The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! In the past, almost every year I have been able to give a lecture in this city in the field that I have recently taken to calling spiritual science. Since our friends have also requested such a reflection in these fateful times, it shall be given this evening. But you will understand that in our present time, when all our feelings, our emotions and our thoughts are focused on the great events, on those events that claim so many hopes, so much confidence, on the events that undoubtedly most significant events are now unfolding, events that are also causing so much pain and suffering. You will understand that at this time, such a reflection, especially if it is to be based on the spiritual scientific worldview, must also be made in view of the fateful events of our time. But it cannot be my task to add yet another of the numerous reflections that are being set forth today in lectures on the things that are so powerfully moving our time. Rather, it must be my task to say, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have always spoken here, what can be said in brief about our time from precisely this point of view.

It has been emphasized many times that the present struggle, the present mighty struggle, in which, in fact, apart from smaller tribal and linguistic differences, 35 different peoples of the earth are at war with each other; it has been said often that this mighty struggle is caused above all by the present-day commercial, economic, social and political antagonisms, and that it is of primary importance to look clearly and energetically at reality and the values in question and not to obscure these considerations with metaphysical speculations. From the standpoint of spiritual science, one can only agree with such a view and never oppose it.

But spiritual science also wants to stand on the standpoint of reality. This is one way in which this evening's meditation will differ from those that are so often practiced, in that it takes into account the realistic admonition of our contemporaries, while also considering that this mighty struggle is, after all, part of the whole course of human development, in which, above all, great impulses are at work that can only be achieved through spiritual contemplation. One could also say: At that time, when the Germanic tribes of Central Europe threatened the southern empires, the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Middle Ages, only the Roman spheres of interest with their social and political intentions were confronted with what was to come from Central Europe. Of course, at the time, one could justifiably speak in this way. But if we look at things today, and judge from a higher point of view, as we must today, because the world has advanced, we would see that if these struggles had not taken place back then, the reorganization of Europe through these struggles, which were initially caused by the Roman spheres of interest, of course, took place in a certain way —, then the whole Western development up to our time would have taken on a different face. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that anyone who follows the intellectual development of nations, the intellectual development in history, must really come to the conclusion, without indulging in any fantasies, without speculating, that what is now being fought out between thirty-five nations of the earth is, in fact, certainly the most significant thing imaginable for the present. It is not words that will fight it out, nor thoughts and human philosophies, but the bravery of the armies. But behind all this, one can see another struggle, a struggle of spiritual forces, a struggle of world views. And without going into what has often been said, I should perhaps emphasize that history will one day regard it as the most absurd of claims that Central Europe somehow provided the immediate cause of this world war. It will be seen more and more clearly, especially when viewed from a higher perspective, that Central Europe and particularly the German people are involved in a purely defensive struggle. But if we look at this defensive struggle, then from a certain point of view we can see how this struggle is one part of a great, mighty defensive struggle that German intellectual life, intellectual impulses, have already had to fight out in part, and in part have to fight out with ever-increasing strength, against that which is also a kind of intellectual encirclement of Central European intellectual life. What I mean by this, I would like to characterize it with a symptom that may not seem very meaningful to you. But one could cite many things and one would always find the same thing.

What we in many respects count among the greatest and most significant things that the spiritual life of modern times has taken up, is called the “idea of development,” the “worldview of development.” And no one tires of emphasizing how significant it was for the whole development of the spiritual life of humanity that people learned to see how not the individual entities of the world around us stand side by side, but that they have developed apart; how one can trace a developmental series from the lowest creatures up to humans.

The one who, out of the deepest impulses of the supporting forces of the German spirit, spoke of such a development in a deeply inward sense is none other than Goethe. And it may be said that, since Goethe, German culture has had a wonderful, to use a Goethean expression: a spiritual doctrine of development. This spiritual doctrine of development has not been taken up into the general world view, nor into the European world view. In contrast, it takes five to six decades for the general consciousness of modern cultural humanity to accept the doctrine of development - but in what form - in the form of Darwinism.

When something like this is said, it still seems to have a chauvinistic coloring for many today. But future times will see it in all the power that is inherent in it. Darwinism has given the idea of development a materialistic [utilitarian] slant; and in this slant, which has been forced upon it, the idea of development has been incorporated into modern cultural ideas by an entirely English thinker. And the deeper German developmental idea is definitely faced with the necessity of defending itself. In the future, the world will realize that it is not necessary to say that Darwinism is something wrong, something incorrect, but that it will be necessary to take the deeper foundations, the more vigorous knowledge from the sources of German intellectual life for the developmental idea as well. In other words, it will be necessary to forge weapons that can defend the spiritual goods of Central Europe against the attacks that are being waged in countless fields, as in the field just mentioned, against this Central European intellectual life. And just as it is not important, when one is in the midst of a struggle between nations such as that which exists today, to wage war with these or those words, so to speak, between individual nations, whether words of hatred or sympathy, but rather, as is much more natural, to take the position that one has to defend what one recognizes as one's fatherland, as one defend one's family without disparaging anything else, so in the field of spiritual struggles, which, as everything shows, we will face in the near future in a tremendous way, it is important to be fully imbued with what the forces of this Central European, especially German, intellectual life are. In these forces there will be weapons that will be needed in the future. I cannot go into more detail, but I would like to suggest that the current struggle of external weapons will only be the beginning of what is to come in terms of spiritual struggles, and that the ill-intentioned, malicious, defamatory views that are hurled at German culture from all sides already show us the beginning.

If we now want to talk about these things from the point of view of spiritual science, it is of course incumbent upon us to at least characterize this point of view of spiritual science with a few words. Even though today, as in other lectures that I have also given in this city, I cannot go into the details of this spiritual science, which is to enter the development of time and the world as something new, and even though I will not be able to say anything conclusive in favor of spiritual science, I would still like to indicate with a few words, with a few points of view, what spiritual science wants.

Spiritual science wants to be a real science of the spirit. Above all, it wants to show how the human soul life, that which we call our innermost human nature, is connected with the real and true spirit that flows and weaves through nature and humanity. And just as natural science renewed the world view of humanity a few centuries ago, so spiritual science today wants to enter into the spiritual development of humanity in a very similar way, albeit from a different point of view.

I would like to draw attention to the following: if you were to say to someone who knows nothing about chemistry, who has never heard of chemistry and only knows water – of course, we can only imagine such a person hypothetically – that in this water, which is liquid and extinguishes fire, extinguishes fire, there is a gas in it that can be separated out, that is hydrogen; this hydrogen burns, it is not liquid but gaseous, so the person who has never heard of chemistry may consider this to be a highly fantastic idea. Natural science has made this into a very ordinary, even trivial, idea today. There was certainly a time when those who claimed such things were thought of as fantasists.

Today, on the other hand, anyone who knows nothing of spiritual science is considered a fantasist who says: When we have the human body with its soul before us, it presents itself in such a way that we cannot recognize the essence of what is directly connected to it while this essence is inside the body itself. One must separate it by the spiritual-scientific method, the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as one separates hydrogen from water by chemical methods, if one wants to recognize it. This spiritual-scientific method does not take place in an external laboratory, but in the intimate processes of the human soul itself.

But there are spiritual scientific methods by which man can truly become a spiritual scientist, by which he can come to separate his spiritual soul from the physical body so that it is outside, as hydrogen is outside of water. But then the spiritual researcher lives in this spiritual-soul realm. He learns to recognize the characteristics and nature of this spiritual-soul realm, that which goes through birth and death in man, that which passes through the gate of death into a spiritual world and then, after death, world with a higher consciousness, with a consciousness that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize when he applies the spiritual scientific method to his soul, just as the chemist learns the properties of water when he applies the chemical methods. A time will come when people will speak of these things as they speak today of the Copernican world view, which was also once regarded as fantasy, or of similar things.

Just as today the spiritual researcher has to present to humanity the truth that there is a spiritual core in us that passes through the gate of death to return to repeated lives on earth, to repeated and repeated lives on earth, so one day this will be a truth, as the idea of development in external natural science is considered true today. If today what the spiritual researcher has to say is quite naturally regarded as a dream, as a fantasy, from many sides, then those who have immersed themselves in these things may point out how, at a certain time, Copernicanism, which is generally recognized today, was regarded as contradicting the five senses. And so it is today. What spiritual science has to say about repeated lives on earth, about the independence of the soul, and so on, is said to contradict the five senses. And if you take a materialistic point of view, you say: the life of the soul is enclosed between birth and death.

One must compare such a view with another view that still existed in the Middle Ages: that the blue firmament arches over us, which is a conclusion, a boundary, a spatial boundary. Modern science shows us that this boundary is only formed by our ability to see, that space extends into an infinite world, that we are embedded in infinite space on the earth. When modern science dawned, the blue firmament was broken through and recognized as something that is evoked by human vision. Through spiritual science it will be recognized that the boundaries that seek to enclose life between birth and death are like the blue firmament in relation to space. Through spiritual science, people will learn to look beyond this temporal firmament, which is set by birth and death, and they will find human life embedded in a line of development from which it emerges again and again.

Between earthly lives lie realms of development of a purely spiritual nature. And so, by learning to experience himself in this way, the spiritual researcher has something to proclaim in spiritual science: in the spiritual and soul realm, the human being feels, not through philosophical speculation but through experience, a connection with the real spiritual world, which surrounds the physical, from which the spiritual-soul is released - spiritual science speaks of an experience of the spiritual world, a spiritual world in which spiritual beings are, as physical beings are around us here.

It is perhaps still somewhat unpopular today if one is obliged to present these basic concepts of spiritual science in this way. But we live in a time in which humanity is living in a time of transformation of all thinking. Just as a Copernicus or a Galilei had to be anticipated in the dawn of modern natural science, so one can see something in spiritual science that lies, as it were, in the bosom of our time.

If we now follow German spiritual life and really immerse ourselves in it, then from the point of view of spiritual science we will have to gain a very definite view of German spiritual life, of that which has constantly revealed itself in it. I cannot go into details now, only with regard to the last times of German spiritual life. Thus, I said, the peculiarity of spiritual science is that the spiritual researcher, through his special spiritual-scientific method, learns to experience himself in the spiritual-soul that has been freed from the physical body and now knows itself, not in time but in eternity.

Let us see, by visualizing this spiritual view, how the most German of philosophers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, I would say, lived out his belief in immortality and his belief in the soul. Fichte, like his contemporaries, was not yet able to have a real spiritual science. But how he drew from the spiritual life and knew this life in connection with the life of his national spirit is shown in the speeches he addressed to his people in one of Germany's most difficult times. But I don't want to talk about that today, but rather about how Fichte expressed himself, for example, where he wanted to give a “directions for a blessed life” philosophically, about his doctrine of immortality and soul. There he says:

I cannot admit that one seeks the main thing in the immortal human life only after death. That which is most important to me is that we become aware in this life of the body within us of that which passes through the gate of death and then goes into a spiritual world and lives on in it. For this invisible element living in us, I want to live through this earthly life.

This is not yet spiritual science, but it is the germ of spiritual science. And this germ of spiritual science can be found wherever we look at the fruits of German intellectual life. Everywhere we find the urge, the longing, not to satisfy ourselves with the abstractions of thought, with the external spirit of science, from which the science of the senses or the combination of the sensual is born. The German does not seek only for concepts and ideas, but also for their connection with the living spirit. The German feels moved when he can realize that science is not an external absorption of knowledge, but that it is the true life of knowledge, which he strives for so that the soul communes with the spirit that pervades and permeates the world. In the real connection with what spiritually permeates and permeates the world, the German wants to see the ideal of his knowledge, that he does not just want to absorb ideas, not just concepts, a science that is like an image of something external. He wants to have something in his soul that flows like a spiritual lifeblood in him, like the God himself who lives in him. And this is expressed more intensely and powerfully in a creation that no nation in the world has; which may not stand at the pinnacle of world creation in an artistic sense, but in the way it expresses itself, in that the German does not strive for a merely external visual connection with the spirit, but for a confrontation, spiritual eye in spiritual eye, with the spirit. You know that by this creation I mean the Goethean “Faust” poetry.

Do we not see in Faust how his consciousness turns away from all that is mere external knowledge, what is mere derivation from something external? Do we not see how he strives for the source of life, the manifestation of the spirit; how he strives to confront this spirit eye to eye? How he turns away from the external and strives to experience supersensible worlds? The German can never be satisfied with something he has achieved as knowledge. This is best seen by looking at the following: the beginning of Goethe's “Faust” has become almost trivial. It reflects the mood of Goethe in the 1770s. We see how Faust wants to get out of a knowledge that is not connected to the living spiritual world. When we grasp its full depth, we are shaken when Faust speaks the words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool,
and am as wise as before!

Now let us see how this German intellectual life unfolds. Let us see how Goethe, in the 1770s, longs for the appearance of the earth spirit, for the sources of intellectual life, for higher self-knowledge, which is achieved by the soul immersing itself in the living spiritual of the transcendental world.

Then we see how greatly the German philosophers strove in this respect after Goethe's time. We see that, after Goethe wrote his “Faust”, German thought, German poetry and German music all seek to look at things from the deepest sources. We see the emergence of thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; we see them connecting with Goethe; we see how they create something from a knowledge that is supposed to be more original than all that has gone before, that is also supposed to come from the very depths of the human soul; we see that they are creating a philosophy; and when we consider that Hegel created a “natural right” and that Schelling published a medical journal, that all these minds were searching for a renewal of science, despairing at Faust! They also sought to renew theology, for they all wanted to be theologians. We see how all this greatness, which has not yet been properly appreciated, springs from the fundamental forces of the German spirit, and we can perhaps say: Goethe could have stood there, after he had seen all this pass him by, and could have said: What I felt in despair back then in the 1770s has been brilliantly brought forth by the German spirit from the sources of life! And let us assume that Goethe had grown even older than he did; let us assume – and I believe that no one would dispute this hypothesis – that Goethe had begun in 1840 [or let us assume that he had been even younger ], to write “Faust” again after all that had happened in the meantime in German intellectual life, can we believe that the beginning of “Faust” around 1840 would have sounded like this:

Now, thank God, I have studied philosophy,
law and medicine, with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
and, thank God, theology as well
with great zeal and assiduity,
and here I am, a wise man,
as wise as one can be.

Do you think the beginning of “Faust” would have sounded like that? Certainly not. It would have sounded exactly the same as in 1772. Exactly the same!

But what does that tell us? It testifies that it is in the essence of this quintessentially German, Goethean idea of Faust to regard everything that has already been achieved not as something that can satisfy the individual, but that a striving is rooted in this German spiritual life, where it is manifested precisely in its representatives, that every individual, in turn, has to go through, in every age, an eternal becoming, never being complete. This is the case because German intellectual life can only describe the grasping of the spiritual as a true one if the spirit is experienced. But it can never be experienced if one wants to grasp it in an established way. To experience the spirit, one must always approach the spirit in a renewed way. But this is a typically German trait, and at the same time it is what can be called the “supporting force of the German spirit”.

Not concepts, not ideas, not something acquired in reason is what the German strives for, but what is to be striven for is that which can be grasped again at any time in original power. Not the spirit in a coffin, but the ever-living spirit is striven for. So that we may say: Admittedly, we do not see an archetypally German striving in the older times in the same way that we see spiritual science today. But we see the seeds; in what lives in the best, we see the same striving for direct experience of the connection with the spirit. This is always being witnessed anew. That means: a real life of the spirit is presupposed, in which the individual stands. That means: the supporting power of the spirit lives in him in such a way that they hold secret dialogue, that he is touched by what the German spirit wants from him. And this we see continuing to have an effect even where German intellectual life has been pushed back on itself by attacks from left and right, from above and below; we see the original German being carried by the real spirit continuing to have an effect. I would like to mention just one of the many phenomena that could be cited from the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the most important representatives of the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century, who has not yet been fully recognized today, is Herman Grimm, the son of one, the nephew of the other of the Brothers Grimm, the great researchers of myths and legends, the researcher of the German language. Herman Grimm is first known as a German cultural historian, as an art historian. If you now delve into Herman Grimm's art history, you come across something peculiar. There is nothing in Herman Grimm's writings of what could be called pedantic erudition, of external systematics, but there is something that originally springs from the spiritual. The most important thing that one can gain from the works of Herman Grimm must be read between the lines, it must be sensed from what is said. Why? Because in Herman Grimm lives the sustaining power of the German spirit, which is brought to life by him, and through which he lets himself be whispered in each individual case through an inspiration as to what he has to say about an artistic phenomenon. So that one cannot but feel the affinity between the one who writes and the one who inspires him, one feels like a living conversation of the German national spirit with the one who speaks to us through his books in terms of art history. This Herman Grimm, he prepared himself in a peculiar way for his art historical profession. In his youth, he wrote novellas and also a significant novel. The recognition of these things also belongs to the living German intellectual heritage. For it is not because of their German nature that they have been forgotten, but because attacks have been made on German intellectual property from outside.

I will briefly outline one of Herman Grimm's novellas. We will see shortly what the purpose of this is. The novella is called “The Songstress”. We are presented with a very beautiful characterization of a woman. We see a man in the woman's surroundings. The man is deeply in love with the woman; the woman cloaks herself more in a nobly flirtatious being. He suffers terribly. Herman Grimm wrote a so-called first-person novella with this novella. What he writes is as if the story were being told by a person who lives next door to the couple and experiences everything that happens. And so, in the novella, the author – but in reality, of course, his friend – describes the events that transpire. The singer's coquettish behavior finally drives the lover completely mad. He distances himself from her. He cannot bear the situation. Later, his friend meets him again and sees that he has completely fallen apart. He takes him into his house and sees that this person has come to the edge of the grave because of his love. He sees that he is on the verge of suicide at any moment. So he takes him into his house. But he sees that it is necessary to get the singer over there. He fetches her. And lo and behold, as he approaches the house with the singer, who is to come as the unfortunate man's last hope, so to speak, they hear a shot. The unhappy lover has shot himself, he is dead. The content of the novella is wonderfully beautiful in its characteristics; but that is not what matters to me now. What matters to me is what happens to the singer now that she has found only the dead, suicidal lover. The singer stays in the friend's house for some time. She explains to her friend that she cannot remain in this house, that she is experiencing terrible things in this house. The friend to whom she relates her experiences does not believe this, of course; he is a rationalist. He thinks as rationalists of the present day think. So she asks him to watch with her for one night. And there he is convinced of what is happening to this woman as a result of the death of her lover. He sees for himself how the woman straightens up. He sees a figure enter through the door; that is, he only recognizes it from the words, he does not see the figure, but through what the woman sees, he is convinced that this is indeed a subjective but true experience, that the woman is really in contact with the dead, that this is a matter of the working out of destiny, which throws its rays over death.

Not because I want to use a work of fiction to prove spiritual science, but because the spiritual scientist has to say: Herman Grimm describes like a spiritual science expert, Herman Grimm wants to describe that a person's destiny is not only understood between birth and death. This novella is wonderfully moving, deeply moving, because it describes a person's life beyond death.

Now this is not a temporary phenomenon in writing. In his great cultural-historical novel, Herman Grimm again describes a female character who also has to experience the death of her lover. He describes how real the death is, how the death of the hero occurs, how the spiritual figure rises out of the physical figure. Now Herman Grimm describes how - appropriately - this figure enters into the spiritual world and how a connection remains between the dead and what rises out of the physical body of the heroine. I describe these things because they show how, in German literature, where one is confronted with representatives of the Germanic spirit, the supporting power of the German spirit works in such a way that the novellist, the novelist, too, can do so if he wants to rise into the world of real, supersensible reality. We are shown how the best minds do not stop at outward, visible reality, but how they follow the human soul into the spiritual world. These representatives of the German character did not yet have spiritual science, but their souls were so directed that they sensed the supporting power of the German spirit, which wants to lead the German character to the experience of the spiritual. Therefore, one can have the strongest confidence in the development of spiritual science when one looks at what is there as a germ for this spiritual science in German idealism, in the German longing, not for the abstract but to the living spirit that lives in the supersensible world, just as the mineral world, the plant world, and the animal world live in the sensory world around us. This testifies to the fact that to be German means to be connected in a very specific way as an individual human being with a totality of spiritual life. And in this respect, German experience is not only easily misunderstood, but is attacked and will be attacked again and again. It is not easy for German experience, which is more profound than anything that has developed around it, to take up the weapons with which German intellectual life, which has been pushed into a corner, will have to defend itself over the course of millennia against the hostile forces that come from all sides through the conditions of life.

What then springs from these original German spiritual impulses? They can perhaps be best characterized by pointing to an older time. This German spiritual life did not first appear with this character in modern times, but already in the Middle Ages. If we go back to the mystic Angelus Silesius, he has left many sayings. One particularly meaningful saying is where he says: “Not I as a human soul experience death, in the depths of my human soul dwells God, and God experiences death in me.” The depth of such a saying is not immediately apparent. It proves the primal German thinking and feeling and sensing, which experiences in itself a being with the world spirit that permeates and interweaves everything. Let us only think of the words of Faust:

[Ehrlicher Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu genießen. Nicht
You only allow cold, astonished visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks, The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches, And neighboring trunks, sweeping down, And the hill thunders hollowly with its fall;Then you lead me to the safe cave, show Then myself, and my own chest secret, deep wonders open up.)

That is what the German has always sought in his best representatives. That is what he has sought: to truly find in his soul, to find in his deepest inner being the living spirit, to live together with this living spirit. So that Angelus Silesius, in all his peculiarity, already expounds great ideas of immortality when he speaks of the experience of death. For God can only be felt as alive. But he who experiences God in this way within himself knows that he is immortal. For God must be immortal, therefore death can only be an appearance. From this feeling of the German soul, even the grasp of the immortal life for this German soul emerges. But that is what has given this German soul this certainty, this firm footing in its development. That is what has always brought this German soul, of all national souls, closest to what we today call spiritual science. I would like to bring this home to your souls from a certain point of view.

Let us compare this German spiritual life with Eastern spiritual life, not in its lower regions, but let us go up to the highest regions of Russian spiritual life. Let us try to visualize one of Russia's most outstanding minds, Soloviev. Soloviev, who really took everything that was in Russian intellectual life into his soul and gave it back as a world view – not just as what is called a “philosophical world view”, but in such a way that one feels the Russian life vibrating – gave something that lived in this deep soul. I can only refer here to his works, only a small part of which have been translated, I cannot go into all of them. But I would like to point out that this philosopher, who retained his faith throughout his life – the faith that lives in many Russians, that Western European life, and Central European life as well, is a dying life, the renewal of which can only come from Russia. He lives according to this error. But this error gives his philosophy its special character. And again and again, in rousing speeches, Solowjow assures his people of the creative and sustaining forces within them. Then came the end of his life. Solowjow ended his life by increasingly arriving at a meager worldview, which I will characterize by comparing it to what lives in a similar field in the German worldview.

Let us see what lives in the German world view: it is the certainty that the human soul can live together with the spirit of the world, that it can hold its dialogue with the spirit of the world. We have seen this in the representative figure of Faust. Solowjow does not speak of the certainty of spiritual experience in the way that a human soul speaks out of the Germanic nature. Rather, he speaks thus: Yes, the Russian people have a great mission, but it is fulfilled by a divine being from the other world, who, through grace, takes hold of the Russian people and gives them their mission. God must work in the Russian people. And the Russians are waiting for the miracle, for a god, a kind of manifestation of the light of Christ, to appear and call the Russian people to their task.

In Central European spiritual culture, people know that they can experience their soul, they can experience God in their soul. Soloviev is waiting for that which pushes and drives and urges him from outside; he is waiting for the miracle. But now, in the year of Solowjow's death, the remarkable thing is that Solowjow appeared before the Petersburg public with a speech that must have been wonderfully moving, because something deeply emotional spoke from his words, which so convinced the audience that this power of persuasion passed over to people like a magic breath. He said: “Everything that has ever been believed about humanity being able to find something within itself that would redeem it, that would lead it to a divine state, is a vain deception and illusion. All that is deception, what believes that humanity will ever find the strength within itself to experience the divine through what it is now. No, Solowjow emphasizes, everything that humanity has of strength now, everything that it has of seemingly highest culture, that must perish. “The whole world lies in ruins” - such are his words - for there is nothing in present-day humanity that could lead this humanity to a spiritual goal. Only when everything has perished will the God who redeems souls step in from outside the dissolved earth, the perished earth. We cannot find anything in our souls that points us to something we could seek ourselves.

And he also describes in detail what he expects. As in a powerful vision, he sees the Asian peoples approaching, he sees them waging war on Europe, he sees how, in the twentieth, twenty-first century, Christianity will have declined to such an extent that only one-tenth of those who are on earth will still be Christians, while the whole world will be flooded with a harsh, materialistic worldview, which is pouring over the world, because “the whole world is in a state of decay.” He who listened to what the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people spoke out of a deep faith shortly before his death, just weeks before his death, might ask: What could have inspired the one who has passed away to say: My soul, through its own power, has lost all eternity.

Let us instead consider the will and testament of a German. There are still people today who scoff at Lessing's momentous will and testament, 'The Education of the Human Race', in which he describes how development continues through all times, how souls keep coming back. For Lessing was the first to incorporate the doctrine of repeated earthly lives into German spiritual life. People often say: Well, yes, Lessing was a great man, but when he wrote this 'Education of the Human Race', he was already an old man. Well, people always arrange what they want to acknowledge as they want. But Lessing did not weaken, rather he had ascended to a deep sense of this direct communion, this speaking of the human soul with the living spirit, which pours out its sustaining strength over the soul of the individual, so that the individual soul can live with it in the sustaining strength of the German spirit. Lessing said something like the following as the closing words of his will: Is it not clear to my soul, from what it experiences within itself, that it must keep coming back to a new life on earth in order to keep learning new things and developing ever higher? That would take a lot of time, well, isn't eternity mine? - That is what Lessing extracts from the depths of the human soul itself, that is what he lays down in his testament. This is a spiritual culture that comes to different words than the one that says: We will never find the strength from the human soul itself.

From such a juxtaposition of different moods, one will understand that in the East, the Russian spiritual mood is asserting itself, which stands without understanding in relation to what is taking place in Central Europe, and which does not overlook everything that is emerging here as a living spiritual life, but always speaks of the decaying culture of the West. Thus, the so-called intellectuals justify, from a spiritual point of view, what they had always intended to do against the West, including politically. The terrible war in which we are engaged was caused as much by the moods of the East as by external interests. But these moods will not disappear with this war. In order to bring German intellectual life to bear, it will be necessary to forge weapons from the spirit, from which the greatest minds of Central Europe have taken their weapons, for this confrontation with the spirit must always be renewed.

And how, by a completely natural process, the enemies of this German intellectual life must be encircled – we can see this if we take a look at how German intellectual life is understood, the German intellectual life that I was able to sketch out in a charcoal drawing, the subject of much discussion. In defense of and in an effort to understand this German intellectual life, I would like to call to mind a Western spirit that truly belongs to the best [Western spirits] of the nineteenth century, an American who wrote in English, Emerson. He is truly not someone to invoke when one wants to describe the contrast between the West and German intellectual life based on prejudice. Emerson portrays the English people as the first world people; but strangely, he places the Germans higher. Despite Emerson's description of the English as the first world people, he says:

The English do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life.
The German thinks for Europe.

But now I would like to mention something else that is very characteristic from the point of view on which I have based this reflection today. Emerson wrote two wonderful essays, one about Shakespeare and one about Goethe. Unfortunately, people today only read with half a mind, but it could be interesting if a number of people really did what I am about to suggest. It would be interesting to get involved in the essays that Emerson wrote and that bear the title “Representatives of the Human Race,” reading the two essays, one about “Shakespeare, or the Poet,” the other about “Goethe, or the Writer.” You will not believe that I am so brutal, or, one could also say, so “barbaric”, that I want to denigrate Shakespeare in any way, or that I do not revere him to the highest degree as one of the greatest poets of humanity. That is what he is, for Emerson too. And Emerson states that if you want to characterize the poet, you have to name Shakespeare as the representative poet. By comparison, you have to call Goethe the representative writer. Now, one should not just read what is there, but one should feel from the words what passed through the whole soul of the presenter when he gave the characteristics. Emerson tries to present Shakespeare as the representative of the poet in general, based on the characteristics of the English national soul, and then Goethe as the representative of the writer in general. And Emerson seeks to draw out the traits that one must consider if one wants to truly characterize Shakespeare inwardly. And with Emerson it is the case that when he is confronted with an appearance, he characterizes the one appearance with all the power of the word, as if there were nothing else, he immerses himself in the individual appearance. In Shakespeare, when he discusses Shakespeare, in Goethe, when he discusses Goethe. [It is a special gift.] And what is it that he seeks to express when he contemplates Shakespeare, Shakespeare the poet, [whom he regards as the most exquisite poet and this as the most exquisite of the English, and this as the most exquisite of the peoples]? He feels compelled to say, while characterizing Shakespeare: An original mind is not, as is usually thought, one that creates everything out of itself, but one that works as Shakespeare did, who goes everywhere and takes the intellectual property he can find. And now he shows how the whole of England thought like Shakespeare, how he was only the echo of his people. On the other hand, he tries to show how Shakespeare used French and Italian sources, how he gathered everything together to become Shakespeare, how he became the great man by organizing the great intellectual goods from other worlds and other peoples. That is what Emerson comes to through Shakespeare. And I would like to read you a few characteristic words:

Great men are distinguished more by their comprehensive minds [and] by the height of the vantage point from which they look down than by their originality. If we demand that originality which, like a spider, draws its own web from its own entrails, which itself finds the clay, forms stones from it and erects the house, then great men are by no means original. The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.

Thus Emerson characterizes Shakespeare in such a way as to show: I must show why Shakespeare is so unoriginal. “The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.”

And one saying, to which particularly much value must be attached in Emerson's characteristics of Shakespeare, is the following, which is not said by me, but Emerson speaks thus about Shakespeare:

It has become a kind of practical rule among writers that once someone has shown themselves capable of creating something original, they may then also discreetly steal the works of others.

So Emerson, when characterizing one of the greatest minds of the world order, needs nothing less than to excuse Shakespeare for being original, even by stealing from others and combining what has been stolen. You have to look a little deeper into what the impulses of human development are when you are standing in such a momentous world period as today.

And then we turn the page, especially in the beautiful translation by Herman Grimm, which he made of Emerson's essays on Shakespeare and Goethe. Let us now turn to Goethe. Again, Emerson delves into Goethe, absorbed in the essence of Goethe, as if nothing else existed. And what comes to Emerson's mind now to characterize Goethe as the representative of writing? He comes up with the following words: All of nature, every stone, everything that is and will be strives to be expressed. The whole world strives for expression. And favored human souls, whom other souls cannot emulate, who therefore stand alone, they find the words to express, in wrestling with the world spirit, what is wrestling with the world spirit.

With Shakespeare, Emerson describes how he [makes references everywhere].

With Goethe, he describes how Goethe himself is connected to the world spirit, which works in the individual realms of nature. Compare the one with the other. About Goethe, Emerson says:

In my eyes, the writer stands as a man whose position was foreseen in the construction of the world.

In direct contrast to the beginning of the world, he brings Goethe. Shakespeare he believes he has to excuse. And further he says of Goethe:

The position he took, he owes nothing, but he entered the world from his birth as a free, [supervising] genius.

About Shakespeare, he says:

It is easy to see that all the best that has ever been written and done in the world was not the work of one man, but the product of a vast, collaborative effort in which a thousand like one, all driven by a single impulse, lent a hand.

Shakespeare is explained entirely out of the environment, out of the world that surrounds him. Regarding Goethe, Emerson says:

He is all eye and instinctively turns to where the truth lies. Say something, and he will immediately know whether it is true or false. It is hateful to him to repeat the old wives' tales, even if they have had the good faith of humanity for a thousand years, and to be made a fool of by them. No one else needs to strain their eyes for him to show them whether something is true or a lie.

I believe, my dear audience, that one can feel something deep and meaningful by comparing Emerson's essay on Shakespeare with his essay on Goethe; one will feel everywhere that this American had a certain right to say: “The English [do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life. The German thinks for Europe.] He tried to fathom it, but in fathoming it, he sensed something of what I wanted to characterize today as the living forces of the German spirit, which penetrate into every single soul; not that power that flows from the commonality of human beings, but from the direct intercourse of the individual soul with the spirit. And one can feel how Emerson is imbued with this sustaining power of the German spirit when, at the end of his meditation on Goethe, he speaks words that must be taken with feeling, not just with the mind. At the end of his meditation on Shakespeare, Emerson says:

It must be admitted that these were only imperfect histories of imperfect men. The world is still waiting for the poet-priest, the reconciler, who, unlike Shakespeare, does not play, who, unlike the body-burial Swedenborg, does not search in graves, but who will see and speak and act with equal enthusiasm. For knowledge will give splendor to sunshine; justice is more beautiful than secret preference, and love is compatible with all-embracing wisdom.

What feelings does Shakespeare inspire in Emerson? The feeling that we must wait for the coming of the one who will bring reconciliation.

What does the contemplation of Goethe inspire in him? He says at the end of the contemplation:

The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie, to make everything we are aware of a truth; in the sophistication of modern life, in art and science, in [the] books and in people, to awaken faith , certainty and trust, and to honor each truth, as we begin and as we end, as we go along and as we go forward, by not only knowing it but by making it a rule of action.

Thus, it was not only Goethe but also Shakespeare who inspired Emerson not to wait for anyone. And the words I have just read are preceded by the following:

We too must write sacred writings to reunite heaven and earth.

We would say today: We have to immerse ourselves in spiritual science, in what human science can be. But Emerson does not grasp the depth of German intellectual life, and is fundamentally hostile to it.

This, however, is precisely why German intellectual life will be in a kind of defensive position for a long time to come. For it experiences strange things even with those of whom it is said that they are trying to penetrate into this German intellectual life. I would also like to give you a sample of this.

Those who are reasonably familiar with the intellectual life of the recent past may have been surprised that such high hopes were placed in some German minds before this war taught people, let's say, about someone like Romain Rolland, a different lesson. The people who admired him represent, to a certain extent, a break in the intellectual life of the present. Those who admired him could not really understand how he could speak so contemptuously of the Germans after the outbreak of the war. One has indeed been able to read strange articles in Germany about Romain Rolland. I will only refer to one work by Romain Rolland, “Jean-Christophe”. In this novel, Romain Rolland portrays a German, but you will see in a moment how. Even this description of Jean-Christophe is to be said: it is given by a person who has never been touched by the real inner strength of the spiritual life. What is Jean-Christophe in the two-volume novel? It is a German musician and how he develops in his Germanness. Romain Rolland wants to describe that. And he really does describe something, yes, you can't say otherwise, than a chaotic mixture of the destinies of various Germans such as Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Gustav Mahler and so on. All of this is mixed up in the most impossible way, and that gives the completely impossible character of Jean-Christophe, who has been so much admired, but who shows himself to be nothing more than the result of an artist's inability to face reality, which not only records external nature but also penetrates into the depths of existence, and can see the impossibility of mixing up such chaos.

I am well aware that there may be many people who will interpret what I am about to say about Romain Rolland as “barbaric”. But I believe that I can take on what these people defend from their apparent aesthetic high ground when it comes to judging the particular aesthetic and artistic nature of people like Romain Rolland. [It has nothing to do with what Schiller said to Goethe. “People say that there is something immoral in Wilhelm Meister. No, the characters are as they have to be.”] For with Romain Rolland, you never know what the author says and what his characters say. Therefore, what his characters say can be seen as the attitude of Romain Rolland himself. This attitude comes across to us wherever he talks about Germanness. For example, he describes the father of Jean-Christoph.

I will now only quote a few significant things that we can say are a Frenchman's recent judgment of the German character. And I will cite evidence because there were people who said: This novel is the first great act since 1870 that will bring about the reconciliation of Germans and French. No political act is as important for this reconciliation as Romain Rolland's novel, so people said. Well, anyone who reads the novel will agree with me if I disagree. You can't say that Romain Rolland didn't want to say what his characters say, you just have to look at it from an artistic point of view. Because what we are hearing from this Romain Rolland, this “reconciler between Germanness and Frenchness”, has recently been presented to us in the most defamatory way as German “barbarism” from the West. So it is said of the father:

He was a fine speaker, well built, if a little heavy, and the type of what is considered classical beauty in Germany: a broad, expressionless forehead, strong regular features and a curly beard: a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine.

Then he characterizes a number of chamber musicians, whom he considers typical of German chamber music, in the following way:

They played neither very accurately nor very in time; but they never went off the rails and faithfully followed the indicated expressive markings. They possessed that musical ease that requires little, and that perfection in mediocrity that is abundant in the race that is called the most musical in the world.

Romain Rolland characterizes Uncle Theodor, the stepson of Jean-Christophe's grandfather, as follows:

He was a partner in a large trading house that had business connections with Africa and the Far East. He was a typical example of the new type of German, who mockingly spurn the old idealism of the race and, drunk with victory, practice a cult that proves that they are not accustomed to living under that sign. But since it is impossible to suddenly change the centuries-old nature of a people, the suppressed idealism kept resurfacing in language, behavior, moral views, and Goethe quotes on the occasion of the slightest domestic events; and so, through the bizarre effort to reconcile the honorable principles of the old German bourgeoisie with the cynicism of these new shop-keepers, a strange mixture of conscientiousness and self-interest, a mixture that has a rather nauseating smell of hypocrisy, which amounts to making a symbol of all that is right, of all justice and truth, out of German strength, greed and the pursuit of personal interest.

That is Romain Rolland's description of certain Germans. We have heard it again through Romain Rolland. But then we are told about Jean-Christophe himself:

He lacked that compliant Germanic idealism that refuses to see and does not see what it would find embarrassing to discover, for fear of destroying the comfortable serenity of its judgment and the comfort of its life.

Of course, Romain Rolland sees German idealism, but he wants to show it in the light that, in his opinion, is the true light. He wants to characterize this German idealism somewhat, and there he says about this German idealism – since Romain Rolland is a good musician, his friends claim that he understands German music particularly well, he may refer to it –; Romain Rolland seeks to characterize German idealism as what the Germans delude themselves about as a blue haze that the Germans fear to see and therefore idealize. He sees in it something with which the Germans mask all kinds of things so as not to see reality. Then he says:

The Germans are not idealists for the reason that they falsify feelings.

– he speaks, I beg to be heard, he speaks as if it were a characteristic of Schumann and Wagner – that is not the problematic thing in music, that idealism fakes feelings, but that feelings are fake, that is shown in Schumann. The German feels fake. These are Romain Rolland's own words:

But it was precisely his example that led Christof to the realization that the worst falsity of German art did not lie where artists wanted to express feelings that they did not feel, but rather where they expressed feelings that they felt but that were false in themselves. Music is a relentless mirror of the soul. The more naive and trusting a German musician is, the more he reveals the weaknesses of the German soul, its insecure foundation, its [soft] sensitivity, its lack of candor, its somewhat devious idealism, its inability to see itself, to dare to look itself in the face.

He wants to get to the very heart of this German idealism. That is why he refers to Mrs. von Stael, who once characterized the Germans, as Romain Rolland reports. She said:

They are well-behaved. They use philosophical reason to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear that transforms respect into admiration.

Romain Rolland refers to these words of Mrs. von Stael.

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest [in Germany]

— he says. And then, to say something quite characteristic of the Germans, he adds:

from Wilhelm Tell, the deliberate, small-minded bourgeois with the muscles of a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with downcast eyes before the post of ‘dear Lord’ Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he who disobeyed who did not see the hat,” up to the portly, seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, hastily gave way to him on the footpath and went down to the road.

[He hated the brutal militarism that he felt weighing on him, all those sabers clanking on the pavement, those pyramids of rifles and cannons set up in front of the barracks, ready to fire with their muzzles pointed towards the city.

We are hearing all of this again now. The novel already contains the same words that we are hearing again now, with the only difference being that later on, the French no longer thought that the muzzles were only pointed at their own German cities, but sensed that they could be pointed elsewhere.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is entirely unjust towards the Germans, whom he characterizes in this way. He does find that these Germans have nothing of the true esthete. In music, he grants them some talent. He calls thinking “clear but cloudy,” and so on. But in the opinion of this Frenchman, who is considered one of the best minds in France today, the Germans do not have much of a sense of beauty. He describes a German girl: “The nose [gap in the text] up one side, down the other.” That, according to him, is the typical German girl. I also ask you to consider the following words:

The Germans are fortunate in their tolerance when it comes to physical imperfections: they manage not to see them; they can even come to embellish them with benevolent imagination, finding unexpected relationships between the [face] they want to see and the most magnificent examples of human beauty.

This refers to the face with the nose that I just described. It would not have taken too much persuasion to get old Euler to declare that [his] granddaughter had the nose of Juno Ludovisi.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is or wants to be completely unjust. He also praises where he wants to praise and recognizes in the German character what he believes he can acknowledge. For example, after he has shown how this Jean-Christophe, who is such a talented fellow that he cannot stand it in the German world, that he strives outwards, because such a genius cannot flourish in the German world. After showing this, he finally invites him to be a guest of a professor, whom he wants to depict as a typical German. And what unfolds in the presence of this German professor is where Romain Rolland does praise the Germans, finding something praiseworthy in them. You see, the professor takes great pains to have his housekeeper prepare the best meal possible. And she, so convinced that she has achieved great art, leaves the door ajar to see how the gentlemen are enjoying their meal.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine, with the aromas of all the herbs, the thick sauces, the nourishing soups, the exemplary meat dishes, the monumental carp, the sauerkraut, the geese, the homemade cakes, the aniseed and caraway breads.

You can see that he also has something good to say about the Germans! And he particularly benefits from the meal that has now been taken and a real German, a singing German, is to be described. He describes him in such a way that you can see; he is actually wondering why this particular specimen can sing, and even sing well. He says that the German actually has no idea how to sing:

They are seized by the power of the song, and the song works through them as through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them, and they obey it. For the soul of the German must do so. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

The so-called German militarism has grown deep into the soul of those who speak of it today with voluptuous expressions. He now describes a real singer by saying: He was a fat man who always sweated when walking, but especially when he made sounds. - He describes his nature, his figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He says that there are many of these Bavarians, because they have “the secret of this human race, which came about through a system of pasta-eating similar to how poultry is fattened.”

He wants to find out what the people who are actually able to practice this German art of singing, which he also admires, look like.

Now, it is no wonder that this mixture of Beethoven, Strauss, Wagner and Mahler, who has the peculiarity of not having a spark of any of the four in his soul, cannot endure this artificial construct in Germany. He must get out of Germanness! It is said that although he did not know it, he is driven by German confusion to “Golden Paris”.

But instinctively his eyes looked towards the Latin South. And first of all to France. To France, the eternal [refuge] from German confusion.

Now it is described how the one who has to leave Germanness has to find his way in Latin culture. There he becomes a great mystic. I hope you will excuse me from pursuing the further paths. But we would find many a characteristic there of what must be called the misunderstanding of that which sustains and carries the individual German from the supporting power of the living spirit, with which the German essence feels connected.

Therefore, it may be said that it must be clear to all those who believe that humanity's future lies in the strong and vigorous representation of intellectual life through a world culture how the German spirit has not yet completed its mission in the world, but how this German spirit has laid the seeds from which it can be seen that they must continue to flourish ever more abundantly.

And that appears to us as the fundamental strength of the German spirit, that we know: we can only hope for the blossoms and fruits of the future. We stand confidently in the midst of it, in the living experience of the German spirit. This must also give us the strength for the necessary defense, for the defense of German intellectual life as well, which, as perhaps few today already suspect, is in a fundamental struggle, just as much as the external life of the immediate present.

It would be out of place to present a reflection that was only meant as a consolation. Who needed weak consolation or who needed words of strength or the like, when a nation that knows how to defend its goods with such strength has shown and has already held out for almost a year with strength and courage and a willingness to make sacrifices?

But we must be aware that the German spirit must be on guard just as much as external German life had to be on guard. And when we look more deeply into this spiritual life of the German, we find something of which we can say: This is the core and the root of Germanness: its yearning for the living spirit, its living together with the living spirit.

Those who revile the Germans today and say: We do not mean this German spirit when we revile them, must be told: You seem to us like someone who says: I know there is a person with strong hands, but when he uses these hands, we do not like it!

The French philosopher Bergson said in a Christmas speech that the German mind today shows that it can no longer grasp the living, it can only grasp the mechanistic. Today, only cannons stand against the French; only mechanisms are seen coming from Germany, and armies.

There is not much logic in what he says, as logic is generally missing today when the world situation is discussed so beautifully. You would have to ask this philosopher Bergson whether he expected the French soldiers to be confronted with recitations of Schiller's poems or with Novalis' works.

But a glance, which I could only hint at with weak words – a glance into the essence and life, into the roots of the German spirit, shows us that, looking at this spirit, we can say:

It has not only not completed; it shows that it is taking its ascending path to a fully blossoming and fruitful spiritual life. And anyone who can trust in inner strength can have the utmost confidence in what the German spirit is willing to accomplish. And anyone who has such an insight into the inner effectiveness of the German spirit also knows what great and powerful things must be defended with external weapons today; he knows that the soul of the German nation still has much, much more to bear.

Therefore, let me express what I wanted to express to you today in a few words, and what I ask you to take more from what underlies my words as feelings and emotions. Finally, let me summarize it in a few words that are based on my feelings, which should be words of confidence for the soul, from what can be known about the sustaining power of the German spirit, in the past and into the future. I would like to say: If you follow through in your thoughts what I have only been able to sketch with a few lines of charcoal, you will increasingly come to the feeling that I would like to express at the end with the words:

The German spirit has not fulfilled
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in worries about the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerfully
Hidden things that must still mature. —
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?

Handwritten summary of contents for the censors.

During the war, public events were subject to the supervision of the censorship authorities. For this purpose, Rudoif Steiner wrote the following table of contents for his lecture scheduled for June 16, 1915 in Düsseldorf (NZ 1564-1566).

Contents of the lecture to be given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Düsseldorf. The lecture has already been given in Berlin, Leipzig and in a similar form in Munich.

The lecture begins with the introduction of personalities who, in fateful times within the development of German culture, placed the security, the confidence, the true invincibility of the German being before the soul of the people by evoking the soul's deep permeation with the effective power of the ruling spirit. For them, this “spirit” was not a “concept” or an “idea,” as it is for the naturalistically thinking consciousness; for them, the spirit was a real being with which the soul maintains contact in its deepest interior, from which it draws spiritual life-force, just as the body draws physical life-force from the air through the lungs.

Thus Fichte stood in the midst of his people when they had to work their way up to freedom, supported only by their own strength, by showing how the German people, in contrast to the Romance peoples, already prove through their language that they are connected in their very essence to the innermost roots of the vital impulse of spiritual existence. The German does not feel spiritual life as something that is only recognized in the individual human soul, but as something that reigns over this individual soul as an independent being and that carries the individual soul.

From this consciousness, a creation within German culture has emerged that is only possible within the German people: Goethe's “Faust”. Faust strives out of dead knowledge towards an inner living contact with the essence of the spirit. In Faust, the most ancient German consciousness of nature and the world comes to life again in a newer way. One does not need to deny the great significance of Shakespeare; but one must still say that in Faust, everything human rises to a nobler height than in Hamlet. Consider how, when confronted with the truly spiritual, the latter can only fall back on doubt and uncertainty, on the hopeless question, “To be or not to be?” By contrast, when confronted with the power of evil, of material things, Faust asserts the inner certainty of victory of his connection with the spirit: “In thy nothing I hope to find the All.”

Those who belong to the nations that today do not want to revile German deeds enough, must have come to the same conclusion that Ernest Renan expressed in 1870, when they sensed the nature of this in the development of German culture. 70, that Germany has added something to the development of humanity in terms of “depth and extent” that “for those who have experienced it, it is as if they only know elementary mathematics compared to those who are proficient in differential calculus”.

This connection of the German soul with the sustaining power of the world-ruling spirit has, in minds like Herder's, evoked the consciousness of the world-significant task of German culture, of the fact that this culture has a contribution to make to the overall education of the human race, insofar as this illuminates the lofty goal of working “until everything has happened, until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth.”

This consciousness warmed Lessing's soul as he wrote his incomparable testament to the “education of the human race,” which elevated all contemplation of history to an experience of the eternal spiritual activity of the world through the human soul.

And this consciousness lives on to the present day in the most exquisite minds of the German people. It will now be shown how this fundamental strength of the German spirit has led to a deep world view and outlook on life in individual personalities of the nineteenth century. Herman Grimm's genuine German character is characterized; lesser-known personalities are also mentioned to show what particular German character is in thinking, feeling and experiencing.

Finally, it is suggested how, in the present day, the consciousness that comes from the sources, in which the German essence is intimately connected with the power of the spirit, may live in the German mind, and how this consciousness may trust in its power within the world of enemies, in the face of which it has to assert itself in our fateful days.

Dear Attendees!

Unlike in previous years when I had the honor of speaking here in this city about subjects of spiritual science, last year I did not venture to speak about a subject of spiritual science in the strict sense, but rather about something that is connected with the spiritual development of the German people, who are currently facing one of the most significant events in world history, with world-historical facts that have no equal in the entire developmental history of modern times. And so, honored attendees, may this evening's reflection also be dedicated to such a topic, the reflection of a certain current in German intellectual life, which I believe, however, not out of a vague feeling, but out of real spiritual-scientific conviction that it contains, in the most essential, in the very most essential sense, German intellectual development, the seeds of that spiritual science as it was always meant, when I was allowed to speak about it here in earlier years.

This spiritual science wants, in the best sense of the word, to be a real science, a real, genuine continuation of the scientific world view that has emerged over the past three to four hundred years in the development of humanity. As a spiritual science, it aims to penetrate into the spiritual realm of the world, just as natural science methodically penetrates into the external world through the external senses and through the mind bound to the external senses, into the mind bound to the external senses and its observations, and into the external senses and their observations.

However, spiritual science requires a certain development of the human soul for its research. It is necessary for this research that what can lead to it is first developed from the human soul. To a certain extent - to apply Goethe's often-used words again today - the spiritual eyes and ears that slumber in man himself must first be awakened from the human soul so that he can look and listen into the spiritual world.

Now, however, it might seem from the outset, esteemed attendees, as if, when speaking of science - and that is the opinion of some; some think that one has no right to speak of anything other than such a thing that belongs to all nations. In certain circles, there is the opinion that one is already thinking unscientifically if one allows oneself the opinion that even that which is the scientific study of the world has its origins in the essence of folklore. However, as superficial as this opinion may be, it is superficial when it comes to the deeper objects of spiritual science.

The moon is also common to all peoples of the earth, but how the thoughts and feelings that the individual peoples have attached to the experiences of the moon differ. One could indeed say: that may relate to poetry. But when it comes to penetrating the deeper secrets of the world, then the different predispositions that exist in different ways in the individual peoples speak. And according to these different predispositions, people penetrate more or less deeply into the secrets of existence.

The German does not need to resort to the clay when speaking of the significance and value of the German national character for the development of the world and humanity, as the opponents of Central Europe are currently doing, using our fateful time not only to vilify the German character in the most hateful way possible, but to downright slander it. The German can quite appropriately penetrate into that which has emerged in the course of his intellectual development. And it will be shown that this appropriate consideration leads precisely to placing German essence, German intellectual life, in the right place in the world development of humanity, not through self-assured arrogance, but by letting the facts speak.

When we consider the events that affect us all so deeply today, that claim so many, so many victims from humanity, that fill us with so much definite hope and confidence, when we consider these events, then there is really only one fact that needs to be mentioned – to strike a chord that will resonate again and again in the future history of humanity: Today, around Central Europe, 777 million people stand, in a row, 150 million hostile. The 777 million people have no reason to envy the size of the land on which the other 150 million live in Central Europe; the people of the so-called Entente live on 68 million square kilometers, and the people of Central Europe live on only 6 million square kilometers!

But leading personalities in particular have repeatedly managed, out of the 777 million, to insult and defame even the best and highest intellectual products of the 150 million.

It is therefore particularly appropriate for the German to reflect on his intellectual life in such a way that it may appear to him as rooted in the actual germinating power of his nationality.

And so, esteemed attendees, we are repeatedly and again and again, although this should only be mentioned in the introduction today, repeatedly and again and again referred to the three great figures within the German world view development, which today, unfortunately, may say, unfortunately, no longer considered in the right, deep way, but whose essence nevertheless lives on to this day, and whose essence wants to rise again, [whose essence] must belong to the best impact forces of German spiritual culture in the future. Three figures are pointed out: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, those personalities in the development of the German world view who tried to lift the German people in time onto the scene of the development of thought, of the highest, purest development of thought, in the time when, from the depths of this national life, such minds as Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and all the others who belong to them have worked so that what has come from them after the Greek intellectual blossoming of humanity means a time of the highest intellectual blossoming of humanity for anyone who is unbiased.

And how does Johann Gottlieb Fichte appear in the mind's eye of the human being? That which lived in his soul as feeling made his world view appear to him, who can be called one of the most German of men, as something that he had attained by having something directly in his lonely soul life, something like a kind of dialogue with the German national spirit itself.

This mood of the soul emerged when he delivered his powerful “Discourses to the German Nation,” which sought to reveal all the power and developmental possibilities of German nationality in order to give impetus to the further development of “Germanness,” as Fichte himself put it.

But what is the essence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's endeavors? It can be said that everything that has been striven for in the best sense from the center of the German soul for centuries appears again in Fichte in the most powerful way. Thus it is that Fichte wanted to gain a well-illuminated world view, an energetic understanding of the world through this. What Fichte strove for was to delve into the human soul, to inwardly experience its deepest powers, to experience them in such a way that in this experience he also experiences what the world as a whole is living through and working through as a spiritual, world-creating entity. [What Fichte strove for was to] experience the spiritual, world-creating essence in one's own soul in such a way that, by unfolding one's own soul powers, one experiences what works and lives and dwells in the innermost part of the world. That was what Fichte wanted: to experience the spirit of the world by making it present in one's own soul.

That was for him the true meaning of the word “knowledge”. That was for him also the content of all truth worth striving for by man – the truth that for him was the direct expression of the divine spirituality that lives through the world, that knowledge, as truth, permeates the human soul so that this human soul can grasp it in an inward, powerful experience. But through this, Fichte felt as if the whole world were pulsating and alive and interwoven with the will of the world, with the divine will of the world.

And as man grasps himself in his innermost being, as he becomes in the truest sense an I-conscious being, an imprint arises within this I, a revelation of the world-will pulsating through the world, which is completely imbued of what Fichte calls the “duties”; those duties that could never reveal themselves to one from a merely material world, that penetrate from the world of the spiritual into the human soul, [which] grasp the will of humanity; so that for Fichte, the external sensual, material world becomes that which, like the material-physical, expands before us, in order to be able to live out the dutiful will and the will-imbued duty in anything.

Not that Fichte diverted his approach from the external sense world, not as if he wanted to escape into a one-sided world free of the senses! It is not like that; but it is the case that everything that the eyes can see externally, that the hands can grasp, for Fichte became the tool, the means of the spirit, so that the spirit could present itself, [so that] the spirit, -the spirit permeated by duty, the duty that man can grasp in his soul, can be represented by an external materiality: a world view that Fichte himself, in the very sense of the word, regards as a world view.

One may say, esteemed attendees, while remaining entirely objective: Nothing stands in such contrast to another as this Fichtean world view stands, say, to the world view born of the spirit of the French Romance language, as it was outlined by one of the greatest French philosophers, Cartesius or Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as an embodiment of the French spirit itself – a philosophical embodiment. Descartes, the Frenchman, the Frenchman who, like Fichte from the Germanic, so from the French national character draws and creates, Descartes starts from the fact that man feels himself a stranger to the outer world, that man must start from doubt in his soul. There can be no doubt for Fichte in the sense that Descartes means it, for his knowledge is an immediate co-experience of that which lives and breathes through the world. Fichte does not place himself outside of the spirit of the world by knowing, but inwardly seeks to unite with the spirit.

Descartes, on the other hand, stands before the world as mere observation, as external observation. What kind of world view emerges from this? One need only mention one thing that appears as a consequence of the French Descartesian world view. As I said, it is really not necessary to develop national biases, but one can remain objective when saying this. What is one consequence of Descartes' view of the world? Well, it is enough to mention that Descartes, in his striving, which also emanates from self-awareness, but from mere rational, intellectual self-awareness, not from the living inner life, like Fichte's self-awareness, this Descartes' view of the world imagines the world as a large machine, as a powerful mechanism. And for Descartes, animals themselves are moving machines, inanimate, moving machines.

Everything that developed as a mechanism in later times, as a mechanistic world view, which also took hold in other nations from France, basically leads back to this starting point of Descartes.

You only have to consider the contrast: On the one hand, the Roman philosopher who turns the world into a machine; on the other hand, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who wants to pour out the soul itself over the whole world from the German folk tradition, so that this soul can experience everything soulful, everything in the world that is pulsating with will – and one has expressed something important about the relationship of the German folk spirit to its western neighbor.

This Descartesian worldview then produced, I might say, one materialistic outgrowth after another. We see how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the worldview that Goethe encountered from France emerged, and of which Goethe, from his German consciousness, said: Oh, how bleak, how desolate! And then the philosopher shows us atoms moving, colliding, pushing each other – a mere mechanism! And all this is supposed to explain the rich abundance of the world in which we live?

It is fair to say – again, entirely objectively: From the abundance and vibrancy of the German mind, Goethe turned away from this merely mechanistic world view, which then, in de La Mettrie's “Man a Machine” at the end of the eighteenth century, had a flowering that of all those who want to build a worldview based on superficial vanity, on that vanity that would be quite satisfied if there were no human soul, but if, like a phonograph, the human mechanical thinking apparatus purred away what man has to say about the world. And well into the nineteenth century, this worldview continued to unfold.

We see it in [gap in transcript], but we also see it in a spirit like – yes, it is still not called French today, but is still called Bergson – like in Bergson, who has found the most shameful thing, again and again, to defame and slander that which wells up from the German soul as a world view. One would like to say: Because he can see nothing else in a world picture that is alive, that is filled with inner life, he believes he can defame it, defames this German world picture as such, which shows - as he repeatedly says in his writings – how the German, from his lofty position at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has descended and degenerated completely into a mechanistic world mechanism.

It is a pity that this so celebrated Bergson not only drew a picture of the world - I have explained it in detail, not only in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, written before the war - but not only drew a picture of the world that was much more powerful, much more forceful, by a German mind, Preuss, who is rarely mentioned and little known, the German thinker, thinker, for example in his book “Spirit and Matter” 1882 [is presented] - of which Bergson either knows nothing, which is an equally big mistake, or does not want to know anything - but not only this, but it has also been shown that entire pages in the so-praised writings of Bergson are simply copied from Schelling or from Schopenhauer! – That is one way of relating to the intellectual life of Central Europe!

This intellectual life is contrasted with that of Fichte, an intellectual life that does not want to understand the world as dead, but that wants to understand the world as a spiritual-living entity, down to the smallest parts, and for which knowledge is nothing other than the experience of this spiritual vitality of the world. Just as with the French conception of the world, Fichte, with his energetic grasp of the human ego, in which he wants to experience the world, stands in contrast to the English conception of the world, that English conception of the world that took its starting point from Baco of Verul am, and which, one might say, has found its repulsive sides, its repulsive one-sidedness, precisely in the most recent world view that English intellectual life has produced in so-called pragmatism – in Baco von Verulam. As Goethe, for example, very profoundly remarks, one sees everywhere how [Baco von Verulam] actually regards the spiritual life in such a way that what otherwise [lives] in the human spirit as truth is actually only there to summarize and form the diversity of the external materials and forces of the world, which can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, and to again disassemble them and the like. A means of dominating the external physical world is philosophy, based on Baco von Verulam, basically everything that could be called philosophy. And up to our days, this meaning has been preserved.

What actually appears as pragmatism? Within English intellectual life, something highly peculiar appears as pragmatism – Schiller, James and other representatives of this pragmatism. For these representatives of pragmatism, for these pragmatists, truth is not something that man experiences inwardly like an image of gods or spirits, something that – as in the Fichte in the sense of Fichte, enters the human soul from the spirit that pulsates, lives and weaves through the world, but in the sense of this pragmatism, truth is actually only something that man thinks up in order to have a direction in the multiplicity of external phenomena.

For example, the soul - this concept of “soul”, this unified concept of soul - you cannot see the soul: What is it then for pragmatism? For pragmatism, the unifying concept of soul, the unifying concept of the ego, of self-awareness, is nothing more than a means of holding together the manifoldness of the soul life and its expressions in the body, so that they do not fall apart in contemplation; so that one has, as it were, brackets and bindings. Concepts are created for the external material. How far removed this is from Fichte's world view, drawn from the depths of the soul, for which spirit is the most original of the world and reality, the spirit that flows into the individual human soul life. And by feeling this influx, man knows himself one with the spirit of the world. And then the external world becomes, as Fichte put it, a field for the spirit to unfold in. Exactly the opposite!

Here with Fichte: the spirit is supreme, the actual reality, the highest living thing, for the sake of which the external world of the senses exists, so that the spirit can find its means of expression in it. There: the mind is capable of nothing more than creating binders and clamps in its concepts and ideas, so that it - which is the main thing - can place these concepts in the service of external material reality, and can ultimately find itself in external material reality.

It is indeed necessary, most honored attendees, to consider the interrelations in this very light. Only through this does the German come to a real, enlightened realization of what is actually taking place in the depths of his people.

Then, in one of the most difficult times in German development, Fichte tried to express what emerged to him as a power of consciousness from this soul power, which was connected to his inner life of will, in order to inspire, to strengthen, to invigorate his people. He did this in his “Addresses to the German Nation” to the German Nation» that the true man of world-view does not merely live in unworldly contemplation, but that these contemplations can intervene directly in that which the time demands and what mankind – I would like to say – [in fact] needs in order to be strengthened and invigorated in soul.

And at the appropriate moment, a second personality appears before us alongside Fichte – the second personality who tried no less to grasp the innermost part of the world with his own soul. These spirits sought to grasp the whole, great world spirit with their own souls, investing their entire personality.

In the case of Fichte, I probably only needed to tell you a few details of his life so that you could see how truly what he experienced – I would say – on the icy heights of thought, but which were permeated by pure human warmth in his case, was connected to his personality, to his immediate human being. A picture of the very young Fichte: he is a good student, already devoting himself to his duties at school as a six- or seven-year-old. His father rewards the young boy by giving him the book 'The Horned Siegfried' for Christmas when he is seven. Fichte, the young Fichte, the boy, is completely gripped by what comes to life through the human personality that is in a soul like that of “Gehörnte Siegfried”! And so it turns out that he now needs to be admonished because he is no longer as diligent at school as he was before. One day we see the boy in his blue farmer's smock; he is standing by the stream that flows past his father's house: suddenly he throws the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which he was holding in his hand, into the water, and he stands there crying and watches as the book floats away in the waves. His father arrives and is initially indignant that his little boy has thrown the book he had given him into the water. Then he has to learn that in this case what Fichte later made the actual core of his philosophical work – the dutiful will – that this dutiful will already lived in the boy Fichte in such a way that he could not bear, by the distracted attention to the “Horned Siegfried”, no longer fulfill his duty as a learner! And everything he experienced as a boy was probably already connected with the innermost workings and nature of his soul.

And once, when Fichte was nine years old, the estate neighbor from the neighboring village came to Fichte's place of residence. He wanted to hear the sermon; but he was too late. He could no longer hear the pastor preach; the church bells had already rung. So it was suggested that the nine-year-old boy could retell the content of the sermon to the estate neighbor. And they sent for him. Young Fichte entered in his blue peasant's smock; and after he had behaved somewhat awkwardly at first, he approached the public figure and developed the thoughts that he had taken in from the sermon with such intimacy that it was clear: he had not only taken something in externally, but had united with his whole soul what he had listened to.

Thus it was that this personality – one might say – that, if I may use the trivial word, it always absorbed everything that affected it with the whole person, out of its own genius, so effectively that everything that came from this person, on the one hand, bore the deepest human character, and on the other hand, rose again to the highest heights of world-historical contemplation.

One beautiful trait of this most German of German thinkers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, must be emphasized again and again: when Fichte later spoke to his audience as a professor, he did not want to speak like someone else who simply conveyed the content of what he had conquered to his listeners. Someone who knew Fichte well and had often heard him speak said that his words rushed forth like a thunderstorm that discharges in individual sparks; [and he said] that he not only wanted to produce good people, but great people.

And in such a way was also the work-you can not say-set up, the work of this German, because in the thoughts of this German thinker lived something in this lecture, which was much more than presented: He wanted, by mounting the lectern, to carry something up to this lectern, which flowed as a living entity from him into flowed from him into the audience, so that the audience, if they listened attentively and left the lecture hall, took with them not only a content, not only a teaching, but something that was more in their soul than what they had brought into the lecture hall, something that seized their whole humanity, permeated it, inspired it! And truly, Fichte knew how to work in this way, to penetrate so directly to the center of the human soul, that he wanted to bring his listeners, these listeners, in direct contact with his listeners, to revive in themselves what really connected them – one might say – immediately connected them to what the soul could experience of the spiritual that flows and permeates the world.

So, for example, he once said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall.” The listeners turned their eyes to the wall and thought, “That would be easy.” After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said, “So, now imagine the one who imagined the wall!” At first they were amazed. But now a way had been found to win the hearts and minds of the audience directly for the realization of the secrets of the world, as they can play out in the human soul.

And so, with his whole personality directly immersed in the life of knowledge, was also Johann Wilhelm Schelling, of whom those who saw him – and I certainly knew such people! – who saw and heard him – not only read his books and knew what was in his books – thus they said that something emerged from his sparkling eyes that was like the gaze of knowledge itself!

Schelling, too, wanted to experience directly in his own soul what lives in nature as spirit. For him, the soul was only something like the outer face of a spirit that lives and weaves through the world. And as the human soul approaches nature, it recognizes in nature what it itself is as spirit and soul.

Spirit flows through the world. It forms an external impression by crystallizing nature around itself. In this way, it creates the ground for the spirit itself to appear in the human soul on this ground. Therefore, for Schelling, the spirit of nature and the spirit of soul grew together into a unity. And with such a view, he knew how to rise to wonderful possibilities. He only penetrated them in seemingly dry concepts – incidentally, in concepts and ideas that sometimes rose to the most tremendous, most alert, intuitive glow. He only spoke in seemingly dry terms about nature and about how one can be in harmony with nature and the spiritual world, and how the concepts arise from nature and how one can be in harmony in cognition.

Once he said the word, the word that was certainly one-sided: To recognize nature is to create nature. - Certainly, a one-sided word; one can only recreate nature in the act of recognizing it. But Schelling felt such a close kinship between what takes place in the human soul and what takes place in nature that he could imagine himself to be living as if he were creating natural forces when he believed that the right cognitive drives had been released in the soul. And so, on the one hand, the human form appears to Schelling as the highest natural expression of the natural forces of the spirit and soul, and on the other hand, art [...] that which is the human expression of spiritual striving.

One would like to say: Schelling feels the highest as two halves that only complement each other: what the artist is able to create in art, on the one hand; the human form, on the other hand, as the crown and blossom of nature. And so we see how Schelling developed a world view that is entirely born out of – indeed, itself appears like a rebirth – the rebirth of the human mind. The German mind itself has become the organ of vision in Schelling, to see in nature and in intellectual life that which speaks to the human mind as external sensory objects speak to the human eyes and ears.

But as a result, Schelling has become the one for the German spiritual development who could raise to an enormous height that which, as a spiritual world, could inspire from the Romance world view, for example, Giordano Bruno, but only inspire. How passionately born out of the [Italian] world-feeling the world-picture of Giordano Bruno appears, if we compare it with the world-picture—with the calm world-picture reborn out of the German soul—of Schelling.

And the third is Hegel. Hegel, the third, the philosopher of the Germans who, I might say, lived in the most intimate union with the Goethean Weltanschauung; Hegel, who, I might say, sought on the third of the paths that were possible from the German folk, on the third of the paths to lead the soul to the place where it can directly grasp the spiritual activity and weaving and essence of the world.

In Johann Gottlieb Fichte, it is the will that pulses through the soul and creates expression in duty; in Schelling, it is the feeling, the innermost part of the soul, while a natural will takes hold of it and gives it birth; in Hegel, it is the life of thought - the life of thought that is felt by Hegel in such a way that, as the thoughts that he lets pass through his soul are moved and experienced by this soul, they appear directly as thoughts of the divine-spiritual life of the world itself, which permeates all spaces and all times. So that man, by letting his thoughts live in himself, free from sensuality and without being influenced by the outside world, has the divine-spiritual thinking of the world simultaneously living and revealing itself in him through this experience of thought. Admittedly, this is how Hegel became a spirit who created a world view as if the whole world were built only out of logic – which is one-sided. But he added to what Fichte and Schelling had offered, the third sound from German folk tradition.

It may be said that what makes Hegel appear particularly as a German spirit is that, unlike Descartes, for example - Rosenkranz, a faithful disciple of Hegel, wrote the fine book “Hegel as a German National Philosopher” - what makes Hegel particularly German spirit, is that, unlike Descartes, who also bases everything on thinking but only arrives at a mechanistic view of the world, he does not experience thinking as if thinking were something that arises in the soul and is alien to existence, but rather: the spirit, the world spirit itself thinks itself in man. The world spirit itself sees itself through thinking in man. In his thinking, Hegel feels interwoven with the thoughts of the world spirit.

One can also say that Descartes' one-sided, naked view of the world is given life – if only as a thought – in Hegel's view of the world.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need to take a dogmatic stand on the views of the three men mentioned. We can go further than that today; to be a partisan or an opponent may perhaps view all that these minds have expressed as one-sided. There is no need to take a dogmatic stand on them; they can be seen as an extension of what lives and weaves in German national character. They are something that has emerged from the flowering of German intellectual life, which will certainly change in many ways over time as it continues to flourish and bear fruit, but which can provide the deepest and most significant insights for anyone striving for spiritual knowledge of the world because a spiritual world knowledge must arise from such a germ within German intellectual life, as was striven for by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and basically arose out of the spirit of Goethe.

What is peculiar about these three personalities is that they basically express three sides, three different shades of something that hovers invisibly over them, that was the common expression of the highest peak of German intellectual life at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, and that in Goethe and others the great fruits emerge in such a way that one always starts not to seek a knowledge of the world in such a way that one simply applies man as he stands in his powers, but that one first tries to awaken the human powers of knowledge that lie deeply dormant in the depths of the soul, and with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear - as I said, these are Goethe's words - then wants to look out into the world and life with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear.

This is how Goethe did it. That is why Goethe, following Kant, speaks of an intuitive power of judgment, which he ascribed to himself. And truly, from this intuitive power of judgment emerged the blossoms of Goethe's achievements. “Intuitive power of judgment” - what does Goethe mean? The ordinary power of judgment lives in human concepts. With this power of judgment, man faces things, he faces nature; he looks at it with his senses; with his mind he judges what he has seen with his senses. Goethe says to himself: If one can see the spiritual through the power of judgment, just as the eyes see the sensual, then one lives and moves in the spiritual. - And so Goethe wanted to look at plants and animals, so he wanted to look at human life. And so he observed it! And so he even wanted to be active in the field of physics.

There one comes upon a chapter in which it is clearly shown how German folk-life must express something different about the external facts of physical life than, for example, English folk-life. The time has not yet come, however, to see the connections in this area.

For more than thirty years now, I myself have endeavored – I may say this without immodesty, because it is simply a fact – to show what Goethe actually wanted, from a spiritual view of nature, from an judgment, as [he opposed his] theory of colors to Newton's color theory, which is based on atomism and mechanism, as a theory of life.

Today, physics cannot yet understand this. But once German culture in the spiritual realm truly reflects on itself, one will understand how the German spirit in Goethe had to rebel against Newton's purely mechanical scientific view in the field of color theory as well.

And the chapter “Goethe versus Newton” – by that I mean German science versus the mechanical utilitarian English science. This chapter will reappear. And perhaps it is precisely such a chapter that will show the relationship of the German soul in its depth and in its deeper contemplation of knowledge to the other judgments of Europe's striving for knowledge.

And what place the German national soul has come to occupy in the overall development of German intellectual life is only one particular, special aspect; but this particular, this single, special aspect is the expression of the general that lived in the Goethe , and that lives on into our days, albeit – I would like to say – under the stream of consciousness, but nevertheless clearly in all deeper recognition of the spiritual in the German: to seek the spiritual organ of knowledge.

Fichte called it a “higher spiritual sense” when he spoke to his Berlin students from 1811 to 1813. Schelling called it “intellectual intuition.” To arrive at a higher organ of spiritual knowledge – which is uncomfortable, and which a philosophy based merely on utility or mechanism, like the Romance or British philosophy, cannot achieve – to create an organ of knowledge organ that is built out of the spirit and can therefore look into the spirit; [that] does not see the spirit in abstract, dry, empty theoretical concepts, but grasps it as fully as the outer senses grasp the world of the senses.

And because such striving was so powerfully alive in the development of the German spirit, it was possible that even lesser minds that followed the time of Goethe were seized and imbued with what had germinated and sprouted in the great age of German life that has just been discussed, and that these lesser minds could even create something that is more similar to the paths that are actually the real paths to grasp the world spiritual as a human spirit in a living way, to get something that is even more similar to this real path than what appeared in Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. Because there is so much that is fruitful in this Fichte-Schelling-Hegel worldview, it could have such a fertilizing effect even on lesser minds, who - let us say - like Fichte's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, come to recognize how in what sensually to man as a human-like form – also as a sensual animal form, but there it does not have the same meaning – what lives in the sensual human form as in a finer bodily organization in a coarser bodily organization, as we say in spiritual science: an etheric body alongside the coarse physical body; and how in this etheric body [work] the great cosmic forces that give birth to man out of the eternal, just as the physical forces give birth to him physically out of the physical. That is to say, Hermann Immanuel Fichte is already seeking a way to directly access the external physical, not only through thoughts, not only through abstractions, but by directly grasping in a higher, spiritual-sensual way that lies beyond birth and death in man.

And then we see a remarkable spirit, little known, who also walks this path, undoubtedly not as ingeniously and magnificently conceived as Schelling and Fichte, for example, but advancing further along the actual spiritual-scientific path than they, because he was allowed to live after them. Although he wrote his wonderful book “Glimpses into the Essence of Man” in 1811, we can still say that Troxler – for that is who we mean – is one of those who are truly at home in a forgotten chapter of German intellectual life. Because he lived later, Troxler was able to find true paths into the spiritual world when even his greater – greater than he – his greater predecessors could not.

It is remarkable that Troxler, when he presented his “[Lectures] on Philosophy” in 1835, spoke of the fact that man can develop something in his soul if he only wants to, something that relates to the purely intellectual view of the world, which works in theoretical concepts and, so to speak, only collects individual concepts from observation, how something could develop in the human soul, which he calls Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, an “super-spiritual sense”. “Supra-spiritual sense” - that is a soul power that Troxler refers to as [one that] can only be developed in man, and which does not, I would say, merely grasp things conceptually, not so abstractly as ordinary abstract cognition, but which grasps things so fully, so fully, that they , like the spirit itself, before man; that man thereby beholds a spiritual world, which is not exhausted in concepts, like even Hegel's, but which sees spiritual reality as the senses see sensual reality, so that the world is truly enriched by a new element of its being, by the spiritual. But the spiritual consists of concrete, fully developed entities that stand side by side and interact with each other in such a way that they can be grasped by the senses.

“Supra-sensible meaning” is one soul force. Troxler speaks of the other as the “supra-sensible spirit”. So that one must see in it that which can be developed in the human soul as a special power, so that the soul comes to go beyond the ordinary sensual, and yet not to fall into spiritual emptiness, as for example the mechanical natural science, but [that one comes to a] being filled by the spirit.

“Supersensible spirit”, “superspiritual sense” - for Troxler, these are two faculties in the human soul. He speaks of this in 1835; and one can receive an enormously significant stimulus for that which one can call knowledge of the spirit from these Troxler lectures, which consciously emerged from the depths of German nationality. For it is this German nationality that encourages us not to look at the world merely from the outside, but to really feel again and again, in what the soul can experience most intimately, the flooding through of the soul-spiritual being of the human being and of the whole world itself. Thus this German national character is called upon to develop something that otherwise could not have occurred within a national character in the course of time.

Now let us see how strangely - even if one characterizes quite one-sidedly that which is really in the sense of this national character - can be expressed, and what can be proved about these characterized spirits, let us look at what it is. We must say that we also see mysticism within the spiritual development of France and England, but this mysticism exists alongside other forms of science. It is either condemned to lead a sectarian existence alongside other forms of science or to close itself off as a special spiritual current.

German intellectual life, by rising to something like what Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte have achieved, shows that one can, in the fullest sense can remain in the fullest sense of the word in a scientific spirit and can work precisely out of a scientific spirit, and that which is to be achieved through mysticism, for example, does not stand alongside this scientific current, but can be directly and organically connected to it and can emerge from it.

Therefore, we see how, for example, in Hegel there arises something that lives in the purest clarity of thought – even if many dispute it, it is still so – but there is nothing in the purest clarity of thought that might be just a nebulous mysticism of feeling or what would be a mystic prattling about all kinds of things, but what, with crystal-clear thoughts, at the same time wants to grasp the thinking of the world mystically in its own thinking: we find thought-like mysticism - if the word may be used - in Hegel. And we find this intellectual mysticism spiritualized — because the life of thought is inwardly illuminated by the supersensible spirit, by the supra-spiritual meaning — in such personalities as, for example, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler.

It is interesting to see how Troxler endeavors to reveal what should lead to a world view from the forces of the soul, how what man knows reveals itself from what actually stands behind what man has in ordinary everyday life for the maintenance and orientation of his life. In Troxler's view, man has faith - faith, which, in the realm of religious belief, supports humanity's highest spiritual supports, but which also plays a major role in other areas of human life: faith. Man has this faith in his soul life. I am not just repeating Troxler's words, but speaking as one would have to think if one took in what Troxler said and developed it a little further. This power of belief is something that the outer physical body must have, something that can be grasped by the soul just as it arises directly in the soul, even without the development of higher cognitive powers. But behind this belief lives, hidden in the soul, [a higher organ of knowledge, so that belief is, as it were, for ordinary daily life, the living out of this higher organ of knowledge. Troxler calls what lives behind faith: spiritual hearing, the supersensible, spiritual hearing. So that in Troxler's sense, faith is to be imagined as the beautiful that flows in from an unconscious or subconscious spiritual part of the soul, which drives faith to the surface. But if it is developed itself, it becomes a spiritual ear that would become hearing in the spiritual world. Spiritual hearing means perceiving in the same way as the sensory ear perceives external sounds that live in the air.

Love, a soul power, which we again find as if born out of the soul-spiritual, the most beautiful power of outer human life, love – behind it stands for Troxler – I would like to say: for Troxler's pious mind – a spiritual, a soul power of knowledge. He calls it “soul feeling”, “soul sensing”.

Thus faith is, as it were, the outer expression, the outer image of what lives in the full soul as hearing. Thus love is the outer fruit of what lives in the inner soul as spiritual sensing, as spiritual feeling.

For Troxler, hope is the outer expression of that which lives in the soul as a higher soul power, as a higher soul sense, as a super-spiritual sense in the soul as an inner spiritual eye.

It is a wonderful image, but one that is not born out of fantasy alone, but is based on real facts of the soul life that everyone can develop within themselves. A wonderful image. There stands man within the physical and the spiritual world. There he develops, in relation to what flows through the world as the Divine-Spiritual, and in relation to what flows towards him from people and other beings: faith, hope, love. He develops them because, when he carries within him that which can stand free of the body in relation to the spiritual world, because he carries within him that which hears spiritually, feels spiritually and can see spiritually. And because the human being, that which he is in his soul, has been shrouded for the time between death – or, let us say, until birth with the bodily covering – that which connects him through spiritual hearing to the world-tone harmony , with the spiritual harmony of the world, which connects him to the world, which through grace leans towards him from the spiritual, through spiritual groping, which connects with him through spiritual vision, which wraps itself for him in faith, love, hope. [And so the soul forces that confront us in everyday life and in ordinary soul education are, for Troxler, an expression of a spiritual life that slumbers down there in the soul, that weaves and lives, and that, when developed, can enter into a direct connection with the spiritual-soul life of the whole world that flows around us. In this, the Troxler feels so at home in this, one can say, temporarily forgotten link in German thought and spiritual development.

Beautifully, wonderfully, he expresses this feeling of being at home by expressing himself in connection with other spirits who have striven for something similar. He says:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body [or assumed a kind of shell for the spirit in this], a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the inner, higher human being for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to the dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings.] “The inner man,” he even says in another place, “this ‘veiled God in nature, is not himself of stone, like these.] In the stony limbs’

of man

“grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could”

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical Apostolic idea, which Paul revealed to the Corinthians, , saying: “A body animated by the soul is sunk, and a body animated by the spirit rises, for as there is a body endowed with a soul, so there is also a body endowed with a spirit.” And in this is] contained the true, only doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man.

Troxler wanted a science that approached the world from all the powers of human nature, not just from the intellect and the ordinary, so-called powers of knowledge, but - but a science, a knowledge that the whole personality contributes to the world, so that in turn the whole human personality, the whole human being, can recreate or relive the world within itself. Not only in poetry, Troxler believes, but also in real knowledge it must become so. Therefore Troxler says the beautiful words in 1835:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the newest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every instance of anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history,] is now rising, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with it as absolute spirit or absolute personality."

Thus, Troxler is faced with the idea of an anthroposophy, as he calls it, an anthroposophy that is not, like anthropology, the study of that which can be observed externally in man with the senses and with the mind from which these senses seem to be drawn, but a higher kind of anthropology ology stands before Troxler's eyes, before Troxler's spiritual eye, which wants to develop an organ in man that is basically only the higher man in man, who then, to use this Goethean expression, directly recognizes and experiences that which is also higher than all nature: the higher nature in nature.

Then, when the whole personality presents itself to the world as a cognitive organ, as a super-spiritual sense organ, as a supersensible spiritual organ – as a “super-spiritual sense, as a ‘supersensible spirit’, [as a] spiritual organ, so that the world comes to life in the whole personality, then, in Troxler's view, ‘anthroposophy’ arises!

Thus, as if in a forgotten aspiration of German intellectual development, anthroposophy lives in the germ. Its blossoms and fruits will sprout from this German intellectual life if one correctly understands German intellectual life. And that they are intimately connected with this German intellectual life - I would like to say: every being, every trait of this German intellectual life shows it to us. It is the case in the world, esteemed attendees, that individual things that flourish in the development of humanity must live for a time, I would say, as if under the stream; the rest of the stream shows something else, something superficial; but under the stream, the deeper things live on. And so it is with what can now sound to us as a faded note from German intellectual life.

Or is it not wonderful, absolutely wonderful, when we see how out of this intellectual life - it was in 1858, when a pastor, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - Pastor Rocholl, published a little book - yes a truly wonderful booklet, in which he wanted to explain how the human spirit must elevate and strengthen itself in order to be able to join that which, as the spirit of the world, permeates and flows through the world. This wonderful, forgotten little book, which in the most eminent sense is, I would say, a document of the just mentioned faded tone of German spiritual life, is called: “Contributions to German Theosophy”. It was published in 1856 by a simple pastor, in whom his theosophical reflections sprouted from his piety. But it is a little book that must be said to rise to a truly wonderful height of spiritual insight and spiritual feeling about the world, even if it may often seem fantastic in relation to what spiritual science has to say today.

One need not be either a supporter or an opponent of these things, but one can simply face them by saying to oneself: they are an expression of what lives in German national culture. And so I could cite many, many more examples, especially from German intellectual life. Everywhere one would find confirmation that this striving for spiritual science is present in German intellectual life, which today has to present itself as half-forgotten – forgotten! And forgotten in such a way that it must be recognized in the course of time. It does no harm for something like this to be forgotten. Why does it do no harm?

Well, dear attendees, the secrets of the world that are in nature do not impose themselves in such a way that they do not need to be explored first! Why should we believe that the spiritual history of mankind does not also contain such secrets that need to be explored first? Why should we believe that only that which - I want to say - has come to light through the favor of the destiny of the time, that only that is the essence of the progress of humanity? In the subsoil of human development lives that which can only be found by those who come afterwards; but that is how it is in the history of ideas; it is also in the history of nature.

But basically, all these minds were more or less aware that – I have already used this image in relation to Fichte – that which lived in them and which was to lead them in their souls to the spiritual secrets of the world, that this was, so to speak, a dialogue with the German folk spirit itself.

And now let me give you another example. I would also mention the remarkable Karl Christian Planck, from whose posthumous writings the Testament of a German was published not so long ago. Karl Christian Planck, who, proceeding from a truly spiritual point of view, sought to place man in the context of the whole of existence. The time will come when such minds will be recognized, minds that have drawn from the depths of the German soul, when there will be full consciousness of the fact that in order that the German spirit may develop fully can fully develop – also in the realm of knowledge, everything foreign, which sometimes – like Newton's theory of colors – is more readily understood by the superficial human soul than the German, for the understanding of which one must first prepare.

What does the earth look like to a modern mind, which is completely sickened by the Romanesque-British-mechanistic in the scientific view, by the world view that is born entirely of the mind, which Schelling even called a mental power in 1803, what does the earth look like to such a view? Now the earth stands as revealed by external mechanical geology: mineral-mechanical.

Before Planck's soul, this lonely thinker in Germany, who had his first books published in Ulm in the 1860s, speaking out of the most genuine German essence, speaking out of the spiritual, but only being recognized by the better minds, how does the earth stand before his mind, before this consciously German mind? Like a mighty organism! Yes, not just like an organism, but like a blessed, spiritualized organism that has shaped its own spiritual-soul out of its own spirit: the human being himself! For Planck, the human being, with all that lives and moves in him, belongs to the earth. One does not fully understand the earth if one does not see man as the flower of the earth. For Planck, to regard the earth as the mere geologist does would be just as if one were to regard the plant only in its root and not to go to its flower. The earth must be regarded in such a way that the possibility of human development lives in the earth itself; that the earth bears within itself something that, out of its forces, out of its being, demands man as its flower!

Thus Planck's world view goes out into the great from its spirit. And how does he speak himself? In 1864, in his “Foundations of a Science of Nature,” he writes wonderful words about the earth:

“What power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parsifal)

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which her hero attains, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

It is important to realize that such spirits are rooted in German intellectual life. It is not very helpful to keep pointing this out, but they live unconsciously in the best minds of German intellectual life.

Karl Christian Planck – I referred to him as early as 1900 in the first edition of my Rätsel der Philosophie (Mysteries of Philosophy), which at the time was called Über Welt- und Lebensanschauungen (On World and Life Views); now again in the new edition of Rätsel der Philosophie, to show what he means within the overall development of German intellectual life. One can say, dear honored attendees, in such spirits one can grasp how the German spirit has precisely this special cognitive faculty, to let the soul-spiritual experience flow into it, to let that which weaves and lives in the secrets of the world — I would like to say — in the innermost part of nature and of the spirit.

For years, I would even say, it was not given to those who are now surrounding us like a hostile ring, to recognize this, even in its external outlines, [those who now live] on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers [within which the German national character develops]. How often the jokes that are heard from everywhere, saturated with hatred and truly defamatory, are cheap in comparison to German intellectual life, which is hated and defamed, and in relation to which one is not aware of the position it must occupy in the world by virtue of its very own strength. One only needs to recall how Emile Boutroux, not long before the war, still traveled around Germany lecturing on the beauty of German intellectual life, on the fraternization of German and Latin intellectual life – and now he repeatedly and repeatedly brings up his so that they can hear again and again that the German spirit is averse to looking at the things of the world; this German spirit imagines that it can carry everything within itself and give birth to the whole world from its own interior.

And in one of his most recent speeches, Emile Boutroux did not disdain to take the following hateful joke into his mouth – and he apparently found listeners – to make the following joke about German intellectual life and its nature. He said: The Frenchman, when he wants to describe animals, goes to a menagerie to look at the animals and then describe them; the Englishman, when he wants to describe animals, travels around the world and describes what he can observe there; the German sits down in his study — he neither travels the world like the Englishman nor goes to the menagerie like the Frenchman — but sits in his study and draws from his own inner being, from what he can experience within himself, the image of the lion and the elephant and so on.

It's just a shame – we are accustomed to the French being a witty people, aren't we? – but it's just a shame that this joke – those who know a little about intellectual history are aware of this – was first made by Heinrich Heine, that even this joke, with which the Frenchman wants to poke fun at German intellectual life, was born on German soil!

And if you wanted to go into the joke: the German would not go to the menagerie or not to the desert, would not observe the animals outside, but would create them from his own inner being. Brehm, if you were to hold Brehm's book with his observations of apes up to such a know-nothing, such a frivolous mocker, he would slander the German people, saying that they create not through world travel but from within. [Let it be said in reply that the greatest work of world travel – which must be recognized by anyone with an open mind as the work that first scientifically discovered America – comes from von Humboldt, the German!

Where it matters to live with nature and observe nature, the German truly does not need the Romance reference. And what this remarkable Frenchman Boutroux, who has become a famous man in France through a few successful sentences, has to say about German inwardness, is truly quite far removed from what this German inwardness turns out to be when you look at it at its core, as we have tried to do today with a few words.

Now, dear attendees, if we try to hear other voices, for example, Eastern voices, the matter becomes even clearer. There one must say: in Eastern Europe, on Russian soil – not only despite the great philosopher Soloviev, but precisely because of the peculiar nature of the great philosopher Soloviev, one can say – in Eastern Europe today there can be no understanding of this peculiar relationship of the human soul to the world-pervading spiritual and living essence; but over there everything is such that there is still no understanding for the experience of the spirit pulsating and permeating the world in one's own inner soul being, that one wants everything to be met halfway, that everything should come only as a revelation, albeit a spiritual revelation from outside. Thus, even the greatest Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century opposed themselves completely to the actual essence of Central Europe, and by the way, even to Western Europe.

What they repeatedly had to say, great minds of Russian intellectual culture – the German just did not realize this because he simply took – I would like to say – the extraordinarily vivid description of a Tolstoy, a Dostoyevsky – the German did not realize this at all! Within Russian spiritual life, basically, only the view exists. This whole life, as it has been expressed in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, in the other Western European minds, is horrible, is repulsive basically, is an abstract life of thought, something that does not reach the heart and mind of the real human being. All this must be replaced by that which lives in the Russian human being. Whether something is categorized as political or not is not the point. The Testament of Peter the Great contains the whole spiritual philosophy of Russia; in the nineteenth century, philosophers express the same basic tenor, which amounts to regarding Western and Central Europe only as something horrible and obsolete.

Megalomania is the direct consequence of such a world view, which fancies itself as mature, but only fancies itself as mature out of immaturity. And so, for example, one can indeed experience the following. First of all - let me explain this in conclusion - an outstanding Russian spirit of the nineteenth century, Yushakov, turns his gaze towards Asia in 1885, because it is imminent that something must grow out of the same nationality in the East, directly like a great, world-historical mission. But this could never arise from the peoples of Western or Central Europe. And so, in 1885, Jushakow wrote a remarkable book, whose gaze is initially directed towards Asia – a remarkable book!

In this book, the following is expressed: When we look over to Asia, we find an old, wonderful world culture in Asia, which has only just grown old. This world culture wanted to understand itself by juxtaposing two spiritual entities: Ahriman and Ormuzd. Ormuzd is revered by these Asians, especially by the Iranian Asians, to whom, for example, the Indians and the Persians also belong, as the spirit that wins the fruits from the earth; but who also brings spiritual striving into the human soul, elevating it and allowing it to experience the spiritual.

In contrast to this stands Ahriman, who is connected with the spirit of the Iranians, the Turanians, who led the Asians through evil in such a way that the blessed conditions of Ormuzd were thwarted by him. And there we see - says Jushakow - in Asia over there Ormuzd and Ahriman fighting out their battle and man placed in this fight.

In 1885, dear attendees, please note that Yushakov wrote this! And he says: Oh, these poor Asians! What have the selfish, decrepit Europeans done to them? What have they let them become!

Yushakov presents the matter as if the Europeans, out of their selfishness and decrepitude, had taken away from the Asians what Ormuzd had brought to them as a blessing. But the Russians, out of their own philosophy of life, must bring the invigorating element of their world view into all its decrepitude. The Russians must come and help the Asians, they must join forces with the Asians. That is what Jushakow says. As I said, the focus is on Asia.

I am not saying this, Yushakov said it in 1885. And Yushakov said something remarkable: the wonderful, blessed alliance of the peasants – the Russian peasants – and the Cossacks will penetrate into Asia and will join forces with the poor Asians against Ahriman, in order to maintain the blessings of Ormuzd.

And who is Yushakov mainly opposed to? In 1885 – I have to keep emphasizing this – he says: Oh, these Asians, they have suffered terribly at the hands of the horrific Europeans, who only wanted to appropriate, in the most terrible selfishness, what Asian civilization, under Ormuzd's fruitfulness and blessing-bringing, has created for humanity. How did the Europeans view the Asians? And which Europeans does Jushakow have in mind? Jushakow, in 1885, has the English in mind; oddly enough. Let us hear what he says: “These Asian peoples are regarded by the English only as if they existed to clothe themselves in English garments, to clothe themselves in English fabrics, to fight with each other with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels and to play with English baubles.” Then he continues – in 1885:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula. I wish

– says Yushakov – my Russian

"Fatherland nothing similar - I can only rejoice that it is ‘

sufficiently far removed’

from this state of affairs, as brilliant as it is sad,

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. So Yushakov in 1885; so a Russian in 1885 looks over to Asia.

This is probably the reason why the Russians allied themselves with England shortly afterwards, not to help the Asians against Ahriman, but to destroy what, with such deep roots, can represent such a spiritual life – in addition to all the other German qualities – as it was allowed to be described.

And so, from the place where 150 million people have to live with 777 million, there must be a powerful awakening of consciousness of what the German essence has fundamentally meant in the development of humanity.

Among those Germans whose gaze was turned to the German character, there was always an awareness of it - an awareness on both sides of the Erz Mountains, in Styria as well as on the Rhine and in the far east of Germany. And just as that which today is being forged together by the great events in Central Europe - basically, among those who understood it, always wanted to forge together - may show us a beautiful word from an Austrian German, a word written in 1862 by the Austrian German Robert Hamerling.

I may well point to these circumstances on the other side of the Erz Mountains, for the reason that I myself have spent almost thirty years of my life under German Austria as a German Austrian myself, taking part in the discussions and struggles that Germans have to face within Austria.

It is the same Hamerling who expressed his attitude towards Austria and Germany in the beautiful words: “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland” – words that every Austrian-German who can see beyond external circumstances lives with in the indeterminable. I need not say anything about Robert Hamerling's other intellectual achievements, I just want to point out that in 1884 it was Robert Hamerling who, from Graz, called out heartfelt words to Germany when it was learned that a statue of the goddess Strasbourg was being erected in Paris and that the German flag was being burned at a festival celebrating the goddess Strasbourg. At that time, it was Robert Hamerling who sent the words from Graz to Germany:

Believe in revenge,
And in the victor's wreath of laurels:
Do not hope to steal back
A piece of German land!
You may rave like ravens Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore.

In 1862, in one of his earlier poems, “Germanenzug”, the same Robert Hamerling had the ancient Germans, the ancestors of the Germans, passing before his spiritual eyes as they moved across from Asia. He leaves them still encamped in Asia, on the borders of Europe. He beautifully describes the image of the evening, the evening image, how the setting sun is above them, how the moon is rising; then he describes how everything falls asleep among the wandering Germans, how only one watches, with blond curls, with radiant eyes, inspired by the essence of his people: Teut. The genius speaks to Teut, who wants to speak of the future essence of Germanness. The genius of the German people speaks, for example, to Teut, the words to the blond, representative youth of the Germanic peoples:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Then Hamerling continues by pointing out that what the Asian sought, and what the ancestors of the Germanic peoples sought in Asia, when they extinguished the human essence and suppressed the ego in order to rise to the spirit of the world, must reappear in a later form. This Asiatic way, which also appears today in Hinduism, can no longer be the present way. Now that the Christ Impulse has entered the world, the human ego must be attached to the world spirituality in a different way. The ego must be elevated, strengthened, as we see in the three - Fichte, Hegel, Schelling - and others; the ego must be strengthened; but in the way it must be, now that the greatest impulse in humanity, as the earth has seen the Christ impulse, as it must be, as the Asian striving must appear on a higher level, so it appeared from the deepest root of the national being. And that is what Robert Hamerling wants to express by also letting the genius speak to the blond Teut, to the blond representative of Germanness.

"But however proudly you may aspire, high above other swarms, you will always retain the ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of of the old Asian homeland. This holy ray of calm existence will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

And that is precisely what the German strives for, what rises from all science, from all knowledge: this carrying over of even what can be known, as if to the altar of a divinized world view itself. Spiritual science does not want to be religion, nor does it want to replace it; it wants to place itself as true science alongside religion – it does not want to affect religion in the least, it wants to accept it – like a current that presents itself as true science, which also only wants to support religion, not replace it in any way. But what spiritual science can achieve is offered at the same time – to use Böhme's expression – in order to experience drunkenness of God, that is, to experience the spiritual of the world in one's own soul being.

That is what was felt by the German philosopher, the German mystic Jakob Boehme, and what may appear as a motto, a guiding principle of the German essence itself, when Jakob Boehme says: When you turn to the deep phenomena of the world and gaze at the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and strive and walk, and in this God you will be buried.

This is a world view that has been decided upon from German knowledge, a spiritual world view.

And how do you encounter it? Let us just take a very brief look at Russia, to conclude. Russia needs a new delusion today: the delusion of Europe's decrepitude. It needs this new delusion of Europe's decrepitude to prove that this European intellectual life, and especially the Central European intellectual life, is outdated; a new delusion, as Russia always needed a delusion.

France – yes, one would like to remain completely objective, not to do wrong to anyone. The German has no need to join in the tones in which his enemies are indulging today. So perhaps we can listen to a French poet himself, who, not long before the war, created a dramatic portrayal of his people that is quite interesting: the French have become accustomed over the centuries to everyone listening to them. They have recently come to see themselves as the ones who set the tone in all external culture. And so Rostand himself, the Frenchman himself, believes it in this poetic representation. The Frenchman is like a cockerel: when he crows in the morning, the sun rises. And so he gradually comes to believe that because he crows, the sun rises. And he cannot imagine that the sun would rise even if he did not crow.

The Frenchman needs a new belief; he must be able to believe that nothing can happen in the world if he does not crow. He needs a new belief about his own nature. And basically, you only have to let the historical events since 1870 really affect your soul to see how this new belief has gradually emerged and how it has not left the French national spirit. You can also read about it in my little book, Thoughts During the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they have to hate them.

One would not want to do the English an injustice either. But when one hears how one of the leading contemporary English politicians lets it be known to the Germans across the Channel that “might before right” applies to them, and that this would be a German principle – then one must emphasize: The principle of “might before right” as a truly justified one can be found in the works of the English writer Thomas Hobbes, where it is first mentioned. The phrase “might before right” is a specifically English product, and all law is rooted in might. And so one could find many things; one would not want to do wrong, as I said, but I must say the sentence: All these nations, they need something to numb themselves about what they are actually doing in world history, to numb what they are doing, they need something like a fog that shrouds the truth. England needs a new lie – that can be said, without becoming in any way unobjective, from the facts themselves. And Italy? Yes, before the war a not insignificant Italian politician – for there were minds that were not so naive that they would have believed before the war that Italy would ever stand up for the Central European powers, and so I was not particularly struck by this – when a not insignificant Italian politician told me: We need a war in Italy, because our people have become impotent and lazy and careless; only war can reinvigorate them. So we need the war, a new sensation, a new passion, a tremor in the soul of the people, that is why Europe is worried.

As I said, these are the words of an Italian politician. Therefore, one can say: It will seem understandable that Italy, in order to numb itself to the real truth of the situation, would have to appoint a new saint: the sacro egoismo, the holy egoism - a new saint, a strange saint indeed. And even stranger is his hierophant, the high priest Gabriel d'Annunzio.

However much the image that will arise from these circumstances in the world history of humanity is forgotten, the German can also look at these things with calm confidence, as - let it be said again - on this side and on the other side of the Ore Mountains has always done my dear teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer spoke the following words in Austria in 1859:

Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
It may not be unwelcome,
If we get into a little fight here,
If they take away our good right
[You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us, every ambition will fade
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has erred,
If discord has arisen in a German heart,
There is but one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So then let us also have in common:]
A German war, if not a German peace.

1859 – spoken in Austria by someone who felt at one with his soul with what lives and breathes in the German national identity. And then he said, the same person, that

A spirit is rising, a giant to behold
[Who will not long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German districts.

He has been called a master in many ways,
In art and knowledge, in building systems,
He can be seen for the first time overall,
then he will be recognized by the world] for real.

I am only reading these sentences so that you can see how what the German can feel about the source and root of German national life was not just created today, as there are enough and sufficient people sitting among the honored audience here who know that I spoke about the German essence for years and years before the war, and also about the relationship to other nations. The German need not fall back on the tone that he can now hear from those who hold him as if in a ring, as if in a great fortress. He may quietly look at what he can gain from an objective observation of the nature of his people. For what he gains in this way presents itself to him where it appears like a pure tone in the development of German intellectual life, first as a germ, as a root, which will later bear flowers and fruit. And so the best that is in German intellectual life, which, as we have seen, is not yet blossom and fruit, but only root and germ, will bear blossom and fruit in the future.

And with his soul, the German turns in the present difficult time of trial, which fills us all with sure hopes and confidence, he turns with these sure hopes and confidence that fill him, to the future, in his whole heart united with the view into this future, to what will develop as the flowering and the fruit of the German national character, of German life and of German strength in general, despite all the hateful and defamatory things that are said today against this German essence – what will develop, what may be addressed by knowledge as that which will develop because it must develop!