The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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!