The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A journey through the most recent German poetry

With a shrug of the shoulders, our present-day generation remembers the time when a philosophical wave swept through the whole of German intellectual life. The powerful current of the times, which seized the minds at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century and boldly set itself the highest conceivable tasks, is currently regarded as a regrettable aberration. Anyone who dares to contradict the "fantasies of Fichte" or the "insubstantial thoughts and word games" of Hegel is simply portrayed as a dilettante "who has as little idea of the spirit of modern natural science as he does of the solidity and rigor of the philosophical method". Only Kant and Schopenhauer find favor with our contemporaries. The former succeeds in seemingly deriving from his teachings the somewhat sparse philosophical chunks on which modern research is based; the latter, in addition to his strictly scientific achievements, also wrote works in a light style and about things that need not be too remote even for people with the most modest intellectual horizon. But for that striving for the highest peaks of the world of thought, for that impetus of the spirit that paralleled our classical artistic epoch in the scientific field, there is now a lack of sense and understanding. The alarming aspect of this phenomenon only becomes apparent when one considers that a permanent turning away from that intellectual direction would be for the Germans a loss of their self, a break with the spirit of the people. For that striving arose from a deep need of the German essence. It does not occur to us to want to deny the manifold errors and one-sidedness that Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken and others committed in their bold undertakings in the realm of idealism, but the tendency that inspired them should not be misjudged in its grandeur. It is so appropriate to the people of thinkers. Not the lively sense for the immediate reality, for the outside of nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their magnificent, imperishable creations, is characteristic of the Germans, but instead an unrelenting urge of the spirit for the basis of things, for the seemingly hidden, deeper causes of the nature that surrounds us. While the Greek spirit lived in a wonderful world of forms and shapes, the German, who withdrew into himself and had less contact with nature and more with his heart, with his own inner being, had to seek his conquests in the realm of pure thought. And that is why it was German how Fichte and his followers approached the world and life. That is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received, that is why the whole life of the nation was gripped by them for a time. But that is also why we must not break with this school of thought. Overcoming the errors, but natural development on the foundation laid at that time, must become our watchword. It is not what these minds found or thought they found, but how they faced up to the tasks of research that is of lasting value. They felt the need to penetrate into the deepest secrets of the mystery of the world, without revelation, without experience limited to chance, purely through the power inherent in their own thinking, and they were convinced that human thinking was capable of the impetus necessary for this. How different are things today? We have lost all confidence in thinking. Observation and experience are regarded as the only tools of research. What is not tangible is considered uncertain. There is no understanding for the fact that our thinking can look deeper into the workings of the world than all external observation is capable of, without hanging on the shackles of the senses, relying purely on itself. One renounces any solution to the great riddles of creation and wastes endless effort on detailed research, which is of no value without great, guiding points of view. The only thing we forget is that with this view we are approaching a point of view that we believe we have long since overcome. For the rejection of all thought and the insistence on experience is, more deeply understood, quite the same as the blind faith in revelation of the religions. For what is the latter based on? But only on the fact that truths are handed down to us ready-made, which we must accept without having to weigh up the reasons in our own thinking. We hear the message, but we are denied insight into the reasons. It is no different with blind faith in experience. According to the naturalists and the strict philologists, we should merely collect and organize the facts and so on, without going into the inner reasons. Here, too, we should simply accept the finished truths without any insight into the forces behind the phenomena. Believe what God has revealed and do not search for the reasons, says theology; register what takes place before your eyes, but do not think about the causes behind it, for that is in vain, says the latest philosophy. And only in the field of ethics, where have we got to! The common thread that runs through the thinking of all the minds of the classical period of our science is the recognition of free will as the supreme power of the human spirit. This recognition is what, properly understood, makes man alone appear to us in his dignity. The religions which demand of us submission to the commandments which an external power gives us, and which see in this submission alone the moral, diminish this dignity. It is not appropriate for a being at the highest stage of organic development to submit without volition to the paths marked out for it by another; it must prescribe for itself the direction and goal of its activity. To obey not commandments but one's own insight, to recognize no power of the world that would dictate to us what is moral, that is freedom in its true form. This view makes us the masters of our own destiny. Fichte's meaningful words are borne by this conception: "Break down all upon me, and you earth and you heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and all you elements, - foam and rage, and in wild struggle wear away the last little sun-dust of the body which I call mine: - my will alone with its firm plan shall hover bold and cold above the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more lasting than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal like it." What was the basis of German idealistic philosophy: breaking with dogma in the field of thought, breaking with commandment in the field of action, must be the unalterable goal of further development. Man must create happiness and satisfaction from within himself and not let it come to him from outside. Pessimism and other similar diseases of the times arise purely from the inability to rely on an energetic self and to work powerfully from there. One does not know how to set oneself specific tasks in life that one could cope with, one dreams oneself into vague, unclear ideals and then complains when one does not achieve what one actually has no idea about. Ask one of today's pessimists what he actually wants and what he despairs of? He does not know. Don't think that I'm referring to Eduard von Hartmann's pessimism, which has nothing in common with the usual lamentation about the misery of life. (How highly I regard Hartmann's world view can be seen from the introduction to the second volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific writings. Kürschner's German National Literature.)

In spite of all the progress we have made in the most diverse fields of culture, we cannot deny that the signature of our age leaves much, very much to be desired. Our progress is for the most part only in breadth and not in depth. But only progress in depth is decisive for the content of an age. It may be that the abundance of facts that have penetrated us from all sides makes it seem understandable that we have momentarily lost our view into the depths over the view into the breadth; we only wish that the broken thread of progressive development will soon be tied up again and that the new facts will be grasped from the spiritual height once gained.

What we are about to consider now is completely outside the scope of anthroposophical considerations. It is only indirectly related to it, and is intended to be a purely philosophical consideration. The direct connection is that it is often claimed that anthroposophical spiritual science cannot stand up in the forum of science, that it appears like pure dilettantism that a serious philosopher should not engage with. It will now be shown that it is not anthroposophy that is amateurish, but philosophy.

At present, philosophy is a wholly unsuitable instrument for elevating oneself to anthroposophy. Let us first orient ourselves in philosophy. Let us see how philosophy has developed historically. Then we want to subject the hereditary evil to a certain consideration. We want to show how philosophy today suffers from the fact that at a certain time all philosophical thinking became entangled in a spider's web, and is therefore incapable of gaining a broader perspective in relation to reality.

We must face the fact that all the history of philosophy begins with Thales. In more recent times, attempts have been made to extend philosophy backwards, that is, to go beyond Greek philosophy. People speak of Indian and Egyptian philosophy. Those who do not construct an arbitrary concept of philosophy say that an important period did indeed begin with Thales. If we ask what it is that intervenes in human evolution, what was not there before, we must say: it is conceptual thinking. It was not present before. This is characteristically different from everything that was there earlier. In the past, only what the seer had seen was said. In Plato, the gift of prophecy still predominates. The first conceptual thinker, whose system is no longer based on the old gift of prophecy, is Aristotle. In him we have the purely intellectual system. Everything else was preparation. The gift of living and thinking in pure concepts begins to find its most outstanding expression in Aristotle. It is no mere coincidence that Aristotle is called the “father of logic”. To the seer, logic is revealed at the same time as seeing. But to form concepts, one needed not only his logic, but also the fact that in the following period the revelations of Christianity were re-shaped into thought formations with Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian thinking spread both to the Arab cultural area in Asia, to Spain and to Western Europe, as well as to the south of Europe, where Christianity was influenced by Aristotelian thinking. Anyone observing the 7th to 9th centuries can see that Christian teachers, like anti-Christian elements, expressed their teachings in Aristotelian form, and this remained so until the 13th century.

We will see in a moment what the focus of Aristotelian thought is. In the middle of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas spread the so-called Thomistic philosophy; it is based on Christian revelation and Aristotelian logic. The Christian teachings were not taught in a strictly adhered form of thought, but it was intended to show that these teachings could also be defended in Aristotelian forms of thought, against the Arabs and their students, such as Averroes, who also thought in these forms of thought. They wanted to show how one could use the correctly understood Aristotle not for Arab teachings, but for Christianity. They wanted to refute the objections of the Arab thinkers; hence the zealous study of Thomas Aquinas. At that time, Aristotle dominated all of science, including, for example, medicine.

Now we have to characterize what the earlier scholasticism had of Aristotle. The thinking at that time was quite different from today's. If you compare it with what was done at that time, you have to say: in terms of content, life was poor then. The tremendous inventions were only made later. The essential thing about that time is the strictly trained thinking. Today people laugh at the strict definitions of scholasticism. But when you compare it to today's arbitrary understanding of all concepts, then you first feel the benefit of that view that there must be an understanding of the concepts. It takes a long time to define the concepts, but then you are working on solid ground.

In order to be able to orient ourselves further, we have to go into a few of Aristotle's concepts. He was a good interpreter for Christianity, even from the point of view of anthroposophy. A few concepts should show how sharply Aristotle thought. Aristotle distinguishes knowledge according to sense and intellect. The senses perceive this rose, this person, this stone. Then the intellect enters. It breaks down into an understanding of matter and form. All things contain matter and form. These two concepts take us a long way. Aristotle sees matter and form in every single natural thing that the senses perceive: consider a wolf. It eats nothing but lambs; then it consists of the same matter as the lambs, but a wolf will never become a lamb. What makes the two different is the form. We have the form of the lamb and the wolf. He identifies the underlying form with the genus lamb and the genus wolf. Aristotle makes a clear distinction between the genus and the generic concept. When we are confronted with a flock of lambs, we form the generic concept. What our concept determines in its form is an objective thing outside us, just as if we were to imagine the prototypes of the forms spreading invisibly throughout the world, spurting out the individual genera into which the indifferent matter is poured. Everything around us is based on the generic; for Aristotle, the material is indifferent.¹

With the scholastics, Albertus Magnus, we find what underlies the external entities. The earlier scholastic distinguishes universals before things, in things and after things. Albertus Magnus says about this: the universals before the thing are the thoughts of the divine entities. There we have the genus. These thoughts have flowed into the things. When man encounters things, he forms the universals according to the thing, which is the conceptual form. In this whole description of the development of thinking, there is only talk of sensible things. He identifies the outer sense with the “sense”. Everything else that is there is a concept to him. The generic concept is not identical to the genus. The whole thing is because people had lost the ancient gift of seeing, so that a philosophy could arise.

An old sage would not have understood at all how to make distinctions in this way, because he would have said: With the gift of prophecy, one can perceive the genus. It was only when the gift of prophecy dried up that the actual science emerged. It was only when man was left to his own devices that the necessity arose to develop a thinking art. Scholasticism arose under the influence of this important principle. In ancient times, the spiritual worlds were still accessible to man. Now the scholastics could refer all the more to Aristotle, because he spoke of the gift of prophecy: Ancient reports tell us that the stars are gods, but the human intellect can no longer make anything out of them. But we have no reason to doubt it.

Scholasticism replaced what was seen with revelation. It placed what was to be taught in the once inspired word. At first, humanity must become accustomed to developing the theory of thought in relation to external things. Where would it end if it were to roam into all possible supersensible things? We want to deny ourselves that; we want to educate ourselves in the things that are around us. So says Thomas Aquinas. When objects come to us, they are given to us for the senses. Then we are compelled to form concepts of them. Behind the things, divine powers rest, which we do not dare approach. We want to educate ourselves from thing to thing. Then, by strictly adhering to the sensual, we finally come to the highest concepts. So we adhered to two things: to the revealed teaching material, which is given in the scriptures, to which thinking does not approach. It has been taken over by the seers. Furthermore, they adhered to what was being worked out in the sensory reality. With this, we only just reach the Bible and Revelation. For a time, the higher world is withdrawn from human thought. But there is no final renunciation of the supersensible worlds. When man has conquered the sensual world, he can get a presentiment of the supersensible worlds. Man can free himself from the physical body and have revelation directly. But first the intellect must be trained. When the human being forms concepts about external things, these concepts depend on the human organization in form, but not in content. In scholastic epistemology, it is never considered that something unrecognized may remain. The objective enters into knowledge; only the form in which concepts are formed depends on the organization of the human mind.

This earlier scholasticism is called realism. It believed in the reality of content. Scholasticism then became nominalistic. People have lost touch with the objective external world. They said: the mind forms concepts; they are not real. The concepts became mere names; they were only abstractions. What is to be achieved with the concept is lost. Therefore, the nominalists had to say to themselves: Sensual reality is spreading before us. We summarize it as our minds will. Nothing real corresponds to our concepts. One must guard the actual revelation against human thinking and renounce all understanding. This view reached its climax in Zuther's saying that human reason is powerless, the deaf, blind, foolish fool who should not presume to approach the teaching material.

This is an important turning point. Luther condemns Aristotle. From this point on, the suggestion that gave birth to Kantianism goes. Kant was a Wolffian until the end of the sixties, like almost all philosophers at the time. Wolff taught: Reason is able to make something out about the supernatural worlds. He distinguishes between rational and empirical science. It is possible to gain a certain amount of human knowledge. The a posteriori knowledge has only relative validity.

[Gaps and deficiencies in the transcript. For a description of Wolff's philosophy, see the lecture of March 14, 1908 in this volume.]

At first, Kant also followed in Wolff's footsteps. Hume disturbed him. Hume developed skepticism. He said that no wall should be built between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. All knowledge is knowledge of habit; there is no rational knowledge. Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber. But he could not completely go along with it. He said: Hume is right; we gain everything from experience. Only mathematics is an exception; what it says has absolute validity. He therefore advocates two things. First, there are absolutely certain judgments a priori. Second, all knowledge must be gained from experience. But experience is governed by our judgments. We ourselves give laws to experience. Man confronts the world with his organization of thought. All experience is governed by our form of knowledge. Thus Kant linked Hume with Wolff.

Now man is ensnared in this philosophical web. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are exceptions. Individual natural scientists also follow this path. Helmholtz says: What man has before him is spun out of his organization. What we perceive of the thing is not even an image, but only a sign. The eye makes only perceptions on the surface. Man is completely ensnared in his subjectivity. The thing in itself remains unknown. – It had to be so. Nominalism has lost the spiritual behind the surface. The human interior has been enervated. The inner working becomes purely formal. If man wants to penetrate behind reality, his inner being gives him no answer. The whole of 19th-century philosophical thinking does not find its way out of this. Hartmann, for example, does not go beyond the idea. A simple comparison can clarify this. A seal contains the name Müller. Nothing, not even the smallest material thing, can come from the brass of the seal into the sealing wax. Consequently, nothing objective can come from the seal; the name Müller must form itself out of the sealing wax. The thinker is the sealing wax. Nothing passes from the object to the thinker. And yet the name Müller is in the sealing-wax. Thus we take the content out of the objective world, and yet it is the true content that we take out. If one takes only the material, it is true: nothing passes from the seal to the stamp and vice versa. But as soon as one sees the spirit, the higher principle, which can embrace the objective and the subjective, then the spirit passes in and out into the subjective and the objective. The spirit carries everything over from objectivity into subjectivity. The ego is objective and subjective in itself. Fichte showed that. -²

The entire epistemology of the 19th century resembles a dog chasing its own tail. You end up with: I have created everything. The world is my imagination. Everything has spurted out of my inner being. I also have the right to kill everything.

Kant uses very convoluted terms. Kant says: I have destroyed knowledge to make room for faith. He has limited knowledge and established a practical faith because everything is spun out of the subjective.

Kantianism is the last result of nominalism. Today the time for it has expired. Man must train his thinking again in reality in order to form real concepts; then we can recognize the supersensible truths again. The scholastic attitude is time-bound, the spiritual had to be withdrawn from thinking for a time. Now the revealed teaching material must again become teaching material to be examined. We must again examine everything with reason. It is a light with which one can penetrate everywhere. One can investigate, understand, grasp everything. Reason is the lowest form of clairvoyance, but it is a seeing, hearing, and intelligent power. Thus we extricate ourselves from the net. Philosophy must free itself from this net and allow itself to be fertilized by logic to achieve true thinking.

• 1. See note
• 2. The rest of the lecture was only recorded by the transcriber in fragmentary notes, as the following sentences show.

Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ]

At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not.

This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change?

We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science.

Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole.

I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind.

So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist.

Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking?

Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic.

Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine.

Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context.

Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history.

After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.

I Logic: Idea in itself
II Nature: Idea in its external being
III Spirit: Idea in its separateness

Soul—State—World-history
Art—Religion—Philosophy

When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction.

Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself.

Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea.

In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical.

I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything.

Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man).

Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite.

Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being.

Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back.

In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this.

Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea!

Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme!

In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality.

Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit.

Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution.

Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand.

You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question.

Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history.

Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

Notes:

1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German.

When my “Philosophy of Freedom” was printed in 1894, I personally handed the book over to Eduard von Hartmann. At the time, I was very keen to engage in a scientific discussion with this man about the fundamental views on which the structure of ideas in my book was based. My expectations in this regard seemed justified, since Eduard von Hartmann had been truly friendly in his approach to my literary work from the very beginning. Every time I sent him my writings published before the “Philosophy of Freedom,” he delighted me with often extensive written responses. In 1889 I had the opportunity of a long conversation with him, the subject-matter of which was the epistemological questions agitating the philosophical world at that time. And I expected much from a discussion of my book, particularly because, on the one hand, I was a warm admirer of the idealism of his philosophy, an attentive observer of his treatment of important vital questions, and, on the other hand, his decided opponent in all essentials of the epistemological foundation of a world view. In one important point, however, I was in complete agreement with him: the philosophical ethics of unselfish devotion of the human soul to the historical process of humanity as an ethical motive. Of course, I could not be taken in by the naive belief that I could convert the creator of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” to my points of view in fundamental matters. But Eduard von Hartmann was always inclined to respond in a truly loving way to views that were contrary to his own; and his responsiveness led to those fruitful confrontations that are desirable in the field of world-view striving. Besides, even then it was far from my mind to make the estimation of a personality dependent on the extent to which I could be an opponent or a supporter of his ideas. The esteem in which I held Eduard von Hartmann led me to ask him in 1891 to accept the dedication of my small writing: “Truth and Science. Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom”. He agreed. And so I was able to have the words printed on the second page of this writing in all sincerity: “Dr. Eduard von Hartmann in warm admiration dedicated by the author.” This happened despite the fact that Eduard von Hartmann had to completely reject the content of the writing from the point of view of his worldview.

I was not mistaken in my expectations regarding a discussion of the “Philosophy of Freedom.” For a few weeks after the presentation of the book, Eduard von Hartmann not only honored me with a friendly letter, but he also sent me the copy of the book that he had received, with his comments and objections, some of which went into great detail. He had entered them almost page by page into the book. At the end he had summarized his overall impression in a few sentences. He had been so sharp in his judgment that I could see in his words the fate that my world view would have to meet within contemporary thought. By concluding the present remarks with a discussion of this judgment, it will be possible for me to show how, from the beginning of my literary career, I strove to establish the epistemological foundation for what I later attempted to present in a series of writings as “spiritual science” or anthroposophy and on whose development I continue to work to this day.

In the 1880s, when I began my writing career, people were confronted with a world view that had basically blocked any access to a world of true reality for human cognition. It seemed necessary to me, above all, to strive for a scientifically sound epistemological basis in matters of world view. The opinions one encountered in this field at that time could be characterized from a myriad of contemporary writings. The one of the poet and philosopher Robert Hamerling shall be cited here. This again for the reason that I found myself in the most fundamental epistemological questions in complete opposition to this personality, whom I highly revered and esteemed. Robert Hamerling was writing his significant “Atomistik des Willens” (Atomism of the Will) at that time. Right at the beginning of this book, we encounter the following thought: “Certain stimuli produce a smell in our olfactory organ... Thus a rose has no scent unless there is a smeller to smell it. Certain vibrations of the air produce a sound in our ear. Thus a sound has no existence unless there is an ear to hear it. The shot of a gun would not resound if no one heard it... Anyone who grasps this will understand what a naive fallacy it is to believe that in addition to the view or idea we call “horse”, there is another, the real “horse”, of which our view is a kind of image. Outside of me there is only – let me repeat it – only the sum of those conditions which cause an idea to arise in my mind that I call a “horse.” Hamerling adds to these sentences: “If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your ‘mind’ rears up before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read a single line further; leave this and all other books dealing with philosophical and scientific matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact impartially and hold it in your thoughts.” The thoughts that Hamerling expresses were so much a part of the thinking habits of epistemologists in the second half of the nineteenth century that as early as 1879 Gustav Theodor Fechner wrote about them in his book “Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht” (“The Day View Compared to the Night View”): “They are the thoughts of the whole thinking world around me. No matter how much and about what they may quarrel, philosophers and physicists, materialists and idealists, Darwinians and anti-Darwinians, orthodox and rationalists all join hands in it. It is not a building block, but a cornerstone of today's world view... What we think we see and hear in the world around us is all just our inner appearance, an illusion that one can praise oneself for, as I read recently; but it remains an illusion. Light and sound in the external world, ruled by mechanical laws and forces and not yet penetrated by consciousness, are only blind, mute waves that cross the ether and the air from more or less agitated material points, and only when they reach the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they reach a certain point of it, do they become visible through the spiritualist magic of this medium. and air, and only when they encounter the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they encounter a certain point of it, are they transformed by the spiritualist magic of this medium into luminous, sounding vibrations. The reason, essence, and details of this magic are debated; the fact is agreed upon; and of all the theories of thought and knowledge, in which philosophy now wants to exhaust and empty itself, as if it wanted to give birth to another philosophy, , none of them leads to doubting the correctness of this fact, unless it is to declare the doubt insoluble or to shatter the world into tiny specks of dust that illuminate only themselves but not the world."

For anyone who has kept his thinking far removed from such considerations, they may appear to be worthless fantasies. In the individual sciences and in activities more closely related to everyday life, they do not arise in such a way that one would have to take them into account. But anyone who wants to have a say in matters of world view must deal with them. In the second volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – in the section “The World as Illusion” – one finds a detailed presentation of the most essential forms in which these considerations have been expressed in recent times. Thirty years ago it would have been fruitless to place oneself in the current direction of thought with a Weltanschhauung without taking a stand on these considerations. For it was on this ground that judgments were formed as to whether a world-view had a legitimate starting-point or not. Gideon Spicker, who wrote a stimulating work on 'Lessing's World-View' and then published the two significant volumes 'From the Cloister to the Academic Chair' and 'At the Turning-point of the Christian World-Period', wrote to me wrote to me in 1886, after the publication of my “Epistemology of the Goethean World View”, that it would be necessary to finally stop constantly pondering the question of how and within what limits man can know. It would be better to start to really know something. But the observation of the time conditions in this field made it seem hopeless to come up with a worldview that did not advance its secure epistemological foundation.

The most diverse formulations of Schopenhauer's sentence: the world is my representation, presented itself at that time in all possible variations. Volkelt, the subtle dissector of Kant, the judicious author of the epistemological book “Erfahrung und Denken” (Experience and Thought), wrote at that time: “The first fundamental proposition that the philosopher must clearly realize is that our knowledge extends to nothing more than our ideas. Our perceptions are the only things we directly experience; and precisely because we experience them directly, not even the most radical doubt can rob us of the knowledge of them. By contrast, knowledge that goes beyond our perceptions – I am using this term here in the broadest sense, so that it includes all mental activity – is not protected from doubt. Therefore, at the beginning of philosophizing, all knowledge that goes beyond the representations must be explicitly presented as open to doubt.” Such assertions had become self-evident truths for philosophers in the last third of the nineteenth century; they still are for many today who are to be heard when it comes to judging whether a world view is based on legitimate ground or not.

One must familiarize oneself with the way of thinking that leads to such assertions if one wants to have a say in matters of world view in our time. It seemed to me that such familiarization showed that the fundamental questions about the process of knowledge must be posed quite differently from the way they are by many epistemologists, if the train of thought that is taken in such questions is not to lead to one standing at the end before a self-dissolution of that train of thought. To seek clarity in this area, clarity about the value and justification of the ideas under consideration, was the task I sought to solve through the research presented in my booklet “Truth and Science” and in my book “Philosophy of Freedom”. “Truth and Science” was intended as a ‘philosophizing consciousness coming to an understanding with itself’. This is also the title of the work as printed in the doctoral dissertation, which already contains its essential content.

At the time when I wrote these writings, I believed, and I still believe today, that the fundamental error of many epistemologies is to be found in the fact that the process of knowledge is viewed quite wrongly at its very root. One first thinks of the opposite: man and the world. One imagines that the world has an effect on man. The latter receives impressions from it. From these impressions, the world view in which he lives imaginatively is formed. From this thought, it is an almost natural progression to the opinion that everything that occurs within human consciousness is only a product of consciousness. Any thing or being of an external world lies beyond consciousness; for only when that which remains unknown, unconscious, of the external world is taken up by consciousness does it become a human world view. What things or beings are like outside of consciousness is a question that goes beyond the human capacity for knowledge. This mode of thought appears in various philosophies, tied up in tangles of concepts that are often thought of in such an unoriginal form, so far removed from their source, that some who have become accustomed to them cannot help but consider anyone who wants to reduce these concepts to their simple form to be a dilettante.

It cannot be denied that the train of thought described appears so firmly established from a certain point of view that an objection becomes almost impossible, and that Hamerling could say with some justification that anyone who does not accept this view lacks the ability to perceive a fact impartially and to retain it in thought. My aim was not to refute or criticize this way of thinking in the usual sense. I did not ask the question: to what extent is this line of thought incorrect? Rather, I tried to answer the other question exhaustively: to what extent is it correct? And it became clear to me that the epistemologists had made the mistake of not completing the answer. They had stopped halfway. A further progression leads from their starting point to different results than those asserted by them. Anyone with a sense for certain more subtle laws of human logic and psychology knows that one very often fails to recognize the truth value of a thought by allowing oneself to be captivated by refuting ideas that arise prematurely in the soul. In this way, fatal traps arise for an unbiased way of looking at things, which can prevent one from arriving at the right cognitive goals. In contrast, it is often better to immerse oneself in a train of thought and follow its course. If one does not lose sight of the scope and range of the individual thought processes, and does not allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the striving for one-sidedness that so many trains of thought entail, then even one-sided and imperfect thoughts can lead to the realm of truth.

Starting from such premises, I tried to arrive at epistemological results. What I found seems to me to be completely certain even today. The way man is placed in the world, he must admit to himself that his world picture is given to him as the essence of his organization demands. In this fundamental idea one can know oneself to be in agreement with Kantians, neo-Kantians, physiologists and their followers. One can profess with them: what appears to human consciousness occurs in such a way as the conditions of the perceiving human being demand. If one now clings to this idea and develops it one-sidedly in thought, without connecting with the reality of the human being in the progression, then one blocks access to a true grasp of the capacity for knowledge. I have tried to explain this in detail in my two aforementioned writings. The first form in which man's world view is given can be followed by a spiritual process in man's inner being that transforms this world view in that it deprives it of its subjective character and allows cognition to submerge into the objective. One can, of course, be of the opinion that this process is only a continuation, a kind of mental or methodical revision of the given world view. If one holds this view, then one will be able to see nothing in all that can occur within consciousness other than a kind of effect of consciousness of the true reality that remains beyond knowledge. I have now endeavored to show that cognition, in its further progress, overcomes the form given to the world picture by the human organization at its first appearance. However, in order to be aware of this fact, cognition must reach an activity that I have called that in pure thinking. This activity is denied from the outset by many epistemologists. But one could, to paraphrase Hamerling, say: anyone who does not accept the idea that an activity is possible in the inner thought process that moves only in inner, living thought processes and that uses the ideas of the sensory world no longer as images but only as illustrative images, lacks the ability to grasp a fact impartially and to hold it in thought. My epistemological research led to the conclusion that man, through his organization, first cuts himself out of true reality into an incomplete one, so to speak, and that he reintroduces himself into this true reality in the further progress of his knowledge, in the elevation to pure thinking. The aim of the books I have mentioned is to show that human knowledge remains unrecognized if we try to view it as an image that is indifferent to the objective process of the world, and then have to admit that it cannot be one. Knowledge presented itself to me as a developmental process rooted in the human being, leading this being from one stage to another. In his cognitive interaction with the external world, the human being initially experiences his own nature incompletely, in that his organization presents him with an incomplete picture of reality. In the further inner experience, he transforms the first form of his world view, which is an incomplete image of the external world, so that he stands in the true reality with his inner experience. Seen in this light, the process of knowledge appears different at its very root than it does to many epistemologists. A comparison can clarify what is being considered here. It is, of course, meant with all the limitations that apply to all comparisons. One can examine the substantial nature of the cereal plant with regard to the extent to which cereals are suitable as human food due to the substances they contain. This investigation can be carried out in a very scientific way. And yet, from a certain point of view, it can be said that such an investigation says nothing about the nature of the plant, insofar as this is expressed in the processes that lead to growth, flowering and fruit bearing. However, the inner nature of the plant is revealed in these processes. And what the plant becomes as human food is, in a sense, a side effect of the plant's nature. The human cognitive process is, by its very nature, a link in human development. What happens through it has its significance within this development. The fact that at a certain stage of this development, a reflection of the external world also comes to light in the activity of thoughts and ideas is not peculiar to the cognitive process in a similar sense to the entry of grain into human nutrition. If one thinks one must pose the main question of epistemology in such a way that one only looks at it: to what extent is cognition a reflection of an external world, then one shifts the consideration just as one would shift the main botanical question if one wanted to seek the essence of the plant through food chemistry.

In the final section of the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” one finds a “sketchy presentation of an anthroposophy” (written in 1914). In it I attempt to show that a completely organic progression must be conceived, from the basic epistemological views of my writing 'Truth and Knowledge' and my 'Philosophy of Freedom', to the content of 'spiritual science' or 'anthroposophy', as I have further developed them. But anyone who reads these earlier writings of mine with an open mind will be able to see that the results developed in them have been obtained through purely philosophical research, and that therefore agreement with what is asserted in them is not dependent on the position that someone takes on the “spiritual science” I represent. In those books I consciously used only the means of thought and methodology that one is accustomed to finding in philosophical works. Thus it seems to me that the kind of research I call “spiritual science” has a secure philosophical foundation in my epistemological presentations, but that the philosophical judgment of this foundation can be kept quite independent of the spiritual-scientific superstructure. But for me there is a clear path from my epistemology to “spiritual science”. Anyone who is able to see without bias what kind of research underlies the content of my later books or the brief presentations in the first and fourth books of this journal will find that the possible epistemological difficulties are cleared up by my earlier writings.

In my spiritual scientific writings, I present those cognitive processes that lead, through spiritual experience and observation, to ideas about the spiritual world in the same way that the senses and the mind bound to them lead to ideas about the sensory world and the human life in it, then, in my opinion, this could only be presented as scientifically justified if it could be proved that the process of pure thinking itself proves to be the first stage of those processes by which supersensible knowledge is attained. I believe I have provided this proof in my earlier writings. I have tried to show in the most diverse ways that man, by living in the pure process of thinking, does not merely perform a subjective activity that is turned away from and indifferent to world processes, but that pure thinking is an event that leads beyond subjective human activity, in which the essence of the objective world lives. It lives in it in such a way that man, in true knowledge, grows together with the objective essence of the world. Anyone who is willing to consider my earlier writings impartially, including the introductory essay I wrote in the 1880s about Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's German National Literature, will feel the weight of the sentence I wrote in 1897 in my book 'Goethe's World View'. “He who speaks of the coldness of the world of ideas can only think ideas, not experience them. He who lives the true life in the world of ideas feels within him the essence of the world at work in a warmth that cannot be compared with anything.” In my recently published book, ‘The Riddle of Man,’ I have described the ‘seeing consciousness’ — in reference to Goethe's idea of the ‘contemplative power of judgment.’ By this I understand the human being's ability to bring a spiritual world to immediate contemplation and observation. My earlier writings treat pure thinking in such a way that it is evident that I include it among the activities of the “contemplative consciousness”. In this pure thinking I see the first, still shadowy, revelation of the stages of spiritual knowledge. Everywhere in my later writings one can see that I regard only those as higher spiritual powers of knowledge that a person develops in the same way as pure thinking. I reject as belonging to the domain of the spiritual powers of cognition every human activity that leads to mere thinking, and I recognize only that which leads beyond pure thinking. No supposed form of knowledge that does not recognize pure thinking as a kind of model and that does not, in the same sphere, possess the same level of deliberation and inner clarity as thinking that is sharp in its ideas, can lead to a real spiritual world. My position regarding the spiritual powers of human cognition, which presupposes the lawfulness of pure thinking for all cognition, placed me in a special position with regard to the kind of thinking that is sometimes called mysticism. If we define mysticism as a form of knowledge through which a person experiences their own being as connected to the essence of the world, then I must apply this definition to my own understanding of true knowledge. I must say that genuine mysticism can only be attained if the epistemological foundations that I believe I have developed are recognized. On the other hand, when I look at what is often referred to as mysticism and what precisely avoids the composure and clarity that characterize the thought process, then I see myself compelled to characterize such mysticism as I did in my book “Goethe's Worldview”: “Mysticism aims to find the source of things, the Godhead, in the human soul. The mystic, like Goethe, is convinced that the essence of the world will reveal itself to him in inner experiences. Only, immersion in the world of ideas is not considered the inner experience that matters. He has roughly the same view of the clear ideas of reason as Kant. For him, they stand outside the creative whole of nature and belong only to the human mind. The mystic therefore seeks to attain the highest knowledge by awakening special powers. He seeks to develop unusual states, for example through ecstasy, to achieve a higher kind of insight... The mystic immerses himself in a world of unclear sensations and feelings; Goethe immerses himself in the clear world of ideas. The mystics despise the clarity of ideas. They consider this clarity to be superficial. They have no inkling of what people feel who have the gift of immersing themselves in the living world of ideas. It freezes the mystic when he surrenders himself to the world of ideas.” This mysticism, which I have to characterize in this way, I must place far outside the realm in which I seek the powers of knowledge that open up the spiritual world. This mysticism drives the life of the human soul into a realm in which it becomes more dependent on the human organization than it is in ordinary sensory perception and in intellectual activity. But the true spiritual faculties of knowledge lead the life of the soul into a realm in which it acquires greater independence from the organization than in sensory perception and imagination, and which is entered with pure thinking even in its simplest form. The cognitive activity by which I think I am building the “spiritual science” has nothing in common with the dreamy, half-conscious soul-life of false mysticism. Unfortunately, the opponents and also those who want to be followers of this spiritual science all too often confuse it with false mysticism, although this confusion is that of a thing with its opposite. Those who do not cling to words and fashion arbitrary creations out of them will see everywhere in my writings where I am aiming at the relatively justified part of the definition of mysticism and where I am rejecting the confusions of false mysticism.

If the process of cognition is recognized as an experience of human development, then one can no longer admit the possibility of pointing to a reality that lies beyond all consciousness by means of mere logical conclusions or hypotheses, through concepts and ideas derived from the perceptions of the senses. One can then speak of a world that lies beyond the senses only in the sense that such a world reveals itself to the “visionary consciousness” in the same way as the world of the senses reveals itself to sensory perception. By making this view my own, I found myself in complete opposition to those philosophies that reject any experience of the realms of reality that lie beyond the sensory world and at most want to admit that there is a logical necessity to hypothetically assume a reality that is alien to consciousness. Within these philosophies, Eduard von Hartmann's “transcendental realism” occupies a particularly characteristic position. From his point of view, the given world picture of man, including all experiences attainable in thinking, appears as the result of the subjective human organization. But Eduard von Hartmann emphasizes the necessity, following from the nature of this world picture itself, to hypothetically conclude from the subjective, conscious to an objective reality, which, however, must be decidedly thought of as remaining in the field of the unconscious. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I try to show that this is a mistaken way of arriving at a metaphysics. I strove for a unified world view and attributed the apparent dualistic form of it to the fact that man, in mere sensory perception, separates an imperfect form of this image from its whole essence, only to overcome this imperfection in the further progress of cognition. Eduard von Hartmann asserts an epistemological dualism that cannot be overcome by human consciousness and that makes all ideas about the nature of the world those that are conceived in terms of dualism. From my point of view, the metaphysical is that which is not unconscious by nature, but is only not seen by the bearer of consciousness as long as the powers of perception are not laid bare, which allow that which lies beyond sense perception to be experienced just as physical reality is for the senses. It hardly needs to be emphasized that the one who speaks in this way of the supersensible does not claim that with the exercise of the “seeing consciousness” all the secrets of the spiritual world are suddenly revealed to man. It is only that knowledge is extended beyond the sense world into a realm that offers explanatory foundations for this sense world and for human life in this world. The essential thing is to enter into the mode of existence of the spiritual, even if one must be convinced that the part of the spiritual world that can be recognized first is only a small area in its wide expanse. Nor should it be overlooked that the investigation of the details of the spiritual world truly requires no less care and scientific conscientiousness than that of the physical world.

In elaborating my two works based on epistemology, it seemed to me that the rejection of any metaphysics that was merely imagined and filled with content that could not be spiritually experienced was to be linked to Eduard von Hartmann's transcendental realism because I warmly approved of the way in which, regardless of this epistemological point of view, this philosopher was able to demonstrate the spirit in the form of the idea in all phenomena of the world and of life. What compelled me to always recognize Hegel's philosophy in its full value, and yet to lead my own understanding beyond it, applied to me in another respect to Eduard von Hartmann as well. In Hegel I saw how he had grasped the content of thinking in its spiritual reality, but was only able to hold it in such a form that thinking could not become the living initial link in a spiritual process of knowledge that opens up the supersensible world. In Hegel's system, the idea is spiritual reality; but as such it is only a means of expressing the sense-perceptible world and the life in it. Therefore, Hegel's philosophy has nothing to say about a spiritual world; its content is only the world of nature and history.

My position in relation to Hartmann's philosophy was that I was able to agree with his idealistic illumination of the sensory world and human life in it in many things; but that I had to see in his fundamental epistemological views not only a only a theoretical contrast to what I consider to be truth, but also a way of thinking that practically deprives human thought of the possibility of discovering and applying the cognitive powers of the “visionary consciousness” that lie dormant in the soul. That is why, in the second volume of my exposition of Goethe's scientific writings (in Kürschner's German National Literature) in 1887, I was able to write the following sentences about Eduard von Hartmann's idealistic illumination of the sensory and historical world with the utmost sincerity: “With his objective idealism, Eduard von Hartmann stands squarely on the ground of the Goethean worldview... He does not want to be a mere idealist. But where he needs something positive in order to explain the world, he does call on the idea for help... But not much is achieved by distinguishing between the conscious and the unconscious... But one must tackle the idea in its objectivity, in its full content; one must not only see that the idea is unconsciously effective, but what this effectiveness is. If Hartmann had stopped at the idea that the idea is unconscious, and had explained the world from this unconscious, that is to say from a one-sided characteristic of the idea, he would have added a new monotonous system to the many systems which derive the world from some abstract formal principle. And his first major work cannot be said to be entirely free from this monotony. But Eduard von Hartmann's mind is too intense, too comprehensive and penetrating to have failed to recognize that the idea cannot be grasped merely as unconscious; rather, one must delve into what one has to address as unconscious, one must go beyond this quality to its concrete content and derive the world of individual phenomena from it.

Since I was in such a frame of mind and in such scientific opposition to Eduard von Hartmann, his overall judgment of my “Philosophy of Freedom” seemed significant to me in 1894. Given the position that Hartmann's philosophy occupies in the intellectual world, it cannot seem offensive that I share this judgment, which was intended only for me at the time, here and discuss it. This may be considered all the more justified since it is clear from the above that I have a high regard for the personality and philosophical significance of Hartmann. At the time, I already foresaw in this judgment the difficulties that my world view would have to face within contemporary thought. All the confusion with other ways of thinking, which I myself reject and which my striving for is also thought to meet with in the unintentional – and now also intentional – combating of it: they were all basically anticipated in Hartmann's judgment. But I had before me the judgment of a personality whom I esteemed and whose scientific seriousness I could acknowledge, despite her rejecting my way of thinking. Eduard von Hartmann wrote: “In this book, Hume's phenomenalism, absolute in itself, is not reconciled with Berkeley's phenomenalism, based on God; nor is this immanent or subjective phenomenalism reconciled at all with Hegel's transcendental panlogism, nor is Hegel's panlogism reconciled with Goethe's individualism. There is an unbridgeable gulf between any two of these components. Above all, however, it is overlooked that phenomenalism leads with inevitable consistency to solipsism, absolute illusionism and agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this slide into the abyss of unphilosophy, because the danger is not recognized at all.” - What is it in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ that Eduard von Hartmann seeks to attack with this judgment? Absolute phenomenalism, as it was realized in Hume's philosophy, appears to have been overcome by the attempt to characterize thinking in such a way that, through this, the phenomenal character of the sensory world view is lost and it is made into an appearance of an objective world; Berkeley's subjective phenomenalism loses its justification in the face of this view , in that it is shown that in thinking man grows together with the objective world and that therefore the assertion loses all meaning that world phenomena do not exist outside of being perceived; in contrast to Hegel's Panlogism, thinking is seen as the initial link for purely spiritual human cognitive abilities, not as the final link of ordinary consciousness, which only reflects the sensory world in shadowy ideas; Goethe's individualism is developed by showing how the understanding of human freedom is only possible through a world view that is based on the epistemological foundations of the “Philosophy of Freedom”. Only when the objective essence of the world of thought is recognized and the soul connection of man with ethical motives as a supersubjective experience comes to light, can the essence of freedom be grasped. It is this understanding that I also tried to make culminate in the presentation of my book. The accusation of solipsism against my world view is unfounded because it assigns thinking its place in the objective course of the world, thus directly pointing to the means of knowledge that makes the fall into solipsism impossible. Only someone who misjudges the reality value of the living thinking that I characterize can fall prey to the mention of the danger of absolute illusionism and agnosticism in relation to my “Philosophy of Freedom.” And this happens unconsciously, because they are foisting their view of thinking onto me. If one sees only what Eduard von Hartmann sees in thinking, then, upon rejecting transcendental realism, illusionism and agnosticism do indeed result, whereas my view of thinking leads precisely to making all illusionism and agnosticism impossible through the power and scope of thinking. And at the end of his judgment Eduard von Hartmann senses that my fundamental epistemological view leads out of the conceptual as a mere reflection of the sensible and historical world. For him, all philosophy and all possible striving for a worldview ends at this point; for me, it is the point where human cognitive powers enter the world of spiritual science. He calls this the “slide into the abyss of unphilosophy”; I characterize it, as I did in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Human Riddle), as the ascent from ordinary to “visionary” consciousness.

I shall explain later on that my arguments concerning the world view of Friedrich Nietzsche and Haeckel, as they appear in my writings from the 1890s, are a direct continuation of the path that leads from my “Philosophy of Freedom” to the “spiritual science” or “anthroposophy” that I advocate. Anyone who is bent on finding contradictions and then constructing a system of contradictions — perhaps a very spiteful system — will easily find contradictions in the structure of a world view if that world view itself is not based on words and word definitions in a formulaic way, but seeks to draw from the fullness of life with all its contradictions. Such a contradiction-fisherman could indeed reproach the world itself with its contradictions. However, some opponents of my world view are clearly prevented from properly assessing what they call contradictions by their obvious lack of knowledge of the development of philosophical science. Attacks on my world view, even from dubious quarters, cannot appear incomprehensible to me, since I was confronted a long time ago with the judgment in question from a serious and highly esteemed source, and I saw myself confronted with all the difficulties that this world view must face in many circles.

It will be nothing strange to many among you that one can find if the word theosophy is pronounced nothing else than a smile with many of our contemporaries. Also it is not unknown to many that just those who demand scholarship or, we say, philosophical education in the present look at theosophy as something that one must call a dilettantish activity, a fantastic belief. One can find in particular in the circles of scholars that the theosophist is regarded as a type of fantastic dreamer who bears witness to his peculiar image worlds because he has never made the acquaintance with the bases of knowledge. You find particularly in the circles which consider themselves as the scientific ones that they presuppose easily that the theosophist is basically without any philosophical education, and even if he has also acquired it or speaks of it, it is a dilettantish, a picked up matter.

These talks should not deal with theosophy directly. There are enough others. It should be a discussion with the western philosophical education, a discussion how the scientific world behaves to theosophy, and how it could behave, actually. They should disprove the prejudice, as if the theosophist is an uneducated, dilettantish person with regard to science. Who has not heard often enough that philosophers of the most different schools—and there are enough philosopher schools—state that mysticism is an unclear view filled with all kinds of allegories and feeling elements, and that theosophy has not achieved a strictly methodical thinking? If it did this, it would see that it walks on nebulous ways. It would see that mysticism could root only in the heads of eccentric people. This is a well-known prejudice.

However, I do not want to begin with a reprimand. Not because it would not correspond to the theosophical conviction, but because I do not consider theosophy as anything dilettantish from my own philosophical education and speak, nevertheless, out of the depths of its conviction. I can understand absolutely that somebody who has taken up the western philosophy in himself and has the whole scientific equipment has it hard to see something else in theosophy than what is just known. For somebody who comes today from philosophy and science it is much more difficult really to familiarise himself with theosophy, than for that who approaches theosophy with a naive human mind, with a natural, maybe religious feeling and with a need to solve certain riddles of life. Because this western philosophy puts so many obstacles to its students, offers them so many judgments which seem to be contradictory to theosophy that it makes it apparently impossible to get involved with theosophy.

Indeed, it is true that the theosophical literature shows little of that which resembles a discussion with our contemporary science and which one could call philosophical. Therefore, I have resolved to hold a series of talks on it. They should be an epistemological basis of theosophy. You will get to know the concepts of the contemporary philosophy and its contents. If you look at this in a real, true and deep sense, you see—but you must really wait till the end—the basis of the theosophical knowledge following from this western philosophy. This should not happen juggling with expert dialectic concepts, but it should happen, as far as I am able to do it in some talks, with any equipment which the knowledge of our contemporaries provides us; it should happen with everything available to give something that can be experienced of a higher world view also to those who do not want to know it.

What I have to explain would not have been possible in another age to explain in the same way. But it has been necessary to look around, maybe just in our time, at Kant, Locke, Schopenhauer or at other writers of the present, we say at Eduard von Hartmann and his disciple Arthur Drews, or the brilliant theorist of knowledge Volkelt or Otto Liebmann, or at the somewhat journalistic, but not less strictly rational Eucken. Who has looked around there who has familiarised himself with this or that of the shadings which the philosophical-scientific views of the present and the latest past took on understands and conceives—this is my innermost conviction—that a real, true understanding of this philosophical development does not lead away from theosophy, but to theosophy. Just somebody who has argued thoroughly with the philosophical doctrines has to come to theosophy.

I would not need to deliver this speech unless the whole thinking of our time were influenced just by a philosopher. One says that the great mental achievement of Immanuel Kant gave philosophy a scientific basis. One says that what he performed to the definition of the knowledge problem is something steadfast. You hear that anybody who has not tackled Kant has no right to have a say in philosophy. You may examine the different currents: Herbart, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, from Schopenhauer up to Eduard von Hartmann—in all these lines of thought only somebody can find the way who orientates himself to Kant. After different matters were striven for in the philosophy of the 19th century, the calling resounds from Zeller in the middle of the seventies, from Liebmann, then from Friedrich Albert Lange: back to Kant!—The lecturers of philosophy are of the opinion that everybody has to orientate himself to Kant, and only somebody who does this can have a say in philosophy.

Kant dominated the philosophy of the 19th century and of the present. However, he caused something else than he himself wanted. He expressed it with the words: he believes to have accomplished a similar action like Copernicus. Copernicus turned around the whole astronomical world view. He removed the earth from the centre and made another body, the sun, to the centre which was once imagined to be movable. However, Kant makes the human being with his cognitive faculties the centre of the physical world view. He really turns around the whole physical world view. It is the opinion of most philosophers of the 19th century that one has to turn around. You can understand this philosophy only if you understand it from its preconditions. One can understand what has flowed from Kant’s philosophy only if one understands it from its bases. Who understands how Kant came to his conviction that we can never recognise the things “by themselves,” because all things we recognise are only phenomena who understands this can also understand the development of the philosophy of the 19th century, he also understands the objections which can be made against theosophy, and also how he has to behave to them.

You know that theosophy rests on a higher experience. The theosophist says that the source of his knowledge is an experience which reaches beyond the sensory experience. You can see that it has the same validity as that of the senses that what the theosophist tells about astral worlds et cetera is as real as the things which we perceive with our senses round us as sensory experience. What the theosophist believes to have as his source of knowledge is a higher experience. If you read Leadbeater’s Astralebene (Astral Plane), you think that the things are as real in the astral world as the cabs and horses in the streets of London. It should be said how real this world is for somebody who knows them. The philosopher of the present argues immediately: yes, but you are mistaken, because you believe that this is a true reality. Has the philosophy of the 19th century not proved to you that our experience is nothing but our idea, and that also the starry heaven is nothing else than our idea in us?—He considers this as the most certain knowledge which there can only be. Eduard von Hartmann considers it as the most natural truth that this is my idea, and that one cannot know what it is also. If you believe that you can call experience “real,” then you are a naive realist. Can you decide anything generally about the value experience has facing the world in this way? This is the great result to which Kantianism has come that the world surrounding us must be our idea.

How did Kant’s world view come to this? It came from the philosophy of the predecessors. At that time when Kant was still young, the philosophy of Christian Wolff had the mastery over all schools. It distinguished the so-called knowledge of experience which we acquire by the sensory impressions and that which comes from pure reason. According to him, we can get to know something of the things of the everyday life only by experience, and from pure reason we have things which are the objects of the highest knowledge. These things are the human souls, the free will of the human being, the questions which refer to immortality and to the divine being.

The so-called empiric sciences deal with that which is offered in natural history, in physics, in history et cetera. How does the astronomer get his knowledge? He directs his eyes to the stars; he finds the laws which are commensurate with the observations. We learn this while opening our senses to the outside world. Nobody can say that this is drawn from mere reason. The human being knows this because he sees it. This is an empiric knowledge which we take up from life, from the experience in ourselves, not caring whether we order them in a scientific system or not; it is knowledge of experience. Nobody can describe a lion from his very reason. However, Wolff supposes that one can draw that which one is from pure reason. Wolff supposes that we have a psychology from pure reason, also that the soul must have free will that it must have reason et cetera. Hence, Wolff calls the sciences which deal with the higher capacities of the soul rational psychology. The question whether the world has a beginning and an end is a question which one should decide only from pure reason. He calls this question an object of rational cosmology. Nobody can decide on the usefulness of the world from experience; nobody can investigate it by observation. These are nothing but questions of the rational cosmology. Then there is a science of God, of a divine plan. This is a science which is also drawn from reason. This is the so-called rational theology, it belongs to metaphysics.

Kant grew up in a time when philosophy was taught in this sense. You find him in his first writings as an adherent of Wolff’s philosophy. You find him convinced that there is a rational psychology, a rational theology et cetera. He gives a proof which he calls the only possible proof of the existence of God. Then he got to know a philosophical current which had a stupefying effect on him. He got to know the philosophy of David Hume. He said that it waked up him from his dogmatic slumber.—What does this philosophy offer? Hume says the following: we see that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. We have seen this many days. We also know that all people have seen sunrises and sunsets that they have experienced the same, and we get used to believing that this must take place forever.

Now another example: we see that the solar heat falls on a stone. We think that it is the solar heat which warms up the stone. What do we see? We perceive solar heat first and then the warmed up stone. What do we perceive there? Only that one fact follows the other. If we experience that the sunbeams warm up the stone, then we have already formed the judgment that the solar heat is the cause that the stone becomes warm. That is why Hume says: there is nothing at all that shows us more than a sequence of facts. We get used to the belief that there a causal relationship exists. But this belief is only a habituation and everything that the human being thinks of causal concepts exists only in that experience. The human being sees a ball pushing the other, he sees that a movement takes place through it, and then he gets used to saying that lawfulness exists in it. In truth we deal with no real insight.

What is the human being considered from the knowledge of pure reason? This is nothing else—Hume says—than a summary of facts. We have to connect the facts of the world. This corresponds to the human way of thinking, to the tendency of the human thinking. We have no right to go beyond this thinking. We are not allowed to say that it is something in the things which has given them lawfulness. We can only say that the things and events flow past us. But the things “in themselves” do not show such a connection.

How can we speak now of the fact that something manifests itself to us in the things that goes beyond experience? How can we speak of a connection in experience that is due to a divine being, that goes beyond experience if we are not inclined to turn to anything other than to the ways of thinking?

This view had the effect on Kant that it waked up him from dogmatic slumber. He asks: can there be something that goes beyond experience? Which knowledge does experience deliver to us? Does it give us sure knowledge? Of course, Kant denied this question immediately. He says: even if you have seen the sun rise hundred thousand times, you cannot infer from it that it also rises tomorrow again. It could also be different. If you inferred only from experience, it could also turn out once that experience convinces you of something different. Experience can never give sure, necessary knowledge.

I know from experience that the sun warms up the stone. However, I am not allowed to state that it has to warm up it. If all our knowledge comes from experience, it can never exceed the condition of uncertainty; then there can be no necessary empiric knowledge. Now Kant tries to find out this matter. He looks for a way out. He had made himself used through his whole youth to believe in knowledge. He could be convinced by Hume’s philosophy that there is nothing sure. Is anywhere anything where one can speak of sure, necessary knowledge? However—he says—there are sure judgments. These are the mathematical judgments. Is the mathematical judgment similar to the judgment: in the morning the sun rises and sets in the evening?

I have the judgment that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. If I have given the proof with one single triangle, it suffices for all triangles. I see from the nature of the proof that it applies to all possible cases. This is the peculiar of mathematical proofs. For everybody it is clear that these must also apply to the inhabitants of Jupiter and Mars if they generally have triangles that also there the sum of the angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees. And then: never can be two times two anything else than four. This is always true. Hence, we have a proof that there is knowledge which is absolutely sure. The question cannot be: do we have such knowledge? But we must think about the possibility of such judgments.

Now there comes the big question of Kant: how are such absolutely necessary judgments possible? How is mathematical knowledge possible?—Kant now calls those judgments and knowledge which are drawn from experience judgments and knowledge a posteriori. The judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees; however, is a judgment which precedes all experience, a judgment a priori. I can simply imagine a triangle and give the proof, and if I see a triangle which I have not yet experienced, I can say that it must have a sum of angles of 180 degrees. Any higher knowledge depends on it that I can make judgments from pure reason.

How are such judgments a priori possible? We have seen that such a judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is equal 180 degrees, applies to any triangles. Experience has to submit to my judgment. If I draw an ellipse and look out into space, I find that a planet describes such an ellipse. The planet follows my judgment formed in pure knowledge. I approach the experience with my purely in the ideal formed judgment. Have I drawn this judgment from experience?—Kant continues asking. There is no doubt, forming such purely ideal judgments, that we have, actually, no reality of experience.

The ellipse, the triangle—they have no reality of experience, but reality submits to such knowledge. If I want to have true reality, I must approach experience. If, however, I know which laws work in it, then I have knowledge before all experience. The law of the ellipse does not come from experience. I myself build it in my mind. Thus a passage begins with Kant with the sentence: “Even if all our knowledge starts from experience, nevertheless, not everything does arise from experience.” I put what I have as knowledge into experience. The human mind is made in such a way that everything of its experience corresponds only to the laws which it has. The human mind is made in such a way that it must develop these laws inevitably. If it moves up to experience, then experience has to submit to these laws.

An example: Imagine that you wear blue glasses. You see everything in blue light; the objects appear to you in blue light. However the things outdoors may be made, this concerns me nothing at all provisionally. At the moment when the laws which my mind develops spread out over the whole world of experience the whole world of experience must fit into it. It is not right that the judgment: two times two is four is taken from experience. It is the condition of my mind that two times two must give always four. My mind is in such a way that the three angles of a triangle are always 180 degrees. Thus Kant justifies the laws out of the human being himself. The sun warms up the stone. Every effect has a cause. This is a law of the mind. If the world is a chaos, I push the lawfulness of my mind toward it. I conceive the world like a string of pearls. I am that who makes the world a knowledge mechanism.—You also see how Kant was induced to find such a particular method of knowledge. As long as the human mind is organised in such a way as it is organised as long everything must submit to this organisation, even if reality changes overnight. For me it could not change if the laws of my mind are the same. The world may be as it wants; we recognise it in such a way as it must appear to us according to the laws of our mind.

Now you see which sense it has, if one says: Kant turned the whole theory of knowledge, the whole epistemology. One assumed before that the human being reads everything from nature. Now, however, he lets the human mind give the laws to nature. He lets everything circle around the human mind like Copernicus let the earth circle around the sun.

Then, however, there is something else that shows that the human being can never go beyond experience. Indeed, it appears as a contradiction, but you will see that it corresponds to Kant’s philosophy. Kant shows that the concepts are empty. Two times two is four is an empty judgment if not peas or beans are filled into it. Any effect has a cause—is a purely formal judgment if it is not filled with particular contents of experience. The judgments are formed before in me to be applied to the observation of the world. “Observations without concepts are blind—concepts without observations are empty.” We can think millions of ellipses; they correspond to no reality if we do not see them in the planetary motion. We have to verify everything by experience. We can gain judgments a priori, but we are allowed to apply them only if they correspond to experience.

God, freedom and immortality are matters about which we can ponder ever so long about which we can get knowledge by no experience. Therefore, it is in vain to find out anything with our reason. The concepts a priori are only valid as far as our experience reaches. Indeed we have a science a priori which only says to us how experience has to be until experience is there. We can catch as it were experience like in a web, but we cannot find out how the law of experience has to be. About the “thing-in-itself” we know nothing, and because God, freedom and immortality must have their origin in the “thing-in-itself,” we can find out nothing about them. We see the things not as they are, but in such a way as we must see them according to our organisation.

With it Kant founded the critical idealism and overcame the naive realism. What submits to causality is not the “thing-in-itself.” What submits to my eye or my ear has to make an impression on my eye, on my ear at first. This is the perception, the sensations. These are the effects of any “thing-in-itself,” of things which are absolutely unknown to me. These produce a lot of effects, and I order them in a lawful world. I form an organism of sensations. But I cannot know what is behind them. It is nothing else than the lawfulness which my mind has put into the sensations. What is behind the sensation, I can know nothing about it. Hence, the world which surrounds me is only subjective. It is only that which I myself build up.

The development of physiology in the 19th century agreed apparently completely with Kant. Take the important knowledge of the great physiologist Johannes Müller. He has put up the law of the specific nerve energy. It consists in the fact that any organ answers in its way. If you let light into the eye, you have a beam of light; if you bump against the eye, you will likewise have a light sensation. Müller concludes that it does not depend on the things outside, but on my eye what I perceive. The eye answers to a process unknown to me with the colour quality, we say: blue. Blue is nowhere outdoors in space. A process has an effect on us, and it produces the sensation “blue.” What you believe that it stands before you, is nothing else than the effect of some unknown processes on a sense. The whole physiology of the 19th century confirmed this law of the specific nerve energy apparently. Kant’s idea seems to be thereby supported.

One can call this world view illusionism in the full sense of the word. Nobody knows anything about what has an effect outside, what produces his sensations. From himself he spins his whole world of experience and builds up it according to the laws of his mind. Nothing else can approach him, as long as his organisation is made in such a way as it is. This is Kant’s doctrine motivated by physiology. Kant calls it critical idealism. This is also that which Schopenhauer develops in his philosophy: people believe that the whole starry heaven and the sun surround them. However, this is only your own mental picture. You create the whole world.—And Eduard von Hartmann says: This is the most certain truth which there can be. No power would be able one day to shake this sentence.—Thus the western philosophy says. It has never pondered how experience basically comes about.

Somebody is only able to stick to realism who knows how experiences come about and then he comes to the true critical idealism. The view of Kant is the transcendental idealism, that is he knows nothing about a true reality, nothing of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of an image world. He says basically: I must refer my image world to something unknown.—This view should be regarded as something steadfast.

Is this transcendental idealism really steadfast? Is the “thing-in-itself” unrecognisable?—If this held true, then could not be spoken of a higher experience at all. If the “thing-in-itself” were only an illusion, we could not speak of any higher beings. Hence, this is also an objection which is raised against theosophy: you have higher beings of which you speak.

We see next time how these views must be deepened.

Very early on, I was drawn to Kant. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I studied Kant very intensively, and before I went to the University of Vienna, I occupied myself intensively with the orthodox followers of Kant from the beginning of the nineteenth century, who have been completely forgotten by the official history of science in Germany and are hardly ever mentioned anymore. Then I immersed myself in Fichte and Schelling. During this time — and this belongs already to the external occult influences — the conception of time became completely clear. This realization had no connection with the studies and was directed entirely from occult life. It was the realization that there is a backward-going evolution interfering with the forward-going evolution — the occult-astral one. This realization is the condition for spiritual vision.

Then came the acquaintance with the agent of the Master.

Then an intensive study of Hegel.

Then the study of the newer philosophy as it had been developing in Germany since the 1850s, namely the so-called theory of knowledge in all its ramifications.

My childhood passed without anyone outwardly intending to do so, so that I never encountered anyone with a superstition; and when someone around me spoke of superstitions, it was always with a strongly emphasized rejection. I did get to know the church cultus, as I was called upon to assist at cultic services as an altar boy, but nowhere, not even among the priests I met, was there any real piety or religiosity. Instead, certain dark sides of the Catholic clergy kept coming to my attention.

I did not meet the master immediately, but first one of his disciples, who was completely initiated into the secrets of the effectiveness of all plants and their connection with the cosmos and with human nature. For him, dealing with the spirits of nature was something that was taken for granted, and it was presented without enthusiasm, but it aroused all the more enthusiasm.

The official studies were directed towards mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, mineralogy and geology. These studies offered a much more secure foundation for a spiritual world view than, for example, history or literature, which, in the absence of a specific method and also without significant prospects in the German scientific community at the time, stood there.

During his first years at university in Vienna, he met Karl Julius Schröer. At first, I attended his lectures on the history of German poetry since Goethe's first appearance, on Goethe and Schiller, on the history of German poetry in the 19th century, on Goethe's “Faust”. I also took part in his “exercises in oral and written presentation”. It was a kind of college college based on Uhland's institution at the University of Tübingen. Schröer came from German language research, had done significant studies on German dialects in Austria, he was a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm and in literary research an admirer of Gervinus. He was previously director of the Viennese Protestant schools. He is the son of the poet and extraordinarily meritorious pedagogue Christian] Oeser. At the time I got to know him, he was turning entirely to Goethe. He has written a widely read commentary on Goethe's “Faust” and also on Goethe's other dramas. He completed his studies at the German universities of Leipzig, Halle and Berlin before the decline of German idealism. He was a living embodiment of the noble German education. In him, the human being attracted. I soon became friends with him and was then often in his house. With him it was like an idealistic oasis in the dry materialistic German educational desert. In the external life, this time was filled with the nationality struggles in Austria. Schröer himself was far from science.

But I myself had been working since early 1880 on Goethe's scientific studies.

Then Joseph Kürschner founded the comprehensive work “Deutsche National-Literatur” (German National Literature), for which Schröer edited Goethe's dramas with introductions and commentaries. Kürschner, on Schröer's recommendation, entrusted me with the edition of Goethe's scientific writings.

Schröer wrote a preface for it, through which he introduced me to the literary public.

Within this collection, I wrote introductions to Goethe's botany, zoology, geology and color theory.

Anyone reading these introductions will be able to find the theosophical ideas in the guise of a philosophical idealism.

It also includes an examination of Haeckel.

My 1886 work, Erkenntnistheorie, is a philosophical supplement to this.

Then, through my acquaintance with the Austrian poet M. E. delle Grazie, who had a fatherly friend in Professor Laurenz Müllner, I was introduced to the circles of Viennese theological professors. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie has written a great epic “Robespierre” and a drama “Shadow”.

At the end of the 1880s, I became an editor of the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna for a short time. This gave me the opportunity to study the national psyche of the various Austrian nationalities in depth. The guiding thread for an intellectual cultural policy had to be found.

In all this there was no question of publicly emphasizing occult ideas. And the occult powers behind me gave me only one piece of advice: “All in the guise of idealistic philosophy”.

All this went hand in hand with my more than fifteen years of work as an educator and private teacher. My first contact with Viennese theosophical circles at the end of the 1880s had no lasting external effect.

During my last months in Vienna, I wrote my small paper: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then I was called to the then newly established “Goethe and Schiller Archives” in Weimar to edit Goethe's scientific writings. I did not have an official position at this archive; I was merely a contributor to the great “Sophien Edition” of Goethe's works.

My next goal was to lay the purely philosophical foundations of my world view. This was done in the two works: “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom”.

The Goethe and Schiller Archives were visited by a large number of scholars and literary figures, as well as other personalities from Germany and abroad. I got to know some of these personalities better because I soon became friends with the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archives, Prof. Bernhard Suphan, and visited his house a lot. Suphan invited me to many private visits that he had from visitors to the archives. It was on one of these occasions that I met Treitschke.

But the friendship I formed soon after with the German mythologist Ludwig Laistner, the author of “Riddle of the Sphynx,” was much deeper. I had repeated conversations with Herman Grimm, who spoke to me a great deal about his uncompleted work, a “History of German Imagination.”

Then came the Nietzsche episode. Shortly before, I had even written about Nietzsche in an opposing sense.

My occult powers pointed out to me the need to let my interest in the true spiritual flow unnoticed into the currents of the times. One does not arrive at knowledge by wanting to assert one's own point of view absolutely, but by immersing oneself in foreign currents of thought.

Thus I wrote my book on Nietzsche by placing myself entirely in Nietzsche's point of view. It is perhaps for this very reason the most objective book on Nietzsche in Germany. Nietzsche as an anti-Wagnerian and an anti-Christian is also fully represented.

For some time I was considered the most uncompromising “Nietzschean.”

At that time the “Society for Ethical Culture” was founded in Germany. This society wanted a morality with complete indifference to all worldviews. A complete construct and a danger to education. I wrote a sharp article against this foundation in the weekly “Die Zukunft”.

The result was sharp replies. And my previous study of Nietzsche led to the publication of a pamphlet against me: “Nietzsche-Narren” (Nietzsche Fools).

The occult standpoint demands: “No unnecessary polemic” and “Avoid defending yourself wherever you can”.

I calmly wrote my book, “Goethe's World View,” which marked the end of my Weimar period.

Immediately after my article in “Zukunft,” Haeckel approached me. Two weeks later, he wrote an article in “Zukunft” in which he publicly acknowledged my point of view that ethics can only arise on the basis of a worldview.

Not long after that was Haeckel's 60th birthday, which was celebrated as a great festivity in Jena. Haeckel's friends invited me. That was the first time I saw Haeckel. His personality is enchanting. In person, he is the complete opposite of the tone of his writings. If Haeckel had ever studied philosophy, in which he is not just a dilettante but a child, he would certainly have drawn the highest spiritualistic conclusions from his epoch-making phylogenetic studies.

Now, despite all of German philosophy, despite all of Haeckel's other German education, Haeckel's phylogenetic thought is the most significant achievement of German intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century. And there is no better scientific foundation of occultism than Haeckel's teaching. Haeckel's teaching is great and Haeckel is the worst commentator on this teaching. It is not by showing Haeckel's contemporaries his weaknesses that one benefits culture, but by presenting to them the greatness of Haeckel's phylogenetic ideas. I did this in the two volumes of my:

“Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century), which are also dedicated to Haeckel, and in my small work: “Haeckel and his opponents”.

In Haeckel's phylogeny, only the time of the German intellectual life actually lives; philosophy is in a state of the most desolate infertility, theology is a hypocritical fabric that is not remotely aware of its untruthfulness, and the sciences, despite the great empirical upsurge, have fallen into the most barren philosophical ignorance.

From 1890 to 1897 I was in Weimar.

In 1897 I went to Berlin as editor of the “Magazine for Literature”. The writings “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) and “Haeckel und seine Gegner” (Haeckel and his Opponents) already belong to the Berlin period.

My next task was to bring an intellectual current to bear in literature. I placed the Magazin für Literatur at the service of this task. It was a long-established organ that had existed since 1832 and had gone through various phases.

I gently and slowly led it in the direction of esotericism. Carefully but distinctly, by writing an essay for the 150th anniversary of Goethe's birth, “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” which only reflected what I had already hinted at in a public lecture in Vienna about Goethe's fairy tale of the “green snake and the beautiful lily”.

It was only natural that a circle of readers should gradually gather around the direction I had inaugurated in the Magazin. They did gather, but not quickly enough for the publisher to consider the venture financially promising. I wanted to give the young literary movement an intellectual foundation and was actually in the most lively contact with the most promising representatives of this movement. But on the one hand I was abandoned; on the other hand, this direction soon either sank into insignificance or into naturalism.

Meanwhile, contact with the working class had already been established. I had become a teacher at the Berlin Workers' Education School. I taught history and natural science. My thoroughly idealistic history method and my way of teaching soon became both appealing and understandable to the workers. My audience grew. I was invited to give a lecture almost every evening.

Then the time came when I, in agreement with the occult forces behind me, could say: You have given the philosophical foundation of the world view, you have shown an understanding of the currents of the time by treating them as only a complete believer could treat them; no one will be able to say: This occultist speaks of the spiritual world because he is ignorant of the philosophical and scientific achievements of the time.

I had now also reached the fortieth year, before the onset of which, in the sense of the masters, no one may publicly appear as a teacher of occultism. (Wherever someone teaches earlier, there is an error).

Now I could devote myself to Theosophy publicly.

The next consequence was that, at the urging of certain leaders of German socialism, a general assembly of the Workers' Educational School was convened to decide between Marxism and me. But the ostracism did not decide against me. In the general assembly, it was decided with all against only four votes to keep me on as a teacher.

But the terrorism of the leaders meant that I had to resign after three months. In order not to compromise themselves, they wrapped the matter up in the pretext that I was too busy with the Theosophical movement to have enough time for the labor school in.

Miss v. Sivers was at my side almost from the beginning of the theosophical work. She also personally witnessed the last phases of my relationship with the Berlin laborers.

Until now,¹ he who sought a book on the literary development of Germany in the first half of this century, despite the many excellent achievements of others, had to resort to Georg Brandes' «Hauptströmungen der Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert» (Main Currents of Literature in the 19th Century). For only here was the connection between literary phenomena and the whole of intellectual life presented by a strong personality who had a relationship to the ideas of the time, to the moving psychological and ethical forces. It is now safe to say that S. Lublinski's work “Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century” changes this fact. We believe that this will become the book that satisfies all those who have previously only found what they were looking for in Brandes' work.

It was unfortunate in two respects that Brandes' work was decisive in the sense described. Even though the Danish literary historian has, in a rare way, placed himself in the [intellectual life] of Germany, he still takes his point of view from outside it. In the end, he describes as a Dane must. There is another, more important point. Brandes is a fine psychologist. But a psychologist who has been completely unaffected by the insights of modern scientific observation. For him, the mind is still a being in its own right. The soul has something ineffable about it. The piece of physiology that the new natural science has incorporated into psychology is missing from his work. He describes the leading figures as if they were purely spiritual beings. For example, he has given an incomparable account of the psychology of romanticism. But the Romantics have something shadowy, ethereal about them. Everything is motivated by the spiritual in itself. That is no longer possible today. Our psychological insight has gained consistency through natural science. Therefore, some things in Brandes' psychology seem to us like an arbitrary apergu. The view of the “eternal, iron laws” according to which the spirit of its existence must also complete circles is missing.

S. Lublinski is a modern, educated man. He relies on the insights provided by natural science and sociology. It is apparent everywhere that he represents the spirit of the departing century. One would certainly like to see more natural scientific knowledge. The educational element that has emerged from the solid German cultural development of the first half of the century is evident in the book, as is the approach that one gains from an insightful immersion in German philosophy. However, this was also present in the minds of such people as F. Th. Vischer, Carriere and Hettner. What was missing in their case was the influence that natural and social science can provide today. Lublinski has incorporated this influence into his approach. We would like to see this to an even greater extent. From some of the statements taken from the field of natural knowledge, it is clear that our author is not yet fully at home in the way of thinking of modern world view. But this is insignificant in view of the fact that he has a modern view of nature in his body.

In addition, the book is written by a man who has something to say about the things he writes about. We are interested in the author of the book, not just in the content of the work. This is what makes Lublinski's presentation a modern creation.

The special chapter “Literature and Society” grows out of the whole of cultural life. Nothing is missing that needs to be drawn upon to explain the activity of the leading minds on the one hand, the physiognomy of taste on the other. With fine tact, science, philosophy, politics, and social life are called upon to give the overall picture its external colors. Lublinski is a master at drawing upon illustrative examples. He seems particularly adept at citing facts that serve to substantiate the truths he expresses. For example, how vividly the German public is characterized by the position it took towards Kotzebue! How subtly Heine's idiosyncrasy is pointed out by a statement that this poet made to Adolf Stahr. And yet, as is the case with so many literary historians, the author's preliminary work does not intrude on us in an obtrusive manner. Lublinski has allowed the results of this preliminary work to mature and bear fruit before presenting them to us.

In contrast to the ingenious Brandes, we can apply the epithet ingenious to Lublinski. A sense of solidity runs through the work. The point of view is lofty, and yet it reads like a simple story. Such books are proof that we have once again reached the level of descriptive art that makes Gutzkow's literary-historical writings so delightful.

We have here a subtle observer and a courageous critic. It is by no means common to find these qualities united. One's own judgment is all too often clouded by devoted contemplation. Or contemplation suffers from the obstinacy of an often quite arbitrary aesthetic standpoint. The editors of literary history have achieved the most incredible things in these two directions, especially in our time. In Lublinski's work, the judgment arises from calm observation, and no prejudice can disturb his immersion in the facts.

Lublinski never allows the greatness of the personalities he portrays to overwhelm their individuality. He presents Kleist as the first great, perhaps the greatest, “poet that the nineteenth century produced in Germany”, but that does not prevent him from pointing out the poet's faults. A remark like this gives us a glimpse of how deeply Kleist's character was: “Kleist was undoubtedly the first pinnacle of Romanticism. He fulfilled almost all the requirements of the school: he unleashed the darkest, most mysterious forces of human nature, which he simultaneously subjected to the rigid constraints of a concise, chiseled art form with tremendous willpower. He was at the height of his age's education, he mastered Greek and Christian mythology, Hellenic and modern art forms, and in his greatest achievements he knew how to melt these fundamentally different elements into a new whole. However, there were certain limits to this path, and the cracks and chasms and contradictions that sometimes emerged could not be completely concealed, even by mysticism and the temporary destruction of the art form, because he, as a mystic and destroyer, kept himself completely away from the fog of clichés of a Zacharias Werner or the witty, scornful, playful high spirits of the other Romantics. He had not become a romantic out of weakness, out of a feminine desire for self-irony, but because terrible painful experiences had taught him to believe in the mysterious and in chaotic confusion.»

The author attempts to characterize the influence that the philosophical movement had on literary life at the beginning and in the first third of the century by providing, as it were, popular extracts from the philosophers' views. He undoubtedly also served the overall tendency of his book in this way. Nevertheless, the connoisseur of the history of world views cannot agree with these extracts. I believe that I have experience in these matters. I know that there is no philosophical truth that cannot be presented in a popular form, in a few short sentences, with a limited number of words. However, Lublinski's extracts hardly ever seem to me to correctly reflect the philosophers' train of thought. For example, in the case of Kant, he places the main emphasis on the fact that this thinker referred human knowledge to experience. The wise man from Königsberg is said to have taught the unknowability of the thing in itself only so that man would be satisfied with the investigation of this world and would not concern himself further with the hereafter. But it seems to me to be quite certain that Kant betrayed his main goal with the words: I sought to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. He wanted to preserve people's belief in God and immortality; that is why he sought to prove that knowledge does not extend to the realm from which these otherworldly elements originate. Fichte's great way of thinking is also not characterized by Lublinski's sentences. I admit that the Romantics understood Fichte in the form reproduced here. But he himself would undoubtedly have objected to this interpretation. The Fichtean ego had to be misunderstood by the Romantics in order to form the basis of the so-called irony. I would make the same comment about Lublinski's presentation of Hegel. It is questionable to me whether it is permissible to present the views of a thinker in the form in which they are reflected by contemporaries with unclear vision. For it is precisely the way in which the genuine form can be transformed into a false image and function as such that is interesting and important in terms of cultural history. However, this way can only be understood if one is familiar with the genuine form.

I would also like to mention that Goethe is not given enough credit in the book. This makes Romanticism seem like a bolt from the blue. However, it is nothing more than the elaboration of an element of Goethe's view of the world. The distance from reality that Goethe experienced after his Italian journey fascinated some of his contemporaries. Goethe wanted to live in a higher world, above the everyday world. He sought the typical, because the common reality with its individualities did not seem to him to give the deeper truth of nature. What he sought, after he had passed through the full experience of reality, was what Romanticism wanted to achieve without such a prerequisite, through its irony based on mere arbitrariness. Goethe wanted to make himself at home in the higher lawfulness, because the everyday necessity was not enough for him. The Romantics confused lawlessness with the higher lawfulness. The whole of Romanticism is, at bottom, Schiller's misunderstood sentence, which he wrote to Goethe in connection with “Wilhelm Meister”: “Man is only completely human where he plays; and he only plays where he is human in the highest sense of the word.” The Romantics only adhered to the first part of this sentence. But first, man must rise through the highest culture to a level of education that makes his play appear as the highest seriousness. He must feel the necessity within himself, have realized it within himself, then he will playfully give birth to it again with freedom.

Goethe's position within literary life in the first third of the century is so outstanding that he must indeed take up more space than Lublinski allows him.

However, these exhibitions are not intended to minimize the value of the book. If the author succeeds in completing his task in the same way as he began it, that is, if he presents the last two-thirds of the century to us in as satisfying a manner as he has done with the first, then he will have created a work that can serve the widest circles in the best conceivable way.

Without doubt, however, the part that has been published so far can be seen as a significant addition to the history of literature, both in terms of the mastery of the material and the way it is treated.

• 1. «Am Ende des Jahrhunderts. A Review of 100 Years of Intellectual Development.» Vols. XII and XIII. S. Lublinski: «Literature and Society in the 19th Century». Berlin, Verlag Siegfried Cronbach

Dear Attendees!

Unlike in previous years when I had the honor of speaking here in this city about subjects of spiritual science, last year I did not venture to speak about a subject of spiritual science in the strict sense, but rather about something that is connected with the spiritual development of the German people, who are currently facing one of the most significant events in world history, with world-historical facts that have no equal in the entire developmental history of modern times. And so, honored attendees, may this evening's reflection also be dedicated to such a topic, the reflection of a certain current in German intellectual life, which I believe, however, not out of a vague feeling, but out of real spiritual-scientific conviction that it contains, in the most essential, in the very most essential sense, German intellectual development, the seeds of that spiritual science as it was always meant, when I was allowed to speak about it here in earlier years.

This spiritual science wants, in the best sense of the word, to be a real science, a real, genuine continuation of the scientific world view that has emerged over the past three to four hundred years in the development of humanity. As a spiritual science, it aims to penetrate into the spiritual realm of the world, just as natural science methodically penetrates into the external world through the external senses and through the mind bound to the external senses, into the mind bound to the external senses and its observations, and into the external senses and their observations.

However, spiritual science requires a certain development of the human soul for its research. It is necessary for this research that what can lead to it is first developed from the human soul. To a certain extent - to apply Goethe's often-used words again today - the spiritual eyes and ears that slumber in man himself must first be awakened from the human soul so that he can look and listen into the spiritual world.

Now, however, it might seem from the outset, esteemed attendees, as if, when speaking of science - and that is the opinion of some; some think that one has no right to speak of anything other than such a thing that belongs to all nations. In certain circles, there is the opinion that one is already thinking unscientifically if one allows oneself the opinion that even that which is the scientific study of the world has its origins in the essence of folklore. However, as superficial as this opinion may be, it is superficial when it comes to the deeper objects of spiritual science.

The moon is also common to all peoples of the earth, but how the thoughts and feelings that the individual peoples have attached to the experiences of the moon differ. One could indeed say: that may relate to poetry. But when it comes to penetrating the deeper secrets of the world, then the different predispositions that exist in different ways in the individual peoples speak. And according to these different predispositions, people penetrate more or less deeply into the secrets of existence.

The German does not need to resort to the clay when speaking of the significance and value of the German national character for the development of the world and humanity, as the opponents of Central Europe are currently doing, using our fateful time not only to vilify the German character in the most hateful way possible, but to downright slander it. The German can quite appropriately penetrate into that which has emerged in the course of his intellectual development. And it will be shown that this appropriate consideration leads precisely to placing German essence, German intellectual life, in the right place in the world development of humanity, not through self-assured arrogance, but by letting the facts speak.

When we consider the events that affect us all so deeply today, that claim so many, so many victims from humanity, that fill us with so much definite hope and confidence, when we consider these events, then there is really only one fact that needs to be mentioned – to strike a chord that will resonate again and again in the future history of humanity: Today, around Central Europe, 777 million people stand, in a row, 150 million hostile. The 777 million people have no reason to envy the size of the land on which the other 150 million live in Central Europe; the people of the so-called Entente live on 68 million square kilometers, and the people of Central Europe live on only 6 million square kilometers!

But leading personalities in particular have repeatedly managed, out of the 777 million, to insult and defame even the best and highest intellectual products of the 150 million.

It is therefore particularly appropriate for the German to reflect on his intellectual life in such a way that it may appear to him as rooted in the actual germinating power of his nationality.

And so, esteemed attendees, we are repeatedly and again and again, although this should only be mentioned in the introduction today, repeatedly and again and again referred to the three great figures within the German world view development, which today, unfortunately, may say, unfortunately, no longer considered in the right, deep way, but whose essence nevertheless lives on to this day, and whose essence wants to rise again, [whose essence] must belong to the best impact forces of German spiritual culture in the future. Three figures are pointed out: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, those personalities in the development of the German world view who tried to lift the German people in time onto the scene of the development of thought, of the highest, purest development of thought, in the time when, from the depths of this national life, such minds as Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and all the others who belong to them have worked so that what has come from them after the Greek intellectual blossoming of humanity means a time of the highest intellectual blossoming of humanity for anyone who is unbiased.

And how does Johann Gottlieb Fichte appear in the mind's eye of the human being? That which lived in his soul as feeling made his world view appear to him, who can be called one of the most German of men, as something that he had attained by having something directly in his lonely soul life, something like a kind of dialogue with the German national spirit itself.

This mood of the soul emerged when he delivered his powerful “Discourses to the German Nation,” which sought to reveal all the power and developmental possibilities of German nationality in order to give impetus to the further development of “Germanness,” as Fichte himself put it.

But what is the essence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's endeavors? It can be said that everything that has been striven for in the best sense from the center of the German soul for centuries appears again in Fichte in the most powerful way. Thus it is that Fichte wanted to gain a well-illuminated world view, an energetic understanding of the world through this. What Fichte strove for was to delve into the human soul, to inwardly experience its deepest powers, to experience them in such a way that in this experience he also experiences what the world as a whole is living through and working through as a spiritual, world-creating entity. [What Fichte strove for was to] experience the spiritual, world-creating essence in one's own soul in such a way that, by unfolding one's own soul powers, one experiences what works and lives and dwells in the innermost part of the world. That was what Fichte wanted: to experience the spirit of the world by making it present in one's own soul.

That was for him the true meaning of the word “knowledge”. That was for him also the content of all truth worth striving for by man – the truth that for him was the direct expression of the divine spirituality that lives through the world, that knowledge, as truth, permeates the human soul so that this human soul can grasp it in an inward, powerful experience. But through this, Fichte felt as if the whole world were pulsating and alive and interwoven with the will of the world, with the divine will of the world.

And as man grasps himself in his innermost being, as he becomes in the truest sense an I-conscious being, an imprint arises within this I, a revelation of the world-will pulsating through the world, which is completely imbued of what Fichte calls the “duties”; those duties that could never reveal themselves to one from a merely material world, that penetrate from the world of the spiritual into the human soul, [which] grasp the will of humanity; so that for Fichte, the external sensual, material world becomes that which, like the material-physical, expands before us, in order to be able to live out the dutiful will and the will-imbued duty in anything.

Not that Fichte diverted his approach from the external sense world, not as if he wanted to escape into a one-sided world free of the senses! It is not like that; but it is the case that everything that the eyes can see externally, that the hands can grasp, for Fichte became the tool, the means of the spirit, so that the spirit could present itself, [so that] the spirit, -the spirit permeated by duty, the duty that man can grasp in his soul, can be represented by an external materiality: a world view that Fichte himself, in the very sense of the word, regards as a world view.

One may say, esteemed attendees, while remaining entirely objective: Nothing stands in such contrast to another as this Fichtean world view stands, say, to the world view born of the spirit of the French Romance language, as it was outlined by one of the greatest French philosophers, Cartesius or Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as an embodiment of the French spirit itself – a philosophical embodiment. Descartes, the Frenchman, the Frenchman who, like Fichte from the Germanic, so from the French national character draws and creates, Descartes starts from the fact that man feels himself a stranger to the outer world, that man must start from doubt in his soul. There can be no doubt for Fichte in the sense that Descartes means it, for his knowledge is an immediate co-experience of that which lives and breathes through the world. Fichte does not place himself outside of the spirit of the world by knowing, but inwardly seeks to unite with the spirit.

Descartes, on the other hand, stands before the world as mere observation, as external observation. What kind of world view emerges from this? One need only mention one thing that appears as a consequence of the French Descartesian world view. As I said, it is really not necessary to develop national biases, but one can remain objective when saying this. What is one consequence of Descartes' view of the world? Well, it is enough to mention that Descartes, in his striving, which also emanates from self-awareness, but from mere rational, intellectual self-awareness, not from the living inner life, like Fichte's self-awareness, this Descartes' view of the world imagines the world as a large machine, as a powerful mechanism. And for Descartes, animals themselves are moving machines, inanimate, moving machines.

Everything that developed as a mechanism in later times, as a mechanistic world view, which also took hold in other nations from France, basically leads back to this starting point of Descartes.

You only have to consider the contrast: On the one hand, the Roman philosopher who turns the world into a machine; on the other hand, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who wants to pour out the soul itself over the whole world from the German folk tradition, so that this soul can experience everything soulful, everything in the world that is pulsating with will – and one has expressed something important about the relationship of the German folk spirit to its western neighbor.

This Descartesian worldview then produced, I might say, one materialistic outgrowth after another. We see how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the worldview that Goethe encountered from France emerged, and of which Goethe, from his German consciousness, said: Oh, how bleak, how desolate! And then the philosopher shows us atoms moving, colliding, pushing each other – a mere mechanism! And all this is supposed to explain the rich abundance of the world in which we live?

It is fair to say – again, entirely objectively: From the abundance and vibrancy of the German mind, Goethe turned away from this merely mechanistic world view, which then, in de La Mettrie's “Man a Machine” at the end of the eighteenth century, had a flowering that of all those who want to build a worldview based on superficial vanity, on that vanity that would be quite satisfied if there were no human soul, but if, like a phonograph, the human mechanical thinking apparatus purred away what man has to say about the world. And well into the nineteenth century, this worldview continued to unfold.

We see it in [gap in transcript], but we also see it in a spirit like – yes, it is still not called French today, but is still called Bergson – like in Bergson, who has found the most shameful thing, again and again, to defame and slander that which wells up from the German soul as a world view. One would like to say: Because he can see nothing else in a world picture that is alive, that is filled with inner life, he believes he can defame it, defames this German world picture as such, which shows - as he repeatedly says in his writings – how the German, from his lofty position at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has descended and degenerated completely into a mechanistic world mechanism.

It is a pity that this so celebrated Bergson not only drew a picture of the world - I have explained it in detail, not only in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, written before the war - but not only drew a picture of the world that was much more powerful, much more forceful, by a German mind, Preuss, who is rarely mentioned and little known, the German thinker, thinker, for example in his book “Spirit and Matter” 1882 [is presented] - of which Bergson either knows nothing, which is an equally big mistake, or does not want to know anything - but not only this, but it has also been shown that entire pages in the so-praised writings of Bergson are simply copied from Schelling or from Schopenhauer! – That is one way of relating to the intellectual life of Central Europe!

This intellectual life is contrasted with that of Fichte, an intellectual life that does not want to understand the world as dead, but that wants to understand the world as a spiritual-living entity, down to the smallest parts, and for which knowledge is nothing other than the experience of this spiritual vitality of the world. Just as with the French conception of the world, Fichte, with his energetic grasp of the human ego, in which he wants to experience the world, stands in contrast to the English conception of the world, that English conception of the world that took its starting point from Baco of Verul am, and which, one might say, has found its repulsive sides, its repulsive one-sidedness, precisely in the most recent world view that English intellectual life has produced in so-called pragmatism – in Baco von Verulam. As Goethe, for example, very profoundly remarks, one sees everywhere how [Baco von Verulam] actually regards the spiritual life in such a way that what otherwise [lives] in the human spirit as truth is actually only there to summarize and form the diversity of the external materials and forces of the world, which can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, and to again disassemble them and the like. A means of dominating the external physical world is philosophy, based on Baco von Verulam, basically everything that could be called philosophy. And up to our days, this meaning has been preserved.

What actually appears as pragmatism? Within English intellectual life, something highly peculiar appears as pragmatism – Schiller, James and other representatives of this pragmatism. For these representatives of pragmatism, for these pragmatists, truth is not something that man experiences inwardly like an image of gods or spirits, something that – as in the Fichte in the sense of Fichte, enters the human soul from the spirit that pulsates, lives and weaves through the world, but in the sense of this pragmatism, truth is actually only something that man thinks up in order to have a direction in the multiplicity of external phenomena.

For example, the soul - this concept of “soul”, this unified concept of soul - you cannot see the soul: What is it then for pragmatism? For pragmatism, the unifying concept of soul, the unifying concept of the ego, of self-awareness, is nothing more than a means of holding together the manifoldness of the soul life and its expressions in the body, so that they do not fall apart in contemplation; so that one has, as it were, brackets and bindings. Concepts are created for the external material. How far removed this is from Fichte's world view, drawn from the depths of the soul, for which spirit is the most original of the world and reality, the spirit that flows into the individual human soul life. And by feeling this influx, man knows himself one with the spirit of the world. And then the external world becomes, as Fichte put it, a field for the spirit to unfold in. Exactly the opposite!

Here with Fichte: the spirit is supreme, the actual reality, the highest living thing, for the sake of which the external world of the senses exists, so that the spirit can find its means of expression in it. There: the mind is capable of nothing more than creating binders and clamps in its concepts and ideas, so that it - which is the main thing - can place these concepts in the service of external material reality, and can ultimately find itself in external material reality.

It is indeed necessary, most honored attendees, to consider the interrelations in this very light. Only through this does the German come to a real, enlightened realization of what is actually taking place in the depths of his people.

Then, in one of the most difficult times in German development, Fichte tried to express what emerged to him as a power of consciousness from this soul power, which was connected to his inner life of will, in order to inspire, to strengthen, to invigorate his people. He did this in his “Addresses to the German Nation” to the German Nation» that the true man of world-view does not merely live in unworldly contemplation, but that these contemplations can intervene directly in that which the time demands and what mankind – I would like to say – [in fact] needs in order to be strengthened and invigorated in soul.

And at the appropriate moment, a second personality appears before us alongside Fichte – the second personality who tried no less to grasp the innermost part of the world with his own soul. These spirits sought to grasp the whole, great world spirit with their own souls, investing their entire personality.

In the case of Fichte, I probably only needed to tell you a few details of his life so that you could see how truly what he experienced – I would say – on the icy heights of thought, but which were permeated by pure human warmth in his case, was connected to his personality, to his immediate human being. A picture of the very young Fichte: he is a good student, already devoting himself to his duties at school as a six- or seven-year-old. His father rewards the young boy by giving him the book 'The Horned Siegfried' for Christmas when he is seven. Fichte, the young Fichte, the boy, is completely gripped by what comes to life through the human personality that is in a soul like that of “Gehörnte Siegfried”! And so it turns out that he now needs to be admonished because he is no longer as diligent at school as he was before. One day we see the boy in his blue farmer's smock; he is standing by the stream that flows past his father's house: suddenly he throws the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which he was holding in his hand, into the water, and he stands there crying and watches as the book floats away in the waves. His father arrives and is initially indignant that his little boy has thrown the book he had given him into the water. Then he has to learn that in this case what Fichte later made the actual core of his philosophical work – the dutiful will – that this dutiful will already lived in the boy Fichte in such a way that he could not bear, by the distracted attention to the “Horned Siegfried”, no longer fulfill his duty as a learner! And everything he experienced as a boy was probably already connected with the innermost workings and nature of his soul.

And once, when Fichte was nine years old, the estate neighbor from the neighboring village came to Fichte's place of residence. He wanted to hear the sermon; but he was too late. He could no longer hear the pastor preach; the church bells had already rung. So it was suggested that the nine-year-old boy could retell the content of the sermon to the estate neighbor. And they sent for him. Young Fichte entered in his blue peasant's smock; and after he had behaved somewhat awkwardly at first, he approached the public figure and developed the thoughts that he had taken in from the sermon with such intimacy that it was clear: he had not only taken something in externally, but had united with his whole soul what he had listened to.

Thus it was that this personality – one might say – that, if I may use the trivial word, it always absorbed everything that affected it with the whole person, out of its own genius, so effectively that everything that came from this person, on the one hand, bore the deepest human character, and on the other hand, rose again to the highest heights of world-historical contemplation.

One beautiful trait of this most German of German thinkers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, must be emphasized again and again: when Fichte later spoke to his audience as a professor, he did not want to speak like someone else who simply conveyed the content of what he had conquered to his listeners. Someone who knew Fichte well and had often heard him speak said that his words rushed forth like a thunderstorm that discharges in individual sparks; [and he said] that he not only wanted to produce good people, but great people.

And in such a way was also the work-you can not say-set up, the work of this German, because in the thoughts of this German thinker lived something in this lecture, which was much more than presented: He wanted, by mounting the lectern, to carry something up to this lectern, which flowed as a living entity from him into flowed from him into the audience, so that the audience, if they listened attentively and left the lecture hall, took with them not only a content, not only a teaching, but something that was more in their soul than what they had brought into the lecture hall, something that seized their whole humanity, permeated it, inspired it! And truly, Fichte knew how to work in this way, to penetrate so directly to the center of the human soul, that he wanted to bring his listeners, these listeners, in direct contact with his listeners, to revive in themselves what really connected them – one might say – immediately connected them to what the soul could experience of the spiritual that flows and permeates the world.

So, for example, he once said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall.” The listeners turned their eyes to the wall and thought, “That would be easy.” After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said, “So, now imagine the one who imagined the wall!” At first they were amazed. But now a way had been found to win the hearts and minds of the audience directly for the realization of the secrets of the world, as they can play out in the human soul.

And so, with his whole personality directly immersed in the life of knowledge, was also Johann Wilhelm Schelling, of whom those who saw him – and I certainly knew such people! – who saw and heard him – not only read his books and knew what was in his books – thus they said that something emerged from his sparkling eyes that was like the gaze of knowledge itself!

Schelling, too, wanted to experience directly in his own soul what lives in nature as spirit. For him, the soul was only something like the outer face of a spirit that lives and weaves through the world. And as the human soul approaches nature, it recognizes in nature what it itself is as spirit and soul.

Spirit flows through the world. It forms an external impression by crystallizing nature around itself. In this way, it creates the ground for the spirit itself to appear in the human soul on this ground. Therefore, for Schelling, the spirit of nature and the spirit of soul grew together into a unity. And with such a view, he knew how to rise to wonderful possibilities. He only penetrated them in seemingly dry concepts – incidentally, in concepts and ideas that sometimes rose to the most tremendous, most alert, intuitive glow. He only spoke in seemingly dry terms about nature and about how one can be in harmony with nature and the spiritual world, and how the concepts arise from nature and how one can be in harmony in cognition.

Once he said the word, the word that was certainly one-sided: To recognize nature is to create nature. - Certainly, a one-sided word; one can only recreate nature in the act of recognizing it. But Schelling felt such a close kinship between what takes place in the human soul and what takes place in nature that he could imagine himself to be living as if he were creating natural forces when he believed that the right cognitive drives had been released in the soul. And so, on the one hand, the human form appears to Schelling as the highest natural expression of the natural forces of the spirit and soul, and on the other hand, art [...] that which is the human expression of spiritual striving.

One would like to say: Schelling feels the highest as two halves that only complement each other: what the artist is able to create in art, on the one hand; the human form, on the other hand, as the crown and blossom of nature. And so we see how Schelling developed a world view that is entirely born out of – indeed, itself appears like a rebirth – the rebirth of the human mind. The German mind itself has become the organ of vision in Schelling, to see in nature and in intellectual life that which speaks to the human mind as external sensory objects speak to the human eyes and ears.

But as a result, Schelling has become the one for the German spiritual development who could raise to an enormous height that which, as a spiritual world, could inspire from the Romance world view, for example, Giordano Bruno, but only inspire. How passionately born out of the [Italian] world-feeling the world-picture of Giordano Bruno appears, if we compare it with the world-picture—with the calm world-picture reborn out of the German soul—of Schelling.

And the third is Hegel. Hegel, the third, the philosopher of the Germans who, I might say, lived in the most intimate union with the Goethean Weltanschauung; Hegel, who, I might say, sought on the third of the paths that were possible from the German folk, on the third of the paths to lead the soul to the place where it can directly grasp the spiritual activity and weaving and essence of the world.

In Johann Gottlieb Fichte, it is the will that pulses through the soul and creates expression in duty; in Schelling, it is the feeling, the innermost part of the soul, while a natural will takes hold of it and gives it birth; in Hegel, it is the life of thought - the life of thought that is felt by Hegel in such a way that, as the thoughts that he lets pass through his soul are moved and experienced by this soul, they appear directly as thoughts of the divine-spiritual life of the world itself, which permeates all spaces and all times. So that man, by letting his thoughts live in himself, free from sensuality and without being influenced by the outside world, has the divine-spiritual thinking of the world simultaneously living and revealing itself in him through this experience of thought. Admittedly, this is how Hegel became a spirit who created a world view as if the whole world were built only out of logic – which is one-sided. But he added to what Fichte and Schelling had offered, the third sound from German folk tradition.

It may be said that what makes Hegel appear particularly as a German spirit is that, unlike Descartes, for example - Rosenkranz, a faithful disciple of Hegel, wrote the fine book “Hegel as a German National Philosopher” - what makes Hegel particularly German spirit, is that, unlike Descartes, who also bases everything on thinking but only arrives at a mechanistic view of the world, he does not experience thinking as if thinking were something that arises in the soul and is alien to existence, but rather: the spirit, the world spirit itself thinks itself in man. The world spirit itself sees itself through thinking in man. In his thinking, Hegel feels interwoven with the thoughts of the world spirit.

One can also say that Descartes' one-sided, naked view of the world is given life – if only as a thought – in Hegel's view of the world.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need to take a dogmatic stand on the views of the three men mentioned. We can go further than that today; to be a partisan or an opponent may perhaps view all that these minds have expressed as one-sided. There is no need to take a dogmatic stand on them; they can be seen as an extension of what lives and weaves in German national character. They are something that has emerged from the flowering of German intellectual life, which will certainly change in many ways over time as it continues to flourish and bear fruit, but which can provide the deepest and most significant insights for anyone striving for spiritual knowledge of the world because a spiritual world knowledge must arise from such a germ within German intellectual life, as was striven for by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and basically arose out of the spirit of Goethe.

What is peculiar about these three personalities is that they basically express three sides, three different shades of something that hovers invisibly over them, that was the common expression of the highest peak of German intellectual life at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, and that in Goethe and others the great fruits emerge in such a way that one always starts not to seek a knowledge of the world in such a way that one simply applies man as he stands in his powers, but that one first tries to awaken the human powers of knowledge that lie deeply dormant in the depths of the soul, and with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear - as I said, these are Goethe's words - then wants to look out into the world and life with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear.

This is how Goethe did it. That is why Goethe, following Kant, speaks of an intuitive power of judgment, which he ascribed to himself. And truly, from this intuitive power of judgment emerged the blossoms of Goethe's achievements. “Intuitive power of judgment” - what does Goethe mean? The ordinary power of judgment lives in human concepts. With this power of judgment, man faces things, he faces nature; he looks at it with his senses; with his mind he judges what he has seen with his senses. Goethe says to himself: If one can see the spiritual through the power of judgment, just as the eyes see the sensual, then one lives and moves in the spiritual. - And so Goethe wanted to look at plants and animals, so he wanted to look at human life. And so he observed it! And so he even wanted to be active in the field of physics.

There one comes upon a chapter in which it is clearly shown how German folk-life must express something different about the external facts of physical life than, for example, English folk-life. The time has not yet come, however, to see the connections in this area.

For more than thirty years now, I myself have endeavored – I may say this without immodesty, because it is simply a fact – to show what Goethe actually wanted, from a spiritual view of nature, from an judgment, as [he opposed his] theory of colors to Newton's color theory, which is based on atomism and mechanism, as a theory of life.

Today, physics cannot yet understand this. But once German culture in the spiritual realm truly reflects on itself, one will understand how the German spirit in Goethe had to rebel against Newton's purely mechanical scientific view in the field of color theory as well.

And the chapter “Goethe versus Newton” – by that I mean German science versus the mechanical utilitarian English science. This chapter will reappear. And perhaps it is precisely such a chapter that will show the relationship of the German soul in its depth and in its deeper contemplation of knowledge to the other judgments of Europe's striving for knowledge.

And what place the German national soul has come to occupy in the overall development of German intellectual life is only one particular, special aspect; but this particular, this single, special aspect is the expression of the general that lived in the Goethe , and that lives on into our days, albeit – I would like to say – under the stream of consciousness, but nevertheless clearly in all deeper recognition of the spiritual in the German: to seek the spiritual organ of knowledge.

Fichte called it a “higher spiritual sense” when he spoke to his Berlin students from 1811 to 1813. Schelling called it “intellectual intuition.” To arrive at a higher organ of spiritual knowledge – which is uncomfortable, and which a philosophy based merely on utility or mechanism, like the Romance or British philosophy, cannot achieve – to create an organ of knowledge organ that is built out of the spirit and can therefore look into the spirit; [that] does not see the spirit in abstract, dry, empty theoretical concepts, but grasps it as fully as the outer senses grasp the world of the senses.

And because such striving was so powerfully alive in the development of the German spirit, it was possible that even lesser minds that followed the time of Goethe were seized and imbued with what had germinated and sprouted in the great age of German life that has just been discussed, and that these lesser minds could even create something that is more similar to the paths that are actually the real paths to grasp the world spiritual as a human spirit in a living way, to get something that is even more similar to this real path than what appeared in Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. Because there is so much that is fruitful in this Fichte-Schelling-Hegel worldview, it could have such a fertilizing effect even on lesser minds, who - let us say - like Fichte's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, come to recognize how in what sensually to man as a human-like form – also as a sensual animal form, but there it does not have the same meaning – what lives in the sensual human form as in a finer bodily organization in a coarser bodily organization, as we say in spiritual science: an etheric body alongside the coarse physical body; and how in this etheric body [work] the great cosmic forces that give birth to man out of the eternal, just as the physical forces give birth to him physically out of the physical. That is to say, Hermann Immanuel Fichte is already seeking a way to directly access the external physical, not only through thoughts, not only through abstractions, but by directly grasping in a higher, spiritual-sensual way that lies beyond birth and death in man.

And then we see a remarkable spirit, little known, who also walks this path, undoubtedly not as ingeniously and magnificently conceived as Schelling and Fichte, for example, but advancing further along the actual spiritual-scientific path than they, because he was allowed to live after them. Although he wrote his wonderful book “Glimpses into the Essence of Man” in 1811, we can still say that Troxler – for that is who we mean – is one of those who are truly at home in a forgotten chapter of German intellectual life. Because he lived later, Troxler was able to find true paths into the spiritual world when even his greater – greater than he – his greater predecessors could not.

It is remarkable that Troxler, when he presented his “[Lectures] on Philosophy” in 1835, spoke of the fact that man can develop something in his soul if he only wants to, something that relates to the purely intellectual view of the world, which works in theoretical concepts and, so to speak, only collects individual concepts from observation, how something could develop in the human soul, which he calls Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, an “super-spiritual sense”. “Supra-spiritual sense” - that is a soul power that Troxler refers to as [one that] can only be developed in man, and which does not, I would say, merely grasp things conceptually, not so abstractly as ordinary abstract cognition, but which grasps things so fully, so fully, that they , like the spirit itself, before man; that man thereby beholds a spiritual world, which is not exhausted in concepts, like even Hegel's, but which sees spiritual reality as the senses see sensual reality, so that the world is truly enriched by a new element of its being, by the spiritual. But the spiritual consists of concrete, fully developed entities that stand side by side and interact with each other in such a way that they can be grasped by the senses.

“Supra-sensible meaning” is one soul force. Troxler speaks of the other as the “supra-sensible spirit”. So that one must see in it that which can be developed in the human soul as a special power, so that the soul comes to go beyond the ordinary sensual, and yet not to fall into spiritual emptiness, as for example the mechanical natural science, but [that one comes to a] being filled by the spirit.

“Supersensible spirit”, “superspiritual sense” - for Troxler, these are two faculties in the human soul. He speaks of this in 1835; and one can receive an enormously significant stimulus for that which one can call knowledge of the spirit from these Troxler lectures, which consciously emerged from the depths of German nationality. For it is this German nationality that encourages us not to look at the world merely from the outside, but to really feel again and again, in what the soul can experience most intimately, the flooding through of the soul-spiritual being of the human being and of the whole world itself. Thus this German national character is called upon to develop something that otherwise could not have occurred within a national character in the course of time.

Now let us see how strangely - even if one characterizes quite one-sidedly that which is really in the sense of this national character - can be expressed, and what can be proved about these characterized spirits, let us look at what it is. We must say that we also see mysticism within the spiritual development of France and England, but this mysticism exists alongside other forms of science. It is either condemned to lead a sectarian existence alongside other forms of science or to close itself off as a special spiritual current.

German intellectual life, by rising to something like what Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte have achieved, shows that one can, in the fullest sense can remain in the fullest sense of the word in a scientific spirit and can work precisely out of a scientific spirit, and that which is to be achieved through mysticism, for example, does not stand alongside this scientific current, but can be directly and organically connected to it and can emerge from it.

Therefore, we see how, for example, in Hegel there arises something that lives in the purest clarity of thought – even if many dispute it, it is still so – but there is nothing in the purest clarity of thought that might be just a nebulous mysticism of feeling or what would be a mystic prattling about all kinds of things, but what, with crystal-clear thoughts, at the same time wants to grasp the thinking of the world mystically in its own thinking: we find thought-like mysticism - if the word may be used - in Hegel. And we find this intellectual mysticism spiritualized — because the life of thought is inwardly illuminated by the supersensible spirit, by the supra-spiritual meaning — in such personalities as, for example, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler.

It is interesting to see how Troxler endeavors to reveal what should lead to a world view from the forces of the soul, how what man knows reveals itself from what actually stands behind what man has in ordinary everyday life for the maintenance and orientation of his life. In Troxler's view, man has faith - faith, which, in the realm of religious belief, supports humanity's highest spiritual supports, but which also plays a major role in other areas of human life: faith. Man has this faith in his soul life. I am not just repeating Troxler's words, but speaking as one would have to think if one took in what Troxler said and developed it a little further. This power of belief is something that the outer physical body must have, something that can be grasped by the soul just as it arises directly in the soul, even without the development of higher cognitive powers. But behind this belief lives, hidden in the soul, [a higher organ of knowledge, so that belief is, as it were, for ordinary daily life, the living out of this higher organ of knowledge. Troxler calls what lives behind faith: spiritual hearing, the supersensible, spiritual hearing. So that in Troxler's sense, faith is to be imagined as the beautiful that flows in from an unconscious or subconscious spiritual part of the soul, which drives faith to the surface. But if it is developed itself, it becomes a spiritual ear that would become hearing in the spiritual world. Spiritual hearing means perceiving in the same way as the sensory ear perceives external sounds that live in the air.

Love, a soul power, which we again find as if born out of the soul-spiritual, the most beautiful power of outer human life, love – behind it stands for Troxler – I would like to say: for Troxler's pious mind – a spiritual, a soul power of knowledge. He calls it “soul feeling”, “soul sensing”.

Thus faith is, as it were, the outer expression, the outer image of what lives in the full soul as hearing. Thus love is the outer fruit of what lives in the inner soul as spiritual sensing, as spiritual feeling.

For Troxler, hope is the outer expression of that which lives in the soul as a higher soul power, as a higher soul sense, as a super-spiritual sense in the soul as an inner spiritual eye.

It is a wonderful image, but one that is not born out of fantasy alone, but is based on real facts of the soul life that everyone can develop within themselves. A wonderful image. There stands man within the physical and the spiritual world. There he develops, in relation to what flows through the world as the Divine-Spiritual, and in relation to what flows towards him from people and other beings: faith, hope, love. He develops them because, when he carries within him that which can stand free of the body in relation to the spiritual world, because he carries within him that which hears spiritually, feels spiritually and can see spiritually. And because the human being, that which he is in his soul, has been shrouded for the time between death – or, let us say, until birth with the bodily covering – that which connects him through spiritual hearing to the world-tone harmony , with the spiritual harmony of the world, which connects him to the world, which through grace leans towards him from the spiritual, through spiritual groping, which connects with him through spiritual vision, which wraps itself for him in faith, love, hope. [And so the soul forces that confront us in everyday life and in ordinary soul education are, for Troxler, an expression of a spiritual life that slumbers down there in the soul, that weaves and lives, and that, when developed, can enter into a direct connection with the spiritual-soul life of the whole world that flows around us. In this, the Troxler feels so at home in this, one can say, temporarily forgotten link in German thought and spiritual development.

Beautifully, wonderfully, he expresses this feeling of being at home by expressing himself in connection with other spirits who have striven for something similar. He says:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body [or assumed a kind of shell for the spirit in this], a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the inner, higher human being for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to the dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings.] “The inner man,” he even says in another place, “this ‘veiled God in nature, is not himself of stone, like these.] In the stony limbs’

of man

“grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could”

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical Apostolic idea, which Paul revealed to the Corinthians, , saying: “A body animated by the soul is sunk, and a body animated by the spirit rises, for as there is a body endowed with a soul, so there is also a body endowed with a spirit.” And in this is] contained the true, only doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man.

Troxler wanted a science that approached the world from all the powers of human nature, not just from the intellect and the ordinary, so-called powers of knowledge, but - but a science, a knowledge that the whole personality contributes to the world, so that in turn the whole human personality, the whole human being, can recreate or relive the world within itself. Not only in poetry, Troxler believes, but also in real knowledge it must become so. Therefore Troxler says the beautiful words in 1835:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the newest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every instance of anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history,] is now rising, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with it as absolute spirit or absolute personality."

Thus, Troxler is faced with the idea of an anthroposophy, as he calls it, an anthroposophy that is not, like anthropology, the study of that which can be observed externally in man with the senses and with the mind from which these senses seem to be drawn, but a higher kind of anthropology ology stands before Troxler's eyes, before Troxler's spiritual eye, which wants to develop an organ in man that is basically only the higher man in man, who then, to use this Goethean expression, directly recognizes and experiences that which is also higher than all nature: the higher nature in nature.

Then, when the whole personality presents itself to the world as a cognitive organ, as a super-spiritual sense organ, as a supersensible spiritual organ – as a “super-spiritual sense, as a ‘supersensible spirit’, [as a] spiritual organ, so that the world comes to life in the whole personality, then, in Troxler's view, ‘anthroposophy’ arises!

Thus, as if in a forgotten aspiration of German intellectual development, anthroposophy lives in the germ. Its blossoms and fruits will sprout from this German intellectual life if one correctly understands German intellectual life. And that they are intimately connected with this German intellectual life - I would like to say: every being, every trait of this German intellectual life shows it to us. It is the case in the world, esteemed attendees, that individual things that flourish in the development of humanity must live for a time, I would say, as if under the stream; the rest of the stream shows something else, something superficial; but under the stream, the deeper things live on. And so it is with what can now sound to us as a faded note from German intellectual life.

Or is it not wonderful, absolutely wonderful, when we see how out of this intellectual life - it was in 1858, when a pastor, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - Pastor Rocholl, published a little book - yes a truly wonderful booklet, in which he wanted to explain how the human spirit must elevate and strengthen itself in order to be able to join that which, as the spirit of the world, permeates and flows through the world. This wonderful, forgotten little book, which in the most eminent sense is, I would say, a document of the just mentioned faded tone of German spiritual life, is called: “Contributions to German Theosophy”. It was published in 1856 by a simple pastor, in whom his theosophical reflections sprouted from his piety. But it is a little book that must be said to rise to a truly wonderful height of spiritual insight and spiritual feeling about the world, even if it may often seem fantastic in relation to what spiritual science has to say today.

One need not be either a supporter or an opponent of these things, but one can simply face them by saying to oneself: they are an expression of what lives in German national culture. And so I could cite many, many more examples, especially from German intellectual life. Everywhere one would find confirmation that this striving for spiritual science is present in German intellectual life, which today has to present itself as half-forgotten – forgotten! And forgotten in such a way that it must be recognized in the course of time. It does no harm for something like this to be forgotten. Why does it do no harm?

Well, dear attendees, the secrets of the world that are in nature do not impose themselves in such a way that they do not need to be explored first! Why should we believe that the spiritual history of mankind does not also contain such secrets that need to be explored first? Why should we believe that only that which - I want to say - has come to light through the favor of the destiny of the time, that only that is the essence of the progress of humanity? In the subsoil of human development lives that which can only be found by those who come afterwards; but that is how it is in the history of ideas; it is also in the history of nature.

But basically, all these minds were more or less aware that – I have already used this image in relation to Fichte – that which lived in them and which was to lead them in their souls to the spiritual secrets of the world, that this was, so to speak, a dialogue with the German folk spirit itself.

And now let me give you another example. I would also mention the remarkable Karl Christian Planck, from whose posthumous writings the Testament of a German was published not so long ago. Karl Christian Planck, who, proceeding from a truly spiritual point of view, sought to place man in the context of the whole of existence. The time will come when such minds will be recognized, minds that have drawn from the depths of the German soul, when there will be full consciousness of the fact that in order that the German spirit may develop fully can fully develop – also in the realm of knowledge, everything foreign, which sometimes – like Newton's theory of colors – is more readily understood by the superficial human soul than the German, for the understanding of which one must first prepare.

What does the earth look like to a modern mind, which is completely sickened by the Romanesque-British-mechanistic in the scientific view, by the world view that is born entirely of the mind, which Schelling even called a mental power in 1803, what does the earth look like to such a view? Now the earth stands as revealed by external mechanical geology: mineral-mechanical.

Before Planck's soul, this lonely thinker in Germany, who had his first books published in Ulm in the 1860s, speaking out of the most genuine German essence, speaking out of the spiritual, but only being recognized by the better minds, how does the earth stand before his mind, before this consciously German mind? Like a mighty organism! Yes, not just like an organism, but like a blessed, spiritualized organism that has shaped its own spiritual-soul out of its own spirit: the human being himself! For Planck, the human being, with all that lives and moves in him, belongs to the earth. One does not fully understand the earth if one does not see man as the flower of the earth. For Planck, to regard the earth as the mere geologist does would be just as if one were to regard the plant only in its root and not to go to its flower. The earth must be regarded in such a way that the possibility of human development lives in the earth itself; that the earth bears within itself something that, out of its forces, out of its being, demands man as its flower!

Thus Planck's world view goes out into the great from its spirit. And how does he speak himself? In 1864, in his “Foundations of a Science of Nature,” he writes wonderful words about the earth:

“What power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parsifal)

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which her hero attains, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

It is important to realize that such spirits are rooted in German intellectual life. It is not very helpful to keep pointing this out, but they live unconsciously in the best minds of German intellectual life.

Karl Christian Planck – I referred to him as early as 1900 in the first edition of my Rätsel der Philosophie (Mysteries of Philosophy), which at the time was called Über Welt- und Lebensanschauungen (On World and Life Views); now again in the new edition of Rätsel der Philosophie, to show what he means within the overall development of German intellectual life. One can say, dear honored attendees, in such spirits one can grasp how the German spirit has precisely this special cognitive faculty, to let the soul-spiritual experience flow into it, to let that which weaves and lives in the secrets of the world — I would like to say — in the innermost part of nature and of the spirit.

For years, I would even say, it was not given to those who are now surrounding us like a hostile ring, to recognize this, even in its external outlines, [those who now live] on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers [within which the German national character develops]. How often the jokes that are heard from everywhere, saturated with hatred and truly defamatory, are cheap in comparison to German intellectual life, which is hated and defamed, and in relation to which one is not aware of the position it must occupy in the world by virtue of its very own strength. One only needs to recall how Emile Boutroux, not long before the war, still traveled around Germany lecturing on the beauty of German intellectual life, on the fraternization of German and Latin intellectual life – and now he repeatedly and repeatedly brings up his so that they can hear again and again that the German spirit is averse to looking at the things of the world; this German spirit imagines that it can carry everything within itself and give birth to the whole world from its own interior.

And in one of his most recent speeches, Emile Boutroux did not disdain to take the following hateful joke into his mouth – and he apparently found listeners – to make the following joke about German intellectual life and its nature. He said: The Frenchman, when he wants to describe animals, goes to a menagerie to look at the animals and then describe them; the Englishman, when he wants to describe animals, travels around the world and describes what he can observe there; the German sits down in his study — he neither travels the world like the Englishman nor goes to the menagerie like the Frenchman — but sits in his study and draws from his own inner being, from what he can experience within himself, the image of the lion and the elephant and so on.

It's just a shame – we are accustomed to the French being a witty people, aren't we? – but it's just a shame that this joke – those who know a little about intellectual history are aware of this – was first made by Heinrich Heine, that even this joke, with which the Frenchman wants to poke fun at German intellectual life, was born on German soil!

And if you wanted to go into the joke: the German would not go to the menagerie or not to the desert, would not observe the animals outside, but would create them from his own inner being. Brehm, if you were to hold Brehm's book with his observations of apes up to such a know-nothing, such a frivolous mocker, he would slander the German people, saying that they create not through world travel but from within. [Let it be said in reply that the greatest work of world travel – which must be recognized by anyone with an open mind as the work that first scientifically discovered America – comes from von Humboldt, the German!

Where it matters to live with nature and observe nature, the German truly does not need the Romance reference. And what this remarkable Frenchman Boutroux, who has become a famous man in France through a few successful sentences, has to say about German inwardness, is truly quite far removed from what this German inwardness turns out to be when you look at it at its core, as we have tried to do today with a few words.

Now, dear attendees, if we try to hear other voices, for example, Eastern voices, the matter becomes even clearer. There one must say: in Eastern Europe, on Russian soil – not only despite the great philosopher Soloviev, but precisely because of the peculiar nature of the great philosopher Soloviev, one can say – in Eastern Europe today there can be no understanding of this peculiar relationship of the human soul to the world-pervading spiritual and living essence; but over there everything is such that there is still no understanding for the experience of the spirit pulsating and permeating the world in one's own inner soul being, that one wants everything to be met halfway, that everything should come only as a revelation, albeit a spiritual revelation from outside. Thus, even the greatest Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century opposed themselves completely to the actual essence of Central Europe, and by the way, even to Western Europe.

What they repeatedly had to say, great minds of Russian intellectual culture – the German just did not realize this because he simply took – I would like to say – the extraordinarily vivid description of a Tolstoy, a Dostoyevsky – the German did not realize this at all! Within Russian spiritual life, basically, only the view exists. This whole life, as it has been expressed in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, in the other Western European minds, is horrible, is repulsive basically, is an abstract life of thought, something that does not reach the heart and mind of the real human being. All this must be replaced by that which lives in the Russian human being. Whether something is categorized as political or not is not the point. The Testament of Peter the Great contains the whole spiritual philosophy of Russia; in the nineteenth century, philosophers express the same basic tenor, which amounts to regarding Western and Central Europe only as something horrible and obsolete.

Megalomania is the direct consequence of such a world view, which fancies itself as mature, but only fancies itself as mature out of immaturity. And so, for example, one can indeed experience the following. First of all - let me explain this in conclusion - an outstanding Russian spirit of the nineteenth century, Yushakov, turns his gaze towards Asia in 1885, because it is imminent that something must grow out of the same nationality in the East, directly like a great, world-historical mission. But this could never arise from the peoples of Western or Central Europe. And so, in 1885, Jushakow wrote a remarkable book, whose gaze is initially directed towards Asia – a remarkable book!

In this book, the following is expressed: When we look over to Asia, we find an old, wonderful world culture in Asia, which has only just grown old. This world culture wanted to understand itself by juxtaposing two spiritual entities: Ahriman and Ormuzd. Ormuzd is revered by these Asians, especially by the Iranian Asians, to whom, for example, the Indians and the Persians also belong, as the spirit that wins the fruits from the earth; but who also brings spiritual striving into the human soul, elevating it and allowing it to experience the spiritual.

In contrast to this stands Ahriman, who is connected with the spirit of the Iranians, the Turanians, who led the Asians through evil in such a way that the blessed conditions of Ormuzd were thwarted by him. And there we see - says Jushakow - in Asia over there Ormuzd and Ahriman fighting out their battle and man placed in this fight.

In 1885, dear attendees, please note that Yushakov wrote this! And he says: Oh, these poor Asians! What have the selfish, decrepit Europeans done to them? What have they let them become!

Yushakov presents the matter as if the Europeans, out of their selfishness and decrepitude, had taken away from the Asians what Ormuzd had brought to them as a blessing. But the Russians, out of their own philosophy of life, must bring the invigorating element of their world view into all its decrepitude. The Russians must come and help the Asians, they must join forces with the Asians. That is what Jushakow says. As I said, the focus is on Asia.

I am not saying this, Yushakov said it in 1885. And Yushakov said something remarkable: the wonderful, blessed alliance of the peasants – the Russian peasants – and the Cossacks will penetrate into Asia and will join forces with the poor Asians against Ahriman, in order to maintain the blessings of Ormuzd.

And who is Yushakov mainly opposed to? In 1885 – I have to keep emphasizing this – he says: Oh, these Asians, they have suffered terribly at the hands of the horrific Europeans, who only wanted to appropriate, in the most terrible selfishness, what Asian civilization, under Ormuzd's fruitfulness and blessing-bringing, has created for humanity. How did the Europeans view the Asians? And which Europeans does Jushakow have in mind? Jushakow, in 1885, has the English in mind; oddly enough. Let us hear what he says: “These Asian peoples are regarded by the English only as if they existed to clothe themselves in English garments, to clothe themselves in English fabrics, to fight with each other with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels and to play with English baubles.” Then he continues – in 1885:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula. I wish

– says Yushakov – my Russian

"Fatherland nothing similar - I can only rejoice that it is ‘

sufficiently far removed’

from this state of affairs, as brilliant as it is sad,

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. So Yushakov in 1885; so a Russian in 1885 looks over to Asia.

This is probably the reason why the Russians allied themselves with England shortly afterwards, not to help the Asians against Ahriman, but to destroy what, with such deep roots, can represent such a spiritual life – in addition to all the other German qualities – as it was allowed to be described.

And so, from the place where 150 million people have to live with 777 million, there must be a powerful awakening of consciousness of what the German essence has fundamentally meant in the development of humanity.

Among those Germans whose gaze was turned to the German character, there was always an awareness of it - an awareness on both sides of the Erz Mountains, in Styria as well as on the Rhine and in the far east of Germany. And just as that which today is being forged together by the great events in Central Europe - basically, among those who understood it, always wanted to forge together - may show us a beautiful word from an Austrian German, a word written in 1862 by the Austrian German Robert Hamerling.

I may well point to these circumstances on the other side of the Erz Mountains, for the reason that I myself have spent almost thirty years of my life under German Austria as a German Austrian myself, taking part in the discussions and struggles that Germans have to face within Austria.

It is the same Hamerling who expressed his attitude towards Austria and Germany in the beautiful words: “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland” – words that every Austrian-German who can see beyond external circumstances lives with in the indeterminable. I need not say anything about Robert Hamerling's other intellectual achievements, I just want to point out that in 1884 it was Robert Hamerling who, from Graz, called out heartfelt words to Germany when it was learned that a statue of the goddess Strasbourg was being erected in Paris and that the German flag was being burned at a festival celebrating the goddess Strasbourg. At that time, it was Robert Hamerling who sent the words from Graz to Germany:

Believe in revenge,
And in the victor's wreath of laurels:
Do not hope to steal back
A piece of German land!
You may rave like ravens Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore.

In 1862, in one of his earlier poems, “Germanenzug”, the same Robert Hamerling had the ancient Germans, the ancestors of the Germans, passing before his spiritual eyes as they moved across from Asia. He leaves them still encamped in Asia, on the borders of Europe. He beautifully describes the image of the evening, the evening image, how the setting sun is above them, how the moon is rising; then he describes how everything falls asleep among the wandering Germans, how only one watches, with blond curls, with radiant eyes, inspired by the essence of his people: Teut. The genius speaks to Teut, who wants to speak of the future essence of Germanness. The genius of the German people speaks, for example, to Teut, the words to the blond, representative youth of the Germanic peoples:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Then Hamerling continues by pointing out that what the Asian sought, and what the ancestors of the Germanic peoples sought in Asia, when they extinguished the human essence and suppressed the ego in order to rise to the spirit of the world, must reappear in a later form. This Asiatic way, which also appears today in Hinduism, can no longer be the present way. Now that the Christ Impulse has entered the world, the human ego must be attached to the world spirituality in a different way. The ego must be elevated, strengthened, as we see in the three - Fichte, Hegel, Schelling - and others; the ego must be strengthened; but in the way it must be, now that the greatest impulse in humanity, as the earth has seen the Christ impulse, as it must be, as the Asian striving must appear on a higher level, so it appeared from the deepest root of the national being. And that is what Robert Hamerling wants to express by also letting the genius speak to the blond Teut, to the blond representative of Germanness.

"But however proudly you may aspire, high above other swarms, you will always retain the ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of of the old Asian homeland. This holy ray of calm existence will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

And that is precisely what the German strives for, what rises from all science, from all knowledge: this carrying over of even what can be known, as if to the altar of a divinized world view itself. Spiritual science does not want to be religion, nor does it want to replace it; it wants to place itself as true science alongside religion – it does not want to affect religion in the least, it wants to accept it – like a current that presents itself as true science, which also only wants to support religion, not replace it in any way. But what spiritual science can achieve is offered at the same time – to use Böhme's expression – in order to experience drunkenness of God, that is, to experience the spiritual of the world in one's own soul being.

That is what was felt by the German philosopher, the German mystic Jakob Boehme, and what may appear as a motto, a guiding principle of the German essence itself, when Jakob Boehme says: When you turn to the deep phenomena of the world and gaze at the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and strive and walk, and in this God you will be buried.

This is a world view that has been decided upon from German knowledge, a spiritual world view.

And how do you encounter it? Let us just take a very brief look at Russia, to conclude. Russia needs a new delusion today: the delusion of Europe's decrepitude. It needs this new delusion of Europe's decrepitude to prove that this European intellectual life, and especially the Central European intellectual life, is outdated; a new delusion, as Russia always needed a delusion.

France – yes, one would like to remain completely objective, not to do wrong to anyone. The German has no need to join in the tones in which his enemies are indulging today. So perhaps we can listen to a French poet himself, who, not long before the war, created a dramatic portrayal of his people that is quite interesting: the French have become accustomed over the centuries to everyone listening to them. They have recently come to see themselves as the ones who set the tone in all external culture. And so Rostand himself, the Frenchman himself, believes it in this poetic representation. The Frenchman is like a cockerel: when he crows in the morning, the sun rises. And so he gradually comes to believe that because he crows, the sun rises. And he cannot imagine that the sun would rise even if he did not crow.

The Frenchman needs a new belief; he must be able to believe that nothing can happen in the world if he does not crow. He needs a new belief about his own nature. And basically, you only have to let the historical events since 1870 really affect your soul to see how this new belief has gradually emerged and how it has not left the French national spirit. You can also read about it in my little book, Thoughts During the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they have to hate them.

One would not want to do the English an injustice either. But when one hears how one of the leading contemporary English politicians lets it be known to the Germans across the Channel that “might before right” applies to them, and that this would be a German principle – then one must emphasize: The principle of “might before right” as a truly justified one can be found in the works of the English writer Thomas Hobbes, where it is first mentioned. The phrase “might before right” is a specifically English product, and all law is rooted in might. And so one could find many things; one would not want to do wrong, as I said, but I must say the sentence: All these nations, they need something to numb themselves about what they are actually doing in world history, to numb what they are doing, they need something like a fog that shrouds the truth. England needs a new lie – that can be said, without becoming in any way unobjective, from the facts themselves. And Italy? Yes, before the war a not insignificant Italian politician – for there were minds that were not so naive that they would have believed before the war that Italy would ever stand up for the Central European powers, and so I was not particularly struck by this – when a not insignificant Italian politician told me: We need a war in Italy, because our people have become impotent and lazy and careless; only war can reinvigorate them. So we need the war, a new sensation, a new passion, a tremor in the soul of the people, that is why Europe is worried.

As I said, these are the words of an Italian politician. Therefore, one can say: It will seem understandable that Italy, in order to numb itself to the real truth of the situation, would have to appoint a new saint: the sacro egoismo, the holy egoism - a new saint, a strange saint indeed. And even stranger is his hierophant, the high priest Gabriel d'Annunzio.

However much the image that will arise from these circumstances in the world history of humanity is forgotten, the German can also look at these things with calm confidence, as - let it be said again - on this side and on the other side of the Ore Mountains has always done my dear teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer spoke the following words in Austria in 1859:

Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
It may not be unwelcome,
If we get into a little fight here,
If they take away our good right
[You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us, every ambition will fade
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has erred,
If discord has arisen in a German heart,
There is but one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So then let us also have in common:]
A German war, if not a German peace.

1859 – spoken in Austria by someone who felt at one with his soul with what lives and breathes in the German national identity. And then he said, the same person, that

A spirit is rising, a giant to behold
[Who will not long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German districts.

He has been called a master in many ways,
In art and knowledge, in building systems,
He can be seen for the first time overall,
then he will be recognized by the world] for real.

I am only reading these sentences so that you can see how what the German can feel about the source and root of German national life was not just created today, as there are enough and sufficient people sitting among the honored audience here who know that I spoke about the German essence for years and years before the war, and also about the relationship to other nations. The German need not fall back on the tone that he can now hear from those who hold him as if in a ring, as if in a great fortress. He may quietly look at what he can gain from an objective observation of the nature of his people. For what he gains in this way presents itself to him where it appears like a pure tone in the development of German intellectual life, first as a germ, as a root, which will later bear flowers and fruit. And so the best that is in German intellectual life, which, as we have seen, is not yet blossom and fruit, but only root and germ, will bear blossom and fruit in the future.

And with his soul, the German turns in the present difficult time of trial, which fills us all with sure hopes and confidence, he turns with these sure hopes and confidence that fill him, to the future, in his whole heart united with the view into this future, to what will develop as the flowering and the fruit of the German national character, of German life and of German strength in general, despite all the hateful and defamatory things that are said today against this German essence – what will develop, what may be addressed by knowledge as that which will develop because it must develop!

[ 1 ] The purpose of this book is to indicate germinal points in the world views of a series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling. The contemplation of these germinal points evokes a feeling that these thinkers drew from a source of spiritual experience from which much more can flow than they brought forth. What matters is not so much one's acceptance or rejection of what they expressed, but rather one's understanding of the character of their striving for knowledge and the direction of their path. One can then arrive at the view that there is something in this character and direction that is more promise than fulfillment. And yet it is a promise with innate power, bearing the guarantee of its fulfillment within itself.

Through this one gains a relationship to these thinkers that is not one of adherence to the dogmas of their world views, but rather one leading to the insight that: Upon the paths they took, there lie living powers for seeking knowledge that did not take effect in what they themselves recognized but that can lead out of and beyond it.

This need not mean returning to Fichte, Hegel, and the others in the hope that, by taking better paths from their starting points, one will thus arrive at better results.

No, that cannot be the point for us—to be “motivated” by these thinkers in this way—but rather to gain access to the sources from which they drew and to recognize what still lies hidden within these sources as motivating powers, in spite of the work of these thinkers.

[ 2 ] A look at the spirit of the modern, natural-scientific way of picturing things (Vorstellungsart) can make one feel how much the idealism in world views living in the above thinkers is a promise awaiting fulfillment.

Through its results in a certain direction, this natural scientific way of picturing things has demonstrated the efficacy of its cognitive means. One can already find this way of picturing things essentially prefigured in a thinker who was at work when its development began—in Galileo. (In his vice-chancellor's address to the Vienna University in 1894, the Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Laurenz Müllner discussed the significance of Galileo in the most beautiful way.) What was already indicated by Galileo reappears, in an evolved state, in the directions taken by the research of the adherents of the modern natural-scientific way of thinking. This way of thinking has attained its significance by letting the world phenomena arising in the field of sens e observation speak purely for themselves, within their own lawful interconnections, and by wishing to allow nothing of what the human soul experiences from these phenomena to flow into what this way of thinking admits as knowledge. No matter what view one might hold about the natural-scientific picture of the world—whose fulfillment of the above cognitive demand is already possible or even achieved today—this cannot detract from one's recognition that this demand provides a sound basis for a valid picture of natural existence. If the adherent of an idealistic or spiritual-scientific world view takes a negative stance toward this demand today, he shows by this either that he does not understand the meanings of this demand, or that something of a natural-scientific way of picturing things are under the misconception that through such a world view something or other of the results of natural science is called into question.

[ 3 ] To anyone who penetrates into the true meaning of modern natural science, it is clear that this science does not undermine knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather supports and ensures it. One will not be able to arrive at this clarity, however, by imagining oneself, through all kinds of theoretical arguments, to be an opponent of a knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather by turning one's gaze upon what makes the natural-scientific picture of the world sensible and meaningful. The natural-scientific way of picturing things excludes everything from what it studies that is experienced through the inner being of the human soul. It investigates how things and processes relate to each other. What the soul, through its inner being, can experience about things serves only to reveal how things are, irrespective of these inner experiences. This is how the picture of purely natural occurrences comes about. This picture will in fact fulfill its task all the better, the more it succeeds in excluding this inner life. But one must now consider the characteristic traits of this picture. What one presents to oneself in this way as a picture of nature—precisely in the case where it fulfills the ideal of natural-scientific knowledge—cannot bear within itself anything that could ever be perceived by a human being nor any other soul being. The natural-scientific way of picturing things must provide a picture of the world that explains the relationship of natural facts but whose content would have to remain unperceivable. If the world actually were as pure natural science must picture it, then this world could never arise within a consciousness as a content of mental pictures. Hamerling is of the opinion: “Certain oscillations of the air produce sound in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it.” Hamerling is wrong, because he has not grasped the determining factors of the natural-scientific picture of the world. If he did, he would say: When a sound arises, natural science must picture something that would not sound even if an ear were there ready to hear it sound. And natural science is acting correctly in this. In his lecture, “The Limits to Our Knowledge of Nature” (1872), the natural scientist, Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself quite aptly on this subject: “Silent and dark in itself, i.e., without any qualities” is the world for the view—gained by natural-scientific study—which, “instead of sound and light, knows only oscillations of a primal substance, without qualities, that has turned into weigh able matter here and into unweighable matter there”; but to this he adds the statement: “God's words in Moses' depiction—‘Let there be light’—are physiologically incorrect. Light first came into existence when the first red ‘eyespot’ of an infusorian [euglena] distinguished light from darkness for the first time. Without optical and aural substance this world around us, glowing with color and filled with sound, would be dark and silent.” No, this second statement cannot be made by someone who in fact understands the full implications of the first. For, this world, whose picture is correctly sketched out by natural science, would remain “silent and dark” even when confronted by optical and aural substance. One fools oneself about this only because the real world, from which one has gained the picture of a “silent and dark” world, does not actually remain silent and dark when one perceives in it. But I should no more expect this picture to correspond to the real world than I would expect the portrait of a friend to step out of his picture as a real person. Just look at the matter from all sides, without preconceptions, and you will certainly find that if the world were as natural science depicts it, no being would ever experience anything about it. To be sure, the world pictured by natural science is there, in a certain way, within the reality from which man perceives his sense world; but lacking in this picture is everything by which it could be perceived by some being. What this way of picturing things must posit as underlying light, sound, warmth does not shine, sound, or warm. Only by experience does one know that the pictures arrived at by this way of thinking were drawn from something shining, sounding, warming; one therefore lives in the belief that what one pictures is also something shining, sounding, and warming. This mistaken belief is the most difficult to penetrate when one is dealing with the sense of touch. There it seems to be enough that something material—precisely as something material—is spread out around us and, through its resistance, stimulates a tactile perception. But something material-spatial can also only exert pressure; the pressure, however, cannot be felt. What seems to be the case deceives us here the most. But one does have to do in fact only with what seems to be the case. What underlies tactile sensations also cannot be felt by touch. Let it be expressly stated here that we are not merely saying that the world lying behind sense impressions is in fact different from what our senses make out of it; we are emphasizing that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must think of this underlying world in such a way that our senses could make nothing out of it if it were in actuality as it was thought to be. From observation, natural science draws forth a world picture that through its own nature cannot be observed at all.¹

[ 4 ] What we are dealing with here came to light in a world historic moment of spiritual evolution: When Goethe, out of the world view of German idealism that lay in his whole nature, rejected Newton's color theory. (For nearly three decades, the present writer has sought in various writings to draw attention to this decisive point in the assessment of Goethe's color theory. But what he said in an 1893 lecture in Frankfurt's “Independent German Academy” still holds good today: “The time will come when even for this question the scientific prerequisites for an understanding among scientists will be present. Today, precisely the investigations of physics are heading in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking.”)

Goethe understood that Newton's color theory could provide a picture representing only a world that is not luminous and does not shine forth in colors. Since Goethe did not involve himself in the demands of a purely natural-scientific world picture, his actual opposition to Newton went astray in many places. But the main thing is that he had a correct feeling for the fundamental issue. When a person, by means of light, observes colors, he is confronting a different world from the only one Newton is able to describe. And Goethe does observe the real world of colors. But if one enters a realm such as this—whether of colors or of other natural phenomena—one needs other ideas than those depicted in the “dark and silent world” imagined by the natural-scientific way of picturing things. In this picture, no reality is depicted that can be perceived. Real nature simply does in fact already contain within itself something that cannot be included in this picture. The “dark world” of the physicist could not be perceived by any eye; light is already spiritual. Within the sense-perceptible the spiritual holds sway.² To wish to grasp this spiritual with the means of natural science is committing the same error as someone who demands of himself as a painter that he paint a man who can walk around in the world. For Goethe, even as a physicist, the ground on which he moved was the spiritual. The world view for which he used the term “in accordance with the spirit” (geistgemäss) made it impossible for him to find in Newton's color theory anything in the way of ideas about real light and real colors. But with the natural scientific way of picturing things, one does not find the spirit in the sense world. That the world view of German idealism had a correct feeling about this is one of its essential characteristics. It may be that what one or another personality has said out of this feeling is only a first germ of a complete plant; but the germ is there and bears within itself the power to unfold. [ 5 ] But to this insight—that in the sense world there is spirit which cannot be grasped by the natural-scientific way of picturing things—another insight must be added: modern natural science has already demonstrated, or is on its way to demonstrating, the dependency of ordinary human soul life—running its course in the sense world—upon the instrument of the body. One enters a realm here in which, as though by entirely obvious objections, one can seemingly be refuted in a crushing way if one declares one's belief in the existence of an independent spiritual world. For what could be clearer than that man's soul life, from childhood on, unfolds as the physical organs develop and declines to the extent that the organs age? What is clearer than that the crippling of certain parts of the brain also causes the loss of certain spiritual abilities? What seems clearer, therefore, than that everything of a soul-spiritual nature is bound to matter and without it can have no continued existence, at least not one about which man knows? One does not even need to take counsel on this from the brilliant results of modern natural science; De la Mettrie, in his book Man: A Machine (L'homme Machine) written in 1746, has already expressed in a sufficiently correct way what is so self-evident in this assertion. This French thinker says: “Since a feebleminded person, as one can usually observe, does not lack brains, his problem must be due to the faulty nature of this organ, its excessive softness, for example. The same applies to imbeciles; the flaws in their brains do not always remain hidden to our investigation; but if the causes of feeble-mindedness, imbecility, and so on are not always recognizable, where should one seek the causes for differences between all human spirits? These causes would escape lynx and Argus eyes. A nothing, a tiny fiber, a thing that even the finest anatomy cannot discover would have turned Erasmus and Fontenelle into two fools—an observation that Fontenelle himself makes in one of his best dialogues.” Now, the adherent of a world view in accordance with the spirit would show little insight if he did not acknowledge the telling and obvious force of such an assertion. He can take this assertion even further and say: Would the world ever have received what Erasmus's spirit accomplished if someone had killed him when he was still a child?

If a world view in accordance with the spirit ever had to resort to denying such obvious facts or even to belittling their significance, it would be in a bad way. But such a world view can be rooted in ground that no materialistic objection can take away from it.

[ 6 ] Human soul experience, as it manifests in thinking, feeling, and willing, is at first bound to the bodily instruments. And this experience takes shape in ways determined by these instruments. If someone asserts, however, that when he observes the manifestations of the soul through the body he is seeing the real life of the soul, he is then caught up in the same error as someone who believes that his actual form is brought forth by the mirror in front of him just because the mirror possesses the necessary prerequisites through which his image appears. Within certain limits this image, as image, is indeed dependent upon the form of the mirror, etc; but what this image represents has nothing to do with the mirror. In order fully to fulfill its essential being within the sense world, human soul life must have an image of its being. It must have this image in consciousness; otherwise it would indeed have an existence, but no picture, no knowledge of it. This image, now, that lives in the ordinary consciousness of the soul is fully determined by the bodily instruments. Without these, the image would not be there, just as the mirror image would not be there without the mirror. But what appears through this image, the soul element itself, is—in its essential being—no more dependent upon the bodily instruments than the person standing before the mirror is dependent upon the mirror. The soul is not dependent upon the bodily instruments; only the ordinary consciousness of the soul is so. The materialistic view of the human soul succumbs to a deception caused by the fact that ordinary consciousness, which is only there through the bodily instruments, is mistaken for the soul itself. The essential being of the soul flows just as little into this ordinary consciousness as my essential being flows into my mirror image. This essential being of the soul, therefore, also cannot be found in ordinary consciousness; it must be experienced outside of this consciousness. And it can be experienced, for the human being can develop a different consciousness within himself than the one determined by the bodily instruments.

[ 7 ] Eduard von Hartmann, a thinker who has come forth from the world view of German idealism, has clearly recognized that ordinary consciousness is an outcome of the bodily instruments, and that the soul itself is not contained within this consciousness. But he did not recognize that the soul can develop a different consciousness, which is not dependent upon the bodily instruments, and through which the soul can experience itself. Therefore he believed that this soul-being lay within an unconscious element about which one can only make mental pictures by drawing conclusions, from ordinary consciousness, about a “thing-in-itself”—that itself actually remains unknown—of the soul. But in this, like many of his predecessors, Hartmann has stopped short before the threshold that must be crossed if a well-founded knowledge of the spiritual world is to be attained. One cannot cross this threshold, in fact, if one is afraid to give one's soul forces a completely different direction than they take under the influence of our ordinary consciousness. The soul experiences its own essential being within this consciousness only in the images produced for it by the bodily instruments. If the soul could experience only in this way, it would be in a situation comparable to that of a being who stands before a mirror and can see only its image, but can experience nothing about itself. The moment this being became livingly manifest to itself, however, it would enter into an entirely different relationship to its mirror image than before.

A person who cannot resolve to discover something different in his soul life than is offered him by ordinary consciousness will either deny that the essential being of the soul can be known, or will flatly declare that this being is produced by the body.

One stands here before another barrier that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must erect, out of its own thoroughly justified demands. The first barrier resulted from the fact that these demands must sketch the picture of a world that could never enter a consciousness through perception. The second barrier arises because natural-scientific thinking must rightly declare that the experiences of ordinary consciousness come about through the bodily instruments and therefore, in reality, contain nothing of any soul. It is entirely understandable that modern thinking feels itself placed between these two barriers, and out of scientific conscientiousness, doubts the possibility of arriving at a knowledge of a real spiritual world that can be attained neither through the picture of a “silent and dark” nature, nor through the phenomena of ordinary consciousness, which are dependent upon the body. And whoever—merely from some dim feeling or out of a hazy mysticism—believes himself able to be convinced of the existence of a spiritual world would do better to acquaint himself with the difficult situation of modern thinking than to rail against the “raw, crude” mental pictures of natural science.

[ 8 ] One gets beyond what the natural-scientific way of picturing things can give only when one experiences in the inner life of the soul that there is an awakening out of ordinary consciousness; an awakening to a soul experience of a kind and direction that relates to the world of ordinary consciousness the way the latter relates to the picture-world of dreams. Goethe speaks in his way about awakening out of ordinary consciousness and calls the soul faculty thus acquired “the power to judge in beholding”. (anschauende Urteilskraft)³ In Goethe's view, this power to judge in beholding grants the soul the ability to behold that which, as the higher reality of things, conceals itself from the cognition of ordinary consciousness. In his affirmation of this human ability, Goethe placed himself in opposition to Kant, who had denied to man any “power to judge in beholding,” Goethe knew from the experience of his own soul life, however, that an awakening of ordinary consciousness into one with the power to judge in beholding is possible. Kant believed he had to designate any such awakening as an “adventure of reason,” Goethe replied to this ironically: “Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more could keep me then from courageously undertaking the adventure of reason, as the old man of Konigsberg himself calls it,” (The “old man of Konigsberg” is Kant, For Goethe's view on this, see my edition of Goethe's natural-scientific works.) ⁴ In what follows now the awakened consciousness will be called a seeing consciousness (schauendes Bewusstsein). This kind of awakening can occur only when one develops a different relationship to the world of thoughts and will than is experienced in ordinary consciousness. It is entirely understandable today that the significance of such an awakening would be regarded with mistrust. For, what has made the natural-scientific way of picturing things great is the fact that it has opposed the claims of any dim mysticism. And although only that awakening in consciousness has validity as spiritual-scientific research which leads into realms of ideas of mathematical clarity and consistency, people who wish to arrive in an easy way at convictions about the greatest questions of world existence confuse this valid awakening with their own mystical muddle-headedness, which they claim is based on true spiritual research. Out of the fear that any pointing to an “awakening of the soul” could lead to such mystical muddle-headedness, and through seeing the knowledge often presented by such mystical illuminati, people acquainted with the demands of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things keep aloof from any research that wishes, by claiming an “awakened consciousness,” to enter the spiritual world.⁵ Now such an awakening is altogether possible, however, through one's developing, in inner (soul) experience, a certain activation differing from the usual—of the powers of one's soul being (thought and will experiences). The indication that with the idea of the awakened consciousness one is continuing in the direction taken by Goethe's world view can show that our study here wishes to have nothing to do with the mental pictures of any muddled mysticism. Through an inner strengthening, one can lift oneself out of the state of ordinary consciousness and in doing so experience something similar to the transition from dreaming into wakeful mental picturing. Whoever passes from dreaming into a waking state experiences how will penetrates into the course of his mental pictures, whereas in dreaming he is given over to the course of his dream pictures without his own will involvement. What occurs through unconscious processes when one awakens from sleep can be effected on a different level by conscious soul activity. The human being can bring a stronger exercise of will into his ordinary conscious thinking than is present there in his usual experience of the physical world. Through this he can pass over from thinking to an experience of thinking. In ordinary consciousness, thinking is not experienced; rather, through thinking, one experiences what is thought. But there is an inner work the soul can do that gradually brings one to the point of living, not in what is thought, but rather in the very activity of thinking itself. A thought that is not simply received from the ordinary course of life but rather is placed into one's consciousness with will in order that one experience it in its thought nature: such a thought releases different forces in the soul than one that is evoked by the presence of outer impressions or by the ordinary course of one's soul life. And when, ever anew within itself, the soul rouses that devotion ⁶ —practiced only to a small degree, in fact, in ordinary life—to thoughts as such, when the soul concentrates upon thoughts as thoughts: then it discovers within itself powers that are not employed in ordinary life but remain slumbering (latent), as it were. These are powers that are discovered only through conscious use. But they predispose the soul to an experience not present before their discovery. The thoughts fill themselves with a life all their own, which the thinking (meditating) person feels to be connected with his own soul being. (What is meant here by “seeing consciousness” does not arise from ordinary waking consciousness through bodily [physiological] processes the way ordinary waking consciousness arises from dream consciousness. In the awakening from this latter consciousness into day consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement [Einstellung] of the body relative to outer reality. In the awakening from ordinary consciousness into seeing consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement of one's soul-spiritual way of picturing things relative to a spiritual world.)

[ 9 ] For this discovery of the life in thoughts, however, the expenditure of conscious will is necessary. But this cannot simply be that will which appears in ordinary consciousness. The will must also become engaged in a different way and in a different direction, so to speak, than for experience in mere sense-perceptible existence. In ordinary life one feels oneself to be at the center of what one wills or what one wants. For even in wanting, a kind of held-back will is at work. The will streams out from the “I” and down into desire, into bodily movement, into one's action. A will in this direction is ineffective for the soul's awakening out of ordinary consciousness. But there is also a direction of will that in a certain sense is the opposite of this. It is at work when, without any direct look at an outer result, a person seeks to direct his own “I.” This direction of the will manifests in a person's efforts to shape his thinking into something meaningful and to improve upon his feelings, and in all his impulses of self-education. In a gradual intensification of the will forces present in a person in this direction there lies what he needs in order to awaken out of his ordinary consciousness. One can particularly help oneself in pursuit of this goal by observing the life of nature with inner heart's (Gemüt) involvement. One seeks, for example, to look at a plant in such a way that one not only takes up its form into one's thoughts, but also, as it were, feels along with its inner life, which stretches upward in the stem, spreads out in the leaves, opens what is inside to what is outside with its blossom, and so on. In such thinking the will is also present in gentle resonance; and there, will is a will that is developed in devotion and that guides the soul; a will that does not originate from the soul, but rather directs its activity upon the soul. At first, one quite naturally believes that this will originates in the soul. In experiencing the process itself, however, one recognizes that through this reversal of the will, a spiritual element, existing outside the soul, is grasped by the soul.

[ 10 ] When will is strengthened in this direction and grasps a person's thought-life in the way indicated, then, in actual fact, out of the circumference of his ordinary consciousness, another consciousness arises that relates to his ordinary one like this ordinary consciousness relates to a weaving in dream pictures. And this kind of a seeing consciousness is in a position to experience and know the spiritual world. (In a series of earlier books, the author of this work has presented in a more detailed way what is only indicated here briefly, as it were. In such a short presentation, objections, misgivings, etc., cannot be taken up; this has been done in my other books; and there one can find many things presented that provide the deeper foundations for what is expressed here. The titles of the relevant books are listed at the end of this book.⁷

A will that does not tend in the direction just indicated, but rather toward everyday desiring, wishing, and so on, cannot—when this will is brought to bear upon one's thought-life in the way described—lead to the awakening of a seeing consciousness out of the ordinary one; it can lead only to a dimming down of this ordinary consciousness into waking dreams, phantasmagoria, visionary states, and such like.

The processes that lead to what is meant here by a seeing consciousness are entirely of a soul-spiritual nature; and their very description protects what is attained by them from being confused with pathological states (visions, mediumism, ecstasies, and so on). All these pathological states push consciousness down beneath the level it assumes in the waking human being who can fully employ his healthy physical soul organs.⁸

[ 11 ] It has often been indicated in this book how the science of the soul developed under the influence of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things has moved away entirely from the significant questions of soul life. Eduard von Hartmann has written a book, Modern Psychology, in which he presents a history of the science of the soul in the second half of the nineteenth century. He states there: “Modern psychologists either leave aside the question of man's free will (Freiheit) entirely, or occupy themselves with it, in fact, only so far as is necessary to show that, on a strictly deterministic basis, just that amount of practical freedom arises which suffices for judicial and moral responsibility. Only in the first half of the period under discussion do a few theistic philosophers still adhere both to the immortality of a self-conscious soul substance and also to a residue of undeterministic freedom; but mostly they are content with wanting to found the scientific possibility of their heart's wish.” Now, from the point of view of the natural-scientific way of picturing things, one can actually speak neither about the true freedom of the human soul nor about the question of human immortality. With respect to this latter question, let us recall once more the words of the significant psychologist Franz Brentano: “The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body. ... And if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentous one for psychology:” Now for the natural-scientific way of thinking, only ordinary consciousness is present. This consciousness, however, in its entirety, is dependent upon the bodily organs. When these fall away at death, our ordinary kind of consciousness also falls away. But seeing consciousness, which has awakened out of this ordinary consciousness, can approach the question of immortality. Strange as this may seem to a way of picturing things that wishes to remain merely within natural science, this seeing consciousness experiences itself within a spiritual world in which the soul has an existence outside the body. Just as awakening from a dream gives one the consciousness that one is no longer given over to a stream of pictures without one's own will involvement, but now stands connected through one's senses with a real outer world, so the awakening into seeing consciousness gives one the direct and experienced certainty that one stands, with one's essential being, within a spiritual world, and that one experiences and knows oneself in something which is independent of the body, something which actually is the soul organism inferred by Immanuel Hermann Fichte, which belongs to a spiritual world and must still belong to it after the destruction of the body.

And since, ill seeing consciousness, one becomes familiar with a consciousness rooted in the spiritual world and therefore different from ordinary consciousness, one can no longer revert to the opinion—because our ordinary kind of consciousness must indeed fall away along with its bodily instruments—that with the destruction of the body all consciousness must cease. In a spiritual science that regards the seeing consciousness as a source of knowledge, something becomes reality of which—out of the idealism of German world views—the school director of Bloomberg, Johann Heinrich Reinhardt, had inklings (see pages 54ff. of this book): that it is possible to know how the soul, “in this life already, is elaborating the new body” that it will then carry over the threshold of death into the spiritual world. (To speak of a “body” in this connection sounds materialistic; for, what is meant of course is precisely the soul-spiritual element that is free of the body; but it is necessary in such cases to apply to something spiritual names taken from what is sense-perceptible, in order to indicate sharply that one means something spiritually real, not just a conceptual abstraction.)

[ 12 ] Relative to the question of human freedom,⁹ a particular conflict in our knowledge of the soul presents itself. Ordinary consciousness knows free human resolve as an inwardly experienced fact. Faced with this experience, ordinary consciousness cannot actually let any teaching take this freedom away from it. And yet it seems as though the natural-scientific way of picturing things could not acknowledge this experience. For every effect it seeks the causes. What I do in this moment seems to it dependent upon the impressions I have now, upon my memories, upon my inborn and acquired inclinations, and so on. Many things are working together; I cannot survey them all, therefore I appear free to myself. But the truth is that I am determined in my action by the working together of all these causes. Freedom would therefore appear to be an illusion. One does not escape this conflict as long as, from the standpoint of seeing consciousness, one does not regard ordinary consciousness as only a mirroring—effected by the bodily organization—of the true soul processes, and as long as one does not regard the soul as a being rooted in the spiritual world and independent of the body. Something that is merely a picture can, through itself, effect nothing. If something is effected by a picture, then this must occur through an entity that lets itself be determined by the picture. But the human soul is in this situation when it does something for which its only motivation is a thought present in ordinary consciousness. The image of myself that I see in a mirror effects nothing that I, with the image as motivation, do not effect. The matter is different when a person does not act according to a conscious thought but rather is driven, more or less unconsciously, by an emotion, or impulse of passion, while his conscious mental life only looks on, as it were, at the blind complex of driving forces.

Since it is therefore the conscious thoughts in man's ordinary consciousness that allow him to act freely, he could after all know nothing through ordinary consciousness about his freedom. He would only look at the picture that determines his action and would have to ascribe to it a causal power. He does not do this, because instinctively, in his experience of inner freedom, the true being of the soul shines into ordinary consciousness. (The author of this book, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Philosophie der Freiheit), has sought to shed light upon the question of human freedom in a detailed way out of the observation of human soul experiences.) Spiritual science seeks, from the point of view of seeing consciousness, to shed light into that realm of the true soul life from which the instinctive certainty of man's inner freedom streams into ordinary consciousness.

[ 13 ] Man experiences the picture-world of dreams through the fact that the level of life possessed by him in the sense world is toned down. A person with healthy thinking will not seek instruction from dreaming consciousness about waking consciousness; rather, he will make waking consciousness the judge over the world of his dream pictures. A spiritual science that takes the point of view of seeing consciousness thinks in a similar way about the relationship of seeing consciousness to ordinary consciousness. Through a spiritual science such as this, one recognizes that the material world and its processes are in truth only a part of a comprehensive spiritual world, of a spiritual world that lies behind the sense world in the same way the world of sense perceptible material processes and substances lies behind the picture-world of dreams. And one recognizes how the human being descends into sense existence out of a spiritual world; and how this sense existence itself is a manifestation of spiritual being and spiritual processes. It is understandable that many people, out of their habitual thinking, scorn a world view such as this because they consider it estranged from reality and because they believe it makes them less fit for life. It frightens such people to hear that, compared with a higher reality, ordinary reality has something dreamlike about it. But does anything about dream consciousness change through our seeking—from the vantage point of waking consciousness—to understand its nature in reality? A person with a superstitious relationship to his dream-pictures can cloud his judgment in waking consciousness thereby. But our waking judgment can never damage our dreams. In the same way, the adherent of a world view that does not wish to gain entry into the spiritual world can cloud his judgment about the spiritual world; but genuine insight into the spiritual world cannot adversely affect our true assessment of the physical world. Seeing consciousness, therefore, cannot reach disruptively into our life of ordinary consciousness; seeing consciousness will affect it only in a clarifying way.

[ 14 ] Only a world view that acknowledges the point of view of seeing consciousness will be able to bring the same understanding both to the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things and to the cognitive goals of modern idealism in world views that works toward knowing the essential being of the world as something spiritual. (Further elaborations on the subject of knowledge of the spiritual world are not possible within the limits of this book. The author must therefore refer the reader to his other works. His purpose here is only to present the basic character of a world view that acknowledges the viewpoint of seeing consciousness insofar as is necessary to indicate the value for life of German idealism in world views.)

[ 15 ] The natural-scientific way of picturing things is justified precisely through the fact that the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is valid. The natural scientist and thinker bases his cognitive work on the presupposition that this viewpoint is possible, even though, as a theoretical observer of his own world picture, he will not admit this. Only those theoreticians fail to see this who declare the world picture of the natural-scientific way of picturing things to be the only one justified in a world view. Theoretician and scientist can of course be combined in one person. For our seeing consciousness, sense-perceptions undergo something similar to what dream-pictures undergo when a person wakes up out of sleep. The working powers that bring about a world of pictures when he is dreaming must give way, when he wakes up, to those working powers by which he makes for himself pictures and mental pictures that he knows are conditional upon the reality surrounding him. When seeing consciousness awakens, a person ceases to think his mental pictures in terms of this reality; he knows now that he pictures things in terms of the spiritual world surrounding him. Just as dream consciousness regards its picture-world as reality and knows nothing of the environment of waking consciousness, so ordinary consciousness regards the material world as reality and knows nothing of the spiritual world. The natural scientist, however, seeks a picture of that world which manifests in the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. But this world cannot be contained in the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. To seek it there would be like expecting one day to dream what a dream is in its essential nature. (Thinkers like Ernst Mach and others, in fact, foundered on the obstacle indicated here.) As soon as the natural scientist begins to understand his own way of research, he cannot believe that his ordinary consciousness can enter into a relationship with the world that he depicts. In actuality, seeing consciousness enters into this kind of a relationship. But this relationship is a spiritual one. And the sense perception of ordinary consciousness is the revelation of a spiritual relationship that plays itself out—beyond this ordinary consciousness—between the soul and the world the natural scientist depicts. This relationship can only first be seen by our seeing consciousness. If the world depicted by the natural-scientific way of picturing things is thought of as material, it remains incomprehensible; if it is thought of in such a way that something spiritual is living in it which, as something spiritual, speaks to the human spirit in a way that can be known only by our seeing consciousness, then this picture of the world becomes comprehensible in its full validity. Ancient Indian mysticism is a kind of counterpart to the natural-scientific way of picturing things. Whereas natural science depicts a world that is unperceivable, Indian mysticism depicts one in which the knower does indeed want to experience something spiritual, but does not want to intensify this experience to the point of having the power to perceive. The knower does not seek there, through the power of soul experiences, to awaken out of ordinary consciousness into a seeing consciousness; rather, he withdraws from all reality in order to be alone with his knowing activity. He believes, in this way, to have overcome the reality that disturbs him, whereas he has only withdrawn his consciousness from it, and, as it were, let it stand outside himself with its difficulties and riddles. He also believes himself to have become free of his “I” and, through selfless devotion to the spiritual world, to have become one with that world. The truth is that he has only darkened his consciousness of his “I” and is living unconsciously, in fact, altogether in his “I.” Instead of awakening out of ordinary consciousness, he falls back into a dreamlike consciousness. He believes himself to have solved the riddles of existence, whereas he is only holding his soul gaze averted from them. He has the contented feeling of knowledge, because he no longer feels the riddles of knowledge weighing upon him. What a knowing “perceiving” is can be experienced only in knowing the sense world. If it has been experienced there, then it can be further developed for spiritual perceiving. If a person withdraws from this kind of perceiving, he robs himself entirely of the experience of perception and takes himself back to a level of soul experience that is less real than sense perception. He regards not-knowing as a kind of deliverance from knowing and believes that, precisely through this, he is living in a higher spiritual state. He falls into merely living in the “I” and believes himself to have overcome the “I” because he has dimmed down his consciousness that he is weaving entirely within the “I.” Only the finding of his “I” can free the human being from ensnarement by his “I.” (See also the discussions on pages 117ff. of this book [Hamerling begins in an entirely Kantian way: ...]) One can truly have to say all this, and yet have no less understanding and admiration for the magnificent creation of the Bhagavad-Gita and similar productions of Indian mysticism than someone who regards what has been said here as proof that the speaker has “no organ, in fact,” for the sublimity of genuine mysticism. But one should not believe that only the unreserved adherents of a world view know how to value it. (I write this in spite of my awareness that I experience no less from Indian mysticism than any of its unreserved adherents.)

[ 16 ] What Johann Gottlieb Fichte brings to expression lies in the direction of a knowledge relating to the world in the way characterized here. This is clear from the way he has to use the image of human dreaming in order to characterize the world of ordinary consciousness. He says: “Pictures exist: they are all that there is, and they know about themselves in the manner of pictures—Pictures that float past; without anything there for them to float past; pictures that relate to each other through pictures of pictures ... All reality transforms itself into a strange dream, without a life that is dreamed about, and without a spirit who is dreaming; transforms itself into a dream that is connected with a dream about itself.” That is a description of the world of ordinary consciousness; and it is the starting point for a recognition of the seeing consciousness which brings an awakening out of the dream of the physical world into the reality of the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] Schelling wishes to regard nature as a stage in the evolution of the spirit. He demands that nature be known through an intellectual beholding, He therefore takes a direction whose goal can be seen only from the point of view of seeing consciousness. He takes note of the point where, in his consciousness of inner freedom (Freiheit), the seeing consciousness shines into ordinary consciousness. He seeks finally to go beyond the mere idealism in his Philosophy of Revelation by recognizing that ideas themselves can only be pictures of something, out of a spiritual world, that has a relationship with the human soul.

[ 18] Hegel senses that within man's thought-world there lies something through which man expresses not only what he experiences from nature, but also what the spirit of nature itself experiences in him and through him. Hegel feels that man can become the spiritual onlooker of a world process playing itself out within him. Lifting what he thus senses and feels up to the point of view of seeing consciousness also lifts man's world picture—which for Hegel is only a reflecting upon the processes that occur in the physical world—up to the beholding of a real spiritual world.

Karl Christian Planck recognizes that the thoughts of ordinary consciousness do not themselves participate in the working of the world, because, correctly viewed, they are pictures of a life; they themselves are not this life, Therefore, Planck is of the view that precisely the person who rightly understands this pictorial nature of thinking can find reality. Insofar as thinking wishes to be nothing itself but speaks about something that is, thinking points to a true reality.

[ 19 ] Thinkers like Troxler and Immanuel Hennarm Fichte take up into themselves the forces of German idealism in world views without limitlng themselves to the views that this idealism brought forth in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Troxler and I.H. Fichte point already to an “inner man” within the “outer man,” to a spirit-soul man, therefore, which the viewpoint of seeing consciousness recognizes as an experienceable reality.

[ 20 ] The significance of the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is particularly clear when one considers that tendency in world views which, as the modern teaching of evolution, stretches from Lamarck, through Lyell and others, to Darwin and the present-day view of life. This evolutionary teaching seeks to portray the ascent of the higher life forms out of the lower ones. It thereby fulfills a fundamentally valid task. But, in so doing, it must act the same way the human soul does, in dreaming consciousness, when dealing with dream experiences; it lets the later go forth from the earlier. In actuality, however, the motive forces that conjure a subsequent dream picture out of the previous one are to be sought within the dreamer and not within the dream pictures. Only seeing consciousness is in a position to sense this. Seeing consciousness, therefore, can no more consent to seeking in a lower life form the forces that cause a higher one to arise than waking consciousness can consider one dream really to emerge from the preceding one without considering the dreamer. While experiencing itself within true reality, man's soul being observes the soul-spiritual element that it sees working in present human nature as also working already in the evolutionary forms that led up to the present human being. This soul being will not anthropomorphically dream the present human entity into the phenomena of nature; but it will know that the soul-spiritual element that seeing consciousness experiences within present-day man is at work in all the natural happenings that have led up to man. Its knowledge will be such that the spiritual world becoming manifest to the human being also contains the origins of the natural configurations that preceded man. This represents a correct development of what Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss—out of the motive forces of German idealism—was striving for in his teaching which “rescues the concept of species insofar as is factually possible, but at the same time transfers the concept of evolution set up by Darwin into its realm and seeks to make it fruitful.” From the point of view of seeing consciousness, one cannot indeed say what Preuss said: “Now the center of this new teaching is man: the species homo sapiens that appears only once upon our planet”; rather, the center of a world view that encompasses human reality is the spiritual world that reveals itself within man. And seen in this way, what Preuss believes seems true: “Strange that earlier observers started with the objects of nature and then went so far astray that they did not find the path to man, which even Darwin in fact achieved only in a most sorry and thoroughly unsatisfactorily way by seeking the progenitor of the lord of creation among the animals,—whereas, the natural scientist would have to start with himself as human being in order, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, to return again to mankind. ...”

The viewpoint of seeing consciousness cannot lead to an anthropomorphical interpretation of natural phenomena, for it recognizes a spiritual reality of which what appears in man is just as much the revelation as what appears in nature. This anthropomorphic dreaming of the human entity into nature was a forbidding specter for Feuerbach and the Feuerbachians. This forbidding specter became for them the obstacle to their recognition of a spiritual reality.

[ 21 ] This forbidding specter worked on also in Carneri's activity as a thinker. It crept in disruptively when he sought the relationship of his ethical view of life, which was based upon the soul being of man, to the Darwinistically tinged view of nature. But the motive forces of German idealism in world views drowned out this disruption, and so it came about that he started with the soul-spiritual element in man, which is ethically predisposed, and, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, returned again to a mankind that is perfecting itself ethically.

[ 22 ] The direction taken by German idealism in world views cannot flow into any acknowledgment of a teaching that dreams unspiritual motive forces into the evolution of higher forms of existence out of lower ones. For this reason, Hegel already had to say: “Thinking observation must rid itself of these nebulous mental pictures, which are basically taken from perception,—especially such pictures as the so-called emergence of plants and animals from the water, for example, and then the emergence of more developed animal organizations out of lower ones, and so on.”

And the feelings with which Herman Grimm assigns the natural-scientific world picture its place in man's larger world view are born from this idealism in world views. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, the stimulating portrayer of great interrelationships in the history of mankind, did not like to express himself on questions relative to world views; he preferred to leave this realm to others. But when he did speak about these things, he did so out of the direct sense of his own personality. With respect to his judgments, he felt secure in that field of judgment which encompassed the German idealistic world view and upon which he knew he stood. And from foundations of his soul like these there came the words he spoke in his twenty-third lecture on Goethe: “Long before, already in his (Goethe's) youth, the great Laplace-Kant fantasy about the rise and eventual downfall of our globe had taken effect. Out of the rotating world mist-children already get this in school—a central drop of gas takes shape from which the earth afterwards arises and, as a solidifying globe, through inconceivable ages of time, passes through all its phases—including the episode of its habitation by the I human race—in order finally, as burnt-out slag, to plunge back into the sun; a long process—but fully comprehensible to the public—needing for its realization no further I input from outside than the efforts of some external power or other to maintain the sun at the same temperature.—A more barren perspective for the future cannot be conceived than this expectation, supposedly forced upon us today by scientific necessity. A carrion bone, avoided even by a hungry dog, would be a refreshing and appetizing morsel compared to this final excrement of creation, the earth, as they picture it ultimately falling prey again to the sun; and the intellectual curiosity with which our generation takes up such things and professes to believe them is one sign of a sick imagination that scholars of future ages will one day have to expend much keen thought to explain as a historical phenomenon of our time.—Never did Goethe allow such bleak prospects to enter ... Goethe would have taken good care not to draw the conclusions of the Darwinian school from what he first discovered from nature in this direction and then expressed.” (With respect to Goethe's relationship to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, see my introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's “German National Literature” and my book Goethe's World View.¹⁰

[ 23 ] Robert Hamerling's reflections also move in a direction that finds its justification in the viewpoint of seeing consciousness. From the human “I” that thinks itself, he leads his observation over to the “I” that experiences itself in thinking; from the will that works in man, he leads his observation over to the world-will. But the “I” that experiences itself can only be seen when, in soul experience, an awakening within spiritual reality occurs; and the world-will penetrates into our knowledge only when the human “I,” in experience, grasps a willing in which the “I”, does not make itself a point of departure but rather an end point, a goal, in which it directs itself toward unfolding what occurs within the world of one's inner life. Then the soul lives into the spiritual reality in which the motive forces of nature's development can also be experienced in their actual being, Passages from his Atomism of Will like the following show how Hamerling's reflections lead to a sense that one is justified in speaking of this kind of awakening of the “I” that knows itself to be within the spiritual world: “In the half-light of bold mysticism and in the light of free speculation, this riddle, this wonder, this mysterious ‘I,’ interprets and grasps itself as one of the countless forms of manifestation in which infinite being (Sein) attains reality, and without which the ‘I’ would be only a nothing, a shadow,” And: “To want to trace a thought in the human brain back to the activity of thoroughly lifeless, material atoms remains for all time a vain and foolish undertaking. Material atoms could never become the bearers of a thought if there did not already lie within them something that is of the same nature as the thought. And this original something, which is related in nature to living thinking, is also without a doubt the atoms' true core, their true self, their true being (Sein),” With this thought, Hamerling does confront the viewpoint of seeing consciousness, but with mere inklings of it. Certainly, to want to trace the thoughts of the human brain back to the activity of material atoms does remain “for all time a vain and foolish undertaking,” For this is no better than wanting to trace back the mirror image of a person merely to the activity of the mirror. But in ordinary consciousness thoughts appear, after all, as the mirroring—determined by the material element of the brain—of something living and full of being that works with power in these thoughts. but unconsciously as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned. Only from the viewpoint of seeing consciousness does this “something” first become comprehensible. It is that real element in which seeing consciousness experiences itself, and to which also the material element of the brain relates like a picture does to the being that is pictured. On the one hand the viewpoint of seeing consciousness seeks to overcome the “half-light of bold mysticism” by the clarity of a thinking that is logically consistent in itself and that has full insight into itself; on the other hand, it seeks to overcome the unreal (abstract) thinking of philosophical “speculation” by a cognitive activity that in thinking is at the same time the experiencing of something real.

[ 24 ] Understanding for the experiences undergone by the human soul through the way of picturing things that manifests in the series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling will prevent a world view that regards the viewpoint of seeing consciousness as justified from falling back into attitudes of soul that, like the ancient Indian, seek an awakening into spiritual reality more through a dimming down of ordinary consciousness than through an intensification of it. (As the author of this book has indicated again and again in his books and lectures: that belief has gone astray which maintains that a modern person can gain anything for spiritual knowledge by reviving such older directions in world views as the Indian one; to be sure, this has not kept people from repeatedly confusing the spiritual-scientific world view advocated by him with such fruitless, anti-historical attempts at revival.)

German idealism in world views does not strive for a dimming down of consciousness, but rather, within this consciousness, seeks the roots of those soul powers that are strong enough to penetrate, with full experience of the “I,” into spiritual reality. In German idealism the spiritual evolution of mankind has taken up into itself the striving, through strengthening the powers of consciousness, to arrive at knowledge of the world riddles. But the natural-scientific way of picturing things, which has led many people into error about the carrying power of this idealistic stream, can also acquire enough freedom from bias to recognize the paths to knowledge of the real world that lie in the directions sought by this idealistic world view. One will misunderstand both the viewpoint of German idealism in world views and that of seeing consciousness if one hopes through them to acquire a so-called “knowledge” that, through a sum of mental pictures, will lift the soul up out of all further questions and riddles and lead it into possession of a “world view” in which it can rest from all further seeking. The viewpoint of seeing consciousness does not bring cognitive questions to a standstill; on the contrary, it brings them into further movement, and in a certain sense increases them, both in number and in liveliness. But it lifts these questions into a sphere of reality in which they receive that meaning which man's knowing activity is already seeking unconsciously before it has even discovered this meaning. And in this unconscious seeking is created what is unsatisfying about those standpoints in world views which do not want to grant validity to seeing consciousness. From this unconscious seeking there also arises the view—which thinks itself to be Socratic but in actuality is sophistic—that that knowledge is the highest which knows only one truth: that there is no truth.

There are people who worry when they think that man could lose his impulse for progress in knowledge as soon as he believes himself equipped with a solution to the riddles of the world. No one need have this concern with respect either to German idealism or to the viewpoint of seeing consciousness.¹¹

[ 25 ] There are also other ways for a rightful appreciation of modern idealism in world views to root out the misunderstandings that confront it. Of course, one cannot deny that many adherents of this idealism in world views, through their own misunderstanding of what they believe, have given cause for opposition, just as the adherents of the natural scientific way of picturing things, by overestimating the carrying power of their views for knowledge of reality, have evoked undeserved rejection of their views, The significant Austrian philosopher (and Catholic priest) Laurenz Müllner, in an essay about Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack, has expressed himself in a forceful manner, from the standpoint of Christianity, on modern natural science's thoughts about evolution. He rejects the assertions of Schack that culminate in the words: “The objections raised against the theory of evolution all stem from superficiality.” And after this repudiation he says: “Positive Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea of evolution as such, if natural processes are not conceived merely as a causal mechanism based from all eternity upon itself, and if man is not presented as a product of such a mechanism.” These words came from the same Christian spirit out of which Laurenz Müllner spoke in his significant inaugural address, on Galileo, as president of the Vienna University: “Thus the new world view (he means that of Copernicus and Galileo) often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious justification. to be descendants of Christian teachings, It was much more a matter of the antithesis between the wider world consciousness of a new age and the more narrowly limited consciousness of classical antiquity; it was a matter of antithesis toward the Greek world view and not toward the rightly understood Christian world view, which, in the newly discovered world of the stars, could only have seen new wonders of divine wisdom through which the wonders of divine love accomplished on the earth could only attain greater significance.” Just as in Müllner we are presented with a Christian thinker's beautiful freedom from bias relative to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, so a similar freedom from bias is certainly possible relative to German idealism in world views. Such a freedom from bias would say: Positive Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea, as such, of a spiritual experience in the soul, if this spiritual experience does not lead to the death of the religious experience of devotion and moral edification, and if the soul is not deified.

And the other words of Laurenz Müllner, for an unbiased Christian thinker, could take the form: The world view of German idealism often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious justification, to be descendants of Christian teachings. It is far more a matter of the antithesis between a world view that acknowledges the spiritual being of the soul and a world view that can find no access to this spiritual being; it is a matter of antithesis to a misunderstood natural-scientific way of picturing things, and not toward the rightly understood Christian world view, which, in the genuine spiritual experiences of the human soul, could see only the revelations of divine power and wisdom, through which the experiences of religious devotion and moral edification—as well as the powers of human duty sustained by love—could only attain further strength.

[ 26 ] Robert Hamerling felt the impulse toward idealism in world views to be the basic impulse in the being of the German folk spirit (Volkstum). The way he presented his search for knowledge in his Atomism of Will shows that for his age he is not thinking of a revival of any ancient Indian stream in world views. But he does think of German idealism as striving—out of the being of his folk spirit, in the way demanded by a new age—toward the spiritual realities that were sought in bygone ages by the strongest soul forces of Asiatic humanity of that time. And he does not think of the cognitive striving of this idealism in world views, with its direction toward spiritual realities, as dimming man's gaze upward into divine heights, but rather as strengthening it; he is filled with this belief because he sees this cognitive striving itself to be merged with the roots of the religious attitude. As Robert Hamerling is writing his German Migration in 1864, he is filled with thoughts about his people's task, which is an expression of this essential characteristic. This poem is like the depiction of a vision. In primeval times, the Germans migrate from Asia into Europe. The Caucasus is a resting place for the wandering people.

The evening sinks away. Like golden landmarks
In twilight's final gleaming glow the summits
Of Caucasus, and as from distant worlds
They look down full of meaning on the groupings
Of people resting, filling up the valleys
With all their weapons, steeds, and canopies.
—
From out the glow of sun's self-sacrifice
At last like phoenix climbs the moon's full disk
And hovers high above the orient's plane.
—
But now the people rest. Yet Teut the youth,
Of kingly gaze and mien, has stayed awake,
His blond head deeply sunk in meditation.
—
And then, as from a brief dream wakening, upward
He turns his eye, a light, a clear one, falls
Like dew upon him. See! It seems to him
As though in heights above, the golden globes
Of heaven joined their shining rays together
Into a shimmering pair of starry eyes:
As though towards him a marvel,
A mild and earnest countenance inclined,
As though, before his proud and sun-like flights,
With noble features, primal mother Asia
Did eye to eye to her brave son appear.

[ 27 ] And primal mother Asia reveals to Teut his people's future; she does not speak only hymns of praise; she speaks earnestly about the people's shadow and light aspects. But she also speaks about that essential trait of the people that shows cognitive striving to be in complete unity with an upward gaze to the divine:

Your joy in dreams, divine inebriation,
Your ancient Asian homeland's blessed warmth
And heartiness will go on living in you.
Of peaceful permanence,
This holy ray will be a temple fire
Of mankind, free of smoke—with purest flame
Will glow on in your breast and will remain
Your soul nurse and the pilot at your helm!
Because you love, you strive: your boldest thinking
Will be the zeal to sink itself in God.

[ 28 ] The introduction of these words of Robert Hamerling is not meant to indicate that the idealism in world views characterized in this book nor the view put forward by the viewpoint of seeing consciousness could in any way vie with the religious world view, let alone supersede it. Both would misunderstand themselves entirely if they wished to create religions or sects, or wished to impinge upon anyone's religious beliefs.

• 1. Please see note on p. 164
• 2. What one now calls the “theory of relativity” must orient itself according to mental pictures of this sort; otherwise it does not escape from logical theories into ideas that are in accordance with reality in the sense that this concept of “accordance with reality” has been characterized in this book in describing Planck's views.
• 3. What you behold in this way is self-explanatory; i.e., seeing it and understanding (“judging”) it are synonymous. What you “see” is pure, self-evident meaning. – Ed.
• 4. Page 55ff., Rudolf Steiner's Goethean Science, Mercury Press, 1988. – Ed.
• 5. Someone whose concern is for a real knowledge of the spiritual world is very happy when a gifted artist like Hermann Bahr, in his brilliant comedy “The Master,” portrays the comedies of life that often attach themselves so insistently to endeavors seeking a science of the spirit.
• 6. Hingabe: literally "a giving oneself over to" something. – Ed.
• 7. Please see p. 167.
• 8. What is meant here should not be confused with the attitude of soul underlying ancient Indian striving for knowledge, as will be indicated in what follows. See page 72 above.
• 9. Freiheit. Please see footnote to page 35. – Ed.
• 10. Published in English as Goethean Science (1988) and Goethe's World View (1985) by the Mercury Press. – Ed.
• 11. Please see note on p. 166.