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Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence
GA 60

26 January 1911, Berlin

Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Goethe

It is a far cry from the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster, who formed the subject of our last lecture in this series, to the three great personalities who provide the subject matter of our lecture to-day, and the gulf of time which, in our imagination, we are called upon to span is wide indeed. It is a gulf which stretches from a time thousands of years ago, long before our Christian Era. A time which we can only understand by attributing to the human beings existing then a mental outlook utterly foreign to our own. From this distant standpoint of time, we pass to the 16th and 17th centuries of our own era, to the time when that spirit was first kindled which, ever since, has been the source and inspiration of all vital and progressive culture from then to the present day. As we shall see, this spirit, which burnt so fiercely in the 16th and 17th centuries in individuals such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno, found a fresh medium in a personality so near our own times as that of Goethe.

Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the two names we must mention when we review the beginnings of that epoch in our human evolution at which Natural Science had reached the same turning-point as Spiritual Science has reached to-day. The same great impulse which was then given to the thought of Natural Science will be, in a certain sense, given to this of Spiritual Science in the immediate future. Hence the importance of a comprehensive survey of the lines of thought and feeling of the men of that day, viz.: during the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries—the time of Galileo and of Giordano Bruno—so that we may be able to understand their teaching in the full sense of the word.

Casting a retrospective glance over the centuries immediately preceding theirs, viz:—from the 11th to the 15th centuries, we must try and realize what at first sight appears to be the peculiar conception of the Science current in those days, and how wide was the field which the term then embraced. We must realise that during these centuries, Scientific Knowledge was viewed from an entirely different standpoint from that from which it is viewed to-day. The popular conception of Scientific Knowledge was then very different from the ideas which prevailed in later times and from those which prevail to-day. For we are now speaking of the days before the printing-press, of those days when, for the majority of the people, their sole means of participating in Spiritual and intellectual life was through the Church or the school, etc.—That is to say they could only learn from oral instruction. Hence the necessity, if we would understand those times, of obtaining a correct picture of the scientific methods pursued by the educated men of that day.

In the times preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, there was an impulse towards Science, but it was an impulse which is very difficult for the modern mind to understand. We can only understand it by placing ourselves, in imagination, in an entirely different mental atmosphere from that by which we are surrounded to-day. In those days, whatever auditorium you might have entered where Science was being taught, you would always have noted one thing. Let us take, for example, a lecture on Natural Science. No matter what branch of Natural Science it might be, whether Medicine or another, the lecturer would base all his deductions solely upon the authority of ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle. To-day, the lecturer on Science bases his thesis upon the results of modern investigation, carried out in such or such an institute, where scientific methods of research are followed. But the lecturer of the days preceding those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno based his thesis upon the ancient writings, especially upon those of Aristotle, which were the foundation of all Science in those days.

The figure of Aristotle stands out pre-eminent as an intellectual giant in the history of human progress; and the service he rendered to his time is unspeakably important. But, for the moment, the interesting point for us is the fact that the books of Aristotle were seldom read in the sense in which they were originally given, but the traditional rendering gave the tone, and was everywhere considered determinant.

No matter whether it were a question of the definition of a principle or of an axiom, or the question of any truth whatever, it was always referred to Aristotle. “Such was Aristotle's opinion on this point,” “you will find it expressed thus by Aristotle”. Now the modern investigator or the lecturer on Science, or even the popular lecturer, always emphasizes the fact that this or that has been observed in some place or another. But the scientific teacher in the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno laid stress upon the fact that a few centuries ago, the great authority, Aristotle, made such or such an assertion upon such or such a question. Just as to-day we refer, in Spiritual matters, to the authority of the revelations of religious documents and tradition and not to personal investigation, so, in those days, teachers of Science did not refer to nature the observation of nature, but referred back to written authority. They referred back to the writings of Aristotle.

It is extraordinarily interesting to study a University discourse and to note how doctors and their colleagues relied upon the theories of Aristotle.

Now Aristotle was an intellectual giant; and though we must admit that even such an intellectual individuality should not be taken literally after the lapse of so many centuries, still, on the other hand, we must acknowledge that the works of Aristotle are so prodigious and so magnificent that even if they learnt nothing new, if men had studied Aristotle diligently, that is to say the original Aristotle, they would have accomplished a great deal. For the deeply illuminating teachings and theories of Aristotle could not have failed to have been of the greatest benefit to them.

This, however, was not the case. The lecturers of those days and the teachers who preached Aristotle in season and out of season, as a rule, understood nothing at all about him.

The doctrines taught in the time preceding that of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and claiming to be those of Aristotle were an almost incredibly mistaken version of his teaching. To-day, I will confine myself to showing you from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the place Galileo and Giordano Bruno took in the intellectual life of their time. I would call to mind in this connection an incident which is perfectly true and which I have often related before.

One of the most devoted adherents of Aristotle was at the same time a friend of Galileo's. Galileo, like Giordano Bruno, was an opponent of the followers of Aristotle, and with good reason, but not of Aristotle himself. Galileo maintained that men ought to go to the great book of Nature, which speaks so clearly to man, and learn from there the meaning of the Spirit in Nature. They should not rely entirely upon the books of Aristotle for their final authority. Now at that time, the School of Aristotle taught a marvelous doctrine concerning the seat of the nerves. Their theory was that the whole nervous system originated in the heart, that from the heart, the nerves spread to the brain and from thence spread over the entire body. “This”, said they, “is the teaching of Aristotle, therefore it must be true.” Galileo, who based his information upon the investigation of the human body, carried out by means of his physical eyes, and did not rely upon the teaching of ancient writings and ancient tradition, affirmed that the nerves had their seat in the brain and that the chief nerves originated in the brain. Galileo told this to one of his friends and wished him to see for himself and be convinced. “Yes, indeed, I will see it,” said the friend who took the opposite view, and he attended a demonstration on the human body. Then, indeed, this scholar, who was a devout follower of Aristotle, was greatly astonished and said to Galileo:—“It does indeed seem as if the nerves originated in the brain; yet Aristotle maintained that they originate in the heart. If there appears to be any contradiction here, I would believe in Aristotle rather than in Nature.” Such was the mental attitude which Galileo had to combat. Aristotle, or rather the distorted view of Aristotle, was dragged into all questions connected with Science.

To quote another instance:—A scholar of the Church wrote a treatise on immortality. Let us consider for a moment the method they employed in those days. They took their subject matter from the Church Doctrine, adding to that what they believed to be the teaching of Aristotle on the subject. Thus they used the words of Aristotle to support their own views, twisting his teaching so that they could claim its support, no matter from which side of the question, whether for or against, they wished to argue. To return to our scholar of Divinity. He had collected various passages from Aristotle in order to demonstrate the opinion of Aristotle upon the question of the immortality of the soul. Now this also is a perfectly true incident. The clergy had to submit their books to their superiors before publication. In this case, the superior objected to the book. “It is dangerous,” he said, “It would be better not to attempt it, for these extracts from Aristotle (in support of immortality) might also be used to support the opposite view.” The author of the book wrote back “If it is only a question of demonstrating more clearly the most acceptable meaning of Aristotle on this subject, then I will support it by another quotation, for one could quite well go on making quotations.” In short, from every point of view, Aristotle was used and abused.

From these two incidents, we can see how greatly Aristotle was misunderstood at the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. We will take the example of the origin of the nerves in the heart. The meaning of this statement is hidden. We can only understand it when we realize that Aristotle lived at the end of the period of ancient Greek culture and, therefore, at the end of the period of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Because Aristotle looked back into the past, he transmitted a Science that arose out of a clairvoyant consciousness which was able to see behind the material world into the Spiritual. It was this clairvoyant consciousness which had produced the old Science. The essence of this primeval Science was transmitted by the Greek culture as ancient Science, and this it was which Aristotle possessed. He was one of the last who recorded it. But Aristotle was not himself capable of developing that clairvoyant consciousness, for he only possessed an intellectual consciousness.

Note this well. Not without reason was Aristotle the first historian of Logic. This is because the intellectual argumentative thought was to become dominant. Thus, Aristotle assimilated the ancient teaching and reduced it into a logical system in his writings. Hence there is much in his writings which we cannot understand until we have learnt what it is he really meant. Thus, when he speaks of nerves, we must not ascribe to the word the meaning given to it to-day, nor the meaning it had even in the time of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which was already related to our own. When Aristotle speaks of the nervous system, he means the Etheric Body of man. By which we mean the super-sensible part of human nature, which is closely connected with the human physical body. This Etheric body can now no longer be seen by man, the power of doing so having been lost during man's progressive evolution. Aristotle could no longer see it, but he knew about it, the knowledge having come to him from those times when the clairvoyant consciousness saw, not only the physical body, but also the Etheric Aura, the Etheric Body, which is really the builder and strength-giver of the physical body.

Aristotle drew his teaching from those times in which man perceived the Etheric Body as we now-a-days perceive colours. Thus, if you look at the Etheric Body instead of at the physical body, the former is truly the origin of certain currents. For Aristotle, this origin was not in the brain, but in the heart. The description given by Aristotle of these currents had usually been designated by the title of nerves. By those currents he did not mean nerves in our sense of the word, but he meant super-sensible currents, super-sensible forces. These proceed from the heart, flow to the brain and, from thence, are distributed to the various activities of the human body. These are matters which we cannot understand until we have learnt by means of Spiritual Science about the super-sensible parts and principles of human nature.

Man had lost the power of seeing clairvoyantly even so long ago as the centuries preceding Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Hence people had no idea that Aristotle was speaking of the Etheric Current. They thought he meant the physical nerves, so they asserted that “Aristotle states that the physical nerves proceed from the heart.”

Such was the contention of the devout followers of Aristotle. Those, however, who had studied in the book of Nature could not allow this. Hence the great battle between Galileo and Giordano Bruno and the School of Aristotle.

The followers of Aristotle completely misunderstood him; no-one understood the real Aristotle; Galileo and Giordano Bruno naturally did not understand him either, for they did not take the trouble to penetrate to the real meaning of the works of Aristotle. Thus Galileo and Giordano Bruno were the two great Intellectuals of their time, who turned away from the pedantry of the Scholastics and of book-learning to the great book of Nature itself, which is available to each and all

Professor Laurenz Muellner, for whom, as philosopher, I have the greatest admiration, refers to this in a lecture which he gave in 1894 as Rector of the Vienna University. In this lecture, he drew attention to the fact that the great Galileo, with his wonderful knowledge and grasp of all the great laws of mechanics, had discovered the laws which govern the distribution of space. Now it is just these laws which govern the operation and, distribution of space which strike the eye and stir the emotions so very forcibly when we see them exemplified in St. Peter's at Rome. This mighty building influences us all. And each one experiences something tangible, which we can all understand. Let me illustrate this by the following example:—Speidel, the Viennese journalist, and the sculptor Natter were driving in the neighborhood of Rome. As they approached the city, Speidel suddenly heard a most extraordinary exclamation from Natter, who was a very genial spirit. Natter sprang suddenly to his feet. His friend could not think what was the matter with him, for he only heard the words “I am frightened”. As Natter would say no more then, it was only later that his friend heard that the exclamation had been called forth by the sight of the dome of St. Peter's in the distance.

Something akin to terrified wonder at the effect of the marvelous distribution of space, created by the genius of Michelangelo, overwhelms all who see this wonderful building. Laurenz Muellner draws attention to the fact that it is owing to Galileo, that great thinker, that it has become possible for mankind to conceive mathematically and mechanically such an effect of space-distribution as meets the eye in the wonderful building of the dome of St. Peter's, at Rome. At the same time, we must not forget that Galileo, who discovered the laws of Mechanics, was born when Michelangelo, the builder of St. Peter's, was almost on his deathbed. This means that it was from the Spiritual forces of Michelangelo that that skill in the distribution of the laws of space arose, which was not available to the intellect of man until later.

From this, we must infer that what we may term intellectual knowledge, knowledge governed by reason, may come much later than the actual composition of matter in space.

If such matters are carefully and thoughtfully considered, it will be seen that human consciousness has undergone a change; that, earlier, men possessed a certain clairvoyance and that the manner of thinking with the intellect does not go back very far. This habit or manner of thinking with the intellect, owing to certain historical necessities, arose during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Minds like those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the first harbingers of what was to come. Hence their fierce opposition to the school of Aristotle and especially to those who first completely misinterpreted Aristotle—who may be taken as the expression of the ancient wisdom—and then used their misinterpretation of him as an argument against Natural Science. We have now indicated Galileo's position in the world. He was, in the highest sense of the word, the man who first inaugurated the system of severe thought necessary for Natural Science, that system of the relation of Natural Science to Mathematics, which has continued on his lines from his day to our own.

What is it that distinguishes Galileo from all other men up to his time? It is the doctrine which he was the first to realize and which he preached with such noble courage, thus proving himself a child of his age. The feelings which possessed Galileo can be to some extent rendered in the following words, which will help us to understand his whole soul and attitude of mind. “Here we stand as men upon the earth. Nature spreads herself out before us, with everything requisite for our senses and for our reason, which is connected with the instrument of the brain through nature”. Galileo says this many times, in various passages in his works, as may be verified, ”through Nature speaks the Divine Spiritual. We men approach Nature, view it with our eyes and study it with our other senses. What we perceive with our eyes, what we receive through our senses, is implanted in Nature by Divine Spiritual Beings. At first, the thoughts of the Divine Spiritual Beings exist yonder; then, as if springing forth from the thoughts of these Beings, come the visible things of Nature as the revelation of. Divine thought. Then come our powers of perception and, above all, our reason, which is inseparable from the brain. There we stand, ready to spell out, as from the letters of a book, and to arrive at the author's meaning, that which Divine thoughts have expressed in Nature.”

Galileo took his stand firmly on the ground upon which all the great minds in the course of earthly evolution have taken their stand. He believed that the manifestations of Nature, the things of Nature, are as the letters of an alphabet, which express the mind of the Divine Spiritual beings. Thus the human mind exists that it may read what the Divine Spiritual Beings have written there, written in the form of minerals, in the course of natural phenomena, in the course of the movements of the stars. Human nature exists that it may read the thoughts of the Divine Mind. To Galileo, however, the Divine Mind is only distinguished from the human mind by the fact that everything that can be thought is thought by Divine Mind at once, in a single moment, unfettered by space or time. Let us apply this to any single field; to the field of Mathematics. We see at once how extra ordinary this conception is. If a student desires to learn all that has as yet been learnt by mankind about Mathematics, he will have or to toil at Mathematics for years. Then, as you know, man's conception of Mathematics depends greatly on time. Now, Galileo argued thus:—What humanity succeeds in grasping in the course of many years is conceived by the Divine thought in one second. Divine thought is unfettered by space or time. Above all, the human mind must not suppose that with its reason limited, as it is, by space and time, it can immediately understand the Divine Mind. Man must strive. He must observe each step. He must study each separate phenomenon carefully. He must not think that he can afford to ignore the phenomena, that he can leave out of account what God has planned as the foundation of the phenomena. Galileo affirmed that it was wrong not to wish to know the, true meaning of the wonderful manifestations which Nature unfolds, by means of human reason, that it was wrong not to strive to ascertain the truth by minute investigation. He affirmed that to endeavour to arrive at the truth by speculation, instead of studying carefully the details of the various phenomena, was an entirely false method of thought.

But the motive which prompted Galileo was quite other than those which give rise to similar language to-day. Galileo would not limit the human mind to observation because he denied the operation of the Divine Mind in Nature; on the contrary, just because the Divine Mind manifests itself in Nature and reveals itself as so great, so powerful and so wonderful; because (to the Divine Intelligence) all creative thought springs into being in a moment, while the human mind requires an eternity in which lovingly to decipher the letters of the Alphabet and can only arrive gradually at the detailed thoughts which they represent. It is humility at the thought of how far human reason is below the Divine Reason which prompts Galileo to warn his contemporaries. “you can no longer see behind the things of sense. Not because this was never possible to man, but because the time for doing so has gone by.”

Observation, experience and individual thought; these composed the standard which Galileo placed before his contemporaries. This he was able to do because, in a certain sense, his mind was cast in a mathematical mould and because his method of thinking was so rigidly mathematical. In illustration of this we will take the matter of the telescope. Galileo heard that a discovery had been made in Holland, by means of which it was possible to perceive the most distant stars in the firmament. We must bear in mind that there were no newspapers in those days. He only heard from travelers that some thing had been discovered in Holland of the nature of a telescope. Galileo could not rest till he had found out for himself what this was and himself invented a telescope by means of which he made the great discoveries which confirmed the theories which had recently been promulgated in the Copernican-cosmo-conception. In order to understand these things aright, we must remember these two facts:—that nothing was then understood of the old super-sensible science, and that Galileo was a pathfinder for the new science. Secondly, that a short time before, Copernicus had given a new aspect to the conception of the world through external thought concerning the movements of the planets round the Sun. We must put ourselves in the position of the men of that time and try to enter into the mentality of those who believed, as men had done for thousands of years before them:—“Here we stand on the firm earth, immovable in space.” To men with views such as these, the idea was now presented for the first time, that the earth was spinning round the Sun with incalculable rapidity. Such a conception literally out the ground from under their feet. We cannot be surprised at the excitement such an idea created in all, whether partisans or opponents. To minds like that of Galileo, the way by which Copernicus had arrived at his conclusions was particularly convincing. Let us examine in the light of the present time the means by which Copernicus arrived at his conclusions.

What made Copernicus arrive at the conception that the planets move round the Sun?

Up to his time, a theory of the universe had prevailed, which was itself not understood because it was intended to be taken in a Spiritual sense. As then understood, it was indeed an impossible conception. Men had to suppose that the planets described the most complicated movements—circles—and then circles within circles. It was precisely this terrible complication of ideas which had to be got rid of. This it was which was so obnoxious to certain types of mind.

In reality, Copernicus made no new astronomical discoveries. Be said to himself “Let us proceed along the simplest lines of thought in order to arrive at an explanation of the movements of the planets.” He expressed his system of the universe in the simplest of terms. And with what a wonderful result! The Sun was placed in the centre while the planets revolved around it in circles or in ellipses, as Kepler proved later. The whole conception of the universe was reduced to a wonderful simplicity.

It was this simplicity which so greatly influenced the mind of Galileo. For he always emphatically affirmed that “the human mind is capable of recognizing truth in its simplicity.” Beauty is to be found in the simple, not in the complex. And truth is beauty.

It was because of its Beauty and because of the simplicity of its Beauty that the Copernican theory of the system of the Universe was accepted by so many minds at that time. Galileo in particular accepted it because he found in the teaching of Copernicus that Beauty in simplicity for which he was seeking.

Now he could see the Moons of Jupiter, which hardly anyone would believe in. The eyes of Galileo were the first to see the Moons of Jupiter which encircle him as the planets do the Sun. It was a solar system in miniature. Jupiter with his Moons was as the Sun with his planets. This discovery confirmed the theories of a solar system constructed in accordance with a conception. It seemed so to Galileo, who applied the theory of Copernicus in miniature to a visible world. Hence Galileo was indeed a Pioneer of the New Science.

Thus it came about that he divided the presence of mountains in the Moons, that there were spots in the Sun and that the Nebulae extending across the stars were disintegrated worlds of stars. In short, all which may be expressed as the revelation of the Divine Wisdom expressed in the world of sense. All this made a tremendous effect upon Galileo. With his mathematical mind, the question of time, which was completely lost sight of in the material conception of the visible world, naturally influenced him greatly. Galileo first created the impulse in the human mind to admit that we cannot see behind the material veil with our normal consciousness: “The super-sensible is not to be understood by the human senses. It cannot be comprehended by human reason. Divine Reason grasps it outside time and space, while man's reason is limited to time and space. Let us confine ourselves to that which, in time and space, our human reason can understand.”

Now, seeing that Galileo achieved such greatness in so many things, he is also, from the point of view of philosophy, one of the most important pioneers of the modern Spiritual development of humanity. Can we then wonder that we also see in him a mind who wished to make clear to himself and to others the relation of man to the world of sense and to his own soul-life.

It is a popular fallacy that Kant was the first to draw attention to the fact that the world around us is nothing but illusion and that it is not possible to arrive at “the thing in itself,” at things as they really are. Expressed rather differently, Galileo had already demonstrated this idea; only, behind the visible, he always saw the all-pervading thoughts of the Divine Spiritual, and it was only from humility and not from principle that he said that only after long aeons of time would mankind be fit to draw nearer to it.

But Galileo said:—“When we see a colour, it makes a certain impression on us. For example, red. Is the red colour in the things?” Galileo used a very remarkable illustration, which showed at once that the primary conception was incorrect. That, however, is immaterial to our purpose. The point we wish to emphasize is the conception itself as an idea of that time. Galileo said:—“If you take a feather and tickle a man on the soles of his feet or the palms of his hands, the man will experience a sensation of tickling. Now is the tickling in the feather? No. It is entirely subjective. What is in the feather is quite different. As the tickling is subjective, so too is the red colour subjective, which is visible in the world.” Thus he compared colours and even sounds with the tickling caused by the application of a feather to the soles of the feet.

Once we realize this, we can already trace in Galileo the beginnings of what came down to us as the philosophy of our modern times. For modern philosophy doubts the possibility of Man's ever being able to penetrate behind the veil of the world sense in any way whatsoever.

Thus we see in Galileo, who was born in 1664, the quiet, determined pioneer, while Giordano Bruno, who was somewhat older, being born in 1648, reflected in his mentality all the great truths which were fermenting in the minds of men such as Copernicus, Galileo himself and others at that period. The mind of Giordano Bruno mirrors for us all the great ideas of that time in a mighty, comprehensive system of philosophy.

What was Giordano Bruno's own personal attitude to the world, quite apart from the mental attitude of the men of his day? Giordano Bruno (who only knew the corrupted version of Aristotle) argued thus:—“Aristotle maintains that a sphere exists which extends to the Moon, thence to the different spheres of the stars; then comes the sphere of
the Divine Spiritual. Thus, according to Aristotle, the Living God must be sought for outside the spheres of the stars.”

Giordano was viewing the Universe according to the conception of Aristotle. He saw first the earth, then the spheres of the Moon and of the Stars. Then, finally, beyond these again, beyond this world and beyond that inhabited by man, in the great periphery of this world, the Divine Spirit, which literally directs the revolutions and movements of the world of the planets.

Giordano Bruno could not reconcile this conception with the actual human experience of his day. That which could now be perceived by means of the human senses, that which he himself perceived when he looked at plants, animals and man, that which he saw when he looked at mountains, seas, clouds and stars, all this appeared to him as a marvelous image of what lives in the Divine Spirit itself. In the moving stars, in the clouds sailing through the air, he saw not only a script written by the Divine Being, but something which might pertain to the Divine Being as a finger or a limb does to ourselves. The fundamental conception of Giordano Bruno was not that of a God who directs the visible world from outside, from the periphery, but a God who is incorporate in every single manifestation of the visible, whose bodily form is the visible world.

If we seek to understand how it was that he arrived at such a conclusion, we find that it was the result of the joy of the intoxication of delight in the spirit of the new age which had just begun. This new age had been preceded by a time during which man had been content to grope about amongst the old ideas of Aristotle. A time in which the leading Scholars, if they walked through woods and fields, had no eyes for Nature and all her beauties, but had their minds wholly set on Parchments and Writings which had originated with Aristotle.

Now, however, the time had come when the voice of Nature began to make itself heard by men. Great discoveries revealed themselves one after another. Mighty minds like that of Galileo pressed on from point to point, recognizing the Divine in Nature herself at every step.

The theory of the God in Nature, in contradistinction to the mediaeval conception of Nature, from which God was eliminated, was accepted everywhere with an universal delirium of joy. To this spirit, every fibre of Giordano Bruno's being responded. “There is Spirit in all things,” he says, “This is proved by physical research. Wherever we see a visible creation, there we shall meet the Divine.” There is only one difference between the physical and the Divine. Because we are men and confined within narrow boundaries, the visible appears to us to be limited by time and space. To Giordano Bruno, the Spirit of God exists behind the sense-world. Not in the way in which (as he thought) it had existed for Aristotle or the men of the Middle Ages. He believed the Divine Spirit to be self-existing; and Nature only the body by means of which its Spirit manifested itself in all its beauty.

Nevertheless, man cannot perceive the whole of the Divine Spirit in Nature, he can only see a part. In all things, in all time and in space, the Divine Spirit is to be found. This was the creed of Giordano Bruno. Hence he says “Where is the Divine? In every stone, in every leaf, the Divine is everywhere. In all creation, specially in beings possessing a certain independent existence”. These beings, which recognise their own independence, he terms Monads. By a Monad, he means something which floats and flourishes in the ocean of divinity. All Monads are mirrors of the Universe. Thus Giordano conceived of the universal Spirit as divided into many Monads, and in each Monad that was an individual Spirit, there was something which was a reflection of the Universe.

Such a Monad is the human soul, and they are many. Indeed, the human body itself is composed of many Monads, not of one. If we understand the truth about the physical body according to the ideas of Giordano Bruno, we shall not see the fleshly human body, but a system of Monads; these Monads cannot be clearly seen, just as we cannot distinguish the separate midges in a swarm; the chief Monad is the human soul. When the human soul comes into existence at birth, so said Giordano Bruno, the other Monads which belong to the soul collect together and, by this, the existence of the Chief-Monad, of the Soul Monad, is made possible. When death approaches, the Chief-Monad discharges and disperses the other Monads.

According to Giordano Bruno, birth is the assembling of many Monads round a Chief-Monad, while death is the separation of the inferior Monads from the Chief-Monad, so that the Chief-Monad may be able to take on another form. For each Monad is obliged to take on, not only the form by which we know it here, but every form which it is possible to take on in the Universe. Giordano Bruno conceives of a procession through every form. Thus he approaches as close as possible—in his enthusiasm—to the idea of the re-incarnation of the human soul.

And with reference to the conception of our collective reality, he says:—Man, with his normal consciousness, stands confronted by this reality. What he first receives are the impressions of the senses. These are his first means of knowledge. Of these, there are four, says Giordano Bruno. The first means by which man acquires knowledge is by the impressions of the senses.

The second are the images we construct in our imagination when the things which have impressed the senses are no longer before us, when we only remember what we have experienced. Here we already penetrate further into the soul. This second channel of knowledge he terms “the power of imagination.” The word must not be taken to mean what it does to-day, but it must be understood in the sense in which it was used by Giordano Bruno. After a man has received what the impressions of sense have to give him, he enters (forming the picture within himself) into the impressions. The impression is made from without on the within. It then follows that man, while he penetrates the things with his reason and then proceeds further, draws nearer to the truth, instead of going further away from it. Hence Giordano Bruno recognises reason, the intellect, as the third means of acquiring knowledge, and in this he has in mind the moment when we leave the objects visible to our senses and ascend to the realm of thought. Then something higher and truer than any impression created by the senses flows towards us.

According to Giordano Bruno, the fourth stage is Reason. Reason to him is a living and weaving in the regions of Pure Spirit.

Thus the system of Giordano Bruno comprises four stages of knowledge. He does not, however, classify them in the same way as they are classified, for example, in my books, “The Way of Initiation” and “Initiation and its Results”, under the headings of Present Knowledge, Imaginative Knowledge, Inspirational Knowledge and Intuitive Knowledge. His classifications are more in the abstract. We must, therefore, think of him in the following way: Giordano Bruno lived first at that point of time when the knowledge of visible phenomena was, advancing, therefore he used expressions which resemble those used now to express knowledge of the ordinary visible world, rather than those which relate to the higher worlds. But when Giordano Bruno looks up to the Spiritual World, we can have no doubt of his meaning from the tremendous emphasis with which he says “The Divine Spirit which exists in everything, which has its bodily form in all things, possesses that of which we have the representation, as the idea is the conception of the thing”.

“In what way is the world in God? How is the Spirit in God?” he asks, and replies: “The Spirit is in God as Idea, as the Thought that precedes the Word.” In everything is the Spirit in Nature, as form, he replies, by which he means, that the idea which exists in the Divine Spirit is in the crystal, which has a form; it is in the plant, which has a form; in the animal, which has a form; it is in the human body, which has a form. Of all visible things which have form, a counterpart exists in the human soul as the concept of them.

Giordano Bruno carries this still further. The things of Nature are shadows of the Divine Ideas. “Note well”, he says, “Our concepts are not the shadows of things, they are the shadows of the Divine Thoughts.” Thus, if we have the things of Nature around us and thus have the shadow of the Divine Idea, our concepts will be again fructified thereby. While we are forming our concepts, the Divine Spirit is weaving His Ideas into the original, so that we come in direct contact with the stream which connects us with the Divine Idea.

When we study the theories of that Physical Science which is to-day called Monism, (unlike that of Giordano Bruno), what strikes us most is the fact that, if we would be consistent in speaking of these theories, we must say “they do not mention the Divine Thought”. But Giordano Bruno did not say that, he was a Spiritualist in the strictest sense of the word. What he has to gibe us out of the true inspiration of the Renaissance relates to the Monads. The assembling of the Monads at birth and their dissolution at death refers to the Divine Thoughts, which, in his conception of the world, flow into the world of ideas; and in his own words “The human thought is a reflection of the Divine.” If this is once thoroughly understood, we shall understand something of the spirituality of Giordano Bruno.

But for this, one thing is necessary: we must distinguish between the real and the unreal Giordano Bruno, between the Giordano Bruno who was so greatly misunderstood and the real man himself.

Giordano Bruno was the master-mind, who, by his unbounded enthusiasm, spread broadcast among his contemporaries the more intellectual achievements of Galileo in the realms of Scientific Thought. This is why every utterance of Giordano Bruno carried such weight. All the joy and enthusIasm of the Spirit of the age, all its delight in the discovery of the working and weaving of Nature in the physical world, was concentrated in the personality of Giordano Bruno. This flood of rejoicing was itself crystallized into a system of philosophy, for the Divine Spirit which dwells in all visible things most certainly illuminated the soul of Giordano Bruno, and he was conscious of it. Hence we can understand those utterances of Giordano Bruno, which we do well to remember; they sound as if Nature herself had a direct message for men in those days. We can only quote a few words here.

Consider how wonderful the following thought is, to which Giordano gives expression in contradistinction to the teaching of Aristotle on the same subject. “The Spirit of Divine intelligence is not beyond the visible world, it is not exterior to it, it is everywhere, wherever we may look. The Divine Intelligence does not dwell in any place exterior to the visible world. It does not dwell in that vague realm, of which we may say ‘something moves in circles wide’, it does mot dwell in a revolving, encircling realm, with which we can communicate only from a great distance. The Divine Spirit is the united principle of that vital force, which is in everything and in Nature herself.”

Such was the language which rang out at that time, such the convictions which sprang from the innermost depths of the soul of Giordano Bruno. The question now remains how best to reproduce this language to-day, so that it will speak directly to our hearts and minds. Hermann Brunnhofer, who called attention to this and had to submit to being called a too enthusiastic admirer of Giordano Bruno, put his words into fine verse:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
Cirounrotans et circumducens;
Dignuis enim illi debet esse
Internum prinzipuim Motus,
Quod est Natura propria, species propria, anima propria,
Quam habeat tot quot in illius
Gremio et corpore vivent
Noe generali Spiritu, corpore.

Anima, Natura animantia
Plantea, Lapides quae univena ut
Disimus proportionaliter cumastro
Euden composita ordine, etaedem
Contemperata complexion um, symmetus,
Secundum genus, quantumlebet secundum
Specierum numeros singula deslingunlui.

  1. Giordano Bruno says philosophically: It is worthy of God to be the inner moving principle of things.
  2. See also: Herman Brunnhofer, The Influence of Giordano Bruno upon Goethe—Goethe's Journals—Vol. VII, 1886.

Goethe translates this line for line in the poem beginning:

“What Kind of God were He who from the World
Remained aloof and the great Universe Around His finger twirled?” etc.

This is a poetical translation of the mind of Giordano Bruno through the instrumentality of the mind of Goethe. It was not merely that Goethe wrote these verses with Giordano Bruno's works lying beside him. Some other influence must have been at work than that which would have made Goethe merely recast the words of Giordano Bruno in a poetical form. We see in this how the spirit of Giordano Bruno becomes fully alive in Goethe. Nevertheless it is not only a couple of centuries which have to be bridged when we pass from the days of Galileo and Giordano Bruno to Goethe. We must realise that what in the case of Giordano Bruno had its origin in the first great enthusiastic mood from which arose the philosophic cult of Nature, became in Goethe a mood leading him with complete devotion from one thing to another and finally causing him to bring back into Nature the God whose existence man now learned to feel in Nature herself. In Goethe the mood of Giordano Bruno had become his own. It was born in him, as it were. It was already present in him when, at the age of seven, he took the music desk belonging to his father and arranged on it mineral ores from his father's collection, so as to have some products of Nature herself—for the same purpose he took plants from his father's herbarium. He then placed a little stick of incense on the top of the heap and waited, burning glass in hand, for the Sun to rise, so that he might enkindle the incense from its rays and thus consummate a sacrifice culled from the forces of Nature to the God who lives in the plants and minerals and to whom he had erected an altar.

Thus did Giordano Bruno live in Goethe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, but in such a way that what lived as the innermost attitude of his soul, Goethe carried into every detail of Nature.

It was this mental attitude which made it impossible to Goethe to understand how the Scientific investigators of that day could attach such importance to the outward signs which differentiate men from animals. The physical Scientists of the eighteenth century maintained that man did not possess the same number of small bones in the upper part of the jaw bone as the animals—viz. the inter-maxillary bones—which contain the sheath of the upper teeth. Animals possess these and this is where men differ from animals. Goethe could not understand this highly materialistic idea. This indeed could not be the God who was the inner vital principle of Nature. The God of whom Giordano Bruno spoke as “circumroians et circumducens.” He must be a God who worked outside Nature, a God who, first of all, made the animals, then made man and then, in order to differentiate man from beast, arranged that animals should have the inter-maxillary bones, while these should be wanting in man.

Goethe was the great investigator of Nature, who endeavoured to show that that which existed in Nature as form was capable of rising higher, and that it is not in anything external, such as the inter-maxillary bones, that the difference between the human and the animal world is to be found, but that something exists in man which, though it may be clothed with tones and muscles like those of the animals, constitutes the higher mind of humanity. This is only another proof of the magnitude of Goethe's genius. He not only discovered traces of the inter-maxillary bone and proved that it had only disappeared in man because it was a subordinate bone, but he also shows that the vertebrae may be distended if the activity of the mind contained in the brain finds this to be necessary. A long time ago, when I was studying the Scientific writings of Goethe, in order to understand his assertion that the bones of the skull are transposed vertebrae, the latter having been extended into the cavities of the skull, I came to the inevitable conclusion that Goethe must have conceived the idea that the brain itself was transposed spinal marrow and that this change had been wrought by the mind. That not only the covering tissue, but that the brain itself had been moved up from the vertebrae and spinal marrow to a higher level. It was a wonderful moment im my life when I discovered that, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Goethe had written in pencil on a slip of paper “The brain is in reality only a piece of transposed spinal marrow.” Professor Bardeleben relates this in his article in the Weimar Year-Book on “Goethe as Scientific Investigator.”

Thus we see the mood which first appeared in Giordano Bruno applied by Goethe to the different parts of living beings. We see how Goethe applied the ideas of Giordano Bruno—to whom, as we have seen, he approaches so closely, even in his choice of words—in a practical way to everything in natural scientific thought.

This is why Goethe laid such stress upon finding in the whole plant world the metamorphosis of the primal archetypal plant (Urpflanze). Added to the great achievements of Goethe as artist were his noteworthy achievements as a scientific investigator of Nature. In a certain sense, the spirit which had come down from the clairvoyant stages of perception to a material form of vision was incorporated in Goethe, as a personality who saw the Divine in all his observations of Nature, even in the individual plants. The expression “Urpflanze”, Primal Archetypal plant. What did Goethe mean by that? He meant to indicate the Spiritual essence in the various species of Plants. With regard to this, the conversation between Schiller and Goethe at Jena, after a meeting of the Botanical Society, which they had both attended, is important. When they had left the assembly, Schiller said:—“What they said about plants was very unsatisfying.” Goethe replied:—“It might have been expressed differently. We ought to be able to see, not only those parts of the plant which we hold in our hands, but also their Spiritual relationship.” Then he took a piece of paper and drew the structure of a plant in a few strokes. He showed to Schiller that the type is not only present in the Lily, the Dandelion or the Ranunculus, but in all plants. Then Schiller, who could not understand the structure of the primal plant) said:—“That is no reality, it is nothing but an idea.” Goethe was very puzzled and said:—“It would gratify me very much to think that I could have ideas without knowing it and even see them with my physical eyes.” For Goethe could perceive the Spiritual element which permeates all plants. He saw it so clearly that he could even draw it. The same applies to the primal archetypal animal in all animals.

Thus Goethe pursued the God who does not work from without the material world, but who lives and operates within all visible things. Thus he followed the Divine Spirit which moves invisibly in everything, working in a concrete way from plant to plant, through leaf, blossom and fruit. It works in the same way from one animal to another, and also from one bone to another, from one animal form to another. It is interesting to note that Goethe was not understood by the men of his own time, not even by Schiller. But little by little the spirit of Goethe will take root even in the thought of the Natural Scientists. It will be acknowledged that Goethe's ideas were a stage higher than those of Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno spoke of a God, a pantheistic God, who is to be found everywhere, in plants and in animals. But Goethe, although he too sought the great spirit who does not operate from without, said further:—We must not only seek for Him in general; we must study the detailed phenomena and look for the Spirit in the separate things. For it lives in one way in plants, in another in mineral; one way in this bone and another way in that.

The Spirit is in perpetual action; it forms the various parts of matter, matter follows the moving spirit. This can be expressed as one universal spirit, as was done by Giordano Bruno. It can also be sought with deep devotion in every single detail, as Goethe did. In this way, man draws nearer and nearer to the Spirit at work in the outspread carpet of Nature, by degrees will that Spirit reveal itself.

If we study the successive stages of progress represented by Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Goethe, and search for the root principle which directed such great minds, we shall learn by degrees to adhere to the root principle which directed them, and not to be led away by the will-of-the-wisp of superficial criticism. For even the greatest minds do not escape criticism. Let us take Galileo with his great conception of the Divine, which embraced the whole of Creation in the span of one moment, and was unfettered by space or time. When we consider this, the question is bound to arise:—“What do the men of to-day know about the real significance of Galileo?” As a rule, they know little more about him than the one incident which is assuredly not true, that he said, as is supposed, “It moves, nevertheless.” A fine saying, truly, but, as can be seen from the investigations of the Italian scholar, Angells de Gubernatis, it cannot be true. And how often do we not hear that the last words of Goethe were:—“More light”, which is exactly what he never did say.

Hence we see that these great minds must be studied in the light which Spiritual Science is able to throw upon them, We cannot, as we are so fond of doing, judge of the past with our own, individual, unaided, modern mind.

These three master-minds form a wonderful, harmonious triad, which marks the beginning of our modern age; in Galileo and in Giordano Bruno we see the dawn, in Goethe we see the Sun itself, which show how the Spirit of the modern age already taught him to see that the smallest atom of matter cannot exist without Spirit behind it, which brings one atom in touch with another.

I would call to your remembrance an incident which Goethe relates himself. Many years after the death of Schiller, it was decided to transfer his remains from their grave to the Princes Mausoleum. There was some difficulty in deciding which were really the bones of Schiller. Goethe was attracted by a skull, which he saw must have belonged to a man of the type of the genius of Schiller; on closer inspection, he decided that this must be Schiller's skull, as he recognised it from the strongly marked peculiarity in the shape of the skull. This skull was accordingly placed in the Princes Mausoleum. Here he recognised the principle, which was also recognised by Galileo, that the spirit (or genius) must be sought for humbly and mathematically.

The ancient church lamp still hangs in the cathedral at Pisa, swinging backwards and forwards before countless souls. But Galileo had only sat before it once, when he measured the beating of his pulse by the regular swinging of the lamp and thus discovered the laws of balance, which are of such vast importance to-day. This was a Divine Inspiration. There are many such cases. At the grave of Schiller, Goethe was inspired with the thought which lived in the philosophic inspiration of Giordano Bruno. “Spirit is inseparable from matter. It is everywhere. Not, however, tossing it wildly about and driving it round, but, as Spirit which exists in the minutest atom.” This conception of the Spiritual, which existed in Giordano Bruno, was re-born in Goethe's soul, as he held the skull of Schiller in his hand, and, as water congealed into ice, so was the Spirit of Schiller made manifest to him in the skull of Schiller.

Goethe's entire spiritual standpoint lies before us when we study the poem which he wrote after having looked on Schiller's skull. Especially those lines, which are so often misinterpreted, and which we can only understand when we realise that in the situation which we have described above, Goethe saw the individuality of Schiller in plastic form before him, as if frozen.

Then he cries, as he must do, forced thereto by the similarity of the Spirit which united Giordano Bruno and Goethe:

What can a man wrest more from life
Than that Nature, all-divine, reveal to him
How that she causeth the firm and formed to melt into Spirit,
And how what is born of the Spirit she holdeth fast in form.

Galilei, Giordano Bruno und Goethe

Es ist eine weite Spanne Zeit, die übersprungen werden muß, wenn der geistige Blick sich von jener großen Persönlichkeit, von dem Zarathustra oder Zoroaster, welcher den Gegenstand des letzten Vortrages dieses Zyklus bildete, wenden soll bis zu jenen drei großen Persönlichkeiten, welche heute unseren Betrachtungen zugrunde liegen sollen. Von dem, was Jahrtausende vor unserer christlichen Zeitrechnung liegt und was uns nur erklärlich sein konnte dadurch, daß wir für jene Zeit ganz andere Seelenverfassungen bei den Menschen voraussetzten, gehen wir herauf bis in diejenige Zeit des sechzehnten, siebzehnten Jahrhunderts unserer Zeitrechnung, in welcher derjenige Geist, welcher bis in die Gegenwart herein in allen nach vorwärts sich bewegenden Kulturströmungen der Menschheit tätig und regsam ist, zuerst aufgeleuchtet ist. Zeigen soll sich uns dann, wie dieser Geist, der im sechzehnten, siebzehnten Jahrhundert so gewaltig aufleuchtet in Persönlichkeiten wie Giordano Bruno und Galilei, dann in einer gewissen Weise eine umfassende Ausgestaltung in einer Persönlichkeit gefunden hat, die uns so nahesteht wie diejenige Goethes. Galilei und Giordano Bruno sind die beiden Namen, die wir nennen müssen, wenn wir des Anfangs derjenigen Zeitepoche in unserer Menschheitsentwickelung gedenken müssen, in welcher die Naturwissenschaften an demselben Wendepunkte standen, an dem heute die Geisteswissenschaft steht. Was damals zuerst geradezu in einer gewaltigen Weise für das naturwissenschaftliche Denken getan worden ist, das muß in einer gewissen Weise im Laufe der nächsten Zeiten für das geisteswissenschaftliche Denken geschehen. Das wird uns insbesondere naheliegen, wenn wir — um im vollen Sinne des Wortes Galilei und Giordano Bruno zu verstehen — den Blick werfen auf die ganze Art und Weise des Denkens und Fühlens der Menschheit in der Zeit, in welche Galilei und Giordano Bruno um die Wende des sechzehnten, siebzehnten Jahrhunderts hineingestellt waren.

Da müssen wir allerdings auf eine zunächst ganz eigenartige Vertretung dessen zurückblicken, was man für die vorangehenden Jahrhunderte — etwa für die Zeit vom elften bis zum fünfzehnten Jahrhundert — im weitesten Umfange als Wissenschaft bezeichnete. Man muß sich klarmachen, daß für diese Jahrhunderte die Popularisierung, die allgemeine Bekanntmachung des Wissenschaftlichen eine ganz andere Gestalt als später in unserer Zeit haben mußte. Denn wir sprechen da von denjenigen Jahrhunderten, in denen es noch keinen Buchdruck gab, in denen die weitaus größte Anzahl der Menschen darauf angewiesen war, nur das als geistiges Leben entgegenzunehmen, was in Kirchen, Schulen oder dergleichen durch das mündliche Wort gebracht wurde. Daher ist es gerade für jene Zeit so bedeutsam, daß man sich ein Bild davon macht, wie der gelehrte, wissenschaftliche Betrieb war. In den Zeiten, die dem Zeitalter des Galilei und Giordano Bruno vorangegangen sind, kann ein wissenschaftlicher Betrieb dem Menschen von heute nur schwer verständlich sein; man kann ihn nur verstehen, wenn man sich in etwas ganz anderes hineinfinden kann, als was heute gang und gäbe ist. Damals hätte man in jeden Hörsaal, überall wo Wissenschaft betrieben worden ist — sagen wir Naturwissenschaft dieses oder jenes Gebietes, auch Medizin und so weiter —, gehen können und man würde gehört haben, daß der, welcher etwas aus der Wissenschaft der damaligen Zeit vortragen wollte, nicht etwa auf das, was man in der damaligen Zeit in diesem oder jenem Institute beobachtert hatte, wie dieses heute geschieht, wo die wissenschaftlichen Methoden beachtet werden, ganz und gar sich stellte, sondern auf etwas, was allem Vorgetragenen, allem Betriebe des Wissenschaftlichen zugrunde lag in den alten Schriften des allerdings für seine Zeit unendlich bedeutsamen Aristoteles. Wie ein geistiger Riese ragt dieser Aristoteles empor, wenn man den Fortschritt der Menschheit geschichtlich betrachtet. Was er für seine Zeit geleistet hat, ist ein unendlich Bedeutsames. Was uns aber jetzt interessiert, ist, daß die Bücher des Aristoteles oft gar nicht in der Form, wie sie in der Ursprache vorhanden waren, gelesen wurden, sondern es wurde überall zugrunde gelegt, wie die Überlieferung war: das gab den Ton an. Was man auch vortrug: über das, was Prinzip, Grundsatz war, was überhaupt irgendwie für eine Wahrheit in Betracht kam, darüber sagte man: Aristoteles hat über diesen Gegenstand so und so gedacht. So steht es im Aristoteles! — Während der heutige Forscher oder derjenige, der irgendwie die Wissenschaft selbst nur vorträgt oder sogar nur in populärem Stile vorträgt, sich darauf beruft, daß dieses oder jenes da oder dort beobachtet worden ist, berief man sich in den Jahrhunderten von Giordano Bruno und Galilei darauf, daß vor so und so viel Jahrhunderten der tonangebende Aristoteles diese oder jene Behauptung über diesen oder jenen Gegenstand gemacht hat. Geradeso wie man sich heute in bezug auf das Geistige auf die religiösen Urkunden und ihre Überlieferung beruft und nicht auf die unmittelbare Beobachtung geht, so berief man sich damals in den Wissenschaften nicht auf die Natur und ihre Beobachtung, sondern auf das Überlieferte, auf Aristoteles.

Es ist außerordentlich interessant, sich selbst noch in eine solche Universitäts-Vorlesung zu vertiefen, um zu sehen, wie die Mediziner überall bei ihren Kollegs die Theorien des Aristoteles zugrunde legten. Aristoteles aber war ein geistiger Riese. Und wenn man auch sagen müßte, daß selbst eine solche geistige Persönlichkeit nach Jahrhunderten nicht mehr unverändert vorgetragen werden sollte, so kann man auf der andern Seite doch wieder mit Recht denken: da Aristoteles so Bedeutsames und Großartiges geleistet hat, so müßten die Menschen doch, wenn sie auch nichts Neues gelernt hätten, wenn man ihnen immer wieder den jahrtausendealten Aristoteles vorgebracht hat, etwas Bedeutsames in ihre Köpfe hineinbekommen haben, denn es müßte bedeutend und nützlich gewesen sein, die tief einleuchtenden Lehren und Theorien des Aristoteles zu empfangen. Das war aber dennoch nicht der Fall, und zwar deshalb nicht, weil die, welche diese Lehren damals vortrugen und sie nach dem Aristoteles überall verkündigten, in der Regel nichts von Aristoteles verstanden, weil es im Grunde genommen eine unglaublich mißverstandene Lehre war, die da vorgetragen und überall vor Galilei und Giordano Bruno als «aristotelisch» gelehrt wurde. Ich will heute vom Standpunkt der Geisteswissenschaft nur das eine hervorheben, das zeigen soll, wie damals Galilei und Giordano Bruno sich in das geistige Leben ihrer Zeit hineinstellen mußten. Ich habe die Sache, die keine Anekdote ist sondern eine Wahrheit, oft erwähnt, will daher jetzt nur noch einmal darauf aufmerksam machen.

Da war einer der vielen Gelehrten, die auf Aristoteles schworen, der selbst mit Galilei befreundet war. Galilei war — wie auch Giordano Bruno — ein Gegner der Aristoteliker, nicht des Aristoteles, und zwar aus gutem Grunde. Galilei wies darauf hin, daß man sich an das große Buch der Natur, das zum Menschen spreche, selber wenden und nicht nur aus den Büchern des Aristoteles entnehmen sollte, was der Geist in der Natur bedeutet. Nun hatten die Aristoteliker eine merkwürdige Lehre damals vertreten: daß die Nerven, das ganze Nervensystem des Menschen vom Herzen ausginge, und daß vom Herzen aus sich die Nerven bis zum Gehirn hinauf und durch den ganzen Leib verbreiteten. Das — sagte man — habe Aristoteles gelehrt, und das sei wahr! Galilei, der nicht auf alte Bücher und alte Überlieferungen, sondern auf das hinweisen wollte, was man sieht, wenn man den menschlichen Leib untersucht, wies darauf hin, daß die Nerven vom Gehirn ausgingen, und daß die hauptsächlichsten Nerven vom Gehirn aus ihren Ursprung nehmen. Nun sagte dies Galilei seinem Freunde, er solle sich überzeugen, wie die Nerven vom Gehirn ausgingen. Ja, ich will es schon sehen, sagte der Betreffende und ließ es sich zeigen am menschlichen Leibe. Da war dieser Gelehrte, der glaubte, ein guter Aristoteliker zu sein, höchst erstaunt und meinte zu Galilei: Es schaut fast so aus, als wenn die Nerven vom Gehirn ausgingen, aber Aristoteles sagt doch, daß die Nerven vom Herzen ausgehen, und wenn hier nun ein Widerspruch zustande kommt, so glaube ich dem Aristoteles und nicht der Natur!

Das waren die Ausdrücke, die Galilei damals zu hören bekam. Aristoteles wurde zu allem herbeigezogen, was nur irgendwie Wissenschaft sein sollte. So wollte auch einmal ein kirchlich gesinnter Gelehrter über die Unsterblichkeitsfrage schreiben. Wie schrieb man damals? Man nahm, was man vertreten wollte, aus der Kirchenlehre, und nahm das dazu, was man glaubte, aus dem Aristoteles anführen zu können, um die betreffende Frage so oder so beweisen zu können, wie man sie beweisen wollte. Da hatte der betreffende Mann, der innerhalb des Verbandes der Geistlichkeit stand, allerlei Stellen in der Absicht herangezogen, über die Unsterblichkeitsfrage das zusammenzubringen, was die rechte Meinung des Aristoteles sei. Das ist nun wieder eine Wahrheit: da hat — weil die Geistlichen ihre Bücher den Oberen vorlegen mußten — dieser Obere dem Betreffenden gesagt: Es ist gefährlich, man wird es nicht approbieren können, denn die Auszüge aus dem Aristoteles könnten auch das Gegenteil beweisen. — Da schrieb der Verfasser zurück: Wenn es nur darauf ankäme, noch deutlicher zu beweisen, daß Aristoteles etwas gemeint habe, was annehmbar sei, dann würde er es durch ein anderes Zitat belegen. Denn das könnte man auch machen! — Kurz, es wurde Aristoteles in jeder Weise gebraucht und mißbraucht.

Von diesem ausgehend wollen wir sehen, wie Aristoteles in der Zeit vor Giordano Bruno und Galilei mißverstanden worden ist, und wollen dazu gerade dieses Beispiel nehmen von dem Ausgang der Nerven vom Herzen. Was dahintersteckt, versteht man nur, wenn man weiß, daß Aristoteles, der am Ausgang der alten griechischen Kultur stand, damit auch zugleich am Ausgange derjenigen Zeit stand, in welcher das alte hellseherische Bewußtsein geherrscht hat. Und indem Aristoteles in seine Vorzeit hinaufsah, hatte er eine Wissenschaft überliefert, die herausgeboren war aus einem hellseherischen Bewußtsein, welches hinter die sinnliche Welt in die geistige Welt hineinschaute. Dieses Bewußtsein hatte die alten Wissenschaften zustande gebracht. Und das, was uralte Wissenschaft war, was auch durch das Griechentum als uralte Wissenschaft heraufgelangt war, hatte Aristoteles, der selbst nicht mehr in der Lage war, ein solches hellseherisches Bewußtsein zu entwickeln, der nur ein intellektuelles Bewußtsein hatte, als ein Letzter registriert. Darüber sollte man nachdenken. Denn nicht umsonst ist Aristoteles der Begründer der Logik in der Geschichte! Das ist er, weil das intellektuelle, das beweisende Denken das maßgebende wurde. Aristoteles war also der, welcher uralte Lehren aufnahm und sie in ein logisches System in seinen Schriften brachte, so daß wir manches bei ihm nur verstehen, wenn wir wissen, was damit eigentlich gemeint ist. Und wenn Aristoteles von Nerven spricht, müssen wir dieses Wort bei ihm nicht so nehmen, wie es unser Zeitalter nimmt, auch nicht so, wie es das Zeitalter des Galilei und Giordano Bruno nahm, das ja dem unsrigen schon ganz verwandt ist, sondern wir müssen folgendes wissen. Indem Aristoteles von dem Nervenverlauf spricht, hat er dasjenige im Auge, was wir heute wiederum kennen als das nächste an den physischen Leib des Menschen sich anschließende übersinnliche Glied der Menschennatur: als den übersinnlichen Ätherleib des Menschen. Das ist etwas, was mit dem vorrückenden Menschenbewußtsein sich allmählich verloren hat aus dem, was der Mensch sehen kann. Aristoteles sah es auch nicht mehr, aber er übernahm diese Anschauung von den Zeiten, da das hellseherische Bewußtsein nicht nur den physischen Leib, sondern auch die ätherische Aura, den Ätherleib gesehen hat, der der eigentliche Aufbauer und Kraftträger des physischen Leibes ist. Aus den Zeiten, da man den Ätherleib so sah wie jetzt das Auge die Farben, nahm Aristoteles seine Lehre. Und wenn man nicht auf den physischen Leib, sondern auf den Ätherleib blickt, dann ist in der Tat der Ausgangspunkt für gewisse Strömungen, die jetzt Aristoteles dem zugrunde legte, was man etwa gewöhnlich hinter dem Ausdruck «Nerv» sucht, nicht das Gehirn, sondern die Herzgegend. So meinte Aristoteles nicht unsere heutigen Nerven, sondern durchaus übersinnliche Strömungen, übersinnliche Kräfte, die vom Herzen ausgehen, zum Gehirn hingehen und nach den verschiedenen Richtungen des menschlichen Leibes verfließen. Das sind Dinge, die erst wieder die Geisteswissenschaft durch die Erkenntnis der übersinnlichen Teile und Glieder der Menschennatur begreiflich machen kann.

Nun hatte man, weil die Menschen ja nicht in der Lage waren, übersinnlich zu sehen, auch schon in den Zeiten, die dem Zeitalter des Giordano Bruno und Galilei vorangegangen waren, keine Ahnung mehr davon, daß Aristoteles die Ätherströmungen gemeint hat; man glaubte, er meinte die physischen Nerven, und behauptete deshalb: Aristoteles hat gesagt, die physischen Nerven gehen vom Herzen aus. Das meinten die Aristoteliker. Das konnten aber die, welche wußten, was in dem Buche der Natur steht, den Aristotelikern nicht zugeben. Daher der große Streit zwischen Galilei, Giordano Bruno und. den Aristotelikern, da den richtigen Aristoteles niemand verstand — natürlich auch nicht Galilei und Giordano Bruno, die sich keine Mühe gaben, in den ursprünglichen Aristoteles einzudringen. Sie waren aber daher die großen Kulturträger für ihr Zeitalter und wiesen von der Buchgelehrsamkeit auf das große Buch der Natur hin, der Natur, die vor allen ausgebreitet ist.

Ein Mann — ich habe auch das schon einmal erwähnt —, den ich als Philosophen sehr schätze, der im Jahre 1894 Rektor der Wiener Universität war und eine Rektoratsrede über Galilei hielt, Laurenz Müllner, machte in dieser Rede darauf aufmerksam, daß Galilei in seiner umfassenden Größe mit seinem Verstande die großen Gesetze der Mechanik, der Raumeswirkungen durchschaut hat, die uns am meisten auffallen und zu unserem Herzen sprechen, wenn wir zum Beispiel der Peterskirche in Rom ansichtig werden. Wenn dieser mächtige Bau auf uns wirkt, dann erfährt tatsächlich jeder etwas, was wir verstehen können. Ich will es durch eine kleine Tatsache, die immerhin bezeichnend dafür ist, charakterisieren.

Es fuhren einmal der Wiener Feuilletonist Speidel und der Bildhauer Natter in die Gegend von Rom. Als sie in die Nähe von Rom kamen, da hörte Speidel eine ganz merkwürdige Bemerkung von Natter, der in einer gewissen Weise ein genialer Geist war. Plötzlich sprang Natter nämlich auf, und der Freund wußte gar nicht, was eigentlich mit ihm los war, er hörte nur die Worte: «Mir wird angst!» Er kam erst später darauf, weil Natter schwieg, daß dieser ganz von ferne den Turm der Peterskirche mit der Kuppel gesehen hatte.

So etwas wie ein Staunen über die RaumeskräfteverteiJung, die da aus der Genialität des Michelangelo entsprungen ist, kann jeden überfallen, der diesen eigentümlichen Bau sieht. Da machte denn Laurenz Müllner auf die Tatsache aufmerksam, daß die Menschheit durch Galilei, diesen großen Denker, die Möglichkeit erhalten hat, mathematisch-mechanisch solche Raumesverteilungen zu denken, wie sie uns in dem schönen Gebilde der Kuppel der Peterskirche zu Rom entgegentreten. Gleichzeitig aber muß man betonen, daß fast in der Todesstunde des Michelangelo, des Erbauers der Peterskirche, Galilei geboren worden ist, der die mechanischen Gesetze gefunden hat. Das heißt: Es entsprang aus den Geisteskräften des Michelangelo diejenige Verteilung der Raumeskräfte, die der Menschheit für den Intellekt erst später zugänglich wurde.

An diesem Beispiel kann man begreifen, daß das, was man verstandesmäßiges, intellektuelles Wissen nennen kann, viel später kommen kann als das Zusammenstellen dieser Dinge in dem Raum. Wird so etwas einmal wirklich denkerisch betrachtet, dann werden es die Menschen eher für möglich halten, daß das Bewußtsein der Menschen eine Änderung erfahren hat: daß die Menschen früher ein gewisses Hellsehen hatten und daß die Art des Denkens durch den Intellekt gar nicht so weit zurückgeht, sondern daß durch ganz gewisse geschichtliche Notwendigkeiten diese Art des Denkens erst in der Zeit des fünfzehnten, sechzehnten, siebzehnten Jahrhunderts entstehen konnte. Und Geister wie Galilei und Giordano Bruno bedeuten die ersten Tonangeber dessen, was dann kommen sollte. Daher ihre starke Opposition gegen die Aristoteliker und namentlich gegen die, welche den Aristoteles, der als ein Ausdruck alter Wissenschaft genommen werden könnte, erst falsch auslegten und ihn dann so auf die Natur anwandten. Damit haben wir zugleich die Weltstellung Galileis bezeichnet. Oh, Galilei war im höchsten Sinne des Wortes der, welcher zuerst in die Menschheit jene Art strengen naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens hineinstellte, man möchte sagen, jene Art von Verhältnis der Naturwissenschaft zur Mathematik, wie sie für die ganze folgende Zeit bis in unsere Zeit herein tonangebend geworden ist. Was ist das Eigentümliche an Galilei? Galilei — ganz in dieser Beziehung ein Kind seiner Zeit — sagte sich mit einem kühnen Mut zuerst folgendes. Ich versichere Sie, mit solchen Worten kann man die Empfindung, die Galilei hatte, umschreiben, denn um die ganze Seele, die ganze Verfassung des Geistes Galileis zu begreifen, muß man das, was er empfand, etwa so beschreiben: Da stehen wir als Menschen auf der Erde. Es breitet sich vor uns die Natur aus mit allem, was sie unseren Sinnen, unserem Verstande zu geben vermag, der an das Instrument des Gehirns gebunden ist. Durch die Natur — so sagt etwa Galilei an unzähligen Stellen seiner Schriften — durch die Natur spricht ein Göttlich-Geistiges. Wir Menschen schauen mit unseren Augen die Natur an und betrachten sie mit den anderen Sinnen. Was da unsere Augen wahrnehmen, was durch unsere Sinne empfunden wird, das ist aber hineingedacht in die Natur durch göttlich-geistige Wesenheiten. Zuerst leben die Gedanken der geistig-göttJichen Wesenheiten, dann kommen — herausspringend aus den Gedanken der göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten — die sinnlichen Dinge der Natur wie die Offenbarungen der Gottesgedanken, und dann kommt unser Wahrnehmungsvermögen, vor allen Dingen unser Verstand, der an unser Gehirn gebunden ist. Dann stehen wir da, um zu entziffern, wie aus den Buchstaben ein Buch wird und dasjenige zustande kommt, was der Autor gemeint hat, das heißt, was die göttlichen Gedanken in der Natur zum Ausdruck brachten.

Galilei stand durchaus auch auf dem Standpunkt, auf dem alle großen Geister der Weltentwickelung gestanden haben, daß in den Naturerscheinungen, in den Naturtatsachen etwas wie Buchstaben gegeben ist, die den Geist der göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten zum Ausdruck bringen. Der menschliche Geist ist dann dazu da, um zu lesen, was die göttlich-geistigen Wesenheiten in die Formen der Mineralien, in den Verlauf der Naturerscheinungen, selbst in den Verlauf der Sternbewegungen hineingeschrieben haben. Die menschliche Natur ist dazu da, zu lesen, was der göttliche Geist gedacht hat. Nur unterscheidet sich der göttliche Geist von dem menschlichen im Sinne Galileis dadurch, daß für den göttlichen Geist alles, was es gibt zum Denken, auf einmal unbegrenzt von Raum und Zeit in einem Augenblicke ausgedacht ist.

Nehmen wir das nur für ein Gebiet — für das Gebiet der Mathematik —, so werden wir schon sehen, wie eigenartig dieser Gedanke war. Denken Sie sich, wenn jetzt einer die ganze Mathematik, so weit sie schon von Menschen studiert ist, gebraucht, so muß er sich lange quälen, bis er sie beherrscht. Diejenigen, die hier sitzen, werden wissen, wie sehr die Auffassung mathematischer Gedanken durch den Menschen von der Zeit abhängig ist. Nun dachte Galilei sich: Was der Mensch im Laufe langer Zeiten erfaßt, das ist für den göttlichen Gedanken in einem Augenblicke da, ist nicht begrenzt von Raum und Zeit. Der menschliche Geist — dachte er sich — muß vor allen Dingen nicht glauben, daß er mit seinem Verstande, der an Raum und Zeit gebunden ist, den göttlichen Geist schnell erfassen kann, er muß versuchen, Schritt für Schritt zu beobachten, lichtvoll die einzelnen Erscheinungen zu beobachten. Er muß nicht glauben, daß man die einzelnen Erscheinungen überfliegen kann, daß man überspringen kann, was Gott als Grund der Erscheinungen vorgedacht hat. Galilei sagte sich: Es ist übel bestellt mit den Denkern, die nicht durch strenge Beobachtung dessen, was vor unserem Verstande in der Natur ausgebreitet ist, zur Wahrheit kommen wollen, sondern die durch ihre Spekulation, indem sie die einzelnen Dinge überfliegen, schnell zur Wahrheit kommen wollen. — Aber Galilei sagte das aus anderen Gründen, als es die sind, aus denen man dies heute oft sagt. Denn nicht deshalb wollte Galilei den menschlichen Geist auf die Beobachtungen beschränken, weil er geleugnet hätte, daß der große Geist mit den « Vorgedanken» dahintersteht, sondern weil ihm dieser göttliche Geist so groß und gewaltig und erhaben dadurch erschien, daß alles, was überhaupt an «Vorgedanken» da ist, in einem Augenblicke vorhanden ist, weil der menschliche Geist eine unendliche Zeit zur liebevollen Entzifferung der Buchstaben braucht, um nach und nach hinter die einzelnen Gedanken zu kommen. Aus Demut, wie tief der menschliche Verstand unter dem göttlichen‘ Verstande steht, ermahnte Galilei seine Zeitgenossen: Ihr könnt nicht mehr hinter die Dinge schauen, — nicht, weil die Menschen es überhaupt nicht könnten, sondern weil die Zeit dafür abgelaufen ist. Beobachtung, Erfahrung und Selbstdenken war es, was Galilei als das Maßgebende für seine Zeitgenossen hinstellte. Er konnte das, weil in gewissem Sinne sein Geist ganz mathematisch geordnet war, weil er ein so richtig mathematisches Denken hatte. Es ist ganz wunderbar, wenn wir zum Beispiel vernehmen, wie Galilei hört, daß in Holland etwas entdeckt ist wie die Fernrohre, durch die man in die fernsten Himmelsräume hinaussehen kann. Man muß bedenken, damals gab es keine Zeitungen. Galilei hörte von Reisenden erzählen, daß in Holland etwas wie Fernrohre entdeckt worden ist. Da kam er von selbst darauf, als er so etwas hörte — es ließ ihm keine Ruhe —, und er erfand selbständig ein Fernrohr. Da war es das Fernrohr, mit dem Galilei seine großen Entdeckungen machte, die sich in das hineinstellten, was seit kurzem durch das kopernikanische Weltsystem zustande gekommen war. Um diese Zeit richtig zu verstehen, muß man zwei Dinge zusammendenken: das eine war, daß die Menschen nichts mehr von der alten übersinnlichen Wissenschaft verstanden und daß Galilei ein Pfadfinder für die neue Wissenschaft war. Und das zweite war, daß es in bezug auf die Sterne ein Bedeutsames war, daß Kopernikus unmittelbar vorher dem Weltbilde ein neues Antlitz gegeben hatte durch das äußere Denken über die Bewegungen der Planeten um die Sonne. Man muß sich nur einmal in die Lage der damaligen Menschen und in die Gemüter derjenigen versetzen, die da seit Jahrtausenden als Menschen geglaubt haben: Hier - mit dieser Erde — stehen wir fest im Raum! Und jetzt war dieses Denken geradezu auf den Kopf gestellt: die Erde mit riesiger Geschwindigkeit sich um die Sonne herum bewegend! Das war ein Gedanke, der buchstäblich den Leuten den Boden unter den Füßen wegzog. Man darf sich gar nicht über den gewaltigen Eindruck wundern, den ein solcher Gedanke machte, der in der Tat bei allen — ob sie Gegner waren oder ihm zustimmten — von tiefster Wirkung war. Für Geister wie Galilei war der Grund, warum Kopernikus zu dieser Anschauung gekommen war, ganz besonders ausschlaggebend. Vergegenwärtigen wir uns, warum Kopernikus besonders zu dieser Anschauung von der Bewegung der Planeten um die Sonne gekommen war.

Es herrschte bis dahin ein Weltsystem, das man auch nicht verstanden hatte, weil es eigentlich geistig gemeint war. So, wie man es verstand, war es ein vollständig unmöglicher Gedanke: dieses Ptolemäische Weltsystem. Denn man mußte sich vorstellen, daß die Planeten ganz komplizierte Bewegungen beschrieben, Kreise und noch einmal Kreise in den Kreisen. Es war besonders das ungeheuer Komplizierte der Vorstellungen, denen man sich hingeben mußte. Das war es, was solchen Geistern auch nicht recht zu Gemüte wollte. Kopernikus hat im Grunde genommen auch keine neue astronomische Entdeckung gemacht. Er hat sich nur gesagt: Nehmen wir den einfachsten Gedanken, wie wir die Bewegungen erklären können! — Er hat das ganze Weltbild in die Einfachheit dieses Gedankens gestellt. Es war etwas Großartiges, wenn in die Mitte gelegt wurde die Sonne, und in Kreisen sich herum bewegten die Planeten, oder, wie später Kepler nachgewiesen hat, in Ellipsen. Die ganze Anschauung grandios vereinfacht! Das war es, was besonders auch auf Galilei überzeugend wirkte. Denn er betonte immer: Es ist dem menschlichen Verstande angemessen, die Wahrheit in der Einfachheit anzuerkennen. Nicht das Komplizierte, sondern die Einfachheit ist das Schöne, — und das Wahre ist schön!

Wegen der Schönheit und der Schönheit in der Einfachheit nahm vielfach die damalige Zeit den Gedanken des kopernikanischen Weltsystems an. Und Galilei fand besonders das, was er an Einfachheit und an Schönheit in dem Kopernikus suchte. Jetzt stand er da, sah, was kaum einmal die Leute glauben wollten: sah die Jupiter-Monde! Ja, das Auge des Galilei sah zuerst die Jupiter-Monde, die den Jupiter umkreisen wie die Planeten die Sonne — ein kleines Sonnensystem: der Jupiter mit seinen Monden wie die Sonne mit den Planeten. Das war geeignet, ein Weltsystem zu bestätigen, das ganz auf den Gedanken der Sinneswelt gebaut war. So war es Galilei, der besonders den Gedanken des Kopernikus im kleinen für die Sinneswelt schaute. Dadurch wurde er besonders ein Pfadfinder der neueren Wissenschaft. So war er es, der zuerst eine Ahnung davon hatte, daß es Gebirge auf dem Monde, daß es Sonnenflecken gibt, und daß das, was als ein Nebelstreifen über die Sterne hingeht, eine ausgesäte Sternenwelt ist. Kurz, alles das kam, was man nennen kann: eine in der Sinneswelt ausgedrückte, «informierte» Schrift der Gottesweisheit. Das war es, was so besonders auf Galilei wirkte. Die Zeit, die ganz aufgehen wollte in dem Anschauen der Sinneswelt, hatte für Galilei und seinen auf die Mathematik gebauten Geist etwas ganz Besonderes. Und so wurde Galilei der, der gewissermaßen den ersten Impuls für die Menschheit gab, zu sagen: Hinter diesen Sinnenteppich können wir zunächst doch nicht mit dem normalen Bewußtsein blicken. Das Übersinnliche ist für keinen Menschensinn und auch nicht für den menschlichen Verstand da. Der göttliche Verstand umfaßt es außerhalb von Raum und Zeit. Der menschJiche Verstand ist an Raum und Zeit gebunden. Also halten wir uns an das, was in Raum und Zeit für den menschlichen Verstand gegeben ist!

Da Galilei so vieles Große tun konnte, ist er tatsächlich auch philosophisch — wenn wir so sagen dürfen — einer der wichtigsten Pfadfinder der neueren geistigen Entwickelung der Menschheit. Was Wunder also, wenn wir in Galilei zu gleicher Zeit den Geist sehen, der nun auch für sich klar werden wollte, wie sich eigentlich die Sinneserscheinungen zum Menschen und zu seinem Seelenleben verhalten. Man spricht ja auch vielfach in populären Darstellungen davon, daß sozusagen Kant zuerst darauf hingewiesen hätte, daß die Welt um uns herum nur eine Erscheinung sei, daß man nicht vordringen könnte zum «Ding an sich». In einer etwas anderen Wendung als Kant hat schon Galilei auf diesen Gedanken hingewiesen, nur daß er überall hinter den Sinnesdingen den allumfassenden Gedanken des Göttlich-Geistigen sah und nur aus Demut annahm, daß der Mensch sich nur in langen Zeiten dem nähern könnte, - nicht aus Prinzip. Aber Galilei sagte: Wenn wir eine Farbe sehen, so macht sie einen Eindruck, zum Beispiel das Rot. Ist das Rot in den Dingen? — Galilei brauchte einen sehr bezeichnenden Vergleich, aus dem zugleich hervorgeht, wie falsch der Gedanke ist; aber darauf kommt es nicht an, sondern darauf, den Gedanken als Zeitgedanken zu fassen. Er sagte: Man nehme eine Feder und kitzle einen Menschen an der Fußsohle oder an der Handfläche: da empfindet der Mensch einen Kitzel. Ist nun der Kitzel in der Feder?, fragte er. Nein, er ist etwas ganz Subjektives. In der Feder ist etwas ganz anderes. Und wie der Kitzel etwas Subjektives ist, so ist auch das Rot, das draußen in der Welt ist, etwas Subjektives. — Galilei verglich die Farben, sogar die Töne mit dem Kitzel, der mit der Feder auf die Fußsohle ausgeübt wird.

Wenn wir das ins Auge fassen, sehen wir sogar in Galilei schon dasjenige leben, was als Philosophie gerade der neueren Zeit gekommen ist, weil die Philosophie der neueren Zeit an der Möglichkeit zweifelt, daß der Mensch überhaupt irgendwie hinter den Teppich der Sinneswelt dringen könnte.

Sehen wir in Galilei den ruhigen, fest auf seinem Boden stehenden Pfadfinder, so tritt uns in dem etwas älteren Giordano Bruno — Galilei ist 1564 geboren, Giordano Bruno 1548 — der Mensch entgegen, der unmittelbar in seiner Persönlichkeit, in der Ganzheit alles das reflektiert, was in den anderen Geistern — in Kopernikus, in Galilei selber — wie überhaupt in der damaligen Zeit durch die Menschenseelen an großen Wahrheiten zog. Aus dem Geiste Giordano Brunos heraus reflektiert sich uns das alles wie in einer gewaltigen, umfassenden Stimmungs-Philosophie. Wie stand Giordano Bruno zur Welt — sie ganz aus dem Geiste seiner Zeit heraus als seine eigene tiefste Wesenheit empfindend?

Da sagte sich etwa Giordano Bruno: Aristoteles — nämlich wie er den mißverstandenen Aristoteles kannte — hat noch gesagt, es gäbe eine Sphäre, die bis zum Mond hinaufreicht, dann die verschiedenen Sternen-Sphären, dann käme die Sphäre des Göttlich-Geistigen, und außerhalb der Sternen-Sphären wäre der bewegende Gott zu suchen. — Giordano Bruno hatte also vor sich — im Sinne des Aristoteles — zunächst die Erde, dann die Sphäre des Mondes und der Sterne, und dann erst außerhalb dieser Welt und außerhalb dessen, worin der Mensch lebt, diese Welt im größten Umkreise drehend und wendend — buchstäblich wendend in den Drehungen und Bewegungen der Sterne — den göttlichen Geist. Das war ein Gedanke, den Giordano Bruno nicht mit dem vereinigen konnte, was jetzt die Menschheit erlebte. Was jetzt die menschlichen Sinne sahen, was der Sinn sah, wenn er auf Pflanzen, Tiere und Menschen blickte, wenn er die Berge, Meere, Wolken und Sterne sah, das erschien ihm als eine bewunderungswürdige Ausgestaltung dessen, was im Göttlich-Geistigen selber lebt. Und er wollte in dem, was sich da als Sterne bewegte, was als Wolken durch die Luft zog, nicht bloß eine Schrift des göttlichen Wesens sehen, sondern etwas, was zum göttlichen Wesen so gehört wie die Finger oder die anderen Glieder zu uns selber. Nicht einen Gott, der von außen, vom Umkreise aus auf das Sinnliche hereinwirkt, sondern einen Gott, der in jedem einzelnen Sinnlichen drinnen ist, dessen Körper, dessen gestalteter Leib die Sinneswelt ist: das war der Grundgedanke Giordano Brunos. Wollen wir verstehen, wie er zu einem solchen Grundgedanken gekommen ist, so müssen wir sagen: Es war das Entzücken, die Seligkeit über diese ganze neue Zeit dazumal! Da war vorangegangen eine Zeit, in der man nur in den alten Gedanken des Aristoteles gewühlt hatte. Die tonangebenden Gelehrten hatten, wenn sie durch Wald und Fluren gingen, kein Auge für die Reiche der Natur und ihre Schönheiten, sondern nur Sinn für das, was auf den Pergamenten stand, was von dem alten Aristoteles stammte. Jetzt war eine Zeit gekommen, wo die Natur zu dem Menschen sprach, die Zeit der großen Entdeckungen, wo solche gewaltigen Geister wie Galilei dazu drängten, von Angesicht zu Angesicht selbst ein Göttliches in der Natur zu erkennen. Das ganze Entzücken über dieses Göttliche gegenüber der entgöttlichten Natur des Mittelalters — das war gekommen! Das war es, was bei Giordano Bruno in jeder Fiber lebte.

Geist überall — sagte er — zeigen uns die Sinnesforschungen, und überall daher, wo uns ein Sinnliches entgegentritt, zeigt sich uns ein Göttliches! Es ist nur ein Unterschied zwischen Sinnlichem und Göttlichem: daß das Sinnliche uns — weil wir ja eng begrenzte Menschen sind — erscheint im Raume und in der Zeit. — Aber hinter dem Sinnlichen steht für Giordano Bruno der göttliche Geist, nicht so, wie er glaubte, daß er für Aristoteles gestanden habe oder für die Menschen des Mittelalters, sondern selbständig, nur daß die Natur sein Leib war, die alle seine Herrlichkeiten verkündete. Aber der Mensch kann den ganzen Geist in der Natur nicht überschauen, sondern er sieht überall nur ein Stück. In allen Dingen aber, in aller Zeit und allem Raum ist der göttliche Geist. Darum sagt Giordano Bruno: Wo ist das Göttliche? In jedem Stein, in jedem Blatt, überall ist das Göttliche, in jeder Ausgestaltung, insbesondere aber in den Wesen, die eine gewisse Selbständigkeit im Dasein haben. — Solche Wesen, die ihre Selbständigkeit empfinden, nannte er Monaden. Eine Monade ist für ihn das, was gleichsam im Meere des Göttlichen schwimmt und schwelgt. Alles, was eine Monade ist, ist zugleich ein Spiegel des Universums. So dachte sich Giordano Bruno den Allgeist zersplittert in viele Monaden — in jeder Monade, die ein selbständiger Geist war, etwas, was wie ein Spiegel das Universum empfand. Eine solche Monade ist die Menschenseele, und solcher Monaden gibt es viele. Selbst im menschlichen Leibe sind viele Monaden, nicht eine. Wenn wir daher nach Giordano Bruno die Wahrheit sagen würden über den menschlichen Leib, so würden wir darin nicht den fleischlich angeordneten menschlichen Leib zu sehen haben, sondern ein System von Monaden. Diese Monaden sehen wir nur nicht genau, wie wir auch nicht bei einem Mückenschwarm die einzelnen Mücken sehen. Würden wir genau sehen, so würden wir den menschlichen Leib als ein System von Monaden sehen, und die Hauptmonade ist die Menschenseele. — Von dem Leben, wenn es durch die Geburt für die Menschenseele ins Dasein tritt, sagt Giordano Bruno, es ist so, daß dann die anderen Monaden, die zur Seele gehören, sich zusammendrängen und dadurch die Erlebnisse der Hauptmonade, der Seelenmonade, möglich machen. Wenn der Tod eintritt, werden von der Hauptmonade die Nebenmonaden wieder entlassen, breiten sich aus. Geburt ist die Versammlung von vielen Monaden um eine Hauptmonade. Tod ist für Giordano Bruno die Trennung der Nebenmonaden von einer Hauptmonade, damit die Hauptmonade eine andere Gestalt annehmen kann. Denn jede Monade ist berufen, nicht nur die eine Gestalt, die wir hier erkennen, anzunehmen, sondern alle Gestalten, die möglich sind im Universum. An einen Durchgang durch alle Gestalten denkt Giordano Bruno. Damit steht er so nahe wie möglich — nur aus einem Enthusiasmus herausgeboren — der Idee von der Wiederverkörperung der menschlichen Seele.

Und in bezug auf die Auffassung der gesamten Wirklichkeit sagt Giordano Bruno sich: Der Mensch steht zunächst mit dem normalen Bewußtsein dieser Wirklichkeit gegenüber. Was ihm zunächst entgegentritt, sind die Sinneseindrücke. Das ist das erste Erkenntnisvermögen. Aber es gibt deren vier, sagte Giordano Bruno. Das erste, wodurch sich der Mensch Erkenntnisse verschaffen kann, sind die Sinneseindrücke; das zweite sind die Bilder, die wir in unseren Vorstellungen bilden, wenn wir die Sinneseindrücke nicht mehr vor uns haben, sondern uns nur daran erinnern. Da gehen wir schon tiefer in die Seele herein, ändern auch die Sinneseindrücke. Dieses zweite Erkenntnisvermögen nennt er die Einbildungskrafl, wobei nicht an die Bedeutung dieses Wortes im heutigen Sinne gedacht werden darf, sondern womit im Sinne des Giordano Bruno gemeint ist: Nachdem der Mensch aufgenommen hat, was die Sinneseindrücke ihm geben können, bildet er sich—es ist das ein Im-Innern-Stehen — in die Eindrücke hinein. Es ist ein von außen nach innen Gewendet-Werden, also nicht ein Erträumtes, sondern ein von außen nach innen «Einge drücktes». Dann hat Giordano Bruno den Gedanken, daß der Mensch, indem er die Dinge in dem Verstande verinnerJicht und dann weitergeht, gerade dadurch der Wahrheit näherkommt und sich nicht von ihr entfernt. Daher erkennt Giordano Bruno als das dritte Erkenntnisvermögen den Verstand an, den Intellekt. Dabei hat er genau den Moment im Sinne, wo wir von den Sinnesdingen aufsteigen und uns Gedanken machen, indem von der übersinnlichen Welt in uns ein Höheres einströmt, ein Wahreres, als es die Sinneseindrücke sind. Die vierte Stufe ist für Giordano Bruno die Vernunft. Die Vernunft ist jetzt wieder für ihn ein Leben und Weben in einem rein Geistigen.

So ist für Giordano Bruno eine Stufenfolge von vier Erkenntnisstufen vorhanden. Nur unterscheidet er dieselben nicht in der Weise, wie Sie dies zum Beispiel angegeben finden können in dem Buche «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» als gegenständliche Erkenntnis, imaginative Erkenntnis, inspirierte Erkenntnis und intuitive Erkenntnis, sondern er unterscheidet mehr abstrakt. Daher müssen wir dieses so auffassen, daß wir sagen: Giordano Bruno steht gerade am Ausgangspunkt der Zeit, welche das Erkennen für die sinnliche Anschauung herausfordert und sich daher Ausdrücke bedient, die uns mehr an die Ausdrücke der gewöhnlichen Erkenntnis für die Sinneswelt erinnern als für die höhere Welt. Aber wie Giordano Bruno hinaufschaut in die geistige Welt aus seiner gewaltigen Emphase, das können wir daran sehen, daß er sagt: Der göttliche Geist, der in allem lebt, der in allem seinen Leib hat, er hat das, was wir als Vorstellungen haben, als die vor den Dingen zu bedenkenden Ideen. Wie ist die Welt in Gott? Wie ist der Geist in Gott?, fragt er und sagt: Der Geist ist in Gott als Idee, als Vorgedanke der Welt. — Und wie ist für ihn der Geist in der Natur? Als Form, sagt er, und Giordano Bruno meint damit, was im göttlichen Geiste vorhanden ist als Ideen, das ist im Kristall, der eine Form hat, in dem Tier, das Form hat, in dem menschlichen Leib, der eine Form hat. Und was in den Dingen draußen als Form ist, das ist in der menschlichen Seele als Vorstellungen. Ja, noch genauer sagt Giordano Bruno: Die Dinge der Natur sind die Schatten der göttlichen Ideen; und unsere Vorstellungen sind die Schatten der göttlichen Gedanken! — Wohlgemerkt: Unsere Vorstellungen, sagt er, sind nicht die Schatten der Dinge, sondern die Schatten der göttlichen Gedanken. —- Wenn wir also die Dinge der Natur um uns herum haben und darin die Schatten der göttlichen Ideen haben, so werden unsere Vorstellungen dadurch wieder befruchtet. Indem wir vorstellen, spielt herein der göttliche Geist mit seinen Ideen, so daß wir einen Strom haben, kann man sagen, der uns verbindet mit den göttlichen Ideen. Wenn man die naturwissenschaftlichen Theorien sich ansieht, was sich heute als Monismus so un-GiordanoBruno-mäßig geltend macht, was so ins Gesicht schlagend ist, das ist, daß diese Theorien sagen müßten, wenn sie konsequent sein wollten: Über die göttlichen Gedanken sprechen wir überhaupt nicht! Das sagt Giordano Bruno aber nicht. Er ist Spiritualist im eminentesten Sinne des Wortes. Was er aus der richtigen Begeisterung des Renaissance-Menschen heraus zu sagen hat, geht auf die Monade, auf ihre Zusammenziehung durch die Geburt und ihre Ausdehnung durch den Tod, auf das, was in die Vorstellungswelt von den göttlichen Gedanken hereinströmt, auf das eine einzige Wort: Die menschlichen Gedanken sind die Schatten der göttlichen Gedanken! Wenn man das versteht, hat man etwas von der Spiritualität des Giordano Bruno verstanden. Aber eines ist dazu nötig: der Appell zum Begreifen von dem mißverstandenen Giordano Bruno zu dem, was Giordano Bruno wirklich war. Er war der Geist, der das, was Galilei mehr intellektuell für das naturwissenschaftliche Denken gegeben hat, aus einem überschwenglichen Enthusiasmus heraus seinen Zeitgenossen übertragen hat. Daher klingt das, was aus Giordano Bruno stammt, so gewaltig, wie wenn die ganze Freude, das ganze Entzücken des damaligen Zeitgeistes, der sehen wollte, wie die Natur im Sinnlichen webt und lebt, im Geiste des Giordano Bruno aufjauchzte. Dieses Jauchzen wird selber Philosophie, weil der göttliche Geist, der überall draußen lebt, bewußt in der Seele des Giordano Bruno aufgeleuchtet ist. Daher verstehen wir solche Worte, die mit Recht gerade bei Giordano Bruno hervorgehoben werden sollen, die wie etwas klingen, was die Natur selbst den Menschen damals zu sagen hatte. Nur ein paar Worte seien davon angeführt.

Wie groß und wunderbar ist es, wenn Giordano Bruno diesen Gedanken im Gegensatz zu Aristoteles ausspricht: Nicht draußen, außerhalb der sinnlichen Welt, sondern überall, wo wir hinblicken, ist der Geist, der Geist der göttlichen Intelligenz. Es ist nicht die göttliche Intelligenz in etwas äußerlichem, nicht in etwas, wovon man dann sagen kann: Ein Etwas stößt im weiten Umkreise — nicht ein Herumstoßendes, im Kreise Herumführendes kann sie sein, sondern es ist des Göttlichen würdiger, ein inneres Prinzip der Bewegung zu sein, das in allem zu sehen ist, was in der Natur selber ist. — Das war die Sprache, die in dem damaligen Zeitalter erklang, das aus Giordano Brunos Seele selber sprach.

Wie kann man das eben Gesagte am besten wiedergeben, damit es so recht zu unserm Herzen spräche? Es hat schon auf diese Tatsache ein Geist aufmerksam gemacht, der es sich allerdings hat gefallen lassen müssen, ein zu enthusiastischer Verehrer des Giordano Bruno genannt zu werden — Hermann Brunnhofer —, welcher nachwies, was ” sich ergibt, wenn man wörtlich, nur in schöne Verse gebracht, das ausdrückt, was Giordano Bruno sagt:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
circumrotans et circumducens;
dignius enim illi debet esse
internum principium motus,
quod est natura propria, species propria,
anima propria,quam habeant tot quot in illius
gremio et corpore vivunt
hoc generali spiritu, corpore,
anima, natura animantia,
plantae, lapides quae universa ut
diximus proportionaliter cum astro
eisdem composita ordine, et eadem
contemperata complexionum, symmetria,
secundum genus, quantumlibet secundum
specierum numeros singula distinguuntur.

Was wär” ein Gott, der nur von außen stieße,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen ließe!
Ihm ziemts, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen,
So daß, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist,
Nie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermißt!

So Zeile für Zeile übersetzt, gibt dieses Goethesche Gedicht eine poetische Übersetzung Giordano Brunos aus dem Geiste Goethes heraus! Man kann nicht Goethe sein — und etwa Giordano Bruno neben sich liegen haben, wenn man diese Verse hinschreiben will; es mußte dabei etwas spielen, was niemals spielen kann, wenn Goethe bloß einfach in poetische Form umgegossen hätte, was Giordano Bruno gesagt hat. Da sehen wir, wie in Goethe Giordano Brunos Geist ganz lebendig geworden ist.

Aber wir müssen nicht nur ein paar Jahrhunderte hinauf gehen, wenn wir von Galilei und Giordano Bruno kommen und Goethe sprechen lassen wollen, sondern wir müssen sozusagen auch bekennen, daß dasjenige, was bei Giordano Bruno wie aus der ersten großen enthusiastischen Stimmung, aus der philosophischen Naturstimmung heraus entsprungen ist, bei Goethe diejenige Stimmung weckt, die nun mit voller Hingabe wieder von Ding zu Ding geht und den Gott, den der Mensch nun fühlen gelernt hat in der Natur, wieder hineinträgt in die Naturdinge. Bei Goethe ist die Giordano Bruno-Stimmung eben Stimmung geworden, ist gleichsam mit ihm geboren. Sie war da, als der siebenjährige Knabe das Notenpult seines Vaters nimmt, es hinstellt, Mineralien aus seines Vaters Sammlung darauf legt, um Naturprodukte zu haben, ebenso Pflanzen aus seines Vaters Herbarium, oben darauf ein Räucherkerzchen steckt und nun ein Brennglas nimmt, an den Strahlen der aufgehenden Morgensonne das Räucherkerzchen entzündet, um so dem Gotte, der in den Mineralien und Pflanzen lebt und dem er einen Altar errichtet hat, ein Rauchopfer darzubringen, das von den Kräften der Natur selbst entzündet ist. So lebt Giordano Bruno um die Wende des achtzehnten, neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in Goethe — aber so, daß das, was da als innerste Seelenverfassung lebt, Goethe in alle Einzelheiten der Natur hineintrug. Gerade aus diesem Geiste heraus konnte es Goethe nicht begreifen, wie dem Menschen — nach Naturforschern der damaligen Zeit — in so äußerlicher Weise ein materielles Kennzeichen zugeschrieben werden sollte, das ihn von den Tieren unterschiede. Es war so ganz materialistisch gedacht, als die Naturforscher des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts sagten, der Mensch habe nicht jenen kleinen Knochen, den die Tiere in der oberen Kinnlade haben, den Zwischenkieferknochen, und der die oberen Schneidezähne enthält. Die Tiere hätten ihn — und das unterscheide den Menschen vom Tier. Es müßte in der Tat kein Gott sein, der inneres, bewegendes Prinzip der Natur wäre, sondern ein Gott, der von außen stieße, von dem Giordano Bruno sagt «circumrotans et circumducens», müßte es sein, der zuerst die Tiere gemacht hat und dann den Menschen daneben gestellt hätte und — wie um eine Marke anzukleben, daß die Menschen noch etwas anderes sind — bestimmt hätte: die Tiere haben den Zwischenkieferknochen, die Menschen haben ihn nicht! Daher wird Goethe der große Naturforscher, der darauf ausgeht zu zeigen, wie das, was in der Natur der Form nach lebt, eine Steigerung erfahren kann, so daß man in der Tat nicht in so etwas äußerem, wie es der Zwischenkieferknochen ist, den Unterschied zwischen Mensch und Tier finden könne, sondern daß im Menschen etwas lebt, was mit denselben Knochen und Muskeln, wie sie die Tiere haben, den höheren Geist des Menschen ausmacht. Daher kommt es bei Goethe so wunderbar heraus, daß er nicht nur den Zwischenkieferknochen findet und zeigt, wie derselbe beim Menschen verwachsen ist, weil er nur ein untergeordneter Knochen ist, sondern es kommt bei Goethe auch heraus, wie die Rückenwirbelknochen aufgeblasen werden können, wenn der Geist, der in einem Gehirn tätig sein will, dies braucht.

Wahrhaftig: es war mir immer ganz wunderbar, als ich lange Zeit mit Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften gearbeitet hatte und in ein solches Prinzip einzudringen versuchte, wie das ist, wo Goethe sich die Schädelknochen einfach als umgestaltete Wirbelknochen vorstellt, indem diese ausgedehnt und zur Schädelhöhle werden. Da war es mir ein Gedanke, der gar nicht anders zu denken war als: Goethe müsse auch die Idee gefaßt haben, daß das Gehirn selber ein durch den Geist umgebildetes Rückenmark sei, so daß nicht nur die Umhüllung, sondern auch das Gehirn selber auf eine höhere Stufe hinaufgefördert das ist, was in den Wirbelknochen und im Rückenmark auf einer unteren Stufe vorhanden ist. Und es war mir ein wunderbarer Augenblick, als ich auf einem kleinen Zettel von Goethe mit Bleistift geschrieben fand in den neunziger Jahren, was dann von Professor Bardeleben mitgeteilt worden ist im Weimarischen Jahrbuch in einem Aufsatz «Goethe als Anatom»: Das Gehirn ist im Grunde genommen nur ein umgebildetes Stück des Rückenmarks.

So sehen wir in Goethe die Stimmung, die wir bei Giordano Bruno zum erstenmal finden, auf die einzelnen Glieder der Naturwesen angewendet, sehen, wie Goethe praktisch den Geist des Giordano Bruno — dem er ja selbst den Worten nach so nahe steht — in alles Naturdenken einzuführen versucht. Daher war es für Goethe so bedeutsam, in der ganzen Pflanzenwelt eine Umwandlung der Urpflanze zu sehen. Und neben dem, was Goethe, der Künstler, geleistet hat, steht groß und gewaltig da, was Goethe als Naturforscher geleistet hat, weil in gewisser Weise derselbe Geist, der von hellseherischen Stufen heruntergestiegen war zu einem sinnlichen Anschauen, sich in Goethe in einer Persönlichkeit verkörperte, die in der Beobachtung überall hingebungsvoll das Geistige auch wieder in die Einzelheiten hineintrug. Was sah Goethe in der einzelnen Pflanze? Den Ausdruck der Urpflanze. Und was war ihm die Urpflanze? Das Spirituelle, das Geistige in den einzelnen Pflanzengebilden. Da ist nun bedeutsam jenes Gespräch zwischen Schiller und Goethe, als beide in Jena eine Versammlung der naturforschenden Gesellschaft besucht hatten. Da ging Schiller heraus und sagte zu Goethe: Es bleibt doch alles so unbefriedigend, was da über die Pflanzen gesagt wird, worauf Goethe meinte: Man kann es ja vielleicht auch anders machen, so daß uns in der Tat nicht nur erscheint, was die Teile sind, die einem in der Hand bleiben, sondern was einem das geistige Band ist. — Goethe nahm nun ein Blatt Papier und zeichnete mit wenigen Strichen ein Pflanzengebilde vor Schiller hin. Er war sich klar darüber: das ist nicht bloß in der Lilie oder im Löwenzahn oder Ranunkulus vorhanden, sondern in allen Pflanzen, aber in den verschiedenen Pflanzen vermannigfaltigt. Da sagte Schiller, der dieses Gebilde der Urpflanze nicht verstehen konnte: Das ist keine Wirklichkeit, das ist eine Idee! Da war Goethe perplex und meinte nur: «Das kann mir sehr lieb sein, wenn ich Ideen habe, ohne es zu wissen, und sie sogar mit Augen sehe!» Denn Goethe sah das Geistige, das sich durch alle Pflanzen hindurch ausbreitet, sah es so, daß er es sogar zeichnen konnte. Und ebenso war es mit dem Urtier in allen Tieren.

So verfolgte Goethe den Gott, der nicht von außen stößt, sondern der im Innern alles bewegt, verfolgte den göttlichen Geist, der in allem webt und lebt, ganz konkret von Pflanze zu Pflanze, aber auch durch Blätter und Blüte und Frucht, ebenso von Tier zu Tier, aber auch von Knochen zu Knochen, von Tiergebilde zu Tiergebilde. Und interessant ist es, daß Goethe wenig verstanden wurde von seiner Zeit, daß man nicht wußte — wie ja Schiller auch nicht —, was Goethe eigentlich wollte. Aber nach und nach wird sich der Goethesche Geist einleben, auch in das Naturdenken. Dann wird man erkennen, daß auch der Goethesche Geist wieder um eine Stufe über Giordano Bruno hinaus war, daß Giordano Bruno gesprochen hat von dem Gott, der pantheistisch überall, in Steinen und Pflanzen und Tieren zu finden ist, daß aber Goethe zwar auch suchte den Gott, der nicht von außen stößt, sich aber weiter sagte: Wir dürfen nicht nur auf das Allgemeine sehen, sondern wir müssen auch zu den einzelnen Erscheinungen gehen und den Geist im Einzelnen suchen. — Denn anders lebt der Geist in der Pflanze, anders im Stein, anders in diesem, anders in jenem Knochen. Der Geist ist das ewig Bewegliche, der die einzelnen Teile der Materie formt. Die Materie folgt dem bewegenden Geist. Das kann man aus einem Geiste heraus aussprechen, wie es Giordano Bruno tut; das kann man aber auch in allen Einzelheiten mit der Hingebung suchen, wie es Goethe tut. Da kommt dann der Mensch immer mehr und mehr dazu, wirklich an das heranzutreten, was der ausgebreitete Teppich der Natur an Geist enthält, so daß sich ihm der Geist darin allmählich enthüllt.

Wenn wir so über die Stufenfolge solcher Geister denken, wie es Galilei, Giordano Bruno und Goethe waren, so werden wir uns endlich daran gewöhnen, an das zu appellieren, was der Grundnerv solcher Geister ist, und nicht beim Landläufigen stehenbleiben, denn auch über die großen Geister hören die Menschen so gern Phrasen. Mit Bezug auf Galilei, der mit seiner großen göttlichen Idee raumlos und zeitlos in dem Augenblick das ganze Leben umspannte, kann man wohl fragen: Was wissen denn unsere Menschen der Gegenwart über die eigentliche Bedeutung Galileis oftmals viel mehr als das eine Einzige, was ganz sicher nicht richtig ist, daß er gesagt haben soll: «Und sie bewegt sich doch!»? Dies ist zwar eine schöne Phrase, aber erwas — wie Sie aus den Forschungen des italienischen Gelehrten Angelo de Gubernatis ersehen können —, was ganz gewiß nicht richtig ist. Und wie oft wird von Goethe immer wieder und wieder zitiert, daß sein letztes Wort gewesen sei: «Mehr Licht!» — das Einzige, was er nicht gesagt hat. Daher ist es notwendig, daß durch das, was Geisteswissenschaft ist, auch in den Geist solcher Persönlichkeiten hineingeleuchtet werde, und daß nicht nur unser eigener Geist, wie wir ihn so gerne haben möchten, in die verschiedenen Zeiten hineingetragen werde. Diese drei Geister, die ein wunderbar gestimmtes Trifolium am Ausgangspunkte unserer neueren Zeit bilden, die in Galilei und Giordano Bruno wie eine Morgenröte dastehen, die dann in Goethe zur Sonne geworden ist, können wir am besten charakterisieren, wenn wir vielleicht denken an ein Wort Goethes selber, das uns so recht zeigt, wie er aus dem Geiste der neueren Zeit heraus empfand, daß selbst das kleinste Atom von Materie gar nicht sein kann ohne den dahinterstehenden Geist, der es an das andere heranbringt. Da können wir uns an die Situation erinnern, die Goethe selber schildert, als er dasteht, viele Jahre nach Schillers Tode, als man dessen Knochen in die Fürstengruft bringen wollte, und nun an einem besonders geformten Schädel den Genius Schillers wiederzuerkennen glaubte. Er glaubte Schillers Schädel wiederzuerkennen in einer ganz bestimmt ausgeprägten Schädelform, die dann auch in die Fürstengruft übergeführt worden ist. Und es zeigte sich ihm so recht, was wir an Galilei sahen: daß man in Demut und mathematisch den Geist finden muß. Sie besteht heute noch, die alte Kirchenlampe im Dome zu Pisa, die für unzählige Seelen hin- und hergependelt hat. Aber als Galilei einst davor saß, maß er an dem eigenen Pulsschlag die Regelmäßigkeit der Schwingungen der Lampe und entdeckte daran das heute so wichtige Gesetz der Pendelschwingungen, das ihm ein Gedanke der Gottheit war. Und so vieles. In Goethe ging am Grabe Schillers der Gedanke auf, der in Giordano Bruno lebte aus seiner philosophischen Begeisterung heraus: Geist ist in aller Materie, überall, aber nicht herumstoßend und herumführend, sondern als ein Geist, der im kleinsten Atom lebt! Dieses Spirituelle Giordano Brunos stand auch in Goethes Seele wieder auf, als er Schillers Schädel in der Hand hielt und — wie Wasser zu Eis geronnen — der Schillersche Geist ihm erscheint in der Schillerschen Schädelform. Die ganze spirituelle Grundanlage Goethes steht vor uns, wenn wir das schöne Gedicht Goethes betrachten, das er nach der Betrachtung von Schillers Schädelform schrieb, und besonders jene Zeilen, die so oft falsch zitiert werden, die nur aus der Situation heraus zu ergreifen sind, indem wir uns denken müssen, daß Goethe plastisch Schillers Individualität wie geronnen vor sich erblickte und dann sagte, wie er es sagen mußte gemäß der Eigenart des in Giordano Bruno und Goethe verwandten Geistes:

«Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen,
Als daß sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare,
Wie sie das Feste läßt zu Geist verrinnen,
Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre!»

Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Goethe

It is a long span of time that must be skipped over when the spiritual gaze turns from that great personality, Zarathustra or Zoroaster, who was the subject of the last lecture in this cycle, to those three great personalities who are to form the basis of our considerations today. From what lies millennia before our Christian era and what could only be explained to us by assuming that people had a completely different state of mind at that time, we move up to the time of the sixteenth and seventeenth century of our era, in which the spirit that is active and vibrant in all the forward-moving cultural currents of humanity up to the present day first dawned. We shall then see how this spirit, which shone so powerfully in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in personalities such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo, then found comprehensive expression in a personality as close to us as that of Goethe. Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the two names we must mention when we think of the beginning of that epoch in our human development in which the natural sciences stood at the same turning point at which spiritual science stands today. What was done in a truly tremendous way for scientific thinking at that time must, in a certain sense, be done for spiritual science thinking in the course of the coming ages. This will be particularly clear to us if we — in order to understand Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the full sense of the word — take a look at the whole way of thinking and feeling of humanity in the time in which Galileo and Giordano Bruno lived at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Here, of course, we must look back on what was initially a very peculiar representation of what was broadly referred to as science in previous centuries — roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. It must be understood that during these centuries, the popularization and general dissemination of scientific knowledge must have taken a very different form than it did later in our time. For we are talking about centuries in which there was no printing press, in which the vast majority of people were dependent on receiving only that intellectual life which was conveyed in churches, schools, or similar institutions through the spoken word. That is why it is so important, especially for that period, to form a picture of what scholarly, scientific activity was like. In the times that preceded the age of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, scientific activity is difficult for people today to understand; it can only be understood if one can find one's way into something completely different from what is common practice today. At that time, one could have gone into any lecture hall, anywhere where science was being practiced — let's say natural science in this or that field, or medicine, and so on — and one would have heard that those who wanted to present something from the science of that time did not focus on what had been observed at that time in this or that institute, as is the case today, where scientific methods are observed, but rather on something that underlay everything that was presented, everything that was done in science, in the ancient writings of Aristotle, who was indeed infinitely significant for his time. Aristotle towers like an intellectual giant when one considers the progress of humanity from a historical perspective. What he achieved for his time is infinitely significant. But what interests us now is that Aristotle's books were often not read in the form in which they existed in the original language, but were based everywhere on tradition: that set the tone. Whatever was presented: whatever was a principle, a fundamental tenet, whatever was considered to be true in any way, people said: Aristotle thought this and that about this subject. That's what Aristotle says! — Whereas today's researchers, or those who simply present science itself, or even present it in a popular style, refer to the fact that this or that has been observed here or there, in the centuries of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, people referred to the fact that so many centuries ago, the influential Aristotle had made this or that assertion about this or that subject. Just as today, in relation to spiritual matters, people refer to religious documents and their tradition and do not rely on direct observation, so in those days, in the sciences, people did not refer to nature and its observation, but to tradition, to Aristotle.

It is extremely interesting to immerse oneself in such a university lecture to see how physicians everywhere based their lectures on Aristotle's theories. Aristotle, however, was an intellectual giant. And even if one had to say that even such an intellectual personality should no longer be presented unchanged after centuries, one can still rightly think: since Aristotle achieved such significant and magnificent things, even if people had not learned anything new, if they had been presented with the millennia-old Aristotle again and again, they must have gained something significant in their minds, for it must have been important and useful to receive Aristotle's deeply illuminating teachings and theories. However, this was not the case, because those who presented these teachings at the time and proclaimed them everywhere according to Aristotle generally did not understand Aristotle, because it was basically an incredibly misunderstood teaching that was presented and taught everywhere before Galileo and Giordano Bruno as “Aristotelian.” Today, from the standpoint of spiritual science, I want to emphasize only one thing, which is intended to show how Galileo and Giordano Bruno had to position themselves in the intellectual life of their time. I have often mentioned this matter, which is not an anecdote but a truth, and therefore I want to draw attention to it once again.

There was one of the many scholars who swore by Aristotle, who was himself a friend of Galileo. Galileo, like Giordano Bruno, was an opponent of the Aristotelians, not of Aristotle, and for good reason. Galileo pointed out that one should turn to the great book of nature, which speaks to man, and not only learn from Aristotle's books what the spirit means in nature. Now, the Aristotelians had advocated a strange doctrine at that time: that the nerves, the entire nervous system of humans, originated in the heart, and that from the heart the nerves spread up to the brain and throughout the entire body. That, they said, was what Aristotle had taught, and it was true! Galileo, who did not want to refer to old books and old traditions, but to what one sees when examining the human body, pointed out that the nerves originated in the brain and that the most important nerves had their origin in the brain. Galileo told his friend that he should see for himself how the nerves originated in the brain. Yes, I want to see it, said the person in question, and had it shown to him on the human body. The scholar, who believed himself to be a good Aristotelian, was greatly astonished and said to Galileo: It almost looks as if the nerves originate in the brain, but Aristotle says that the nerves originate in the heart, and if there is a contradiction here, I believe Aristotle and not nature!

These were the words Galileo heard at the time. Aristotle was invoked for everything that was supposed to be science. Once, a church-minded scholar wanted to write about the question of immortality. How did people write back then? They took what they wanted to represent from church doctrine and added what they believed they could quote from Aristotle in order to prove the question in question one way or another, as they wanted to prove it. The man in question, who was a member of the clergy, had quoted all sorts of passages with the intention of presenting Aristotle's correct opinion on the question of immortality. And here is another truth: because clergymen had to submit their books to their superiors, this superior said to the man in question: It is dangerous; it will not be possible to approve it, because the excerpts from Aristotle could also prove the opposite. — The author then wrote back: If it were only a matter of proving even more clearly that Aristotle meant something that was acceptable, he would substantiate it with another quotation. For that could also be done! — In short, Aristotle was used and abused in every way.

Starting from this, let us see how Aristotle was misunderstood in the time before Giordano Bruno and Galileo, and let us take this example of the nerves originating from the heart. One can only understand what lies behind this if one knows that Aristotle, who stood at the end of ancient Greek culture, also stood at the end of the era in which the ancient clairvoyant consciousness prevailed. And as Aristotle looked back to his past, he had handed down a science that had been born out of a clairvoyant consciousness that looked behind the sensory world into the spiritual world. This consciousness had brought about the ancient sciences. And what was ancient science, which had also come down through Greek culture as ancient science, was recorded as the last by Aristotle, who was no longer able to develop such clairvoyant consciousness himself, who had only intellectual consciousness. This is something to think about. For it is not without reason that Aristotle is considered the founder of logic in history! He is so because intellectual, demonstrative thinking became the norm. Aristotle was therefore the one who took up ancient teachings and brought them into a logical system in his writings, so that we can only understand some of his ideas if we know what he actually meant by them. And when Aristotle speaks of nerves, we must not take this word as it is taken in our age, nor as it was taken in the age of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which is already quite similar to ours, but we must know the following. When Aristotle speaks of the course of the nerves, he has in mind what we today know as the supersensible member of human nature that is closest to the physical body of man: the supersensible etheric body of man. This is something that has gradually been lost from what man can see with the advance of human consciousness. Aristotle no longer saw it either, but he took over this view from the times when clairvoyant consciousness saw not only the physical body but also the etheric aura, the etheric body, which is the actual builder and power carrier of the physical body. Aristotle took his teaching from the times when the etheric body was seen as the eye now sees colors. And if one looks not at the physical body but at the etheric body, then the starting point for certain currents, which Aristotle now took as his basis, is in fact not the brain but the heart region, which is what one usually seeks behind the term “nerve.” Aristotle did not mean our nerves as we know them today, but rather supersensible currents, supersensible forces that emanate from the heart, go to the brain, and flow in various directions throughout the human body. These are things that only spiritual science can make understandable again through the knowledge of the supersensible parts and members of human nature.

Now, because people were not able to see super-sensibly, even in the times preceding the age of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, they had no idea that Aristotle was referring to ether currents; they believed he was referring to the physical nerves and therefore claimed: Aristotle said that the physical nerves originate in the heart. That is what the Aristotelians believed. However, those who knew what was written in the book of nature could not agree with the Aristotelians. Hence the great dispute between Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and the Aristotelians, since no one understood the real Aristotle — not even Galileo and Giordano Bruno, of course, who made no effort to penetrate the original Aristotle. But they were therefore the great cultural figures of their age and pointed from book learning to the great book of nature, the nature that is spread out before everyone.

A man — I have mentioned this before — whom I greatly admire as a philosopher, who was rector of the University of Vienna in 1894 and gave a rector's speech on Galileo, Laurenz Müllner, pointed out in this speech that Galileo, in his comprehensive greatness, understood with his intellect the great laws of mechanics and spatial effects that strike us most and speak to our hearts when we see St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, for example. When this mighty building makes an impression on us, then everyone actually experiences something that we can understand. I want to characterize this with a small fact that is nevertheless significant.

Once upon a time, the Viennese feature writer Speidel and the sculptor Natter were traveling to the Rome area. As they approached Rome, Speidel heard a very strange remark from Natter, who was, in a certain sense, a genius. Suddenly, Natter jumped up, and his friend had no idea what was wrong with him; he only heard the words: “I'm getting scared!” It was only later, when Natter fell silent, that he realized that Natter had seen the dome of St. Peter's Basilica from a great distance.

Anyone who sees this peculiar building can be overcome by a sense of wonder at the spatial distribution of forces that sprang from Michelangelo's genius. Laurenz Müllner then drew attention to the fact that Galileo, that great thinker, had given humanity the ability to conceive mathematically and mechanically of spatial distributions such as those we encounter in the beautiful structure of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that Galileo, who discovered the laws of mechanics, was born almost at the hour of Michelangelo's death, the builder of St. Peter's Basilica. In other words, the distribution of spatial forces that only later became accessible to humanity's intellect sprang from Michelangelo's intellectual powers.

This example shows that what we call intellectual knowledge can come much later than the arrangement of these things in space. Once something like this is really considered intellectually, people will be more likely to believe that human consciousness has undergone a change: that people used to have a certain clairvoyance and that the way of thinking through the intellect does not go back that far, but that, due to very specific historical necessities, this way of thinking could only emerge in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. And minds such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno were the first to set the tone for what was to come. Hence their strong opposition to the Aristotelians, and in particular to those who first misinterpreted Aristotle, who could be taken as an expression of ancient science, and then applied him to nature in this way. This also describes Galileo's position in the world. Oh, Galileo was, in the highest sense of the word, the first to introduce into humanity that kind of rigorous scientific thinking, one might say, that kind of relationship between science and mathematics that has set the tone for the entire subsequent period up to our own time. What is so special about Galileo? Galileo—in this respect very much a child of his time—first said the following with bold courage. I assure you that such words can be used to describe Galileo's feelings, for in order to understand the whole soul, the whole constitution of Galileo's mind, one must describe what he felt in this way: Here we stand as human beings on the earth. Nature spreads out before us with everything it can give to our senses, to our understanding, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. Through nature — as Galileo says in countless places in his writings — through nature, a divine spirit speaks. We humans look at nature with our eyes and observe it with our other senses. But what our eyes perceive, what is felt through our senses, is thought into nature by divine spiritual beings. First, the thoughts of the spiritual-divine beings live, then — springing from the thoughts of the divine-spiritual beings — the sensory things of nature come as revelations of God's thoughts, and then comes our power of perception, above all our intellect, which is bound to our brain. Then we stand there to decipher how the letters become a book and how what the author meant comes about, that is, what the divine thoughts expressed in nature.

Galileo also stood on the same ground as all the great minds of world development, namely that in natural phenomena, in natural facts, there is something like letters that express the spirit of the divine-spiritual beings. The human spirit is then there to read what the divine-spiritual beings have written into the forms of minerals, into the course of natural phenomena, even into the course of the movements of the stars. Human nature is there to read what the divine spirit has thought. Only the divine spirit differs from the human spirit in Galileo's sense in that for the divine spirit, everything that exists to be thought is conceived at once, unlimited by space and time, in a single moment.

If we take just one area — the field of mathematics — we will already see how peculiar this idea was. Imagine if someone now wanted to use all of mathematics, as far as it has been studied by humans, they would have to struggle for a long time before they could master it. Those of you sitting here will know how much the human understanding of mathematical ideas depends on time. Now Galileo thought to himself: What humans grasp over a long period of time is there for the divine mind in a single moment, unlimited by space and time. The human mind, he thought, must above all not believe that it can quickly grasp the divine mind with its intellect, which is bound to space and time; it must try to observe step by step, to observe the individual phenomena with clarity. It must not believe that one can skim over the individual phenomena, that one can skip over what God has conceived as the basis of the phenomena. Galileo said to himself: It is bad for thinkers who do not want to arrive at the truth through strict observation of what is spread out before our minds in nature, but who want to arrive at the truth quickly through their speculation, by skimming over individual things. But Galileo said this for reasons other than those for which it is often said today. For Galileo did not want to limit the human mind to observations because he denied that the great Spirit with the “preconceived thoughts” behind it existed, but because this divine Spirit appeared to him so great and powerful and sublime that everything that is at all “preconceived thoughts” is present in an instant, because the human mind needs an infinite amount of time to lovingly decipher the letters in order to gradually get behind the individual thoughts. Out of humility, knowing how far below the divine mind the human mind stands, Galileo admonished his contemporaries: You can no longer see behind things — not because humans are incapable of doing so, but because the time for it has passed. Observation, experience, and independent thinking were what Galileo presented as the decisive factors for his contemporaries. He was able to do this because, in a certain sense, his mind was completely mathematically ordered, because he had such a truly mathematical way of thinking. It is quite wonderful when we hear, for example, how Galileo heard that something like telescopes had been discovered in Holland, through which one could see into the farthest reaches of space. One must remember that there were no newspapers at that time. Galileo heard from travelers that something like telescopes had been discovered in Holland. When he heard this, it occurred to him spontaneously — it wouldn't leave him alone — and he invented a telescope on his own. It was with this telescope that Galileo made his great discoveries, which fitted in with what had recently come about through the Copernican world system. To understand this period correctly, two things must be considered together: one was that people no longer understood anything about the old supernatural science and that Galileo was a pioneer of the new science. And the second was that, with regard to the stars, it was significant that Copernicus had immediately before given the world a new face through his external thinking about the movements of the planets around the sun. One only has to put oneself in the position of the people of that time and in the minds of those who had believed for thousands of years that here — with this Earth — we stand firmly in space! And now this thinking was turned upside down: the Earth moving around the Sun at enormous speed! That was a thought that literally pulled the ground from under people's feet. It is not surprising that such a thought made a tremendous impression, one that had a profound effect on everyone, whether they were opponents or supporters. For minds like Galileo's, the reason why Copernicus had come to this view was particularly decisive. Let us recall why Copernicus had arrived at this particular view of the movement of the planets around the sun.

Until then, there had been a world system that was not understood because it was actually meant to be spiritual. As it was understood, it was a completely impossible idea: this Ptolemaic world system. For one had to imagine that the planets described very complicated movements, circles and circles within circles. It was particularly the enormously complicated nature of the ideas that one had to devote oneself to. That was what such minds did not really like. Copernicus did not really make any new astronomical discoveries. He simply said to himself: Let's take the simplest idea of how we can explain the movements! — He placed the entire world view in the simplicity of this idea. It was magnificent to place the sun in the center and have the planets move around it in circles, or, as Kepler later proved, in ellipses. The whole view was magnificently simplified! That was what particularly convinced Galileo. For he always emphasized: It is appropriate for the human mind to recognize truth in simplicity. It is not complexity, but simplicity that is beautiful—and truth is beautiful!

Because of beauty and the beauty of simplicity, the Copernican world system was widely accepted at that time. And Galileo found exactly what he was looking for in Copernicus: simplicity and beauty. Now he stood there and saw what people hardly wanted to believe: he saw the moons of Jupiter! Yes, Galileo's eye was the first to see the moons of Jupiter orbiting Jupiter like the planets orbit the sun — a small solar system: Jupiter with its moons like the sun with its planets. This was suitable for confirming a world system that was entirely based on the idea of the sensory world. So it was Galileo who particularly saw Copernicus' idea on a small scale for the sensory world. This made him a pioneer of modern science. It was he who first had an inkling that there were mountains on the moon, that there were sunspots, and that what hung over the stars like a strip of fog was a scattered world of stars. In short, all that came about was what can be called an “informed” writing of God's wisdom expressed in the sensory world. That was what had such a special effect on Galileo. The time that wanted to be completely absorbed in the contemplation of the sensory world had something very special for Galileo and his mind, which was based on mathematics. And so Galileo became the one who, in a sense, gave humanity the first impulse to say: Behind this tapestry of the senses, we cannot yet see with our normal consciousness. The supersensible is not there for any human sense, nor for the human mind. The divine mind encompasses it outside of space and time. The human mind is bound to space and time. So let us stick to what is given to the human mind in space and time!

Since Galileo was able to accomplish so many great things, he is indeed, philosophically speaking, one of the most important pioneers of humanity's recent spiritual development. No wonder, then, that we see in Galileo at the same time the spirit that now also wanted to become clear to itself how sensory phenomena actually relate to human beings and their soul life. It is often said in popular accounts that Kant was the first to point out that the world around us is only an appearance, that one cannot penetrate to the “thing in itself.” Galileo had already pointed to this idea in a slightly different way than Kant, except that he saw the all-encompassing idea of the divine spirit behind all sensory things and assumed out of humility that humans could only approach it over a long period of time—not out of principle. But Galileo said: When we see a color, it makes an impression, for example, red. Is the red in the things? Galileo used a very telling comparison, which at the same time shows how false the idea is; but that is not the point. The point is to understand the idea as a contemporary idea. He said: Take a feather and tickle a person on the sole of their foot or on the palm of their hand: the person feels a tickle. Is the tickle in the feather? he asked. No, it is something entirely subjective. There is something entirely different in the feather. And just as the tickle is something subjective, so too is the red that is out there in the world something subjective. Galileo compared colors, even sounds, to the tickle exerted on the sole of the foot with the feather.

When we consider this, we see even in Galileo the emergence of what has become modern philosophy, because modern philosophy doubts the possibility that humans could ever penetrate behind the veil of the sensory world.

If we see Galileo as the calm scout standing firmly on his ground, then in the somewhat older Giordano Bruno — Galileo was born in 1564, Giordano Bruno in 1548 — we encounter a person who, in his personality and in his entirety, reflects everything that moved through the souls of people in the form of great truths in the minds of others — in Copernicus, in Galileo himself — and in general at that time. From the spirit of Giordano Bruno, all this is reflected back to us as if in a powerful, comprehensive philosophy of mood. How did Giordano Bruno view the world — perceiving it entirely from the spirit of his time as his own deepest essence?

Giordano Bruno said to himself: Aristotle — as he knew the misunderstood Aristotle — said that there was a sphere that reached up to the moon, then the various spheres of the stars, then the sphere of the divine spirit, and outside the spheres of the stars was the moving God. — So Giordano Bruno had before him — in the sense of Aristotle — first the earth, then the sphere of the moon and the stars, and only then, outside this world and outside that in which man lives, this world revolving and turning in the greatest orbit — literally turning in the revolutions and movements of the stars — the divine spirit. This was a thought that Giordano Bruno could not reconcile with what humanity was now experiencing. What the human senses now saw, what the mind saw when it looked at plants, animals, and humans, when it saw the mountains, seas, clouds, and stars, appeared to him as an admirable manifestation of what lives in the divine spirit itself. And he wanted to see in what moved there as stars, what drifted through the air as clouds, not merely a writing of the divine being, but something that belongs to the divine being as much as the fingers or other limbs belong to ourselves. Not a God who acts on the senses from outside, from the periphery, but a God who is inside every single sense, whose body, whose formed body is the sensory world: that was Giordano Bruno's basic idea. If we want to understand how he arrived at such a fundamental idea, we must say: it was the delight, the bliss of this whole new era at that time! It was preceded by a period in which people had only delved into the old ideas of Aristotle. When the leading scholars walked through forests and fields, they had no eye for the riches of nature and its beauties, but only a sense for what was written on the parchments, what came from the old Aristotle. Now a time had come when nature spoke to man, the time of great discoveries, when such powerful minds as Galileo urged us to recognize face to face the divine in nature itself. All the delight in this divine aspect, in contrast to the de-divinized nature of the Middle Ages—that had come! That was what lived in every fiber of Giordano Bruno's being.

Spirit is everywhere, he said, as sensory research shows us, and therefore wherever we encounter something sensory, something divine reveals itself to us! There is only one difference between the sensory and the divine: because we are limited human beings, the sensory appears to us in space and time. — But behind the sensual, for Giordano Bruno, stands the divine spirit, not as he believed it stood for Aristotle or for the people of the Middle Ages, but independently, only that nature was his body, proclaiming all his glories. But man cannot see the whole spirit in nature, he sees only a piece of it everywhere. But in all things, in all time and all space, is the divine spirit. That is why Giordano Bruno says: Where is the divine? In every stone, in every leaf, the divine is everywhere, in every form, but especially in beings that have a certain independence in existence. He called such beings, which feel their independence, monads. For him, a monad is that which swims and revels in the sea of the divine, as it were. Everything that is a monad is at the same time a mirror of the universe. Thus, Giordano Bruno imagined the universal spirit fragmented into many monads — in each monad, which was an independent spirit, something that perceived the universe like a mirror. Such a monad is the human soul, and there are many such monads. Even in the human body there are many monads, not just one. Therefore, if we were to speak the truth about the human body according to Giordano Bruno, we would not see the physically arranged human body, but a system of monads. We just cannot see these monads clearly, just as we cannot see the individual mosquitoes in a swarm of mosquitoes. If we could see clearly, we would see the human body as a system of monads, and the main monad is the human soul. Giordano Bruno says that when life comes into existence for the human soul through birth, the other monads that belong to the soul crowd together and thereby make the experiences of the main monad, the soul monad, possible. When death occurs, the secondary monads are released from the main monad and spread out. Birth is the gathering of many monads around a main monad. For Giordano Bruno, death is the separation of the secondary monads from a main monad so that the main monad can take on a different form. For every monad is called upon to take on not only the one form that we recognize here, but all forms that are possible in the universe. Giordano Bruno thinks of a passage through all forms. In this way, he comes as close as possible—born solely out of enthusiasm—to the idea of the reincarnation of the human soul.

And with regard to the conception of reality as a whole, Giordano Bruno says to himself: Man is initially confronted with the normal consciousness of this reality. What he first encounters are sensory impressions. This is the first faculty of cognition. But there are four of them, said Giordano Bruno. The first, through which man can gain knowledge, are sensory impressions; the second are the images we form in our imagination when we no longer have the sensory impressions before us, but only remember them. Here we go deeper into the soul and also change the sensory impressions. He calls this second faculty of cognition the power of imagination, whereby we must not think of the meaning of this word in today's sense, but rather what Giordano Bruno meant by it: After humans have absorbed what sensory impressions can give them, they form themselves—it is an inner standing—into the impressions. It is a turning from the outside to the inside, so it is not something dreamed up, but something “pressed” from the outside to the inside. Giordano Bruno then has the idea that by internalizing things in the mind and then moving on, humans come closer to the truth and do not distance themselves from it. Therefore, Giordano Bruno recognizes the mind, the intellect, as the third faculty of cognition. In doing so, he has in mind precisely the moment when we ascend from the sensory world and engage in thought, as something higher, something truer than sensory impressions, flows into us from the supersensible world. For Giordano Bruno, the fourth stage is reason. For him, reason is once again a life and activity in a purely spiritual realm.

Thus, for Giordano Bruno, there is a sequence of four stages of knowledge. However, he does not distinguish between them in the way you might find, for example, in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” as objective knowledge, imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge, and intuitive knowledge, but rather he distinguishes between them more abstractly. We must therefore understand this to mean that Giordano Bruno stands at the very beginning of a period that challenges knowledge for sensory perception and therefore uses expressions that remind us more of the expressions of ordinary knowledge for the sensory world than for the higher world. But we can see how Giordano Bruno looks up into the spiritual world with his tremendous emphasis when he says: The divine spirit, which lives in everything, which has its body in everything, has what we have as ideas, as the ideas to be considered before things. What is the world like in God? What is the spirit like in God? he asks, and says: The spirit is in God as an idea, as a pre-thought of the world. — And what is the spirit like for him in nature? As form, he says, and Giordano Bruno means by this that what is present in the divine spirit as ideas is in the crystal, which has a form, in the animal, which has a form, in the human body, which has a form. And what is in things outside as form is in the human soul as ideas. Yes, Giordano Bruno says even more precisely: The things of nature are the shadows of divine ideas; and our ideas are the shadows of divine thoughts! — Mind you: Our ideas, he says, are not the shadows of things, but the shadows of divine thoughts. —- So when we have the things of nature around us and in them the shadows of divine ideas, our ideas are fertilized by them. As we imagine, the divine spirit plays with its ideas, so that we have a stream, one might say, that connects us with divine ideas. If one looks at scientific theories, what is so striking about monism, which is so un-Giordano Bruno-like today, is that these theories would have to say, if they wanted to be consistent: We do not speak of divine thoughts at all! But Giordano Bruno does not say that. He is a spiritualist in the most eminent sense of the word. What he has to say, out of the genuine enthusiasm of the Renaissance man, is based on the monad, on its contraction through birth and its expansion through death, on what flows into the world of imagination from divine thoughts, on the one single word: human thoughts are the shadows of divine thoughts! If you understand this, you have understood something of Giordano Bruno's spirituality. But one thing is necessary for this: the appeal to understand the misunderstood Giordano Bruno for what Giordano Bruno really was. He was the spirit who, out of exuberant enthusiasm, conveyed to his contemporaries what Galileo gave more intellectually to scientific thinking. That is why what comes from Giordano Bruno sounds so powerful, as if all the joy, all the delight of the spirit of the time, which wanted to see how nature weaves and lives in the sensual, rejoiced in the spirit of Giordano Bruno. This exultation itself becomes philosophy, because the divine spirit that lives everywhere outside has consciously illuminated the soul of Giordano Bruno. That is why we understand such words, which rightly deserve to be emphasized in Giordano Bruno, as sounding like something that nature itself had to say to people at that time. Let us quote just a few of them.

How great and wonderful it is when Giordano Bruno expresses this thought in contrast to Aristotle: Not outside, beyond the sensory world, but everywhere we look, is the spirit, the spirit of divine intelligence. It is not divine intelligence in something external, not in something of which one can then say: Something collides in a wide circle — it cannot be something that collides, that moves in circles, but it is more worthy of the divine to be an inner principle of movement that can be seen in everything that is in nature itself. — That was the language that resounded in that age, which spoke from Giordano Bruno's own soul.

How can we best convey what has just been said so that it truly speaks to our hearts? A spirit has already drawn attention to this fact, a spirit who has had to put up with being called an overly enthusiastic admirer of Giordano Bruno — Hermann Brunnhofer — who demonstrated what "results when one expresses literally, only in beautiful verse, what Giordano Bruno says:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
circumrotans et circumducens;
dignius enim illi debet esse
internum principium motus,
quod est natura propria, species propria,
anima propria,quam habeant tot quot in illius
gremio et corpore vivunt
hoc generali spiritu, corpore,
anima, natura animantia,
plantae, lapides quae universa ut
diximus proportionaliter cum astro
eisdem composita ordine, et eadem
contemperata complexionum, symmetria,
secundum genus, quantumlibet secundum
specierum numeros singula distinguuntur.

What would be a god who only pushed from the outside,
Let the universe run in a circle on his finger!
It befits him to move the world within,
To cherish nature within himself, himself within nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is within him
Never misses his power, never misses his spirit!

Translated line by line, this poem by Goethe is a poetic translation of Giordano Bruno from the spirit of Goethe! One cannot be Goethe — and have Giordano Bruno lying next to one, so to speak, when one wants to write these verses; something had to come into play that could never have come into play if Goethe had simply recast what Giordano Bruno said into poetic form. Here we see how Giordano Bruno's spirit came to life in Goethe.

But we must not only go back a few centuries when we come from Galileo and Giordano Bruno and want to let Goethe speak, but we must also acknowledge, so to speak, that what sprang from Giordano Bruno as if from the first great enthusiastic mood, from the philosophical mood of nature, awakens in Goethe a mood that now goes from thing to thing with complete devotion and carries the God that man has now learned to feel in nature back into the things of nature. In Goethe, the Giordano Bruno mood has become a mood, born with him, as it were. It was there when the seven-year-old boy took his father's music stand, set it down, placed minerals from his father's collection on it to have natural products, as well as plants from his father's herbarium, placed a small incense cone on top of it, and then took a magnifying glass and lit the incense cone with the rays of the rising morning sun in order to offer a smoke sacrifice to the god who lives in the minerals and plants and to whom he had built an altar, a sacrifice lit by the forces of nature itself. This is how Giordano Bruno lives on in Goethe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—but in such a way that what lives there as the innermost state of mind, Goethe carried into all the details of nature. It was precisely out of this spirit that Goethe could not understand how, according to natural scientists of the time, a material characteristic that distinguished humans from animals could be attributed to humans in such an external way. It was so completely materialistic when the natural scientists of the eighteenth century said that humans did not have that small bone that animals have in their upper jaw, the intermaxillary bone, which contains the upper incisors. Animals had it — and that distinguished humans from animals. In fact, it would not have to be a God who was the inner, moving principle of nature, but a God who pushed from the outside, of whom Giordano Bruno says “circumrotans et circumducens,” who would first have made the animals and then placed humans alongside them and — as if to affix a mark that humans are something else — would have determined: animals have the intermaxillary bone, humans do not! This is why Goethe becomes the great natural scientist who sets out to show how that which lives in nature in terms of form can experience an enhancement, so that in fact one cannot find the difference between humans and animals in something external, such as the intermaxillary bone, but that something lives in humans that, with the same bones and muscles as animals have, constitutes the higher spirit of humans. This is why Goethe so wonderfully demonstrates not only that he finds the intermaxillary bone and shows how it is fused in humans because it is only a subordinate bone, but also how the vertebrae can be inflated when the spirit that wants to be active in the brain needs it.

Truly, it always struck me as wonderful when I worked with Goethe's scientific writings for a long time and tried to penetrate such a principle, where Goethe simply imagines the skull bones as transformed vertebrae, expanded and becoming the cranial cavity. It occurred to me that Goethe must also have conceived the idea that the brain itself is a spinal cord transformed by the spirit, so that not only the covering but also the brain itself is elevated to a higher level, which is what is present in the vertebrae and spinal cord at a lower level. And it was a wonderful moment for me when I found a small note written in pencil by Goethe in the 1890s, which was then communicated by Professor Bardeleben in the Weimar Yearbook in an essay entitled “Goethe as Anatomist”: The brain is basically just a transformed piece of the spinal cord.

Thus, in Goethe we see the mood that we first encounter in Giordano Bruno applied to the individual limbs of natural beings, and we see how Goethe practically attempts to introduce the spirit of Giordano Bruno—to whom he himself is so close in his words—into all natural thinking. That is why it was so important for Goethe to see a transformation of the primordial plant in the entire plant world. And alongside what Goethe, the artist, achieved, what Goethe achieved as a natural scientist stands tall and mighty, because in a certain sense the same spirit that had descended from clairvoyant levels to sensory perception was embodied in Goethe in a personality that devotedly carried the spiritual back into the details in his observations. What did Goethe see in the individual plant? The expression of the primordial plant. And what was the primordial plant for him? The spiritual, the spiritual in the individual plant structures. The conversation between Schiller and Goethe is significant here, when both had attended a meeting of the natural history society in Jena. Schiller came out and said to Goethe: “Everything that is said about plants remains so unsatisfactory,” to which Goethe replied: “Perhaps it can be done differently, so that we see not only the parts that remain in our hands, but also the spiritual bond.” Goethe then took a sheet of paper and drew a plant structure in front of Schiller with a few strokes. He was clear about one thing: this is not only present in the lily or the dandelion or the ranunculus, but in all plants, albeit in different forms. Schiller, who could not understand this structure of the primordial plant, said: “That is not reality, that is an idea!” Goethe was perplexed and simply said: “That may be very dear to me, if I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes!” For Goethe saw the spiritual that spreads through all plants, saw it so clearly that he could even draw it. And it was the same with the primordial animal in all animals.

Thus Goethe pursued the God who does not push from the outside, but who moves everything from within, pursued the divine spirit that weaves and lives in everything, quite concretely from plant to plant, but also through leaves and blossoms and fruit, likewise from animal to animal, but also from bone to bone, from animal form to animal form. And it is interesting that Goethe was little understood by his contemporaries, that they did not know — as Schiller did not either — what Goethe actually wanted. But little by little, the Goethean spirit will take root, even in thinking about nature. Then people will recognize that Goethe's spirit was also a step beyond Giordano Bruno, that Giordano Bruno spoke of the God who is pantheistically found everywhere, in stones and plants and animals, but that Goethe also sought the God who does not impose himself from outside, but went further and said: We must not only look at the general, but we must also go to the individual phenomena and seek the spirit in the individual. — For the spirit lives differently in the plant, differently in the stone, differently in this bone, differently in that bone. The spirit is the eternally mobile force that forms the individual parts of matter. Matter follows the moving spirit. This can be expressed from a spirit, as Giordano Bruno does; but it can also be sought in all its details with devotion, as Goethe does. Then the human being comes closer and closer to truly approaching what the spread-out carpet of nature contains in spirit, so that the spirit gradually reveals itself to him.

If we think about the sequence of such spirits as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Goethe, we will finally become accustomed to appealing to what is the fundamental nerve of such spirits, and not remain stuck with the commonplace, for people are so fond of hearing phrases about even the great spirits. With regard to Galileo, who with his great divine idea spanned the whole of life in that moment, timeless and spaceless, one may well ask: What do our people of the present know about the real significance of Galileo, often much more than the one thing that is certainly not true, that he is supposed to have said: “And yet it moves!”? This is a beautiful phrase, but something — as you can see from the research of the Italian scholar Angelo de Gubernatis — that is certainly not true. And how often is Goethe quoted over and over again as having said his last words: “More light!” — the one thing he did not say. It is therefore necessary that spiritual science also shine light into the minds of such personalities, and that it is not only our own spirit, as we would like it to be, that is carried into the different eras. These three minds, which form a wonderfully attuned trifolium at the beginning of our modern era, which stand like a dawn in Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which then became the sun in Goethe, can best be characterized if we perhaps think of a word of Goethe himself, which shows us so clearly how he felt from the spirit of modern times that even the smallest atom of matter cannot exist without the spirit behind it, which brings it into contact with the other. We can recall the situation described by Goethe himself, when he stood there, many years after Schiller's death, as people were about to transfer his bones to the royal crypt, and believed they recognized Schiller's genius in a particularly shaped skull. He believed he recognized Schiller's skull in a very distinctive skull shape, which was then also transferred to the princely crypt. And it became clear to him what we saw in Galileo: that one must find the spirit in humility and mathematics. It still exists today, the old church lamp in the cathedral in Pisa, which has swung back and forth for countless souls. But when Galileo once sat in front of it, he measured the regularity of the lamp's oscillations by his own pulse and discovered the law of pendulum oscillations, which is so important today and which was a thought of divinity to him. And so much more. At Schiller's grave, Goethe had the thought that lived in Giordano Bruno out of his philosophical enthusiasm: Spirit is in all matter, everywhere, but not pushing and pulling, but as a spirit that lives in the smallest atom! This spirituality of Giordano Bruno also arose again in Goethe's soul when he held Schiller's skull in his hand and — like water frozen into ice — Schiller's spirit appeared to him in the shape of Schiller's skull. Goethe's entire spiritual foundation is before us when we consider the beautiful poem he wrote after contemplating the shape of Schiller's skull, and especially those lines that are so often misquoted, which can only be understood in context by imagining that Goethe vividly saw Schiller's individuality as if frozen before him and then said what he had to say in accordance with the nature of the spirit shared by Giordano Bruno and Goethe:

“What more can man gain in life
Than that God-Nature reveal herself to him,
How she lets the solid melt into spirit,
How she keeps what is spiritually created solid!”