reasons for this, and of one of these I will now speak.

You see, my dear friends, the earth has a past, the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; it has a present, the earth-period; it has a future, the periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. In evolution there is both good and evil. Out of the cosmos, out of cosmic evolution, good can only be recognised from the past, from the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and half the earth-period. Wisdom and goodness are associated, in this looking back into the past. Wisdom and goodness were implanted into human nature by those members of the higher hierarchies who belong to man, at a time when this human nature was not yet awakened to full consciousness, as it is on the earth. For the coming time, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods, and at present on the earth, for the coming half of the earth-period—it is already beginning—man must preserve goodness if he wishes to attain it; he must develop the impulse for goodness out of his own nature. For in his environment,in what is new that approaches him, the forces of evil are revealed. Were these forces for evil not revealed, man could not arrive at free-will. And those initiates to whom I refer know this important secret, my dear friends, and will not impart it because they do not wish to help mankind to maturity. They know this secret. If what arose as human nature on ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon, and still continues further—if what was evolved for us men on Saturn, and possesses a past, were to arise now out of earth-conditions, it would be fundamentally evil, it would only be able to absorb evil. It is only possible to receive evil from external conditions. That man can acquire freedom of will is due to this exposure to evil and his being able to choose between the evil that approaches him, and the good he can develop out of his own nature. This is if he has confidence in what was planted there in previous ages. Hence these initiates say to those wishing to be initiated: There are three layers of consciousness, (that is the formula always used in these English-speaking schools os initiation) three layers of consciousness. When a man plunges into the subconscious, from which dreams spring up, he experiences an intimate relation with other beings (I have described this to you before) also with other men; these beings do not appear in the present world. When, as is the case today, man is living in his day-consciousness in the perceptible, rational world, he is in the world where he goes through birth and death. And when he raises himself to the world—that he will enter as physical man in the future—to which he attains through supersensible knowledge, then that is the world where he first experiences evil. For it is then that a man must find strength to be a match for evil, to hold his own against it. He must learn to know evil.

The natural consequence of this is the necessity for men of the present to shed light on the past, so that they may be prepared for the inevitable encounter with evil; and this can be done only through Spiritual Science. To these three layers of consciousness, the initiates of the English-speaking peoples continually draw attention. This will be the basis of that conflict that is of the utmost importance, though the present age has little external knowledge of it. This conflict will be between those who want what is a necessity to take place, and secrets of this kind to be imparted, and those who wish to keep mankind in immaturity. So far the latter have had the upper hand. It is most important that these things should be known. You can see from this, my dear friends, what mischief will be set on foot if the truths of Spiritual Science are withheld. For man will be exposed to the forces of evil, and he will only be protected from it by giving himself up to the spiritual life of the good. To withhold the spiritual life of goodness from men is to be no friend to humanity. Whoever does this, be he Freemason or Jesuit, is no friend to humanity. For it means handing men over to the forces of evil. And there may be a purpose in doing so. This purpose may be to confine goodness to a small circle, in order by the help of this goodness to dominate the helpless humanity who are thus led by evil into the follies of life.

You can imagine, my dear friends, that anyone like Goethe, who has a presentiment of all these things, will have some hesitation in approaching them. From many things I have said in your presence about Goethe's particular kind of spirituality, you will be able to form a concept of how he would approach these subtle, but world-shattering matters with only really relevant ideas. Hence, in conceiving his Faust, he did not wish to be thought that man, wanting to make progress in culture, must fearlessly expose himself to the forces of evil; instead, he clothes this too, in Greek ideas, by confronting Mephistopheles with primeval ugliness, with the trinity of Phorkyads, the three prototypes of ugliness. Instead of pointing men unreservedly to the reality of evil, as Spiritual Science must do, Goethe points to the reality of ugliness as contrasted with beauty. Hence the characteristic behaviour of Mephistopheles towards the Phorkyads. Had Mephistopheles remained in his northern home, that is to say in a world that has certainly advanced beyond that of the Greeks in the world-order, he would have been obliged to meet with the bitter, but essential world, from which future evil flows. Instead of this, Goethe makes him meet in the world of antiquity the prototypes of ugliness, the Phorkyads. So that he places him, as it were, in prehistoric times before the history of evil. By employing Greek concepts, he places most solemn truth before men in a way that could still arouse their sympathy. And here too Goethe shows his deep knowledge of the matter. We know—you may read this in my Occult Science—that the future is in a sense the reproduction of the past on a higher level. Jupiter is a kind of repetition of the Moon; Venus of the Sun; and Vulcan of Saturn. On a higher level, the earlier appears in the later. It is the same as regards evil. Evil appears in order that man may develop goodness out of his own nature with all possible strength. But this evil will show distorted pictures, caricatures, of the forms of the primeval age.

You see, what we now are is largely because we are constructed symmetrically, the left-man and the right-man working together. Physicists and physiologists wonder why it is we have two eyes, what use we have for two eyes. If they knew why we have two hands, and of what use they are to us, they would also know why we have two eyes and of what use these are. If, for instance, we could not touch the left hand with the right, we could never arrive at ego-consciousness. By being able to grasp the right-man with the left, by gaining knowledge of the right-man by means of the left, we arrive at consciousness of ourselves, at consciousness of the presence of the ego. To look at an object a man must have more than one eye. If, by birth or accident, he has only one eye, that does not matter: it is not the external apparatus but the faculty, the forces, that are of importance. When we look at a man the axes of the eyes are crossed. In this way the ego is associated with sight; through the crossing the left direction is associated with the right. And the farther we go back the closer is the relation, in common with the consciousness. This is why Goethe gives the three Phorkyads one eye and one tooth between them, a representation that shows his deep knowledge. Thus the three have but one eye and one tooth. This implies that the senses are not meant to be working together, they are still isolated from one another. On the one hand relationship is expressed, on the other we are told that the elements are not yet working in collaboration, that what arises through the right-man and the left-man cannot yet appear. Thus accurately does Goethe express what he wishes to say, and he suggests infinitely much.

Now, if you think over what you know from Occult Science namely, that the present bi-sexual-sexual human being has sprung from the uni-sexual being, and that male and female have only been developed in the course of evolution, you will see that a retrograde evolution takes place when Mephistopheles meets with evil in the form of ugliness, joins with it in going with the Phorkyads: “Done! here stand I” (after he has thrown in his lot with the Phorkyads) ...

“Here stand I, Chaos' well-beloved son!”
Phorkyads: “And Chaos' true-born daughters, we, undoubted.”

To which Mephistopheles replies:

“O fie! Hermaphrodite must I be flouted?”

He becomes ‘hermaphrodite’ when it is intended to show the condition preceding the bi-sexual, the condition to which I have just referred. Truly Goethe gives his descriptions from inside knowledge! In this scene we may recognise how deeply he had divined and entered into the truths of Spiritual Science.

Now, remember now not long ago I said that no one can ever arrive at a satisfying conception of the world who, misled by what man is now, what he has of necessity to be, comes on the one hand to abstract ideals, ideals having no forces. (Forces such as those in nature that cannot fit into the physical world-order, but have to disperse like mist when the earth reaches her goal, that is, her grave). No one can find a satisfying world-outlook who is either an abstract idealist of this kind, or a materialist. As I said, man must be both. He must be able to rise to ideas in conformity with the age in which he lives, and also look at material things in a material way and form materialistic ideas about them. Thus, he must be able to form both a materialistic and an idealistic conception of the world, and not set up a unity with abstract concepts. Having on the one hand scientific concepts, on the other idealistic concepts, we must then let them interpenetrate each other just as spirit and matter do. As I have told you, in processes of cognition the ideal must permeate and illumine the material, the material must permeate and illumine the ideal.

And Goethe found this out. It occurred to him how one-sided it is when, in abstract concepts, men seek a world-outlook inclining more to matter or more to spirit. Hence he was drawn to seek his world-conception not in abstract ideas but in a different way. And this he describes as follows:

“Since so much of our experience does not admit of being openly expressed and directly imparted, long ago I chose this method, namely, to reveal the hidden meaning to the observant by dint of contrasted images playing into one another.”

Now, can anyone express more clearly that he is neither idealist nor realist, but both idealist and realist, letting the two world-outlooks play into one another. Goethe seeks to approach the world from the most diverse directions, and to come to truth by means of mutually reflected concepts. Thus, in Goethe's impulses there is already concealed the way that must be taken by Spiritual Science in order to lead mankind towards the future—the health-giving future.

One would like, my dear friends, what Goethe began to be continued; but then it would be essential for such works as Faust to be really read. Man has, however, more or less lost the habit of reading. At best, men would say when they read:

“Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom widener, profoundly pensive one!”

Oh! poetry. Then there is no need to go deeper into it, no need to meditate over every word! Thus men console themselves today when offered anything they are not actually bound to believe; for they like to take things superficially. But the universe does not permit that. When you consider the deep truth I have just shown in connection with the meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads—a truth that has been preserved in many occult schools of the present day—then you have the opportunity of understanding, together with much else that enables you to realise it, the intense seriousness of our striving after Spiritual Science, the seriousness that must underlie our endeavours. It may be said that there sometimes escapes, half consciously, from those who have come into contact with what is essential for man in the future, an pious ejaculation, like Nietzsche's, in his Midnight Song: “The world is deep, Yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”.

We must indeed say that the day gives man day-consciousness; but, so long as he clings only to what the day brings, man of himself becomes simply Homunculus, not Homo. For “the world is deep, yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”. And since Goethe does not wish to lead Faust into merely what the day brings, but into all that conceals the eternal, he has to let him take his way in the company of Homunculus, and of Mephistopheles who confronts the supersensible. Goethe thought he could do this by steeping himself in Greek ideas, and by bringing them to life within himself.

The relationship between anthroposophy and philosophy has already been discussed, albeit only briefly. Today we want to talk about fairly elementary aspects of so-called formal logic. Despite the elementary nature of our deliberations today, it may not be without use to delve into a philosophical chapter between our forays into higher worlds. It is not meant that such a lecture could directly offer anything for penetrating into the higher worlds. A logical consideration can do this no more than formal logic can enrich experience in the sensory realm. For example, someone who has never seen a whale cannot be convinced that they exist. He must make the observation himself. But it is precisely the knowledge of borderline areas that will be useful to anthroposophy, just as logic was useful to scholastics. The philosophers of the Middle Ages, who today are somewhat contemptuously grouped together under the name of scholastics, did not regard logic as an end in itself either; it did not serve to learn anything substantial. The subject-matter of teaching was either the observation of the senses or revelation, which is obtained through divine grace. But although, in the opinion of the scholastics, logic was quite powerless to enrich experience, they nevertheless regarded it as an important instrument of defense. So it should be an instrument of defense for us as well.

A distinction is made between material and formal logic. Logic as such cannot grasp anything material or substantial as its object. Concepts such as time, number, and God give a content that does not arise through logical conclusions. On the other hand, the form of thinking is the task of logic; it brings order to thoughts, it teaches how we must connect concepts that lead to correct conclusions. It is fair to say that logic was more highly valued in the past than it is today. In grammar schools, philosophy, logic and psychology used to be taught together. The aim of the teaching was to lead young people to disciplined, orderly thinking; propaedeutics means preparation. Today, however, people are trying to eliminate this kind of preparation and incorporate it into the study of silence because logic is no longer sufficiently respected. Thinking, they say, is innate in man; so why teach thinking in a special subject? But it is precisely in our time that it is very necessary to reflect on ourselves and to devote more attention to formal logic.

Aristotle is considered the founder of formal logic. And what Aristotle has done for logic has always been recognized, even by Kant, who says that formal logic has not progressed much since Aristotle. More recent thinkers have sought to add to it. We do not want to examine today whether or not such additions were necessary and justified. We just have to recognize the scope of logic here.

Anthroposophists are often reproached for not being logical. This is very often because the person making the reproach does not know what logical thinking is and what the laws of logical thinking are. Logic is the science of the correct, harmonious connection of our concepts. It comprises the laws by which we must regulate our thoughts in order to have within us a mirror reflecting the right relationships of reality.

We must first realize what a concept is. The fact that people are so little aware of what a concept is is due to the lack of study of logic on the part of the learned. When we encounter an object, the first thing that happens is sensation. We notice a color, a taste or a smell, and this fact, which takes place between man and object, we must first consider as characterized by sensation. What is in the statement: something is warm, cold and so on, is a sensation. But we actually do not have this pure sensation in ordinary life. When we look at a red rose, we not only perceive the red color; when we interact with objects, we always perceive a group of sensations at once. We call the combination of sensations “red, scent, extension, form” a “rose.” We do not actually perceive individual sensations, only groups of sensations. Such a group can be called a “perception”.

In formal logic, one must clearly distinguish between perception and sensation. Perception and sensation are two entirely different things. Perception is the first thing we encounter; it must first be dissected in order to have a sensation. However, that which gives us a mental image is not the only thing. The rose, for example, makes an impression on us: red, scent, shape, expanse. When we turn away from the rose, we retain something in our soul, such as a faded remnant of the red, the scent, the expanse, and so on. This faded remnant is the idea. One should not confuse perception and idea. The idea of a thing is where the thing is no longer present. The idea is already a memory image of the perception.

But we still have not come to the concept. We get the idea by exposing ourselves to the impressions of the outside world. We then retain the idea as an image. Most people do not get beyond the idea in the course of their lives, they do not penetrate to the actual concept. What a concept is and how it relates to the idea is best shown by an example from mathematics. Take the circle. If we take a boat out to sea, until we finally see nothing but the sea and the sky, we can perceive the horizon as a circle when it is very calm. If we then close our eyes, we retain the idea of the circle from this perception as a memory image. To arrive at the concept of the circle, we have to take a different path. We must not seek an external cause for the idea, but we construct in our minds all the points of a surface that are equidistant from a certain fixed point; if we repeat this countless times and connect these points with a line in our minds, the image of a circle is built up in our minds. We can also illustrate this mental image with chalk on the blackboard. If we now visualize this image of the circle, which has been created not by external impressions but by internal construction, and compare it with the image of the sea surface and the horizon that presented itself to our external perception, we can find that the internally constructed circle corresponds exactly to the image of external perception.

If people really think logically, in the strict logical sense, they do something other than perceive externally and then visualize what they have perceived; this is only an idea. In logical thinking, however, every thought must be constructed inwardly, it must be created similarly to what I have just explained using the example of the circle. Only then does man approach external reality with this inner mental image and find harmony between the inner picture and external reality. The representation is connected with external perception, the concept has been created by inner construction. Men who really thought logically have always constructed inwardly in this way. Thus Kepler, when he formulated his laws, constructed them inwardly, and then found them in harmony with external reality.

The concept is therefore nothing other than a mental image; it has its genesis, its origin in thought. An external illustration is only a crutch, an aid to make the concept clear. The concept is not gained through external perception; it initially lives only in pure inwardness.

In its thinking, our present-day intellectual culture has not yet gone beyond mere imagining, except in mathematics. For the spiritual researcher, it is sometimes grotesque to see how little people have progressed beyond mere imagining. Most people believe that the concept comes from the imagination and is only paler, less substantial than the latter. They believe, for example, that they can arrive at the concept of a horse by successively seeing large, small, brown, white and black horses appear in their perception; and now I take - so people continue - from the perception of these different horses, what is common to all horses and omit what is separate, and so I gain the concept of the horse. But one only gets an abstract idea, and one never arrives at the concept of the horse in the strict sense of the word. Nor does one arrive at a concept of the triangle by taking all kinds of triangles, taking what is common to them and omitting what separates them. One only arrives at a concept of the triangle by inwardly constructing the figure of three intersecting lines. With this inwardly constructed concept we approach the outer triangle and find it harmonizing with the inwardly constructed image.

Only in relation to mathematical things can people in today's culture rise to the concept. For example, one proves by inner construction that the sum of the angles in the triangle is equal to one hundred and eighty degrees. But if someone starts to construct concepts of other things inwardly, a large proportion of our philosophers do not recognize it at all. Goethe created the concepts of the “primordial plant” and the “primordial animal” by inward construction; not only was the different left out, the same was retained - as stated earlier in the example of the horse. The primordial plant and the primordial animal are such inward mental constructions. But how few recognize this today. Only when one can build up the concept of the horse, the plant, the triangle, and so on, through inner construction, and when this coincides with outer perception, only then does one arrive at the concept of a thing. Most people today hardly know what is meant when one speaks of conceptual thinking.

Let us not take mathematical concepts, and let us not take Goethe's Organik, where he created concepts in a truly magnificent way, but let us take the concept of virtue. One can indeed have a pale general idea of virtue. But if you want to arrive at a concept of virtue, then you have to construct it inwardly, and you have to take the concept of individuality to help you. You have to construct the concept of virtue as you construct the concept of a circle. It takes some effort to do this, and various elements have to be brought together, but it is just as possible as constructing mathematical concepts. Moral philosophers have always tried to give a sensuality-free concept of virtue. Some time ago, there was a philosopher who could not imagine a sensuality-free concept of virtue and thought those who claimed such a thing were fantasists. He explained that when he thinks of virtue, he imagines virtue as a beautiful woman. Thus, he still introduced sensuality into the non-sensual concept. And because he could not imagine a sensuality-free concept of virtue, he also denied this to others.

If you delve into Herbart's ethics, you will find that for him, “goodwill” and “freedom”, these ethical concepts, are not formed by taking what is common and omitting what is separate. Instead, he says, for example, that goodwill encompasses the relationship between one's own will impulses and the imagined will impulses of another person. He thus gives a pure definition. In this way, one could construct the whole of morality through pure concepts, as in mathematics, and as Goethe attempted with his organic system. The general idea of virtue must not be confused with the concept of virtue. People arrive at the concept only gradually, through an inner process.

By setting the concept of the concept before us, we distance ourselves from all arbitrariness of imagining. To do this, we must first consider the pure course of imagining and the pure course of conceptualizing. I need not say that when a person imagines a triangle, he can only imagine this or that triangle. We must now take into account the way in which mere perceptions are connected and the way in which pure concepts are connected. What governs our perceptual life? When we have the perception of a rose, the perception of a person who has given us a rose can arise quite spontaneously. This may be followed by the perception of a blue dress that the person in question was wearing, and so on. Such connections are called: association of perceptions. But this is only one way in which people link ideas together. It occurs most purely where the human being completely abandons himself to the life of ideas. But it is also possible to string ideas together according to other laws. This can be shown by an example: a boy sits in the forest under tall trees. A person comes along and admires the good-quality timber. “Good morning, carpenter,” says the bright boy. Another comes along and admires the bark. “Good morning, tanner,” says the bright lad. A third passes by and marvels at the magnificent growth of the trees. “Good morning, painter,” says the boy. So here three people see the same thing – the trees – and each of these three people has different ideas, but these are different for the carpenter, the tanner and the painter. They are different combinations of ideas, not mere associations. This is because, according to his inner element, his soul structure, man connects this or that external idea with another, not only externally surrendering himself to the ideas. Here man allows the power that rises from his inner being to work. This is called: apperception is at work in him. Apperception and association are the forces that link mere ideas through external or subjective inner motives. Both apperception and association work in the mere life of ideas. It is quite different in the life of concepts. Where would people end up if they only relied on the subject's apperception and random association in the life of concepts? Here, people have to follow very specific laws that are independent of the association of ideas and the apperception of the subject. If we look at the mere external connection, we do not find the inner belonging of the concepts. There is an inner belonging of the concepts, and we find the lawfulness for this in formal logic.

First of all, we now have to look at the connection between two concepts. We connect the concept of the horse and that of running when we say: The horse is running. - We call such a connection of concepts a “judgment.” The point now is that the connection of concepts is carried out in such a way that only correct judgments can arise. Here we have, first of all, only a connection of two concepts, quite independently of association and apperception. When we connect two ideas through their content, we form a judgment. An association is not a judgment, because, for example, you could also connect bull and horse with each other through an association. But the connection of ideas can also happen in more complicated ways. We can add judgment to judgment and thus come to a “conclusion.” A famous old example of this is the following: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore, Caius is mortal. - Two judgments are correct in these sentences, so the third one “Caius is mortal” that follows from them is also correct. A judgment is the combination of two terms, a subject with the predicate. If two judgments are combined and a third follows from them, that is an inference. We can now develop a general scheme for this: If “Caius” is the subject \(S\) and “mortal” the predicate \(P\), then in the judgment “Caius is mortal” we have the connection of the subject \(S\) with the predicate \(P: S = P\). According to this scheme, we can form thousands of judgments. But to come to a conclusion, we still need a middle term \(M\), in our example “human”, “all humans”. So we can set up the scheme for a conclusion:

\(M = P\) All humans are mortal
\(S = M\) Caius is a human
\(S = P\) Therefore Caius is mortal.

If this conclusion is to be correct, the concepts must be connected in exactly this way; nothing must be transposed. If, for example, we form the sequence of judgments: The portrait resembles a person – The portrait is a work of art – we must not conclude: Therefore the work of art resembles a person. This latter conclusion would be false. But what is the error here? We have the schema:

\(M = P\) The portrait resembles a person
\(M = S\) The portrait is a work of art
But \(S\) is not equal to \(P\):
The work of art does not resemble a person.

We have turned the universally valid schema upside down here. It depends, then, on the form of the schema, on the manner of linking, to know: the first figure of conclusion is correct, the second is false. It is immaterial how the linking of concepts otherwise proceeds in our thoughts; it must be like the first formula in order to be correct.

We shall now see how one comes to know a certain legitimate connection in order to be able to find a number of such figures. Correct thinking proceeds according to quite definite such figures of inference; otherwise it is just wrong thinking. But things are not always as easy as in this example. Merely from the fact that the conclusions are wrong, one could often find out today, from even the most learned books, that what has been said cannot be true. Thus there are inner laws of thinking like the laws of mathematics; one could say an arithmetic of thinking. Now you can imagine the ideal of correct thinking: all concepts must be formed according to the laws of formal logic. However, formal logic has certain limits. These limits must be applied to the human mind. This would lead to correct insights and recognize the nature of fallacies. By all rules of logic, it would conform to the laws of logic if we said:

All Cretans are liars \(M = P\)
This one is a Cretan \(S = M\)
Therefore he is a liar, therefore \(S = P\)

Now the ancient logicians had already noticed that this is true for all cases, except for the case in which a Cretan himself says it. In this case, the conclusion is certainly false. For if a Cretan says, “All Cretans lie, therefore I am a liar,” it would not be true that Cretans are liars, and so he would be telling the truth; and so on.

It is similar with all fallacies, for example with the so-called crocodile conclusion: An Egyptian woman saw how her child playing by the Nile was seized by a crocodile. At the mother's request, the crocodile promises to return the child if the mother guesses what it will do now. The mother now utters: You will not give me back my child. - The crocodile replies: You may have spoken the truth or a lie, but I do not have to give the child back. Because if your speech is true, you will not get it back according to your own saying. But if it is false, then I do not return it according to our agreement. - The mother: I may have spoken the truth or spoken falsely, but you must give me back my child. Because if my speech is true, then you must give it to me according to our agreement; but if it is false, then the opposite must be true. You will give me back my child. The same applies to the conclusion that affected a teacher and a student. The teacher has taught the pupil the art of jurisprudence. The pupil is to pay the last half of the fee only after he has won his first case. After the teaching is completed, the pupil delays the beginning of the practice of law and therefore also the payment. Finally, the teacher sues him, saying to him: “Foolish youth! In any case, you must now pay. For if I win the lawsuit, you must pay according to the judgment; if you win, you must pay according to the contract, for you have won your first lawsuit. But the student: Wise teacher! Under no circumstances do I have to pay. For if the judges rule in my favor, I have nothing to pay according to the judgment; but if they rule against me, I pay nothing according to our contract.

There are countless such fallacies, which are formally quite correct. The problem is that logic can be applied to everything except itself. The moment we refer back to the subject itself, formal logic breaks down. This is a reflection of something else: when we move from the three bodies of man to the ego, everything changes. The self is the setting for logic, which, however, may only be applied to other things, not to itself. No experience can ever be made through logic, but logic can only be used to bring order to experiences.

You have to go back to the founding of Christianity if you want to find a point in the history of human development that seems as significant as the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We are immeasurably closer to everything that has happened in the last four centuries than to what happened before. We feel that our own cultural life forms a whole with the events of this age, and that everything that has gone before seems like something complete.

Gutenberg's invention stands there like the great landmark that separates this completed era from the cultural epoch that still continues today. If we take a closer look, Gutenberg appears to us as a contributor to everything that has happened in the last few centuries. Our material and spiritual life fully confirms what Wimpheling said soon after Gutenberg: "Of no invention or intellectual fruit can we Germans be so proud as of the printing press. What a different life is stirring in all classes of the people, and who would not gratefully commemorate the first founders and patrons of this art?" But it can also be said that no art entered history at the right time like letterpress printing. It is as if the whole world had been waiting for Gutenberg's deed in the middle of the fifteenth century. A change in social coexistence, in people's ideas and feelings had been in the making for a long time. German mysticism, which brought about the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is the herald of the new epoch. The mystics wanted to free themselves from the ideas handed down to man by an old tradition, which could only be believed on the testimony of authorities. They wanted to seek the source of all spiritual life within their own souls. An urge for the liberation of personality, of individuality, took hold. The individual wanted to examine for himself the thoughts to which he had to adhere in his cultural tasks. The need for a new means of acquiring human knowledge had to arise from such an urge. He who has the will to surrender himself unreservedly to authority can do no other than go and have the views of this authority conveyed to him orally. Those who want to seek truth and knowledge for themselves, based on their own thinking, need a book that makes them independent of authority. Gutenberg put the book in people's hands at a time when they had the greatest need for it. Luther translated the Bible into the native language of the Germans. Gutenberg paved the way for this now comprehensible Bible to travel all over the world. The Reformation is inconceivable without the prior invention of printing.

The way in which the spiritual treasures made accessible to all people through the art of printing initially had an impact clearly demonstrates the immense importance of this art. Before its invention, knowledge of scientific laws was a mystery to a few. The great masses of the people had to rely on the worst superstitions if they wanted to explain the natural phenomena that took place before their eyes every hour. The book gave these masses the opportunity to form ideas about the natural course of what was happening before their eyes and ears. But the masses, who for centuries had relied solely on belief in authority, were ill-equipped to form truly factual ideas. The books conveyed ideas that people had never heard of before. People therefore believed that there must be more to these ideas than the simple, plain letters of the new art conveyed. Such beliefs paved the way for all kinds of "secret sciences" and arts, for the charlatans who claimed to possess a special higher knowledge and whom the people willingly believed, allowing themselves to be beguiled by them because they were slow to form their own independent judgment.

We can still observe the inability, nurtured over centuries, to explain natural facts simply in the profound books of such an exquisite mind as Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). This simple man is truly great in his depiction of all things that can be gained through contemplation of one's own heart and mind. However, he becomes highly adventurous when he wants to explain physical or other natural occurrences.

Such phenomena show how Gutenberg's deed contributed to the expansion of Western mankind's horizons. It was through the art of printing that insight into nature was first gained for the majority of mankind.

This conquest of knowledge of nature gave the intellectual life of the modern age a completely different character. As unworldly and hostile to nature as the life of the Middle Ages enclosed in monasteries was, all education before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was essentially unworldly. What could be the subject of such an education? Nothing other than what man could draw from himself. One did not allow oneself to be instructed by natural phenomena; one only sharpened the logical weapons of the mind. Scholasticism is the result of such an unworldly educational system. It is fair to say that scholasticism could only be decisive for intellectual life as long as there were only written books that were inaccessible to most people. The educational path that someone who wanted to get hold of these books had to go through beforehand was such that it brought the whole human mind in a direction that was receptive to scholasticism. The printing press made it possible to attract entirely new forces to participate in intellectual culture. People could participate in the promotion of education who had not been forced into a particular path. This also changed the whole physiognomy of education. Instead of merely dealing with unworldly scholasticism, the focus was directed towards experience, towards real life. Gutenberg can also be seen as a silent participant in all the achievements associated with the names Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Baco of Verulam. For Copernicus' influential book, which showed astronomy new paths, Kepler's discoveries of the movement of celestial bodies: they could only become truly fruitful for the world if they met a generation that sought a world-friendly, not a world-alienated education.

Gutenberg made it possible for the great pathfinders of science and art in modern times to speak to a wide circle of people. The prosperity of a scientific world view depends on the participation of as many people as possible in education. As long as truth was sought in the human mind alone, it was enough for a few people to devote themselves to this search and communicate their findings to others. But since truth has been sought in the immeasurable number of facts of the external world, it is necessary that the circle of those interested in enriching education be as large as possible.

But not only intellectual culture, but also social and economic life in the fifteenth century was virtually waiting for a new means of disseminating human thought, established facts and experiences. The growth and developing independence of the merchant class placed higher demands on the personal efficiency of the individual than earlier conditions. Previously, the activity of the: Previously, the activities of the individual had been strictly determined by the whole to which he belonged, by the social organism in which he was integrated, and within very narrow limits. In the fifteenth century, all these things underwent an expansion. The individual detached himself from the associations which had formerly prescribed his aims. The whole of life became more complicated. The fixed cooperatives had loosened. The individual had to make his own way through life. It was not the guild that now determined what had to be done, but the personality. The large merchant could now only look at the personal efficiency of his clerks and authorized signatories. Family considerations and class affiliation, which had previously been the deciding factors as to who should be appointed to a particular position, were now completely eliminated. The need arose for the individual to have a broad view of the world. People had to find out what was going on in the world. Again, it was Gutenberg's invention that made this possible. Printed information took the place of the primitive means of communicating about world conditions that had been used in the Middle Ages. The first "newspaper" appeared as early as 1505, bringing news about Brazil.

Printed communication made possible what we call public opinion. The whole of humanity was, as it were, drawn into the great consultation that steered the course of world events. In pamphlets, tracts and pamphlets, the individual spoke to the whole. The seventeenth century saw the development of the newspaper and with it the influence of the popular spirit. Alongside the cabinets and the individual statesmen, the people appeared on the world stage and had their say when it came to major political and cultural issues. And the individual statesman is forced to adapt himself to public opinion if he wants to be successful. We see that statesmen disseminate the motives for their actions through the press in order not to be powerless; we see the respect for public opinion growing more and more among leading personalities. Wallenstein's officers send reports of their military exploits to the Munich newspapers; the Austrian government complains to the Brandenburg government that the Berlin newspapers have an anti-Austrian bias. It is thanks to the art of printing that the popular spirit gradually had to be reckoned with as a fully justified element within the world movement.

It is not going too far to say that the Age of Enlightenment was essentially influenced by printing. Gutenberg's workshop in Mainz laid the foundation for the attitude to which the philosopher Kant gave monumental expression with the words: "Have the audacity to use your own reason." For this reason first had to be gradually developed into such boldness. It could only do so if it constantly knew how to obtain information about what was going on in the world. And anyone who wants to benefit from using his own reason must also be able to count on his voice being heard. The eighteenth century was allowed and able to be enlightened because the seventeenth developed public opinion and established its value.

What the publicity of opinion means was soon learned by those in power, but also by those who wanted to contribute their mite to the progress of intellectual life. We can follow how power and education were linked to the art of printing, because successful work depended on it. Book printing found its best nurturing grounds in the vicinity of educational establishments, and scholars fraternized with the new art, even becoming book printers themselves in order to make their works known to the world. The papal envoys no longer merely sent their own weekly reports to Rome, but also the newspapers in which the popular voice was expressed.

It has a deeply symbolic meaning that the art of printing was met with a similar distrust as knowledge, knowledge itself. And it is significant that Gutenberg's comrade Fust or Faust was associated with the most culturally and historically interesting legend of modern times. Because man has seized knowledge, knowledge, he has fallen away from God. This is the meaning of the Fall of Man. Man's thirst for knowledge could only be attributed to the intervention of the devil. And the "black art", the great ally of the thirst for knowledge, was portrayed as nothing less than a work of hell. It was said of Faust: "He no longer wanted to be called a theologian, became a man of the world, called himself a Dr. Medicinae". The fact that science and the art of printing were followed by a similar formation of legends shows their deep inner relationship.

With the spread of the art of printing, we also see poetry and all literature becoming popular. The scholarly veneer that intellectual life had until then made way for a completely new spirit. The cheerful joke, the amusing prank, enters the art of storytelling. One knows that one can now speak to the people, and one therefore endeavors to offer them things that are connected with their own sentiments, with their feelings and imaginations. And from the people themselves, who are now taking part in spiritual life, new forces are growing. One must not underestimate how much the art of printing has contributed to the fact that personalities such as Hans Sachs were able to rise to a significant height of creativity. How much would never have come before his eyes had it not been for the printing press.

Gutenberg created the bridge between two worlds that are called to work together, which can only bring about a prosperous process of development for mankind through constant interaction. In his "Speeches to the German Nation", Fichte described it as a serious detriment to culture when a scholarly community is confronted with a people that is dependent on itself, that does not understand it and from which it is not constantly supplied with new, fresh driving forces. In the full sense of the word, such a judgment can only be made about the culture of the Middle Ages. The last four centuries have brought about a complete change in it through the printing press. The participation of the people in their work also had the most favorable effect on the scholars. The latter had lost all contact with the other classes. This can best be seen in the first books on natural history that were handed down to the people. These were interspersed with all kinds of miracle stories. It was believed that the people were not ready for real natural truths. In this, too, they soon changed their ways. On the contrary, people were driven to clarify their own thoughts, to give them a better form, because they wanted to be understood. The need to communicate knowledge led to a clarification of knowledge itself. People began to think about the art of how best to make education accessible to the widest circles. Cormenius' great pedagogical thoughts on the tasks of popular education presuppose the need for a lively interaction between the people who desire knowledge and the bearers of the entire intellectual life.

In this way, we can trace the influence of Gutenberg's deed into the whole of modern life. If other intellectual heroes have created the content for this life, he has provided the means to bring this content to full fruition and effect. That is why we are so at home in everything that the last four centuries have produced; and that is also why everything that we historically appropriate about the times that lie before the invention of the art of printing is so foreign to us. How a person thinks depends more than one is usually inclined to assume on the way he relates to his fellow human beings, how he interacts with them. Just as language itself, which builds a bridge from person to person, is a creator of culture, so the printed word, this powerful mediator, this appointed representative of the spoken word, is a co-creator of modern culture. Man took possession of this printed word in the age in which he began to place the highest value on his individuality, on personal efficiency. By emphasizing his personality, he turned away from the old cooperatives, within which the space became too narrow for him. The art of printing has given him a new means to seek a new association in place of the old limited one, which corresponds to the broader horizon of life. The more man individualized himself, the more he needed a means detached from his immediate personality in order to return to the whole. Thus the art of printing proved to be the unifying bond at the point in history when life made the imperative demand on the individual and also on the individual nation to separate themselves in order to make themselves fit for the great struggle for existence.

Since the art of printing was invented, it has shown itself to be the appointed ally of human progress. Where the latter reaches a certain height, the art of printing favors it; where progress is hindered, the art of printing also suffers. The beneficial effect of the Dutch association of the "Brothers of the Common Life" is a clear example of this. It was founded by Gerhard Groote (1340-1384) from Deventer and set itself the task of transforming education from a scholarly monopoly into a source of public welfare. This association developed a significant educational activity. The establishment of a large number of schools can be attributed to this activity. With the advent of the printing press, the cultural work of the Brothers of the Common Life took on a whole new life. It became possible for them to ensure the widest possible distribution of good educational books. They took the printing of these books into their own hands and thus became promoters of the new art in Holland and throughout north-western Germany. If this fact shows that progress and book printing went hand in hand, the regression that occurred in this art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after an initial period of great prosperity and rapid dissemination is no less indicative of this relationship. The Peasants' Wars, the unfortunate religious turmoil with its bloody, devastating aftermath, the Thirty Years' War, dealt a series of heavy blows to culture, which had reached a wonderful height at the beginning of the modern era. And the art of printing now participated in the decline of intellectual and material culture, just as it had previously contributed to its prosperity.

The interaction between a lower level of general education and the art of printing is also unmistakable in the difficulties the latter encountered in Spain. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerical censorship and the paternalism of the people on the part of the clergy were greater here than in Central Europe. For this reason, the art of printing spread only slowly; and even the little that it achieved here was due to the influence of individuals with an interest in science. And because this art had no real foundation in Spain, it was subsequently possible for the subjugation of intellectual life by the Jesuits and the Inquisition to find a special home here. Turkey is the most glaring example of the fact that only those who are also patrons of Gutenberg's art can play a role in modern cultural life. The Turks proved to be complete enemies of this art right up to the eighteenth century. The Sultan Bajazet threatened printing with the death penalty in 1483, and his son renewed the ban. This people had to pay for such anti-cultural measures by losing all significance in the intellectual life of Europe. It is interesting to follow the relationship between intellectual life and the art of printing in Hungary. King Matthias Corvinus ruled there in the second half of the fifteenth century. He had a profound interest in the sciences and arts. For this reason, the art of printing was already being cultivated in the Hungarian capital from 1473 onwards. A lively intellectual life therefore prevailed in this country, which had to contend with "the greatest difficulties in terms of culture due to its geographical location.

Man is a being who can only achieve truly purposeful work in the future by recognizing the past. History is his great teacher. Now compare how much more precisely and intimately we know the last four centuries than the earlier times, when printing was not yet the companion of all culture. With the latter, we are all too often dependent on mere conjecture and bold hypotheses, because historical tradition leaves us in the lurch for large areas. The art of printing is therefore not only an eager contributor to all culture, it is also the best, the most faithful guardian of the treasures of the past, which mankind needs so much for the future.

In the nineteenth century, the age of scientific knowledge and technology, the art of printing did not lag behind other cultural factors in its progress. With its great technical advances, it can stand worthily alongside the other achievements of our time. And if we are not without optimism today as we approach the dawning century and look joyfully into the future of human development, we owe this mood in no small part to the genius of Johannes Gutenberg.

[ 1 ] As we have seen in the preceding chapters, an epistemological investigation must begin by rejecting existing knowledge. Knowledge is something brought into existence by man, something that has arisen through his activity. If a theory of knowledge is really to explain the whole sphere of knowledge, then it must start from something still quite untouched by the activity of thinking, and what is more, from something which lends to this activity its first impulse. This starting point must lie outside the act of cognition, it must not itself be knowledge. But it must be sought immediately prior to cognition, so that the very next step man takes beyond it is the activity of cognition. This absolute starting point must be determined in such a way that it admits nothing already derived from cognition.

[ 2 ] Only our directly given world-picture can offer such a starting point, i.e. that picture of the world which presents itself to man before he has subjected it to the processes of knowledge in any way, before he has asserted or decided anything at all about it by means of thinking. This “directly given” picture is what flits past us, disconnected, but still undifferentiated.¹ In it, nothing appears distinguished from, related to, or determined by, anything else. At this stage, so to speak, no object or event is yet more important or significant than any other. The most rudimentary organ of an animal, which, in the light of further knowledge may turn out to be quite unimportant for its development and life, appears before us with the same claims for our attention as the noblest and most essential part of the organism. Before our conceptual activity begins, the world-picture contains neither substance, quality nor cause and effect; distinctions between matter and spirit, body and soul, do not yet exist. Furthermore, any other predicate must also be excluded from the world-picture at this stage. The picture can be considered neither as reality nor as appearance, neither subjective nor objective, neither as chance nor as necessity; whether it is “thing-in-itself,” or mere representation, cannot be decided at this stage. For, as we have seen, knowledge of physics and physiology which leads to a classification of the “given” under one or the other of the above headings, cannot be a basis for a theory of knowledge.

[ 3 ] If a being with a fully developed human intelligence were suddenly created out of nothing and then confronted the world, the first impression made on his senses and his thinking would be something like what I have just characterized as the directly given world-picture. In practice, man never encounters this world-picture in this form at any time in his life; he never experiences a division between a purely passive awareness of the “directly-given” and a thinking recognition of it. This fact could lead to doubt about my description of the starting point for a theory of knowledge. Hartmann says for example:

“We are not concerned with the hypothetical content of consciousness in a child which is just becoming conscious or in an animal at the lowest level of life, since the philosophizing human being has no experience of this; if he tries to reconstruct the content of consciousness of beings on primitive biogenetic or ontogenetic levels, he must base his conclusions on the way he experiences his own consciousness. Our first task, therefore, is to establish the content of man's consciousness when he begins philosophical reflection.”²

The objection to this, however, is that the world-picture with which we begin philosophical reflection already contains predicates mediated through cognition. These cannot be accepted uncritically, but must be carefully removed from the world-picture so that it can be considered free of anything introduced through the process of knowledge. This division between the “given” and the “known” will not in fact, coincide with any stage of human development; the boundary must be drawn artificially. But this can be done at every level of development so long as we draw the dividing line correctly between what confronts us free of all conceptual definitions, and what cognition subsequently makes of it.

[ 4 ] It might be objected here that I have already made use of a number of conceptual definitions in order to extract from the world-picture as it appears when completed by man, that other world-picture which I described as the directly given. However, what we have extracted by means of thought does not characterize the directly given world-picture, nor define nor express anything about it; what it does is to guide our attention to the dividing line where the starting point for cognition is to be found. The question of truth or error, correctness or incorrectness, does not enter into this statement, which is concerned with the moment preceding the point where a theory of knowledge begins. It serves merely to guide us deliberately to this starting point. No one proceeding to consider epistemological questions could possibly be said to be standing at the starting point of cognition, for he already possesses a certain amount of knowledge. To remove from this all that has been contributed by cognition, and to establish a pre-cognitive starting point, can only be done conceptually. But such concepts are not of value as knowledge; they have the purely negative function of removing from sight all that belongs to knowledge and of leading us to the point where knowledge begins. These considerations act as signposts pointing to where the act of cognition first appears, but at this stage, do not themselves form part of the act of cognition. Whatever the epistemologist proposes in order to establish his starting point raises, to begin with, no question of truth or error, but only of its suitability for this task. From the starting point, too, all error is excluded, for error can only begin with cognition, and therefore cannot arise before cognition sets in.

[ 5 ] Only a theory of knowledge that starts from considerations of this kind can claim to observe this last principle. For if the starting point is some object (or subject) to which is attached any conceptual definition, then the possibility of error is already present in the starting point, namely in the definition itself. Justification of the definition will then depend upon the laws inherent in the act of cognition. But these laws can be discovered only in the course of the epistemological investigation itself. Error is wholly excluded only by saying: I eliminate from my world-picture all conceptual definitions arrived at through cognition and retain only what enters my field of observation without any activity on my part. When on principle I refrain from making any statement, I cannot make a mistake.

[ 6 ] Error, in relation to knowledge, i.e. epistemologically, can occur only within the act of cognition. Sense deceptions are not errors. That the moon upon rising appears larger than it does at its zenith is not an error but a fact governed by the laws of nature. A mistake in knowledge would occur only if, in using thinking to combine the given perceptions, we misinterpreted “larger” and “smaller.” But this interpretation is part of the act of cognition.

[ 7 ] To understand cognition exactly in all its details, its origin and starting point must first be grasped. It is clear, furthermore, that what precedes this primary starting point must not be included in an explanation of cognition, but must be presupposed. Investigation of the essence of what is here presupposed, is the task of the various branches of scientific knowledge. The present aim, however, is not to acquire specific knowledge of this or that element, but to investigate cognition itself. Until we have understood the act of knowledge, we cannot judge the significance of statements about the content of the world arrived at through the act of cognition.

[ 8 ] This is why the directly given is not defined as long as the relation of such a definition to what is defined is not known. Even the concept: “directly given” includes no statement about what precedes cognition. Its only purpose is to point to this given, to turn our attention to it. At the starting point of a theory of knowledge, the concept is only the first initial relation between cognition and world-content. This description even allows for the possibility that the total world-content would turn out to be only a figment of our own “I,” which would mean that extreme subjectivism would be true; subjectivism is not something that exists as given. It can only be a conclusion drawn from considerations based on cognition, i.e. it would have to be confirmed by the theory of knowledge; it could not be assumed as its basis.

[ 9 ] This directly given world-content includes everything that enters our experience in the widest sense: sensations. perceptions, opinions, feelings, deeds, pictures of dreams and imaginations, representations, concepts and ideas. [ 10 ] Illusions and hallucinations too, at this stage are equal to the rest of the world-content. For their relation to other perceptions can be revealed only through observation based on cognition.

[ 11 ] When epistemology starts from the assumption that all the elements just mentioned constitute the content of our consciousness, the following question immediately arises: How is it possible for us to go beyond our consciousness and recognize actual existence; where can the leap be made from our subjective experiences to what lies beyond them? When such an assumption is not made, the situation is different. Both consciousness and the representation of the “I” are, to begin with, only parts of the directly given and the relationship of the latter to the two former must be discovered by means of cognition. Cognition is not to be defined in terms of consciousness, but vice versa: both consciousness and the relation between subject and object in terms of cognition. Since the “given” is left without predicate, to begin with, the question arises as to how it is defined at all; how can any start be made with cognition? How does one part of the world-picture come to be designated as perception and the other as concept, one thing as existence, another as appearance, this as cause and that as effect; how is it that we can separate ourselves from what is objective and regard ourselves as “I” in contrast to the “not-I?”

[ 2 ] We must find the bridge from the world-picture as given, to that other world-picture which we build up by means of cognition. Here, however, we meet with the following difficulty: As long as we merely stare passively at the given we shall never find a point of attack where we can gain a foothold, and from where we can then proceed with cognition. Somewhere in the given we must find a place where we can set to work, where something exists which is akin to cognition. If everything were really only given, we could do no more than merely stare into the external world and stare indifferently into the inner world of our individuality. We would at most be able to describe things as something external to us; we should never be able to understand them. Our concepts would have a purely external relation to that to which they referred; they would not be inwardly related to it. For real cognition depends on finding a sphere somewhere in the given where our cognizing activity does not merely presuppose something given, but finds itself active in the very essence of the given. In other words: precisely through strict adherence to the given as merely given, it must become apparent that not everything is given. Insistence on the given alone must lead to the discovery of something which goes beyond the given. The reason for so insisting is not to establish some arbitrary starting point for a theory of knowledge, but to discover the true one. In this sense, the given also includes what according to its very nature is not-given. The latter would appear, to begin with, as formally a part of the given, but on closer scrutiny, would reveal its true nature of its own accord.

[ 13 ] The whole difficulty in understanding cognition comes from the fact that we ourselves do not create the content of the world. If we did this, cognition would not exist at all. I can only ask questions about something which is given to me. Something which I create myself, I also determine myself, so that I do not need to ask for an explanation for it.

[ 14 ] This is the second step in our theory of knowledge. It consists in the postulate: In the sphere of the given there must be something in relation to which our activity does not hover in emptiness, but where the content of the world itself enters this activity.

[ 15 ] The starting point for our theory of knowledge was placed so that it completely precedes the cognizing activity, and thus cannot prejudice cognition and obscure it; in the same way, the next step has been defined so that there can be no question of either error or incorrectness. For this step does not prejudge any issue, but merely shows what conditions are necessary if knowledge is to arise at all. It is essential to remember that it is we ourselves who postulate what characteristic feature that part of the world-content must possess with which our activity of cognition can make a start.

[ 16 ] This, in fact, is the only thing we can do. For the world-content as given is completely undefined. No part of it of its own accord can provide the occasion for setting it up as the starting point for bringing order into chaos. The activity of cognition must therefore issue a decree and declare what characteristics this starting point must manifest. Such a decree in no way infringes on the quality of the given. It does not introduce any arbitrary assertion into the science of epistemology. In fact, it asserts nothing, but claims only that if knowledge is to be made explainable, then we must look for some part of the given which can provide a starting point for cognition, as described above. If this exists, cognition can be explained, but not otherwise. Thus, while the given provides the general starting point for our theory of knowledge, it must now be narrowed down to some particular point of the given.

[ 17 ] Let us now take a closer look at this demand. Where, within the world-picture, do we find something that is not merely given, but only given insofar as it is being produced in the actual act of cognition?

[ 18 ] It is essential to realize that the activity of producing something in the act of cognition must present itself to us as something also directly given. It must not be necessary to draw conclusions before recognizing it. This at once indicates that sense impressions do not meet our requirements. For we cannot know directly but only indirectly that sense impressions do not occur without activity on our part; this we discover only by considering physical and physiological factors. But we do know absolutely directly that concepts and ideas appear only in the act of cognition and through this enter the sphere of the directly given. In this respect concepts and ideas do not deceive anyone. A hallucination may appear as something externally given, but one would never take one's own concepts to be something given without one's own thinking activity. A lunatic regards things and relations as real to which are applied the predicate “reality,” although in fact they are not real; but he would never say that his concepts and ideas entered the sphere of the given without his own activity. It is a characteristic feature of all the rest of our world-picture that it must be given if we are to experience it; the only case in which the opposite occurs is that of concepts and ideas: these we must produce if we are to experience them. Concepts and ideas alone are given us in a form that could be called intellectual seeing. Kant and the later philosophers who follow in his steps, completely deny this ability to man, because it is said that all thinking refers only to objects and does not itself produce anything. In intellectual seeing the content must be contained within the thought-form itself. But is this not precisely the case with pure concepts and ideas? (By concept, I mean a principle according to which the disconnected elements of perception become joined into a unity. Causality, for example, is a concept. An idea is a concept with a greater content. Organism, considered quite abstractly, is an idea.) However, they must be considered in the form which they possess while still quite free of any empirical content. If, for example, the pure idea of causality is to be grasped, then one must not choose a particular instance of causality or the sum total of all causality; it is essential to take hold of the pure concept, Causality. Cause and effect must be sought in the world, but before we can discover it in the world we ourselves must first produce causality as a thought-form. If one clings to the Kantian assertion that of themselves concepts are empty, it would be impossible to use concepts to determine anything about the given world. Suppose two elements of the world-content were given: a and b. If I am to find a relation between them, I must do so with the help of a principle which has a definite content; I can only produce this principle myself in the act of cognition; I cannot derive it from the objects, for the definition of the objects is only to be obtained by means of the principle. Thus a principle by means of which we define objects belongs entirely to the conceptual sphere alone.

[ 19 ] Before proceeding further, a possible objection must be considered. It might appear that this discussion is unconsciously introducing the representation of the “I,” of the “personal subject,” and using it without first justifying it. For example, in statements like “we produce concepts” or “we insist on this or that.” But, in fact, my explanation contains nothing which implies that such statements are more than turns of phrase. As shown earlier, the fact that the act of cognition depends upon and proceeds from an “I,” can be established only through considerations which themselves make use of cognition. Thus, to begin with, the discussion must be limited to the act of cognition alone, without considering the cognizing subject. All that has been established thus far is the fact that something “given” exists; and that somewhere in this “given” the above described postulate arises; and lastly, that this postulate corresponds to the sphere of concepts and ideas. This is not to deny that its source is the “I.” But these two initial steps in the theory of knowledge must first be defined in their pure form.

• 1. Differentiation of the given, indistinct, world picture into distinct entities is already an act of thought-activity.
• 2. Hartmann, Grundproblem

Introduction. This is based on the fact that we consider the view of nature itself to be incomplete.

In science, no special attention is paid to the actual genius of nature. At most, it is admitted that the genius's gaze succeeds in spotting the combination of natural forces; but it is not considered decisive for the shaping of the world view that we seek in science. The influence of genius on science is therefore said to be only a historical one, not a factual one.

What distinguishes the epoch of education in which we live from others can be traced back to Goethe. He has given it its character. In him, German poetry of our century sees an ideal to strive for; with the eye gained from his writings, we look at antiquity; with the same eye, Germans have succeeded in unraveling Shakespeare's genius. All the radii of German intellectual life emanate from him. However, this magnificent image of the great genius is marred by a dark spot that stands in unsatisfactory disharmony with the brightness spreading over it. Goethe's unreserved admiration in all fields of the intellect is contrasted with the dubious position in which his scientific achievements are placed.

Today, we have come back from the absolute rejection of these achievements, which occurred during Goethe's lifetime and long after his death, and we still have a completely negative attitude towards the physical part of the color theory, but we still grant them some importance. But if we take a closer look at the verdict of modern science, we cannot deny that the recognition of Goethe's scientific achievements is based on completely different premises than his other achievements and is by no means on a par with them.

Those who go furthest in their appreciation of Goethe in a scientific sense admit that Goethe's view of nature is based on ideas that also underlie the modern science of organisms – the Darwin-Haeckelian theory of evolution. But no one can dispute that this modern science does not originate from Goethe's view at all. His influence on it is not noticeable. And if it has been claimed in recent times that modern developmental theory would have reached its present state even without Goethe, this cannot be denied. Thus, one cannot ascribe to his efforts the power that was necessary to elevate the ideas on which they were based to the level of scientific conviction.

This fact is attributed to the fact that Goethe, while conceiving the connections within the organic series of beings entirely in line with the theory of evolution, did not penetrate to the principles that make this kind of connection comprehensible to us. Goethe is said to have anticipated Darwin's world view without being able to provide an explanation of it at the same time. Without this explanation, the theory of evolution appears as an arbitrary hypothesis.

This is precisely where the difference in the appreciation of Goethe's scientific achievements and his other writings lies. Through the latter, he created a new epoch. But the former lack precisely that which would make them the starting point of a new epoch. For we must not deceive ourselves: a scientific world view without a principled foundation is without any kind of justification and is no more than a series of unfounded ideas. Such a view lacks the one characteristic that would make it convincing: inner perfection, self-contained.

One would think that with such a fundamental difference in the influence of Goethe's two directions on posterity (that of his artistic and that of his scientific achievements), the origin of the same should also be traced back to two very different dispositions of Goethe's mind.

The question arises as to why Goethe was able to achieve the highest level of perfection in one direction, while in the other he was forced to stop where he should have provided the supports for his scientific edifice. Why the highest level of perfection in one area, while in the other it is precisely that which is lacking, which is necessary for perfection? Otherwise, it is much more the task of the genius to state the principles, and it is then up to the lesser minds to draw the further conclusions.

It seems to us that these principles are by no means lacking in Goethe, that one has simply not yet found the way to arrive at them.

The main characteristic of all of Goethe's views can be traced back to the fact that he seeks everything that is supposed to determine our judgment about an object in the external world in the realm of the latter itself. He does not allow anything extraneous or borrowed from the outside into such a judgment.

We can follow this in his ethical, aesthetic and also in his scientific assessments of events or objects. In Truth and Poetry, he occasionally says, in an explanation of his inclination towards incognito: “It is not a matter of objects in so far as they are worthy of praise or blame, but in so far as they can occur.” A judgment about whether something is praiseworthy or blameworthy presupposes an ethical model according to which one values an object. But Goethe rejects such a model because it is not taken from the events themselves, but rather is brought in from the outside. His judgment seeks only that which lies within the events themselves and makes it possible for us to explain why they have come about as they have. In his works one can find innumerable proofs of this direction of his mind. It may be said that Goethe does not judge about the objects of the external world, but he regards them in such a way that they express the explanation that our scientific need demands. He judges in the objects.

Knowledge and Belief

Goethe's views on the organic can be traced back to this principle. He contradicts the same, both the view of the final causes, which at the time of Goethe still represented almost the whole world, as well as the assumption [regarding] that the living beings could be traced back to mechanical causes. The former view comes down to the fact that an organic being has such an organization that we cannot explain it according to mere physical laws; the components of the being are in a connection and interaction that they would never enter into if they merely obeyed the mechanical-physical forces that govern them. Since these forces are the only ones that are accessible to our knowledge, the structure of organisms can only be explained if we assume that an external principle builds them according to a premeditated plan, so that this structure becomes a purposeful one. In this doctrine, theology found a mainstay of religion, a proof of the existence of God, and Kant gave it philosophical sanction. It contradicted Goethe's fundamental principle because it resorted to something outside the organism to explain it. It had to demand that all the elements that help us to understand the organism be found within it. If living beings have some purposeful structure, then something must be found within them from which this structure follows. Goethe's response to Link, who seeks to explain organic natural phenomena in terms of teleological principles, is: “The author, a knowledgeable botanist, explains physiological phenomena in terms of teleological views that are not, and cannot be, ours.” On January 6, 1798, he wrote to Schiller: “You know how much I am attached to the purposiveness of organic nature inwardly.” But the mechanistic view of living beings was just as incompatible with his fundamental principles as the teleologic one. The reason is quite the same. This view, too, does not explain the organism in terms of laws that are peculiar to it, as it were, innate in it, but rather makes it appear to be dominated by forces that are effective in inorganic nature. He did not want to explain the organic from the inorganic, but from itself. Even in his youth, he rejected the idea that the whole universe could be traced back to mechanical laws, as he describes in Truth and Fiction in relation to the système de la nature. “The système de la nature was announced, and so we really hoped to learn something about nature, our idol.” He sees himself as disappointed. “A matter should be from eternity, and moved from eternity, and should now with this movement right and left and on all sides without further ado produce the infinite phenomena of existence. We would have been satisfied with all this if the author had really built the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he may know as little about nature as we do: for by putting up some general concepts, he immediately leaves them to transform that which appears higher than nature, or as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, indeed moving, but still directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained a great deal.” The same is expressed in the following saying of Goethe: “The nearest comprehensible causes are comprehensible and for that very reason most comprehensible; which is why we like to think of ourselves as mechanical, which is of a higher kind.” - This is proof that Goethe found teleology and the mechanical world view to be equally insufficient to explain the organic.

He demanded that a true science of the organic should create the concept of the organic and the laws of life in the mind, just as Galileo once created the laws of mechanical nature. But that is the task of genius. In his theory of colors, Goethe emphasizes the importance of natural science to the genius, for whom “one case is worth a thousand,” and he admires Galileo for developing the theory of pendulums and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.

Every advance in science depends on our expanding our system of concepts, for in doing so we shed light in a realm of phenomena that is dark to us. Without Galileo's laws, we can observe the swinging motion of bodies, the motion of falling and throwing, for as long as we like, but we will not understand them. Merely describing the phenomena is not enough. It is essential that our mind is able to create a concept that makes an appearance understandable to us. But this requires creative power. It is the peculiarity of genius that from within it the conceptual does not emerge as a gray, content-free generalization - gray theory - but as one that is saturated and full of content, creating ideas that make the outside world comprehensible to our minds.

In our time, however, people fail to recognize the necessity of this creative power of genius for science. This is because they consider the latter to be nothing more than a reflection, a photograph of reality, to which faithfulness is the main requirement. The task of compiling such a “lifelike” image falls primarily to what is called “common sense.” In the face of such a view, the substantial ideas of genius naturally appear as a falsification of experience, as “conceptual poetry”.

For this view, genius has a very small role at all. At most, it can hasten the discovery of some natural law through a divinatory insight, it can find sooner what the history of science without it would have arrived at sooner or later, but that genius should also have any significance for the formulation of the content of a natural law is, according to this view, out of the question. In the face of this view, one is driven to ask: why have science at all if it is supposed to offer nothing more than a reflection of experience? Why not be satisfied with mere contemplation? The history of science, as well as science itself today, refutes this view. All progress in science is based on the creative power of the human mind. The laws of nature are not the object of direct experience; they are the creations of the human mind. Goethe belongs to the ranks of those who have truly conquered a field for science by creating new ideas. What he calls the type in the field of organic nature is to the latter what Galileo's mechanical principles are.

Only the consistent development of the fundamental view of the necessity of explaining every object of nature from its own self, as set forth above, led Goethe to this idea of the type. But his mission as a poet is also based on the same fundamental direction of his spirit. As a poet, he had the task of transforming immediate reality into poetry. This immediate reality as such no longer satisfies a certain higher need of man.

There is something about the way phenomena unfold that can no longer satisfy us. Chance plays a role and brings about constellations in reality that do not satisfy our reason. Goethe felt this more than anyone else. He often speaks of “wicked” chance, by which he means that some event takes an outcome that it would not take if only the necessity of reason were to prevail in the world. His mission in both poetry and science is to arrive at a satisfactory view of things that goes beyond what is directly experienced. “Real life often loses its luster to such an extent” (Poetry and Truth II, 9th book and Schröer's edition of the dramas $117), ”that it [sometimes] has to be refreshed with the varnish of fiction.” But in doing so, he never goes beyond what is given to man in poetry either, so that Merck could say of him that he seeks to give the real a poetic form, while others seek to realize the so-called poetic, the imaginative, which gives nothing but nonsense. We see that Goethe's whole mission actually consists in seeking the necessary, that which satisfies our minds, within reality itself. But his work in the field of inorganic nature is also based on the same disposition of his mind.

In the organism, we have a center that works from within the phenomena, and this is what we have to start with in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of them. In inorganic nature, however, there is no such central element; all effects can be traced back to external influences, spatial and temporal conditions, etc. It seems almost impossible to provide anything other than a mere photograph if one does not want to go beyond reality. And yet Goethe demands with all his energy that we also seek the principles for explaining phenomena within the given itself. “The highest would be to comprehend that all fact is already theory.” To get to know Goethe from this side, it is necessary, above all, to consider what Goethe the experiment is. A phenomenon of inorganic nature results from the interaction of the qualities that fill space and time, from the interaction of substances and forces.

The conditions for the progression of a phenomenon lie in the nature of the interacting objects and in the constellation in which they find themselves as a result of their location in space and time. This latter factor is now something that is added to the nature of the objects. Phenomena thus always contain a factor that prevents us from explaining them as a necessary consequence of the existing objects. According to Goethe, the experiment is to eliminate this factor of direct experience. The experiment is to bring the objects of the sensory world into such a mutual dependence that we are able to recognize a certain event as the necessary consequence of the existing objects. Everything that modifies the original mutual behavior of the objects is to be eliminated by the experiment. Goethe calls a phenomenon that comes about in this way a primal phenomenon. In mathematics, the primal phenomenon of physics corresponds to the axiom. The latter has no other function than to show us the relationships between simple spatial quantities in such a way that their connection is immediately comprehensible to us without further deduction. The entire mathematical system is nothing more than a complication of the axioms. Goethe wants to shape physics in an analogous way. It should be a system that arises through a complication of the archetypal phenomena and thus has an inner necessity in the way it is constructed. We find every phenomenon of experience in the system of science, not only in the random constellation in which it appears to us in the external world, but in a systematic whole from which it can be fully understood in its course. For Goethe, theory is nothing more than higher experience, but precisely higher experience, in which all details are connected as required by reason. “There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself intimately identical with the object and thereby becomes the actual theory” (Spr. in Prosa, N. 906).

Do we now ask whether Goethe's view of nature really lacks fundamental principles and whether it therefore proves to be incomplete, unfinished, in need of justification? The preceding pages show most decidedly that this is not the case. The foundations of Goethe's scientific views are the most definite that can be imagined, and they are identical with those that determine the whole direction of his work. His view is self-sustaining and did not have to await its justification from a later time. What it lacked was to apply the given points of view to all areas of the world of phenomena.

The reason why the self-justifying guarantee of Goethe's world view was denied is that so far no one has considered his scientific endeavors in the context of his entire being. But most of his assertions are not at all comprehensible without such a perspective, and it is easy to then attribute a false sense to them. If we now look from the Goethean view of nature to the modern one, of which he was a prophet, then we must indeed admit that his starting points were essentially different. The modern view of nature arose from the need to explain the entire universe in terms of mechanical causality. It was believed that the explanation of nature could only be made consistent if the laws that govern the inorganic could also be extended to the organic. We see that this view is based on a premise that Goethe rejected.

From this alone it is clear that the similarity of one of Goethe's assertions with one of the mechanical explanation of nature can only be an external one, and that it is absolutely necessary to go back to the most original axioms of Goethe if one wants to recognize the true meaning of his assertions. From this it also becomes clear how the misunderstanding we referred to above regarding the recognition of Goethe as a scientific thinker developed. There is a certain, and it must be admitted extensive, agreement between Goethe's view of nature and that of modern natural science; however, Goethe starts from completely different premises than the latter. But because these latter premises were not regarded as really scientific, because they were denied the power to found a view of nature, it was concluded that Goethe lacked the principles for his view of nature altogether, whereas in fact he lacked only those that dominate the mechanical explanation of the universe.

Goethe's view of nature is thus a self-contained whole, with its own foundations, and can only be understood in itself. By being lumped together with other theories, it is placed in an inadequate position.

But if one is to pass judgment on its influence on the shaping of science, then it must indeed be described as very slight, and it remains for the future to decide whether, through the power inherent in it, it will succeed to satisfy the scientific needs of humanity more than other explanations of nature, and whether it will thus one day be granted a more fruitful influence on the development of human thought than has been the case so far.

I have often spoken to you of how the human soul has altered in the course of mankind's development, how short-sighted it is to believe that the constitution of the modern soul can be understood if one will not look back to the different changes it has passed through. We look back—I do not need to recapitulate it—to the most varied epochs of earthly evolution; we have in particular often characterised the post-Atlantean epochs in order to show how the constitution of man's soul continually altered. In speaking of such things one must advance from the abstract to the concrete. One must try to give as clear an answer as possible to the question: What was the nature of the human soul in the ages of antiquity? We look back to a far-off age in which—and this may be stated in more than a figurative sense—divine teachers themselves instructed men about the sacred mysteries of existence. We know that from this ancient epoch onwards men have come to learn of these mysteries of existence in most manifold ways. From epoch to epoch the conceptions of the human soul have actually become more and more different. The concepts and ideas which we have today, which live in us and which we put every moment into words, these lived too in earlier conditions of our soul but in an utterly different way. Many of our most ordinary ideas lived quite differently. Today I will speak of what are apparently the most ordinary concepts, two concepts living in man's soul. People denote them at every moment from their word-store, but they lived in the human soul in earlier times in an entirely different way. I will speak of the two concepts: Space and Time.

Space for modern man is the most abstract thing conceivable. What do men mostly picture as space? Three dimensions standing at right angles to each other—or if one reads philosophical text books: the state of extension of physical objects—or there are still other definitions of space. But all that—think how prosaic, cold, abstract, that all is! Three dimensions standing at right angles to one another, or even all that geometry has to say about space,—how frightfully abstract, how prosaic and poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken that the whole of space—with time as well—has become for Kant subjective shadow, merely a form of conceiving sense-phenomena. This abstraction, space, of which modern man knows little more than that it has length, breadth and height, this abstraction, space, was a very different conception in the far past, of which, however, something still exists today for especially sensitive people—though indeed it is only a trace. One need not go back so extremely far; in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries one may definitely say that space, as it was then experienced, was very different for the human soul from the prosaic abstraction that it is for man today. Even in the early Greek ages when the soul experienced space, it felt it to be something with which it was livingly united. It felt itself placed into a living Something, in feeling itself placed into space.

Today man has at most a vestige of the sense of standing with his personality, his human self within space. But the man of antiquity expressed a significant relation of himself to the universe, if he distinguished above and below, right and left, in front and behind. The living feeling that one expressed when in ancient times one spoke of above and below, of right and left, of before and behind, has terribly little to do with our abstract three dimensions, which have no other occupation at all than standing at right angles to each other. What a very monotonous occupation it would be through eternity, if one did nothing else at all but stand at right angles to one another like the three dimensions of geometry.

Above and below: it was something living when in ancient times man still experienced how he was first a little child and raised himself from below upwards, when he felt how the course of life consists in an unfolding in the direction of above and below. The course of life consisted in the experience of the direction of above and below. One only travels a tiny distance from the earth (unless one lives in the Ahrimanic age of aeroplanes, or in the Atlantean age but there it was not very high above the earth—you know of this from my description of Atlantis), only a very little distance in normal life does one travel upwards from the earth in growing, and thus experience the above and below, the opposition of above and below. But this opposition was felt in antiquity as the contrast of the world of consciousness and the objective world,—of the conscious and the unconscious world. How subject is related to object—that was a deep experience when one felt above and below. Above, and ever farther and farther upwards come the divine worlds, downwards the worlds which are opposed to the Gods, and the human being is placed within the Above and Below.

As late as to such men as Goethe (you only need study his “Faust”) you still find remains of the consciousness of above and below. In addition to the above and below men felt the right, and left. Today we must use abstractions if we speak of right and left. To the man of antiquity a living in right and left was an actual experience, one might say a genuine world of observation. The Above and Below is the line from infinity to infinity or from the conscious to the unconscious. Right and left: in experiencing right and left one experienced the connection in the world between mind and figure, between wisdom and form. You only need draw a symmetry-axis, what is left and right of it gives together the form and you cannot combine the right and the left without doing it purposefully, without relating the one to the other.

If above and below is pointing to man's mysterious relation to the spiritual and material worlds, then the experience of right and left is his relation to the worlds spreading out in form. And by relating the form in the right and left to one another, by letting wisdom prevail in the forms arranged symmetrically right and left, he experiences himself in the second element of space. This experience of sense in the shape, of wisdom in the form in all possible variations, this feeling of oneself within this harmony of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was experienced by the man of old as what today is the abstract second dimension. The above and below, the right and left belonged to the flat plane, to the surface which can have no existence for the senses, which requires thickness, needs before and behind if it is to exist in the element of the sense-perceptible.

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And in this third, in the before and behind, ancient mankind felt the entrance of the material into the spiritual. (See diagram) Above and below, left and right he experienced as something still spiritual. It can have no material existence if something is merely above and below, and right and left—it is pure picture, must be pure picture in space; it becomes material only through thickness. In ancient times man felt vividly that in growing he made a few steps upwards from the earths surface in the direction of the above and below. He felt that in walking, he could move freely that he was in the element of his will: before and behind. In between stood the completely free self-movement to right and left while standing still.

Ancient man experienced in his being this threefold contrast as placed into the All; the remaining still with regard to right and left, the striding into the world with regard to before and behind, the gradual movement from below upwards in the direction of the above-below. This was the experience of the man of old. In experiencing the above and below he felt weaving in the universe all that today we call the intelligence, the reasoning of the universe. All that rules in the universe as intelligence was interwoven in space with his idea of the above and below, end since he could share in this intelligence of the world through his growth from below upwards, man felt himself to be intelligent. The participation in the above and below was at the same time a participation in cosmic intelligence. And participation in the right and left, in the interweaving of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was for him the feeling that weaves through the world. And his restful remaining still, surveying the world, was to him a uniting of his own feeling with the universal feeling. His striding through space in the direction of forwards or back was the unfolding of his will, the placing of himself, with his own will, into the universe, the universal will, He felt his own life to be interwoven with the above and below, the right and left, the before and behind. The conscious and the unconscious: above and below; wisdom and form: right and left; spirit and matter: in front and behind. Such was the experience of the man of antiquity.

At the same time, however, he experienced the indefinite—if I put it crudely—when one stands on one's head then the under is above and the above under. So too is it for the antipodes, and if one counts oneself in with the earth, the below is above and the above underneath. One can imagine too through some circumstance or other that what is normally right is in front, what is normally left is behind. These directions are just as living and weaving in space as in a certain respect they are indistinguishable, weaving into one another. Ancient man felt as he thus experienced himself in the three-divisioned space that the Divinity ruled in the threefoldness. The divine ruling in space directed man then to the divine in duration.

He experienced—and what I am saying now was actually experienced—he experienced in space the divine manifestation, ruling in threefold manner. It was the image in him of the threefold God: Father, Son and Spirit or by what other terms the three-membered God was known. Threefoldness is truly not thought out in the mind, is not an invention. The threefoldness with all its qualities was experienced in its reflection when ancient man experienced livingly the three dimensions of space.

And just as in a certain respect want of clearness can prevail about the above and below, just as right and left can also be before and behind, so in certain circumstances an uncertainty can also enter into the reciprocal relationships of God, Son, Spirit. In the sphere of the transitory, the sphere of space, man experienced the three dimensions concretely, not abstractly or geometrically as we do. And as he experienced concretely how the divine expressed itself in space, in the transitory, he therefore related the transitory to the element of duration; the three-dimensioned space became for him the reflected image of the three-dimensioned spirituality.

The idea of ancient man was approximately: If I live here below on earth I live in the threefoldness of space, but this is to me the reflected proof of the threefold nature of the divine origin of the world.

Today space has become an abstraction and only a few people perceive the depth-dimension, the thickness-dimension, that is, the above and below, the in front and behind, or the plane-dimension of right and left. Even among philosophers little of this experience is to be found. But yet some few who reflect on things and are not entirely asleep come to realise that the depth-dimension really arises in the unconscious observation lying not so very far below the consciousness. Men still feel the depth, but that is the last shadowy relic of space-experience. In the evolved religions an understanding for the Oneness of God has taken precedence of the real understanding of the threefoldness. The understanding for the unity of God has an origin similar to that for the threefold nature of God through space.

My dear friends, spiritual science seeks its information out of the divine facts themselves. Simple-minded people that come and say that no external proof for this or that is given. Well, we have gone into a great deal. I could still relate many things, but it shall not occupy our time today. I will only point out that it is largely the unscientific nature of modern science, so-called, if the verification cannot be found. Just this one thing I will say, and it is as it were an external proof of the fact that the man of antiquity felt in the same way I have described today. Why have the ancient Rabbis called God also Space? Because in earlier time, even in Judaism, they felt what I have shown you today concerning mankind. If science could really think in different domains it would find countless riddles which at the same time, however, are true proof, external proof of what spiritual science has at any rate to find out of the spiritual facts. One of the names for God among the Rabbis is Space; Space and God denote the same.

The unity of the divine has an origin similar to that of the threefoldness of the divine. It is connected with the living experience of Time. Time too was not the abstraction to the man of old that it is to us today. But the concrete experience of time was lost still earlier than the concrete experience of space. If one reads Plato or Aristotle today with a real understanding, and not in the way many schoolmasters read—well, I have often quoted the note written by Hebbel in his diary where the reincarnated Plato sits before the schoolmaster as a pupil, and the teacher reads a dialogue of Plato's with his class and the reincarnated Plato is given very poor marks. Hebbel noted this in his diary. One who reads Plato and Aristotle today, not as is often done by a schoolmaster, but with really deep understanding, finds that this feeling for space was still fully in existence in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries. It was however already shadowy in Plato and Aristotle, and the living experience of time was lost still earlier than those pre-Christian centuries. It was strongly alive in the second post-Atlantean epoch the ancient Persian, where a cold shiver would have been produced among, for instance, the pupils of Zarathustra, if one had spoken to them of time as a line running from the past to the future. It runs quite uniformly, but does nothing else than run its course from the past to the future.

Again in the Gnosis there existed a more shadowy feeling—but scarcely still to be recognised—for the living nature of time. They did not speak of a line running from past to future but they spoke of Aeons, the creators who were there earlier and from whom the later proceeded, where one Aeon always passed on the impulse of creation to others. Time was so imagined pictorially that in the hierarchical succession the preceding Being always gave the impulse to the one following; the following was ever, as it were, brought forth by the preceding, the preceding Being enclosed the next following. One looked up to the preceding Being, as more divine than the one succeeding. “Later” one experienced as more non-divine, “earlier” one experienced as more divine. This looking towards the change in evolution from the divine to the non-divine was contained in the living experience of time. Everything would fall apart if one were not to weave the divine and the non-divine to a unity. That is identical with our modern abstractions of past and future.

But in this picture of time, looking right back to the “Ancient of Days”, and encompassing the ever more and more encompassing, one experienced the image of God as Unity. Just as the three-divisioned, threefold Space was experienced as the image of the threefoldness of God, so was Time experienced as the image of the oneness of God. The basis of monotheism lies in the ancient time-experience, the basis for perceiving the Trinity lies in the ancient space-experience. Thus has the constitution of man's soul changed, thus has what was once alive became abstract and dry. However paradoxical this may sound: modern man most certainly has an abstract picture when he speaks of space, and he pictures or so I believe—a living relationship when he speaks of a friend. But that concreteness, that elementary experience, which today speaks from friend to friend, that is still abstract in comparison with the intensive experience of the universe which ancient man had when he experienced space and time, which to him were the images of the Unity and Trinity of the Divine.

Thus have we become dry and abstract in respect of space and time, and something else must take their place, something that we must again experience, that must be more and more inwardly realised. We must learn to feel that duality, that contrast in the world of which I have spoken during recent weeks. My dear friends, think for once that someone were to see only the rippled surface of water. This crinkly, rippled water-surface is in fact an abstract line. What is the concrete? There below, the water; there above, the air. And out of the duality air and water, in the co-operation of their forces, there arises the maya, the rippled surface. But so is our world the rippled surface, so too are we as men if we behold ourselves only as we look within maya; if we behold ourselves in reality then here too we must see: below, the water; above, the air.

Below the water—we see it if we observe transitory evolution, as I have brought it before you recently, where man develops in such a way that what he can conceive as a child he would grasp only as an old man. What he conceives in the age of puberty, he knows somewhat earlier, but still only towards old age. I depicted the course of human life, where it is only in old age that one grasps in oneself what one has been in childhood and youth. Life runs thus not apparently, but in reality on the surface, I have said that perhaps one does not need such a perspective today for life on the surfaces but for dying one needs it.—That the conception of the below; and belonging to it, the conception of the real above the region of duration. I spoke of this region in a recent lecture,¹ where man does not evolve, but has that which belongs to duration his whole life through from birth to death. But we cannot consider today how the below and the above interweave, if we do not realise the below, there where it threatens to become fixed, where it threatens to harden; and if we do not realise the above there where it threatens to dissolve, to spiritualise itself—if we do not develop the feeling for the contrast: the Divine—the Luciferic the Ahrimanic. Man of old had something alive in his soul when he spoke of his space-experience, his time-experience; the man of the Earth-future must develop inner concepts, inner impulses representing: Divine—Ahrimanic Luciferic.

• 1. 15th September 1918

It gives me profound pleasure to be among our Breslau friends. We have been through grave times which have made it all too obvious that mankind today is in need of something which can enable further development to take place. These catastrophic times are the consequence of a loss of upward momentum in human evolution. But in the soil of Anthroposophy we are tilling forces which can serve us in building up a spiritual life. Therefore I shall not speak too much today about contemporary events, but rather about the knowledge which human beings need, knowledge which they must absorb into their moral impulses. A great deal lives in our soul of which we are hardly aware. But because it is there, and because our soul element is linked to our existence on the earth, it is very important for our life.

What weighs on human beings today is the discordance between what the soul really needs and what present-day science can supply. Scientific knowledge is very demanding, and we ought to ask ourselves what it is that it demands of human beings. One thing it demands, for instance, is that we should accept its view of the beginning and end of the earth. Take the Kant-Laplace explanation of how the world began. A glowing ball of gas was formed by chemical and mechanical forces; it cooled, and when it was cool enough the same mechanical forces brought about the further solidification of everything that later became the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. And as for the future of earthly life and existence, we are told of an end to all life brought about by a gradual re-warming of the earth. Scientists say that physical laws will lead to the death of the earth through overheating. The end of the earth stretches before us like a gigantic churchyard. Between the two extremes, of the chemical and mechanical beginning of the world and its death by warmth at the end, lie all our human aspirations and ideals, all the moral purposes we have ever had or are going to have. The question is, why do such ideals and aspirations arise by chemical and physical means in the first place, if all they are destined for is to perish in the general death by overheating? Of course we can retort that these are theoretical considerations which have little influence on ordinary life. But even if we prefer to evade such questions, they still remain as disharmonies which work right into the depths of our unconscious soul life. They lead to the anxious question: What is the point of our moral impulses, what is the point of our religious ideals, if the whole of earth evolution is doomed to destruction?

The way this question is put shows what I am getting at. For all our moral impulses and all our religious ideals would benothing but an immense fraud perpetrated on mankind, they would be a terrible illusion, if they were destined to be buried in the cemetery of the earth. Eloquent examples already exist of the terrible effect of such soul moods brought about by purely scientific knowledge, but we are often not properly conscious of them. So the anxious question lives on in human hearts. Asking it from the point of view of natural science we have to say: We human beings grew out of nature and our moral ideals rose up in us; but they will perish with the earth. These moral ideals will perish in natural science. Natural science does not allow us to concede that our ideals have an independent, actual, reality. And even though this is no more than a theory, it nevertheless weighs heavily on the human soul.

This fatalistic world view is based, in the final analysis, on faith in the imperishability of material forces. But anyone trying to topple this dogma is considered mad. If this dogma were true, there would be no escape for moral ideals; they would simply be a picture of something that human beings have thought up and figured out. There would be no escape for these ideals if spiritual research could not find the means to give back to people a super-sensible content for their consciousness. This is relevant today. And in this relevant matter we are living at an important turning-point of evolution. Those of you who know me are aware that I do not like saying such a thing, because any moment in time can be called a turning-point. We have to consider in what respect a certain moment is a turning-point.

Let us consider where the knowledge given by natural science can lead us. Look first at the human being in his external manifestation living in the physical, sense-perceptible world. If we do this in an absolute sense, we see no more than a corpse. If we leave everything aside except the physical, sense-perceptible being and if we allow only chemical and physical laws to work on this being, then, by following only the external laws of nature, the human being begins to disintegrate, to dissolve. The forces we recognize with ordinary knowledge destroy the human being.

This alone is enough to refute the materialistic world view. If we say that the external forces destroy the human being, this must mean that from birth onwards people have been gathering forces which resist this destruction. As it dissolves, the corpse is absorbed into the world which we perceive with our senses. It is amalgamated into the sense-perceptible world by the death forces of chemical and physical laws. But what takes place at death inwardly at the level of the soul cannot be perceived by external sense-perception. These inward processes of soul can only be experienced by direct vision in the realm where higher knowledge has its source. This vision shows that outside the body the inward soul element is united with the spirit, with all the spiritual forces that stream through the world, giving it strength. The soul which unites with the spirit after death is then bound up in the spirit in the super-sensible world.

This is a fact which takes its place beside the fact of the corpse. In life the physical body was filled by the soul; in death it unites with the forces of nature. Anthroposophy leads us to a fact of life which is diametrically opposed to the fact of death. The merely theoretical statement of the eternal life of man can never be satisfying. But Anthroposophy introduces the fact that the soul unites with the spirit. The knowledge of natural science, on the other hand, leads only to the fact of death.

The higher sources of knowledge given by spiritual science lead us to what is revealed to the spiritual seeker in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. These stages of knowledge are described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds¹ and also in Occult Science. In the first instance you will find that here are descriptions of stages of knowledge. However, more is given to the spiritual seeker than mere stages of knowledge. Just as natural-scientific knowledge is not just knowledge but also possesses other sides and aspects, so it is with higher knowledge.

Today I shall consider with you something that goes beyond Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge, something that I discussed, for instance, in the Vienna lecture cycle of 1914² about life after death, but now from a somewhat different point of view. The part of the human being that lives here on earth is a corpse which is united with external physical nature. And just as he is united with the mineral forces below, so is he also united with the higher hierarchies above. Just as in the corpse he grows together with the mineral forces, so above he slowly grows together with, and enters into, the hierarchies. Sometimes people say that they might as well wait until they die to find out what happens then. And they might as well wait to grow together with the hierarchies. This is all very well, but it is not actually the point. It is very important for the human being to grow into the hierarchies in the right way, for we have to admit that to start with he stands in the world in a manner which allows him no inkling of his relationships with the higher hierarchies. Much depends on our becoming aware of these relationships.

The first hierarchy with whom human beings have a relationship we may call the world of the angels. But those who do not recognize the spiritual world—for whatever reason—cannot establish a relationship with the world of the angels, any more than someone who lacks physical sense organs can establish a relationship with the physical world. Angels are the beings next above man, closest to man, yet under certain circumstances we cannot approach them. Only by endeavouring to make a picture of the angel world while we are here on earth can we prepare to form relationships with it. The portal of death leads to the world of the angels if human beings can become conscious after death of what is confronting them.

The second group of higher beings is that of the folk spirits, or archangels. Angels are not folk spirits. Real folk spirits have no individual links with human beings, as is the case with angels. Folk spirits are related to communities and groups of human beings. Even natural science sometimes speaks of the national spirit, but this does not denote an actual being, let alone a spiritual one. From higher knowledge the spiritual seeker knows that folk spirits are real spiritual beings whose position is one step above that of the angels. The human being can grow into this hierarchy, too. But if our inner spiritual experience is not intense enough, our angel cannot lead us with our consciousness to the folk spirit. But since we have to be led to the folk spirit, this happens unconsciously by means of the laws of karma. Either we grow into the folk spirit consciously and with love, or we are forcibly led into the sphere of the folk spirits. When, after death, the moment is reached at which we turn to descend once more to the sense-perceptible world for a new incarnation, then it makes a great difference, as our soul is led down, whether we have consciously united in love with the folk spirit, or whether, unaware of what is going on, this takes place forcibly, under coercion.

This finds expression in a spiritual, a soul, fact. We can be born into a nation because we are related by coercion to that folk spirit, or because we are related by inner love. Those who are able to perceive such things find it outstandingly characteristic of our time that a great many people today lack a sufficiently loving relationship to their folk spirit. This statement hints at the cause for what today brings about disorder among nations. The conflict prevailing among nations today stems from the fact that many people are born with little love for their folk spirit and therefore find themselves in a forced relationship to it. The love which leads us to a particular folk spirit can never bring about a conflict with other nations. We must do everything we can to help people regain a love-filled relationship with their folk spirits. This is most urgent.

As we stand here in life, we have Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as stages of knowledge which can lead to real vision in the spiritual and soul realm. But in the realm of spirit and soul, when our soul is to return once more to the physical world, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are facts governing events, they are facts of action. There our soul stands in a relationship with whatever it is that it has to achieve out of the cosmos. If we are to manage our life properly it must grant us conditions which make the achievement of its aims as nearly feasible as possible. Thus the discarnate, spiritual human being works through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition towards his reincarnation in the physical world, while the incarnated, sense-bound human being can gain through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition a vision of the world of soul and spirit.

Natural-scientific knowledge is not in a position to recognize the profoundest secrets of life. Such knowledge starts, for instance, with the consideration of a chemical compound. Proceeding to the consideration of a more complicated chemical compound, and so on, it arrives in the end at the living cell, which it regards as nothing more than a particularly elaborate chemical compound. Spiritual science shows that externally the cell is indeed a particularly elaborate chemical structure; but when the living cell, the germ of a new life, arises in the mother's womb in such an elaborate fashion, the chemical laws are reversed and become chaotic. In the germ of the embryo in the mother's womb, in the germ of life, the chemical laws are suspended, reversed, and in the realm of nature this means chaos. Because the germ is chaos, the cosmos can work into it.

Between death and a new birth the human being has an inkling of this. In the first step on the way to a new incarnation Imagination is realized and leads towards reincarnation. In the second stage Inspiration is realized, and this is a far clearer consciousness than our brain consciousness, for Inspiration is a cosmic force. A part of this cosmic force is breathed in, as it were, and streams towards the bodily nature without coming fully to consciousness, rather as is the case with the will. We are unaware of how our will moves our hand, yet our hand moves in the manner required. The spiritual human being approaching incarnation through realized Inspiration stands in relation to this realized Inspiration as does the incarnated human being to the air. When we think about our physical body in the ordinary way, we imagine it to consist of muscles, nerves, vessels, bones. We imagine the same of a corpse. The airy part of our organism we assume to be outside it rather than within. Although we know that we cannot live without air, we still do not consider it as so intimately a part of ourselves as, say, our skeleton. Yet it is a part of our organism. The air as it is outside us, and at the next moment within, only to be outside again at the next, is a part of our organism. It lives rhythmically in us. In a far more extended rhythm we live with the element of soul and spirit. Just as we breathe air in and out, so we also breathe the element of soul and spirit in and out, though for the most part this takes place unconsciously. Physically, too, part of what happens through breathing takes place unconsciously. When the human being consisting of soul and spirit breathes in realized Inspiration, he takes a picture into his soul. He takes it into the dampened down part of his consciousness. And what he takes in is the world of moral and religious impulses. He takes this in as his conscience.

The third stage in the descent to a new incarnation is when the human being makes the transition to what his parents give him. In doing this he is enacting a realized Intuition. So you see that what can be achieved, while incarnated, by way of three higher stages of knowledge, is something that is accomplished as a real occurrence in the realm of soul and spirit on the way to incarnation. Here on earth we ascend to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And on our return from the spiritual world to incarnation we descend from the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is the counter-image, in the spiritual world, of the three higher stages of knowledge.

What does this show us? It shows us that Anthroposophy is not merely knowledge but something which is alive. Through Anthroposophy we strive for higher knowledge in order to grasp the reality of the higher realms of life and in order to fill our souls with the content of what lives in the spiritual worlds. Those whose common sense has helped them to understand what the spiritual seeker has to say, experience something else as well. They can say to themselves that human beings in the state of incarnation between birth and death are constantly counteracting the death forces at work in their body. The forces of death are forever present in the human body, but so are those forces which counteract the forces of death. They are there. If we did not bear the forces of death within us we should never have developed our understanding for our physical environment.

One of the most important facts given to us by higher knowledge is that our forces of intellect are bound up with our forces of dying. Death is in a way nothing but a summary of all the forces of dying which are forever at work in us. But a moral ideal, which can intensify until it becomes a religious ideal, lives in us in quite a different way. It is said that certain natural forces exist which bring it about that plants grow upwards; and these forces are taken to be quite real. But when, on looking into the human being, people find there the driving forces of moral and religious ideals, they are not inclined to accept these as having any reality. Yet there they are, working not only in every human being but also in the cultures of all mankind. Higher knowledge teaches us that moral ideals live in man through the burning up of matter. Matter is destroyed when a person makes moral resolves. The breaking down of matter is the precondition for the building up of moral ideals. What is crucial is the manner in which a human being breaks down matter and the manner in which he can build it up again. External research is still caught up in the prejudice about the indestructibility of matter. But spiritual science shows that man can break through external natural forces. Once we are in possession of an anthroposophical world view we can comfort ourselves in face of the idea of the death of the earth through overheating. For it is this very destruction of matter which ensures for the human being the possibility of building up his moral personality.

If you look deeply into your soul you will find something which consumes and gnaws at the soul of modern man. This something, which consumes and gnaws at the soul, is the fact that modern natural science excludes the moral element from the realm of what is real. Anthroposophy shows how human beings break through natural laws; how the moral element destroys matter, which is then built up again as matter which can be the bearer of a moral world order. All that is contained within the confines of our skin is connected with the dying forces of matter. But what the world builds up again—this has been forgotten by the natural sciences.

In order to discover new moral worlds we must proceed to the question of where matter can be built up. Death is in us at every moment, but so is resurrection. This is where we should look. This, out of the anthroposophical world view, is the perspective we must place before human souls, since the natural sciences have turned their attention for far too long and far too one-sidedly to the forces of dying. It is important to develop the courage to attend to what must be done in order to build up new worlds.

I am assuming that these suggestions will give encouragement and lead to meditations on how to see more clearly what is felt and talked about a great deal, but what ought also to be strongly willed.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved?
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and New birth, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London 1959.

Dr. Steiner: I am sorry I could not be here at the end of school. It was not possible, though I thought we would be able to meet at that time. You have told me there are a number of things we need to discuss, so I would like to begin there.

A teacher reads a letter from F.R.’s father. The boy had stolen sixteen silver spoons, and his father wants to keep him home.

Dr. Steiner: This story about the spoons is old. The boy’s relationship to his father was never any different. The father would like to take him out if he will go. We need to find a way to work with the boy. We can certainly not throw him out. The boy needs a little moral support at these times. We have to give him some moral support. He is only in the ninth grade, and the children in that class need some moral support. They need a certain relationship to the faculty. They need to love the faculty. I think you have lost contact with the whole ninth grade. The boys immediately see that is very wrong. I think this whole theft problem has caused an enormous amount of remorse in F.R. We need to help him. Under no circumstances can we allow the boy to be taken out. We should not give any cause for removing him from school. We need to work with him.

Doesn’t G.T. have a little tendency to fool himself? He seems to play the part of a pleasant boy.

You need to avoid expressing subjective judgments. If you use such expressions, you will have a subjective relationship. Even when the boys do the worst things, you need to stick to the facts and never relate them to the person. If you reprimand the boys, you can achieve nothing more.

Certainly old R. is someone who cannot control his anger. His treatment of the boy is such that you can almost understand when he exhibits such behavior. When the situation is like that at home, we can only feel sorry for the boy.

We need to have more contact with the students in the upper grades. At that age students cannot stand going through a whole morning of class without any personal contact. They want you to be interested in them personally. They want you to know them, to be interested in them, that is what they want. In those grades this is still a school, not a college; the class is too much like a college, like a seminar, and not enough like a school. They want some contact with the teacher.

I already said it was five, but these five are not just some boys we can throw out into the street. If we threw them out into the street, it would be an unnecessary loss for humanity. We cannot allow that to happen. F.R. is not nearly so talented as T.L.

The father can do what he wants, and we can only try to help. It is crazy to say we should try to force him. The father can do what he wants during the holidays. I think we need more personal contact with the students in the upper grades. It is important that we attempt to have a more personal relationship with them.

One of the ninth-grade teachers says that he would like to visit the class of the previous teacher.

Dr. Steiner: You could make some interesting observations if you visited, but it is very important that you have no difficulties when you stand before your class. During your free time, you should have worked through the material so completely that it causes you no effort while you are teaching, so that you can give all your attention to how you are teaching. The material should be second nature. This whole discipline question is primarily a question of good, methodical preparation. That is true for all the subjects in all grades. It is a question of preparation. Perhaps a basic question is whether there is enough time for preparation. Many of you have told me that there is not enough time for proper preparation. It is obvious that here in the Waldorf School we must do what is necessary to prepare thoroughly, so that the material itself gives us no difficulty when we stand before the class. The students notice very quickly when that is not the case. Then they feel themselves to be above authority. That’s when the problems start.

I can see nothing more than that these five boys are really very good. F.R. is a little weak. He is quite dependent upon being treated such that he feels that you mean what you say honestly. This is a feeling he does not have with his father. He is always wondering subconsciously whether things at school will be the way they are at home. He wants to be understood, but he thinks he is treated without any understanding. His father does not know he is so angry. Everything depends upon the interest the boys have for the content of your teaching. They all pay attention in algebra. They have not been so bad. I have often observed how you can work quite well with them.

It is silly that the father wrote this letter. He did so even after I told him that the way to avoid such problems is for no one to speak about them, not to anyone, and that we have to teach the boy that he should also not speak about them to anyone. Then the father did this anyway. The old man is less well behaved than the boy. This is all very difficult. The boy does not lie to anyone, even when he has to admit some misdeed, but the old man lies all the time. The problem is that the boy knows his father lies every time he opens his mouth. He knows that from his own experience. It would have been best if the boy had seen that, as bad as his action was, we still have so much sympathy for his moral situation that we will cover it up. He can only lose more if we hang it from the bell tower. It would be best if we could remove F.R. from his parents.

All kinds of problems are coming up. I have a new student to enroll, S.T. He is sixteen and will go into the ninth grade. The boy is very well versed in philosophy, knows Plato and Kant and also Philosophy of Freedom. He is good in mathematics, but poor in Latin and German, poor in history, knows a little about geography and natural history, and is horrible in drawing. We need to take all of that into account, but we cannot put him in the eighth grade, since he has already attended the ninth grade at another school. He would also be too old. We must find a place for him to stay, somehow we need to find one. Since there is no room with the teachers, we need to see if we can’t find somewhere else where he can stay.

A teacher mentions there is always so much noise in the eighth grade. She wants either to teach two students separately, or to divide the class.

Dr. Steiner: Taking them aside is not a particularly good method. You need to try to stop their running around. You could give them some extra help, but it is not good to teach them separately. You can divide the class if that is possible. The class is too large for the situation as it is. It would be quite good if you were to give them some extra help, but do not take them away from the class. Such things will always arise, that you have students who are difficult to handle. In normal schools you would not have such students, but with us, they need to move with the class. I think, however, that things would go better if you were better friends with them.

A teacher asks about B.B. in the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Such people exist, and your task is not simply to rid yourself of them, but to really work with them. I do not believe we should try to influence them. What the mother wants to do is another thing. Just because we see there are some difficulties, we cannot simply remove a student from school. You need to interest him. You can work with him if you give him some reason. B. said he didn’t take any of the plums, but when Mr. S. asked him if they were ripe or not, he said Mr. S. was really very sly. He gave the impression that he was defeated.

You must give him some reasons for turning inward, otherwise his thinking will always be like nailing a box shut with a hammer that is always falling off the handle. There are clumps of fat between the various parts of his brain, so that he cannot bring them together. If you get him to really think, he withdraws, but in that way he can get through the fat. I am convinced that he is a good boy, and that you can work with him.

You need to try to move him on so he can move to the next class. You still have five weeks. You can learn to be sly also.

Nettle baths would be useful for him. It might also be useful to add some lemon juice to the bath; in any event, bitter things, bitter plants. I could even say sauerkraut. If possible, use a mixture of all three, but no licorice. Do this three times a week, but not too warm. He should not eat too many desserts. If he has bread, try to toast it, so it has as little water as possible. He has a tendency to form fat, and we must eliminate that. He is also lazy. You could also do the standard curative eurythmy exercises for fat with him. You can also give him some coffee.

A teacher: How can I learn to be sly?

Dr. Steiner: Did you read the issue of Das Goetheanum that contained Brentano’s riddles? Try to get the book and then solve all the riddles. I am serious about that. I selected the four most difficult for the article. That is all there is to say about being sly with B.

A teacher: The Association for School Reform has invited us to participate in a pedagogical conference.

Dr. Steiner: The question is whether you have any interest in going there and speaking. It is senseless. Anyone who would write such a letter was not born to be a school reformer. This is all just nonsense. On the other hand, though, our perspective could be that we would just say something. We could take the standpoint that we would say as much as possible about the subject. Someone who is not afraid of doing that could go and speak about our work, although what you would say would serve no real purpose. Someone who would write such a letter has not been called to that task. It is all just show. That is immediately clear from the letter.

A teacher asks about participating in the art conference in Stuttgart.

Dr. Steiner: Only the things we initiate under our full control have any real purpose. Participation in such a conference would make sense only if you took the standpoint that you wanted to go and talk about our work. Someone could become aware of our Waldorf School method in nearly every kind of gathering. Of course, it would have to be people with whom you could achieve something, as at the English conferences. We need to see them in a different way. This stuff here is just garbage, so we need to view it without any great expectations. If you have no particular desire to go, then simply write that in the near future we are so occupied with developing the Waldorf School and its methods that we need to devote our entire attention to it. That would be more useful than such a conference. We need to be careful to look at what people’s real interest is, otherwise we would degrade the Waldorf School. We can easily reply that we have no time because we need to further develop our methods. I don’t think it is very pedagogical simply to put children’s paintings on display.

We cannot discuss any principle questions today. Perhaps there are still some questions about the material to be taught or how to treat the children.

A teacher asks about algebra in the eleventh-grade curriculum.

Dr. Steiner: What I said was that you should go far enough for the children to have an understanding of Carnot’s theorem and how it is used. That essentially describes the whole curriculum. A great deal of algebra is involved. They will need to understand a lot of algebra, series and functions. The curriculum can stay with that. They should be able to solve problems requiring the use of Carnot’s theorem in all its aspects.

(Speaking about a new teacher) I have made the whole faculty responsible for his education as a human being. You need to be careful that he does not deviate.

A religion teacher: What should I use as examples for folk religions?

Dr. Steiner: The Old Testament. The Hebrew people.

Teachers ask about art class, Goethe’s poetry in the tenth grade, and metaphors.

Dr. Steiner: That material is included in almost all the grades. Of course you can teach them about metaphors and similes. You can teach them a feeling for poetic forms. We cannot say that Goethe could do that only after a certain age, that he could write a verse only after the age of forty. If we do, the students will ask themselves why they should do it when Goethe could do it only at the age of forty. Such things cause reactions, and you need to be very careful. Nevertheless, you can do it. In art, the problem is the material. You can, however, be guided by what the students understand.

A teacher asks about King Henry II.

Dr. Steiner: What I said was that it was his desire to found an ecclesia catholica, non Romana. That is a well-known story. You can certainly find a description of Henry II. Lamprecht is not a historian, he is a dilettante.4 He is interesting as being characteristic of the 3. See lecture of March 13, 1924, in Die Geschichte der Menschheit und die Weltanschauungen der Kulturvölker (GA 353, not in English). development of historical science. You will need to find some source book about Henry II. It is all written down. It is not some phrase, but something he really felt. Henry II introduced the Breviary as something holy. In that connection, we can always say that at that time it was possible for someone to come to the Divine Office who wanted a catholic, but not a Roman Catholic, church.

Lamprecht is more appearances, he has no real feeling. He is always speaking so smugly.

A teacher: What do Parzival’s words lapsit exillis mean as the name for the Grail?

Dr. Steiner: No one knows that now.

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: The main thing is that you recover, refresh yourself. It is important that your enthusiasm blossom during the holidays, and that the flower will have become a fruit when you return again, particularly where the class is not so good. The children are already happy to know you will be here again.

The situation in Germany has become increasingly worse, and it will be complete chaos.

The lectures from Oxford should be printed. We are considering one thing. This morning Leinhas said to me that, in his view, there are so many people who have so much to say, but who write nothing. Why don’t they write anything? Even Das Goetheanum is slowly beginning to suffer from a deficiency of material.

A teacher asks how the pedagogical lectures should be prepared for publication.

Dr. Steiner: The pedagogy should be published independently, much as Steffen reproduces my lectures. Those working with the material should prepare it. You should speak about your personal experiences. Support and describe those areas of the Waldorf School that you have as an ideal, so that what results is a living discussion of the pedagogical principles of the Waldorf School. You could write some beautiful essays about art instruction. Das Goetheanum needs some real essays. There must be a real desire to do something independent, even if it is only an independent honoring of things already begun. But do something.

Where do all these useless manuscripts come from? Are they also coming from the Society? Sometimes they print really useless things. It would be good to present the things that arose in the art conference in a more universal way. Why shouldn’t that be the occasion for giving special presentations.

There is also a possibility of discussing very interesting questions of method, for example, questions like those I spoke about in Dornach. There is too little literature about the Waldorf School available to the public. Couldn’t you write something about your principles of teaching? We have forty-two teachers, almost enough that four could write something for each issue. These things need to develop here. We need to develop a feeling for how to present things from various perspectives. I wanted to give an example of that in the introductions to the various eurythmy performances, when I attempted to present something from various points of view. That is what I tried to do with the eurythmy introductions.8 When I gave such an introduction recently, people stood outside and did not come in to listen. That was during the General Meeting, after a session where the German delegates had distinguished themselves so much by saying that the Goetheanum was already in ruins before it burned. Four hours of pure rubbish were spoken during that session. It was just dirty garbage, four hours long.

I hope you will refresh yourselves in every way. In all the various areas of the anthroposophical movement, we need a renewal of our strength. It is really so that we should give consideration to renewing our strength, just as plants renew themselves each year. We need a new inner enthusiasm, a new inner fire. Of course, living conditions are difficult, and they become more so each week. Now the Mark has no value whatsoever; it is only a means of computing. There is no way to foresee what chaos we will slide into. Our monthly budget is now about DM 400,000,000. By August, it could easily be two billion, perhaps even more.

A man in Austria wrote me that he had completed a business transaction for which he will be paid in dollars. He wants to keep only six hundred dollars for himself, and what he receives beyond that he wants to give us. That will apparently happen. I asked him to contact the Waldorf School. That is about DM 500,000,000, but it is really only a drop in the bucket. It is totally crazy, the situation. I think that for a while, it will be just as necessary to have outside money for the Waldorf School as it is for the Goetheanum. This is something we should present properly. It was not done properly in Dornach. Now we need to close.

My dear friends! The last reflections will have made you aware of the position that spiritual-scientific knowledge has to occupy in the spiritual development of humanity. There is, of course, a great deal to be said on this question; we will have more to say about it in the near future. However, it is sometimes necessary to point out the inhibitions that arise from the spiritual life of the present day and that stand in the way of what must be done in the interest of the further development of humanity. And so, in today's discussions, I will have to familiarize you with such thoughts, which are indeed quite common today against spiritual science, by picking out what I would like to call typical examples. I will try to characterize the nature of such obstructive thoughts for you.

It is indeed the case that since spiritual science has recently been given more consideration from this or that side, the voices are also increasing that not only want to put everything possible in the way of this spiritual science, but also want to crush it, so to speak. They must only bear in mind that a spiritual movement in our time will meet with little opposition as long as it can be labeled a sect. However, it would be a great convenience on our part if we were to think about the inhibitions that arise in the same way as we were accustomed to thinking at the time when this spiritual science was practiced in smaller circles like a sect. Personally, I never liked the sectarian aspect, but in view of the present-day habits of thinking, feeling and willing, it is extraordinarily difficult to get away from the sectarian, because it is almost taken for granted that the individual human being seeks points of contact for the progress and development of his soul where he can find them from a spiritual knowledge. But then, of course, there is the outer life, in which one fears nothing so much as the possibility of stumbling here or there, and then the will that has been fought through in the quiet chamber of the soul fades to a great extent when it comes to stepping more openly into the public arena.

The number of hostile writings that are being produced today is so great that I can only pick out something typical, and in doing so I will refer to a brochure that has just been published, 'Rudolf Steiner as Philosopher and Theosophist', by a professor in Tübingen, Dr. Friedrich Traub, who has formed his opposing remarks from the present-day Protestant-Lutheran point of view. The peculiarity that confronts us in such matters in the present day is something that can be linked to reflections that I have been engaging in recently and also here in these days. It must be constantly and repeatedly recalled that a truly fruitful cultivation of a spiritual-scientific movement absolutely requires the assimilation of a completely unclouded sense of truth and the conscientious pursuit of truth in the contemplation and treatment of the things of the physical world. That wisdom can only be sought in truth, my dear friends, should not be an inanimate motto of our movement, it should point to something very essential.

Now, it is a peculiarity of our time, firstly, that people in general tend to retouch what is happening, to retouch it in some way. There is certainly a lot of unconsciousness in such retouching, but even unconscious retouching must be striven for by those who strive for truthfulness in their lives. It is a matter of the fact that when one remembers things, one must endeavor to recall them in their true form. It is so remarkable, as it always happens even in our circles – that must be said – that things are told, things of the ordinary physical plane, which one can then investigate and find that there is nothing to them, that they completely vanish into thin air. These are things that should really be taken more seriously than they usually are. But then it is a matter of observing certain things in the interaction between people, which are necessary if social life is not to degenerate into absurdity.

You see, some time ago in Stuttgart a theologian was severely reprimanded (Dr. Unger did it) for mixing a lot of personal stuff into a lecture about my anthroposophy. Theologians should actually be people with a sense of truth. This personal information was almost completely borrowed from the brochure of the well-known ex-anthroposophist — one is accustomed to such word formations today — Max Seiling. Now, the theologian in question, who wants to be a researcher, that is, a scientist, said, among other things, that these things have not yet been refuted in public. Well, my dear friends, if you wanted to refute everything that comes from such a source, it would be a task on a par with boys throwing dirt at you on the street and you then getting into a scuffle with the boys, wouldn't it? So much for the refutation. But the following should be criticized about the statement of a person who wants to be a scientist.

The one who makes an assertion has the obligation to follow the sources for the evidence, not just to repeat it, but to check the sources first. Where would you end up, for example, in historical research, if you were to regard everything you pick up somewhere as real history, and did not feel obliged to really check the truth of the sources? It is not the person who is being attacked who has the obligation to refute the allegations, but rather the person who repeats them, who uses them to characterize, who would have the obligation to investigate such a matter before repeating it. And this gentleman, who, in addition, in the outer social life may call himself a university professor, should be made to understand that such a person, who works scientifically without examining the sources, simply documents himself before the world in such a way that he can never be taken seriously scientifically in the future with regard to anything.

You see, such things must be stated so categorically today because these things should be investigated in public, because people should actually be tested today for their sense of truth. One would have to investigate whether anyone who is in public life takes the truth seriously or not, that is, whether they also feel the obligation to check the sources of the truth for everything they claim. It is not enough for someone to say that they are speaking in good faith; this faith is worth nothing when it comes to asserting a public judgment. Of value is only the conscientious examination that everyone is obliged to do when making any kind of assertion. If one were to make a habit of this in one's private, personal life, it would not be able to occur in a context like the one I have characterized. And if it does occur, then it is a symptom that in today's world it is common practice in everyday life to blindly assert something without conscientiously checking the sources for any assertion. This is something that must be said in general.

Now, my dear friends, I will start with something seemingly extremely trivial, something that many of you might consider trivial and say: Well, such things, they don't matter, such small oversights, one must forgive. Nevertheless, it is precisely in the – I would say unscrupulous way – in which someone often treats small matters that shows how he acts in matters of importance. You see, the brochure I mentioned, which says in the introduction, in the preface:

The present writing - originally a lecture at the course organized by the Evangelical Federation and held in Tübingen in August 1919 - endeavors to describe and assess Steiner's world of thought as clearly and objectively as possible.

- this writing also contains some biographical information at the beginning, and this biographical information begins:

Steiner was born in 1861 in the small Hungarian border town of Kraljewitz.

Now, my dear friends, if the man were to open any old guidebook – which he would be obliged to do – and look up Kraljevec on the Island of Mur in Hungary, he would find that it is a terrible little dirt hole of a village that is being discussed. So, you just need to look it up. You may find it insignificant and inconsequential, but in research, accuracy is important, in research, an exact love of truth is important, and if someone does such things in small things and does not feel obliged to research the truth, then there is actually nothing to be given in his great things. Then it continues:

But he is still not Hungarian, but German Austrian.

And so on. Then it says:

The intellectual atmosphere in which he grew up is that of enlightened Catholicism, which explains why he is inwardly distant from the intellectual world of German Protestantism.

Now, my dear friends, where did this man get it from? He cannot have got it from a reasonable source, because I truly did not grow up in an enlightened Catholicism, but grew up without Catholicism, even without enlightened Catholicism, in fact in a way of thinking that corresponds entirely to what I would call the most radical scientific point of view of the 1860s and 1870s. One would like to believe that such a man knows nothing at all about what happened in the last third of the last century, otherwise he would not be able to find anything in my writings about enlightened Catholicism. Then just one more sentence of this kind:

He studied natural science and mathematics in Graz and Vienna and later went on to philosophy.

My dear friends, I was in Graz for the first time at Hamerling's funeral in 1889, after I had long since finished all my philosophical studies. I have never seen the University of Graz or any other university in Graz from the inside.

As I said, you may find all this irrelevant, you may say that these are such small oversights that one can forgive. No, my dear friends, anyone who wants to be a researcher cannot be treated in this way; instead, we have to look at the exact truth. If someone claims such things out of some fantasy or other, then we also have to realize that we can't really believe much of what he says otherwise.

But I have studied what the man might actually have thought, how he could have found out that I studied in Graz – I actually studied in Vienna – how does he come up with something like that?

Yes, you see, my dear friends, if you imagine: here the Styrian Mur, so here is the Mur Island, Großmurschen, there the very small village of Kraljevec, Csaktornya is in front of it, then Kottori. Now, if this is Graz, this is Vienna. Now the man said: How did Steiner get from Kraljevec to Vienna? Of course via Graz (see Chart 1). There seems to be no other way of asserting these things. But from this, my dear friends, you can see what the thinking of some people who call themselves researchers from our social background actually is.

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Traub's brochure is divided into two parts. The first part deals with “Steiner's Philosophy”, the second with “Steiner's Theosophy”. Now, after the experiences of life, one does not exactly have reason to believe that Protestant theologians understand much about philosophy on average; but if someone writes about it and makes the claim to be taken seriously at least in theology, then it should be possible for him, when he writes about the “philosophy” of a personality, to at least touch on the main point somehow; it should somehow be emphasized what is essentially important. The way he treats my philosophy here, the whole thing is basically a statement that there are indeed many witty remarks in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” but then it culminates in the following sentence:

But then there are also passages that are quite obscure and that leave the reader at a loss.

I believe that Pastor Traub, or rather Professor Traub, is at a loss for words; but it seems to me that in this respect he would do well to consider whether the perplexity might not come from his state of mind. For, after all, what good Mr. Lichtenberg said a long time ago is still true today: When a book and a head collide and it sounds hollow, it is not necessarily the book that is to blame. Now, you see, when someone goes so far as to say:

So here we have a lack of conceptual clarity in Steiner that is disastrous for the justification of his point of view.

- then he would at least have to try to somehow take into account the point of view that matters. Perhaps it would have helped Mr. Traub a little if he had tried to examine the matter conscientiously. But he only cites the “Philosophy of Freedom” and “World and Life Views in the 19th Century” from 1901 among the writings he has read for a description of my philosophy; he does not mention “Truth and Science,” which could have been very helpful to him in not being quite so at a loss in the face of the “Philosophy of Freedom”.

But to find out the crux of the matter - it is as if Pastor Traub really was at a loss in the matter - that would certainly be the most important thing. For this crux of the matter concerns the fact that both in my book “Truth and Science” and in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” a consciously anti-Kantian point of view has been clearly and distinctly formulated. And the important thing about this is that I have shown that one cannot at all place oneself in relation to the outer sense world in the way that Kant and all his imitators placed themselves in relation to this outer sense world, simply accepting it and asking: Is it possible to penetrate deeper into it or not? What I wanted to show at the beginning of my literary career was that the external sense world, as it presents itself to us, is a mere semblance, is half-real, because we are not born into the world in such a way that our relationship to the external world born into the world in such a way that our relationship to the external world is a finished one, but that our relationship to the external world is one that we ourselves must first complete when we think about the world, when we acquire this or that experience of the world. So when we acquire knowledge about the world in the broadest sense, only then do we come to reality.

The fundamental error of 19th-century philosophy is that it always simply takes the sensory world as a finished product. People have not realized that the human being belongs to true reality, that what arises in the human being, especially in thought, splits off from reality, in that the human being is born into reality , that reality is hidden at first, so that it appears to us as an illusory reality; and only when we penetrate this illusory reality with what can come to life in us do we have full reality before us. But from the outset, from the point of view of a certain theory of knowledge, everything that later forms the basis of my anthroposophy would be characterized by this. For it has been attempted from the very beginning to prove that the sense world is not a reality, but that it is an illusory reality, to which must be added what man brings to it, what flashes up in man's inner being and what he then works out. All of Kant's and post-Kantian philosophy is based on the assumption that we have a finished reality before us and that we can then ask the question: Yes, can we recognize this finished reality or cannot we recognize it? But it is not a finished reality, it is only half a reality, and the whole reality only comes into being when the human being comes along and pours into reality that which arises in his innermost being. If one were to characterize as it is given in my “Truth and Science” and what then leads from this “Truth and Science” to the “Philosophy of Freedom”, one would see that the thinking, which is necessary to found an anthroposophy, has already been philosophically characterized by me in its essence. It is interesting that Traub writes:

Anyone who talks about moral freedom cannot, one would think, do so without taking a stand on the fundamental question of “Freedom and Causal Necessity of Nature”. There is almost nothing about this question in this entire book.

Of course, the word 'about' in this sentence allows for a wide range of interpretations. But putting that aside, one might ask whether the author only opened the book halfway through and only read from the middle to the end. In the first chapter, there is a discussion, in connection with Spinoza, of how to understand the idea of freedom in contrast to natural causality. As far as it is necessary for such a book, this question is the starting point. Such a way of thinking as that of Professor Traub overlooks this.

Regarding the “riddles of philosophy,” you need only read what I said at the beginning of that admittedly daring introductory chapter: that it was necessary to let the whole course of philosophy of mankind have an effect on me in order to write these few pages, which are intended to characterize the course of philosophical thought of mankind in the period of seven to eight centuries. When you read this, you will ask yourself: What does such a gentleman want when he says:

But these points of view...

— he means those developed in these pages —

... are so vague and fluid and so poorly aligned with the content they are supposed to summarize that one gets the impression of a schema that has been arbitrarily superimposed on the content, not an order that grows organically out of the material.

It is precisely this that is shown, how the order grows organically out of the material, and every opportunity is taken, in every single chapter, to show how precisely what he calls a scheme here grows out of the real empirical observation of the material. You can say anything to people like that – they then say anything that comes into their heads.

But the most beautiful thing, my dear friends, in this writing are sentences like this:

It would therefore have been of the greatest importance if he had formed a clear and unambiguous concept of science in his philosophical period. Is spiritual science a science of facts like natural science and history? Is it a science of norms like logic, ethics, aesthetics? Or in what other sense is it a science? Nowhere does one get any satisfactory information about it.

Now, my dear friends, what is the basis of such a sentence? First of all, the gentleman in question has the ingrained concepts of factual science and normative science in his mind. He has learned from his compendia, at least in the course of his life, that there are normative sciences and factual sciences. He would first have to educate himself about the fact that these old concepts break down when confronted with spiritual science. But he judges that which he should find his way into according to the concepts he has acquired. No wonder they do not fit into these concepts.

The following is also cute, for example. He says:

A third example. For Steiner, all “riddles of philosophy” are ultimately reduced to one: soul and world. How must the world be conceived in order to accommodate the soul? But this formulation of the problem is extremely vague. The term 'soul' is, after all, ambiguous. Is the soul meant as the psychological, the epistemological, the ethical-religious subject?

First of all, I would like to know where he got this problem from. Yes, my dear friends, soul is meant as soul, as the real soul. The fact that in the compendiums, reflections have been made in the course of time that can be called epistemological, that can be called psychological or that can be called ethical-religious does not imply the nonsense that one should say: I am considering the relationship of the ethical-religious soul to the world, or I am considering the relationship of the epistemological soul to the world, or I am considering the relationship of the psychological soul to the world. It is very difficult, you see: if you wanted to refute such stuff, it would have to be based on something tangible. But you can't really grasp such things, they just vanish in your hands.

Of course, the Protestant theologian is most interested in how I dealt with the concept of God during the period in which my philosophical writings were written. Now, my dear friends, when one writes something, it is not a matter of writing about everything possible, from all possible points of view, but rather of writing from the points of view that are relevant to the content of the writing in question. During the period when I was writing my “Philosophy of Freedom” and also earlier and some later works, I never had any reason to deal with the theological question about God and the world in any way. So it is a strange criticism if one does not see that in a context such as that of “The Philosophy of Freedom”, neither a personal nor a superpersonal God can be found. It is about the treatment of matter, the treatment of substance.

Now you see, it is of course a godsend for people who miss the main point – for Traub has missed the real main point, the determination of the relationship between man and reality, to such an extent that he has not even seen this point, that he has no idea at all that this is the main point – it is always a godsend when secondary matters can be emphasized. It should surprise no one that from the point of view, including the anthroposophical point of view, from which I have to start, only a harsh judgment can be passed on everything that is denominational Christianity of one shade or another in the present day, that a harsh judgment must be passed on everything that is vague ideas about the beyond. For those who have grasped the core of anthroposophy, the latter shines forth upon what I have had to assert philosophically. The point is that, however far we penetrate into the spiritual worlds, we must always imagine them as a unified whole, so that everything that is spirit must at the same time be sought in material existence. The greatest harm that has been done in the development of our modern world view is that people have repeatedly wanted to point beyond what is direct experience to an indefinite, vague beyond. This beyond is to become a here, a real presence here, precisely through spiritual contemplation. Therefore, from the point of view of epistemology, I had to fight all vague ideas of the beyond and had to reject everything that tends to repeat these vague ideas of the beyond from one religious confession to another. In order to gradually ascend to a true understanding of Christ, I had to present everything that actually obscures the real Christ impulse as something to be rejected by future humanity. For it must be clear that the way in which, in more recent times, under the protection of precisely the theological schools of thought, a distinction is made between revelation and external science, that precisely this is of great harm to our spiritual development. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that ordinary Christianity has been rejected by me in my philosophical period, for this ordinary Christianity is to be rejected precisely for the sake of Christ Himself. But for those people who cling to words, who never look at things in context but always cling to words, it is easy to discover apparent contradictions when words are taken out of context. Of course, this is extremely easy for someone who has never been concerned with words but always with the matter at hand.

And so one can take up a sentence like the one I said in 1898:

We want to be fighters for our gospel, so that in the coming century a new generation will arise that knows how to live, satisfied, cheerful and proud, without Christianity, without looking to the hereafter.

Or even earlier:

It is only worthy of man to seek the truth himself, that neither experience nor revelation guides him. Once this is fully recognized, the religions of revelation will have had their day.

This is something, my dear friends, which, if taken literally, can very easily, terribly easily, lead to the construction of contradictions. The conscientious person would, of course, examine the context in which these words were used. For Pastor or Professor Traub, however, this is something dangerous, because his Christianity, his belief in the hereafter, is quite certainly affected.

You see, I have roughly demonstrated the wealth of ideas with which my philosophy is characterized by Professor Traub. Because other ideas are not to be found much in the writing. Everything that matters has been overlooked. The fact that I speak of intuitive thinking in The Philosophy of Freedom is something that Professor Traub does notice, but he cannot form any conception of it because he finds that thinking is merely formal in nature and is therefore actually empty. Yes, my dear friends, there is no talking to such a person, because he has not acquired the very simplest concepts that one could gain right at the beginning in mathematics, for if you only give mathematics a formal, content-free thinking, then I would like to know how one could ever understand something like the Pythagorean theorem. If the aim were to take all content out of experience, then one would never be able to grasp something like the Pythagorean theorem, which presupposes that thinking that is rich in content meets external sense experience, which then, so to speak, comes with intuitive thinking, as characterized in 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. The fact that the development of this thinking, the ascent of this thinking into the spiritual world, is already there, would be something to be emphasized when characterizing my philosophy. Well, after all, one cannot assume that a Mr. So-and-so will find out.

Then he moves on to the characterization of what he calls “Steiner's theosophy.” He has read “How to Know Higher Worlds.” In it, he initially finds some commendable ethical principles that are given. But then he proceeds, as is actually to be expected from his entire attitude, then he proceeds - yes, how shall I put it? — not to understand and to emphasize sharply that he does not understand what astral body, life spirit, etheric body and so on is.

It is difficult...

– he says literally –

... to form a reasonably comprehensible picture of these components of the human being.

Well, he agrees with me that I demand of everyone who has common sense that they should be able to examine things from the point of view of common sense. Of course, Professor Traub has common sense – in his own opinion. But, my dear friends, it is a peculiar way of approaching such things when he finds, for example, in “Theosophy” that the number seven is often mentioned, and when he then says:

Should there really be - this critical question cannot be suppressed here in the presentation - a regularly recurring sevenfold “view”? Can one avoid the suspicion that one has an artificial scheme here, which is arbitrarily grafted onto things?

If he understood anything at all, he would know that it is no more an artificial scheme than it is when you look at a rainbow and say that there are seven colors in it, or when you look at the scale and say that there are seven tones in it and the octave is the repetition of the prime and so on. But, my dear friends, he does not even approach such a thing in a positive sense, but simply raises the question:

Can one avoid the suspicion that one has an artificial scheme here, which is arbitrarily grafted onto things?

Why ask such a question if you are not going to investigate the matter! The whole methodology is something quite impossible.

I would not speak so harshly about this book, my dear friends, because in my opinion the author's limitations are actually largely to blame for the way the book is, not exactly ill will - that emerges from the content. But judging by the terms the man uses, it justifies the use of equally strong terms. I will endeavor not to use harsher terms than those used in the book against my “Philosophy” and my “Theosophy.” This gentleman's way of thinking is indeed quite peculiar. You see, he has grasped how I arrive at a certain corroboration – you know, I try to corroborate everything in the most diverse ways – how I arrive at a certain corroboration of the idea of reincarnation, of repeated lives on earth, by using an example such as Schiller, who, with his genius, could not could not have inherited everything that he carried within him from his father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and so on, and that if one does not want to assume that the qualities that Schiller could not have inherited with his blood were born out of nothing, one comes back to some kind of previous existence.

You know that I don't present such things as proof, but one gathers these things because, when gathered together, they can corroborate a matter. Yes, but how does Professor Traub deal with this example? He says:

So there must have been a soul related to the poet in earlier times, a prehistoric Schiller, so to speak, who died unnoticed and unrecognized and then embodied himself in the historical Schiller in 1759. Of course – to insert this critical remark right here – a hair-raising logic! Otherwise, the explanation is that the unknown is traced back to the known. But here the unknown, the becoming of Schiller, is traced back to something even more unknown, the re-embodiment of a prehistoric Schiller. That is not logic, but a gimmick.

My dear friends! You can declaim for a long time that explanations consist of reducing the unknown to the known. Now, my dear friends, I would first like to know how to do that. How do you get at the unknown? It must first be known; but then, at most, you would only have to reduce the unknown, the seemingly unknown, which must first be known, to the known! So, the “hair-raising logic” seems to me to be more on the other side. But if it is also often proclaimed that the unknown should be traced back to the known in order to provide explanations, I would first like to ask: Why explain it at all? One could stop at the known. But in truth it is not so. Just go through all the explanations that are offered. Explanations always assume that what is being sought is something that is not actually present. In practice, the exact opposite of what Professor Traub's method demands is true. It is not surprising that the old objections arise, that one does not remember previous incarnations, but it is interesting to note that it is stated here:

The return to this earthly world is said to be necessary for the purpose of making it possible for man to make amends in a future life for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men in the present life. But, one must ask, how is he to go about this? After all, he does not know which of his fellow human beings in the present have been harmed by him in a previous life.

Yes, my dear friends, I have certainly never claimed anything similar, even remotely similar, about the average person. But it is really not at all a matter of whether a person A, who is standing in the present and facing a person B, now saying to himself: This person B, I lived with in the year 202 AD; I did him an injustice then, now I have to do this and that to make amends. Professor Traub can only imagine that karma, that fate, unfolds under this assumption. Yes, my dear friends, but it does not matter at all whether person A makes these considerations, because karma is arranged in such a way that he makes amends for what he has done wrong in the previous life, from what is going on in his soul, even without knowing it, without him first reflecting on it. It is indeed the case that when Professor Traub says that he does not know which of his fellow human beings in this life were harmed by him in a past life and how he can make amends, he does it without knowing how. Such gentlemen are completely lacking in the most obvious thoughts.

Now, my dear friends, what are we to do with such an assertion? That this Protestant gentleman does not, of course, like such explanations as I have given about a passage in the Bible: “He who eats my bread tramples me under his feet” or similar - one can believe that, of course. He expressly assures us that he cannot imagine anything at all about the “center spirit” of the earth. But then a series of extraordinarily cute remarks follows. You see, I emphasize from the most diverse points of view that the embodiment of the Christ-being in the man Jesus of Nazareth is not just an earthly, but a cosmic event. That which took place, whether in the great historical context or in the own soul of the man Christ-Jesus, is not to be regarded as merely an earthly, a telluric event, but as an event that concerns the cosmos. The point is to lift the event of Golgotha out of the merely earthly sphere and raise it into the sphere of the world, and I have emphasized this again and again in all possible variations.

Yes, my dear friends, after Professor Traub has expressed his horror at the two Jesus children, which may well be granted him, he goes on to say the following cute sentence, which is all too beautiful for us to ignore:

According to Steiner, however, the crucifixion is a purely cosmic event. Anyone who could have followed the development of the earth through the millennia from a distant planet would have seen not only the physical but also the astral body of the earth, and this astral body would have shown the same lights, the same forms, the same colors for thousands of years. But at a certain moment, this would have changed. “Other forms appeared, other lights and other colors shone - that was the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer at Golgotha. This was not a human event, but a cosmic one."

That's what I say, he even quotes it verbatim. But then he says:

There is no trace of an ethical appreciation of the death on the cross! The astral body of the earth shines in different lights and colors, appears in different forms. The Christ-I, the solar regent descends to the earth, and in the spirit of the earth one now sees the solar-I, the Christ-I. Can these purely cosmic processes simply be added to the moral deed of the historical Jesus? Are the two processes, the cosmic and the ethical, not too heterogeneous to be considered as elements of a cumulative example? One could object that Jesus' ethical deed could be accompanied by cosmic effects, just as such effects are linked to the death of Christ in the letters of Paul. But with Steiner it is not the case that one could distinguish between an ethical act and its cosmic effects. One hears nothing at all about an ethical act, only about cosmic events. But then the two interpretations of the death on the cross are mutually exclusive. It cannot be both an ethical act and a purely cosmic event.

Yes, my dear friends, what am I supposed to understand from this? That the event of Golgotha took place on the earth's orbit is certainly not denied by me. I did not claim that it took place on the sun or the moon. Well, in any case it is a telluric event. That this is reversed by Traub in the assertion that I understand the event of Golgotha as a pure, that is, only a cosmic event - that is basically a strong act! From Kraljevec the way to Vienna goes via Graz! That is the distorted thinking in small, insignificant things. This distorted thinking, which one often does not want to criticize in small, insignificant things, is something that then also shows itself in great things. For anyone who feels obliged to conscientiously read what Professor Traub claims to have read will never be so presumptuous as to claim that I said that the Christ event was only a cosmic event.

Now, I can only pick out individual things. The description of Atlantis naturally hurts him again, and he finds himself particularly badly affected when I say that the Atlanteans thought in images and that now people think in concepts.

The Atlanteans thought in images. And when an image appeared before their soul, they remembered so-and-so many similar images that they had already experienced. Based on that, they formed their judgment.

To which Professor Traub says:

So the Atlantean also judged; but how a judgment without a concept is possible remains unclear.

Yes, my dear friends, concepts are formed according to judgments for straightforward thinking. If you had to have concepts in order to judge, few judgments would be able to come about. So this is something that really testifies to a very blatant lack of philosophical education.

Now, I won't even talk about the fact that he cannot understand what is spiritually similar to the sensation of blue as I describe it, right; I also won't talk about the fact that he says:

A spiritual color is a contradiction in terms.

- because he constructs arbitrary concepts of a spiritual color. I will only speak of the fact that it is said of me again and again that one can follow everything with common sense, even that which is directly observed, if one is willing to overcome one's laziness and observe to a certain degree what is written in “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

In a length that is striking for the brevity of the remaining remarks, Professor Traub now explains that on the one hand, faith in authority is required, but on the other hand, one should examine it oneself. In particular, he is harshly critical of those who say that, after all, other things in the world are also accepted on trust, for example that people who have not been to America still believe the travelers when they say that it looks like this or that there. — Well, of course it is easy to say that in America there are also people, animals, plants and so on that are also known in Europe. I will not dwell on this, I have spoken of it often; but I would like to draw your attention to the logic of this gentleman. On page 34 you read the cute sentence:

The truths learned at school I can verify.

—- so he thinks.

Most people will admittedly have no occasion to do so; but the fundamental possibility exists. I may have to become a historian, a physicist, a chemist, in order to be able to test independently. I cannot verify the theosophical truths if I am not clairvoyant; I can only check them in a negative way.

This is literally true; to test a chemical truth, one must want to become determined to become a chemist. There is nothing at all to be said against that. But Professor Traub continues:

But I cannot verify the theosophical truths unless I am clairvoyant.

Yes, you see, of course I cannot verify the theosophical truths either unless I want to become clairvoyant, just as you cannot verify the chemical truths without becoming a chemist; he himself cites this as proof. But he considers it his right to become a chemist if he wants to verify chemical truths, but he does not want to become one, as one must become to verify the theosophical truths. In any case, he turns out to be extremely demanding on this point. Because the fact that one or the other can verify and then confirm is not enough for Professor Traub. He says:

It is not enough for the theosophical side to say that the results of spiritual scientific research have already been verified by a large number of people. The question is whether they have been or can be verified by me, and, apart from the formal logical criticism, I have to say no.

That is logic, isn't it! But this logic is even intensified, my dear friends. He says, after all, with chemical truths, with ordinary scientific truths, it does not matter if everyone checks them, because they are not as important as spiritual truths, nor are historical truths. And there we find the following cute sentence:

On the contrary, we must demand that in matters of world view, the individual stands by himself and does not simply accept what others dictate to him. If I were ever in a position to have to dare something great based on one of those school truths – for example, that Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire or that Hannibal crossed the Alps – and I came to the complete conviction that life or bliss depends on such a truth, I would no longer be satisfied with just accepting the authority of others, but would do everything I could to gain an independent certainty about those things.

Yes, I want to know how he actually does it, I want to know how he wants to gain an independent certainty about the event of his own birth, which is, after all, an extremely important event in his life on earth! So these things are written down from the mere rattling of words that are not at all accompanied by any thoughts. Based on our current circumstances, these are youth educators! This raises the question of judging everything as possible.

Now I would like to read you a sentence of mine, my dear friends, which you will know, which I am reading here not for any personal reason, but because something quite peculiarly remarkable appears to me in the way Professor Traub introduces the sentence:

Spiritual science will not, in its very essence, directly interfere with any religious confession or the domain of any religious confession. It can never want to create a religion. Therefore, in the circles of the spiritual scientific world view, the most diverse religious confessions will live together in the deepest peace and fullest harmony and will be able to strive for the knowledge of the spiritual. ... Spiritual science does not in any way need to divert anyone from their religious life. Therefore, one cannot speak of spiritual science as such being a religious confession. It does not want to create a religious confession, nor does it want to change people in any way with regard to their religious confession. Nevertheless, it seems as if people are thinking about the religion of anthroposophy. In truth, one cannot speak in such terms, because within the Anthroposophical Society all religions are represented, and none are prevented by it from practicing their religious beliefs in the fullest, most extensive and most intense way.

These sentences are mine. They are found in 'The Task of Spiritual Science and Its Structure in Dornach'. Professor Traub cites them and then adds the following sentence. I will read it out, although I am not sure whether I am clever enough to recall the following sentence in the right way. He adds the sentence:

These sentences, which also give a certain impression of Steiner's unsightly and un-German style, reveal his opinion: anthroposophy is not a religion as such.

Yes, I must confess that if I wanted to judge the unsightly style of this Traub writing – well, I don't want to pass judgment on it, because after all it is a matter of taste, but when I have read so much criticism about style lately and then see that judgments are formed in such a way, then it seems to me to be almost as irrelevant as the content-related matters.

Now I would like to share with you just a few sentences from the last part of the text, where the relationship between anthroposophy and Christianity is discussed. It says:

2. Christianity is a historical religion. Theosophy is a religion without history. The first sentence cannot be substantiated here, only elucidated. It means not only that Christianity has a history and passes through a historical development, but also that its validity as truth is bound up with history. If one crosses out the story of the Gospels, the whole of Christianity stands in the air. And what about the other sentence, that Theosophy is without history? He does not mean, of course, that Theosophy has no history. It has a very long history. You meet only old acquaintances when you look around in the theosophical literature. What is Steiner's Christology other than a new form of Gnostic Christology? His anthropology and cosmology also have their parallels in the history of religious and philosophical thought. The doctrine of reincarnation and the related, though not identical, idea of transmigration of souls run through the history of religions in ever new forms. In this sense, Theosophy also has its history. It is without history in the sense that it does not need history to justify its conviction of truth.

Yes, I must say, with such a remark, one's mind could stand still: a Protestant theologian who claims that the truth of Christianity is based only on history, that Christianity does not contain eternal truths! One cannot even find out what the contradiction is supposed to be. He himself points out that Theosophy also originated historically. But he attaches great importance to the fact that Theosophy endeavors - although it originated historically - to find ahistorical, that is, eternal truths. Christianity is supposed to be merely a historical matter. Traub writes:

The first sentence...

- namely, “Christianity is an historical religion” —

... cannot be justified here, but only explained. It means not only that Christianity has a history and is undergoing an historical development, but also that its validity is bound up with history.

Yes, it is absolutely incomprehensible how such a sentence can be pronounced as something valid, because that is how it is pronounced. The person in question is a university professor, so he teaches with a certain authority. These things are sufficiently characterizing to show where the words that oppose the humanities come from.

It is particularly interesting for me, who always tries to reject anything that is overheated tone, who tries to present as calmly as possible, with a calm, scientific style, that I am also accused of:

It was different with the great mystics of the past. In their presence one had the feeling: “Take off your shoes; the ground you stand on is holy ground.” One does not have this feeling in the presence of Steiner. There is no sense of mystery here. It is as if the magic of mystery has been stripped from the beyond. Hence the sober, dry tone that characterizes Steiner's writings. They have none of the excitement and gripping quality that one would expect from the prophet of a new worldview. When you consider this, it is impossible to overlook the contrast between Christianity and anthroposophy. There is reverence for the mystery of the eternal; here is the understanding and sobriety of the one who has uncovered the secret.

Yes, my dear friends, I consciously refuse to speak in an overheated tone of something unknown, because that is precisely what has a hypnotizing effect on human souls.

Now, I have highlighted some of the typical things that oppose the spiritual scientific movement. We had to stop at such a point, since I intend to move on to characterizing what the position of that spiritual entity that we call Michael, who in turn has become the spiritual world regent since the end of the seventies of the last century, actually is in relation to the human present and its culture. Next time I must characterize the whole metamorphosis of the Michael personality, from what Michael was – that which is called the face of Yahweh – to his present position. It was also necessary to characterize a little the stones that are thrown in the path of spiritual science.

One can say: Firstly, in such a case there is the most terrible inaccuracy, secondly, in such a case there is the inability to somehow find out the key points of the matter - and, moreover, the unscrupulous will to characterize the matter as it has been done here. Finally, the brochure summarizes the content of the critique:

Christianity is a religion of history...

— there is the sentence for the second time! —

... theosophy is without history. Christianity is essentially ethical, anthroposophy is cosmically oriented. Christianity is a religion of mystery; the anthroposophist has penetrated the mystery. Christianity is simple at its core; anthroposophy is complicated and fantastic.

Yes, that is true, and many opponents of anthroposophy today fly this flag. But the reasons for this and the direction in which the judgment should be steered if one wants to arrive at a fair and dignified judgment must first be pointed out in a typical case. Next Friday, I will discuss the topics mentioned above. We will meet here at 7 p.m. for the lecture.

[ 1 ] For our cognition, the concept of the tree is conditioned by the percept of the tree. When faced with a particular percept, I can select only one particular concept from the general system of concepts. The connection of concept and percept is determined by thinking, indirectly and objectively, at the level of the percept. This connection of the percept with its concept is recognized after the act of perceiving; but that they do belong together lies in the very nature of things.

[ 2 ] The process looks different when we examine knowledge, or rather the relation of man to the world which arises within knowledge. In the preceding chapters the attempt has been made to show that an unprejudiced observation of this relationship is able to throw light on its nature. A proper understanding of this observation leads to the insight that thinking can be directly discerned as a self-contained entity. Those who find it necessary for the explanation of thinking as such to invoke something else, such as physical brain processes or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind the conscious thinking which they observe, fail to recognize what an unprejudiced observation of thinking yields. When we observe our thinking, we live during this observation directly within a self-supporting, spiritual web of being. Indeed, we can even say that if we would grasp the essential nature of spirit in the form in which it presents itself most immediately to man, we need only look at the self-sustaining activity of thinking.

[ 3 ] When we are contemplating thinking itself, two things coincide which otherwise must always appear apart, namely, concept and percept. If we fail to see this, we shall be unable to regard the concepts which we have elaborated with respect to percepts as anything but shadowy copies of these percepts, and we shall take the percepts as presenting to us the true reality. We shall, further, build up for ourselves a metaphysical world after the pattern of the perceived world; we shall call this a world of atoms, a world of will, a world of unconscious spirit, or whatever, each according to his own kind of mental imagery. And we shall fail to notice that all the time we have been doing nothing but building up a metaphysical world hypothetically, after the pattern of our own world of percepts. But if we recognize what is present in thinking, we shall realize that in the percept we have only one part of the reality and that the other part which belongs to it, and which first allows the full reality to appear, is experienced by us in the permeation of the percept by thinking. We shall see in this element that appears in our consciousness as thinking, not a shadowy copy of some reality, but a self-sustaining spiritual essence. And of this we shall be able to say that it is brought into consciousness for us through intuition. Intuition is the conscious experience—in pure spirit—of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the essence of thinking be grasped.

[ 4 ] Only if, by means of unprejudiced observation, one has wrestled through to the recognition of this truth of the intuitive essence of thinking will one succeed in clearing the way for an insight into the psyche-physical organization of man. One will see that this organization can have no effect on the essential nature of thinking. At first sight this seems to be contradicted by patently obvious facts. For ordinary experience, human thinking makes its appearance only in connection with, and by means of, this organization. This form of its appearance comes so much to the fore that its real significance cannot be grasped unless we recognize that in the essence of thinking this organization plays no part whatever. Once we appreciate this, we can no longer fail to notice what a peculiar kind of relationship there is between the human organization and the thinking itself. For this organization contributes nothing to the essential nature of thinking, but recedes whenever the activity of thinking makes its appearance; it suspends its own activity, it yields ground; and on the ground thus left empty, the thinking appears. The essence which is active in thinking has a twofold function: first, it represses the activity of the human organization; secondly, it steps into its place. For even the former, the repression of the physical organization, is a consequence of the activity of thinking, and more particularly of that part of this activity which prepares the manifestation of thinking. From this one can see in what sense thinking finds its counterpart in the physical organization. When we see this, we can no longer misjudge the significance of this counterpart of the activity of thinking. When we walk over soft ground, our feet leave impressions in the soil. We shall not be tempted to say that these footprints have been formed from below by the forces of the ground. We shall not attribute to these forces any share in the production of the footprints. Just as little, if we observe the essential nature of thinking without prejudice, shall we attribute any share in that nature to the traces in the physical organism which arise through the fact that the thinking prepares its manifestation by means of the body.¹

[ 5 ] An important question, however, emerges here. If the human organization has no part in the essential nature of thinking, what is the significance of this organization within the whole nature of man? Now, what happens in this organization through the thinking has indeed nothing to do with the essence of thinking, but it has a great deal to do with the arising of the ego-consciousness out of this thinking. Thinking, in its own essential nature, certainly contains the real I or ego, but it does not contain the ego-consciousness. To see this we have but to observe thinking with an open mind. The “I” is to be found within the thinking; the “ego-consciousness” arises through the traces which the activity of thinking engraves upon our general consciousness, in the sense explained above. (The ego-consciousness thus arises through the bodily organization. However, this must not be taken to imply that the ego-consciousness, once it has arisen, remains dependent on the bodily organization. Once arisen, it is taken up into thinking and shares henceforth in thinking's spiritual being.)

[ 6 ] The “ego-consciousness” is built upon the human organization. Out of the latter flow our acts of will. Following the lines of the preceding argument, we can gain insight into the connections between thinking, conscious I, and act of will, only by observing first how an act of will issues from the human organization.²

[ 7 ] In any particular act of will we must take into account the motive and the driving force. The motive is a factor with the character of a concept or a mental picture; the driving force is the will-factor belonging to the human organization and directly conditioned by it. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary determining factor of the will; the driving force is the permanent determining factor of the individual. A motive for the will may be a pure concept, or else a concept with a particular reference to a percept, that is, a mental picture. Both general concepts and individual ones (mental pictures) become motives of will by affecting the human individual and determining him to action in a particular direction. But one and the same concept, or one and the same mental picture, affects different individuals differently. They stimulate different men to different actions. An act of will is therefore not merely the outcome of the concept or the mental picture but also of the individual make-up of the person. Here we may well follow the example of Eduard von Hartmann and call this individual make-up the characterological disposition. The manner in which concept and mental picture affects the characterological disposition of a man gives to his life a definite moral or ethical stamp.

[ 8 ] The characterological disposition is formed by the more or less permanent content of our subjective life, that is, by the content of our mental pictures and feelings. Whether a mental picture which enters my mind at this moment stimulates me to an act of will or not, depends on how it relates itself to the content of all my other mental pictures and also to my idiosyncrasies of feeling. But after all, the general content of my mental pictures is itself conditioned by the sum total of those concepts which have, in the course of my individual life, come into contact with percepts, that is, have become mental pictures. This sum, again, depends on my greater or lesser capacity for intuition and on the range of my observations, that is, on the subjective and objective factors of experience, on my inner nature and situation in life. My characterological disposition is determined especially by my life of feeling. Whether I shall make a particular mental picture or concept into a motive of action or not, will depend on whether it gives me joy or pain.

These are the elements which we have to consider in an act of will. The immediately present mental picture or concept, which becomes the motive, determines the aim or the purpose of my will; my characterological disposition determines me to direct my activity towards this aim. The mental picture of taking a walk in the next half-hour determines the aim of my action. But this mental picture is raised to the level of a motive for my will only if it meets with a suitable characterological disposition, that is, if during my past life I have formed the mental pictures of the sense and purpose of taking a walk, of the value of health, and further, if the mental picture of taking a walk is accompanied in me by a feeling of pleasure.

[ 9 ] We must therefore distinguish (1) the possible subjective dispositions which are capable of turning certain mental pictures and concepts into motives, and (2) the possible mental pictures and concepts which are in a position to influence my characterological disposition so that an act of will results. For our moral life the former represent the driving force, and the latter, its aims.

[ 10 ] The driving force in the moral life can be discovered by finding out the elements of which individual life is composed.

[ 11 ] The first level of individual life is that of perceiving, more particularly perceiving through the senses. This is the region of our individual life in which perceiving translates itself directly into willing, without the intervention of either a feeling or a concept. The driving force here involved is simply called instinct. The satisfaction of our lower, purely animal needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) comes about in this way. The main characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which the single percept releases the act of will. This kind of determination of the will, which belongs originally only to the life of the lower senses, may however become extended also to the percepts of the higher senses. We may react to the percept of a certain event in the external world without reflecting on what we do, without any special feeling connecting itself with the percept, as in fact happens in our conventional social behaviour. The driving force of such action is called tact or moral good taste. The more often such immediate reactions to a percept occur, the more the person concerned will prove himself able to act purely under the guidance of tact; that is, tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[ 12 ] The second level of human life is feeling. Definite feelings accompany the percepts of the external world. These feelings may become the driving force of an action. When I see a starving man, my pity for him may become the driving force of my action. Such feelings, for example, are shame, pride, sense of honour, humility, remorse, pity, revenge, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love, and duty.³

[ 13 ] The third level of life amounts to thinking and forming mental pictures. A mental picture or a concept may become the motive of an action through mere reflection. Mental pictures become motives because, in the course of life, we regularly connect certain aims of our will with percepts which recur again and again in more or less modified form. Hence with people not wholly devoid of experience it happens that the occurrence of certain percepts is always accompanied by the appearance in consciousness of mental pictures of actions that they themselves have carried out in a similar case or have seen others carry out. These mental pictures float before their minds as patterns which determine all subsequent decisions; they become parts of their characterological disposition. The driving force in the will, in this case, we can call practical experience. Practical experience merges gradually into purely tactful behaviour. This happens when definite typical pictures of actions have become so firmly connected in our minds with mental pictures of certain situations in life that, in any given instance, we skip over all deliberation based on experience and go straight from the percept to the act of will.

[ 14 ] The highest level of individual life is that of conceptual thinking without regard to any definite perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition from out of the ideal sphere. Such a concept contains, at first, no reference to any definite percepts. If we enter upon an act of will under the influence of a concept which refers to a percept, that is, under the influence of a mental picture, then it is this percept which determines our action indirectly by way of the conceptual thinking. But if we act under the influence of intuitions, the driving force of our action is pure thinking. As it is the custom in philosophy to call the faculty of pure thinking “reason”, we may well be justified in giving the name of practical reason to the moral driving force characteristic of this level of life. The dearest account of this driving force in the will has been given by Kreyenbuehl⁴. In my opinion his article on this subject is one of the most important contributions to present-day philosophy, more especially to Ethics. Kreyenbuehl calls the driving force we are here discussing, the practical a priori, that is, an impulse to action issuing directly from my intuition.

[ 15 ] It is clear that such an impulse can no longer be counted in the strictest sense as belonging to the characterological disposition. For what is here effective as the driving force is no longer something merely individual in me, but the ideal and hence universal content of my intuition. As soon as I see the justification for taking this content as the basis and starting point of an action, I enter upon the act of will irrespective of whether I have had the concept beforehand or whether it only enters my consciousness immediately before the action, that is, irrespective of whether it was already present as a disposition in me or not.

[ 16 ] Since a real act of will results only when a momentary impulse to action, in the form of a concept or mental picture, acts on the characterological disposition, such an impulse then becomes the motive of the will.

[ 17 ] The motives of moral conduct are mental pictures and concepts. There are Moral Philosophers who see a motive for moral behaviour also in the feelings; they assert, for instance, that the aim of moral action is to promote the greatest possible quantity of pleasure for the acting individual. Pleasure itself, however, cannot become a motive; only an imagined pleasure can. The mental picture of a future feeling, but not the feeling itself, can act on my characterological disposition. For the feeling itself does not yet exist in the moment of action; it has first to be produced by the action.

[ 18 ] The mental picture of one's own or another's welfare is, however, rightly regarded as a motive of the will. The principle of producing the greatest quantity of pleasure for oneself through one's action, that is, of attaining individual happiness, is called egoism. The attainment of this individual happiness is sought either by thinking ruthlessly only of one's own good and striving to attain it even at the cost of the happiness of other individuals (pure egoism), or by promoting the good of others, either because one anticipates a favourable influence on one's own person indirectly through the happiness of others, or because one fears to endanger one's own interest by injuring others (morality of prudence). The special content of the egoistical principles of morality will depend on the mental pictures which we form of what constitutes our own, or others', happiness. A man will determine the content of his egoistical striving in accordance with what he regards as the good things of life (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from various evils, and so on).

[ 19 ] The purely conceptual content of an action is to be regarded as yet another kind of motive. This content refers not to the particular action only, as with the mental picture of one's own pleasures, but to the derivation of an action from a system of moral principles. These moral principles, in the form of abstract concepts, may regulate the individual's moral life without his worrying himself about the origin of the concepts. In that case, we simply feel that submitting to a moral concept in the form of a commandment overshadowing our actions, is a moral necessity. The establishment of this necessity we leave to those who demand moral subjection from us, that is, to the moral authority that we acknowledge (the head of the family, the state, social custom, the authority of the church, divine revelation). It is a special kind of these moral principles when the commandment is made known to us not through an external authority but through our own inner life (moral autonomy). In this case we hear the voice to which we have to submit ourselves, in our own souls. This voice expresses itself as conscience.

[ 20 ] It is a moral advance when a man no longer simply accepts the commands of an outer or inner authority as the motive of his action, but tries to understand the reason why a particular maxim of behaviour should act as a motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority to action out of moral insight. At this level of morality a man will try to find out the requirements of the moral life and will let his actions be determined by the knowledge of them. Such requirements are

the greatest possible good of mankind purely for its own sake;

the progress of civilization, or the moral evolution of mankind towards ever greater perfection;

the realization of individual moral aims grasped by pure intuition.

[ 21 ] The greatest possible good of mankind will naturally be understood in different ways by different people. This maxim refers not to any particular mental picture of this “good” but to the fact that everyone who acknowledges this principle strives to do whatever, in his opinion, most promotes the good of mankind.

[ 22 ] The progress of civilization, for those to whom the blessings of civilization bring a feeling of pleasure, turns out to be a special case of the foregoing moral principle. Of course, they will have to take into the bargain the decline and destruction of a number of things that also contribute to the general good. It is also possible, however, that some people regard the progress of civilization as a moral necessity quite apart from the feeling of pleasure that it brings. For them, this becomes a special moral principle in addition to the previous one.

[ 23 ] The principle of the progress of civilization, like that of the general good, is based on a mental picture, that is, on the way we relate the content of our moral ideas to particular experiences (percepts). The highest conceivable moral principle, however, is one that from the start contains no such reference to particular experiences, but springs from the source of pure intuition and only later seeks any reference to percepts, that is, to life. Here the decision as to what is to be willed proceeds from an authority very different from that of the foregoing cases. If a man holds to the principle of the general good, he will, in all his actions, first ask what his ideals will contribute to this general good. If a man upholds the principle of the progress of civilization, he will act similarly. But there is a still higher way which does not start from one and the same particular moral aim in each case, but sees a certain value in all moral principles and always asks whether in the given case this or that principle is the more important. It may happen that in some circumstances a man considers the right aim to be the progress of civilization, in others the promotion of the general good, and in yet another the promotion of his own welfare, and in each case makes that the motive of his action. But if no other ground for decision claims more than second place, then conceptual intuition itself comes first and foremost into consideration. All other motives now give way, and the idea behind an action alone becomes its motive.

[ 24 ] Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have singled out as the highest the one that works as pure thinking or practical reason. Among the motives, we have just singled out conceptual intuition as the highest. On closer inspection it will at once be seen that at this level of morality driving force and motive coincide; that is, neither a predetermined characterological disposition nor the external authority of an accepted moral principle influences our conduct. The action is therefore neither a stereotyped one which merely follows certain rules, nor is it one which we automatically perform in response to an external impulse, but it is an action determined purely and simply by its own ideal content.

[ 25 ] Such an action presupposes the capacity for moral intuitions. Whoever lacks the capacity to experience for himself the particular moral principle for each single situation, will never achieve truly individual willing.

[ 26 ] Kant's principle of morality—Act so that the basis of your action may be valid for all men—is the exact opposite of ours. His principle means death to all individual impulses of action. For me, the standard can never be the way all men would act, but rather what, for me, is to be done in each individual case.

[ 27 ] A superficial judgment might raise the following objection to these arguments: How can an action be individually made to fit the special case and the special situation, and yet at the same time be determined by intuition in a purely ideal way? This objection rests upon a confusion of the moral motive with the perceptible content of an action. The latter may be a motive, and actually is one in the case of the progress of civilization, or when we act from egoism, and so forth, but in an action based on pure moral intuition it is not the motive. Of course, my “I” takes notice of these perceptual contents, but it does not allow itself to be determined by them. The content is used only to construct a cognitive concept, but the corresponding moral concept is not derived by the “I” from the object. The cognitive concept of a given situation facing me is at the same time a moral concept only if I take the standpoint of a particular moral principle. If I were to base my conduct only on the general principle of the development of civilization, then my way through life would be tied down to a fixed route. From every occurrence which I perceive and which concerns me, there springs at the same time a moral duty: namely, to do my little bit towards seeing that this occurrence is made to serve the development of civilization. In addition to the concept which reveals to me the connections of events or objects according to the laws of nature, there is also a moral label attached to them which for me, as a moral person, gives ethical directions as to how I have to conduct myself. Such a moral label is justified on its own ground; at a higher level it coincides with the idea which reveals itself to me when I am faced with the concrete instance.

[ 28 ] Men vary greatly in their capacity for intuition. In one, ideas just bubble up; another acquires them with much labour. The situations in which men live and which provide the scenes of their actions are no less varied. The conduct of a man will therefore depend on the manner in which his faculty of intuition works in a given situation. The sum of ideas which are effective in us, the concrete content of our intuitions, constitutes what is individual in each of us, notwithstanding the universality of the world of ideas. In so far as this intuitive content applies to action, it constitutes the moral content of the individual. To let this content express itself in life is both the highest moral driving force and the highest motive a man can have, who sees that in this content all other moral principles are in the end united. We may call this point of view ethical individualism.

[ 29 ] The decisive factor of an intuitively determined action in any concrete instance is the discovery of the corresponding purely individual intuition. At this level of morality one can only speak of general concepts of morality (standards, laws) in so far as these result from the generalization of the individual impulses. General standards always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be derived. But the facts have first to be created by human action.

[ 30 ] If we seek out the rules (conceptual principles) underlying the actions of individuals, peoples, and epochs, we obtain a system of ethics which is not so much a science of moral laws as a natural history of morality. It is only the laws obtained in this way that are related to human action as the laws of nature are related to a particular phenomenon. These laws, however, are by no means identical with the impulses on which we base our actions. If we want to understand how a man's action arises from his moral will, we must first study the relation of this will to the action. Above all, we must keep our eye on those actions in which this relation is the determining factor. If I, or someone else, reflect upon such an action afterwards, we can discover what moral principles come into question with regard to it. While I am performing the action I am influenced by a moral maxim in so far as it can live in me intuitively; it is bound up with my love for the objective that I want to realize through my action. I ask no man and no rule, “Shall I perform this action?”—but carry it out as soon as I have grasped the idea of it. This alone makes it my action. If a man acts only because he accepts certain moral standards, his action is the outcome of the principles which compose his moral code. He merely carries out orders. He is a superior automaton. Inject some stimulus to action into his mind, and at once the clockwork of his moral principles will set itself in motion and run its prescribed course, so as to result in an action which is Christian, or humane, or seemingly unselfish, or calculated to promote the progress of civilization. Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act. I act, at this level of morality, not because I acknowledge a lord over me, or an external authority, or a so-called inner voice; I acknowledge no external principle for my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, namely, my love of the action. I do not work out mentally whether my action is good or bad; I carry it out because I love it. My action will be “good” if my intuition, steeped in love, finds its right place within the intuitively experienceable world continuum; it will be “bad” if this is not the case. Again, I do not ask myself, “How would another man act in my position?”—but I act as I, this particular individuality, find I have occasion to do. No general usage, no common custom, no maxim applying to all men, no moral standard is my immediate guide, but my love for the deed. I feel no compulsion, neither the compulsion of nature which guides me by my instincts, nor the compulsion of the moral commandments, but I want simply to carry out what lies within me.

[ 31 ] Those who defend general moral standards might reply to these arguments that if everyone strives to live his own life and do what he pleases, there can be no distinction between a good deed and a crime; every corrupt impulse that lies within me has as good a claim to express itself as has the intention of serving the general good. What determines me as a moral being cannot be the mere fact of my having conceived the idea of an action, but whether I judge it to be good or evil. Only in the former case should I carry it out.

[ 32 ] My reply to this very obvious objection, which is nevertheless based on a misapprehension of my argument, is this: If we want to understand the nature of the human will, we must distinguish between the path which leads this will to a certain degree of development and the unique character which the will assumes as it approaches this goal. On the path towards this goal the standards play their rightful part. The goal consists of the realization of moral aims grasped by pure intuition. Man attains such aims to the extent that he is able to raise himself at all to the intuitive world of ideas. In any particular act of will such moral aims will generally have other elements mixed in with them, either as driving force or as motive. Nevertheless intuition may still be wholly or partly the determining factor in the human will. What one should do, that one does; one provides the stage upon which obligation becomes deed; one's own action is what one brings forth from oneself. Here the impulse can only be wholly individual. And, in truth, only an act of will that springs from intuition can be an individual one. To regard evil, the deed of a criminal, as an expression of the human individuality in the same sense as one regards the embodiment of pure intuition is only possible if blind instincts are reckoned as part of the human individuality. But the blind instinct that drives a man to crime does not spring from intuition, and does not belong to what is individual in him, but rather to what is most general in him, to what is equally present in all individuals and out of which a man works his way by means of what is individual in him. What is individual in me is not my organism with its instincts and its feelings but rather the unified world of ideas which lights up within this organism. My instincts, urges and passions establish no more than that I belong to the general species man; it is the fact that something of the idea world comes to expression in a particular way within these urges, passions and feelings that establishes my individuality. Through my instincts and cravings, I am the sort of man of whom there are twelve to the dozen; through the particular form of the idea by means of which I designate myself within the dozen as “I”, I am an individual. Only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others by the difference in my animal nature; through my thinking, that is, by actively grasping what expresses itself in my organism as idea, I distinguish myself from others. Therefore one cannot say of the action of a criminal that it proceeds from the idea within him. Indeed, the characteristic feature of criminal actions is precisely that they spring from the non-ideal elements in man.

[ 33 ] An action is felt to be free in so far as the reasons for it spring from the ideal part of my individual being; every other part of an action, irrespective of whether it is carried out under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation of a moral standard, is felt to be unfree.

[ 34 ] Man is free in so far as he is able to obey himself in every moment of his life. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called a free one in this sense. We have here considered what conditions are required for an intentional action to be felt as a free one; how this purely ethically understood idea of freedom comes to realization in the being of man will be shown in what follows.

[ 35 ] Acting out of freedom does not exclude the moral laws; it includes them, but shows itself to be on a higher level than those actions which are merely dictated by such laws. Why should my action be of less service to the public good when I have done it out of love than when I have done it only because I consider serving the public good to be my duty? The mere concept of duty excludes freedom because it does not acknowledge the individual element but demands that this be subject to a general standard. Freedom of action is conceivable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.

[ 36 ] But how is a social life possible for man if each one is only striving to assert his own individuality? This objection is characteristic of a false understanding of moralism. Such a moralist believes that a social community is possible only if all men are united by a communally fixed moral order. What this kind of moralist does not understand is just the unity of the world of ideas. He does not see that the world of ideas working in me is no other than the one working in my fellow man. Admittedly, this unity is but an outcome of practical experience. But in fact it cannot be anything else. For if it could be known in any other way than by observation, then in its own sphere universal standards rather than individual experience would be the rule. Individuality is possible only if every individual being knows of others through individual observation alone. I differ from my fellow man, not at all because we are living in two entirely different spiritual worlds, but because from the world of ideas common to us both we receive different intuitions. He wants to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both really conceive out of the idea, and do not obey any external impulses (physical or spiritual), then we cannot but meet one another in like striving, in common intent. A moral misunderstanding, a clash, is impossible between men who are morally free. Only the morally unfree who follow their natural instincts or the accepted commands of duty come into conflict with their neighbours if these do not obey the same instincts and the same commands as themselves. To live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will, is the fundamental maxim of free men. They know no other obligation than what their will puts itself in unison with intuitively; how they will direct their will in a particular case, their faculty for ideas will decide.

[ 37 ] Were the ability to get on with one another not a basic part of human nature, no external laws would be able to implant it in us. It is only because human individuals are one in spirit that they can live out their lives side by side. The free man lives in confidence that he and any other free man belong to one spiritual world, and that their intentions will harmonize. The free man does not demand agreement from his fellow man, but expects to find it because it is inherent in human nature. I am not here referring to the necessity for this or that external institution, but to the disposition, the attitude of soul, through which a man, aware of himself among his fellows, most clearly expresses the ideal of human dignity.

[ 38 ] There are many who will say that the concept of the free man which I have here developed is a chimera nowhere to be found in practice; we have to do with actual human beings, from whom we can only hope for morality if they obey some moral law, that is, if they regard their moral task as a duty and do not freely follow their inclinations and loves. I do not doubt this at all. Only a blind man could do so. But if this is to be the final conclusion, then away with all this hypocrisy about morality! Let us then simply say that human nature must be driven to its actions as long as it is not free. Whether his unfreedom is forced on him by physical means or by moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his unlimited sexual desire or because he is bound by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view. Only let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by a force other than himself. But in the midst of all this framework of compulsion there arise men who establish themselves as free spirits in all the welter of customs, legal codes, religious observances, and so forth. They are free in so far as they obey only themselves, unfree in so far as they submit to control. Which of us can say that he is really free in all his actions? Yet in each of us there dwells a deeper being in which the free man finds expression.

[ 39 ] Our life is made up of free and unfree actions. We cannot, however, think out the concept of man completely without coming upon the free spirit as the purest expression of human nature. Indeed, we are men in the true sense only in so far as we are free.

[ 40 ] This is an ideal, many will say. Doubtless; but it is an ideal which is a real element in us working its way to the surface of our nature. It is no ideal just thought up or dreamed, but one which has life, and which announces itself clearly even in the least perfect form of its existence. If man were merely a natural creature, there would be no such thing as the search for ideals, that is, for ideas which for the moment are not effective but whose realization is required. With the things of the outer world, the idea is determined by the percept; we have done our share when we have recognized the connection between idea and percept. But with the human being it is not so. The sum total of his existence is not fully determined without his own self; his true concept as a moral being (free spirit) is not objectively united from the start with the percept-picture “man” needing only to be confirmed by knowledge afterwards. Man must unite his concept with the percept of man by his own activity. Concept and percept coincide in this case only if man himself makes them coincide. This he can do only if he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, if he has found the concept of his own self. In the objective world a dividing line is drawn by our organization between percept and concept; knowledge overcomes this division. In our subjective nature this division is no less present; man overcomes it in the course of his development by bringing the concept of himself to expression in his outward existence. Hence not only man's intellectual but also his moral life leads to his twofold nature, perceiving (direct experience) and thinking. The intellectual life overcomes this two-fold nature by means of knowledge, the moral life overcomes it through the actual realization of the free spirit. Every existing thing has its inborn concept (the law of its being and doing), but in external objects this concept is indivisibly bound up with the percept, and separated from it only within our spiritual organization. In man concept and percept are, at first, actually separated, to be just as actually united by him.

One might object: At every moment of a man's life there is a definite concept corresponding to our percept of him just as with everything else. I can form for myself the concept of a particular type of man, and I may even find such a man given to me as a percept; if I now add to this the concept of a free spirit, then I have two concepts for the same object.

[ 41 ] Such an objection is one-sided. As object of perception I am subjected to continual change. As a child I was one thing, another as a youth, yet another as a man. Indeed, at every moment the percept-picture of myself is different from what it was the moment before. These changes may take place in such a way that it is always the same man (the type) who reveals himself in them, or that they represent the expression of a free spirit. To such changes my action, as object of perception, is subjected.

[ 42 ] The perceptual object “man” has in it the possibility of transforming itself, just as the plant seed contains the possibility of becoming a complete plant. The plant transforms itself because of the objective law inherent in it; the human being remains in his incomplete state unless he takes hold of the material for transformation within him and transforms himself through his own power. Nature makes of man merely a natural being; society makes of him a law-abiding being; only he himself can make of himself a free man. Nature releases man from her fetters at a definite stage in his development; society carries this development a stage further; he alone can give himself the final polish.

[ 43 ] The standpoint of free morality, then, does not declare the free spirit to be the only form in which a man can exist. It sees in the free spirit only the last stage of man's evolution. This is not to deny that conduct according to standards has its justification as one stage in evolution. Only we cannot acknowledge it as the absolute standpoint in morality. For the free spirit overcomes the standards in the sense that he does not just accept commandments as his motives but orders his action according to his own impulses (intuitions).

[ 44 ] When Kant says of duty: “Duty! Thou exalted and mighty name, thou that dost comprise nothing lovable, nothing ingratiating, but demandest submission,” thou that “settest up a law ... before which all inclinations are silent, even though they secretly work against it,”⁵ then out of the consciousness of the free spirit, man replies: “Freedom! Thou kindly and human name, thou that dost comprise all that is morally most lovable, all that my manhood most prizes, and that makest me the servant of nobody, thou that settest up no mere law, but awaitest what my moral love itself will recognize as law because in the face of every merely imposed law it feels itself unfree.”

[ 45 ] This is the contrast between a morality based on mere law and a morality based on inner freedom.

[ 46 ] The philistine, who sees the embodiment of morality in an external code, may see in the free spirit even a dangerous person. But that is only because his view is narrowed down to a limited period of time. If he were able to look beyond this, he would at once find that the free spirit just as seldom needs to go beyond the laws of his state as does the philistine himself, and certainly never needs to place himself in real opposition to them. For the laws of the state, one and all, just like all other objective laws of morality, have had their origin in the intuitions of free spirits. There is no rule enforced by family authority that was not at one time intuitively grasped and laid down as such by an ancestor; similarly the conventional laws of morality are first of all established by definite men, and the laws of the state always originate in the head of a statesman. These leading spirits have set up laws over other men, and the only person who feels unfree is the one who forgets this origin and either turns these laws into extra-human commandments, objective moral concepts of duty independent of man, or else turns them into the commanding voice within himself which he supposes, in a falsely mystical way, to be compelling him. On the other hand, the person who does not overlook this origin, but seeks man within it, will count such laws as belonging to the same world of ideas from which he, too, draws his moral intuitions. If he believes he has better intuitions, he will try to put them into the place of the existing ones; if he finds the existing ones justified, he will act in accordance with them as if they were his own.

[ 47 ] We must not coin the formula: Man exists only in order to realize a moral world order which is quite distinct from himself. Anyone who maintains that this is so, remains, in his knowledge of man, at the point where natural science stood when it believed that a bull has horns in order to butt. Scientists, happily, have thrown out the concept of purpose as a dead theory. Ethics finds it more difficult to get free of this concept. But just as horns do not exist for the sake of butting, but butting through the presence of horns, so man does not exist for the sake of morality, but morality through the presence of man. The free man acts morally because he has a moral idea; he does not act in order that morality may come into being. Human individuals, with the moral ideas belonging to their nature, are the prerequisites of a moral world order.

[ 48 ] The human individual is the source of all morality and the centre of earthly life. State and society exist only because they have arisen as a necessary consequence of the life of individuals. That state and society should in turn react upon individual life is no more difficult to comprehend than that the butting which is the result of the presence of horns reacts in turn upon the further development of the horns of the bull, which would become stunted through prolonged disuse. Similarly, the individual would become stunted if he led an isolated existence outside human society. Indeed, this is just why the social order arises, so that it may in turn react favourably upon the individual.

• 1. The way in which the above view has influenced psychology, physiology, etc., in various directions, has been set forth by the author in works published after this book. Here he is concerned only with characterizing the results of an unbiased observation of thinking itself.
• 2. The passage from the beginning of the chapter down to this point was added or rewritten for the 1918 edition.
• 3. A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phaenomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins.
• 4. Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. xviii, No. 3.
• 5. Critique of Practical Reason, chapter iii.