The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Modern Idealistic Worldviews

[ 1 ] In the second half of the century, three thinkers merged the scientific way of thinking with the idealistic traditions of the first half of the century three times to form world views, which bear a sharp individual physiognomy: Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906).

[ 2 ] Lotze, in his work published in 1843 on "Life and Vital Force" (in R. Wagner's Handwörterbuch der Physiologie), resolutely opposed the belief that a special force, the vital force, was present in living beings and defended the idea that the phenomena of life can only be explained by complicated processes of the kind that also take place in inanimate nature. In this respect, therefore, he took the side of the newer scientific conception, which sought to bridge the old opposition between the inanimate and the living. His works dealing with the natural sciences are based on this point of view: his "General Pathology and Therapy as Mechanical Natural Sciences" (1842) and "General Physiology of Physical Life" (1851). In his "Elements of Psychophysics" (1860) and his "Preliminary School of Aesthetics" (1876), Fechner delivered works that carried the spirit of a strictly scientific way of thinking, in areas that had been treated almost without exception in the sense of an idealistic way of thinking before him. Lotze and Fechner, however, had a decided need to build an idealistic world of thought beyond the scientific way of looking at things. Lotze was compelled to do so by the nature of his mind, which not only demanded of him a thinking pursuit of the natural laws of the world, but also made him seek in all things and processes life and inwardness of the kind that man himself feels in his breast. He wants to "constantly argue against the ideas that only want to know one half and a lesser half of the world, only the unfolding of facts into new facts, of forms into new forms, but not the constant re-internalization of all this externality into that which alone has value in the world, what alone has value and truth in the world, to bliss and despair, admiration and disgust, love and hatred, to joyful certainty and doubtful longing, to all the nameless fear and anxiety in which life proceeds, which alone deserves to be called life". Lotze, like so many others, has the feeling that the human image of nature becomes cold and sober if we do not bring into it ideas taken from the human soul. (Cf. p. 375 above.) What in Lotze is a consequence of his emotional disposition appears in Fechner as the result of a richly developed imagination, which works in such a way that it always leads from a logical grasp of things to a poetic interpretation of them. As a scientific thinker, he cannot merely search for the conditions of man's origin and the laws that cause him to die again after a certain time. For him, birth and death become events that guide his imagination towards a life before birth and one after death.

[ 3 ] "Man" - Fechner explains in the "Booklet on Life after Death" - "lives on earth not once, but three times. His first stage of life is a constant sleep, the second an alternation between sleep and waking, the third an eternal waking. - On the first stage man lives alone in darkness; on the second he lives sociably, but separately beside and between others in a light that reflects the surface to him; on the third his life intertwines with that of other spirits to form a higher life in the highest spirit and he looks into the essence of finite things. - On the first stage, the body develops from the germ and creates its tools for the second; on the second, the spirit develops from the germ and creates its tools for the third; on the third, the divine germ develops, which lies in every human spirit and already here points beyond the human being into a beyond that is dark for us, but bright as day for the spirit of the third stage through intuition, faith, feeling and instinct of the genius. - The transition from the first to the second stage of life is called birth; the transition from the second to the third is called death."

[ 4 ] Lotze gave an interpretation of world phenomena that corresponded to the needs of his mind in his work "Mikrokosmos" (1856-1858) and in his writings "Drei Bücher der Logik" (1874) and "Drei Bücher der Metaphysik" (1879). The transcripts of the lectures he gave on the various areas of philosophy have also been published. His method presents itself as a pursuit of the strictly natural lawfulness in the world and a subsequent interpretation of this lawfulness in terms of an ideal, harmonious, soulful order and effectiveness of the world's foundation. We see one thing acting upon another; but the former could not be able to effect the latter at all if there were not an original kinship and unity between the two. The second thing would have to remain indifferent to what the first accomplishes if it did not have the ability to organize its own actions in the sense of what the first wants. One sphere can only be caused to move by another from which it is pushed if it meets the other with understanding, so to speak, if it has the same understanding of movement as the first. The ability to move is something that is contained in both the one and the other sphere as something they have in common. All things and processes must have such a common feature. That we perceive them as things and occurrences that are separate from each other is due to the fact that in our observation we only get to know their outside; if we could see into their inside, we would see that which does not separate them but unites them into a great world whole. There is only one being for us that we know not only from the outside, but from the inside, that we can not only look at, but into which we can look. This is our own soul, the whole of our spiritual personality. But because all things must have something in common within them, they must all have that in common with our soul which constitutes its innermost core. We may therefore imagine the interior of things to be similar to the constitution of our own soul. And the ground of the world, which rules as the common ground of all things, cannot be conceived by us in any other way than as a comprehensive personality in the image of our own personality. "No other form of existence than that of personality can satisfy the longing of the mind to grasp as reality the highest that is permitted to it. So much is it convinced that living, self-possessing and self-enjoying selfhood is the irrefutable precondition and the only possible home of all good and all goods, so filled with silent contempt for all apparently lifeless existence, that we always find incipient religion in its myth-forming beginnings busy transfiguring natural reality into spiritual reality, but it has never felt the need to trace spiritual vitality back to blind reality as a solid foundation." And Lotze expresses his own feelings towards the things of nature in the words: "I do not know them, the dead masses of which you speak; to me, all life and activity and even rest and death are only a dull, passing semblance of restless inner weaving." And if the processes of nature, as they appear in observation, are only such a dull passing semblance, then their deepest essence cannot be sought in this lawfulness available to observation, but in the "restless weaving" of the overall personality that inspires them all, in its aims and purposes. Lotze therefore imagines that all natural activity expresses a moral purpose set by a personality towards which the world strives. The laws of nature are the outward expression of an omnipotent ethical lawfulness of the world. What Lotze says about the survival of the human soul after death is in perfect harmony with this ethical interpretation of the world: "No other thought is open to us except the general idealistic conviction: every created thing whose continuance belongs to the meaning of the world will continue; everything will pass away whose reality had its rightful place only in a temporary phase of the course of the world. That this principle has no further application in human hands hardly needs to be mentioned; we certainly do not know the merits which can entitle one being to eternal existence, nor the defects which deny it to others." (Drei Bücher der Metaphysik, § 245.) Where Lotze lets his considerations lead into the area of the great philosophical riddles, his thoughts take on an uncertain character. It should be noted that their bearer cannot gain a secure idea of man's relationship to the course of the world from his two sources of knowledge, natural science and spiritual self-observation. The inner power of self-observation does not penetrate to a thought that could give the ego the right to feel itself as a certain entity within the world as a whole. In his lectures on "Philosophy of Religion" we read (p. 82): "The 'belief in immortality has no other sure foundation than the religious need. Therefore, nothing more can be determined philosophically about the nature of continuity than what could flow from a simple metaphysical proposition. Namely: since we regard every being only as a creature of God, there is absolutely no originally valid right, to which the individual soul, for example as a "substance", could refer in order to demand eternal individual continuity. Rather, we can merely assert: every being will be preserved by God as long as its existence has a valuable meaning for the whole of his world plan ..." The vagueness of such sentences expresses the extent to which Lotze's ideas can develop into the field of great philosophical puzzles.

[ 5 ] In the pamphlet "On Life after Death", Fechner talks about man's relationship to the world. "What does the anatomist see when he looks into the human brain? A tangle of white fibers whose meaning he cannot decipher. And what does it see within itself? A world of light, sounds, thoughts, memories, fantasies, sensations of love and hate. So think of the relation of what you, externally facing the world, see in it, and what it sees in itself, and do not demand that both, the external and the internal, see themselves more alike in the whole of the world than in you, who are only its part. And only that you are a part of this world lets you see in yourself a part of what it sees in itself." Fechner imagines that the world spirit has the same relationship to world matter as the human spirit has to the human body. He now says to himself: man speaks of himself when he speaks of his body; and he also speaks of himself when he speaks of his spirit. The anatomist who examines the tangle of brain fibers has before him the organ from which thoughts and fantasies once sprang. When the person whose brain the anatomist is examining was still alive, it was not the brain fibers and their physical activity that stood before his soul, but a world of ideas. What changes now when, instead of man looking into his soul, the anatomist looks into the brain, the physical organ of this soul? Is it not the same being, the same person, who is viewed in the one case and in the other? The being, says Fechner, is the same, only the observer's point of view has changed. The anatomist looks from the outside at what man used to look at from the inside. It is like looking at a circle once from the outside and once from the inside. In the first case it appears raised, in the second hollow. Both times it is the same circle. It is the same with man: if he looks at himself from the inside, he is spirit; if the naturalist looks at him from the outside, he is body, matter. According to Fechner's way of thinking, it is not appropriate to think about how body and spirit interact. For the two are not two different beings at all; they are one and the same. They only present themselves as different when observed from different locations. Fechner sees the human being as a body that is also a spirit. - From this point of view, it is possible for Fechner to imagine the whole of nature as spiritual, animated. Man is able to look at the physical from the inside, i.e. to recognize the inside directly as spiritual. Does not the thought now suggest itself that everything physical, if it could be seen from the inside, would appear as spiritual? We can only see the plant from the outside. But is it not possible that it, too, if viewed from the inside, would prove to be a soul? This idea grew into a conviction in Fechner's imagination: Everything physical is at the same time spiritual. The smallest material thing is animated. And if the material parts build themselves up into more perfect material bodies, then this process is only one that is seen from the outside; it corresponds to an inner one that would present itself as the composition of individual souls into more perfect spiritual souls, if one could observe it: If someone were able to look at the physical activity on our earth with the plants living on it, with the animals and people cavorting on it from the inside, this whole would present itself to him as an earth soul. And it would be the same with the whole solar system, indeed with the whole world The universe, seen from the outside, is the physical cosmos; seen from the inside, All-Spirit, most perfect personality, God.

[ 6 ] Whoever wants to arrive at a world view must go beyond the facts that present themselves to him without his intervention. There are many different views on what is achieved by going beyond the world of immediate perception. In 1874 Kirchhoff expressed his own (cf. p. 433 f. above) to the effect that even the most rigorous science leads to nothing other than a complete and simple description of the actual processes. Fechner starts from a different point of view. He is of the opinion that it is "the great art of drawing conclusions from this world to the hereafter, not from reasons which we do not know, nor from presuppositions which we make, but from facts which we know, to draw conclusions about the greater and higher facts of the hereafter, and thereby to consolidate and support the practically required faith from below, which depends on higher points of view, and to place it in living relation to life". (Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, 4th ed. p.69). In the sense of this opinion, Fechner not only seeks the connection of the physical phenomena that are given to observation with the spiritual phenomena of observation; but he adds others to the observed soul phenomena, the earth spirit, the planet spirit, the world spirit.

[ 7 ] Fechner does not allow his scientific knowledge, which rests on a secure foundation, to prevent him from elevating his thoughts from the sense world to regions where world beings and world processes, which must be removed from sense observation if they exist, are conceived. He feels stimulated to such elevation by his sensuous contemplation of the sense world, which tells his thinking more than mere sense perception can tell him. He feels prompted to use this "more" to conceive of extrasensory beings. In this his way, he strives to imagine a world into which he promises to lead thoughts that have come to life. Such transgression of sensory boundaries did not prevent Fechner from proceeding according to the strictest scientific method even in an area that borders on the spiritual. It was he who created the scientific methods for this field. His "Elements of Psychophysics" (1860) is the fundamental work in this field. The basic law on which he based psychophysics is that the increase in sensation caused in man by a growing impression from outside takes place in a certain proportion more slowly than the increase in strength of the impression. The greater the existing strength of the stimulus, the less the sensation grows. Based on this idea, it is possible to obtain a dimensional relationship between the external stimulus (for example, the physical intensity of light) and the sensation (for example, the sensation of light). Following Fechner's path led to the development of psychophysics as a completely new science of the relationship between stimuli and sensations, i.e. between the physical and the mental. Wilhelm Wundt, who continued to work in Fechner's spirit in this field, characterized the founder of "psychophysics" in an excellent way: "Perhaps in none of his other scientific achievements does the rare combination of gifts that Fechner possessed emerge so brilliantly as in his psychophysical work. A work such as the Elements of Psychophysics required a familiarity with the principles of exact physical-mathematical methodology and at the same time an inclination to delve into the deepest problems of being that only he possessed in this combination. And for this he needed that originality of thought which knew how to freely reshape the traditional tools according to its own needs and had no qualms about taking new and unfamiliar paths. The observations of E. H. Weber, the isolated, often more coincidental than planned experiments and results of other physiologists - they formed the modest material from which he built a new science." Important insights into the interactions between body and soul were gained through the experimental methods Fechner encouraged in this field. Wundt characterized the new science in his "Lectures on the Human and Animal Soul" (1863): "In the following investigations I shall show that experiment in psychology is the main means of leading us from the facts of consciousness to those processes that prepare conscious life in the dark background of the soul. Self-observation, like observation in general, provides us only with the composite appearance. Only in the experiment do we strip the phenomenon of all the accidental circumstances to which it is bound in nature. Through the experiment we create the phenomenon artificially out of the conditions that we hold in our hands. We change these conditions and thereby also change the appearance in a measurable way. Thus it is always and everywhere the experiment that leads us to the laws of nature, because it is only in the experiment that we are able to see both the causes and the results." Undoubtedly it is only a borderline area of psychology in which the experiment is fruitful, precisely the area in which the conscious processes lead over into the no longer conscious, material background of the soul's life. The actual phenomena of the soul can only be obtained through purely spiritual observation. Nevertheless, E. Kraepelin, a psychophysicist, is fully justified in his assertion that "the young science ... will be able to maintain its independent place alongside the other branches of natural science and physiology in particular". (Psychologische Arbeiten, edited by E. Kraepelin I. Band, I. Heft, p.4.)

[ 8 ] When he presented his "Philosophy of the Unconscious" in 1869, Eduard von Hartmann had less a world view in mind that reckoned with the results of modern natural science than one that raised the ideas of the idealistic systems from the first half of the century, which seemed insufficient to him in many respects, to a higher level, purified them of contradictions and developed them in an all-round way. To him, Hegei's, Schelling's and Schopenhauer's ideas seemed to contain the right seeds that only needed to be brought to maturity. Man cannot content himself with the observation of facts if he wants to recognize the things and processes of the world. He must progress from facts to ideas. These ideas cannot be something that is arbitrarily added to the facts by thinking. Something must correspond to them in the things and occurrences. This correspondence cannot be conscious ideas, for such ideas only come about through the material processes of the human brain. Without the brain there is no consciousness. One must therefore imagine that the conscious ideas of the human mind correspond to an unconscious ideal in reality. Like Hegel, Hartmann also regards the idea as the real in things, which is present in them beyond what is merely perceptible and accessible to sensory observation. - However, the mere idea content of things could never produce a real event in them. The idea of a sphere cannot encounter the idea of another sphere. The idea of a table cannot make an impression on the human eye either. A real event presupposes a real force. In order to gain an idea of such a force, Hartmann borrows from Schopenhauer. Man finds a force in his own soul through which he gives reality to his own thoughts and decisions, the will. Just as the will expresses itself in the human soul, it requires the existence of the human organism. Through the organism the will is conscious. If we want to think of a force in things, we can only imagine it as similar to the will, the only force directly known to us. But again we must disregard consciousness. Apart from us, therefore, there is an unconscious will in things, which gives the ideas the possibility of realizing themselves. In their union, the idea content and the will content of the world constitute the unconscious foundation of the world. - Even if the world has a thoroughly logical structure because of its idea content, it owes its real existence to the illogical, unreasoning will. Its content is rational; the fact that this content is a reality has its reason in irrationality. The reign of the unreasonable is expressed in the presence of the pain that torments all beings. Pain prevails over pleasure in the world. Eduard von Hartmann seeks to substantiate this fact, which can be explained philosophically from the illogical volitional element of existence, through careful observations on the relationship between pleasure and displeasure in the world. He who does not indulge in any illusion, but looks objectively at the evils of the world, can come to no other conclusion than that displeasure exists to a far greater extent than pleasure. It follows, however, that non-existence is preferable to existence. But non-being can only be achieved if the logical-reasonable idea destroys the will, the being. Hartmann therefore sees the world process as a gradual annihilation of the unreasonable will by the reasonable world of ideas. Man's highest moral task must be to participate in the overcoming of the will. All cultural progress must ultimately lead to finally bringing about this overcoming. Man is therefore morally good if he participates in the progress of culture, if he demands nothing for himself, but selflessly devotes himself to the great work of liberation from existence. He will undoubtedly do so if he realizes that displeasure must always be greater than pleasure, and that happiness is therefore impossible. Only he can egotistically desire happiness who considers it possible. The pessimistic view of the predominance of pain over pleasure is the best cure for egoism. Only by becoming absorbed in the world process can the individual find salvation. The true pessimist is led to non-egoistic action. - What man accomplishes consciously, however, is only the unconscious raised to consciousness. Conscious human cooperation in the progress of culture corresponds to an unconscious overall process which consists in the progressive liberation of the primal being of the world from the will. The beginning of the world must also have served this goal. The original being had to . create the world in order to . gradually liberate itself from the will with the help of the idea. "Real existence is the incarnation of the Godhead, the world process is the passion history of the incarnate God, and at the same time the path to the redemption of the crucified in the flesh; morality, however, is the cooperation in shortening this path of suffering and redemption." (Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewußtseins, 1879, p. 871) In a series of comprehensive works and in a large number of monographs and essays, Hartmann has developed his world view in a comprehensive manner. This is particularly the case because Hartmann knows how not to allow himself to be tyrannized by his basic ideas when dealing with individual questions of science and life, but to give himself over to an unbiased view of things. This is particularly true of his "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness", in which he presents the various types of human moral doctrines in a logical structure. He has thus given a kind of "natural history" of the various moral standpoints, from the egoistic pursuit of happiness through many intermediate stages to the selfless devotion to the general world process, through which the divine primordial being frees itself from the wretchedness of existence.

[ 9 ] Since Hartmann incorporates the idea of purpose into his world view, it is understandable that the scientific way of thinking based on Darwinism appears to him as a one-sided current of ideas. Just as the idea in the world as a whole works towards the goal of non-existence, so also in the individual the ideal content is purposeful. In the development of the organism Hartmann sees a purpose that realizes itself; and the struggle for existence with the natural choice of breeding are only henchmen of the purposefully ruling ideas. (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 10th ed., vol. III, p. 403.) From various sides, the life of thought in the nineteenth century leads to a world view of thought uncertainty and desolation. Richard Wahle declares with all determination that thinking is incapable of doing anything to solve "exuberant" supreme questions; and Eduard von Hartmann sees in all cultural work only a detour to finally bring about complete redemption from existence as the ultimate end. There is a fine statement against such ideas, which a German linguist, Wilhelm Wackernagel, wrote down in 1843 (in his book "Über den Unterricht in der Muttersprache"). He believes that doubt cannot provide a basis for a world view; rather, it is an "injuria" against the personality that wants to recognize something and also against the things that are to be recognized. "Knowledge begins with trust."

[ 10 ] Modern times have produced such trust for the ideas that rest on the methods of scientific research, but not for a cognition that draws the power of truth from the self-conscious ego. The impulses which lie in the depths of the development of spiritual life demand such a power of truth. The inquiring human soul instinctively feels that it can only find satisfaction through such a power. Philosophical research struggles for such a power. But it cannot find it in the thoughts it is able to drive out of itself for a world view. The achievements of the life of thought fall short of what the soul demands. Scientific ideas receive their certainty from the observation of the outside world. Within the soul one does not feel a force that guarantees the same certainty. One wants truths about the spiritual world, about the destiny of the soul and its connection with the world, which are as certain as the ideas of natural science. The thinker Franz Brentano, who drew as thoroughly from the philosophical thinking of the past as he did from the nature of scientific research, demanded that philosophy should arrive at its results in the same way as the natural sciences. He hoped that the science of the soul (psychology), for example, would not have to forego gaining insight into the most valuable questions of mental life because of this imitation of scientific methods. "For the hopes of Plato and Aristotle to gain certainty about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body, on the other hand, the laws of the association of ideas, the development of convictions and opinions and the germination and driving of desire and love would be anything but a true compensation ... And if it really meant" - the new scientific way of thinking - "the exclusion of the question of immortality, it would be an extremely important one for psychology." Brentano expressed this in his "Psychology from an Empirical Point of View" in 1874 (p. 20). The fact that such a serious seeker after truth as Franz Brentano did not follow up the first volume of his Psychology, which only deals with questions that "can be anything but a true compensation" for the highest questions of the soul, with another volume that really approaches the highest questions, is significant for the low viability of soul research, which wants to be completely modeled on natural science. Thinkers lack the resilience that could really meet the demands of modern times. Greek thought mastered the image of nature and the image of the life of the soul in such a way that the two were united to form an overall picture. Subsequently, in the depths of the life of the soul, the life of thought developed independently, in separation from nature; the newer natural science provided an image of nature. In the face of this, the necessity arose to find an image of the life of the soul - in the self-conscious ego - which would prove strong enough to be able to exist together with the image of nature in a general picture of the world. For this it is necessary to find a point of certainty in the soul itself that is as secure as the results of scientific research. Spinoza believed he had found it by modeling his world view on the mathematical kind; Kant abandons the knowledge of an intrinsically existing world and seeks to gain ideas which, through their moral gravity, are not supposed to yield knowledge, but rather a more profound faith. One can see the striving for an anchoring of the life of the soul in the overall structure of the world among the philosophers engaged in research. However, the tension that shapes the ideas about the life of the soul in such a way that prospects for a solution to the questions of the soul arise from them does not want to materialize. Uncertainty arises about the true meaning of what one experiences as a human being in the soul. Natural science in the sense of Haeckel pursues the natural processes that can be perceived through the senses and sees the life of the soul as a higher level of such natural processes. Other thinkers find that in everything that the soul perceives in this way, only the effects of unknown, never to be recognized extra-human processes are given. For these thinkers, the world becomes an "illusion", albeit an illusion caused by the natural necessity of human organization. "As long as the feat of looking around the corner, that is, imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-condemnation that the that, but never the what of existence is recognizable, will remain." Thus speaks a philosopher from the second half of the nineteenth century: Robert Zimmermann. - For such a worldview, the human soul, which can know nothing of its essence - its "what" - sails in the sea of ideas without becoming aware of its ability to find something in the vast sea of ideas that could provide insight into the essence of existence. Hegel had lost the ability to perceive in thinking itself the inner life force that leads the human ego into being. In the following period, "mere thinking" became an easy conceptualization that contains nothing of the essence of true being. - Wherever an opinion emerges about a focus of the search for truth lying in thinking, uncertainty rings through the thoughts put forward. Thus, when Gideon Spicker says: "We can never know that thinking is right in itself, neither empirically nor logically with certainty ..." (Lessing's Weltanschauung, 1883, p.5.)

[ 11 ] In his "Philosophy of Redemption" (1876), Philipp Mainländer (1841 to 1876) expressed the lack of trust in existence in a captivating way. Mainländer sees himself confronted with the world view that modern natural science is pushing towards. But he searches in vain for a way to anchor the self-conscious ego in a spiritual world. He cannot come to gain from this self-conscious ego that for which Goethe had the beginnings: namely, to feel an inner living entity arise in the soul, which feels itself as spiritually alive in a spiritual-living being behind mere external nature. Thus the world appears to him without spirit. But since he can only think of it as if it came from the spirit, it becomes for him the remnant of a past spiritual life. Sentences such as the following from Mainländer have a moving effect: "Now we have the right to give this being the familiar name that has always designated that which no imagination, no flight of the boldest fantasy, no abstract thinking, no matter how deep, no collected, devout mind, no enraptured, earth-raptured spirit has ever achieved: God. But this simple unity has been; it is no more. Changing its essence, it has completely fragmented into a world of multiplicity." (Reference should be made to Max Seiling's essay "Mainländer, ein neuer Messias") If the view of existence offers only worthlessness, only the remnants of what is valuable, then only its destruction can be the goal of the world. Man can only see his task in participating in its destruction. (Mainländer ended up committing suicide.) According to Mainländer, God only created the world in order to free himself from the torment of his own existence through it. "The world is the means to the end of non-existence, and indeed the world is the only possible means to the end. God recognized that only through the becoming of a real world of multiplicity ... could he step out of superbeing into non-being". (Philosophy of Redemption, p. 352).

[ 12 ] In a powerful way, the poet Robert Hamerling (1830-1889) in his worldview work "Atomistik des Willens" (published after his death) opposed the view that arises from mistrust in the world. He rejects logical investigations into the value or lack of value of existence and takes his starting point from an original experience. "The main thing is not whether people are right, that they all, with infinitesimal exceptions, want to live, to live at all costs, - regardless of whether they are doing well or badly. The main thing is that they want it: and this is absolutely undeniable. And yet the doctrinaire pessimists do not reckon with this decisive fact. They only ever intelligently weigh pleasure and displeasure against each other in scholarly discussions, as the fiefdom in particular does; but since pleasure and displeasure are matters of feeling, it is feeling, and not reason, that finally and decisively draws the balance between pleasure and displeasure. And this balance is actually in favor of the pleasure of existence for all of humanity, indeed, one can say for everything that has life. That everything that lives wants to live, to live under all circumstances, to live at all costs, that is the great fact, and all doctrinaire talk is powerless in the face of this fact." In front of Hamerling's soul is thus the thought: in the depths of the soul there is something that is attached to an existence and which expresses the essence of the soul more truthfully than the judgments that speak about the value of life under the burden of more recent scientific conceptions. One might say that Hamerling senses a spiritual center of gravity in the depths of the soul, which secures the self-conscious ego in worldly life. He would therefore like to see something in this ego that guarantees its existence more than the thought structures of the philosophers of recent times. He sees a major flaw in the newer worldviews in the opinion "that in the latest philosophy there is so much nagging about the ego", and he would like to explain this "from the fear of a soul, a soul being or even a soul thing". Hamerling points meaningfully to what is important: "Emotional moments play into the ego thoughts... What the mind has not experienced, it is also incapable of thinking ..." For Hamerling, all higher worldviews depend on feeling thinking itself, on experiencing it. Before the possibility of penetrating into those depths of the soul in which the living conceptions are to be gained which lead to the recognition of the being of the soul - through the inner carrying power of the self-conscious ego - the concepts originating from the more recent development of the world-view, which make the world-view a mere sea of conceptions, lie in store for Hamerling. Thus he introduces his view of the world with words like these: "Certain stimuli produce the odor in our olfactory organ.... . So the rose does not smell if nobody smells it. - Certain air vibrations produce sound in our ear The sound does not exist without an ear. So the shotgun blast would not bang if no one heard it." Such ideas have become such an integral part of thought through the power of the more recent development of world views that Hamerling adds the words to the above-mentioned argument: "If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your mind rears up before this fact like a shy horse, do not read another line; leave this and all other books that deal with philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact impartially and to hold it in thought." -Hamerling wrestled his "Homunculus" from his soul as his last poetic work. In it, he wanted to offer a critique of modern morality. In a radical way, he develops in a poetic series of images where a soulless humanity that believes only in the power of external natural laws is drifting. As the poet of "Homunculus", he does not stop at anything in modern morality that seems to him to stem from this false belief; as a thinker, however, Hamerling does, in the fullest sense of the word, strike sail in the face of the kind of imagination that is presented in the chapter "The World as Illusion" in this work. He does not shy away from words like these: "The extended, spatial physical world exists as such only insofar as we perceive it. - Whoever holds on to this will realize what a naïve error it is to believe that in addition to the idea we call 'horse' ... there is another horse, the real one, of which our perception is a kind of image. Apart from this, it must be repeated, there is only the sum of those conditions which cause a perception to arise in my senses which I call a horse." - Hamerling feels towards the life of the soul as if nothing of the intrinsic nature of the world could enter into its sea of imagination. But he has a sense of what is taking place in the depths of the more recent development of the soul. He feels that the knowledge of modern man must shine forth with its own power of truth in the self-conscious ego, as it presented itself in the perceived thought of Greek man. Again and again he gropes towards the point where the self-conscious ego feels itself inwardly endowed with the power of its true being, which at the same time feels itself to be standing in the spiritual life of the world. Since nothing else reveals itself to it by groping in this way, it clings to the feeling of being living in the soul, which seems to it to be more essential, more existential than the mere idea of the ego, than the ego-thought. "From the consciousness or feeling of our own being we gain the concept of a being that goes beyond mere thought. We gain the concept of a being that is not merely thought, but thinks." Hamerling now seeks to gain a world view from this ego that grasps itself in its sense of existence. What the ego experiences in its feeling of existence is - as Hamerling puts it - "the atomic feeling in us". The ego, feeling itself, knows of itself; and it thus knows itself towards the world as an "atom". It must imagine other beings in the same way as it invents itself within itself; as experiencing, feeling atoms; which for Hamerling appears to be synonymous with atoms of will, volitional monads. In Hamerling's "atomistics of will", the world becomes a multiplicity of monads of will and the human soul is one of these monads of will. The thinker of such a world view looks around him and sees the world as a spirit, but everything he can see in this spirit is a revelation of will. Nothing more can be said about it. Nothing speaks from this picture of the world that answers the questions: How does the human soul stand in the becoming of the world? For whether one regards this soul as what it appears to be before all philosophical thinking, or whether one characterizes it, according to this thinking, as a monad of will: one has to pose the same puzzling questions to both conceptions of the soul. And someone thinking along with Brentano could say: "For the hopes of Plato and Aristotle to gain certainty about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body, the knowledge that the soul is a monad of will among other monads of will would be anything but a true compensation."

[ 13 ] In many currents of the newer worldview life one notices the instinctive urge (living in the subconscious of the thinkers) to find a force in the self-conscious ego that is not that of Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz and others, and through which this ego - the core of the human soul - can be presented in such a way that the position of man in the course of the world and in the becoming of the world is revealed. At the same time, these worldview currents show that the means used to find such a force do not have enough resilience to fulfill the "hope of Plato and Aristotle" (in the sense of Brentano) in a way that corresponds to the newer requirements of the soul. One brings it to develop opinions on how perception could relate to things outside the soul, for example, how ideas develop and chain together, how memory arises, how feeling and the will relate to imagination; but one closes the door through one's own way of imagining when it comes to the "hopes of Plato and Aristotle". One believes that anything that could be conceived about these "hopes" would immediately violate the demands of strict scientificity, which are set by the scientific way of thinking.

[ 14 ] A philosophical conception whose ideas do not want to rise higher than the scientific ground allows is that of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). For Wundt, philosophy is "the general science which has to unite the general knowledge conveyed by the individual sciences into a system without contradictions". (Wundt, System der Philosophie, p. 21.) The only way to achieve this is to continue the trains of thought created by the individual sciences, to combine them and to organize them into a clear whole. Wundt accomplishes this, and he proceeds in such a way that the character he gives to his ideas is entirely dependent on the habits of imagination that develop in a thinker who - like Wundt - is an expert in the individual sciences and a personality who has worked practically in individual fields of knowledge (for example, the psychophysical part of psychology). Wundt's view is directed towards the world view which is built up by the human soul through sensory experience, and towards the ideas which are experienced in the soul under the impression of this world view. The scientific mode of conception regards sensory perceptions in such a way that it understands them as effects of processes external to man. For Wundt this mode of conception is in a certain sense something self-evident. He therefore considers external reality to be that which is conceptualized on the basis of sense perceptions. This external reality is therefore not experienced; it is presupposed by the soul in the same way as it is presupposed that there is a process outside the human being that acts on the eye and causes the sensation of light in the eye through its activity. In contrast to this, the processes in the soul are experienced immediately. In these processes, cognition has nothing to deduce, but only to observe how the ideas are formed and linked, how they are connected with feelings and volitional impulses. Within this observation we are only dealing with mental activities that present themselves in the stream of inner experience; there is no justification for speaking of a soul revealing itself in this life apart from this stream of the soul's life flowing along. To take matter as the basis of natural phenomena is justified, for one must infer the processes in material existence conceptually from sense perceptions; not in the same sense can one infer a soul from the processes of the soul. "The auxiliary concept of matter is ... bound to the indirect or conceptual nature of all knowledge of nature. It is absolutely impossible to see how immediate and vivid inner experience could also require such an auxiliary concept ..." (System of Philosophy, p. 369 f.). Thus the question of the nature of the soul is for Wundt a problem to which neither the observation of inner experiences nor anything that could be deduced from these inner experiences leads. Wundt does not perceive a soul; only mental activity. And this mental activity presents itself in such a way that wherever mental activity is present, a physical process takes place parallel to it. Both, mental activity and physical process, form a unity: they are basically one and the same; only the observer separates them in his perception. Wundt believes that scientific experience can only recognize those mental processes that are bound to physical processes. For Wundt, the self-conscious ego merges into the mental organism of mental processes, which are the same to it as bodily processes, except that these, seen from within, appear as mental-spiritual. But when the ego now tries to invent within itself that which it can regard as characteristic of itself, it discovers its volitional activity. Only in will does it distinguish itself as an independent entity from the rest of the world. This causes it to recognize the basic character of being in will. It admits to itself that, with regard to its own essence, it may accept the source of the world in volitional activity. The own being of the things that man observes in the outer world remains hidden from him behind observation; in his inner being he recognizes will as the essential; he may conclude that what encounters his will from the outer world is similar to it. As the volitional activities of the world interact, they bring forth in each other the ideas, the inner life of the volitional units. - From all this we see how Wundt is driven by the basic impulse of the self-conscious ego. He descends into his own human being as far as the ego, which is active as will; and standing in the will-being of the ego, he feels justified in ascribing to the entire world the same being that the soul experiences in itself. - From this world of will, too, nothing responds to the "hopes of Plato and Aristotle".

[ 15 ] Hamerling confronts the mysteries of the world and the soul as a man of the nineteenth century with a mindset that is animated by the spiritual impulses in his time. He perceives these spiritual impulses out of a fully free human spirit, for whom it is natural to ask questions about the riddles of existence, just as it is natural for the natural man to feel hunger and thirst. He says of his relationship to philosophy: "Above all, I felt myself to be a human being, a full human being, and of all spiritual interests, the great problems of existence and life were closest to me." "I didn't suddenly throw myself into philosophy because I happened to feel like it or because I wanted to try my hand at something else. I have occupied myself with the great problems of human knowledge from my early youth, as a result of the natural, irrefutable urge that drives man to investigate the truth and solve the riddles of existence. Nor have I ever been able to see in philosophy a specialized science whose study one can pursue or leave aside, like that of statistics or forestry, but have always regarded it as the study of that which is closest, most important and most interesting to everyone." On the paths that Hamerling took to this exploration, the guiding forces of thought, which with Kant deprived knowledge of the power to penetrate the source of existence, and which then in the course of the nineteenth century made the world appear as an illusion of imagination, intruded into his contemplation. Hamerling did not necessarily surrender to these forces of direction, but they weighed on his contemplation. This searched in the self-conscious ego for a center of gravity in which being can be experienced, and believed to find it in the will. Thinking did not want to have the effect on Hamerling that it had on Hegel. It presented itself to him only as "mere thinking", which cannot grasp being in itself in order to sail into the sea of world existence, strengthened in itself; thus Hamerling surrendered to the will, in which he thought to feel the power of being; and strengthened by the will grasped in the ego, Hamerling thought to immerse himself in a world of monads of will with the power of being.

[ 16 ] Hamerling takes his starting point from that which in man quite directly animates the questions of the enigma of the world like a feeling of hunger in the soul; Wundt allows himself to be urged to pose these questions by everything that has matured in recent times on the broad ground of the individual sciences. In the way in which he poses the questions from these sciences, the individual power and attitude of these sciences prevails; in what he has to muster for the answer to these questions, as with Hamerling, the guiding forces of recent thought live, which remove from this thinking the power to experience oneself at the source of existence. Wundt's view of the world therefore basically becomes a "merely ideal overview" of the natural image of the newer way of thinking. And for Wundt, too, only the will in the human soul proves to be an element that cannot be deprived of being by the impotence of thought. The will imposes itself on the observation of the world in such a way that it seems to betray itself as omnipotent in the circumference of existence.

[ 17 ] Hamerling and Wundt are two personalities in the modern development of the world view, in whose souls the forces are at work which this development has brought forth within certain currents in order to master the world puzzles which experience and science pose to the human soul. In both personalities these forces work in such a way that in their unfolding they find nothing in themselves through which the self-conscious ego feels itself in the source of its existence. Rather, these forces arrive at a point where they can only preserve something that can no longer concern itself with the great mysteries of the world. These forces cling to the will; but even from the world of the will that has been attained there sounds nothing that allows us to gain certainty about "the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body", or that touches on such mysteries of the soul and the world. Such world views spring from the natural, irrefutable urge "which drives man in general to investigate the truth and to solve the riddles of existence"; but, by using the means for this solution, which in the opinion of certain currents of time appear to them to be the only legitimate ones, they advance to a view within which there are no more elements of experience to bring about the solution. We see that at a certain time the questions of the world are put to man in a very definite way; he instinctively feels what is incumbent upon him. It is up to him to find the means of answering them. In the exercise of these means he may lag behind what is demanded of him in the depths of development. Philosophies which move in such activity represent the struggle towards a goal not yet fully grasped in consciousness. The aim of the newer development of the world-view is to experience something in the self-conscious ego which gives being and essence to the ideas of the world-view; the philosophical currents characterized here prove powerless to bring it to such life, to such being. The perceived thought no longer gives the ego - the self-conscious soul - that which guarantees existence; this ego has distanced itself too far from the natural ground to be able to believe in such a guarantee in the way it was believed in Greece; and it has not yet revived in itself what this natural ground, without demanding its own soul creations, once granted it.