The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Images from the Intellectual Life of Austria

[ 1 ] The author would like to draw a few pictures - nothing other than such - and not about the intellectual and spiritual life of Austria, but only from this life. No kind of completeness is intended. Not even with regard to what the author himself has to say. Many other things may be much more important than what is presented here. For this time, however, only a few things from the spiritual life of Austria shall be indicated which are in some way directly or indirectly, more or less connected with the currents in which the writer of these remarks himself was involved during his youth. Spiritual currents, such as those meant here, can also be characterized in such a way that one does not give the ideas one has formed about them, but that one speaks about personalities, their way of thinking and their direction of feeling, of whom one believes that - as is symptomatic - these currents are expressed in them. I would like to describe what Austria reveals about itself through some of these personalities. If I speak in the first person in some places, you may find this justified in my current point of view.

[ 2 ] I would like to speak first of a personality in whom I believe I can see the revelation of intellectual Austrianism in the second half of the nineteenth century in a very noble sense, Karl Julius Schröer. When I came to the Vienna University of Technology in 1879, he was a teacher of German literary history there. He first became my teacher, then an older friend. He has not been among the living for many years now. - In the first lecture I heard from him, he spoke about Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen. Schröer's words brought to life the whole age from which this poetry grew. And also how Götz entered this age. A man spoke who incorporated into each of his judgments what he had incorporated from the world view of German idealism into all the feelings and intentions of his entire spiritual personality. The following lectures built up a vivid picture of German poetry since Goethe's appearance. In such a way that through the description of poets and poems one could always feel the lively weaving of the views that struggle for existence in the essence of the German people. Enthusiasm for the ideals of humanity carried Schröer's judgments; and they were characterized by a lively feeling for the view of life that began in Goethe's age. A spirit spoke from this man who only wanted to communicate what had become a deep self-awareness of his soul through the contemplation of spiritual life.

[ 3 ] Many who got to know this personality have misunderstood it. When I was already living in Germany, I was once at a dinner party. A very well-known literary historian was sitting next to me. He was talking about a German princess whom he praised very highly, only - he said - she could also stray from her usual sound judgment, which was shown, for example, by the fact that she "considered Schröer to be an important man". I can understand that some people do not find in Schröer's books what many of his students found through the lively influence of his personality; but I am convinced that those who are able to receive his impression not only according to the so-called "strict method", perhaps even according to one that bears the stamp of this or that school of literature, but according to their own way of judging, according to the revelation of a self-experienced view, could also feel much of it in Schröer's writings. It is from such a point of view that a personality matured in German worldview idealism also speaks from Schröer's much criticized book "Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" and from other of his works. A certain kind of presentation in his Faust commentary, for example, may repel some free-minded people. However, Schröer's presentation is influenced by what a certain age considered to be inseparable from the character of science. Even strong minds have come under the yoke of this view; and one must seek these minds themselves in their true character by penetrating a shell of their work imposed on them by this yoke.

[ 4 ] Karl Julius Schröer spent his boyhood and youth in the light of a man who - like himself - was rooted in spiritual German-Austrianism; who was one of its blossoms - his father Tobias Gottfried Schröer. - Not so long ago, certain books were known in the widest circles, to which many people undoubtedly owed the awakening of an idealistically deepened perception of history, poetry and art, borne by a spiritual view of life. They are: "Briefe über die Hauptgegenstände der Ästhetik" by Chr. Oeser, "Die kleinen Griechen" by Chr. Oeser, "Weltgeschichte für Töchterschulen" and others by the same author. In these writings, a personality speaks about the most diverse areas of spiritual life from the point of view of the writer of youth, a personality who has matured in the way of thinking of the Goethean age of German spiritual development, and who looks at the world with the soul eye formed by it. The author of these writings is Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who published them under the name Chr. Now - nineteen years after the death of this man - the German Schiller Foundation presented his widow (in 1869) with an honorary gift, which was accompanied by a letter stating: "The undersigned board has learned to its deepest regret that the wife of one of the most worthy German writers, a man who with talent and mind always stood up for national sense, is by no means in circumstances that correspond to her standing and the merits of her husband, and so it only fulfills a duty commanded to it by the spirit of its statutes when it endeavors as far as possible to compensate somewhat for the disfavor of a hard fate. " Inspired by this decision of the Schiller Foundation, Karl Julius Schröer then wrote an article about his father in the Wiener Neue Freie Presse, from which it became known, what until then had only been known to a very small circle, that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was not only the author of Chr. Oeser's writings, but also an important poet and writer of works that are true ornaments of Austrian intellectual life and who only remained unknown because he could not give his name due to the censorship conditions prevailing at the time. His comedy "Der Bär", for example, was published in 1830. Karl von Holtei, the important Silesian poet and playwright, commented on it immediately after its publication in a letter to the author: "As far as the comedy 'Der Bär' is concerned, it delighted me. If the invention, the creation of the characters is entirely yours, I wish you luck with all my heart, because then you will still write beautiful plays." The poet took his material from the life of Ivan IV Vasilievich and all the characters except Ivan himself are his own creation. A drama published later, "The Life and Deeds of Emerich Tököly and His Comrades in Arms", was brilliantly received without anyone knowing the author. In the "Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung" (October 25, 1839) it was written: "A historical picture of admirable freshness ... Works with such a fresh touch and such a resolute character are truly a rarity in our day ... Each of the groups is full of high charm, because it is full of high truth; ... the author's Tököly is a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen, and the drama can only be compared with him. ... From such a spirit we can expect everything, even the greatest." This judgment stems from W. v. Lüdemann, who wrote a "History of Architecture", a "History of Painting", "Walks in Rome", stories and novellas, works that speak of subtlety and a high understanding of art.

[ 5 ] The sun of German worldview idealism had already shone on Karl Julius Schröer through his father's way of thinking when he went to the universities of Leipzig, Halle and Berlin at the end of the 1940s, where he was still able to feel this idealism through many of the things that influenced him. When he returned home in 1846, he took over the management of the "Seminarium für deutsche Literärgeschichte und Sprache" at the Lyceum in Bratislava, which his father had founded in that city. In this position he now developed an activity whose character he shaped in such a way that one can say: Through his endeavors, Schröer sought to solve the task of how best to work in the intellectual life of Austria when one finds the direction of one's endeavors predetermined by the fact that one has received the driving forces of one's own soul from German culture. In a "Lehr- und Lesebuch" (which appeared in 1853 and is a "History of German Literature"), he spoke about this endeavor: "There (in the Lyceum) came together primers, lawyers, theologians of the Lyceum ... came together ... To such an audience I endeavored to present the Glorie des deutschen Volkes in its development, to evoke awe for German art and science, and possibly to bring the audience closer to the viewpoint of modern science." And Schröer expressed his view of Germanism in this way: "From this point of view, the one-sided passions of the parties naturally disappeared before my eyes: you will hear neither a Protestant nor a Catholic, neither a conservative nor a subversive enthusiast, and someone who is enthusiastic about German nationality only insofar as humanity was won through it and the human race was glorified." And I do not want to repeat these words, written almost seventy years ago, in order to say what was right for a German in Austria at that time, or even what is right now. I only want to show what a person was like in whom the German-Austrian nature was expressed in a special way. Members of the various parties and nations in Austria will also make the most diverse judgments about the extent to which this nature gives the Austrian the right kind of aspiration. And in addition to all this, it should also be borne in mind that Schröer expressed himself in this way as a young man who had just returned from German universities. But what is significant is that in the soul of this young man, not out of political intentions, but out of purely spiritual worldview thoughts, the German-Austrian consciousness formed an ideal for Austria's mission, which he expresses in these words: "If we compare Germany with ancient Greece and the German with the Greek tribes, we find a great similarity between Austria and Macedonia We see the beautiful task of Austria in one example before us: to spread the seed of Western culture over the East."

[ 6 ] Schröer later became a professor at the University of Budapest, then a school principal in Vienna, and finally worked for many years as a professor of German literary history at the Vienna University of Technology. In a way, these positions were only the outer garments of a significant activity within Austrian intellectual life. This activity began with an exploratory immersion in the spiritual and linguistic expressions of German-Austrian folk life. He wants to recognize what works and lives in the people, not like a dry, sober researcher, but like someone who wants to reveal the riddles of the people's soul in order to see through the forces of humanity that struggle into existence in these souls. In the vicinity of the Bratislava region, old Christmas plays lived among the peasants. They are played every year around Christmas time. They are passed down from generation to generation in handwritten form. They show how the people dramatize the birth of Christ, and everything connected with it, in cosy images. Schröer collects such plays in a booklet and writes an introduction to them, in which he describes this revelation of the popular soul with the most loving devotion, so that his account immerses the reader in popular feeling and popular opinion. In the same spirit, he then undertakes to portray the German dialects of the Hungarian mountains, the West Hungarian Germans and the Gottscheerland in Carniola. Everywhere his intention is to unravel the organism of the folklore; what he has researched really gives a picture of the life that works in the development of language and the soul of the people. And basically, in all such endeavors, he had in mind the idea of getting to know the living conditions of Austria from the spiritual driving forces of its peoples. Much, very much of the answer to the question: what weaves in the soul of Austria? can be gained from Schröer's dialect research. - For him, however, this intellectual work had another effect. It provided him with the basis for deep insights into the nature of the human soul in general. When he was able to test how views on education and teaching are shaped by a mind that has looked as deeply into the essence of the popular mind as he has through his research, these insights bore fruit. And so he was able to publish a small work: "Unterrichtsfragen" (Questions of Teaching), which, in my opinion, should be counted among the pearls of educational literature. This little book deals brilliantly with the aims, methods and nature of teaching. I believe that this little book, which is completely unknown today, should be read by everyone who has anything to do with teaching within the German cultural area. Although it is written entirely for Austrian conditions, the guidelines given in it can be applied to the entire scope of German culture. What one might call outdated about the book, which was published in 1876, is out of the question in view of the way of thinking it contains. Such a way of thinking, gained on the basis of a rich life experience, always remains fruitful, even if the later living person has to apply it to new conditions. In the last decades of his life, Schröer's intellectual work was almost entirely devoted to delving deeper into Goethe's life's work and way of thinking. In the introduction to his book "Die deutsche Dichtung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century), he stated: "We in Austria want to go hand in hand with the intellectual life of the German Empire." He saw the roots of this intellectual life in the world view of German idealism. And he expressed his commitment to this world view with the words: "The world-rejuvenating emergence of idealism in Germany, in the age of frivolity a hundred years ago, is the greatest phenomenon in modern history. The intellect, directed only towards the finite, which does not penetrate into the depths of being; with it the selfishness directed towards the satisfaction of sensuality, suddenly receded behind the emergence of a spirit that rises above all that is common." (Cf. introduction to Schröer's Faust edition, 1st vol., 3rd ed., p. XXVIII.) In Goethe's "Faust" Schröer saw "the hero of invincible idealism. It is the ideal hero of the time in which the poetry was written. His contest with Mephistopheles expresses the struggle of the new spirit as the innermost essence of the epoch, and that is why this poem stands so high: it lifts us to a higher level". (In the same Faust edition, p. xxx.)

[ 7 ] Schröer is unreservedly committed to German idealism as a world view. In his "Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (History of German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century), he uses the words with which he wants to characterize the thoughts in which the spirit of the German people expresses itself when it does so in the sense of its very own essence: "In what is perceived experientially, conditions are recognized everywhere that are hidden behind the finite, experientially recognizable. They must be described as the unconditioned and are perceived on all sides as something permanent in change, as an eternal lawfulness, and at the same time as something infinite. The perceived infinite in the finite appears as an idea; the ability to perceive it as reason, in contrast to the intellect, which clings to the clearly finite and perceives nothing beyond it." At the same time, the way in which Schröer professes this idealism shows the participation of everything that resonates in a soul that feels the Austrian spiritual current in its own being. And this is what gives his worldview idealism its particular shade of color. By expressing it, the thought is given a shade of color that does not readily release it into the realm that Hegel described as that of philosophical knowledge with the words: "To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy; for what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then a figure of life has grown old; the owl of Minerva only begins its flight in the dawning twilight" (see my book "Rätsel der Philosophie", 1st volume.) No, Schröer, the Austrian, does not want to see the world of thought grey in grey; the ideas should shine in a color that has a refreshing, constantly rejuvenating effect on the mind. And rather than the bird of twilight, Schröer would probably have thought in this context of the human mind struggling for light, which seeks in the world of ideas the sun of the realm in which the mind directed towards the finite and the sensory world should feel its light extinguishing.

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[ 8 ] Herman Grimm, the intellectual observer of art, has found words of complete appreciation for the Austrian sculptor Heinrich Natter. The essay he published on Natter in his "Fragments", published in 1900, also contains Grimm's thoughts on Natter's relationship to Austrianism. "Wherever I meet Austrians, I am gripped by an ingrained love for the soil of the special fatherland and the urge to rise up in spiritual community with all Germans. Let only one of these men be remembered this time, Ignaz Zingerles. The Walter statue in Natters owes its existence to his incessant, silent work. He resembled the men of our earlier centuries in that he was hardly conceivable outside the district of his closest home. A figure with simple outlines of loyalty and honesty, as if built from boulders. A Tyrolean, as if his mountains were the navel of the earth, an Austrian through and through and at the same time one of the best and noblest Germans. And so Natter was also a good German, Austrian and Tyrolean, everything." And Herman Grimm says of the monument to Walter von der Vogelweide in Bolzano: "In Natter, the intimacy of German feeling and creative imagination were united. His Walter von der Vogelweide stands in Bolzano as a triumphant bijou of German art, towering in the wreath of the Tyrolean mountains on the borders of the fatherland. A manly, solid figure." - I often had to think of these words by Herman Grimm when I remembered the magnificent figure of the Austrian poet Fercher von Steinwand, who died in 1902. He was "a good German, Austrian and Carinthian, everything"; even if one could hardly say of him that he was "hardly conceivable outside the district of his closest homeland". I got to know him in Vienna at the end of the eighties and was able to meet him personally for a short time. He was sixty years old at the time; a true shining figure, even outwardly; his noble features, his speaking eyes, his expressive gestures revealed a captivating warmth; through serenity and prudence, this soul still worked in the old man as if with the freshness of youth. And if one got to know this soul, its character, its creations, one saw how the sensibility shaped by the Carinthian mountains had united with a life that had become sense in the power of German worldview idealism. - A sensing that is born entirely in the soul as a poetic world of images; that points with this world of images into the depths of existence; that confronts the riddles of the world artistically without the originality of artistic creation fading into thought poetry - such a sensing can be seen in the following lines from Fercher von Steinwand's "Chor der Urträume":

Removed from all ascended
Spaces withdrawn,
An ether walks in radiant arcs,
Walk in hidden
Depths the waves.
There with the seeing
Will loaded,
Our ferries swing in swathes,
Between emerging
Shores of wonder.
There before the warming
Eyes of mildness
We weave and wind our formations
Around the swarming
Fields of stars
There, to the doom
Never beholden,
We have built floating castles
And the afflictions
Exultantly destroyed.
Who with most sacred
Described you with the most sacred features,
Highest dwelling of the contemplative impulses,
Wait of the most hasty
Servant of love!

[ 9 ] The following stanzas want to reveal how the soul lives in thinking-waking dreams in faraway starry worlds and in near reality; then the poet continues:

Whatever thoughtful
Powers accomplish:
Only on the unfolded wings of dreams
Can the mighty be
Can be won permanently.
Every mastering greatness of deeds,
All protecting angels of the seeds
Are by inspiring
dreams advised.

[ 10 ] Fercher von Steinwand goes on to sing of the penetration of thought spiritualized into dreaming into the depths of the world - of the penetration of that dreaming which is an awakening from ordinary waking into the depths in which the life of the spiritual of the world can make itself felt by the soul:

Life, with vibrating
heart heard,
Life, climbed with a struggling heart
Under sounding
Spirit welcome:

[ 11 ] and then he lets it resound to the human spirit what the beings of the spiritual realm speak to the soul that opens itself to them in contemplation

"Be you recovered,
Lovingly entwined!
What you sought in uplifting hours,
Here, you exquisite ones,
It is found;
Here in sublime
Divine halls,
Where minds please the mind,
Where the buried
Voices resound -
Where the sorrowful
Walk royally,
Shining souls spread their smiles
Around the shattered
Wheels of the ages --
Only the blinded
Earthly fools
Are born for the maw of destruction,
Spiritually perfected
Worlds lost! Well to the receptive,
Whom we buoy up,
Whom we buoy up to the most flourishing life,
Without transient
To weave shadows!"

[ 12 ] This "Chorus of Primal Dreams" is followed in Fercher von Steinwand's poems by his "Chorus of Primal Urges":

In the boundless latitudes
Our old mother's night,
Hark - there seems to argue with itself
The mysterious power! Do we hear the foreboding stride?
Has the longing awakened? Has a flash of inspiration been kindled? Do dreams glide through the vastness?
How powers intoxicate themselves with strength,
Blissful exchange! Sudden haste,
Silent lingering,
Indulgent listening
Alternates with waving
Astonished trepidation! The charm of attainment
Rises in order to sink,
Sinks to hate,
White before the pale
Image of the embrace
Hate not to grasp.
Dark ramifications
Sprouting inclinations
Searching for tendrils
Heavy thoughts
Dawning and wavering
Over the expanses,
Seem to advise
Or to guide.
What they prepare,
Are they the seeds
Of giant deeds,
Of radiant times?
He who felt what he felt
Creatively felt! Who wandered through it,
Blissfully enjoying
Or unraveled,
Revealing the high! Above it moves like the embrace of spirits,
We in warmth,
We also win,
Searching and pondering,
See ourselves lifted,
Highest beginning
Happily interwoven.
That blow around us,
Arise within us:
"It is you, ideas! - -"

[ 13 ] So the poet's soul ponders into the experience where the world spirit's ideas of existence reveal secrets to the soul spirit, and the soul spirit sees the supersensible formers of the sensually formed. - After the visions of the soul have been depicted in the chorus of worldly urges in brilliant, resounding images, the poet concludes:

"May the duration become accustomed,
What the urge conjured up,
The beautifying, the reconciling
Walt' in the stream of creation before.
Sweet light, in fair tones
Climbs the heart up to you,
While before the gate of the West,
Help crown the deed of love! Is yet the impulse from the earthly bonds
Risen spiritually! But the mature,
Ruling, bundled,
Reveals itself as spirit! Everything that circles,
Earthly founded,
Heavenly ignited things
Created itself in the spirit,
Came from the spirit,
Works through the spirit
- - - - -
- - - - -
Yet created the mighty chaos rapture
Room for happiness!
Wrapped in the dew of breathing mildness
Forest and climes!
See to it that the glow joins the dew,
Sensibly form the hem of transfiguration -
Let every drop hover over the threshold
Spiritual brightness!"

[ 14 ] In Fercher von Steinwand's "sämtlichen Werken" (published by Theodor Daberkow in Vienna), some details about his life are also printed, which he himself wrote down at the request of friends on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The poet writes: "I began my life on March 22, 1828, on the heights of the Steinwand above the banks of the Möll in Carinthia, in the middle of a defiant community of lofty mountains, under whose commanding grandeur the burdened man seems to be constantly impoverished." - As the world view of German idealism is poured into poetic creation in "Chor der Urtriebe", it is interesting to see how the poet received inspiration from this world view in his youth as he made his way through Austrian intellectual life. He describes how he came to the University of Graz: "With my securities, which of course presented nothing but school reports, close to my chest, I reported to the dean in Graz. It was Professor Edlauer, a criminologist of great renown. He hoped to see me (he said) as a diligent listener in his college, he would read about natural law. Behind the curtain of this harmless announcement, he gave us enthusiastic lectures throughout the semester on the German philosophers who had been kept away by well-meaning bans under the paternal care of our intellectual guardians: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and so on, heroes, that is, founders and fructifiers of all pure fields of thought, givers of language and creators of concepts for every other science, thus illustrious names that nowadays shine from the corners of our alleyways and stand out there almost whimsically in their peculiar diamond clarity. This semester was my vita nuova!"

[ 15 ] Whoever gets to know Fercher von Steinwand's tragedy "Dankmar", his "Gräfin Seelenbrand", his "Deutsche Klänge aus Österreich" and others by him will be able to sense much of the forces at work in Austrian intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century. And the fact that one receives from Fercher von Steinwand's soul a picture of this intellectual life in clarity, truth and authenticity is attested to by the whole of this personality. The amiable Austrian dialect poet Leopold Hörmann felt right when he wrote the words:

"Far from meanness,
greed and pettiness;
Enemy of advertising,
The disgusting lady;
German in spirit,
Strong and full of goodness,
Great in thought,
No hesitation and wavering,
Trutz all objection -:
Fercher von Steinwand !"

[ 16 ] From the Austrian intellectual life of the second half of the nineteenth century emerges a thinker who expresses deeply significant traits of the worldview of the modern era: the ethicist of Darwinism Bartholomäus von Carneri. A thinker who lived through Austria's public life as if he had experienced happiness and suffering himself and who took an active part in this life with all the strength of his mind as a member of the Imperial Council for many years. Carneri could initially appear only as an opponent of a spiritual world view. For all his endeavors were aimed at shaping a world view that came about solely through ideas that lie in the current of thought stimulated by Darwinism. But if you read Carneri with a sense not only for the content of his views, but also for the underground of his soul, which struggles for truth, you will discover a strange fact. In this thinker, an almost completely materialistic view of the world paints itself, but with a clarity of thought that stems from the deep-seated idealistic trait of his nature. For him, as for many of his contemporaries, the ideas rooted in a world view based entirely on Darwinism had burst into his intellectual life with such overwhelming force that he could not help but include all contemplation of spiritual life in this world view. To want to approach the spirit in a cognitive way, other than on the paths Darwin had taken, seemed to him to tear apart the unified being that must be spread over all human striving for knowledge. In his opinion, Darwinism has shown how a unified law of causes and effects encompasses the development of all natural beings up to man. Whoever understands the meaning of this connection must also realize how the same lawfulness in man increases and refines the natural forces and instincts so that they grow up to the height of moral ideals and views. Carneri believes that only man's deluded arrogance and misguided overestimation of himself can seduce the striving for knowledge to want to approach the spiritual world with other means of knowledge than nature. - Every page of Carneri's writings on the moral nature of man proves, however, that he would have shaped his view of life in the manner of Hegel if Darwinism had not, at a certain point in the development of his life, struck his thoughts like a bolt of lightning with irresistible suggestive power, so that he made a great effort to silence the predisposition to an idealistic view of the world. Admittedly - as his writings also prove - this view of the world would not have emerged through the pure thinking that prevailed in Hegel, but through a thinking that was tinged with cozy sensuality: but Hegel's direction would have taken it nonetheless. - As if from the hidden depths of the soul, Hegel's way of thinking often emerges in Carneri's remarks as a kind of reminder. On the page of the "Grundlegung der Ethik" one reads: "With Hegel ... the dialectical movement had taken the place of the causal law, a gigantic idea which, like all the Titans, could not escape the fate of arrogance. His monism wanted to storm Olympus and sank back to earth, but in order to remain a lamp for all future thinking, illuminating the path and also the abyss." On page 154 of the same book, Carneri speaks of the essence of Greekness and says: "We are not remembering the mythical heroic age, nor the times of Homer ... . We are placing ourselves in the heyday of the years that Hegel so aptly described as the youthful age of humanity." On page 189, Carneri characterizes the attempts that have been made to fathom the laws of thought and remarks: "The greatest example of this kind is Hegel's attempt to allow thought to unfold, so to speak, without being determined by the thinker. The fact that he went too far in this does not prevent the unbiased from recognizing this attempt to lay a single law at the basis of all physical and mental development as the most glorious in the entire history of philosophy. His services to the development of German thought are imperishable, and many an enthusiastic student, who later became his bitter opponent, has erected a lasting monument to him in the perfection of the mode of presentation he acquired against his will." On page 421 we read: "Hegel has told us in an unsurpassable way how far one can get in philosophizing" with mere so-called common sense ". - Well, one might think that Carneri himself has also "in the perfection of the mode of presentation acquired through him ... a lasting monument", even if he applied this method of representation to a world view that Hegel would probably never have agreed with. But Darwinism had such a suggestive effect on Carneri that he counted Hegel alongside Spinoza and Kant among the thinkers of whom he said: "They would have accepted the sincerity of his (Carneri's) endeavor, which would never have dared to look beyond them, had not Darwin torn the veil that ensnared the whole of creation as long as the doctrine of expediency was irrefutable. We have this awareness, but also the conviction that those men would not have said many things at all or would have said them differently if they had been allowed to live in our time, with liberated natural science..."-

[ 17 ] Carneri developed a form of materialism in which perspicacity often degenerates into naivety, the insight into "liberated natural science" into blindness to the impossibility of one's own concepts. "We conceive of matter insofar as the phenomena resulting from its divisibility and movement act physically, i.e. as mass on our senses. If the division or differentiation goes so far that the resulting phenomena are no longer sensual, but only perceptible to the mind, then the effect of the substance is a spiritual" (Carneri's Groundwork of Ethics, page 30). It is as if someone wanted to explain reading and said the following: As long as someone has not learned to read, he cannot say what is written on a page of a book. Because only the shapes of the letters are visible to him. As long as he can only look at these letter forms, into which the words can be divided, his contemplation of the printed matter does not lead to reading. Only when he comes to perceive the letter forms in a more divided or differentiated way does the meaning of the printed matter have an effect on his soul. - Of course, a convinced believer in materialism will find such an objection ridiculous. But the difficulty of putting materialism in the right light lies precisely in the fact that one has to express such simple thoughts. Thoughts to which it is scarcely credible that the adherents of materialism do not form them for themselves. And thus the prejudice easily falls upon the illuminator of this world-view that he is meeting with meaningless phrases a view which is based on the experience of recent science and on its strict principles. ^{1From a later remark in this description of Carneri's world of thought, it will be seen that the author of this writing does not find his characterization of materialism applicable to Carneri alone, but that he is of the opinion it applies to widespread views of the present day, which often emphasize that materialism has been scientifically overcome, without knowing, or often even suspecting, how materialistic that is by which they think materialism has been overcome.} And yet the strongly persuasive power of materialism for its advocates arises only from the fact that they are unable to feel the strength of the simple ideas that destroy their view. He is convinced - like so many - not by the light of logical reasons which he has seen through, but by the power of habits of thought which he does not see through; indeed, which at first he feels no need to see through. But Carneri differs from such materialists, who hardly suspect anything of this need, in that his idealism constantly brings it into his consciousness and he therefore often has to silence it in a rather artificial way. No sooner has he admitted that the spiritual is an effect of finely divided matter than he immediately adds: "This view of the spirit will be unsatisfactory to many a claim; however, in the further course of this investigation the value of our view will prove to be significant, and quite sufficient to draw the attention of materialism, which wants to touch the phenomena of the spirit physically, to the insurmountability of its limits." (Grundlegung der Ethik, page 30.) Indeed, Carneri is truly afraid of being counted among the materialists; he defends himself against this with words such as these: “rigid materialism is just as one-sided as old metaphysics: the latter brings no sense to its design, the latter no design to its sense; there is a corpse, here a ghost, and what both struggle for in vain is the creative glow of sentient life.” (Grundlegung der Ethik, page 68.) - But now Carneri feels how justified it is to call him a materialist; for after all, no one in his right mind, even if he professes materialism, will claim that a moral ideal can be "physically touched", to use Carneri's expression. - He will only say that the moral ideal appears in the material through a process in it. And this is also what Carneri says in his assertion about the divisibility of matter. It is from this feeling that he says (in his work "Sensation and Consciousness"): " The charge of materialism will be brought against us, inasmuch as we deny all spirit and allow only matter to be valid. But this reproach does not apply as soon as the ideality of the world view is assumed, for which matter itself is nothing but a concept of thinking man." But now touch your head and feel whether it is still whole after you have taken part in such a conceptual dance! Substance becomes matter when it is so coarsely divided that it only acts "as mass on the senses"; it becomes spirit when it is so finely divided that it is only perceptible to "thinking". And matter, that is, the coarsely divided substance, is after all only "a concept of the thinking human being". With its coarse division, therefore, matter achieves nothing other than the role of a human concept, which is questionable for a materialist; but if it divides itself more finely, it becomes spirit. Then the mere human concept would have to divide itself more finely. But now such a world-view immediately makes the hero, who pulls himself out of the water by his own hair, the model of all reality! - One can understand why another Austrian thinker, F. von Feldegg (in the "Deutsche Worte" of November 1894), countered Carneri with the words: "As soon as the ideality of the world view is assumed! What, for all the forced eccentricity of the thought, arbitrary supposition! Yes, does it depend entirely on our discretion whether we start from the ideality of the world view or from the opposite - that is, from its reality? And is matter supposed to be nothing but a concept of the thinking person for this ideality? This is the most absolute idealism, such as Hegel's, which is supposed to provide support here to counter the accusation of materialism; but in a moment of need it is not acceptable to turn to the one whom one has stubbornly denied until then. And how does Carneri intend to reconcile this idealistic confession with everything else contained in his writing? In fact, there is only one explanation, and that is this: Carneri also fears and craves the transcendent. However, this is a half-measure that has bitter consequences. Carneri's 'Monistic Concerns' thus disintegrate into two heterogeneous parts, a roughly materialistic part and a hidden idealistic part. In the former, the author's head is right, for it cannot be denied that he is immersed up to his head in materialism; in the latter, on the other hand, the author's mind defends itself against the crude demands of rationalist fashionable conceit with the power of that metaphysical magic from which even in our coarse-minded age nobler natures are not able to completely escape."

[ 18 ] And despite all this: Carneri is an important personality, of whom it may be said (as I indicated in my book "Rätsel der Philosophie", 2nd volume): "This Austrian thinker sought to open up broad perspectives of worldview and life organization out of Darwinism. He emerged eleven years after the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of Species' with his book 'Morality and Darwinism', in which he made the new world of ideas the basis of an ethical world view in the most comprehensive way. Since then, he has constantly endeavored to expand Darwinian ethics. Carneri tries to find the elements in the image of nature through which the self-conscious ego can be imagined within this image. He wants to think this image of nature so broad and large that it can encompass the human soul." - Carneri's writings seem to me to challenge us everywhere through their own character: to eradicate from their content everything that their author forced himself to do by placing himself under the yoke of the materialistic world view; and to look only at what appears in them as a revelation of a great man, like an elementary inspiration of his mind. From such a premise, one can read how he conceives of the task of educating to true humanity: "The task of education is... to train man in such a way that he must do the good. That human dignity does not suffer from this, but rather that the harmonious development of the being, which by its nature joyfully accomplishes what is noble and great, is an ethical phenomenon that cannot be conceived more beautifully.... . The solution of this glorious task is made possible by the striving for happiness, to which the instinct of self-preservation purifies itself in man as soon as intelligence is fully developed. Thinking is based on feeling and is only the other side of feeling, which is why all thinking that does not reach maturity in the warmth of feeling, like all feeling that does not clarify itself in the light of thinking, is one-sided. It is the task of education to purify the striving for happiness through the concordant development of thinking and feeling, so that the I sees its natural extension in the You, its necessary completion in the We, and egoism recognizes altruism as its higher truth.... . Only from the point of view of the instinct of happiness is it explicable that one should lay down his life for a beloved being or a sublime purpose: he sees his higher happiness precisely in this. Seeking his true happiness, man arrives at morality; only he has been educated to be so educated that he cannot do otherwise. He finds the most beautiful reward in the blissful feeling of the nobility of his deed and demands no more." (Compare Carneri's book: Modern Man. Introduction.) As you can see: Carneri considers the pursuit of happiness, as he sees it, to be a natural force in true human nature, a force that must unfold under the right conditions, just as a plant germ unfolds when it has the conditions to do so. Just as the magnet has the power of attraction through its own nature, so the animal has the instinct of self-preservation, and so man has the instinct of bliss. Nothing needs to be grafted on to human beings in order to lead them to morality; one only needs to develop their instinct of happiness properly, and they will unfold through it to true morality. Carneri considers in detail the various manifestations of the life of the soul: how sensation stimulates or dulls this life; how the affects, the passions work: and how in all this the bliss instinct unfolds. This he presupposes in all these expressions of the soul as their actual fundamental power. And by giving this concept of bliss a broad meaning, all the soul's desires, wills and actions fall within its sphere. How a person is depends on the image he has of his happiness: one person sees his happiness in the satisfaction of base instincts, another in acts of devoted love and self-denial. If it were said of someone: he does not strive for happiness, he only does his duty selflessly, Carneri would object: his sense of happiness consists precisely in not consciously pursuing happiness. But with such an extension of the concept of happiness, Carneri reveals the thoroughly idealistic basic tone of his world view. For if happiness is something quite different for different people, then morality cannot lie in the pursuit of happiness; rather, the fact is that man perceives his ability to be moral as making him happy. Thus human striving is not drawn down from the realm of moral ideals into the desire for happiness, but it is recognized as inherent in the nature of man to see his happiness in the attainment of ideals. "According to our conviction" - says Carneri - "ethics has to content itself with the statement that the path of man is the path to bliss, and that man, walking the path to bliss, matures into a moral being. " (Grundlegung der Ethik, page 423.) - Anyone who now believes that Carneri wants to make ethics Darwinian through such views is deceived by the way this thinker expresses himself. This is forced by the overwhelming power of the scientific conception prevailing in his age. In truth, Carneri does not want to make ethics Darwinian, but to make Darwinism ethical. He wants to show that one only needs to recognize man in his true essence, as the naturalist seeks to recognize a natural being, then one finds in him not a natural being, but a spiritual being. This is Carneri's significance, that he wants to incorporate Darwinism into a spiritual worldview. And this makes him one of the most important minds of the second half of the nineteenth century. One does not understand the demands made on mankind by the scientific insights of this age if one thinks like those who want all striving for knowledge to be absorbed into natural science. Like those who until the end of the nineteenth century called themselves confessors of materialism, but also like those who today in reality are no less so whenever they affirm anew that materialism has long since been "overcome by science". At present, many do not call themselves materialists only because they lack the ability to recognize that they are. One can almost say that some people now reassure themselves about their materialism by pretending that they no longer need to call themselves materialists according to their views. They will still have to be called that. One has not yet overcome materialism by rejecting the view of a number of thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century who regarded all spiritual experiences as mere material effects; but only by accepting to think about the spiritual in the same spiritual sense as one thinks about nature in the natural sense. What is meant by this is already clear from the preceding remarks in this paper, but will become particularly clear in the concluding remarks, which are intended as an "outlook". - But one does not do justice to the demands mentioned if one establishes a world view against natural science and only indulges in rejections of the "raw" ideas of "materialism". Since gaining the scientific insights of the nineteenth century, every spiritual worldview that wants to correspond to its age must incorporate these insights as an element in its world of thought. And Carneri grasped this powerfully and expressed it forcefully in his writings. Carneri, who took the first steps towards this understanding, could not yet fully realize that a true understanding of the newer scientific ideas would not lead to the consolidation of materialism, but to its true overcoming. That is why he was of the opinion, to recall Brentano's words once again (see p. 53 of this book), "that the hopes of Plato and Aristotle to gain certainty about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body" could not be expected to be fulfilled by the newer science. But anyone who delves into Carneri's thoughts in such a way that he not only accepts their content, but also looks at the path of knowledge on which this thinker was only able to take the first steps, will find that through him, in a different direction, something similar has happened for the further development of the world view of German idealism as through Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte and others in the direction indicated in this writing. With the powers of Hegelian thought, these spirits sought to penetrate not only into the sensualized spirit, but also into that spiritual realm which is not revealed in the sensory world. Carneri strives to devote himself to the scientific mode of conception with a spiritual view of life. The further pursuit of the path felt by these thinkers can show that the forces of knowledge to which they have turned will not destroy the "hopes of Plato and Aristotle about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body", but will give them a firm basis of knowledge. On the one hand, it is certainly justified when the aforementioned F. v. Feldegg (Deutsche Worte, of November 1894), referring to the conflict in which Carneri found himself in relation to idealism and materialism, says: "But the time is no longer distant when this conflict will come to a head not only in the individual, but in the entire cultural consciousness. But Carneri's 'misgivings' are perhaps an isolated forerunner of quite different and more powerful 'misgivings', which will then, like a storm, sweep away whatever of our 'scientific' creed has not yet succumbed to self-destruction." On the other hand, however, it can be acknowledged that Carneri, through the way in which he processed Darwinism for ethics, also became one of the first overcomers of Darwinian thinking.

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[ 19 ] Carneri was a personality for whom thinking about the questions of existence characterized everything she did and worked on in life. Not one of those who become "philosophers" by allowing the healthy roots of life's reality to wither within them. But rather one of those who prove that a realistic exploration of life can produce more practical people than the anxious, but also comfortable, keeping away from every idea and the stubborn insistence that one should not allow the "true" practice of life to be spoiled by conceptual musings. Carneri was an Austrian representative of the people, from 1861 in the Styrian Parliament, from 1870 to 1891 in the Imperial Council. I still often think of the heart-warming impression I received when, as a young twenty-five-year-old, I heard Carneri speak from the gallery of the Imperial Council in Vienna. A man stood down there who had deeply absorbed Austria's living conditions, the conditions resulting from the development of Austria's culture and the vital forces of its peoples, and who, in what he expressed, spoke from the high vantage point on which his world view had placed him. And in all this, never a pale thought; always heart-warming tones; always ideas that were strong in reality; not the words of a merely thinking head; but the revelations of a whole man who felt Austria pulsating in his own soul and had clarified this feeling through the idea: "Humanity will only fully deserve its name and walk on the path of morality when it knows no other struggle than work, no other shield than justice, no other weapon than intelligence, no other banner than civilization." (Carneri, Morality). (Carneri, Morality and Darwinism, page 508.)

[ 20 ] I have tried to show how a sensible idealism is the root of Carneri's soul life, firmly rooted in reality; but also how - overwhelmed by a materialistic view of the times - this idealism goes hand in hand with a way of thinking whose contradictions are felt but not completely resolved. I believe that this, in the form in which it appears in Carneri, is based on a particular peculiarity which the Austrian people can easily imprint on the soul. A peculiarity which - as it seems to me - is difficult to understand even for Germans outside Austria. One can perhaps only feel it if one has grown out of Austrian folklore oneself. It is conditioned by the development of Austrian life over the centuries. Through education, one is brought into a different relationship to the expressions of the immediate ethnicity than in German areas outside Austria. What one absorbs through school bears traits that are not in such a direct way a transformation of what one experiences from the folklore as with the Germans of Germany. There is something in Fichte's highest thought developments in which one can recognize a direct continuation of the folklore that was at work in his Central German fatherland, in the house of the farmer and band maker Christian Fichte. In Austria, what one develops in oneself through education and self-education often bears fewer such directly down-to-earth traits. The down-to-earth traits are more mediate, although often no less strong for that reason. One carries a conflict of feelings in the soul, which in its unconscious effect gives the expressions of life the special Austrian coloring. As an example of an Austrian with this kind of soul, I would like to consider the personality of Misson, one of the most important Austrian dialect poets.

[ 21 ] It is true that dialect poetry arose from similar soul foundations as Misson's in other Germans. What is peculiar about him, however, is that he became a dialect poet as a result of the indicated trait in the souls of many Austrians. Joseph Misson was born in Mühlbach in the Lower Austrian district of Mannhardtsberg in 1803; he went to school in Krems and joined the Order of Pious Schools. He worked as a grammar school teacher in Horn, Krems and Vienna. In 1850, he published a pearl of all Austrian dialect poetry: "Da Naz, a Lower Austrian farmer's boy, geht in d'Fremd." (Ignaz, a Lower Austrian farm boy, goes abroad.) It was published unfinished. (The provost Karl Landsteiner later wrote about Misson in a beautiful booklet and reprinted the unfinished poem). - Karl Julius Schröer says about it (1875), as I think, aptly: "As small as the poetry is and as isolated as it has remained, as Misson has published nothing else, it nevertheless deserves to be emphasized. It takes first place among the dialectal poems of Austria. The epic calm that is poured out over the whole, the masterly description in detail, which constantly captivates us and surprises and refreshes us with its truth, are qualities in which no other is equal to Misson." Misson depicts the start of a Lower Austrian peasant boy's wanderings. A directly truthful revelation of Lower Austrian folklore lives in the poetry. Misson lived in the world of thought he had acquired through education and self-education. This life represented one side of his soul. It was not a direct continuation of the life that was rooted in his Lower Austrianism. But it was precisely for this reason that the truest image of his nationality emerged in his mind, as if from the depths of his soul, and presented itself as the other side of his inner experience. The magic of the directly folkloristic aspect of Misson's poetry is an effect of the "two souls in his breast". I will include a piece of this poetry here, and then reproduce the Lower Austrian dialect in the most faithful, unpretentious High German prose possible. (In this rendering I will only take care that the meaning of the poem comes out fully in accordance with the sensibility. If one simply replaces the dialect word with the corresponding High German word in such a rendering, the point is basically distorted. Because the dialect word often corresponds to a completely different emotional coloration than the corresponding High German word.)

Lehr vo main Vodern auf d'Roas

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
God, what's so good! and try tai luck ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and tai Muida are old and tahoam, know as ee, looks nothing out.
What you look and work and plod and do not care
Do it for the children, what don't you do, don't leave the place!
I'm just a pressed person and a black woman,
Graif an s'am aa, ma fint töös pai ortlinga rechtschoffan Kinern,
Gladly under Orm, on taas mer d'Ergiibnus laichter daschwingan.
If you don't have any luck, you won't live all your life.
Just stay in the same place, in the middle of the golden mass, don't get bored.
Your luck is round as a ball, balls so lightly toni as touaha.
But if something happens and misfortune befalls you, don't let it go.
Don't let anything happen to you, don't let it happen to me, don't let it happen to you.
Klock's unsan Heagoot, pitt'en, iih so ders, er mochts wida pessa!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Head hanging, just as if amt' Heana had eaten her protest:
You don't like it bad, you don't like it bad, you don't like it bad! Look at your soul, what you have, think about the future!
If you give something, don't talk about it, take it and so for it: good luck!
Look Naaz, mirk ta dos fai: what little politeness iis no longer gstroft!
Get ti nea ritterla, Fremd zügelt t'Leud, ist a Sprichwoat, a Worwoat.
Let's go, don't wash your hands, don't get any more clay. Go on, don't open your eyes, you won't be lucky in Trambuich.
Go two weeks and tar oani is naich, so gee du en olden.
If you go to a place that is also often the case, you are a big one -
Look at tain Gsund, ta Gsund iis pai olIn no allwail tos Pessa.
So what do you have in the world if you are not healthy? - - - - -
Come back and you'll find our old friends in the parlor,
We often go to places where you and your friends are happy to meet us,
Finding our guittäter and our vastoabani friendschoft! Olli, sö kenan uns glai - und töös, Naaz, töös is dos Schöner!"

Rendition: A lesson from my father for traveling

Ignaz, now listen, what I tell you, your father tells you.
In God's name, because it must be so, and you should try your luck in the wide world,
Therefore I must tell you this, and what I tell you, heed it well.
I and your mother are old and stayed at home; you know nothing comes of it.
You toil a lot, toil hard, work hard and weaken yourself with work -
You do this for the sake of your children; what wouldn't you like to do as soon as they don't go down the wrong path? If you later become weak and sickly, and hard times come
If they also jump lovingly at us, one finds this with proper, righteous children,
Helping to make it easier to achieve what the state and life demand.
Should fortune come to you, do not live like a gentleman.
Remain as you were, with the golden measure of the middle road, do not deviate from the right path of life.
Happiness is round like a ball; it rolls away from us as easily as it rolls towards us.
If something doesn't work out, or if misfortune strikes you, don't talk about it to people.
Stay calm; don't let anything bother you; don't be faint-hearted;
Only complain to God; ask him; I tell you, he will make everything better again! Pretending to be sad, withdrawing, making sour faces, being weepy: this achieves nothing.
Hanging your head as if the chickens had eaten your bread:
It doesn't make a bad thing better, let alone make a good thing better! Keep the possessions you take with you; make a little provision for the future.
If someone gives you something, take it without being coy and say: repay God!
Take heed, Ignaz; and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for politeness! -
Do not be rebellious, foreignness makes a man humble; this is a proverb and a truth.
Do not let yourself be tempted to gamble; do not make too much of the dance floor.
Do not have your cards told; and do not seek your destiny from the dream book.
If two paths go, and one is new, take the old one.
If one is uneven, which is often the case, take the straight one.
Guard your health; health is the better of all goods.
Admit to me: what do you really possess in the world if you do not have health?
- - - - -
When you come home one day, and you no longer find us old people in this little room,
Then we will be where your grandfather and grandmother are waiting for us with joy,
Where our benefactors will find us and our deceased relatives! Everyone will immediately recognize us - and this, Ignaz, is something very beautiful.

[ 22 ] Karl Julius Schröer wrote in 1879 of this Austrian, from whose learned soul peasant life, but also, as the piece of his poetry quoted above shows, the original peasant philosophy - emerged so magnificently: "His talent found no encouragement. Although he still wrote many poems, he burned all his poetry... and now he lives, as librarian of the Piarist College at St. Thekla on the Wieden in Vienna, secluded from all contact, in his own words 'without joy and sorrow'." Like Joseph Misson, many personalities of Austrian intellectual life must be sought in hidden situations. - Misson cannot be considered a thinker among the personalities described in this book. But if one imagines his mental life, this gives an understanding of the special coloring of the ideas of Austrian thinkers. The thoughts of Schelling, Hegel, Fichte and Planck form themselves plastically apart like the limbs of an organism of thought. One thought grows out of the other. And in the physiognomy of this whole organism of thought one recognizes a folk-like quality. With the Austrian thinkers, one thought stands next to the other; and each one grows for itself - not so much from the other - but from the common ground of the soul. As a result, the overall form does not bear the direct national character; but this national character is poured over each individual thought like a fundamental mood. Such a basic mood is naturally held back in the mind by the thinkers; it only sounds softly. It appears in a personality like Misson as a homesickness for the elementary nature of the people. In Schröer, in Fercher von Steinwand, in Carneri, and also in Hamerling, it is present everywhere in the basic tone of their aspirations. Thinking thus acquires the character of sense.

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[ 23 ] In Robert Hamerling, one of the greatest poets of modern times sprang from the Lower Austrian Waldviertel. At the same time, he is also one of the bearers of German worldview idealism. I do not intend to discuss the nature and significance of Hamerling's poetry in this essay. I will only hint at how he has placed himself in the development of the Weltanschauung in more recent times. In his work "The Atomistics of the Will" he also expressed his world view in thought form. (The Styrian poet and folk writer Adolf Harpf published this book after Hamerling's death in 1891). The book bears the subtitle "Contributions to the Critique of Modern Knowledge".

[ 24 ] Hamerling knew that many who called themselves philosophers would receive these "contributions" with - perhaps indulgent - astonishment. What should - some might think - the idealistically-minded poet know how to do in a field in which strict scientific rigor must prevail? And the remarks in his book did not convince those in whom such a judgment is merely the wave driven to the surface from the depths of the soul, in which it is formed in an unconscious (or subconscious) way from thinking habits. Such people can be very perceptive, they can be scientifically very important: but the struggle of the true poetic nature is incomprehensible to them. That poetic nature in whose soul all the conflicts live from which the riddles of the world present themselves to man. Which therefore has inner experience of these world riddles. When such a nature expresses itself poetically, the questioning world order reigns in the depths of its soul, revealing itself in the elementary creation of art without transforming itself into thoughts in consciousness. However, even those poets who shrink back from a world view, as from fire that could burn their "vital originality", have no idea of the nature of such true poetry. A true poet may perhaps never form into thought in his consciousness what unconscious thoughts of the world are struggling in the roots of his soul life: he therefore stands with his inner experience in those depths of reality of which one suspects nothing, if one sees in comfortable wisdom only reveries there, where the reality of the senses is given its existence out of the spirit. When a true poet like Robert Hamerling, without dulling his poetic creativity, knows how to raise to consciousness as a world of thought that which often remains unconscious in others, then one can also have the view of such a phenomenon that special lights are thereby thrown up from the depths of the spirit onto the riddles of the world. In the preface to his "Atomistics of the Will", Hamerling himself talks about how he arrived at his world of thought. "I did not suddenly throw myself into philosophy a long or short time ago, perhaps 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 to solve the riddles of existence. I have never regarded philosophy as a specialized science whose study can be pursued or left 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... . For my part, I could not deny myself the opportunity to follow the most original, most natural and most general of all spiritual impulses and, over the years, to form a judgment on the fundamental questions of existence and life."-One of those who held Hamerling's world of thought in high esteem was the learned and subtle Benedictine priest Vincenz Knauer, who lived in Vienna. As a private lecturer at the University of Vienna, he gave lectures in which he wanted to show how Hamerling stood in the developmental current of world views that began with Thales in Greece and revealed itself in the Austrian poet and thinker in the most significant manifestation for the end of the nineteenth century. However, Vincenz Knauer was one of those researchers to whom narrow-mindedness is alien. As a young philosopher, he wrote a book on moral philosophy in Shakespeare's poetry. (Knauer's Vienna lectures have appeared in print under the title "Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie von Thales bis Hamerling".)-

[ 25 ] The idealistic mood of his view of reality also lives on in Robert Hamerling's poetry. The figures of his epic and dramatic creations are not a reproduction of what a spiritually shy observation sees in external life; they show everywhere how the human soul receives directions and impulses from a spiritual world. Spirit-shy observation scolds such creations. It calls them bloodless products of thought that lack the fullness of life. This view is often heard to use the formula: the people of this poet are not people who walk in the world; they are schemes born out of abstraction. If only "real people" who speak in this way could realize how much they themselves are walking abstractions and their confession is the abstraction of an abstraction! If only they knew how empty of soul their blood-filled figures are to those who have a sense not only for pulsating blood, but also for how soul pulsates in blood. From such a point of view of reality, it has been said that Hamerling's dramatic poem "Danton and Robespierre" only enriches the shadowy race of former revolutionary heroes with a number of new schemes.

[ 26 ] Hamerling rejected such objections in the "Epilogue to the Critics", which he appended to the later editions of his "Ahasuerus in Rome". This epilogue contains the words: ... . It is said that 'Ahasuerus in Rome' is an 'allegorical' poem, at which words many are immediately overcome by goose bumps. - However, the poem is allegorical insofar as a mythical figure is woven into it, whose raison d'être is only ever based on the fact that it means something. For every myth is an idea visualized by the popular imagination. But, they say, Nero also wants to 'mean' something - the 'urge to live'! Well, yes, he means the urge to live; but not unlike Molière's 'Miser' means avarice, Shakespeare's 'Romeo' means love. There are, however, poetic figures that are nothing more than allegorical schemes and have nothing more to them than their inner abstract meaning - comparable to Heine's sick, skinny canon, who ultimately consisted of nothing more than 'spirit and plasters'. But for a poetic figure filled with real life, the inherent meaning is not a vampire that sucks its blood. Does anything exist that doesn't 'mean' anything? I would like to know how the beggar should do it so as not to signify poverty, and a Croesus so as not to signify wealth? ... I believe, then, that by 'signifying' the thirst for life to the death-seeking Ahasuerus, the thirsty Nero loses as little of his reality as a rich merchant would lose of his prosperous wealth if he happened to stand next to a beggar and, out of necessity, sensualized the contrast between poverty and wealth in an allegorical group." In this way, the poet, inspired by an idealistic world view, rejects the attacks of people who shudder when they sense an idea rooted in true reality - spiritual reality - somewhere.

[ 27 ] When one begins to read Hamerling's "Atomistics of the Will", one may initially experience the impression that he has allowed Kantianism to convince him of the impossibility of there being any knowledge of true reality, of the "thing in itself". But in the further course of the presentation of his book one sees that Hamerling's fate with Kantianism was the same as Carneri's with Darwinism. He allowed himself to be overwhelmed by the suggestive power of certain Kantian thoughts; but then he came to the conclusion that, even if man cannot reach true reality through the outward view of the senses, he still encounters it when he dives through the surface of mental experience into the depths of the soul.

[ 28 ] Hamerling begins quite Kantian: "Certain stimuli produce the smell in our olfactory organ. So the rose does not smell if nobody smells it. - Certain air vibrations produce sound in our ear. So sound does not exist without an ear. So the shotgun blast would not bang if nobody heard it... . Whoever holds on to this will realize what a naïve error it is to believe that, in addition to the perception or idea we call 'horse', there exists another, and only the right, real 'horse', of which our perception is a kind of image. Apart from me there is - let it be repeated - only the sum of those conditions which cause a perception to arise in my senses which I call a horse." These thoughts have such a suggestive power that Hamerling is able to conclude them with the words: "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 your thoughts." I would like to say to Hamerling: May there be quite a few people whose mind rears up like a shy horse at these opening words of his book, but who have enough strength of thought to appreciate the profound later chapters; and I am glad that Hamerling has written these later chapters, even though his mind did not rear at the assertion: "there is in me the idea of 'horse'; but out there does not exist the right real horse, but only the 'sum of those conditions which cause to be produced in my senses a view which I call horse'. For here we are again dealing with an assertion such as Carneri made with regard to matter, substance and spirit. With an assertion that gains overwhelming power over a person because he cannot see what impossible thoughts he has spun himself into. Hamerling's whole train of thought is worth no more than this: certain effects that emanate from me onto the surface of a pane of glass produce my image in the mirror. Nothing is created by the effects emanating from me if there is no mirror. Apart from the mirror, there is only the sum of those conditions that cause an image to be created in the mirror, which I designate with my name. - I hear in my mind all the declamations about a philosophical dilettantism that goes as far as frivolity and dares to dismiss serious scientific philosophical thoughts with such a childish objection. After all, I know what has been taught in the spirit of these thoughts since Kant. One is not understood by the choir from which this emanates when one speaks as has happened here. One must turn to unbiased reason, which understands that the form of the thought is the same in both cases: whether I am faced with the idea of the horse in the soul, or whether I doubt my existence in the face of the image in the mirror. There is no need to go into certain epistemological refutations of this comparison. For certain epistemologists are absolutely certain about the quite different relations of the "imagination to the imagined" than of the mirror image to the mirrored; for other readers, however, a corresponding refutation of these thoughts could only be a tissue of unfruitful abstractions. - Hamerling feels from his healthy idealism that an idea which is to have justification in a world view must not only be correct, but must also be in accordance with reality. (I must express myself here through the ideas that I have characterized in the remarks in this paper on Karl Christian Planck). If he had been less suggestively influenced by the way of thinking indicated, he would have noticed that there is nothing real in thoughts such as those he considers necessary, even though "the mind rears up to them like a shy horse". They arise in the human soul when it, afflicted by a sense of abstraction that is alien to reality, abandons itself to the spinning out of thoughts that are logically coherent in themselves, but in which no spiritual reality is alive. But it is precisely this healthy idealism that leads Hamerling in the further thoughts of his anatomy of the will beyond the web of ideas that he presented in the opening chapters. This becomes particularly clear where he speaks of the human "I" in connection with the life of the soul. See how Hamerling relates to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". Fichte's mode of conception (which is spoken of in the remarks in this essay on Fichte) has the effect of a softly resonating keynote in the beautiful words on the page of the first volume of "Atomistik des Willens". "The Cogito ergo sum of Cartesius (Descartes) remains, despite all the conceptual hair-splitting that nags at it, the sparkling flash of light of all modern speculation. But this 'I think, therefore I am' is, strictly speaking, not certain because I think, but because I say that I think. The conclusion would have the same certainty even if I turned the premise into its opposite and said: 'I think not, therefore I am'. In order to be able to say this, I must exist." In discussing Fichte's view of the world, it is said in this writing that the sentence "I think, therefore I am" cannot be upheld in relation to the state of sleep. One must grasp the certainty of the I in such a way that this certainty cannot appear exhausted by the inner perception "I think". Hamerling feels this; therefore he says that the following also applies: "I think not, therefore I am." He says this because he feels that something is experienced in the human ego that does not receive the certainty of its existence from thinking, but rather gives thinking its certainty. Thinking is unfolded by the true ego in certain states; the experience of the ego, however, is of such a kind that the soul can feel itself immersed through it in a spiritual reality in which it knows its existence is also anchored for other states than those for which Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" applies. But all this is based on the fact that Hamerling knows that when the "I" thinks, the will to live lives in its thinking. Thinking is not merely thinking; it is willful thinking. "I think" as a thought is a mere fabric that is never and nowhere there. There is only ever the "I want to think". Anyone who believes in the "I think" can separate himself from the entire spiritual world and then either become a believer in materialism or a doubter of the reality of the outside world. He becomes a materialist if he allows himself to be caught up in the fully justified thought that the nerve tools are necessary for thinking, as Descartes has it in mind. He becomes a doubter of the reality of the external world when he becomes entangled in the thought - again within certain limits justified - that all thinking about things is experienced in the soul after all; thus one could never approach an intrinsically existing external world with one's thinking, even if this external world existed. Whoever notices the will in all thinking can, if he is inclined to abstraction, separate the will conceptually from thinking and, in the style of Schopenhauer, speak of a will that is supposed to prevail in all world existence and that drives thinking like waves of foam to the surface of life's phenomena. But he who has the insight that only the "I think willingly" has reality, thinks will and thinking in the human soul as little separated as he thinks head and body separated in a human being if he wants to have the thought of a reality. But such a person also knows that with the experience of an experienced thought borne by the will he leaves the boundaries of his soul and enters into the experience of world events that also pulsate through his soul. And Hamerling moves in the direction of such a world view. Towards a world view that knows that with a real thought it has an experience of the will of the world within itself; not merely an experience of its own " I". Hamerling strives towards a worldview that does not stray into the chaos of a mysticism of will, but rather wants to experience the will of the world in the clarity of ideas. - With this view of the will of the world seen through ideas, Hamerling now knows himself to be standing in the mother soil of German worldview idealism. His thoughts prove to be rooted in the German folklore, which already struggled for knowledge in an elementary way in Jakob Böhme. On page 259 f. of Hamerling's "Atomistik des Willens" one reads: "To make the will the supreme philosophical principle is - what one seems to have overlooked so far - a preferably German thought, a core thought of the German spirit. From the German natural philosophers of the Middle Ages to the classics of German speculation and all the way down to Schopenhauer and Hartmann, this idea pervades the philosophy of the German people, sometimes more, sometimes less prominent, often only emerging for a moment, as it were, only to disappear again in the fermenting masses of ideas of our thinkers. And so it was also the 'philosophus teutonicus', in truth the most German and profound of all modern philosophers, who in his profoundly original imagery first explicitly grasped the will as the absolute, as the unity ... " And to refer to another German thinker of this direction, Hamerling quotes the words of Jacobi, Goethe's contemporary: " Experience and history teach that man's actions depend much less on his thinking than his thinking depends on his actions; that his concepts are based on his actions and in a sense only depict them, that therefore the path of knowledge is a mysterious path - not a syllogistic one - not a mechanical one." - Because Hamerling has a feeling from the basic tone of his soul that the mere logical correctness of an idea must be complemented by its correspondence to reality, he cannot accept the views on life of the pessimistic philosophers who want to determine by abstract-conceptual weighing up whether pleasure or displeasure predominates in life, i.e. whether it must be regarded as good or evil. No, this is not decided by reflection that has become theory; it is decided in much deeper reasons of life, in depths that have to judge this reflection, but do not allow themselves to be judged by it. Hamerling says about this: "The main thing is not whether people are right, that they all, with vanishingly small exceptions, want to live, to live at all costs, regardless of whether things are going well or badly for them. 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 weigh pleasure and displeasure, as life in particular brings it, intelligently against each other in learned discussions; 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 indeed 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, wants to live under all circumstances, wants to live at all costs, that is the great fact, and all doctrinal talk is powerless in the face of this fact." Hamerling seeks the path into spiritual reality in a similar way to the thinkers from Fichte to Planck who are described in this book. However, he endeavors to do justice to the scientific idea to a greater degree than Schelling or Hegel, for example, were able to do. Nowhere does the "atomistics of the will" violate the demands of the scientific world view. Everywhere, however, it is permeated by the insight that this world view represents only one element of reality. It is based on the recognition of the idea that one surrenders to the belief in an unreal world if one refuses to include the forces of a spiritual world in the world of thought. (I use the word unreal here in the sense in which it is used in the discussion of Planck.)

[ 29 ] The high degree to which Hamerling's thinking was realistic is vividly demonstrated by his satirical poem "Homunculus". In it, he portrays with great poetic power the human being who himself becomes soulless because soul and spirit do not speak to his knowledge. What would become of people who really originated from the kind of world order that the scientific way of thinking then adopts as a creed when it rejects a world view in keeping with the spirit? What would man be if the unreal nature of this way of thinking were real? These are some of the questions that find their artistic answer in "Homunculus". Homunculism would have to take hold of a humanity that believed only in a world constructed according to the mechanical laws of nature. Hamerling also shows how those who strive for the ideas of existence have a healthier view of practical life than those who shy away from the world of ideas and thus feel themselves to be a true "man of reality". Hamerling's homunculus could help those who, especially in the present day, allow themselves to be seduced by the opinion that natural science is the only science of reality. In their intellectual timidity, such people say that the idealism of the classical period of thought, which they believe has been overcome today, has placed too much emphasis on homo sapiens. "True science" must recognize that man as homo economus must be considered above all within the world and human order. For such people, "true science" is only that which arises from the scientific way of thinking. Homunculism arises from such a belief. Those who advocate it have no idea how they are heading towards homunculism. Hamerling has drawn this homunculism with the vision of the cognizer. Even those who are afraid of such an overestimation can see from the "Homunculus" that the right estimation of "homo sapiens" in Hamerling's sense does not produce an overestimation of literacy.