The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Worldview of the Greek Thinkers

[ 1 ] In Pherekydes of Syros, who lived in the sixth century before Christ, a personality appears within Greek intellectual life in whom one can observe the birth of what will be called "world and life views" in the following remarks. On the one hand, what he has to say about the questions of the world still resembles the mythical and pictorial representations of a time before the striving for a scientific world view; on the other hand, imagination through the image, through the myth, struggles through to a contemplation that wants to penetrate the riddles of existence and the position of man in the world through thoughts. He still presents the earth under the image of a winged oak, on which Zeus drapes the surface of land, sea, rivers etc. like a fabric; he imagines the world to be interwoven with spiritual beings, of which Greek mythology speaks. But he also speaks of three origins of the world: of Chronos, of Zeus and of Chthon.

[ 2 ] There has been much discussion in the history of philosophy about what is to be understood by these three origins of Pherekydes. Since the historical accounts of what he wanted to portray in his work "Heptamychos" contradict each other, it is understandable that opinions differ on this subject even today. Anyone who looks at what has been historically handed down about Pherekydes can get the impression that the beginning of philosophical reflection can be observed in him, but that this observation is difficult because his words must be taken in a sense that is far removed from the thinking habits of the present and which must first be sought.

[ 3 ] The second edition of this book, which is intended to give a picture of the world- and life-views of the nineteenth century, is preceded by a brief description of the preceding world- and life-views, insofar as these world-views are based on a conceptual understanding of the world. This is done out of the feeling that the ideas of the previous century reveal themselves better in their inner meaning when they are not only taken for themselves, but when the thought-lights of the preceding times fall on them. Naturally, however, not all the "evidence" that must serve as a basis for this brief sketch can be recorded in such an "introduction". (If the writer of these remarks is ever permitted to turn the sketch into a book in its own right, then it will become apparent that the corresponding "evidence" is indeed available. Nor does the author doubt that others who want to see a suggestion in this sketch will find the "evidence" in the historical record.)

[ 4 ] Pherekydes arrives at his view of the world in a different way than one had arrived at it before him. What is significant about him is that he perceives man as an animated being in a different way than was the case before him. For the earlier world view, the term "soul" did not yet have the meaning that it acquired for the later views of life. Pherekydes also did not yet have the same idea of the soul as the thinkers who followed him. He first perceives the soul of man, whereas the later thinkers speak of it clearly in thought and want to characterize it. The people of early times did not yet separate their own human soul experience from natural life. They do not place themselves next to nature as a special being; they experience themselves in nature, as they experience thunder and lightning, the drifting of the clouds, the movement of the stars, the growth of plants. What moves the hand on one's own body, what sets the foot on the earth and makes it advance, belongs for prehistoric man to a region of world forces which also cause the lightning and the driving of the clouds, which cause all external events. What this person feels can be expressed in something like this: Something makes lightning flash, thunder, rain, moves my hand, makes my foot advance, moves the air I breathe, turns my head. When one expresses such a realization, one must use such words, which may seem exaggerated at first glance. But only through the seemingly exaggerated-sounding word can the correct fact be fully perceived. A man who has a conception of the world such as is meant here, feels in the rain which falls to the earth a power at work which must at present be called "spiritual," and which is similar to that which he feels when he sets out on this or that personal activity. It may be of interest to find this mode of conception again in Goethe, in his younger years, naturally in that shade which it must have in a personality of the eighteenth century. One can read in Goethe's essay "Nature": "She (Nature) has brought me in, she will also lead me out. I trust myself to her. She may change with me. She will not hate her work. I did not speak of her. No, what is true and what is false, she has spoken everything. All is her fault, all her merit."

[ 5 ] One can only speak as Goethe speaks if one feels one's own being within the whole of nature and expresses this feeling through thoughtful contemplation. Prehistoric man felt as he thought, without his soul experience forming itself into thought. He did not yet experience the thought; but instead of the thought, the image (symbol) was formed in his soul. The observation of the development of mankind leads back to a time in which the mental experiences were not yet born, but in which the image (symbol) came to life within the human being, just as the thought comes to life in the later living human being when he observes the processes of the world. The life of thought arises for man at a certain time; it brings the previous experience of the world in images to extinction.

[ 6 ] For the habits of thought of our time, it seems acceptable to imagine: in prehistoric times men observed the processes of nature, wind and weather, the germination of the seed, the course of the stars, and added to these processes spiritual entities, as the active agents; whereas it is far from the present consciousness to recognize that the man of prehistoric times experienced the images in the same way as the later man experienced the thoughts as mental reality.

[ 7 ] One will gradually recognize that in the course of human development a transformation of human organization has taken place. There was a time when the subtle organs were not yet developed in human nature which make it possible to develop an inner, separate thought life; at that time man had the organs which presented him with his co-experience with the world in images.

[ 8 ] When this is recognized, a new light will fall on the meaning of myth on the one hand and also on that of poetry and thought life on the other. When the inwardly independent thought-experience appeared, it extinguished the earlier image-experience. Thought emerged as the instrument of truth. In it, however, only one branch of the old image-experience lived on, which had created its expression in myth. In another branch the extinguished image-experience lived on, albeit in a pale form, in the creations of fantasy, of poetry. Poetic imagination and intellectual worldview are the two children of the one mother, the old pictorial experience, which must not be confused with the poetic experience.

[ 9 ] The essential thing that matters is the transformation of the finer organization of the human being. This was brought about by the life of thought. In art, in poetry, it is naturally not the thought as such that works; the image continues to work. But it now has a different relationship to the human soul than it had in the form in which it was still formed as a cognitive image. As thought itself, the experience of the soul only appears in the world view; the other branches of human life form themselves in a different way accordingly when thought becomes dominant in the field of cognition.

[ 10 ] The progress of human development thus characterized is connected with the fact that from the appearance of thought-experience man had to feel himself in a quite different sense as a separate being, as a "soul", than was formerly the case. The "image" was experienced in such a way that one felt: it is in the outer world as reality, and one experiences this reality with it, one is connected with it. With the "thought" as well as with the poetic image, man feels separated from nature; he feels himself in the thought-experience as something that nature cannot experience in the way he experiences it. The clear perception of the contrast between nature and soul becomes more and more apparent.

[ 11 ] In the various cultures of the peoples, the transition from the old image-experience to the thought-experience has taken place at different times. In Greece, this transition can be observed by looking at the personality of Pherekydes. He lives in a world of imagination in which image-experience and thought still have an equal share. His three basic ideas, Zeus, Chronos, Chthon, can only be imagined in such a way that the soul, in experiencing them, simultaneously feels that it belongs to the events of the outside world. We are dealing with three experienced images and can only come to terms with them if we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by anything that our current habits of thought would like to imagine.

[ 12 ] Chronos is not time as we currently imagine it. Chronos is a being that can be called "spiritual" in today's parlance, if one is aware that one is not exhausting the meaning. Chronos lives, and his activity is the consumption, the consumption of the life of another being, Chthon. In nature Chronos rules, in man Chronos rules; in nature and man Chronos consumes Chthon. It makes no difference whether one experiences the consumption of chthon by Chronos inwardly or sees it outwardly in the processes of nature. For the same thing happens in both areas. Connected with these two beings is Zeus, who in the sense of Pherekydes may no more be imagined as a divine being in the sense of the current conception of mythology than as mere "space" in today's sense, although he is the being who creates what takes place between Chronos and Chthon into a spatial, extended form.

[ 13 ] The interaction of Chronos, Chthon, Zeus in the sense of Pherekydes is experienced directly in the image, as the idea of eating is experienced; but it is also experienced in the outside world, as the idea of the blue or red color is experienced. This experience can be imagined in the following way. Let us look at the fire that consumes things. Chronos lives in the activity of fire, of warmth. Whoever looks at the fire in its activity and does not yet have the independent thought, but the image, looks at Chronos. He sees "time" with the effectiveness of fire, not with the sensual fire. There is no other concept of time before the birth of thought. What we currently call "time" is an idea that was only formed in the age of the intellectual world view. If you look at water, not as it is as water, but as it transforms into air or steam, or at the dissolving clouds, you experience in the image the power of "Zeus", the spatially effective expander; you could also say: the "radiant" expander. And if you look at water as it becomes solid, or solid as it forms into liquid, you see chthon. Chthon is something that later became "matter", "substance" in the age of intellectual worldviews; Zeus became "ether" or "space"; Chronos became "time".

[ 14 ] Through the interaction of these three primordial causes, the world is created in the sense of Pherekydes. Through this interaction, the sensual material worlds are created on the one hand: Fire, Air, Water, Earth; on the other, a sum of invisible, supersensible spiritual beings that animate the four material worlds. Zeus, Chronos, Chthon are beings to whom the expressions "spirit, soul, matter" can be applied, but their meaning is only approximate. It is only through the combination of these three primordial beings that the more material realms of fire, air, water and earth and the more spiritual and mental (supersensible) beings come into being. Using an expression from later world views, Zeus can be called the "space-ether", Chronos the "time-creator" and Chthon the "substance-provider", the three "primordial mothers" of the world. They can still be seen in Goethe's "Faust", in the scene of the second part where Faust makes his way to the "mothers".

[ 15 ] Just as these three primal beings appear in Pherekydes, they point back to the ideas of predecessors of this personality, to the so-called Orphics. These are confessors of a type of imagination that still lives entirely in the old pictorial nature. They also have three primordial beings, Zeus, Chronos and Chaos. Alongside these three "primordial mothers", those of Pherekydes are one degree less figurative. Pherekydes tries to grasp more through the life of thought what the Orphics still held completely in the image. This is why he appears as the personality in whom one can speak of the "birth of the life of thought". This is expressed not so much by Pherekydes' conceptual formulation of the Orphic ideas as by a certain basic mood of his soul, which can be found in a similar way in many of Pherekydes' philosophizing successors in Greece. Pherekydes feels compelled to see the origin of things in the "good" (Arizon). He could not associate this concept with the "mythical worlds of the gods" of ancient times. The beings of this world had soul characteristics that were not compatible with this concept. Pherekydes could only conceive of the concept of the "good", of perfection, in his three "primordial reasons".

[ 16 ] This has to do with the fact that the birth of the life of thought was associated with a shattering of mental perception. One should not overlook this mental experience where the mental world view has its beginning. One could not have felt any progress in this beginning if one had not believed to grasp something more perfect with the thought than was achieved with the old picture-experience. It is quite natural that within this stage of the development of the world-view the sensation meant here was not clearly expressed. What was felt, however, was what can now be clearly expressed, looking back to the ancient Greek thinkers. It was felt that the images experienced by the immediate ancestors did not lead to the highest, the most perfect primal grounds. These images only revealed less perfect primal causes. Thought must rise to the still higher primal causes, of which the things seen in images are only the creatures.

[ 17 ] Through the progress to the life of thought, the world fell apart for the imagination into a more natural and a more spiritual sphere. In this spiritual sphere, which was only now perceived, one had to feel what had formerly been experienced in images. To this was now added the idea of something higher, which is thought to be sublime above this older spiritual world and above nature. The thought wanted to penetrate to this sublime. In the region of this sublime, Pherekydes searches for his "three primeval mothers". A glance at the phenomena of the world can illustrate the nature of the ideas that took hold in a personality like Pherekydes. In his environment, man finds a harmony underlying all phenomena, as expressed in the movements of the stars, in the course of the seasons with the blessings of plant growth, etc. The inhibiting, destructive forces interfere with this blessed course of things, as they express themselves in the harmful effects of the weather, in earthquakes, etc. Whoever looks at all this can be led to a duality of the ruling powers. But the human soul requires the assumption of an underlying unity. It feels naturally: the devastating hail, the destructive earthquake, they must ultimately come from the same source as the blessed order of the seasons. In this way, man looks through good and bad to a primal good. The same good force is at work in the earthquake as in the blessing of spring. In the drying, desolating heat of the sun the same entity is at work that brings the seed to maturity. So the "good original mothers" are also in the harmful facts. When man feels this, a tremendous riddle of the world presents itself to his soul. Pherekydes looks to his Ophioneus to solve it. Drawing on ancient imagery, Ophioneus appears to him as a kind of "world serpent". In reality, this is a spirit being which, like all other world beings, belongs to the children of Chronos, Zeus and Chthon, but which has changed after its creation in such a way that its effects are directed against the effects of the "good original mothers". Thus, however, the world disintegrates into a trinity. The first are the "primeval mothers", who are portrayed as good, as perfect, the second are the beneficial world processes, the third are the destructive or only imperfect world processes, which wind themselves into the beneficial effects as Ophioneus.

[ 18 ] In Pherekydes, Ophioneus is not merely a symbolic idea for the inhibiting, destructive powers of the world. With his imagination, Pherekydes stands on the border between image and thought. He does not think: there are devastating powers, I imagine them under the image of Ophioneus. Nor is such a thought process present in him as an imaginative activity. He looks at the inhibiting forces, and Ophioneus immediately stands before his soul, just as the red color stands before the soul when the gaze is cast upon the rose.

[ 19 ] Whoever sees the world only as it presents itself to image perception does not initially distinguish in thought between the processes of the "good primordial mothers" and those of Ophioneus. The necessity of this distinction is felt on the border to the intellectual world view. For it is only with this progress that the soul feels itself to be a separate, independent being. It feels that it must ask itself: Where do I myself come from? And it must seek its origin in the depths of the world, where Chronos, Zeus and Chthon did not yet have their adversary beside them. But the soul also feels that at first it can know nothing of its origin. For it sees itself in the midst of the world in which the "good primeval mothers" work together with Ophioneus; it feels itself in a world in which the perfect and the imperfect are bound together. Ophioneus is intertwined with her own being.

[ 20 ] You can feel what was going on in the souls of individual personalities in the sixth century before Christ if you let the characterized feelings have an effect on you. Such souls felt entangled in the imperfect world with the old mythical gods. These divine beings belonged to the same imperfect world as they themselves. Such a mood gave rise to a spiritual association such as the one founded by Pythagoras from Samos between 540 and 500 BC in Kroton in Greater Greece. Pythagoras wanted to lead the people who professed faith in him back to the feeling of the "good primeval mothers", in whom the origin of their souls was to be presented. In this respect, it can be said that he and his disciples wanted to serve "other" gods than the people. And thus there was what must appear to be the break between such spirits as Pythagoras and the people. The people felt comfortable with their gods; he had to relegate these gods to the realm of the imperfect. This is also the "secret" which is spoken of in connection with Pythagoras and which could not be revealed to those who were not initiated. It consisted in the fact that his thinking had to attribute a different origin to the human soul than to the souls of the gods of popular religion. The numerous attacks that Pythagoras experienced can ultimately be traced back to this "secret". How was he to make it clear to others than those whom he had first carefully prepared for such knowledge that "as souls" they could even in a certain sense regard themselves as superior to the popular gods? And how else than in a covenant with a strictly regulated way of life could it be achieved that the souls became aware of their high origin and yet felt entangled in imperfection. The latter feeling was to generate the striving to organize life in such a way that it would lead back to its origin through self-perfection. It is understandable that legends and myths had to form around Pythagoras' aspirations. It is also understandable that almost nothing is known about the true significance of this personality. However, anyone who observes the legends and legendary traditions of antiquity about Pythagoras in context will recognize the picture just given from them.

[ 21 ] In the image of Pythagoras, contemporary thought still feels the disturbing idea of the so-called "transmigration of souls". It seems childish when Pythagoras is even said to have said that he knew that he had already been on earth as another human being in earlier times. It may be recalled that the great representative of the more recent Enlightenment, Lessing, in his "Education of the Human Race", renewed this idea of man's repeated lives on earth from a completely different way of thinking than that of Pythagoras. Lessing could only imagine the progress of the human race in such a way that human souls participate repeatedly in life in successive periods on earth. A soul brings with it into the life of a later period what it has retained from its experience in earlier periods. Lessing finds it natural that the soul has often been there in its earthly life and will often be there in the future, thus working its way from life to life to the perfection possible for it. He points out that this idea of repeated earthly lives should not be considered implausible because it was present in the earliest times, "because the human mind, before the sophistry of the school had dispersed and weakened it, immediately fell for it".

[ 22 ] This idea is present in Pythagoras. But it would be a mistake to believe that he, like Pherekydes, who is mentioned in antiquity as his teacher, devoted himself to it because he thought logically that the path indicated above, which the human soul has to go through to its origin, can only be reached in repeated earthly lives. To attribute such intellectual thinking to Pythagoras would be to misjudge him. We are told of his long journeys. It is said that he met with sages who preserved traditions of the oldest human insight. Whoever observes what has been handed down from the oldest human ideas can come to the conclusion that the view of repeated earthly lives was widespread in primeval times. Pythagoras drew on the primal teachings of mankind. The mythical teachings of his surroundings must have seemed to him like decayed views which came from older, better ones. In his age these pictorial doctrines had to be transformed into an intellectual view of the world. But this intellectual world-view appeared to him to be only a part of the life of the soul. This part had to be deepened; then it led the soul to its origins. But by penetrating in this way, the soul discovers in its inner experience the repeated earth lives as a soul perception. It does not reach its origins if it does not find the way to them through repeated earthly lives. Just as a wanderer who goes to a distant place naturally passes through other places on his way, so the soul, when it goes to the "mothers", passes through its previous lives, through which it has descended from its existence in the "perfect" to its present life in the "imperfect". If one takes everything into consideration, one cannot but attribute the view of repeated earth lives to Pythagoras in this sense, as his inner perception, and not as something conceptually understood. Now the view that all things are based on "the numbers" is spoken of as particularly characteristic of Pythagoras' belief. When this is mentioned, it must be taken into account that Pythagoreanism continued into later times, even after Pythagoras' death. Of later Pythagoreans, Philolaus, Archytas and others are mentioned. In ancient times it was known of them in particular that they "regarded things as numbers". However, even if this does not seem historically possible, this view can be traced back to Pythagoras. One may only make the assumption that it was deeply and organically rooted in his whole way of thinking, but that it took on an externalized form with his successors. Imagine Pythagoras standing in his mind before the emergence of the intellectual world view. He saw how thought takes its origin in the soul after it, starting from the "primordial mothers", had descended through successive lives to its imperfection. Sensing this, he could not wish to ascend to the origins through mere thought. He had to seek the highest knowledge in a sphere in which thought had nothing to do. There he found a super-thought life of the soul. Just as the soul experiences ratios in the tones of music, so Pythagoras lived into a spiritual coexistence with the world, which the mind can express in numbers; but the numbers for the experience are nothing other than what the tone ratios found by the physicist are for the experience of music. For Pythagoras, thought has to take the place of the mythical gods; but through corresponding deepening, the soul, which has separated itself from the world with thought, finds itself again in one with the world. It experiences itself as not separated from the world. However, this is not in a region in which the experience of the world becomes a mythical image, but in such a region in which the soul resonates with the invisible, sensually imperceptible world harmonies and brings to consciousness within itself that which it does not want, but which the powers of the world want and allow to become imagined in it.

[ 23 ] Pherekydes and Pythagoras reveal how the worldview experienced in thought originates in the human soul. In wrestling out of older types of conception, these personalities come to an inner, independent grasp of the "soul", to distinguish it from external "nature". What is illustrated in these two personalities, the wrestling of the soul out of the old pictorial conceptions, takes place more in the soul-underground with the other thinkers, with whom the beginning is usually made in the description of the development of the Greek world-view. They are usually mentioned first Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC), Anaximander (611-550 BC), Anaximenes (who had his heyday between 585 and 525 BC) and Heraclitus (around 540-480 BC at Ephesus).

[ 24 ] Whoever acknowledges the preceding remarks will be able to approve of a depiction of these personalities that must differ from the one commonly used in historical descriptions of philosophy. These descriptions are always based on the unspoken premise that these personalities arrived at the assertions they handed down through an imperfect observation of nature: Thales that the fundamental and original nature of all things is to be sought in "water", Anaximander in the "unlimited", Anaximenes in "air", Heraclitus in "fire".

[ 25 ] This does not take into account that these personalities are still living in the process of the emergence of the intellectual world view; that although they feel the independence of the human soul to a higher degree than Pherekydes, they have not yet completed the completely strict separation of the life of the soul from the workings of nature. For example, one will certainly misconceive Thales if one thinks that he, as a merchant, mathematician, astronomer, thought about natural processes and then, in an imperfect way, but still like a modern scientist, summarized his findings in the sentence: "Everything comes from water". In those ancient times, being a mathematician, astronomer, etc. meant practically dealing with the relevant things, in the manner of a craftsman who relied on tricks, not on intellectual and scientific knowledge.

[ 26 ] In contrast, for a man like Thales it must be assumed that he experienced the external processes of nature in a similar way to the internal processes of the soul. What presented itself to him as natural processes in the processes with and in the water - the liquid, mud-like, earthy-image-like - was the same to him as what he experienced inwardly in his soul and body. To a lesser degree than the people of prehistoric times, however, he experienced the effect of water in himself and in nature, and both were an expression of power to him. It may be pointed out that a later period still thought of the external effects of nature in their relation to the internal processes, so that there was no question of a "soul" in the present sense, existing separately from the body. In the view of the temperaments this point of view is still retained in an echo into the times of the intellectual world view. The melancholic temperament was called earthy, the phlegmatic watery, the sanguine airy, the choleric fiery. These are not mere allegories. One did not feel a completely separate soul; one experienced within oneself a soul-body as a unity, and in this unity the stream of forces which, for example, pass through a phlegmatic soul, just as the same forces pass outside in nature through the effects of water. And these external water effects were seen as the same as what one experienced in the soul when one was in a phlegmatic mood. Current habits of thought must adapt to the old ways of thinking if they want to penetrate the soul life of earlier times.

[ 27 ] And so one will find in the world view of Thales the expression of what his soul life, which is related to the phlegmatic temperament, allows him to experience inwardly. He experienced within himself what appeared to him as the world mystery of water. The reference to a person's phlegmatic temperament is associated with a bad connotation. As justified as this is in many cases, it is also true that the phlegmatic temperament, when it occurs together with the energy of imagination, makes a person a wise man through his calmness, freedom from emotion and lack of passion. Such a disposition in Thales probably caused him to be celebrated by the Greeks as one of their sages.

[ 28 ] The world view was formed in a different way for Anaximenes, who experienced the sanguine mood within himself. One of his sayings has come down to us that directly shows how he perceived his inner experience with the air element as an expression of the mystery of the world: "Just as our soul, which is a breath, holds us together, so air and breath embrace the universe."

[ 29 ] Heraklit's world view must be perceived by an unbiased observer as an immediate expression of his choleric inner life. A look at his life will shed some light on this thinker in particular. He belonged to one of the noblest families of Ephesus. He became a fierce opponent of the democratic party. He did so because certain views came to him, the truth of which presented itself to him in his immediate inner experience. The views of those around him, measured against his own, seemed to him, quite naturally, to directly prove the folly of this environment. He was so conflicted by this that he left his home town and led a solitary life at the Temple of Artemis. Here are a few sentences that have come down to us from him: "It would be good if all the Ephesians who are adults would arise and hand over their city to the minors ...", or the other where he says of the people: "Fools in their lack of understanding, even when they hear the truth, are like the deaf; of them it is true: they are absent when they are present." An inner experience that expresses itself in such choleric behavior is related to the consuming work of the fire; it does not live in comfortable, calm existence; it feels at one with the "eternal becoming". Such a soul experiences stagnation as absurdity; "everything flows" is therefore the famous sentence of Heraclitus. It is only apparent when a persistent being appears somewhere; one will reproduce a Heraclitean feeling if one says the following: The stone seems to represent a closed, persistent being; but this is only apparent: it is wildly moving inside, all its parts act on each other. Heraclitus' way of thinking is usually characterized by the sentence: one cannot step into the same stream twice, for the second time the water is different. And a disciple of Heraclitus, Cratylus, enhanced the saying by saying that you cannot step into the same stream even once. So it is with all things; while we are looking at what seems to persist, it has already become something else in the general stream of existence.

[ 30 ] One does not consider a world-view in its full significance if one accepts only its thought content; its essence lies in the mood which it communicates to the soul; in the vitality which arises from it. One must feel how Heraclitus feels himself in the stream of becoming with his own soul, how the world-soul pulsates with him in the human soul and communicates its own life to it when the human soul knows itself to be alive in it. Heraclitus' thought arises from this co-experience with the world soul: What lives has death in it through the continuous stream of becoming; but death has life in it again. Life and death are in our living and dying. Everything has everything else in itself; only in this way can eternal becoming flow through everything. "The sea is the purest and most impure water, drinkable and wholesome to fish, undrinkable and corrupting to man." "The same is life and death, waking, sleeping, young, old, this changing is that, that again this." "Good and evil are one." "The straight path and the crooked ... are but one."

[ 31 ] Anaximander appears freer from the inner life, more devoted to the element of thought itself. He sees the origin of things in a kind of world ether, an indeterminate, shapeless primordial being that has no boundaries. Take the Zeus of Pherekydes, strip him of everything that is still inherent in his imagery, and you have the primordial being of Anaximander: Zeus who has become thought. In Anaximander a personality appears in which the life of thought is born out of the mood of the soul, which still has its temperamental shades in the aforementioned thinkers. Such a personality feels united as a soul with the life of thought and thus not as fused with nature as the soul which does not yet experience thought as independent. It feels connected with a world order that lies above the processes of nature. When Anaximander speaks of the fact that humans first lived as fish in the wet and then developed through land animal forms, this means for him that the spirit germ, as which man recognizes himself through thought, has only passed through the other forms as through preliminary stages in order to finally give itself the form that is appropriate to it from the outset.

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[ 32 ] Following the thinkers mentioned for the historical account are: Xenophanes of Colophon (born in the 6th century BC. ); mentally related to him, albeit younger: Parmenides (born around 540 BC; lived as a teacher in Athens); Zenon of Elea (whose heyday was around 500 BC); Melissos of Samos (who lived around 450 BC).

[ 33 ] In these thinkers the intellectual element already lives to such a degree that they demand a world view and recognize truth in such a world view alone, in which the life of thought is fully satisfied. How must the primordial ground of the world be constituted so that it can be fully received within thought? they ask. Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot exist before thought; he therefore rejects them. His god must be able to be thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is afflicted with qualities that do not correspond to thought, which must seek the permanent. Therefore, God is the unchanging, eternal unity of all things that can be grasped in thought. Parmenides sees in external nature, which the senses observe, the untrue, the deceptive; in the unity, the imperishable, which thought grasps, only the true. Zenon seeks to deal with the experience of thought in such a way that he points out the contradictions that arise from a view of the world that sees a truth in the change of things, in the becoming, in the many things that the external world shows. Of the contradictions to which he refers, only one should be mentioned. He says that the fastest runner (Achilles) cannot reach the tortoise; for however slowly it crawls, by the time Achilles has reached the place it had just occupied, it is already a little further on. By such contradictions Zeno indicates how an imagination that clings to the outside world cannot come to terms with itself; he points to the difficulty that thought encounters when it tries to find the truth. One will recognize the significance of this world view, which is called the Eleatic (Parmenides and Zeno are from Elea), if one focuses on the fact that its bearers are so far advanced in the development of the experience of thought that they have shaped this experience into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In this "art of thought" the soul learns to feel itself in its independence and inner unity. Thus the reality of the soul is felt as what it is through its own being, and as what it feels itself to be through the fact that it no longer, as in prehistoric times, lives the general world-experience, but unfolds in itself a life of thought-experience which is rooted in it, and through which it can feel itself implanted in a purely spiritual world-ground. At first this feeling does not yet find expression in a clearly expressed thought, but it can be felt as a living feeling in this age by the esteem in which it is held. According to one of Plato's "Conversations", Parmenides told the young Socrates that he should learn the art of thought from Zeno, otherwise the truth would remain distant from him. This "art of thought" was perceived as a necessity for the human soul that wants to approach the spiritual foundations of existence.

[ 34 ] Whoever does not see in the progress of human development to the stage of thought-experiences how, with the beginning of this life, real experiences ceased to be the image-experiences that were present before, will see the special character of the thinker personalities of the sixth and the following pre-Christian centuries in Greece in a different light than that in which they must be presented in these explanations. Thought drew something like a wall around the human soul. Formerly it was, according to its feeling, within the phenomena of nature; and what it experienced together with these natural phenomena, as it experienced the activity of its own body, presented itself before it in pictorial phenomena, which were there in their vitality; now the whole picture-painting was obliterated by the power of thought. Where before the images full of content spread out, now the thought stretched through the outer world. And the soul could only feel itself in that which spread outside in space and time by connecting with the thought. One senses such a mood of the soul when one looks at Anaxagoras from Klazomenä in Asia Minor (born around 500 BC). He feels connected in his soul with the life of thought; this life of thought encompasses what is extended in space and time. Thus extended, it appears as the Nus, the world mind. This pervades the whole of nature as an entity. Nature, however, presents itself only as composed of small primordial beings. The natural processes that result from the interaction of these primordial beings are what the senses perceive after the picture painting has disappeared from nature. These primordial beings are called homoiomeries. Within itself, the human soul experiences the connection with the world-mind (the nus) in the thought within its wall; through the windows of the senses it looks at that which the world-mind creates through the interaction of the "homoiomeries".

[ 35 ] In Empedocles (who was born in Agrigento around 490 BC) lived a personality in whose soul the old and the new modes of conception clashed as if in violent conflict. He still felt something of the interweaving of the soul with external existence. Hatred and love, antipathy and sympathy live in the human soul; they also live outside the wall that encloses the human soul; the life of the soul thus continues in the same way outside it and appears in forces that separate and connect the elements of external nature: air, fire, water, earth, and thus bring about what the senses perceive in the external world.

[ 36 ] Empedocles stands, as it were, before nature, which appears to the senses to be disembodied, and develops a mood of soul that rebels against this disembodiment. His soul cannot believe that this is the true essence of nature, what thought wants to make of it. Least of all can it admit that it is in truth only in such a relation to this nature as results from the mental world-view. One must imagine what goes on in a soul that experiences such an inner conflict in all its acuteness, that suffers from it; then one will feel how in this soul of Empedocles the old mode of conception arises as the power of feeling, but is unwilling to bring this to full consciousness, and so seeks an existence in a thought-image-like manner, in that way of which Empedocles' sayings are an echo, which, understood from what is indicated here, lose their peculiarity. After all, he quotes a saying like this: "Farewell. No longer a mortal, but an immortal god I walk about; ... and as soon as I come into the flourishing cities, I am worshipped by men and women: they join me by the thousands, seeking with me the way to their salvation, since some expect prophecies, others healing spells for manifold diseases from me." Thus the soul, in which an old way of imagining is rumbling, numbs itself, which makes it feel its own existence like that of an exiled god who has been transferred from another being into the desecrated world of the senses, and who therefore perceives the earth as an "unfamiliar place" into which he is thrown as if in punishment. One can certainly find other sensations in the soul of Empedocles; for flashes of wisdom shine forth meaningfully from his sayings; his feeling towards the "birth of the intellectual world view" is given by such moods.

[ 37 ] Other than this personality, those thinkers who are called atomists looked at what had become for the soul of man from nature through the birth of thought. The most important of them was Democritus (born around 460 BC in Abdera). Leukipp is a kind of precursor to him.

[ 38 ] In Democritus, the homoiomeries of Anaxagoras have become much more material. In Anaxagoras, the primal-part beings can still be compared to living germs; in Democritus they become dead, indivisible particles of matter, which through their various combinations compose the things of the outside world. They move away from each other, towards each other, through each other: this is how the processes of nature arise. The world-mind (Nus) of Anaxagoras, which, like a spiritual (disembodied) consciousness, allows the world processes to emerge in a purposeful way from the interaction of the homoiomeries, becomes with Democritus an unconscious natural lawfulness (Ananke). The soul only wants to accept what it can grasp as the closest result of thought; nature is completely de-souled; thought as soul-experience fades into the inner shadow-image of de-souled nature. Thus through Democritus, the intellectual archetype of all more or less materialistically colored worldviews of the following period appeared.

[ 39 ] The atomic world of Democritus represents an external world, a nature in which nothing of "soul" lives. The thought-experiences in the soul, through whose birth the human soul has become aware of itself: in Democritus they are mere shadow-experiences. This characterizes part of the destiny of thought-experiences. They make the human soul conscious of its own being, but at the same time they fill it with uncertainty about itself. The soul experiences itself in itself through the thought, but at the same time it can feel torn away from the spiritual, independent world power that gives it security and inner support. Those personalities to whom the name "sophists" is given within Greek intellectual life felt themselves to be so unbound in the soul. The most important in their ranks is Protagoras (from Abdera around 480-410 BC). In addition to him, the following can also be considered: Gorgias, Critias, Hippias, Trasymachus, Prodicus. The sophists are often portrayed as people who played a superficial game with thinking. The way they were treated by the playwright Aristophanes contributed much to this opinion. However, among many other things, the fact that even Socrates, who felt himself to a certain extent to be a pupil of Prodicus, is said to have described him as a man who had worked well for the ennoblement of language and thought among his pupils is an external reason for a better appreciation. Protagoras' view is expressed in the famous sentence: "Man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not." In the attitude that underlies this sentence, the thought-experience feels sovereign. It does not feel a connection with an objective world power. When Parmenides says: The senses give man a world of illusion, one could go further and add: Why should thinking, which one does experience, not also deceive? But Protagoras would reply: What can it matter to man whether the world outside him is different than he perceives and thinks? Does he imagine it for someone other than himself? May it be for another being as always, man need not worry about it. His ideas should only serve him; he should find his way in the world with their help. When he becomes completely clear about himself, he cannot want to have any other ideas about the world than those that serve him. Protagoras wants to be able to rely on thinking; to do so, he simply relies on its own power.

[ 40 ] But in doing so Protagoras puts himself in some way at odds with the spirit that lives in the depths of Greek thought. This "spirit" is clearly audible within the Greek essence. It already speaks from the inscription of the Delphic temple "Know thyself". This ancient oracular wisdom speaks as if it contained the invitation to progress in worldview, which takes place from imagining images to mentally grasping the secrets of the world. Through this invitation man is pointed to his own soul. He is told that he can hear in it the language through which the world expresses its essence. But it also refers to something that creates uncertainties and insecurities in his own experience. The spirits within Greece were to conquer the dangers of this life of the soul, which relied on itself. In this way they were to shape the thought in the soul into a world view. In doing so, the Sophists got into dangerous waters. In them, the spirit of Greekness stands as if on a precipice; it wants to give itself the power of equilibrium through its own power. As has already been indicated, one should look more at the seriousness of this attempt and its boldness than lightly accuse it, even if the accusation is certainly justified for many of the sophists. But this attempt naturally comes at a turning point in Greek life. Protagoras lived around 480-410 B.C. The Peloponnesian War, which stands at the turning point of Greek life, took place from 431-404 B.C. Before that, the individual in Greece was firmly embedded in the social context; the community and tradition provided him with the standard for his actions and thoughts. The individual personality only had value and significance as a member of the whole. Under such conditions, the question could not yet be asked: What is the individual person worth? Sophistry poses this question, thus taking a step towards the Greek Enlightenment. It is basically the question: How does man organize his life after he has become aware of the awakened life of thought?

[ 41 ] From Pherekydes (or Thales) to the Sophists, the gradual incorporation of the thought born before these personalities can be observed within the development of the world view in Greece. They show how thought works when it is placed at the service of the world view. But this birth can be observed in the whole breadth of Greek life. The world view is only one area in which a general phenomenon of life is lived out in a particular case. A quite similar current of development could be traced in the fields of art, poetry, public life, the various branches of trade and commerce. This observation would show everywhere how human activity becomes different under the influence of that organization of man which introduces thought into the world-view. The worldview does not "discover" the thought, it arises rather through the fact that it uses the born life of thought to build up a worldview that has previously been formed from other experiences.

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[ 42 ] If it can be said of the Sophists that they brought the spirit of Greekness to a dangerous cliff, which expresses itself in "Know thyself", then Socrates must be seen as a personality who expressed this spirit with a high degree of perfection. Socrates was born in Athens around 470 and was sentenced to death by poison in 399 BC.

[ 43 ] Socrates is historically presented to the viewer in two forms. Firstly, in the figure drawn by his great student Plato (427-347 BC). Plato presents his world view in the form of a conversation. And Socrates appears in these "conversations" as a teacher. He appears as "the wise man" who guides those around him to high levels of knowledge through his spiritual guidance. Xenophon painted a second picture of Socrates in his "Memoirs". At first, it seems as if Plato idealized the nature of Socrates, while Xenophon traced more of the immediate reality. A more detailed consideration of the matter might well find that Plato and Xenophon each draw the picture of Socrates that they have received according to their particular point of view, and that one may therefore consider the extent to which the two complement and illuminate each other.

[ 44 ] First of all, it must appear significant that Socrates' world view has come down to posterity entirely as an expression of his personality, of the basic character of his mental life. Both Plato and Xenophon portray Socrates in such a way that one has the impression that his personal opinion speaks everywhere in him; but the personality carries within it the awareness that he who expresses his personal opinion from the right reasons of the soul, expresses something which is more than human opinion, which is an expression of the intentions of the world order through human thought. Socrates is received by those who think they know him in such a way that he is proof of the fact that truth comes about in the human soul through thinking when this human soul is connected with its basic being in the way that Socrates was. By looking at Socrates, Plato does not present a doctrine that is "established" through reflection, but rather allows a human being developed in the right sense to speak and observes what he produces as truth. Thus the way in which Plato relates to Socrates becomes an expression of what man is in his relationship to the world. It is not only what Plato said about Socrates that is significant, but how he placed Socrates in the world of Greek intellectual life in his literary behavior.

[ 45 ] With the birth of thought, man was directed towards his "soul". Now the question arises: What does this soul say when it makes itself speak and expresses what the forces of the world have placed in it? And the way in which Plato relates to Socrates provides the answer: in the soul, reason speaks to the world what it wants to say to man. This justifies the trust in the revelations of the human soul, insofar as it develops the thought within itself. The figure of Socrates appears under the sign of this trust.

[ 46 ] In ancient times, the Greek consulted the priests in important matters of life; he had the will and opinion of the spiritual powers "prophesied" to him. Such an institution is in harmony with a soul experience in images. Through the image, the human being feels connected to the rule of the powers that govern. The place of divination is then the facility through which a particularly suitable person finds the way to the spiritual powers better than other people. As long as one's soul did not feel isolated from the outside world, the feeling was natural that this outside world could express itself more through a special facility than in everyday experience. The picture spoke from outside; why should the outside world not be able to speak particularly clearly in a special place? The thought speaks to the inside of the soul. Thus this soul is pointed to itself; it cannot know itself as connected with another soul as with the manifestations of the priestly place of prophecy. One had to surrender one's own soul to the thought. One felt from the thought that it is the common property of men.

[ 47 ] World reason shines into the life of thought without special facilities. Socrates felt: In the thinking soul lives the power which was sought in the "places of prophecy". He felt the "demonium", the spiritual power that guides the soul, within himself. Thought made the soul conscious of itself. With his idea of the demonium speaking within him, which, always guiding him, told him what he had to do, Socrates wanted to express: The soul that has found itself in the life of thought may feel as if it consorted within itself with world reason. This is the expression of the appreciation of what the soul has in the experience of thought.

[ 48 ] Under the influence of this view, "virtue" is placed in a special light. Just as Socrates values thought, so he must presuppose that the true virtue of human life reveals itself to the life of thought. The right virtue must be found in the life of thought, because the life of thought gives man his value. "Virtue is teachable" is how Socrates' idea is usually expressed. It is teachable because it must be possessed by those who truly grasp the life of thought. What Xenophon says of Socrates in this respect is significant. Socrates teaches a pupil about virtue. The following conversation develops. Socrates says: "Do you now believe that there is a doctrine and science of justice, as well as a doctrine of grammar?" The pupil: "Yes." Socrates: "So who do you think is more proficient in grammar, the one who deliberately fails to write and read correctly or the one who does so unintentionally?" Student: "The one who does it on purpose, I should think, because if he wanted to, he could do it right." Socrates: "Doesn't it seem to you that the one who deliberately writes incorrectly understands writing and the other does not?" Disciple: "Without doubt." Socrates: "But who knows better what is right, the one who deliberately lies or deceives, or the one who does not? " (Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates -, translated by Güthling.) For Socrates it is a matter of making it clear to the pupil that it is important to have the right thoughts about virtue. What Socrates says about virtue is also aimed at establishing trust in the soul that recognizes itself in the experience of thought. One must trust in the right thought of virtue more than in all other motives. Virtue makes man worthy of appreciation when he experiences it in thought.

[ 49 ] Thus Socrates expresses what the pre-Socratic age strove for: appreciation of what is given to the human soul through the awakened life of thought. Socrates' teaching method is influenced by this idea. He approaches man with the assumption that the life of thought is in him; it only needs to be awakened. That is why he directs his questions in such a way that the person being asked is prompted to awaken his thought life. Therein lies the essence of the Socratic method.

[ 50 ] Born in Athens in 427 B.C., Plato, as a student of Socrates, felt that through him his confidence in the life of thought was strengthened. That which the entire development up to that point wanted to bring to manifestation: in Plato it reaches a climax. It is the idea that the spirit of the world reveals itself in the life of thought. At first, Plato's whole soul life is illuminated by this perception. Everything that man recognizes through the senses or in any other way is of no value as long as the soul has not brought it into the light of thought. For Plato, philosophy is the science of ideas as the true being. And the idea is the revelation of the spirit of the world through the revelation of thought. The light of the world spirit shines into the human soul, revealing itself there as ideas; and the human soul, by grasping the idea, unites itself with the power of the world spirit. The world spread out in space and time is like the mass of ocean water in which the stars are reflected; but only that which is reflected as an idea is real. Thus, for Plato, the whole world is transformed into Ideas interacting with each other. Their work in the world is brought about by the fact that the Ideas are reflected in the hyle, the primordial matter. This reflection gives rise to what man sees as many individual things and individual processes. But there is no need to extend cognition to the hyle, the primordial matter, for the truth is not in it. One only arrives at this when one strips away from the world picture everything that is not an idea.

[ 51 ] For Plato, the human soul is alive in the Idea; but this life is shaped in such a way that this soul is not in all its manifestations a revelation of its life in the Ideas. Insofar as the soul is immersed in the life of ideas, it appears as the "rational soul" (thought-bearing soul). The soul appears as such when it reveals itself in the perception of thought. In its earthly existence it is incapable of revealing itself in this way alone. It must also express itself in such a way that it appears as an "unreasoning soul" (not thought-bearing soul). And as such it appears again in two ways, as a soul developing courage and as a soul full of desire. Thus Plato seems to distinguish three members or parts in the human soul: the rational soul, the courageous soul and the desirous soul. However, the spirit of his conception will be better understood if this is expressed in a different way: the soul is by nature a member of the world of ideas. As such it is the soul of reason. But it is active in such a way that it adds to its life in reason an activity through the courageous and the desirous. In this threefold mode of manifestation it is the earth-soul. As the soul of reason it descends to earthly existence through physical birth and re-enters the world of ideas at death. In so far as it is the soul of reason, it is immortal, for as such it lives the eternal existence of the world of ideas.

[ 52 ] This doctrine of the soul of Plato appears as a significant fact within the age of thought perception. The awakened thought pointed man to the soul. Plato develops a view of the soul that is entirely the result of thought perception. In Plato, thought endeavored not only to point to the soul, but to express what the soul is, to describe it, so to speak. And what thought has to say about the soul gives it the power to know itself in the eternal. Indeed, the thought in the soul even illuminates the nature of the temporal by extending its own being beyond this temporal. The soul perceives the thought. As it reveals itself in earthly life, the pure form of thought cannot be developed in it. Where does the experience of thought come from if it cannot be developed in earthly life? It forms a remembrance of a pre-earthly, purely spiritual state. Thought has seized the soul in such a way that it is not content with its earthly existence. It is revealed to the soul in a pre-existence in the spiritual world (world of ideas), and the soul brings it up during its earthly existence through memory from the life it spent in the spirit.

[ 53 ] This conception of the soul gives rise to what Plato has to say about the moral life. The soul is moral when it arranges its life in such a way that it expresses itself as strongly as possible as a rational soul. Wisdom is the virtue that comes from the rational soul; it ennobles human life; courage comes from the courageous soul, prudence from the desirous soul. The latter two virtues arise when the rational soul becomes the ruler over the other revelations of the soul. When all three virtues work together harmoniously in man, what Plato calls righteousness, the direction towards the good, dikaiosyne, arises.

[ 54 ] Plato's pupil Aristotle (born 384 BC in Stagira in Thrace, died 321 BC) represents a high point of Greek thought alongside his teacher. With him, the integration of thought into the world view was already complete and had come to rest. Thought assumes its rightful possession in order to understand the nature and processes of the world by itself. Plato still uses his imagination to place thought in its dominion and to lead it to the world of ideas. With Aristotle, this dominion has become self-evident. It is also important to consolidate it everywhere in the realm of knowledge. Aristotle understands the use of thought as a tool that penetrates into the essence of things. For Plato, it is a matter of overcoming the thing or essence of the external world; and when it is overcome, the soul carries within itself the idea by which the external being was only overshadowed, but is alien to it, and hovers above it in a spiritual world of truth. Aristotle wants to immerse himself in the beings and processes, and what the soul finds in this immersion is for him the essence of the thing itself. The soul feels as if it had only lifted this essence out of the thing and brought it into thought form for itself so that it could carry it with it like a souvenir of the thing. Thus, for Aristotle, the ideas are in the things and processes; they are one side of the things, the one that the soul can lift out of them by its own means; the other side, which the soul cannot lift out of the things, through which these have their life built upon themselves, is the substance, the matter (hyle).

[ 55 ] Just as Plato's entire view of the world is illuminated by his view of the soul, this is also the case with Aristotle. With both thinkers, the situation is such that one characterizes the basic nature of their entire worldview when one does this for their view of the soul. Certainly, many details would come into consideration for both thinkers that cannot find a place in these explanations; but in both cases the conception of the soul gives the direction that their way of thinking has taken.

[ 56 ] For Plato, what comes into consideration is what lives in the soul and as such has a share in the spiritual world; for Aristotle, what is important is how the soul presents itself in man for his own cognition. As in other things, the soul must also immerse itself in itself in order to find in itself that which constitutes its essence. The idea, which, in Aristotle's sense, man finds in an extra-soul thing, is indeed this essence of the thing; but the soul has brought this essence into the form of ideas in order to have it for itself. The idea does not have its reality in the cognizing soul, but in the external thing together with the substance (the hyle). However, if the soul immerses itself in itself, it finds the idea as such in reality. In this sense, the soul is an idea, but an active idea, an effective entity. And it also behaves as such an active entity in the life of the human being. It grasps the physical in the germinal life of the human being. While idea and substance form an inseparable unity in an extra-soul thing, this is not the case with the human soul and its body. There the independent human soul grasps the corporeal, overrides the idea already active in the body, and puts itself in its place. In Aristotle's sense, a soul already lives in the corporeal, with which the human soul unites. For he also sees a subordinate soul active in the plant body and in the animal body. A body that carries the soul of the plant and the animal is fertilized, as it were, by the human soul, and so for the earthly human being a physical-soul is combined with a spiritual-soul. The latter abolishes the independent activity of the bodily-spiritual during the duration of human life on earth and itself works with the bodily-spiritual as its instrument. This gives rise to five expressions of the soul, which Aristotle presents as five soul members: the plant-like soul (threptikon), the sentient soul (asthetikon), the desire-developing soul (orektikon), the will-developing soul (kinetikon) and the spiritual soul (dianoetikon). The human being is a spiritual soul through that which belongs to the spiritual world and connects with the physical-soul in the germinal life; the other soul members arise when the spiritual soul unfolds in the physical and leads earthly life through it. For Aristotle, the view of a spiritual soul naturally implies the view of a spiritual world in general. Aristotle's view of the world stands before the observing gaze in such a way that things and processes live below, representing matter and idea; the higher one turns one's gaze, the more that which has a material character disappears; the purely spiritual appears to man as an idea, the world sphere in which the divine has its being as pure spirituality that moves everything. The spiritual human soul belongs to this world sphere; it does not exist as an individual being but only as part of the world spirit before it connects with a physical soul. Through this connection it acquires its individual existence, separated from the world spirit, and continues to live as a spiritual being after separation from the physical. Thus the individual soul being begins with human life on earth and then lives on immortally. Plato assumes a pre-existence of the soul before life on earth, but not Aristotle. This is just as natural for the latter, who allows the idea to exist in the thing, as the other is natural for the one who imagines the idea floating above the thing. Aristotle finds the idea in the thing; and the soul attains what it is supposed to be in the spiritual world as an individuality in the body.

[ 57 ] Aristotle is the thinker who allows thought to develop into a world view through contact with the essence of the world. The age before Aristotle led to the experience of thought; Aristotle grasps thought and applies it to that which presents itself to him in the world. The natural way of living in thought, which is peculiar to him, also leads Aristotle to investigate the laws of the life of thought itself, the logic. Such a science could only emerge after the awakened thought had grown to a mature life and had come to such a harmonious relationship with the things of the outside world as can be found in Aristotle.

[ 58 ] Placed alongside Aristotle, the thinkers whom the Greek, indeed the whole of antiquity, presents as his contemporaries and successors are personalities who appear to be of much lesser importance. They give the impression that something is lacking in their abilities to rise to the level of insight on which Aristotle stood. One has the feeling that they deviate from him because they have to form opinions about things they do not understand as well as he does. One would like to derive their views from their deficiency, which tempted them to express opinions that have basically already been refuted by Aristotle.

[ 59 ] Such an impression can first be received from the Stoics and Epicureans. The former, who took their name from the Hall of Columns, Stoa, in Athens, in which they taught, include Zenon of Cition (336-264 BC), Kleanthes (331-233), Chrysippus (280-208) and others. They take from earlier world views what seems to them to be reasonable in them; but their main concern is to find out how man is placed in the world by looking at it. Then they want to determine how life is to be arranged so that it corresponds to the world order and so that man lives out what is in accordance with his nature in the sense of this world order. Through desires, passions and needs, man, in their view, anaesthetizes his natural being; through equanimity and lack of need, he feels best what he should and can be. The ideal of man is "the wise man", who does not obscure the inner development of the human being through any vices.

[ 60 ] While the thinkers up to Aristotle were concerned with attaining the knowledge that is attainable to man after he had come to full awareness of his soul through the perception of thought, the Stoics began to reflect on this: What should man do to best express his human nature?

[ 61 ] Epicurus (born 342, died 271 BC) developed in his way the elements that were already present in atomism. And it is on this foundation that he raises a view of life that can be seen as an answer to the question: Since the human soul stands out like a flower from the processes of the world, how should it live in order to shape its special life, its independence, in accordance with rational thinking? Epicurus could only answer this question in a way that takes into account the life of the soul between birth and death, because with complete sincerity nothing else can result from the atomistic world view. Pain must form a special riddle of life for such a view. For pain is one of those facts which drive the soul out of the consciousness of its unity with the things of the world. One can regard the movement of the stars, the falling of the rain in the sense of the world-view of prehistoric times in the same way as the movement of one's own hand, that is, one can sense a unified spiritual-soul in both. The fact that processes in man can cause pain, but not those outside him, drives the soul to recognize its special nature. A doctrine of virtue which, like that of Epicurus, strives to live in harmony with world reason, can understandably value such an ideal of life which leads to the avoidance of pain, of unpleasure. Thus, everything that eliminates unpleasantness becomes the highest Epicurean good of life.

[ 62 ] This view of life found many followers in later antiquity, especially among the Romans who were striving for education. The Roman poet T. Lucretius Carus (96-55 BC) gave it perfect expression in his poem "On Nature".

[ 63 ] The perception of thought leads the human soul to recognize itself. However, it can also happen that the soul feels powerless to deepen the experience of thought in such a way that it finds in it a connection with the reasons of the world. Then the soul feels itself torn away from the connection with these reasons through thinking; it feels that its essence lies in thinking; but it finds no way to find in the life of thought anything other than its own assertion. Then it can only surrender to the renunciation of all true knowledge. In such a case were Pyrrho (360-270 BC) and his followers, whose creed is known as scepticism. Skepticism, the worldview of doubt, ascribes no other ability to the experience of thought than to form human opinions about the world; it does not want to decide whether these opinions have any meaning for the world outside of man.

[ 64 ] In a certain sense, one can see a closed picture in the series of Greek thinkers. Admittedly, one will have to admit that such a combination of the views of personalities can all too easily have a completely external character and in many respects be of only secondary importance. For the essential thing remains the observation of the individual personalities and the gaining of impressions as to how in these individual personalities the general humanity is revealed in particular cases. But in the Greek line of thinkers one sees something like the birth, unfolding and life of thought, in the pre-Socratic thinkers a kind of prelude; in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the height, and in the following period a descent of the life of thought, a kind of dissolution of the same.

[ 65 ] Whoever follows this course can come to the question: Does the experience of thought really have the power to give the soul all that it has led it to by bringing it to full awareness of itself? For the unbiased observer, the Greek life of thought has an element that makes it appear "perfect" in the best sense of the word. It is as if in the Greek thinkers the power of thought had worked out everything that it contains within itself. Anyone who wants to judge otherwise will realize on closer inspection that his judgment contains an error somewhere. Later views of the world have produced other things through other powers of the soul; the later thoughts as such always present themselves in such a way that they were already present in their actual thought content with some Greek thinker. What can be thought, and how one can doubt thought and knowledge: all this appears in Greek culture. And in the revelation of thought, the soul grasps itself in its essence.

[ 66 ] But has the Greek life of thought shown the soul that it has the power to give it everything that it has stimulated in it? Before this question stood, as if forming an echo of the Greek life of thought, the world view current which is called Neuplatonism. Its main proponent is Plotinus (205-270 AD). A forerunner can already be named Philo, who lived in Alexandria at the beginning of our era. Philo did not rely on the creative power of thought to build up a world view. Rather, he uses thought to understand the revelation of the Old Testament. He interprets what is narrated in it as facts in an allegorical way. The stories of the Old Testament become symbols for the processes of the soul, which he tries to approach mentally. Plotinus does not see the soul's experience of thought as something that encompasses the soul in its full life. Behind the life of thought there must be another life of the soul. Over this soul-life the apprehension of thought spreads a blanket rather than revealing it. The soul must overcome the thought being, eradicate it within itself, and after this eradication can come into an experience which connects it with the primordial being of the world. Thought brings the soul to itself; it must now grasp something in itself which leads it out of the area again into which thought has brought it. Plotinus strives for an enlightenment that occurs in the soul after it has left the realm to which thought has brought it. Thus he believes himself to be elevated to a world being that does not enter into the life of thought; therefore, world reason, to which Plato and Aristotle elevate themselves, is not the last to which the soul comes, but a creature of the higher that lies beyond all thought. All world events emanate from this supra-thought, which cannot be compared to anything that can be thought about. Thought, as it was able to reveal itself to Greek intellectual life, has, so to speak, made its circumference up to Plotinus and thus exhausted the relations in which man can bring himself to it. And Plotinus searches for sources other than those which lie in the revelation of thought. He steps out of the evolving life of thought and into the realm of mysticism. Explanations about the development of actual mysticism are not intended here, but only those which represent the development of thought and that which emerges from this itself. However, at various points in the spiritual development of mankind there are connections between the intellectual world view and mysticism. Such a connection is present in Plotinus. In his soul life, mere thinking is not decisive. He has a soul experience which represents inner experience without thoughts being present in the soul, mystical experience. In this experience he feels his soul united with the foundation of the world. But how he then represents the connection of the world with this world reason is to be expressed in thoughts. The world beings emanate from the super-thought. The superconceptual is the most perfect. What emerges from it is less perfect. So it goes down to the visible world, the most imperfect. Man is found within it. Through the perfection of his soul, he should strip away that which the world in which he initially finds himself can give him and thus find a path that makes of him a being that is appropriate to the perfect origin.

[ 67 ] Plotin presents himself as a personality who feels it impossible to continue the Greek life of thought. He cannot come up with anything that follows from the thought itself like a further offshoot of the worldview life. If we look at the meaning of the development of the world-view, we are justified in saying that the image-conception has become the thought-conception; in a similar way the thought-conception must continue to transform itself into something else. But in Plotinus' time the development of the world view was not yet ready for this. Therefore Plotinus leaves thought and searches outside the experience of thought. However, the Greek thoughts, fertilized by his mystical experiences, develop into the ideas of evolution, which imagine world events as the emergence of a sequence of stages of imperfect beings in descending order from a supreme perfect one. The Greek thoughts continue to have an effect in Plotinus' thinking; however, they do not continue to grow like an organism, but are absorbed by the mystical experience and do not transform themselves into what they themselves are. In a similar way as Greek thought in its more Platonic coloring is continued through Plotinus and his successors under the influence of an extra-thought element, it happens with this thought in its Pythagorean nuance through Nigidius Figulus, Apollonius of Tyana, Moderatus of Gades and others.