The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

In honor of Goethe's birthday

[ 1 ] The *Faust* cycle accompanied Goethe from his youth—one might well say, in the truest sense of the word—until his death. For the second part of *Faust* had been left by Goethe, sealed, as his literary testament. And the completion of individual important sections of this “Faust,” the second part, truly belongs to the final years of this universal spirit’s life. Anyone who has the opportunity to follow Goethe a little in his intellectual development, as it is expressed in this life’s work, will be able to discover many highly interesting things, particularly regarding the way in which Goethe, as he returned again and again to this poem—his life’s poem—always arrived at different ideas about how it should unfold. There is, for instance, an interesting note regarding the conclusion of Goethe’s *Faust*, as it was once intended to be according to Goethe’s views at the time—a period we can roughly place in the late 1780s or early 1790s. There, alongside a few notes—“disposition” would not be the right word for them—on the first and second parts, we find a short sentence, a hint about the ending. And this hint contains the words written by Goethe in pencil: “Epilogue in chaos on the way to hell.” - From this you will see that Goethe once considered not granting his Faust at the end that kind of ascension to heaven which now appears in the poem he completed in his very old age, but that he intended, in the spirit of that journey hinted at in the prologue—from heaven through the world to hell— wanted to conclude *Faust* with an “Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell.” These were thoughts that lived in Goethe’s soul at the time and which suggested that knowledge, when it crosses certain boundaries, can only lead into chaos. And in a certain sense, we may connect the mood from which these words emerged—which I was able to cite to you as Goethe’s words—with what was said yesterday about our trials of the soul, when the soul, on the one hand, plunges out into nothingness, and on the other hand, into the dense inner essence of the human being, and cannot yet find the union. Goethe is a personality who indeed had to conquer everything step by step, who had to go through everything personally. That is why everything Goethe created strikes us as so sincere and so honest, though sometimes so vast that we cannot immediately grasp it, because we cannot always immediately find our way into the individual configuration of the personality that was present in Goethe at this or that point in his life. We can therefore note a truly great advancement in Goethe from the point when he wanted to conclude his “Faust” with an “Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell” to the point where he concludes entirely in the spirit of the succinct sentence: “Whoever strives with effort, we can redeem.” For when Goethe wrote down the conclusion to his *Faust*—now known everywhere—that intuition we spoke of yesterday lived within him, but so did that energy which gives us the certainty that, even if we must pass through all trials of the soul, we must ultimately arrive at the conclusion that was outlined yesterday. Let this be said, my dear friends, to point out a little ‘what is the most striking feature of Goethe’s life.’

[ 2 ] Those people who love a straightforward life, who shy away from grappling with the contradictions that are, after all, the very essence of a life in progress, will take offense at the fact that, if one looks closely, one does indeed find many contradictions in Goethe’s life—that Goethe judged many things differently in old age than he did in his youth. But this stems solely from the fact that Goethe first had to fight for every truth of life. And it is precisely in Goethe’s personality that we see how this life, directly on the physical plane, challenges our inner experiences, and how necessary this life, in its successive unfolding, is to make us fully human. For what appears so magnificently to us in Goethe when we survey his entire life and engage with its successive stages is the universality of his spirit, the all-encompassing, all-pervading nature of this spirit. And it is of the utmost importance to study Goethe from precisely this perspective in his own time, and also to measure what he was through the universality of his spirit against our own time, and then to ask: What can Goethe be for our time through the universality of his spirit?

[ 3 ] It is therefore beneficial for us to take a brief look at the inner nature of our time, our present, and our spiritual culture. For the anthroposophist, it is of particular importance to take a close look at the spirit of our age. It is often said that our time is the age of specialization, the age in which rigorous science must reign. And time and again, people quote the words of the great physicist Helmholtz: that in our time there can be no mind capable of comprehending the individual branches of human knowledge—as they exist today. It has practically become a catchphrase that there can be no Doctor universalis in our time, that one must be content with an overview of this or that specialty. But when we consider that life is a unified whole, that everything in life is interconnected, and that life does not depend on whether we can grasp with our soul what belongs to the entire spiritual organism of our time, we must say: It would actually be a tragedy for our age if it were not possible to gain, at least in some way, the spirit that reigns in all specialization. And one will be able to grasp it most easily by attempting to penetrate through those approaches that spiritual science alone can open up. It must be universal; it must, in a certain sense, survey the specialties of the individual sciences and the individual fields of the entire cultural life at a glance. And let us at least take a look today from one perspective at how our present spiritual life appears in the light of spiritual science. We will not speak—because there is not enough time—of those scientific fields that remain more or less the same for all time, at least in their meaning and spirit, even though they have undergone such tremendous enrichment in our time. We shall leave aside the field of mathematics, although we could also point out there that 19th-century mathematics, through its serious considerations in certain branches, has virtually conquered the supersensible realm. But we wish to point out that in the most diverse branches of modern science, over the course of the last few decades, tremendous discoveries have been made which, when viewed in the proper light, show us everywhere that the spiritual-scientific interpretation corresponds exactly to them, whereas all the theories that have been taught up to our time do not at all correspond to the facts that have been gathered with such diligence and energy over the course of the last few decades. We can already see from the single example of physics and chemistry how remarkable the course of development has been in recent decades.

[ 4 ] When we were young—in the 1970s, 1980s, or earlier—there were so-called atomistic theories in physics and chemistry that attributed all phenomena to certain forms of vibration, whether of the ether or some other material substance. And one might say: Back then, it was fashionable to ultimately attribute everything we encounter in the world to movements. Then, toward the 1890s, it became apparent from the facts that were gradually coming to light that the theory of motion, the atomistic theory, no longer held up, and it was, in a certain sense, a significant act—though in the most limited sense—when Ostwald, known primarily as a chemist and natural scientist, proposed the so-called energetics, the energy theory, at the Lübeck conference in place of that atomistic theory. That was, in a certain sense, a step forward. But what has subsequently become apparent in the fields of physics and chemistry right up to our own time has ultimately led to a certain skepticism, a certain disbelief, arising toward all that is theoretical. And only backward-thinking minds still believe today that external physical phenomena, such as light phenomena or other physical or chemical phenomena, can be attributed to the movements of minute particles or to mere manifestations of energy. This was undoubtedly influenced in particular by what has become known in recent years about the substances that led to the theory of radium, and the remarkable fact has already emerged that great physicists, such as Thomson and others, were forced by certain circumstances that gradually came to light to essentially throw all theory overboard, above all the ether theory with its elaborate forms of oscillation, which had once been pursued with such great seriousness and calculated with such diligent work involving differentials and integrals. It has thus come to pass with this theory of motion that the great physicists have cast it aside and, in a certain sense, have returned to a kind of vortex theory that had already taken shape under Descartes, one might say on the basis of ancient occult traditions. But even these theories were abandoned, and a certain skepticism toward all theorizing has set in, particularly in the fields of physics and chemistry, after it was observed that matter, so to speak, has crumbled in our hands under modern physical experiments. The fact is that, in the face of contemporary physics as it has developed up to the present day, the atomistic theories of motion and energy are no longer tenable. Everything that could still have been defended five, six, or even a few years ago—on which so many hopes were pinned when we were young, when even gravity was attributed to motion—has crumbled to nothing in recent years for those who have come to know the facts. But of course, one repeatedly encounters the strangest phenomena among those who lag behind. I would like to point out something interesting to you, since today I intend to discuss what characterizes our time and Goethe.

[ 5 ] A small book has been published that more or less takes the position that gravity does not exist—that is, that matter and celestial bodies do not attract one another. This has always been a difficulty for science: how to account for this so-called attraction, because one asks oneself: How can the sun attract the Earth if it does not extend anything out into space? Then, in recent days, this treatise appeared, which attributes attraction to impact forces, so that, for example, if we have a body—a celestial body or even just molecules—impacts are constantly being exerted on it from all sides by other celestial bodies and molecules. Why is it that these bodies collide from all sides? For naturally they also collide internally—one goes this way, the other that way, and so on. The most essential point now would be, if you consider the total number of collisions exerted externally and internally, and then the collisions exerted in between, that a difference arises. The impacts exerted in between are fewer and exert smaller forces than the external ones. The result is that the external impacts drive the two—be they molecules or celestial bodies—together. Thus, what we otherwise call a force of attraction is traced back to the impacts of matter. It’s cute when one finds something like a new idea today, but for those who investigate the matters, it is simply just cute. For the simple reason, for example, that it is cute because, when I was still a very young boy, this theory was expounded with all its mathematical intricacies by a certain Heinrich Schramm in a book that is, admittedly, out of print today: “The General Motion of Matter as the Fundamental Cause of All Natural Phenomena.” It is treated much more thoroughly there. Such things occur time and again among those who do not take the development of spiritual life into account. One can witness the strangest things there, such as how, from a one-sided point of view, the same errors are made over and over again. I would like to emphasize how the achievements of physics and chemistry in recent years have provided ample evidence that what is called matter is merely a human concept that disintegrates under experimentation, and that, beyond all motion and all energy, physics and chemistry are heading directly toward the point where matter converges with the spirit underlying it. The factual world of physics and chemistry is already challenging the need for a spiritual foundation today.

[ 6 ] Geology and paleontology present a very similar case. Until the 1860s and 1870s, there were still certain more comprehensive theories that took into account large-scale forces. Today we see skepticism everywhere, and among those who are our best geologists or paleontologists, we see a tendency to limit themselves to merely recording the facts, because they do not dare to synthesize them through thought. It does, after all, take a certain courage to develop thoughts that synthesize the corresponding series of facts. But today people are afraid to take the step that geology and paleontology also demand: from the material into the spiritual, the step that would also lead beyond the Kant-Laplacean theory. One does not dare to acknowledge that what is a dreamt-of cosmic nebula ultimately flows into the spiritual, into the totality of hierarchies, of which only an outer garment is all that one might call the external physical—or, for my part, astrophysical—theory.

[ 7 ] The situation is different, however, when we turn to those sciences that deal more closely with life—or, rather, with the soul. First among these is biology. Well, you know what tremendous hopes were pinned on the progress of biology, the study of life, when Darwin’s great work *On the Origin of Species* was published. You may also know that in the 1860s, Ernst Haeckel, with rare boldness, extended at the naturalists’ congress in Stettin in 1863 what Darwin had apparently until then applied only to the animal kingdom to human beings as well. And then we see a curious development with regard to this science of life, or biology. We see the more cautious minds, who limit themselves more to recording the facts, but also others who rush forward and construct bold theories based on what emerges from investigations into the relationships among the forms of individual living beings. Haeckel, in particular, we see boldly stepping forward and constructing family trees, showing how the most complex organisms are said to have arisen from simple ones through ever-new branches.

[ 8 ] But alongside these, one might say, more strikingly obvious lines of thought, there is a school of research that is also important to consider, and which I would like to characterize by the name of the anatomist Carl Gegenbaur. Gegenbaur essentially held the view that one should not initially ask how all this relates—this kinship among individual living beings. But he regards the Darwinian theory in such a way that, if one takes it as a guiding principle of research, one then investigates certain facts in the external world of forms or living beings. Let’s say the attitude of such a researcher could be expressed with the words: I don’t want to say right away that, as far as I’m concerned, higher animals are descended from birds or fish, but I want to take as my starting point the principle that a relationship exists, and I want to examine the gills and fins in light of that, I want to investigate how ever finer and finer relationships emerge. — And indeed, by viewing Darwinian work as a kind of guiding principle for inquiry, important and increasingly significant research findings have emerged. These have also emerged where this research—inspired by the Darwinian impulse—sought to investigate human descent, to trace all the evidence of paleontology and geology.

[ 9 ] Wherever greater caution has been exercised, this is the approach that has been taken: one seeks to identify relationships, using the Darwinian theory simply as a guiding principle. And this has led to the curious result that the Darwinian theory, as such a guiding principle, has proven to be immensely fruitful in recent years, and that through the facts to which it has led us up to the present day, it has refuted itself, it has negated itself! So that today we are faced with the curious fact that in hardly any field is there as much disagreement among researchers on every point as there is in the field of Darwinism. There are still those today—they are the most backward of all—who trace human beings directly back to the human-like apes that are still alive today or perhaps only slightly modified. There are, in particular among those who follow modern blood research, those who have taken up this older form of Darwinist theory—those who study the kinship of individual blood substances—and there are those, such as Klaatsch, who say: It is quite impossible, based on the facts that have emerged, to trace human beings back to any animal form that exists today. All shades of opinion exist, ranging from those who still wish to trace humans back to the ape as it is today, to those who do not trace them back to this ape, nor to the ancestors of these apes or other mammals. One must go back to animals of which one cannot form a conception and from which, on the one hand, humans are descended and from which, on the other hand, mammals have diverged, so that apes are quite distant from humans. - And the peculiar thing is that when such researchers then attempt to use the present forms that present themselves to us to evoke an image of those true pre-humans, all physically existing forms dissolve into all sorts of nebulous stuff. Nothing comes of it. Why not? Because we have, once again, a point in biology where external physical research into honestly investigated facts leads to the conclusion that one must not imagine the ancestors of humans in physical terms, since all physical imagination fails. One arrives at the spiritual archetype of the human being, at that which was the result of earlier planetary development, at the spiritual proto-human of whom we speak in spiritual science.

[ 10 ] Thus, the fully valid evidence consists precisely of the facts researched in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the disagreement among researchers is actually only masked by the fact that students listen to only one professor and do not examine what the others say. If they were to compare what one scholar says with what another says, they would make a curious discovery today. For example, one might find a passage quite clearly underlined in the books of one naturalist where he says: If someone studying under me who wants to take the doctoral exam were to put forward this claim that is made by the other scholar, I would fail him without hesitation. — But this assertion is none other than the one made by some colleague at another university. And this disagreement is the most striking feature in the field of biology, whereas in the fields of physics and chemistry it is a general resignation regarding theories. It is even more interesting, however, when one moves into physiology.

[ 11 ] We see how this physiology leads everywhere to highly peculiar, fantastical doctrines. We see how the purely external aspects of physiology today are already being influenced everywhere—even among materialistically minded people who do not wish to be so but are, in fact, materialists in their entire way of thinking—by all manner of things that lie beneath or within the physical realm. I could point to hundreds of examples here, such as the strange theories that have emerged in recent times under the influence of a Viennese school, the so-called Freudian school: theories about how the subconscious life of human beings, insofar as it expresses itself in dream life or other life phenomena, plays a role in the physiological realm. I wish to point to such facts, which I can only touch upon, for the sole reason that they demonstrate how the compulsion—which also emerges theoretically in other contexts—to channel empirical, external, sensory factual material into the spiritual realm is indeed evident everywhere. At the same time, however, we see that the moment a kind of comprehensive grasp, a kind of overall view of what the scientific impression of the present must be, asserts itself, a certain resignation sets in.

[ 12 ] We see this resignation in the realm of philosophy as well. You may be aware that, under the influence of William James in America, F. C. Schiller in England, and other researchers in the field of philosophy, a curious theory has developed which, in truth, is born of that striving of facts toward the spirit, yet refuses to admit that one must turn toward the spirit. It is so-called pragmatism, which holds that one must view the various phenomena of life in such a way that we invent theories about them as if they were indeed summarizable, but everything we devise is there only for the economy of the mind, having no inner, constitutive, or real value. This is the final dross of the most burnt-out minds of the present. This is a complete disbelief in the spirit, which seeks only to appeal to feeble theories and allows them to be invented to hold the facts together, but which does not believe that the living spirit first placed the thoughts within the things that we ultimately find in them.

[ 13 ] The most curious aspect in this regard, however, concerns the science of the soul itself. There are certain psychologists who cannot quite penetrate to a living spirit in which the soul is found as rising up in things. Yet they cannot deny that, if one is to establish any kind of harmony between the soul and things at all, one must then carry something from the soul into things. What one experiences in the soul must have something to do with things. And so a curious word has emerged that haunts German psychology today, a word that truly flies in the face of any philological thinking: the word “empathize.” One cannot imagine a word more embarrassing in the face of all thorough thinking than the word “empathize.” As if it depended on our ability to feel something into things when we cannot find the objective, real connection to what we see in things from the things themselves. It is the spiritual desolation of the science of the soul, or psychology, that seeks to help itself with such words of embarrassment.

[ 14 ] And so we could find many similar tricks that such unserious psychologies bring to light in our time. Other schools of psychology limit themselves entirely to describing the external instruments of the soul’s life—the brain or other such instruments—and things have already reached the point where psychologists are taken seriously who seek to prove experimentally that nothing is lost of the forces and energies we take into ourselves through eating and drinking and so on, which we thereby force into ourselves. This is then supposed to prove that the law of conservation of energy must also be the guiding principle for psychology, and that there is not, as it were, a purely distinct soul-being at work within the body through its instruments. Such a conclusion is truly devoid of all logic. For anyone who draws such a conclusion—who even finds themselves in the predicament of conceiving such a thought—would also have to admit that it is reasonable to stand in front of a bank building, count how much money is carried in, recount how much money is carried out, count how much money remains in the cash register, and then to conclude from this that there are no people inside the bank who are working there. Such conclusions are drawn today, and they are regarded as scientific conclusions. These are the theories that are built upon the facts of current research and that, like a fog, obscure the true state of the facts.

[ 15 ] We can observe the true state of psychology through a highly interesting phenomenon: a truly significant figure who wrote a work on psychology in the 1870s, Franz Brentano. He wrote the first volume of a multi-volume work on psychology. Anyone who is able to engage with what is written in this first volume of a multi-volume work on psychology, anyone who knows how to approach it from the true perspective of psychological facts, can say to themselves: Based on the starting points taken by Franz Brentano—assuming one could proceed further on the basis of these starting points at all—everything would have to lead into spiritual science. There is simply no other way forward. - And if one did not wish to lead into spiritual science and were to make such—albeit weak—beginnings in order to understand the life of the soul in a reasonable way, one would have to assume that one could go no further. And here we have the interesting fact that this first volume of the multi-volume work on psychology has indeed not been followed by any further volumes. It remained at the first volume, and in smaller works Brentano made attempts to understand this or that; but he found nowhere the access, the gateway to spiritual science, and therefore could not at all enable the further progress of psychology for himself. From such a significant fact, you can see how even the negative aspects we encounter in our present day everywhere call for the convergence of minds—minds grounded in the facts that have emerged so wonderfully in recent decades—into spiritual science. Admittedly, this convergence is still too difficult for some today; for others, different reasons stand in the way. We do not wish to delve into these reasons now, but only to show that wherever we seek the true forces present in the actual substance of today’s scientific culture, wherever we wish to proceed honestly, sincerely, comprehensively, and energetically, the convergence with spiritual science must necessarily take place.

[ 16 ] However, history—as it is practiced today—is the furthest removed from this convergence with the humanities. It seems that those historians come closest to this who do not merely see in the facts of history a random interplay of successive human impulses and passions and other facts of the physical plane, but who speak of ruling thoughts. As if abstract thoughts could have an effect! Unless one attributes a will to them, they are not spiritual beings; they cannot act. Therefore, it is meaningless to speak of insubstantial ideas in history. Only when one introduces living life into history, when one conceives of the spiritual life-principle as flowing through the souls, living itself out ever more highly from soul to soul, when one understands history as it is understood in *Les grands Initiés*, in *The Great Initiates*, has one reached the point where history also flows into spiritual science.

[ 17 ] We can thus say quite plainly: To an unbiased observer, it becomes clear how all scientific inquiry challenges the spiritual-scientific perspective. - But those spirits who delve more deeply into spiritual life, who truly wish to walk the paths of knowledge with their whole soul—who do not merely pursue theories, but whose very lifeblood is devoted to knowledge—oh, such spirits also demonstrate in their lives how everything is led into spiritual science. There was a man who, for a number of years, was known to the outside world as a famous poet, who lay on his sickbed for decades and, in the last years of his life, wrote down what he had conceived, what had come to him on the path of knowledge, in order to pass it on to posterity: a poet whom the philosophers, of course, did not take seriously philosophically. I am referring to Robert Hamerling. But Robert Hamerling—who was perhaps taken seriously enough only by Vincenz Knauer, who also gave lectures on him —- was not a theoretical philosopher, but one who embarked on the paths of knowledge with his heart and soul, who, to the extent it was accessible to him, brought together the chemical, physical, philosophical, physiological, biological, and historical knowledge of our time and enriched it with poetic intuition. Robert Hamerling, who was able to enrich thoughts about the world through what his poetic intuition gave him, set down in his *Atomistik des Willens* everything he found on his path of knowledge, and this path of knowledge was not one that so many today follow—based on mere theory or academic training—but one that sprang directly from life itself. In this *Atomistik des Willens*, he recorded various insights that are of interest to those concerned with the convergence of external scientific inquiry and intellectuality with spirituality. Let us read a passage from *Atomistics of the Will* here to show what this 1891 book contains of his solitary thoughts, which he gathered for himself on the path of knowledge as he had embarked upon it. “One could,” says Hamerling on page 145 of the second volume of his *Atomistics of the Will*, “at least conceive of the possibility of living beings whose physicality is thinner than atmospheric air. At least for other celestial bodies, the assumption of such beings is not unreasonable. Beings of such low physical density would, being invisible to us, correspond entirely to what we “customarily call spirits.” Likewise, to what is referred to as “etheric bodies,” which are said to survive the death of the individual.” And so it goes on. Here, in the midst of a work written from the spiritual life of the present, you have referred to the etheric body. Now consider, my dear friends, if truth and sincerity were to prevail everywhere, along with a thorough striving to acquaint oneself with what truly lives as thought within human beings; if one were to engage honestly with what already exists; if—in other words—people did not write so many books before they have learned what is already written in other books: then there would be a very different kind of work in our time, then there would be continuity, but then one would also have to say that in our last few decades, spiritual life has sprung forth everywhere from true, serious science, offering glimpses of spiritual goals and perspectives. For there are a great many cases like that of Robert Hamerling.

[ 18 ] Thus the specialties of the individual sciences come together and call for what today can be provided solely by a comprehensive worldview, as has been attempted, for example, in “The Secret Science,” which I was recently able to outline and into which, without one noticing it, the findings of all of today’s sciences have been woven alongside spiritual research. When we consider this, we must say: In truth, there is no lack of open doors to spirituality anywhere; it is simply that they are not noticed. — Anyone familiar with contemporary science will find everywhere that it calls for spirituality in its facts, not in its theories. Once we are able to emancipate ourselves, in relation to external science, from all theories—from atomistic and kinetic theories, from energetics, and from everything that, with similar one-sidedness, repeatedly seeks to encompass the world with a few fixed concepts—we will let the vast sum of facts that modern science brings to light speak for themselves, then one will find no further contradiction between what is pursued here as spiritual science and the true scientific results of contemporary research.

[ 19 ] In this way, Goethe can be of great assistance, as he fulfilled all the criteria of a universal mind in a magnificent way. Even in a superficial sense; for anyone familiar with Goethe’s correspondence knows that, during his lifetime, countless natural scientists from all fields corresponded with him on the most important questions. From Goethe’s study, from his physics and other cabinets, threads extended in every direction to the various branches of science. With botanists, opticians, zoologists, anthropologists, geologists, mineralogists, historians—indeed, I would have to list all the sciences—Goethe corresponded with them all. And while the narrow-minded minds of his time certainly refused to acknowledge him—because his research far surpassed their own—he found minds that took him most seriously and heeded his judgment when it came to resolving this or that specific question. This is, of course, merely a superficial aspect, but we can also see how Goethe collaborated in thought and in fact with the most significant philosophers of his time, such as Schelling and Hegel, and how a number of philosophers were inspired by Goethe, as Goethean ideas recurred in their works in different or similar forms. Finally, we can see how, throughout his life, Goethe seriously engaged with botany, zoology, osteology in particular, and anthropology in a broader sense, and how he engaged with optics and physics in a broader sense. Today, some scientists in the biological field do give Goethe some credit. One must, however, take the physicists quite seriously and understand from the standpoint of color theory that they cannot make sense of Goethe’s color theory, that they do not understand it, because this color theory will only be understood in later times—unless one has already become acquainted with it through spiritual science—perhaps not until the second half of the 20th or the first half of the 21st century. Today’s physics can only view Goethe’s theory of colors as nonsense. But this is not due to the theory of colors itself, but to the current forms of science. And if you read what is meant in my book on “Goethe’s Worldview” as well as in the preface to Goethe’s Scientific Works, edited by Kürschner, then you can see that it contains a view of color theory that is scientific in the deepest sense, compared to which all contemporary physical theories are amateurish.

[ 20 ] Thus we can see how Goethe truly worked in all fields. We can see how, everywhere, his quest to understand the laws of nature is enriched by what Goethe possessed within himself as poetic powers. With him, nothing is separate at all; everything intertwines within his soul. Yet one does not interfere with the other, and in this Goethe is living proof to us that it is indeed a folly, an absurdity, to believe that the active work of one branch of the intellectual mind could interfere with intuition. If both impulses are present only in their full strength and originality, then one does not interfere with the other. We can form a conception of the living interplay of the human soul’s powers as they manifest in the individual sciences and in the whole personality of the human being; we can form such a conception out of the necessity of life, and we have the further aid of the fact that there exists such a modern spirit in whom this interplay of the individual soul powers of the whole personality was immediately alive. That is why Goethe is such an exemplary figure, whom one must observe in order to study this living interplay of the soul forces. And since he is a person in whom one can actually trace how he grows from year to year in terms of the deepening of his own soul life and his understanding of the world, we have in him an example of how a person must strive to achieve a deepening of their soul life. Not merely the contemplation of Goethe, not the parroting of his sentences, not the acceptance of his works, but rather the grandeur that emanates from his entire being—to regard this as an exemplar for our present time—that is what may perhaps come to the forefront of our souls on a day like today, which, as a calendar date in the narrower sense, commemorates Goethe’s life. And today’s scientific spirit, in particular, could learn much from Goethe. True, this scientific spirit has not advanced far in terms of grasping spiritual life, but it is precisely from this perspective that Goethe will and must celebrate a resurrection; it is precisely from this perspective that Goethe will and must gradually be understood more and more, for much of what can be called a healthy examination of our progress into the spiritual worlds—of our spiritual science in general—can stem from a consideration of Goethe, because in Goethe everything is healthy. Goethe is reliable in all things, and where he contradicts himself, it is not logical contradictions that arise, but because life itself contradicts itself and must contradict itself in order to be alive.

[ 21 ] That was a thought I wanted to share with you today, on Goethe’s birthday, to show how necessary it is that we delve into the things that lie before us in a completely different way. Goethe has so much to offer us. He will give us the most if we forget much of what has been written about him in countless works, for that tends to cast a veil over the real Goethe rather than help us get to know him. But Goethe possesses a secret power of attraction; Goethe has something that works through itself, and if you open yourselves to Goethe, you will see that you can experience a Goethe’s birthday within yourselves, that you can experience something of what is eternally young and fresh in Goethe—something of which one can say: Goethe can be reborn in a soul imbued with spiritual science. Our materialistic age, no matter how often it mentions the name Goethe or cites so many of Goethe’s works, has very little understanding of him.

[ 22 ] There were times when one could truly be captivated by Goethe with one’s whole soul, even when speaking seriously about Goethe—not in our sense of literary-historical terms, which is not serious when speaking seriously—for there were people who, through such discourse, were entranced by the innermost, spiritual nerve that always lies within Goethe. And here we may always recall how Rosenkranz, the Hegelian, in the 1830s and 1840s, how old Karl Rosenkranz, who stood at the pinnacle of the scholarship of his time, took the risk of announcing lectures on Goethe at the University of Königsberg. He wanted to speak frankly and freely about what a philosopher has to say about Goethe. So he prepared these lectures and left his study with the thought: Well, you might have a few listeners after all. - But that thought nearly vanished as he stepped outside and found such a terrible snowstorm raging that one might have thought no one would dare venture out onto the street—and consequently, no one would come to the lecture halls for a course that wasn’t required for one’s bread-and-butter studies. So he went there anyway, and lo and behold, the conditions under which he had to lecture were the most unfavorable imaginable. It was a room that could not be heated, that had no proper floor, and on whose walls water was streaming down everywhere. But the name Goethe had drawn a crowd, and there was already a sizeable number of people on the first evening of lectures, and more and more kept coming. And even though conditions grew increasingly unfavorable and the hall became ever more uncomfortable, in the end there were so many people attending Karl Rosenkranz’s lectures that the hall could barely hold them all.

[ 23 ] Goethe, in particular, is one of those minds who can inspire us most from an anthroposophical perspective, and if we tell ourselves that within Goethe’s physical body there was a great spirit—one we must, of course, first study—we will arrive at an anthroposophical perspective in a healthier way than if we were presented with a physical body in which there is a great spirit that we are expected to acknowledge on authority. There are truly healthy paths into anthroposophy. One need only walk them; one need only not shy away from the effort. That is why I never shy away from shedding light—even if it may be quite uncomfortable—on this or that side path of spiritual contemplation, from saying this or that daring thing, from saying this or that difficult-to-understand thing, even when there are many listeners in such a lecture series. I will never shy away from this, because I know that only in this way is healthy progress for anthroposophy possible—a true integration of spiritual science into modern cultural life. And it seems to me that one can ascend to the highest spiritual realms without allowing one’s heart to grow cold. It seems to me that all those gathered here can sense something of the fact that anthroposophy is being interpreted here with the means of the most modern spiritual life, and that it is a very great error when, anywhere—even in the anthroposophical sphere—the strange judgment appears that something medieval, something not corresponding to modern science, is being rehashed for people. Because this is said by some, even within the anthroposophical sphere, it must be pointed out: Those who can follow with understanding will know that nothing medieval, but rather something objectively scientific in union with a truly modern spiritual striving, is being pursued. It is not for me to judge to what extent this is achieved. But one should at least recognize that what is being sought is not something medieval, nor anything merely connected to traditions, but rather something objective, on a par with modern science. And that our hearts can be moved by the conditions of life that arise from this anthroposophical perspective—that, too, may be regarded as certain. That seems to me to be the most important thing we take away from such a perspective for our hearts and carry out into the world. What we have grasped in the breadth of concepts and words is condensed in our hearts; we live it out in our feelings and sensations, in our compassion; we live it out in our actions—and thus live out anthroposophy. And just as rivers can only flow out across the land when they draw their water from the springs, so the life of anthroposophy can only flow out into the world when it draws its strength from the sources of wisdom that are opened to us today through those spiritual powers we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. And we have grasped spiritual science in the true sense of the word when it speaks to us in the forms of modern spiritual life, but at the same time does not leave our hearts and souls cold, but warms them, so that this warmth can also be communicated to others throughout the world. To the extent that you carry out into the world what is said here—carrying it out not only through thoughts, but through your feelings, impulses of will, and deeds—to that extent have these lectures been of benefit. And that is the aim of these lectures.

[ 24 ] With this wish, my dear friends, I always welcome you in my heart whenever you come here; with these wishes I greet you today, as we conclude this lecture series and as I say to you: Let us be together in a spiritual and intellectual sense, even if we must live in physical space—one here, the other there. And let us take from the times when we can be closer together in space the most beautiful mutual greeting, the most beautiful mutual farewell, knowing that we are together in spirit, even when we are physically scattered. In this spirit, I offer you today, as we stand at the end of our series on Goethe’s birthday, this farewell at the conclusion of this lecture series. Let us think often of what has united us, and let this also bear fruit for the personal bond that can always entwine itself from one to another in love. Let us be together in this spirit, even when we have parted ways, and let this spirit bring us together again and again anew, so that we may rise to the heights of the spirit, of the supersensible life.