The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There is a very witty man who has made a remarkable statement about all human philosophizing. He said in a recently published work, which discusses at length the impossibility and futility of all human philosophizing: Man has no more philosophy than an animal and differs from the animal only in that he makes frantic attempts to arrive at a philosophy and must finally admit to himself that he has to resign, must end in not knowing. — There is much in this book, which is otherwise very readable, that basically brings together everything that can be said against philosophy. The person in question has become a professor of philosophy at a university for this reason. I will quote a saying of this man, which deals with the human view of nature. The saying is quite radical. The gentleman in question says that nature is mysterious on all sides, and that if man really feels the mysteriousness of nature on all sides, he cannot help but realize the infinite smallness of his own being. Nature expands immeasurably in its eternity, and we should actually feel that we stand there with our notions and ideas about nature, holding our tongues! I quote, and it can be said that the saying is not entirely inaccurate, that when we look at nature, we as human beings do indeed feel how little what we can grasp in our thoughts, even when we are engaged in the most brilliant natural science, actually corresponds to the great, immeasurable secrets of nature. And if we did not feel that the thought — which nature itself cannot bring forth, but which can only be generated in the human mind — stands face to face with nature, if we did not know that this thought corresponds to a human need, if we did not feel that in the something of our entire human destiny and human development lies in the reign of thought over nature, we need it as the seed needs the plant, we would actually not know, with careful inner self-knowledge, why we reflect on nature. We reflect on nature for our own sake and know that when we are confronted with nature, we are actually quite far from it with our thoughts. So one feels when contemplating nature.

If one feels towards the spiritual life, the supersensible life, then one must say differently. No matter how insignificant, childlike this supersensible life may be when it presents itself in us, one feels an inner necessity to also express what the spirit reveals to one in the soul. And although one must feel the most intense responsibility towards everything one expresses in the spirit, everything one can speak out of the supersensible, everything one can bring to light in the soul, one feels that one must follow this, that one must express it out of an inner necessity, just as one grows as a child or as one learns to speak itself. Thus, one feels oneself to be in a very different position with regard to the sensual and the supersensible.

A third thing is what one can call: reflection or expression about art. When one wants to express oneself about art, one feels neither the sense of being on the sidelines, which one always feels when pondering nature, nor does one feel that sense of necessity that overcomes one when faced with the inner revelations of the supersensible. Rather, when one tries to express oneself about art, one has the feeling that one is actually constantly interfering with the thought one is developing. In terms of artistic enjoyment, thought is actually a real troublemaker. And when it comes to anything related to art, you always want to stop thinking and talking and enjoy the art in silence. If, for whatever reason, you do want to talk about art, you don't want to do it from the perspective of an aesthetics professor or, even worse, an art critic. Not from the point of view of an art critic, because it seems superfluous to lecture on why you liked a particular dish after having eaten a series of dishes. You just want to say what you yourself can experience in art, in terms of joy, edification and so on, just as you feel the need to talk about what you have experienced with a dear friend. Out of a certain abundance of the heart, not out of a critical sense, one wants to talk about art, and one does not want to claim that what one has to say somehow expresses something lawful or universally valid, but basically just a kind of subjective confession. But that seems to me to be a constant feeling when talking about art, that the thought actually bothers you, and this, in turn, seems to me to point to what art is essentially about.

Since we as human beings live primarily in the world of the senses, we can ask: What is the relationship between art and the sensual? — Or, since we as human beings can only perceive the world of the senses exhaustively if we have a relationship to the supernatural, we could also ask: What is the relationship between art and the supernatural? — Well, it seems to me that anyone who develops an elementary feeling for artistic creation must very soon come to the conclusion that art is not capable of representing the sensual as it directly surrounds us, nor is it capable of expressing thought.

In the face of sensuality, anyone with a sense of nature will always have the feeling that if one wants to depict it and create a kind of image of it, one cannot achieve nature as such, that nature is always more beautiful and more perfect than any image. In the face of the spiritual – world-view poetry or the like bears witness to this – one will have the feeling that, if one wants to represent it, one describes something straw-like and superfluous. World-view poetry has a pedantic, scholastic character under all circumstances; the allegorical-symbolic will always actually reject any true artistic feeling.

And so the question of the relationship between art and the sensual and the supersensual can seem like a vital question for art. Therefore, the question arises: Is there anything else, besides the sensual and the supersensual, that has something to do with the essential tasks of artistic creation and enjoyment? This question can only be answered by really delving into the soul process of artistic creation and enjoyment: how it cannot be described by legitimate aesthetics, but can only be experienced. When we face the world in our ordinary, sober, and at first glance inartistic lives, we are dealing, on the one hand, with sensory perception and, on the other, with what is produced in our own soul through sensory perception, with thought. To demand from nature such perception as it offers us, such as the depiction of a human being through art, seems to me, for the reasons given, to be something quite impossible and therefore superfluous. The desire to represent through art what direct perception of nature offers is actually always rooted in certain aberrations of art. On the other hand, however, it seems as if – perhaps this is a little strange, but one does experience it, as I have already indicated in relation to talking about art – in the actual process of artistic creation and enjoyment, one strives to eliminate thought as far as possible, to prevent it from arising in any way. This seems to me to be based on the fact that processes are constantly taking place in the human soul that can either flourish to their end or break off at some point. One can only follow these processes if, through spiritual observation of the soul life, one really descends into the depths of the soul life that, for ordinary consciousness, remain in the subconscious or unconscious.

Those who observe the soul life of a person will find — leaving aside observation of the outer world for the moment — that this soul life, insofar as it develops freely in meditation and inner feeling, always has a tendency that cannot be described other than as follows: What swells and surges in the soul-life as feeling, as restrained impulses of the will, as feelings and the like, that wants to emerge, and it wants — basically also in the healthy soul-life — to form itself into what one can call a kind of vision. In the depths of our soul, we are always striving to shape our surging, flowing soul life into a vision. However, in a healthy soul life, the vision must not be allowed to emerge. It must be replaced, it must be stopped in its tracks as it arises, otherwise a diseased soul life will result. But in every soul there are efforts to shape itself into a vision, and basically we go through life continually stopping visions in the subconscious, by allowing them to fade to the point of thought. Then the outer image helps us. When we face the outer world with our seething soul life, and the outer world with its impressions affects us, then this outer world blunts that which wants to become a vision, and the vision fades to a healthy thought. I said: we actually go through the world constantly striving for visions, only we do not always become properly aware of the corresponding perceptions. But anyone who tries to realize what only quietly echoes between the lines of life in what one experiences daily, anyone who is able to observe this, will see that all kinds of things do emerge. I must say: if, for example, I happened to enter someone's dining room and found a party eating inside, and the plates and bowls were painted red, I would instinctively believe through an elementary sensation: there sits around the table a party of gourmets who want to immerse themselves in the dishes and courses. If, on the other hand, I saw that there were plates and bowls painted blue on the tables, I would believe that these were not gourmets, but that they were eating because they were hungry. Of course, one could feel the same thing somewhat differently; that does not matter. What matters is that one is actually always tempted, by what one encounters in life, to trigger an aesthetic sensation and to bring it in a certain way to a fading vision. It is, of course, entirely possible to succumb to strong illusions in this area. That does no harm. But if it is not true at all that a society that eats out of red bowls must be told that they are gourmets: aesthetically, the matter remains correct. Likewise, one could say: If someone receives me in a red room and constantly lets me speak, and I am a very boring gentleman, then I say: he is lying to me. Because in a red room, I expect a person who has something to say to me, and I feel it is a lie if he always lets me do the talking.

So, actually, as we go through life, we are always inclined to reduce what we experience to a suspended vision that then fades under the external impressions of life. Artistic enjoyment and creation always go one step further. Artistic enjoyment and creation cannot allow what simmers and boils in the soul to emerge subconsciously to the mere thought. That would be something that would simply permeate us with thoughts, but would not lead us to anything artistic. But when we, as artists, or because an artist comes to meet us, are able to give expression to something that wants to come up in the soul, I just want to say a color scheme, and when we feel that this combination of colors gives us something we need, so that the corresponding vision that arises, but which must not become a vision, has an external complement, then we have something decidedly artistic before us. I can imagine that someone would simply use artistic means to express moods and feelings by combining colors that may not correspond to any external object at all – perhaps the less they correspond to it, the better – but which are, so to speak, the counter-image of what wants to come to vision in his soul life. In the somewhat abundant discussions in recent times about all kinds of artistic matters, people have also become more aware of such phenomena and, when someone creates something that has nothing to do with the external, that has the sole task that I have just described, they speak of expressionist art. It is still frowned upon today to assume that what is preparing itself in man as a yearning and striving towards a goal corresponds precisely to a basic trait of humanity: to arrive at a sensualization of that which can only reveal itself spiritually in the soul. However, if one were to express a thought, something that has already come from the stage of vision to the pale thought, through some sensual means, one would be unartistic. If one avoids the thought and directly confronts the sensory form, one has established the connection between the human being and what has been artistically created, whereby the thought is eliminated. And one may say: That is precisely the essential thing, that art represents neither the sensual nor the supersensible, but the sensual-supersensible, something in which the sensual is directly mirrored by a supersensible experience. Neither the sensual nor the supersensible, but only the sensual-supersensible can be realized through art.

On the other hand, one may ask: if it is not acceptable for what we have encountered in sober life as perception to simply be reproduced in art, how is it possible to relate to nature artistically at all? If nature contained nothing but what it presents to our external perception and what this perception inspires in us, then there would be no necessity for art. We can only speak of the necessity of artistic creation if there is more to nature than what appears in the finished natural products for the imagination, for the thought that, in the artistic, must not provide the bridge between personality and external nature. Now, of course, we have to say that nature has within it that immensity, has within it also the intense infinity that we cannot grasp directly through thought. Nature has within it, even in the sensory, the supersensible. We can grasp the basis of the sensory-supersensible of external nature itself by looking at nature in such a way that we try to gain an insight into what is present in it beyond the sensory impression. Now, let me give you an example: When you are standing in front of a person, you can focus your attention on the human form, on the fact that the incarnate reveals itself through the human form, on the fact that the soul manifests itself through the outer form in the physiognomy, in facial expressions; you can follow how life permeates what is external form. Of course you can do that. But even if one wanted to reproduce everything about a person, one could not, as I said, achieve nature, because there is something unartistic about simply wanting to reproduce external natural objects. Anyone who asks whether a work of art should resemble a natural object is, from the outset, certifying that they do not want to see a work of art, but an illustration. But another is at hand. It must be said that when one pursues what is expressed in the human form, what actually appears as form is actually killed by everything else that lives in it – by the hue that comes from direct life, by the soul content. And that is the secret of nature: this nature is so infinite in its details that every detail can be killed by something higher. But if you have the sense for it, you can awaken the dead from its own essence to a new life; you can revive that which is dead in the form of the human being through the higher life, through the spiritual penetration, in the form, so that the form itself now becomes a living being, without it containing life and spiritual content. A sculptor, for example, who works with materials, can give form to what he must take; he comes to realize that nature is so intensely infinite that it contains infinitely more in each of its details than what it represents. When it presents a form to us, it deadens the inner life of the form, the life is enchanted in it, and one can disenchant it. When we encounter something in nature that is colored, it is quite certain that the color itself is deadened by something else in the object. If I take the mere color, I am able to awaken something out of the color itself that has nothing to do with what the color is on the object. I create life out of the color that lies enchanted only in the color when the color appears on the surface of the natural object. In this way it is possible to disenchant enchanted life from everything that nature presents us with. It is possible to release what lies within nature and its intense infinity from this nature everywhere and nowhere to create an imitation of nature, but to disenchant what is found in nature through some higher power.

When talking about these things, one is tempted to speak in paradoxes; but I believe that this does no harm, because one can see from the extreme, radical cases how things actually are in the less radical cases. On the one hand, I can imagine that when the artistic works from within through the held vision and I create a counter-image from forms and lines and colors, these lines and colors can be put together in such a way that they reflect nothing other than the restrained vision. On the other hand, I can say: It seems possible to me that I can create something alive out of something natural, let's say a human being in whom life itself has died, who has become a corpse, purely artistically, by bringing something out of the general universe that can artistically revive the corpse. There is no need for such extreme cases. But the possibility exists, as a borderline case, that when nature has already killed a being, a new creation of even the corpse comes about, in that something is brought up that is now, as something quite different from what man himself is with his soul nature, ensouls this form. I could imagine that a captivating work of art could come about through a new life sprouting in a corpse, which reflects the secrets that exist in relation to man, and which are only hidden because man has his own soul within him until his death. One need not be offended by such a borderline case. It is just that: a borderline case. From this it can be seen that artistic creation can be effective in relation to external nature, because artistic creation and enjoyment actually proceed continually in this way, even if not pushed to the borderline case. Art is a continuous release of mysterious life that cannot exist in nature itself, that must be brought out. I am then confronted with a natural product in human form, which is dead, but I try to awaken the life of this form and, from within the form, despite it being only a dead form, to awaken the whole person again.

Genesis says that man was created by the breath of God, that a human soul was breathed into him. This could lead one to see something else in the air besides the combination of oxygen and nitrogen. It could seduce one to see in the air something that awakens the human soul from it, something soul-like; it could seduce one to believe that this air basically longs to become a soul when inhaled by humans. One could see in the air the counter-image of the human soul, thus more than something merely inanimate: a yearning for the human being. Now it is very difficult to arrive at such a feeling in connection with air, because air and fire inspire little in the way of artistic creation. Nobody would want to paint fire, or lightning, and one would not want to draw air either. So it is not easy to arrive at this feeling in direct contact with air; but it seems to me that one can arrive at a true artistic feeling for this sensation in contact with the world of light and color. In the world of light and color, one can truly have the feeling that every color, or at least the color relationships, have the longing to become either a whole human being or a piece of a human being. In the human being, they find expression either as an inner expression of his being or in the way the light illuminates him and is reflected back. But one can say: If one lives in the light itself, one lives with the longing of the air to shape itself into the human face, for example. One can have the feeling that red and yellow want to achieve something; they want to shape themselves into something human, they have a language that lies within themselves. Then one will not try to simply reproduce the human being in a sober way. The liberation from the model must become an ideal of artistic creation in general. He who has not overcome the model at the moment he begins to create, who does not regard it as something that gives him the instruction to eavesdrop on nature's secrets, will remain dependent on the model and create illustrations. On the other hand, he who has artistic feeling will be tempted to shape the human being or some other being or some natural form out of color. For such a person, the world of color will be able to take on an inner, differentiated life. One will find that red and yellow colors are such that they tempt one to use them wherever one wants something to express itself, to speak through itself. What confronts one in red and yellow will express itself, will, through its own power, produce the ideal of art, excluding thought. It is different when one is confronted with blue, with violet. There one will have much more the feeling that with blue, with violet, one comes close to thought, at least on one side. One will have the feeling that with blue, with violet, one cannot represent something that expresses itself, but rather, something else, more easily. One will be tempted to represent the blue of one's inwardness by showing it in motion. And you will find that it is difficult to create an inner movement of the object by evoking some lines in the red. Rather, lines, shading, I would even say physiognomy, will arise in the red. The red will speak for itself. The blue, when transformed into lines, will betray its inner nature, will lead us more under the surface of the color than lead us out of it. When something expresses itself as color, one has the feeling that the color repels one. The blue leads us under the surface of the color; one believes that in what is expressed through the blue, movement, the development of will, is possible. A purely sensual-supersensible being, that is, a supersensible being that one wants to place in the sensory world, to paint blue and to express its inner mobility through the nuances of the blue, will be able to be fruitful.

In this way, one can disenchant whatever one encounters in nature as a part, whatever is killed in nature by higher life. One can find the sensual and the supersensual in nature itself; one can give life to mere form. One will find that it can never make a truly satisfying impression if one simply reproduces the human form as it is in a sculptural work of art. Many years ago, I once had a strange experience with a friend who became a sculptor. He said to me at the time – we were both quite young –: Yes, you see, you would actually have to produce the right plastic work of art by exactly imitating every single twist of the surface. – I must confess that I was almost furious at this expression, because it seemed to me that in this way the most abominable thing of an artistic performance could come out. Because, in any case, if you want to carve out of stone or wood what has form in man, what is killed by the higher things in life, without this inner life, then you have to bring it to life for yourself, you have to call upon the surface to say what it can never say on the outer man of nature.

For example, one finds that if one bends a surface and then bends it twice more, so that the bend is bent again, one has the simplest archetypal phenomenon of inner life. A surface bent in such a way that the bend is bent again can be used in the most diverse ways, and it will — of course this needs to be further developed — the inner life of the surface will emerge from the surface itself. These things testify to the fact that there is a relationship between outer nature and the human soul, which in truth has the character of the sensual-supersensible. We come to form thoughts precisely through our encounter with outer nature, in that outer nature kills off through a higher power that which otherwise exists as members in nature and keeps a higher spiritual life enchanted. This compels us to grasp this deadened life through the sober thought. If we avoid this pale thought and seek to grasp that which lies enchanted in the parts of nature and to which we ourselves carry out the process of putting it together, of giving it the higher life, then we undergo the process of artistic creation or that of artistic enjoyment. The two are related only in that what is later in the first is earlier in the second, and what is later in the second is earlier in the first. If we follow this approach, which is directed towards the intense infinity of nature and the possibility of demystifying the secrets of nature, in terms of what it represents in the soul life of man, then we have to say that it does not evoke the pale world of thoughts. What is demystified is lighter than what mere thought can grasp. But it does establish a connection between the external object and the human soul, in which thought is excluded, and in which a spiritual relationship between the human being and the object is nevertheless sought.

This can of course be taken further and we arrive at what may still appear quite absurd and terrible to many people today. It can be understood, but what at first seemed terrible to people was always something that they took for granted after they had become accustomed to it for some time. If you look at a person – you only need to look at their skeletal structure – then even with a very superficial observation you will be able to see that the skeleton clearly consists of two very different parts – we will not consider the other one today –: the head skeleton, which is, so to speak, only attached, and the rest of the skeleton. For those who have a sense of form, it now becomes clear – not through some anatomical observation, but through a sensory observation of the head and body skeleton – that one is the metamorphosis of the other, that one can think of the main bones in such a way that wherever there is a hump, it can also grow, and wherever there is an outgrowth, it can recede. By mere transformation, one can actually — by changing the form — make the main skeleton emerge from the rest of the skeleton and, to a high degree, the rest of the skeleton emerge from the main skeleton. So that one can say: the whole human being is enchanted in the head. Even when one is confronted with a skeleton without a head, one will be tempted, if one does not want to get stuck with the sensory perception, to supplement the head to this skeleton in a sensory-supersensory way; one will be tempted to let the vision of the head arise from the skeleton. There are people who cannot imagine this. But it is impossible for a human trunk skeleton to arise in nature without a head skeleton. For those who, in their imagination, do not merely confront nature as an abstraction, but in such a way that they carry the essence of nature in their own perception and cannot perceive the natural object other than as it must be, it is self-evident that the head skeleton will also appear to them out of the body skeleton like a vision. But for him who sees through these things, it is the case that if he has only the head and now completes the whole person out of it as if from a vision, this person is different from when he completes the other the other way round. It is similar and yet different. So that one can also say here: In nature outside, a wholeness is created in man, which consists in the dissection into head and remaining organism; but each individual wants to be a whole man. In a higher whole, life, which is enchanted in each individual as a whole man, is killed. If you exclude the thought that arises when you encounter a human being, then you see yourself forced to recreate from your own inner being that which you take from the human being by analyzing him. And in this way, you rebuild nature, like nature itself. One creates this infinitely intense, significant process of unifying what must first be killed in its members in order to reappear at a higher level. And it will naturally be different if one recreates it in spirit.

I believe that this already evokes a certain horror in the imagination. We have made an attempt in our building in Dornach – one can make attempts in all fields, it can never be a matter of wanting to restrict art by means of any dogmas – in a group that is to be executed in wood – it is important that it is to be executed in wood – it cannot be done in stone – to first reunite in a central figure at a higher level that which is also united in the human being, but united through nature, where in turn the sexual organs are killed by something higher. Every human being is asymmetrical. But what wants something completely different in the left side than in the right, you can feel it: then two people stand before us, the left-handed person and the right-handed person. That which is specialized in the left- and right-handed person is united in nature to a higher unity, in that the self-will of the limbs is slain. In artistic contemplation, which confronts the will of nature, arises, I would say, the complete figure of the left-handed and right-handed man. Both basically want something different, and the artist must — this can remain very much in the subconscious — relive the process that nature carries out on another level by killing the left-handed and right-handed man and balancing them in the whole human being. If one now artistically creates a figure in which the form suggests that the human being is an asymmetrical being, then something else must be added. The sensual-supersensory, perceived, brings one into the necessity of really bringing about what is necessary as other limbs. Therefore, we were compelled to create other figures. We were obliged to compensate for the disintegration and subsequent reassembling of the left- and right-handed man by hinting at the other two opposites. What lives in man as a vision when one imagines the torso of the human body as a visionary complement to the whole human being? One would have alive in the outer form what rises from the trunk to the head as drives, as instincts, what one could call the Luciferic. One will want to shape this Luciferic in a different way than nature has done: For example, one will reshape the shoulder blades into wings; then one will be tempted to bring together what nature constricts, these wings, with the shape of the ear and head. Something different will come out of these sensual-supernatural human limbs than an ordinary natural man, but it will represent a certain side of man that one should not be allowed to represent individually. It would be dreadful if someone were to present something like this as a figure in itself, but together with the human being and in the right composition to the human being, it can be composed in such a way that one imitates the compositional power of nature. Conversely, what wants to become a whole human being in the human head must also be recreated. What wants to become a whole human being in the human head, becomes ossified, hardened, when it is developed into a whole human being. This is what we must continually overcome in ourselves, what we actually overcome by adding to the impulses that we carry in us through our head those that keep this hardening fresh from the rest of the organism. We must overcome what comes from the head with what comes from the blood of the heart organism. The human being's sensible-supersensible nature makes it possible to recreate in separate forms what is hidden in the individual human form and was composed by nature herself at a different level.

What might be called the process of re-creation actually takes place in the human soul; it is a process in the life of the soul, something that is not just an external and abstract imitation of nature, but rather a continuation of nature's evolution in the human being himself. This presupposes that the artist and the person who is artistically gifted actually face nature and themselves in a very complicated way – which remains only in the subconscious, since the thought is eliminated –. That is understandable. It must be said that, emotionally, we are in a complicated process with regard to what is to become artistic. If someone simply wanted to reproduce a beautiful woman by imitating what nature provides, he would inwardly kill this woman. He would depict her dead. She would not come to life in his work, even if he reproduced her very faithfully. You have to be able to transform her into a corpse first, but then, through what is genuine, true humor, recreate her beauty from a completely different element. Without figuratively speaking, figuratively speaking, you have to kill a beautiful woman - you have to beat her up or something like that, first transform her into something dead - you can't paint her properly. Its beauty is present in nature in a completely different way than it must be present in the finished work of art. One must first discover with humor what is to be recreated and what must be killed. One can say: when one sits opposite a serious scholar, the reproduction of this is initially actually a comedy; one might be tempted to laugh at his serious expression. But one is only artistically finished with the serious scholar's countenance when one has humorously revived it with something else. One must make it amiable again and then one can understand it from a completely different perspective.

The aim is therefore to resurrect that which has been killed in nature through one's own subjective life, to disenchant it, to redeem it. If I observe a dashing young farmer walking on the mountain pasture and simply imitate him, I will probably create something very dead; but if I make an effort to, as it were, first kill him and, through certain lines, bring about a harmony between him and the surrounding nature, I will be able to create something artistic. Hodler has attempted such things, and we can see that in the subconscious similar efforts are being made everywhere, which has also led to artistic discussion about what might be called, on the one hand, the creation of the counter-image for the unfinished vision, and on the other hand, the creation of the subjective counter-image through what enchants in nature and is always killed by a higher life. In this way the sensible and the super-sensible approach man from two sides, and through art man can endeavour to bring them to a higher, new existence.

In my earlier lecture on the same theme I endeavoured to connect the thoughts which I have developed here before you to certain thoughts of Goethe's in order to show how the sensible and the super-sensible can be realized through art. I was criticized for this, and I now realize that it worked just as well without the reference to Goethe. People reproach you for many things, especially when you refer to Goethe, because those who think they come particularly close to Goethe when they repeat something of his that they do not understand, and are able to judge those who have made an effort to penetrate into the matter. These things can be understood; it is a natural process in human life, and one must sometimes be quite pleased when what one says is judged in this way. One can even think: if it had received a different, more approving judgment, one would have to say something quite superfluous or foolish. So I will at least present what I could avoid at the end. I do believe that anyone who approaches Goethe with understanding will find in his broad-minded and perceptive view of art, even if it is expressed in a different way, what has been asserted today as the sensual-supernatural element in art. I even borrowed the expression from Goethe. And I believe, although I am quite of the opinion that in a certain sense it is correct that the one to whom art reveals its secrets has a rather pronounced antipathy to art or to enter into an aesthetic-scientific consideration, I believe that art can only be discussed from the standpoint of life, that the most correct way to discuss art is to listen to the artists themselves. However, sometimes one comes to strange experiences. As a rule, artists complain terribly about what other artists produce, and if you enjoy their works, you sometimes do not enjoy what artists say about their works, because they sometimes live in illusions about their own works. But the artist must create out of illusions, and precisely that could be right, giving the right impulse for his artistic creation. Even if I fully admit all this, and even if I understand from a certain point of view that the artist is always quite reserved about anything approaching ingratiation from the side of aesthetic science or other considerations, I still do not believe that it is completely unnecessary to have intuitive ideas about art. I believe that art must always advance with the general progress of the soul's life. I believe that it is precisely through the contemplation of the sensual-supernatural, as it unfolds through the held vision, as it confronts us from the outer nature, when we disenchant what is enchanted in it, that art solves the riddle of nature in a sensual-supernatural way. So that in the end I want to quote this beautiful, worldly saying of Goethe's as a summary of today's reflection: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to someone, that person feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.”

From time immemorial, people have felt the affinity between artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge, with what can be called seeing consciousness, or, if one is not misunderstood, which would be easy, seership. For the spiritual researcher of the present day, who, starting from the point of view of the present, attempts to penetrate into the spiritual world, this relationship between artistic creation and supersensible knowledge is much more significant than the other, often emphasized relationship between the visionary life, which is fundamentally based on pathological conditions, and that which is really only in the soul, without the help of the body, is vision.

Now we know that poets, artists in general, sometimes feel a very close relationship between the whole nature of their work, between their experience and vision. In particular, artists who seek their way into the supersensible regions through creative work, fairy-tale writers or other artists who seek to embody the supersensible, rightly tell of a truly living experience, of how they have their figures visibly before them, how they stand before them in action, making an objective, concrete impression when they deal with them. As long as such a confrontation with that which is poured into artistic creation does not take away the composure of the soul, as long as it does not turn into compulsive visions over which human will has no power and composure cannot dispose, one can still speak of a kind of borderline event between artistic vision and seership. In the field of spiritual scientific research alone, a very definite boundary can be seen – and that is the important thing – between artistic creation with its source, artistic imagination, on the one hand, and seeing with the eyes closed on the other. Those who are unable to recognize this clear boundary and make it fruitful for their own work will easily end up where many of my artist colleagues have been who were actually afraid of being limited in their work by allowing something of the visionary to enter their consciousness. There are people who are true artistic natures, but who consider it necessary for artistic creation to have impulses well up from the subconscious or unconscious of the soul, but who, like a fire, shy away from the fact that something of a supersensible reality, which confronts clear consciousness, may shine into their unconscious creativity.

In relation to their experience in artistic enjoyment, reception and comprehension, and in relation to the experience of the supersensible worlds through supersensible vision, there is now subjectively an enormous difference in this experience. In the soul in which it finds expression, artistic activity, reception and vision, leaves intact the directing of the personality through the senses to the external world with the help of outer perception and with the help of imagination, which then becomes memory. One need only recall the peculiar nature of all artistic creation and enjoyment, and one will say to oneself: Certainly, in artistic reception and also in artistic creation, there is perception and conception of the external world. It is not present in such a crude way as it is usually present in sensory revelations; there is something spiritual in the way of perceiving and creating, which freely intervenes and rules over perception and imagination and over what lives in the artist as memory and the content of memory. But one could not dispute the justification of naturalism and individualism if one did not know about the connection with perception. Likewise, one can be convinced that in the soul, hidden memories, subconscious things, what is in man as memory, participates in artistic creation and enjoyment. All this is absent in what, in the sense of modern spiritual research, is the content of truly supersensible knowledge. Here we are dealing with a complete detachment of the soul from sensory perception, and also from ordinary thinking and from that which, as memory, is connected with thinking. Yes, that is precisely the great difficulty in convincing contemporaries that there can be something like an inner experience that excludes perception and ordinary thinking and remembering. The natural scientist, in particular, will not admit that this could be the case. He will always claim: “You say that nothing flows into your seeing. I see that you are mistaken: you do not know how hidden content rests in memory and comes up in a sophisticated way. That is because those who object to it do not occupy themselves with the methods by which one attains the ability to see and which show that the impression of the spiritual world can be directly present where nothing is incorporated from reminiscences, from mysterious memories. The training consists precisely in finding the way to free the soul from outer impressions and ideas based on memories. This establishes a firm boundary between artistic creation and the production of supersensible knowledge, since the soul, the human ego in which supersensible knowledge lives, does not actually draw on the organization of the body, which does play a part when it comes to artistic creation.

But because of this state of affairs, the question arises all the more: What is the relationship between the impulses that arise from the subconscious depths of the soul and are woven into artistic creation and enjoyment, and what is born out of the pure spiritual world in the form of direct impressions from supersensible knowledge? — To answer this question, I would like to start from some experiences with art for the seer himself. These experiences with the arts in general are characteristic right from the start. It then becomes evident that anyone who has learned to live in the supersensible life, to gather supersensible knowledge, really is able to exclude for certain periods of time all sense impressions and the memories that follow on from them. These can be excluded, cast out of the soul. When someone who is immersed in supersensible vision also tries to clearly perceive all this when confronted with a work of art, what he is accustomed to perceiving when confronted with an external sensory phenomenon, a completely different experience arises. When confronted with a sensory phenomenon, the seer is always able to exclude sensory perceptions and memories, but not when confronted with a work of art. Even though everything that can be perceived or imagined is of course excluded, the seer is always left with important inner content that he can neither exclude nor wants to exclude. The work of art gives something that turns out to be related to his seership. This raises the question: what is the source of this relationship?

One comes to this realization when one seeks to grasp what is active in man when he sees purely spiritually in supersensible knowledge. Then one comes to realize what inadequate ideas we have about ourselves and our relationship to the external world when we remain in ordinary consciousness. We believe that our thinking, feeling and willing are strictly separated from one another. Psychology does trace these activities back to one another, but not with the right skill. But the one who experiences the actual complexity of the soul life as it presents itself in seership knows that such a distinction between imagining, feeling and willing does not even exist, but in ordinary consciousness and life there is in every imagining a remnant of feeling and willing, in every feeling a remnant of imagining and willing, and in every willing there is also an imagining, even a perceiving in it; there remains in the willing a remnant of perception, which is hidden in it, subconscious. This must be borne in mind if one wishes to understand the process of seeing. For from what has been said, you will gather that in the act of seeing, the faculty of imagining and perceiving is silent, but the faculties of feeling and willing are not. However, it would not be a true vision if the person only developed feeling and willing, as in ordinary consciousness. On the contrary, when man passes over into the seer state, all volition as it is in ordinary life must be silenced. Man enters into the state of complete rest.

What is meant here by the term 'vision' does not imply the fidgety act of placing oneself in the spiritual world, as in dervishry, but the complete silencing of all that expresses itself as volition in ordinary life, as the power of emotional feeling. In that which a person allows to pass from volition into action, something of the emotional feeling still lives on. This feeling, also in relation to the revelation in the will, must remain silent. But the emotional feeling as such does not remain silent, and above all, the impulse of the will does not remain silent. Perception and imagination remain silent, but the impulses of emotional feeling and will are justified, only entering into a state of calm soul condition, and therefore developing their perceiving and imagining character differently than usual. If one were to dwell only in feeling, or in a false mystical inner living out of the will, then one would not enter into the spiritual world. But in the calm state of soul, what are otherwise emotional feelings and impulses of the will are lived out in a spiritual way. Feeling and volition are so lived out that they appear before the human soul as objective spiritual beings endowed with powerful thoughts, while the rest of perception and imagination, which otherwise remained unnoticed in feeling and volition, comes to revelation and becomes capable of placing itself in the spiritual world. Once one has realized this, that as a seer in feeling and willing one lives as otherwise one lives in thinking and perceiving — not in unclear thinking and feeling, not in nebulous mysticism, but as clearly as otherwise in thinking and perceiving — one can enter into a fruitful dialogue with art, although only by realizing how worthless such generalizations are, as they are expressed, for example, by the word art.

Art encompasses very different areas: architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, painting and more. One could say that if one wanted to establish the relationships between the different arts with the experience of the seer, then the diversity of the arts becomes much more meaningful to one than what philosophy would like to summarize under the name of art. By achieving the possibility of experiencing the world's thought content and spirit content with the help of thinking, emotional feeling and willing, one arrives at being able to establish a remarkable relationship with architecture.

I said that in this vision, ordinary perception and thinking cease, but a kind of completely different thinking arises that flows from feeling and willing, a thinking that is actually thinking in forms, that could directly, by thinking, represent forms of the distribution of power in space, proportions in space. This thinking feels akin to what is expressed in architecture and sculpture when they represent true artistic creations. One feels particularly at home with the thinking and perceiving in architecture and sculpture because the shadowy abstract thinking that the present so loves ceases, falls silent, and a representational thinking sets in that can but allow its content to pass over into spatial forms, into moving spatial forms, into stretching, over-arching, bending forms, in which the will flowing in the world is expressed. The seer is compelled not to grasp with the intellect what he wants to cognize from the spiritual world, as is done in the rest of science. One would recognize nothing spiritual there. One is mistaken if one believes that one recognizes in the spiritual, because one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with ordinary thoughts. He who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world must have something as a thinker, which creates plastic or architectural, but living forms in himself. Through this one comes to the conclusion that the artist enters into an experience of forms in the subconscious. They strive upwards, fill his soul, are transformed into ordinary ideas, which can be partly calculated; they are transformed into that what is then artistically formed. The architect and the sculptor are intermediaries for what the seer experiences as perception and imagination in the spiritual world. What the seer grasps as form for his life of thinking and perceiving creeps into the architect's organization. Down in the depths of the soul, it rises in waves and becomes conscious. This is how the architect and sculptor create their forms. The only difference is that what underlies the architectonic and sculptural work as the essential form-giving element arises from subconscious impulses, and that the seer discovers these impulses as what he needs to grasp the great interrelations of the spiritual world. Just as one otherwise has imagination and perception, so the seer has to develop gifts that point to what permeates and trembles through the great structure of the world. And what he, as a seer, sees through and lives through, that lives in an unconscious way in the architect and sculptor, permeating his work as he creates it.

In a different way, those who have had supernatural experiences and are seeking a connection to poetic and musical creativity can identify with his experiences. The seer gradually comes to feel his inner self quite differently than the ordinary consciousness, which presents and perceives the sensual world around us: He feels within himself in his feeling and willing.

Those who can practise self-observation know that one is only in one's self in feeling and willing. But the seer raises feeling and willing out of himself, and in that feeling and willing provide him with perceptions and perceptions, he comes away from himself in his feeling and willing. But something else occurs. He finds himself again. With the clear consciousness of having stepped out of his body, of perceiving nothing with the help of his body, he finds himself again in the outer world, intuitively passing into what he has perceived in moving forms and shaping into images. He carries his self into the outer world. By doing so, he learns, as it were, to say to himself: Through truly inner experience from experience, I can recognize that I have stepped out of my body, which has always been the mediator of my relationship to the outer world, but I have found myself again by immersing myself in the spiritual world. By becoming an inner experience, the seer finds that he is compelled to receive his will and feeling from the spiritual world again, to receive himself again out of the supersensible world. He must do this by once more receiving a feeling and a will — but a transformed feeling and will that does not take the body for help — a feeling that is intimately related to the experience of music, so related in fact that one could say: It is even more musical than the comprehension of music itself. It is such a feeling that it is as if one's soul were pouring out into sounds, becoming a melody, a vibration, in the presence of a symphony or another work of music.

With poetry, it is the case that one is in one's volition. That is what the poetry wants, which one learns to perceive as true poetry precisely in this way, by finding one's volition there. Feeling in music, volition in true poetry.

In a peculiar situation, in a particularly significant situation, is the relationship between seers and painters. The matter is such that neither the one nor the other occurs, but something else, something even more characteristic. In the presence of real painting the seer has the feeling — and he could be a painter himself, for we shall hear that artistic creation and supersensible insight can exist side by side — the painter comes to meet him from some indefinite region of the world, brings a world of line and color and he approaches the painter from the opposite direction and is obliged to transpose what the painter brings with him, what he has transferred from the external world into his art, as imaginations into what he experiences in the spiritual world. The colors the seer experiences are different from those of the painter, and yet they are the same. They do not interfere with each other. If you want to get an idea of this, take a look at the sensual-moral part of Goethe's theory of colors about the moral effect of colors. It contains the most elementary description, It describes with inner instinct what emotional effects are awakened in the soul by individual colors. It is through this feeling that the seer comes out of the spiritual world, through this feeling that one really experiences every day in the higher world.

One should not think that the seer speaks in the same way as a painter speaks of colors when describing the colored aura. He experiences the feeling that one otherwise experiences with yellow and red, but it is a spiritual experience and should not be confused with physical visions. The worst misunderstanding arises on this point. For the seer, the experience is similar to painting in that one can speak of an encounter with something similar that comes from the opposite direction, where understanding is possible because the same thing comes in from the outside that is created from within. I always assume that it is a matter of artistic creation, with which communication is possible if, before that, not naturalism but art is there. The seer is compelled to imagine what he experiences, to illustrate it, roughly speaking. This happens when he expresses in colors and forms what he experiences: there he encounters the painter. And again, if you were to ask the painter, how do we relate to one another? the painter would have to answer: Something lives in me! As I went through the world with my ordinary eye and saw color and form, and artistically transformed them, I experienced something within me that had previously surged in the depths of my soul; it has come to consciousness and become art. The seer would say to the painter: What lives in the depths of your soul lives in things. By going through the things, you live with the soul in the spirit of things. But in order to retain the strength for painting and to consciously experience what you experienced by going through the things outside, so that what comes to the senses is not extinguished in you, you have to keep the impulses that create painting alive in the subconscious. The point is that the unconscious impulses now rise to consciousness. The seer says: “I walked through the same world, but paid attention to what lives in you. I looked at what arose in your subconscious and brought what was unconscious to your consciousness.

It is precisely with such an understanding that something will confront the human soul as a great and significant problem that may not otherwise always be properly observed. When one becomes familiar with what has just been characterized through inner experience, something comes up that touches life deeply. This is the mystery of the incarnate, this wonderful human flesh color, which is actually a great clairvoyant problem. It reminds one so much that such clairvoyance, as I mean it, is actually not so completely alien and unknown to ordinary life; it is just not heeded. I would like to express the paradoxical but true sentence: every person is clairvoyant, but this is also denied in theory where it cannot be denied in practice. If it were denied in practice, it would destroy all life.

There are oddballs today who think: How come I have to deal with a complete stranger's ego? They want to remain completely within the realm of the naturalistic; they want to remain true naturalists, so they say to themselves: I have memorized the facial oval and other things, and because I have learned from various experiences that a person is hidden in such shapes, I conclude that there will be a human ego behind this nose shape. One finds such arguments today among “clever people”. But that does not correspond to the experience one comes to when one observes life from one's own participation in life. I do not conclude that there is an ego from the shape of the face and so on. I have the consciousness of an ego because the perception of what confronts one as a physical human being is based on something other than the perception of crystals or plants. It is not true that inanimate natural bodies make the same impression as a human being. It is different with animals. What stands before you as a sensual human object cancels itself out, makes itself ideationally transparent, and through real clairvoyance one sees its ego directly every time one stands before a human being. That is the real fact. This clairvoyance consists in nothing more than extending this way of facing the human being with one's own subject to the world, in order to see if there is anything else to see through in the way of the human being.

You cannot get real impressions from clairvoyance without considering what the other person's perception is based on, which is so different because it is based on clairvoyance of the other soul. In this clairvoyance, the complexion plays a special role. For the external observer, it is a finished product, but for the one who sees supernaturally, the experience of looking at the incarnate changes. For him, there is an intermediate state. It comes about by turning one's clairvoyance, which extends to the other areas of the world, to the human form in such a way that the incarnate, which is so calm, oscillates between opposites and the intermediate state. One perceives paleness and a blush that is as if it radiated warmth. In this, that one sees people blushing and turning pale, the middle state is within. Associated with this experience of being in motion is the fact that one knows one is also immersed in the outer being of the person, not only in his soul, in his ego. One plunges into what the person is through his soul in his body, through the incarnate. This is something that leads one to the relationship between artistic perception and supersensible knowledge. For that which becomes so mobile in the perception of the incarnate lies unconsciously in the artistic creation of the incarnate. The artist needs only to be subtly aware of this. Only by being able to experience this will an artist be able to place the fine, living vibration in the center of the incarnate parts.

In this way, painting shows how the sources of artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge collide. In ordinary life, they collide when one does not even notice it, in the realm of language. Nowadays, language is usually viewed in a very intellectual way, even scientifically; but the life of language is present in us in a threefold way. Anyone who approaches language with a seer's eye and has to express what they perceive in the spiritual world must first acquire a feeling for language that could be described as a sense of loss. When people talk to each other, and also when they engage in ordinary science, everything they say is a debasement of language below the level at which language should be. Language as a mere means of communication is debasement. One senses that language actually comes to life in its own essence where poetry flows through it, where what emerges from the human soul flows through language. This is where the spirit of language itself is at work. The poet actually discovers the level of language for the first time, perceiving ordinary language as a neglect of the higher level of language. It is easy to understand how a subtle poet like Morgenstern could come to the conclusion that there is actually a perceptible lower limit to speaking, which is very common, the limit that can be called chattering. He finds that chatter has its basis in ignorance of the meaning and value of the individual word, that the chatterer comes to distort the word from its fixed contours and make it unclear. Morgenstern senses that this is a deep secret of life that is being expressed. He says that language takes revenge on the unclear, on the vague. That is understandable, since he was able to bridge the gap between poetry and seeing, just as he finds their affinity with sound, image, architecture, and so on.

This same affinity underlay the entire work of Goethe, who at one time in his life did not know whether he should become a poet or a sculptor. But the seer experiences what is the content of the spiritual experience for him outside of language. This is something that is difficult to explain because most people think in words, but the seer thinks without words and is then compelled to pour what is wordless in the experience into the already firmly formed language. He has to adapt to the formal relationships of language. He need not feel this as a constraint, for he will discover the secret of creating language. He can make himself understood by stripping away the conceptual aspect of language. It is therefore so important to understand that it is more important how the seer says it than what he says. What he says is conditioned by the ideas that each of us brings in from the outside. He is obliged, in order not to be regarded as a fool, to clothe what he has to say in viable sentences and chains of thought. For the highest realms of the spirit, it is important how the seer says something. The one who came up with the how of expression, who came up with the fact that the seer has to be careful, to say some things briefly, others more broadly, and others not at all, that he is obliged to formulate the sentence from one side in one way, then to add another from the other side. It is the way it is formulated that is important for the higher parts of the spiritual world. Therefore, in order to understand, it is important to listen less to the content, which is of course also important as a revelation of the spiritual world, and more to penetrate through the content to the way in which the content is expressed, in order to see whether the speaker is merely linking sentences and theories, or whether he is speaking from experience. Speaking from the spiritual world becomes visible in the way something is said, not so much in the content, if it is theoretical, but in the way it is expressed. In such communications from the forms of language, the artistic element of language can have an effect on what inspires the seer to rise to the level of the process of language creation, so that he recreates something of what was present when language emerged from the human organism.

What is the reason that what arises in the visionary consciousness is brought into the spirit world through artistic creation, but lives in the artistic imagination in an unconscious and subconscious way? — Artistic creation is, of course, conscious, but the impulses, the driving force, must remain in the unconscious so that artistic creation is uninhibited. Only he can understand what is at stake here who knows that the ordinary consciousness of man is, for certain reasons, destined for something other than for entering into the full world.

On the one hand, our ordinary consciousness proceeds from the observation of nature. But what it delivers to us does not arise from our concepts; they do not penetrate into the realm where, in space, matter haunts, as Dz Bois-Reymond says. And again: what lives in the soul cannot be fulfilled with reality. No matter how deeply mystical the experience, it always hovers over reality. Man comes to the full world neither by seeing nature nor by seeing into the soul. There is an abyss there that usually cannot be bridged. It is consciously bridged in the seeing consciousness, in artistic creation. There, self-knowledge must become something other than what is usually called that. Mystical insight finds that it has achieved enough when it is said: “I have experienced the God, my higher self, within.” Real self-knowledge aims to see how what one otherwise experiences in the mere point of the ego lives creatively in the organism. We are not merely conceiving and perceiving beings in that we have perception and perception; we also continually breathe out and in. While we are facing the world in waking consciousness, we are always breathing out and in, but ordinary consciousness is unaware of what is going on within us. Something wonderful is happening that can only be recognized by the seeing consciousness, when one looks not only at nebulousness, at the abstract I, but at how this I lives, forming in the concrete. The following then takes place.

When breathing out, the cerebral fluid passes into the medullar canal, into a long sack which has many stretchy, tearable points; it pushes downwards, pushing against the veins of the body. What is going on here I describe as an external process. Ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate it, but the soul experiences it subconsciously, this spreading out of what comes from the brain into the veins of the body, and when breathing in, the backflow of the venous blood into the veins of the back through the spinal canal, the penetration of the cerebral fluid into the brain, and what happens there as a play between nerves and sensory organs. Ordinary consciousness is shadowy here, knows nothing about it, but soul and spirit are involved. This process appears chaotic. What pulsates back and forth takes place in musical form in every human being. There is inner music in this process. And the creative element in music is to be raised up into the outer conscious form of the music by what the musician has become accustomed to experiencing as the music of his soul body. In it lives the tone, the subconscious life-giving power of the music in which the human soul weaves. Our psychology is still quite elementary; the things that shed light on the artist's life have yet to be explored in harmony with the faculty of vision. The human experience is a complex one. It is this subconscious knowledge of the soul that is the actual impulse of artistic imagination, in that the musical life plays out between the spinal cord and the brain, where the blood and cerebrospinal fluid rush in, so that the nerve is set into vibration, which rises up towards the brain. If this is brought into connection with the possibility of higher perception, then there is more inner music in it that is enjoyed than in the objective impulse from which the human soul is born, in that the human being enters into physical existence through birth or conception from the spiritual life. The soul enters into existence by learning to play on the instrument of the physical body.

And what happens when all this movement takes place, this vibration of the brain water that comes up? What takes place there in the interaction between nerves and senses? — When the nerve wave strikes the outer senses — not yet the sensory perception, mind you — when the nerve wave simply strikes in the waking state, there lives unconsciously and is drowned out by perception: poetry! Between the senses and the nervous system is a region where man unconsciously creates poetry. The nerve wave rolls into his senses - unconsciously it runs, one can determine this physiologically - this life runs in the senses and is poetry-producing: man lives creating poetry within himself. And the poetic creation is the bringing up of this unconscious life.

I have described this in the breathing process. During exhalation, we must bear in mind that the cerebral fluid in the body presses downwards in the forces that come from the body to meet it, and in the forces through which the human being places himself in the external world. We are constantly standing in a certain static position in the outer world, whether we are standing with legs apart, with arms bent, or whether we are crawling as a child, or whether we transform this static position of crawling into the static position of standing upright: we are in a state of inner equilibrium. The inner forces with which the waves that are exhaled meet us are based on what is formed in sculpture and architecture. The emotional feeling that lives in a person when they move but keep that movement still is expressed in the sculpture. This is an inner experience that is connected to the forms of the body. One recognizes this only when one is accustomed to developing perception and thinking into calm formal ideas. One learns that from the body do not come chaotic forces, but forms that show that the human being is integrated into the cosmos. By looking at more external forces, which the soul experiences subconsciously, one has more to do with plastic imagination. Between the two lies a strange unconscious realm that the soul has down in its depths. As the nerve impulse vibrates between body and brain, it is in contact with the warm blood, which is actually the cold, intellectual part of the human body. In such warmth and spirituality lie unconsciously the sources of artistic creation, which impulsates the painter as he brings his impressions, raised from the subconscious, onto the wall in colors. Man stands unconscious in the spiritual world, which is only opened up through seership.

It was not for nothing that in ancient times the body was seen as a temple for the soul. There was an indication of how architecture is related to the balance of the whole body and the whole cosmos.

Art should express what the artist is only able to put into his work because his soul experiences it in connection with the world, because his body is a microcosmic image of the whole macrocosm. If this is to be brought to consciousness, it can only be done through the gift of second sight. Why does the ordinary aesthetic, built on the model of natural science, prove so barren? The artist cannot do anything with this school aesthetic, which wants to bring the unconscious in human nature to consciousness in the same way as ordinary natural science. What lives in artistic creation brings the vision to consciousness, only the artist must not be afraid of the vision, as so many are. The two areas can live separately side by side in the human personality because they can be so distinct. It is possible for the soul to live outside the body in the spiritual world: then it can observe how that which otherwise remains in the subconscious is crystallized into artistic creation, but also how that which can be artistically experienced by the seer, separate from his seership. Only artistic fertilization can come from this experience and can only benefit the artist, just as artists can also fertilize the seer's vision. The seer who has artistic sense or taste will be saved from allowing spiritual science to be shot through with too much of the philistine. He will describe this spiritual world flexibly, will be able to shape the how of spiritual science, of which I spoke, more appropriately than someone who, without artistic sense, has appropriated entry into the spiritual world. There is no need, as there is for many artists, to develop a fear of seeing. I am speaking of the serious fear, not just the fear of being said to be an anthroposophist. I am speaking of the very common fear in principle that seeing would impair the immediacy of artistic creation. In reality, this impairment does not exist. But we live in an age in which, through the historical necessity of human development, the soul is pushed to transform into consciousness what was naively present in the subconscious. Only those who increasingly transform the unconscious into the free grasp of the conscious understand the times in which we live.

If this demand of the time is not met, humanity will enter a cultural cul-de-sac. Art cannot be recognized by ordinary science, which is why aesthetics is rejected by artists. But a science that seeks to understand is developing a seership that does not take the dew from the flowers of art. The seer is agile enough to grasp art. Therefore, anyone can grasp it as a fact of today's world that a bridge must be built between artistry and seership; they can emphasize this as a necessity, as Christian Morgenstern beautifully emphasized it in words that point to the need for a turnaround. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced today from the Divine-Spiritual through feeling, not penetrating through knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with the primer under his pillow.”

Often one wants to sleep with the primer of world knowledge under one's pillow all one's life, so as not to have one's original elementary creativity weakened by visionary science. Whoever grasps the science of prophecy as it can be understood today, in keeping with the times, will understand that, in the spirit of Morgenstern, one must emerge from illiteracy and build bridges between artistry and seership, and that through this new light will fall on art and new warmth will come through art to seership. So that as the fruit of the right efforts in a healing future, a deeply meaningful impulse can work through visionary light and artistic warmth into the development of humanity in the future.

From time immemorial, people have sensed that there is a certain affinity or at least a relationship between the impulses of artistic imagination, artistic creation and enjoyment, and supersensible knowledge. Whoever encounters artistic individuals will realize that there is a widespread fear among creative artists that artistic work could be disturbed by approaching the conscious experience of the supersensible world, from which artistic imagination receives its impulses, as it is striven for in spiritual-scientific supersensible knowledge. On the other hand, it is well known that certain artistic natures, who approach their artistic production with what appears to shine from the supersensible world, experience something like vision within the activity of their creative imagination. Fairytale writers or other artistic individuals who want to deal more with the phenomena from the supersensible world shining into the world of the senses know how the figures appear before their eyes, but are entirely spiritual, so that they have the feeling that they are in contact with these artistic figures, or that these figures are in contact with each other. Insofar as full consciousness is present, through which one can always tear oneself away from what overcomes one in a visionary way, spiritual science can also speak of vision in such a case. It must be said that there are points of contact between artistic creation, artistic imagination and the seeing consciousness that is able to place itself in the spiritual world in a cognizant way. Nevertheless, especially in the face of a spiritual-scientific view such as the one meant here, one feels the need to emphasize that the artist should not allow his originality to be robbed by what is consciously taken in from the spiritual world. In such a view, one overlooks the essential relationship between artistic imagination and the visionary perception of the spiritual world. For what is meant here by this visionary perception is the kind that develops quite independently through mere soul activity, independently of the physical bodily tool. To what extent it is possible for the soul to place itself in the spiritual world free of the body, I cannot explain today. I would just like to say in advance that what arises in terms of kinship and relationships between genuine artistic creation and enjoyment and true, genuine seership is of more interest to anthroposophical spiritual researchers today than the relationship between seership and visionary states, or abnormal states, which, even if attempts are made to describe them as clairvoyance, are nevertheless only related to physical conditions and do not represent solely mental experiences. But to understand this real relationship between artistic imagination and visionary power, it is necessary to look at what, in the strictest sense of the word, separates the two, and that is a very significant one.

Those who create with artistic imagination will not, as is the case with ordinary sensory perception and reflection on what is perceived, comprehend the external sensory world and reproduce it within themselves: they will change it, idealize it, or whatever else one wants to call it. It does not depend on the direction. Whether one conceives realistically or idealistically, whether one is an impressionist or an expressionist, it does not matter, but in everything artistic there is a transformation of what is otherwise recreated by the human being from reality. But what remains alive in artistic creation is what can be called the perception of the external world. The artist adheres to the perception of the external world. What remains in this artistic creation is the image of the ideas that are based on external perception, and what is connected with it in the ability to remember, in the memory. In the artist, everything he has taken in during his life continues to have an effect in the subconscious, and the better that which settled in the soul as an experience continues to have an effect in the soul, the richer the artistic production will be as the personality is directed towards external sensory impressions, the ability to imagine and remember will live in artistic fantasy. This is not the case with the soul life in the vision-gifted personality that penetrates into the spiritual world through supersensible intuition. The essential point is that one can only penetrate into the spiritual world if one can silence both outer sense perception and the faculty of imagination, which runs into memory. Memory, the faculty of perceiving external sense impressions, must be completely silent during supersensible cognition. It is difficult enough to make our contemporaries understand that it is possible for the human soul to achieve such a degree of arousal of its dormant powers, that soul life can still be present in full vividness when the faculty of imagination and perception are suppressed. Therefore, the endeavor for supersensible knowledge, if it is methodically developed, must not be objected that one is dealing with the arbitrary vision only with something reminiscent of the memory, which surges up from the subconscious. The essential thing is that he who, as a spiritual researcher, wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, should learn the method that makes it possible to shut out the memory faculty so completely that his soul lives only in present impressions, into which nothing is mixed from reminiscences arising from the subconscious, so that the soul, with what it presents and experiences, stands in a world that it consciously attempts to penetrate, so that nothing remains unconscious.

When we consider that much mystical, so-called theosophical striving has a yearning for everything that is vague and nebulous, we can understand how what is meant here by seership can be confused with it, even by those who believe they are followers. But that is not the point, but rather what is meant by this seership.

Here we can see how fundamentally different this kind of vision is from artistic creation. Both are based on different states and moods of the soul; but the one who strives for supersensible knowledge in the sense meant here will have special experiences with art.

First of all, a cardinal experience. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from morning till night. Gazing into the spiritual world is tied to a specific time; one knows the beginning and end of the state in which the soul penetrates into the spiritual world. In this state, the soul is able, through its own power, to completely disregard the impressions of the outer senses, so that nothing remains of all the things that the outer senses see as colors and hear as sounds. It is precisely through this gazing into the nothingness that perception of the spiritual world arises. I would like to say: The seer can extinguish everything that comes to him from the outside world, everything that surges up from ordinary memory into mental consciousness, but he cannot extinguish certain impressions that come to him from works of art that really come from the creative imagination, even if he puts himself into this state. I do not mean to say that the seer in such states has the same impressions of the works of art as the non-seer. He has them in non-seer moments. But in seer moments he has the possibility of completely erasing the sensual and the reminiscent with regard to the outside world, but not with regard to a work of art that he encounters.

These are experiences that specify themselves. It turns out that the seer has certain experiences with the individual arts. It is precisely in the details of the effect that words such as “art” lose their usual meaning. From the point of view of supersensible knowledge, the individual arts become realms in themselves. Architecture becomes something different from music, painting and so on. But to get an overview of what seer-like experience is in relation to art, it is necessary to point out that the question suggests itself: if the seer must suppress the effects of the external world and that which belongs to the memory, what remains for him?

Of the three soul activities mentioned in the science of the soul, only two are ever active in the human soul. Imagination and perception are not present, but feeling and willing are, although in a completely different way than in ordinary life. One should not confuse supersensible knowledge with the nebulous, emotional melting into the spiritual world, which must be called mysticism. It must be clearly understood that supersensible knowledge, although it springs from feeling and willing, is something other than feeling and willing. It must be borne in mind that, for seer-knowledge, feeling and willing must fill the soul so completely that the soul is at rest, and that all the other faculties of the human being are also in complete rest. This must occur in a way that is not otherwise possible for the human being through feeling and willing: Feeling and willing must develop entirely inwardly. In the case of seeing, volitional impulses usually develop in revelations to the outside. Dervish-like states and the like are opposed to the knowledge of the spiritual world.

As feeling and willing develop inwardly, a soul activity full of light and sharply contoured springs up from them. A soul activity sprouts up, the formations of thought are similar. The ordinary thought image is something faded. Something objective, but no less imbued with reality than ordinary thinking, sprouts for the seer out of feeling and willing.

The experiences with art in particular can be used to characterize what the seer experiences in detail in his soul abilities. By trying to put himself in the place of the architect in his architectural forms and proportions, in what the architect encloses in his buildings, he feels a kinship with these architectural proportions and harmonies, with that which develops in him, in the seer, as a completely different thinking than the shadowy thinking of ordinary life. One would like to say: the clairvoyant develops a new thinking that is related to nothing so much as to the forms in which the architect thinks and which he fashions. The thinking that rules in ordinary life has nothing to do with true seership. The thinking that rules in seership includes space in its creative experience. The seer knows that with these forms, which are living thought forms, he enters into the supersensible reality behind the sense world, but that he must develop this thinking that lives out in spatial forms. The seer perceives: In all that lives in the harmony of measure and form, will and emotional feeling are active. He learns to recognize the forces of the world in such measure and number relationships through the designs that live in his thinking. Therefore, he feels related in his thinking to what the architect designs. In a certain sense, a new emotional life awakens in him — not that of ordinary consciousness — and he feels akin to what the architect and sculptor create in forms. For supersensible knowledge, a representational intellectuality is born that thinks in spatial forms that curve and shape themselves through their own life. These are thought-forms through which the soul of the seer plunges into spiritual reality; one feels akin to what lives in the forms of the sculptor. One can characterize the seer's thinking and new perception by considering his experiences with architecture and sculpture.

The seer's experiences with music and poetry are quite different. The seer can only develop a relationship to music if he penetrates even further into the sphere I have just described. It is true that this new spiritual intellectuality initially develops out of the feeling and will that are turned inwards. One is able to penetrate into the spiritual world through the experience that one penetrates only through the soul; the soul does not use the physical organization for this. Then comes the next step: one would only penetrate incompletely into the spiritual world if one did not advance to the next level. This consists not only in developing this spiritual intellectuality, but also in becoming aware of one's being outside of the body in the spiritual reality, just as one is aware here of one's existence in the physical world, of one's feet on the ground, of one's grasping at objects and so on. By beginning to know oneself in the spiritual world and to think and feel as I have just said, one comes to develop a new, deep feeling and volition, but a volition in the spiritual world that is not expressed in the sense world. By experiencing this volition, one can only make certain experiences with music and poetry.

It becomes apparent that what is experienced in music in supersensible knowledge is related in particular to the new emotional feeling that is experienced outside the body. Music is experienced differently in the visionary state than in ordinary consciousness: it is experienced in such a way that one feels united with every single note, every melody, living with the soul in the surging, sounding life. The soul is completely united with the tones, the soul is as if poured out into the surging tones. I may well say that there is hardly any other way to get such a precise, such a pictorial view of Aphrodite rising from the sea foam than by considering the way the human soul lives in the element of the musical and rising from it, when it grasps itself in the visionary.

And just as the creatures of the air flutter around Aphrodite as she rises above the sea, approaching her as manifestations of the living in space, so for the seer the musical is joined by the poetic. As he feels himself with his soul as if set apart from the musical element and yet again as if within it, as if identical with it, the poetic element is added to the musical for the seer. He experiences this in an intense form. What he experiences depends on the degree to which he is trained in seership. It is a peculiar thing about poetry. Through language or other means of poetry, the poet expresses what comes to the visionary faculty from poetry. A dramatic person, for example, whom the poet brings to the stage, whom he lets say a few words, is formed from these few words into the complete image of a human personality. That is why, in all that is unreal in poetry, that which is mere empty phrase, that which does not push out of creative power but is made, things seem so unpleasant to the seer: he sees the grotesque caricature in that which is not poetry but still seeks to create something in empty phrases. While the plastic is transformed into spiritual intellectuality, the poetic is transformed into the plastic and the representational, which he must look at. He looks at what is true, what is formed from the true creative laws by which nature creates, and sharply separates this from what is merely created out of human imagination, because one wants to create poetry, even if one is not connected in fantasy with the creative powers of the universe. Such are the experiences in relation to poetry and music.

Supernatural insight experiences painting in a peculiar way. It stands alone for supernatural insight. And because the seer — to use a trivial comparison — is obliged, as the geometrician is obliged to use lines and a compass, to visualize what he could have in mere conception, to make the conception tangible, the seer is also obliged to translate the experience of the spiritual world, what he experiences without form, into a formed, dense world. This happens when he experiences what he experiences in this way in such a way that he transforms it into inner vision, into imagination, and fills it, if I may say so, with soul-material. He does this in such a way that, so to speak, he creates the counterpart to painting in the inner, creative, visionary state. The painter forms his imagination by applying the inner creative powers to sensual perception, which he experiences as he needs them. He comes in from the outside until he transforms what lives in space in such a way that it works in lines, forms, colors. He brings this to the surface of the painterly perception. The seer comes from the opposite direction. He condenses what is in his visionary activity to the point of emotional coloring; he imbues what is otherwise colorless, as if illustrating inwardly with colors, he develops imaginations. One must only imagine in the right way that what the painter brings from one side comes from the opposite side in what the seer creates from within.

To imagine this, read the elementary principles in the last chapters of Goethe's Theory of Colours about the sensual-moral effect of colors, where he says that each color triggers an emotional state. The seer receives this emotional state last, with which he tinges what would otherwise be colorless and formless. When the seer speaks of aura and the like and cites colors in what he sees, one should be aware that he is tinting what he experiences inwardly with these emotional states. When the seer says what he sees is red, he experiences what one otherwise experiences with the red color; the experience is the same as when seeing red, only spiritually.

It is the same thing that the seer sees and that the artist conjures onto the canvas, but seen from different sides. In this way the seer meets the painter. This meeting is a remarkable and significant experience. It reveals painting to be a special characteristic of supersensible knowledge. This is particularly evident in the case of an appearance that must become a special problem for every soul: the incarnate, the color of human flesh, which actually has something equally mysterious and appealing for those who want to penetrate inwardly into such things, allowing one to see deeply into the relationships of nature and spirit. The seer experiences this incarnate in a special way. I would like to draw attention to one particular aspect.

When speaking of clairvoyance, people think that it refers to something that only a few twisted people have, something that is completely outside of life. It is not so. That which is earnest looking is always present in life. We could not stand in life if we were not all clairvoyant for certain things. It is important that the serious seer does not mean something that is outside of life, but that it is only an enhancement of life in certain ways. When are we clairvoyant in our ordinary life? We are clairvoyant in a case that is so little understood today because, from a materialistic point of view, all kinds of craziness have been formed about the way we grasp a foreign ego when we are confronted with a foreign body. There are already people today who say: You only perceive the soul of another human being through a subconscious conclusion. We see the oval of the face, the other human lines, the color of the face, the shape of the eyes. We have become accustomed to finding ourselves face to face with a person when we see something physical like this, so we draw the analogy that whatever is in such a form also contains a person. — It is not so; that is what supersensible knowledge shows. What appears to us in the human form and coloring is a kind of perception, like the perception of color and form in a crystal. The color, form and surface of a crystal present themselves as themselves. The surface and coloring in a human being cancel each other out, making themselves transparent, ideally speaking. The sensory perception of the other person is spiritually extinguished: we perceive the other soul directly. It is an immediate empathy with the other soul, a mysterious and wonderful process in the soul when we stand face to face with another person in our own humanity. There is a real stepping out of the soul, a stepping over to the other. This is a clairvoyance that is present in life always and everywhere. This kind of clairvoyance is intimately connected with the mystery of the incarnate. The seer becomes aware of this when he rises to the most difficult seerical problem: to perceive the incarnate in a seerical way. For the ordinary view, the incarnate has something resting about it; for the seer, it becomes something moved within itself. The seer does not perceive the incarnate as something finished, he perceives it as an intermediate state between two others. When the seer concentrates on the coloring of the person, he perceives a continuous fluctuation between paleness and a kind of blush, which is a higher blush than the ordinary blush, and which for the seer merges into a kind of radiance of warmth. These are the two borderline states between which the coloring of the person oscillates, with the incarnate lying in the middle. For the seer, this becomes a vibrating back and forth. Through the paleness, the seer understands what the person is like inwardly, in their mind and intellect, and through the blush, one recognizes what the person is like as a being of will and impulse, how they are in relation to the external world. What is in the inner character of the person vibrates to a higher degree.

One should not imagine that the path to seeing things spiritually consists of 'developing' oneself and then seeing all people and all things spiritually. The path into the spiritual world is a multifaceted and complicated one. Coming to understand the inner being of another person is the main problem of the experience of incarnation.

Thus you see that the seer has the most diverse experiences with the arts. What is meant here is still somewhat shaded for us by an appearance that is suitable for pointing out the way in which seership stands in life: the relationship of seership to human language.

Language is actually not a unified thing, but something that exists in three different spheres. First, there is a state of language that can be seen as a tool for communication between people and in science. One may call the seer's experience paradoxical, but it is a real one: the seer perceives this use of language as a means of communication and expression for ordinary intellectual science as a kind of demotion of language, even as a debasement of language to something that language is not in its innermost nature. The seer's perception reaches to a different conception. Language is the instrument through which a people lives in community. What lives in language, in the way it is shaped into different forms, in the way sounds are articulated and so on, is, when viewed correctly, artistic. Language as a means of expression of a people is art, and the way language is created is the collective artistic creation of the people who speak that language.

By using language as a means of everyday communication, we degrade it. Anyone with a sense for what lives in language and is revealed in our subconscious knows that the creative aspect of language is akin to the poetic, to art in general. Anyone with an artistic nature has an unpleasant feeling when language is unnecessarily tuned down to the sphere of ordinary communication. Christian Morgenstern had this feeling. He was not anxious to build a bridge between artistry and seership; he did not believe that artistic originality would be lost through the penetration of the intellectual world; he felt that the poetic in him was akin to the plastic and the architectural. He, who expresses what he feels about language by characterizing chatter as an abuse of language, says: “All chatter is based on uncertainty about the meaning and value of the individual word. For the chatterbox language is something vague. But it gives it back to him in abundance: the (vague, the “swimmer.” One must feel what — in order to feel like him — Morgenstern felt as the language-creative: that where language in prose becomes a means of communication, its degradation to a mere purpose takes place.

Thirdly, the experience of the seer with language characterizes what is experienced in the spiritual world. What is seen there is not seen in words, it is not expressed directly in words. Thus, it is difficult to communicate with the outside world in a seerly way, because most people think theoretically and in terms of content in words and cannot imagine a life of the soul that goes beyond words. Therefore, those who experience the spiritual world perceptively feel a certain compulsion to pour into the already formed language that which they experience. But by silencing what otherwise lives in language — the power of imagination and memory — they can awaken in themselves the creative powers of language itself, those creative powers that were active in the development of humanity when language first arose. The seer must place himself in the state of mind when language first arose, must develop the dual activity of inwardly forming spiritual images that he has seen, and immersing himself in the spirit of speech formation so that he can combine the two. It is therefore important to realize that the words of the seer must be understood differently than words usually are. In communicating, the seer must make use of language, but in such a way that he allows what is creatively active in language to arise again, by responding to the formative forces of language. This makes it important that he shapes the spoken word by emphasizing certain things strongly and others less, saying certain things first and others later, or by adding something illustrative. A special technique is necessary for those who want to express spiritual truths in language, when they want to express what lives within them. Therefore, the seer needs to take into account the “how” of how he expresses himself, not just what he says. It is important that he first forms, it depends on how he says things, especially the things about the spiritual world, not just on what he says. Because this is so little taken into account, and because people remember the words by what they otherwise mean, the seer is so difficult to understand. He has a need — this is all only relative — to develop the ability to create language so that he expresses the supersensible through the way he expresses himself. It will become more and more necessary to realize that the important thing is not the content of what is said, but that through the way the seer expresses himself, one has the vivid impression that he is speaking from the spiritual world. Thus, even in ordinary life, language is already an artistic element. The seer also has a special relationship to language.

Now the question arises: What is the basis for such a relationship between the seer and the artist? How is it that basically the seer cannot detach himself from the impression of a work of art? The reason for this is that in the work of art something akin to supersensible knowledge appears, only in a different guise. It is due to the fact that the inner life of man is much more complicated than modern science is able to imagine.

I would like to present this from a different angle, where, however, apparently scientific language is used, and which points to something that must be developed more and more in order to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, the ordinary observation of reality and, on the other hand, the experience in artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge. I will ask: What is it that enables the creative musician to bring forth from his inner being that which lives in his notes? Here we must realize that what is usually called self-knowledge is still abstract. Even what mystics or nebulous theosophists imagine is something very abstract. If one believes that one experiences the divine in one's soul, then this is something very unclear and nebulous before the real, concrete seership. This becomes clear that on the one hand man has his inner experience, his thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses; he can immerse himself in them, call it mysticism, philosophy, science. If one learns to recognize the living, one knows: All this is too thin, even if one tries to condense it inwardly. Even with intense mysticism, one always flutters above reality, does not come close to true reality, only experiences inner images, experiences the effects of reality, and does not experience reality through ordinary contemplation of nature, which faces material processes.

It is true what Dz Bois-Reymond says: that contemplation of nature can never grasp what haunts space. When the natural scientist speaks of matter that exists in space, it does not yield to what we use to grasp reality. For ordinary consciousness, it remains the case that on the one hand we have the inner life, which does not penetrate to reality, and on the other hand we have external reality, which does not yield to the inner life. There is an abyss in between. This abyss, which one must know, is an obstacle to human knowledge. It can only be overcome by developing supersensible vision in the soul, the kind of vision that I have shown today in its relationship to the artistic.

When this vision develops, one enters into an external relationship with oneself and with material reality, which is present as a body. The body becomes something new, it does not remain the brittle, the one that does not surrender to the inner self. The inner self does not remain the one fluttering above reality, but it impregnates itself, permeates itself in its own corporeality with what has material existence in the body. But all material existence contains spiritual existence.

Let us try to visualize this with the help of musical art. While a person is developing musical or other ideas and perceiving them in ordinary consciousness, complicated states are taking place in his physical interior. He knows nothing about them, but they take place. The clairvoyant consciousness penetrates to this inward, complicated, wonderful physical experience. The cerebral fluid, in which the brain is otherwise embedded, pours out into the spinal cord sac when we breathe out, penetrates down, pushes the blood to the lower abdominal veins, and when we breathe in, everything is pushed up. A wonderful rhythm takes place, which accompanies everything we imagine and perceive. This breathing, this plastic art in its rhythm, pushes in and out in the brain. A process takes place that plays a part in human experience. It is something that goes on in the subconscious and of which the soul is aware. Modern physiology and biology are still almost completely ignorant of these things, but this will become a broad science,

In times that can no longer be ours, spiritual life had to be sought in a different way. But the time for seeking spiritual science in the Oriental-Indian way is past; it can be studied afterwards, but the belief that one must go back to Indian methods is completely mistaken. That is not for our time; it would lead humanity astray. Our methods are much more intellectual, but one may see by studying what ancient India was seeking. A large part of the training for higher knowledge in India consisted of a rhythmically ordered breathing process: they wanted to regulate the breathing process. If you compare what they were seeking with what I have just said, you will find that the yoga student wanted to experience within himself what I have described by inwardly feeling the path of breathing. The Indian experienced this by trying to feel the breathing process as it rose and fell.

Our methods are different. Those who follow this with understanding will find that we are no longer to immerse ourselves in the organism in this physical way, but to try to grasp what flows down through the meditative nature of the intellect and what flows up through the exercises of the will, and in this way to try to oppose ourselves to the current with our soul life and to feel it as it flows up and down.

A certain progress in human development depends on this. This is something of which science and everyday consciousness know nothing, but the soul knows it in its depths. What the soul knows and experiences there can, under special circumstances, be brought up into consciousness. It is brought up when the human being is an artist in relation to music. How does this happen? In the ordinary human condition, which one could also call the bourgeois condition, there is a strong connection between the soul and spirit and the physical and bodily. The soul and spirit are strongly tied to the processes just described. If the equilibrium is a labile one, if the soul and spirit are detached, then one is musical or receptive to it through this construction, which is based on inner destiny. The special artistic gift in other fields also depends on this unstable relationship. Those who have this gift are able to bring up what would otherwise only take place down in the soul — in the depths of the soul we are all musical artists. Those who are in a stable equilibrium cannot bring up what takes place there: they are not artists. Those who are in a labile equilibrium — now, as a scientific philistine, one could speak of degeneration — those who are in a labile equilibrium of soul and body, bring up more of what is playing in the inner rhythm, darker or lighter, and shape it through the tone material. If we look at the flow of nerve impulses from bottom to top towards the brain, we first encounter what we characterize as musical. How the optic nerve spreads out in the eye and connects with blood vessels remains in the subconscious. Something is going on that is extinguished when a person is confronted with the external world. When confronted with the external sensory world, the external impression is extinguished. But what takes place between nerve waves and sensory processes has always been a poet; the poet lives in every human being. And it depends on the state of the soul-body balance whether what takes place remains down there or whether it is brought up and poured into poetry.

Let us again consider the radiating process, the wave that strikes downwards, and strikes against the branching of the blood wave: this expresses the placing of our own equilibrium into the equilibrium of our environment. The subconscious experience is particularly strong here, in which the human being moves from the crawling child into upright balance. This is an enormous subconscious experience. The fact that we have this, which is only caricatured in the ape, and which becomes significant for humanity, that the line through the center of the body coincides with the center of gravity, is an enormous inner experience. There one unconsciously experiences the architectural-sculptural relationship. When the downward nerve wave encounters the blood flow, architecture and sculpture are unconsciously experienced, and it is again brought up and shaped to a greater or lesser extent by unstable or stable conditions.

The painting and what is expressed in it is experienced inwardly where nerve and blood waves meet. The artistic process is conscious, but the impulses are unconscious. The visionary consciously immerses himself in what underlies the artistic imagination as an impulse, as an inner experience, which is not characterized in such an abstract way as it is done today, but so concretely that one can find every single phase in the configuration of one's own body. The ancients sensed correctly that, with regard to architecture, every form and every measure is present in one's own self-insertion into the external world. Ancient architecture originates from a different sensing of these proportions than Gothic architecture, but both originate from a sensing of one's own equilibrium with the conditions of the macrocosm. In this way, one recognizes how man, in his own construction, is an image of the macrocosm. That is why the body has been called the temple of the soul. There is much truth in such expressions. Thus we can say that basically the sources from which the artist draws, who is to be taken seriously and has a relationship to reality, are the same sources from which the seer draws, to whom only that which is to remain an impulse in its effect now appears in consciousness, while when the impulse remains in the subconscious, he brings up what is brought to view by the artist.

From this it can be seen that these areas of human experience are strictly separate. Therefore, there is no reason for the anxiety that believes that the artist's originality will be lost through the gift of second sight. The gift of second sight is developed in the same states that can be separated from artistic creation and experience, but the two cannot affect each other if they are properly experienced. On the contrary.

We are at a time when humanity must become more and more aware and conscious, more and more free. That is why the light of art must be poured out by the artist himself, and in this way a bridge will be built between art and vision, which will not interfere with each other.

It is understandable that the artist feels disturbed when art history develops according to the pattern of modern natural science or the rational aesthetics as it is understood today. A knowledge that penetrates real art with vision does not yet exist today; one day artists will not feel disturbed by it, but fertilized by it.

Anyone who works with a microscope knows how to proceed in order to learn how to see. Just as one first penetrates oneself from within with the ability to work properly with a microscope – in this way, the inner view stimulates the outer view, does not hinder it – so will a time come when true seership impregnates and permeates the elementary productive capacity of the artist.

Sometimes, however, what is meant by vision is misunderstood because one thinks of supersensible science and knowledge too much in terms of ordinary sensory science and knowledge. However, people who approach spiritual science sometimes feel disappointed: they do not find convenient answers to their down-to-earth questions, but they do find other worlds that sometimes have much deeper riddles than those in the world of the senses. Through an introduction to spiritual science, new riddles arise that cannot be solved in theory, but promise to dissolve vividly in the process of life and thus create new riddles. If one lives into this higher liveliness, one remains related to art. Hebbel demands conflicts that must remain unresolved, and he finds Grillparzer philistine when, despite all his beauty, he resolves conflicts in a way that only makes sense to someone smarter than his hero. — This is the ultimate goal of true vision: it does not create cheap answers, but rather worldviews that complement the ones we perceive with our senses. Of course, profound artists have already sensed this. In his recently published book “Stufen” (Stages), Morgenstern expresses the idea that anyone who, like the artist, really wants to get to the spiritual must be willing to absorb and unite with what can already be comprehended today, through supersensible knowledge, of the divine-spiritual. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced of the Divine-Spiritual today, not penetrating it with knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with his primer under his pillow.”

This characterizes the point in our culture we are at. If one is able to respond to what is needed in our time, one will, like Morgenstern, have to come to the conclusion: one must not remain illiterate towards clairvoyant knowledge; as an artist, one must seek connections to clairvoyant knowledge. Just as it is significant when the visionary element sheds light on artistic creation, it is equally significant when artistic taste can inspire what, as a form of visionary philistinism, still has nothing artistic and at best something amusing about it. For the true spiritual expert of the future, the bridge that can be built between artistry and vision is more important than any pathological visionary.

Whoever sees through this knows that it will flourish for the good of present and future humanity if more and more spiritual things and spiritual knowledge are sought. The light of vision must shine in art, so that the warmth and grandeur of art may have a fertilizing effect on the breadth and grandeur of the horizon of vision. This is necessary for art, which wants to immerse itself in true existence, as we need it to be able to master the great tasks that must increasingly approach humanity from indeterminate depths.

Some friends who were present at my lectures in Munich on the relationship between spiritual science and art were of the opinion that I should also speak about the thoughts expressed there here in Vienna. And in complying with this wish, I would ask you to accept what I am going to say this evening entirely as meant to be unpretentious and as consisting only of aphoristic remarks about many things that could be said about the relationship between what might be called modern seership, as it is striven for by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and artistic creation and the nature of artistic enjoyment.

First of all, there is a certain prejudice against such a consideration as the one to be presented here, and prejudices are not always unfounded. There is a certain well-founded prejudice that is based on the insight that artistic creation, artistic enjoyment, artistic feeling actually have nothing to do with any view of art, with any knowledge of art. And very many people who are involved in the artistic process are of the opinion that they actually do harm to the element of the artistic creation and the artistic enjoyment if they associate thoughts, concepts, and ideas with what one experiences as an artist. I believe, however, that this prejudice is well-founded with regard to everything that can be called abstract, conventionally scientific aesthetics. I think that this science is rightly shunned by the artistic view, because truly artistic feeling is actually desolate, impaired by anything that somehow leads to a conventionally scientific view.

On the other hand, however, we live in an age in which, out of a certain necessity in world history, much of what previously worked unconsciously in man must become conscious. Just as we are no longer able to view the social and societal relationships between people in the light of myth, as was the case in earlier times, but are simply forced by the course of human development to seek our refuge in a real understanding of what is pulsating in the historical process, if we want to recognize what social structure, social togetherness and so on is among human beings, it is also necessary that much of what has rightly been sought in a more or less conscious or unconscious way in the instinctive workings of the human imagination and the like, be raised into consciousness. It would be raised up even if we did not want it. But if it were raised up in a way that was contrary to the progress of creation, the result would be what should be avoided: impairment of the intuitive-artistic, which impairment must be excluded precisely by the living-artistic.

I am not speaking as an esthete, nor as an artist, but as a representative of spiritual scientific research, as a representative of a world view that is imbued with the conviction that, as human development progresses, we will increasingly be able to penetrate into the real spiritual world that underlies our sensory world. I am not speaking of some metaphysical speculation, I am not speaking of some philosophy, but of what I would call supersensible experience. I do not believe that it will take long before it is recognized that all mere philosophical speculation and all logical or scientific endeavor is inadequate to penetrate into the spiritual realm. I believe that we are on the threshold of an epoch that will recognize as a matter of course that there are forces slumbering in the human soul and that these slumbering forces can be drawn out of this soul in a very systematic way. I have described how these slumbering powers in the human soul can be awakened in my various books, in 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds', 'Soul Mysteries' and 'The Riddle of Man'. So I understand spiritual knowledge to mean something that is basically not yet there, something that is only taken into account by a few people today, something that is not based on the continuation of already existing knowledge, be it mysticism or natural science, but on the acquisition of a special kind of human knowledge, which is based on the fact that man, through the methodical awakening of certain slumbering soul powers, brings about a state of consciousness that relates to ordinary waking life as this waking life relates to sleeping or dreaming life. Today, we are basically only familiar with these two opposing human states of consciousness: the dull, chaotic consciousness of sleep, which is only seemingly completely empty, only subdued, and the daytime consciousness from waking up to falling asleep. We can relate the mere images of dream life, when the will nature of the human being falls asleep, to the external physical reality, which relates him to the things of the environment. Likewise, as humanity continues to develop, it will come to effect an awakening from this waking consciousness to what I call the seeing consciousness, where one does not have external objects and processes before one, but a real spiritual world that underlies our own.

Philosophers want to open it up; you cannot open it up, only experience it. Just as little as you can experience your physical environment in dream life, you cannot experience the spiritual environment in waking consciousness: not through mysticism, not through abstract philosophy, but by bringing yourself into a different state of mind, by moving from dream life into ordinary waking consciousness.

Thus we speak of a spiritual world from which the spiritual and soul-life emerges just as the physical and bodily life emerges from the sense world. Such spiritual research is, of course, completely misunderstood in its peculiarity today. People are such that they judge what arises among them according to the ideas they already have, some even according to the words they already have. They want to tie in with something already known. As far as the results of the seeing consciousness are concerned, this is not the case, because it is not what is already known. The seeing consciousness, one could, if the word were not misunderstood, call it the visionary, the clairvoyant consciousness, whereby I do not understand anything superstitious. What comes from the visionary is judged by what people already know. Everything of a dubious nature, such as visionary life, hallucinations, mediumship and so on, has been brought close. What I mean here has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. All that I have listed last are the products of the sick soul life, that soul life which is more deeply embedded in the physical body and which brings images from the physical body to the soul. What I call the seeing consciousness takes the opposite path. The hallucinatory consciousness goes below the ordinary state of mind into the physical, while the seeing consciousness goes above the ordinary state of mind, lives and breathes only in the spiritual-mental realm, making the soul completely free from bodily life. In our ordinary consciousness, only pure thinking is free from bodily life, which many philosophers therefore deny because they do not believe that man can unfold an activity that is free from the body. That is the starting point: a seeing consciousness can be trained that develops upwards into the spiritual world, where there is nothing physical around us. This seeing consciousness now feels completely unrelated to any medium or visionary, but it does feel very much related to a real, genuine artistic understanding of the world. That is what I hope and long for, that a bridge could be built between real, genuine seership and artistic experience, whether in creation or in artistic enjoyment, in an unpedantic, artistic way between these two human perspectives.

It is indeed an experience for those who live in a visionary way that the source, the real source from which the artist creates, is exactly the same as that from which the seer, the observer of the spiritual worlds, draws his experiences. The only difference is the way in which the seer attempts to gain his experiences and to express these experiences in concepts and thoughts, and the way in which the artist creates. This is a considerable difference, and one which we may perhaps discuss today. But the source from which the artist and the seer draw is, in reality, one and the same.

Before I go into this question of principle, I would like to make a few preliminary remarks that may seem trivial to some, but which claim nothing less than to show that an artistic world view is not something that is arbitrarily added to life. For someone who strives for a certain totality, for a certain wholeness of life, artistic world view appears as something that belongs to life just as much as knowledge and the external banal hustle and bustle. A dignified existence is inconceivable without the permeation of our cultural life with artistic feeling.

It is important to truly recognize that wherever we go and stand, there is a latent urge within us to perceive the world aesthetically, artistically. I would like to give a few examples of this. However, we often do not become aware of the artistic experience that accompanies our life, our existence between the lines. It lives quite below the threshold of consciousness. If I have to visit someone and I enter their room and the room has red walls, red wallpaper, and they then come and talk to me about the silliest things, or perhaps don't talk at all, behave very boringly, then I feel that there is a falsehood. It remains entirely in feeling; it does not become thought, but I feel that there is untruth. However strange, however paradoxical it may appear, if someone papers his room in red, he disappoints me if he does not bring me something meaningful in thoughts in the red room in which he receives me. This does not need to be true, of course, it does not need to happen, but it does accompany our soul life. We have this feeling deep in our souls. If we enter a room with blue walls and someone spouts words at us, not letting us get a word in edgewise and considering himself the only person of importance, we feel it is at odds with the blue or violet walls of his room. The external prosaic truth need not correspond to this, but there is a special aesthetic truth that is as I have stated it. If I am invited to dinner somewhere, or let's not say snowed in, but politely invited to dinner, and I see that the place setting is red, painted red, I have the feeling that these are gourmets who eat to eat, enjoy eating. If I find a blue place setting, I have the feeling that they don't eat to eat, but that they want to tell each other something while eating, and leave the telling to the telling that otherwise accompanies social gatherings. These are real feelings that always live in the subconscious. If I meet a lady in a blue dress on the street and she shoots at me and behaves aggressively instead of reservedly, I find that contradictory to the blue dress, but I would find it natural if I met a lady in a red dress like that. Of course, I would also find it natural if a lady with snail hair was snappish. There is something that lives in the soul as a fundamental tone. I do not mean to say anything other than that an aesthetic feeling is there, even if we do not bring it to mind, which we cannot exclude: our mood depends on it; we are in a good or bad mood. We know what a good or bad mood is, but only those who engage more closely with things can become aware of the reasons for it. In this lies what might be called the necessity to pass from natural aesthetic feeling to life in art. Art simply accommodates natural life, just as the other ways of looking at people do.

The seer who has developed these powers, of which I have spoken, has a special way of experiencing art, and I believe that, even if not artistically, then at least in terms of the evaluation and perception of art, something can be gained from the special experience of seership in relation to art. The seer, who awakens his soul in such a way that he can have a spiritual world around him, is always able to turn his soul life away, to distract it from all that is merely external, sensual reality. If I have before me – I speak in the third person, not individually – a piece of external physical object or process, I am always able, in the space where the object is, to exclude perception for myself, so that I see nothing of the physical in that space. That is the real abstraction that is possible for seership. It can only be done with natural objects, not with what is truly artistically created. And I consider that to be something significant. When confronted with a work of art, the seer is not able to completely exclude the object, the artistic process, just as he can exclude an external process. What is truly artistic creation, imbued with spirit, remains spiritually before the consciousness of the seer.

This is the first thing that can testify to us that truly artistic creation and visionary beholding come from the same source. But there is much more that is very significant in this direction. You see, the seer, when he applies the means that develop his soul, comes to a very different way of conceiving as well as willing. If we use ordinary expressions, we can of course say that both the conceiving and the willing become inward, but this 'inward' is actually not correct, because one is still outside, spreading one's whole view over a real spiritual world. A different conceiving and a different willing occurs in seership.

The visualization does not proceed in abstract thoughts. Abstract thoughts are something that is suitable for the physical world, for registering it in its phenomena, for finding natural laws, and so on. The seer does not think in such thoughts, he does not think in abstractions, he thinks in thoughts that are actually weaving images. This is still somewhat difficult to understand in the present, because it is not yet fully known what is meant by an activity that is actually a thinking, but which does not think abstract thoughts and follows things, living in the forms and configurations of things. This imagining can be compared to the formation of surfaces and curves, as the mathematician does. But it comes to life inwardly, as Goethe attempted in his theory of metamorphosis in its elementary state. Today, the inward, visual imagination can become much more alive. This visual imagination is extraordinarily akin to the basis of certain areas of creative art, namely sculpture and architecture.

The strange thing is that in relation to this new thinking, this new imagining that the seer acquires, he feels most akin to the forms that the truly artistic architect develops and the forms that the sculptor must base his work on. There is really something like architectural visualization, or visualization in sculptural forms, that is capable of following things in the visionary grasp of the world in such a way that one learns to understand them in their spiritual inwardness, and also learns to transcend them, to rise purely into the spiritual world. With abstract thoughts one can learn nothing about the inner nature of things. The seer feels akin to the architect and the sculptor in his new thinking. He must think the world in the way of spiritualizing that unconsciously or subconsciously underlies the work of the sculptor and the architect. This prompts one to inquire as to the source of this. The question arises: What is it that the seer actually uses? He uses certain hidden senses, senses that are present in ordinary life but that only resonate softly and are not fully expressed in ordinary life. For example, we have a sense that could be called the sense of balance. We live in it, but we are only aware of it to a limited extent, not fully consciously. When we take a step, for example, or stretch out or bend our hand, all these actions that bring us into some kind of relationship with space are connected with a perception that does not quite reach our consciousness, as it does with seeing and hearing, except that these senses are much louder and more clearly audible. But this sense of balance and the related sense of movement are only subtly present because they are not just meant for our inner life, but convey our place in the cosmos. How I stand in the cosmos, whether I am walking towards the sun or away from it and feel that I am drawing closer and closer to the light, and at the distance the light feels dimmed in some way, this feeling of being inside the whole of the world is something that cannot be described in any other way than to say: man in his movement is constructed as a microcosm out of the macrocosm and experiences as a microcosm his being placed in the macrocosm through such a sense.

When a sculpture is created, it is nothing more than perceptions of a usually hidden meaning being translated into the design of external surfaces and the like. What we as human beings always carry with us in our feeling for the world is unconsciously expressed in architecture and sculpture. However strange this observation may at first seem, anyone who is truly able to explore psychically the relationship between individual architectural forms, what lives in the sculptor's imagination as he shapes his surfaces, knows that what I have just hinted at plays a mysterious part in this creative work. The seer does nothing other than to bring this sense of placing oneself in the world to full consciousness. He develops it in the same way that the architect, the sculptor, is artistically prompted by what he feels in his body to shape as forms in the external material. From this point of view, one sees certain things; I could not only talk for many hours in this regard, I could talk for days. Anyone who acquires a feeling for sculpture knows that mere imitation is not truly sculptural. Those who try to answer the question “What is actually in the sculptural?” perceptively, not abstractly, cannot say that a surface is only significant to them because it imitates a surface in the human body and the like that exists in external nature. That is not it. What is experienced in the sculptural is the intrinsic life of the surface. Anyone who has discovered the difference between a surface that is curved only once and one that is curved again knows that no surface that is curved only once can somehow have sculptural life within itself. Only a surface that is curved within its curvature can express life as a surface. This inner expression – not symbolic, but artistic – is what is at issue here, not imitation, not adhering to the model, this is what constitutes the secret of the two-dimensional itself.

This touches on a question that is indeed as unresolved as possible in the present day. Not only do we see many people today enjoying art, which is quite right, but we also see many people judging art almost professionally. Now, I believe that, precisely on the basis of the premises underlying today's considerations, I really do not have to express a critical judgment, but simply express what comes more and more to mind: I do not believe that anyone who has never kneaded clay, who is only a critic, can ever get an idea of what is actually essential to sculpture. I do believe that everyone can enjoy art, but I don't believe that anyone can judge art who has not made those attempts that have shown him what artistic forms can be realized within the material. Because very different things are realized in reality by the material than mere imitation of the model and the like. Mere imitation of the model is thus artistically no more valuable than the imitation of the nightingale's song through the use of certain tones. Real art begins where nothing is imitated anymore, but where something new and creative is created. In architecture – not in music, but very much so in sculpture – we draw on the model. But something that is somehow imitative in relation to the model is not art. Art begins where imitation can no longer be spoken of. And what works and weaves as an independent spiritual reality, unconsciously by the artist, consciously by the seer, is what is common to the seer's perception of the world and the artist's creation, except that it is also expressed spiritually by the seer, and by the artist, because he cannot express it, but only has it unconsciously in his hands, in his imagination, to which “material can be incorporated.

The seer feels a completely different affinity with the poetic and the musical arts. It is particularly interesting in the case of music how the seer experiences his experiences in a different way when he enters the realm of art with his seership. I must make a comment about what I call seeing: I do not mean all the time, but only in the moments when one puts oneself in this state. Therefore, it does not apply that the seer experiences the musical in other times than when he wants, as it is now described. At other times, he experiences music as any other person does. He can compare what he experiences musically and what he experiences when he sees the musical work of art. When it comes to musical works of art, it is important that the seer is clear about experiencing music in such a way that it is entirely spiritual, and in such a way that the concrete spiritual feels a direct connection to the musical. I have said before that the seer develops a new power of imagination, he visualizes in such a way that he feels at home in architectural and sculptural creation. — In that the seer not only grasps things imaginatively, but also develops feeling and pictorial powers, but in such a way that they enter into a union, one cannot speak of a separation of feeling and willing; one must speak of a feeling will and a willing feeling, of an experience of the soul that connects these two, which usually go hand in hand in ordinary consciousness, to form the totality of feeling will. Sometimes this sentient volition is more nuanced towards volition, at other times more towards feeling. When the seer, in the elevated spiritual state of soul, places himself in the realm of music, he experiences everything that occurs in his soul with the nuance of feeling in the truly musical, in the genuine musical. He experiences it in such a way that he does not separate the objective tone and the subjective tone experience from one another, but that these are one in the visionary experience, that the soul flows as the tones flow into one another, only that everything is spiritualized. He experiences his soul poured out into the musical element; he knows that what he experiences through the newly formed feeling volition is woven into the tone substance by the musician from the same source. It is particularly interesting to investigate the origin of the fact that the creative musician brings up from the unconscious the spiritual that the seer beholds and lays it into his material. In the realm of music, there is a revelation of what underlies it.

In all unconscious phenomena that occur in the life of the soul, the miracle structure of our organism plays a role in a completely different way. It is becoming more and more apparent that our organism should not be regarded in the way that it is by the ordinary biologist and physiologist, but that it must be regarded as an image of a spiritual model. What the human being carries within him is the image of a spiritual model. The human being enters into existence through birth or through conception, and he applies the laws of heredity that are his, as well as that which descends from a spiritual world and behaves in relation to the physical in such a way that the physical is truly an image of the spiritual. How this comes about, I cannot explain today. The fact exists that in our organism such a working takes place, which proceeds according to spiritual-pictorial laws. With music, this is particularly remarkable. We believe that when we enjoy music, the ear is involved and perhaps the nervous system of our brain, but only in a very external way. Physiology is only just beginning in this field and will only reach a certain level when artistic ideas are incorporated into this physiological and biological area. There is something completely different at the root of it than the mere hearing process or what takes place in the nervous system of our brain. What underlies the sense of music can be described as follows: every time we breathe out, the brain, the head space, the inner space of the head, is caused by breathing to let its brain water descend through the spinal cord sac into the diaphragm region; a descent is caused. The inhalation corresponds to the reverse process: the brain water is driven against the brain. There is a continuous rhythmic up and down movement of the cerebral fluid. If this were not the case, the brain would not lose as much of its weight as is necessary to prevent it from crushing the underlying blood vessels; if it did not lose so much of its weight, it would crush our blood vessels. This cerebral fluid moves up and down in the arachnoid space, in expansions that are elastic and less elastic, so that when it rises and falls, the cerebral fluid flows over the less elastic expansions, over some that expand more or less. This gives a very wondrous way of working within a rhythm. The whole human organism, apart from the head and limbs, expresses itself in this inner rhythm. What flows in through the ear as sound, what lives in us as a sound image, becomes music when it encounters the inner music that is played by the fact that the whole organism is a strange musical instrument, as I have just described.

If I were to describe everything to you, I would have to describe a wonderful inner human music, which is not heard but is experienced inwardly. What is experienced musically is basically nothing more than the response of an inner singing of the human organism. This human organism is, precisely in relation to what I have just described, the image of the macrocosm: that we carry within us, in the most concrete laws, more strictly than natural laws, this lyre of Apollo, on which the cosmos plays within us. Our organism is not what biology alone recognizes, but it is the most wonderful musical instrument.

One can cite very rough things to show how man is built according to strange cosmic laws. To cite the most trivial thing: we take eighteen breaths on average in one minute. Let's calculate how many that is in a twenty-four hour day: that's 25,920 breaths; that's how many breaths in a whole day. Let's calculate a human day. We can calculate a person's day, although many people grow older, to be between seventy and seventy-one years: a person's day. Try to calculate how much that is for a single twenty-four-hour day! 25,920 – that's how many breaths you take in one day! The world breathes us out and breathes us in as we are born and as we die. It takes just as many breaths during a human day as we do during a twenty-four-hour day.

Take the Platonic solar year. The sun rises in a certain sign of the zodiac. The vernal point moves on. In ancient times, the sun rose in the sign of Taurus, then in Aries, now in Pisces. Modern astronomy schematizes. This vernal point apparently goes around the whole sky – but apparently, but that is not important – and of course, after a significant number of years, it arrives at the same point again: after 25,920 years. The Platonic solar year is 25,920 years long! Take a human day of 71 years: it has 25,920 individual days; take a single human day of 24 hours: it has 25,920 breaths in the experience. You see, we are integrated into the rhythm of the world. I believe — and one could engage in many reflections on this point — that there is no more abstract religious concept that could evoke such fervor as the awareness that one's own outer physical organism is so embedded in the macrocosm, in the cosmic structure. The seer attempts to penetrate this embeddedness in a spiritual way. It lives itself out in our inner music: What comes out of the organism, what strikes up into the soul — the soul's resonance, resonating with the cosmos — is the unconscious element of artistic creation. The whole world resonates when we truly create artistically.

There you have the common source between being an artist and being a seer: unconsciously in the artist, by incorporating the laws of the world into the material; consciously in the seer, by attempting to behold the purely spiritual through the seeing consciousness.

By studying these things in this way, one learns to recognize what causes the artist to unconsciously incorporate what is entrusted to the material. Just as inner music lives in our respiratory system, which then becomes outer music in art, so too does poetry live there. In this respect, today's physiology is still very far behind. Because if you want to understand it, it is not the sensory physiology or the nervous physiology of the brain that needs to be studied, but the border area where the brain and nervous system converge. It is precisely at this border, in the physiological area where, if a person is predisposed to it – you always have to be predisposed to the artistic – that the source of poetic creation lies. And the seer finds the poetic creation most particularly when he enters into the realm of his inner experience, where the feeling-will inclines more toward the side of the will. Otherwise, the will expresses itself in the entire physical body; in that which is the imagination, the will lives where the brain and nerves and sense organs meet: that is where the poetic images are generated. When this is detached from the physical, it is the feeling will through which the seer enters into the realms from which the poet draws from the same source. Therefore, through this feeling, willing sense of the seer, when he appropriates the state of mind in order to enjoy the poetic with his state of mind, he feels in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the poetic. He must see what the poet creates. This leads to the fact that at the moment when the poet presents one thing or another, not drawing from reality but presenting something that is actually merely imagined, composed, unreal, inartistic, at that moment the seer sees in a creative way what is presented. A person who is not a seer does not feel so strongly when the playwright presents an unreal figure. The seer, for example, cannot feel about Thekla from “Wallenstein” other than as if she were made of papier-mâché, so that when he looks at her, he sees her knees buckling. And this with a great poet! Every deviation from reality, every failure to depict reality, is felt in such a way that the seer must recreate in plastic form precisely what the poet creates, and he withdraws his thinking from the plastic. The seer submerges himself in an inner plastic in relation to the poet. The peculiar thing about this is that in the poetic, the seeing consciousness creates sculpture, which is why the seer sees caricatures in what is often truly much praised. But the satirist cannot but see in many a dramatic performance, in which it is not even noticed that the figures are only puppets stuffed with tow, such puppets marching across the stage, or they arise before him when he reads the drama. Therefore, the seer can endure torments through what is brought about by fashion folly or otherwise, because he sees what is created formlessly in mere poetry.

Christian Morgensiern, who aspired to seership, made a beautiful statement. It can be found in the last volume of his posthumous works, in the “Stufen”. There he says, wanting to characterize his own soul, that he feels close to the architectural, the sculptural. This is the feeling: When one aspires towards the visionary, inwardly the poetic aspect is transformed into the plastic. When one looks at it this way, one can never believe that the visionary, with its inner mobility and its response to spiritual entities, can have a scorching and paralyzing effect on the artist, but only as a good friend, a good patron. They cannot disturb each other. Only things that flow together can disturb each other. But the seer can never allow his seership to disturb his artistry; he can permeate it with his seership. They are completely separate from each other; flowing from the same source, they can never disturb each other in life. This is no longer sufficiently felt.

The seer has a very difficult time making himself understood to people. He has to use language. But language has something very peculiar about it. It only appears to be a unity; in reality it is a tripartite thing. One experiences it namely on three levels. First, as we have it, in the way we communicate from person to person in everyday life, in the way we live our philistine lives and say the words that have to flow from person to person in order to shape that philistine life. Anyone who has a vivid sense of language, who experiences language through the eyes of a seer, cannot help but feel that the use of language as just described is a debasing of it. Perhaps one will say: Man is grumbling about life. He merely recognizes that not everything can be perfect, and thus refrains from creating perfection in a sphere where imperfection must necessarily prevail. In the outer physical life it is absolutely necessary that there should be imperfections: trees must also wither, not only grow. There must always be imperfection in life for perfection to arise. Language is pressed down from its original level, is pushed to a subordinate level. And the way we use language in life, we could only become a schoolmaster, then we would only turn a withered, dried-up, philistine state into a straw-like being, but otherwise we would achieve nothing. Words cannot have the values that they have by themselves, because language, as the property of a people, lives on its own level and, on its own level, is an artificial construct, not a prosaic one. It is not there to facilitate communication in everyday life; as an expression of the national spirit, it is an artificial construct. We belittle it, but we have to, by pressing that which is actually an artistic creation down into the prose of life. It only comes into its own in the poetic creations of a people when the spirit of language truly reigns. That is the second way in which language lives.

The third way is only experienced in the realm of seeing. One is in a strange position: for if one wants to express what is seen, one does not have the words of the language. They are not there in reality. Just as one learns to speak in any language and uses the words to express what one wants, one cannot express what one has as a seer's vision. The words are not shaped for it. Therefore, the seer has the need to express some things quite differently. He is always struggling with language to be able to say what he wants to say. He has to choose the way to put some thing into a sentence that approximately expresses what he wants to say; he has to say a second sentence that says something similar. He must count on the goodwill of his listeners so that one sentence illuminates the other. If this goodwill is lacking, then people want to criticize various contradictions. The one who really has something to express must work in contradictions, and one contradiction must illuminate the other, since the truth lies in the middle. By putting oneself in this position, one arrives at something in terms of language that already expresses the relationship between the artistic and the visionary in this field. The seer must count on goodwill to seek to penetrate more into how he says the thing than what he says. He strives to say much more in the way he says the thing than in what he says. He gradually succeeds in transporting himself back to the spirit of language creativity that prevailed before any language came into being, to re-immersing himself in the sounds, in the genius of the sounds, to submerging himself in it with his mind. He sees how a vowel is enclosed, how a vowel soon flows into this or that language. In order to transport himself back into the language-creative state of his people, the seer is compelled to express himself more through the how than through the what. In this way, one can distinguish in language the stages that stand side by side, artistically and seerically. Because they are experienced separately, they cannot disturb each other; on the other hand, they can support each other because, when they live side by side, they illuminate each other. The time may come when hostility towards the visionary on the part of the artistic side will no longer be tolerated, nor the opposite on the visionary side. For unfortunately all that is false scholasticism tends too much towards a supersensible philistinism. To clothe everything that is not seen with the external senses in visionary seeing is hostile to artistry. But what is really grasped by the seeing consciousness of the spiritual world is already the same as what lives unconsciously in artistic creation and in aesthetic perception. It is commonly believed that the clairvoyance referred to here is something quite alien to man; it is present in human life, only in an area where it goes unnoticed.

There is a great difference in the way we face a plant, a mineral, an animal or another human being. External things affect me through what they are with the help of my sense organs. When one person faces another, the senses work quite differently. In our time, people are quite averse to grasping the spiritual. People say that some fields have overcome materialism – yes, people talk about that today. They can find such arguments, but they say: When I stand opposite a person, I see the shape of his nose, and from such a shaped nose I conclude that he is a human being. An analogy. There is no such thing in reality. He who can perceive the world seerically knows where conclusions lie; these conclusions to the analogous do not exist. The soul of man is perceived directly; his external sensuality is such that it is annulled. This is very important to bear in mind when considering another art, because it makes clear to us the juxtaposition of seership and artistic skill.

When we stand face to face with a person, we look at him, and we do not know that what appears of him appears in such a way that it cancels itself out, that he makes himself spiritually transparent. Every time I stand face to face with a person, I see him clairvoyantly. The seer has a very special problem where the person stands opposite him: this is the mysterious incarnate. The seer sees the incarnate parts of a person not in a static way, but rather in an oscillating movement. When he is standing opposite a person, he sees a state in which what appears on the person fades, and then again, where the person, when warmed, becomes redder than he is. The physical form oscillates between these extremes, so that it appears to the seer as if the human form changes, reddens with shame and pales with fear, as if it were constantly establishing its normal state between feelings of fear and shame, just as the pendulum has its point of rest between swinging up and down. The complexion as it appears to us in the external world is only an intermediate state. The seen complexion is connected with something that remains unconscious to the human being: it makes possible the first unconscious glimpse behind the scenes. The way the human complexion is seen by the seer, so that he sees in it something soul-like in the sense-perceptible — the seer beholds in the complexion something sense-supersensuous — so everything that is out there in color and form is gradually transformed in such a way that one sees it spiritually. He beholds it in such a way that he perceives something inward in all that is otherwise colored, the impression of form. You will find the most elementary of this in Goethe's sensual-moral part of the “Theory of Colors”. The whole theory of colors becomes an experience, but in such a way that the seer experiences the spiritual in it. He also experiences the rest of the spiritual world in such a way that he has the same experiences that he otherwise has of colors. In my “Theosophy” you will find that the soul is seen in the form of a kind of aura. It is described in colors. Coarse people who do not go into the matter in greater depth, but write books themselves, believe that the seer describes the aura by saying that there really is a mist in front of him. What the seer has before him is a spiritual experience. When he says the aura is blue, he is saying that he has a soul-spiritual experience that is as if he were seeing blue. He describes everything he experiences in the spiritual world and what is analogous to what can be experienced in the sensual world in terms of colors.

This gives an indication of the way the seer experiences painting. It is a different experience from that of any other art. In the presence of every other art, one has the feeling that one is immersed in the artistic element itself. One has the element, goes to a limit, where the seership ends. If the seer were to continue, he would have to put this color here and that color there; if he were to continue, he would have to tint what he experiences entirely in colors. If he experiences painting, it comes to meet him from the other side. The painter, by painting what is formed out of light and dark, brings his artistic work exactly to the point where painting meets seeing, where the seeing begins. And that is exactly where the seeing begins, where, if one wanted to continue it outwardly, one begins to paint. When one has a concrete seer-like vision, one knows: one should paint this color with the brush, and next to it the other. Then one begins to grasp the secret of color, to understand what is written in my mystery drama “The Portal of Initiation”, that the form of color is a work, that actually drawing lines is an artistic lie. There is no line. The sea does not border on the sky with a line; where the colors border on one another, there is the boundary. I can help myself with a line, but it is only the consequence of the interaction of colors. The secrets of color are revealed to you. You learn that you perform an inner movement, that movement lives in what you paint. You know: you cannot do it any other way than by treating the blue in a certain way. You live with color its inwardness. That is the special thing about painting, that the visionary and the artistic, the creative, touch each other.

If one understands what is at stake in this field, then one will see that what is meant by the visionary can be very much in harmony with artistic creation, that they can stimulate and inspire each other. However, it will become more and more apparent that those who have never held a paintbrush and know nothing of what can be done should not judge from abstract principles. Criticism from outside art, critical criticism, will perhaps have to retreat when friendship between artistry and vision arises. But precisely what is meant here by modern spiritual science is something quite different from what was formerly called aesthetics and is so called today. Artists have told me that such people are called “aesthetic grunters of delight”. Aesthetic bliss is not what is meant here; it is a life in the same element in which the artist also lives, only that the seer experiences in the pure spiritual what the artist forms. I would like to say that this also seems to me to be one of the many things that help humanity. I believe that the times when it was thought that the elementary and original would be affected by what is explored through the spirit will come to an end.

Christian Morgenstern said: “Anyone today who still believes that they should not grasp that which lives in the world as spiritual in clear ideas, but only wants to reach it in a dark, mystical contemplation, is like an illiterate who, with the reading book under his pillow, wants to sleep away his entire life in illiteracy. We are living in a time when much of what is subconscious must be raised into consciousness. The art of seeing will only then have found its true home when it rises above all philosophy and feels akin to the art of creating. I believe that in this field, too, there is something that is connected with the significant questions of human development. More and more will be understood of the fact that the sense world is based on a supersensible one. What can be recognized by supersensible vision cannot be an arbitrary addition to life, but what is true is what Goethe said from his experience of life: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” — Anyone who wants to understand how art is part of life as a whole, of its overall development, anyone who truly understands art in its essence, and feels it while understanding, must admit to themselves that this is aided by the gift of sight, that the gift of sight will be something that, in the future, will stand hand in hand with the artist, providing new inspiration and support.

What humanity needs to take in, with an eye to developmental necessities, is an expansion of consciousness in all areas of life. Humanity lives today in such a way that what it does, what it engages in, is actually only linked to the events between birth and death. In everything that happens, we only ask about what takes place between birth and death. It will be essential for the recovery of our lives that we ask about more than just this period of time in our lives, which we spend under very special conditions. Our life includes what we are and do between birth and death, and also what we are and do between death and a new birth. In this materialistic age, people are not very aware of the role played by the life between death and birth that we have gone through before descending to this life through birth or conception; nor are they aware of how things are already taking place in this life here in the physical body that point to the life we will lead after death. Today we want to point out a few things that can show how certain cultural areas will take on a different view of the whole of human life, in that human consciousness will and must extend beyond life in the supersensible worlds.

I believe that a certain question may arise for people when they consider the full extent of our artistic life. Let us look at the supersensible life from this perspective today. Something will emerge from it that can later be used to look at social life.

We know that the actual high arts are sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry and music, and we are adding something to these arts from certain foundations of anthroposophical life and knowledge, such as eurythmy. The question that I mean, which could arise for people in relation to the arts, would be: What is the positive, the actual reason for introducing art into life? In the materialistic age, art has only to do with the immediate reality that takes place between birth and death. In this materialistic age, however, people have forgotten the supersensible origin of art and more or less merely aim to imitate what is in the external, sense-perceptible world. But anyone who has a deeper feeling for nature on the one hand and for art on the other will certainly not be able to agree with this imitation of natural existence in art, with naturalism. For the question must always be raised again and again: Can, for example, the best landscape painter somehow conjure up the beauty of a natural landscape on canvas? A person who is not educated will have the feeling, even in the presence of a naturalistically conceived landscape, however good it may be, that I expressed in the preface to my first mystery, The Portal of Initiation: that no imitation of nature will ever be able to reach nature. Naturalism will have to prove itself contrary to feeling for the better-sensed. Therefore, only that which goes beyond nature in some way will be recognized by the discerning observer as legitimate in art. It is that which attempts to give something other than what mere nature can present to man, at least in the way it is presented. But why do we, as human beings, develop art at all? Why do we go beyond nature in sculpture and poetry?

Anyone who develops an appreciation of the world's interconnections will see how, for example, a sculptor works in a unique way to capture the human form, how an attempt is made to express the human in the shaping of the form; how we cannot simply take the human form, as it appears to us in a natural man, suffused with inner inspiration, with flesh tints, with everything we see in a natural man except the form, we cannot incorporate this into the form when we are creating a sculptural work of art, when we are creating a human being. But I believe that the sculptor who creates human beings will gradually develop a very special sense. And I have no doubt that the Greek sculptor had the feeling I am about to describe, and that it was only in the naturalistic era that this feeling was lost.

It seems to me that the sculptor who forms the human figure has a completely different way of feeling when he sculpts the head and when he sculpts the rest of the body. These two things are actually fundamentally different from each other in the work: sculpting the head, and sculpting the rest of the body. If I may express myself somewhat drastically, I would like to say: when you are working on the sculptural design of the human head, you have the feeling that you are constantly being absorbed by the material, that the material wants to draw you into itself. But when you are sculpting the rest of the human body, you have the feeling that you are actually pricking and pushing into the body everywhere without authorization, that you are pushing into it from the outside. You have the feeling that you are shaping the rest of the body from the outside, that you are forming the forms from the outside. You have the feeling that when you shape the body, you are actually working inside it, and you have the feeling when you shape the head that you are working out of it.

This seems to me to be a very peculiar feeling in plastic design, which was certainly still characteristic of the Greek artist and which was only lost in the naturalistic period, when one began to be a slave to the model. One wonders: where does such a feeling come from when one intends to form the human figure with a view to the supersensible?

All this is connected with much deeper questions, and before I go on to this, I would like to mention one more thing. Just consider how strongly one has the feeling of a certain inwardness of experience in relation to sculpture and architecture, despite the fact that sculpture and architecture apparently form externally in the external material: In architecture, one inwardly experiences the dynamics, one inwardly experiences how the column supports the beam, how the column develops into the capital. One inwardly experiences that which is outwardly formed. And in a similar way it is the case with sculpture.

This is not the case with music, and it is especially not the case with poetry. In poetry, it seems quite clear to me that in the shaping of the poetic material it is, to put it drastically, as if when one begins to shape the words – which one can still hold in one's larynx when speaking prose – into iambs or trochees, when one puts them into rhyme, they run away and one has to chase after them. They inhabit the atmosphere around you more than your inner self. You feel poetry much more externally than, for example, architecture and sculpture. And it is probably the same with music if you focus your feelings on it. Musical notes also animate your entire surroundings. You actually forget space and time, or at least space, and you live out of yourself in a moral experience. You don't have the feeling that you have to chase after the figures you create, as you do with poetry; but you do have the feeling that you have to swim in an indeterminate element that spreads everywhere and that you dissolve in the process of swimming.

There, you see, one begins to nuance certain feelings towards the whole essence of the artistic. One gives these feelings very specific characteristics. What I have described to you now, and what, I believe, the fine artistically sensitive can empathize with, cannot be believed when one looks at a crystal or any other mineral natural product, or at a plant or an animal or a physically real human being. One feels and senses differently in relation to the whole of external physical and sensory nature than one feels and senses in relation to the individual branches of artistic experience that I have just described.

One can speak of supersensible knowledge as transforming ordinary abstract knowledge into intuitive knowledge and can point the way to experiential knowledge. It is absurd to demand that in higher fields, one should prove in the same pedantic, logical, philistine way as one proves in the rough natural sciences or the like or in mathematics. If one familiarizes oneself with what the sensations become when one enters the field of art, then one gradually enters into strange inner states of mind. Very definite nuances of soul state arise when one really experiences the plastic, the architectural, inwardly, when one goes along with the dynamics, mechanics, and so on, in architecture, when one goes along with the rounding of the form in sculpture. A remarkable path is taken by the inner world of feeling: here one is confronted with an experience of the soul that is very similar to memory. Those who have the experience of remembering, the experience of memory, notice how the architectural and sculptural feeling becomes similar to the inner process of remembering. But then again, remembering is on a higher level. In other words, by way of the feeling for architecture and sculpture, one gradually comes close to the soul feeling, the soul experience, which the spiritual researcher knows as the memory of prenatal states. And indeed, the way one lives between death and a new birth in connection with the whole universe, by feeling that one moves as a spiritual soul or a spiritualized spirit in certain directions, crossing paths with beings , one is in balance with other beings, and what one experiences and lives between death and a new birth is initially remembered subconsciously and is in fact recreated in architectural art and sculpture.

And when we relive this spatial quality with our inner presence in sculpture and architecture, we discover that we actually want nothing more in sculpture and architecture than to somehow conjure up into the physical-sensory world the experiences we had in the spiritual world before our birth, or before our conception. When we build houses not purely according to the principle of utility, but when we build houses that are architecturally beautiful, we shape the dynamic relationships as they arise from our memory of experiences, of experiences of balance, of vibrating formative experiences and so on, which we had in the time between death and this birth.

And in this way one discovers how man actually came to develop architecture and sculpture as arts. The experience between death and the new birth rumbled in his soul. He wanted to bring it out somehow and put it in front of him, and he created architecture and he created sculpture. That humanity in its cultural development has produced architecture and sculpture is essentially due to the fact that the life between death and birth has an effect, that the human being wants this out of his inner being: as the spider spins, so he wants to bring out and shape what he experiences between death and this birth. He carries the experiences from before birth into physical, sensual life. And what we see in the overview of the architectural and sculptural works of art that people create is nothing other than the realization of unconscious memories of the life between death and this birth.

Now we have a real answer to the question of why man creates art. If man were not a supersensible being who enters into this life through conception or birth, he would certainly not create any sculpture or architecture.

And we know what a peculiar connection exists between two successive or, let us say, three successive earthly lives: what you have today as a head is, in the formative forces, the headless body of your previous incarnation, and what you have today as a body will transform into your head by the next incarnation. The human head has a completely different meaning: it is old; it is the transformed previous body. The forces that one has experienced between the previous death and this birth have formed this outer form of the head; the body, which carries within itself the seething forces that will be formed in the next earthly life.

So there you have the reason why the sculptor feels differently about the head than about the rest of the body. With the head, he feels something like: the head wants to absorb him because the head is formed from the previous incarnation through forces that reside in its present forms. With the rest of the body, he feels something like: he wants to push into it and the like, by developing it plastically, because the spiritual forces that lead through death and lead across to the next incarnation are seated in it. The sculptor in particular senses this radical difference between the past and the future in the human body. What the formative forces of the physical body are, and how they work from incarnation to incarnation, is expressed in plastic art. What is now seated deeper in the etheric body, which is our equilibrium carrier, the carrier of our dynamics, comes out more in architectural art.

You see, you cannot really grasp human life in its entirety if you do not take a look at the supersensible life, if you do not seriously answer the question: How do we come to develop architecture and sculpture? — The fact that people do not want to look at the supersensible world stems from the fact that they do not want to look at the things of this world in the right way.

Basically, how do most people react to the arts that reveal a spiritual world? Actually, like a dog to human speech. The dog hears human speech, but probably thinks it is barking. Unless he is a “Mannheim Rolf,” he does not perceive the meaning that lies within the sounds. This was an apt dog that caused quite a stir some time ago among people who deal with such useless arts. This is how man stands before the arts, which actually speak of the supersensible world that man has experienced: he does not see in these arts what they actually reveal.

Let us look, for example, at poetry. Poetry clearly emerges for those who can feel it through – but when characterizing such things, one must always bear in mind that, with some variation, Lichtenberg's saying applies: Ninety-nine percent more is written than our globe's humanity needs for its happiness, and than is real art – real poetry emerges from the whole person. And what does it do? It does not stop at prose: it shapes prose, it introduces meter and rhythm into prose. It does something that the prosaic man of the world finds superfluous for life. It specially shapes that which – already unformed – would give the meaning that one wants to associate with it. When you listen to a recitation, which is real art, and you get a sense of what the poetic artist makes out of the content of the prose, then you get a peculiar character of the sensations. One cannot perceive the mere content, the prose content of a poem as a poem. One perceives as a poem how the words roll in iambs or in trochaics or in anapaests, how the sounds repeat themselves in alliterations, assonances or in other rhymes. One perceives much else that lies in the how of the shaping of the prosaic material. That is what must be conveyed in the recitation. If one recites in such a way that one merely brings the prose content, however seemingly profound, out of one's inner being, then one believes one is reciting “artistically”! If you can really hold this peculiar nuance of feeling, which includes the feeling of the poetic, then you come to say to yourself: This actually goes beyond ordinary feeling, because ordinary feeling clings to the things of sensual existence, the poetic does not cling to the things of sensual existence. I expressed it earlier by saying: the poetically shaped then lives more in the atmosphere that surrounds you; or you want to burst out of yourself in order to actually experience the words of the poet correctly outside of yourself.

This comes from the fact that you create something out of yourself that you cannot experience at all between birth and death. One develops something of the soul that one can also leave between birth and death if one only wants to live. One can live and die quite well until death without doing anything other than making the sober prose content the content of life. But why does one feel the need to add rhythm and assonance and alliteration and rhymes to this sober prose content? Well, because one has more in oneself than one needs until death, because one also wants to shape out during this life what one has more in oneself than one needs until death. It is foresight of the life that follows death: because one already carries within oneself what follows after death, therefore one feels impelled not just to speak, but to speak poetically. And just as sculpture and architecture are connected with prenatal life, with the forces within us from prenatal life, so poetry is connected with the life that takes place after death, or rather with the forces within us that are already within us for the life after death. And it is more the ego, as it lives here between birth and death, as it passes through the gate of death and then lives on, that already carries within itself the powers that poetry expresses.

And it is the astral body that already lives here in the world of sound, that forms the world of sound into melody and harmony, which we do not find in the physical world outside, because what we experience after death is already in our astral body. You know, this astral body that we carry within us only lives with us for a while after death, then we also discard it. Nevertheless, this astral body has the actual musical element in it. But it has it in the way it experiences it here between birth and death in its life element, the air. We need the air if we want to have a medium for musical feeling.

When we arrive at the station after death, where we discard our astral body, we also discard everything that reminds us of our musical life on earth. But in this moment in the world, the musical element transforms into the music of the spheres. We become independent of what we experience as musical in the air and live our way up into a musicality that is the music of the spheres. For that which is experienced here as music in the air is, above, the music of the spheres. And now the reflection lives itself into the element of air, becomes denser, becomes that which we experience as earth music, which we imprint on our astral body, which we develop, which we relive as long as we have our astral body. After death we discard our astral body: then — forgive the banal expression — our musicality leaps up into the music of the spheres. Thus we have in music and in poetry a pre-life of that which after death is our world, our existence. We experience the supersensible in two directions. This is how these four arts present themselves to us.

And painting? There is still another spiritual world that lies behind our sensory world. The coarse-materialistic physicist or biologist speaks of atoms and molecules behind the sensory world. They are not molecules and atoms. Behind them are spiritual beings. There is a spiritual world that we live through between falling asleep and waking up. This world, which we bring over from sleep, is what actually inspires us when we paint, so that we bring the spiritual world that surrounds us spatially onto the canvas or onto the wall in general. Therefore, when painting, one must be very careful to paint from the color, not from the line, because the line lies in painting. The line is always something of the memory of prenatal life. If we want to paint in an expanded consciousness that includes the spiritual world, then we must paint what comes out of the color. And we know that color is experienced in the astral world. When we enter the world that we live through between falling asleep and waking up, we experience this color. And however we want to create a harmony of colors, however we want to put the colors on the canvas, it is nothing other than what is pushing us: we push into it, we let flow into our waking body what we have experienced between falling asleep and waking up. That is in there, and that is what the person wants to put on the canvas when painting. In turn, what emerges in painting is the reproduction of a supersensible reality. So that the arts actually point to the supersensible everywhere. For those who can perceive it in the right way, painting becomes a revelation of the spiritual world that surrounds us in space and permeates us from space, in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and waking up. Sculpture and architecture bear witness to the spiritual world that we live through between death and a new birth before conception, before birth; music and poetry bear witness to how we live through life post mortem, after death. In this way, that which is our share in the spiritual world penetrates into our ordinary physical life on earth.

And if we philistinely regard what a person presents as art in life as being only connected with what happens between birth and death, then we actually take away all meaning from artistic creation. For artistic creation is definitely a way of bringing spiritual, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. And it is only because man is pressed by that which he carries within him from prenatal life, because he is pressed in the waking state by that which he carries within him from the supersensible life during sleep, because he is pressed by that which is already within him and which wants to shape him after death, that he places architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry in the world of sensory experience. That people do not usually speak of supersensible worlds is merely because they do not understand the sensory world either, especially not even understand what spiritual human culture once knew, but what has been lost and what has become an externalization: art.

If we learn to understand art, it is a true proof of human immortality and of the human being having come into existence. And we need this so that our consciousness expands beyond the horizon that is limited by birth and death, so that we can connect what we have in our physical life on earth to the superphysical life.

If we now create out of a knowledge that, like anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, goes straight for the spiritual world, to include the spiritual world in the imagination, in the thinking, in the feeling, the feeling, the will, then there will be fertile soil for an art that, so to speak, synthetically summarizes the prenatal and the afterlife.

And let us consider eurythmy. We set the human body itself in motion. What do we set in motion? We set the human organism in motion so that its limbs move. The limbs are what primarily lives itself over into the next earthly life, what points to the future, to what happens after death. But how do we shape the movements of the limbs that we produce in eurythmy? We study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, how the larynx and all the speech organs have developed out of the head — through the intellectual and sentient faculties of the chest — out of our previous life. We directly connect the prenatal with the afterlife. We take only that part of the human being that is the physical material: the human being himself, who is the tool, the instrument for eurythmy. But we allow what we study inwardly to appear in the human being, what is formed in him from previous lives, and we transfer this to his limbs, that is, to that which is formed in the afterlife. In eurythmy we provide a form of human organism and movement that is direct outward proof of the human being's life in the supersensible world. We connect the human being directly to the supersensible world by letting him or her eurythmize.

Wherever art is created out of a true artistic spirit, art is a testimony to the connection between human beings and the supersensible worlds. And when, in our time, man is called upon to take the gods, as it were, into his own soul forces, so that he does not merely wait in faith for the gods to bring him this or that, but wants to act as if the gods lived in his active will , then humanity will want to experience it, where, so to speak, man must pass from the externally shaped objective arts to an art that will take on completely different dimensions and forms in the future: to an art that directly represents the supersensible. How could it be otherwise? Spiritual science also wants to directly represent the supersensible, so it must, so to speak, also create such an art out of itself.

And the pedagogical-didactic application will gradually educate people who, through education in this direction, will find it natural that they are supersensible beings because they move their hands, arms and legs in such a way that the forces of the supersensible world are active within them. It is indeed the soul of the human being, the supersensible soul, that comes to life in eurythmy. It is the living out of the supersensible that comes to light in the eurythmic movements.

Everything that is brought by spiritual science is truly in harmony inwardly. On the one hand, it is brought so that the life in which we live can be seen more deeply and more intensely, so that we learn to direct our gaze to the living proofs that are there for the unborn and the immortal; and on the other hand, what is supersensible in man is introduced into human will.

This is the inner consistency that underlies spiritual science when it is oriented anthroposophically. As a result, spiritual science will expand human consciousness. Man will no longer be able to walk through the world as he did in the materialistic age, when he only had an overview of what lives between birth and death, and perhaps still had a belief in something else that , which makes him happy, which redeems him, but of which he cannot form a concept, of which he only allows himself to be preached in a sentimental way, of which he actually only has an empty content. Through spiritual science, man is to receive real content from the spiritual worlds again. People are to be released from an abstract life, from a life that only wants to stop at perception, at thinking between birth and death, and that at most still absorbs in words some vague references to a supersensible world. Spiritual science will bring about an awareness in people that broadens their horizons and enables them to perceive the supersensible world when they live and work here in the physical world. We go through the world today, having turned thirty, and know that what we have at thirty has been instilled in us at ten, at fifteen: we remember that. We remember that when we read at thirty, our learning to read twenty-two or twenty-three years ago is linked to the present moment. But we do not consider that at every moment between birth and death, what we have lived through between the last death and this birth vibrates and pulses within us. If we turn our gaze to what has been born out of these forces in architecture and sculpture, and understand it in the right sense, then we will also transfer it to life in the right sense and in turn gain a sense for the superfluous shaping of prose into rhythm and beat and rhyme, into alliteration and assonance in poetry, in the face of philistine, prosaic life. Then we will correctly connect this nuance of feeling with the immortal essence within us, which we carry through death. We will say: No human being could become a poet if it were not for the fact that what actually creates in the poet is in all people: the power that only comes to life externally after death, but that is already in us now.

This is the inclusion of the supersensible in the ordinary consciousness, which must be expanded again if humanity is to avoid sinking further into what it has rushed into by contracting its consciousness so much that it only really lives in what takes place between birth and death, and at most allows itself to be preached to about what exists in the supersensible world.

As you can see, spiritual science is everywhere when we speak of the most important cultural needs of the present.

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.

[ 1 ] Goethe's world-conception reached its highest state of maturity when there dawned within it the perception of Nature's two great motive forces: the meaning of the concepts of polarity and intensification (Steigerung) (Compare the Essay, Erläuterung zu dem Aufsatz ‘Die Natur’). Polarity inheres in the phenomena of Nature in so far as we think of them in a material sense. It consists in this:( everything of a material nature expresses itself in two opposites, like the magnet, in a north and a south pole. These states of matter are either apparent to the eye, or they lie latent within the material and can be roused into activity by appropriate means. Intensification presents itself when we think of the phenomena in a spiritual sense. It can be observed in Nature processes which fall within the scope of the idea of development. At the different stages of development these processes manifest the idea underlying them with greater or less distinctness in their external appearance. In the fruit, the idea of the plant, the vegetable law, is only indistinctly expressed in outer appearance. The idea cognised by the mind and the perception do not resemble each other. “The vegetable law appears in its highest manifestation in the blossom and the rose becomes once again the summit of the phenomenon.” What Goethe calls “intensification” consists in the emergence of the spiritual from out of the material as a result of the creative activity of Nature. Nature being engaged “in an ever-striving ascent” means that her endeavour is to create forms which, in ascending order, bring the ideas of the objects ever more and more to manifestation in outer appearance also. Goethe holds that “Nature has no secret that is not somewhere revealed to the eye of the attentive observer.” Nature can produce phenomena wherein the ideas proper to a wide sphere of allied processes may be discerned. They are the phenomena wherein the “intensification” has reached its goal, wherein the idea becomes immediate truth. The creative spirit of Nature here appears on the surface of the objects; what can only be apprehended by thought in the coarse material phenomena—what can be perceived only by spiritual vision—becomes visible to bodily eyes in “intensified” phenomena. Here all that is sensible is also spiritual, all that is spiritual, sensible. Goethe thinks of the whole of Nature as permeated with spirit. Her forms are different because the spirit becomes in them outwardly visible to a lesser or greater degree. Goethe knows no dead, spiritless matter. Those things appear as such in which the spirit of Nature assumes an external form that does not resemble her ideal essence. Because one and the same spirit is working in Nature and in his own inner being man can rise to a participation in the products of Nature. “From the tile that falls from the roof, to the shining flash of spirit that arises in thee and which thou impartest”—everything in the universe is to Goethe the activity, the manifestation of One Creative Spirit. “All effects of which we are conscious in experience, of whatever kind they be, are in continuous interdependence; they merge into each other; they undulate from the first to the last.” “A tile is loosed from the roof and in the ordinary sense we call this chance; it falls on the shoulders of a passer-by, in a mechanical sense certainly; yet not only mechanically, for it follows the laws of gravity and so works physically. The ruptured life veins give up their functioning forthwith; instantaneously the fluids work chemically, the rudimentary qualities make their appearance. But the deranged organic life offers opposition with equal rapidity and tries to restore itself; the human being as a whole is, meanwhile, more or less unconscious and psychically disturbed. The person coming to himself again feels himself deeply wounded in an ethical sense; he bewails his disturbed activity of whatever kind it may be, but man does not willingly resign himself in patience. In a religious sense, on the other hand, it is easy to ascribe this accident to a higher destiny, to view it as a preservation from a greater evil, as a preliminary to a higher good. This is sufficient for the sufferer; the convalescent, however, rises up with the buoyancy of genius, with trust in God and himself, and feels himself saved; he takes hold even of what is accidental and turns it to his advantage in order to begin an eternally fresh orbit of life.” All effects in the world appear to Goethe modifications of the spirit, and the man who penetrates into their depths, and studies them from the level of the fortuitous to that of genius, experiences the metamorphosis of the spirit from the form wherein it expresses itself in an external manifestation unlike itself, right up to the stage where it appears in its own most appropriate form. In the sense of the Goethean world-conception all creative forces operate uniformly. They are one Whole manifesting itself in a gradation of related multiplicities. Goethe, however, had no inclination to present to himself the unity of the universe as homogeneous. Adherents of the idea of unity often fall into the error of extending the law that may be observed in one region of phenomena to cover the whole of Nature. The mechanistic view of the world, for example, has fallen into this error. It has a special eye and understanding for what can be explained mechanically. Therefore the mechanical alone appears to it to be in accordance with Nature, and. it tries to trace the phenomena of organic Nature as well back to mechanical laws. Life is only a complicated form of the co-operation of mechanical processes. Goethe found such a world-conception expressed, in a singularly repulsive form, in Holbach's “Système de la Nature” that fell into his hands in Strasburg. Matter was supposed to have existed and to have been in motion from all eternity, and to this motion to right and left in every direction, were attributed the infinite phenomena of existence. “We might have allowed even so much to pass if the author, out of his matter in motion, had built up the world before our eyes. But he seemed to know as little of Nature as we did, for, after simply propounding some general ideas, he forthwith disregards them in order to change what seems above Nature, or a higher Nature within Nature, into matter with weight and motion but without aim or shape,—and by this he fancies he has gained much.” (Poetry and Truth, Book II.). Goethe would have expressed himself in similar words if he could have heard Du-Bois Reymond's phrase (Grenzen des Naturerkennens, S.13.): “Natural knowledge is a tracing back of the variations in the corporeal world to movements of atoms generated by their central forces which are independent of time, or it is the conversion of natural processes into the mechanics of atoms.” Goethe thought that the modes of natural operations were interrelated, the one passing over into the other; but he never wanted to trace them back to one single mode. He did not aspire after one abstract principle to which all natural phenomena should be traced back, but for observation of the characteristic mode in which creative Nature, in each single one of her regions of phenomena, manifests her universal laws through specific forms. He did not want to force one particular form of thought on all natural phenomena, but by living experience in different forms of thought, his aim was to keep the spirit within him as vital and pliable as Nature herself. When the feeling of the mighty unity of all Nature's activity was strong within him he was a Pantheist. “With the many and varied tendencies of my being, I for myself can never be satisfied with one mode of thinking; as poet and artist I am a Polytheist, as Nature investigator, a Pantheist, and such as decisively as the other. If I need a God for my personality as a moral being, that also is provided for” (To Jacobi, 6th January, 1813.). As Artist, Goethe turned to those natural phenomena where the idea is present in direct perception. Here the particular seemed immediately divine, the world a multiplicity of divine entities. As Nature investigator Goethe had perforce also to follow up the forces of Nature in those phenomena where the idea in its individual existence was not visible. As Poet, he could rest content with the multiplicity of the Divine; as Nature investigator he had to seek for the uniformly active ideas of Nature. “The law that manifests in the most absolute freedom, according to its own conditions, produces the objectively beautiful, and this must indeed find worthy subjects by whom it can be understood.” As Artist, Goethe's aim is to perceive this element of objective beauty in the single creation, but as Nature investigator his aim is “to cognise the laws according to which universal Nature wills to act.” Polytheism is the mode of thought that sees and venerates a spiritual element in the particular; Pantheism is the mode that apprehends the Spirit of the Whole. The two modes of thought can exist side by side; the one or the other asserts itself according to whether the gaze is directed to Nature as one Whole, that is, life and progression from one central point; or to those entities wherein Nature unites in one form all that she usually extends over a whole kingdom. Such forms arise when, for instance, the creative powers of Nature “after producing manifold plant forms, produce one wherein all the rest are contained;” or “after manifold animal forms, a being who contains them all: Man.”

[ 2 ] Goethe has made this remark: “Whoever has learnt to understand my writings and my real nature will have to admit that he has attained a certain inner freedom” (Conversations with Chancellor F. von Müller, January 5th, 1813.). Goethe was referring here to the active force which asserts itself in all man's striving for knowledge. So long as man remains stationary at the point where he perceives all the antitheses around him, regarding their laws as principles which have been implanted in them and by which they are governed, he has the feeling that they confront him as unknown powers working upon him, forcing upon him the thoughts of their laws. He feels no freedom in face of the objects; he experiences the Law of Nature as inflexible necessity to which he has to submit. Only when man becomes aware that the forces of Nature are only forms of the same spirit that works also in himself does the intuition dawn in him that he partakes of freedom. Nature's Law is perceived as compulsion only so long as man looks upon it as an alien power. If he penetrates its true being it is experienced as a force which he himself uses in his inner being; he feels himself to be an element co-operating productively in the “being and becoming” of things. He is on intimate terms with all power of “becoming;” he has absorbed into his own action what he otherwise only experiences as external instigation. This is the liberating process brought about by the cognitional act in the sense of the Goethean world-conception. Clearly did Goethe perceive the ideas of Nature's activity as they faced him in the Italian works of Art. He also realised clearly the liberating effect which the mastery of these ideas has on man. A consequence of this is his description of the mode of cognition which he speaks of as that of comprehensive minds. “Comprehensive minds, which we can proudly speak of as creative, are productive in the highest degree; in that they take their start from ideas, they already express the unity of the Whole, and it is really thereafter the concern of Nature to submit herself to these ideas.” Goethe, however, never attained to direct perception of the act of liberation. This perception can only be attained by one who observes himself in the act of cognition. Goethe did indeed practise the highest mode of cognition, but he did not observe this mode of cognition in himself. Does he not himself admit: “I have been clever, for I have never thought about thought.”

[ 3 ] But just as the creative powers of Nature after manifold plant forms bring forth one wherein “all the others are contained,” so, after manifold ideas, do these creative powers of Nature produce one wherein is contained the whole of ideas. And man apprehends this idea when to the perception (Anschauung) of other objects and processes, he adds the perception (Anschauung) of thinking. For the very reason that Goethe's thinking was entirely filled with the objects perceived, because his thinking was a perception, his perception a thinking, he could not come to the point of making thought itself into an object of thought. But the idea of freedom is only attained through the perception of thought. Goethe did not make the distinction between thinking about thought and the perception of thought. Otherwise he would have attained the insight that although in the sense of his world-conception one may indeed refrain from thinking about thought, it is nevertheless possible to attain to perception of the world of thought. Man has no participation in the coming-into-existence of all other perceptions. The ideas of these perceptions come to life within him. The ideas, however, would not be there if the productive power to bring them to manifestation did not exist within him. The ideas may be in truth the content of what is working in the objects, but they come to evident existence as a result of the activity of man. Therefore man can only cognise the essential nature of the world of ideas when he perceives his own activity. In every other perception he does nothing more than penetrate the idea in operation; the object in which it is operating remains, as perception, outside his mind. In the perception of the idea the operative activity and what it has brought about are contained within his inner being. He has the whole process completely present within him. The perception no longer seems to have been generated by the idea; for the perception is now itself idea. This perception of what brings forth its self, is, however, the perception of freedom (free spiritual activity). When he observes thought, man penetrates the world-process. Here he has not to search for an idea of this process, for the process is the idea itself. The previously experienced unity of perception and idea is here experience of the spirituality of the world of ideas which has become perceptible. The man who perceives this self-grounded activity has the feeling of freedom. Goethe indeed experienced this feeling but did not express it in its highest form. He practised a free activity in his observation of Nature, but this activity was never objective to him. He never gazed behind the veils of human cognition and therefore never assimilated into his consciousness the idea of the world-process in its essential form, in its highest metamorphosis. As soon as man attains to the perception of this highest metamorphosis he moves with certainty within the realm of things. At the central point of his personality he has attained the true point of departure for all observation of the world. He will no longer search for unknown principles, for causes that he outside himself; he knows that the highest experience of which he is capable consists in the self-contemplation of his own being. Those who are wholly permeated by the feelings which this experience evokes will attain the truest relationship to things. Where this is not the case men will seek for the highest form of existence elsewhere and since it is not to be discovered in experience, they will conjecture that it lies in an unknown region of reality. An element of uncertainty will make its appearance in their observation; in answering the questions which Nature puts to them they will perpetually plead the unfathomable. Because of his life in the world of ideas Goethe had a feeling of the firm central point within the personality, and so he succeeded within certain limits in acquiring sure concepts in his observation of Nature. Because, however, the direct perception of the most inward experience eluded him, he groped around insecurely outside these limits. For this reason he says that man is not born “to solve the problems of the universe but to seek where the problem commences, and then to keep within the boundary of the comprehensible.” He says: “Unquestionably the greatest service rendered by Kant is that he sets up limits to which the human mind is capable of advancing, and that he leaves the insoluble problems alone.” If the perception of the highest experience had yielded him certainty in the observation of things Goethe would have attained more along his path than “a kind of qualified reliability by means of ordered experience.” Instead of penetrating right through experience in the consciousness that the true has only meaning to the extent to which it is demanded by the nature of man, he came to the conviction that “a higher influence favours the constant, the active, the rational, the ordered and the ordering, the human and the pious” and that “the moral World Order” manifests in the greatest beauty where it “comes indirectly to the assistance of the good, of the valiant sufferer.”

[ 4 ] Because Goethe did not know the most inward human experience it was impossible for him to attain to the ultimate thoughts concerning the moral World Order which essentially belong to his conception of Nature. The ideas of things are the content of the active creative elements within them. Man experiences moral ideas directly in the form of ideas. A man who is able to experience how in perception of the world of ideas, the ideal itself becomes self-contained, filled with itself, is also able to experience how the moral element is produced within the nature of man. A man who knows the ideas of Nature only in their relationship to the world of perception will want to relate moral concepts also to something external to them. He will seek a reality for these concepts similar to the reality that exists for concepts that have been acquired from experience. A man, however, who is able to perceive ideas in their own proper essence will be aware that in the case of moral ideas nothing external corresponds to them, that they are produced directly in spiritual experience as ideas. It is clear to him that neither an externally working Divine Will nor an externally working moral World Order is active in producing these ideas. For no trace of relationship to such powers can be observed in them. All that they express is also included in their pure, ideal form which is experienced spiritually. They work upon man as moral powers by virtue of their own content only. No categorical imperative stands behind them with a whip and forces man to follow them. Man feels that he himself has brought them forth and he loves them as he loves his child. Love is the motive power of action. Spiritual delight in one's own production is the source of the moral.

[ 5 ] There are men who are incapable of giving birth to any moral ideas. They assimilate those of other men through tradition. And if they have no perceptual faculty for ideas per se they do not recognise the source of the Moral that can be experienced in the mind. They seek this source in a superhuman Will that lies outside them. Or they believe that outside that spiritual world which is experienced by man there exists an objective, moral World Order whence the moral ideas are derived. The speech organ of this World Order is frequently thought to lie in the human conscience. Goethe is uncertain in his thoughts about the source of the Moral, just as he is about certain matters pertaining to the rest of his world-conception. Here too, his feeling for what is in conformity with ideas drives him to principles that accord with the demands of his nature: “Duty—where man loves the commands he gives to himself.” Only a man who perceives the basis of the Moral wholly in the content of moral ideas could have said: “Lessing, who reluctantly was aware of various limitations, puts these words into the mouth of one of his characters: Nobody is compelled to be compelled (Niemand muss müssen). A spiritually-minded, happily disposed man said: He who wants to—must. A third, a man of culture to be sure, added: He who has insight, he also wants to. And so it was believed that the whole range of knowledge, will and necessity had been defined. But on the average, man's knowledge of whatever kind it be, determines his actions and missions; therefore nothing is more terrible to see than ignorance in action.” The following utterance proves that a sense of the true nature of the moral held sway in Goethe but never became a clear perception: “In order to become perfect the will must submit itself in the moral sphere, to the conscience that does not err. ... The conscience needs no ancestry, everything exists within it, it is concerned with the inner world alone.” “Conscience needs no ancestry” can only mean that originally there exists no moral content in man; he supplies it himself. In contradistinction to these sayings we find others where the origin of conscience is relegated to a region outside man: “However strongly the earth with its thousands upon thousands of phenomena attracts man, he still raises his gaze with longing to the heavens, because he feels deeply and vividly within himself that he is a citizen of that spiritual realm the belief in which we can neither reject nor surrender.” “That which defies solution we leave with God as the All-determinant, All-liberating Being.”

[ 6 ] Goethe has no faculty for observation of the innermost nature of man, for self-contemplation. “I acknowledge in this connection that the mighty command which sounds so significant—‘Know thyself!’—has always roused the suspicion in me that it was a ruse of a secret confederacy of the priesthood whose aim it was to confuse men by unattainable demands and to lead them away from activity in the external world to a false inward contemplation. Man knows himself only to the extent to which he knows the world. He becomes aware of the world only in himself, and of himself, only in the world. Every fresh object, contemplated with deliberation, opens up a new faculty within us.” The truth is exactly the reverse: man knows the world only to the extent to which he knows himself. For what is present as perception in external objects in reflection, example, symbol, only reveals itself in his inner being in its own essential form. That which man can otherwise only speak of as unfathomable, impenetrable, divine, appears before him in its true form in self-perception. Because in self-perception he sees the ideal in direct form he acquires the power and faculty to seek for and recognise this ideal element in all outer phenomena also, in the whole of Nature. A man who has experienced the flash of self-perception does not any longer set out in quest of a “hidden” God behind the phenomena; he apprehends the Divine in its different metamorphoses within Nature. Goethe remarked in reference to Schelling: “I would see him more frequently if I were not still living in the hope of poetic moments; philosophy ruins poetry so far as I am concerned, probably because it forces me into the object, and since I can never remain purely speculative but am compelled to seek a perception for every principle I take flight at once out into Nature.” The highest perception, the perception of the world of ideas, however, was just what he could not discover. That perception cannot ruin poetry, for it alone frees the spirit from all conjectures as to the existence in Nature of an unknown, an unfathomable element. It makes the spirit able to surrender itself wholly and freely to the objects, for it imparts the conviction that all that the spirit may desire from Nature may be gleaned from her.

[ 7 ] The highest perception, however, also frees the human spirit from any one-sided sense of dependence. In possessing it the spirit of man feels itself master in the realm of the moral World Order. The spirit of man knows that in its inner being there works, as in its own will, the motive power that brings forth all things, and that the highest moral decisions lie within itself. For these highest decisions flow from the world of moral ideas, and the soul of man has been present at the production of this world. Man may be conscious of limitation in regard to a particular thing, may be dependent on a thousand others, but on the whole he himself sets his own moral goal and moral direction. The operative element of all other things is manifested in man as idea; the operative element in man is the idea which he himself brings forth. The process that takes place in Nature as a Whole is accomplished in each single human individuality: it is the creation of an actuality from out of the idea, man himself being the creator. For at the basis of his personality there lives the idea which imparts content to itself. Going beyond Goethe, we must expand his phrase that Nature “in her creation is so bounteous that after multifarious plant forms she makes one wherein all the others are contained, and after multifarious animals one being who contains them all—Man.” Nature is so mighty in her creation that she repeats in each individual human being the process by means of which she brings forth all creatures directly out of the idea, inasmuch as moral acts spring from the ideal basis of the personality. That which man feels to be the objective basis of his acts is only the result of “paraphrasing” and misunderstanding of his own being. Man realises himself in his moral acts. In concise phrases Max Stirner has described this knowledge in his work: “The Individual and his Rights.” “I am the owner of my power; I am this when I know myself as a unique individual. In the individual the owner returns to his creative void out of which he was born. Every higher being above me, be he God, be he Man, weakens the sense of my individuality and pales before the sunlight of this consciousness. If I cast my lot upon myself, the individual, it rests on its own perishable, mortal creator who consumes himself, and I am able to say: ‘I have cast my lot on Nothingness.’” But one may reply to Stirner in the words of Faust to Mephistopheles: “In thy Nothingness I hope to find the All,” for in my inner being dwells, in its individual form, the active power whereby Nature creates the All. So long as man has not perceived this active power in himself he will appear, in face of it, as Faust appeared to the Earth Spirit. It will always cry to him in the words: “Thou'rt like the Spirit whom thou comprehendest, not me!” Only the perception of the deepest inner life can conjure forth this Spirit which says of itself:

“In the tides of Life, in Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing,
Thus at Time's humming loom
'tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life
which the Deity weaves.”

[ 8 ] In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity¹ I have tried to show how the knowledge that in his actions man is dependent upon himself is derived from the most inward of all experiences, from the perception of his own being. In 1844 Stirner advocated the view that if man truly understands himself he can only see the basis of his activity in himself. In the case of Stirner, however, this knowledge did not proceed from perception of the most inward experience but from the feeling of being free and untrammelled by all-constraining world powers. Stirner does not go further than to demand freedom; in this region he is led to lay the sharpest possible emphasis on the fact that human nature is based upon itself. I have tried to describe life in freedom on a broader basis by showing what man discovers when he beholds the foundation of his soul. Goethe did not attain to the perception of freedom because he had an aversion to self-knowledge. If this had not been the case the knowledge of man as a free personality based on itself must have constituted the summit of his world-conception. We find the germs of this knowledge everywhere in Goethe, and they are at the same time the germs of his view of Nature.

[ 9 ] In his real studies of Nature Goethe never speaks of impenetrable courses or of hidden motive forces of phenomena. He is content with observing the phenomena in their sequence and explaining them by the help of those elements which in the act of observation are revealed to the senses and the mind. On May 5th, 1786, he writes in this sense to Jacobi; he says that he had the courage “to devote his whole life to the observation of objects accessible to him” and of whose essential being he “can hope to form an adequate idea,” without worrying in the least about how far he will advance or about what is suitable for him. A man who believes that he draws near to Divinity in the single object of Nature does not any longer need to build up for himself a separate conception of a God existing exterior to and alongside of the objects. It is only when Goethe leaves the realm of Nature that his sense for the essential being of objects no longer asserts itself. His lack of human self-knowledge leads him then to make statements that cannot be reconciled either with his innate mode of thought or with the trend of his Nature studies. Those who are prone to refer to statements of this kind may assume that Goethe believed in an anthropomorphous God and in an individual continuation of that form of the soul's life that is bound up with the conditions of the physical, bodily organisation. Such a belief is contradictory to Goethe's Nature studies. The trend of these studies could never have become what it is if Goethe had allowed himself to be guided by this belief. In accordance with the whole character of his Nature studies is the conception that the true being of the human soul lives in a supersensible form of existence after the body has been laid aside. This form of existence necessitates that by reason of the changed life conditions it will also assume a mode of consciousness different from that which it possessed through the physical body. And so the Goethean teaching of metamorphoses leads also to the perception of metamorphoses of soul life. But we shall only be able to apprehend this Goethean idea of Immortality aright if we realise that Goethe's view of the world could not lead him to conceive of an unmetamorphosed continuation of that form of spiritual life that is conditioned by the physical body. Because Goethe did not attempt a perception of the life of thought in the sense indicated here he was not induced in the course of his life to develop in any special degree that idea of Immortality which would have been the continuation of his thoughts on Metamorphosis. This is, however, the idea that would really in truth have followed from his world-conception in reference to this sphere of knowledge. What Goethe gave as the expression of a personal feeling in reference to the view of life of one or another of his contemporaries, or from some other motive, without thinking of its connection with the view of the world won from its Nature studies must not be quoted as characteristic of his idea of Immortality.

[ 10 ] When it is a question of a true estimation of some particular utterance of Goethe within the collective picture of his world-conception, we must also take into consideration the fact that the attitude of his soul in the different periods of his life gives special colouring to such utterances. He was fully conscious of this variation in the forms in which his ideas were expressed. When Forster gave it as his view that the solution of the Faust problem is given in the words:

“A good man through obscurest aspirations
Has still an instinct of the one, true way,”

Goethe's reply was: “That would be an explanation. Faust ends as an old man, and in old age we become Mystics.” And in the Prose Aphorisms we read: “There is a specific philosophy answering to every period of life. The child is a Realist, for it finds itself as convinced about the existence of the pears and apples as it is about its own. The youth, assailed by inner passions, must reckon with himself, must feel his way, and he is transformed into an idealist. On the other hand, the grown man has every cause to become a sceptic; he does well to doubt as to whether the means which he has chosen for his ends are the right ones. Before acting and in action he has every cause to keep his intellect mobile in order that he may not later have to regret a wrong choice. The old man, however, will always embrace Mysticism; he realises that so much seems to be dependent on chance; the unreasonable succeeds, the reasonable strikes amiss, fortune and misfortune alike balance unexpectedly; thus it is, thus it was, and old age rests in Him Who is, Who was and Who will be.”

[ 11 ] In this book I have been concerned with Goethe's world-conception out of which his insight into the life of Nature has developed, and was the driving force in him, from the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man up to the completion of his Doctrine of Colours. And I think I have shown that this world-conception corresponds more fully to his personality as a whole than any compilation of utterances where it is necessary above all to take into consideration the colouring given to the thoughts by the mood of youth or mature age. It is my belief that in his Nature studies Goethe was guided by a true feeling, although not by a clear self-knowledge in conformity with ideas, and that he maintained a free and independent mode of procedure, derived from the true relationship of human nature to the external world. Goethe himself realises that there is something unfinished in his mode of thought. “I was conscious of great and noble aims, yet I could never understand the conditions under which I worked; I noted what was lacking in me, and equally what was exaggerated; therefore I did not abstain from developing myself from without and from within. And yet it remained as before. I pursued each aim with earnestness, intensity and fidelity. I often succeeded in a complete mastery of refractory conditions, but I was often frustrated by them because I could not learn how to yield and to evade. And so my life passed amid action and enjoyment, suffering and opposition, amid love, contentment, enmity and displeasure of others. Let those who share the same destiny behold themselves mirrored here!”

• 1. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 46 Gloucester Place, London, W.1. Price 12/-

[ 1 ] We cannot understand Goethe's relation to the natural sciences if we confine ourselves merely to the single discoveries he made. I take as a guiding point of view for the study of this relation the words which Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy, 18th August, 1787: “After what I have seen of plants and fishes at Naples and in Sicily I should be tempted, if I were ten years younger, to make a journey to India, not in order to discover anything new, but to observe, in my own way, what has already been discovered.” It appears to. me to be a question of the way in which Goethe coordinated the natural phenomena known to him in a view of Nature in harmony with his mode of thinking. Even if all his individual discoveries had already been made, and he had given us nothing but his view of Nature, this would not detract in the least from the importance of his Nature studies. I am of the same opinion as Du Bois-Reymond that “even without Goethe's participation, science would still be as far advanced as it is to-day” ... that “the steps attained by him would have been attained by others sooner or later.” (Goethe und kein Ende S.31.). I cannot, however, apply these words, as Du Bois-Reymond does, to the sum-total of Goethe's work in natural science. I limit them to the individual discoveries made during the course of his work. In all probability we should not be without a single one of them to-day even if Goethe had never occupied himself with botany, anatomy, and so forth. His view of Nature, however, emanated from his personality; none other could have achieved it. The single discoveries as such did not interest him. They arose of themselves during his studies, because in regard to the facts in question, views prevailed which were not reconcilable with his mode of observation. If he could have built up his views with what natural science had to offer he would never have occupied himself with detailed studies. He had to particularize because what was said to him by the investigators of Nature about the particulars did not correspond with his demands. The individual discoveries were made only accidentally, as it were, during the course of these detailed studies. For instance, the question whether man, like other animals, has an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw-bone did not at first concern him. He was trying to discover the plan by which Nature develops the series of animals and, at its summit, Man. He wanted to find the common archetype which lies at the basis of all animal species and finally, in its highest perfection, at the basis of the human species also. The Nature investigators said: there is a difference between the structure of the animal body and that of the human body. Animals have the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, man has not. Goethe's view was that the human physical structure could only be distinguished from the animal by its degree of perfection, not details. For, if the latter were the case, there could not be a common archetype underlying the animal and the human organisations. He could make nothing of the assertion of the scientists, and so he sought for the intermaxillary bone in man—and found it. Something similar to this can be observed in the case of all his individual discoveries. For him they are never the end in itself; they had to be made in order to justify his ideas concerning natural phenomena.

[ 2 ] In the realms of organic Nature the important thing in Goethe's views is the conception he formed of the nature of life. It is not a question of emphasising the fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are plant-organs identical with each other and unfolding out of a common basic form. The essential point is Goethe's conception of the whole plant-nature as a living thing, and how he thought of the individual parts as proceeding from the whole. His idea of the nature of the organism is his central, most individual discovery in the realm of biology. Goethe's basic conviction was that something can be perceived in the plant and animal which is not accessible to mere sense observation. What the bodily eye can observe in the organism appears to Goethe to be merely the result of a living whole of formative laws working through one another, laws which are perceptible only to the ‘spiritual eye.’ He has described what his spiritual eye perceived in the plant and in the animal. Only those who are able to see as he did can recapture his idea of the nature of the organism; those who remain stationary at what the senses and experiments give, cannot understand him. When we read his two poems “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” and “The Metamorphosis of Animals,” it appears at first as if the words simply led us from one part of the organism to another, as if the intention was merely to unite external facts together. If, however, we permeate ourselves with what hovered before Goethe as the idea of the living being we feel ourselves transplanted into the sphere of organic Nature and the conceptions concerning the various organs develop from out of one central conception.

[ 3 ] When Goethe began to make independent reflections upon the phenomena of Nature it was the concept of life that claimed his attention above all else. In a letter from the Strasburg period, 14th July, 1770, he writes of a butterfly: “The poor creature trembles in the net, and its fairest colours are rubbed off; even if it is caught uninjured, in the end it perishes there, stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature. Something else is required, indeed the essential part, and in this case as in every other, the most essential part: Life.” It was clear to Goethe from the beginning that an organism cannot be considered as a dead product of Nature; that something more exists within it over and above the forces which also live in inorganic Nature. When Du Bois-Reymond says that “the purely mechanical world-construction which to-day constitutes science was no less obnoxious to the princely poet of Weimar than, in earlier days, the ‘Système de la Nature’ to Friederike's friend,” he was undoubtedly right; he was no less right when he said that “Goethe would have turned away with a shudder from this world-construction which, with its primeval generation, borders on the Kant-Laplace theory; from man's emergence out of chaos as the result of the mathematically-determined play of atoms from eternity to eternity; from the icy world-end, from the pictures to which our race adheres with all the insensibility by means of which it has accustomed itself to the horrors of railway travel.” (Goethe und kein Ende. S.35. f.). Naturally Goethe would have turned away in disgust because he sought and found a higher concept of the living than that of a complicated, mathematically-determined mechanism. Only those who are incapable of grasping a higher concept of this kind and identify the living with the mechanical because they can only see the mechanical in the organism, will enthuse over the mechanical world-construction with its play of atoms, and regard without feeling the pictures which Du Bois-Reymond sketches. Those, however, who can assimilate the concept of the organic in Goethe's sense will dispute its justification as little as they dispute the existence of the mechanical. We do not dispute with those who are colour-blind concerning the world of colours. All views which represent the organic mechanically incur the judgment which Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles:

“Who would describe and study aught alive.
Seeks first the living spirit thence to drive;
Then are the lifeless fragments in his hand,
There only fails, alas! the spirit band.”

[ 4 ] The opportunity of concerning himself more intimately with plant life came to Goethe when Duke Karl August presented him with a garden (21st April, 1776). He was also stimulated by excursions in the Thuringian forest, where he could observe the living phenomena of lower organisms. Mosses and lichens claimed his attention. On October 31st he begged Frau von Stein to give him mosses of all kinds, if possible with the roots and moist, so that he could use them for observing the process of propagation. It is important to bear in mind that at the beginning of his botanical studies Goethe occupied himself with lower plant forms. He only studied the higher plants when later he was forming his idea of the archetypal plant. This was certainly not because the lower kingdom was strange to him, but because he believed that the secrets of plant-nature were more clearly manifested in the higher. His aim was to seek the idea of Nature where it revealed itself most distinctly and then to descend from the perfect to the imperfect in order to understand the latter by means of the former. He did not try to explain the complex by means of the simple, but to survey it at one glance as a creative whole, and then to explain the simple and imperfect as a one-sided development of the complex and perfect. If Nature is able, after countless plant forms, to create one more which contains them all, on perceiving this perfect form, the secret of plant formation must arise for the mind in direct perception, and then man will easily be able to apply to the imperfect what he has observed in the perfect. Nature investigators go the opposite way to work, for they regard the perfect merely as a mechanical sum-total of simple processes. They proceed from the simple and derive the perfect from it.

[ 5 ] When Goethe looked around for a scientific guide in his botanical studies he could find no other than Linnæus. We first learn of his study of Linnæus from his letters to Frau von Stein in the year 1782. The earnestness with which Goethe pursued his studies in natural science is shown by the interest he took in the writings of Linnæus. He admits that after Shakespeare and Spinoza he was influenced most strongly by Linnæus. But how little could Linnæus satisfy him! Goethe wanted to observe the different plant forms in order to know the common principle that lived in them. He tried to discover what it is that makes all these forms into plants. Linnæus was satisfied with classifying the manifold plant forms in a definite order and describing them. Here Goethe's naive, unbiased observation of Nature, in one special instance, came into contact with the scientific mode of thought that was influenced by a one-sided conception of Platonism. This mode of thought sees in the separate forms manifestations of original, co-existing Platonic Ideas, or creative thoughts. Goethe sees in the individual formation only one special form of an ideal archetypal being which lives in all forms. The aim of the former mode of thought is to distinguish the separate forms with the greatest possible exactitude in order to discern the manifoldness of the ideal forms or of the plan of creation; Goethe's aim is to explain the manifoldness of the particular from out of the original unity. That many things are present in manifold forms is clearly evident to the former mode of thought, because for it the ideal archetypes are already manifold. This is not evident to Goethe, for according to his view the many only belong together when a unity reveals itself in them. Goethe therefore says that what Linnæus “sought to hold forcibly asunder, had to strive for union, in order to satisfy the innermost need of my being.” Linnæus simply accepts the existing forms without asking how they have arisen from a basic form. “We count as many species as there are different forms that have been created in principle.” This is a basic statement. Goethe sought the active element in the plant kingdom that creates the individual through the specific modifications of the basic form.

[ 6 ] In Rousseau Goethe found a more naïve relationship to the plant world than was the case with Linnæus. He writes to Karl August, 16th June, 1782: “In Rousseau's Works one finds the most delightful letters on botany in which he gives a very clear and charming exposition of this science to a lady. It is a fine example of the way one ought to give instruction, and is a supplement to Emil. It makes me want to recommend the beautiful kingdom of flowers anew to my friends of the fair sex.” In the “History of my Botanical Studies” Goethe tells us what attracted him to Rousseau's botanical ideas: “His relation to plant lovers and connoisseurs, specially to the Duchess of Portland, may have widened his penetrating sight, and a spirit such as his, which felt called to prescribe law and order to nations, was forced to suppose that in the immeasurable kingdom of plants no such great diversity of forms could appear without a basic law, be it ever so concealed, which brings them back collectively to a Unity.” Goethe was seeking for a fundamental law which leads back the manifold to the unity from which it has originally proceeded.

[ 7 ] Two works of Freiherr von Gleichen, called “Russwurm,” came at that time to Goethe's knowledge. Both of them deal with the life of plants in a manner which proved fruitful for him; they are ‘Das Neueste aus dem Reiche der Pflanzen’ (Nürnburg, 1764), and ‘Auserlesene Mikroscopische Entdeckungen bet den Pflanzen’ (Nürnburg, 1777/1781.) These books deal with the processes of fructification in plants; pollen, stamens and pistils are minutely described and the processes of fructification presented in well-executed diagrams. Goethe himself now makes attempts to observe with his own eyes the results described by Gleichen-Russwurm. He writes to Frau von Stein, 12th Jan., 1785: “Now that Spring is approaching my microscope is set up in order to observe and check the experiments of Gleichen-Russwurm.” At the same time Goethe studied the nature of the seed, as may be gathered from an account which he gives to Knebel, 2nd April, 1785: “I have reflected on the seed substance as far as my experiences extend.” These observations of Goethe only appear in the right light when one considers that even at that time he did not stop at them, but tried to acquire a general perception of natural processes which should serve to support and strengthen them. On April 8th of the same year he tells Knebel that he is not merely observing facts, but that he has also made “fine combinations” of these facts.

[ 8 ] The share Goethe took in Lavater's great work, “Physiognomic Fragments for the furtherance of Human Knowledge and Human Love,” which appeared in the years 1775 to 1778, had a considerable influence on the development of his ideas concerning the workings of organic Nature. He himself contributed to this work, and his later mode of regarding organic Nature is already foreshadowed in the way he expresses himself in these contributions. Lavater goes no further than treating the form of the human organism as the expression of the soul. He wanted to indicate the character of soul from the forms of the body. Goethe began even then to observe the external form in itself, to study its own laws and formative force. He began at the same time to study the writings of Aristotle on physiognomy and endeavoured, on the basis of the study of the organic form, to confirm the distinction between man and the animals. He finds this in the prominence of the head which is determined by the human structure as a whole, and in the perfect development of the human brain to which all parts point as to an organ by which they are determined. In the animal, on the other hand, the head is merely appended to the spine; the brain and spinal cord comprise no more than is absolutely necessary for the execution of subordinate life-principles and sense-activities pure and simple. Goethe was already then seeking for the distinction between man and the animals, not in any one detail, but in the different degrees of perfection which the same basic form attains in one case or the other. Already there hovers before him the picture of a type which occurs both in the animal and in man, but which is developed in the former in such a way that the entire structure subserves animal functions, whereas in the latter the structure furnishes the scaffolding for the development of the spirit.

[ 9 ] Goethe's specific studies in anatomy grew out of such considerations. On Jan. 22nd, 1776, he writes to Lavater: “The Duke has sent me six skulls, and I have made some magnificent observations which are at your service if you have not already found the same things without me.” In Goethe's Diary, under the date, 15th Oct., 1781, we read that he studied Anatomy in Jena with Einsiedel, and in the same year began to enter more deeply into this science under the guidance of Loder. He speaks of this in letters to Frau von Stein, 29th Oct., and to the Duke, 4th Nov., 1781. He also had the intention of “explaining the skeleton” to the young people at the Drawing Academy, “and guiding them to a knowledge of the human body.” “I do it,” he says, “for my own sake as well as for theirs; the method I have chosen will give them this winter a real acquaintance with the basic structures of the body.” The Diary shows that these lectures were, in fact, given. During this time he also had many conversations with Loder concerning the structure of the human body. Again it is his general view of Nature which is the motive force and the real aim of these studies. He treats “the bones as a text to which all life and everything human may be appended.” (Letters to Lavater and Marck, 14th Nov., 1781.)

Goethe's mind was occupied at that time with conceptions relating to the workings of organic Nature and the connection between human and animal development. That the human form is simply the highest stage of the animal, and that man produces the moral world out of himself as a result of this more perfect stage of animal life, is an idea which is already expressed in the ode “The Divine”—written during the year 1782. “Let man be noble, helpful and good; for that alone distinguishes him from all the beings known unto us. According to laws mighty, rigid, eternal, must all we mortals complete the orbit of our existence.” [ 10 ] The “eternal, rigid laws” work in man just as they work in the rest of the world of organisms; in him alone they reach a perfection which makes it possible for him to be “noble, helpful and good.”

[ 11 ] While such ideas were establishing themselves in Goethe's being more and more firmly Herder was working at his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.” All the thoughts of this book were discussed by the two men. Goethe was satisfied with Herder's comprehension of Nature; it harmonised with his own conceptions. Frau von Stein writes to Knebel, 1st May, 1784: “Herder's work makes it probable that we were first plants and animals. ... Goethe is now brooding profoundly over these things and whatever has passed through his mind becomes supremely interesting.” Goethe's words to Knebel, 8th Dec., 1783, afford the justification for arriving at his ideas from Herder's. “Herder is writing a Philosophy of History, fundamentally new, as you may well imagine. We read the first chapters together the day before yesterday—and very excellent they are.” Sentences such as the following entirely harmonise with Goethe's mode of thought: “The human race is the great coalescence of lower organic forces.” “And so we assume that man is the central creation among animals, i.e., the developed form wherein the features of all species around him are summed up superbly.” [ 12 ] The view of anatomists at that time that the tiny bone which animals have in the upper jaw, the intermaxillary bone which contains the upper incisors, is lacking in man, was of course irreconcilable with such conceptions. Sommering, one of the most noted Anatomists of the time, writes to Merck, 8th Oct., 1782: “I wish you had consulted Blumenbach on the subject of the os intermaxillane which, ceteris paribus, is the only bone which all animals possess from the apes onward, including even the orang-utan, but which is never to be found in man; with the exception of this bone there is nothing in man which cannot be attributed to the animals. I am sending you therefore the head of a hind in order to convince you that this os intermaxillane, as Blumenbach, or os incis as Campa calls it, also exists in animals which have no incisors.” That was the general view of the time. Even the famous Camper, for whom Merck and Goethe had the deepest respect, admitted it. The fact that the intermaxillary bone in man coalesces left and right with the upper jaw bone without any clear demarcation in the normally developed individual, led to this view. If the learned men were correct in this it would be impossible to affirm the existence of a common archetype for the structure of the animal and human organism; a boundary between the two forms would have to be assumed. Man would not be created according to the archetype which lies at the basis of the animal. Goethe had to remove this obstacle to his world-conception. This he succeeded in doing, in conjunction with Loder, in the Spring of 1784. Goethe proceeded according to his general principle that Nature has no secret which “she does not somewhere place openly before the eye of the attentive observer.” He found the demarcation between upper jaw and intermaxillary bone actually existing in some abnormally developed skulls. He joyfully announced his discovery to Herder and Frau von Stein (27th March). To Herder he wrote: “It should heartily please you also, for it is like the keystone to man; it is not lacking; it is there! But how?” “I have thought of it in connection with your ‘Whole’ and it will indeed be a fair link in the chain.” When Goethe sent the treatise he had written on the subject to Knebel in Nov., 1784, he indicated the significance which he attributed to this discovery in his whole world of ideas by the words: “I have refrained from pointing to the logical outcome which Herder already indicates in his ideas, that the distinction between man and the animal is not to be looked for in any single detail.” Goethe could gain confidence in his view of Nature only when the erroneous view about this fatal little bone had been rejected. He gradually found the courage to extend to all kingdoms of Nature, to her whole realm, his ideas concerning the manner in which, playing as it were with one basic form, she produces life in all its diversity. In this sense he writes to Frau von Stein in the year 1786.

[ 13 ] The book of Nature becomes more and more legible to Goethe after he has deciphered the one letter. “My long ‘spelling out’ has helped me; now at last it works, and my silent joy is inexpressible.” He writes thus to Frau von Stein, 15th May, 1785. He now regards himself capable of writing a small botanical treatise for Knebel. Their journey together to Karlsbad, in 1785, becomes a formal journey of botanical study. After their return the kingdom of fungi, mosses, lichens and algae were studied with the help of Linnæus. He informs Frau von Stein, 9th November: “I continue to read Linnæus, indeed I must, for I have no other book with me: it is the best way of reading a book conscientiously and I must cultivate the practice, for it is not easy for me to read a book to the end. This book is not compiled for reading but for repeated study, and is of the very greatest service to me because I have thought for myself on most of the points.” During these studies the basic form out of which Nature fashions all the manifold plant forms assumes separate contours in his mind, even if they are not yet quite definite. In a letter to Frau von Stein, 9th July, 1786, we find these words: “It is a perception of the form with which Nature is, as it were, always playing, and in her play producing life in its diversity.”

[ 14 ] In April and May, 1786, Goethe made microscopical observations of lower organisms which develop in infusions of different substances—plantain pulp, cactus, truffles, peppercorn, tea, beer, and so on. He carefully noted the processes which he perceived in these organisms and prepared drawings of them. It is apparent also from these notes that Goethe did not try to approach the knowledge of life through such observation of the lower and simpler organisms. It is quite apparent that he thought he could grasp the essential features of life-processes in the higher organisms just as well as in the lower. He is of the opinion that in the infusoria the same kind of law repeats itself as the eye of the mind perceives, for instance, in the dog. Observation through the microscope only yields information of processes which are, in miniature, what the unaided eye sees on a larger scale. It merely affords an enrichment of sense-experiences. The essential nature of life reveals itself to a higher kind of perception, and not to observation that merely traces to their minutest details, processes that are accessible to the senses. Goethe seeks to cognise this essential nature of life through the observation of higher plants and animals. He would undoubtedly have sought this knowledge in the same way, even if in his age the anatomy of plants and animals had advanced as far as it has to-day. If Goethe had been able to observe the cells out of which the bodies of plants and animals are built he would have asserted that these elementary organic forms reveal the same conformity to law as is to be perceived in the most complex. He would have explained the phenomena in these minute entities by means of the same ideas by which he interpreted the life-processes of higher organisms. [ 15 ] It is in Italy that Goethe first finds the thought which solves the riddle facing him in organic development and metamorphosis. On September 3rd he leaves Karlsbad for the South. In a few but significant sentences he describes in the History of my Botanical Studies the thoughts stimulated in him by the observation of the plant world up to the moment when, in Sicily, a clear conception comes to him of how it is that “a fortunate mobility and plasticity is bestowed on plant forms, together with a strong generic and specific tenacity, so that they can adapt themselves to the many conditions working upon them over the face of the earth and develop and transform themselves accordingly.” The “variability of plant forms” was revealed to him as he was crossing the Alps, in the Botanic Gardens of Padua, and in other places. “Whereas in the lower regions branches and stalks were stronger and more bounteous in sap, the buds in closer juxtaposition, and the leaves broader, the higher one got on the mountains the stalks and branches became more fragile, the buds were at greater intervals, and the leaves more lancelate. I noticed this in the case of a willow and of a gentian, and convinced myself that it was not a case of different species. So also near the Walchensee I noticed longer and thinner rushes than in the lowlands” (Italian Journey, 8th September). On October 8th, by the seashore in Venice, he finds different plants wherein the relation between the organic and its environment becomes specially clear to him. “These plants are all both robust and virile, succulent and hardy, and it is apparent that the old salt of the sandy soil, and still more the saline air, gives them this characteristic; they are swollen with juices like water-plants; they are fleshy and hardy like mountain-plants; if their edges have the tendency to form prickles, like thistles, they are exceedingly strong and highly pointed. I found such leaves on bushes; they appeared to me to resemble our harmless coltsfoot, but here they were armed with sharp weapons, the leaves like leather, as also the seed capsules and the stalk, everything very thick and succulent.” (Italian Journey). In the Botanical Gardens at Padua the thought of how all plant-forms could be developed out of one, assumes more definite shape in Goethe's mind. In November he writes to Knebel: “The little botany I know has for the first time become a pleasure to me in this land with its brighter, less sporadic vegetation. I have already made fine general observations which will subsequently be acceptable to you also.” On 25th March, 1787, there comes to him “considerable illumination regarding botanical phenomena.” He begs that “Herder may be told that he is very near to finding the archetypal plant.” Only he fears “no one will be willing to recognise the rest of the plant world therein.” On April 17th he goes to the Public Gardens “with a firm, calm determination to continue his poetical dreams.” But all of a sudden the plant-nature catches him up like a ghost. “The many plants which I was formerly only accustomed to see in pots and tubs, indeed only behind glass windows for most of the year, stand here fresh and gay under the open sky, and thus fulfilling their destiny, they become clearer to us. Amongst so many formations, some new, some familiar, the old fancy again occurred to me as to whether I could not discover among the multitude the archetypal plant. There must be such a thing: how otherwise should I recognise this or that form to be a plant if they were not all fashioned after one type?” He tries hard to distinguish the divergent forms, but his thoughts are guided ever and again to an archetype that lies at the basis of them all. Goethe starts a Botanical Diary in which he notes all his experiences and reflections on the subject of the plant world during the journey. (Goethe's Werke. Weimar Edition Bd. 17. S.273). These diary leaves show how untiringly he is occupied in seeking out specimens of plants fitted to lead him to the laws of growth and reproduction. When he thinks he is on the track of any law he first puts it into hypothetical form, in order to confirm it in the course of his further experiences. He makes careful notes of the processes of generation, of fructification, of growth. More and more it dawns upon him that the leaf is the basic organ of plants, and that the forms of all other plant organs are best understood if they are considered as transformed leaves. He writes in his Diary: “Hypothesis: all is leaf, and through this simplicity the greatest diversity becomes possible.” And on May 17th he writes to Herder: “I must further confide to you that I am very near to the secret of plant generation and organisation, and that it is the simplest thing conceivable. Under this sky the finest observations are possible. I have found clearly and indubitably the cardinal point where the germ is concealed: already I see everything else in its entirety, and only a few details have yet to become more definite. The archetypal plant is the most wonderful creation in the world, for which Nature herself should envy me. With this model, and its key, one can invent plants ad infinitum, and consequently, that is to say, plants which could exist, even if they do not exist, and are not as it were artistic or poetic shadows and fancies but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law may be applied to all else that lives. ... Forwards and backwards the plant is ever only leaf, so indissolubly united with the future germ that one cannot think of the one without the other. To grasp such a concept, to sustain it, to discover it in Nature, is a task which places us in a condition that is almost painful, despite its joy.” (Italian Journey).

[ 16 ] For an explanation of the phenomena of life Goethe takes a path entirely different from those which scientists usually travel. Investigators of Nature may be divided into two classes. There are those who advocate the existence of a life-force working in organic Nature, and this life-force represents a special, higher form of force compared with other Natural causes. Just as the forces of gravity, chemical attraction and repulsion, magnetism, and so on, exist, so there must also exist a life-force which brings about such an interaction in the substances of the organism, that it can maintain itself, grow, nourish and propagate itself. These investigators of Nature say: In the organism work the same forces as in the rest of Nature, but they do not work as in a lifeless machine. They are taken up, as it were, by the life-force and raised to a higher stage of activity. Other investigators oppose this view, believing that no special force works in the organism. They regard the phenomena of life as more highly complicated chemical and physical processes and hope that some time it will be possible to explain an organism just as it is possible to explain a machine, by reducing it to the workings of inorganic forces. The first view is described as the theory of vitalism, the second as mechanistic theory. Goethe's mode of conception differs essentially from both. It appears to him self-evident that in the organism something is active as well as the forces of inorganic Nature. He cannot admit a mechanical explanation of living phenomena. Just as little does he seek a special life-force in order to explain the activities in an organism. He is convinced that for the understanding of living processes there must be a perception of a kind other than that through which the phenomena of inorganic Nature are perceived. Those who decide in favour of the assumption of a life-force realise, it is true, that organic activities are not mechanical, but at the same time they are not able to develop in themselves that other kind of perception by means of which the organic could be understood. The conception of the life-force remains obscure and indefinite. A more recent adherent of the theory of vitalism, Gustav Bunge, thinks that “All the riddles of life are contained in the tiniest cell, and with the existing means at our disposal we have already reached the boundary line.” (Vitalismus und Mechanismus, Leipsig. 1886, S.17). One may answer, entirely in the sense of Goethe's mode of thinking: “That power of perception which only cognises the nature of inorganic phenomena has arrived at the boundary which must be crossed in order to grasp what is living.” This power of perception, however, will never find within its sphere the means adequate to explain the life of even the tiniest cell. Just as the eye is necessary for the perception of colour phenomena, so the understanding of life is dependent on the power of perceiving directly in the sensible a supersensible element. This supersensible element will always escape one who only directs his senses to organic forms. Goethe seeks to animate the sensible perception of the plant forms in a higher sense and to represent to himself the sensible form of a supersensible archetypal plant. (Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums. Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33. S.80). The Vitalist takes refuge in the empty concept of the “life-force” because he simply does not see anything that his senses cannot perceive in the organism; Goethe sees the sensible permeated by a supersensible element, in the same sense as a coloured surface is permeated by colour.

[ 17 ] The followers of the mechanistic theory hold the view that some day it will be possible to produce living substances artificially from inorganic matter. They say that not many years ago it was maintained that substances existed in the organism which could only arise through the activity of the life-force and not artificially. To-day it is already possible to produce some of the substances artificially in the laboratory. Similarly, it may one day be possible to produce a living albumen, which is the basic substance of the simplest organism, out of carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salts. The mechanists think that this will provide the irrefutable proof that life is nothing more than a combination of inorganic processes—the organism just a machine that has arisen in a natural way.

[ 18 ] From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception it may be said that the mechanists speak of substances and forces in a way that has no justification in experience. And people have grown so accustomed to speak in this way that it becomes very difficult to maintain the clear pronouncements of experience in the face of such concepts. Let us, however, consider, without bias, a process of the external world. I/it us take a quantity of water at a definite temperature. How do we know anything about this water? We observe it, notice that it takes up space and is enclosed within definite boundaries. We put a finger or a thermometer into it and find that it has a definite degree of warmth. We press against the surface and find that it is fluid. This is what the senses tell us concerning the condition of the water. Now let us heat the water. It will boil and finally change into steam. Again one can acquire knowledge through sense-perception of the constitution of the substance, of the steam into which the water has changed. Instead of heating the water, it can be subjected to an electric current, under certain conditions. It changes into two substances, hydrogen and oxygen. We can learn about the nature of these two substances also through the senses. Thus in the corporeal world we perceive states, and observe at the same time that these states can, under certain conditions, pass over into others. The senses inform us of these states. When we speak of something else besides states which change we no longer keep to pure facts, but we add concepts to these. When it is said that the oxygen and the hydrogen which have developed out of the water as a result of the electric current were already contained in the water, but so closely united that they could not be perceived individually, a concept has been added to the perception—a concept by means of which the development of the two bodies out of the one is explained. When it is further maintained that oxygen and hydrogen are substances, as is shown by the fact that names have been given to them, again a concept has been added to what has been perceived. For, in reality, in the space occupied by the oxygen, all we can perceive is a sum of states. To these states we add, in thought, the substance to which they are supposed to belong. The substantiality of the oxygen and hydrogen that is conceived of as already existing in water is something that is added in thought to the content of perception. If we combine hydrogen and oxygen into water by a chemical process we can observe that one collection of states passes over into another. When we say: “the two simple substances have united to form a compound,” we have there attempted to give a conceptual exposition of the content of observation. The idea “substance” receives its content, not from perception but from thought. The same thing holds good with “force” as with “substance.” We see a stone fall to the earth. What is the content of perception? A sum-total of sense impressions, states, which appear at successive places. We try to explain this change in the sense-world and say: “the earth attracts the stone; it has a ‘force’ by which it draws the stone to itself.” Again our mind has added a conception to the actuality and given it a content which does not arise out of perception. We do not perceive substances and forces, but states and their transitions into each other. These changes of states are explained by adding concepts to perceptions. [ 19 ] Let us conceive of a being who could perceive oxygen and hydrogen but not water. If we combined oxygen and hydrogen into water before the eyes of such a being the states it perceived in the two substances would disappear into nothingness. If we now described the states which we perceive in water, such a being could form no idea of them. This proves that in the perceptual contents of hydrogen and oxygen there is nothing from which the perceptual content water can be derived. When one substance arises out of two or more different ones that means: Two or more perceptual contents have transformed themselves into a content which is connected with them but is absolutely new. [ 20 ] What would have been achieved if it were found possible to combine carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salt into a living albumenous substance in the laboratory? We should know that the perceptual content of many substances could combine into one perceptual content. But this latter perceptual content cannot in any sense be derived out of the former. The state of living albumen can only be observed in itself; it cannot be developed out of the states of carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salt. In the organism we have something wholly different from the inorganic constituents out of which it can be formed. The sensible contents of perception change into sensible-supersensible when the living being arises. And those who have not the power to form sensible-supersensible conceptions can as little know anything of the nature of an organism as they could experience water if the sensible perception of it were inaccessible to them.

[ 21 ] In his studies of the plant and animal world Goethe tried to conceive of germination, growth, transformations of organs, nutrition and reproduction of the organism, as sensible-supersensible processes. He perceived that this sensible-supersensible process is the same, ideally, in all plants and that it only assumes different forms in its outer manifestation. He was able to establish the same thing concerning the animal world. When man has formed in himself the idea of the sensible-supersensible archetypal plant he will find this again in all single plant-forms. Diversity arises because things, the same ideally, can exist in the perceptual world in different forms. The single organism consists of organs which can be traced back to one basic organ. The basic organ of the plant is the leaf with the nodes from which it develops. This organ assumes different forms in external appearance: cotyledon, foliage, leaf, sepal, petal, etc. “The plant may sprout, blossom, or bear fruit, but it is always the same organs which in manifold conditions and under frequently changed forms fulfil Nature's prescription.”

[ 22 ] In order to get a complete picture of the archetypal plant Goethe had to follow, in general, the forms which the basic organ passes through in the progress of the growth of the plant from germination to the ripening of the seed. In the beginning of its development the whole plant-form rests in the seed. In this the archetypal plant has assumed a form, through which it conceals, as it were, its ideal content in outward appearance.

“Simply slumbered the force in the seed; a germ of the future
Peacefully locked in itself, 'neath the integument lay,
Leaf and root and bud, still void of colour and shapeless;
Thus does the kernel, while dry, cover that motionless life.
Upward then strives it to swell, in gentle moisture confiding,
And from the night where it dwelt, straightway ascendeth to light.”

(Translation by A. E. Bowring).

[ 23 ] Out of the seed the plant develops its primary organs, the cotyledons, after it “has left behind its coverings more or less in the earth” and has established “the root in the soil.” And now, in the further course of growth, impulse follows impulse, nodes upon nodes are piled one above the other, and at each node we have a leaf.

The leaves appear in different forms, the lower still simple, the upper much indented, notched, and composed of many tiny leaves. The archetypal plant at this stage of development spreads out its sensible-supersensible content in space as external sense appearance. Goethe imagines that the leaves owe their progressive development and improvement to the light and the air. “When we find these cotyledons produced in the enclosing seed-walls, filled as it were with a crude sap, almost entirely unorganised, or at any rate only crudely organised and unformed, so do we find the leaves of those plants which grow under water more crudely organised than others that are exposed to the free air; indeed even the same plant species develops smoother and less perfect leaves if it grows in deep, moist places; whereas, on the contrary, in higher regions it produces fibrous and more finely developed leaves, provided with tiny hairs” (Goethe's Werke, Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33. S25.).

In the second epoch of growth the plant again contracts into a narrower space what was previously spread out.

“Less abundantly yielding the sap, contracting the vessels,
So that the figure 'ere long gentler effects doth disclose.
Soon and in silence is checked the growth of the vigorous branches
And the rib of the stalk fuller becometh in form.
Leafless however and quick the tenderer stem then upspringeth,
And a miraculous sight doth the observer enchant.
Ranged in a circle, in numbers that now are small, and now countless,
Gather the smaller-sized leaves, close by the side of their like,
And as the perfectest type, brilliant-hued coronals form.”

(Translation by A. E. Bowring).

[ 24 ] In the calyx the plant form draws itself together, and in the corolla again spreads itself out. The next contraction follows in the pistils and stamens, the organs of generation. In the previous periods of growth the formative force of the plant developed uniformly as the impulse to repeat the basic form. At this stage of contraction the same force distributes itself into two organs. What is separated seeks to re-unite. This happens in the process of fructification. The male pollen existing in the stamens unites with the female substance in the pistils, and the germ of a new plant arises. Goethe calls this fructification, a spiritual anastomosis, and sees in it only another form of the process which occurs in the development from one node to another. “In all bodies which we call living we observe the force to produce its like. When we perceive this force divided, we speak of the two sexes.”

The plant produces its like from node to node, for nodes and leaf are the simple form of the archetypal plant. In this form production means growth. If this reproductive force is divided among two organs we speak of two sexes. In this sense Goethe believes he has brought the concepts of growth and generation nearer to each other. At the stage of fruit-formation the plant attains its final expansion; in the seed it appears again contracted. In these six steps Nature accomplishes a cycle of plant development, and begins the whole process over again. Goethe sees in the seed only another form of the nodule which develops on the leaves. The shoots developing out of the node are complete plants which rest on a mother-plant instead of in the earth. The conception of the basic organ transforming itself stage by stage, as on a “spiritual ladder” from seed to fruit is the idea of the archetypal plant. In order to prove to sense perception, as it were, the transforming power of the basic organ, Nature, under certain conditions, at one stage allows another organ to develop instead of the one that should arise in conformity with the regular course of growth. In the double poppy, for example, petals appear in the lilace where the stamens should arise. The organ destined ideally to become a stamen has become a petal. In the organ that has a definite form in the regular course of plant development there is the possibility to assume another.

[ 25 ] As an illustration of his idea of the archetypal plant Goethe considers the bryophyllum calycinum, a plant species which was brought to Calcutta from the Molucca Islands, and thence came to Europe. Out of the notches in the fleshy leaves these plants develop fresh plantlets, which grow to complete plants after their detachment. In this process, sensibly and visibly presented, Goethe sees that ideally a whole plant slumbers in the leaf. (Goethe's Notes on Bryophyllum Calycinum. Weimar Edition, Part 2. Vol. VII.).

[ 26 ] One who develops the idea of the archetypal plant in himself, and keeps it so plastic that he can think of it in all possible forms which its content permits, can explain all formations in the plant kingdom by its help. He will understand the development of the individual plant, but he will also find that all sexes, species, and varieties are fashioned according to this archetype. Goethe developed these views in Italy and recorded them in his work entitled Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären which appeared in 1790.

[ 27 ] In Italy Goethe also makes progress in the development of his ideas concerning the human organism. On January 20th he writes to Knebel: “As regards anatomy, I have only a very indifferent preparation, and it is not without some labour that I have succeeded in acquiring a certain knowledge of the human frame. Constant examination of the stages here leads one to a higher understanding. In our Academy of Medicine and Surgery it is merely a question of knowing the part, and for this a wretched muscle serves just as well. But in Rome the parts mean nothing unless at the same time they present a noble form. In the great hospital San Spirito they have prepared, for the sake of artists, a very beautiful body displaying the muscles, so that one marvels at its beauty. It could really pass for some flayed demi-god, for a Marsyas. Thus one does not study the skeleton as an artificially arranged mask of bones, but rather after the example of the ancients, with the ligaments by which it receives life and movement.”

After his return from Italy Goethe applied himself industriously to the pursuit of anatomical studies. He feels compelled to discover the formative laws of the animal form just as he had succeeded in doing in the case of the plant. He is convinced that the uniformity of the animal organisation is also based on a fundamental organ which can assume different forms in its external manifestation. When the idea of the basic organ is concealed the organ itself has an undeveloped appearance. Here we have the simpler organs of animals: when the idea is master of the substance, forming the substance into a perfect likeness of itself, the higher, nobler organs arise. That which is present ideally in the simpler organs manifests itself externally in the higher. Goethe did not succeed in apprehending in a single idea the law of the whole animal form as he did for the plant form. He found the formative law for one part only of this animal form—for the spinal cord and brain, with the bones enclosing these organs. He sees in the brain a higher development of the spinal cord. He regards each nerve centre of the ganglia as a brain which has remained at a lower stage (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 8.).

He explains the skull-bones enclosing the brain as transformations of the vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord. It had occurred to him previously that he must regard the posterior cranial bones (occipital, posterior and anterior sphenoid bones) as three transformed vertebrae; he maintains the same thing in regard to the anterior cranial bones, when in the year 1790 he finds in the sands of the Lido a sheep's skull, which is, by great good fortune, cracked in such a way that three vertebrae are made visible to immediate sense perception in a transformed shape in the hard palate—the upper jaw-bone, and the intermaxillary bone.

[ 28 ] In Goethe's time the anatomy of animals had not yet advanced so far that he was able to cite a living being which really has vertebrae in place of developed cranial bones, and which thus presents in sensible form that which only exists ideally in developed animals. The investigations of Karl Gegenbauer, published in the year 1872, made it possible to instance such an animal form. Primitive fish, or selachians, have cranial bones and a brain which are obviously terminal members of the vertebral column and spinal cord. According to this discovery a greater number of vertebrae than Goethe supposed, at least nine, appear to have entered into the head formation. This error in the number of vertebrae, and, in addition, the fact that in the embryonic condition the skull of higher animals shows no trace of being composed of vertebral parts but develops out of a single cartilaginous vesicle, has been adduced as evidence against the value of Goethe's idea concerning the transformation of the spinal cord and vertebrae. It is indeed admitted that the skull has originated from vertebrae, but it is denied that the cranial bones, in the form in which they appear in the higher animals, are transformed vertebrae. It is said that a complete amalgamation of vertebrae into a cartilaginous vesicle has taken place, and that in this amalgamation the original vertebral structure has entirely disappeared. The bony forms which are to be perceived in the higher animals have developed out of this cartilaginous capsule. These forms have not developed in accordance with the archetype of the vertebra, but in accordance with the tasks they have to fulfil in the developed head. So that in seeking an explanation of the forms of any cranial bone the question is not, “How has a vertebra been transformed in order to become the bones of the head?”—but “What conditions have led to this or that bony form separating out of the simple cartilaginous capsule?” It is believed that there is a development of new forms, in conformity with new formative laws, after the original vertebral form has passed over into an unorganised capsule. A contradiction between this view and Goethe's can only be found from the standpoint of “fact-fanaticism.” The vertebral structure that is no longer sensibly perceptible in the cartilaginous capsule of the skull does nevertheless exist in it ideally and re-appears as soon as the conditions for this appearance are there. In the cartilaginous skull-capsule the idea of the vertebral basic organ is concealed within matter; in the developed cranial bones it re-appears in outer manifestation.

[ 29 ] Goethe hopes that the formative laws of the other parts of the animal organism will be revealed to him in the same way as was the case with those of brain, spinal cord, and their enveloping organs. With regard to the Lido discovery he informs Herder, through Frau von Kalb, April 30th, that he “has come much closer to the animal form and its many transformations and indeed through a most curious accident.” He believes himself to be so near his goal that he wants to complete, in the very year of his discovery, a work on animal development which may be placed side by side with the “Metamorphosis of Plants” (Correspondence with Knebel, pp 98.).

During his travels in Silesia, July, 1790, Goethe pursues studies in Comparative Anatomy and begins to write an Essay On the Form of Animals (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 8, p. 261.). He did not succeed in advancing from this happy starting point to the formative laws of the whole animal form. He made many an attempt to find the Type of the animal form, but nothing analogous to the idea of the archetypal plant resulted. He compares the animals with each other, and with man, and seeks to obtain a general picture of the animal structure, according to which, as a model, Nature fashions the individual forms. This general picture of the animal type is not a living conception that is filled with a content in accordance with the basic laws of animal formation, and thus recreates, as it were, the archetypal animal of Nature. It is only a general concept that has been abstracted from the special appearances. It confirms the existence of the common element in the manifold animal forms, but it does not contain the law of animal nature.

“All the members develop according to Laws Eternal.
And the rarest of forms secretly preserves the Archetype.”

(The Metamorphosis of Animals.)

[ 30 ] Goethe could not evolve a uniform conception of how the archetype, through the transformation according to law of a basic member, develops as the many-membered archetypal form of the animal organism. The Essays on The Form of Animals and the Sketch of Comparative Anatomy proceeding from Osteology, which were written in Jena in 1795, as well as the later and more detailed work, Lectures on the first three Chapters of an Outline of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, only contain indications as to how the animals are to be compared suitably in order to obtain a general scheme according to which the creative power “produces and develops organic beings,” in accordance with which these descriptions are worked out and to which the most diverse forms are to be traced back, since such a norm may be abstracted from the forms of different animals. In the case of plants, however, Goethe has shown how through successive modifications an archetype develops, according to law, to the perfect organic form.

[ 31 ] Even if Goethe could not follow the creative power of Nature in its formative and transforming impulse through the different members of the animal organism, yet he did succeed in finding single laws to which Nature adheres in the building of animal forms, laws which do indeed conform to the general norm but vary in their manifestation. He imagines that Nature has no power to change the general picture at will. If in some creature one member is developed to a high degree of perfection, this can only happen at the expense of another. The archetypal organism contains all the members that can appear in any one animal. In the single animal form one member may be developed, another only indicated; one may develop completely, another may be imperceptible to the senses. In the latter case Goethe is convinced that the elements pertaining to the general type that are not visible in an animal exist, nevertheless, in the idea. “If we behold in a creature some special excellence we have merely to question and find where something is lacking. The searching spirit will find somewhere the existence of a defect and at the same time the key to the whole of creation. Thus we can find no beast who carries a horn on its head and has perfect teeth in the upper bone of the jaw; the Eternal Mother, therefore, could never have created a lion with horns even by the exercise of all her power. For she has not enough substance to implant the full series of teeth and at the same time bring forth horns and antlers.” (Metamorphosis of the Animals.)

[ 32 ] All members are developed in the archetypal organism and maintained in equilibrium; the diversity arises because the formative force expends itself on one member and, as a result, another remains in an absolutely undeveloped state or is merely indicated in external manifestation. This law of the animal organism is called to-day the law of the correlation or compensation of organs.

[ 33 ] Goethe's conception is that the whole plant world is contained in the archetypal plant and the whole animal world in the archetypal animal, as idea. Out of this thought arises the question: How is it that in one case these definite plant or animal forms arise, and in another, others? Under what conditions does a fish develop out of the archetypal animal? under what conditions a bird? In the scientific explanation of the structure of organisms Goethe finds a mode of presentation that is distasteful to him. The adherents of this mode of conception ask in regard to each organ: What purpose does it serve in the living being in whom it occurs?—Such a question is based on the general thought that a divine Creator, or Nature, has predetermined a definite purpose in life for each being and has then bestowed upon it a structure which enables it to fulfil this purpose. In Goethe's view this is just as absurd as the question: To what end does an elastic sphere move when it is pushed by another? An explanation of the motion can only be given by discovering the law by which the sphere is set in motion through a blow or other cause. One does not ask: “What purpose is served by the motion of the sphere?” but, “Whence is the motion derived?” In Goethe's opinion one should not ask: “Why has the bull horns?” but rather: “How can he have horns?” Through what law does the archetypal animal appear in the bull as a horn-carrying form? Goethe sought for the idea of the archetypal plant and animal in order to find in them the reasons for the diversity of organic forms. The archetypal plant is the creative element in the plant world. If one wants to explain a single plant species then one must show how this creative element works in this special case. The thought that an organic being owes its form, not to the forces formatively acting in it, but to the fact that the form is imposed upon it from without for certain ends, was repulsive to Goethe. He writes: “In a pitiful, apostolically monkish declamation of the Zurich prophet I recently found this stupid sentence: ‘Everything that has life, lives through something outside of itself’—or words to that effect. Only a proselytiser of the heathen could write such a thing, and on revising it, his genius does not pluck him by the sleeve” (Italian Journey, 5th Oct., 1781). Goethe thinks of the organic being as a “little” world, a microcosm which has arisen through itself, and fashions itself according to its own laws. “The conception that a living being is produced from outside for certain extraneous ends, and that its form is determined by a purposive primeval force, has already delayed us many centuries in the philosophical consideration of Nature, and still holds us back, although individual men have vigorously attacked this mode of thought, and have shown the obstacles which it creates. It is, if one may so express it, a paltry way of thinking, which like all paltry things is trivial just because it is convenient and sufficient for human nature in general” (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 7, p.217). It is, of course, convenient to say that a Creator, when forming an organic species, has based it on a certain purposive thought, and has therefore given it a definite form. Goethe's aim, however, is not to explain Nature by the intentions of some supernatural being, but out of her inherent formative laws. An individual organic form arises because the archetypal plant or animal assumes a definite form in a special case. This form must be of such a kind that it is able to live in the conditions surrounding it. “The existence of a creature which we call fish is only possible under the condition of an element that we call water.” (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 7. p. 221). When Goethe is seeking to comprehend the formative laws which produce a definite organic form he goes back to his archetypal organism. This archetypal organism has the power to realise itself in the most manifold external forms. In order to explain a fish Goethe would investigate what formative forces the archetypal animal employs in order to produce this particular fish form from among all the forms which exist in it ideally. If the archetypal animal were to realise itself in certain conditions in a form in which it could not live it would not survive. An organic form can only maintain itself within certain conditions of life if it is adapted to them.

“Thus by the animal's form is its manner of living determined,
Likewise the manner of life worketh
back on every creature, And so the organised form firmly makes its appearance,
yet with the power to change, through outer conditions of Nature.”

(The Metamorphosis of Animals.)

[ 34 ] The organic forces surviving in a given life-element are conditioned by the nature of the element. If an organic form were to leave one life-element for another it must transform itself accordingly. This can happen in definite cases because the archetypal organism which lies at its base has the power of realising itself in countless forms. The transformation of one form into another is, however, according to Goethe's view, not to be conceived of in such a way that the external conditions immediately remould the form in accordance with their own nature, but that they become the cause through which the inner being transforms itself. Changed life-conditions provoke the organic form to transform itself in a certain way according to inner laws. The external influences work indirectly, not directly, on the living being. Countless forms of life are contained in the archetypal plant and animal ideally: those on which external influences work as stimuli come to actual existence.

[ 35 ] The conception that a plant or animal species can in the course of ages, as a result of certain conditions, be transformed into another, has its full justification in Goethe's view of Nature. Goethe's view is that the force which produces a new being through the process of procreation is simply a transformation of that force which brings about the progressive metamorphosis of organs in the course of growth. Reproduction is a “growing-beyond” the individual.

As the basic organ during growth undergoes a sequence of changes which are ideally the same, similarly, a transformation of the external form can also occur in reproduction, while the ideal archetype remains the same. If an original organic form existed, then its descendants in the course of great epochs of time could pass over through gradual transformations into the manifold forms peopling the earth at present. The thought of an actual blood-relationship uniting all organic forms flows out of Goethe's basic conceptions. He might have expressed it in its completed form immediately after he had formed his idea of the archetypal animal and plant. But he expresses himself with reserve, even indefinitely, when he alludes to this thought.

In the Essay, Versuch einer allgemeinen Vergleich-ungslehre, which was probably written shortly after the Metamorphosis of Plants, we read: “And how worthy it is of Nature that she must always employ the same means in order to produce and nourish a creature. Thus one will progress along just these paths, and just as one at first only regarded the inorganic, undetermined elements as vehicles of organised beings, so will one now progress in observation, and again regard the organised world as a union of many elements. The whole kingdom of plants, for example, will again appear to us like a great ocean, which is just as necessary to the limited existence of the insects, as the waters and rivers are to the limited existence of fishes, and we shall see that a vast number of living creatures are born and nourished in this ocean of plants; we shall, finally, again regard the whole animal world as a great element where one race maintains itself out of and through the other if not arising from it.” There is less reserve in the following sentence from Lectures on the first three Chapters of an Outline of Comparative Anatomy (1796): “We should also have come to the point where we could fearlessly maintain that all the more perfect organic beings, among which we reckon fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the summit of the last, Man, are formed according to one archetype, which only in its constituent parts inclines hither and thither and daily develops and transforms itself through procreation.” Goethe's caution regarding the thought of transformation is comprehensible. The epoch in which he elaborated his ideas was not unfamiliar with this thought. It had, however, been developed in the most confused sense. “That epoch,” writes Goethe, “was darker than one can conceive of now.” It was stated, for example, that man, if he liked, could go about comfortably on all fours, and that bears, if they remained upright for a period of time, could become human beings. The audacious Diderot ventured to make certain proposals as to how goat-footed fauns could be produced and then put into livery, to sit in pomp and distinction on the coaches of the mighty and the rich! Goethe would have nothing to do with such undue ideas. His aim was to obtain an idea of the basic laws of the living. It became clear to him here that the forms of the living are not rigid and unchangeable, but are subject to continual transformation. He had, however, no opportunity of making observations which would have enabled him to see how this transformation was accomplished in the single phenomenon. It was the investigations of Darwin and the reflections of Haeckel that first threw light on the actual relationship between the single organic forms. From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception one can only give assent to the assertions of Darwinism in so far as they concern the actual emergence of one organic species from another. Goethe's ideas, however, penetrate more deeply into the nature of the organic world than modern Darwinism. Modern Darwinism believes that it can do without the inner impelling forces in the organism which Goethe conceives of in the sensible-supersensible image. Indeed it would even deny that Goethe was justified in arguing, from his postulates, an actual transformation of organs and organisms. Jul. Sachs rejects Goethe's thoughts by saying that he transfers “the abstraction evolved by the intellect to the object itself when he ascribes to this object a metamorphosis which, fundamentally speaking, is only accomplished in our concept.” According to this view Goethe has presumably gone no further than to reduce leaves, sepals, petals, etc., to one general concept, designating them by the name ‘leaf.’ “Of course the matter would be quite different if we could assume that the stamens were ordinary leaves in the ancestors of the plant-forms lying before us, etc.” (Sachs, History of Botany. 1875, p. 169).

This view springs from that “fact-fanaticism” which cannot see that the ideas belong just as objectively to the phenomena as the elements that are perceptible to the senses. Goethe's view is that the transformation of one organ into another can only be spoken of if both contain something in common over and above their external appearance. This is the sensible-supersensible form. The stamens of a plant-form before us can only be described as the transformed leaf of the predecessors if the same sensible-supersensible form lives in both. If that is not the case, if the stamen has developed in the particular plant-form simply in the same place in which a leaf developed in its predecessors, then no transformation has occurred, but one organ has merely appeared in the place of another. The Zoologist Oscar Schmidt asks: “What is it that is supposed to be transformed according to Goethe's views? Certainly not the archetype!” (War Goethe Darwinianer? Graz. 1871, p. 22.). Certainly the archetype is not transformed, for this is the same in all forms. But it is just because this remains the same that the external forms can be different, and yet represent, a uniform Whole. If one could not recognise the same ideal archetype in two forms developing out of each other, no relation could be assumed to exist between them. Only the conception of the ideal archetypal form can impart real meaning to the assertion that the organic forms arise by a process of transformation out of each other. Those who cannot rise to this conception remain chained within the mere facts. The laws of organic development lie in this conception. Just as Kepler's three fundamental laws make the processes in the solar system comprehensible, so can the forms of organic Nature be understood through Goethe's ideal archetypes.

[ 36 ] Kant, who denies to the human spirit the power of understanding, in the ideal sense, a Whole by which a multiplicity is determined in its appearance, calls it “a risky adventure of reason” to seek to explain the various forms of the organic world by an archetypal organism. For him man is only in a position to gather the manifold, individual phenomena into one general concept by which the intellect forms for itself a picture of the unity. This picture, however, exists only in the human mind and has nothing to do with the creative power by which the unity really causes the multiplicity to proceed out of itself. The “risky adventure of reason” consists in assuming that the Earth first allows the more simple organisms to proceed out of her womb and that these then produce from themselves forms with more deliberate purpose; that from these again, still higher forms develop, up to the most perfect living being. Kant holds that even if such a supposition is made, it can only be based on a purposive creative force, which has given evolution such an impulse that all its various members develop in accordance with some goal. Man perceives a multitude of different organisms; and since he cannot penetrate them in order to see how they themselves assume a form adapted to the life-element in which they develop, he must conceive that they are so adapted from without that they can live within these conditions. Goethe, however, claims the faculty of being able to recognise how Nature creates the particular from the whole, the outer from the inner. He is willing to undertake courageously what Kant calls the “adventure of reason” (cp. the Essay: Anschauende Urteilskraft Kürschner. Bd. 34.). If we had no other proof that Goethe regarded as justifiable the thought of a blood-relationship among all organic forms within the limits here specified, we should have to conclude it from this judgment of Kant's “adventure of reason.”

[ 37 ] A sketch, Entwurf einer Morphologie, which still exists, suggests that Goethe intended to present, in their sequence, the special forms which his archetypal plant and archetypal animal assume in the main forms of living beings. He wanted first to describe the nature of the organic as it appeared to him through his contemplation of animals and plants. Then he wanted to show how the organic archetypal being, “proceeding from a centre,” develops on the one side to the manifold plant world, on the other to the multiplicity of animal forms, and how particular forms of worms, of insects, of higher animals and the form of man can be derived from the general archetype. He intended even to shed light on physiognomy and phrenology. He made it his task to present the external form in its connection with the inner spiritual faculties. He was impelled to follow the organic formative impulse, which in the lower organisms is portrayed in a simple external appearance, in its striving to fulfil itself stage by stage in ever more perfect forms until it produces in man a form which makes him able to be the creator of spiritual production.

[ 38 ] This plan of Goethe's was never completed, any more than was another, the commencement of which is to be found in the fragment, Vorarbeiten zu einer Physiologie der Pflanzen (cp. Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 6, pp. 286 ff.). Goethe tried to show how the various branches of material knowledge,—Natural History, Physics, Anatomy, Chemistry, Zöonomy and Physiology—must work together, in order to be applied in a higher mode of perception to explain the forms and processes of living beings. He wanted to bring forward a new science, a general morphology of organisms, new indeed “not in reference to its subject-matter, for this is known, but in its outlook and method, which must give an individual form to the doctrine as well as establish a place for it among other sciences.” What Anatomy, Natural History, Physics, Chemistry, Zöonomy, Physiology have to offer as the various laws of Nature, would be taken up by the living idea of the organic and placed on a higher level, just as the living being itself takes up the different processes of Nature in the cycle of its development and places them on a higher level of activity.

[ 39 ] Goethe reached the ideas which guided him through the labyrinth of living forms along paths of his own. The prevailing conceptions in regard to important regions of Nature's activity contradicted his own general world-conception. Therefore with regard to these regions he had to form for himself conceptions in accordance with his own being. He was convinced, however, that there was “nothing new under the sun,” and that one “could certainly find one's own perceptions already indicated in traditions.” For this reason he sent his work on the Metamorphosis of the Plants to learned friends, and begged them to tell him whether anything had already been written or handed down concerning the theme in question. He was glad to be told, by Friedrich August Wolf, of an “admirable precursor,” one Caspar Friedrich Wolf. Goethe became acquainted with his Theoria Generationis which had appeared in 1759. But this very work shows that it is possible to hold a correct view of the facts and yet that a man cannot come to the full idea of organic development unless he is capable of arriving at the sensible-supersensible form of life through a power of perception higher than that of the senses. Wolf was an excellent observer. He sought to discover the beginnings of life by means of microscopical investigations. He recognised transformed leaves in the calyx, corolla, pistils, stamens and seed. But he ascribed the process of transformation to a gradual decrease of the life-force, which diminishes in proportion to the length of time the plant exists, until it finally disappears. Calyx, corolla, etc., are, therefore, for him an imperfect development of the leaf. Wolf came forward as the opponent of Haller, who advanced the theory of Pre-formation or “Encasement.” According to this theory, all the members of a fully-grown organism are already represented on a small scale in the germ, and, indeed, in the same shape and mutual arrangement as in the developed living being. The development of an organism is thus simply an unfolding of what already exists. Wolf would only accept validity in what he saw with his eyes. And since the encased condition of a living being could not be discovered even by the most careful observations, he regarded development as an actually new formation. According to his view, the shape of an organic being is not yet present in the germ. Goethe is of the same opinion in reference to the external manifestation. He, too, rejects the “Encasement Theory” of Haller. For Goethe the organism is indeed pre-figured in the germ, not according to its external appearance but according to the idea. He regards the external appearance as a new formation, but reproaches Wolf with the fact that where he sees nothing with the eyes of the body, he also sees nothing with the eyes of the spirit. Wolf had no conception of the fact that something may still exist in the idea even if it does not pass into external manifestation. “Therefore he is always concerned with penetrating to the beginnings of the development of life by means of microscopical investigations and so following the organic embryos from their earliest appearance up to their development. However admirable this method may be, yet the excellent man did not think that there is a distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing,’ that the eyes of the spirit have to work in constant, living union with the eyes of the body because otherwise one may fall into the danger of seeing and yet overlooking. ... In the plant-transformation he saw the same organ continually contracting, continually diminishing, but he did not see that this contraction alternated with an expansion. He saw that it diminished in volume, but did not observe that at the same time it became more perfect, and he therefore absurdly attributed the path towards perfection to a process of impoverishment.” (Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33.).

[ 40 ] Until the very end of his life Goethe was in touch with innumerable scientific investigators, both in personal and written intercourse. He followed the progress of the science of living beings with the keenest interest; he saw with joy how modes of thought resembling his own gained entrance into this department of knowledge, and how his doctrine of metamorphosis was also recognised and made fruitful by individual investigators. In the year 1817 he began to gather his works together and to publish them in a periodical which he founded under the title, Zur Morphologie. In spite of all this, however, he made no further progress, through personal observation or reflection, in the growth of his ideas concerning organic development. On two other occasions only did he feel compelled to occupy himself more deeply with such ideas. In both cases he was attracted by scientific phenomena in which he found the confirmation of his own thoughts. The one case was the Course of Lectures held by K. F. Martius on “The Vertical and Spiral Tendency of Vegetation” at the Conference of Natural Scientists in the years 1828 and 1829, of which the periodical “Isis” published extracts; the other was a scientific dispute in the French Academy which broke out in the year 1830 between Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier.

[ 41 ] Martius conceived of the growth of plants as being dominated by two tendencies by a striving in the vertical direction which governs the root and stem, and by another which causes the leaves, the organs of the blossoms and so on, to incorporate themselves into the vertical organs of the form of a spiral line. Goethe took these thoughts and brought them into connection with his idea of metamorphosis. He wrote a long essay (Kürschner Bd. 33), into which he collected all his experiences of the plant-world which appeared to him to point to the existence of these two tendencies. He believed that he had to merge these tendencies into his idea of metamorphosis. “This much we must assume: there prevails in vegetation a general spiral tendency, whereby, in union with the vertical striving of the whole structure, each formation in the plant is brought about in accordance with the laws of metamorphosis.” Goethe regarded the existence of spiral vessels in the various plant organs as a proof that the spiral tendency dominates the life of plants throughout. “Nothing is more in accordance with Nature than the fact that what she intends in the Whole she activates through the minutest detail.” “Let us in summer look at a stake planted in the soil up which a bindweed (convolvulus) climbs from below, winding its way to the heights and—clinging closely—maintains its living growth. Let us think now of the bindweed and stake as both equally living and ascending upwards from one root, producing each other alternately and so progressing unchecked. Those who can transform this picture into an inner perception will find the idea considerably easier. The twining plant seeks outside itself that which it should itself produce, but cannot.” Goethe uses the same comparison in a letter to Count Sternberg, 15th March, 1832, and adds these words: “Of course the comparison does not entirely fit, for in the beginning the creeper must wind itself round the stem in barely perceptible circles. The nearer it approaches the summit, however, the quicker must the spiral line turn in order finally (in the blossom) to collect itself in a circle on the disc. This process resembles the dances of one's youth, where half reluctantly one was often pressed in the close embrace of affectionate children. Pardon these anthropomorphisms!” Ferdinand Cohn remarks in reference to this passage: “If only Goethe had known Darwin! How pleased he would have been with this man, who through his strictly inductive methods knew how to find clear and convincing proofs for his ideas.” Darwin thinks that in nearly all plant organs he can show that in the period of their growth they have the tendency to spiral movements which he calls circummutation.

[ 42 ] In September, 1830, Goethe refers in an essay to the dispute between the two investigators, Cuvier and Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire; in March, 1832, he continues this essay. In February and March, 1830, Cuvier, the “fact-fanatic” came forward in the French Academy in opposition to the work of Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire, who, in Goethe's opinion, had attained to a “lofty mode of thought in conformity with the idea.” Cuvier was a master of the distinctions existing between the various organic forms. Saint-Hilaire tried to discover the analogies in these forms and to prove that the organisation of animals is “subject to a general plant only modified here and there, whence the differences can be derived.” He tried to acquire knowledge of the relationship between the laws and was convinced that the particular could develop stage by stage from the whole. Goethe regards Saint-Hilaire as a man of like mind with himself and he expresses this to Eckermann, 2nd August, 1830, in the words: “Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire is now our ally, and with him all important followers and adherents in France. This occurrence is of inconceivable value to me and I justly rejoice at this final victory of a matter to which I have devoted my life and which is my own special concern.” Saint-Hilaire practises a mode of thought which is also that of Goethe, for he seeks to lay hold in experience of the idea of unity simultaneously with the sensible manifold. Cuvier clings to the manifold, to the particular, because in his observation of the particular the idea does not immediately arise. Saint-Hilaire had a right perception of the relation of the sensible to the idea; Cuvier had not. Therefore he describes Saint-Hilaire's all-inclusive principle as presumptive—nay even inferior. One can often experience, especially in the case of investigators of Nature, that they speak in a derogatory sense of something merely ideal, of something merely “thought.” They have no organ for the ideal, and therefore do not know its mode of working. It was because Goethe possessed this organ in a highly perfect state of development that he was led from his general world-conception to his deep insight into the nature of the living. His power of allowing the spiritual eye to work in constant living union with the eye of the body made it possible for him to behold the uniform sensible-supersensible essence which permeates organic evolution. He was also able to recognise this essence where one organ develops out of the other, and where, by its transformation, it conceals its relationship and similarity to its predecessor, even belying it, and changing, both in its function and in its form, to such a degree that no parallel, according to external characteristics, can be found with its earlier stages (cp. the essay on Joachim Jungius, Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 33.). Perception with the eye of the body imparts knowledge of the sensible and material; perception with the eye of the spirit leads to the perception of processes in human consciousness, to the observation of the world of thinking, feeling and willing; the living union of the spiritual and bodily eye makes possible the knowledge of the organic which, as a sensible-supersensible element, lies between the purely sensible and the purely spiritual.

[ 1 ] The feeling that “great works of Art are produced by men according to true and natural laws” was an ever-present stimulus to Goethe to search for these laws of artistic creation. He was convinced that the effectiveness of a work of Art must depend on a natural conformity to law that it reveals. He wishes to discover this conformity to law. He wanted to know why the highest works of Art are at the same time the loftiest productions of Nature. It became clear to him that the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws which Nature follows when they developed “the circle of divine form out of the human structure” Italian Journey, 28th Jan., 1787.). His aim is to see how Nature brings about this form in order that he may understand it in works of Art. Goethe describes how in Italy he gradually acquired an insight into the natural law of artistic creation (Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 36.). “Happily I could always hold fast to certain maxims taken from poetry, which inner feeling and long usage had preserved in me, so that as the result of an uninterrupted perception of Nature and Art, animated conversations with connoisseurs of more or less insight, and the life I continually led in the company of more or less practical or thoughtful artists, it became possible for me, though not without difficulty, gradually to analyse Art for myself without dissecting it and to become conscious of its interpenetrating elements.” But one particular element will not reveal to him the natural laws in accordance with which it is active in a work of Art, namely colour. Several pictures were “designed and composed in his presence and carefully studied according to their parts, arrangement and form.” The artists were able to tell him how they proceeded with their composition. But as soon as it came to the question of colour everything seemed to depend on caprice. No one knew what relation prevailed between colour and chiaroscuro—light and shade—or between the single colours. Nobody could tell Goethe, for instance, why yellow makes a warm, pleasant impression, why blue evokes a feeling of cold, why yellow and reddish-blue side by side produce an effect of harmony. He realised that he must first acquaint himself with the laws of the world of colour in Nature in order from there to penetrate into the secrets of colouring.

[ 2 ] The ideas concerning the physical nature of colour-phenomena which still lingered in Goethe's memory from his student days, and the scientific treatises which he consulted, alike proved fruitless for his purpose. “With the rest of the world I was convinced that all colours were contained in light; I never heard anything but this, and I never found the slightest cause for doubting it, because I had then no further interest in the matter” (Confessions of the Author. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 36.2.). When, however, his interest began to be aroused, he found that he “could evolve nothing for his purpose” out of this view. Newton was the founder of this view which Goethe found to be prevailing among Nature investigators and which, indeed, still occupies the same position to-day. According to this view, white light, as it proceeds from the sun, is composed of colours. The colours arise because the constituent parts are separated out from the white light. If we allow sunlight to enter a dark room through a small round opening, and catch it on a white screen placed perpendicular to the direction of the instreaming light, we obtain a white image of the sun. If we place between the opening and the screen a glass prism through which the light streams, then the white circular image of the sun is changed. It appears as though distorted, drawn out lengthways, and coloured. This image is called the solar spectrum. If we place the prism so that the upper portions of light have to traverse a shorter path within the mass of glass than the lower, the coloured image is extended downwards. The upper edge of the image is red, the lower, violet; the red passes downwards into yellow, the violet upwards into blue; the central portion of the image is, generally speaking, white. Only when there is a certain distance between the screen and prism does the white in the centre vanish entirely; the entire image then appears coloured, from above downwards, in the following order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Light Blue, Indigo, Violet. Newton and his followers conclude from this experiment that the colours are originally contained in the white light but intermingled with each other. They are separated from each other by the prism. They have the property of being deviated in varying degrees from their direction when passing through a transparent body, that is to say, of being refracted. The red light is refracted least, the violet most. They appear in the spectrum according to their degree of refrangibility. If we observe through a prism a narrow strip of paper on a black background this also appears deviated. It is at the same time broader and coloured at the edges. The upper edge appears violet, the lower red; the violet here also passes over into the blue and the red over into yellow; the middle is generally white. Only when there is a certain distance between the prism and the strip does this appear wholly in colours. Green again appears in the middle. Here also the white of the strip of paper is said to be resolved into its colour constituents. That all these colours appear only when there is a certain distance between the screen or strip of paper and the prism, whereas otherwise the centre is white, the Newtonians explain simply. They say: In the middle the more strongly refracted colours from the upper portion of the image coincide with those that are more weakly refracted from below, and blend to make white. The colours only appear at the edges because here into these portions of light that are more weakly refracted, no strongly refracted colours can fall from above, and into those portions that are more strongly refracted none of the more weakly refracted portions can fall from below.

[ 3 ] This is the view from which Goethe could evolve nothing useful for his purpose. He had therefore to observe the phenomena himself. He went to Büttner in Jena who lent him the apparatus with which he could make the necessary experiments. He was occupied at the time with other work and was, at Büttner's request, about to return the apparatus. Before doing so, however, he took a prism in order to look through it at a white wall. He expected that it would appear in various degrees of colour, but it remained white. Colours only appeared at those places where the white contacted dark. The window-bars appeared in the most vivid colours. From these observations Goethe thought he had discovered that the Newtonian view was false, that colours are not contained in the white light. The boundary, the darkness, must have something to do with the origin of the colours. He continued the experiments. He observed white surfaces on black, black surfaces on white backgrounds. Gradually his own view was formed. A white disc on a black background appeared distorted on looking through the prism. Goethe thought that the upper parts of the disc extend over the adjacent black of the background, whereas this background extends over the lower parts of the disc. If one now looks through the prism one perceives the black background through the upper part of the disc as through a white veil. If one looks at the lower part of the disc it appears through the overlying darkness. Above, the light is spread over the dark; below, dark over light. The upper edge appears blue, the lower, yellow. The blue passes over into violet towards the black—the yellow into red below. If the prism is moved further from the disc the coloured edges spread out, the blue downwards, the yellow upwards. At a sufficient distance the yellow from below extends over the blue from above, and green arises from their overlapping in the middle. In confirmation of this view Goethe observed a black disc on a white ground through the prism. Now dark is spread over light above, light over dark below. Yellow appears above, blue below. As the edges are extended by placing the prism farther away from the disc, the lower blue, which gradually passes over into violet in the centre, spreads over the upper yellow and the yellow, as it extends, gradually takes on a reddish shade. The colour of peach-blossom arises in the middle. Goethe says to himself: what holds good for the white disc must also hold good for the black. “If the light is there resolved into colours here also the darkness must be regarded as being resolved into colours” (Confessions of the Author. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 36.). Goethe now imparts his observations and the doubts which had grown out of them with regard to the Newtonian view to a Physicist of his acquaintance. The Physicist considered his doubts to be unfounded. He interpreted the coloured edges and the white in the centre, as well as its transition into green when the prism is removed further away from the object observed, according to Newton's view. Other Nature investigators whom Goethe approached did the same, and so he continued the observations in which he would have liked to have had assistance from trained specialists alone. He had a large prism of plate-glass constructed which he filled with pure water. He noticed that the glass prism whose cross-section is an equilateral triangle is, on account of the marked dispersion of the colours, often a hindrance to the observer; therefore he had his large prism constructed with the cross section of an isosceles triangle, the smallest angle of which was only 15 to 20 degrees. Goethe calls the experiments performed when the eye looks at an object through the prism, subjective. They present themselves to the eye but are not rooted in the outer world. He wants to add to these objective experiments. To this end he made use of the water-prism. The light shines through a prism and the colour-image is caught on a screen behind the prism. Goethe now caused the sunlight to pass through the openings in cut pasteboard. In this way he obtained an illuminated space bounded by darkness. This circumscribed beam of light passes through the prism and is refracted by this from its original direction. If one places a screen before the beam of light issuing from the prism, there arises on it an image which is, generally speaking, coloured at the edges above and below. If the prism is placed with the narrow end below, the upper edge of the image is coloured blue and the lower edge yellow. The blue passes over towards the dark space into violet, and towards the light centre into light blue; the yellow passes over towards the darkness into red. In this phenomenon, too, Goethe derived the appearance of colours from the boundary. Above, the clear light-beams radiate into the dark space; they illumine a darkness which thereby appears blue. Below, the dark space radiates into the light-beams; it darkens the light and makes it appear yellow. When the screen is moved further from the prism the coloured edges get broader, the yellow approaches the blue. Through the streaming of the blue into the yellow, when there is a sufficient distance between the screen and the prism, green appears in the middle of the image. Goethe made the instreaming of the light into the dark and of the dark into the light perceptible by agitating a cloud of fine white dust which he produced from fine, dry hair-powder along the line by which the light-beam passes through the dark space. “The more or less coloured phenomenon will now be caught up by the white atoms and presented in its whole length and breadth to the eye of the spectator” (Farbenlehre, Didactic Part., para. 326.). Goethe found that the view he had acquired of the subjective phenomena was confirmed by the objective phenomena. Colours are produced by the working together of light and darkness. The prism only serves to move light and darkness over each other.

[ 4 ] After these experiments Goethe cannot adopt the Newtonian conception. His attitude to it was the same as his attitude to Haller's Encasement Theory. Just as according to this theory the developed organism with all its parts is contained in the germ, so the Newtonians believe that the colours which appear under certain conditions in the light, are already contained in it; Goethe could use the same words against this belief which he used against the Encasement Theory, that it “is based on a mere invention, devoid of all element of sense experience, on an assumption which can never be demonstrated in the sense world” (Essay on K. Fr. Wolf. Kürschner. Nat. Lit., Bd. 33.). To Goethe colours are new formations which are developed in the light, not entities that have merely developed out of the light. He had to reject the Newtonian view because of his own mode of thinking in conformity with the idea. The Newtonian view has no knowledge of the nature of the idea. It only acknowledges what is actually present, present in the same sense as the sensible-perceptible. Where it cannot establish the reality through the senses it assumes the reality hypothetically. Because colours develop through the light, and thus must already be contained ideally within it, the Newtonians imagine that they are also actually and materially contained in it, and are only called forth by the prism and the dark border. Goethe knows, however, that idea is active in the sense-world; therefore he does not transfer what exists as idea into the realm of the actual. Idea works in inorganic just as in organic Nature, but not as sensible-supersensible form. Its external manifestation is wholly material, merely pertaining to the senses. It does not penetrate into the sensible; it does not permeate it spiritually. The processes of inorganic Nature run their course according to law, and this conformity to law presents itself to the observer as idea. If one perceives white light in one part of space and colours that arise through the light in another, a causal connection exists between the two perceptions and this can be conceived of as idea. When, however, this idea is given embodiment and transferred into space as something concrete which passes over from the object of the one perception into that of the other, this is the result of a crude mode of thinking. It was this crudeness that repelled Goethe from the Newtonian theory. It is the idea which leads over one inorganic process into another, not a concrete thing that passes from the one to the other.

[ 5 ] The Goethean world-conception can only acknowledge two sources for all knowledge of the inorganic processes of Nature: that which is sensibly perceptible in these processes and the ideal connections between the sensible-perceptible which reveal themselves to thought. The ideal connections within the sense-world are not all of the same kind. Some of these connections are immediately obvious when sense perceptions appear side by side, or after, each other, and there are others which can only be penetrated if one traces them back to others of the first kind. In the phenomenon which presents itself to the eye when it beholds darkness through light, perceiving blue, Goethe thinks he recognises a connection of the first kind between light, darkness and colour. It is just the same when light is perceived through darkness, and yellow arises. One can perceive in the border-phenomena of the spectrum a connection which becomes evident through direct observation. The spectrum which shows seven colours in a sequence from red to violet can only be understood by realising that other conditions are there as well as those which give rise to the border-phenomena. The single border-phenomena have united themselves in the spectrum into one complicated phenomenon which can only be understood if one deduces it from the basic phenomena. That which stands before the observer in the basic phenomenon in its purity, appears impure and modified in the phenomena complicated by the additional conditions. The simple facts can no longer be directly recognised. Therefore Goethe seeks everywhere to lead back the complicated phenomena to the simple and pure. To him the explanation of inorganic Nature lies in this. He goes no further back than the pure phenomenon. An ideal connection between sensible perceptions is revealed therein—a connection which is self-explanatory. Goethe calls this pure phenomenon the primary or basic phenomenon (Urphänomen). He regards it as idle speculation to think further about the primary phenomenon. “The magnet is a primary phenomenon which one need only express in order to explain it” (Prose Aphorisms. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 36.). A compound phenomenon is explained when we show how it is built up out of primary phenomena.

[ 6 ] Modern natural science sets to work differently from Goethe. It seeks to trace back processes in the sense-world to movements of the smallest parts of bodies and in order to explain these movements it makes use of the same laws which it applies to the movements which transpire visibly in space. It is the task of mechanics to explain these visible movements. When the movement of a body is observed mechanics ask: By what forces has it been set in motion? What path does it travel in a definite time? What form has the line in which it moves? It tries to present mathematically the relations between the force, the path traversed, and the form of its path. The scientist says: Red light can be traced back to the vibratory motion of the tiniest parts of a body, and this motion is propagated through space. This motion becomes comprehensible when the laws discovered in mechanics are applied to it. The science of inorganic Nature considers its goal to be a gradual and complete passing over into applied mechanics.

[ 7 ] Modern physics enquires after the number of vibrations in unit time which correspond to a definite colour. From the number of vibrations corresponding to red, and from the number corresponding to violet, it seeks to determine the physical connection of the two colours. The qualitative disappears before its gaze; it observes the spatial and time elements of processes. Goethe asks: What is the connection between red and violet when we disregard these spatial and time elements and consider only the qualitative? The Goethean mode of observation presupposes that the qualitative is also actually present in the outer world, and that it forms, with the temporal and spatial, one inseparable whole. Modern physics, on the contrary, has to proceed from the basic conception that in the outer world only the quantitative, dark and colourless processes of motion are present, and that the qualitative only arises as the effect of the quantitative, on an organism endowed with sense and mind. If this assumption were correct, the ordered connections between the qualitative could not be sought in the outer world, but would have to be deduced from the nature of sense-organs, nervous mechanism, and organs of presentation. The qualitative elements of processes would not be the object of physical investigation but of physiology and psychology. Modern natural science proceeds along the lines of this assumption. According to this view the organism translates one process of movement into the sensation of red, another process into that of violet according to the constitution of its eyes, optic nerves and brain. The external aspect of the world of colour is thus explained if the connection between the processes of movement by which this world is determined have been perceived.

[ 8 ] A proof of this view is sought in the following observation. The optic nerve experiences each external impression as the sensation (Empfindung) of light. Not only light but also a blow or pressure on the eye, an irritation of the retina by a quick movement of the eye, an electric current conducted through the head—all these things give rise to the sensation of light. Another sense (organ) experiences the same stimuli in a different way. If blows, pressure, irritation, or electric currents stimulate the skin they cause sensations of touch. Electricity excites in the ear a sensation of hearing, on the tongue one of taste. It is concluded from this that the content of sensation arising in the organism as the result of an influence from outside differs from the external processes by which it is caused. The colour red is not sensed by the organism because it is united with a corresponding process of movement outside in space, but because the eye, optic nerve and brain of the organism are so constituted that they translate a colourless process of movement into a colour. The law expressing this was called by the physiologist, Johannes Müller, who first enunciated it, the Law of the Specific-Sense-Energies.

[ 9 ] This observation only proves that the sense-and mind-endowed organism can translate the most diverse impressions into the language of the particular senses on which they fall. This does not, however, prove that the content of each sense-experience exists only within the organism. Irritation of the optic nerve causes an indefinite, wholly general stimulus which contains nothing that causes us to localise its content outside in space. The sensation arising as the result of a real impression of light is, by its content, inseparably united with the spatial-time process corresponding to it. The movement of a body and its colour are in quite the same way contents of perception. When we conceive of the movement per se we are abstracting from all else which we perceive in the body. All the other mechanical and mathematical conceptions are, like the movement, drawn from the world of perception. Mathematics and mechanics arise as the result of one portion being separated off from the content of the perceptual world and studied by itself. In reality there are no objects or processes whose content is exhausted when we have comprehended in them all the elements that can be expressed through mathematics and mechanics. All that is mathematical and mechanical is bound up with colour, warmth, and other qualities. If physics has to assume that vibrations in space, of minute dimensions and a very high velocity correspond to the perception of a colour, these movements can only be thought of as analogous to the movements which go on visibly in space. That is to say, if the corporeal world is conceived of as in motion, even to its most minute elements, it must be conceived of as endowed with colour, warmth and other qualities also down to its most minute elements. Those who regard colours, warmth, tones and so on, as qualities which only exist inwardly as the effects of external processes on the sensitive (vorstellenden) organism, must also transfer everything mathematical and mechanical connected with these qualities to within. But then there is nothing left for the outer world. The red which I see, and the light vibrations which the physicist indicates as corresponding to this red, are in reality a unity, which only the abstracting intellect can separate from each other. I should see the vibrations in space which correspond to the quality “red” as movement if my eye were organised for this. But united with the movement I should have the impression of the red colour.

[ 10 ] Modern Natural Science transfers an unreal abstraction, a vibrating substratum devoid of all perceptual qualities into space, and is astonished that it cannot understand what causes the receptive (vorstellenden) organism with its nerve apparatus and brain to translate these indifferent processes of movement into the variegated sense-world, permeated by degrees of warmth and sounds. Du Bois-Reymond assumes, therefore, that man, because of an insuperable barrier to his knowledge, will never understand how the fact: “I taste something sweet, smell the fragrance of roses, hear the tone of the organ, see red” is connected with definite movements of the tiniest molecules in the brain—movements which in their turn are caused by vibrations of tasteless, odourless, soundless and colourless elements of the external corporeal world. “It is absolutely and eternally incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of indifference to a number of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen atoms how they are placed and move, how they were placed and moved and how they will be placed and will move” (Grenzen des Naturerkennens. Leipsig, 1882. S. 35.). But there are no boundaries to knowledge here. Wherever a collection of atoms exists in space in a definite movement, there also necessarily exists a definite quality (e.g. Red). And vice-versa, wherever red appears, there the movement must exist. Only the abstracting intellect can separate the one from the other. Those who think of the movement as actually separated from the remaining content of the process to which the movement belongs, cannot rediscover the transition from the one to the other.

[ 11 ] Only what is movement in a process can again be derived from movement; that which belongs to the qualitative aspect of the world of light and colours can also only be traced back to a qualitative element within the same sphere. Mechanics leads back complicated movements to simple movements which are directly comprehensible. The theory of colours must lead back complicated colour-phenomena to simple colour phenomena which can be penetrated in the same way. A simple process of movement is just as much a primary phenomenon as the appearance of yellow from the inter-working of light and dark. Goethe knows what the primary mechanical phenomena can accomplish towards the explanation of inorganic Nature. He leads back that which is not mechanical within the corporeal world to primary phenomena which are not of a mechanical nature. Goethe has been reproached with condemning the mechanical consideration of Nature and limiting himself simply to the observation and classification of the sensible-perceptible (Cp. Harnack's Goethe in der Epoche seiner Vollendung. S. 12.). Du Bois-Reymond (Goethe und kein Ende. S. 29) finds that “Goethe's theorising limits itself to deriving other phenomena out of a primary phenomenon, as he calls it. It is rather like one shadowy picture following another without any illuminating causal connection. What was wholly lacking in Goethe was the concept of mechanical causality.” What does mechanics do, however, but derive complicated processes from simple, primary phenomena? Goethe has accomplished in the region of colour just what mechanics perform in the realm of movement. It is because Goethe does not consider all processes in inorganic Nature to be purely mechanical that he has been accused of lacking the concept of mechanical causality. His accusers merely show that they themselves err concerning the significance of mechanical causality within the corporeal world. Goethe remains within the qualitative realm of the world of light and colours. He leaves to others the quantitative and mechanical elements which can be expressed mathematically. He “endeavoured throughout to keep the theory of colours apart from mathematics, although clearly, certain points arise where the assistance of the art of measurement would be desirable. But this very want may in the end be advantageous, since it may now become the business of the ingenious mathematician himself to ascertain where the doctrine of colours is in need of his aid and how he can contribute to the complete elucidation of this branch of physics” (Farbenlehre. S. 727.). The qualitative elements of the sense of sight—light, darkness and colours—must first be understood from out of their own connections. They must be traced back to primary phenomena; then at a higher level of thought it is possible to investigate the relation existing between these connections and the quantitative, the mechanical-mathematical element in the world of light and colours.

[ 12 ] Goethe seeks to lead back the connections within the qualitative element of the world of colours to the simplest elements, just as strictly as the mathematician or mechanician does in his sphere. “We have to learn from the mathematician the careful cautiousness with which he proceeds step by step, deducing each step from the preceding one and even where we employ no calculation, we must always proceed as if we had to render account to the strictest geometrician. For it is really the mathematical method which, on account of its cautiousness and purity, immediately reveals any gap in an assertion, and its proofs are in truth only detailed affirmations that what is brought into connection has already existed in its simple parts and its entire sequence, that its whole range has been examined and found to be correct and irrefutable under all conditions” (Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 34. Versuch als Vermittler vom Subjekt und Objekt.).

[ 13 ] Goethe derives the explanatory principles for the phenomena directly from the sphere of observation. He shows how the phenomena are connected within the world of experience. He rejects conceptions which lead out of and beyond the realm of observation. All modes of explanation that overstep the field of experience by drawing in factors which, by their very nature cannot be observed, are contrary to the Goethean world-conception. Such a mode of explanation is that which seeks the nature of light in a medium which cannot itself be perceived as such but can only be observed in its mode of working as light. To this category also belong the methods which hold sway in modern natural science, where light vibrations are executed, not by the perceptible qualities revealed to the sense of sight but by the smallest parts of an imperceptible substance. To imagine that a definite colour is united with a definite process of movement in space does not contradict the Goethean world-conception. But the assertion that this process of movement belongs to a region of reality transcending experience, i.e. the world of substance which can be observed in its effects, but not in its own being, contradicts it absolutely. For an adherent of the Goethean world-conception the light vibrations are processes in space and have no other kind of reality than that which inheres in any other content of perception. They elude immediate observation not because they lie beyond the region of experience, but because the organisation of the human sense-organs is not subtle enough to have direct perception of movements so minute. If an eye were so organised that it could observe in all details the oscillations of a body occurring four hundred billion times a second, such a process would resemble a process in the crude sense-world. That is to say, the vibrating body would manifest the same properties as other objects of perception.

[ 14 ] Any explanation which derives objects and processes of experience from others lying beyond the field of experience can only attain to adequate conceptions of the realm of reality, lying beyond observation, by borrowing certain attributes from the world of experience and carrying them over to what cannot be experienced. Thus the physicist carries over hardness and impenetrability to the tiniest corporeal elements to which he also ascribes the power of attracting and repelling similar elements; on the other hand he does not ascribe to these elements, colour, warmth and other qualities. He believes that he explains a process of Nature which can be experienced by tracing it back to one that is not capable of being experienced. According to Du Bois-Reymond's view the knowledge of Nature consists in tracing back processes in the corporeal world to movements of atoms brought about by their forces of attraction and repulsion (Grenzen des Naturerkennens. 1882. S. 10.). Matter, the substance filling space, is regarded as being endowed with movement. This substance has existed from eternity, and will exist for all eternity. Matter itself does not belong to the realm of observation but lies beyond it. Du Bois-Reymond, therefore, assumes that man is incapable of knowing the nature of matter as such, and that because of this he derives the processes of the corporeal world from something whose nature will always remain unknown to him. “We shall never know more than we do to-day as to what ‘haunts’ space where matter is” (Grenzen des Naturerkennens. S. 22.). This concept of matter dissolves into nothingness before a more exact consideration. The real content given to this concept is borrowed from the world of experience. Man perceives movements within the world of experience. He feels a pull if he holds a weight in the hand, and a pressure if he places a weight on the surface of the hand held horizontally. In order to explain this perception he forms the idea of force. He imagines that the Earth attracts the weight. The force itself cannot be perceived. Its nature is ideal, but it belongs, nevertheless, to the realm of observation. The mind observes it because it beholds the ideal relations among the perceptions. Man is led to the concept of a repelling force if he presses a piece of india-rubber and then leaves it to itself. It re-assumes its former shape and size. He imagines that the compressed parts of the rubber repel each other and again assume their former volume. The mode of thinking of which we have spoken carries over conceptions which have been drawn from observation to a region of reality transcending experience. Thus it does nothing in reality but derive one experience out of another, only it places the latter arbitrarily in a region lying beyond experience. It can be shown in regard to any mode of thought which speaks of a transcendental region that it takes certain fragments from the region of experience and relegates them to a sphere of reality transcending observation. If these fragments of experience are removed from the conception of the transcendental there only remains a concept devoid of content, a negation. The explanation of any experience can only consist in tracing it back to another possible experience. Ultimately we come to elements within experience that can no longer be derived from others. These cannot be further explained because they are in no need of explanation. They contain it within themselves. Their immediate being consists in what they present to observation. To Goethe light is an element of this kind. According to his view, whoever freely perceives light in manifestation has understood it. Colours arise in light and their origin is understood if we show how they arise therein. Light itself is there in immediate perception. We know what is ideally contained in it if we observe the connection that exists between it and colours. From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception it is impossible to ask concerning the nature of light, concerning the transcendental element corresponding to the phenomenon “Light.” “It is really useless to undertake to express the essential nature of a thing; we perceive effects, and a complete history of these effects would in all cases comprise the nature of the thing.” That is to say, a complete account of the effects of an experience embraces all the phenomena which are ideally contained therein. “It would be useless to try to describe a man's character, but put together his actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will stand before us. Colours are acts of light, its active and passive modifications. In this sense we may expect from them some illumination concerning light itself” (Farbenlehre. Didactic Part. Preface.).

[ 15 ] Light presents itself to observation as “the simplest and most homogeneous, undivided entity that we know” (Correspondence with Jacobi, p. 167.). Opposed to it there is darkness. For Goethe darkness is not the complete, passive absence of light. It is something active. It opposes itself to light and interplays with it. Modern natural science regards darkness as a complete nullity. The light which streams into a dark space has, according to this modern view, no opposition from the darkness to overcome. Goethe imagines that light and darkness are related to each other like the north and south poles of a magnet. Darkness can weaken the light in its power of action. Vice-versa, light can limit the energy of darkness. Colour arises in both cases. A physical view which conceives darkness as perfect passivity cannot speak of such an inter-working. It has therefore to derive colours out of light alone. Darkness appears as a phenomenon for observation just as does light. Darkness is a content of perception in the same sense as light. The one is merely the antithesis of the other. The eye which looks out into the night mediates the real perception of darkness. If darkness were the absolute void, there would be no perception on looking out into the dark.

[ 16 ] Yellow is light toned down by darkness; blue is darkness weakened by light.

[ 17 ] The eye is adapted for transmitting to the sensitive organism the phenomena of light and colour and the relations between them. It does not function passively in this connection, but enters into living interplay with the phenomena. Goethe endeavoured to cognise the manner of this inter-working. He considers the eye to be wholly living and seeks to understand the expressions of its life. How does the eye relate itself to the individual phenomenon? How does it relate itself to the connections between phenomena? These are questions which he puts to himself. Light and darkness, yellow and blue, are opposites. How does the eye experience these opposites? It must lie in the nature of the eye that it experiences the mutual relations which exist between the single perceptions. For “the eye has to thank the light for its existence. The light calls forth out of indifferent auxiliary animal organs, an organ that is akin to itself; the eye forms itself by the light for the light, so that the inner light can meet the external light” (Farbenlehre. Didactic Part. Introduction.).

[ 18 ] Just as light and darkness are mutually opposed to each other in external Nature, similarly the two states in which the eye is placed by these two phenomena are also opposed to each other. If we keep our eyes open in a dark space a certain lack is experienced. If, however, the eye is turned to a strongly illuminated white surface it becomes incapable, for a certain time, of distinguishing moderately illuminated objects. Looking into the dark increases its receptivity; looking into the light weakens it.

[ 19 ] Every impression on the eye remains within it for a time. When we look at a black window cross against a light background, we shall, when we shut our eyes, still have the phenomenon for some time before us. If while the impression still lasts, we look at a light grey surface, the cross appears light, the panes, on the contrary, dark. A reversal of the original phenomenon thus occurs. It follows from this that the eye has been disposed by the one impression to produce the opposite out of itself. As light and darkness stand in relation to each other in the outer world, so also do the corresponding states of the eye. Goethe thinks that the region in the eye on which the dark cross fell is rested and becomes receptive to a new impression. Therefore it is that the grey surface works more intensely on it than on the rest of the eye which previously received the stronger light from the window panes. Light produces in the eye the inclination to dark, dark the inclination to light. If we hold a dark object before a light-grey surface and look fixedly at the same place when it is removed, the space it occupied appears much lighter than the remaining surface. A grey object on a dark ground appears lighter than the same object on a light ground. The eye is disposed by the dark ground to see the object lighter, and by the light to see it darker. These phenomena are indications to Goethe of the great activity of the eye, “and to the passive resistance which all that is living is forced to exhibit when any definite state is presented to it. Thus inbreathing already presupposes outbreathing, and vice-versa. The eternal formula of life is also manifest here. When darkness is presented to the eye, the eye demands light; it demands darkness when light is presented to it and manifests thereby its vitality, its fitness to grasp the object by producing from itself something that is opposed to the object” (Farbenlehre. S. 38.).

[ 20 ] Colour perceptions also evoke a reaction in the eye in a similar way to light and darkness. Let us hold a small piece of yellow paper before a moderately illuminated white surface, and look fixedly at the small yellow patch. If after a little while the paper is removed, we shall see the space which the paper had occupied as violet. The impression of yellow causes the eye to produce violet from out of itself. Similarly, blue will produce orange as reaction, and red will produce green. Thus in the eye every colour impression has a living relation to another. The states into which the eye is put by perceptions stand in a connection similar to that of the contents of these perceptions in the external world.

[ 21 ] When light and darkness work on the eye this living organ meets them with its demands; if they work on things outside in space these interact with them. Empty space has the property of transparency. It does not work on light and darkness at all. They penetrate it unhindered. It is different when space is occupied with objects. This occupation of space may be of such a kind that the eye does not perceive it because light and darkness shine through it in their original form. Then we speak of transparent objects. If light and darkness do not pass through an object unweakened, the object is designated semi-transparent. The occupation of space by a semi-transparent medium furnishes the possibility for observing light and darkness in their mutual relation. Something bright seen through a semi-transparent medium appears yellow, and something dark, blue. The medium is a material substance which is illuminated by the light. It appears dark, compared with a clearer, more intense light behind it, and bright compared with a darkness passing through it. When a semi-transparent medium is thus presented to light or darkness, then brightness and darkness are present and really work into one another.

[ 22 ] If the transparency of the medium through which the light shines gradually decreases, the yellow assumes a yellowish-red hue and finally a ruby-red colour. If the transparency of a medium through which darkness penetrates increases, the blue passes over to indigo and finally to violet. Yellow and blue are primary colours. They arise through the working-together of light or darkness with the medium. Both can assume a reddish hue, the former through decrease, the latter through increase, in the transparency of the medium. Thus red is not a primary colour. It appears as a hue of yellow or blue. Yellow, with its red shades, which deepen to pure red, stands near to light; blue with its shades is allied to darkness. If blue and yellow mingle, green arises. If blue intensified to violet mixes with yellow deepened to red, purple arises.

[ 23 ] Goethe followed up these basic phenomena in Nature. The bright sun orb seen through a haze of semi-transparent vapour appears yellow. The darkness of space seen through atmospheric vapours illuminated by the day-light presents itself as the blue of heaven. “Similarly, the mountains appear blue to us; for when we behold them at so great a distance that we no longer distinguish the local colours, and no light from their surface works on our eye, they resemble so many dark objects, which owing to the interposed vapours appear blue” (Farbenlehre. Para. 156.).

[ 24 ] Out of his deep penetration into the works of Art produced by painters, there arose in Goethe the need to understand the laws which dominate the phenomena of the sense of sight. Every painting presented him with riddles. How is the chiaroscuro related to the colours? What relations do the single colours bear to each other? Why does yellow produce a joyful, and blue a serious mood? The Newtonian doctrine of colours could yield no point of view able to elucidate these mysteries. The Newtonian theory derives all colours out of light, places them side by side in sequence, and says nothing about their relation to darkness or of their living relations to each other. Goethe was able to solve the riddles presented to him by Art by the insight he had acquired along his own paths. Yellow must possess a bright, gay, mildly stimulating character because it is the colour nearest to light. It arises through the gentlest moderation of light. Blue indicates the darkness working in it. Therefore it produces a sense of coldness, just as it “is reminiscent of shadows.” Reddish-yellow arises through the intensification of yellow towards the side of darkness. Through this intensification its energy increases; the gaiety and brightness pass over into rapture. With the further intensification of reddish-yellow into yellowish-red, the gay, cheerful feeling is transformed into the impression of power. Violet is blue striving towards light. The repose and coldness of blue hereby change into unrest. This restless feeling increases in blue-red. Pure red stands in the centre between yellowish-red and bluish-red. The violence of the yellow quietens down; the passive repose of the blue is animated. Red gives the impression of ideal satisfaction, the equalising of extremes. A feeling of satisfaction also arises through green which is a mixture of yellow and blue. The satisfaction is purer here than that produced by red because the gaiety of the yellow is not intensified and the repose of the blue not disturbed through the red shade.

[ 25 ] The eye, when confronting one colour, immediately demands another. When the eye looks at yellow the longing arises for violet; when it perceives blue it desires orange; when it looks at red it yearns for green. It is comprehensible that the feeling of satisfaction should arise, if by the side of one colour presented to the eye there is placed another which the eye desires in accordance with its nature. The law of colour harmony is an outcome of the nature of the eye. Colours which the eye demands in juxtaposition to each other work harmoniously. If two colours appear side by side, the one of which does not demand the other, then the eye is stimulated into opposition. The juxtaposition of yellow and purple has something one-sided about it, but the effect is that of brightness and magnificence. The eye demands violet by the side of yellow in order to express itself according to its nature. If purple appears in the place of violet the object asserts its claims against those of the eye. It does not accommodate itself to the demands of the organ. Juxtapositions of this kind serve to draw attention to the significance of things. They will not satisfy unconditionally but they characterise. Characteristic combinations of this kind demand colours which do not stand in complete contrast to each other, and yet do not merge directly into each other. Juxtapositions of the latter kind impart a kind of characterless element to the objects on which they occur.

[ 26 ] The origin and nature of the phenomena of light and colour were revealed to Goethe in Nature. He found the same thing again in the creations of painters, where it is raised to a higher level, translated into the spiritual. Goethe acquired a deep insight into the relation of Nature and Art as the result of his observations concerning the perceptions of sight. This may well have been in his mind when, after the conclusion of the Doctrine of Colour, he wrote concerning these observations to Frau von Stein: “I do not regret having sacrificed so much time to them. I have thereby attained an education which I could hardly have got elsewhere.”

[ 27 ] Goethe's doctrine of colour differs from that of Newton and of those physicists who build up their views on the basis of Newton's ideas, because it proceeds from a different conception of the world. Those who do not bear in mind the connection that has here been demonstrated between Goethe's general ideas of Nature and his doctrine of colour will be unable to hold any other opinion than that Goethe came to his view of colour because he had no understanding for the physicists' true methods of observation. Those who perceive this connection will also realise that within the Goethean world-conception no other doctrine of colour is possible. Goethe would have been unable to think differently about the nature of the phenomena of colour, even if all the discoveries made in this sphere since his time had been laid before him, and even if he had been able to make use of the experimental methods in their present perfection. Although he could not embody Frauenhof's lines wholly into his conception of Nature after he had become aware of their discovery, neither this nor any other discovery in the realm of optics is an objection to his conceptions. In all these things it is merely a question of so elaborating Goethe's view that these phenomena can find their place in it. It must be admitted that physicists who adhere to the Newtonian point of view can make nothing of Goethe's views of colour. That is not because they possess knowledge of phenomena which contradict Goethe's conception, but because they have grown accustomed to a view of Nature which prevents them from understanding the real aim and object of Goethe's view.

[ 1 ] Goethe's connection with the Ilmenau mine stimulated his observations of the kingdom of minerals, stones and rocks as well as the superimposed strata of the earth's crust. In July, 1776, he accompanied Duke Carl August to Ilmenau. The object of their journey was to see whether the old mine could be put into use again. Goethe gave further attention to this matter of the mine, and as a result he felt more and more the desire to know how Nature proceeds in the formation of stony and mountainous masses. He climbed high summits and crept into clefts in the earth in order “to discover the nearest traces of the great shaping hand.” He told Frau von Stein of his joy at learning to know creative Nature from this side also, writing from Ilmenau, 8th September, 1780: “I am now living with body and soul in stone and mountains and am overjoyed at the wide perspectives opening out before me. These last two days have revealed to me a new territory and may lead to important results. The world has now assumed for me a new, a gigantic aspect.” More and more there established itself in him the hope that he would succeed in spinning a thread which could lead through subterranean labyrinths and afford perspective amid the confusion. (Letter to Frau von Stein, 12th June, 1784.) Goethe gradually extended his observations over wider regions of the earth's surface. He believed that his travels in the Harz mountains had afforded him the knowledge of how great, inorganic masses were formed. He ascribes to these inorganic masses the tendency “to break in various directions, so that parallelepipeds arise which in their turn have the tendency to split diagonally” (Cp. The Formation of large Inorganic Masses. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd. 34.). He thinks of the stony masses as being interwoven by an ideal, six-sided trellis-work. Cubic, parallelepiped, rhombic, rhomboidal, columnar and laminated bodies are thereby formed out of a basic mass. He conceives of forces at work within the basic mass which separate it in the way illustrated by this ideal trellis-work. Goethe seeks this active idea in the kingdom of stone as well as in organic Nature. Here also he investigates with the eye of the spirit. Where this separation into regular forms does not actually appear he conceives of it as existing ideally in the masses. On a journey to the Harz mountains which he undertook in 1784, he asks Councillor Kraus, who accompanied him, to execute chalk drawings in which the invisible ideal is elucidated and made perceptible through the visible. He is of the opinion that the real can only be truly represented by the draughtsman if he heeds the intentions of Nature, which do not often appear sufficiently clearly in the external phenomenon.

“In the transition from the soft to the solid state, this separation occurs, which either affects the entire mass or else is confined to its inner parts” (Essay on Mountain Formation: General and Specific. Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 34.). According to Goethe's view a sensible-supersensible archetype is livingly present in the organic forms; an ideal element enters into the sensible perception and permeates it. In the regular formation of inorganic masses, however, there is working an idea which does not enter the sensible form as such, but nevertheless creates a sensible form. The inorganic form is not sensible-supersensible in its appearance, but only sensible; it must, however, be understood as the effect of a supersensible force. The inorganic form is a transition between the inorganic process, the course of which is still dominated by an idea although it receives from the idea no finished form, and the organic process in which the idea itself becomes sensible form.

[ 2 ] Goethe thinks that the formation of compound rocks is brought about by the substances, which originally existed ideally in a mass only, becoming actually separated from each other. In a letter to Leonhard, 25th November, 1807, he writes: “Thus I willingly admit that I often perceive simultaneous operations where others see only a succession. In many a rock which others regard as a conglomerate, as a heap of fragments gathered and cemented together, I think I see a rock, divided and broken out of a heterogeneous mass, and then held firmly together by consolidation.”

[ 3 ] Goethe did not succeed in making these thoughts fruitful in regard to a large number of inorganic forms. It is in accordance with his mode of thinking to explain the arrangement of geological strata out of ideal formative principles which inhere in substances according to their nature. He could not agree with the geological views of Werner, which were very general at that time, because Werner did not recognise any such formative principles, but traced everything back to the purely mechanical action of water. Still more alien to Goethe was the Plutonic theory brought forward by Hutton, and maintained by Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, and others, which explained the development of separate earth periods by revolutions brought about by material causes. According to this conception, great mountain systems may suddenly shoot up from out of the earth as the result of volcanic forces. Such colossal accomplishments of force seemed to Goethe contrary to Nature. He saw no reason why the laws of earthly evolution should suddenly change at certain times, and after a long period of graded activity should burst out through processes of “heaving, pressing, rolling, crushing, hurling and flinging.” Nature appeared to him consistent in all her parts, so that even a God could make no change in the laws innate in her. He regarded Nature's laws as unchangeable. The forces active to-day in the formation of the earth's surface must have worked at all times.

[ 4 ] This point of view leads him to a natural conception of the way in which the masses of rock distributed in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Geneva have come into position, and which, to judge by their constitution, have been separated off from distant mountains. He was confronted by the opinion that these rocks had been thrown into their present position by the tumultuous rise of mountains lying far off. Goethe tried to discover forces which can be observed to-day and which are able to explain this phenomenon. He found such forces active in the formulation of glaciers. He only had now to assume that the glaciers, which to-day still move rock from mountains into the plains, were once immeasurably greater in extent than at present. At that time they removed rocks much further from the mountains than at present. As the glaciers receded these rocks were left behind. Goethe thought that the granite blocks lying around in the lowlands of North Germany must have reached their present abode in an analogous way. In order to imagine that the regions covered by these erratic masses were once covered by glacier-ice, he had to assume the existence of an epoch of intense cold. This assumption became the common property of science through Agassiz, who arrived at it independently, and in 1837 laid it before the Swiss Society for Natural Research. In recent times, this cold epoch which broke over the continents of the earth after a rich animal and plant life had already developed, has become the pet study of eminent geologists. The details which Goethe brings forward concerning the phenomena of this “Ice Age” are unimportant in the face of observations made by later investigators.

[ 5 ] Just as Goethe was led by his general view of Nature to the assumption of an epoch of intense cold, so he was led to a correct view of the nature of fossils. It is true that earlier thinkers had already recognised, in these formations, relics of organisms of former ages. This correct view, however, was so long in becoming general that we find Voltaire still regarding the petrified shell-fish as freaks of Nature. After some experience in this sphere Goethe soon recognised that the petrified remains of organisms stand in a natural connection with the strata in which they are found. That means that these organisms lived in the epochs of the earth in which the corresponding strata were formed. He speaks about fossils in this sense in a letter to Merck, 27th October, 1782: “I am fully convinced that all the bony fragments of which you speak, and which are found everywhere in the upper sand of the earth, originate in the most recent epoch, but this, compared with our ordinary reckoning of time, is very ancient. In this epoch the sea had already receded; on the other hand streams still flowed in broad beds, yet comparatively at the level of the sea, not faster and perhaps not even so fast as now. At the same time the sand, mixed with lime, was deposited in all broad valleys, which gradually, as the sea sank, were forsaken by the water, the rivers digging only small beds in the middle of them. At that time the elephant and the rhinoceros had their home with us on the barren mountains, and their remains could easily have been washed down by the woodland streams into those great river valleys or lake plains where, permeated with rocky sediment, they were preserved to a greater or less degree and where we now dig them up with the plough, or accidentally in some way. I said before that in this way one finds them in the upper sand, that is to say in the sand that has been swept together by other rivers when the main crust of the earth was already fully formed. The time will soon come when fossils will no longer be mixed up together but will be classified in accordance with the corresponding epochs of the world.”

[ 6 ] Goethe has often been called a precursor of the Geology founded by Lyell. Geology no longer assumes mighty revolutions or catastrophes in order to explain the origin of one earth period out of the other. It traces former changes of the earth's surface back to the same processes still occurring to-day. We must not, however, ignore the fact that modern geology applies merely physical and chemical forces to explain the formation of the earth. Goethe, on the contrary, assumes formative forces operative within the rocks, and which represent a type of formative principles higher than those recognised by physics and chemistry.