The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A Forgotten Current in German thought

[ 1 ] Fichte, Schelling and Hegel appear in their full significance especially to those who look at the far-reaching stimuli they had for personalities who had far less intellectual vigor than themselves. Something drives and works in the souls of these free thinkers that could not be fully expressed in themselves. And what thus drives as a basic tone in the souls of these thinkers: it continues to have a living effect in their successors and brings them to spiritually appropriate world views that could not be achieved by the great predecessors themselves, because they had to exhaust their spiritual resilience in their first attempts, so to speak.

[ 2 ] So in Johann Gottlieb Fichte's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, a thinker emerges who attempts to penetrate the spiritual more deeply than his father, and than Schelling and Hegel. Whoever dares to make such an attempt will not only hear from the outside the contradiction of all those who are anxious about worldview issues apart from him; if he is a level-headed thinker, he will also clearly perceive this contradiction from within his own soul. Is there really a possibility of releasing powers of knowledge in the human soul that lead into areas from which the senses give no insight? What can guarantee the reality of such areas, what can characterize the difference between such reality and the products of fantasy and reverie? He who does not have the spirit of this contradiction always at his side, as it were, like the faithful companion of his prudence, will easily stumble with his attempts at spiritual science; he who has it will recognize in it a great value in life. - Whoever delves into Immanuel Hermann Fichte's explanations will find that he has inherited from his great predecessors a way of thinking that strengthens his steps into the spiritual realm just as much as it gives him prudence in the sense indicated.

[ 3 ] The point of view of Hegel's worldview, which makes the spiritual nature of the world of ideas the fundamental conviction, could also be the starting point for Immanuel Hermann Fichte's development of thought. But he felt it to be a weakness of this world view that from its supersensible point of view it only sees what is evident in the world of the senses. Anyone who follows Immanuel Hermann Fichte's views can experience the following as their keynotes. The soul experiences itself in a supersensible way when it rises above sensory perception to weave in the realm of ideas. It has thus not only enabled itself to view the sense world differently than the senses view it - which would correspond to Hegel's world view - but it has a self-experience that it cannot have through anything that can be found in the sense world. It now knows of something that is itself supersensible about it. This "something" cannot merely be "the idea" of its sensual body. Rather, it must be a living entity that underlies the sensory body in such a way that it is formed in the sense of its idea. Thus Immanuel Hermann Fichte is led beyond the sensual body to a supersensible body, which forms the former out of its life. Hegel progresses from sense perception to thinking about sense perception. Fichte seeks in man the being that can experience thinking as a supersensible one. Hegel, if he wants to see something supersensible in thinking, would have to ascribe to this thinking itself the ability to think. Fichte cannot go along with this. He must say to himself: If one is not to regard the sensory body itself as the producer of thought, then one is forced to assume a supersensible beyond it. Driven by such a view, Fichte considers the human sensory body from a scientific (physiological) point of view, and he finds that such a view, if it is only impartial enough, is compelled to assume a supersensible body as the basis of the sensory body. In the 118th and 119th paragraphs of his "Anthropology" (2nd edition 1860) he says: "In the material elements, therefore, the truly persistent, that unifying principle of form of the body cannot be found, which proves to be effective throughout our whole life". - "Thus we are pointed to a second, essentially different cause in the body." - "In that" this "contains what is actually persistent in the metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible, but in all visible materiality present body. The other, the outer appearance of the same, formed from incessant metabolism, may henceforth be called 'body', which is truly not persistent and not one, the mere effect or afterimage of that inner corporeality which throws it into the changing world of matter, just as, for example, the magnetic force prepares an apparently dense body from the parts of iron filing dust, but which atomizes in all directions when the binding force is withdrawn from it." For Fichte, this opens up the prospect of escaping from the world of the senses, in which man operates between birth and death, into a supersensible world to which he is linked by the invisible body in the same way as he is linked to the sensible world by the visible body. For the realization of this invisible body leads him to the view that he expresses with the words: "For there is hardly any need to ask here how man behaves in himself - in this process of death? Even after the last act of the life process, which is invisible to us, he remains in his being completely the same according to spirit and organizational power as he was before. Its integrity is preserved; for it has lost absolutely nothing of what its was and belonged to its substance during visible life. He only returns to the invisible world in death, or rather, since he had never left it, since it is the actual persistence in everything visible, - he has only shed a certain form of visibility. 'Being dead' merely means no longer remaining perceptible (perceptible) to the ordinary conception of the senses, in quite the same way as the actually real, the ultimate causes of bodily phenomena are impereceptible (imperceptible) to the senses." And Fichte feels so secure in the supersensible world with such a thought that he can say: "With this concept of the continuation of the soul we therefore not only skip over experience and reach over into an unknown realm of merely illusory existences, but with it we find ourselves right in the middle of the comprehensible reality accessible to thought. The opposite of this, to assert a cessation of the soul, would be contrary to nature, contrary to all analogy of experience. The 'dead' soul, i.e. the soul that has become invisible to the senses, continues to exist no less, unaffected by its original conditions of life. ... Its organizing power must only be presented with a different means of embodiment in order to stand there in new bodily effectiveness...." (p 133 and p 134 of Fichte's "Anthropology".)

[ 4 ] From such views, the possibility of a self-knowledge of man opens up for Immanuel Hermann Fichte, which he attains when he looks at himself from the point of view which he gains through experiencing his supersensible being. His sensual being brings man to the point of thinking. But in thinking he grasps himself as a supersensible being. If he raises mere thinking to inner experience, whereby it is no longer mere thinking but supersensible contemplation, he gains a kind of knowledge through which he no longer merely looks at the sensible but at the supersensible. If anthropology is the science of man when he observes his part in the sensory world, then through the contemplation of the supersensible another science comes to light, about which Immanuel Hermann Fichte expresses himself thus (p 270): ". ... anthropology ends in the conclusion, founded from the most diverse sides, that man, according to the true quality of his being, as in the actual source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. Sense-consciousness, on the other hand, and the phenomenal world (world of appearances) which arises at its eye-points, with the whole, also human, sense-life, have no other meaning than to be only the place in which that supersensible life of the spirit takes place, by introducing the other-worldly spiritual content of ideas into the sense-world by free conscious action. ..." This thorough understanding of the human being now elevates "anthropology" in its final result to "anthroposophy".

[ 5 ] Through Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the cognitive drive that manifests itself in German worldview idealism was brought to take the first of those steps that can lead human insight to a science of the spiritual world. Just as Immanuel Hermann Fichte sought to carry forward the ideas of his predecessors: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, many other minds strove to do the same. For this German idealism points to the germinal force of a real development of those powers of human cognition which see the supersensible-spiritual in the same way as the senses see the sensible-material. Here we shall only look at a few of these spirits. Just how fruitful the German idealistic intellectual current proved to be in this direction can be seen if one looks not only at those spirits who are treated in the usual handbooks on the history of philosophy, but also at those whose intellectual activity was confined within narrower boundaries. There are, for example, "Kleine Schriften" by Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died on August 16, 1867 in Bromberg as a grammar school director (Hermann Schmidt published these writings in 1869 in Leipzig, with B.G. Teubner). It contains essays on "the contrast between pantheism and deism in the pre-Christian religions", on "the concept of religion", on "Kepler, life and character", etc. The basic tone of these essays is certainly one that shows how their author's thought life is rooted in German worldview idealism. One of the essays talks about the "rational reasons for the immortality of the human soul". This essay initially defends immortality only on the grounds that arise from ordinary thinking. Only at the end is the following significant note from the editor: "According to a letter to the editor dated August 14, 1866, the author intended to expand this essay in the complete edition of his collected short writings with a comment on the new body that the soul had already developed in this life. His death the following year prevented this plan from being carried out." How such a remark sheds light on the stimuli that drove the spirits from German worldview idealism to penetrate the spiritual realm in a scientific manner! How many such attempts would someone find at the present time if he were to pursue only those that are still to be found in the literature! How many can be assumed to have borne fruit not for literature, but for life! We are looking at a current of German intellectual life that has really been more or less forgotten in the prevailing scientific consciousness of the time.

[ 6 ] One of those spirits who is hardly spoken of today is Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler. Among his numerous writings, his "Lectures on Philosophy", published in 1835, are worth mentioning here. Through them, a personality expresses himself who is fully aware of how man, who uses only his senses and the intellect that calculates with the observations of the senses, can only recognize a part of the world. Like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Troxler also feels that his thinking is situated in a supersensible world. But he also senses how man, when he is enraptured by the power that binds him to the senses, can not only place himself before a world that is thought in the Hegelian sense, but how through this enrapture he experiences in his inner being the blossoming of purely spiritual means of cognition, through which he sees a spiritual world spiritually, just as the senses see the sensory world sensually. Troxler speaks of a "super-spiritual sense". And we can form an idea of what he means by this in the following way. Man observes the things of the world through his senses. This gives them sensory images of things. They then think about these images. This gives rise to thoughts that no longer carry the sensory-imagery within them. Through the power of his mind, man thus adds supersensible thoughts to the sensory images. If he now experiences himself in the entity that thinks in him, so that he rises above mere thinking to spiritual experience, then an inner purely spiritual power of visualization takes hold of him from this experience. He then sees a world in images that can serve as a revelation of supersensibly experienced reality. These images are not received from the senses; but they are full of life like the sensory images; they are not the results of a reverie, but the experiences in the supersensible world captured in images by the soul. In ordinary cognition the sense-image is present first, and the thought is added in the process of cognition - the thought that is not sense-image-like. In the spiritual process of cognition the supersensible experience is present; this could not be seen as such if it did not pour itself through a power natural to the spirit into the image that brings it to spiritual-visual sensualization. For Trox1er, such cognition is that of the "super-spiritual sense". And the images of this super-spiritual sense are grasped by the "supersensible spirit" of man in the same way as the sensual images are grasped by reason in sensory cognition. According to Troxler's view, spirit cognition develops in the interaction of the supersensible spirit with the supersensible sense (compare the sixth of Troxler's "Lectures on Philosophy"). Starting from such premises, Troxler senses in the human being who experiences himself in the sensory world a "higher human being" who underlies this and who belongs to the supersensible world; and in this opinion he feels himself to be in agreement with what Friedrich Schlegel has expressed. And so, like Friedrich Schlegel before him, the highest qualities and activities of man that reveal themselves in the world of the senses become expressions of the abilities of the supersensible man. As man stands in the world of the senses, his soul is endowed with the power of faith. But this is only the revelation of the supersensible soul through the sensible body. In the supersensible, the power of faith is based on an ability of the soul which - if one wants to express it in a supersensible, figurative way - must be called an accessory of the supersensible human being. And so it is with the power of hope. It is based on a seeing of the supersensible human being; the activity in love corresponds in the "higher human being" to the ability to "feel" in the spirit, to touch, just as the sense of feeling in the sensual world is the ability to touch. Troxler speaks about this (on page 107 of his "Lectures on Philosophy", Bern 1835) in the following way: "Our immortal friend, Friedrich Schlegel" has highlighted the relationship between the senses and the spirit "very beautifully and truly". In his lectures on the philosophy of language and the word, he says: "If one wants to find the first beginnings of our higher knowledge in that alphabet of consciousness, which gives the individual elements to the individual syllables and whole words, after God himself forms the keystone of the highest consciousness, then the feeling of the spirit must be accepted as the living center of the entire consciousness, and as the point of union with the higher. ... These basic feelings of the eternal are very often referred to as faith, hope and love. ... If these three basic feelings, or qualities, or states of consciousness, are to be regarded as just as many organs of knowledge and perception, or if one prefers, at least organs of intuition of the divine, then in this respect, and in relation to the form of perception peculiar to each of them, they may well be compared to the external senses and sensory instruments. Love, then, in the first exciting touch of the soul, in the continual attraction, and finally perfect union, corresponds strikingly to the outer sense of feeling; faith is the inner hearing of the spirit, which unites, grasps and preserves within itself the given word of a higher communication; hope, however, is the eye whose light beholds the objects longed for with deep desire even from afar." The words that Troxler adds show that he goes beyond the meaning that Schlegel gives to these sentences and thinks of them in the sense indicated above: "Far above understanding and will, like their interaction, far above reason and freedom, and their unity, these ideas of mind uniting in a consciousness of mind and heart are sublime, and just as understanding and will, reason and freedom, and all the faculties and faculties of the soul lying beneath them represent a reflection turned earthward, these three are a consciousness directed heavenward, illuminated by a truly divine light. " The same is shown by the fact that Troxler also speaks about the supersensible soul body in the same way as Immanuel Hermann Fichte: "Even earlier, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body ... a soul that had an image of the body in itself, which they called Schema, and which was to them the inner higher man.... In recent times, even Kant, in the dreams of a spirit seer, seriously jokingly dreams of a whole inner spiritual man who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spiritual body; Lavater writes poetry and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul jokes humorously about Bonet's undergarment and Platner's soul-laced body, which are supposed to be in the coarser body overcoat and torture gown, we also hear him ask again, 'for what purpose and from where were these extraordinary dispositions and desires placed in us, which merely slowly cut our earthy shell like swallowed diamonds? ... In the stony limbs (of man) his living ones grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us'. We could" - Troxler continues - "cite a myriad of similar ways of thinking and poetry, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which ... the true, single doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man" is contained.

[ 7 ] Troxler also speaks of the possibility of a science of man on the path of knowledge he seeks, through which - to use his own terms - the "supersensible sense" in union with the "supersensible spirit" grasp the supersensible essence of man in an "anthroposophy". On 5.101 of his "Lectures" we find the sentence: "If it is now most gratifying that the latest philosophy, which ... in every anthroposophy ... ... is emerging, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must neither be confused with that which it posits as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with that which it opposes to it as absolute spirit or absolute personality."

[ 8 ] There is no doubt that Troxler sought his way beyond Hegel's world of thought more in a dark feeling than in a clear view. Nevertheless, one can observe in his cognitive life how the stimuli of the German worldview idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have an effect on a personality who cannot make the views of this freedom of thought his own; but who finds his own way by receiving these stimuli.

[ 9 ] Karl Christian Planck is one of the forgotten personalities of German intellectual development who has gone unnoticed during his lifetime. He was born in Stuttgart in 1819 and died in 1880; he was a professor at the grammar school in Ulm and later at the seminary in Blaubeuren. As late as 1877, he hoped that he would be offered the then vacant chair of philosophy in Tübingen. It did not happen. In a series of writings, he sought to approach a world view that seemed to him to be the expression of the spiritual nature of the German people. In his book "Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur" (1864), he expresses how he wanted to represent the thoughts of the inquiring German people's soul with his own thoughts: "What power of deep-rooted prejudices from the previous view is opposed to his - the author's - writing, of which he is fully aware; However, just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances that stood in the way of a work of this kind due to the author's entire situation and professional position, has nevertheless fought for its realization and its way into the public eye, so he is also certain that what is only now gaining its recognition, what now has to fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conceptions of nature and the spirit. - What our medieval poetry already foreshadowed in unconscious, profound foreboding will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival), will finally attain the highest in the power of its ceaseless striving; it will look to the bottom of the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, whose dominion its hero attains, will conversely receive its purely natural fulfilment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and the spirit itself." - In the last period of his life, Karl Christian Planck summarized his thoughts in a book published in 1881 by the philosopher Karl Köstlin as the "Testament of a German".

[ 10 ] It is quite possible to perceive a similar kind of perception of the puzzle of knowledge in Planck's soul as is revealed in the other thinkers characterized in this work. This cognitive puzzle in its original form becomes the starting point of Planck's research. Is the power to be found in the world of human thought through which man can grasp true reality, the reality that gives his existence meaning and significance in the world? Man sees himself in nature and confronts it. He can certainly think about what is at work in its depths as true essential forces; but where is the guarantee that his thoughts have any other meaning than that they are creatures of his own soul, without relationship to those depths? If they were, man would have to remain unaware of what he himself is and how he is rooted in the true world. To want to approach the depths of the world through any other power of the soul than through thinking was as far from Planck's mind as it was from Hegel's. He could have no other view than that true reality must somehow surrender itself to thinking. But no matter how far one reaches out with thinking, no matter how one tries to strengthen its inner power, one always remains in thinking; one does not encounter being in the vastness and depths of thinking. Through its own essence, thinking seems to exclude itself from any communion with being. But for Planck, the insight into this alienation of thinking from being is precisely the ray of light that shines on the riddle of the world. If thinking does not claim to somehow carry something of reality in itself, if it truthfully reveals itself as the unreal, then it proves to be the very tool to express reality. If it were itself a real thing, then the soul could only weave in its reality and would not come out of it; if it is itself unreal, then it does not disturb the soul through its own reality; man, in thinking, is not at all in a thought-reality, but in the thought-unreality, which for this very reason does not impose itself on man with its own reality, but expresses the reality of which it speaks. Whoever sees something real in thought itself must, in Planck's view, renounce any approach to reality; for him, thought must place itself between the soul and reality. If thinking itself is nothing, i.e. if it cannot conceal reality from cognition, then reality must be able to reveal itself in thinking.

[ 11 ] With this view, Planck initially only gained the starting point for his world view. For in the web of thoughts that the soul has directly in life, pure, self-denying, even negating thinking is by no means effective. What lives in the imagining, feeling, willing and desiring of the soul plays into this. Because this is so, the clouding of the world view arises. And Planck's endeavor is to attain such a worldview in which everything it contains is the result of thinking, but nothing originates from thinking itself. In everything that is made into a thought about the real world, we must look at what lives in thought without itself being conceived. Planck paints his world view with a thinking that gives itself up in order to let the world shine out of itself.

[ 12 ] As an example of how Planck wants to arrive at a world view in such a striving, let us mark with a few strokes how he thinks about the nature of the earth. - If someone imagines the earth in the way that purely physical geology entails, then there is no truth in this idea for Planck's world view. To imagine the earth in this way would be like speaking of a tree and only considering the trunk without leaves, flowers and fruit. Such a trunk can be called reality to the physical eye. In a higher sense, it is not reality. For it cannot exist in the context of the world as it is. It can only be what it is because the driving forces that develop leaves, blossoms and fruit arise in it at the same time. In the reality of the trunk we must also think of these driving forces and must be aware that the mere trunk only gives a picture of reality that is deceptive about itself. The fact that something is there before the senses is no proof that it is also a reality. Imagining the earth as the totality of what it shows in terms of mineral formations and facts occurring within these formations is not a reality. Whoever wants to imagine something real about the earth must imagine it in such a way that its mineral kingdom already contains within itself the plant kingdom, just as the trunk structure of the tree contains the leaves and blossoms; indeed, that the animal kingdom and man are already included in the "true earth". One does not say that this is a matter of course, and that Planck is basically only deceiving himself by saying that everyone thinks this as he does. Planck would have to reply: where is he who does this? Certainly, everyone presents the earth as the body of the world with its plants, animals and people. But they present the mineral earth, consisting of its geological layers, with plants growing out of its surface and animals and human beings walking around on it. But this sum earth, made up of minerals, plants, animals and humans, does not exist. It is merely an illusion of the senses. Instead there is a true earth, which is a completely supersensible entity, an invisible being, which gives itself the mineral subsoil out of itself; but does not exhaust itself in this, but continues to reveal itself in the plant kingdom, then in the animal kingdom, then in the human kingdom. For the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the human kingdom, only he has the right view who sees the whole of the earth in its supersensuousness, and who feels how, for example, the idea of the material mineral kingdom in itself, without the idea of the development of the soul of mankind, is a delusion. Certainly, one can imagine a material mineral kingdom; but one lives in the lie of the world and not in the truth of the world if one does not have the feeling that with such an idea one is under the same delusion as if one wanted to think that a man whose head has been cut off will continue to walk calmly through life: If true knowledge necessitated what is indicated here, then it could never be attained; for he who claims that the mineral earth is not a reality because it must be seen in the whole of the earth should also say that the whole of the earth must be seen again in the plant system and so on. Whoever makes such an objection has not grasped the meaning of what underlies a spiritual world view. The point of all cognition is not merely that one thinks correctly, but that one also thinks in accordance with reality. Whoever speaks of a painting can certainly say that one does not think realistically if one only looks at one person while there are three in the painting; but this assertion within its scope cannot be refuted by saying that no one understands this painting who does not also know all the previous ones by the same painter. To recognize reality, correct and realistic thinking is necessary. To regard the mineral as a mineral, the plant as a plant, and so on, can be in accordance with reality; the mineral earth is not a real, but a figment of the imagination; even if one is aware that it is only a part of everything earthly.-This is the significant thing about such a personality as Planck, that he brings himself into a mood through which he does not conceive the truth of a thought, but experiences it. That it develops a power for itself in its own soul, through which it experiences when a thought may not be thought, because it kills itself through its own essence. To grasp the existence of a reality that carries its own life and death within itself belongs to such a state of soul that does not rely on the sensory world to tell it: this is, or this is not.

[ 13 ] From this point of view, Planck sought to understand what lives in natural phenomena, in human existence, in historical, artistic and legal life. He wrote about the "truth and shallowness of Darwinism" in an ingenious book. He called this work a "landmark in the history of modern (1872) German science". There are people who have the feeling that a personality like Planck hovers in unworldly conceptual heights and has no sense of practical life. This requires people who form their sound judgment based on "real" life, as it is called. Now, one can also have the opinion that many things would be different in real life if this ponderous view of life and the practice of life were less widespread in reality. If, on the other hand, the opinion could become somewhat more widespread that thinkers like Planck, because they acquire a constitution of soul through which they connect themselves with true reality, also have a truer judgment of the conditions of life than those who call them conceptualists and impractical philosophers. The opinion is also possible that the dullards, who are averse to such alleged "conceptual giddiness" and think themselves to be quite practical in life, lose the scent for the true conditions of life, while the impractical philosophers use it precisely for accuracy. One can arrive at such an opinion if one looks at Planck and sees in him a far-sighted, accurate judgment for the needs of real life practice and for the events of external life combined with the height of philosophical idea formation. Even if one disagrees with Planck about some of the ideas he developed about the external organization of life - which is also true of the author of this book - one can nevertheless concede that his views can provide a viable starting point for practical questions in this area in particular, from which one can proceed; even if the progression leads to something quite different from what is assumed. And one would think that people who are "conceptual enthusiasts" of this kind and thus see through the forces at work in real life are better suited to the needs of this real life than some who believe themselves to be saturated with practical life precisely because, in their view, they have not allowed themselves to be "made stupid" by contact with any world of ideas. -(The author of this essay spoke about Karl Christian Planck's position in the development of worldviews in recent times in his book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert", published in 1900, which appeared in a new edition in 1914 under the title "Die Rätsel der Philosophie"). Someone might think that it is unjustified to regard Planck's thoughts as significant for the driving forces of the German people, since these thoughts have found little dissemination. Such an opinion fails to recognize what is important when we speak of the effect of the people's essence in the views of a people's thinkers. What is at work there are the impersonal (often subconscious) forces of the people, which live in the activities of the people in the most varied areas of existence and which also shape the ideas in such a thinker. These forces were there before his appearance, are active after it; they live even when they are not spoken of; they also live when they are misjudged. And it may be that they work in a particularly strong way in such a popular thinker who is not spoken of, because until the opinions formed about him are formed, what such powers harbor radiates less than into his thoughts. Such a thinker can often stand alone, not only during his life, and his thoughts can also stand alone in the opinions of posterity. But if one has grasped the character of his thoughts, then one has recognized a trait of the national soul, a trait that has become a thought in him and that remains indestructible in the nation, ready to reveal itself in ever new impulses. Regardless of the question: what was granted to him to work, the other question is: what worked in him? And what will always lead to similar achievements? The second edition of Karl Christian Planck's "Testament of a German" was published in 1912. It is a pity that many a philosopher's mind with a penchant for writing was more enthusiastic at the time about Henri Bergson's lightly woven worldview ideas, which were therefore easier for undemanding souls to understand, than about Planck's strictly structured, far-reaching ideas. What has been written about Bergson's "reshaping" of the worldview, especially by those who discover the novelty of a worldview so easily because they lack the understanding, sometimes even the knowledge, of what has long been there. With regard to the "novelty" of one of Bergson's main ideas, the author of this essay has also pointed out the following important fact in his book "Rätsel der Philosophie". (It should be noted in passing that this reference was written before the present war. Compare the preface to the second volume of the aforementioned book.)-Bergson's thoughts lead to a transformation of the widespread idea of the development of organic beings. He does not place the simplest living being at the beginning of this development, in order then to think of the more complicated beings up to man emerging from it through external forces, but he imagines that at the starting point of development there is a being that already contains in some form the impulse to become man. But it can only bring this drive to realization by first separating from itself other drives that also lie within it. In the separation of the lower life beings it gains the power to realize the higher ones. Thus the human being is, according to his nature, not the last thing to come into being, but the first thing to take effect before everything else. He first separates the other beings from his formative powers in order to gain the strength for his emergence into external sensual reality through this preliminary work. Of course, some will object: well, many have already thought that an inner developmental instinct is at work in the development of living beings. And it will be possible to cite the long-standing idea of purposefulness, or views held by natural scientists such as Nägeli and others. However, in a case such as the one in question here, such objections do not hit the mark. For Bergson's thought is not concerned with starting from a general idea of an inner power of development, but from a definite conception of what man is in his full extent; and to see from this conception that this supersensibly conceived man has in himself the impulses to place the other beings of nature first in sensuous reality and then also to place himself in it.

[ 14 ] Now we have the following. What can be read in Bergson's dazzling, lightly abbreviated development of ideas has before been expressed in a thoughtful, powerful way by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuß. Preuß is now also one of those personalities who belong to the more or less forgotten current of a spiritually appropriate German worldview development described here. With a powerful sense of reality, Preuß combines nature and world view - for example in his book "Geist und Stoff" (1882). The Bergsonian thought mentioned above is expressed by him as follows: "It may be ... be time to develop a ... theory of the origin of organic species, which is not based solely on one-sided propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are also the laws of human thought. A doctrine at the same time that is devoid of all hypothesizing and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the concept of species according to actual possibility, but at the same time takes over the concept of development established by Darwin into its field and seeks to make it fruitful. -The center of this new doctrine is now man, the only once on our planet recurring species: Homo sapiens. It is curious that the older observers began with the objects of nature and then lost their way to such an extent that they could not find their way to man, which even Darwin only succeeded in doing in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by searching for the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals - while the natural scientist would have to begin with himself as man in order to return progressively through the whole field of being and thinking to mankind ... It was not by chance that human nature emerged from earthly nature, but by necessity. Man is the goal of the telluric processes, and every other form emerging alongside him has borrowed its features from his own. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos ... When his germs had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary strength to produce further human germs. What remained became animal or plant ..."

[ 15 ] The idea of the essence of man as it lives in the philosophy of German idealism also shines through in these ideas of the little-known thinker from Elsfleth, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuß. With this view, he knows how to make Darwinism, insofar as it only looks at the development that takes place in the sensory world, a part of a spiritual world view. A world view that wants to recognize the human being in its unfolding from the depths of the universe. How Bergson arrived at his glittering thought, which shines so powerfully from Preuß' presentation, is less important in this context than the fact that in the writings of the little-known Preuß one can see the most fruitful seeds, which could give many a stronger stimulus than the glittering form in which one finds them in Bergson. However, for Preuß, too, one must have a greater aptitude for deepening thought than was evident in those who showed so much enthusiasm for Bergson's "revitalization" of the world view. What has been said here has nothing at all to do with national liking or disliking. In recent times, H. Bönke has investigated Bergson's "original philosophical neologism", because he found it necessary to utter such hateful, contemptuous words against German intellectual life in these fateful times. (Compare the writing: Plagiator Bergson, Membre de l'Institut. In response to the disparagement of German science by Edmond Perrier, President of the Academie des Sciences. Charlottenburg, Huth 1915) In view of all that Bönke proves about the way Bergson reproduces what he owes to German thought, it is hardly an exaggeration what the philosopher Wundt says in Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland No. 46 of November 13, 1915: ... Bönke leaves it ... is not lacking in incriminating evidence. His writing consists for the most part of passages taken from the works of Bergson and Schopenhauer, in which the younger author repeats the thoughts of the older either verbatim or with slight variation. Nevertheless, this is not the only decisive factor. It will therefore be expedient to organize the examples that Bönke brings into the field to some extent according to critical aspects. They can then be divided into three categories. The first contains sentences which, apart from insignificant differences, are exactly the same in both writers ..." In other categories, the agreement lies more in the shaping of the thought. Now, it is perhaps really less important to what extent Bergson, who so furiously condemns German intellectual life, shows himself to be a quite willing processor of this German intellectual life; but it may seem more important that with Bergson the processing occurs in easily woven, easily attainable reflection, and that many an evaluator would have done better to wait with the enthusiastic elevation of this "reviver" of the world view until, through better understanding of those thinkers to whom Bergson owes his inspiration, he might have refrained from this elevation. - The fact that a successor allows himself to be inspired by his predecessors is, incidentally, a natural part of the development of humanity; what matters, however, is whether the inspiration leads to a process of further development or - as is also clear from Bönke's account - to a process of regression, as in Bergson's case.

A sideways glance

[ 16 ] In 1912, "Das Hohe Ziel der Erkenntnis" by Omar al Raschid Bey was published (Munich, Verlag R. Piper). (It should be noted that the author is not a Turk, but a German, and that the view he represents has nothing to do with Mohammedanism, but is an ancient Indian world view in a modern guise). The book was published after the author's death. Such a book would not appear in our time, and its author would not believe that he was showing himself and others a path of knowledge corresponding to the present with what is expressed in it, if he wanted to create the conditions in his soul through which an understanding of the series of thinkers described in this writing is possible. The way things are for him, the author of the "High Aim" could only smile pityingly at the assertion made here. He would not realize that everything he presents in his concluding chapter "Awakening from Appearance" on the basis of the preceding chapter - and with it - was indeed a right path of knowledge for ancient India, for which one can have full understanding as one belonging to the past; but that this path of knowledge leads into another, if one does not stop prematurely on it, but walks the spiritual path of reality, which has been taken by the newer idealism.

[ 17 ] He should have recognized how his "awakening from appearance" is only a semblance of awakening; In reality, it is a withdrawal from the appearance caused by his own mental experience - an earthquake before the appearance, as it were - and thus not an "awakening from the appearance", but a falling asleep in delusion; a self-delusion that takes its delusional world for reality, because it does not manage to take the path into the spiritually appropriate reality. Planck's self-denying thinking is an experience of the soul that al Raschid's delusional thinking cannot reach. In the "High Goal" we find the sentences: "He who seeks his salvation in this world remains a slave to this world; he has no escape from unfulfilled desire; he has no escape from futile play; he has no escape from the narrow shackles of the 'I'. He who does not rise from this world lives and perishes with his world." These sentences are preceded by the following: "He who seeks his salvation in the 'I', to him selfishness is a commandment, to him selfishness is divinity." However, anyone who fully recognizes the driving forces of the soul, which rule in thinkers from Fichte to Planck, will see through the deception expressed in these sentences of the "High Goal". For he recognizes how the addiction to the self - the selfishness - lies before the experience of the "I" in the Fichtean sense, and how the fleeing of the recognition of the ego - in the old Indian sense - leads the haughty recognition of the ego apparently further into the spiritual world, but in reality throws it back into the addiction to the ego. For only the finding of the ego allows the ego to escape the shackles of the addiction to the ego, of selfishness. It depends on whether in the "awakening from the appearance" one has the experiences of the "high goal" caused by the relapse into ego addiction, or whether one has experiences to which the following words can point. He who seeks his salvation in fleeing the "I" falls into the addiction to the "I"; he who finds the "I" frees himself from the addiction to the I; for addiction to the I creates the I into its own idol; finding the "I" gives the I to the world. He who seeks his salvation by fleeing from the world is thrown back by the world into his own delusion; he is deceived by arrogant delusions of knowledge and allows his play of ideas to appear as the truth of the world; he loosens the fetters of the ego from the front and does not see how the enemy of knowledge only tightens them from behind. He who, spurning the revelation of the world, wants to rise above the world, leads himself into the delusion that holds him all the more securely as it reveals itself to him as wisdom. - Into the delusion with which one holds oneself and others back from the difficult awakening in the newer worldview idealism, and dreams oneself into an "awakening from appearance". A supposed awakening, as the "High Goal" wants to point out, is indeed a source for the experience that allows the "awakened" to speak again and again of the sublimity of his knowledge, but it is also an obstacle to experiencing this worldview idealism. One should not take these remarks as if the author of this writing wanted to somehow belittle al Raschid Bey's striving for knowledge in his own way; what he says here is only the objection that seems necessary to him against a worldview that seems to him to live in the worst self-delusion. Such an objection can certainly also be made if one appreciates a spiritual phenomenon from a certain point of view; perhaps it can seem most necessary to one precisely then, because the seriousness that must prevail in the treatment of questions of knowledge compels one to do so.