The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Battle for the Spirit

[ 1 ] Hegel felt that his thought structure had reached the goal towards which the development of the world view had been striving since it sought to master the riddles of existence within the experience of thought. With this in mind, he wrote the following words at the end of his "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences": The "concept of philosophy is the idea that thinks itself, the knowing truth ... Science has thus gone back to its beginning, and the logical its result, as the spiritual, which has proved itself to be the truth in and of itself ... has."

[ 2 ] Experiencing oneself in thought should, in Hegel's sense, give the human soul the awareness of being with its true original source. And by drawing from this primordial source and filling itself with thoughts from it, it lives in its own true essence and at the same time in the essence of nature. For this nature is just as much a revelation of thought as the soul itself. Through the phenomena of nature, the world of thought looks at the soul; and the soul grasps the creative power of thought within itself, so that it knows itself to be one with all world events. The soul sees its narrow self-consciousness expanded by the fact that the world itself looks at it knowingly. The soul thereby ceases to regard itself merely as that which is grasped between birth and death in the transient sensory body; in it knows itself the imperishable spirit, bound to no barriers of sensory existence, and it knows itself to be united with this spirit in inseparable unity.

[ 3 ] Put yourself in the place of a human soul that can go along with Hegel's direction of ideas to such an extent that it seems to experience the presence of thought in consciousness in the same way as Hegel himself; and you will feel how, for such a soul, centuries-old enigmatic questions appear in a light that can satisfy the questioner to a high degree. Such a satisfaction is indeed to be found, for example, in the numerous writings of the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz. Anyone who allows these writings (including System of Philosophy 1850; Psychology 1844; Critical Explanations of Hegel's Philosophy 1851) to sink in will find himself confronted with a personality who believes that he has found in Hegel's ideas what can place the human soul in a cognitive relationship to the world that is satisfying for it. Rosenkranz can be considered significant in this respect because he is by no means a blind follower of Hegel, but because a spirit lives in him that has the awareness that Hegel's position on the world and on man offers the possibility of giving a world view a healthy foundation.

[ 4 ] How could such a spirit feel about this foundation? - Over the centuries, since the birth of thought in ancient Greece, the riddles of existence that every soul basically faces have crystallized into a number of main questions within philosophical research. In more recent times, the fundamental question of the meaning, value and limits of knowledge has become the focus of philosophical reflection. What is the relationship between what man can perceive, imagine and think and the real world? Can this perception and thinking provide the kind of knowledge that can enlighten man about what he wants to be enlightened about? For those who think in Hegel's sense, this question is answered by their awareness of the nature of thought. When he takes possession of thought, he believes that he experiences the creative spirit of the world. In this union with the creating thought he feels the value and the true meaning of cognition. He cannot ask: what is the meaning of cognition? For by recognizing, he experiences this meaning. Thus the Hegelian sees himself as being abruptly opposed to all Kantianism. Consider what Hegel himself argues against the Kantian way of investigating cognition before cognizing: "A main point of view of critical philosophy is that, before proceeding to cognize God, the essence of things, etc., the faculty of cognition itself must be recognized. the faculty of knowledge itself must first be examined to see whether it is capable of doing so; one must first get to know the instrument before undertaking the work that is to be accomplished by means of it; otherwise, if it is inadequate, all effort would be wasted in vain. This idea has seemed so plausible that it has aroused the greatest admiration and approval, and has led the cognition back to itself from its interest in the objects and the business with them. However, if one does not want to deceive oneself with words, it is easy to see that other instruments can be examined and judged in other ways than by performing the peculiar work for which they are intended. But cognition cannot be investigated in any other way than cognizing; with this so-called tool, the same investigation means nothing other than cognition. To want to recognize before one recognizes is just as inconsistent as the wise resolution of that scholastic to learn to swim, if he dared to enter the water. " For Hegel, it is a matter of the soul experiencing itself, filled with the thought of the world. In this way it grows beyond its ordinary being; it becomes, as it were, the vessel in which the world-thought living in thought consciously grasps itself. But it does not feel itself merely as a vessel of this world-spirit, but knows itself to be one with it. Thus one cannot investigate the essence of cognition in Hegel's sense; one must rise to the experience of this essence and thus stand directly in cognition within it. If one stands in it, then one has it and no longer needs to ask about its meaning; if one does not yet stand in it, then one does not yet have the ability to investigate it. Kantian philosophy is an impossibility for the Hegelian worldview. For, in order to answer the question: How is knowledge possible, - the soul would first have to create knowledge; but then it could not allow itself to ask about its possibility in the first place.

[ 5 ] Hegel's philosophy amounts in a certain sense to allowing the soul to rise above itself, to a height at which it grows into one with the world. With the birth of thought in Greek philosophy, the soul separated itself from the world. It learned to face it in solitude. In this solitude, it discovers itself with the thought that reigns within it. Hegel wants to take this experience of thought to its height. He also finds the creative world principle in the highest experience of thought. The soul has thus described a cycle in which it has first separated itself from the world in order to seek thought. It feels separated from the world as long as it recognizes the thought only as a thought. But it feels reunited with it when it discovers the original source of the world in thought; and the cycle is complete. Hegel can say: "In this way, science has returned to its beginning."

[ 6 ] From such a point of view, the other main questions of human knowledge are placed in such a light that one can believe to survey existence in a complete world view. A second main question is that of the divine as the ground of the world. For Hegel, the elevation of the soul, through which the world-thought recognizes itself alive in it, is at the same time a becoming one with the divine world-ground. Thus, in his sense, one cannot ask: what is the divine ground of the world, or: how does man relate to it? One can only say: when the soul really experiences the truth in recognition, it immerses itself in this world ground.

[ 7 ] A third main question in the sense indicated is the cosmological one; this is the question of the inner essence of the external world. For Hegel, this essence can only be sought in thought itself. If the soul succeeds in experiencing the thought within itself, it also finds in its self-experience that form of thought which it is able to recognize when it looks into the processes and essences of the external world. For example, the soul can find something in its thought experiences that it knows immediately: this is the essence of light. If it then looks with the eye into nature, it sees in the outer light the revelation of the thought essence of light.

[ 8 ] So, for Hegel, the whole world dissolves into thought-being. Nature floats in the cosmos of thought as a solidified part of it, as it were; and the human soul is thought in the world of thought.

[ 9 ] The fourth main question of philosophy, that of the nature of the soul and its destiny, seems to be answered satisfactorily in the Hegelian sense by the true progression of the experience of thought. The soul initially finds itself connected with nature; in this connection it does not yet recognize its true essence. It detaches itself from this being of nature, then finds itself separated in thought, but finally sees that in thought, together with the true being of nature, it has also grasped its own true being as that of the living spirit, in which it lives and weaves as a member of it.

[ 10 ] All materialism thus seems to have been overcome. Matter itself appears only as a revelation of the spirit. The human soul may feel itself as becoming and existing in the spiritual universe.

[ 11 ] Now the unsatisfactory nature of Hegel's worldview is revealed most clearly in the question of the soul. Looking at this world view, the human soul must ask: Can I really find myself in what Hegel has presented as a comprehensive thought-world structure? It has been shown how all newer worldviews had to search for such a picture of the world in which the human soul with its essence has a corresponding place. Hegel allows the whole world to be thought; in thought the soul also has its supersensible being of thought. But can the soul declare itself satisfied with being contained as world-thought in the general world of thought? This question arose among those who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, were confronted with the impulses of Hegelian philosophy.

[ 12 ] What, after all, are the soul's most vexing riddles? Those that the soul must long to answer in order to have inner security and stability in life. The first question is: What is the human soul in its innermost essence? Is it one with bodily existence and do its expressions cease with the passing of the body, just as the movement of the hands of a clock ceases when the clock is divided into its parts? Or is the soul an independent being in relation to the body, which still has life and meaning in a world other than that in which the body arises and passes away? But the other question is related to this: How does man come to recognize such another world? Only by answering this question can man then hope to receive light for the questions of life: Why am I subject to this or that fate? Where does suffering come from? Where is the origin of morality?

[ 13 ] A satisfying worldview can only be one that points to a world from which answers to the indicated questions come. And which at the same time proves its right to give such answers.

[ 14 ] Hegel gave a world of thoughts. If this world is to be the all-exhausting cosmos, then the soul is compelled to regard itself in its innermost essence as thought. If one takes this cosmos of thought seriously, then the individual life of the human soul becomes blurred in relation to it. One must refrain from explaining and understanding this; one must say: What is significant in the soul is not its individual experience, but its being contained in the general world of thought. And this is basically what Hegel's world view says. To recognize it in this respect, compare it with what Lessing had in mind when he formulated the ideas of his "Education of the Human Race". He asked for a meaning of the individual human soul beyond life, which is enclosed between birth and death. In pursuing Lessing's thought, one can speak of the soul undergoing a form of existence after physical death in a world that lies outside the one in which the human being lives, perceives and thinks in the body, and that after a corresponding time such purely spiritual experience passes over into a new life on earth. This refers to a world with which the human soul is connected as a single, individual being. It sees itself referred to this world when it searches for its true nature. As soon as one thinks of this soul as being lifted out of its connection with bodily existence, one has to think of it in this world. For Hegel, on the other hand, the life of the soul, stripped of everything individual, enters into the general thought process, first of historical becoming, then of the general spiritual-thought processes of the world. The riddle of the soul is solved in his sense by disregarding everything individual about the soul. It is not the individual soul that is real, it is the historical process. Take what is written at the end of Hegel's "Philosophy of History": "We have considered the progress of the concept alone and have had to renounce the attraction of describing in detail the happiness, the periods of the flowering of peoples, the beauty and greatness of individuals, the interest of their fate in suffering and joy. Philosophy is concerned only with the splendor of the idea reflected in world history. From the weariness of the movements of the immediate passions in reality, philosophy sets out to contemplate; its interest is to recognize the course of development of the idea that realizes itself."

[ 15 ] Overview Hegel's theory of the soul. It describes how the soul develops within the body as a "natural soul", how it develops consciousness, self-consciousness, reason; how it then realizes in the outside world the ideas of law, of reality, of the state, how it sees in world history that which it thinks as ideas in a continuing life, how it lives out these ideas as art, as religion, in order then, in becoming one with the thinking truth, to see itself in the livingly effective All-Spirit.

[ 16 ] That the world in which man sees himself is entirely spirit, that all material existence is also only a revelation of spirit, must be certain for every Hegelian sentient being. If such a person seeks this spirit, he finds it, according to its essence, as an effective thought, as a living creative idea. The soul now stands in front of this and must ask itself: Can I really see myself as a being that is exhausted in being thought? It can be perceived as the great, the irrefutable aspect of Hegel's world view that the soul, when it rises to the true thought, feels itself enraptured in the creative aspect of existence. Those personalities who followed Hegel's development of thought to a greater or lesser extent found it deeply satisfying to be able to feel this way in their relationship to the world.

[ 17 ] How to live with the thought? That was the great riddle of the more recent development of the world view. It had arisen from the progress of what had occurred in Greek philosophy from the revival of thought and the resulting detachment of the soul from external existence. Hegel has now attempted to place the entire scope of the experience of thought before the soul, to confront it, as it were, with everything that it can conjure up from its depths as thought. Faced with this thought experience, he now demands of the soul: Recognize yourself according to your deepest essence in this experience, feel yourself in it as in your deepest foundation.

[ 18 ] With this Hegelian demand, the human soul is brought to a decisive point in the realization of its own being. Where should it turn when it has arrived at pure thought and does not want to stop there? From perception, from feeling, from volition, it can go to thought and ask: What results when I think about perception, feeling, volition? From thinking it cannot go any further at first; it can only think again and again. It may appear to those who follow the more recent development of the world-view up to the age of Hegel as the significant thing about this philosopher that he follows the impulses of this development up to a point beyond which they cannot be carried if one retains the character with which they have shown themselves up to him. Whoever perceives this can come to the question:

[ 19 ] If thinking initially leads, in the sense of Hegeltum, to spreading out a thought-picture in the sense of a world-picture before the soul: has thinking thus really developed everything out of itself that which lies decidedly alive in it? It could be that there is more to thinking than mere thinking. Consider a plant that develops from the root, through stem and leaves, to blossom and fruit. You can now end the life of this plant by removing the germs from the fruit and using them for human food, for example. But you can also bring the plant germ into suitable conditions so that it develops into a new plant.

[ 20 ] Those who look at the meaning of Hegel's philosophy can see it in such a way that in it the whole picture that man makes of the world unfolds like a plant; that this unfolding is brought to the germ, the thought, but is then completed like the life of a plant, whose germ is not developed further in the sense of plant life, but is used for something that is externally opposed to this life, like human nourishment. In fact, once Hegel has arrived at the thought, he does not continue on the path that led him to it. He starts from the perception of the senses and now develops everything in the human soul that ultimately leads to the thought. He stops at this thought and uses it to show how it can lead to an explanation of world processes and world entities. Thought can certainly serve this purpose, just as the plant germ can serve as human food. But should living things not be able to develop from thought? Should it not be deprived of its own life by the use that Hegel makes of it, just as the plant germ is deprived of its life when it is used for human nourishment? In what light must Hegel's philosophy appear if it were true that thought can indeed serve to elucidate, to explain the processes of the world, as the plant seed serves as food, but that it can only do this by being withdrawn from its continuous growth? The plant seed will, however, only give rise to a plant of the same kind. But the thought as a germ of knowledge could, if it is brought to its living development, produce something completely new in relation to the world picture from which it has developed. Just as repetition prevails in plant life, so increase could take place in the life of knowledge. Is it then inconceivable that all use of thought to explain the world in the sense of external science is only, as it were, a use of thought which pursues a by-path of development, just as in the use of plant-seed for food there is a by-path in relation to continuous development? It is quite natural that one can say of such trains of thought that they have sprung from mere arbitrariness and represent only worthless possibilities. It is equally self-evident that one can object that where the idea is taken further in the sense indicated, there begins the realm of arbitrary fantasy. To the observer of the historical development of world outlook in the nineteenth century the matter may appear different. The way in which Hegel conceives the idea does indeed lead the development of the world view to a dead end. One feels that one has reached an extreme with the thought; but if one wants to transfer the thought, as one has grasped it, into the immediate life of cognition, it fails; and one longs for a life that may sprout from the world-view to which one has brought it. Around the middle of the century, Friedrich Theodor Vischer began to write his "Aesthetics" in the spirit of Hegel's philosophy. He completes it as a monumental work. After completing it, he himself became the most astute critic of this work. And if one searches for the deeper reason for this strange process, one finds that Vischer realizes that he has imbued his work with Hegelian thought as an element that, taken out of its living conditions, has become dead, just as the plant germ acts as a dead thing when it is torn from its developmental current. A peculiar perspective opens up if we place Hegel's world view in this light. The thought could demand that it be grasped as a living germ and brought to unfold in the soul under certain conditions, so that it leads beyond Hegel's world view to a world view in which the soul, according to its essence, can first recognize itself and with which it can only truly feel itself to be placed in the external world. Hegel has brought the soul so far that it can experience itself with thought; the progression beyond Hegel would lead to thought growing beyond itself in the soul and into a spiritual world. Hegel understood how the soul conjures the thought out of itself and experiences itself in the thought; he left to posterity the task of finding the essence of the soul with the living thought as in a truly spiritual world, which cannot experience itself in its entirety in mere thought.

[ 21 ] It has been shown in the preceding remarks how the more recent development of the world view strives from the perception of thought to an experience of thought; in Hegel's world view, the world seems to stand before the soul as a self-generated experience of thought; yet the development seems to point to a further progression. Thought must not remain as thought; it must not be merely thought, not merely experienced in thought; it must awaken to an even higher life.

[ 22 ] As arbitrary as all this may seem, it must impose itself on a more profoundly urgent consideration of the development of the world view in the nineteenth century. Such an examination reveals how the demands of an age are at work in the depths of historical development and how people's efforts are attempts to come to terms with these demands. The natural-scientific view of the world was opposed by the more recent age. While maintaining it, ideas about the life of the soul had to be found which could stand up to this world view. The whole development from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke to Hegel appears as a struggle for such ideas. Hegel brings the struggle to a certain conclusion. The way in which he presents the world as a thought seems to have been prefigured everywhere by his predecessors; he makes the bold intellectual decision to let all worldview concepts run into a comprehensive thought-painting. - With him, the age has initially exhausted the forward-moving power of impulses. What is expressed above - the demand to feel the life of thought: it is felt unconsciously; it weighs on the minds around the middle of the nineteenth century. One despairs of the possibility of fulfilling this demand; but one does not bring this despair to consciousness. Thus there is a failure to make progress in the philosophical field. The productivity of philosophical ideas ceases. It should move in the direction indicated; but first it seems necessary to reflect on what has been achieved. One seeks to take up this or that point with philosophical predecessors; but the power for fruitful further development of Hegel's world view is lacking. - Consider what Karl Rosenkranz wrote in the preface to his "Life of Hegel" in 1844: "It is not without melancholy that I part from this work, should we not at some point allow becoming to come into being. For does it not seem as if we of today were only the gravediggers and monument-setters for the philosophers whom the second half of the last (eighteenth) century gave birth to in order to die in the first half of the present? Kant began this death of German philosophers in 1804. He was followed by Fichte, Jacobi, Solger, Reinhold, Krause, Schleiermacher, W. v. Humboldt, Fr. Schlegel, Herbart, Baader, Wagner, Windischmann, Fries and so many others... . Do we see offspring for that harvest of death? Are we capable of sending over a holy crowd of thinkers into the second half of our century? Are there those among our young people whose Platonic enthusiasm and Aristotelian industriousness inspire their minds to immortal efforts for speculation? ... Strangely enough, in our day it is precisely the talents that seem unable to endure. They quickly wear out, become barren after a few promising blossoms and begin to copy and repeat themselves, where the period of vigorous and collected activity should only begin after the more immature and imperfect, one-sided and stormy youthful attempts have been overcome. Some, full of beautiful zeal, rush ahead and, like Constantin Frantz, have to partially retract their previous writing in every subsequent work ..."

[ 23 ] The fact that, after the middle of the nineteenth century, people found themselves compelled to persevere with such an assessment of the philosophical situation of the time is often expressed. The excellent thinker Franz Brentano said in his inaugural address for his Vienna professorship "On the reasons for discouragement in the philosophical field" in 1874: "In the first decades of our century, the lecture halls of German philosophers were overcrowded: in more recent times, the flood has been followed by a deep ebb. One therefore often hears older men accusing the younger generation of lacking a sense for the highest branches of knowledge. - That would be a sad, but at the same time an incomprehensible fact. Why should the new generation as a whole be so far behind the former in intellectual vigor and nobility? - In truth, it was not a lack of talent, but ... (a) lack of confidence was the cause of the decline in philosophical study. Had the hope of success returned, the most beautiful palm tree of research would surely not now wave in vain..."

[ 24 ] Even at the time when Hegel was still alive and shortly thereafter, individual personalities felt how his view of the world manifested its weakness precisely in that in which its greatness lies. It leads the world-view to thought, but in return it also compels the soul to see its being exhausted in thought. If it were to bring the thought to a life of its own in the sense described above, this could only happen within the individual life of the soul; the soul would thereby find its relationship to the entire cosmos as an individual being. Troxler, for example, felt this; however, it did not go beyond a dark feeling in him. In 1835, in lectures he gave at the university in Bern, he expressed himself in the following way: "Not only now, but already twenty years ago, we were deeply convinced, and sought to demonstrate in scientific writing and speech, that a philosophy and anthropology, which should encompass the one and whole man and God and world, could only be founded on the idea and reality of the individuality and immortality of man. The entire work published in 1811 is proof of this: 'Glimpses into the Essence of Man', published in 1811, is the most irrefutable proof of this, and the last section of our anthropology, entitled 'The Absolute Personality', is the most certain evidence. We therefore take the liberty of quoting from the latter the opening passage of the section mentioned: The whole nature of man is built upon divine disproportions within it, which dissolve in the glory of a supernatural destiny, in that all the motive springs lie in the spirit, and only the weights in the world. We have now pursued these disproportions with their manifestations from the dark, earthly root, and have followed the threads of the heavenly plant, which seemed to us only to entwine a great, noble trunk from all sides and in all directions; we have now come to the top, but it rises unclimbable and incalculable into the upper, bright spaces of another world, whose light dawns softly on us, whose air we may scent ..." - Such words sound sentimental and not very scientific to contemporary man. However, it is only necessary to consider the goal towards which Troxler is heading. He does not want to see the essence of man dissolved into a world of ideas, but rather seeks to grasp "man in man" as the "individual and immortal personality". Troxler wants to know that human nature is anchored in a world that is not mere thought; he therefore draws attention to the fact that one can speak of something in man that binds man to a world beyond the sensory world and that is not mere thought. "Even earlier, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body, or in this sense assumed a kind of shell of the spirit, a soul that had an image of the body in itself, which they called Schema and which was the inner higher man for them." Troxler himself divided the human being into body, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, he referred to the nature of the soul in such a way that it protrudes with body and body into the sensory world and with soul and spirit into a supersensible world in such a way that it is rooted in the latter as an individual being and does not operate individually only in the sensory world, but loses itself in the generality of thought in the spiritual world. But Troxler does not come to grasp the thought as a living germ of cognition and, by letting this germ of cognition live in the soul, to really justify the individual soul entities soul and spirit out of one cognition. He does not suspect that the thought in his life can, as it were, grow into what is to be addressed as the individual life of the soul; rather, he can only speak about this individual essence of the soul as if from a hunch. - Troxler could not arrive at anything other than a hunch about these connections because he was too dependent on positive-dogmatic religious ideas. However, since he had a broad overview of the science of his time and a deep insight into the development of worldviews, his rejection of Hegel's philosophy can be seen as more than just a personal antipathy. It can be regarded as an expression of what one could put forward against Hegel from the mood of the Hegelian age itself. This is how Troxler should be regarded when he says: "Hegel took speculation to the highest level of its development and destroyed it in the process. His system has become the: up to here and no further! in this direction of the spirit." - In this form, Troxler poses the question, which, brought from a hunch to a clear idea, should probably be called: How does the worldview go beyond the mere experience of thought in the Hegelian sense to a participation in the coming to life of thought?

[ 25 ] The position of Hegel's Weltanschauung in relation to the mood of the time is characterized by a writing that in 1834 C. H. Weiße published in 1834 and which bears the title "The Philosophical Secret Doctrine of the Immortality of the Human Individual". It states: "Whoever understands Hegel's philosophy in ... its ... Hegel's philosophy in its ... context is familiar with the way in which, in a manner that is quite logically founded in its dialectical method, it has first raised the subjective spirit of the finite individual in the objective spirit, the spirit of law, of the state and of morality ... to be suspended, that is, to enter into this higher spirit as a subordinate, simultaneously affirmed and denied, in short as a dependent moment. The finite individual thereby becomes, as has long been noted both within and outside the school of Hegel, a temporary phenomenon ... What purpose, what meaning could ... the continuance of such an individual have, after the world spirit has passed through it ... " In contrast to this insignificance of the individual soul, Weiße seeks to demonstrate its immortality in his own way. That he, too, cannot make any real progress beyond Hegel's presentation will be understandable from the lines of thought he follows, which are outlined in a previous chapter of this book.

[ 26 ] Just as one could feel the impotence of Hegel's thought-painting in relation to the individual essence of the soul, so one could also become aware of it in relation to the demand to really penetrate into further depths of nature than those which are also open to the world of the senses. That everything that presents itself to the senses is in truth thought and as such spirit was clear to Hegel; but whether with this "spirit of nature" all spirit in nature is seen through, that could be perceived as a new question. If the soul does not grasp its own essence through thought, could it not be that it experiences deeper forces and entities in nature when it experiences its own essence in a different way? Whether one asks such questions with all clarity or not is not the point; what matters is whether they can be posed in relation to a worldview. If they can, then this possibility gives the worldview the impression of being unsatisfactory. Because this was the case with the Hegelian world-view, therefore it was not felt that it gave the right picture of the world to which the highest riddles of existence relate. This must be borne in mind if the picture is to be seen in the right light in which the development of the world view in the middle of the nineteenth century presents itself. In this period further progress was made with regard to the picture of external nature. This image exerted an even greater influence than before on the entire human world view. It must seem understandable that philosophical ideas were involved in a hard struggle at this time, since they had reached a critical point in the sense described above. - First of all, it is significant how Hegel's followers attempted to defend his philosophy. Carl Ludwig Michelet, the editor of Hegel's "Philosophy of Nature", wrote in his preface to it in 1841: "Will it any longer be considered a barrier to philosophy to be able to create only thoughts, not even a blade of grass? That is to say, only the general, permanent, uniquely valuable, not the individual, sensual, ephemeral? But if the limitation of philosophy is not merely that it cannot make anything individual, but also that it does not even know how it is made, then the answer is that this how is not above knowledge, but rather below knowledge, so that the latter can have no limitation on it. In the how of this transformation of the idea into reality, knowledge is lost, precisely because nature is the unconscious idea and the blade of grass grows without any knowledge. The true creation, that of the general, however, remains undiscovered by philosophy, in its knowledge itself ... And now we assert: the most chaste development of thought in speculation will most completely agree with the results of experience, and the great sense of nature in turn will most unbendingly reveal nothing more than the embodied ideas."

[ 27 ] Michelet also expresses a hope in the same preface: "Thus Goethe and Hegel are the two geniuses who, in my opinion, are destined to pave the way for speculative physics in the future by preparing the reconciliation of speculation with experience ... In particular, these Hegelian lectures would be the first to succeed in gaining recognition in this respect; for since they testify to comprehensive empirical knowledge, Hegel had the surest sample of his speculations at hand in them"

[ 28 ] The subsequent period did not bring about such a reconciliation. A certain animosity towards Hegel spread in ever wider circles. One can see how this mood towards him became increasingly widespread in the course of the 1950s in the words used by Friedrich Albert Lange in his "History of Materialism" (1865): "His (Hegel's) whole system moves within our thoughts and fantasies about things, to which high-sounding names are given, without any reflection on what validity can be given to phenomena and the concepts derived from them at all ... Through Schelling and Hegel, pantheism became the dominant way of thinking in natural philosophy, a world view which, with a certain mystical depth, at the same time almost in principle includes the danger of fantastic excesses. Instead of strictly separating experience and the world of the senses from the ideal and then seeking to reconcile these areas in human nature, the pantheist carries out the reconciliation of spirit and nature through the power of poetic reason without any critical mediation."

[ 29 ] Although this view of Hegel's way of thinking corresponds as little as possible to his world view (compare the description of it in the chapter "The Classics of World View"), it already dominated many minds around the middle of the century and was gaining ever more ground. A man who held an influential position within German intellectual life as a professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1833 to 1872, Trendelenburg, could be sure of great applause when he judged Hegel: the latter wanted to "teach without learning" through his method, because he "imagines himself in possession of the divine concept, but inhibits laborious research in its secure possession". Michelet tried in vain to correct this with Hegel's own words, such as these: "The development of philosophy is due to experience. The empirical sciences prepare the content of the particular to be incorporated into philosophy. On the other hand, they contain the necessity for thinking itself to proceed to these concrete determinations."

[ 30 ] Characteristic of the course of worldview development in the middle decades of the 19th century is the statement of an important, but unfortunately little recognized thinker: K. Ch. Planck. In 1850 he published an outstanding work entitled "The Ages of the World", in the preface to which he says: "To bring to consciousness the purely natural lawfulness and conditionality of all being and at the same time to establish the full self-conscious freedom of the spirit, the independent inner law of its being, this double tendency, which is the distinguishing fundamental trait of recent history, also forms the task of the present work in its most pronounced and purest form. Since the revival of the sciences, the first tendency has been evident in the awakening of independent and comprehensive research into nature and its liberation from the dominion of the purely religious, in the transformation of the whole physical view of the world brought about by it and in the increasingly sober and comprehensible view of things in general, and finally in the highest form in the philosophical striving to understand the laws of nature according to their inner necessity in all directions; but it also manifests itself practically in the ever more complete formation of this immediately present life according to its natural conditions." The growing influence of the natural sciences is expressed in such sentences. Trust in these sciences became ever greater. The belief became authoritative that a world view could be gained from the means and results of the natural sciences that did not have the unsatisfactory aspects of Hegel's.

[ 31 ] An idea of the turnaround that took place in this direction is provided by a book that can be regarded as representative of this period in the fullest sense of the word: Alexander von Humboldt's "Cosmos, Outline of a Physical Description of the World". The man, who was at the height of scientific education of his time, speaks of his confidence in a scientific view of the world: "My confidence is based on the brilliant state of the natural sciences themselves: their richness is no longer the abundance, but the concatenation of what is observed. The general results, which are of interest to every educated mind, have increased wonderfully since the end of the eighteenth century. The facts are less isolated; the gaps between the beings are filled in. What has long remained inexplicable to the inquiring mind in a narrower circle of vision, in our vicinity, is illuminated by observations made on a journey to the remotest regions. Plant and animal formations, which for a long time appeared to be isolated, are joined together by newly discovered middle links or transitional forms. A general concatenation: not in a simple linear direction, but in a net-like interwoven fabric, according to the higher development or atrophy of certain organs, according to versatile fluctuations in the relative predominance of the parts, gradually presents itself to the inquiring sense of nature... . The study of general natural history awakens in us, as it were, organs that have long been dormant. We enter into a more intimate intercourse with the outside world." In "Cosmos", Humboldt himself takes the description of nature only as far as the gateway that opens up access to the world view. He does not seek to link the abundance of phenomena with general ideas of nature; he strings things and facts together in a natural way that corresponds to "the completely objective direction of his way of thinking".

[ 32 ] Soon, however, other thinkers intervened in the development of the mind who were bold in linking, who sought to penetrate into the essence of things from the ground of natural science. What they wanted to bring about was nothing less than a radical transformation of all previous philosophical views of the world and life on the basis of modern science and knowledge of nature. The knowledge of nature of the nineteenth century had prepared the way for them in the most powerful way. Feuerbach radically indicates what they wanted:

[ 33 ] "To place God earlier than nature is just as much as if one wanted to place the church earlier than the stones from which it is built, or the architecture, the art that has assembled the stones into a building, earlier than the combination of chemical substances into a stone, in short, than the natural origin and formation of the stone." The first half of the century created numerous scientific stones for the architecture of a new worldview building. Now it is certainly true that a building cannot be erected if no building blocks are available. But it is no less true that one cannot do anything with the stones if one does not independently of them have an image of the building to be constructed. Just as no building can arise from the haphazard superimposition and juxtaposition and cementing of stones, so no world view can arise from the recognized truths of natural science unless independently of what natural science can give the power to form a world view is present in the human soul. This was completely disregarded by the opponents of an independent philosophy.

[ 34 ] If one looks at the personalities who took part in the construction of a world view in the 1950s, the physiognomies of three men stand out with particular clarity: Ludwig Büchner (born 1824, died 1899), Carl Vogt (1817-1895) and Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893). - If we want to characterize the basic feeling that animates these three men, we can do so in the words of the latter: "When man has explored all the properties of substances that are capable of making an impression on his developed senses, then he has also grasped the essence of things. Thus he attains his knowledge, that is, the absolute knowledge of mankind. Any other knowledge is of no value to man." In the opinion of these men, all previous philosophy has handed down to man such a knowledge without substance. In the opinion of Büchner and his fellow philosophers, idealistic philosophers believe that they draw from reason; however, Büchner claims that such a process cannot produce a conceptual structure full of content. "The truth, however, can only be eavesdropped from nature and its reign," says Moleschott. In her time and in the period that followed, the fighters for such a world view derived from nature were summarized as materialists. And it was emphasized that this materialism of theirs was an ancient world view, of which outstanding minds had long since recognized how unsatisfactory it was for higher thinking. Büchner opposed such a view. He emphasizes: "Firstly, materialism or the whole school of thought has never been refuted at all, and it is not only the oldest philosophical view of the world that exists, but it has also reappeared with renewed vigor with every revival of philosophy in history; and secondly, the materialism of today is no longer the former one of Epicurus or the encyclopedists, but a quite different direction or method, supported by the achievements of the positive sciences, which differs very essentially from its predecessors in that it is no longer, like the former materialism, a system, but a simple realistic-philosophical view of existence, which seeks above all the unified principles in the world of nature and spirit and strives everywhere for the exposition of a natural and lawful connection of all the phenomena of that world. " The attitude of a spirit who strove in the most eminent sense for a natural way of thinking, Goethe, to one of the most outstanding materialists of the French - the encyclopaedists of the last century - to Holbach, shows how a spirit who gives the natural scientific conception its fullest right is able to take a stand on materialism. Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (born 1723) published the "Systéme de la nature" in 1770. Goethe, who came across the book in Strasbourg, described the repulsive impression he received from it in "Dichtung und Wahrheit": "A matter should be from eternity, and moved from eternity, and should now with these movements to the right and left and to all sides, without further ado, produce the infinite phenomena of existence. We would even have been satisfied with all this if the author had really built up the world before our eyes from his moving matter. But he may have known as little about nature as we do; for, by piling up a few general concepts, he immediately abandons them in order to transform that which is higher than nature, or that which appears as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, indeed moving, but nevertheless directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained quite a lot." Goethe was imbued with the conviction: "Theory in and of itself is of no use except in so far as it makes us believe in the connection between phenomena." (Proverbs in prose. German national literature, Goethe's works, vol. 36, 2nd section, p.357).

[ 35 ] The scientific findings from the first half of the nineteenth century, however, were now suitable as factual knowledge to provide the maternalists of the 1950s with a basis for their world view. For they had penetrated ever deeper into the interrelationships of material processes, insofar as these result from sensory observation and thinking that only wants to rely on this sensory observation. Even if one wants to deny to oneself and others that spirit is at work in matter, one unconsciously reveals this spirit. In a certain sense, what Friedrich Theodor Vischer says in the third volume of "Old and New" (p. 97) is quite correct: "The fact that so-called matter can produce something whose function is spirit is the full proof against materialism." And in this sense, Büchner unconsciously refutes materialism by attempting to prove that spiritual processes emerge from the depths of material facts for sensory observation.

[ 36 ] The discovery of Wöhler in 1828 is an example of how scientific knowledge took on forms that could have a profound influence on the world view. He succeeded in artificially representing a substance that forms in the living organism outside of it. This seemed to prove that the previous belief that certain compounds could only form under the influence of a special life force present in the organism was incorrect. If such compounds could be produced outside the living body without vital force, it could be concluded that the organism also only works with the forces that chemistry has to deal with. For the materialists it was obvious to say that if the living organism does not need any special vital force to produce what was previously ascribed to such a force, why should it need special spiritual forces to bring about the processes in it to which the spiritual-mental experiences are bound? Substance with its properties now became for the materialists that which produces all things and processes from its mother's womb. It was not far from the fact that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen unite to form an organic compound to Büchner's assertion: "The words soul, spirit, thought, sensation, will, life do not denote entities, no real things, but only properties, abilities, activities of the living substance or results of entities which are founded in the material forms of existence." Büchner no longer called a divine being, no longer the human soul, but the substance with its power immortal. And Moleschott expresses the same conviction in the words: "Power is not a creating God, not an essence of things separate from the material basis, it is an inseparable property of matter, inherent in it from eternity. - Carbonic acid, water and oxygen are the forces that break down even the most solid rock and bring it into the flow whose current creates life. - Change of substance and form in the individual parts, while the basic shape remains the same, is the secret of animal life."

[ 37 ] The scientific research work of the first half of the century gave Ludwig Büchner the opportunity to express views such as these: "In a similar way as the steam engine produces movement, the intricate organic complication of force-gifted substances in animal life produces a sum total of certain effects which, combined into a unity, we call spirit, soul, thought." And Karl Gustav Reuschle explains in his book "Philosophie und Naturwissenschaft. Zur Erinnerung an David Friedrich Strauß" (1874), that the results of natural science themselves contain a philosophical element. The 'relationships' discovered between the forces of nature were regarded as guides to the secrets of existence.

[ 38 ] Oersted found such an important relationship in Copenhagen in 1819. He discovered that the magnetic needle is deflected by the electric current. In 1831, Faraday discovered the counterpart to this, namely that electricity can be generated by bringing a magnet closer to a spirally wound copper wire. Electricity and magnetism were thus recognized as related natural phenomena. The two forces were no longer isolated from each other; it was pointed out that they had something in common in their material existence. Julius Robert Mayer took a deep look into the nature of matter and force in the 1940s when he realized that there was a very specific relationship between mechanical work and heat that could be expressed by a number. Heat is generated by pressure, impact, friction, etc., i.e. from work. In the steam engine, heat is converted back into work. The amount of heat generated from work can be calculated from the amount of this work. If you convert the amount of heat required to heat one kilogram of water by one degree into work, you can lift 424 kilograms one meter high with this work. It is not surprising that such facts were seen as a tremendous advance on the explanations of matter given by Hegel:

[ 39 ] "The transition from ideality to reality, from abstraction to concrete existence, here from space and time to reality, which appears as matter, is incomprehensible to the intellect, and therefore always appears to it externally and as a given." Such a remark is only recognized in its meaning if one can see something valuable in the thought as such. But that was far from the minds mentioned here.

[ 40 ] In addition to such discoveries about the uniform character of the inorganic forces of nature, there were others that provided information about the composition of the world of organisms. In 1838, the botanist Schleiden recognized the importance of the simple cell for the plant body. He showed how all plant tissues, and therefore the plant itself, are made up of these "elementary organisms". Schleiden had recognized this "elementary organism" as a lump of liquid plant mucilage surrounded by an envelope (cell skin) and containing a more solid cell nucleus. These cells multiply and attach themselves to each other in such a way that they form plant-like beings. Soon afterwards, Schwann discovered the same for the animal world. In 1827, the ingenious Carl Ernst Baer discovered the human egg. He also traced the processes of the development of higher animals and humans from the egg. Thus, people everywhere had moved away from searching for the ideas underlying natural things. Instead, they observed the facts that show how the higher, more complicated natural processes and natural beings are built up from simple and lower ones. Men who sought an idealistic interpretation of world phenomena became increasingly rare. It was still the spirit of the idealistic world view that in 1837 gave the anthropologist Burdach the view that life does not have its reason in matter, but that it rather transforms matter through a higher power, as it can use it. Moleschott could already say: "The vital force, like life, is nothing other than the result of the intricately interacting and interlocking physical and chemical forces."

[ 41 ] The consciousness of time urged that the universe be explained by no other phenomena than those which take place before the eyes of men. Charles Lyell's work "Principles of geology", published in 1830, had overthrown the entire old geology with this explanatory principle. Until Lyell's epoch-making work, it was believed that the development of the earth had taken place in leaps and bounds. Repeatedly everything that had come into being on earth was said to have been destroyed by total catastrophes, and a new creation was said to have arisen over the grave of past beings. This explained the presence of plant and animal remains in the layers of the earth. Cuvier was the main proponent of such repeated epochs of creation Lyell came to the conclusion that no such interruption of the steady course of the earth's development was necessary. If one assumes only sufficiently long periods of time, then one could say that the forces that are still active on earth today have brought about this entire development. In Germany, Goethe and Karl von Hoff had already expressed such a view earlier. The latter advocated it in his "Geschichte der durch Überlieferung nachgewiesenen natürlichen Veränderungen der Erdoberfläche" (History of the Natural Changes of the Earth's Surface Proven by Tradition) published in 1822.

[ 42 ] With all the boldness of enthusiasts of the idea, Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott set out to explain all phenomena from material processes as they occur before the human senses.

[ 43 ] The battle that materialism had to wage found a significant expression when the Göttingen physiologist Rudolf Wagner and Cal Vogt confronted each other. In 1852, Wagner argued in the "Allgemeine Zeitung" for an independent soul against the view of materialism. He spoke of "the soul being able to divide itself, as the child inherits much from the father and much from the mother". Vogt first responded in his "Pictures from Animal Life". One recognizes Vogt's position in the dispute when one reads the following sentence in his answer: "The soul, which is supposed to be the very epitome, the essence of the individuality of the single, indivisible being' the soul should be able to divide itself! Theologians, take this heretic as your prey - he was one of yours until now! Divided souls! If the soul can divide itself in the act of procreation, as Mr. R. Wagner thinks, it could perhaps also divide itself in death, and one portion laden with sins go to purgatory, while the other goes straight to paradise. At the end of his physiological letters, Mr. Wagner also promises excursions into the field of the physiology of divided souls." The battle became fierce when Wagner gave a lecture on "Human Creation and Soul Substance" against materialism at the Natural Scientists' Assembly in Göttingen in 1854. He wanted to prove two things. Firstly, that the results of modern natural science do not contradict the biblical belief in the descent of the human race from a pair; secondly, that these results do not decide anything about the soul. In 1855, Vogt wrote a polemic against Wagner entitled "Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft" (Köhler's Faith and Science), which on the one hand shows him to be at the height of scientific insight of his time, but on the other hand also shows him to be a sharp thinker who unreservedly exposes his opponent's conclusions as fallacies. His objection to Wagner's first assertion culminates in the following sentences: "All historical and natural-historical research provides positive proof of the diverse origins of human species. The teachings of Scripture about Adam and Noah and the twofold descent of humans from one couple are scientifically untenable fairy tales." And Vogt objected to Wagner's theory of the soul: We see the soul activities of man developing gradually with the development of the bodily organs. We see the mental functions becoming more perfect from childhood to maturity; we see that with every shrinking of the senses and the brain, the "spirit" also shrinks accordingly. "Such a development is incompatible with the assumption of an immortal soul substance that is implanted in the brain as an organ." The dispute between Vogt and Wagner shows with perfect clarity that the materialists had not only intellectual reasons but also emotions to fight against in their opponents. In his Göttingen lecture, the latter appealed to the moral need that cannot tolerate it when "mechanical apparatuses running around on two arms and legs" finally dissolve into indifferent substances, without one being able to hope that the good they do will be rewarded and their evil punished. Vogt replies: "The existence of an immortal soul is not the result of research or reflection for Mr. Wagner. ... He needs an immortal soul in order to be able to torture and punish it after the death of man."

[ 44 ] Heinrich Czolbe (1819 to 1873) tried to show that there is a point of view from which the moral world order can also agree with the materialistic view. In his 1865 essay "Die Grenzen und der Ursprung der menschlichen Erkenntnis im Gegensatz zu Kant und Hegel" (The limits and origin of human knowledge in contrast to Kant and Hegel), he argues that all theology springs from dissatisfaction with this world. "The exclusion of the supernatural or all that is incomprehensible, which leads to the assumption of a second world, in a word, to naturalism, is by no means compelled by the power of scientific facts, nor, to begin with, by philosophy, which seeks to understand everything: but in the deepest sense by morality, namely that moral behavior of man towards the world order, which can be called satisfaction with the natural world." Czolbe sees the desire for a supernatural world as an outflow of ingratitude towards the natural world. For him, the foundations of the philosophy of the hereafter are moral errors, sins against the spirit of the natural world order. For they lead away from "the striving for the greatest possible happiness of each individual" and the fulfillment of duty that follows from such striving "towards ourselves and others without regard to supernatural reward and punishment". In his view, man should be filled with "grateful acceptance of the perhaps small earthly happiness that falls to him, together with the humiliation that lies in contentment with the natural world under its limitations, its necessary suffering". Here we encounter a rejection of the supernatural moral world order - for moral reasons.

[ 45 ] In Czolbe's worldview, one can also clearly see which characteristics make materialism so acceptable to human thought. For there is no doubt that Büchner, Vogt and Moleschott were not philosophers enough to make the foundations of their view logically clear. They were influenced by the power of scientific facts. Without descending to the heights of an idealistic way of thinking, as Goethe used to express it, they drew their conclusions from what the senses perceive, more like natural thinkers. It was not their business to account for their method from the nature of human cognition. Czolbe did that. In his "New Exposition of Sensualism" (1855), we find reasons given as to why he considers only knowledge based on sensory perceptions to be valuable. Only such knowledge provides clearly conceivable and vivid concepts, judgments and conclusions. Every inference to something inconceivable and every vague concept must be rejected. In Czolbe's view, what is vividly clear is not the spiritual as such, but the material, in which the spiritual appears as a property. For this reason, in his 1856 publication "The Origin of Self-Consciousness, an Answer to Professor Lotze", he attempts to trace self-consciousness back to material-descriptive processes. He assumes a circular movement of the parts of the brain. Through such a movement returning into itself, an impression that a thing makes on the senses becomes a conscious sensation. It is curious that this physical explanation of consciousness was for Czolbe at the same time the reason for becoming unfaithful to his materialism. Here he shows one of the weaknesses inherent in materialism. If he remained faithful to his principles, he would never go further with his explanations than the facts investigated with the senses would allow him. He would speak of no other processes in the brain than those that can really be determined by scientific means. What he imagines is therefore an infinitely distant goal. Minds like Czolbe are not satisfied with what has been researched; they hypothetically assume facts that have not yet been researched. One such fact is the aforementioned circular movement of the parts of the brain. A complete exploration of the brain will certainly reveal processes within it that do not occur anywhere else in the world. From this it will follow that the mental processes caused by brain processes also only occur in connection with a brain. Czolbe could not claim that his hypothetical circular motion was restricted to the brain. It could also occur outside the animal organism. But then it would also have to involve mental phenomena in inanimate objects. Czolbe, who insists on vivid clarity, does not in fact exclude the possibility that all of nature is animated. "Should" - he says - "my view not be a realization of the world soul already defended by Plato in his Timaeus? Shouldn't this be the point where Leibniz's idealism, which held that the whole world consisted of animated beings (monads), is united with modern naturalism?"

[ 46 ] The mistake that Czolbe made with his brain circle movement occurs to a greater extent with the genius Carl Christian Planck (1819-1880). This man's writings have been completely forgotten, even though they are among the most interesting things that modern philosophy has produced. Just as vividly as materialism, Planck strove for an explanation of the world based on perceptible reality. He criticized the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for its one-sided search for the essence of things in the idea. "To explain things truly independently from themselves means to recognize them in their original conditionality and finitude." (Cf. Planck, Die Weltalter, p. 103.) "There is only the one and true pure nature, so that mere nature in the narrower sense and spirit are only opposites within the one nature in the higher and comprehensive sense" (op. cit. p. 101). But Planck has the strange thing that he declares the real, the extended, to be that which the explanation of the world must seek, and yet he does not approach sensory experience, the observation of facts, in order to arrive at the real, the extended. For he believes that human reason can penetrate through itself to the real. Hegel had made the mistake of letting reason look at itself, so that it saw itself in all things; but he did not want to let reason remain in itself, but to lead it beyond itself to the extended, as the truly real. Planck rebukes Hegel for letting reason spin its own web out of itself; he himself is bold enough to let reason spin objective existence. Hegel said that the mind can comprehend the essence of things because reason is the essence of things and reason comes into existence in the human mind; Planck declares that the essence of things is not reason; yet he merely uses reason to represent this essence. A bold construction of the world, intellectually conceived, but conceived far from real observation, far from real things, and yet conceived in the belief that it is completely imbued with the most genuine reality, that is Planck's construction of ideas. He sees world events as a living interplay of expansion and contraction. For him, gravity is the striving of bodies spread out in space to contract. Heat and light are the striving of a body to bring its contracted material to bear at a distance, i.e. the striving for expansion.

[ 47 ] Planck's relationship to his contemporaries is a highly interesting one. Feuerbach says of himself: "Hegel stands on a standpoint that constructs the world, I stand on a standpoint that wants to recognize the world as existing; he descends, I ascend. Hegel turns man upside down, I stand on his feet resting on geology." The materialists could have used this to characterize their creed. Planck, however, proceeds in exactly the same way as Hegel. Nevertheless, he believes he is proceeding in the same way as Feuerbach and the materialists. But if they had interpreted his way in their sense, they would have had to say to him: You stand on a standpoint that constructs the world; yet you believe you recognize it as existing; you descend, and take the descent for an ascent; you turn the world upside down, and take the view that the head is the foot. The urge for natural, actual reality in the third quarter of the nineteenth century could not have been expressed more sharply than through the world view of a man who wanted to conjure up not just ideas but reality from reason. Planck's personality is no less interesting when compared with that of his contemporary Max Stirner. In this respect, it is important to consider how Planck thought about the motives of human action and community life. Just as the materialists started from the substances and forces actually given to the senses for the explanation of nature, Stirner started from the real individual personality for the guideline of human behavior. Reason is only with the individual. What it determines as a guideline for action can therefore only apply to the individual. Living together will result automatically from the natural interaction of individual personalities. If everyone acts according to his reason, the most desirable state will arise through the free cooperation of all. Living together in accordance with nature arises of its own accord if everyone allows reason to prevail in his individuality, in the sense of Stirner, just as, according to the view of the materialists, the natural view of world phenomena arises when things are allowed to express their essence themselves and the activity of reason is merely limited to connecting and interpreting the statements of the senses accordingly. Just as Plank does not explain the world by letting things speak for themselves, but by using his reason to decide what they supposedly say, so he does not rely on a real interaction of personalities with regard to communal life, but dreams of an association of peoples regulated by reason and serving the common good, with a supreme legal authority. Here, too, he considers it possible for reason to master that which lies beyond personality. "The original general law of right necessarily demands its external existence in a general power of right; for it would not itself really exist as a general law in an external way if it were only left to the individuals themselves to carry it out, since the individuals themselves, according to their legal position, are only representatives of their right, not of the general law as such." Planck constructs a general legal power because the idea of law can only become real in this way. Five years earlier, Max Stirner had written: "Own and creator of my right, I recognize no other source of right than - myself, neither God, nor the state, nor nature, nor even man himself with his 'eternal human rights', neither divine nor human right." He is of the opinion that the real right of the individual cannot exist within a general right. A thirst for reality is what drives Stirner to deny an unreal general right; but a thirst for reality is also what leads Planck to strive to construct a real state of law out of an idea.

[ 48 ] Like a power that disturbs Planck to the strongest degree, one reads from his writings the feeling that the belief in two interplaying world orders, one natural and one purely spiritual, not natural, is unbearable.

[ 49 ] Now, even in earlier times, there were thinkers who strove for a purely scientific way of thinking. Apart from more or less clear attempts by others, in 1809 Lamarck sketched a picture of the origin and development of living beings which, according to the state of knowledge at the time, should have been very attractive for a contemporary world view. He imagined the simplest living beings to have arisen through inorganic processes under certain conditions. Once a living being has been formed in this way, it develops new structures out of itself by adapting to given conditions in the outside world, which serve its life. It drives new organs out of itself because it needs them. Beings can therefore transform themselves and perfect themselves in this transformation. Lamarck, for example, imagines this transformation as follows: There is an animal that is dependent on taking its food from high trees. For this purpose, it must stretch its neck in length. In the course of time, the neck lengthens under the influence of need. A short-necked animal develops into a giraffe with a long neck. Thus living beings did not develop in diversity, but this diversity developed naturally in the course of time as a result of conditions. Lamarck is of the opinion that man is included in this development. In the course of time, he has developed from ape-like animals into forms that allow him to satisfy higher physical and mental needs. Lamarck had thus connected the entire world of organisms up to man to the realm of the inorganic.

[ 50 ] Lamarck's attempt to explain the diversity of life received little attention in his time. Two decades later, a dispute broke out in the French Academy between Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier. Geoffroy St. Hilaire believed that, despite the diversity of animal organisms, a common blueprint could be recognized in their abundance. This was the prerequisite for an explanation of their development from one another. If they have evolved from one another, they must have something in common despite their diversity. Something must still be recognizable in the lowest animal that only needs to be perfected in order to become the structure of the higher animal in the course of time. Cuvier vigorously opposed the consequences of this view. He was the cautious man who pointed out that the facts gave no grounds for such far-reaching conclusions. As soon as Goethe heard about this controversy, he regarded it as the most important event of the time. For him, interest in a simultaneous political event, such as the French July Revolution, completely faded in comparison with this struggle. He expressed this clearly enough in a conversation with Soret (in August 1830). It was clear to him that the natural conception of the organic world hinged on this controversial question. In an essay he wrote, he strongly advocated Geoffroy St. Hilaire (cf. Goethe's Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften in the 36th volume of the Goethe edition of Kürschner's German National Literature). He said to Johannes von Müller that Geoffroy St. Hilaire was walking on a path that he himself had trodden fifty years ago. From this it is clear what Goethe wanted when he began to study animal and plant life soon after his arrival in Weimar. Even then, he had in mind a natural explanation of living diversity; but he too was cautious. He never claimed more than the facts justified. And he says in his introduction to "Metamorphosis of Plants" that the time was unclear enough with regard to these facts. It was believed, as he puts it, that the ape only had to stand up and walk on its hind legs and then it could become a human being.

[ 51 ] The scientific thinkers lived in a completely different way of thinking than the Hegelians. They were able to remain within their ideal world. They were able to develop their idea of man from their idea of the ape without worrying about how nature manages to create man alongside the ape in the real world. Michelet had still said (cf. p. 348 above) that it was not up to the idea to decide on the "how" of the processes in the real world. The formulator of an idealistic world view is in this respect in the case of the mathematician who only needs to say by which thought operations a circle is transformed into an ellipse and this into a parabola or hyperbola. But he who seeks an explanation from facts would have to show the real processes by which such a transformation could take place. In this case, he is the creator of a realistic world view. He will not take the standpoint that Hegel indicates with the words: "It has been an unskillful conception of older, even of more recent natural philosophy, to regard the development and transition of a natural form and sphere into a higher one as an external-real production, which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been relegated to the darkness of the past. Nature is peculiar precisely to the exteriority of allowing the differences to fall apart and appear as indifferent existences; the dialectical concept that perpetuates the stages is the interior of them. Thinking contemplation must dispense with such nebulous, essentially sensuous notions as, for example, the so-called emergence of plants and animals from water, and then the emergence of the more developed animal organizations from the lower ones, etc." (Hegels Werke, 1847, vol. 7, dept. 1, p. 33). Such a statement by an idealist thinker is contrasted with that of the realist, Lamarck: "In the first beginning only the simplest and lowest animals and plants came into being, and only at last those of the most highly compound organization. The development of the earth and its organic population was entirely continuous, not interrupted by violent revolutions. The simplest animals and the simplest plants, which are at the lowest level of the ladder of organization, have arisen and still arise today through primordial generation (generatio spontanea)." Lamarck also had a kindred spirit in Germany. Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) also advocated a natural development of living beings based on "sensual ideas". "Everything organic has emerged from mucus, is nothing but differently shaped mucus. This primordial slime originated in the sea from inorganic matter in the course of planetary evolution."

[ 52 ] Despite such intrusive trains of thought, there had to be doubts about a natural way of looking at things, especially among thinkers who, in a cautious manner, never wanted to leave the guiding thread of factual knowledge, as long as the purposefulness of living beings remained unexplained. Even to such a pioneering and trend-setting thinker and researcher as Johannes Müller, the consideration of this purposefulness suggested the idea: "Organic bodies do not differ from inorganic bodies merely by the nature of their composition from elements, but the constant activity which acts in living organic matter also creates in the laws of a rational plan with purposefulness, in that the parts are arranged for the purpose of a whole, and this is precisely what characterizes the organism" (J. Müller's Manual of the Physiology of Man, 3rd ed, 1838, 1, S. 19). However, for a man like Johannes Müller, who kept strictly within the boundaries of natural research and for whom the view of expediency as a private idea remained in the background of his factual research, this view could not have any particular consequences. He investigated the laws of organisms in a strictly objective manner despite their purposeful interrelationship and became a reformer of modern natural science through his comprehensive understanding, which was able to make unlimited use of physical, chemical, anatomical, zoological, microscopic and embryological knowledge. His view did not prevent him from basing knowledge of the mental characteristics of beings on their physical peculiarities. One of his basic views was that one could not be a psychologist without being a physiologist. However, anyone who left the confines of natural research and entered the realm of the general world view was not in the fortunate position of being able to easily relegate the idea of purposefulness to the background. And so it seems only too understandable when such an important thinker as Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) expresses the idea in his book "Zend-Avesta oder über die Natur des Himmels und des Jenseits" (Zend-Avesta or on the Nature of Heaven and the Beyond), published in 1852, that it is in any case strange to believe that no consciousness is required to create conscious beings, as humans are, since unconscious machines can only be created by conscious humans. Even Carl Ernst von Baer, who followed the development of animal nature right up to its initial states, could not abandon the idea that the processes in the living body strive towards certain goals, indeed that the full concept of purpose should be applied to the whole of nature. (C. E. v. Baer, Studien aus dem Gebiet der Naturwissenschaft, 1876, pp. 73 and 82.)

[ 53 ] These difficulties, which for certain thinkers are opposed to a world view that wants to take its elements only from sensually perceptible nature, were not noticed by the materialist-minded thinkers. They strove to contrast the idealistic world view of the first half of the century with one that received all the light for an explanation of the world solely from the facts of nature. They only had confidence in the knowledge gained on the basis of these facts.

[ 54 ] Nothing lets us see into the hearts of the materialists better than this trust. They have been accused of taking the soul out of things and thus that which speaks to the heart, to the mind of man. And does it not seem that they rob nature of all its uplifting qualities and degrade it to a dead thing in which their intellect only satisfies the urge to seek the causes of everything that leaves the human heart without participation? Does it not seem as if they wanted to undermine morality, which rises above mere natural instincts and looks for higher, purely spiritual motives, and unfurl the banner of animal instincts, which say to themselves: "Let us eat and drink, let us satisfy our bodily instincts, for tomorrow we shall be dead"? Lotze (1817-1881) says of the very period we are talking about here that its members value the truth of sober experiential knowledge according to the degree of hostility with which it offended everything that the mind considers inviolable.

[ 55 ] But in Carl Vogt we get to know a man who had a deep understanding of the beauties of nature and sought to capture them as a dilettante in painting. A man who was not dull to the creatures of the human imagination, but who felt at ease in his dealings with painters and poets. It seems to have been not least the aesthetic enjoyment of the marvelous structure of organic beings that carried the materialists away to enthusiasm at the thought that the marvelous phenomena of the physical can also give their origin to souls. Should they not have said to themselves: How much more claim to be regarded as the cause of the spirit does the magnificent structure of the human brain have than the abstract conceptual beings with which philosophy concerns itself?

[ 56 ] And the accusation that the moral is degraded does not necessarily apply to the materialists either. Their knowledge of nature was linked to deep ethical motives. What Czolbe particularly emphasizes, that naturalism has a moral basis, was also felt by other materialists. They wanted to instill in man the joy of natural existence; they wanted to awaken in him the feeling that he had duties and tasks to seek on earth. They regarded it as an elevation of human dignity if the consciousness arose in man that he had developed from subordinate beings to his present perfection. And they promised themselves that only those who knew the natural necessities out of which the personality is effective would be able to judge human actions correctly. They said to themselves that only he is able to recognize a man according to his value who knows that life revolves through the universe with matter, that thought is necessarily connected with life, and good or evil will with thought. To those who believe that moral freedom is endangered by materialism, Moleschott replies "that everyone is free who is joyfully aware of the natural necessity of his existence, his circumstances, his needs, demands and requirements, the limits and scope of his sphere of activity. He who has understood this natural necessity also knows his right to fight for demands that arise from the needs of the species. Even more, because only freedom that is in harmony with what is genuinely human is defended by the species with natural necessity, every struggle for freedom over human goods guarantees the ultimate victory over the oppressors."

[ 57 ] With such feelings, with such devotion to the wonders of natural processes, with such moral sentiments, the materialists could expect the man who, in their view, had to come sooner or later, the man who would overcome the great obstacle to a natural world view. This man appeared for them in Charles Darwin, and his work, which also placed the idea of expediency on the ground of natural knowledge, was published in 1859 under the title: "On the Origin of Species in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms by Natural Breeding, or the Preservation of the Perfected Races in the Struggle for Existence."

[ 58 ] For the realization of the impulses that are active in the development of the philosophical world view, the scientific advances mentioned as examples (to which others could be added) are not important as such, but the fact that advances of such a kind coincided with the emergence of the Hegelian world view. The description of the development of philosophy in the previous chapters has shown how the newer world view since the times of Copernicus, Galileo etc. has been under the influence of the scientific way of thinking. However, this influence could not have been as significant as that of the scientific achievements of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, significant scientific advances were also made. One thinks of the discovery of oxygen by Lavoisier and those in the field of electricity by Volta and many others. Nevertheless, spirits such as Fichte, Schelling and Goethe were able to arrive at a view of the world that emanated from the spirit while fully recognizing these advances. The scientific way of thinking could not yet have such a powerful effect on them as it did on the materialist-minded thinkers in the middle of the century. They could still place scientific ideas on one side of the world view and had certain ideas for the other side that contained more than "mere thoughts". One such idea was, for example, that of the "life force" or that of the "purposeful structure" of a living being. Such ideas made it possible to say that there is something at work in the world that does not fall under the ordinary laws of nature, that is spirit-like. This resulted in an idea of the spirit that had an "actual content", so to speak. Hegel had now driven everything "factual" out of the spirit. He had diluted it down to "mere thought". For those for whom "mere thoughts" can be nothing but images of the actual, the spirit was thus shown in its nullity by philosophy itself. They had to replace Hegel's "mere things of thought" with something that had real content for them. That is why they sought the origin of "spiritual phenomena" in the material processes that can be observed "as facts" by the senses. The world view was pushed towards thoughts of the material origin of the spirit by what Hegel had made of the spirit.

[ 59 ] Whoever realizes that deeper forces than those appearing on the surface are involved in the historical course of human development will find something significant for the development of the world view in the way in which nineteenth-century materialism relates to the emergence of Hegel's philosophy. - In Goethe's thoughts there were germs for the progress of philosophy that were only inadequately taken up by Hegel. When Goethe sought to gain such a conception of the "primordial plant" that he could live with this conception inwardly and allow such special plant formations to emerge from it mentally that are possible to live, he shows that he was striving for thoughts to come alive in the soul. He stood before the entry of the thought into a living development of this thought, while Hegel stopped at the thought. In the soul's being together with the living thought, as Goethe strove for it, one would have had a spiritual experience that could have recognized the spirit in the substance as well; in the "mere thought" one did not have such an experience. Thus the development of the world was put to a severe test. After the deeper historical impulses, the new age urged us not only to experience the thought, but to find a concept for the self-conscious ego through which we could say: This I stands firmly within the world structure. By thinking of it as the result of material processes, this was achieved in a way that was comprehensible to the formation of time. Even in the denial of the spiritual essence of the self-conscious ego by the materialism of the nineteenth century lies the impulse to search for the essence of this ego. Therefore, the scientific impulse that was exerted on the world view in this age belongs to its history in a completely different sense than the influences of the scientific mode of conception on previous materialistic currents. These had not yet been urged by a Hegelian philosophy of thought to seek certainty from the natural sciences. However, this urge does not take place in such a way that the leading personalities become fully aware of it; it merely acts as a temporal impulse in the subconscious foundations of the soul.