The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Classics Among Worldviews and Lifeviews

[ 1 ] A sentence uttered by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) in his "Naturphilosophie" appears like a flash of light that has an illuminating effect backwards and forwards within the development of the world view: "To philosophize about nature means as much as to create nature." This sentence gives monumental expression to what Goethe and Schiller were imbued with: that the productive imagination must play its part in the creation of the world view. What nature freely gives us when we observe, look at and perceive it does not contain its deepest meaning. Man cannot absorb this meaning from outside. He must create it.

[ 2 ] Schelling's mind was particularly predisposed to such creation. In him, all mental powers strove towards the imagination. He is an inventive mind without equal. However, his imagination did not produce images, like an artist's, but concepts and ideas. Through this way of thinking, he was called upon to continue Fichte's train of thought. The latter did not possess a productive imagination. With his demand for truth, he had reached the spiritual center of man, the "I". If this is to be the source of the world view, then the person who stands on this standpoint must also be able to arrive at substantive thoughts about the world and life from the ego. This can only happen with the help of the imagination. It was not available to Fichte. For this reason, he basically spent his whole life pointing to the ego and saying how it must gain a content of thought; but he did not know how to give it such a content himself. We can see this clearly from the lectures he gave at the University of Berlin in 1813 on "Wissenschaftslehre". (Nachgelassene Werke, 1. Band.) There he demands for those who want to arrive at a world view "a completely new inner sensory tool, through which a new world is given, which does not exist at all for the ordinary person". But Fichte does not go beyond this demand for a new sense. He does not develop what such a sense is supposed to perceive. Schelling sees in the thoughts that his imagination places before his soul the results of this higher sense, which he calls intellectual perception. He, who thus sees in what the mind says about nature a product that the mind creates, must above all be interested in the question: How can that which comes from the spirit be the real lawfulness prevailing in nature? He turns with sharp expressions against those who believe that we "only transfer our ideas to nature", because "they have no idea of what nature is and should be for us, ... for we do not want nature to coincide with the laws of our spirit by chance (perhaps through the mediation of a third party), but that it itself necessarily and originally not only expresses the laws of our spirit, but realizes them itself, and that it is nature and is called nature only insofar as it does so. ... Nature is supposed to be the visible spirit, the spirit the invisible nature. Here, then, in the absolute identity of the spirit within us and of nature outside us, the problem of how a nature outside us is possible must be resolved." Nature and spirit are therefore not two different entities at all, but one and the same entity in two different forms. Schelling's actual opinion on this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been properly grasped. One must completely immerse oneself in his way of thinking if one does not want to understand it as a triviality or an absurdity. In order to illustrate this way of thinking, reference should be made here to a sentence in his book "On the World Soul", in which he speaks about the nature of gravity. Many see a difficulty in this concept because it presupposes a so-called "effect at a distance". The sun has an attractive effect on the earth, although there is nothing between the sun and the earth to mediate this attraction. One must imagine that the sun extends its sphere of action through space to places where it is not. Those who live in gross sensory conceptions see a difficulty in such a thought. How can a body act where it is not? Schelling reverses the whole thought process. He says: "It is very true that a body acts only where it is, but it is equally true that it is only there where it acts." If we see the sun acting on our earth through the force of attraction, it follows that it extends in its being to our earth and that we have no right to transfer its existence only to the place where it acts through its visibility. The sun extends its being beyond the limits within which it is visible; only a part of its being can be seen; the other reveals itself through attraction. This is roughly how we must think of the relationship between the spirit and nature. The spirit is not only where it is perceived, but also where it perceives. Its essence extends to the most distant places where it can still observe objects. It embraces and permeates the whole of nature known to it. When it thinks the law of an external process, this process does not remain outside, and the spirit merely takes in a mirror image, but it streams its essence into the process; it penetrates the process, and when it then finds the law of it, it does not express it in its separate corner of the brain, but the law expresses itself. The spirit has gone to where the law works. If it had not heeded it, it would also have acted; but it would not have been uttered. Since the spirit creeps into the process, as it were, the law was uttered as an idea, as a concept, even in addition to the fact that it acts. It is only when the spirit takes no account of nature and looks at itself that it seems to it as if it were separate from nature, as it seems to the eye that the sun is enclosed within a certain space, if we disregard the fact that it is also there where it acts by attraction. So if I allow the ideas to arise in my mind that express the laws of nature, then it is just as true as the one assertion: that I create nature, the other: that nature creates itself in me.

[ 3 ] Now there are two ways of describing the one being that is spirit and nature at the same time. One is: I show the laws of nature that are active in reality. Or I show how the spirit does it in order to arrive at these laws. Both times I am guided by one and the same thing. On the one hand, I show the laws as they are active in nature; on the other hand, the spirit shows me what it begins to do in order to imagine the same laws. In the one case I am doing natural science, in the other spiritual science. Schelling describes in an attractive way how these two belong together: "The necessary tendency of all natural science is to move from nature to the intelligent. This and nothing else underlies the endeavor to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualization of all natural laws into laws of perception and thought. The phenomena (the material) must disappear completely and only the laws (the formal) remain. Hence it is that the more the lawful emerges in nature itself, the more the shell disappears, the more the phenomena themselves become spiritual and finally cease completely. Optical phenomena are nothing but a geometry whose lines are drawn by light, and this light itself is already of ambiguous materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism all material trace already disappears, and of the phenomena of gravitation, which even naturalists believed to be able to comprehend only as a direct spiritual influence, nothing remains but its law, the realization of which is on a large scale the mechanism of the movements of the heavens. The perfected theory of nature would be that by virtue of which the whole of nature would dissolve into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts of nature to reflect upon itself, but so-called nature is an immature intelligence in general, which is why the intelligent character already shines through in its phenomena while it is still unconscious. Nature reaches the highest goal of becoming a complete object to itself only through the highest and final reflection, which is nothing other than man, or more generally that which we call reason, through which nature first returns completely into itself, and through which it becomes apparent that nature is originally identical with that which is recognized in us as intelligent and conscious."

[ 4 ] Schelling wove the facts of nature into an elaborate web of thought, so that all its phenomena stood before his creative imagination like an ideal harmonious organism. He was animated by the feeling that the ideas that appeared in his imagination were also the true creative forces of natural processes. Spiritual forces therefore underlie nature; and what appears to our eyes as dead and lifeless originally comes from the spiritual. When we focus our minds on this, we uncover the ideas, the spiritual aspects of nature. Thus for man, in Schelling's sense, the things of nature are revelations of the spirit, behind whose outer shell it hides itself, as it were. It then reveals itself in its true form in our own inner being. Man thus knows what spirit is and can therefore also find the spirit hidden in nature. The way in which Schelling allows nature to re-emerge as spirit within himself has something in common with that which Goethe believes he finds in the perfect artist. In Goethe's opinion, he proceeds in the production of works of art as nature proceeds in its creations. In the work of the artist, therefore, we would have before us the same process by which everything that lies spread out before man in external nature has come into being. What nature withdraws from the external gaze is presented to man in a perceptible form in artistic creation. Nature shows man only the finished works; how she has done it to bring them to completion: that he must guess from these works. He has the creatures before him, not the Creator. With the artist one perceives creation and creature at the same time. Schelling now wants to penetrate through the products of nature to its creation; he places himself in the creative nature and lets it arise in his soul in the same way as the artist lets his work of art arise. So what, in Schelling's opinion, are the thoughts contained in his world view? They are the ideas of the creative spirit of nature. What preceded things and what created them emerges as a thought in the individual human spirit. This thought relates to its original real existence in the same way that the memory image of an experience relates to this experience itself. Thus, for Schelling, human science becomes a memory-image of the spiritual models that created before things. A divine spirit has created the world; it ultimately also creates human beings in order to form just as many tools in their souls through which it can remember its work. Thus, when Schelling devotes himself to the contemplation of world phenomena, he does not feel like an individual being at all. He appears to himself as a part, a member of the creative world powers. He does not think, but the spirit of the world thinks in him. This spirit contemplates its own creative activity in him.

[ 5 ] In the production of the work of art, Schelling sees a creation of the world on a small scale; in the thinking contemplation of things, a reminder of the creation of the world on a large scale. In the world-view, the ideas themselves appear in our spirit, which underlie things and have brought them forth. Man leaves out of the world everything that the senses say about it, and retains only that which pure thinking provides. The intimate interpenetration of the idea with what is revealed to the senses occurs in the creation and enjoyment of the work of art. In Schelling's view, therefore, nature, art and worldview (philosophy) stand opposite each other in such a way that nature presents the finished, external products, worldview the generating ideas, art both in harmonious interaction. Artistic activity stands in the middle between creative nature, which produces without knowing the ideas on the basis of which it creates, and the thinking spirit, which knows these ideas without being able to create things with their help. Schelling expresses this in the sentence: "The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are thus products of one and the same activity; the meeting of the two (the conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness gives the real world, with consciousness the aesthetic world. The objective world is only the original, still unconscious poetry of the spirit, the general organon of philosophy and the keystone of its entire vault the philosophy of art."

[ 6 ] The intellectual activities of man: thinking contemplation of the world and artistic creation, appear to Schelling not only as individual activities of the individual personality, but, if they are grasped in their highest meaning, at the same time as activities of the primordial being of the spirit of the world. In truly dithyrambic sentences, Schelling describes the feeling that arises in the soul when it realizes that its life is not merely an individual one, limited to one point in the universe, but that its activity is a spiritual-general one. When it says: I know, I recognize, this means in a higher sense: the world spirit remembers what it did before the existence of things; and when it produces a work of art, this means: the world spirit repeats on a small scale what it accomplished on a large scale in the creation of the whole of nature. "Thus the soul in man is not the principle of individuality, but that by which he raises himself above all selfhood, by which he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of unselfish love, and, what is the highest, of contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things, and thus of art. It is no longer concerned with matter, nor does it deal directly with it, but only with the spirit, as the life of things. Even appearing in the body, it is nevertheless free from the body, whose consciousness floats in it, in the most beautiful formations, only like a light dream that does not disturb it. It is not a quality, a faculty, or anything of the kind in particular; it does not know, but it is science, it is not good, but it is goodness, it is not beautiful, as the body can be, but it is beauty itself." (On the relationship of the fine arts to nature.)

[ 7 ] This type of conception is reminiscent of German mysticism, which had a representative in Jacob Böhme (1557 to 1624). In Munich, where he stayed from 1806 to 1841 with brief interruptions, Schelling enjoyed the stimulating contact with Franz Xaver Baader, whose philosophical ideas were entirely in the direction of that older doctrine. This is the reason why he himself settled into this world of thought, which was entirely in line with the point of view at which he himself had arrived with his thinking. If one reads the above statements from the speech "On the Relationship of the Fine Arts to Nature", which he delivered in 1807 at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Munich, one is reminded of Jacob Böhme's view: "When you look at the depths and the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and are, and the same God also governs you . ... you were created from this God and live in him; also all your science is in this God and when you die, you will be buried in this God."

[ 8 ] As his thinking progressed, Schelling's view of the world became a view of God or theosophy. He was already fully grounded in such a view of God when he published his "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Subjects Connected Therewith" in 1809. All questions of worldview now came to him in a new light. If all things are divine, how is it that there is evil in the world, since God can only be perfect goodness? If the soul of man is in God, how is it that it pursues its selfish interests? And if it is God who acts in me: how can I, who therefore do not act as an independent being, still be called free?

[ 9 ] Schelling sought to answer these questions by considering God, no longer by considering the world. It would be completely inappropriate for God to create a world of beings that he would have to continually guide and direct as dependent beings. God is only perfect if he can create a world that is equal to himself in perfection. A God who can only produce something that is more imperfect than himself is himself imperfect. God has therefore created beings in human beings who do not need his guidance, but who are themselves free and independent like him. A being that has its origin in another need not therefore also be dependent on the latter. For it is no contradiction that he who is the son of man is himself man. Just as the eye, which is only possible in the whole of the organism, nevertheless has an independent life of its own, so also the individual soul, which is indeed conceived in God, but is therefore not effective through him like a link in a machine. "God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. It is impossible to see how the most perfect being could find pleasure in the most perfect machine possible. However one may conceive the nature of the succession of beings from God, it can never be a mechanical one, not a mere effecting or placing, whereby the effecting is nothing in itself; just as little emanation, whereby that which flows out would remain the same as that from which it flowed out, thus nothing of its own, independent. The consequence of things from God is a self-revelation of God. But God can only reveal himself in that which is similar to him, in free beings acting out of themselves; for whose being there is no reason other than God, but who are as God is." If God were a God of the dead and all world phenomena were merely a mechanism whose processes could be traced back to him as their mover and primal cause, one would only need to describe God's activity and everything within the world would be understood. One could understand all things and their activity from God. But this is not the case. The divine world is independent. God created it, but it has its own essence. Thus it is divine; but the divine appears within an entity that is independent of God, within a non-divine. Just as light is born out of darkness, so the divine world is born out of an ungodly existence. And from the ungodly comes evil, comes selfishness. So God does not have the entirety of beings under his control; he can give them light, but they themselves emerge from the dark night. They are the sons of this night. And God has no power over what is darkness in them. They must work their way up through the night to the light. That is their freedom. You could also say that the world is God's creation out of the ungodly. The undivine is therefore the first and the divine only the second.

[ 10 ] First, Schelling sought the ideas in all things, i.e. their divinity. For him, this transformed the whole world into a revelation of God. However, he then had to proceed from the divine to the undivine in order to comprehend the imperfect, the evil, the selfish. Now the whole process of becoming the world became for him a progressive overcoming of the undivine by the divine. The individual human being takes his origin from the ungodly. He works his way out of this to divinity. We can also observe the progression from the ungodly to the divine in the course of history. The ungodly was originally the ruling force in the world. In ancient times, people abandoned themselves to their nature. They acted naively out of selfishness. Greek culture stands on this ground. It was the age when man lived in alliance with nature, or, as Schiller put it in his essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry", was nature itself and therefore did not yet seek it. With Christianity, this state of innocence of humanity disappears. Mere nature is seen as the ungodly, evil is set against the divine, the good. Christ appears to make the light of the divine appear within the night of the ungodly. This is the moment when "the earth becomes desolate and empty for the second time", that of "the birth of the higher light of the spirit", which "was in the world from the beginning, but incomprehensible by the darkness working for itself; and in still closed and limited revelation; and indeed it appears to confront personal and spiritual evil, also in personal, human form, and as a mediator to restore the rapport of creation with God at the highest level. For only the personal can heal the personal, and God must become man so that man can come to God again. "

[ 11 ] Spinozism is a worldview that seeks in God the ground of all world events, and from this ground derives all processes according to eternal, necessary laws, just as mathematical truths are derived from principles. Such a world view was not enough for Schelling. Like Spinoza, he also believed that all beings are in God; however, in his opinion, they are not determined by God alone, but rather the undivine is in them. He reproaches Spinoza for the "lifelessness of his system, the insensitivity of the form, the paucity of the concepts and expressions, the relentless harshness of the determinations, which is perfectly compatible with the abstract way of looking at things". Schelling therefore finds Spinoza's "mechanical view of nature" quite logical. But nature by no means shows this consistency. "The whole of nature tells us that it is by no means there by virtue of a mere geometrical necessity; there is not pure, pure reason in it, but personality and spirit, otherwise the geometrical intellect, which has prevailed for so long, would have had to penetrate it long ago and prove its idol of general and eternal laws of nature more true than it has done so far, since it must rather recognize the irrational relationship of nature to itself more and more every day. Just as man is not merely intellect and reason, but unites other faculties and powers within himself, so, in Schelling's sense, this should also be the case with the divine primal being. A God who is pure, pure reason appears like personified mathematics; a God, on the other hand, who cannot proceed according to pure reason in his work, but has to constantly struggle with the undivine, can be regarded as "a completely personal, living being". His life has the greatest analogy with the human one. Just as man seeks to overcome the imperfect in himself and strives for an ideal of perfection, such a God is presented as an eternally struggling being whose activity is the progressive overcoming of the undivine. Schelling compares Spinoza's God to the "oldest images of the deities, which, the less individual-living traits spoke from them, the more mysterious they appeared". Schelling gives his God ever more individual traits. He describes him like a human being when he says: "If we consider the terrible things in nature and the world of spirits and the far greater things that a benevolent hand seems to cover up for us, then we cannot doubt that the deity is enthroned above a world of horrors, and that God, according to what is hidden in him and through him, cannot be called the terrible, the fearful, in the non-actual sense, but in the actual sense."

[ 12 ] Schelling could no longer view such a God in the same way that Spinoza viewed his God. A God who determines everything out of himself according to the laws of reason can also be seen through with reason. A personal God, as Schelling envisioned him in his later period, is unpredictable. For he does not act according to reason alone. In the case of an arithmetical example, we can determine the result in advance simply by thinking; not so with the acting human being. With him we must wait and see what action he will decide to take at a given moment. Experience must be added to rational knowledge. The pure science of reason was therefore not sufficient for Schelling's view of the world or of God. In the later form of his world view, he therefore calls everything gained from reason a negative knowledge that must be supplemented by a positive one. Whoever wants to recognize the living God must not merely abandon himself to the necessary conclusions of reason; he must immerse himself with his whole personality in the life of God. Then he will experience what no conclusions, no pure reason can give him. The world is not a necessary effect of the divine cause, but a free act of the personal God. In his "Philosophy of Revelation" and his "Philosophy of Mythology", Schelling set out what he believed to have recognized not through rational contemplation, but as free, unpredictable acts of God. He did not publish either of these works himself, but only based their content on the lectures he gave at the University of Berlin after Frederick William IV had appointed him to the Prussian capital. They were only published after Schelling's death (1854).

[ 13 ] With such views, Schelling proved to be the boldest and most courageous of those philosophers who were inspired by Kant to develop an idealistic world view. Under the influence of this inspiration, philosophizing about things that lie beyond what the human senses observe and what thinking says about observations was abandoned. One sought to be modest with that which lies within observation and thought. But while Kant concluded from the necessity of such knowledge that nothing could be known about things beyond, the post-Kantians declared that since observation and thought do not point to any divine beyond, they themselves are the divine. And of those who declared this, Schelling was the most energetic. Fichte took everything into the ego; Schelling spread the ego over everything. He did not want to show, like Fichte, that the ego is everything, but conversely that everything is ego. And Schelling had the courage to declare not only the idea content of the ego to be divine, but the entire human spiritual personality. He not only made human reason into a divine one, but the human content of life into the divine personal entity. An explanation of the world is called anthropomorphism, which starts from man and imagines that the course of the world as a whole is based on an entity that directs it in the same way as man directs his own actions. The world is also explained in anthropomorphic terms by those who assume that events are based on a general world reason. For this general world reason is nothing other than human reason made general. When Goethe says: "Man never realizes how anthropomorphic he is", he is thinking of the fact that the simplest statements we make about nature contain hidden anthropomorphisms. When we say that a body rolls on because another has pushed it, we are forming such an idea of our ego. We push a body and it rolls on. If we now see that one ball moves against another and the latter then rolls on, we imagine that the first has pushed the second, analogous to the pushing effect that we ourselves exert. According to Ernst Haeckel, the anthropomorphic dogma "compares the creation and government of the world by God with the artistic creations of an ingenious technician or machine engineer and with the government of a wise ruler. The Lord God as creator, sustainer and ruler of the world is presented in his thoughts and actions in a very human-like way." Schelling had the courage for the most consistent anthropomorphism. In the end, he declared man with his entire purpose in life to be a deity. And since this purpose of life includes not only the rational but also the unreasonable, he had the possibility of explaining the unreasonable within the world. To this end, however, he had to supplement the rational view with another one that did not have its source in thinking. He called this higher view, in his opinion, "positive philosophy". It "is the real free philosophy; whoever does not want it may leave it, I leave it to everyone, I only say that if one wants, for example, the real course of events, if he wants a free creation of the world, etc., he can only have all this by way of such a philosophy. If rational philosophy is enough for him, and if he wants nothing apart from it, he may stay with it, but he must give up wanting to have with and in rational philosophy what it absolutely cannot have in itself, namely the real God and the real process and a free relation of God to the world." Negative philosophy will "preferably remain the philosophy of the school, positive philosophy that of life. Only through both together will the complete consecration be given that is to be demanded of philosophy. It is well known that in the Eleusinian consecrations a distinction was made between the lesser and greater mysteries, the lesser being regarded as a preliminary stage of the greater ... The positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of the rightly understood negative one, and so one can say: in the negative philosophy the small, in the positive the great mysteries of philosophy are celebrated." If the inner life is explained as the divine, then it seems inconsistent to stop at one part of this inner life. Schelling did not commit this inconsistency. The moment he said: to explain nature means to create nature, he gave direction to his whole view of life. If the thinking contemplation of nature is a repetition of its creation, then the basic character of this creation must also correspond to that of human activity: it must be an act of freedom, not one of geometric necessity. But neither can we recognize free creation through the laws of reason; it must reveal itself through another means.

[ 14 ] The individual human personality lives in and through the spiritual primal being; nevertheless, it is in possession of its full freedom and independence. Schelling regarded this idea as one of the most important within his world view. Because of this idea, he believed he could see progress in his idealistic school of thought compared to earlier views; because by allowing the individual being to be founded in the world spirit, they also thought it to be determined solely by this spirit, thus robbing it of its freedom and independence. "For until the discovery of idealism, the actual concept of freedom was lacking in all recent systems, in the Leibnizian as well as in the Spinozian; and a freedom such as many among us have conceived, who, moreover, boast of the most vivid sense of it, according to which it consists in the mere dominion of the intelligent principle over the sensual and the desires, such a freedom could still be derived from Spinoza, not by necessity, but quite easily and even more definitely." One man who thought only of such freedom and who, with the help of ideas borrowed from Spinozism, sought to bring about the reconciliation of religious consciousness with the thinking view of the world, of theology with philosophy, was Schelling's contemporary Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834). In his "Reden über die Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern" (1799), he said: "Sacrifice with me reverently the manes of the holy, departed Spinoza! The high spirit of the world permeated him, the infinite was his beginning and his end, the universe his only and eternal love; in holy innocence and deep humility he reflected himself in the eternal world and watched how he too was its most lovable mirror." For Schleiermacher, freedom is not the ability of a being to determine the direction and goal of its own life in complete independence. For him, it is only "self-development". But a being can very well develop out of itself, and it can still be unfree in a higher sense. If the primordial being of the world has placed a very definite germ in the individuality, which it brings to development, then the path it has to follow is precisely marked out for it; and yet it only develops out of itself. Such freedom, as Schleiermacher conceives it, is therefore quite conceivable in a necessary world order in which everything takes place with mathematical necessity. That is why he can also say: "Freedom therefore goes as far as life. ... Even the plant has its freedom." Because Schleiermacher only knew freedom in this sense, he was also able to seek the origin of religion in the most unfree feeling, that of "absolute dependence". Man feels that he must relate his existence to another being, to God. His religious consciousness is rooted in this feeling. A feeling as such is always something that must be linked to another. It has only a second-hand existence. Thought, the idea, have such an independent existence that Schelling can say of them: "Thus thoughts are indeed generated by the soul; but the generated thought is an independent power, working for itself, indeed growing in the human soul in such a way that it conquers and subdues its own mother." Whoever therefore seeks to grasp the divine primal being in thought takes it into himself and has it within him as an independent power. This independent power can then be followed by a feeling, just as the idea of a beautiful work of art is followed by a feeling of satisfaction. Schleiermacher, however, does not want to seize the object of religion, but only the religious feeling. He leaves the object, God, itself completely undefined. Man feels himself dependent; but he does not know the Being on whom he is dependent. All concepts that we form of the deity do not correspond to the high nature of the same. This is why Schleiermacher also avoids going into any specific concepts about the Godhead. The most indeterminate, emptiest concept is his favorite. "It was religion when the ancients regarded every peculiar kind of life throughout the whole world as the work of a deity; they had received the peculiar way of acting of the universe as a definite feeling and so designated it." This is why Schleiermacher's subtle words on the nature of immortality nevertheless reveal something quite indeterminate: "The goal and character of a religious life is not that immortality outside of time and behind time, or rather only after this time, but still in time, but the immortality that we can already have directly in this temporal life, and which is a task in the solution of which we are constantly engaged. To become one with the infinite in the midst of finiteness and to be eternal in every moment, that is the immortality of religion." If Schelling had said this, a certain idea could be linked to it. It would then mean that man creates the thought of God within himself. This is nothing other than God himself remembering his own being. The infinite thus comes to life in the individual being's thought of God. It is present in the finite. This therefore participates in infinity itself. But since Schleiermacher says this without Schelling's foundations, it remains completely nebulous. It expresses the mere dark feeling that man is dependent on an infinite. It is the theology in Schleiermacher that prevents him from progressing to certain ideas about the primordial nature of the world. He wants to raise religiosity and piety to a higher level. For he is a personality of rare depth of mind. The religious feeling should be a worthy one. Everything he says about this feeling is of a noble nature. He defended the morality that transcends all barriers of convention and social concepts, born purely of his own arbitrariness, which prevails in Schlegel's "Lucinde"; he was allowed to do so because he was convinced that man can be pious, even if he accomplishes the most daring things in morality. "There is no healthy sentiment that is not pious," he was allowed to say. He understood piety. What Goethe expressed in his later years in the poem "Trilogy of Passion":

"In our pure bosom a striving surges,
To surrender to a higher, purer, unknown
To surrender voluntarily out of gratitude,
Unraveling the eternally unnamed;
We call it: being pious-

This feeling was familiar to Schleiermacher. That is why he knew how to describe the religious life. He did not want to recognize the object of devotion. Every kind of theology may determine it in its own way. Schleiermacher wanted to create a realm of piety that was independent of the knowledge of the Godhead. In this sense, he is a reconciler of faith with knowledge.

[ 15 ] "In recent times, religion has increasingly contracted the educated expansion of its content and withdrawn into the intensity of piety or also of feeling, and often a very meagre and cold content manifesting feeling." So wrote Hegel in the preface to the second edition of his "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences" (1827); and he continued: "As long as it still has a creed, a doctrine, a dogma, it has that with which philosophy can concern itself and in which it as such can unite with religion. This, however, is again not to be taken according to the divisive bad sense in which modern religiosity is caught up, and according to which it conceives of both in such a way that the one excludes the other, or that they are so separable that they then only unite from the outside. On the contrary, it is also evident from the foregoing that religion can indeed be without philosophy, but philosophy cannot be without religion, but rather includes it within itself. The true religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a credo, a content; for the spirit is essentially consciousness, thus of the content made objective; as feeling it is the non-objective content itself... and only the lowest level of consciousness, indeed in the form of the soul which is common with the animal. Thinking is what makes the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, a spirit; and philosophy is only an awareness of that content, the spirit and its truth, also in the form and manner of its essence, which distinguishes it from the animal and makes it capable of religion. " The whole spiritual physiognomy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) presents itself to our minds when we hear such words from him, through which he wanted to express clearly and sharply that he sees in thinking, which is conscious of itself, the highest activity of man, the one through which alone he can gain a position on the supreme questions. Hegel declared the feeling of dependence, which Schleiermacher regarded as the creator of piety, to be genuinely animal; and he paradoxically stated that if this feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a personality who lives entirely in the element of thinking. "Because man is thinking, no more common sense than philosophy will ever allow itself to be deprived of the opportunity to rise to God from and out of the empirical view of the world. This elevation has nothing else as its basis than the thinking, not merely sensual, animalistic contemplation of the world." What can be gained through self-conscious thinking is what Hegel makes the content of the world view. For what man gains in a way other than through this self-conscious thinking can be nothing other than a preliminary stage to a world view. "The elevation of thought above the sensible, the going forth of the same beyond the finite to the infinite, the leap which is made by breaking off the ranks of the sensible into the supersensible, all this is thinking itself, this passing over is only thinking. If such a transition is not to be made, this means that it is not to be thought. In fact, animals do not make such a leap; they remain with sensual perception and contemplation; they therefore have no religion." What man can elicit from things through thinking is therefore the highest that is there for him in them. He can therefore only call this their essence. For Hegel, thought is therefore the essence of things. All sensual imagination, all scientific observation of the world and its processes ultimately comes down to man thinking about the connection between things. Hegel's work now begins where sensual imagination, scientific observation has reached its goal in the thought of how it lives in self-consciousness. The scientific observer observes nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer says about nature. The former seeks through his scientific procedure to reduce the multiplicity of natural phenomena to a unity; he explains one process from another; he strives for order, for an organic overview of the whole, which presents itself to his senses as a disordered multiplicity. Hegel seeks order and a harmonious overview in the results of the natural scientist. He adds to the science of nature the science of thoughts about nature. All thoughts that one has about the world naturally form a unified whole, just as nature is also a unified whole. The scientific observer derives his thoughts from the individual things; therefore they first appear in his mind as individuals, one next to the other. If we look at them side by side in this way, they come together to form a whole within which each individual is a member. This whole of thoughts is what Hegel's philosophy wants to be. Just as the natural scientist who wants to determine the laws of the starry sky does not believe that he can construct the starry sky out of these laws, so Hegel, who seeks the lawful connections within the world of thought, does not believe that he can find any scientific laws out of thought that can only be determined through experiential observation. The repeated claim that Hegel wanted to draw full and unrestricted knowledge of the world as a whole from pure thought is based on nothing more than a naïve misunderstanding of his view. He said clearly enough: "The task of philosophy is to grasp what is; for what is reasonable is real, what is real is reasonable. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a figure of life has grown old ...; the owl of Minerva only begins its flight with the breaking dawn." This means nothing other than that the actual insights must already be there when the thinker comes and illuminates them from his point of view. Just don't ask Hegel to derive new laws of nature from pure thinking, because that is not what he wanted at all. No, he wanted nothing more than to throw a philosophical light on the sum of the laws of nature that existed in his time. No one demands of the natural scientist that he create the starry sky, even though he does his research on it; HegeI's views are declared unfruitful because he, who thought about the connection between the laws of nature, did not create these laws of nature at the same time.

[ 16 ] What man ultimately arrives at by immersing himself in things is their essence. It underlies them. That which man absorbs as his highest knowledge is at the same time the deepest essence of things. The thought living in man is therefore also the objective content of the world. One can say: Thought is first in the world in an unconscious way; then it is absorbed by the human spirit, it appears to itself in the human spirit. Just as man, when he looks into nature, finally finds the thought that makes its phenomena comprehensible to him, so here too, when he contemplates himself, he finally finds the thought. Just as the essence of nature is thought, so is man's own essence thought. In human self-consciousness, therefore, thought looks at itself. The essence of the world comes to itself. Thought works in the other creatures of nature; its activity is not directed towards itself, but towards something else. Nature therefore contains thought; but in thinking man thought is not only contained, it not only works, but is directed towards itself. Thought also lives itself out in external nature, but there it flows out into something else; in man it lives in itself. Thus for Hegel the whole world-process appears as a thought-process. And all the events of this process present themselves as preliminary stages to the highest event that exists: the thinking apprehension of thought itself. This event takes place in human self-consciousness. Thought thus works its way progressively through to its highest form of manifestation, in which it comprehends itself.

[ 17 ] If one thus looks at any thing of reality, a process, one will always see a certain developmental form of thought in this thing or process. The world process is a progressive development of thought. Apart from the highest stage of this development, all other stages contain a contradiction. There is thought in them, but this has more in it than it gives out in such a low stage. It therefore overcomes this contradictory form of appearance and rushes to a higher one that corresponds more to it. It is thus the contradiction that drives the development of thought forward. When the observer of nature observes things by thinking, he therefore forms contradictory concepts of them. When the philosophical thinker then takes up these thoughts gained from the observation of nature, he finds in them contradictory ideal formations. But it is precisely this contradiction that makes it possible for him to turn the individual thoughts into an entire thought structure. He seeks out what is contradictory in a thought. And it is contradictory because the thought points to a higher stage of its development. Through the contradiction it contains, therefore, every thought points to another, towards which it rushes in the course of its development. Thus the philosopher can begin with the simplest thought, which is completely empty of content, with abstract being. He is driven out of it by the contradiction inherent in this thought itself to a higher and less contradictory stage, and then onwards until he arrives at the highest stage, at the thought living in itself, which is the highest expression of the spirit.

[ 18 ] Hegel expresses the basic character of the newer striving for a world view. The Greek spirit knows thought as perception, the newer spirit as the soul's self-production. Hegel pursues the creatures of self-consciousness in contemplation by presenting his world-view. Initially, therefore, he is concerned only with self-consciousness and its products. But then the activity of this self-consciousness becomes one in which this self-consciousness feels connected with the world-spirit. The Greek thinker observes the world, and this observation provides information about the essence of the world. The newer thinker in Hegel wants to live himself into the creating world, to put himself into it; he then believes to discover himself in it and lets express in himself what the spirit of the world expresses as its essence, whereby this essence of the world spirit is vividly present in the self-consciousness. What Plato is within the Greek world, Hegel is within the newer one. Plato raises the contemplative spiritual gaze to the world of ideas and allows this contemplative gaze to catch the mystery of the soul; Hegel allows the soul to submerge into the world spirit and then, after it has submerged, allows it to unfold its inner life. Thus it lives as its own life what the world spirit lives in which it is immersed.

[ 19 ] Hegel thus grasped the human spirit in its highest activity, thinking, and then attempted to show what meaning this highest activity has within the world as a whole. It represents the event in which the primordial being poured out into the whole world finds itself again. The highest activities through which this rediscovery takes place are art, religion and philosophy. Thought is present in the work of nature; but here it is alienated from itself; it does not appear in its original form. If you look at a real lion, it is nothing other than the embodiment of the thought "lion"; but here it is not a question of the thought of the lion, but of the corporeal being; this being itself is not concerned with the thought. Only when I want to understand it do I look for the thought. A work of art that depicts a lion carries what I can only comprehend in the real creature on the outside. The corporeality is only there to make the thought itself appear. Man creates works of art so that what he otherwise only grasps in thought about things can also be seen externally. Thought can only appear in reality, in its own form, in human self-consciousness. What appears in reality only here, man imprints on the sensuous material so that it may also appear in it. When Goethe stood before the works of art of the Greeks, he was compelled to say: there is necessity, there is God. In Hegel's language, in which God expresses himself in the thought content of the world and lives himself out in human self-consciousness, this would mean: the highest revelations of the world, which in reality are only granted to man within his own spirit, look out at him from the works of art. Philosophy contains thought in its purest form, in its very essence. The highest form of manifestation that the divine primal being can assume, the world of thought, is contained in philosophy. In Hegel's sense, one can say that the whole world is divine, that is filled with thought, but in philosophy the divine appears quite directly in its divinity, while in other manifestations it takes on the forms of the undivine. Religion stands between art and philosophy. Thought does not yet live in it as pure thought, but in the image, in the symbol. This is also the case with art; but in art the image is one that is borrowed from external perception; the images of religion, however, are spiritualized.

[ 20 ] In relation to these highest manifestations of thought, all other human expressions of life are like imperfect preliminary stages. The whole historical life of mankind is composed of such preliminary stages. Whoever therefore follows the external course of historical phenomena will find much that does not correspond to pure thought, which is the object of reason. But he who looks deeper will see that in the historical development the rational thought is nevertheless realized. It only realizes itself in a way that appears ungodly in its immediate extraordinariness One can therefore say on the whole: "Everything real is rational." And it is precisely on this that it depends that in the whole of history the thought, the historical world spirit realizes itself. The individual is only a tool for the realization of the purposes of this world spirit. Because Hegel recognizes the highest essence of the world in thought, he also demands of the individual that he subordinate himself to the general thought prevailing in the development of the world. "These are the great men in history whose actual particular purposes contain the substantial, which is the will of the world spirit. This substance is their true power; it is in the general unconscious instinct of men; they are inwardly impelled to it, and have no further disposition to resist him who has undertaken the execution of such purpose in his interest. Rather, the peoples gather around his banner; he shows them and carries out what is their own immanent purpose. If we look further at the fate of these world-historical individuals, they have had the good fortune to be the executors of a purpose which was a stage in the progress of the general spirit. In making use of these instruments, we may call it a cunning of reason, for it lets them accomplish their own ends with all the fury of passion, and not only preserves itself undamaged, but produces itself. The particular is usually too small in comparison with the general: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. World history thus presents itself as the struggle of individuals, and in the field of this particularity it proceeds quite naturally. Just as in animal nature the preservation of life is the purpose and instinct of the individual, but just as here reason, the general, prevails and the individuals fall, so it is also in the spiritual world. The passions destroy each other; reason alone keeps watch, pursues its purpose and asserts itself. "The individual can only embrace the All-Spirit in contemplation, in his thinking. Only by contemplating the world is God fully present in him. Where man acts, where he intervenes in active life, he is a member and can therefore only participate as a member in general reason. Hegel's doctrine of the state also flows from such thoughts. With his thinking man is alone; with his deeds he is a member of the community. The rational order of the community, the thought that permeates it, is the state. The single individuality as such is only worth something for Hegel insofar as the general reason, the thought, appears in it. For thought is the essence of things. A product of nature does not have it in its power to make thought appear in itself in its highest form; man has this power. He will therefore only achieve his destiny if he makes himself the bearer of thought. Since the state is the realized thought, and the individual man only a member within it, man must serve the state and not the state man. "If the state be confounded with civil society, and its destiny placed in the security and protection of property and personal liberty, then the interest of individuals as such is the ultimate end for which they are united, and it follows equally from this that to be a member of the state is something arbitrary. But it has a quite different relation to the individual; in that it is objective spirit, the individual himself has objectivity, truth and morality only as a member of it. The association as such is itself the true content and purpose, and the destiny of individuals is to lead a general life; their further particular satisfaction, activity, manner of behavior has this substantial and universally valid as its starting point and result." What about freedom within such a view of life? Hegel does not accept the concept of freedom, which recognizes an unconditional right of the individual human personality to set the goal and purpose of its activity for itself. For what value should it have if this individual personality did not take its goal from the rational world of thought, but decided according to complete arbitrariness? That, in his opinion, would be precisely the lack of freedom. Such an individual would not correspond to its nature; it would be imperfect. A perfect individual can only want to realize his essence; and the ability to do this is his freedom. But this essence is embodied in the state. If man acts in the spirit of the state, he therefore acts freely. "The state, in and of itself, is the moral whole, the realization of freedom, and it is the absolute purpose of reason that freedom should be real. The state is the spirit that stands in the world and realizes itself in it with consciousness, while it realizes itself in nature only as the other of itself, as a sleeping spirit ... It is the course of God in the world that the state is; its ground is the power of reason realizing itself as will." Hegel is nowhere concerned with things as such, but always with their rational, intellectual content. Just as he sought thought everywhere in the field of world observation, he also wanted life to be guided by the point of view of thought. That is why he fought against vague ideals of state and society and took up the cause of defending what really existed. According to Hegel, anyone who fancies an indefinite ideal in the future believes that common reason has been waiting for him to appear. To such a person it must be made particularly clear that there is already reason in everything that is real. He called Professor Fries, whose colleague he was in Jena and whose successor he was in Heidelberg, the "military leader of all shallowness", because he wanted to form such an ideal of the future out of the "pulp of the heart".

[ 21 ] Hegel's far-reaching defense of the real and the existing earned him severe reproaches even from those who were friendly towards his ideas. A follower of Hegel, Johann Eduard Erdmann, writes about this: "The decisive preponderance that Hegel's philosophy was given over all contemporary systems, especially in the mid-twenties, has its reason in the fact that the momentary calm that followed the wild battles in the political, religious and ecclesiastical-political sphere corresponded to a philosophy that enemies reproached and friends praised as 'restoration philosophy'. It is this in a much broader sense than those who invented the name meant."

[ 22 ] However, one must not overlook the fact that it was precisely through his sense of reality that Hegel created a highly life-friendly view. With his "Philosophy of Revelation", Schelling wanted to create a view for life. But how alien the concepts of his view of God are to immediate, real life. Such a view can at most have its value for those solemn moments of life in which man withdraws from everyday life and devotes himself to the highest moods; in which he, so to speak, does not perform a service to the world, but only a service to God. Hegel, on the other hand, wanted to imbue man with the feeling that he also serves the universal divine in everyday reality. With him, the divine reaches down to the smallest things, as it were, whereas with Schelling it withdraws into the highest regions of existence. Because he loved reality and life, Hegel sought to present them as rationally as possible. He wanted man to take every step with reason. Basically, he did not hold the individual personality in low esteem. We can see this from statements such as these: "The richest is the most concrete and sublective and that which withdraws into the simplest depth is the most powerful and overarching. The highest, most sharpened point is the pure personality, which alone, through the absolute dialectic which is its nature, just as much concerns and holds everything in itself, because it makes itself the freest, the simplest, which is the first immediacy and generality." But in order to become "pure personality", the individual must also permeate himself with the whole of reason and make it his own. For the "pure personality" is at the same time the highest to which man can develop, but which he is by no means already by nature. Once he has risen there, Hegel's words apply to him: "The fact that man knows of God is, according to the essential community, a common knowledge, for man only knows of God insofar as God knows of himself in man: this knowledge is God's self-consciousness, but also a knowledge of God of man, and this knowledge of God of man is man's knowledge of God. The spirit of man to know of God is only the spirit of God himself. " In Hegel's opinion, only a person in whom this is realized deserves the name personality in the highest sense of the word. For in him reason and individuality coincide; he realizes the God in himself, to whom he gives the organ in his consciousness to look at himself. All thoughts would remain abstract, unconscious, ideal formations if they did not gain a living reality in man. Without man, God would not exist in his highest perfection. He would be the unfinished primordial being of the world. He would know nothing of himself. Hegel presented this God before his realization in life. The content of this representation is logic. It is a building of lifeless, rigid, mute thoughts. Hegel himself calls it the "realm of shadows". It is intended to show, as it were, what God is like in his innermost eternal being before the creation of nature and the finite spirit. But since self-perception is a necessary part of God's essence, the content of logic is still the dead God who desires existence. In reality, this realm of pure, abstract truth does not exist anywhere; only our understanding can separate it from the living realities. In Hegel's sense, there is no ready-made primordial being that exists anywhere, but only one that is in eternal motion, in constant becoming. This eternal being is "the eternally real truth, in which the eternally active reason is free for itself, and for which necessity, nature and history only serve its revelation and are vessels of its honor". Hegel wanted to show how the world of thought takes hold of itself in man. He expressed Goethe's view in a different form: "If the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, if he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, if harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being." Translated into Hegel's language, this means that when man experiences his own being through thinking, this act has not only an individual, personal meaning, but a universal one; the essence of the universe reaches its peak, its completion, in man's self-knowledge, without which it would remain a fragment.

[ 22 ] The Hegelian conception of cognition does not conceive of it as a grasping of a content that is already present somewhere in the world without it, not as an activity that creates images of real events. What, in Hegel's sense, is created in thinking cognition is not present anywhere else in the world, only in cognition. Just as the plant produces the blossom at a certain stage of its development, so the universe produces the content of human cognition. And just as little as the blossom is present before its formation, so little is it the thought content of the world that comes to light in the human spirit. A world view that believes that only images of already existing content should arise in cognition makes man an idle spectator of the world, which would be completely finished without him. Hegel, on the other hand, makes man an active participant in world events, which would lack the summit without him.

[ 23 ] Grillparzer characterized Hegel's opinion on the relationship of thought to the world in a significant statement:

It is possible that you teach us prophetically the divine thinking,
But the human, friend, you will surely bring to ruin.

What the poet means here by human thinking is that which presupposes its content ready-made in the world and wants to be nothing but the image of it. For Hegel, the statement is not a rebuke. For this thinking about something else is, in his view, not yet the highest, the most perfect thinking. When one thinks about a thing of nature, one seeks a concept that "corresponds" to its external object. One then understands what the external object is through the thought that one forms. We are dealing with two things, with the thought and with the object. But if we want to climb to the highest point of view that man can reach, then we must not be afraid to ask what the thought itself is. But for this we have no other means than thought. In the highest cognition, thought seizes itself. It no longer asks for a correspondence with something else. It only has to do with itself alone. This thinking, which has no reference to anything outside itself, to any object, appears to Grillparzer like a destroyer of the thinking that provides the information about the manifold things of sensual and spiritual reality spread out in time and space. But as little as the painter destroys nature when he reproduces its lines and colors on canvas, so little does the thinker destroy the ideas of nature when he expresses them in their spiritual purity. It is strange that one wants to see an element hostile to reality precisely in thinking, because it abstracts from the fullness of sensual content. Indeed, does not the painter, by merely giving color, tone and line, abstract from all other features of an object? Hegel has met all such objections with a pretty joke: When the primordial being active in the world "slips out and falls into the water from the ground where it walks about, it becomes a fish, an organic, a living thing. If it now likewise slips out and falls into pure thinking - for even pure thinking is not supposed to be its ground - then, plopping into it, it is supposed to become something bad, finite, of which one must actually be ashamed to speak, if it were not for official reasons and because for once it cannot be denied that logic is there. Water is such a cold, bad element and yet life is so comfortable in it. Should thinking be a much worse element? Should the absolute even be bad in it and also behave badly in it?"

[ 24 ] It is entirely in the spirit of Hegel to assert that the primordial being of the world created lower nature and man; having reached this point, it decided to leave it to man to create thoughts about things in addition to the external world and himself. Thus the primordial being, in union with man, creates the whole content of the world. Man is co-creator of being, not an idle spectator, not a recognizing ruminant of what would also be there without his existence.

[ 25] What man is in his innermost existence, he is not through another, he is through himself. This is why Hegel does not regard freedom as a divine gift that has been placed in man's cradle once and for all, but as a result to which he gradually arrives in the course of his development. From life in the outer world, from the satisfaction of purely sensual existence, he rises to the comprehension of his spiritual being, his own inner world. In this way he also makes himself independent of the outer world; he follows his inner being. The spirit of the people contains natural necessity and feels itself to be entirely dependent on that which is custom and practice, moral opinion, apart from the individual. But gradually the personality struggles to free itself from this moral world of views laid down in the outer world and penetrates into its inner being by recognizing that it can develop moral views and give moral precepts out of its own spirit. Man rises to the contemplation of the primal being that reigns within him, which is also the source of his morality. He no longer seeks his moral precepts in the outside world, but in his own soul. He makes himself dependent only on himself. (§ 552 of Hegel's "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences"). This independence, this freedom, is therefore not something that comes to man from the outset; it is acquired in the course of historical development. World history is the progress of humanity in the awareness of freedom.

[ 26 ] Because Hegel sees in the highest expressions of the human spirit processes in which the primordial being of the world finds the conclusion of its development, its becoming, all other phenomena become for him precursors of this highest summit; and this itself appears as the purpose, towards which everything else strives. This idea of purposefulness in the universe is different from the one that thinks of world creation and world control as the work of a sensible technician or machine designer who has arranged all things according to useful goals. Goethe sharply rejected such utilitarianism. He said to Eckermann on February 20, 1831 (see Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann, Part II): Man "does not omit to carry his habitual view from life into science as well, and to ask about the purpose and usefulness of the individual parts of an organic being as well. This may go on for a while, and he may also get by in science for a while; but very soon he will come across phenomena where such a small view will not suffice, and where he will become entangled in contradictions without any higher support. Such teachers of usefulness say that the ox has horns to defend itself. But now, I ask: why doesn't the sheep have any? And if it does, why are they wrapped around its ears so that they are of no use to it? But it is something else if I say: The ox defends itself with its horns because it has them. The question of why is not at all scientific. One gets a little further with the question How? For if I ask: How does the ox have horns? this leads me to the consideration of its organization and at the same time teaches me why the lion has and can have no horns." Nevertheless, in another sense, Goethe sees in all of nature a purposeful organization that ultimately reaches its goal in man, i.e., as it were, arranges all of its works in such a way that he ultimately finds his destiny. We read in his "Winckelmann": "For what is the use of all the expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds that have become and are becoming, if a happy man does not ultimately enjoy his existence?" And Goethe is also convinced that the essence of all phenomena comes to light as truth in and 'through man. (Cf. p. 205 f.) How everything in the world is designed so that man has a worthy task and can solve it: to understand this is the aim of this world view. What Hegel says at the end of his "Philosophy of Nature" seems like a philosophical justification of Goethe's statements: "In the living, nature has perfected itself and made its peace by turning into something higher. Spirit has thus emerged from nature. The goal of nature is to kill itself and to break through its bark of the immediate, sensual, to burn itself as a phoenix in order to emerge rejuvenated from this exteriority as spirit. Nature has become another in order to recognize itself as an idea and to reconcile itself with itself ... As the purpose of nature, it (the spirit) is precisely for this reason before it, it has emerged from it." In this way, this world view was able to place man so highly, because it allows to be realized in him that which underlies all the world as a primal force, as a primal being; that which prepares its realization through the whole course of stages of all other phenomena, but only achieves it in man. Goethe and Hegel are in complete agreement in this conception. What the former gained from his observation of nature and spirit, the latter expresses on the basis of bright, pure thinking living in self-consciousness.

[ 27 ] What Goethe undertook with individual natural processes, to explain them through their becoming, their development, Hegel applied to the whole cosmos. Goethe demands of those who want to understand the essence of the plant organism: "Becoming now consider how the plant, guided step by step, gradually forms itself into blossom and fruit." Hegel wants to understand all world phenomena in the gradual sequence of their becoming, from the simplest, dull working of inert matter up to the self-conscious spirit. And in the self-conscious spirit he sees the revelation of the primordial nature of the world.