The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Worldviews of the Most Recent Age of Thought Development

[ 1 ] The flourishing of natural science in more recent times is based on the same quest as J. Böhme's mysticism. This can be seen in a thinker who grew directly out of the intellectual current that led to the first great scientific achievements of modern times in Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galilei (1564-1642) and others. It is Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). If one considers how he sees the world as consisting of an infinite number of small animated and emotionally experiencing primordial beings, the monads, which are uncreated and imperishable, and which in their interaction result in natural phenomena, one might be tempted to place Giordano Bruno together with Anaxagoras, for whom the world consists of homoiomeries. And yet there is a significant difference between the two. For Anaxagoras, the idea of homoiomeries unfolds as he contemplates the world; the world gives him this idea. Giordano Bruno feels: What lies behind the phenomena of nature must be thought of as a world view in such a way that the essence of the I is possible in the world view. The I must be a monad, otherwise it could not be real. Thus the assumption of monads becomes necessary. And because only the monad can be real, the truly real beings are monads with different inner properties. Something is going on in the depths of the soul of a personality like Giordano Bruno which does not come fully to his consciousness; the effect of this inner process is then the formulation of the world view. What goes on in the depths is an unconscious process of the soul: the ego feels that it must imagine itself in such a way that reality is guaranteed to it; and it must imagine the world in such a way that it can really be in this world. Giordano Bruno must form the idea of the monad so that both are possible. In Giordano Bruno's worldview of modern times, the ego fights for its existence in the world. And the expression of this struggle is the view: I am a monad; such a monad is uncreated and imperishable.

[ 2 ] Compare how differently Aristotle and Giordano Bruno arrive at the concept of God. Aristotle observes the world; he sees the meaningfulness of natural processes; he surrenders to this meaningfulness; the thought of the "first mover" of these processes is also revealed to him in the natural processes. Giordano Bruno fights his way through to the idea of monads in his soul life; the natural processes are, as it were, extinguished in the image in which innumerable monads appear interacting with each other; and God becomes the being of power acting behind all processes of the perceptible world and living in all monads. Giordano Bruno's passionate opposition to Aristotle expresses the contrast between the thinker of Greece and that of more recent times.

[ 3 ] In a variety of ways, the development of the modern worldview reveals how the ego searches for ways to experience its reality within itself. What Francis Bacon of Verulam (1561-1626) expresses bears the same hallmark, even if this is not immediately apparent when considering his endeavors in the field of worldview. Bacon of Verulam demands that the study of world phenomena should begin with unprejudiced observation; that one should then try to separate the essential from the non-essential in order to gain an idea of what lies behind a thing or process. He believes that up to his time, the thoughts that were to explain world phenomena were first conceived and then the ideas about the individual things and processes were based on these thoughts. He imagined that the thoughts were not taken from the things themselves. Bacon wanted Verulam to contrast this (deductive) method with his other (inductive) method. The concepts should be formed from the things themselves. One sees - so he thinks - how an object is consumed by fire; one observes how another object behaves towards fire, and then one observes the same with many objects. In this way one finally gets a general idea of how things behave in relation to fire. According to Bacon, it is because people did not investigate in this way in the past that so many idols prevail in the human imagination instead of true ideas about things.

[ 4 ] Goethe says something significant about this way of imagining of Bacon of Verulam: "Baco is like a man who recognizes the irregularity, inadequacy and dilapidation of an old building quite well and knows how to make this clear to the inhabitants. He advises them to abandon it, spurn the land, materials and all the accessories, look for another site and erect a new building. He is an excellent orator and persuader; he shakes some of the walls, they collapse and some of the inhabitants are forced to move out. He points to new places; they begin to level the ground, and yet it is too narrow everywhere. He presents new cracks; they are not clear, not inviting. But mainly he speaks of new, unknown materials, and now the world is served. The crowd disperses to all parts of the sky and brings back infinitely individual things, while at home new plans, new activities, new settlements occupy the citizens and devour their attention." Goethe says this in his History of the Theory of Colors, where he talks about Bacon. In a subsequent passage on Galileo, he says: "If the Verulamian method of dispersion seemed to fragment natural science for ever, Galileo immediately brought it back together again: he brought the science of nature back to man, and showed even in his early youth that genius is one case in a thousand, by developing the doctrine of the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps. Everything in science depends on what is called an aperu, on an awareness of what actually underlies the phenomena. And such an awareness is infinitely fruitful."

[ 5 ] Goethe thus points sharply to what is characteristic of Bacon. He wants to find a safe path for science. For in this way, he hoped, man would find a secure relationship to the world. Bacon felt that the new age could no longer follow the path of Aristotle. But he does not know that in different ages different soul forces are predominantly active in man. He only realizes that he, Bacon, must reject Aristotle. He does so passionately. So much so that Goethe uses the words: "For how can one listen with composure when he compares the works of Aristotle and Plato to light tablets, which, because they are not made up of a competent, substantial mass, can easily be washed over to us on the tide of time." Bacon does not understand that he himself wants to achieve what Plato and Aristotle achieved, and that he must use other means to reach the same goal, because the means of antiquity can no longer be those of the new age. He points to a path which might seem fruitful for research in the external field of nature; but Goethe shows by the case of Galileo that in this field, too, something other than what Bacon demands is necessary. But Bacon's way must prove completely unfruitful if the soul seeks access not only to individual research but to a world view. Of what use is the search for individual phenomena and the formation of general ideas from such phenomena if these general ideas do not, like flashes of light from the ground of existence, light up in the soul and show themselves to be true? In ancient times, thought appeared in the soul like a perception; this kind of appearance is dimmed by the brightness of the new I-consciousness; what leads in the soul to the thoughts that are to form a world view must take shape like the soul's own invention. And the soul must seek the possibility of giving validity to its invention, its own creation. It must be able to believe in its own creation. Bacon does not feel any of this; therefore he refers to the building materials, namely the individual natural phenomena, for the construction of the new world view. But just as little as one can ever build a house by merely observing the forms of the building blocks that are to be used, so little will a fruitful worldview ever arise in a soul that only concerns itself with the individual processes of nature.

[ 6 ] In contrast to Bacon of Verulam, who referred to the building blocks, Descartes (Cartesius) and Spinoza approach the blueprint. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650. The starting point of his quest for a world view is significant. He confronts the world with unbiased questions, which presents him with various mysteries, partly through religious revelation and partly through the observation of the senses. He now considers neither the one nor the other in such a way that he simply accepts it and recognizes as truth what it brings him; no, he opposes it with the "I", which opposes all revelation and all perception with its doubt from its own decision. This is a fact of the newer striving for a world view of great significance. The soul of the thinker in the midst of the world allows nothing to make an impression on it, but opposes everything itself with the doubt that can only exist in itself. And now this soul grasps itself in its own actions: I doubt, that is, I think. So, whatever may be the case with the whole world, my doubting thinking makes it clear to me that I am. This is how Cartesius arrives at his Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. With him, the ego fights for the right to recognize its own being through radical doubt about the whole world. Descartes draws the rest of his world view from this root. He sought to grasp existence in the "I". What can justify his existence together with this "I" can be regarded as truth. The "I" finds the idea of God innate in him. This idea presents itself in the ego as truly, as clearly as the ego presents itself. But it is so sublime, so powerful, that the ego cannot have it through itself, so it comes from an external reality to which it corresponds. Descartes does not believe in the reality of the external world because this external world presents itself as real, but because the ego must believe in itself and then further in God, but God can only be thought of as true. For it would be untrue of him to present a real external world to man if it were not real.

[ 7 ] The way in which Descartes arrives at the recognition of the reality of the ego is only possible through thinking that is directed towards this ego in the narrowest sense in order to find a point of support for cognition. In other words, this possibility is only possible through an inner activity, but never through an external perception. All perception that comes from outside only gives properties of extension. Thus Descartes comes to recognize two substances in the world: the one, which is inherent in extension, and the other, which is inherent in thinking and in which the human soul is rooted. Animals, which in the sense of Descartes cannot grasp themselves in inner, self-based activity, are therefore mere beings of extension, automata, machines. The human body is also a mere machine. The soul is connected to this machine. If the body becomes useless through wear and tear and the like, the soul leaves it in order to continue living in its element.

[ 8 ] Descartes already stands in a time in which a new impulse in worldview life can be recognized. The epoch from the beginning of the Christian era to about the time of Scotus Erigena proceeds in such a way that the experience of thought is pulsated by a force which enters like a powerful impulse into the development of the mind. The thought awakened in Greece is illuminated by this force. In the outer progress of human soul-life this is expressed in the religious movements and in the fact that the young forces of the people of Western and Central Europe absorb the effects of the older thought-experience. They permeate this experience with younger, more elementary impulses and thereby transform it. This shows one of the advances of mankind which are brought about by the fact that older spiritualized currents of spiritual development, which have exhausted their vitality but not their spiritual power, are continued by young forces which emerge from the nature of humanity. In such processes one may recognize the essential laws of human development. They are based on rejuvenation processes of spiritual life. The spiritual powers acquired can only develop further if they are implanted in young natural human powers. The first eight centuries of the Christian era represent a continuation of the experience of thought in the human soul in such a way that the emergence of new forces, which want to have a formative effect on the development of the world view, still rests as if in a deeply hidden place. In Descartes these forces are already highly effective. In the age between Scotus Erigena and (approximately) the fifteenth century, thought emerges again in its own power, which it had not evidently developed in the preceding epoch. But it emerges from a completely different side than in the Greek age. With the Greek thinkers it is experienced as perception; from the eighth to the fifteenth century it comes up from the depths of the soul; man feels: Thought is generated in me. With the Greek thinkers, a relationship of thought to natural processes is still directly generated; in the age indicated, thought stands there as a product of self-consciousness. The thinker feels that he must prove the justification of thought. This is how the nominalists and realists feel; this is also how Thomas Aquinas feels, who anchors the experience of thought in religious revelation.

[ 9 ] The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries put a new impulse before souls. Slowly it prepares itself, and slowly it settles in. A transformation is taking place in the human soul organization. In the field of world-view life this transformation is expressed by the fact that thought can now be perceived not as perception but as a product of self-consciousness. This transformation can be observed in the human soul organization in all areas of human development. It can be seen in the Renaissance of art and science and of European life, as well as in the religious movements of the Reformation. You will be able to find it if you study the art of Dante and Shakespeare for its foundations in the development of the human soul. All this can only be hinted at here; for these remarks are intended to remain within the progress of the development of the worldview of thought.

[ 10 ] The emergence of the newer scientific mode of conception appears as another symptom of this transformation of the human soul organization. Just compare the state of thinking about nature, as it emerges through Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, with what has gone before. This scientific conception corresponds to the mood of the human soul at the beginning of the modern age in the sixteenth century. From now on, nature is viewed in such a way that sensory observation is made the sole witness to it. Bacon is one personality, Galileo another, in whom this becomes clearly evident. The picture of nature should no longer be painted in such a way that thought is perceived in it as a power revealed by nature. From the image of nature gradually disappears more and more what is perceived only as a product of self-consciousness. Thus the creations of self-consciousness and the observation of nature face each other ever more sharply, ever more separated by an abyss. Descartes heralds the transformation of the organization of the soul, which pulls the image of nature and the creations of self-consciousness apart. From the sixteenth century onwards, a new character begins to assert itself in worldview life. Whereas in the preceding centuries thought had appeared in such a way that, as a product of self-consciousness, it demanded justification from the world view, since the sixteenth century it has clearly and distinctly appeared in self-consciousness on its own. Previously, he had still been able to see a support for his justification in the image of nature itself; now he was faced with the task of creating validity for himself out of his own strength. The thinkers of the time that now followed felt that something had to be sought in the experience of thought itself that would prove this experience to be the legitimate creator of a world view.

[ 11 ] The significance of this change in the life of the soul can be recognized if one considers the way in which natural philosophers such as H. Cardanus (1501 1576) and Bernardinus Telesius (1508-1588) still speak about the processes of nature. The image of nature, which lost its power with the emergence of the scientific conception of Copernicus, Galileo and others, continued to have an effect in them. For Cardanus, there is still something alive in the processes of nature that he imagines in the manner of the human soul, as would also have been possible in Greek thought. Telesius speaks of formative forces in nature, which he conceives in the image he gains from the human formative force. Galileo must already say that what man has in himself, for example, as a sensation of warmth, is just as little present as such in external nature as the tickle that man feels on the sole of his foot is present in the outside world when it is touched with a bird's feather. Telesius may still say that heat and cold are the driving forces of world processes; Galileo must already assert that man only knows heat as an experience of his inner being; in the image of nature only that which contains nothing of this inner being can be conceived. Thus the ideas of mathematics and mechanics become what the image of nature alone can form. In a personality such as Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519), who is as outstanding a thinker as he is an artist, one can recognize the struggle for a new law of the image of nature. Such minds felt the need to find a path to nature that was not yet given to Greek thought and its after-effects in the Middle Ages. Man must discard the experiences he has of his own inner self if he wants to gain access to nature. He may only depict nature in ideas that contain nothing of what he experiences as the effects of nature in himself.

[ 12 ] This is how the human soul emerges from nature, it focuses on itself. As long as one could still think that something of what is also directly experienced in man flows in nature, one could feel justified without hesitation in letting thought speak about natural processes. The image of nature in more recent times forces human self-consciousness to feel itself outside of nature with the thought and thus to create a validity for it that it gains through its own power.

[ 13 ] From the beginning of the Christian era until Scotus Erigena, the experience of thought continues to work in such a way that its form is determined by the presupposition of a spiritual world - that of religious revelation; from the eighth to the sixteenth century, the experience of thought wrests itself free from the interior of self-consciousness and allows the other of revelation to exist alongside its germinal power. From the sixteenth century onwards, it is the image of nature that pushes the experience of thought out of itself; from then on, self-consciousness seeks to draw from its own powers that which a worldview can form with the help of thought. Descartes was faced with this task. The thinkers of the new worldview epoch found themselves before it.

[ 14 ] Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) asked himself: How must that be conceived from which the creation of a true world view may be started? This starting point is based on perception: May countless thoughts announce themselves as true in my soul, I give myself to it as the foundation stone for a world view whose characteristics I must first determine. Spinoza finds that only that which needs no other for its being can be assumed. He gives this being the name substance. And he finds that there can only be one such substance, and that this is God. If we look at the way in which Spinoza arrives at this beginning of his philosophizing, we find that his path is modeled on that of mathematics. Just as the mathematician starts from general truths which the human ego forms freely, so Spinoza demands that the world view should start from such freely created ideas. The one substance is as the ego must think it. Thus conceived, it tolerates nothing that, apart from it, would be equal to it. For then it would not be everything; it would need something else for its existence. Everything else is therefore only in the substance, as one of its attributes, as Spinoza says. Two such attributes are recognizable to man. One he sees when he looks at the outside world; the other when he turns inwards. The first is expansion, the second is thinking. Man bears both attributes in his being; expansion in his body and thinking in his soul. But with both he is one being in the one substance. When he thinks, the divine substance thinks; when he acts, the divine substance acts. Spinoza acquires existence for the human ego by anchoring this ego in the general, all-encompassing divine substance. There can be no question of unconditional human freedom. For man is no more the thing that acts and thinks of itself than the stone is the thing that moves; it is the one substance in everything. We can only speak of conditional freedom in man when he does not regard himself as an independent individual being, but when he knows himself to be one with the one substance. Spinoza's world view, in its consistent development in a personality, leads to the consciousness of that personality: I think about myself in the right sense when I take no further account of myself, but in my experience know myself to be one with the divine All. This consciousness then, in the sense of Spinoza, pours over the whole human personality the impulse to do what is right, that is God-filled action. This comes naturally to those in whom the right view of the world is complete truth. This is why Spinoza calls the writing in which he presents his worldview ethics. For him, ethics, that is moral behavior, is in the highest sense the result of the true knowledge of man's dwelling in the one substance. One might say that the private life of Spinoza, the man who was first persecuted by fanatics and then, after voluntarily giving away his fortune, sought his livelihood in poverty as a craftsman, was in the rarest way the outward expression of his philosopher's soul, which knew its ego in the divine universe and felt that all mental experience, indeed all experience in general, was illuminated by this consciousness.

[ 15 ] Spinoza builds a worldview from thoughts. These thoughts must be such that they have their justification for the construction of the picture from self-consciousness. That is where their certainty must come from. What the self-consciousness is allowed to think in the way it thinks the self-supporting mathematical ideas can form a world view that is an expression of what is in truth present behind the world phenomena.

[ 16 ] In a completely different sense from Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm v. Leibniz (1646-1716) seeks the justification of the I-consciousness in the existence of the world. His starting point is similar to that of Giordano Bruno, insofar as he thinks of the soul or the "I" as a monad. Leibniz finds self-consciousness in the soul, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, i.e. the revelation of the ego. There can be nothing else in the soul that thinks and feels but itself. For how could the soul know about itself if the knower were something else? But it can also only be a simple being, not a composite one. For parts in it could and should know of each other; but the soul only knows of itself as the one. Thus the soul is a simple, self-contained, self-imagining being, a monad. But nothing can enter this monad that is outside of it. For nothing other than itself can be active in it. All its experiencing, imagining, perceiving, etc. is the result of its own activity. It could only perceive another activity within itself through its defense against this activity, that is, it would only perceive itself in its defense. Nothing external can therefore enter this monad. Leibniz expresses this by saying that the monad has no windows. All real beings are monads in Leibniz's sense. And in truth there is nothing but monads. But these different monads have different intensities of inner life. There are monads with a very dull inner life, which are as if asleep, those which are as if dreaming, then the awake human monads up to the highly heightened inner life of the divine primordial monad. If man does not see monads in his sensory perception, it is because the monads are seen by man in the same way as the fog, which is not a fog but a swarm of gnats. What man's senses see is like a misty image formed by the monads being together.

[ 17 ] So for Leibniz, the world is in truth a sum of monads that do not interact at all, but are independently living, self-conscious beings. If the individual monad nevertheless has an image of the general world life in its inner life, this does not stem from the fact that the individual monads interact with each other, but from the fact that in a given case one monad experiences inwardly for itself what another monad also experiences independently of it. The inner lives of the monads agree with each other, just as clocks show the same hours, even though they do not affect each other. Just as the clocks are in tune because they are initially in tune with each other, so the monads are in tune with each other through the pre-stabilized harmony emanating from the divine primordial monad.

[ 18 ] This is the world view to which Leibniz is driven, because he has to form it in such a way that the self-conscious soul life, the ego, can assert itself as a reality in this picture. It is a view of the world that is formed entirely out of the "I" itself. Indeed, in Leibniz's view, this cannot be otherwise. In Leibniz, the pursuit of a world view leads to a point where, in order to find the truth, it accepts nothing of what is revealed in the outside world as truth.

[ 19 ] In Leibniz's sense, man's sense life is effected in such a way that the soul monad enters into connection with other monads, which have a duller, dreaming, sleeping self-consciousness. A sum of such monads is the body; connected with it is the one waking soul monad. In death, this central monad separates itself from the others and continues to exist on its own.

[ 20 ] If Leibniz's world view is one that is formed entirely from the inner energy of the self-conscious soul, then that of his contemporary John Locke (1632-1704) is built entirely on the feeling that such a working out of the soul should not be allowed. Locke only recognizes as legitimate members of a worldview what can be observed (experienced), and what can be thought about what is observed on the basis of observation. For him, the soul is not a being that develops real experiences out of itself, but a blank slate on which the outside world makes its markings. Thus, for Locke, human self-consciousness is a result of experience, not an ego the origin of this experience. If a thing in the external world makes an impression on man, the following is to be said about it: In truth, there are only extension, figure, movement in the thing; sounds, colors, smells, warmth, and so on arise through contact with the senses. What thus arises in the senses is only there as long as the senses are in contact with things. Apart from perception, there are only differently shaped substances in different states of motion. Locke feels compelled to assume that, apart from form and motion, what the senses perceive has nothing to do with the things themselves. In doing so, he begins a current of worldview that does not want to regard the impressions of the external world that humans experience through cognition as belonging to the world itself.

[ 21 ] A strange spectacle presents itself to the contemplating soul with Locke. Man is supposed to be able to recognize only by perceiving and thinking about what he perceives; but what he perceives has only the smallest part to do with the world's own properties. Leibniz recoils from what the world reveals, and creates a picture of the world from within the soul; Locke only wants a picture of the world which is created by the soul in union with the world; but no picture of the world comes about through such creation. Since Locke cannot, as Leibniz does, see in the ego itself the point of support for a world view, he arrives at ideas which do not seem suitable for establishing such a view, because they cannot count the possession of the human ego as part of the world. A world view such as Locke's loses its connection with any world in which the "I", the self-conscious soul, could be rooted, because from the outset it wants to know nothing of other paths to the foundation of the world than only those that are lost in the darkness of the senses.

[ 22 ] In Locke, the development of the world-view produces a form within which the self-conscious soul struggles for its existence in the world-picture, but loses this struggle because it believes it can only gain its experiences by communicating with the external world given by the image of nature. It must therefore deny itself any knowledge of anything that could belong to its being outside of this intercourse.

[ 23 ] Inspired by Locke, George Berkeley (1684 to 1753) came to completely different conclusions from Locke. Berkeley found that the impressions which the things and processes of the world seem to make on the human soul are in truth in the soul itself. If I see "red", then I must bring this "red" into existence in myself; if I feel "warm", then the "warmth" lives in me. And so it is with everything that I seem to receive from the outside. But apart from what I generate within myself, I know nothing at all about external things. So it makes no sense at all to speak of things that are supposed to be material, material. For I only know what appears in my spirit as spiritual. What I call a rose, for example, is entirely spiritual, namely an idea experienced by my spirit. Thus, according to Berkeley, there is nowhere to be perceived anything other than the spiritual. And if I notice that something is caused in me from outside, then it can only be caused by spiritual beings. For bodies cannot work spiritual things. And my perceptions are definitely spiritual. So there are only spirits in the world that have an effect on each other. That is Berkeley's view. She turns Locke's ideas into their opposite by taking everything that he regards as impressions of material things as spiritual reality, and thus believes herself to recognize herself with self-consciousness directly in a spiritual world.

[ 24 ] Others have taken Locke's thoughts to other conclusions. One example of this is Condillac (1715 to 1780). Like Locke, he believed that all knowledge of the world must, indeed could only be based on the observation of the senses and thinking. However, he went on to the extreme consequence: thinking has no independent reality of its own; it is nothing more than a refined, transformed external perception of the senses. Thus, only sensory perceptions may be included in a world view that is supposed to correspond to the truth. His explanation in this regard is telling: "Take the human body, still completely unawakened in soul, and imagine one sense after another awakening. What more do we have in this sentient body than in the non-sentient body before? A body on which the environment has made impressions. These impressions of the environment have completely and utterly brought about what is supposed to be an "I". This world-view does not arrive at any possibility of grasping the "I", the self-conscious "soul", anywhere, and it does not arrive at any world-picture in which this "I" could appear. It is the world-view that seeks to come to terms with the self-conscious soul by proving it away. Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771), Julien de La Mettrie (1709-1751) and the "System of Nature" (Système de la nature) by Holbach, published in 1770, walk along similar paths. In it, all spirituality is expelled from the world picture. Only matter and its forces are at work in the world, and Holbach finds the words for this de-spiritualized image of nature: "0 Nature, ruler of all beings, and you, her daughters, Virtue, Reason and Truth, you are forever our only deities."

[ 25 ] In de La Mettrie's "Man a Machine", a view of the world comes to light that is so overwhelmed by the image of nature that it can only accept it. What appears in self-consciousness must therefore be imagined like the reflection in a mirror. The organization of the body should be compared to the mirror, self-consciousness to the image. The latter, apart from the former, has no independent meaning. In "Man a Machine" we read: "But if all the properties of the soul depend so much on the peculiar organization of the brain and the whole body that they are visibly only this organization itself, then here we have a very enlightened machine ... The soul is therefore only a meaningless expression, of which we have no conception at all, and which a sharp mind may only use to designate that part of us which thinks. If one assumes even the simplest principle of movement in them, the animated bodies have everything they need to move, to feel, to think, to repent, in short, to find their way in the physical and in the moral, which depends on it" ... "If what thinks in my brain is not a part of this viscera, and consequently of the whole body, why does my blood heat up when I am quietly in my bed making the plan of my work, or pursuing an abstract train of thought?" (Cf. de La Mettrie, Man a Machine. Philosophische Bibliothek vol. 68.) It was Voltaire (1694 to 1778) who brought Locke's teachings into the circles in which these spirits, including Diderot, Cabanis and others, were still active. Voltaire himself probably never went as far as the final consequences of the aforementioned philosophers. However, he himself was inspired by Locke's thoughts, and much of this inspiration can be felt in his brilliant and dazzling writings. He himself could not become a materialist in the sense of those mentioned. He lived in too broad an imaginative horizon to deny the spirit. He aroused the need for worldview questions in the widest circles, because he wrote in such a way that these worldview questions were linked to the interests of these circles. There would be much to say about him in an account that sought to trace the worldview currents in the region of contemporary issues. This is not the intention of these remarks. Only the higher worldview issues in the narrower sense are to be considered; therefore, nothing further can be said here about Voltaire or about Rousseau, the opponent of the Enlightenment.

[ 26 ] If Locke loses himself in the darkness of the mind, David Hume (1711-1776) loses himself in the interior of the self-conscious soul, whose experiences seem to him to be governed not by the forces of a world order but by the power of human habituation. Why do we speak of one process in nature as a cause and another as an effect? asks Hume. Man sees the sun shining on the stone; he then perceives that the stone has become warm. He often sees these two processes following one another. Therefore he gets into the habit of thinking of them as belonging together. He makes the sunshine the cause and the warming of the stone the effect. The habit of thinking links the perceptions, but there is nothing outside in the real world that reveals itself as such a connection. Man sees a movement of his body following a thought of his soul; he becomes accustomed to think that the thought is the cause, the movement the effect. Habits of thought, that is all Hume means, underlie man's statements about the processes of the world. Through habits of thought the self-conscious soul can arrive at guidelines for life; but it can find nothing in these habits to form a view of the world that would have any meaning for the being outside the soul. Thus, for Hume's view of the world, everything that man forms in terms of ideas beyond sensory and intellectual observation remains a mere content of belief; it can never become knowledge. About the fate of the self-conscious human soul, about its relationship to a world other than the sensory world, there can be no science, only faith.

[ 27 ] Leibniz's view of the world received a broad, intellectual education from Christian Wolff (born 1679 in Breslau, professor in Halle). Wolff is of the opinion that a science can be founded which, through pure thinking, recognizes that which is possible, that which is destined to exist because it appears to the mind to be free of contradiction and can thus be proven. In this way Wolff establishes a science of the world, of the soul, of God. This world view is based on the premise that the self-conscious human soul can form thoughts within itself that are valid for that which lies entirely outside itself. Here lies the riddle that Kant then felt he had to solve: How are insights brought about by the soul possible that are supposed to be valid for world beings that lie outside the soul?

[ 28 ] In the development of the world view since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the endeavour has been expressed to place the self-conscious soul in such a position that it could recognize itself as entitled to form valid ideas about the riddles of the world. From the consciousness of the second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing (1729-1781) perceives this endeavor as the deepest impulse of human longing. When one hears him, one hears with him many personalities who reveal in this longing the fundamental character of this age. Lessing strives for the transformation of religious truths of revelation into truths of reason. His goal is clearly recognizable in the manifold turns and outlooks that his thinking must take. Lessing, with his self-conscious ego, feels himself to be in an epoch of the development of humanity, which is to attain through the power of self-consciousness what has previously flowed to it from outside through revelation. What has gone before in history thus becomes for Lessing a preparatory process for the point in time in which man's self-consciousness stands alone. History thus becomes for him an "education of the human race". And this is also the title of his essay, written at his height, in which he does not want the essence of the human soul to be limited to one earthly life, but allows it to undergo repeated earthly lives. The soul lives lives separated by intervening periods in the periods of human development, takes up in each period what this can give it, and embodies itself again in a following period in order to develop further there. It thus carries the fruits of one human age over into the following ages and is thus "educated" by history. In Lessing's view, the ego is thus expanded beyond individual life; it is rooted in a spiritually effective world that lies beyond the world of the senses.

[ 29 ] Thus Lessing stands on the ground of a worldview that wants to make the self-conscious ego feel, through its own nature, how that which works in it does not express itself completely in individual sensory life.

[ 30 ] In a different way, but with the same impulse, Herder (1744-1803) sought to arrive at a world view. He turned his gaze to the entire physical and spiritual universe. In a sense, he seeks the plan of this universe. The interplay and harmony of natural phenomena, the dawning and lighting up of language and poetry, the progress of historical development: Herder allows all this to affect his soul, permeating it with often ingenious thoughts in order to arrive at a goal. In all the outside world, one can say, this goal presents itself to Herder, something presses into existence that finally appears in the self-conscious soul. This self-conscious soul reveals to itself, by feeling itself founded in the universe, only the path that its own powers have taken within it before it has attained self-consciousness. According to Herder's view, the soul may feel itself to be rooted in the universe, for it recognizes in the whole natural and spiritual context of the universe a process that had to lead to it, just as childhood must lead to mature human life in personal existence. Herder presents a comprehensive picture of this idea of the world in his "Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind". It is the attempt to think the image of nature in harmony with the image of the spirit in such a way that there is also a place for the self-conscious human soul in this image of nature. One must not ignore the fact that Herder's world view shows the struggle to come to terms with the newer scientific conception and the demands of the self-conscious soul at the same time. Herder stood before the modern worldview demands like Aristotle before the Greek ones. How the two had to relate in different ways to the image of nature given to them by their age gives their views their characteristic coloring.

[ 31 ] Herder's attitude towards Spinoza, in contrast to that of other contemporaries, sheds light on his position in the development of the world view. The significance of this position becomes apparent when it is compared with that of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819). Jacobi finds in Spinoza's view of the world that which the human mind must arrive at when it pursues the paths marked out for it by its powers. This world view exhausts the scope of what man can know about the world. But this knowledge cannot decide anything about the nature of the soul, about the divine ground of the world, about the connection of the soul with it. These areas only become accessible to man if he surrenders to a knowledge of faith that is based on a special capacity of the soul. Knowledge must therefore, in Jacobi's sense, necessarily be atheistic. It can have a strictly necessary lawfulness in its thought structure, but not a divine world order. Thus, for Jacobi, Spinozism becomes the only possible scientific mode of conception; but at the same time he sees in it a proof of the fact that this mode of conception cannot find the connection with the spiritual world. In 1787 Herder defended Spinoza against the accusation of atheism. He can do that. For he does not shy away from feeling the experience of man in the divine primordial being in his own way in a similar way to Spinoza. But Herder expresses this experience in a different way to Spinoza. The latter builds up a pure thought structure; Herder seeks to gain his world view not merely through thinking, but through the whole fullness of human soul life. For him, there is no sharp contrast between faith and knowledge when the soul becomes clear about the way in which it experiences itself. One speaks in his sense when one expresses the soul's experience in this way: When faith reflects on its reasons in the soul, it arrives at ideas that are no more uncertain than those that are gained through mere thinking. Herder accepts everything that the soul can find within itself in a clarified form as forces that can provide a world view. Thus his conception of the divine world ground is richer, more saturated than that of Spinoza; but it places the human ego in a relationship to this world ground that in Spinoza only appears as the result of thinking.

[ 32 ] It is like standing at a junction of the most diverse threads of the more recent development of the world view when one looks at how Spinoza's train of thought intervened in this development in the eighties of the eighteenth century. In 1785, Fr. H. Jacobi published his "Spinoza-Büchlein". In it, he recounts a conversation he had with Lessing before the latter's death. After this conversation, Lessing himself professed Spinozism. For Jacobi, this also established Lessing's atheism. If one recognizes the "Conversation with Jacobi" as authoritative for Lessing's intimate thoughts, one must regard him as a personality who acknowledges that man can only gain a world view corresponding to his nature if he takes the firm certainty which the soul gives to the thought living by its own power as the basis of his view. With such an idea, Lessing appears as a prophetic forerunner of the worldview impulses of the nineteenth century. The fact that he only expressed this idea in a conversation shortly before his death, and that it is still barely noticeable in his own writings, testifies to how difficult the struggle, even of the freest minds, has become with the puzzling questions which the newer age has given up to the development of the world view. The world view must express itself in thought. But the convincing power of thought, which had reached its climax in Platonism and found its natural development in Aristotelianism, had disappeared from the impulses of the human soul. Only Spinoza's soulful nature was able to draw the power from the mathematical mode of conception to develop thought into a picture of the world that would point to the foundation of the world. The thinkers of the eighteenth century were not yet able to sense the vital impulse of thought in self-consciousness and to experience it in such a way that man feels himself securely placed in a spiritual-real world through it. Lessing stands among them like a prophet in that he perceives the power of the self-conscious ego in such a way that he ascribes to the soul the passage through repeated earthly lives. What one felt, unconsciously, like a nightmare in questions of world-view, was that thought no longer appeared for man as it did for Plato, for whom it revealed itself in its supporting power and with its saturated content as an effective world entity. Thought was now felt to emerge from the depths of self-consciousness; the necessity was felt to give it a supporting force from some power or other. Again and again one looked for this supporting power in the truths of faith or in the depths of the mind, which one believed to be stronger than the pale, abstractly perceived thought. For many souls this is again and again their experience with the thought that they only feel it as mere soul content and are not able to draw from it the strength that guarantees them that man with his being may know himself to be rooted in the spiritual world ground. The logical nature of thought impresses such souls; they therefore recognize it as a force which must build up a scientific view of the world; but they want a force which is stronger for them for the prospect of a view of the world which embraces the highest knowledge. Such souls lack the Spinozistic boldness of soul to feel the thought in the source of world creation and thus to know themselves with the thought in the foundation of the world. It is from such a state of mind that a person often considers thought to be of little importance in the construction of a world-view and feels his self-consciousness to be more securely supported in the darkness of the powers of the mind. There are personalities for whom a view has all the less value for their relationship to the mysteries of the world the more this view wants to step out of the darkness of the mind into the light of thought. Such a mood of the soul can be found in J. G. Hamann (d. 1788). Like many personalities of this kind, he was a great stimulator. For if such a mind is brilliant like his, the ideas drawn from the dark depths of the mind have a more energetic effect on others than thoughts put into intellectual form. Hamann expressed himself as if in oracles about the questions that filled the worldview of his time. As with others, he also had a stimulating effect on Herder. A mystical feeling, often with a pietistic tinge, lives in his oracular sayings. Chaotically, they reveal the urge of time for the experience of a power of the self-aware soul, which can be the basis of everything that man wants to imagine about the world and life.

[ 33 ] It is in this age that the spirits feel: One must descend into the depths of the soul in order to find the point at which the soul is connected with the eternal ground of the world, and one must gain from the realization of this connection from the source of self-consciousness - a world view. But there is a great distance between what man was able to grasp with his spiritual powers and this inner root of self-consciousness. The spirits do not penetrate with their spiritual work to that which in dark foreboding sets them their task. They go, as it were, around that which acts as a world riddle and do not approach it. This was the feeling of many who were confronted with questions of worldview when Spinoza began to work towards the end of the eighteenth century. Lockean and Leibnizian ideas, these also in Wolffian attenuation, permeate the minds; in addition to the urge for clarity of thought, the shyness of this works, so that the views brought up from the depths of the mind are repeatedly called into the world view to help complete this picture. This is reflected in Mendelssohn, Lessing's friend, who was bitterly affected by the publication of Jacob's Conversation with Lessing. He did not want to admit that this conversation on Lessing's part had really had the content communicated by Jacobi. He believed that his friend would then really have professed a world view that seeks to reach the root of the spiritual world with mere thought. In this way, however, one does not arrive at a view of the life of this root. One must approach the world spirit differently if one wants to feel it in the soul as a living entity. And that is what Lessing must have done. He could therefore only have professed a "purified Spinozism", one that goes beyond mere thinking if it wants to reach the divine origin of existence. Mendelssohn shied away from feeling the connection with this primordial ground in the way that Spinozism makes possible.

[ 34 ] Herder did not need to shy away from this, because he painted over the lines of thought in Spinoza's picture of the world with the substantial ideas that the contemplation of the picture of nature and spirit revealed to him. He could not have stopped at Spinoza's thoughts. As they were given by their author, they would have seemed too gray in gray to him. He looked at what takes place in nature and history and placed the human being within this observation. And what was thus revealed to him resulted in a connection between the human being and the divine origin of the world and with the world itself, through which he felt in agreement with Spinoza in his mindset. Herder was directly convinced that the observation of nature and historical development must result in a world view through which man can satisfactorily perceive his position in the world as a whole. Spinoza believed that such a world view could only be arrived at in the light sphere of thought work, which is carried out according to the pattern of mathematics. If we compare Herder with Spinoza and consider the former's agreement with the latter's attitude, we must recognize that an impulse is at work in the more recent development of worldviews that is hidden behind what emerges as worldview images. It is the striving for an experience of that in the soul which binds self-consciousness to the totality of world processes. One wants to gain a world view in which the world appears in such a way that man can recognize himself in it as he must recognize himself if he allows the inner voice of his self-conscious soul to speak to him. Spinoza wants to satisfy the urge of such an experience by allowing the power of thought to unfold its own certainty; Leibniz contemplates the soul and wants to imagine the world as it must be imagined if the correctly imagined soul is to show itself correctly placed in the world picture. Herder observes the processes of the world and is convinced from the outset that the right world view emerges in the human mind when this mind confronts these processes in a healthy way with all its strength. What Goethe later said, that everything factual is already theory, is absolutely certain for Herder. He was also inspired by Leibniz's circles of thought; but he would never have been able to first search theoretically for an idea of self-consciousness in the monad and then build a world view with this idea. The development of the soul of mankind is presented in Herder in such a way that he points particularly clearly to the underlying impulse in modern times. What in Greece was treated as a thought (idea) like a perception is felt as a self-experience of the soul. And the thinker is faced with the question: How must I penetrate into the depths of the soul in such a way that I reach the connection of the soul with the foundation of the world and my thought is at the same time the expression of the world-creating forces? The Age of Enlightenment, which we see in the eighteenth century, still believed to find its justification in thought itself. Herder goes beyond this point of view. He does not seek the point in the soul where it thinks, but the living source where thought springs forth from the creative principle indwelling the soul. Herder is thus close to what can be called the mysterious experience of the soul with thought. A world view must express itself in thought. But the thought only gives the soul the power it seeks through a world view in the newer age when it experiences the thought in its soul origin. If the thought is born, if it has become a philosophical system, then it has already lost its magic power over the soul. This explains why thought, why the philosophical world view is so often underestimated. This is done by all those who only know the thought that is expected of them from the outside, that they believe in, that they are supposed to profess. The real power of the thought is only known to those who experience it as it arises.

[ 35 ] How this impulse lives in souls in more recent times can be seen in a significant figure in the history of worldviews, Shaftesbury (1671 to 1713). For him, an "inner sense" lives in the soul; through this the ideas, which become the content of the worldview, penetrate the human being, just as external perceptions penetrate through the external senses. Shaftesbury therefore does not seek justification in the thought itself, but by referring to a fact of the soul which enables the thought to enter the soul from the world's foundation. Thus for him there is a twofold external world facing man: the "outer" material external world, which enters the soul through the "outer" senses, and the spiritual external world, which reveals itself to man through the "inner sense".

[ 36 ] The urge to get to know the soul is alive in this age. For one wants to know how the essence of a world view is anchored in its nature. Such a quest can be seen in Nikolaus Tetens (d. 1807). In his research on the soul, he arrived at a distinction between the faculties of the soul that has now passed into general consciousness: thinking, feeling and willing. Previously, a distinction was only made between the faculties of thought and desire.

[ 37 ] How the spirits of the eighteenth century sought to eavesdrop on the soul where it works creatively on its image of the world can be seen, for example, in Hemsterhuis (1721-1790). In him, whom Herder regarded as one of the greatest thinkers after Plato, the struggle of the eighteenth century with the soul impulse of modern times is vividly demonstrated. Hemsterhuis' thoughts will be met, for example, if we say the following: If the human soul could observe the world through its own power, without external senses, the image of the world would be spread out before it in a single moment. The soul would then be infinite in the infinite. If the soul had no possibility of living within itself, but were dependent only on the external senses, the world would be spread out before it in endless temporal expansion. The soul would then live, unconscious of itself, in the sea of sensual boundlessness. Between these two poles, which are nowhere real, but like two possibilities limit the life of the soul, the soul really lives: it permeates its infinity with boundlessness.

[ 38 ] An attempt has been made here to show how the soul impulse of modern times in the eighteenth century flows through the development of the world view. In this current live the seeds from which the "age of Kant and Goethe" emerged for this development.