The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I will have to say a few things about more recent historical developments from the point of view of the spiritual science which we are considering in these lectures. It will be necessary to take as read some of the things I said in the earlier lectures. Essentially this will be the only precondition. Something else which I will not be able to repeat, time being limited, in so far as it applies today is that along the lines I tried to give in the first lecture, this science of the spirit can confirm that human beings, striving with their powers of soul, must come to recognize a supersensible world, and that a specific training of these powers of soul—I have characterized this at least in principle—will enable human beings to gain insight into the facts pertaining to this supersensible world.

It is now a matter of applying these fundamental truths of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science to one of the most significant fields in human life, the field of history. I will, of course, have to limit myself to what is of most immediate concern to us, the historical evolution of humanity in more recent times. People who do not look far into the development of human civilization take history to be a very old field of study. The truth is, however, that history really only came to life just before the second half of the 18th century, arising from beginnings that could not yet be called history. And in the sense in which we are accustomed to think of history, having learned this at school, namely that history serves to study the laws that govern the evolution of the human race in the course of time—in this sense history is really only a child of the 19th century.

The study of history arose from the interest that people have always shown in other people and their destinies, in so far as those other people and their destinies had a connection with one’s own life, being on the periphery of one’s personal life experience. We might say it is a straight line from the family records that people use to inform themselves on their own nation and native land, and ultimately the efforts made to gain insight into the laws that govern the evolution of humanity as a whole. It is significant that the study of history, which before was always within the above-mentioned narrow confines, thus came to be extended to the whole of humanity. It has only been in the recent times which we intend to consider here that a wholly general, human interest in the evolution of humanity as a whole arose from the more or less narrowly defined interest shown by people.

This alone will show anyone who is prepared to see that human beings showing pure interest in other human beings as such is essentially of recent origin. Now the situation is such that exactly because history arises from people’s interest in people, an obstacle arises when history is supposed to rise to a higher level where insight is gained into the laws that govern human evolution. For here history is very easily taken into an abyss that at some time or other has threatened every kind of scientific study. The natural-scientific approach has almost completely overcome this in more recent times, but it will often and quite unconsciously influence the way people look at history. We may call it the anthropomorphic view. It arises because something found in the human being himself is taken out into the world and the phenomena which present themselves in the world. The most obvious, happily overcome in natural science, is that a person finds that when he achieves something he has been following a purpose, an aim. People are therefore inclined to look at anything that happens in the natural world, and also at historical developments, by looking for purposive actions in the same sense as one finds them in the inner human being, that is, in oneself.

Natural science has grown great in the more recent sense exactly because efforts are made not to take an anthropomorphic view, though this is in many respects unconscious. Goethe was justified in saying that people do not know how anthropomorphic they are.¹¹¹ In the case of history, however, there is the special temptation to see the things which we find in ourselves also in historical developments outside, for we are trying to consider something that is human. We overcome the obstacle—which existed to a greater or lesser degree for the most hardworking thinkers of recent times when they wanted to establish a kind of philosophy of history—basically only by going beyond the narrow limits set to human nature even as we consider the human being himself. Those limits are set because human beings act according to something that is immediately subjective, according to such aims as are possible in their inner life between birth and death.

If you overcome an inner nature that relies on the senses, with the life of the soul bound to it between birth and death, by rising higher and going beyond the senses, you can take the discoveries made in supersensible study of the human being out into historical evolution. For human beings go beyond themselves when they rise to their supersensible nature, and they can then no longer be anthropomorphic in the study of history, for they are no longer so in the way they look at their own essential nature. By just making efforts to overcome a particular obstacle to seeing the world clearly, we are thus taken beyond ourselves into the supersensible sphere.

If we are thus equipped to approach historical evolution with the powers that take us into the supersensible world, the facts of historical life appear in a completely new light, purely because one sees them in the light of the supersensible sphere. In this new light you ask yourself: What is the real situation? Have certain facts that have been recorded so that we find them in our usual history books truly had such a close connection with the human being as they are often said to have, with the view expressed that the human being, as he stands before us, is a product of historical development, a product of the past? However, if we ask these questions only in the light of supersensible insight, we soon discover, on turning our attention to historical events, how little people are able to say with the impulses of the lives in which they find themselves at the present time, for example: This or that is connected with this or that historical event in the past. Just as natural science, if pursued consistently, takes us beyond itself, so does the study of history take us to the point where we have to say: In a sense, the historical events are falling apart. We cannot just speak of cause and effect in the usual sense, considering the present as though it were due to the influence of the past, certainly where this contains whatever may be found in the world perceptible through the senses. We can only see history truly if we connect the human being with the supersensible and do not look in historical facts for anything they appear to be on the surface but for something that initially is only given as revelation—a supersensible process in world events, with human beings involved in it.

Then history becomes something other than a study of consecutive events. It becomes a symptomatology, as I’d like to call it. We then consider individual events not just the way they present in the life perceived through the senses but as symptoms that allow us to penetrate into a supersensible process behind them that goes beyond history itself. It will then also no longer be possible to seek absolute completeness in the usual way—anyone who has been working with historical material in some area or other will know that such completeness can never be achieved. Instead you will try to take the facts that can be discovered, regarding them as symptoms, and penetrate into the great spiritual scheme of things that lies behind them.

Taking this road you will soon find yourself compelled to abandon the old distinctions we know from our schooldays, where the study of recent history begins with all kinds of reflections on the journeys of discovery and the importance of discovering America, or on inventions and the like. Instead you feel compelled to say: Where can a point be found—if we start from the present time and go back in historical evolution—where a major change came in the course of human evolution, with new ways of life and new conditions for life?

People who like to take the easy way in looking at the world often tend to say that one thing simply arises from another that went before, and that there are no significant changes or turning points. They will even quote the soothing words: Nature does not take leaps.¹¹² But just look at the natural world and the leaps that are made! A plant will first develop green leaves and later transform them into petals of different colours—a leap. And such leaps exist everywhere in the natural world, refuting common prejudice that people find comfortable.

Even a superficial look will in fact show that in the European world, the 15th century brought a major change in all ways of life. A change came in the characteristic state of soul humanity had had until then, and in the way humanity made this inner state of soul into external historical actions. With regard to symptomatology, we can point to something of a landmark at an earlier time, an important turning point in the historical life of more recent humanity. This was when the French forced the Pope to move his residence from Rome to Avignon in 1303.¹¹³ Almost at the same time the order of the Templars, a very special community that had a strange relationship to the Church, was destroyed by the French government, its properties being confiscated.¹¹⁴

Those events were turning points in more recent historical evolution because they showed that people were going against something that for centuries had been characteristic of the whole civilized world. This characteristic was reflected in the strange hostilities between central European imperialism and the Popes, as well as the mutually supportive alliances that resulted from them. All those hostilities were in the light of a quite specific fact. The peoples throughout the civilized world of that time were not divided into groups such as national and other groups the way they came to be in later times, for beyond any such division reigned something that people had in common; we can only say that a universal idea reigned in the human race, influencing people’s actions, and on the one side this came from the Roman papacy, which felt itself to be something that brought people together. Medieval imperialism was equally universal, except that it was often fighting that universal community.

The element that came with the turning point of which I spoke goes against this way of holding people together. The kind of cohesion which existed through the Middle Ages, with people feeling themselves to be part of a great whole, was for centuries based on certain unconscious impulses that dwelt in human beings. The leaders knew them and used them in bringing people together. They addressed a particular sum total of unconscious powers of soul in bringing people together from the above-mentioned points of view in the civilized world of that time. The event at Avignon created breaches, perceptible breaches in that cohesion. We can sense that a new element thus had to come into the constitution, into the state of soul, of occidental humanity.

We also see that the forces at work in the European West had for a long time been affected by an event that had come from the East like a force of nature. I only need to mention everything that started with the Mongolian hordes, and the migrations from East to West, from Asia to Europe, that followed. Both were turning points, and at the dawn of the 15th century they gave Europe and its people the structure of community life. Despite all attempts to preserve the past, this structure was different from the earlier one, when it depended on unconscious impulses. Humanity found it increasingly necessary to be consciously aware also in areas where they were previously given cohesion on the basis of unconscious impulses.

Something highly significant happened with these changes in the West of Europe, especially in areas where people had until then be used, more or less so but significantly, to find cohesion through that universal idea, universal impulse, which I have been characterizing. We see something completely new arise in those areas. The national element came to take over from the old, more spiritual element of the Catholic Church in providing cohesion. We see England and France become a new kind of nation-states, setting a pattern, as it were.

Let us try and consider the way in which the new element was taken particularly into those areas of Western Europe. Initially the two countries were united until the movement arose in the 15th century which we may also call a turning point, in 1428, when in a certain direction a dividing wall came between England and France. This came to expression in the events that happened around Joan of Arc.¹¹⁵ The seed was then sown for the mutual independence of France and England; before that there had been a degree of connection between them. This is a tremendously significant phenomenon. For we shall see many things grow from this differentiation, which only came at that time, in the 15th century, things that will again prove symptomatic in the further evolution of history.

Another change came when a kind of national feeling, at the time preparing the way for an independent feeling of being Italian, developed in Italy from the very element which had led to the papacy being so powerful in that country, overshadowing all such national and similar groupings. Letting the eye roam across Europe we also see ourselves—I can only refer to these things briefly here—coming closer to the time when a major struggle arose between central and more or less eastern parts of Europe, the Germanic and Slavonic cultures. We see how the power of the Hapsburgs arose from the struggles in those regions, with the Slavs attacking, and Slav and Germanic cultures mingling. We also see highly individual structures, which before that had not emerged in such a way from the universal impulses, now with individual views and individual purpose. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, city states flourished throughout the occidental civilization of that time.

Again, once national aspirations had become differentiated and France and England were separate, we see long periods of civil war in England leading to the parliamentary system, as the world was to know it, being the goal of a social structure that arose from mutual understanding among individual people.

These, then, are not all, but some of the symptoms from more recent history. I merely have to add that as the groups formed from those impulses everywhere in Europe, there slowly arose in the East, still only in its early beginnings, from struggles that had to lead to its emergence, what later was to be the Russian structure. A strange structure. Seen from Europe it evolved in such a way that to our feeling it will always be a riddle. The most important impulses living within that structure were not really sentiently perceived but welded together, I would say, from something that had survived through all kinds of migrations—passing through Byzantium, arising from a certain metamorphosis of Roman Catholic life; something had come together that arose from what had sprouted forth as the blood of the Slavonic and Norman cultures. In ways that are familiar enough to you, it took in much of the Asiatic inner attitude of soul, a state of soul—I am now referring to the best parts of it—that through millennia had turned away from anything immediately coming through the senses and towards great mystic approaches, hoping to penetrate into a supersensible world with which the sensual life of human beings is connected.

If we take these and perhaps also many other symptoms of more recent historical development and truly consider them from the point of view of the issues considered earlier, a characteristic emerges clearly from these symptoms. We come to perceive it if we ask ourselves: How does the element that comes to expression in these symptoms inwardly differ from anything which in earlier centuries and millennia showed itself in a similar way in a historical evolution of humanity that was more at an unconscious level? We need to consider these things without any sympathy or antipathy, in a wholly objective way. It is only then that we will discover the characteristic element in the phenomena we are considering.

It is strange, when we ask ourselves: What do all these symptoms—for instance those I have given as examples today—have in common if we compare them with earlier impulses that came into historical evolution? I won’t speak of the fruitful way, for example, in which Christianity came into the world in a positive way, creating something new for the soul. I won’t speak of this, but only of the kind of impulses that were, for example, often given in ancient Greek life, when a new impulse would simply be given as though produced from inmost human nature. This would then come into its own in a completely new configuration of reality; or the way it was given, let us say, to Roman civilization in the days of Augustus. None of the impulses that come now are of that kind. The most evident impulse we see, for example, is the national one, based not on national cohesion—as one often sees it identified today and considered to be a state cohesion—but on the national element in so far as it bases on natural principles deep down in human nature. We see it as an impulse that people take up without having produced it inside. A person is French or English on account of his nature. And when in establishing the historical configuration he refers to his nationality he is not referring to something produced in his mind and spirit, but something he has simply accepted from outside.

If we compare the national principle as it has come up in history with those earlier impulses, we discover that all the impulses which we have seen coming to humanity in Greek and in Roman Latin times were infinitely much closer to the productive side in human nature. What came there was retained and preserved. When one takes up something new in more recent history, this is something one is not producing oneself, something which comes to the human being from outside.

Having attempted to gain our orientation more from the outer progress of more recent European history, we’ll now attempt to penetrate to the inner aspects. Within the soul’s inner state, we see a very similar onrush in the inner state of soul against the universal impulse that had counted on the unconscious, an impulse given through the ages. We see the onrush of Huss in the 15th century, Wiclif even before him, and then Luther and later Calvin. We see something human beings want to give, to put into history much more than anything that went before, when it was thought of in more universal ways; this is something individual, welling up from human nature itself. Strangely, however, we also see how in discussion, everything is always related to what went before. What is new is that the human being was referred to his own nature. Decide for yourself what the nature of the eucharist is. Decide for yourself on your attitude to your priest, do not let it be forced on you through a universal impulse coming from outside.

Yet when we consider the subject of the discussion, the dogma of the eucharist that had earlier been produced into humanity, had existed for centuries in history, or in human life altogether. Nothing new was being produced from the soul and given over to historical life, but the old was produced and preserved, everything that was there without human beings contributing anything. All that happened then was that the human being entered into a new relationship to it.

In following this inner process in European development we see infinitely much of the old torn apart, changed, metamorphosed in the onrush against the universal impulse that had reigned before. We can see it exactly from the way knighthood scattered and vanished. The whole of its inner state of soul—you only have to study the crusades—was connected with the universal impulse. Again we can refer to a turning point that will provide the orientation for everything else that happened. This was the battle of Murton in 1476, towards the end of the 15th century, fought against knighthood connected with the universal impulse. We may see it as representative of a struggle that happened in many places.¹¹⁶

We also find a change in the ecclesiastical authority in connection with all this. This ecclesiastical authority had assumed a strange form, and you can find this characterized in any work on history. During this time and because of the onrush, a need was felt for inner regeneration and improvement. The onrush against it really made the Church itself change many things internally. Yet we see everywhere how the element that had raised the Church up in the course of human evolution, having spread it in form of a universal impulse, was to be given a new relationship to each individual human being. We see this happening all over Europe. We see how the English Church made itself independent. We see how in central Europe growing independence joined forces with political powers. We see how everywhere the individual and personal rose against the universal, in other words how something that the human mind was to make its own raged against an earlier inner human nature that had been more unconscious or subconscious, and we see what followed from this in historical terms.

Counter forces did, of course, also arise, like the counter reformation against the reformation. But if we study the symptomatology, the struggles this caused immediately show something of the greatest importance with regard to more recent history. We see the Thirty Years’ War arise from everything that happened in connection with the symptoms I have characterized. Studying the Thirty Years’ War,¹¹⁷ we discover something strange. It arose from opposition arising among the confessions in Europe. It began with all the impulses connected with religious struggles, and it ended as a purely political phenomenon. It turned into something completely different as it progressed. If we now ask ourselves how its evolution looks to us with regard to the confessions which then existed in Europe, we find that in 1648 people were exactly where they had been in 1618. The whole 30 years really changed nothing of any significance as regards the relationship between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and so on. All this remained as before. However, in the course of that war quite different powers intervened, and this gave the European national structures a completely different configuration.

If you study the Thirty Years’ War in this way you will be truly convinced that we cannot see history as something that follows as an effect connected with what went before and call the latter the cause. Nothing that came from the Thirty Years’ War was genuinely connected as effect with anything we can call cause in the true sense. Studying the evolution we see how events happening on the outside can only be a symptom for something that happens deeper down. This is particularly evident in the case of the Thirty Years’ War. But what did happen? It was the western countries and above all France which advanced as a result of the events that came in the course of that war, and not its causes. The consequences of the Thirty Years’ War later led to the whole regal glory of France. We see how the royal power of France shone out over Europe in the time that followed.

Then again, something arose in the womb of what was evolving there, taking the old national impulse forward in a most eminent sense. This new element went far beyond anything merely national; it broke the national idea apart, as it were. Individual, personal nature arose, later to come into its own in the French Revolution. The human individual, standing by himself, wanted to emancipate from the compulsion of a community that had not arisen from some productive impulse but been taken up into the human state of soul from nature, from the world surrounding humanity. Again, in looking at the symptomatology, we see how Napoleon then arose, quite inorganically we might say, without any evident motivation. He was the executor, as it were, of the French Revolution’s will and testament. At the same time we also see a strange, a great and tremendous turning point arise. This significant turning point in more recent history came on 21 October 1805, when the battle of Trafalgar prevented Napoleon from extending his tentacles across to England. Something which earlier had only been potential, the separation between England and the Continent, was then made complete.

We can now let things that are generally known pass quickly before the inner eye. We find that parliamentary life going in the direction of liberalism evolved further in an independent England. We see a more tumultuous evolution in France during the 19th century. Then, however, we see emerge in a new form, symptomatic and shining out over what is really happening at the foundations of European history, how the European west and centre needed to come to grips in the 1850s with something that was like a dark riddle in the European east, with the Russian configuration that had arisen. This was like a question posed with regard to European development. We then see certain ideas gaining strength in the 19th century, other ideas going against them, and how ideas of the one kind or the other became impulses in historical development. We see how everything was building up in the 19th century towards the storm which then broke in 1848.¹¹⁸ And we see evolve from all this the social movement that was later to be so comprehensive and today has a profound influence on human evolution. We see how one especially noteworthy event came among everything that evolved in the 19th century, something the people of Europe were able to observe quite profoundly. Out of the glory that had arisen with France becoming a national state, a kind of demand or claim arose and continued to spread.

Let us not put values on things here. We do not follow them with sympathy or antipathy, but quite objectively. We see how out of the relationship between developments in west and east something arose that was considered an insoluble problem—insoluble for Europe at least for the time being—by people who had the necessary insight at the time, irrespective of the attitude they took to it, to whether it should happen or not. We can even completely leave aside the question as to whether Alsace was occupied by the French originally or later by the Germans, but the Alsatian question, as it is known today, evolved out of European life.

If you study history, and especially things said by people with insight at the time in question, you will know that even then they foresaw conflicts arising from this, conflicts that were really insoluble in either direction because they had to do with all the difficult questions concerning the European east. Those questions arose because the European west—the Crimean War¹¹⁹ was symptomatic of this—was forced to come to grips with the European east, which was behind all the phenomena like an enigma. We should really consider and feel it to be extraordinarily significant, especially in these days, that something which appears insoluble is given in the way in which central Europe must face up to western Europe because of a question which under specific historical conditions may be asked to be solved in one way or another, a question that has arisen from the national impulse emerging in France but cannot be solved in national terms.

I could give you many more symptoms apparent in recent history, but I only want to mention just one thing which enters deeply into the whole of human evolution in recent times. Although the connections cannot always be clearly seen, I want to refer to the emergence of the more recent scientific way of thinking. I have characterized its significance from other points of view in my earlier lectures here. The scientific way of thinking is evolving. What does it do? It makes the human being stand on his own. It is exactly this thinking which separates the individual out from the community. It is in many respects also the driving impulse in all the other things I have mentioned. This modern scientific way of thinking has something in it which strangely does betray the significance which it has in more recent history.

Two kinds of problems arise. Let me show you the one by referring to a fact. This is that in 1830 a friend found Goethe in a state of sheer excitement. Asked what was the matter, Goethe said: The news coming from France are overwhelming; the world is in flames; something new is beginning to emerge. Soret, the friend to whom Goethe said these words, did of course think he was speaking of the 1830 revolutions. ‘No,’ said Goethe, ‘I am not talking about that but about the revolution which is taking place between the two scientists Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire.’¹²⁰ Cuvier held the view that all life forms in the natural world exist side by side and each had to be taken on its own. Saint- Hilaire was looking for a common type in the organic forms, he set the whole of organic life in motion, so that one could only get an overview in this state of flux if one looked at nature itself in an immediately productive spirit, experiencing the spirit to be as much in flux as nature itself. Goethe sensed something in Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that ultimately, when taken from seed to fruit, will be the supersensible concepts of natural phenomena which I characterized here the day before yesterday.

Initially, however, the world was overshadowed by everything that came with the other way of looking at nature, where the human being is taken out of any living, immediate relationship to the phenomena of nature. This approach, which has not been taken hold of by the impulse of which Goethe spoke, gives insight into the part of nature that is nonliving, into the dying element, where nature dissolves, and this is connected with the element that is mortal in us, as I characterized it the day before yesterday.

The study of nature from which Goethe turned away is such that it can only work with the gradual process of decay in nature. Efforts are then made to rise to something that cannot be shown by these means but only by supersensible vision, and those are the symptoms of ascent, of growth, of being born and thriving. But, though this does again sound paradoxical, this approach to nature, which really focuses on whatever is dead within living nature, cast its deep shadows on the whole of modern social life. Essentially it created a new universal impulse for humanity in more recent times, but this is a universal impulse against which the human being himself as an individual must rebel all the time, for it takes him out of nature, so that he must look for the real whole over and over again. The knowledge gained puts him outside. He needs to look for the real whole again in something other than the area in which he seeks such knowledge. The result is dualism in the way the human being relates to his environment and hence also in life. This natural science flows into modern industrial life which supports the whole of modern civilization; its influence is highly significant.

With the impulses we considered earlier, for instance the national impulse, we saw that old tradition was preserved and no new productive element introduced into life. With the riddle of the European east we see how a nation remarkably stimulated to be productive in the spirit ties itself up so that it truly cannot be productive, although it has the potential to be highly productive, truly tying itself up in the most extreme bonds of the old Byzantine Church community. Old things are thus preserved. We see how with the views from natural science that are poured out over modern humanity something universal is created, something universal which also does not consider anything the human being produces out of himself, but exactly the knowledge that is gained in cutting things off from himself, knowledge concerning decay in natural phenomena. This can also only be brought into civilization in the sphere of industry, with the natural element killed off.

Initially by not being productive in the old sense, humanity has been gaining the full conscious awareness which began to develop in the 15th century. Earlier, they maintained their connection with nature and the world at a subconscious level rather than in full conscious awareness. In addition to preservation of old things we see a process of educating the human race in more recent times which is given out of something new but nevertheless is along the lines of the old. The principles developed for industry only seem to arise from productive ideas. For those productive ideas do not arise as independent green plants in the human soul—the supersensible, if it is to be sought, must arise as an independent plant in the human soul—but from calm contemplation of objective natural phenomena.

We see how an event that has had a significant influence on more recent developments is particularly connected with this modern industry, for it is now becoming apparent that modern industry develops progressively in our times and that colonization also gains significance; for colonial and colonizing life is closely bound up with the element that enters into industry through natural science.

Let us now take a general view of what all these symptoms are more or less telling us. We see that anything which has come up as something new since the 15th century has not come from productive human nature. Looking at these things we find it necessary to take a wider view of historical evolution and to acknowledge—supersensible insight makes us acknowledge this—that there is not only ascent in this human life, not only what in abstract terms is usually called progress, but that ascending, sprouting and shooting life goes hand in hand with a descending life. Life is bound up with a principle that is all the time leading to death.

When we consider an individual human life, birth, growth and development are presented separately from dying and decay. But it only seems like that. When we consider life in the outside world, developments that have come particularly in more recent history show that dying, descending and ascending development are immediately next to one another and influence one another. We see that descending evolution, which is the evolution that takes historical death into itself, had great significance actually for the beginning of this more recent period in history which began in the 15th century, doing so initially for several centuries and right into our own time. The life of decay, of death, has greater significance than ascending, sprouting and shooting life. We see how the mind of modern man as it evolves is connected with the element in him which is mortal, and how he is able to sense that the element which drives him towards death is also the element that helps him to advance in knowledge. Whilst sprouting, shooting life lulls him as if in dreams, we can see that the spiritual soul is evolving from the more unconscious state of soul which humanity developed from the 8th century BC until the 15th century AD, and that it has influenced the history of more recent times. We see that there is need, for a first education towards developing this spiritual soul, that symptoms of decay, of dying life take effect particularly also in human civilization. We cannot understand more recent historical life unless we are able to develop the thought—in spite of all admiration, in spit of all the good will and recognition that has to be given for the great, tremendous achievement of modern industry, of modern national impulses—that descending life moving towards the death of historical evolution must be present in it all, and that an ascending, sprouting and shooting life must be born into this descending life.

This has caused people of more recent times who have insight to develop something we might call a pessimistic view of civilization. Thus Schopenhauer¹²¹ looked at more recent historical developments. In spite of all the achievements they seemed rather trivial to him. The only thing Schopenhauer appreciated was anything that could be achieved in the minds of single individuals. Pessimists are themselves mere symptoms in recent historical development, but they have a feeling that the greatest and most significant element in that development which we are used to seeing as a characteristic of more recent historical evolution has been the death impulse entering into it.

What has been the consequence? Something we may call tragedy coming into the historical life of more recent times. Promotion of the impulses that we may consider to have been partly traditional and partly coming from natural scientific views is a matter of course. All this is such that we have to say to ourselves: We must encourage it, we must take it up, it is a necessity of our more recent history; human beings absolutely must make it part of developments in world history, but it must of necessity also lead to its own decline and death in everything that arises, that is achieved in this field. The tragedy is that something has to be encouraged and considered an achievement of which one knows that in creating it one is creating something that must at the same time also decay. We actually start the decay as we create it.

Anyone who thinks that the events arising in more recent historical development from the impulses I mentioned can stand on their own, is like someone who thinks a woman can give birth without conception, without the one principle being connected with the other. The element arising from those impulses presents as something one-sided that needs something to come from another side if it is to survive. Within itself there is only the power to die. Let us take everything that has come with modern industry and social relationships in more recent times, be they commercial or other kinds of connections. Let us take all this—on its own, seen in accord with its own impulse, it is infertile and always leads to its own death, I would say in rhythms. We have to realize that we need to look at it in such a way that we say: For the sake of something else, this dying element has to enter into our modern world as an achievement.

What is this something else? Well, we have seen that the strange thing I hinted at shows itself as we follow more recent history with its sequence of what we consider to be different symptoms. On the one hand we see the spiritual soul come into flower from the 15th century onwards, and this happens exactly because of the unproductive principle. On the other hand we have seen this spiritual soul grow great in that initially the stimulus for the productive element was withdrawn from its environs, so that it took its guidance from the principle that was all the time leading to a dying process in civilization. This has made the human being independent. The outside world does not stimulate something in us that has productive life but all the time something that bears the seed of the dying process in the insights gained. The human being grows up in his individual and conscious natural development in a way where the outside world does not raise him for life, nor to something that will take him higher, but is all the time preventing anything intended to take him higher. As a result, the human being stands by himself.

Looking at the situation purely in the light of supersensible insight, we see that this inner life of the human being, with the movement towards the spiritual soul from the 15th century onwards, also has something that corresponds to it on the outside. This could not emerge in the early centuries but shows itself immediately if without bias we consider the human heart and mind in the present time when it has once again gained an inclination towards a supersensible life. Many are, of course, still unconscious of this, but this inclination towards a supersensible life now exists for very many people. Someone working with the science of the spirit with an anthroposophical orientation knows that the principle of dying which developed in the outer material civilization of recent times was only of a passing nature and that we are at a great turning point in time which will bring a new revelation of the supersensible to human beings from outside, this time not through nature but stimulated in the way I have shown when I spoke on anthroposophically orientated spiritual science.

We see it approaching everywhere, this new revelation of the supersensible. It will now be gained in a different way from earlier times when human beings were connected with nature unconsciously, through their instincts, finding in nature itself the principles that also held true for the soul and which they could also introduce into social and historical life. A productive, supersensible life will develop that goes beyond anything which this study of nature and the old impulses in more recent historical developments are able to give. It will be revealed from the world of the spirit. And if we look particularly at the terrible catastrophe that has arisen in our time—what is it, seen in the genuine light of truth, but something in which elements that are dying crowd together?

Much will die within this catastrophic life. Anything that has the principle of dying within it in the way I have characterized will die more quickly. No reason for pessimism, even if there is reason for pain with all the things that can come to us from watching and being involved in this catastrophe. There is no reason to be pessimistic about civilization if we consider life in the light of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. For it is apparent now in one point in recent historical evolution around the globe that the dying process which otherwise is distributed across material life comes powerfully together. This gives more recent events their tragic note. At the same time it shows us that everything that comes into the world in the way I have characterized earlier must be fruitless and needs to be made fruitful with what we receive out of the supersensible.

Anyone who considers the principle which makes the development of the spiritual soul complete and the new revelations from the supersensible with an open mind will raise his head, however much it may be bowed down in pain over the things that are happening now, and say to himself: It is the first flush of dawn for something that must come and will trigger the impulse in humanity to turn towards the supersensible. All the suffering and pain over the present collapse would be in vain, and so would be all the feelings, the justifiable pain felt by those who see this collapse, if these feelings could not take us forward to the realization that as with everything in nature that is destined to die, so with this dying, too, something new is arising. However, the new development will only be possible if humanity has the will to take up the principle that will make things fruitful, a principle revealed to us from the supersensible world.

The spiritual soul has evolved. Nature must now no longer give us unconsciously the things we introduce into the world of social and historical development. Humanity of our time must now also consciously receive, willingly receive, the new kind of supersensible revelation that comes to the spiritual soul if this spiritual soul wills it. It is exactly when we consider the tragedy of modern life without prejudice that the redeeming impulse reveals itself on the other side. It reveals itself in that we feel the need to acknowledge the revelation of a new supersensible element which now also has to be there for the spiritual soul.

We thus see through the symptoms and perceive what humanity is going to be and what is to be revealed to humanity out of the universe. In Graeco-Latin times, which began in the 8th century before the Christian era and came to an end in the 15th century, the inner life was still bound up with outward physical life. This led to the great achievements of Greek and Roman times that were passed on to the Middle Ages. In the 15th century evolution took a great leap as the powers of conscious awareness began to evolve what we may call the spiritual soul. We are now in this stage of evolution. We see that for a true science of history human beings must take up the principles that are revealed behind the symptoms. We must have the courage to admit, however, that death is all around us as much as life, and that death is necessary so that new life may come. It has also been necessary for death to be overwhelming for a time, so that human beings might all the more develop the powers of the spiritual soul. When no more is given to us from outside, we feel the need to look inside for the spirit, the supersensible principle.

Some may of course object and say: Well, where are those people, how many of them are there? Not many have developed their powers of soul so that they are able to point to the supersensible world. We certainly have to admit that there are only few of them today. Their numbers will grow apace; but it is not a matter of how many find their way to the supersensible sphere which is needed to make the sensual fruitful. What matters is that one does not have to take the road to supersensible insight oneself, for, quite apart from how and for what you estimate the individual who provides the fruits of the supersensible, once they have been uttered, once they have been cast into human culture, they can be understood with the understanding that is perfectly common in the age of the spiritual soul. People can largely understand everything brought to them from the sphere of the supersensible, unless they create obstacles for themselves with prejudices which they then find insurmountable.

There is, however, one thing which is needed. Just consider that with the view of history I have outlined one finds it necessary to admit to oneself, in insight, as it were, and in full awareness, that what has to be done—what is a necessity of the age and will be a necessity more and more—is at the same time something that is all the time also dying. It does take some courage to acknowledge that one has to be active so that that active principle may perish and be the soil for the Father principle of the spiritual, supersensible sphere. It does need such courage for all supersensible insight. Fear of supersensible insight prevents many people from entering into it. There is one field at least where in more recent times we face the immediate necessity to develop such courage if we want to be at all considered for human development. This is the field of history. Those who know something of supersensible insight always speak of crossing the threshold, and of a guardian of the threshold.¹²² They speak of crossing the threshold because one has to abandon many things that seemed to be absolutely solid ground before one crossed the threshold in finding one’s way into the supersensible world. Unconsciously people feel it is a relief not to have to cross the threshold. Yet something that had to be done at a particular time for historical development is becoming more and more of a necessity. And this is again part of the inner progress of historical development from the 15th century onwards. It is becoming more and more of a necessity to say to oneself: You are actively involved in the creation of processes of dying, processes of decay. You need to devote yourself to these processes of decay, and this will bring your inner power to life; it is exactly because of this that you will be able to come close to the supersensible. You must abandon what you used to consider a foundation in mind and spirit before, cross the threshold to the supersensible world, losing the ground under your feet, as it were. And in its place you must find within you the firm focal point where you can maintain yourself even in the face of what in sensual terms has no ground.

The human being needs to find a new focus for the whole of his inner life. Historical necessity will make us look for this focus more and more in future. The fact that we thus gain insight will not change things. We are, as it were, facing the process of dying—in the sense I mean here. The fact that we admit it is a dying process will not change it. But it is exactly by this that one must feel driven to try and fructify the living principle that is the counter force. For the situation is like this: Inscribed above the search for supersensible insights there has always been the great, tremendous demand: ‘Know yourself.’¹²³ And it is still the demand made on human beings who are seekers. Seeking to gain this insight today people can only do so by rising to worlds that can take them beyond finite existence. Above all, impelled by the necessities of human evolution, they will have to admit to themselves with regard to historical life in more recent times, that the spiritual soul is a goal that has been implanted with regard to more recent history, to know themselves more and more. In coming to know themselves, they are facing the necessity of going beyond themselves. In going beyond themselves, perceiving his supersensible nature within their sensual nature, they also come to the supersensible that is active in history, with external facts merely symbols for it. We will only have a history that is fruitful for life if we look for the supersensible behind the symptoms, just as we do behind the phenomena of nature.

The look we have taken at history has shown that more recent developments impose trials on human beings, the trial where they must consider descending as well as ascending life, involution as well as evolution. With supersensible insight into history people will find this gaining of insight to be a great trial for the soul for they must cross the threshold and find a new focus in the inner life of the soul, so that in having gone through the trial they will have the strength to go through the other trials that life will present more and more out of historical events as they move towards the future. We may say, however, that human beings only grow strong and robust and truly fit for life by going through trials. Fear of insight should not prevent people from entering into the trials. Instead, courage to gain insight should make them prepared to accept these trials. They will develop those trials on the road to insight into powers that will also guide them to be active human beings who are involved in evolution and fruitful in the course of history.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 17 October 1918

The suggestion has been made that 1 should briefly say something about one particular phenomenon in more recent history that is particularly relevant to human life, and that is the evolution of speech and language. This could, of course, be another whole lecture if I were to treat the subject exhaustively. I would, however, like to take up the suggestion, apart from anything else because I would indeed like to draw your attention to the fact that anthroposophically orientated spiritual science in the sense of which I have been speaking truly is such that it does not owe its existence to a sudden idea that came like a shot, nor is it made up of sudden flashes of insight. No, if you study the literature you’ll find that this anthroposophically orientated spiritual science gathers what it has to say from the whole breadth of observation, the whole range of phenomena in the world.

Of course, when one has to cover vast areas in an hour—and I am sorry that it always takes longer than this anyhow—the impression inevitably arises that one is moving in abstract regions; on the other hand the intention is not to convince anyone, but merely to encourage them to take this further, for then people will see that this science of the spirit is based on careful, conscientious and methodical investigation, serious research, more so than in any other kind of scientific endeavour.

It is interesting to consider the principles which I have been characterizing in general terms today in a single phenomenon such as the development of human speech and language. When we say anything today, we do not usually consider the fact that talking is actually at every moment forcing us to be inaccurate. Fritz Mauthner has written three volumes as well as a dictionary of philosophy to show that everything we produce in philosophy and science is based on language and that the language is imprecise. Because of this, he says, we can really never have a body of true knowledge.¹²⁴

Well, when it comes to the science of the spirit this is, of course, a foolish thing to say, even in three volumes. It is, however, significant to consider the partial phenomenon that lies behind this. Going back in the development of language we find—unlike the superficial anthropological linguistics where the means are inadequate—that the further back we go, human beings were progressively more closely connected with anything their speech expressed, inwardly so, and again instinctively and unconsciously. Human beings are gradually also separating from the things that lie in their own inherent nature, just as they are from the outside world of nature.

Thus they also cease to be so closely connected with their speech. Speech thus becomes something external. A marked dualism arises between the thoughts that live in us—and some do not even have them any more, because they remain in the sphere of language—and the words that are spoken. If we do not give ourselves to illusion at the point in human evolution where we are today, in the age of the spiritual soul, we need to take a real look at the way language has already separated from the human being. It is really only proper names relating to a single individual that are truly appropriate to that individual. As soon as we use general terms, be they adjectives, nouns, or whatever, they are imprecise about what they are meant to tell us. They are abstract, they are like generalities. We will only understand the relationship between language and human life rightly if we take it really as gesture; if we know: just as I point to something in a direct, living way when I point to it with my finger, so I also point in a kind of gesture at the entity to which the sounds of speech refer when I produce sounds, using my larynx. To take speech as gesture, this is what matters. In earlier times, people had a vague feeling, I would say it was instinctive and lay in the subconscious, as to how their inner life was connected with sound in a kind of gesture. They did not confuse their experiences in inner life with the things brought to expression in speech.

We ourselves have tried to develop endeavours in this direction in a field of spiritual science, using the element of gesture to make speech visible. This is in the art we call eurythmy. Efforts are made to get the whole human being moving, and express in gesture—in the movements of the limbs, movements of the human form in space, the movements in groups and relationships between individuals—what is otherwise expressed in gesture, though not perceived as gesture, through the human larynx and its neighbouring organs. We call this art of movement, something new which has to come to humanity, eurythmy. We had intended to follow this lecture here in Zurich with a eurythmy performance. This had to be put off for another time, for we were given permission to give these lectures, in what is now a difficult time,¹²⁵ but not to give a eurythmy performance. The intention was to show how the whole human being becomes a larynx, as it were. In becoming aware of what speech is, we come to something that is particularly important, fundamentally important, for life in the present and future.

Nothing happens more frequently in human life today but that someone makes a statement of some kind, as I am doing with regard to the science of the spirit, for instance, and then someone else will come along and say: ‘I have read this before,’ showing you something which at least in parts has exactly the same wording. I could give you striking examples of this, but will give just one which I found illustrated the situation perfectly.

One thing I truly endeavour to do is to apply all the things that demand consideration in spiritual science to life and thus enter into the true impulses in life. For a long time I have thus been reflecting on the whole way of thinking, the whole attitude of thought, shown by Woodrow Wilson.¹²⁶ I found it interesting to study especially his essays on historical method, the study of history and American historical life. He plays such a major role in present-day life that one has to get to know him—this is what someone would say who does not want to sleep through current events but observe them with his senses wide awake. I have come to admire the magnificent way, truly apt in an American way, in which Woodrow Wilson presents the evolution of the American nation, this advance from the American east to the American west, with American life emerging in a quite specific way, that came only once people had advanced from east to west. Woodrow Wilson characteristically speaks of everything that went before as mere appendage to European life. This uprooting and overcoming of nature, overcoming the native population of the American west, this specific way of making history, which shows some similarity to what has happened in human life generally yet also differs in quite specific ways—this is magnificently presented. It is therefore also interesting to see how Woodrow Wilson develops his method of history.

I looked at the descriptions he gave of his own method of history and found something quite peculiar. Sentences come from this man, who is wholly and entirely American, that seemed to me to almost word for word in agreement with sentences written by a completely different person, someone who truly arose from an entirely different approach to life and way of thinking. Statements Woodrow Wilson made in his essay on the methodology for history that bore such excellent fruit for him, could be transposed word for word into essays by Herman Grimm, who is entirely within the Goethean development of our time, and out of this development presents as a truly Central European mind. We might say that you need only take sentences from Herman Grimm’s essays and transpose them, or include sentences by Woodrow Wilson in Herman Grimm’s essays, and you would not see any great difference in the wording.

What we learn from such things—to put it in ordinary words, though I want to say something highly significant in this way—is that when two people say the same thing, even using the same words, it is not the same. We have to learn from this that it is necessary to enter not only into the wording, which comes from speech, but the into whole person. This will reveal the specific differences between Herman Grimm and Woodrow Wilson. You will find that with Herman Grimm, every single sentence is worked out with the spiritual soul wholly present. The progression one finds in Herman Grimm’s spirited essay where he writes about historical method and the contemplation of history is truly such that one sees him progress from sentence to sentence through an inner struggle in his soul, so that nothing remains unconscious and everything is brought to conscious awareness. All the time one sees this inner progression in the soul.¹²⁷

Looking across at what we see in the case of Woodrow Wilson, we see how the statements arise from subconscious depths of the soul, as though out of the human being as such rather than inner activity. I don’t mean anything bad by this, but I would like to say, if I may be paradoxical about it, that with Herman Grimm I always feel that in the region of wholly conscious inner life, all the life of the soul proceeds as statement follows statement; with Woodrow Wilson I feel he is as if possessed by something that lies within himself and lets his own truths shine up in his own inner life. As I said, I do not mean anything sympathetic or antipathetic by this, merely something I want to characterize. It is given to him from the depths of his own soul. So we find, and it is truly evident, that even if the wording is the same, two people are saying the same thing yet it is not the same. We only discover what lies behind it if we learn to go not by the wording but by what arises from the whole way the person presents himself in life.

You see, modern humanity must learn to overcome the general habit of judging anything that is presented only on its content. We will have to learn that the content is not really what matters. When I speak about the science of the spirit, I do not focus on the way I formulate my sentences, on the content, but what matters is that something which has truly been projected from the supersensible world flows into what I say. Considering the How more important than the What, so that one can sense, or feel, that these things are said out of the supersensible world. This is what matters.

This is how we must altogether learn in a way in the present time in contrast to ordinary life. A paper, or a journal, may say the nicest things—people can say the most beautiful things today, for ‘beautiful ideas’ and ‘nice things’ are commonplace today—but it is not the words which matter but the inner attitude from which they arise, so that we look through the statements and the words to symptoms, to the human being. We need to penetrate language and wording as if they were a veil and thus come closer to the human being himself again. We are made aware of this in more recent developments in language, for here the human being’s inmost nature, his spiritual soul, has become separate from speech and language. Out of ourselves, therefore, the necessity arises to consider not just the words, but see through them to the human soul, doing so in every possible direction and way.

It will, however, be necessary to overcome something else if one wants to go on in this direction. People are still used to abstract notions today, to going by the immediate content in what I might call an uninspired, middle-class way. When someone speaks of an ideal, however beautifully formulated, we need to be aware that this is something that is a hundred a penny today, for the ideas have been given form. You can put all kinds of ideas to people and nations today, and they will be formed. It will depend on where they come from, where they truly arise in the inmost soul, in the soul region. Life will be tremendously enriched if we are in a position to see it like this.

Perhaps I may also be permitted to say something personal. You see I am often presented with people’s poetical productions. All kinds of people produce them nowadays. Among them are some that are perfect in form, beautifully expressing something or other, and others that seem awkwardly phrased, bumpy or indeed primitive, having problems with the language. Someone taking a point of view that is not yet modern will of course delight in the beauty of the language, especially if the forms are perfect. He will not—not yet today—feel that Emanuel Geibel¹²⁸ was right in saying that his verses would have a public for as long as there were young girls. They are beautiful, polished, and will have a public even among those who believe Wildenbnich¹²⁹ or similar people to be poets—and there are many of these as well.

Today, however, a different view is taken. This is also the case with other arts, but I am here talking about language. There are poets today whose verses make us stumble; you may have problems with the awkward words, but there is a new impulse in them. This is something we must feel! We must be able to see through the veil of the language and see the inner superficiality reflected in polished verse. For polished poems, beautiful poems, much more beautiful than Goethe’s poems, are a hundred a penny today; there it is the language itself which is producing the poetry. But a new inner life springing directly from the source of all life—this is something one must look for. It sometimes comes to expression exactly by having to battle with the language, so that we might say it has only got as far as being a stammer. Such ‘stammers’ may, however, be preferable for us to something that is perfect in itself but only reflects superficiality of soul. There was an occasion where I was given some verses. We needed verses, because we had to make a translation from another language. Very beautiful verses. I grew angry about them and wrote bad verse myself. I am aware that as poetry they are much poorer in quality. I knew, however, that in that case it was a necessity to express what needed to be expressed in a language that may perhaps seem rough and bumpy if one was drawing on the source spring of life that had to be sought in that case. I certainly do not overestimate what I undertook to do; but I also do not overestimate the polished verse I was given at the time.

The human being seeking through speech and language in the age of the spiritual soul—this is something which becomes life practice when we truly consider the life of language. Today I have therefore also tried to speak in a way where I did not deal with spiritual science in every sentence, always wanting to prove the supersensible, and instead tried to put this into the How of looking at history. And I think this is also the important thing, that one does not only call someone a true spiritual scientist whose every fifth word is ‘spirit’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual world’, believing in the suggestive effect of this, but someone who shows in the way he looks at the world, even in completely outer terms, by the way in which he presents things, that the inner guide, who takes us from thought to thought, from view to view, from impulse to impulse—that this guide is the spirit. If it is the spirit we need not keep on chirping the word all the time.

Here you can see how one can substantiate in speech and language something which I might also present in an extensive lecture.

• 111. Sprüche in Prosa. See note 10.
• 112. Nature non facit saltus. First in Fournier, Varietés historiques et litteraires, 1613, IX, 247, then in Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur I’entendement humain, 1756, preface and IV ch. 16, and in Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica, 1751, No. 77.
• 113. At the request of Philipp IV, Pope Boniface VIII was taken prisoner at Anagni on 7 September 1303. He died soon after. The French pope Clement V did not go to Italy but resided in Avignon from 1309. The Papal Court had its seat there from 1309 until 1377.
• 114. The Order of the Templars, established in 1119 for the protection of the Sacred Tomb in Jerusalem and the pilgrims who visited it, was accused of heresy by French Kind Philip IV who wanted them suppressed and their property appropriated. The Papacy, then wholly under the French influence in Avignon, acceded to this. Following inquisition and torture, the Order was suppressed in 1312. The remaining Templars who had been arrested in 1307 were burned.
• 115. In the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, Orleans was under siege by the English in 1428. It was relieved in April 1429 by a small army led by Joan of Arc.
• 116. The attack by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was successfully beaten off by the Swiss at Grandson and Murten. Charles was killed in the decisive battle of Nancy in 1477.
• 117. 1618-1648, power struggle between kings of France and Habsburg rulers of Holy Roman Empire and Spain, with added overtones of conflict between Calvinism and post-Tridentine Catholicism. Other powers that became involved included German principalities, Sweden, Denmark and Transylvania. [Tr.]
• 118. Revolution broke out in many European countries in 1848—France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and other areas. In England this was reflected in a final outburst of Chartist agitation [Tr.].
• 119. Britain and France fought Russia in 1854-6, originally because the Russians had successfully fought the Turks in the Black Sea region. European peace was under threat.
• 120. The talk between Goethe and Frédéric Jean Soret took place on 2 August 1830. Conflict between Etienne Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier had started in February that year at the Paris Academy. Goethe had above all studied Saint-Hilaire’s writings, publishing a review entitled ‘Principes de Philosophic zoologique’ in 1830/32. In Goethe’s scientific writings. See note 10.
• 121. See note 33.
• 122. See also Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (GA 10); tr. G. Metaxa; Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1993; chapter on the guardian of the threshold.
• 123. Words of Solon or Chilon on the Apollo Temple at Delphi.
• 124. Mauthner, F. Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1901-1903. Wörterbuch der Philosophy, see note 27.
• 125. An influenza epidemic had led to a partial ban on gatherings.
• 126. See note 88.
• 127. It has not been possible to establish exactly which essay this was. See notes 44 and 46, however.
• 128. Geibel, Emanuel (1815–1884), German poet and dramatist.
• 129. Wildenbruch, Ernst von (1845–1909), German writer and dramatist, wrote patriotic poems during the Hohenzollem empire.

Over the past four years, we have often heard that events as terrible for mankind as those that have just taken place have not occurred in the entire period covered by human historical thought. It is less common to hear this sentiment countered by the idea that the terrible events that have befallen mankind should at least be countered by attempts to reorganize social coexistence, which differ in their conceptual foundations just as thoroughly from what we are accustomed to think as the terrible events of recent years differ from what we have experienced in the course of human development. Indeed, when such an attempt arises to develop thoughts that run counter to ingrained habits of thought, then today one usually hears such an attempt met with reproach: Well, another utopia! - However, in the course of more recent times, we have already had some experience with the attitude on which such an accusation is based. It was precisely those people who think like those who speak of “utopia” in the case alluded to, who would have considered a description of the catastrophic events that affected us as late as the spring of 1914 to be a dream, a fantasy. They call themselves practitioners, these people. How did they talk back then, before the world-shattering catastrophe struck? Let's take a look at some of them. We need only look at some of the leading statesmen of Europe at that time, in the spring of 1914. They were almost verbatim when they said: “Such practitioners, such despisers of what they call utopias, spoke at that time something like this: the relations between the great European powers, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, give a certain guarantee that world peace cannot be shaken for the foreseeable future. - Such talk is not an invention, it can be read in the parliamentary reports; it is contained there in the most diverse variations.

However, anyone who could not follow the thinking of such people in the inner state of his soul at that time, but who tried to maintain an unbiased view of events, perhaps spoke in the same way as the person who had to speak to a meeting in Vienna in April 1914, who is also speaking to you today. At that time, my intellectual conscience and my powers of observation forced me to say: with regard to the development of our social and international relations, we are in the midst of something that can only be described as a carcinoma, a cancerous disease in the life of nations, which must break out in a terrible way in a very short time. - Perhaps the force of events will force people to regard as utopians less those who speak out of this state of mind than those who, in what they say, are so well in tune with events as I have just indicated. Today, on the other hand, you can hear the practitioners, who are poring over some of what they call utopias, saying: “We cannot climb the highest mountain peaks of a new order in human society right now, we have to move forward step by step. Certainly some thoughts - say such people - are nice, and perhaps we will come to such things centuries from now; but today it is up to us to take the next steps.

Now it is quite certainly simply a matter of course that one must first take the very next steps, but he will climb a mountain badly who has no idea at all, when he takes the next step, which direction he should take; who has no idea at all in which direction the summit actually lies. And those who do not think in the sense of these utopia-despisers, but perhaps think in a realistic sense, will perhaps have to start today from a different comparison with what lies hidden in the germ and could also erupt in a terrible way. He will perhaps not have to start from the carcinoma that has broken out in the war catastrophe of recent years. But he will have to point out that many people are now thinking like those who live in a house that has cracks and fissures, who are threatening the house with collapse, but who cannot decide to do anything to rebuild the house, but who enter into all kinds of discussions about how to connect the individual rooms that they live in with each other through doors, so that they can help each other more easily through these doors. - The help that can be afforded through these doors will be of little help when the leaps have grown to a corresponding strength!

Thinking such things, it seems, is probably due to the development of the facts, which today speak a louder and clearer language than people are often inclined to hear today.

Now, out of the horrors that had to be lived through, this world war catastrophe has released a sentiment that has gradually crystallized in such views as are now again the basis of the significant meeting that is being held here in Bern as a League of Nations Conference. The call for a League of Nations has developed out of the terrible events of recent years. It must be said, however, that it might be justified to approach the call for a League of Nations with different feelings than some people do today. For perhaps it is more important to ask not only: What could be done for this League of Nations? What measures could be taken to bring it about in the best way imaginable? Rather, the question could perhaps be raised: What foundations exist in the life of the peoples for the establishment of such a League of Nations? For only if one looks at the forces that exist in the life of nations can one perhaps recognize from these forces to what extent one is in a position to achieve something fruitful with such a League of Nations. And does it not seem necessary, I would say, to shift the question somewhat in this direction, since the important conception of this League of Nations, which is particularly plausible to the world, arose together with an idea whose realization can no longer be spoken of today? In 1917, in a speech by Wilson to the American Senate, a thought emerged which, in connection with another thought, went something like this: What one could strive for with this League of Nations had a certain precondition, namely the precondition that in the events of the war neither one side nor the other would achieve what one would have to call victory or defeat in the decisive sense. - Wilson was looking towards an outcome that was not that of victory or defeat for one party. And from the direction of thought towards such an outcome he derived the feelings that urged him towards this League of Nations.

To be sure, the thought had a reality in itself; but the reality that was thought of then can no longer be spoken of today; for today the decisive victory on the one side is the decisive defeat on the other. Indeed, perhaps it is precisely for this reason that the question of the League of Nations, for example, must be posed in a completely different way.

I think it is particularly natural for me to ask the question about the League of Nations myself and to dare to discuss it in front of people today, to ask this question in a very special way. As a member of the people on whose side the decisive defeat is, it is not possible today to pose the question as if its answer could only emerge from a free agreement of those peoples who might wish to unite in such a League of Nations, and to whom, according to their innermost feelings, the Central European peoples most certainly also belong. The events in Paris basically rule out such a question for the Germans today, and one should have no illusions about this. But that is not how I want to pose this question either. My aim is to find a question and formulate a corresponding answer in which even those who may be excluded from participation in this League of Nations for the foreseeable future can have their say. In other words, the question will have to be posed in this way: Whatever agreements are reached at the moment, what can each individual nation contribute from its own resources, regardless of whether it has suffered victory or defeat, to a real League of Nations that can bring humanity what it longs for?

But since a League of Nations will undoubtedly have to deal with international affairs, it will have to turn its attention above all to the most important international affairs, which will concern all peoples in the near future under all circumstances.

When dealing with such matters today, we first look in two directions, as is customary in this day and age. On the one hand, we look at the state, and on the other hand, we look at economic life. Those people who today want something with regard to the coexistence of people look first of all to the state with regard to the guidelines of this will, asking: What should the state do in this or that matter for which a change has become ripe? - Or else, in order to arrive at an explanation, people look today, as if, I might say, with hypnotized eyes, to economic life; for economic conditions seem to be the only ones that cause today's conflicts, the greatest conflicts at least of the present day.

In these considerations, which are based on these two points of view, one thing is usually ignored. Even if one assures oneself that one wants to take account of the circumstances of the present day and, above all, focus on the human being, this is rarely done in reality. Here I would like to try not to shy away from looking at what we find when we look at the state on the one hand and at economic life on the other. But above all, I do not want to neglect to ask a question in a very energetic way, starting from the point of view of man as such: What do the states have to do in order to unite in a league of nations? That is what is asked first and foremost. And many things - do not think that I wish to criticize or condemn - many quite good things will come about in the near future if this question is posed in this way, by attempting to find from the construction of the states, from the individual customs of the states, something that transcends the states, as it were, such as a world federation or a world parliament. -- But today I would like to contrast the question: What should the states do? - the other question: What should states refrain from doing for the good of mankind? - In many respects we have learned through the terrible events of recent years what the states have accomplished with their actions; they have led mankind into this terrible catastrophe. We cannot deny it, it is the states that have led humanity into this terrible catastrophe!

Shouldn't it make sense to consider whether a person, when he has seen that he is causing all kinds of harm with his actions, should always ask himself: How do I do things differently? - Might it not be more useful to say: perhaps I should leave what I have done badly to someone else to do? - Then, you see, the question might be led down a completely different track.

It may be necessary to turn to the most important international questions if we want to obtain fruitful documentation on what can be said to be the cracks and fissures in the house that present-day humanity inhabits, consisting of various states. One must perhaps ask: Where do these cracks and fissures come from? Where does it come from that the states have driven people into this terrible catastrophe of war?

Two things have certainly become international in the course of modern times; apart from many others, they are capitalism and human labor. Undoubtedly, we had a “League of Nations” or something similar to it: the League based on international capital. And another “League of Nations” was also in the making, and it is very much in evidence today: it is the one based on the international of human labor. And we will have to fall back on these two things if we want to arrive at the fruitful germs of such a League of Nations, which can now really be built on the affairs of man as such.

With regard to capital, we see that a large number of people regard the way in which it has been administered over the course of time and what has led to so-called capitalism as that which is most contrary to the interests of a large part of humanity, and which, moreover, through much that lies within it, has led us to such terrible events. And the call is being raised from many sides - which is expressed in opposition to this capitalism - the radical call that the entire social order based on capitalism must be changed, that the private management of capitalism must give way to what we are now used to calling socialization. This, combined with a feeling about human labor power, gives international life its coloring today. It must be repeated again and again: however little it is clearly expressed in the consciously expressed thoughts of the proletarian world population, it lives unconsciously in the subsoil of a mass of people numbering in the millions that in the course of capitalist development it is precisely human labor power that has taken on a character that it should not continue to have.

Let us first look in these two directions. Capital, the capitalist administration of economic life, must, if we wish to see through it clearly, be quite distinctly separated from what it is connected with today. Two things are connected today with what is called capitalism: the one points to something that cannot be separated from capitalism; the other is something that must be distanced from it. Today, economic enterprises based on capital and private ownership of capital are combined into one. But the question must be asked: Can these two things be separated? For the private management of economic enterprises, which is built on the greater or lesser intensity of individual human abilities, this private management, which requires an auxiliary means, capital, for its operation, cannot be abolished. Anyone who somehow makes an impartial effort to ask under what conditions the social organism is viable will always have to say to himself: This social organism is not viable if it is deprived of its most important source, namely that which flows into it through the individual abilities that one person or another can acquire on different scales. What works in the direction of capital must also work in the direction of individual human abilities. This indicates that in no way can the necessary addition to social life, which comes from individual human abilities, be separated from its means, capital, in the future state.

However, the private possession of capital, the ownership of private capital, is something else. This ownership of private capital has a different social function from the management of the enterprises for which capital is necessary, by individual human capacities. The fact that someone acquires or has acquired private capital, by whatever means, gives him a certain power over other people. This power, which will mostly be an economic power, cannot be regulated in any other way than by bringing it into connection with the legal relations of the social organism. That which supplies the social organism with really fruitful forces is the work which the individual faculties perform through capital. But that which harms the social organism is when people who cannot perform such work themselves through their individual abilities are nevertheless in permanent possession of capital through some kind of relationship. For such people have economic power. What does it mean then? To have capital? - Having capital means having a number of people work according to your intentions, having power over the work of a number of people.

Health can only be brought about by ensuring that everything that has to be achieved in the social organism by means of capital is not separated from the human personality with its individual abilities behind it. But it is precisely through the possession of capital on the part of those persons who do not put their individual abilities into the use of capital that the fruitfulness of the effect of capital is again and again detached in the social organism from that which capital is in general, and which can also have very, very harmful consequences for the social coexistence of people. That is to say, at the present historical moment of mankind we are faced with the necessity of separating the possession of capital from the administration of capital. That is one question. Let us leave it at that for the moment. We shall see shortly afterwards what possible solution can be found to this question.

The second is the question of the social significance of human labor. This social significance of human labor can be seen if we can follow what has passed through the minds of the proletarian population over the last few decades, if we have seen the impact on these minds of what Karl Marx and those who worked in his direction have said about this human labor. What Karl Marx said in his theory of surplus value struck a chord in the souls of the proletariat! Why? Because there were feelings in them that brought this question about human labor power together with the deepest questions about human dignity and about an existence worthy of human beings in general. Marx had to put into such words what he had to say about the social significance of human labor power, which said that human labor power had not yet been freed by the modern capitalist economic order from the character of being a commodity. In the economic process commodities circulate; but in the modern economic process not only commodities circulate; not only commodities follow the dictates of supply and demand, but human labor is also offered on the commodity market, which in this case must be called the labor market, and it is paid for, just as commodities are otherwise paid for. The person who has to carry his human labor power to the market feels, despite the existence of the modern labor contract, the degradation of his human value when he sees his labor power turned into a commodity. For this modern labor contract, it is concluded on the condition that the labor manager - in this case the entrepreneur - takes the worker's labor power from him in return for a compensation that proves necessary on the economic market. In short: labor power is turned into a commodity.

But this question can only be solved by not stopping at what Karl Marx said. Today it will be a vital question for what is to be achieved - whether on the part of the proletarian population or on the part of the leading bourgeois circles - to bring about liberation on this very point by learning in the right way to go beyond what Karl Marx was able to teach the proletarian population in this field. Wherever there are people today who believe that their social will is entirely in the direction of the proletariat, they are always and forever based on the feeling that those who are otherwise propertyless, who have only their labor power, must go out for wages; that is, they must turn their labor power into a commodity. How can labor-power best be made into a commodity? this is how the question is formulated, how can it be made most profitable? - This question will never be solved in such a way that it cannot give rise to new social upheavals unless the opposite demand is made: How can human labor power be stripped of the character of a commodity? How is a social organization possible in which human labour power is no longer a commodity? - After all, the fact of labor in the actual sense results in the following. Through the joint - let us now call it work -, through the joint work of the manual worker and the intellectual leader, a product is created. The question is this: How can this joint production of a product for the commodity market be brought into a satisfactory relationship with what is today called the employee and with what is today called the employer?

These are the two most important questions that can and must be raised today across the entire international community: What is there in the use of capital in human social life? What, on the other hand, is there in the flow of human labor power into this social human life?

The worker today - let us consider his situation - even if he does not express this, even if Marx did not learn to think in this direction to the end, the worker can feel: I manufacture my product together with the entrepreneur. That which is produced at the workplace comes from both of us. It can only be a question of: what division occurs between what is today called the entrepreneur and what is today called the manual worker? And such a division must occur, which can be satisfactory to both sides in the immediate concrete case.

What is the actual relationship today between the employer and the employee? I do not want to fall into agitational phrases. But let us look at this whole relationship soberly, soberly, as it is formulated by today's proletarians - though not even in clear terms - but as it is deeply and intensely rooted in the subconscious feelings of these proletarians. Since the economic power of the entrepreneur does not enable the worker to conclude a contract about what they jointly produce as a commodity, or what the joint yield of this commodity is, about how much accrues to one and how much to the other, since he is only in a position to conclude a labor contract, the worker gets into a state of mind which gives him the feeling that basically no labor power can ever be compared with any commodity. And yet today we speak of exchanging commodity for commodity or its representative, money, in the economic process. And we also speak of exchanging goods or their representative, money, for human labor power. So the worker today gets the impression that although he works together with the entrepreneur on the production of goods, he is actually being cheated because he does not get the part he is entitled to.

This already points to the fact that the individual human abilities that have to make use of capital are actually running on a slippery slope. For what these individual human faculties accomplish by managing capital out of human mental or physical strength is perceived by a large part of humanity as overreaching, as a kind of fraud. Whether this is justified or not is not something we want to investigate at the moment, but it is perceived as such. And in the perception it forms the basis for the vocal facts of the present.

This, however, points to the fact that the individual abilities of human beings must be rooted in something that is, or at least can be, placed in the social organism today in a skewed way. This utilization of man's individual abilities is connected today in the modern capitalist economy with the appropriation of the ownership of the means of production; it is thus connected with the appropriation of a certain economic power, an economic superiority. But that which can express itself in a power, which can express itself in this superiority of one person over another, is nothing other than what constitutes a legal relationship in human life.

Whoever now takes a look at how a legal relationship is strangely intertwined with the application of individual human abilities will perhaps, as happened to the person speaking to you here, have to direct his gaze to something that is more deeply rooted in the entire nature of the social organism than the things that are very often sought today. It is obvious to ask from such premises: How is right and how is the use of individual human abilities, which must always be productive anew, which must always emerge anew from their original source in man, how is the utilization of individual abilities in the social organism justified?

Whoever has retained an unbiased view of human life will gradually come to the realization that three quite different, original sources of human life can be distinguished in a social organism. These three original sources of human life flow together quite naturally in the social organism, they work together. But the way in which they work together can only be fathomed if we are able to look at the reality of the human being as such, who must be a unity, a unified being within the social trinity.

In the social organism these individual human faculties are first of all present. And we can trace their domain from the highest spiritual achievements of man in art, in science, in religious life, down to that form of the application of individual human faculties as they are more or less grounded in the spiritual or in the physical, down to that application of individual human faculties which must be used in the most ordinary, in the materialistic process, which is based on capitalism, right into the economic process, which is usually called with a derogatory word the material sphere. Up to this point a uniform current can be traced down from the other intellectual achievements. Within this area everything is based on the corresponding, on the fruitful application of that which must always be lifted anew from the primal sources of human nature if it is to flow in the right way into the healthy social organism.

In the healthy social organism everything that is based on law lives quite differently. For this right is something that takes place between man and man simply because man is generally man. We must have the opportunity to develop our individual abilities in social life. The better we develop them, the better for the generality of the social organism. The more freedom we have in bringing out and utilizing our individual abilities, the better for the social organism. For anyone who does not start out from theories and dogmas, who is able to observe real life, everything that must play out as law between people stands in stark contrast to this in real life. There is nothing else to be considered but that in which all men are equal to each other.

A third thing that plays a role in human social coexistence, which in turn is totally different from the other two - the individual human faculties that come from the inequalities of human nature, the right that comes from the consciousness of right - is the human need that comes from the natural foundations of physical and spiritual life, and which must find its satisfaction in the cycle of economic life through production, circulation and consumption.

This threefold structure of the social organism has not been brought about by some abstract thinking, this threefold structure is there. And the question can only be: How can this threefold structure be regulated in such a way that the result is not a sick but a healthy social organism? An unbiased view of the social organism - and of course I can only cite results in these allusions - leads one to say: It is precisely the misjudgment of this radical difference between the three sources of social life in the course of recent historical development that has led to the discussion in which we are already involved today, and in which we will find ourselves more and more. In the course of modern times, these three currents of human interaction have been mixed up in an unlawful way.

What started it? When, in more recent times, economic life, I would like to say, took up the view as if hypnotized, it was found justified in the progress of mankind to merge with the purely political state - which has to do with that in which all men are equal, with the actual right - at first certain branches of the economy, especially telegraphy, railroads and so on, i.e. those branches of the economy which appeared to be the most suitable for merging with the state, on which, as on economic life, the human gaze was hypnotized. And what does the socialist thinker of today actually do? He is merely inheriting the legacy of bourgeois thinking in this respect. He does not merely want certain individual branches of the economy that seem suitable to be nationalized or socialized. He wants to socialize either the entire property or the entire business. He just wants to draw the final consequences of what has been done.

Now one could cite many things. One need only mention in the external political sphere the role played by what I need only call the “Baghdad Railway” among the disastrous causes of war that have been preparing for years. Hundreds and hundreds of such things could be mentioned. What do such things mean? Such things mean a merging of economic interests with the pure interests of the state. So that in the end the result is that the administrators of state life must give themselves up to rendering the services that are possible to them by virtue of their power, following economic interests. And in this way the political interests of the states are drawn into the conflicts of economic interests. The whole configuration of states in recent times has shown this intermingling of economic life with political life.

Anyone who has been able to observe Central European life from this point of view - as the person who is speaking to you today has been able to observe it in Austria - knows that much of what has wiped the Austrian state out of the circle of the existing state has contributed to what people think of least. When, in the sixties, people in Austria thought of establishing a constitutional life, this constitutional life was based on the fact that the mere economic life was actually used for the configuration of the state. For the Austrian Imperial Council, voting was organized in such a way that four electoral curiae voted: that of the large landowners, that of the chambers of commerce, that of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and that of the rural communities, all economic communities. What was elected out of these economic communities became law in Austria. What emerged as law from purely economic interests could not, of course, come to terms with something that came from the spiritual and individual foundations of humanity: the interests of the people of the so-called Austrian state. And so things became entangled in such a way that what the people elected by the four economic curiae wanted to make law in a sham state out of their economic interests was made law. This, in turn, confounded itself with what one particularly likes to confound out of the sentiments of modern times, that confounded itself with the spiritual interests and aspirations of mankind, with all that which one can call the whole scope of spiritual life.

If, on the one hand, economic life has been incorporated into modern state life, then, on the other hand, the entire spiritual life has been incorporated into this state life. We have also seen in this that which is precisely in the spirit of modern human progress. The ideal was to gradually make all spiritual life a part of the political life of the state. How much has remained free today? Individual branches of the arts and individual branches of science, which are carried on by those who may not be employed by a state, and the like. Today there is still no sense of the fact that spiritual life can only integrate its reality into the social organism in the right way if this spiritual life is completely emancipated from all other life, if it can give itself its own administration, its own structure. While in recent times more and more efforts have been made to nationalize the entire school system, it is within the developmental powers of modern man to bring about a complete reversal in this area. Just imagine: If the lowest teacher is not the servant of the state, but if the lowest teacher knows how to place himself in a freely organized spiritual life, knows how to place himself in a spiritual organism, how differently he can then integrate what he is able to achieve into the unity of the human social organism, how differently than if the state demands of him what he must or must not do, what he must teach the developing human being!

Those who judge these things perhaps believe, from many a bad experience that has been made, that the people who have to deal with science, for example, on which so much depends, are employed according to certain considerations. But science itself and its teaching are free. Such laws can be found in the most diverse states. And many people claim that this is the case. Anyone who really knows things knows that these transgressions occur not only with regard to employment, not only with regard to the administration of intellectual offices, but also in the work itself. Free spiritual life, which can powerfully place itself with its own reality in the healthy social organism, must also be able to develop freely and separately from state and economic life, as being on its own.

I know the cheap objections that can be raised: “When schools are freed from state compulsion, when everyone can send their children to school out of the zeal they have for intellectual education, then we will return to illiteracy.” People who speak like this are reckoning with old sentiments in modern circumstances. We shall see in a moment how these modern conditions have quite a different effect from what these people with the old sentiments suppose. But the result - it must be said in advance - is that the real truth can only live in the social organism if the necessary division is also present and comprises the following: the spiritual organism, which is built on the individual physical and mental faculties of human beings - what we could also call spiritual life in its full extent; the legal organism, which comprises the area of the actual political state; and the cycle of economic processes, in which only the production, circulation and consumption of goods are concerned.

It is not believed that the unity of life is thereby destroyed. On the contrary, each of these members of the healthy social organism will become healthy again precisely because it receives its strength from itself and each member can give the other the appropriate contribution. And so those who aim at the recovery of our social conditions must demand the independence of these three links, which have been fused together by confused thinking and confused action in the last century, i.e. the independence of these three links: spiritual life, legal life and the life that comprises the cycle of the economic process.

The state cannot be an economist. Economic life must necessarily be placed on its own basis according to its own conditions. In economic life this has also developed to a certain extent in cooperative and trade union life. But this cooperative and trade union life has repeatedly become inappropriately intertwined with legal relationships. That which is necessary in economic life is the system of association, that is, the association of certain circles of people according to the needs of consumption and the production necessary for this, the association of people according to professional interests and the administration of that which circulates within these circles according to corresponding human needs, as can only result from an expert judgment of economic life itself.

The effects of human labor now play into this life, the effects of capital play into it. I can only indicate in a few lines how these effects are formed. The use of human labor power in the social organism consists in the relationship of the person who works manually to some spiritual leader who must make use of capital by managing some economic enterprise or anything at all that is useful to the social organism. This relationship can only be a legal relationship. The relationship that the worker has with the entrepreneur must be based on a right. It must be founded on a different ground than the ground of economic life itself. This will bring about a radically different situation from the one we have today. But today we must also come to radical judgments in the face of radical facts. Economic life today is, on the one hand, dependent on the natural basis. Man must face this with expert judgment. He can, to a certain extent, make one piece of land or another fertile through his diligence and technology, but only within certain limits. He is to a large extent dependent on his natural basis. Just as economic life is dependent on the natural basis on the one hand, it must also become dependent on what must be established on the basis of the rule of law, in the cooperation of all people, no matter what kind of work they do. Whether they are intellectual or manual laborers, they enter into a relationship on the basis of the rule of law in which the equality of men among themselves comes into consideration. And it is established, now not in an associative way, as it must be in economic life, but in a purely democratic way, in a way that makes the effects in the political field of the state equal for all people before the law. There is determined what relates to the utilization of human labor power, what relates to the relationship of the worker to the leader. Only a maximum or minimum working day and the type of work a person can perform can be determined. What is fixed - this must be taken into account - will have an effect on the prosperity of the people. If any branch of production should not prosper because too much legally impossible work is demanded of it, it should not be done; then a remedy should be found in other ways. Economic life should reach its limits on both sides: on the one hand, the limits of its scientific basis, and on the other, the limits of law. In short, we move from one part of the social organism to the other, the political state, in which everything legal and everything related to law is regulated to the greatest extent possible.

And then we come to the third member, which again must regulate itself out of its own conditions and needs and give laws: this is the organization of the spiritual. The spiritual must be based on the free initiative of man on the one hand, so that man is able to offer his powers individually to humanity in a free spiritual life. On the other side must be the free understanding and the free acceptance of these spiritual powers. How can this be? It can only be by the fact that the spiritual life, which is free in school life, in all spiritual branches, is administered solely by the spiritual organization right up to the use of the spiritual life, which expresses itself in the utilization of capital. How is this possible? It is only possible if that socialization really takes place which cannot come about by making human society into a uniform cooperative society in which perhaps only economic interests assert themselves and everything is to be organized on the basis of economic interests. If the spiritual organism is structured in a healthy way, free from the two other branches, the state and the economic organism, which have been mentioned, and if one is in a position to provide from that spiritual organism also that administration which relates to the use of capital and the whole economic life, that is: if all the places which are necessary in economic life are filled by the administration of the spiritual organization, if man with his individual abilities is placed in economic life from the spiritual organization, then alone one arrives at a healthy, fruitful socialization. For only in this way is it possible to separate what is the possession of private capital from the administration of this capital in favour of the healthy social organism.

What will happen? Well, many things will happen. I will only cite a few examples. It is quite natural that in the economic process man acquires private capital, property. But as little as it will be possible to separate the utilization of this private capital from the utilization of individual abilities as long as these individual abilities can be active, it will be necessary to separate private property from the individual when their activity ceases. For all private property is after all acquired through that which plays in the social forces, and it must in turn flow back into the social organism from which it is taken. That is to say, there will have to be a law from within the legal organism - for property is a right, the right to use some object or something exclusively - there will have to be a law that what one has acquired as private property from economic life must - through the free disposal of the one who has acquired it - after a certain time fall back to the spiritual organism, which in turn has to look for another individuality that can utilize it in a corresponding way.

Something similar will occur for all possessions that exist today, as for the possession of certain spiritual things that one produces, which belong to general humanity thirty years after death. One cannot say that one has more right to any other possession than to this spiritual possession. However long it may take to be allowed to keep what one has acquired, the time will have to come, be it for inherited property or otherwise acquired property, when, through the free disposal of the private owner, that which has passed into his possession through individual labor will return to the spiritual organism. In addition, the other will develop, that those who acquire private property from the economic process will be able to choose freely, out of free understanding, those whom they consider individually capable of operating something. But this will be made impossible by the power of the rule of law, of the actual political state, that a considerable part of private property will revert to pure interest, by means of which someone will be able to use private labor and other people's labor for himself without using individual abilities that enter into the economic process of life as a whole. It is possible, and it is made possible by these three links, that human productivity always remains connected with the individual abilities of man, with which it must be properly connected.

This tripartite structure of the social organism still appears to be a radical idea today. And yet, whoever will not be comfortable with this idea, whoever will not want to take the first step in this direction towards the summit that we must climb in the social order, whoever does not realize that the most immediate, most everyday, most immediate actions must be developed with the knowledge of this direction, will not be acting in the spirit of human development, but will be acting against this spirit of human development. Today we are faced with facts that have demanded the primal feelings of human beings. We must counter these with the original ideas of human social order. And one such original idea is this threefold structure.

This idea will now initially be regarded as something quite practical even by those who do not consider it to be a pure utopia, but who can perhaps bring themselves to regard it as something quite practical, it will only be regarded as something that relates to the interior of states.

And now you will ask: What does this have to do with the League of Nations? - That is what can at the same time be the most realistic foreign policy! For if we work towards answering the question: What should the state refrain from doing? - the answer that emerges from this consideration is that it should refrain from interfering in the functions of spiritual and economic life. It should confine itself to the purely political, the purely legal sphere. This, however, will also have the necessary consequence in non-political life that the economic interests of one area will come directly into negotiation, into exchange, into intercourse with the economic interests of the other area, and likewise the legal relationships and the spiritual relationships. If the spiritual conditions in one area are liberated, then no cause can ever arise from this spiritual area which could result in any warlike event. This can be observed on the smallest scale. Spiritual interests can only come into a relationship with warlike conflicts through the interposition of state life.

Even here one can really only judge from experience; but even small experiences can be eloquent. One could observe, if one has an eye for such things, how in Hungary, for example, in the times when state life in Hungary had not yet interfered with everything in the German-speaking parts, the people who had German children in the numerous German areas sent them to German-speaking schools, the Magyars living in German areas sent them to Magyar schools, and vice versa: the Germans who lived in areas with Magyar schools sent their children to such areas where there were German schools. This exchange of children was maintained in a free manner.

It was a free exchange of the spiritual goods of languages, just as one can cultivate other spiritual goods in free exchange, from country to country, from town to town. This free exchange of the spiritual goods of languages meant deep peace for the country of Hungary in all areas in which it was cultivated. The inner instinct of the people was imprinted in this free exchange. When the state became involved, things changed. That which happened in the inner political life, happened in the course of modern times in the outer political life. Anyone with an eye for such things could see how deeply peaceful the German intellectuals actually were. The mood of these German intellectuals would never have given rise to the mood of war! But the relationship they had with the state was what gave rise to this impression of the state. This is not meant to be an objection or anything else, but merely an understanding of the facts.

The economic life of a tripartite social organism will be able to live itself out within international economic life precisely because the economic relations are not made by state relations, but by people who grow out of territories in which there is not one parliament, but three parliaments, a spiritual, an economic and a state parliament, in which there is not one administration, but three administrations that work together. Only from such territories will people be able to grow up and play the right role in an intergovernmental organization. And it is not the state and the economy that matter, but the human being, the whole, full human being.

The role of the spiritual leaders will be different if it develops out of the emancipated spiritual organization, different from the theatrical play that takes place, for example, between the Middle States and America in the exchange of professors, which could only develop out of that which was spiritually improperly connected with the state. All these relationships will also be placed on a sound basis in the international sphere when the sound basis has been established in the individual social territory. From these individual social territories will then emerge the man who can also contribute in the right way to international life.

That seems to me to be the answer which can be given in such a way that it takes into consideration not only the coordination of the various peoples, but that the contribution of each people can be considered for the real future ideals of the human League of Nations. A German can also speak in this way; for even if the Central European countries or Germany are excluded from the next League of Nations, they can work in such a way that, through the recovery of their own territory, they work ahead for the healthy League of Nations of the future; they can contribute their share to it.

This is an answer that everyone can give for themselves. It is an answer that each state can also develop as its own policy towards the outside world. For just as the states that enter into peace negotiations with the German Empire, for example, elect their own peace delegates, it will not be possible to prevent the chaotic former German Empire from electing special delegates from the three members - from the economic, the state and the spiritual organism - who can then represent the healthy social organism to the outside world in a corresponding manner. That is real, possible, that is true real politics.

In the last few years I have often presented these ideas to people; I have also, as perhaps some of you have seen, summarized them in an appeal which is now appearing in the newspapers, signed by a very satisfactory number of people, among whom are those who cannot doubt that they have a right to judge these things, and I have often had to hear: such a division would bring back the old, which is precisely contrary to the feelings of a large part of modern mankind, that mankind would be divided again into the old three classes: Nourishing, military and teaching. The opposite is the case! Nothing is so different from these old estates of nourishment, defense and apprenticeship as what is wanted here; for it is not people who are divided into classes, into estates, as earlier times were divided, but that which is separated from man, in which man lives: the social organism is divided. And the human being is precisely that which, as a whole, complete, self-contained being, will only be able to develop as a human being within this structure that is self-contained. This liberated human being, he alone will be able to form the basis of the thoughts, the feelings, the acts of will that must play out in the modern League of Nations.

In thinking about these things, one does not want to become one-sided. And it is easy to become one-sided if you only take your own feelings as a basis. That is why I would like to refer to someone else now, at the end, after I have so radically presented what I have said as necessary for the recovery of the social organism and want to distinguish it from what has developed so far and what has led to this terrible catastrophe. I would like to refer to another, to a man to whom I often refer when I look for a highly respected spiritual observer of those things that have occurred within the development of humanity up to the present day: Herman Grimm. He once said in a passage that emerged from his thoughts on the modern social development of mankind: If one looks at Europe today, one sees on the one hand how people have come into connections with one another of which former times could not have dreamed; but one sees at the same time projecting into this, what is called modern civilization, that which expresses itself in our warlike armament - so he says as a German - in our own militarism and in the armament of the other states, which after all can only amount to invading one another one fine day. And when you see what could come of it - the words sound truly prophetic, they were written in the nineties, Herman Grimm died in 1901 - when you look at it, Herman Grimm says, it is as if a future consisting of nothing but human conflicts could develop, so that you would like to set aside a day for the general suicide of humanity so that it does not have to experience the terrible things that follow from these conditions.

Since then, people have seen many things that result from these conditions. What they have seen could well lead to thoughts that are then no longer regarded as utopian, especially when one has seen how many things that have really come into being should look like utopia to the eyes of practitioners compared to what they believed to be impossible just a short time ago.

This is what should make people today not only change their actions, but also change their thoughts and rethink. In the future, we will not only need different institutions, we will ultimately need new ideas, new people, which can only grow out of a new organization of the social organism. International alliances, we have basically experienced them after all! Whether what we are striving for is on firmer ground, offers a firmer foothold than the old conditions, can only be decided if we really go back to the basic conditions of human social coexistence. Have we not also seen something like an international life develop in the way people used to marry among the members of various royal houses? There would be nothing wrong with that if the princely houses had developed in a promising way! Something could then have arisen in terms of this “international alliance” that would have been very useful even under the monarchical principle! - We have seen other international alliances, for example the very real international alliance of capital. We have experienced international social democracy. We have experienced various international alliances. That which was based on the international of family instincts has disintegrated. That which is based on the economic power of unspiritual capitalism, it is clear to the unbiased eye: it will disintegrate. But what international socialism is aiming at is basically the longing for power. In the future, this power will have to give way to the right, because what man can seize through his striving for power in social life can only lead to the salvation of mankind if it is integrated into legal life, illuminated by legal life.

And so perhaps the feeling may arise in contemporary man in the face of many an internationalism that a truly fruitful alliance of nations of mankind must be founded on something other than these old relationships. It must be founded on entirely new human ideas, entirely new human impulses, and not on princely blood, not on the power of capital or labor. It must be founded on the right, on the truly liberated whole man. For only this truly liberated, whole human being, awake to international feeling, will also have the right understanding for what can then shine for him as the light of international law.

Discussion

1st speaker: Explained that the solution proposed by Dr. Steiner was not clear to him. Nor was it possible to dismiss socialism as a great spiritual concept in the way that Dr. Steiner had done, because, after all, a new right does not come into being by wiping away the healthy core of socialism. The idea of the threefold structure may seem to be a solution, but it is an arbitrary solution. According to this speaker, land reform is something that is in the nature of the times. Finally, reference was made to the progressive spread of socialism as a testimony to the fact that it is not an imaginary system but corresponds to a reality.

Rudolf Steiner: It is, of course, difficult to discuss whether or not what was indicated in a lecture that was, after all, not very short, must be clear to each individual in an absolute sense; after all, that is an individual matter, and each listener will, of course, have his or her own opinion about it. I will therefore not touch on this question in particular. I would just like to make a few very brief comments on the other thoughts expressed by the previous speaker, above all on matters of principle. Anyone who has followed my perhaps radical and therefore seemingly unprovable train of thought today has perhaps been able to see, from the way the matter was formulated, that what I said did not come from a mere flash of inspiration one fine morning, or from other ideas, but that they are built on what I believe has been proven by others. It is not necessary to prove to you again everything that socialism, for example, has proved! I have expressed one thought, the thought that the theory of surplus value and its relation to human labor power is particularly plausible to the proletarian soul. I then expressed the thought that this view must be taken one step further. In doing so, however, I believe I have also shown that I do not want to wipe away what the honorable previous speaker has just pointed out: modern socialism. Anyone who has listened to me more closely will perhaps also be able to tell that I have made sufficient allusions to the significance of modern socialism in my speech.

I could not understand what I said in any other way than in the sense of the example I mentioned. I meant that if one did not get involved in modern socialism, then one would live like the inhabitants of a house that was threatening to collapse and who did not decide to build a new one, but instead discussed how to connect all the rooms so that they could help each other through these doors.

Thus, with some good will, you could see the weight I actually attach to modern socialism. And it was basically not so difficult to derive from this the idea, which could of course be developed further in forty or fifty lectures, that you can't get by with what is already in modern socialism. I would like to point out one more thing. Of course, I will again only be able to be brief enough for those who wish to do so to be able to say that I am not giving the audience anything to take home with them. I would just like to say that I have the greatest respect for what Marxism and everything that has been built on Marxism has produced, especially in modern proletarian thought. I myself was a teacher for many years at a workers' education school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and I was involved, so to speak, in helping to establish socialist ideas within the working class. And I may perhaps point out that it would not exactly be incorrect if I said: I believe that a number of corresponding older editors of German socialist newspapers, even orators, who at least have a not insignificant say in Germany today, are perhaps my pupils. So I not only know modern socialism as such - one could have seen that from the way I put forward my points of view - but I also know the weight that this socialism has in the life of the modern proletariat. If you have been involved in it for years, I might say decades, then you don't really need to wait for a nice, special idea to develop a system, because you want to have one, but then you continue to build on what is there. And those who respond to things see from what they continue to build that they are respecting what is already there.

But there is one thing we must not lose sight of. Certainly, thoughts as such, if they are kept within the theoretical, are basically nothing more than symptoms of what is moving in real life. Therefore do not think that I want to suggest to you how the modern labor movement or anything else is actually carried only by the driving force of thought, but on the contrary I want to express that the thoughts that come to light - and I am not only thinking of economic forces - express deeper inner forces symptomatically. In general, I believe that in the future we will move towards a symptomatological view of history, not the causal one that is popular today.

But now we must see how certain thoughts, which are all to be regarded as symptoms of certain underlying facts, how these thought-symptoms present themselves. Today you are familiar with very radical forms of socialism. Do not believe how this could arise in the subconscious of some people who misinterpret this - which perhaps the previous speaker did not mean in this way - do not believe that I feel as frightened as some people in leading circles about what is emerging in the present - although I must regard it with the same weight as I did in my lecture. I can already look with a certain objectivity at the consequences of the social way of thinking and social development that are emerging today, for example. I would like to point out something that might seem significant to you. You see, Lenin and Trotsky are also socialists. And anyone who is not, I would say, intimidated by what is now being said about Eastern Europe and ascribes it all to the “wicked Bolsheviks”, but who knows that everything that is now tended to be attributed to the Russian socialists is still largely due to Tsarism and what preceded it, will perhaps take a somewhat more objective view of what is happening! And those who look objectively will then have to say to themselves above all: In a certain direction, Lenin in particular is a kind of final consequence of Marx, including the way he sees himself. And Lenin draws attention to two things in Marx. First, he draws attention to the fact that the modern social movement must strive to proletarianize the state itself through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the state is only - I must briefly indicate this - taken up by the dictatorship of the proletariat because it thereby draws its ultimate consequences. The ultimate consequences of what is germinating in the state are drawn by social-democratism: namely, the state kills itself, it dissolves itself.

Now, the various dark sides of this socialist state must come to light. Lenin, for example, is under no illusions about this. That is also better than indulging in illusions, as so many people do. But he is working towards creating a state that carries within it the seeds of death, that will dissolve. Then comes the really new stage, where work is not paid equally, but where the motto is: each according to his abilities, each according to his needs. - And at that moment, when this appears: each according to his abilities, each according to his needs - which must not only be a socialist ideal, but a very general one - at that moment Lenin, like Marx, makes a strange remark that allows us to look much deeper than we usually do. He makes the remark: this social order, which can only come about in such a way that everyone is placed in the social order according to his needs and his abilities, cannot, of course, be achieved with today's people; it requires a completely new breed of people, which must first come into being.

Yes, you see, those who do not want to wait and cannot wait for a “new breed of man”, because otherwise the time might come when it would be better to establish the general suicide of which I have spoken, will turn their thoughts to the present life, and will try to gain from this present life an idea of what the mistakes were. And in this respect I do believe that it might already be evident from my, albeit brief and sketchy, train of thought, in which I have referred to the question: What should the state do, and what should it not do? How the entanglement of economic life with the state, the entanglement of intellectual life with the state, has caused damage to the social order - I have tried to indicate this; the examples I have given could be multiplied a hundredfold.

Does it not stand to reason that we should think about how these damages can be remedied? It can be remedied by not merging further, but by reversing what has just occurred.

You could call it naïve, of course, but I believe that my lecture today showed how deeply what I have said actually penetrates the very foundations of modern life. How far this is the case, however, must be left to the judgment of each individual. The ideas that are currently realized and recognized are indeed not new ideas; and nothing new can be built with these ideas.

I have presented the idea of the threefold structure to many a person who would have been in a position to realize it, especially during the difficult time of war. I have also found understanding in some circles. But today there is still no bridge between understanding and the courageous will to do something. This bridge has not been built.

I have had a strange experience in the last few days, which could perhaps point out to you how what I have said is deeply rooted in real life and is not a wiping away, but rather a taking up or rather a continuation of socialist thinking: I spoke - which is not exactly easy today - to a workers' meeting that was simply invited from the street. As I experienced many times during my work in Berlin, it was precisely the socialist leaders who opposed my remarks in many ways. And after many objections had been raised, a Russian woman appeared who - I'm just telling you! - said, among many other things, that we may have heard many things today against which we could object to this or that, but it would be impossible today to remain merely with the old ideas or even with the old socialist ideas, but it was necessary to move forward to new ideas.

We will not come to a real, thorough rebuilding of the house, but only to new doors and so on, which cannot help if the whole thing collapses, if we do not really engage in new thoughts. And that is why I have said to many people in these difficult times that many of the misfortunes that have happened in recent years could have been avoided if many people had thought like the Russian woman I spoke of. I am convinced that it would have been understood if the Central European negotiators at the time had made the ideas I have expressed here - which were very well known to a few of them - the content of foreign policy, the content of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. If these ideas had been presented to the outside world, they would have been understood.

Of course, one cannot explain such things in detail in a lecture; but one has the feeling that real life must live in the human soul in the present, as it is simply rooted in reality. I do not consider myself so clever that I know better than others what has to happen in detail!

Because I am not a program person, because I do not give programs and utopias, but because I am someone who wants reality to be grasped as reality, I am not at all interested in having all my suggestions carried out in detail. If at any point one begins to work in the spirit of what I have said today, then let not one stone of the content I have conveyed be left upon another; something quite different may result, but it will be something that is justified in the face of real life.

With programmes, whether socialist or other programmes, the aim is always to ensure that the individual ideas that have been devised are realized in accordance with the programme; here it is a matter of tackling reality at one point. Then the result may be something quite different! And so what I have said is only apparently so incomprehensible because the matter is not to be understood in the same way as other programs. You could say that today it is easy not only to introduce a program with a few thoughts, but even to prove it. But it is difficult to appeal to human souls, and to appeal in the way I wanted to do, namely to point these souls back to themselves, to give them suggestions. Then perhaps they will think something completely different. But it is basically the most necessary thing today for people to know: you have to start from one reality, then the other will follow.

There is therefore no need to despise what the land reformers are striving for. In a conversation I once had with Damaschke in Berlin many years ago, I pointed out to him that his ideas certainly have a great deal of power, but that they cannot fully intervene in real life and understand it thoroughly because the soil is not elastic. It is not; and therefore, I told him, it is not possible to translate them directly into reality.

Well, there is no other way of coming to terms with it than by looking at the tendency of the times, which results from the fact that people have come to a dead end through the confusion of legal life, economic life and spiritual life. Then something arises which is not at all difficult to prove, namely that one should not continue to confound them, but should start on the way back!

What I have said is intended to continue thoughts about how socialization should actually be carried out, how we can get into a situation where human labour may not legitimately be used in the sense of someone else's power. And as I said, as incomplete as this must remain, because it cannot be dealt with exhaustively in one lecture, I believe that today it is necessary to approach things with a little good will, because the facts speak too loudly! And even in the face of what might well appear to be different in the socialist field than four years ago, the facts speak too loudly today. I will soon explain all this comprehensively and in detail in a brochure, because I consider this to be extremely necessary for the present, which will then prove in detail what has now only appeared in a truly suggestive way.

I believe there is one thing we must not lose sight of today. I had a special experience yesterday. When I was a little boy, I used to learn the following in my religion books: I learned that you have to realize that Christ must either be a fool or a hypocrite, or that he must be what he pretended to be. And that's what it says in these religious books: And since he can be considered neither a fool nor a hypocrite, he must be the Son of the living God. - I also heard that answered yesterday as the solution to the social questions here in Bern! I read it in my school books more than fifty years ago, and I hear it repeated again today - as the right solution to the social question. Between the time when I read it in my religion books at school and this almost word-for-word repetition, which one could hear again and again during the difficult times, I would like to say: word-for-word exactly, but between the two points in time lies the experience that mankind should have had through the great catastrophe that we have lived through. We should learn something from this great catastrophe! Above all, I believe, we should have become more willing to accept thoughts that may seem somewhat sketchy today, but which, by the way in which they refer to things, perhaps show that they are at least making an attempt to delve into the depths of things.

2nd speaker (Baron von Wrangell): Sees in the threefold structure of the social organism proposed by Dr. Steiner the right solution. How the idea can be realized seems to him to be a different question. The fundamental error of socialism lies in the fact that it leads to an overvaluation of the state.

3rd and 4th speakers: Objected essentially that a realization of the idea of tripartism would unnecessarily complicate the situation, which speaks against this solution. The threefold structure would lead to fragmentation, whereas human life should form a unity.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I think I should perhaps say something very briefly. I can understand quite well what the honorable previous speaker wants; but I have the feeling that he does not understand himself very well! I think he should assess the whole situation we are in from a somewhat broader perspective. We humans really don't just have the task of making our lives comfortable. There are many other things in life than making ourselves comfortable! And I believe that a large part of the damage we suffer today comes precisely from the fact that a large part of humanity only strives to make life comfortable, in its own way. But it seems to me that what matters is something else.

You see, I would not bother you with any ideas about a tripartite division if these three parts were not inherent in the reality of the social organism. The fact that this threefold division wants to happen is something that does not depend on us, we cannot change it, it makes itself. I really did have the opportunity, I must come back to this again, during this difficult time, to talk to many a person who I thought should do something from the positions that are so authoritative today - it was two and a half years ago, there would still have been the possibility of doing something - and I said to some people: “You see, what is being said here is not a simple matter. It is the result of decades of observation of what will happen in Europe over the next ten, twenty or thirty years. For anyone who observes the course of events - and there is no other way to understand the social threefold structure than to recognize the possibilities for future development from the whole of the present - will see that, whether we like it or not, this threefold structure is taking place. In earlier times it arose instinctively; more and more in recent times there has been a confusion, a fusion of the three parts. Now these three parts want to separate again in the way that suits them, to become independent. - And I have said this to some people with the drastic words: “You see, those who are now at the helm could still do many things in this direction with reason; people have the choice - Goethe also said with reference to the revolution: either evolution or revolution - they have the choice of either doing this now through reason, or they will experience revolutions and cataclysms. Not only those who have been at the helm up to now will experience cataclysms, but also those who merely want to hold on to the dogmas of socialism will experience cataclysms. It is a matter of this threefold organization of the social organism taking place by itself. And you can also see that: That which is natural always occurs under certain extraordinary conditions in certain one-sidednesses of development; these three members want to become more and more independent. And they become independent in an unnatural way if they are not given their natural independence, if they are confounded, if they are thrown together; they develop in a way that hinders humanity. The spiritual power, the spiritual organization develops, be it as a church state or state church or whatever, becomes independent, and even if it cannot encompass the whole of spiritual life, it nevertheless seeks to catch as much as it can. The other, legal life, is taken up by the state, and in its turn makes serviceable to the state that which will seek to become independent. What wants to realize itself in political life in an unnatural way is everything that is today the much frowned upon militarism. For you see, many a healthy opinion was expressed during the war about this militarism and its one-sided relationship to state life. But if one gets to the bottom of these opinions with common sense, then one also realizes that militarism is nothing other than the one-sided realization of what one does not want to give its natural independence, political life in turn. And Clausewitz said: War is the continuation of politics by other means; Clausewitz puts it in a certain context; one can still go into these things, not as in recent years, when one has heard many such one-sided statements. One can also say that marital strife and divorce are the continuation of marriage by other means! There have been a lot of one-sided statements like that in recent years; people just mix everything up. But what everything is based on, if one wants to develop fruitful views in life, which then also turn into real institutions, is that one sees these relationships as healthy. And so these things really want to take on a life of their own, to develop independently. In recent times, the economic organism has flooded the whole of public life to such an extent that today many people no longer see anything but an economic organism. And then they see in what can otherwise be there only an administration of the economic organism.

That is what you can prove. But above all, if I have achieved nothing more than to stimulate some people, that is quite enough for me. That is all I want! For I do not believe that one can say anything right about what should happen socially. I would like to add the following: You know that there are two Bolsheviks in the present day: one is Lenin, the other Trotsky. I know of a third, who, however, does not live in the present day and whom few people think of when they talk about the Bolsheviks: Johann Gottlieb Fichte! Read his “Closed Commercial State” and you have, theoretically speaking, exactly what you can read in Lenin and Trotsky! Why? Because Fichte spins a state system out of his own soul! From the forces with which you can reach the highest heights in philosophy, he develops a state system, a political, or rather a social system. Why did this happen? Because it is not at all possible to gain a view of what is socially fruitful from the individual! That can only be found from person to person. Just as language cannot be developed if a person lives alone on an island, but just as language can only develop as a social phenomenon, only when people live together properly, so that which is social at all cannot be gained by spinning it out of an individual person! One cannot draw up a program out of oneself. But we can think about the social order in which people must be placed so that they relate to each other so naturally that they find the right social order of their own accord.

The social question will not disappear from the agenda! It is there and must continue to be solved more and more. But the task at hand is to answer the question: How should people relate to each other in the tripartite social organism? Then you will always more or less find the solution. People must relate to each other in the social organism in such a way that the solutions arise from their living together. To do this preliminary work is the task of truly social thinking, the preliminary work that shows how people can solve social issues in real social life.

I have already said that I do not believe I could be so clever as to draw up a social program. But I drew attention to the fact that if people live in this natural threefold division, and if they really allow what corresponds to their impulses as institutions in this natural threefold division to arise in the world, then it is only through people, in this cooperation of people appropriate to the healthy social organism, that the social order arises! One can cooperate in this! You can't do it the way modern Marxists say: first we make a big mess, then comes the dictatorship of the proletariat, then the right thing will happen. - No, at the very least it is necessary to do this preliminary work, to ask oneself: How must people stand in the social organism so that, through their cooperation, what is demanded of us today by the facts that truly speak loudly will happen?

[ 1 ] We cannot understand Goethe's relation to the natural sciences if we confine ourselves merely to the single discoveries he made. I take as a guiding point of view for the study of this relation the words which Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy, 18th August, 1787: “After what I have seen of plants and fishes at Naples and in Sicily I should be tempted, if I were ten years younger, to make a journey to India, not in order to discover anything new, but to observe, in my own way, what has already been discovered.” It appears to. me to be a question of the way in which Goethe coordinated the natural phenomena known to him in a view of Nature in harmony with his mode of thinking. Even if all his individual discoveries had already been made, and he had given us nothing but his view of Nature, this would not detract in the least from the importance of his Nature studies. I am of the same opinion as Du Bois-Reymond that “even without Goethe's participation, science would still be as far advanced as it is to-day” ... that “the steps attained by him would have been attained by others sooner or later.” (Goethe und kein Ende S.31.). I cannot, however, apply these words, as Du Bois-Reymond does, to the sum-total of Goethe's work in natural science. I limit them to the individual discoveries made during the course of his work. In all probability we should not be without a single one of them to-day even if Goethe had never occupied himself with botany, anatomy, and so forth. His view of Nature, however, emanated from his personality; none other could have achieved it. The single discoveries as such did not interest him. They arose of themselves during his studies, because in regard to the facts in question, views prevailed which were not reconcilable with his mode of observation. If he could have built up his views with what natural science had to offer he would never have occupied himself with detailed studies. He had to particularize because what was said to him by the investigators of Nature about the particulars did not correspond with his demands. The individual discoveries were made only accidentally, as it were, during the course of these detailed studies. For instance, the question whether man, like other animals, has an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw-bone did not at first concern him. He was trying to discover the plan by which Nature develops the series of animals and, at its summit, Man. He wanted to find the common archetype which lies at the basis of all animal species and finally, in its highest perfection, at the basis of the human species also. The Nature investigators said: there is a difference between the structure of the animal body and that of the human body. Animals have the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, man has not. Goethe's view was that the human physical structure could only be distinguished from the animal by its degree of perfection, not details. For, if the latter were the case, there could not be a common archetype underlying the animal and the human organisations. He could make nothing of the assertion of the scientists, and so he sought for the intermaxillary bone in man—and found it. Something similar to this can be observed in the case of all his individual discoveries. For him they are never the end in itself; they had to be made in order to justify his ideas concerning natural phenomena.

[ 2 ] In the realms of organic Nature the important thing in Goethe's views is the conception he formed of the nature of life. It is not a question of emphasising the fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are plant-organs identical with each other and unfolding out of a common basic form. The essential point is Goethe's conception of the whole plant-nature as a living thing, and how he thought of the individual parts as proceeding from the whole. His idea of the nature of the organism is his central, most individual discovery in the realm of biology. Goethe's basic conviction was that something can be perceived in the plant and animal which is not accessible to mere sense observation. What the bodily eye can observe in the organism appears to Goethe to be merely the result of a living whole of formative laws working through one another, laws which are perceptible only to the ‘spiritual eye.’ He has described what his spiritual eye perceived in the plant and in the animal. Only those who are able to see as he did can recapture his idea of the nature of the organism; those who remain stationary at what the senses and experiments give, cannot understand him. When we read his two poems “The Metamorphosis of Plants,” and “The Metamorphosis of Animals,” it appears at first as if the words simply led us from one part of the organism to another, as if the intention was merely to unite external facts together. If, however, we permeate ourselves with what hovered before Goethe as the idea of the living being we feel ourselves transplanted into the sphere of organic Nature and the conceptions concerning the various organs develop from out of one central conception.

[ 3 ] When Goethe began to make independent reflections upon the phenomena of Nature it was the concept of life that claimed his attention above all else. In a letter from the Strasburg period, 14th July, 1770, he writes of a butterfly: “The poor creature trembles in the net, and its fairest colours are rubbed off; even if it is caught uninjured, in the end it perishes there, stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature. Something else is required, indeed the essential part, and in this case as in every other, the most essential part: Life.” It was clear to Goethe from the beginning that an organism cannot be considered as a dead product of Nature; that something more exists within it over and above the forces which also live in inorganic Nature. When Du Bois-Reymond says that “the purely mechanical world-construction which to-day constitutes science was no less obnoxious to the princely poet of Weimar than, in earlier days, the ‘Système de la Nature’ to Friederike's friend,” he was undoubtedly right; he was no less right when he said that “Goethe would have turned away with a shudder from this world-construction which, with its primeval generation, borders on the Kant-Laplace theory; from man's emergence out of chaos as the result of the mathematically-determined play of atoms from eternity to eternity; from the icy world-end, from the pictures to which our race adheres with all the insensibility by means of which it has accustomed itself to the horrors of railway travel.” (Goethe und kein Ende. S.35. f.). Naturally Goethe would have turned away in disgust because he sought and found a higher concept of the living than that of a complicated, mathematically-determined mechanism. Only those who are incapable of grasping a higher concept of this kind and identify the living with the mechanical because they can only see the mechanical in the organism, will enthuse over the mechanical world-construction with its play of atoms, and regard without feeling the pictures which Du Bois-Reymond sketches. Those, however, who can assimilate the concept of the organic in Goethe's sense will dispute its justification as little as they dispute the existence of the mechanical. We do not dispute with those who are colour-blind concerning the world of colours. All views which represent the organic mechanically incur the judgment which Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles:

“Who would describe and study aught alive.
Seeks first the living spirit thence to drive;
Then are the lifeless fragments in his hand,
There only fails, alas! the spirit band.”

[ 4 ] The opportunity of concerning himself more intimately with plant life came to Goethe when Duke Karl August presented him with a garden (21st April, 1776). He was also stimulated by excursions in the Thuringian forest, where he could observe the living phenomena of lower organisms. Mosses and lichens claimed his attention. On October 31st he begged Frau von Stein to give him mosses of all kinds, if possible with the roots and moist, so that he could use them for observing the process of propagation. It is important to bear in mind that at the beginning of his botanical studies Goethe occupied himself with lower plant forms. He only studied the higher plants when later he was forming his idea of the archetypal plant. This was certainly not because the lower kingdom was strange to him, but because he believed that the secrets of plant-nature were more clearly manifested in the higher. His aim was to seek the idea of Nature where it revealed itself most distinctly and then to descend from the perfect to the imperfect in order to understand the latter by means of the former. He did not try to explain the complex by means of the simple, but to survey it at one glance as a creative whole, and then to explain the simple and imperfect as a one-sided development of the complex and perfect. If Nature is able, after countless plant forms, to create one more which contains them all, on perceiving this perfect form, the secret of plant formation must arise for the mind in direct perception, and then man will easily be able to apply to the imperfect what he has observed in the perfect. Nature investigators go the opposite way to work, for they regard the perfect merely as a mechanical sum-total of simple processes. They proceed from the simple and derive the perfect from it.

[ 5 ] When Goethe looked around for a scientific guide in his botanical studies he could find no other than Linnæus. We first learn of his study of Linnæus from his letters to Frau von Stein in the year 1782. The earnestness with which Goethe pursued his studies in natural science is shown by the interest he took in the writings of Linnæus. He admits that after Shakespeare and Spinoza he was influenced most strongly by Linnæus. But how little could Linnæus satisfy him! Goethe wanted to observe the different plant forms in order to know the common principle that lived in them. He tried to discover what it is that makes all these forms into plants. Linnæus was satisfied with classifying the manifold plant forms in a definite order and describing them. Here Goethe's naive, unbiased observation of Nature, in one special instance, came into contact with the scientific mode of thought that was influenced by a one-sided conception of Platonism. This mode of thought sees in the separate forms manifestations of original, co-existing Platonic Ideas, or creative thoughts. Goethe sees in the individual formation only one special form of an ideal archetypal being which lives in all forms. The aim of the former mode of thought is to distinguish the separate forms with the greatest possible exactitude in order to discern the manifoldness of the ideal forms or of the plan of creation; Goethe's aim is to explain the manifoldness of the particular from out of the original unity. That many things are present in manifold forms is clearly evident to the former mode of thought, because for it the ideal archetypes are already manifold. This is not evident to Goethe, for according to his view the many only belong together when a unity reveals itself in them. Goethe therefore says that what Linnæus “sought to hold forcibly asunder, had to strive for union, in order to satisfy the innermost need of my being.” Linnæus simply accepts the existing forms without asking how they have arisen from a basic form. “We count as many species as there are different forms that have been created in principle.” This is a basic statement. Goethe sought the active element in the plant kingdom that creates the individual through the specific modifications of the basic form.

[ 6 ] In Rousseau Goethe found a more naïve relationship to the plant world than was the case with Linnæus. He writes to Karl August, 16th June, 1782: “In Rousseau's Works one finds the most delightful letters on botany in which he gives a very clear and charming exposition of this science to a lady. It is a fine example of the way one ought to give instruction, and is a supplement to Emil. It makes me want to recommend the beautiful kingdom of flowers anew to my friends of the fair sex.” In the “History of my Botanical Studies” Goethe tells us what attracted him to Rousseau's botanical ideas: “His relation to plant lovers and connoisseurs, specially to the Duchess of Portland, may have widened his penetrating sight, and a spirit such as his, which felt called to prescribe law and order to nations, was forced to suppose that in the immeasurable kingdom of plants no such great diversity of forms could appear without a basic law, be it ever so concealed, which brings them back collectively to a Unity.” Goethe was seeking for a fundamental law which leads back the manifold to the unity from which it has originally proceeded.

[ 7 ] Two works of Freiherr von Gleichen, called “Russwurm,” came at that time to Goethe's knowledge. Both of them deal with the life of plants in a manner which proved fruitful for him; they are ‘Das Neueste aus dem Reiche der Pflanzen’ (Nürnburg, 1764), and ‘Auserlesene Mikroscopische Entdeckungen bet den Pflanzen’ (Nürnburg, 1777/1781.) These books deal with the processes of fructification in plants; pollen, stamens and pistils are minutely described and the processes of fructification presented in well-executed diagrams. Goethe himself now makes attempts to observe with his own eyes the results described by Gleichen-Russwurm. He writes to Frau von Stein, 12th Jan., 1785: “Now that Spring is approaching my microscope is set up in order to observe and check the experiments of Gleichen-Russwurm.” At the same time Goethe studied the nature of the seed, as may be gathered from an account which he gives to Knebel, 2nd April, 1785: “I have reflected on the seed substance as far as my experiences extend.” These observations of Goethe only appear in the right light when one considers that even at that time he did not stop at them, but tried to acquire a general perception of natural processes which should serve to support and strengthen them. On April 8th of the same year he tells Knebel that he is not merely observing facts, but that he has also made “fine combinations” of these facts.

[ 8 ] The share Goethe took in Lavater's great work, “Physiognomic Fragments for the furtherance of Human Knowledge and Human Love,” which appeared in the years 1775 to 1778, had a considerable influence on the development of his ideas concerning the workings of organic Nature. He himself contributed to this work, and his later mode of regarding organic Nature is already foreshadowed in the way he expresses himself in these contributions. Lavater goes no further than treating the form of the human organism as the expression of the soul. He wanted to indicate the character of soul from the forms of the body. Goethe began even then to observe the external form in itself, to study its own laws and formative force. He began at the same time to study the writings of Aristotle on physiognomy and endeavoured, on the basis of the study of the organic form, to confirm the distinction between man and the animals. He finds this in the prominence of the head which is determined by the human structure as a whole, and in the perfect development of the human brain to which all parts point as to an organ by which they are determined. In the animal, on the other hand, the head is merely appended to the spine; the brain and spinal cord comprise no more than is absolutely necessary for the execution of subordinate life-principles and sense-activities pure and simple. Goethe was already then seeking for the distinction between man and the animals, not in any one detail, but in the different degrees of perfection which the same basic form attains in one case or the other. Already there hovers before him the picture of a type which occurs both in the animal and in man, but which is developed in the former in such a way that the entire structure subserves animal functions, whereas in the latter the structure furnishes the scaffolding for the development of the spirit.

[ 9 ] Goethe's specific studies in anatomy grew out of such considerations. On Jan. 22nd, 1776, he writes to Lavater: “The Duke has sent me six skulls, and I have made some magnificent observations which are at your service if you have not already found the same things without me.” In Goethe's Diary, under the date, 15th Oct., 1781, we read that he studied Anatomy in Jena with Einsiedel, and in the same year began to enter more deeply into this science under the guidance of Loder. He speaks of this in letters to Frau von Stein, 29th Oct., and to the Duke, 4th Nov., 1781. He also had the intention of “explaining the skeleton” to the young people at the Drawing Academy, “and guiding them to a knowledge of the human body.” “I do it,” he says, “for my own sake as well as for theirs; the method I have chosen will give them this winter a real acquaintance with the basic structures of the body.” The Diary shows that these lectures were, in fact, given. During this time he also had many conversations with Loder concerning the structure of the human body. Again it is his general view of Nature which is the motive force and the real aim of these studies. He treats “the bones as a text to which all life and everything human may be appended.” (Letters to Lavater and Marck, 14th Nov., 1781.)

Goethe's mind was occupied at that time with conceptions relating to the workings of organic Nature and the connection between human and animal development. That the human form is simply the highest stage of the animal, and that man produces the moral world out of himself as a result of this more perfect stage of animal life, is an idea which is already expressed in the ode “The Divine”—written during the year 1782. “Let man be noble, helpful and good; for that alone distinguishes him from all the beings known unto us. According to laws mighty, rigid, eternal, must all we mortals complete the orbit of our existence.” [ 10 ] The “eternal, rigid laws” work in man just as they work in the rest of the world of organisms; in him alone they reach a perfection which makes it possible for him to be “noble, helpful and good.”

[ 11 ] While such ideas were establishing themselves in Goethe's being more and more firmly Herder was working at his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.” All the thoughts of this book were discussed by the two men. Goethe was satisfied with Herder's comprehension of Nature; it harmonised with his own conceptions. Frau von Stein writes to Knebel, 1st May, 1784: “Herder's work makes it probable that we were first plants and animals. ... Goethe is now brooding profoundly over these things and whatever has passed through his mind becomes supremely interesting.” Goethe's words to Knebel, 8th Dec., 1783, afford the justification for arriving at his ideas from Herder's. “Herder is writing a Philosophy of History, fundamentally new, as you may well imagine. We read the first chapters together the day before yesterday—and very excellent they are.” Sentences such as the following entirely harmonise with Goethe's mode of thought: “The human race is the great coalescence of lower organic forces.” “And so we assume that man is the central creation among animals, i.e., the developed form wherein the features of all species around him are summed up superbly.” [ 12 ] The view of anatomists at that time that the tiny bone which animals have in the upper jaw, the intermaxillary bone which contains the upper incisors, is lacking in man, was of course irreconcilable with such conceptions. Sommering, one of the most noted Anatomists of the time, writes to Merck, 8th Oct., 1782: “I wish you had consulted Blumenbach on the subject of the os intermaxillane which, ceteris paribus, is the only bone which all animals possess from the apes onward, including even the orang-utan, but which is never to be found in man; with the exception of this bone there is nothing in man which cannot be attributed to the animals. I am sending you therefore the head of a hind in order to convince you that this os intermaxillane, as Blumenbach, or os incis as Campa calls it, also exists in animals which have no incisors.” That was the general view of the time. Even the famous Camper, for whom Merck and Goethe had the deepest respect, admitted it. The fact that the intermaxillary bone in man coalesces left and right with the upper jaw bone without any clear demarcation in the normally developed individual, led to this view. If the learned men were correct in this it would be impossible to affirm the existence of a common archetype for the structure of the animal and human organism; a boundary between the two forms would have to be assumed. Man would not be created according to the archetype which lies at the basis of the animal. Goethe had to remove this obstacle to his world-conception. This he succeeded in doing, in conjunction with Loder, in the Spring of 1784. Goethe proceeded according to his general principle that Nature has no secret which “she does not somewhere place openly before the eye of the attentive observer.” He found the demarcation between upper jaw and intermaxillary bone actually existing in some abnormally developed skulls. He joyfully announced his discovery to Herder and Frau von Stein (27th March). To Herder he wrote: “It should heartily please you also, for it is like the keystone to man; it is not lacking; it is there! But how?” “I have thought of it in connection with your ‘Whole’ and it will indeed be a fair link in the chain.” When Goethe sent the treatise he had written on the subject to Knebel in Nov., 1784, he indicated the significance which he attributed to this discovery in his whole world of ideas by the words: “I have refrained from pointing to the logical outcome which Herder already indicates in his ideas, that the distinction between man and the animal is not to be looked for in any single detail.” Goethe could gain confidence in his view of Nature only when the erroneous view about this fatal little bone had been rejected. He gradually found the courage to extend to all kingdoms of Nature, to her whole realm, his ideas concerning the manner in which, playing as it were with one basic form, she produces life in all its diversity. In this sense he writes to Frau von Stein in the year 1786.

[ 13 ] The book of Nature becomes more and more legible to Goethe after he has deciphered the one letter. “My long ‘spelling out’ has helped me; now at last it works, and my silent joy is inexpressible.” He writes thus to Frau von Stein, 15th May, 1785. He now regards himself capable of writing a small botanical treatise for Knebel. Their journey together to Karlsbad, in 1785, becomes a formal journey of botanical study. After their return the kingdom of fungi, mosses, lichens and algae were studied with the help of Linnæus. He informs Frau von Stein, 9th November: “I continue to read Linnæus, indeed I must, for I have no other book with me: it is the best way of reading a book conscientiously and I must cultivate the practice, for it is not easy for me to read a book to the end. This book is not compiled for reading but for repeated study, and is of the very greatest service to me because I have thought for myself on most of the points.” During these studies the basic form out of which Nature fashions all the manifold plant forms assumes separate contours in his mind, even if they are not yet quite definite. In a letter to Frau von Stein, 9th July, 1786, we find these words: “It is a perception of the form with which Nature is, as it were, always playing, and in her play producing life in its diversity.”

[ 14 ] In April and May, 1786, Goethe made microscopical observations of lower organisms which develop in infusions of different substances—plantain pulp, cactus, truffles, peppercorn, tea, beer, and so on. He carefully noted the processes which he perceived in these organisms and prepared drawings of them. It is apparent also from these notes that Goethe did not try to approach the knowledge of life through such observation of the lower and simpler organisms. It is quite apparent that he thought he could grasp the essential features of life-processes in the higher organisms just as well as in the lower. He is of the opinion that in the infusoria the same kind of law repeats itself as the eye of the mind perceives, for instance, in the dog. Observation through the microscope only yields information of processes which are, in miniature, what the unaided eye sees on a larger scale. It merely affords an enrichment of sense-experiences. The essential nature of life reveals itself to a higher kind of perception, and not to observation that merely traces to their minutest details, processes that are accessible to the senses. Goethe seeks to cognise this essential nature of life through the observation of higher plants and animals. He would undoubtedly have sought this knowledge in the same way, even if in his age the anatomy of plants and animals had advanced as far as it has to-day. If Goethe had been able to observe the cells out of which the bodies of plants and animals are built he would have asserted that these elementary organic forms reveal the same conformity to law as is to be perceived in the most complex. He would have explained the phenomena in these minute entities by means of the same ideas by which he interpreted the life-processes of higher organisms. [ 15 ] It is in Italy that Goethe first finds the thought which solves the riddle facing him in organic development and metamorphosis. On September 3rd he leaves Karlsbad for the South. In a few but significant sentences he describes in the History of my Botanical Studies the thoughts stimulated in him by the observation of the plant world up to the moment when, in Sicily, a clear conception comes to him of how it is that “a fortunate mobility and plasticity is bestowed on plant forms, together with a strong generic and specific tenacity, so that they can adapt themselves to the many conditions working upon them over the face of the earth and develop and transform themselves accordingly.” The “variability of plant forms” was revealed to him as he was crossing the Alps, in the Botanic Gardens of Padua, and in other places. “Whereas in the lower regions branches and stalks were stronger and more bounteous in sap, the buds in closer juxtaposition, and the leaves broader, the higher one got on the mountains the stalks and branches became more fragile, the buds were at greater intervals, and the leaves more lancelate. I noticed this in the case of a willow and of a gentian, and convinced myself that it was not a case of different species. So also near the Walchensee I noticed longer and thinner rushes than in the lowlands” (Italian Journey, 8th September). On October 8th, by the seashore in Venice, he finds different plants wherein the relation between the organic and its environment becomes specially clear to him. “These plants are all both robust and virile, succulent and hardy, and it is apparent that the old salt of the sandy soil, and still more the saline air, gives them this characteristic; they are swollen with juices like water-plants; they are fleshy and hardy like mountain-plants; if their edges have the tendency to form prickles, like thistles, they are exceedingly strong and highly pointed. I found such leaves on bushes; they appeared to me to resemble our harmless coltsfoot, but here they were armed with sharp weapons, the leaves like leather, as also the seed capsules and the stalk, everything very thick and succulent.” (Italian Journey). In the Botanical Gardens at Padua the thought of how all plant-forms could be developed out of one, assumes more definite shape in Goethe's mind. In November he writes to Knebel: “The little botany I know has for the first time become a pleasure to me in this land with its brighter, less sporadic vegetation. I have already made fine general observations which will subsequently be acceptable to you also.” On 25th March, 1787, there comes to him “considerable illumination regarding botanical phenomena.” He begs that “Herder may be told that he is very near to finding the archetypal plant.” Only he fears “no one will be willing to recognise the rest of the plant world therein.” On April 17th he goes to the Public Gardens “with a firm, calm determination to continue his poetical dreams.” But all of a sudden the plant-nature catches him up like a ghost. “The many plants which I was formerly only accustomed to see in pots and tubs, indeed only behind glass windows for most of the year, stand here fresh and gay under the open sky, and thus fulfilling their destiny, they become clearer to us. Amongst so many formations, some new, some familiar, the old fancy again occurred to me as to whether I could not discover among the multitude the archetypal plant. There must be such a thing: how otherwise should I recognise this or that form to be a plant if they were not all fashioned after one type?” He tries hard to distinguish the divergent forms, but his thoughts are guided ever and again to an archetype that lies at the basis of them all. Goethe starts a Botanical Diary in which he notes all his experiences and reflections on the subject of the plant world during the journey. (Goethe's Werke. Weimar Edition Bd. 17. S.273). These diary leaves show how untiringly he is occupied in seeking out specimens of plants fitted to lead him to the laws of growth and reproduction. When he thinks he is on the track of any law he first puts it into hypothetical form, in order to confirm it in the course of his further experiences. He makes careful notes of the processes of generation, of fructification, of growth. More and more it dawns upon him that the leaf is the basic organ of plants, and that the forms of all other plant organs are best understood if they are considered as transformed leaves. He writes in his Diary: “Hypothesis: all is leaf, and through this simplicity the greatest diversity becomes possible.” And on May 17th he writes to Herder: “I must further confide to you that I am very near to the secret of plant generation and organisation, and that it is the simplest thing conceivable. Under this sky the finest observations are possible. I have found clearly and indubitably the cardinal point where the germ is concealed: already I see everything else in its entirety, and only a few details have yet to become more definite. The archetypal plant is the most wonderful creation in the world, for which Nature herself should envy me. With this model, and its key, one can invent plants ad infinitum, and consequently, that is to say, plants which could exist, even if they do not exist, and are not as it were artistic or poetic shadows and fancies but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law may be applied to all else that lives. ... Forwards and backwards the plant is ever only leaf, so indissolubly united with the future germ that one cannot think of the one without the other. To grasp such a concept, to sustain it, to discover it in Nature, is a task which places us in a condition that is almost painful, despite its joy.” (Italian Journey).

[ 16 ] For an explanation of the phenomena of life Goethe takes a path entirely different from those which scientists usually travel. Investigators of Nature may be divided into two classes. There are those who advocate the existence of a life-force working in organic Nature, and this life-force represents a special, higher form of force compared with other Natural causes. Just as the forces of gravity, chemical attraction and repulsion, magnetism, and so on, exist, so there must also exist a life-force which brings about such an interaction in the substances of the organism, that it can maintain itself, grow, nourish and propagate itself. These investigators of Nature say: In the organism work the same forces as in the rest of Nature, but they do not work as in a lifeless machine. They are taken up, as it were, by the life-force and raised to a higher stage of activity. Other investigators oppose this view, believing that no special force works in the organism. They regard the phenomena of life as more highly complicated chemical and physical processes and hope that some time it will be possible to explain an organism just as it is possible to explain a machine, by reducing it to the workings of inorganic forces. The first view is described as the theory of vitalism, the second as mechanistic theory. Goethe's mode of conception differs essentially from both. It appears to him self-evident that in the organism something is active as well as the forces of inorganic Nature. He cannot admit a mechanical explanation of living phenomena. Just as little does he seek a special life-force in order to explain the activities in an organism. He is convinced that for the understanding of living processes there must be a perception of a kind other than that through which the phenomena of inorganic Nature are perceived. Those who decide in favour of the assumption of a life-force realise, it is true, that organic activities are not mechanical, but at the same time they are not able to develop in themselves that other kind of perception by means of which the organic could be understood. The conception of the life-force remains obscure and indefinite. A more recent adherent of the theory of vitalism, Gustav Bunge, thinks that “All the riddles of life are contained in the tiniest cell, and with the existing means at our disposal we have already reached the boundary line.” (Vitalismus und Mechanismus, Leipsig. 1886, S.17). One may answer, entirely in the sense of Goethe's mode of thinking: “That power of perception which only cognises the nature of inorganic phenomena has arrived at the boundary which must be crossed in order to grasp what is living.” This power of perception, however, will never find within its sphere the means adequate to explain the life of even the tiniest cell. Just as the eye is necessary for the perception of colour phenomena, so the understanding of life is dependent on the power of perceiving directly in the sensible a supersensible element. This supersensible element will always escape one who only directs his senses to organic forms. Goethe seeks to animate the sensible perception of the plant forms in a higher sense and to represent to himself the sensible form of a supersensible archetypal plant. (Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums. Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33. S.80). The Vitalist takes refuge in the empty concept of the “life-force” because he simply does not see anything that his senses cannot perceive in the organism; Goethe sees the sensible permeated by a supersensible element, in the same sense as a coloured surface is permeated by colour.

[ 17 ] The followers of the mechanistic theory hold the view that some day it will be possible to produce living substances artificially from inorganic matter. They say that not many years ago it was maintained that substances existed in the organism which could only arise through the activity of the life-force and not artificially. To-day it is already possible to produce some of the substances artificially in the laboratory. Similarly, it may one day be possible to produce a living albumen, which is the basic substance of the simplest organism, out of carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salts. The mechanists think that this will provide the irrefutable proof that life is nothing more than a combination of inorganic processes—the organism just a machine that has arisen in a natural way.

[ 18 ] From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception it may be said that the mechanists speak of substances and forces in a way that has no justification in experience. And people have grown so accustomed to speak in this way that it becomes very difficult to maintain the clear pronouncements of experience in the face of such concepts. Let us, however, consider, without bias, a process of the external world. I/it us take a quantity of water at a definite temperature. How do we know anything about this water? We observe it, notice that it takes up space and is enclosed within definite boundaries. We put a finger or a thermometer into it and find that it has a definite degree of warmth. We press against the surface and find that it is fluid. This is what the senses tell us concerning the condition of the water. Now let us heat the water. It will boil and finally change into steam. Again one can acquire knowledge through sense-perception of the constitution of the substance, of the steam into which the water has changed. Instead of heating the water, it can be subjected to an electric current, under certain conditions. It changes into two substances, hydrogen and oxygen. We can learn about the nature of these two substances also through the senses. Thus in the corporeal world we perceive states, and observe at the same time that these states can, under certain conditions, pass over into others. The senses inform us of these states. When we speak of something else besides states which change we no longer keep to pure facts, but we add concepts to these. When it is said that the oxygen and the hydrogen which have developed out of the water as a result of the electric current were already contained in the water, but so closely united that they could not be perceived individually, a concept has been added to the perception—a concept by means of which the development of the two bodies out of the one is explained. When it is further maintained that oxygen and hydrogen are substances, as is shown by the fact that names have been given to them, again a concept has been added to what has been perceived. For, in reality, in the space occupied by the oxygen, all we can perceive is a sum of states. To these states we add, in thought, the substance to which they are supposed to belong. The substantiality of the oxygen and hydrogen that is conceived of as already existing in water is something that is added in thought to the content of perception. If we combine hydrogen and oxygen into water by a chemical process we can observe that one collection of states passes over into another. When we say: “the two simple substances have united to form a compound,” we have there attempted to give a conceptual exposition of the content of observation. The idea “substance” receives its content, not from perception but from thought. The same thing holds good with “force” as with “substance.” We see a stone fall to the earth. What is the content of perception? A sum-total of sense impressions, states, which appear at successive places. We try to explain this change in the sense-world and say: “the earth attracts the stone; it has a ‘force’ by which it draws the stone to itself.” Again our mind has added a conception to the actuality and given it a content which does not arise out of perception. We do not perceive substances and forces, but states and their transitions into each other. These changes of states are explained by adding concepts to perceptions. [ 19 ] Let us conceive of a being who could perceive oxygen and hydrogen but not water. If we combined oxygen and hydrogen into water before the eyes of such a being the states it perceived in the two substances would disappear into nothingness. If we now described the states which we perceive in water, such a being could form no idea of them. This proves that in the perceptual contents of hydrogen and oxygen there is nothing from which the perceptual content water can be derived. When one substance arises out of two or more different ones that means: Two or more perceptual contents have transformed themselves into a content which is connected with them but is absolutely new. [ 20 ] What would have been achieved if it were found possible to combine carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salt into a living albumenous substance in the laboratory? We should know that the perceptual content of many substances could combine into one perceptual content. But this latter perceptual content cannot in any sense be derived out of the former. The state of living albumen can only be observed in itself; it cannot be developed out of the states of carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salt. In the organism we have something wholly different from the inorganic constituents out of which it can be formed. The sensible contents of perception change into sensible-supersensible when the living being arises. And those who have not the power to form sensible-supersensible conceptions can as little know anything of the nature of an organism as they could experience water if the sensible perception of it were inaccessible to them.

[ 21 ] In his studies of the plant and animal world Goethe tried to conceive of germination, growth, transformations of organs, nutrition and reproduction of the organism, as sensible-supersensible processes. He perceived that this sensible-supersensible process is the same, ideally, in all plants and that it only assumes different forms in its outer manifestation. He was able to establish the same thing concerning the animal world. When man has formed in himself the idea of the sensible-supersensible archetypal plant he will find this again in all single plant-forms. Diversity arises because things, the same ideally, can exist in the perceptual world in different forms. The single organism consists of organs which can be traced back to one basic organ. The basic organ of the plant is the leaf with the nodes from which it develops. This organ assumes different forms in external appearance: cotyledon, foliage, leaf, sepal, petal, etc. “The plant may sprout, blossom, or bear fruit, but it is always the same organs which in manifold conditions and under frequently changed forms fulfil Nature's prescription.”

[ 22 ] In order to get a complete picture of the archetypal plant Goethe had to follow, in general, the forms which the basic organ passes through in the progress of the growth of the plant from germination to the ripening of the seed. In the beginning of its development the whole plant-form rests in the seed. In this the archetypal plant has assumed a form, through which it conceals, as it were, its ideal content in outward appearance.

“Simply slumbered the force in the seed; a germ of the future
Peacefully locked in itself, 'neath the integument lay,
Leaf and root and bud, still void of colour and shapeless;
Thus does the kernel, while dry, cover that motionless life.
Upward then strives it to swell, in gentle moisture confiding,
And from the night where it dwelt, straightway ascendeth to light.”

(Translation by A. E. Bowring).

[ 23 ] Out of the seed the plant develops its primary organs, the cotyledons, after it “has left behind its coverings more or less in the earth” and has established “the root in the soil.” And now, in the further course of growth, impulse follows impulse, nodes upon nodes are piled one above the other, and at each node we have a leaf.

The leaves appear in different forms, the lower still simple, the upper much indented, notched, and composed of many tiny leaves. The archetypal plant at this stage of development spreads out its sensible-supersensible content in space as external sense appearance. Goethe imagines that the leaves owe their progressive development and improvement to the light and the air. “When we find these cotyledons produced in the enclosing seed-walls, filled as it were with a crude sap, almost entirely unorganised, or at any rate only crudely organised and unformed, so do we find the leaves of those plants which grow under water more crudely organised than others that are exposed to the free air; indeed even the same plant species develops smoother and less perfect leaves if it grows in deep, moist places; whereas, on the contrary, in higher regions it produces fibrous and more finely developed leaves, provided with tiny hairs” (Goethe's Werke, Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33. S25.).

In the second epoch of growth the plant again contracts into a narrower space what was previously spread out.

“Less abundantly yielding the sap, contracting the vessels,
So that the figure 'ere long gentler effects doth disclose.
Soon and in silence is checked the growth of the vigorous branches
And the rib of the stalk fuller becometh in form.
Leafless however and quick the tenderer stem then upspringeth,
And a miraculous sight doth the observer enchant.
Ranged in a circle, in numbers that now are small, and now countless,
Gather the smaller-sized leaves, close by the side of their like,
And as the perfectest type, brilliant-hued coronals form.”

(Translation by A. E. Bowring).

[ 24 ] In the calyx the plant form draws itself together, and in the corolla again spreads itself out. The next contraction follows in the pistils and stamens, the organs of generation. In the previous periods of growth the formative force of the plant developed uniformly as the impulse to repeat the basic form. At this stage of contraction the same force distributes itself into two organs. What is separated seeks to re-unite. This happens in the process of fructification. The male pollen existing in the stamens unites with the female substance in the pistils, and the germ of a new plant arises. Goethe calls this fructification, a spiritual anastomosis, and sees in it only another form of the process which occurs in the development from one node to another. “In all bodies which we call living we observe the force to produce its like. When we perceive this force divided, we speak of the two sexes.”

The plant produces its like from node to node, for nodes and leaf are the simple form of the archetypal plant. In this form production means growth. If this reproductive force is divided among two organs we speak of two sexes. In this sense Goethe believes he has brought the concepts of growth and generation nearer to each other. At the stage of fruit-formation the plant attains its final expansion; in the seed it appears again contracted. In these six steps Nature accomplishes a cycle of plant development, and begins the whole process over again. Goethe sees in the seed only another form of the nodule which develops on the leaves. The shoots developing out of the node are complete plants which rest on a mother-plant instead of in the earth. The conception of the basic organ transforming itself stage by stage, as on a “spiritual ladder” from seed to fruit is the idea of the archetypal plant. In order to prove to sense perception, as it were, the transforming power of the basic organ, Nature, under certain conditions, at one stage allows another organ to develop instead of the one that should arise in conformity with the regular course of growth. In the double poppy, for example, petals appear in the lilace where the stamens should arise. The organ destined ideally to become a stamen has become a petal. In the organ that has a definite form in the regular course of plant development there is the possibility to assume another.

[ 25 ] As an illustration of his idea of the archetypal plant Goethe considers the bryophyllum calycinum, a plant species which was brought to Calcutta from the Molucca Islands, and thence came to Europe. Out of the notches in the fleshy leaves these plants develop fresh plantlets, which grow to complete plants after their detachment. In this process, sensibly and visibly presented, Goethe sees that ideally a whole plant slumbers in the leaf. (Goethe's Notes on Bryophyllum Calycinum. Weimar Edition, Part 2. Vol. VII.).

[ 26 ] One who develops the idea of the archetypal plant in himself, and keeps it so plastic that he can think of it in all possible forms which its content permits, can explain all formations in the plant kingdom by its help. He will understand the development of the individual plant, but he will also find that all sexes, species, and varieties are fashioned according to this archetype. Goethe developed these views in Italy and recorded them in his work entitled Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären which appeared in 1790.

[ 27 ] In Italy Goethe also makes progress in the development of his ideas concerning the human organism. On January 20th he writes to Knebel: “As regards anatomy, I have only a very indifferent preparation, and it is not without some labour that I have succeeded in acquiring a certain knowledge of the human frame. Constant examination of the stages here leads one to a higher understanding. In our Academy of Medicine and Surgery it is merely a question of knowing the part, and for this a wretched muscle serves just as well. But in Rome the parts mean nothing unless at the same time they present a noble form. In the great hospital San Spirito they have prepared, for the sake of artists, a very beautiful body displaying the muscles, so that one marvels at its beauty. It could really pass for some flayed demi-god, for a Marsyas. Thus one does not study the skeleton as an artificially arranged mask of bones, but rather after the example of the ancients, with the ligaments by which it receives life and movement.”

After his return from Italy Goethe applied himself industriously to the pursuit of anatomical studies. He feels compelled to discover the formative laws of the animal form just as he had succeeded in doing in the case of the plant. He is convinced that the uniformity of the animal organisation is also based on a fundamental organ which can assume different forms in its external manifestation. When the idea of the basic organ is concealed the organ itself has an undeveloped appearance. Here we have the simpler organs of animals: when the idea is master of the substance, forming the substance into a perfect likeness of itself, the higher, nobler organs arise. That which is present ideally in the simpler organs manifests itself externally in the higher. Goethe did not succeed in apprehending in a single idea the law of the whole animal form as he did for the plant form. He found the formative law for one part only of this animal form—for the spinal cord and brain, with the bones enclosing these organs. He sees in the brain a higher development of the spinal cord. He regards each nerve centre of the ganglia as a brain which has remained at a lower stage (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 8.).

He explains the skull-bones enclosing the brain as transformations of the vertebrae surrounding the spinal cord. It had occurred to him previously that he must regard the posterior cranial bones (occipital, posterior and anterior sphenoid bones) as three transformed vertebrae; he maintains the same thing in regard to the anterior cranial bones, when in the year 1790 he finds in the sands of the Lido a sheep's skull, which is, by great good fortune, cracked in such a way that three vertebrae are made visible to immediate sense perception in a transformed shape in the hard palate—the upper jaw-bone, and the intermaxillary bone.

[ 28 ] In Goethe's time the anatomy of animals had not yet advanced so far that he was able to cite a living being which really has vertebrae in place of developed cranial bones, and which thus presents in sensible form that which only exists ideally in developed animals. The investigations of Karl Gegenbauer, published in the year 1872, made it possible to instance such an animal form. Primitive fish, or selachians, have cranial bones and a brain which are obviously terminal members of the vertebral column and spinal cord. According to this discovery a greater number of vertebrae than Goethe supposed, at least nine, appear to have entered into the head formation. This error in the number of vertebrae, and, in addition, the fact that in the embryonic condition the skull of higher animals shows no trace of being composed of vertebral parts but develops out of a single cartilaginous vesicle, has been adduced as evidence against the value of Goethe's idea concerning the transformation of the spinal cord and vertebrae. It is indeed admitted that the skull has originated from vertebrae, but it is denied that the cranial bones, in the form in which they appear in the higher animals, are transformed vertebrae. It is said that a complete amalgamation of vertebrae into a cartilaginous vesicle has taken place, and that in this amalgamation the original vertebral structure has entirely disappeared. The bony forms which are to be perceived in the higher animals have developed out of this cartilaginous capsule. These forms have not developed in accordance with the archetype of the vertebra, but in accordance with the tasks they have to fulfil in the developed head. So that in seeking an explanation of the forms of any cranial bone the question is not, “How has a vertebra been transformed in order to become the bones of the head?”—but “What conditions have led to this or that bony form separating out of the simple cartilaginous capsule?” It is believed that there is a development of new forms, in conformity with new formative laws, after the original vertebral form has passed over into an unorganised capsule. A contradiction between this view and Goethe's can only be found from the standpoint of “fact-fanaticism.” The vertebral structure that is no longer sensibly perceptible in the cartilaginous capsule of the skull does nevertheless exist in it ideally and re-appears as soon as the conditions for this appearance are there. In the cartilaginous skull-capsule the idea of the vertebral basic organ is concealed within matter; in the developed cranial bones it re-appears in outer manifestation.

[ 29 ] Goethe hopes that the formative laws of the other parts of the animal organism will be revealed to him in the same way as was the case with those of brain, spinal cord, and their enveloping organs. With regard to the Lido discovery he informs Herder, through Frau von Kalb, April 30th, that he “has come much closer to the animal form and its many transformations and indeed through a most curious accident.” He believes himself to be so near his goal that he wants to complete, in the very year of his discovery, a work on animal development which may be placed side by side with the “Metamorphosis of Plants” (Correspondence with Knebel, pp 98.).

During his travels in Silesia, July, 1790, Goethe pursues studies in Comparative Anatomy and begins to write an Essay On the Form of Animals (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 8, p. 261.). He did not succeed in advancing from this happy starting point to the formative laws of the whole animal form. He made many an attempt to find the Type of the animal form, but nothing analogous to the idea of the archetypal plant resulted. He compares the animals with each other, and with man, and seeks to obtain a general picture of the animal structure, according to which, as a model, Nature fashions the individual forms. This general picture of the animal type is not a living conception that is filled with a content in accordance with the basic laws of animal formation, and thus recreates, as it were, the archetypal animal of Nature. It is only a general concept that has been abstracted from the special appearances. It confirms the existence of the common element in the manifold animal forms, but it does not contain the law of animal nature.

“All the members develop according to Laws Eternal.
And the rarest of forms secretly preserves the Archetype.”

(The Metamorphosis of Animals.)

[ 30 ] Goethe could not evolve a uniform conception of how the archetype, through the transformation according to law of a basic member, develops as the many-membered archetypal form of the animal organism. The Essays on The Form of Animals and the Sketch of Comparative Anatomy proceeding from Osteology, which were written in Jena in 1795, as well as the later and more detailed work, Lectures on the first three Chapters of an Outline of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, only contain indications as to how the animals are to be compared suitably in order to obtain a general scheme according to which the creative power “produces and develops organic beings,” in accordance with which these descriptions are worked out and to which the most diverse forms are to be traced back, since such a norm may be abstracted from the forms of different animals. In the case of plants, however, Goethe has shown how through successive modifications an archetype develops, according to law, to the perfect organic form.

[ 31 ] Even if Goethe could not follow the creative power of Nature in its formative and transforming impulse through the different members of the animal organism, yet he did succeed in finding single laws to which Nature adheres in the building of animal forms, laws which do indeed conform to the general norm but vary in their manifestation. He imagines that Nature has no power to change the general picture at will. If in some creature one member is developed to a high degree of perfection, this can only happen at the expense of another. The archetypal organism contains all the members that can appear in any one animal. In the single animal form one member may be developed, another only indicated; one may develop completely, another may be imperceptible to the senses. In the latter case Goethe is convinced that the elements pertaining to the general type that are not visible in an animal exist, nevertheless, in the idea. “If we behold in a creature some special excellence we have merely to question and find where something is lacking. The searching spirit will find somewhere the existence of a defect and at the same time the key to the whole of creation. Thus we can find no beast who carries a horn on its head and has perfect teeth in the upper bone of the jaw; the Eternal Mother, therefore, could never have created a lion with horns even by the exercise of all her power. For she has not enough substance to implant the full series of teeth and at the same time bring forth horns and antlers.” (Metamorphosis of the Animals.)

[ 32 ] All members are developed in the archetypal organism and maintained in equilibrium; the diversity arises because the formative force expends itself on one member and, as a result, another remains in an absolutely undeveloped state or is merely indicated in external manifestation. This law of the animal organism is called to-day the law of the correlation or compensation of organs.

[ 33 ] Goethe's conception is that the whole plant world is contained in the archetypal plant and the whole animal world in the archetypal animal, as idea. Out of this thought arises the question: How is it that in one case these definite plant or animal forms arise, and in another, others? Under what conditions does a fish develop out of the archetypal animal? under what conditions a bird? In the scientific explanation of the structure of organisms Goethe finds a mode of presentation that is distasteful to him. The adherents of this mode of conception ask in regard to each organ: What purpose does it serve in the living being in whom it occurs?—Such a question is based on the general thought that a divine Creator, or Nature, has predetermined a definite purpose in life for each being and has then bestowed upon it a structure which enables it to fulfil this purpose. In Goethe's view this is just as absurd as the question: To what end does an elastic sphere move when it is pushed by another? An explanation of the motion can only be given by discovering the law by which the sphere is set in motion through a blow or other cause. One does not ask: “What purpose is served by the motion of the sphere?” but, “Whence is the motion derived?” In Goethe's opinion one should not ask: “Why has the bull horns?” but rather: “How can he have horns?” Through what law does the archetypal animal appear in the bull as a horn-carrying form? Goethe sought for the idea of the archetypal plant and animal in order to find in them the reasons for the diversity of organic forms. The archetypal plant is the creative element in the plant world. If one wants to explain a single plant species then one must show how this creative element works in this special case. The thought that an organic being owes its form, not to the forces formatively acting in it, but to the fact that the form is imposed upon it from without for certain ends, was repulsive to Goethe. He writes: “In a pitiful, apostolically monkish declamation of the Zurich prophet I recently found this stupid sentence: ‘Everything that has life, lives through something outside of itself’—or words to that effect. Only a proselytiser of the heathen could write such a thing, and on revising it, his genius does not pluck him by the sleeve” (Italian Journey, 5th Oct., 1781). Goethe thinks of the organic being as a “little” world, a microcosm which has arisen through itself, and fashions itself according to its own laws. “The conception that a living being is produced from outside for certain extraneous ends, and that its form is determined by a purposive primeval force, has already delayed us many centuries in the philosophical consideration of Nature, and still holds us back, although individual men have vigorously attacked this mode of thought, and have shown the obstacles which it creates. It is, if one may so express it, a paltry way of thinking, which like all paltry things is trivial just because it is convenient and sufficient for human nature in general” (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 7, p.217). It is, of course, convenient to say that a Creator, when forming an organic species, has based it on a certain purposive thought, and has therefore given it a definite form. Goethe's aim, however, is not to explain Nature by the intentions of some supernatural being, but out of her inherent formative laws. An individual organic form arises because the archetypal plant or animal assumes a definite form in a special case. This form must be of such a kind that it is able to live in the conditions surrounding it. “The existence of a creature which we call fish is only possible under the condition of an element that we call water.” (Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 7. p. 221). When Goethe is seeking to comprehend the formative laws which produce a definite organic form he goes back to his archetypal organism. This archetypal organism has the power to realise itself in the most manifold external forms. In order to explain a fish Goethe would investigate what formative forces the archetypal animal employs in order to produce this particular fish form from among all the forms which exist in it ideally. If the archetypal animal were to realise itself in certain conditions in a form in which it could not live it would not survive. An organic form can only maintain itself within certain conditions of life if it is adapted to them.

“Thus by the animal's form is its manner of living determined,
Likewise the manner of life worketh
back on every creature, And so the organised form firmly makes its appearance,
yet with the power to change, through outer conditions of Nature.”

(The Metamorphosis of Animals.)

[ 34 ] The organic forces surviving in a given life-element are conditioned by the nature of the element. If an organic form were to leave one life-element for another it must transform itself accordingly. This can happen in definite cases because the archetypal organism which lies at its base has the power of realising itself in countless forms. The transformation of one form into another is, however, according to Goethe's view, not to be conceived of in such a way that the external conditions immediately remould the form in accordance with their own nature, but that they become the cause through which the inner being transforms itself. Changed life-conditions provoke the organic form to transform itself in a certain way according to inner laws. The external influences work indirectly, not directly, on the living being. Countless forms of life are contained in the archetypal plant and animal ideally: those on which external influences work as stimuli come to actual existence.

[ 35 ] The conception that a plant or animal species can in the course of ages, as a result of certain conditions, be transformed into another, has its full justification in Goethe's view of Nature. Goethe's view is that the force which produces a new being through the process of procreation is simply a transformation of that force which brings about the progressive metamorphosis of organs in the course of growth. Reproduction is a “growing-beyond” the individual.

As the basic organ during growth undergoes a sequence of changes which are ideally the same, similarly, a transformation of the external form can also occur in reproduction, while the ideal archetype remains the same. If an original organic form existed, then its descendants in the course of great epochs of time could pass over through gradual transformations into the manifold forms peopling the earth at present. The thought of an actual blood-relationship uniting all organic forms flows out of Goethe's basic conceptions. He might have expressed it in its completed form immediately after he had formed his idea of the archetypal animal and plant. But he expresses himself with reserve, even indefinitely, when he alludes to this thought.

In the Essay, Versuch einer allgemeinen Vergleich-ungslehre, which was probably written shortly after the Metamorphosis of Plants, we read: “And how worthy it is of Nature that she must always employ the same means in order to produce and nourish a creature. Thus one will progress along just these paths, and just as one at first only regarded the inorganic, undetermined elements as vehicles of organised beings, so will one now progress in observation, and again regard the organised world as a union of many elements. The whole kingdom of plants, for example, will again appear to us like a great ocean, which is just as necessary to the limited existence of the insects, as the waters and rivers are to the limited existence of fishes, and we shall see that a vast number of living creatures are born and nourished in this ocean of plants; we shall, finally, again regard the whole animal world as a great element where one race maintains itself out of and through the other if not arising from it.” There is less reserve in the following sentence from Lectures on the first three Chapters of an Outline of Comparative Anatomy (1796): “We should also have come to the point where we could fearlessly maintain that all the more perfect organic beings, among which we reckon fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the summit of the last, Man, are formed according to one archetype, which only in its constituent parts inclines hither and thither and daily develops and transforms itself through procreation.” Goethe's caution regarding the thought of transformation is comprehensible. The epoch in which he elaborated his ideas was not unfamiliar with this thought. It had, however, been developed in the most confused sense. “That epoch,” writes Goethe, “was darker than one can conceive of now.” It was stated, for example, that man, if he liked, could go about comfortably on all fours, and that bears, if they remained upright for a period of time, could become human beings. The audacious Diderot ventured to make certain proposals as to how goat-footed fauns could be produced and then put into livery, to sit in pomp and distinction on the coaches of the mighty and the rich! Goethe would have nothing to do with such undue ideas. His aim was to obtain an idea of the basic laws of the living. It became clear to him here that the forms of the living are not rigid and unchangeable, but are subject to continual transformation. He had, however, no opportunity of making observations which would have enabled him to see how this transformation was accomplished in the single phenomenon. It was the investigations of Darwin and the reflections of Haeckel that first threw light on the actual relationship between the single organic forms. From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception one can only give assent to the assertions of Darwinism in so far as they concern the actual emergence of one organic species from another. Goethe's ideas, however, penetrate more deeply into the nature of the organic world than modern Darwinism. Modern Darwinism believes that it can do without the inner impelling forces in the organism which Goethe conceives of in the sensible-supersensible image. Indeed it would even deny that Goethe was justified in arguing, from his postulates, an actual transformation of organs and organisms. Jul. Sachs rejects Goethe's thoughts by saying that he transfers “the abstraction evolved by the intellect to the object itself when he ascribes to this object a metamorphosis which, fundamentally speaking, is only accomplished in our concept.” According to this view Goethe has presumably gone no further than to reduce leaves, sepals, petals, etc., to one general concept, designating them by the name ‘leaf.’ “Of course the matter would be quite different if we could assume that the stamens were ordinary leaves in the ancestors of the plant-forms lying before us, etc.” (Sachs, History of Botany. 1875, p. 169).

This view springs from that “fact-fanaticism” which cannot see that the ideas belong just as objectively to the phenomena as the elements that are perceptible to the senses. Goethe's view is that the transformation of one organ into another can only be spoken of if both contain something in common over and above their external appearance. This is the sensible-supersensible form. The stamens of a plant-form before us can only be described as the transformed leaf of the predecessors if the same sensible-supersensible form lives in both. If that is not the case, if the stamen has developed in the particular plant-form simply in the same place in which a leaf developed in its predecessors, then no transformation has occurred, but one organ has merely appeared in the place of another. The Zoologist Oscar Schmidt asks: “What is it that is supposed to be transformed according to Goethe's views? Certainly not the archetype!” (War Goethe Darwinianer? Graz. 1871, p. 22.). Certainly the archetype is not transformed, for this is the same in all forms. But it is just because this remains the same that the external forms can be different, and yet represent, a uniform Whole. If one could not recognise the same ideal archetype in two forms developing out of each other, no relation could be assumed to exist between them. Only the conception of the ideal archetypal form can impart real meaning to the assertion that the organic forms arise by a process of transformation out of each other. Those who cannot rise to this conception remain chained within the mere facts. The laws of organic development lie in this conception. Just as Kepler's three fundamental laws make the processes in the solar system comprehensible, so can the forms of organic Nature be understood through Goethe's ideal archetypes.

[ 36 ] Kant, who denies to the human spirit the power of understanding, in the ideal sense, a Whole by which a multiplicity is determined in its appearance, calls it “a risky adventure of reason” to seek to explain the various forms of the organic world by an archetypal organism. For him man is only in a position to gather the manifold, individual phenomena into one general concept by which the intellect forms for itself a picture of the unity. This picture, however, exists only in the human mind and has nothing to do with the creative power by which the unity really causes the multiplicity to proceed out of itself. The “risky adventure of reason” consists in assuming that the Earth first allows the more simple organisms to proceed out of her womb and that these then produce from themselves forms with more deliberate purpose; that from these again, still higher forms develop, up to the most perfect living being. Kant holds that even if such a supposition is made, it can only be based on a purposive creative force, which has given evolution such an impulse that all its various members develop in accordance with some goal. Man perceives a multitude of different organisms; and since he cannot penetrate them in order to see how they themselves assume a form adapted to the life-element in which they develop, he must conceive that they are so adapted from without that they can live within these conditions. Goethe, however, claims the faculty of being able to recognise how Nature creates the particular from the whole, the outer from the inner. He is willing to undertake courageously what Kant calls the “adventure of reason” (cp. the Essay: Anschauende Urteilskraft Kürschner. Bd. 34.). If we had no other proof that Goethe regarded as justifiable the thought of a blood-relationship among all organic forms within the limits here specified, we should have to conclude it from this judgment of Kant's “adventure of reason.”

[ 37 ] A sketch, Entwurf einer Morphologie, which still exists, suggests that Goethe intended to present, in their sequence, the special forms which his archetypal plant and archetypal animal assume in the main forms of living beings. He wanted first to describe the nature of the organic as it appeared to him through his contemplation of animals and plants. Then he wanted to show how the organic archetypal being, “proceeding from a centre,” develops on the one side to the manifold plant world, on the other to the multiplicity of animal forms, and how particular forms of worms, of insects, of higher animals and the form of man can be derived from the general archetype. He intended even to shed light on physiognomy and phrenology. He made it his task to present the external form in its connection with the inner spiritual faculties. He was impelled to follow the organic formative impulse, which in the lower organisms is portrayed in a simple external appearance, in its striving to fulfil itself stage by stage in ever more perfect forms until it produces in man a form which makes him able to be the creator of spiritual production.

[ 38 ] This plan of Goethe's was never completed, any more than was another, the commencement of which is to be found in the fragment, Vorarbeiten zu einer Physiologie der Pflanzen (cp. Weimar Edition, Part 2, Vol. 6, pp. 286 ff.). Goethe tried to show how the various branches of material knowledge,—Natural History, Physics, Anatomy, Chemistry, Zöonomy and Physiology—must work together, in order to be applied in a higher mode of perception to explain the forms and processes of living beings. He wanted to bring forward a new science, a general morphology of organisms, new indeed “not in reference to its subject-matter, for this is known, but in its outlook and method, which must give an individual form to the doctrine as well as establish a place for it among other sciences.” What Anatomy, Natural History, Physics, Chemistry, Zöonomy, Physiology have to offer as the various laws of Nature, would be taken up by the living idea of the organic and placed on a higher level, just as the living being itself takes up the different processes of Nature in the cycle of its development and places them on a higher level of activity.

[ 39 ] Goethe reached the ideas which guided him through the labyrinth of living forms along paths of his own. The prevailing conceptions in regard to important regions of Nature's activity contradicted his own general world-conception. Therefore with regard to these regions he had to form for himself conceptions in accordance with his own being. He was convinced, however, that there was “nothing new under the sun,” and that one “could certainly find one's own perceptions already indicated in traditions.” For this reason he sent his work on the Metamorphosis of the Plants to learned friends, and begged them to tell him whether anything had already been written or handed down concerning the theme in question. He was glad to be told, by Friedrich August Wolf, of an “admirable precursor,” one Caspar Friedrich Wolf. Goethe became acquainted with his Theoria Generationis which had appeared in 1759. But this very work shows that it is possible to hold a correct view of the facts and yet that a man cannot come to the full idea of organic development unless he is capable of arriving at the sensible-supersensible form of life through a power of perception higher than that of the senses. Wolf was an excellent observer. He sought to discover the beginnings of life by means of microscopical investigations. He recognised transformed leaves in the calyx, corolla, pistils, stamens and seed. But he ascribed the process of transformation to a gradual decrease of the life-force, which diminishes in proportion to the length of time the plant exists, until it finally disappears. Calyx, corolla, etc., are, therefore, for him an imperfect development of the leaf. Wolf came forward as the opponent of Haller, who advanced the theory of Pre-formation or “Encasement.” According to this theory, all the members of a fully-grown organism are already represented on a small scale in the germ, and, indeed, in the same shape and mutual arrangement as in the developed living being. The development of an organism is thus simply an unfolding of what already exists. Wolf would only accept validity in what he saw with his eyes. And since the encased condition of a living being could not be discovered even by the most careful observations, he regarded development as an actually new formation. According to his view, the shape of an organic being is not yet present in the germ. Goethe is of the same opinion in reference to the external manifestation. He, too, rejects the “Encasement Theory” of Haller. For Goethe the organism is indeed pre-figured in the germ, not according to its external appearance but according to the idea. He regards the external appearance as a new formation, but reproaches Wolf with the fact that where he sees nothing with the eyes of the body, he also sees nothing with the eyes of the spirit. Wolf had no conception of the fact that something may still exist in the idea even if it does not pass into external manifestation. “Therefore he is always concerned with penetrating to the beginnings of the development of life by means of microscopical investigations and so following the organic embryos from their earliest appearance up to their development. However admirable this method may be, yet the excellent man did not think that there is a distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing,’ that the eyes of the spirit have to work in constant, living union with the eyes of the body because otherwise one may fall into the danger of seeing and yet overlooking. ... In the plant-transformation he saw the same organ continually contracting, continually diminishing, but he did not see that this contraction alternated with an expansion. He saw that it diminished in volume, but did not observe that at the same time it became more perfect, and he therefore absurdly attributed the path towards perfection to a process of impoverishment.” (Kürschner Nat. Lit. Bd. 33.).

[ 40 ] Until the very end of his life Goethe was in touch with innumerable scientific investigators, both in personal and written intercourse. He followed the progress of the science of living beings with the keenest interest; he saw with joy how modes of thought resembling his own gained entrance into this department of knowledge, and how his doctrine of metamorphosis was also recognised and made fruitful by individual investigators. In the year 1817 he began to gather his works together and to publish them in a periodical which he founded under the title, Zur Morphologie. In spite of all this, however, he made no further progress, through personal observation or reflection, in the growth of his ideas concerning organic development. On two other occasions only did he feel compelled to occupy himself more deeply with such ideas. In both cases he was attracted by scientific phenomena in which he found the confirmation of his own thoughts. The one case was the Course of Lectures held by K. F. Martius on “The Vertical and Spiral Tendency of Vegetation” at the Conference of Natural Scientists in the years 1828 and 1829, of which the periodical “Isis” published extracts; the other was a scientific dispute in the French Academy which broke out in the year 1830 between Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier.

[ 41 ] Martius conceived of the growth of plants as being dominated by two tendencies by a striving in the vertical direction which governs the root and stem, and by another which causes the leaves, the organs of the blossoms and so on, to incorporate themselves into the vertical organs of the form of a spiral line. Goethe took these thoughts and brought them into connection with his idea of metamorphosis. He wrote a long essay (Kürschner Bd. 33), into which he collected all his experiences of the plant-world which appeared to him to point to the existence of these two tendencies. He believed that he had to merge these tendencies into his idea of metamorphosis. “This much we must assume: there prevails in vegetation a general spiral tendency, whereby, in union with the vertical striving of the whole structure, each formation in the plant is brought about in accordance with the laws of metamorphosis.” Goethe regarded the existence of spiral vessels in the various plant organs as a proof that the spiral tendency dominates the life of plants throughout. “Nothing is more in accordance with Nature than the fact that what she intends in the Whole she activates through the minutest detail.” “Let us in summer look at a stake planted in the soil up which a bindweed (convolvulus) climbs from below, winding its way to the heights and—clinging closely—maintains its living growth. Let us think now of the bindweed and stake as both equally living and ascending upwards from one root, producing each other alternately and so progressing unchecked. Those who can transform this picture into an inner perception will find the idea considerably easier. The twining plant seeks outside itself that which it should itself produce, but cannot.” Goethe uses the same comparison in a letter to Count Sternberg, 15th March, 1832, and adds these words: “Of course the comparison does not entirely fit, for in the beginning the creeper must wind itself round the stem in barely perceptible circles. The nearer it approaches the summit, however, the quicker must the spiral line turn in order finally (in the blossom) to collect itself in a circle on the disc. This process resembles the dances of one's youth, where half reluctantly one was often pressed in the close embrace of affectionate children. Pardon these anthropomorphisms!” Ferdinand Cohn remarks in reference to this passage: “If only Goethe had known Darwin! How pleased he would have been with this man, who through his strictly inductive methods knew how to find clear and convincing proofs for his ideas.” Darwin thinks that in nearly all plant organs he can show that in the period of their growth they have the tendency to spiral movements which he calls circummutation.

[ 42 ] In September, 1830, Goethe refers in an essay to the dispute between the two investigators, Cuvier and Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire; in March, 1832, he continues this essay. In February and March, 1830, Cuvier, the “fact-fanatic” came forward in the French Academy in opposition to the work of Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire, who, in Goethe's opinion, had attained to a “lofty mode of thought in conformity with the idea.” Cuvier was a master of the distinctions existing between the various organic forms. Saint-Hilaire tried to discover the analogies in these forms and to prove that the organisation of animals is “subject to a general plant only modified here and there, whence the differences can be derived.” He tried to acquire knowledge of the relationship between the laws and was convinced that the particular could develop stage by stage from the whole. Goethe regards Saint-Hilaire as a man of like mind with himself and he expresses this to Eckermann, 2nd August, 1830, in the words: “Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire is now our ally, and with him all important followers and adherents in France. This occurrence is of inconceivable value to me and I justly rejoice at this final victory of a matter to which I have devoted my life and which is my own special concern.” Saint-Hilaire practises a mode of thought which is also that of Goethe, for he seeks to lay hold in experience of the idea of unity simultaneously with the sensible manifold. Cuvier clings to the manifold, to the particular, because in his observation of the particular the idea does not immediately arise. Saint-Hilaire had a right perception of the relation of the sensible to the idea; Cuvier had not. Therefore he describes Saint-Hilaire's all-inclusive principle as presumptive—nay even inferior. One can often experience, especially in the case of investigators of Nature, that they speak in a derogatory sense of something merely ideal, of something merely “thought.” They have no organ for the ideal, and therefore do not know its mode of working. It was because Goethe possessed this organ in a highly perfect state of development that he was led from his general world-conception to his deep insight into the nature of the living. His power of allowing the spiritual eye to work in constant living union with the eye of the body made it possible for him to behold the uniform sensible-supersensible essence which permeates organic evolution. He was also able to recognise this essence where one organ develops out of the other, and where, by its transformation, it conceals its relationship and similarity to its predecessor, even belying it, and changing, both in its function and in its form, to such a degree that no parallel, according to external characteristics, can be found with its earlier stages (cp. the essay on Joachim Jungius, Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 33.). Perception with the eye of the body imparts knowledge of the sensible and material; perception with the eye of the spirit leads to the perception of processes in human consciousness, to the observation of the world of thinking, feeling and willing; the living union of the spiritual and bodily eye makes possible the knowledge of the organic which, as a sensible-supersensible element, lies between the purely sensible and the purely spiritual.

Anthroposophy and psychology. Spiritual scientific findings concerning the human soul

Reference to ‘anthroposophy’ in this lecture is not to something coming from a sectarian movement or spiritual stream, but to something much more general and human—a spiritual stream that arises with an inner necessity at this time from the scientific approach that has evolved into its present form in recent centuries.

Please do not, however, think of this approach, which we refer to as ‘anthroposophy’, as the kind of logical consequence arising from consistent judgements based on scientific postulates. No, the idea is that this anthroposophy must develop in its own right, as a living structure, living experience, in an age when we have to think scientifically about many issues in life and in the world. It is more like a live offspring—if I may put it like this—of the scientific way of thinking than just a logical conclusion drawn from it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I will have to try and make these four lectures on widely different fields in modern science into a whole. This means that individual lectures cannot be complete in themselves, and I would ask you to keep this very much in mind.

Beginning the series of lectures with a look at the relationship between anthroposophy and psychology seems natural and indeed obvious since in aiming to be orientated towards the world of the spirit, and seeking to obtain its findings from that world, we will have to be concerned in anthroposophy with the most inward affairs of the human being, that is, with human psychology. That is one side of it. On the other hand we have to consider that in the course of recent centuries, especially the 19th century, the science called psychology has taken on a very different character from that which it had just a short time before. It is exactly because scientific thinking has been applied in many spheres of life that psychology has become more of an enigma perhaps, has been found to be more full of riddles relating to life than any other field of scientific endeavour in recent times. It was only natural that in the light of the great, tremendous results achieved in scientific research, views and approaches based on scientific methods took hold, as it were, of everything that comes within the horizons of human knowledge. The scientific approach has therefore also extended its power, we might say, to the field of psychology in more recent times.

Let me immediately deal with a prejudice or misunderstanding that arises only too easily when it comes to anthroposophical research. People may say that those who do research with an anthroposophical orientation are not prepared to take account of the scientific advances made in recent times. The opposite is the case. The other lectures I will be giving here will show that modern science is in fact only given its proper due by providing it with the firm foundation which anthroposophy or the science of the spirit is able to provide for it. To some degree this will be evident as soon as we consider the relationship between anthroposophy and human psychology. Modern science is justified in making it an ideal to keep all natural processes that have been studied, the content of natural developments and facts of nature, separate from anything that has soul quality, never allowing anything that comes from subjective, psychological experience and therefore arises as inner experience, to be brought into scientific observations and experiments. That is the only way in which anyone using this modern scientific approach can hope that human beings will not cloud the objective view taken of facts in nature with anything they bring to nature out of inner inclinations or experiences.

It was only natural that such an ideal would give psychology a particular character, for in earlier times the soul did not relate to the outside world in the way it now must do in the scientific study of nature. Anyone who is seeking to get a feel for the scientific thinking and the views of the world held in earlier centuries, will find that in those earlier times people did not neatly keep the facts of nature which they sought to explain and understand apart from the soul’s inner response to these facts and to the symbolic, shall we say, or other ideas developed in relation to them. In a way, the experiences people had in relation to nature were mixed up with the objective facts of nature. However, as science itself was not yet free then from some of the things that came from the soul, people did not find themselves as puzzled as they do today when it comes to psychology. If you found soul qualities revealed in nature herself, and gained soul qualities as well as purely material facts from nature, you were also much more likely than now seems possible—when the aim is to consider nature in such a way that anything ‘subjective’, any soul quality, is ignored—to think that you might learn something about how soul quality was created in the nonphysical world so as to be in harmony with what you would observe in nature and world. If you have a scientific approach where the greatest ideal is thought to be that anything to do with the soul is excluded, so that concepts, ideas and methods must be developed that are based on exclusion of the soul element, how can you use such methods to study and gain any kind of insight in the sphere of the soul? How can anything learnt in modern science, where the soul element is excluded, be applied to a study of the inner life?

Nevertheless, we shall see in the third lecture how physiology and another science which has a great future and is currently in the process of having chairs established at universities—experimental psychology—will gain sound foundations if it proves possible to develop a psychology that is a science of the soul in spite of the modern scientific ideal. The approach which is to be presented here does not in any way go against everything that has come to the inner life out of modern science when this served as an aid. Quite the contrary! The work which has been done in psychology laboratories more recently will truly bear fruit and gain real significance when seen from a particular anthroposophical point of view.¹

Now we may ask ourselves: What do human beings really want when they approach the natural world using the methods applied, and rightly so, in modern science? What do people want to discover in that world? We could talk about this for hours; let me give a brief idea of how the question might perhaps be answered.

Human beings develop certain needs as their inner life evolves, for the simple reason that they have inner experiences in the psyche, whilst the realities of nature proceed outside them. Modern science is developing out of those needs. People want to be able to cope with the questions that arise inwardly, with the riddles and doubts that may arise in the psyche when they consider the world of nature. And they want to have an image of nature where justice is also done to their inner experiences. It is really the observer who establishes the directives, the trends in modern science. We only have to recall the words if Du Bois- Reymond² in his famous talk on the limits of science: ‘Insight is gained into nature when our need for causality is met—something subjective, therefore, something based in human experience.’ The postulate is, however, that such a subjective, personal inner experience, with its doubts and questions, comes up against the outer processes in the world of nature as though against a sphinx. Those natural events do not at first sight match the image we have of them in our souls. We can alter the first image which has arisen at first sight, doing so with the processes that occur in the soul, and exactly in this way arrive at modern science.

Can we do the same with regard to the inner life? This is a question we do not always answer with sufficient clarity and accuracy. We cannot relate to the psyche in the same way as we do to the natural world, posing our questions in our usual state of mind. The life of the psyche happens inside us. We can merely experience it, live through it. We will not gain anything, however, by categorizing whatever we have come to know there the way we do when we categorize the natural world according to laws so as to arrive at a science of nature. This inner life can be known as it occurs in ordinary everyday life; but in thus living in it there is really no reason for us to treat it in the same way as we do the facts of the natural world. These take us into the unknown, as it were, at every step, but when it comes to the inner life we are right inside it. We have to train ourselves to consider specific questions in natural science if with regard to the inner life we want to use a method similar to the one generally used in natural science.

Now we might say that with the natural world, the observer is inevitably someone on the outside, but when it comes to the inner life, there is no outside observer. This makes some people doubt that it will be possible to observe the inner life. They are unable to see how such a split might happen, so that one has the evolution of the inner life and at the same time is also an observer.

But it is exactly this strange paradox which has to come about if we want to develop a psychology that will rank equal with natural science, or, I would say, is in the spirit of the demands made in modern science. The question concerning the observer of the inner life must be taken seriously and considered in its full significance and depth. Nothing that lives in us can directly observe this inner life. Where scientists studying the natural world who want to be true to the ideal of modern science remove everything that has soul quality from their way of thinking, making the psyche stand aside completely, as it were, psychologists must go exactly the opposite way today. They must not take away anything that is inner experience but must bring something into those inner experiences; they must penetrate those inner experiences with something that does not exist in our ordinary conscious minds. Psychologists must go exactly in the opposite direction! Modern science has grown great by going its way, and because of this the psychologist must go the opposite way. The big and significant question is, how can this way be found?

Some of the things I am going to say now will sound strange. But perhaps you need to consider that anything new in the course of cultural development has always seemed strange to begin with. Just think of the great, revolutionary scientific achievements—how people felt about them, and the troubles and strife they caused. Human beings are very much closer to the psyche than they are to the natural world. No wonder then if with regard to psychology, as a more recent science, many things will come up again that have also been known in the evolution of natural scientific research.

With anthroposophically orientated psychology it has to be clear from the beginning that, as I said before, the conscious awareness we have in everyday life and which is also commonly used in ordinary scientific research, will not be enough. Psychology is going to be a challenge to conscious awareness. In a book published a year ago,³ I dealt with the subject of psychology as follows. If the soul is basically unable to know anything about its everyday experiences but is only able to live in them the way one lives in the natural world outside before one has gained an image of it through natural science, this indicates that the soul must change if it is to observe facts relating to itself. This will mean quite a few difficulties with today’s dominant school of thought. The current idea is not to touch the soul, whatever we do, but to leave it as we have received it ‘from the hands of nature herself’, as the saying goes, and to direct scientific study to what lives in the psyche. Psychology will, however, need to draw powers from deeper sources, from spheres that lie hidden from ordinary experience, to gain methods of observation and of forming ideas that differ from those we have in ordinary life.

Let me tell you briefly and simply what has to happen to the human psyche if it is to be a real observer of its own inner experiences or, to put it in a better way, awaken the inner observer who lies hidden in it, so that it may investigate its own inner life. Our thinking, all the ways of forming ideas we develop in the study of the natural world, will not be what we need when it comes to the psyche. You will soon note, especially if you struggle inwardly to gain insight, that all those ideas do not take us beyond the facts that can be observed in natural science; they do not get us anywhere near the realm of the psyche.

The situation changes the moment we reach the points—I call them the frontier posts in our search for knowledge—where the human being is full of doubt to begin with and keeps saying to himself: This is as far as we can go in our search for knowledge with what has been granted to humanity; we cannot go beyond this. Just consider how people whose thinking is wholly based on the modern scientific way and who seek to dig down deeper and deeper into existence in their thoughts then come to such frontier posts. Let me give you some examples to show how someone struggling to gain insight truly comes to quite specific points in his inner life.

The first example I would like to give is one I found with a seeker who may not be appreciated so much as a philosopher but is all the more highly esteemed as a person, and that is the well-known aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer.⁴ In his review of Volkelt’s interesting small book on dream fantasy⁵ he put all his inner energies into raising the question as to what the relationship might be between human soul and human body.

There is a difference between considering the issue from a philosophical perspective, taking a conventional view and applying only the rational mind to it, or letting hard effort in thinking create the inner experience of truly facing something like a sphinx. It was out of such apprehensions—one can see it from the way it all goes—that Friedrich Theodor Vischer, known as ‘V Vischer’, asked himself this question. He wrote: ‘The human soul cannot be in the body; yet it also cannot be anywhere but in the body.’⁶ Completely contradictory! The contradiction arises, however, not because it has been dragged in by logic, but out of the fullness of inner thought, a contradiction one is wrestling with, a contradiction that may be the beginning of an inner drama in the struggle to gain insight. And we should not fight shy of such dramas that bring living inner experience if we want to develop a true psychology.

This, then, is one of the highly significant questions at the frontier posts of knowledge. There are many of them. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of seven riddles of the world.⁷ We might refer to hundreds of such questions, both lesser and greater. We may stop at them, saying that this is as far as the human ability to know things goes, but if we admit to this it merely means that we lack courage in the quest for knowledge. What matters here is that we must be able to let such questions live on in us, in the fullness of our inner life, not seeking to consider them rationally, bringing all our inner powers to bear, but to live through them and have the patience to wait and see if something of a revelation will not come from the outside. And this does happen.

If we do not seek to meet such questions with preconceived ideas but enter into the billows, as it were, which such questions raise in the human soul, we come to a completely new living experience which we cannot have in our ordinary state of mind. Let me give you an analogy for this living experience. It is an elementary experience in the psyche and an elementary experience for the genesis of an anthroposophically orientated psychology. We simply must take it in its full reality, not in an abstract, dead sense. Let us think—it does not matter here if the analogy has full justification or not, for it will tell us what it is meant to tell us—let us think of an animal that is very low down in the evolutionary scale, a creature that does not yet have a differentiated sense of touch relating to the outside world. It is more or less just rummaging around inside as it experiences life and bumps into physical objects that exist around it. Now imagine such a life form gaining perfection in terms of the theory of evolution. What can evolve in this case? Where a lower animal merely bumps into objects outside and experiences those bumps inwardly in a completely undifferentiated way, differentiation in the course of evolution causes this to develop into a sense of touch. In the scientific theory of evolution, the differentiation of life in the senses is, I would say, generally presented as bumping into things and differentiation developing from this. The process which here happens externally, physiologically, or physically if you like—with a differentiated sense of touch developing merely from bumping into things—repeats itself purely at the level of the soul, if we take things in a truly living way, as we arrive at those frontier posts of knowledge with the psyche fully involved in the process. First you will feel as if you were in the dark in the world of mind and spirit, bumping into things everywhere. The fact that questions like those asked by Vischer have arisen proves that we live in darkness of soul, in an existence that is grounded in the world of the spirit and touches on that world. But the element which thus comes up against the world of the spirit now needs to be differentiated.

If we truly live with such frontier issues, something enters into the soul, is brought to it by revelation, which previously existed as little for the soul as sensory perception based on a differentiated sense of touch existed for a creature that had not yet developed such a differentiated sense of touch but merely bumped into things. We have to live with and through those frontier issues, the countless, tormenting, sphinx-like questions, so that we may know that the methods we can gain through working with nature, the methods which truly meet the ideal of the modern scientific approach, only take us to the point, where soul and spirit are concerned, where we bump into those boundaries. From there, life itself must forward.

And it can move forward. This can only be empirical fact. I am talking about something which every thinker who bases himself on modern science has perceived only too clearly, too significantly. The time when the soul truly expands its sphere of life into these boundary areas of knowledge can only come slowly as we patiently feel our way. I have given examples of such boundary issues in a brief chapter I have just written in the book which is due to appear shortly.⁸

Let me refer to another such fundamental boundary issue which we find in the work of Friedrich Theodor Vischer. It is an example of how someone who is beginning to live with the drama of insight and knowledge in himself in a very real way comes to the matter I have just been characterizing, inwardly feeling his way and not yet outwardly differentiated in feeling one’s way in mind and spirit. When Friedrich Theodor Vischer was struggling with these issues, the time had not yet come for the soul to break through the boundaries it had met. Vischer wrote:

No mind without a nerve centre, nor a brain, say our opponents. We say: no nerve centre and no brain unless there has been preparation in countless stages, starting from below; it is easy to be derisory about the spirit bumbling about in granite and limestone—no harder than it would be for us to ask derisively how the protein in the brain manages to get to something as sublime as ideas. Human powers of insight lack the ability to establish levels or degrees. It will remain a secret how it comes about that nature, and the spirit must surely slumber beneath her, is there as such a perfect counter thrust of the spirit that we—please note his choice of term here—

get bumps and bruises from it; it is a forcible separation that seems so absolute that Hegel’s concepts of being other and being outside oneself, however brilliantly formulated, really say practically nothing, simply covering up the abruptness of the apparent dividing wall. Fichte gives proper recognition to the fine edge and impact in this counter thrust, but no explanation.⁹

There can be no more accurate description of this inner life. First it feels itself bumping into the world of the spirit when such boundary issues come up, and it longs to let this process of coming up against the world of the spirit become differentiated and be a real way of feeling one’s way in that world, with, to use Goethe’s words, a mental organ developing.¹⁰ Where Goethe spoke of eyes and ears of the mind, we might say that organs of touch¹¹ arise in the mind at a most elementary level as we live in these things. It is truly a vital process, a growth process; it is not a matter of simply applying what one has previously learnt in the sciences; it is something as real as the way a child grows, but it takes the soul into regions it has not known before.

People are often mistaken about this. Thus the philosopher Bergson,¹² who has grown famous, makes one of the absolutely basic errors in this field. Henri Bergson says we cannot comprehend the world with the analytical mind, and especially cannot comprehend the inner life in this way, for in the psyche, and in the whole of existence, everything is evolving, flowing, vital. What is he thinking? That what we need does already exist and we can look for it with powers we already possess. In this, however, he is greatly mistaken. It does not lead to anything that can truly explain the psyche, for the soul must go beyond itself; it must develop something it does not yet have. The soul does not think that the life which it is to explore does already exist, but that it must first be gained.

Many people are really scared—if I may use the term—of entering deeply into the inner drama of gaining insight and knowledge. They believe it will take them into the abyss of subjectivity, the abyss of individual nature. If they were really to enter into this abyss in the way which has just been described, they would find that in doing so they would find something inside themselves that is as objective as are the things we find when we consider the natural world. It is merely an illusion to think that in living through the drama of insight one person would find one thing, and another something else. In a certain respect individual experiences have to differ because they are different aspects, different views of the same thing seen from different sides. Yet if we take photographs of something from different angles and those photographs look different, this does not mean to say that the thing itself does not present something objective in those aspects. We should not be dogmatic about anything someone has gathered from the psyche in this way, making his particular formulation into dogma and believing in it as one believes in any dogma or law of nature. No, we have to be clear in our minds that however subjective something perceived with the mind’s organs of touch may be, seeing that it represents a particular angle—if the methods I have presented only in principle are developed further, organs will truly develop in soul and spirit that may be compared to eyes and ears of the mind—if the world of the spirit is characterized on the basis of a mind that has vision of the kind I referred to in my book,¹³ then something described by an observer may be a subjective aspect; but if we accept it we approach the world of the spirit in the same way as we have a true image of a tree even if it is only from one angle. This is something that needs to be understood, especially in this particular field.

When human beings go beyond themselves in their inner life, something arises which I have described in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. There you find a detailed description of what the soul has to do so that it may go beyond itself in this way. Today I have, of course, only been able to give the principles. If you take what it says in the book to a certain level you will discover why I called the experiences, which are of a completely new kind compared to our ordinary conscious awareness, ‘imaginations’, seeing in images, and referred to the level of awareness which develops as ‘imaginative awareness’.

This imaginative awareness has nothing to do with fantasy. Its content is new compared to what one has known before. ‘Imaginative awareness’ is a term like many others. What matters is that the imaginations or inner images we gain, enriching our inner life, clearly show that they are, well, let us say reflections of a non-physical reality, just as our usual ideas of things are reflections of outer physical reality.

I have now described the process in which the soul rises above itself at the first level to gain imaginative insight. With this imaginative insight one is in fact living in a state for which we have to use a paradoxical term, and this can of course be the subject of derision in view of general thinking habits today. It is that in uniting the soul with the living inner experiences thus gained we are living out of the body. This is the crux of the matter. And above all we learn to distinguish experiences which we have gained in this way, without making use of the body, from those gained in the outside world which we have perceived through the senses; above all, however, also distinguish them from anything by way of visions, hallucinations or illusions.¹⁴

For this is something we must always remember. The way which is shown here goes in the opposite direction to the one which we may call pathological, the way that leads to illusory and visionary life. Those who find their way to a life in images know that anything we perceive with the senses, perceive with normal senses in the world of nature, is of a higher quality than anything that may present itself in visions or hallucinations. If we give ourselves up to visions we enter more deeply into our living physical body, becoming more closely bound up with it; we bring soul quality into the living body but we do not come free of it.

In the third lecture we will consider the human being as part of the natural world, and we will then realize why the contents of visions can be confused with perceptions made in the spirit. Today we are talking about the inner life, the psyche, and it is important to make the distinction quite clear—a visionary goes down into the life of the body, whilst someone seeking imaginative insight enters into a life that is wholly in the soul sphere, and this leads to experience lived independently of the body.

As I said, this is highly unusual in present-day thinking. Someone wanting to reach the world of the spirit on an amateurish basis, with amateurish ideas, would greatly like to think of this world by taking external sensory perceptions for a model; he would greatly like—we can see this in spiritualism, which is so disastrous—to have factual things in the spirit, just as one sees factual natural effects if one performs a physical experiment in a laboratory. He wants a tangible spirit. Yet the things we find in imaginative perception do not compare with anything tangible. In my book¹⁵ I compared this—one can only offer an analogy, for it is not the same—with the memories of past events which we think we call up from the depths of our inner life. The tenuous nature of such memories, which are entirely nonphysical, having soul quality, is the only thing in which it is possible to experience the spirit in which the psyche has its roots. It is just that the images seen independently of the body do not relate to anything one has known in the physical world. They have their own content which tells us that we have entered into a new, non-physical world, a world we did not know before. One gradually has to familiarize oneself with a very different way of inner experience, for the I will not have the support of the physical organs through which we gain our sensory perceptions. It takes some time to get used to this kind of life.

Above all it is this: I may have compared the images gained in the new way with memories of past events, but everything that arises by way of such images, and which therefore is a reflection of a spiritual reality, has one peculiarity which it is hard to get used to, and that is the peculiarity that the more perfect such a non-physical perception is, the less are we able to recall it afterwards. We are used to remembering things that have gone through our minds. Those non-physical experiences do not generate an immediate power to remember. The process is very different. I described it in the above book. It goes like this: If you want to have a specific non-physical image you have to prepare for this, exercising the soul so that it will develop the inner powers by which the image may be revealed. We can remember the things the soul does, what it undertook to gain that image vision. It is then possible to call the image up again. So once you have had a spiritual experience in imaginative insight you will not easily remember it; you have to go through all the inner preparation again; this you can remember. You can say to yourself: you did this, and you did that; do it again and you’ll have the experience again. Only if we succeed in bringing copies of it, as it were, back to our ordinary conscious mind, to our ordinary thinking, as ideas will we be able to recall those copies. But the actual nonphysical image has to be new every time, otherwise it is not the real thing.

Another peculiarity is this. Ideas we gain in our life in the outside world are produced all the more easily the more often we produce them. We get a degree of practice in this, and these things become habit. This is not the case when we have living experience of non-physical images, genuine spiritual realities. It is rather the opposite. The more often we seek to have a non-physical image under the same conditions, the more vague does it grow. Hence you have the strange situation, really quite paradoxical, that students in the life of the spirit who make efforts to gain certain non-physical images will have them and then be surprised that they cannot have them again. The ability to produce something again is often lost very quickly, the second or third time, and we then have to make new efforts, over and over again, to call up something which is escaping us, as it were, having come to us just once from the world of the spirit.

You will find all the individual exercises that will help to overcome the problem in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, though even there it is just a brief outline of things I have said on the subject since.

Another peculiarity is that you will only manage to cope with such imaginative ideas if you have gone through inner training to develop a life of thinking, forming ideas, inner responses and of will that provide reference points, so that one may bring ideas into the non-physical images. If you do not pay careful attention to this, you may fall into inner confusion and darkness, though this would not be pathological. Again and again you come to say to yourself: Here you learn something out of the spirit which you cannot yet understand, for you have not developed concepts that go sufficiently deep for this. At that point you have to stop, you have to find another way, trying to take your ability to form ideas in the world of the senses further, so that you may on a later occasion understand what you have not been able to understand before.

In short, I could mention many more such characteristics. You come across lots of things that take you aback and are paradoxical compared to the inner experiences we have in our ordinary state of mind. Yet it is only when we have torn the soul element away, as it were, from the living body that we are in the world of the spirit. No one can deny this experience, which is spiritual.

With the development which I have been describing so far, you are able to gain certain insights. You come to see that apart from the physical body, which is part of us and which is the object of anatomy, physiology and of modern science altogether, something else is also truly our own. In my more recent books I have called it the ‘body of creative powers’, so that there may be no misunderstanding; previously I called it the ‘ether body’.¹⁶ It is really a second element in us, and can never be perceived by ordinary sensory perception, ordinary inner experience. It can only be perceived if this inner experience progresses to become the capacity for vision in images. For this body of creative powers does not exist in space; it is something which lives only in time, but lives in time in such a way that everything which is active in our physical body from birth or conception to death, let us say, wells forth from this body of creative powers. We have a second body in us, a body of creative powers. It becomes a reality for us when we gain the power of awareness in images.

This awareness will not, however, take us beyond the principle which is with us from birth to death as our body of creative powers. This may sound odd, but that does not matter. We are able to go beyond it if we find additional ways of inwardly strengthening the soul, which has now become free of the body. Exercises have to be done again and again, with patience, to develop a completely new relationship to the principle we call the life of ideas or concepts.

In ordinary life we bring objects around us to mind by forming ideas of them. When we have an idea of something we think we possess whatever we are inwardly able to have of such an external object. This is a notion we must abandon when we come to gain experience in the spiritual realm. We need to be able, as it were, to put ourselves in a position where we let our ideas of things be like forces and powers that fight one another in the inward drama of gaining insight and knowledge. We have to develop the ability to let one idea enter into conflict with another. We must long to characterize anything we have characterized from one point of view also from another. At this level terms like materialism, idealism, spirituality, sensuality, and so on, all become empty phrases, for all of them, woven from the webs of concepts we have, prove to be like photographs taken from different angles.

We come to realize that in the realm of the spirit we have to deal with our concepts the way we work with our sense organs in the sphere of the senses. We walk around objects. We do not consider concepts as snapshots but merely as something which characterizes objects for us from one perspective or another, giving a one-sided view.

The spiritual scientist will therefore develop an inner tendency to characterize things from one angle, and then to characterize them also from the opposite angle. He will above all feel a longing to develop certain ideas and then refute them again, thus truly going through this inner combat. I am just giving some important inner aspects which one has to make progressively come true when a certain point has been reached at the frontier post of knowledge and insight.

The soul then continues to develop. It manages to develop the faculty I have called ‘inspired insight’ in my books. Please leave aside all superstition or prejudiced ideas with regard to this. The soul then separates from the body to a higher degree. Having gained this level of insight and knowledge one is not merely able to perceive the body of creative powers which is with us in time, from birth to death, but also spiritual realities that are outside our bodies, just as we see physical realities with our physical eyes. In my next lecture I will be speaking of the spiritual reality outside the human being. Now I am first of all going to talk about what the human being sees with this inspired insight, a spiritual reality that lies within him.

Something arises in inspired insight which does not live in our existence between birth and death; it lived before us, before we entered into the earthly body at birth, or, let us say, conception. It will live with us when we enter into the world of the spirit at our death. It has united with the physical genetic material we have from our parents and ancestors; it has penetrated this physical material. Inspired insight will truly allow us to perceive what preceded our physical existence at the soul level, what happens after our physical death, for we learn to see, in the spirit, the part of us which is wholly independent of the physical body. The body of creative powers is still bound to our physical existence; it will disperse when it is cut off from this physical existence. The principle which inspired insight is able to perceive does not disperse; it remains by itself; it is the part of us which goes through births and deaths. In the field of inspired insight the human being is able to investigate properly what connects him with worlds that are wholly of the spirit, what works most powerfully so that he becomes this particular human being when physical genetic material connects with his spiritual part.

The third ability we acquire is called intuition. This is not the kind of vague idea generally called an ‘intuition’ but something else. I’ll just refer to it briefly. At the third level of spiritual insight you can become fully aware—this will happen at a particular point of time in our inner development—that you are someone else, that through the efforts you made as you progressed through vision in images and inspiration you have truly found an inner observer in you.

Something significant then occurs in the drama of insight and knowledge, as I have called it. At this point we may say: You can see that it is not only this physical body of ours which the spirit has helped to create; you come to see that our soul itself, with its feelings, tendencies, ambitions, affects and will qualities, has come to be what it is through spiritual processes. The drama thus becomes an inner stroke of destiny.

You may have destiny experiences in life that make you shout for joy or feel very low, you may know the worst and also great happiness—the things you experience when you perceive the development not only of the physical aspect but of also of the soul principle, are a stroke of destiny, an inner stroke of destiny that means more to someone who experiences it to the full in the drama of knowledge and insight than the highs and lows, pleasures and pain of destiny experiences in everyday life.

If this is possible, if there truly is this inner power to bring about change, so that the inner eye perceives not only the physical and bodily aspect out of the spirit but the soul principle itself within the process of spiritual evolution, then intuitive perception arises. A sphere is entered which encompasses repeated earth lives, the ability to look back on earlier lives on earth, and the certainty that this life on earth will be followed by others. Knowledge is gained that the whole of human life consists of successive lives on earth, with lives in the world of the spirit in between them that extend from death to rebirth.

With all this, the inner eye needs to be directed to something for which a relationship with the natural world outside has not really trained it. With reference to the natural world we always ask about the origin and cause of facts. When it comes to things of the spirit, questions as to origin and causes will not serve. When the realm of the spirit opens up to someone in the way I have mentioned, he finds that everything that has to do with growth, thriving, progression and development has retrogressive development mixed in with it, with existence progressively crumbling away and destruction in progress all the time. This is what made individuals who were able to see this—perhaps not in this modern way, but in the ways in which such things were known in the past—say that insight into the spirit takes us to the gates of death.¹⁷ You come to realize that conscious awareness, life in mind and spirit, and living in the spirit in full conscious awareness can only arise if a principle that makes existence crumble away enters into all our growth, healthy development and progression. You come to see that death is but a single major event which we can think of as divided up, broken up into its atoms, as it were, and happening in us all the time when we gain conscious awareness in physical life. In this world, to know is to enter a little bit into something that will come all at once when we go through the gates of death.

You get to know the relationship between the conscious mind and the process of dying. In doing so, you also get to know how this conscious awareness goes through the gates of death, and that death actually awakens us to a different conscious awareness. We enter into this when we lay aside our physical body. We lay this aside, as it were, merely in order to gain such insight in images, inspiration and intuition.

If you want to get a real idea of gaining insight in the spirit, you have to get used to seeing your relationship to the world in a very different way from the one you have been used to. Above all it is necessary to give up the idea that you can somehow find the spirit by interpreting the material world, looking at it critically in some way, and by finding laws based on the material world. The laws we discover in relation to the material world only apply in that world. You will not find the spirit by interpreting the world you perceive through the senses; when you are in the physical body you find the spirit in connection with the world of the senses; but you find it through independent life in the realm of the spirit.

Let me clarify this by using an analogy. When we read sequences of words, which are letters put in a row, we do not say: There’s a vertical line, there’s a horizontal line; we do not identify the letters but consider the row of letters or words as a whole, and an inner content then arises. This content has nothing to do with identification of the letters. You must have learned to read. And something quite different from the identity of individual letters arises in the reader’s mind. You cannot find the spirit which you discover from the letters by looking in the printers’ letter case. Nor can you find the life of the spirit by spelling out nature. You will only find it if you let the soul rise beyond itself and thus find the element which extends from the spirit itself into this physical life, in so far as the soul finds itself living in the physical world between birth and death.

You see, this leads to a psychology that can well hold its own side by side with the natural sciences. It does not transfer the methods developed in the study of nature to the psyche, nor does it stop at the inner life as we know it in everyday life. Instead it brings an objective principle into the inner life, and out of this the psyche experiences itself. The living body has also been born out of this principle, as we shall see in the third lecture.

These are first, elementary indications; you will have to refer to my books for the rest. They show how human beings can find the immortal element that lies in them, and how a psychology with this anthroposophical orientation truly guides us in this direction. Then such things as happened to Franz Brentano,¹⁸ the great psychologist who died in Zurich in March this year, need no longer happen. Brentano was a significant figure, but also a tragic one in the way he bore with his thinking. He came to the study of psychology at a time when the modern scientific way of thinking was developing. He wanted to apply this approach to the inner life. One can get no further with this approach, however, than to compare ideas as to how feelings want to rise in the soul, what attention is and so on in outer physical life. In his work on psychology from the empirical standpoint—in the first volume he wrote, which has remained the only one—Franz Brentano regretted the things psychology could not achieve, saying: What help is it to us, even if we are thoroughly scientific in our approach, to compare ideas, make associations of ideas, the way inclinations and disinclinations arise, and so on, if the great hopes held by Plato and Aristotle cannot be fulfilled. They hoped that with psychology we would gain insight into how the better part of our nature lives on when we have gone through the gates of death.¹⁹

Franz Brentano regretted the fact that he did not have the means of tackling these problems. It is remarkable to see how he struggled with them to the end of his life. The straight, honest nature of his struggles is evident especially from the tragic circumstance I referred to in an obituary for Franz Brentano which appears in the third chapter of my above-mentioned book. He was always saying he would continue his book on psychology, the first volume of which had been published. The work was intended to be in four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He promised the second for the autumn of that year, to be followed by the rest. He did not publish any of those, however. He wanted to master the inner life with the modern scientific method; he wanted to set about this in a straight and honest way. If he had been able to do so, if the modern scientific method had not been like a dead weight on his powers of investigation because he misunderstood it, he would have been able to enter through the gates into a life in the spirit that gathers something from the depths of the soul that cannot be there if one has only the methods of modern science.

We can see from the tragedy of Franz Brentano’s life as a scientist—and of the lives of many others, but especially in his case, because he was such a significant figure who at the same time was absolutely honest—that there is a need for a psychology that can only be found through inner experiences gained out of the living body. Then the great problems can be considered again, issues that must be foremost in the minds of those who consider their own inner life—the problem of immortal life, if we find the truly immortal part by the methods I have described, and also the problem of free will, which we are going to consider later on in these lectures. These are the two most important and compelling problems. But look at the works on psychology published in recent years. These problems are completely left aside in them; indeed, they have disappeared from psychological studies, simply for the reasons we have been considering today.

There is more to it, however, than being able to work with those great questions. The insights psychologists are seeking with methods they have developed by going more deeply into the modern scientific approach can only be fully clear if one can consider them from the point of view which I have indicated. That is the way it is. Modern science will prove valid on the one hand, the science of the spirit and spiritual investigation on the other. But it is just the way it is when one is digging a tunnel from two sides and must have worked things out carefully in advance so that one may meet in the middle. Spiritual science and natural science must come together if the knowledge and insight sought by humanity is to be a whole.

Let me give you just one example of how ordinary psychology, too, can be conquered if we enter the higher regions which I have briefly outlined today. Among the questions considered by people who do research in psychology are those concerning memory or recall. It is enough to drive you to despair to see how the memory problem is dealt with in the ordinary approaches to psychology. There you can really see the frontier posts in the process of gaining insight. Someone has an idea which he develops from something he has perceived through the senses; this idea then ‘goes down’ into the soul sphere; it ‘vanishes’, as they say, and later the person is able to recall it. Where has it been?

I won’t go into everything that has been said on the matter for centuries. On the one hand people say that such ideas vanish into the unconscious and then come up again across the threshold to conscious awareness. I’d like to know someone who is able to find any real meaning in such words as he says them. All meaning is immediately lost when you talk of ideas ‘going down’ and ‘coming up’. You can say anything; but you cannot envisage it; for it does not relate to any kind of reality. Psychologists more inclined towards physiology will talk about ‘traces engraved’ in the nervous system or brain; these traces then ‘call’ the ideas ‘up again’. People try painfully to explain how the idea which has gone down is dug out from those traces. As I said, it can drive you to despair when you consider the different approaches to psychology. Just think of how much serious, noble, genuine research effort goes into working on these problems. We certainly would not deny that such honest and genuine work is being done.

In truth, however, this simple fact relating to the inner life can only be seen in the right light if we consider it with the power in our souls that has the spiritual organs to observe the ordinary inner life, too, from the point of view taken in the world of the spirit. You then find that there is no question of an idea which I have ‘going down’ to anywhere or ‘coming up’ again somewhere. People altogether have the wrong idea of memory. An idea I form on the basis of something perceived in the world around me does not live in me as something real at all, but as a mirror image which the soul creates by means of the body’s mirroring. We will go into this in the third lecture. And this idea lives only now! It is no longer there once I have lost it from the inner life. There is no such thing as ideas going down and coming up again, thus creating memories. The commonly held idea of memory is wrong.

What matters is this. Having sharpened the soul’s power to see things in the spirit, you see—you can observe this in the spirit just as you observe things in the world outside—that something else is going on at the same time as we form an idea based on something we have perceived. It is not the process of forming the idea but this other, unconscious process running parallel to it which produces something that does not come directly to conscious awareness but lives on in me. So if I have an idea, a subconscious process develops that is wholly bound up with the physical body. When occasion arises to call this process up again, the idea forms again because the soul now looks to this process, which is a purely bodily one. A remembered idea is a new idea created from the depths of the living body. It is like the earlier idea because it has been called up in the unconscious process that had been produced in the living body. The soul reads the engram engraved in the body, as it were, when it recalls an idea.

This, then, does correct the ideas ordinarily held by psychologists. You now have the right idea instead of something perceived in entirely the wrong way in ordinary experience. I could go through the whole of psychology with you and show you many points where genuine insight shows that the inner experiences which people think they have prove to be illusory. People have quite wrong ideas about the inner life, and these need to be corrected by the soul coming free of the body and then observing its life from a truly spiritual point of view.

It is exactly with ideas like these, which on the one hand really make the spirit accessible to scientific study, that on the other hand the fruits of faithful hard work with the modern scientific method in experimental psychology and physiological psychology as well as other fields find their right place. Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is neither hostile nor unsympathetic towards such work. Knowing that the ordinary methods developed in the study of the physical world cannot solve but only raise questions, real questions, work done in spiritual science can make the results of natural scientific investigation truly fruitful by casting a new light on those questions.

The work done in anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is truly moving towards natural science, like digging a tunnel from opposite directions. Another example will show this. Scientists with a Darwinian orientation have recently made some very interesting findings, which I am going to tell you about in a minute. But first let me say that the unconscious activity which underlies memory recall is something different from the powers of heredity or of growth, but, having developed parallel to the forming of ideas, it is also related to those powers. Powers that take effect at an unconscious level when we form an idea on the basis of sensory perceptions are related to the powers that grow in us. They create dispositions in the living body that can later be read, leading to memory recall. Genuine observation in the soul gives us a clear idea of how the powers of memory relate to those of heredity and growth. A bridge is built—we will be saying more about such bridges in the next few days—between soul and spirit on the one hand and the living body on the other.

Consider how Darwinian Richard Semon starts with heredity in his very interesting book, with the emergence of characteristics, and then brings these hereditary powers together with the powers of memory.²⁰ The scientist thus sees a relationship between hereditary and memory powers. The psychologist has come to connect the unconscious powers that lie behind heredity with those of memory recall.

These things happen quite independently of one another. What Richard Semon called ‘mneme’ in his most interesting book agrees with the views held in anthroposophically orientated psychology, where consideration extends to regions in the human being that are also studied by modern scientific methods. We will speak of this in the third lecture.

What I have been saying today at an elementary level about the results of genuine spiritual experience in the soul that provide the basis for a more up-to-date psychology, must inevitably sound strange in many ways to people used to thinking in the way that is usual today. This is perfectly understood by someone who is in the midst of these things, yet perhaps one may also say that it needs more than just hearing an interesting lecture. You need to enter deeply into the serious process of spiritual scientific investigation. You will find that one’s powers are used differently from the way they are in natural science, but that the route followed in anthroposophical research is no less serious, no less demanding than the route taken in natural scientific research. The fact is, however, that the fruits, the results of natural science only provide the starting point for spiritual research. We come to concepts, ideas and natural laws when we want to investigate the natural world. We make it our premise that the work done in natural science takes us to the frontier posts from which we set out to make investigations in the science of the spirit and in anthroposophical psychology.

I would say, therefore, that psychology based on anthroposophy should not be said to go against the justifiable demands of today’s natural scientific way of thinking. Quite the contrary. It does not reject anything resulting from justifiable investigations in natural science. Nowhere does it oppose such justifiable science. However, it cannot stop at merely drawing logical conclusions from things that are already given in natural science. Spiritual science is not a philosophy where one merely wants to draw conclusions based on natural science. No! In anthroposophically orientated spiritual science we have to adopt a different device, the device that this spiritual investigation must follow from natural science not as an abstract logical conclusion, but as a live offspring.

The spiritual investigator holds the belief, which is stronger than the belief of many a natural scientist who rejects spiritual investigation, that natural science is sufficiently robust not only to lead to its logical consequences but to bring forth, from itself, as it were, something that is very much alive. This has its own vital energies and must thrive by having its own independent life. This is what the science of the spirit should be, a science which natural science itself demands.

Questions and answers

Several questions related to repeated lives on earth.

Ladies and gentlemen, the nature of the questions which have been asked is such that a brief answer cannot be satisfactory. One would indeed have to speak volumes to answer them in full. First of all we have the question:

What purpose does reincarnation serve?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, essentially the question as to purpose—I have to answer in a scientific way, otherwise it is just empty words—and the question as to reason—I am afraid I cannot go into the question as to whether teleology is justifiable or not—is a question arising in the physical world and therefore has validity in the physical world. Reincarnation—if we want to use this term for repeated lives on earth—I like to avoid jargon, which is why I spoke of ‘repeated lives on earth’—is governed by laws that belong to the world of the spirit and have significance in that world. This is something people find most difficult to get used to—that in moving from the physical world to the world of the spirit one must also change, or metamorphose, one’s concepts, and that concepts which apply in the physical world lose in significance, in importance, when we enter into the world of the spirit. Once you have started to know the nature of the spiritual world you do not really ask about the ‘purpose of the human being’ the way one would ask about the purpose of a machine, and certainly not about the ‘purpose of reincarnation’.

I said in my lecture that the way of thinking developed in the natural sciences is essentially the way of thinking developed in relation to the physical world around us. It will at best lead to the right questions being asked. One must then, however, seek to obtain the answers from the world of the spirit.

Someone asking: ‘What purpose does reincarnation serve?’ will of course have a reason for asking. There is a need to know, despite the fact that the question as to the purpose is not really applicable in the sphere one is dealing with. I would, however, ask you to consider the following. I would like to say that I have to bring together the building blocks needed to answer these questions. The science of the spirit is not like something you can quickly make your own by using a small handbook. It is in fact a very comprehensive field.

When we ask questions in life, one way is to continue with further questions until we come to an end. But this may not apply in every case. You see I am asked a question like this one hundreds of times. On many occasions I have said the following on the subject: People wanting to go from Zurich to Rome may want to know the route. And indeed, if no one in Zurich is able to give them the exact route, in every detail, they may decide that they don’t want to go to Rome after all. On the other hand there may be people who’ll be happy to know the route from Zurich to Lugano, and once in Lugano will be satisfied to learn how they should go on from there, and later on again how to go further. This is an analogy. It is meant to say that when we are in one life on earth, this has relevance for subsequent lives on earth. We have a progression. We are going to gain things in other lives on earth that we are not going to gain in this one. We go through experiences that present different trials and learning experiences. If we were able to answer all questions in this life on earth, then this life would not generate future lives on earth.

For the science of the spirit, it is therefore a matter of presenting the fact of reincarnation, if I am to use that term. Just as an individual gives purpose to a particular life on earth out of a free impulse, so he will give successive purposes, with one arising from the other, to repeated lives on earth. And he will not imagine that he can define the whole compass of human existence—which involves a number of lives one earth—in one of those lives. You altogether get out of the habit of producing definitions meant to be comprehensive when you enter into the true inner life in the spirit. Definitions are quite useful in ordinary physical life; in the life of the spirit, where it is all about perspectives, we are reminded, when someone just asks for definitions, of the example of a definition given in Greek literature. Asked how to define a human being, it was said—for definitions must always refer to individual characteristics—that a human being was a creature with two legs and no feathers.²¹ The next time someone brought along a cockerel which he had plucked—a ‘human being’!

Well, I do of course know the requirements for a proper logical definition. However, from the spiritual point of view, definitions show definite bias. So do all statements of purpose, of causality, and so on. Reality is something into which you find your way, in which you are alive and active, but you do not define it using biased terms. You will find the purposes in successive lives on earth. But when someone asks about the ‘purpose of reincarnation’, this lacks substance.

Question. Is reincarnation a product of ideas developed in the spiritual realm?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, one might say so. One will, however, have to take into account what I said in my book. The kind of ideas we have in our ordinary way of thinking are not really true ideas from the spiritual point of view. They have been deprived of life and are like corpses of ideas. This is the strange thing. Much more lives in the soul than does normally come to conscious awareness. Much of it is partly deprived of life because we would be unable to bear it in our ordinary way of thinking. It is then like the corpse of an idea. Hence the abstract notions we have. They are really only a reflection, something that arises and passes away again. We do not remember it at all, as I have shown in the lecture. Behind it, however, is the living, spiritual reality which enters into vision in images, which goes through death and does live in the powers of reincarnation. Perhaps this would answer the question.

Question. Does reincarnation follow absolute established laws rather than being the outcome of creative etheric powers?

Only life between birth and death, or rather conception and death, is the outcome of creative etheric powers. The principle we are calling ‘reincarnation’ is subject to much higher spiritual laws. It is difficult to say if it is ‘established law’; it is simply a fact. Repeated lives on earth are a fact. ‘Outcome of creative etheric powers?’ Human beings only acquire an ether body as they are moving towards conception; they lay it aside again after death; the body of creative powers is not eternal, as I said in my lecture. But the powers to be considered when we speak of the laws of reincarnation do not enter into the human I’s awareness nor do they enter into the sphere of the ordinary physical world.

You see, the way would open up for many people even in this realm if we were only to look for it in the right way. The point is—and I have spoken of this with reference to individual instances—that experiences gained in the world of the spirit seem paradoxical compared to those we have in everyday life. In many respects the things you find in the other world are completely different from those we know in the physical world. We have to say that with their capacity for forming ideas based on experiences gained in natural life, through natural events, human beings are hardly able to go beyond ideas relating to space. Honest and more accurate self knowledge shows how little we are able to go beyond concepts of space. Just consider, how do we gain ideas of time? Really from ideas of space. Changes in space, the sun’s and moon’s changes in position, and indeed the hands of a clock in our case—that is how we gain our ideas of time. In reality they are ideas of space. The spiritual principle, on the other hand, lives in time even in its lowest form, which is the body of creative powers. Here we need a real idea of time!

Very few people are able to get a real idea of time today. And one is even less able to get a real idea of the different velocities—not times, therefore, but velocities—that apply in the realm of soul and spirit. Our inner life depends on the fact that our thinking, the forming of ideas, for instance, goes at quite a different speed from our feeling, and this again goes at a different speed from our doing. These things—that different velocities are layered one inside the other in the inner life—actually cause conscious awareness to arise in us. Conscious awareness only arises where something meets with interference. This is actually why it is also related to death—for death interferes with life. But it is altogether the situation that interference occurs. This is why Bergson’s view is so wrong, for instance, that one should always look to life and movement;²² instead we come to the nature of movement by impeding it, and to the nature of life by seeing how death takes hold of life. To enter into the essential nature of life is something different from having a view of life.

All this makes us realize that the nature of law itself changes when you enter into the life of the spirit, and many people find this highly inconvenient. They therefore do not even take courage and enter into that life with their concepts and ideas, for those concepts and ideas would have to change. In genuine spiritual investigation you essentially get to know this very, very well. I do not like to bring in anything personal, for personal elements have not much to do with being objective. But many years ago an important question arose for me which has proved fruitful in a particular field. Herbart²³ and other psychologists applied arithmetic or mathematics to research in their field; they tried to calculate facts relating to the psyche. Eduard von Hartmann²⁴ even tried to calculate facts that must be taken in a moral sense when he undertook to establish the basis of pessimism mathematically. He put all pleasures on the debit side of life and all negative experiences on the credit side, and then said: the negative experiences show a surplus; therefore life is bad.

I have shown the whole of this to be nonsense. You will find the proof I gave in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity²⁵ written in 1894. If you want to speak of calculations, you have to make quite a different start, not establishing the balance by subtraction but writing a division, a fraction, making all pleasure, delight, experiences that prove elevating in life the enumerator and all pain and suffering the denominator. Let us look at this division. When would life seem to be no longer worth living? If the denominator were zero, if there were no pain at all, the figure would be infinitely great. But the denominator would have to be infinitely great if the fraction were to equal zero. This means that life would no longer seem worth living only if the pain was infinitely great. This cannot be decided by any kind of abstract reckoning but only by life itself. Life does its reckoning in this way.

When it comes to the psyche, we cannot do calculations about inner events the way Herbart or Hartmann wanted to do it. Life gives the result, and when you get up into the worlds of the spirit the result divides up—a sum into summands, a fraction into enumerator and denominator. You get exactly the opposite. Here in physical life, you have the individual summands and enumerators and denominators and then get your result. There it is the other way round. You have the result, it is inner experience, and the individual elements that lead to the result go into the world of the spirit. So you see, many of our ideas have to be completely rethought if we want to cross the threshold from the physical world to the world of the spirit.

Perhaps the things I have said in connection with this question will give you the idea that this science of the spirit really is not something straight off the bat, nor is it the offspring of fantasy. It is something which, as I said in the lecture, needs no less effort to gain than any other kind of scientific work. Only the powers needed for this belong to another sphere. We therefore have to say that there is a law to the progression of repeated lives on earth. But the nature of this law is something we must first of all get hold of. This is why I said it is not a matter of interpreting natural phenomena but of truly rising above them so that we may live freely in the spirit inwardly. This, then, answers the question.

Now a strange question—strange after this lecture: Question: Which are the spiritual organs of touch?

Well, we should not think of this as something physical. I made it quite clear that it is something that exists in the realm of soul and spirit and can only be compared with something that arises from memory. If you want the kind of answer where you have the specific ‘spiritual organs of touch’ and are then looking for a generic term, you’ll not achieve anything. Instead, we have to find our way through, as I have shown. The soul reaches limits, differentiates and develops ‘spiritual organs of touch’ which in the realm of soul and spirit can be compared to the organs of touch we have in the physical realm, just as we may compare ‘eyes of the spirit’ and ‘ears of the spirit’ with physical eyes and physical ears.

Question. Are there clear definitions of what we understand by 'belief’?

I would really need to give you the history and origins of the word ‘belief’ to make the answer complete, and then show how the different kinds of belief evolved from this. Let me say the following, however. In more recent times the meaning of the word ‘belief’ has been limited to ‘taking something to be true’ on a subjective basis—insight, therefore, that is not real insight but a subjective surrogate of insight. The word did not always have such a limited meaning. To understand the background to the idea of belief we have to consider the following.

In today’s lecture I mentioned just briefly that the soul related to reality in a different way in earlier times. It has only come to stand apart from the reality of the natural world in more recent times. In those earlier times, when the soul was still more closely connected with the spiritual reality and had developed an inner awareness of soul content that was other than it has to be now in modern anthroposophy, people knew that if they took something to be true, this was not just a theoretical attitude, for their believing something to be true also had the power of living reality in it. If I have an ideal and believe in my ideal, this is not just a matter of letting the idea of the ideal be present in the mind; a power of soul connects with the ideal. And this is part of the human being’s reality. Human beings are involved in creating reality. Here ‘belief’ means a positive way of generating inner power.

The concept ‘belief’ is presented in a similar way in Ricarda Huch’s interesting book on Luther’s faith.²⁶ There, too, the concept of belief is found to be not just believing something to be true but connecting oneself with the reality as it evolves. I would like to say that when one is in the power of belief, one has something in oneself like the seed which a plant holds in itself; it is not yet a real plant but has the power to grow into a real plant.

Belief thus should not be the image or reflection of an insight but an element in the realm of ideas that connects with a genuine power, so that we are wholly within reality with our belief. And if someone were to insist that belief gives him no insight, he would nevertheless have to admit that if he uses the concept ‘belief’ in this way, the reality in it places him in the real world.

These are just hints, brief comments.

• 1. See Steiner R. Von Seelenrätseln, IV. Skizzenhafte Erweiterungen des Inhalts dieser Schrift, 8. Ein oft erhobener Einwand gegen die Anthroposophie. GA 21.
• 2. Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896). Swiss-born professor of physiology in Berlin. Lecture entitled ‘Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens’ given in Leipzig on 14 August 1872.
• 3. Steiner R. The Riddle of Man. Tr. W. Lindemann. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1990.
• 4. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor (1807–1887). Altes und Neues. Stuttgart 1881, Erste Abteilung.
• 5. Volkelt, Johannes. Die Traum-Phantasie. Stuttgart 1875.
• 6. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, loc. cit. I, S. 194: ‘The soul, as the highest union of all processes, cannot, however, be located in the body, though it does not exist anywhere but in the body.’
• 7. Du Bois-Reymond, as note 2. ‘The seven riddles of the world’ lecture was given at a public meeting at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin to celebrate the Leibniz anniversary on 8 July 1880. Publ. Leipzig 1882.
• 8. See Von Seelenrätseln (note 1), Kap. IV, 6, S. 150 ff.
• 9. As note 4, S. 229 f.
• 10. ‘We learn to see with eyes of the spirit. Without them we stumble about blindly as in anything else and thus also in the study of nature.’ Goethe, Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ausgehend von der Osteologie VII, B (1795), in Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften herausgegeben und kommentiert von Rudolf Steiner in Kuerschners Deutsche National-Litteratur (1883-97), 5 Bände, Nachdruck Dornach 1975, GA Bibl.-Nr. la-e, Bd. 1, GA Bibl.-Nr. la, S. 262. With ref. to ‘ears of the spirit’, see also Goethe’s Faust 2, Act 1, Pleasing landscape, ‘Hark, the Hours, with furious winging, Bear to spirit-ears the ringing Rumours of the new day-springing.’ Tr. P. Wayne. Penguin Books 1959.
• 11. Spiritual organs of touch - see questions and answers following the lecture.
• 12. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher.
• 13. Steiner R. The Riddle of Man (note 3).
• 14. See also public lectures Errors in Spiritual Investigation given in Berlin on 6 March 1913; tr. WW. Ringwald, A. Wulsin. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1983 (from GA 62), and ‘Die Wege der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis’, Berlin, 21 Nov, 1912, in Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, GA 62. Lectures to members in Dornach on 1 and 2 July 1921 in Steiner R. Therapeutic Insights (from GA 205), tr. M. Laird-Brown, A. Wulsin, G. Kamow. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1984.
• 15. See Von Seelenrätseln ( as note 1).
• 16. Also called ‘formative forces body’ by some translators. [Tr.] For basic details see Steiner R. Theosophy (various translations) I, 4; Steiner R. Occult Science (GA 13; various translations), chapter on essential nature of humanity, and subsection on human ether body.
• 17. In his Phaedo (67 d-e), Plato had Socrates say: "... people really do not seem to have an idea that men who are faithful followers of philosophy are in life, in their whole lives, concerned over nothing but their dying and their death. And if that is true, it would be entirely wrong to think of death all one's life and then in the hour of death turn against one’s own wish and goal." Sec also Rudolf Steiner on Arnold Fortlage in the lecture of 7 November 1917 in this volume.
• 18. Brentano, Franz (1838–1917), German psychologist and philosopher. Rudolf Steiner had written about Franz Brentano in an essay on the future of psychology in 1893 (in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie, GA 30), referring to his views on extending the natural scientific approach to certain areas, for instance in psychology. The essay concludes: ‘General acceptance of Brentano’s statement would for me mean the general decline and decay of philosophy.’ Rudolf Steiner also wrote extensively in appreciation of Brentano, e.g. in Von Seelenrätseln (note 1), and spoke about him in a lecture he gave in Berlin on 12 December 1911 (in A psychology of Body, Soul and Spirit, GA 115, tr. M. Spock; Hudson: Anthroposophie Press 1999).
• 19. The actual words are: ‘For the hopes Plato and Aristotle had of gaining certainty concerning the continued existence of the better part of us once the body has dissolved, the laws of association of ideas, the development of convictions and opinions and the budding and growth of pleasure and love would be anything but genuine compensation ... And if the difference between the two views did truly mean accepting or rejecting the question of immortality, it would have to be considered highly significant for psychology, and we would inevitably have to enter into a metaphysical investigation of substance as the vehicle for states and conditions.’ Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Leipzig 1874, S. 20.
• 20. Semon, Richard (1859–1919). Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens. Dritte Auflage, Leipzig 1911. Semon explored changes in organic matter (plant, animal, human) due to external stimuli. He called them engrams and the ‘sum of engrams an organism possesses’ its ‘engram resource’, distinction having to be made between an ‘inherited and an individually acquired engram resource’. ‘The name I give to the phenomena in an organism resulting from the presence of a particular engram or sum of engrams, is “mnemic phenomena”. The quintessence of an organism’s mnemic faculties I call “Mneme”.’ S. (page) 15. Semon deliberately avoided the terms ‘memory’ and ‘recall’, using instead a terminology that ‘permitted’ him ‘to abstract from this completely whether or not the material processes concerned manifest through higher conscious sentience in the given case or not.’ S. (page) 390.
• 21. Diogenes Laertius (2nd century AD), Greek writer. Peri bion doniaton kai apophthegmaton ton en philosophia endokimesanton (lives of the Greek philosophers). Book 6, ch. 2, 40: ‘When Plato made the definition that man is a two-legged featherless creature, and people applauded this, he [Diogenes of Sinope] plucked a cockerel and brought him to the school, saying: This is Plato’s man.’
• 22. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner. His views on our inability to grasp life, or anything that moves, in our thoughts are above all presented in La pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences, 3rd edn, Paris 1934, especially in the lecture given in Bologna on 10 April 1911, entitled ‘L’intuition philosophique’.
• 23. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841), German philosopher and educationist. See his Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegruendet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, Koenigsberg 1824.
• 24. Hartmann, Eduard von (1842–1906), German philosopher.
• 25. See Steiner, Rudolf The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4), Tr. R. Stebbing rev. Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1963. ch. 13. A number of other translations have been published, the most recent being Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. A Philosophy of Freedom. Tr. M. Lipson. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1995.
• 26. Huch, Ricarda (1864–1947), German novelist and historian. Luthers Glaube, Briefe an einen Freund (Luther’s faith, letters to a friend), Leipzig 1916. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture on Luther given in Berlin on 11 September 1917, in Karma of Materialism (GA 176) tr. R. Stebbing; New York & London: Anthroposophic Press & Rudolf Steiner Press 1985.

[ 1 ] Unspeakable suffering, deep sorrow live in the souls of men of the present, side by side with the will to offer to this moment, incomparable in world history, the sacrifices of courage, of valor, of love, which it requires. The warrior is steeled by the awareness that he is fighting for a most precious good that the earth has to give to mankind. He faces death with the feeling that his dying is demanded by that Life which, as something higher than the single man, may lay claim even to his death. Fathers, mothers, and sons, wives, sisters, and daughters must, out of personal suffering, find themselves in the Idea that out of blood and death, the development of mankind will rise to aims for which the sacrifices were necessary, and which will justify them. The upward glance from individual experience to the life of mankind, from the transitory to that which lives in this transitory as the imperishable: this is demanded by the experiences of this time. The confidence rises up, from the sensation of what is happening, that what is experienced will be lifted up by the dawn of a new age of mankind, whose powers are to be ripened by this experience.

[ 2 ] One would like to look with the understanding that seeks also to under stand men's aberrations, upon the flames of hatred that are kindling. Too strong, for many a one, is the impression he receives when he compares what is currently being experienced with what seemed to him already achieved for the present by the development of mankind. Men who understood how to speak out about these achievements of mankind from a full inner participation, have found words to do so like those spoken by the fine German contemplator of art Herman Grimm, who died in the year 1901. He compares man's experience in earlier time with what the present brings to this experience. He says: “Sometimes it feels to me as if one were transposed into a new existence, and had taken along only the most needful spiritual hand-baggage. As if fully altered conditions of life were compelling one to fully new thought-work. For distances are no longer something that separates people. With the ease of child's play our thoughts circle the compass of the earth's surface, and fly from every single person to every other person, wherever he be. The discovery and exploitation of new forces of nature unites all peoples to incessant shared work. New experiences, under whose pressure our view of all things visible and invisible alters in uninterrupted change, force upon us new ways of observing, also for the history of the evolution of mankind.” Before the outbreak of this war, every European person had, in his individual way, such sensations in his soul. And now: what has been made, for the time of this war, of what stirred people to these sensations. Is it not as if mankind were to be shown how the world looks when much that is fruit of development ceases to take effect? And yet also: does the war by its horrors not show what the conflicts of peoples, fought out with the means brought by the newest developments, must lead to?

[ 3 ] Confusing can be the sensations that arise out of the experiences. One would like to understand out of the presence of this confusion why it is that many people cannot comprehend that war itself brings war's horrors and suffering, and why they decry the opponent as a “barbarian” when a bitter necessity forces upon him the use of the means of battle created by the modern age.

[ 4 ] Words of hate-filled condemnation of German essential being, now spoken by leading personalities among the peoples with which Germany currently lives at war: how do they sound to a soul that senses as true expression of German feeling what the already mentioned Herman Grimm, shortly before the entry of this century, characterized as a fundamental trait in the understanding of the life will of modern humanity. He wrote: “The solidarity of moral convictions of all men is today the church that connects us all. We seek more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All really earnest strivings of the masses know only this one goal. Here the separation of nations already exists no longer. We feel that over against the ethical world view, no national difference prevails. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our Fatherland; but we are far from longing for, or bringing about, the moment when this could happen by war. The assurance that keeping peace is the most sacred wish of all of us is no lie. `Peace on earth and good will to men' permeates us. The inhabitants of our planet, taken all together as a unity, are filled with a delicate sensibility understandable to all ... people as a totality acknowledge themselves as subject to an invisible court of judgment, throning as if in the clouds, before which they regard not being allowed to stand vindicated as a calamity, and to whose judicial procedure they seek to adapt their internal disputes. With anxious striving they here seek their right. How are the French of today at pains to make out their intended war against Germany to be a moral requirement, whose acknowledgement they demand from the other peoples, indeed from the Germans them selves.” Herman Grimm's life work is grounded in such a way with all its roots in the German life of the spirit, that one can say: when he utters such a thought, it is as if he were permeated by the consciousness that he is speaking on the spiritual charge of his people. That he is using words with which he would be al lowed to have the certainty: if the German people as a whole could express it self, it would use such words to express its attitude as to how it conceives of its own willing within the entirety of mankind. Herman Grimm does not want to say that what is present of such an attitude in the present life of mankind could prevent wars. He does speak of having to have the thought that the French want a war against Germany. However, that this attitude will prove its power, even right through wars, that had to be Herman Grimm's conviction, when he brought to expression thoughts like those quoted. Opponents of the German people currently speak as if they held it to be proven that the only cause of this war lay merely in this: that the Germans lack the understanding for such an attitude. As if the result of this war would have to be that the Germans are forced to an understanding of such an attitude. As if among the Germans, authoritative minds had set themselves the task of obliterating this attitude in their people.

[ 5 ] One now hears some names of German personalities spoken in a hate-filled manner. Not only by journalists, also by spiritual leaders of the peoples living at war with Germany. Indeed, such voices also come from countries with which Germany has no war. Among these German personalities is for example the historian of the German people, Heinrich von Treitschke. The Germans who form thoughts about the scientific significance and the essence of the personality of Treitschke pronounce the most divergent value judgments concerning him. From what points of view these judgments are passed, whether they are justified or unjustified, does not matter at this moment; concerning the voices of the opponents of the German essential being, quite another point of view is defining. These opponents want to see in Treitschke a personality who has affected the present German generation in such a way that the German people currently holds itself to be in all directions the most gifted of peoples, which therefore wants to force the others to subordinate themselves to its leadership, and sets the attainment of power above all justice. Were Treitschke still alive, and heard the judgments of the opponents of the German essential being concerning his person, he could remember words he wrote down in 1861, as the expression of his deepest sensibility, in the treatise on Freeness. He there spoke his mind about such people as set a limit right away to their respect and tolerance for alien opinions, when in such opinions something confronts them that does not please them. In such people—Treitschke opines—the thought conceals itself in a veil of passion, and he says: as long as such a manner of replacing judgment with the cliché born of passion is still alive, “there is yet alive in us, even if in a milder form, the fanatical spirit of those zealots of old who used to mention alien opinions only in order to prove that their authors had earned themselves rightful claims to the Lake of Hell.” A man who as Frenchman among Frenchmen, as Italian among Italians, had worked the way Treitschke did as German among Germans: he would not appear to the Germans as a seducer of the French or Italians. Treitschke was an historian and politician, who out of a strong, decided feeling sense, gave all his judgments an imprint that had the effect of sharpness. Those judgments too had such an imprint which he pronounced, out of love for his people, about the Germans. But all these judgments were carried by the feeling: not only his soul was speaking thus, but the course of German history. At the close of the Foreword of Part Five of his German History in the Nineteenth Century stand the words: “as surely as man only understands what he loves, just as surely can only a strong heart that senses the fortunes of the Father land like suffering and happiness of its own experience, give inner truth to the historical narrative. In this might of heart and mind, and not merely in the perfected form, lies the greatness of the historians of antiquity.” Some judgments that Treitschke uttered about what the German people has experienced at the hands of other peoples sound like harsh condemnation of these other peoples. How statements of Treitschke's that go in this direction are to be understood, only he recognizes who also looks at the harshness of the judgments with which Treitschke often passes verdict upon what he finds reprehensible within his own people. Treitschke had the deepest love for his people, which was noble fire in his heart; but he believed it does no harm when one passes verdict most brusquely where one most loves. It would be thinkable that enemies of the German people could turn up who assembled from Treitschke's works a collection of pronouncements, then took away from these pronouncements the color of love they have with Treitschke, and daubed them with their color of hatred: they could thereby prepare word weapons against the German people. These word weapons would not be worse, either, than those with which they shoot at a distorted image of Treitschke in order to wound the German people. Herman Grimm, who knew how to appreciate Treitschke, and was well acquainted with him and his personal manner, spoke some time after his death the words: “Few have been so loved, but also so hated, as he.” Treitschke was grouped by Grimm with the German historians Curtius and Ranke to a trinity of German teachers, about which he expressed himself thus: “They were friendly and confiding in their intercourse. They sought to further their listeners. They acknowledged merit where they met it. They did not seek to suppress their opponents. They had no party and no fellow partisans. They spoke their minds. In their bearing lay something exemplary. They saw in science the highest flowering of the German spirit. They stood up for its dignity.” There is a thorough discussion of Treitschke's German History by Herman Grimm. Whoever reads it must come to the recognition that Herman Grimm counted Treitschke among those who, regarding the relation the German people wants to have to other peoples, thought no differently from himself.

[ 6 ] Whoever from an enemy country reviles a German personality such as lived in Treitschke, and brands him a seducer of the younger generation, lacks a judgment about how a German who sensed “the fortunes of the Fatherland like suffering and happiness of his own experience” had to speak to Germans who, for an understanding of their own history, have to look at experiences in the past that Herman Grimm (in his book on Michelangelo, 16th printing) characterizes with the words: “For thirty years Germany, which was unable to tip the scales as a nation of its own, was the battlefield for the peoples bordering around us, and after the foreigners who had thus waged war upon each other on our ground had finally made peace, the old indefinite situation returned.” In Herman Grimm's Goethe book, there is about these experiences, with the same reference: “the Thirty Years' War, this terrible disease brought in to us from without and nourished artificially,” made “all the young shoots of our forward development wilt and die off.” What a short time had just elapsed since the German people had freed itself from the effect of the suffering that Europe had brought it through the Thirty Years' War, when in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century the other destiny experience came to pass, which coincided with a flourishing of German spiritual life. Were they the words of a man in whose heart the sufferings of his people resonated “like suffering of his own experience,” or were they words of a seducer of the people, with which Treitschke spoke of the spirits whose working coincided with Germany's destiny experience of the beginning of the Nineteenth Century? He speaks about these spirits thus: “They guarded our people's very Own, the sacred fire of Idealism, and we have them pre-eminently to thank that there was still a Germany even when the German Empire had vanished, that in the midst of affliction and bondage the Germans were still permitted to believe in themselves, in the imperishability of German essential being. From the educational molding through and through of the free personality is sued our political freedom, issued the independence of the German state.” Do the opponents of German essential being demand that Treitschke should have said: history teaches that the Germans “are permitted to believe in the imperishability of German essential being” because for all the past and the future they can keep themselves convinced that French, English, Italians, Russians have never fought and will never fight for anything else than for “right and freedom” of peoples? Should the other Germans who are presently called Germany's seducers give the Germans the advice: build not on what in hard wars has gotten you “right and freedom;” you will have “right and freedom” because with those who surround you, the sense for “right and freedom of peoples” shines resplendent in bright light? Only, you must not believe that you are allowed to think of your “right as a people” other than in the sense of what you are deemed entitled to by the peoples who encircle you. You must only never call anything else your “freedom as a people” but what these peoples will show you by their behavior that you “as a people are free to do?”

[ 7 ] Where the sensations are rooted which those who belong to “Europe's Middle” have in the present war, the author of this brief writing would like to state. The facts he wants to discuss are, in their general basic features, certainly known to every reader. It does not lie in the author's intention to speak in this direction about what is not yet known. He would only like to point toward certain connections in which what has long been known stands.

[ 8 ] If opponents of the German people should perhaps read this brief writing, they will quite comprehensibly say: so speaks a German, who can naturally bring no understanding toward the opinion of other peoples. Whoever judges in this way does not comprehend that the paths the author of this contemplation seeks in order to discuss the coming about of this war are quite independent of how much of the essential being of a non-German people he understands or does not understand. He wants to speak in such a way that if the reasons he puts forward for what is claimed are any good, his thoughts can be right, even if he, with respect to an understanding of the special quality and the value of non German peoples, as far as they may be closed to a German, were the pure fool. When, for example, he refers to what a Frenchman says about the intentions of the French for war, and on that basis forms a judgment about the coming about of the war, then this judgment could be right, even if a Frenchman were to believe he had to deny in him any understanding of French special quality. When he forms judgments about the English political ideal, it does not come into question how the Englishman for himself thinks or senses, but what the actions are like in which this political ideal lives itself out, and what the German in particular experiences through these actions. For himself, to be sure, the author is convinced that in this brief writing there will lie no occasion to judge what understanding he brings toward this or that non-German folk quality.

[ 9 ] The author of the brief writing believes that what he allows himself to pronounce as a German about the feeling of “Middle Europe,” he may say, for he spent the first three decades of his life in Austria, where he lived as an Austrian German by descent, nationality, and upbringing; and for the other—almost just as long—time of this life, he has been permitted to be active in Germany.

[ 10 ] Perhaps someone who knows the one or the other of the author's writings will seek of one who stands at the vantage point of the science of the spirit, as it is meant in these writings, “higher points of view” in the following discussions than he finds. Especially those will be unsatisfied who expect to find here some thing about how the present war events can be judged “on the basis of the eternal, highest truths of all being and life.” To such “disappointed ones,” who will perhaps turn up precisely among the friends of the author, he would like to say that the “highest eternal truths” are of course valid everywhere, thus also for the present events, but that this contemplation was not undertaken in the intention of showing how one can bear witness to these “higher truths” with respect to these events as well, but in another intention, the intention of speaking of these events themselves. [The author hopes to be able to give other things about the present time and the peoples of Europe soon in a second brief writing. The thoughts written down here are concentrated from lectures the author held in several places in recent months.]

[ 11 ] Whoever has allowed Fichte's manner of spirit to work upon him, senses in all following time that he has taken something into his soul that has still an other effect entirely than the ideas and words of this thinker. These ideas and words transform themselves in the soul. They become a power that is essentially more than the remembrance of what was received directly from Fichte. A power that has something of the quality of living beings. It grows in the soul. And in it, the soul feels a never dwindling means of strength. If one senses the special quality of Fichte this way, one can never separate from this sensation the mental representation of the inner essential being-ness with which the German soul spoke through Fichte. How one stands toward Fichte's world view does not matter here. It is not the content, it is the power by which this world view is created. That power is what one feels. Whoever wants to follow Fichte as a thinker must enter into seemingly cold regions of ideas. Into regions in which the power of thinking must cast aside much that is otherwise dear to it, in order merely to find it possible that a man can put himself into such a relationship toward the world as Fichte had. But if one has followed Fichte thus, then one feels how the power that held sway in his thinking streamed into the life-giving words with which, in a destiny-bearing time, he sought to enflame his people to world-effective deed. The warmth in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation is one with the light that shone for him in his energetic thought work. And the connection of this light with this warmth appears in Fichte's personality as that by which he is one of the most authentic embodiments of German essential being. This German essential Being had first to make Fichte into the thinker he was, before it could speak through him the penetrating Speeches to the German Nation. But after it had created such a thinker as Fichte, this German essential Being could not speak otherwise to the nation than happened in these speeches. Again it matters less what Fichte said in these speeches than, rather, how German-ness, through them, placed itself before the consciousness of the people. A thinker who in his world view is far removed from Fichte's trains of thought, Robert Zimmermann, must speak the words: “As long as in Germany a heart beats that is able to feel the shame of foreign tyranny, the memory of the courageous one will live on, who at the moment of deepest humiliation, in the midst of French-occupied Berlin, before the eyes and ears of the enemies, among spies and informers, under took to raise the power of the German people, broken from without by the sword, upright again from within by the spirit, and at the same instant when the political existence of this people seemed to be annihilated forever, to create it anew, by the enthusiastic thought of universal education, in future generations.”

[ 12 ] One need not have the aim of awakening sentimental feelings if, to characterize the special quality of how Fichte is connected with the deepest essential being of being German, one portrays the last hours in the life of the thinker.—Fichte's wife, the life companion who truly was not only worthy of him, who fully measured up to his greatness, had done hospital service for five months under the most difficult conditions, and had thereby contracted lazaret fever. The wife recovered. Fichte himself fell prey to the disease and succumbed to it. His son described the manner of Fichte's dying. The last report that the dying one received was that delivered by the son, of Blucher's crossing of the Rhine, of the advance of the allies against the French enemy. The soul wresting itself from the thinker's body lived entirely in the profound joy over these events; and as the formerly icy-sharp thinking passed over in the dying one into fever fantasies, he felt himself among the midst of the fighters. How the image of the philosopher stands before the soul, who—right over into the fever fantasies clouding the consciousness—is like the Entity, revealing itself, of the will and working of his people! And how in Fichte the German philosopher is one with every stirring of life of the whole man. The son hands the dying one a medicine. The dying one gently pushes back what is proffered; he feels himself entirely one with the world-historical working of his people. In such feeling he concludes his life with the words: I need no medicine; I feel that I have recovered. He had “recovered” in the feeling of participating in his soul in the experience of the elevation of the German essential Being.

[ 13 ] From the upward glance to Fichte's personality, one is allowed to draw the power to speak about German essential being. For his striving was to make this essential being astir, as an actively working power, right into the sources of his special nature. And in the contemplation of his personality it comes clearly to light that he felt his own work of spirit connected with the deepest roots of the German essential being. These roots themselves, though, he sought in the foundations of the working of spirit which he beheld behind all of the world's outer, sense-accessible functionings. He could not conceive of German working with out a connection of this working with the spirituality illuminating the world through and through and warming it through and through. He saw the essential being of German-ness in the welling forth of the life expressions of the people from the primal source of the originally spiritually alive. And what he himself understood as world view that issues from this primal source in the sense of the German quality, he spoke out about it thus: “It—this world view—glimpses time and eternity and infinity, as they come into being out of the appearing and becoming visible of that One that is in itself simply invisible, and only in this its invisibility is grasped, rightly grasped.”—“All persistent existence appearing as not spiritual life is but an empty shadow cast from seeing, transmitted in multiple ways by nothingness, as opposed to which, and by whose recognition as nothingness transmitted in multiple ways, seeing itself is to rise to the recognizing of its own nothingness, and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only true being.”

[ 14 ] In his Speeches to the German Nation, Fichte seeks to grasp all truly German life expressions this way, out the source of spiritual life, and to receive out of this source the words themselves with which he speaks of these life expressions.—One will perhaps pause with special feelings at one passage in these Speeches, if from their tone and bosom depth, one has imbued oneself with the feeling perception: how this man stands with his whole soul within the viewing of the spiritual essential being of the world! How this standing with his soul within the spiritual world is for him such an immediate reality as for the outer man the standing within the material world by means of the senses! One may think how ever one does about the characterization of his time as developed by Fichte in the Speeches; if one hears of this characterization through his words, it cannot matter whether one agrees with what is said or not, but what a magical breath of human ethos one feels.—Fichte talks of the age he would like to help to bring about. He uses a simile. And this simile is where one is held fast with one's feelings in the sense hinted at. He says: “The age appears to me like an empty shade, who is standing above its corpse, which a host of diseases has just driven it out of, and lamenting, and is unable to tear its gaze from the once so beloved sheath, and despairingly tries all means of re-entering that housing-place of plagues. Though the enlivening airs of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already received her, and surround her with warm breath of love, though secret voices of her sisters are already greeting her joyfully and welcoming her, though there is already a stirring and an expanding in her inner being in all directions, to develop the glorious shape to which she is to grow: yet she has no feeling for these airs as yet, or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is consumed in pain at her loss, with which she believes she has at the same time lost herself.”

[ 15 ] The question is natural: how is the mood of a soul who, in a contemplation of the age and the changing of the ages, is driven to such a comparison? Fichte is talking here about the existence of the human soul after its separation from the body by death, the way a person otherwise talks about a material process that plays itself out before his senses. To be sure, Fichte is using a simile. And a simile must not be exploited in such a way that one would like to prove something by it about a significant view of the person who utters the simile. But the simile points to a mental representation that lives in the soul of the simile-maker with regard to an object or process. Here, with regard to the experiences of the human soul after death. Without wanting to claim anything about how Fichte would have made a pronouncement about the validity of such a mental representation if he had done so in the context of his world view, one can never-the-less lead this mental representation before one's soul. Fichte speaks of the human soul as of a being so independent of the body that this being separates from the bodily nature in death, and is able to look consciously at the separated body the way the man in the sense world looks at an object or process with his eyes. Apart from this looking at the body which one has left, the new environment which the soul enters when it has separated from the body is hinted at too. That modern form of the science of the spirit which talks about these things on the basis of certain soul experiences is allowed to find something significant in this Fichtean simile. What this science of the spirit strives for is a recognition concerning the spiritual worlds entirely in the sense of the type of recognition that is acknowledged by modern natural science as justified concerning the natural world. Though this form of spirit science is presently still seen by many as a dreaming, as a wild flight of fancy; yet so it also went for many people for a long time with the view, contradicting the senses, of the orbit of the earth around the sun. It is essential that this science of the spirit has as its basis a real recognizability of the spiritual world. A recognizability that rests not on concepts thought out, but on experiences of the soul of man that are really to be achieved. As he can know nothing of the properties of hydrogen who knows only water, which has hydrogen in it, so he can know nothing of the true being of the human soul who experiences the soul only the way it is when it is in connection with the body. Yet the science of the spirit leads to this: that the spiritual-and-soul re leases itself for its own perception from the physical-and-bodily, as by the methods of the chemist hydrogen can be released from water. Such a release of the soul happens not by false mystical flights of fancy, but by rigorously healthy intensified inner experiencing of certain soul faculties, which, though always pre sent in every soul, remain unnoticed and unconsidered in normal life and in nor mal science. By such strengthening and enlivening of soul forces, the soul of man can come to an inner experiencing in which it beholds a spiritual world, as it beholds with the senses the material world. It then knows itself to be indeed “outside of the connection with the body” and equipped with what—to use Goethean expressions—one can call “eyes of spirit” and “ears of spirit.” Spirit science talks of these things not at all in a pseudo-mystical sense, but in such a way that for it, the progression from the usual view of the sense world to the viewing of the spiritual world becomes a definite process inherent in the essential being of the nature of man, which to be sure one must call forth by one's own inner experiencing, by a definitely directed self-activation of the soul. But with respect to this too, the science of the spirit is allowed to feel itself in unison with Fichte. When in 1813 in autumn he delivered his Doctrine before listeners as ripe fruit of his spirit striving, he spoke the following as introduction: “This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sense instrument, by which a new world is given that for the ordinary person does not exist at all.” Fichte does not at all mean by this an “organ” that exists only for “chosen,” not for “ordinary people,” but an “organ” that anyone can acquire, but which for man's ordinary recognizing and perceiving does not come to consciousness. With such an “organ,” man is now really in a spiritual world, and is able to speak about life in this world as by his senses about material processes. For anyone who puts himself into this position, it becomes natural to speak about the life of the soul the way it is done in the Fichtean simile quoted. Fichte makes the comparison not out of a general belief, but by a standing within the spiritual world that has been experienced. One must sense in Fichte a personality that in every stirring of life consciously feels itself one with the holding sway of a spiritual world, and beholds itself standing within this world as the man of the senses does in the material world. Now, that this is the mood of soul that he has the German basic tenor of his world view to thank for, Fichte distinctly states. He says: “ The true philosophy¹ that has come to an end within itself, and has truly penetrated beyond appearance to its core, ... proceeds from the one, pure, divine life—as life outright, which remains that for all eternity, and in eternity always remains one, but not as from this or that life; and it sees how merely in the appearance this life closes and again opens, endlessly on, and only in consequence of this law comes to an existence, and to a Something at all. For it, existence comes about, which the other (here Fichte means un-German philosophy) takes as given in advance. And so this philosophy (Fichte means the one he professes) is in the quite proper sense only German, that is, original; and conversely, were someone but to be come a true German, he would not be able to philosophize otherwise than thus.”

[ 16 ] It would be wrong to quote these words of Fichte's in characterization of his soul mood without at the same time calling to mind the others that he spoke in the same context of the speech: “Anybody who believes in spiritual-intellectual activity, and freeness of this spiritual-intellectual activity, and wants the eternal further education of this spiritual-intellectual activity by freeness, he, wherever he was born, and whatever language he speaks, is of our lineage, he belongs to us, and he will join us.”—In the time when Fichte saw German nationality threatened by western foreign rule, he felt the necessity of declaring that he sensed the essential-being quality of his world view as a gift extended to him as if by the German Folk Spirit. And he unreservedly brought it to expression that this sensation had led him to the recognition of the tasks he was allowed to accord the German Folk within the evolution of humanity, in the sense that from the recognition of these tasks the German may derive his right and his vocation to all that he intends and fulfills in the context of peoples. That he may seek in this recognition the source from which there flows to him the power to get involved in this evolution as a German with all that he has and is.

[ 17 ] Whoever in the present time has taken up Fichte's soul mood into the life of his own soul, will find in the world view of this thinker a power which does not let him remain at this world view. Which leads him, in his striving for spiritual-intellectual activity, to a viewpoint that shows the connections of man with the world differently from how Fichte presented them. He will be able to gain by Fichte the ability to see the world differently from how Fichte saw it. And he will sense just this manner of striving in a Fichtean way as a profound relation ship with this thinker. Such a one will also certainly not reckon among the ideals which he would like to stand up for unconditionally the plan of education that Fichte in his Speeches to the German Nation characterized as the one that appeared salutary to him. And so it is with much that Fichte wanted to advance as content of his views. But the soul mood that from him communicates itself to the soul that can meet with him works like a spring still flowing in the present in full freshness. His world view strives for the strongest exertion of the powers of thought that the soul can find in itself, in order to discover in man what shows man's being as “higher man” in man in connection with the spirit foundation of that world which lies beyond all sense experience. Certainly that is the way of every striving for a world view that does not want to see in the sense world itself the basis of all being. But Fichte's special quality lies in the power he wants to give to thought out of the depths of the essential being of man. So that this thought find by itself the firmness that lends it weight in the spiritual world. A weight that maintains it in the regions of soul life, and in which the soul can feel the eternity of her experiencing, yes, so create this eternity by willing it that this willing is allowed to know itself to be connected with the eternal spirit life.

[ 18 ] Thus does Fichte strive for “pure humanity” in his world view. In this striving he is allowed to know himself to be at one with all that is human, wherever and however it ever makes its appearance on the earth. And in a time heavy with destiny, Fichte uttered the word: “Were someone but to become a true German, he could not philosophize other than thus.” And through all that he says in the Speeches to the German Nation, the extension of this thought sounds through like a foundation tone: If only someone is a true German, he will out of his German-ness find the path upon which an understanding of all human reality can ripen. For it is not that Fichte thinks he is allowed to see only the world view in the light of this thought. Because he is a thinker, he gives as an example what kind of thinker he by his German-ness had to become. But he is of the opinion that this fundamental essential being of German-ness must speak itself out in every German, wherever he has his place in life.

[ 19 ] The passion of the war wants to deny Germans the right to speak about the German element the way Fichte did. From the countries living at war with the Germans, personalities who occupy a high position in the spiritual life of these countries also speak out of this passion. Philosophers use the power of their thinking to corroborate—in unison with the opinion of the day—the judgment that the German ethnic element itself has estranged itself from that willing that lived in personalities of Fichte's quality, and has fallen prey to what is designated with the now popular word “barbarism.” And if the German voices the thought that this ethnic element did after all produce people of that quality, then probably the utterance of such a thought will be designated as most superfluous. For one would probably like to reply that all of that is not what is being talked about. That one knows how to honor it that the Germans have had Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, etc. in their midst; but that their spirit does not speak out of what the Germans are bringing about in the present. And so the passionate critics of the German essential being will probably even manage to find the words: out of the dreamy quality of the Germans—which we have always evaluated correctly—why shouldn't dreamers still turn up today as well who, in response to the words with which we meet what the German weapons do to us, answer with a characterization of the German essential being given them by their Fichte in a past that is lost to them; which characterization he himself would probably change, though, if he saw how the German manner is today.

[ 20 ] There will come times that will acquire a calm judgment about whether the condemnation of German willing spoken out of passion does not correspond to blind inebriation, equivalent in its reality-value with a dream, and whether next to that, the “dreaming” that still speaks about present German willing in Fichte's manner does not perhaps signify that waking state which does not insert between itself and the events the passions, hostile to reality, which lull judgment to sleep.

[ 21 ] Working out of no other spirit than that in whose name Fichte spoke can the willing appear to the German which the German people must develop in the fight forced upon it by the enemies of Germany. As if in a far-spread fortress, the opponents hold the body enclosed which is the expression of what Fichte characterized as the German Spirit. That Spirit which the German warrior feels himself as a fighter for, whether he does this in conscious recognition of this Spirit, or takes his stand in the battle out of the subconscious powers of his soul.

[ 22 ] “Who wanted this war?” so ran a question posed to the Germans by many opponents, which presupposed, as self-evident answer, that the Germans wanted it. Yet to such a question, not passion may reply. Also not the judgment that wants to draw conclusions only from the facts that preceded the war in the very most recent time. What happened in this very most recent time is rooted deeply in the currents of European will impulses. And an answer to the above question can be sought only in the impulses that have long been set against the German element.

[ 23 ] Here only such impulses are to be pointed to as are so well known, in their general essence, that it can seem fully superfluous to speak about them when one wants to say something about the causes of the coming about of the present war. There are, however, two points of view from which the seemingly superfluous can appear desirable after all. The one results when one considers that in the forming of a judgment about important facts, what matters cannot be solely that one knows something, but from what bases one forms one's judgment. One is led to the second point of view when, in the contemplation of im pulses of peoples, one wants to recognize in what manner they are rooted in the life of the peoples. From the insight into this manner, there results a feeling perception about the strength with which these impulses live on in time, and take effect at the moment that is favorable to them.

[ 24 ] Ernest Renan is one of the leading spirits of France in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. This author of a Life of Jesus and of the Apostles wrote in an open letter during the war in the year 1870 to the German author of a Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss: “I was at the Seminaire St. Sulpice, around the year 1843, when I began to get to know Germany through the writings of Goethe and Herder. I believed I was entering a temple, and from that moment on, all that until then I had held to be a splendor worthy of the Godhead only made upon me the impression of wilted and yellowed paper flowers.” Further the French man writes in the same letter: “in Germany” there has “for a century come about one of the most beautiful spiritual developments known to history, a development which, if I may venture the expression, has added a level of depth and ex tension to the human spirit, so that whoever has remained untouched by this new development is to him who has gone through it as one who knows only elementary mathematics is to him who is experienced in differential calculus.” And this leading Frenchman brings clearly to expression in the same letter what this Germany, before whose life of spirit “all that until then” he “had held to be a splendor worthy of the Godhead only made upon” him “the impression of wilted and yellowed paper flowers,” would have to expect from the French if it did not conclude the war of then with a peace agreeable to Renan's fellow countrymen. He writes: “The hour is solemn. There are in France two currents of opinion. The ones judge thus: Let us make an end to this hated business as quickly as possible; let us give away everything, Alsace, Lorraine; let us sign the peace accord; but then, hatred unto death, preparations without rest, alliance with anyone convenient, unlimited permissiveness toward all Russian overreachings; one single goal, one single driving force for life: the struggle of obliteration against the German race. Others say: Let us save France's integrity, let us develop the constitutional institutions, let us make good our mistakes, not by dreaming of revenge for a war in which we were the unjust attackers, but by concluding a treaty with Germany and England whose effect will be to lead the world further on the path of free civilized morality.” Renan himself calls attention to this: that France was the unjust attacker in the war of then. And so it is not necessary to put forward the easily demonstrable historical fact that Germany had to wage that war to put in its bounds the constant disturber of its work. Now, one can disregard to what extent Germany was striving for Alsace-Lorraine as a region of related ethnic stocks; one need only emphasize the necessity which Germany was put into by this: that it could only get itself some calm at the hands of the French if with the Alsace-Lorraine region it took away from its neighbor the possibility of disturbing this calm so easily in the future as had often happened in the past. But thereby a brake was put on the second current in France spoken of by Renan; not this one had prospects for its goal of “leading the world further on the path of free civilized morality,” but the other, whose “single goal, single driving force,” for life was: “the struggle of obliteration against the German race.” There were men who in some of what has happened since the War of 1870 believed they recognized signs that a bridging of the conflicts was possible on a peaceful path. In the course of the last years many voices that sounded in this tone could be heard. Yet the impulse directed against the German people lived on, and there remained alive the driving force: “alliance with anyone convenient, unlimited permissiveness toward all Russian overreachings; ... the struggle of obliteration against the German race.” Out of the same spirit, sounds are issuing again at present through quite a few of the leading minds of France. Renan continues his contemplation about the two previously portrayed currents in the French people with the words: “Germany will decide whether France will choose this political strategy or that one; it will thereby decide at the same time about the future of civilized morality.” One must really first convert this sentence into the German meaning to appraise it rightly. It means: France has proven to be an unjust attacker in the war; in the event that Germany, after a victory over France, does not conclude a peace that leaves France unimpededly in the position to become such an unjust attacker again as soon as it pleases, then Germany is deciding against the civilized morality of the future. What is decided, out of such an understanding, concerning “hatred unto death, preparations without rest, alliance with anyone convenient, unlimited permissiveness toward all Russian overreachings,” what is decided concerning the “single driving force for life: the struggle of obliteration against the German race,” that and nothing else provides the basis for an answer to the question: “Who wanted this war?”

[ 25 ] As to whether the “alliance” will be found, there too, men capable of taking a look at the impulses directed against Germany were already giving an answer back when Renan spoke out in the sense characterized. A man who seeks a look forward from the then present into the future of Europe, Carl Vogt, writes during the War of 1870: “It is possible that even if its territory is left intact, France will take advantage of the opportunity to whet the nicked blade sharp again; it is probable that with no annexation, it will have more than enough to do with its own internal affairs, and will consider a renewed war all the less, since a powerful current of peace must take hold in the hearts and minds; it is certain that it will set aside all scruples should an annexation take place. Which wager then should the statesman choose?”—It is easy to see that the answer to this question depends also upon one's view about the coming European conflicts. By itself, France will not dare, even in the longer term, to brave the fight against Germany anew, the blows have been too heavy and thorough for that,—but as soon as another enemy arises, it will be able to put to itself the question whether it is in a position to join in, and on whose side.—As far as I'm concerned, I am not in doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and the Slavic world is approaching and that in it, Russia will take over the leadership on the one side. This power is preparing even now for this eventuality; the national Russian press spits fire and flames against Germany. The German press is already letting its calls of warning resound. A long time has passed since Russia collected itself after the Crimean War, and as it seems, it is now found advisable in Petersburg to take up the Oriental question once again ... If the Mediterranean is someday supposed to become, according to the more pompous than true expression, a “French lake,” Russia has the at least much more positive aim of making the Black Sea a Russian lake, and the Sea of Marmara a Russian pond. That Constantinople .... needs to become a Russian city, is an established goal of “the Russian policy,” which finds its “supporting lever” in “Pan-Slavism.” (Carl Vogt's Political Letters, Biel 1870.) To this judgment of Carl Vogt's about what he foresees for Europe, there could be added those of not a few other personalities, gleaned from the contemplation of European directions of willing. They would make what is to be indicated here more vividly insistent, and yet speak of the same fact: that already in 1870 an observer of these directions of willing had to point to the East of Europe if he wanted to answer for himself the question: Who will want to wage a war against Middle Europe sooner or later? And his gaze had to fall upon France when he asked: who will want to wage this war together with Russia against Germany? Vogt's voice comes especially into consideration because in the letter in which he so speaks, he says some unfriendly things to Germany. He can truly not be accused of bias in favor of Germany. But his words are proof that the question: who will want this war? had long been answered by the facts before those causes were at work which Germany's opponents would so like to hear as an answer when they raise the question: Who wanted this war? That it took more than forty years from then to the outbreak of the war, is not thanks to France.

[ 26 ] In the Russian spiritual life of the Nineteenth Century, there come to light directions of thought that bear the same countenance as the will to war that has unloaded at present from the East against Middle Europe. To what extent those persons are right who assert that the reference to this kind of directions of thought is inappropriate, can be known by him too who sees in such a reference the right way to the understanding of the relevant events. What one calls the “causes” of these events in the ordinary sense can quite certainly not be sought in such directions of thought of Particular people—who today aren't even alive anymore. As regards these causes, there will certainly eventually be some agreement for those who will show that these causes lie with a number of per sons, whom they will then point to. Against this way of looking at the issue, no objection shall be made, its full justification shall not be contested. Yet some thing else, something no less justified, is the recognition of the powers and driving forces operative in the historical process. The directions of thought pointed to here are not these driving forces; but these driving forces show themselves upon and in the directions of thought. Whoever recognizes the directions of thought, holds fast in his recognition the beings in the folk forces. It can also not be objected that it is asserted by many with a certain rightness that the directions of thought that come into question are no longer alive at present. What is alive in the East flickered up in souls of thinkers, formed itself back then to thoughts, and lives at present—in another form—in the will to war.

[ 27 ] What flickered up is the idea of the special mission of the Russian people. What comes into consideration is the manner of h o w this idea is brought to bear. In it lives the belief that the Western European life of the spirit has entered the state of wizened old age, of decline, and that the Russian Folk Spirit is called to effect a total renewal, rejuvenation of this life of the spirit. This idea of rejuvenation grows to the opinion that all historical progress of the future coincides with the mission of the Russian People. In the first half of the Nineteenth Century Khomiakov already builds out this idea to a comprehensive edifice of doctrine. This edifice of doctrine is to be found in a work published only after his death. It is carried by the belief that the Western European development of the spirit was basically never set up to find the way to proper humanness. And that the Russian folk element must first find this way. Khomiakov looks in his fashion at this Western European development of the spirit. Into this development has flowed, according to his kind of view, to begin with, the Roman essential being. That this has never been able to manifest inner humanity in the deeds of the world. That on the contrary, it forced upon the human inward being the forms of external laws of men, and thought in a rational, materialistic way of what ought to be taken hold of in the inner weaving of the soul. This external way of grasping life continued, Khomiakov opines, in the Christendom of the Western European peoples. That their Christianity lives in the head, not in the soul's in most. Now according to Khomiakov's belief, what Western Europe has as life of the spirit, has been made by modern “barbarians”—again externalizing after their fashion what ought to live inwardly—out of the Roman element and Christendom. That the turning inward will have to be brought by the Russian people, in keeping with the higher mission embodied in it by the spiritual world.—In such an edifice of doctrine, there rumble sensations whose complete interpretation would necessitate a detailed characterizing of the Russian folk soul. Such a characterization would have to point to forces inherent in this folk soul that will one day occasion it to adapt in a corresponding way for itself, out of its inner power, what holds sway in the Western European life of the spirit and will only then give the Russian people what it can ripen to in the course of history. What of the result of this ripening of the Russian people the other peoples will make fruitful for themselves, the Russian people should leave up to these peoples. Otherwise, it could fall prey to the sad misunderstanding of taking a task it has to fulfill for itself to be a task for the world, and thereby taking away its very most essential point.—Since it is a matter of the rumbling of sensations of such a misunderstood task, the idea in question did connect it self, in the heads it appeared in, only all too frequently with political directions of thought that demonstrate that in these heads this idea is the expression of the same driving powers that from the East laid in other people the germ to the pre sent will to war. Even if on the one hand one will be able to say of the lovable, poetically high-minded Khomiakov that he expected the fulfillment of the Russian mission by a peaceful current of spirit, yet the reminder is also permissible that in his soul this expectation associated with what Russia would like to attain as military opponent of Europe. For one will certainly do him no wrong when one says that in 1829 he took part in the Turkish War as a volunteer hussar be cause he sensed, in what Russia was then doing, a first flashing up of its world-historical mission.—What rumbled in the lovable Khomiakov often in poetic transfiguration; it rumbled on; and in a book by Danilevsky Russia and Europe, which toward the end of the Nineteenth Century was regarded by a number of personalities as a gospel on the task of Russia, the driving powers are brought to expression which thought of the “spiritual task of the Russian people” as fused to complete unity with a far-reaching will to conquest. One need but look at the expression this fusion of spiritual willing with intentions of attack has found be fore all the world, and one will find clear symptoms of what mattered to begin with to many of those, also, who wanted to derive the mission of Russia from the essential being of the spiritual world. This mission is brought together with the conquest of Constantinople, and it is demanded of the will which is thereby assigned its direction that without sensing “love and hate,” it dull itself against all feeling toward “Reds or Whites, toward demagogues or despots, to ward the legitimate or revolutionaries, toward Germans, French, English, or Italians,” that it regard as “true allies” only those who support Russia in its striving. It is said that “in Europe the balance of political driving powers” is especially pernicious to what Russia must will, and that one must further “any violation of this balance,” “whatever side it may come from.” “It is incumbent upon us to reject forever any cooperation with European interests.”

[ 28 ] Especially characteristic is the position the fine-minded Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovieff has taken toward these directions of thought and sensation. Solovieff can be regarded as one of the most significant embodiments of Russian essential being of spirit. In his works there lives beautiful philosophical power, noble upward spiritual vision, mystical depth. Yet he too was long imbued with the idea rumbling in the heads of his fellow countrymen of the lofty mission of the Russian element. With him too this idea associated with the other one about the exhausted-ness of the Western European element. For him, the reason Western Europe was not able to help the world to the revealing of full inmost humanity was that this Western Europe had expected salvation from the development of the individual powers inherent in man. Yet in such striving out of man's own powers, Solovieff could see only an unspiritual false path, from which mankind had to be redeemed by this: that without human doing, by a miracle, spiritual power would pour itself from other worlds onto the earth, and that that folk element which was chosen to receive this power would become the savior of a mankind that had lost its way. In the essential being of the Russian people he saw what was prepared to receive such an extra-human power, and hence to be the savior of true humanity. Solovieff's growing together with the

Russian essential being got to the point where in his soul the rumbling of the Russian ideal was pleased to look benevolently for a time upon others who were likewise possessed by this rumbling. Yet this was only able to be so until his soul, which was filled with genuine idealism, awakened to the feeling sense that this rumbling was based on the misconception of a future ideal for the Russian people's own development. He made the discovery that many others do not speak at all about which ideal the Russian people strives after for its own salvation, but rather that they make the Russian people, as it presently is, itself to an idol. And through this discovery, Solovieff became the harshest critic of those who, under the flag of a mission of the Russian people, were introducing into the will of the nation, as wholesome driving powers of further spirit development, the attacker instincts directed against Western Europe. Out of the doctrine of Danilevsky's book Russia and Europe, the question was staring at Solovieff: why must Europe look with concern at what is coming about within the borders of Russia? And in the soul of the Russian this question takes on the form: “Why does Europe not love us?” And Solovieff, who saw the Russian attacker instincts in the garb of the ideas of the world-historical mission of Russia especially spoken out in Danilevsky's book, found in his way the answer to this question in a critique of this book (1888). Danilevsky had opined, “Europe fears us as the newer and higher cultural Type, called to replace the wizened old age of the Romanic-Germanic civilization.” Solovieff quotes this as Danilevsky's belief. And to it he replies: “Nevertheless, both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions and those of his like-minded friend—meaning Strakhov, who advocated Danilevsky's ideas after his death—lead to a different answer: Europe looks upon us as an opponent and with worry because in the Russian people there live dark and unclear elemental forces, because its spiritual and cultural powers are meager and insufficient, whereas its demands make their appearance blatantly, and sharply defined. Mightily the calls resound out to Europe of what the Russian people wills as a nation, that it wants to annihilate Turkey and Austria, defeat Germany, wants to seize Constantinople, and if possible, India too. And when they ask us, in place of what we seize and destroy, what favors we want to bestow on mankind, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we want to bring into world evolution, we must either be silent or babble meaningless clichés. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession that Russia is beginning to fall ill is just, then instead of the question: why does Europe not love us? we would have to occupy ourselves rather with a different one, a question closer to us and more important to us: why and wherefore are we ill? Physically, Russia is still fairly strong, as shown in the latest Russian war; so our malady is a moral one. There weigh upon us, according to the words of an old author, the sins hidden in the folk character and not coming to our awareness—and so it is needful above all to bring these up into the light of bright consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elemental instincts must cause us only harm. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriot ism is not the question about the power of Russia and about its calling, but about its sins.”

[ 29 ] One will have to point to these directions of will coming to light in the East of Europe if one wants to speak of operative forces in the attacker will of this East; what came to expression through Tolstoy represents inoperative forces.

[ 30 ] This doctrine of the “mission of Russia” can receive an illumination by this: that side by side with it, one contemplates an example of how such a mission of a people is sensed within that life of spirit which the speakers of this mission look down upon as upon a life of spirit condemned to wizened old age. Schiller stood especially close to Fichte in his life of thought when in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man he sought for a prospect that lets man behold in himself the “higher,” the “true man.” If one enters into the soul mood that holds sway in these aesthetic letters of Schiller's, one will be able to find in them a high point of German perceptive feeling. Schiller is of the opinion that man can become unfree toward two sides in his life. He is unfree when he faces the world in such a way that he lets the things affect him only through the necessity of the senses; then the sense world governs him, and his spirituality subordinates itself to it. But also when man obeys only the necessity holding sway in his Reason he is unfree. Reason has its own demands, and if he submits to these demands, man cannot experience the free holding sway of his will in the rigid necessity of reason. Through the reason-necessity, he does live on a spiritual level, but the spirituality subjugates the sense life. Man becomes free when he can experience in such a way what affects the senses that in the sense-perceptible something spiritual manifests, and when he experiences the spiritual itself in such a way that it can be pleasing to him like what affects the senses. That is the case when man stands before the work of art, when the sense impression becomes spiritual pleasure, when what is experienced spiritually, transfiguring the sense impression, is felt. On this path, man becomes “completely man.” Many prospects that result from this way of mind shall be disregarded here. Only one thing that is striven for with this Schiller view shall be pointed out. One of the paths is sought on which man, through his relationship to the world, finds in himself the “higher man.” This path is sought out of the contemplation of the human entity. Just really place beside this way of mind, which wants to speak humanly in man with man himself, the other, which supposes that the Russian folk quality is the one that in contrast to other folk qualities must lead the world to true humanity.

[ 31 ] Fichte seeks to characterize this way of mind inherent in the essential being of the German attitude in his Speeches to the German Nation with the words: “There are peoples who, while themselves retaining their peculiarities and wanting them honored, also let the other peoples have theirs, and do not begrudge them, and grant them; without doubt the Germans belong to these, and this trait is so deeply founded in their entire past and present life in the world that very often, in order to be just both towards the contemporary world abroad and towards antiquity, they are unjust towards themselves. Again there are other peoples whose narrowly ingrown self never allows them the freeness of separating off for a cool and calm contemplation of what is foreign, and who are therefore compelled to believe there is only one way of qualifying as an educated person, and that every time this way is the one that some chance has cast precisely upon them at this point in time; that all other people in the world have no other calling than to become as they are, and that they ought to pay them the greatest thanks if they are willing to take upon themselves the pains of thus forming them. Between peoples of the first kind, an interplay of mutual formation and education most beneficial to the development of man in general takes place, and an interpenetration in which nevertheless each one, with the good will of the other, remains himself. Peoples of the second kind are able to educate nothing, for they are unable to take hold of anything in its existent state; they only want to annihilate everything that stands existent, and outside of them selves everywhere produce an empty place, in which they can only keep repeating their own shape; even their initial apparent entry into foreign customs is only the good-natured condescension of the educator toward the apprentice who is now still feeble but gives good hope; even the figures of the perfection of the ancient world they do not like, until they have wrapped them in their garment, and if they could, they would wake them up from the tombs to educate them after their fashion.” That is how Fichte passes verdict concerning some national peculiarities; only, after this judgment there follows straightway a sentence in tended to take away from this judgment any tinge of a national arrogance of his own: “To be sure, far be the audacity from me to accuse any existent nation as a whole and without exception of that narrow-mindedness. Let us rather assume that here too those who do not express themselves are the better ones.”

[ 32 ] These contemplations would not like to answer the question: who wanted this war? out of such a mood of soul as some personalities of the countries at war with Middle Europe do. They would like to let the conditions influencing the events speak on their own. He who is writing down these contemplations asked among Russians whether they had wanted a war against Middle Europe.—To him, what Renan predicted² in the year 1870 seems to lead onto a surer path than the judgments presently pronounced out of passion. This seems to him to be a path to the only region of judgment which, regarding the war, can and should be entered upon by him too who makes himself mental representations about what judgments of thought are superfluous and inappropriate when the judgments of deed by the weapons have to decide about the destinies of peoples out of blood and death.

[ 33 ] It is certain that driving powers pushing for war can be compelled by other forces into a life of peace long enough until they have weakened in themselves so far that they become ineffective. And whoever has to suffer from this effectiveness will make an effort to create these peacekeeping forces. The course of history shows that for years, Germany has taken upon itself this effort concerning the will forces streaming from West and East. Everything else that one can say regarding the present war in the direction of France's and Russia's driving powers weighs less than the simple, patent fact that these driving powers were sufficiently deeply anchored in the willing of these two countries to defy everything that wanted to hold them down. Whoever states this fact does not necessarily have to be reckoned among those personalities who judge out of inclination or disinclination, predetermined by the events—quite comprehensible in this time, of course—toward this or that people. Disdain, hatred, or the like need have nothing to do with such formation of judgment. How one loves such things, or does not love them, how one assesses them in feelings, is entirely another matter than setting forth the simple fact. It also has nothing to do with how one loves or does not love the French, how one values their Spirit, when one believes one has reasons for the opinion that driving powers to be found in France are entwined in the present war complications. What is said about such driving forces as are present in peoples, can be kept free of what falls within the realm of accusation or blame in the usual sense.

[ 34 ] One will seek in vain among the Germans for such driving forces as had to lead to the present war in a similar way to those characterized by Solovieff among the Russians, proclaimed in advance for the French by Renan. The Germans could foresee that one would wage this war against them some day. It was their obligation to arm for it. What they have done to fulfill this obligation, is called among their opponents the cultivation of their militarism.

[ 35 ] What the Germans have to accomplish, for their own sake, and in order to fulfill the tasks laid upon them by world-historical necessities, would have been possible for them to accomplish without this war, if these accomplishments were just as acceptable to others as they are necessary to them. It did not at all depend on the Germans how the other peoples took the fulfillment of the world-historical tasks that in recent time in the realm of material culture added themselves for the Germans to their tasks existing earlier. In the power that, working only out of itself, establishes the position of their material cultural accomplishments, the Germans were able to place the trust they could gain from the way their work of spirit has been received by the peoples. If one looks at the German manner, one notices that nothing is inherent in it that would have made it necessary for the German to establish in any other way before the world the present work he has to accomplish than has happened with his purely spiritual accomplishments.

[ 36 ] It is not necessary that the German make the attempt himself to characterize the significance for mankind of the German quality of spirit and accomplishment of spirit. If he wants to record verdicts as to what significance this quality and accomplishment have for mankind outside of the German area, he can seek the answers among this mankind outside of the German area. One will be permitted to listen to the words of a personality who belongs to the leading ones in the region of the English language, to the words of the great speaker of America, Ralph Waldo Emerson.³ In his contemplation on Goethe, he gives a characterization of the German quality of spirit and accomplishment of spirit in their relationship to the world's formative cultural education. [Emerson's sentences are quoted here according to the translation by Herman Grimm. Cf. his book: Fifteen Essays, Third Installment.] He says: “What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which he shares with his nation,—a habitual reference to interior truth. In England and in America there is a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied. In France there is even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And in all these countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the understanding is occupied, the taste propitiated,—so many columns, so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?” And in another pas sage of this contemplation on Goethe, Emerson molds the words: The “earnest ness enables them—Emerson means men educated in Germany—to out-see men of much more talent. Hence almost all the valuable distinctions which are current in higher conversation have been derived to us from Germany. But whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in England and France, adopt their study and their side with a certain levity, and are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part they espouse,—Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth shines through. He is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. He has the formidable independence which converse with truth gives. Hear you, or forbear, his fact abides.”

[ 37 ] A few more thoughts of Emerson's shall be added that will quite certainly be allowed to stand here; after all, an English-American spoke them about the Germans. “The Germans think for Europe ... The English want the faculty of grouping men in natural classes by an insight of general laws ... The English cannot interpret the German mind.” Emerson was able to know what infusion German spiritual work is capable of giving to mankind.

[ 38 ] In the sentences quoted, Emerson speaks of the “French sprightliness,” and of the “fine practical understanding of the English.” If one wanted to continue in his sense with regard to the Russians, one could perhaps say: the German lacks the impulse of the Russians to seek a mystical power for all their life expressions, even the practical, by which they are justified.

[ 39 ] And in these relationships of the spirits of these peoples lies something quite similar to the military conflicts presently in effect. In the driving force that from the side of the French led to the war with Germany, their temperament is at work, what Emerson means by their sprightliness is at work. In this temperament lies the mysterious force that so bubbles over when it utters itself in Renan's words: “hatred unto death, preparations without rest, alliance with anyone convenient.” That before the war France stood armed with a military almost equal to Germany's in absolute terms, but in relation to its population even more than one and a half times as large, is a result of this mysterious force, over which result, the cliché about “German militarism” is to be drawn as a concealing veil.—In Russia's will to war, the mystical belief is at work, even where it finds only an instinctive expression. To characterize the conflicts effective to day between French and Russians on the one hand and Germans on the other hand, one will have to observe the moods of the souls.—The military conflict between British and Germans, by contrast, is such that the Germans see themselves facing only “fine practical” driving forces. The ideal of English policy is, in keeping with the essential being of the country, entirely oriented toward practical goals. Be it emphasized: in keeping with the essential being of the country. What its inhabitants reveal of this essential being, say in their behavior, is itself a working of this essential being, but not the basis of the English political ideal. Activity in the sense of this ideal has engendered in the Briton the habit of counting as guideline for this activity what seems to him to correspond to personal interests of life. It does not contradict the presence of such a guideline that it asserts itself in the shared life of society as a definite rule, which one strictly obeys if one wants to have manners. It also does not contradict it that one holds the guideline to be something quite other than it is.⁴ All of this holds good only for the Briton insofar as he is integrated into the world of his political ideal. And by this, a military conflict is created between England and Germany.

[ 40 ] That one day the time must come when on soul territory, the world view of the German essential being, aiming as it does for the spiritual, will have to achieve its world validity by conquest—obviously, only by a battle of spirits—over against the one that has its representatives out of the English essential being in Mill, Spencer, the pragmatist Schiller, in Locke and Huxley, among others: the fact of the present war can be an admonition for this. But this has nothing directly to do with this war.

[ 41 ] Goethe had in mind the guideline characterized for England's political ideal when he, who counted Shakespeare among the spirits that exerted the greatest influence on him, spoke the words: “But while the Germans torture themselves solving philosophical problems, the English with their great practical mind laugh at us, and win the world. Everyman knows their declamations against the slave trade, and while they would have us believe⁵ what humane principles lie at the basis of such a policy, it now comes out that the true motive is a real object, without which the English, as is known, never do so, and which one should have known.”—About Byron, who became his model for Euphorion in the Second Part of Faust, Goethe says: “Byron is to be regarded as man, as Englishman, and as patriot. His good qualities are to be derived primarily from the man; his bad ones, that he was an Englishman. All Englishmen are as such without real reflection; distraction and partisan spirit do not allow them to reach any calm formative training. But they are great as practical men.”

[ 42 ] These Goethean verdicts, too, touch not the Englishman as such, but only what reveals itself as “total essential being England” when this total essential being reveals itself as bearer of its political ideal.

[ 43 ] The political ideal mentioned has developed the habit of establishing as great a space of the earth as possible for England's use, in keeping with the guideline characterized. Regarding this space, England appears like a person establishing his house at his pleasure, and growing accustomed to bar his neighbors as well from doing anything that makes the inhabitability of the house less pleasant than one wishes.

[ 44 ] England believed the habit of being able to live on in this fashion was threatened by the development that Germany unnecessary had to strive for in most recent time. Hence it is understandable that it did not want to allow a military conflict to arise between Russia-France on the one hand and Germany-Austria on the other without doing everything that could contribute to eliminating the nightmare of threat caused to it by Germany's cultural work. That, how ever, was to join Germany's opponents. A purely political “fine practical under standing” calculated what danger could arise for England from a Germany victorious against Russia and France.—This calculating has as little to do with a merely moral indignation over the “violation of Belgian neutrality” as it has much to do with the “fine practical understanding,” which sees the Germans in England's circle of interests when they enter Belgium.

[ 45 ] What this “fine practical” direction of will in connection with other forces directed against Germany has to bring into operation in the course of time, was able to show itself, for a German sensing, when the question was asked: how did England's political ideal always work when a European land power had to find that the world-historical conditions demanded that it expand its activity over the seas? One needed only to look at what this political ideal had done regarding Spain and Portugal, Holland, France, when these unfolded their activity at sea. And one could remember that this political ideal always “had a fine understanding for the practical,” and that it knew how to calculate how the European directions of will that were directed against the countries in which a young maritime activity was unfolding were to be brought into a relationship of forces in such a way that a prospect opened up that England would be freed of its competitor.

[ 46 ] What the People of Germany had to sense regarding the European situation before the war, emerges upon observation of the forces directed upon this people from the periphery. From England, the “fine practical” “ideal” of this country. From Russia, directions of will that opposed the tasks that had emerged for Germany and Austria-Hungary for “Europe's Middle.” From France, folk forces whose being was not to be sensed otherwise for the German than in the manner which Moltke, in reference to France's relationship to Germany, once molded into the words: “Napoleon was a passing phenomenon. France remained. We already had to do with France centuries ago, we shall still have to do with it in centuries. ... the younger generation in France is raised in the belief that it has a sacred right to the Rhine, and that it has the mission of making it the border of France at the first opportunity. The Rhine border must become a truth, that is the theme for the future of France.”

[ 47 ] In the face of these three directions of will, world-historical necessity had forged together Germany and Austria-Hungary into “Europe's Middle.” There have always been people grown together with this European middle who sensed how tasks will grow up for this European middle that will reveal themselves to them as tasks to be solved in common by the peoples of this middle. Like a representative of such people, one long dead shall be remembered here. One who bore the ideals of “Europe's Middle” deep in his soul, in which they were warmed by the power of Goethe, from which he let his whole world conception and the inmost impulses of his life be carried. It is the Austrian researcher of literature and language, Karl Julius Schröer. A man who was all too little known and appreciated by his contemporaries in his being and significance. The writer of these contemplations counts him among those personalities to whom he owes immeasurable thanks in life. Schröer wrote down in his book on German Poetry in the year 1875, as written trace of the sensations that the events of 1870/1871 had stirred for the forming of an ideal of “Europe's Middle,” the words: “We in Austria see ourselves, just at this significant turning point, in a peculiar situation. Though the free movement of our life of state has cleared away the wall of separation that parted us from Germany up to a short time ago, though we are now given the means of working our way upward to a common cultural life with the other Germans, yet just now it has come to pass that we were not to participate in a great act of our people. ... A wall of separation could not arise through this in the German life of the spirit. Its roots are not of a political but of a culture-historical nature. We want to keep our eyes on this untearable unity of the German life of the spirit ... in the German Empire may they appreciate and honor our difficult cultural task, and as for the past, not blame us for what is our fate, not our fault.” Out of what sensations would a soul who so feels speak, if he still dwelt among the living, and beheld how the Austrian in full unity with the German of Germany is fulfilling an “act of his people!”

[ 48 ] “Europe's Middle” is formed by “fate;” the souls that feel themselves as belonging to this middle with an engagement full of understanding place it in the responsibility of the spirit of history to judge what in the past—and what also in the present and future is its “fate, not its fault.”

[ 49 ] And whoever wants to assess the understanding which the ideas of a common direction of will of the “Middle of Europe” have found abroad in Hungary, let him read voices from Hungary such as one is to be found in the article about “The Genesis of the Defensive Alliance,” by Emerich von Halasz, in the March, 1911 issue of Young Hungary. In it are the words: “If we ... consider that Andrassy stepped back from directing affairs more than thirty, and Bismarck more than twenty-one years ago, and this great work of peace stands ever yet in full power, and promises to have still further a long duration: then surely we need not surrender to a gloomy pessimism ... Bismarck and Andrassy with united force found an impressive solution to the middle-European problem, and thereby fulfilled a civilizational work that hopefully will outlast several generations ... In the history of alliances we seek in vain for a formation of such duration and of such mighty conception.”

[ 50 ] When the characterized directions of willing, turned against “Europe's Middle,” had joined for common pressure, it was inevitable that this “pressure” determined the sensations that formed within the middle-European peoples concerning the course that world events were taking. And when the facts of the summer of 1914 came about, they found Europe in a world-historical situation in which the forces operative in the life of peoples enter actively into the course of events in such a way that they remove the decision about what is to happen from the realm of ordinary human assessment, and place it into that of a higher order, an order by which world-historical necessity takes effect within the course of human development. Whoever senses the essential being of such world-moments, also lifts his judgment out of the region in which questions nest of the type, what would have happened if in an hour heavy with destiny this or that proposal of this or that personality had had more effect than was the case? In moments of world-historical turnings, men experience in their decisions forces about which one only judges aright if one endeavors—remember the words of Emerson⁶—not only to “see the particular” but to “conceive of” mankind “as a whole by higher laws.” How should it be permissible to judge by the laws of ordinary life the decisions of men that cannot be made out of these laws, because in them the spirit is at work who can be beheld only in the world-historical necessities.—Natural laws belong to the natural order; above them stand the laws that belong to the order of ordinary human living-together; and above them stand the spiritual-operative laws of world-historical becoming, which belong to yet another order, the one through which men and peoples solve tasks and go through developments that lie outside the realm of ordinary human living together.

[ 51 ] The preceding thoughts contain what the author of this brief writing spoke out in lectures held before the military entry of Italy into the present wrestling of peoples. From this fact, one will find it comprehensible that in this writing nothing is included about the driving powers that from this side have become the will to war against “Middle Europe.” A brief writing appearing later will hopefully be able to bring an addition in this regard.

Berlin, 5 July 1915.

• 1. on p. 11 beginning “The true philosophy” has been corrected in one point. The present essay, as printed in 1915 (3rd printing) misquotes one word, Leben, as Lebens (this is now corrected in the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works [vol. 24, latest edition only, 1982]). The alteration is presumably unintentional, producing as it does the meaning “... and it sees how merely in the appearance of this life closes and again opens, endlessly on, ...” Therefore I have translated according to the original Fichte.
• 2. on p. 23. The 3rd printing (1915) has a sentence that would mean, uncorrected: “It seems to him that what Renan predicted in the year 1870 to lead onto a surer path than the judgments presently pronounced out of passion.” The present translation is based on the assumption that Ihm scheint, daß, was (1915) should probably read Ihm scheint das, was.
• 3. On pp. 24 f. there are quotations from Emerson. Rudolf Steiner uses a free but very true German rendering by Herman Grimm. Here the passages are given in Emerson's original English, but with unmarked omissions and sentence divisions as in the German. Nevertheless I have left Rudolf Steiner's footnote unaltered.
• 4. On p. 26 the expression “something quite other than it is” is based on the correction of etwa to etwas. Otherwise it would mean “perhaps quite other than it is.”
• 5. On p. 26 the expression “have us believe” is based on the correction of weiß to weis. Otherwise it would mean “make us white.”
• 6. On p. 29, Emerson's thoughts are quoted in brief phrases taken from a free rendering in German. I have translated the German into English, rather than replacing it with Emerson's own words.

Let me begin by repeating yet again my urgent request that you do not take notes during these lectures. It is mystifying that my wish in this respect seems to meet with absolutely no compliance. Yet I must make this request particularly with regard to these lectures. Firstly, the current situation gives no opportunity for someone who is seriously concerned with human evolution to give properly rounded-off lectures; at best only isolated remarks are possible. Secondly, we all know what misunderstandings came about at the beginning of this painful time because parts of my lectures were taken down and disseminated in every direction, in some cases with the praiseworthy intention of saying: Look, the things he says aren't as bad as all that—but in others with the less praiseworthy aim of raising people's hackles so that they might build up all sorts of resentments.

Isolated sentences quoted out of context, especially when taken from a series of lectures, can never mean anything and can be interpreted in all manner of ways. I am concerned solely with the quest for the truth, in this case particularly because a number of our friends have requested discussions of this sort and have a real desire for them. I am not concerned that it might be possible to report here or there that what I have to say is really not so bad after all. What I am concerned with is the truth. Surely all those of us who take spiritual science seriously, and who are concerned with the findings of spiritual science with regard to human evolution in our time, should be concerned with the truth.

I shall continue today to give you some more of the viewpoints which furnish a basis on which to form a judgement fitting for today—that is, not for the next few days or weeks, or even for the next year, but for the present time in the wider sense. Let us remember above all that spiritual science is a serious matter and that to understand it in the proper way we must take it more seriously than anything else. If, on the other hand—as is so frequently the case when there is a society which serves as an instrument for the endeavours of spiritual science—if spiritual science is approached with all sorts of prejudices and premature feelings which lead to a state of furious zeal over all manner of things, then this proves a lack of readiness for spiritual science. Yet it is perfectly possible to understand today that spiritual science alone is suitable for the development of that earnestness which is so needed in these tragic times.

Each individual must set aside his preferences for one direction or another and endeavour to accept things without any prejudice. It is impossible to say certain things without making one person or another feel uncomfortable. There are plenty of people today who regard it as a sin even to hint at certain facts, because they imagine that the mere mention of some fact or other is tantamount to taking sides—which is, of course, not the case at all. Some facts must be looked calmly and squarely in the face because only then can a valid judgement be reached. Of course, perhaps a person does not want to reach such a judgement, but he could reach it if he wanted to stand on the foundation of spiritual science.

I shall now present you with a number of preparatory remarks in order to bring forward, at the end of today's discussion, some points which may awaken an understanding for the manner in which certain—shall we say—occult knowledge is forcing its way into the present-day spiritual development of mankind. Actually, this knowledge is forcing its way to the surface of its own accord as a result of the process of human evolution, so that it is not necessary to make any extra effort to place it within the development of mankind. I shall take my departure from certain details, which I beg you will simply accept as the groundwork, so that later the main emphasis can be placed on what I shall put forward as the outcome of these considerations.

At the beginning of these discussions I said: If, as a good European, one makes every effort to go thoroughly through all the events and facts that have been taking place over decades and have also come to be known recently, if one makes the effort to go thoroughly into them without prejudice, and if one then examines the judgements made on the periphery as a matter of course—and I mean as a matter of course—by people who have rightly borne famous names during the period leading up to today's painful events, then one cannot but reach a certain conclusion. This conclusion is that certain judgements are such that, whatever one might say or assert, the answer is always the same: Never mind, the German will be burnt-after the old pattern: ‘Never mind, the Jew will be burnt.’ Many, many judgements contain nothing but a certain aversion—whether justified or not is open to question—against anything in the world that might be called German. I am weighing my words carefully.

This aversion has recently intensified into a burning hatred which has no inclination whatsoever to scrutinize anything carefully, nor to accept anything that has been carefully scrutinized, but which finds its total justification simply in hating. Yet advantage is not necessarily taken of this justification. If someone says: I hate—and if he really wants to do so and announces that he intends to do so, then why not? Everyone has the right to hate as much as he likes; no objection can be made to it. But very many people are most concerned not to admit to their feelings of hatred in such a situation. They try to lull themselves into forgetting about them by saying all sorts of things which are supposed to wipe away the hatred and put in its place a supposedly objective and just judgement. But this puts everything into a false light. If someone admits honestly: I hate this or that person—then you can talk with him, or perhaps not, depending on the intensity of his hatred. Truthfulness, absolute truthfulness towards oneself and the world in all things is necessary, and if we fail to comprehend that truthfulness is necessary in all things, then we shall be unable to make what spiritual science ought to be for mankind into the most intimate impulse of our own heart and of our own soul. We then say: Certainly, we want a part of spiritual science, that part which is not concerned with our sympathies or antipathies, that part which is useful for us; but we shall reject those parts which do not suit us. It is possible to take this stance, but it is not a standpoint that is beneficial today for human evolution. What I have to say is based on certain remarks, but truly without anger!

It is a well-known fact that very many people see a connection between today's events and the foundation of the German Reich which lies in the centre of Europe. It is not my task to speak about the politics of the German Reich or about any other politics, and I shall not do so. I simply want to give you certain isolated facts as a foundation. It is possible to form an opinion about the events which led to the foundation of this German Reich. It is also possible to form the opinion—whether justified or not—that it is a calamity for mankind that Germans exist at all. Even this is open to discussion. Why not, if someone is open and honest enough to admit that he holds these views? But this is not our concern at the moment.

Let us look at the fact that this German nation led to the founding of the German Reich during the final third of the nineteenth century. There are people who challenge the founding of the German Reich from quite another point of view. They consider that the founding of this empire was not good for human evolution. But people who share the standpoint of the western empires have no right to form a judgement of this kind. For let us not forget that these very nations of the West are exceedingly attached to the concept of empire, the concept of the state, and that their way of thinking with regard to nationality is very much linked to the various ideas about the state. Therefore, those who unite patriotism with the idea of the state, as do the western nations, have no right to question the idea of an empire at all. If they did they would be quite illogical, for they would be stating that another nation has no right to do what their own nation has done. In a discussion you have to take up a standpoint which provides a basis for discussion and also makes it possible to remain logical. It would be easy to have a discussion with Bakunin about whether a German Reich in Central Europe is something beneficial. But the basis for such a discussion would differ greatly if it were held, not with statesmen but with almost any member of a western nation, because they are so immersed in the idea of the state. So there must be one presupposition, namely, that the idea of empire as such is not rejected out of hand, otherwise there is no basis for discussion. But one's presuppositions must be known if one wants to arrive at valid judgements.

People today no longer think of the historical impulses out of which this empire in Central Europe arose. They do not consider, for instance, that the soil on which this empire has been founded was for many centuries a kind of reservoir, a kind of fountain-head for the rest of Europe. You see, something Roman, in the sense of a continuation of what used to be Roman, no longer exists today. What used to be Roman has, if I may say so, evaporated and has only entered into other folk elements in the form of isolated impulses. Take the soil of Italy. During the course of the Middle Ages all sorts of Germanic elements kept migrating to Italy. I might have an opportunity to define this more closely later on. In today's Italian population, even in their very blood, there flows a tremendous amount of what can be called Germanic. This was instilled into them by the Roman element, but not in any way which might make it possible today to call the people of present-day Italy a continuation of the old Roman people. It was always the case that from Central Europe, as from a reservoir of peoples, all sorts of tribes migrated to the periphery, to Spain, North Africa, Italy, France, Britain. And as the peoples rayed out in this way, something not of these peoples came to meet them: the Roman element. In the middle, as it were, was the reservoir:

A man such as Dante, about whom I spoke to you yesterday, is simply a characteristic expression of a general phenomenon. Who are today's French people? Not merely descendants of the Latin element. Franks, in other words former Germanic tribes, spread out over this land. Their make-up became mingled with folk elements no longer their own, elements containing Latin aspects, via Roman civic attitudes, mixed with ancient Celtic aspects; the result of all this being something in which many more Germanic impulses live than might be imagined. A great many Germanic impulses live in today's Italian population as well. If we wanted to, we could study the migration of the Lombards into northern Italy, a Germanic element which simply absorbed the Roman. Britain was originally inhabited by elements which were then pushed back into Wales and Brittany and even as far as Caledonia, but not before they had sent out messengers to draw the Jutes, Angles and Saxons over to the island so that they might deter the predatory Picts and Scots. Out of all this an element emerged in which the Germanic obviously predominates.

This spreading out took place in all directions. In Central Europe the reservoir remained behind. Connected with the fact that the centre had to develop differently is that jump—which I do not want to brag about as a jump forward—which is expressed in Grimm's law of sound shifts. This law need not be measured with the yardstick of sympathy or antipathy, for it is simply a fact. Anyone can imagine what led to it, but this need not be confused with sympathy or antipathy.

When the Roman Caesars were carrying out their campaigns against the Germanic tribes, those who were first conquered formed by far the greater part of the army, so the Romans fought the Germanic tribes with Germanic tribesmen. Even in later times the massed peoples of the periphery stood by what was to be found in the centre to the extent that it became necessary to form the empire which, in its final phase, was the Holy Roman Empire. You know the passage in Faust where the students are glad that they need not worry about the Holy Roman Empire. But, on the other hand, it also came about that the periphery made terrible war on the middle element, it was constantly rebelling against the middle element. One must also take into account that much of what is present in the consciousness of Central Europe is linked with the way the soil of this empire in Central Europe has constantly been chosen as the scene of battle for all the quarrelling nations. This was particularly the case in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years' War, in which Central Europe lost up to one third of its population through the fault of the surrounding peoples. Not only towns and villages but whole tracts of countryside were destroyed. The peoples of Central Europe were utterly flayed by those of the periphery. These are historical facts which must simply be looked at squarely.

Now it is not surprising that in Central Europe the inclination arose to want something other peoples had already achieved, namely an empire. But the population of this soil has far less of a relationship to the idea of empire than has that of western Europe, which clings particularly strongly to it, regardless of whether it is a republic or a monarchy. This is irrelevant. You have to look beyond the mere words and see how the individual, whether in a republic or some other form, stands in relation to the state he belongs to, whether his feeling for the way he belongs to it is of this kind or that. I said it is not surprising that the impulse arose in Central Europe to want an empire, a state which makes it possible, on the one side, to build up some protection against the centuries of attack from the West and, on the other, to put up a barrier against what comes from the East—which is something that is still necessary for Central Europe though not, of course, for the East. These things are, I believe, comprehensible.

The Central European population has a different relationship to what might be called the idea of a state; that is it differs from that of the Western European, especially the French, population. In Central Europe the idea of a state has not been living for centuries as it has, for instance, in France, and furthermore the idea of a state as it exists in France is not suitable for what has remained in Central Europe. On the other hand, in what has remained in Central Europe something developed around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century which is of such spiritual stature that it will even be admired in the West when one day the hatred will have abated somewhat. And this spiritual stature, which mankind will continue to savour for centuries to come, was achieved in Central Europe at a time when the West was making it utterly impossible for Central Europe to build a coherent state structure. Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Herder and all the others who are connected with this stream did not become great within a coherent state structure. They became great despite the absence of a proper state structure. It is hardly possible to imagine how different it was for Goethe, who became great without any coherent state structure, compared with Corneille, or Racine, who can scarcely be imagined without the background of that state structure which was given its brilliance and eminence by Louis XIV, the king who said: ‘L'état, c'est moi!’ These things should be looked at together.

However, during the course of the nineteenth century impulses arose among the inhabitants of Central Europe which were at first entirely inward, impulses which gave birth to the inclination to want some form of state structure also. This inclination first came into being in an intensely idealistic way, and those who are familiar with the development of the nineteenth century know that the idea of a state which moved the inhabitants of Central Europe was at first anchored, above all, in the heads of all sorts of idealists, people who were more idealistic than practical, who were most unpractical with regard to the idea of a state, compared with the practical westerners.

So we follow the development of the endeavours to form a German Reich which could encompass the German peoples of Central Europe. We see, particularly in the year 1848, how the idea takes on certain forms which have a definite idealistic stamp. But because the nineteenth century was the age of materialism, anything of an idealistic stamp was not favoured with much luck. The blame for this bad luck lay not so much with the nation as with the materialism of the nineteenth century. So then it became necessary to achieve in a practical way what could not be achieved in an idealistic way; in other words it had to be achieved just as it had always been achieved during the course of European history. For how did states come into being? States came into being through wars, and through all the other things which also led to the German Reich between the years 1864 and 1870.

Those who experienced the days when the new German Reich was being founded know how pain-filled were the hearts of the ones who were still imbued with the ideas of 1848, when the aim was to found this Reich out of feelings and ideals. There were, in the sixties and seventies, those who favoured a ‘great German’ arrangement, while others favoured a ‘little German’ arrangement. Those who favoured a ‘greater’ Germany stood by the old idealistic principles and hoped to found the Reich on idealistic foundations and impulses. They did not want to make any conquests; they simply wanted to unite everything that was German, including Austria, in a common Reich or state. Anyone who imagines that these people desired to make even the smallest conquest has failed to grasp the degree of national idealism that lived in them. For a long period they were in bitter opposition to those who favoured a ‘little’ Germany, and who, under Bismarck, founded the present German Reich-that is, the German Reich under the leadership of Prussia. But in the end the ‘greater German’ party made their peace with the others because they came to understand that in Central Europe in the nineteenth century things had to go the way they did. They came to terms with this and realized that in the end Germany had to be founded in the same way as had been France and England. In this way those who favoured a ‘greater’ Germany gradually came to terms with something that went utterly against their ideals. These things have to be taken into consideration.

Consider further: Whatever opinion one might have about the events that took place between 1866 and 1870/71, whomsoever one might blame or not blame for the war of 1870, one must not forget that on the side of France efforts were made to prevent the foundation of the German Reich, that French politics were aimed at preventing the creation of a German Reich. Of course this can be denied, but things which are denied nevertheless remain true. When I speak of the French side, or the English side, I never mean the people themselves. I mean the cohesion of those who are at the helm at any given time, those who cause the external events to happen. People may think what they like about the Spanish succession, or about a French or a German party in favour of war. But there is no disputing the fact that there were people in France who made every effort to implement their judgement: namely, that the creation of an independent German Reich in Central Europe was not in keeping with the ‘gloire’ of the French state. This was one of the causes of the war of 1870/71. As a counter-stroke another impulse developed, about which once again one may think what one likes. This was the opinion that the German Reich might just as well be founded in the same manner as the French Empire, namely, by making war on a neighbour. These things must be looked at in cold blood.

So this German Reich was founded in the manner with which you are familiar, though there is little inclination today to examine the historical facts minutely. However, most of you know them, at least in outline. So we can say: The German Reich was founded, while France and Germany were at war with one another, in such a way that the forces generated by this war were those that brought the German Reich into being.

Let us look at the moment when Paris was not yet under siege but when the German victories were already making the founding of the German Reich seem a possibility. There was cause to view the resistance to the founding of this German Reich as broken, and so in Central Europe the idea arose to set in motion the founding of the Reich favoured by the ‘little’ German party. We are looking approximately at November 1870. In doing this we come up against the fact that, out of all that took place in what later became Germany—that is, the German Reich—there arose the feeling that this way of founding the German Reich has done great damage to Europe, the feeling that the structure of this Reich is a structure of menace. To speak of ‘Germany’ is no more than a want of tact on the part of those who live in the periphery. There is no Germany today, any more than there is a Kaiser of Germany. There are individual German states and the one who has been chosen to represent these states before the rest of the world is expressly not called ‘Kaiser of Germany’ but ‘German Kaiser’, which is something quite different. This has come about out of certain characteristics of the nature of Central Europe. I might point out that when the new Romanian state was recently formed there was much discussion on whether the king should be entitled ‘King of the Romanians’ or ‘King of Romania’. Such things come to mean a great deal the moment one starts to look at realities and not only illusions. The title ‘King of Romania’ was chosen for quite specific historical reasons in place of the originally intended ‘Romanian King’ or ‘King of the Romanians.’

Now if we allow judgements which have been in the making for some time to work on us, judgements which have recently in some cases reached new peaks of folly—again, we are not discussing what is justified, for everything is, of course, always either justifiable or unjustifiable in its separate parts—if we summarize these judgements we find that there has come into a being a feeling that great damage has been done to Europe by the founding of the German Reich, a feeling that the structure of this Reich in Central Europe is, in a way, a structure of menace. In order to make this clear I should like to read to you a text which, in addition, contains a number of other things I am also concerned with at present. It has been said: Germany, or the Germans, feel themselves to be threatened in some way, and yet in fact it is Germany that poses a threat to the whole of Europe. A judgement has been expressed which is rather significant in connection with this. It was printed in the journal Matin dated 8 October 1905. Do not forget that when we are concerned with realities we need to know that behind the opinion of one person there always stand the judgements of countless others, and also that realities always proceed from realities. In Matin of 8 October 1905 we read:

‘If Herr von Bülow wants to complain that Germany is being isolated, he ought first to ask himself whether perhaps Germany has not isolated herself from the rest of Europe by her actions. The authors of the mistrust and the suspicious hatred which are squeezing the German Reich ever more tightly by the day are not called Delcassé, Lansdowne, Edward VII or Roosevelt, but Bismarck and Moltke, Wilhelm II and von Bülow. These are the ones who have created and developed this prickly, irritable and provoking Reich, bristling with weaponry, which has been casting challenging glances at Europe for the past quarter century and which Europe in the end cannot help looking at with envy. By making her ever more Prussian, they are the ones who are turning away the sympathy which she was guaranteed in earlier days by her active scientific ways and her sober modesty. They are the ones who are sending out sparks of barbaric menace or brutal passion in this time of weariness. Europe is afraid of the fire that never stops smouldering in Berlin; Europe is taking precautionary measures.’

So where do we stand with this judgement that the German Reich poses a threat for the whole of Europe?

Among those in the West who express opinions today there are unlikely to be any who do not see Germany as a threat for the whole of Europe, or who do not consider that the worst thing that could possibly have happened was to turn this people, who formerly shone through their sciences and their sober modesty—as is so aptly expressed here—into a threat for the whole of Europe. For that this is what it has become is repeated over and over again by countless voices and in rivers of printers' ink.

It is easy to say what is often said, namely that this Reich was not created out of a historical necessity but out of ‘Germanic arrogance’—a misuse, incidentally, of the word ‘Germanic’—and further that it is filled with people who never cease stressing that Germans lead the world, Germans are the saviours of the world, and so on. Countless times we have heard it said: The Germans have grown arrogant, they think they have been called to rule the world, they consider the Reich they have founded to be something urgently needed in modern times, and so on; the pride, the arrogance of the Germans has become utterly insufferable. Such are the judgements which one hears in ever-changing forms.

I have no intention of glossing over anything, but I now want to read to you a judgement which was made at the time the Reich was founded, a time I have already mentioned. I said: Let us return to November 1870. What I want to read to you might make some people jump up and down with impatience—pardon the flippant expression—and say: There you have it! This is the kind of idea people have about the importance of this German Reich! It had hardly come into being, indeed was still in the process of being founded, and already it was being presented as something beneficial, not only for Germans but for the whole of Europe, indeed for the whole world—even for the French themselves! To show you that I am not glossing over anything I shall read to you a judgement expressed in the year 1870:

‘No nation ever had so bad a neighbour as Germany has had in France for the last four hundred years; bad in all manner of ways; insolent, rapacious, insatiable, unappeasable, continually aggressive ... Germany, I do clearly believe, would be a foolish nation not to think of raising up some secure boundary-fence between herself and such a neighbour now that she has the chance. There is no law of nature that I know of, no Heaven's Act of Parliament, whereby France, alone of terrestrial beings, shall not restore any portion of her plundered goods when the owners they were wrenched from have an opportunity upon them ... The French complain dreadfully of threatened “loss of honour” ... But will it save the honour of France to refuse paying for the glass she has voluntarily broken in her neighbour's windows? For the present, I must say, France looks more and more delirious, miserable, blameable, pitiable, and even contemptible. She refuses to see the facts that are lying palpable before her face, and the penalties she has brought upon herself ... Ministers flying up in balloons ballasted with nothing but outrageous public lies, proclamations of victories that were creatures of the fancy; a Government subsisting altogether on mendacity, willing that horrid bloodshed should continue and increase rather than that they, beautiful Republican creatures, should cease to have the guidance of it: I know not when or where there was seen a nation so covering itself with dishonour ... The quantity of conscious mendacity that France, official and other, has perpetrated latterly, is something wonderful and fearful ... It is evidently their belief that new celestial wisdom is radiating out of France upon all the other overshadowed nations; that France is the new Mount Zion of the universe ... I believe Bismarck will get his Alsace and what he wants of Lorraine; and likewise that it will do him, and us, and all the world, and even France itself by and by, a great deal of good ... Bismarck seems to me to be striving with strong faculty, by patient, grand, and successful steps, towards an object beneficial to Germans and to all other men. That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France, seems to me the hopefullest public fact that has occurred in my time ... The appearance of a strong German Reich brings about a new situation. If the military states of France and Russia were to join forces, they could crush a splintered Germany lying between them. But now their arbitrary actions are faced with a considerable restraint ...’

Now I am going to omit a phrase for a reason which you will understand in a moment:

‘What every English statesman has longed for has left the realm of ideas and become reality ...’

You could ask, is this megalomania? Dear friends, I have just read to you a leading article which appeared in The Times in November 1870, but I omitted one word in the final sentence. The complete sentence reads:

‘But now their arbitrary actions are faced with a considerable restraint. The strong Central Power every English statesman has longed for has left the realm of ideas and become reality.’

As you see, it is necessary to look at things as they really are. Those who read The Times today should to some extent take into account the opinion of The Times of November 1870. They might even attain to an unusual view of that most ghastly phrase ever coined, that of ‘German militarism’, if they were to think a little about what was said from the English side at that time: that the appearance of a strong German Reich brings about a new situation. If the military states of France and Russia joined forces, they could crush a splintered Germany lying between them.

Times change, as you see. But people still believe they can make absolute judgements, and they are so happy in their absolute judgements. It is truly not enmity towards the English being and the English people if one passes a judgement which may seem wrong to many people from England, such as the one I passed yesterday about Sir Edward Grey. Those English who think it is enmity are, in fact, their own worst enemy. But I am not in the habit of passing judgement without any support from what can be regarded as a reliable source. You could say that whoever said what I said about Sir Edward Grey was no Englishman and cannot have known him. So now let me read to you a judgement about him by an Englishman who knew him well because he was a fellow minister. During the winter of 1912/13 this man said about Sir Edward Grey:

‘It is amusing for those of us who have known Grey since the beginning of his career to note how much he impresses his Continental colleagues. They seem to assume there is something in him which is, in fact, not there. He is one of the foremost sporting anglers of the kingdom and also quite a good tennis player. He does not, however, possess any political or diplomatic capacities, unless a certain wearisome tediousness in his manner of speaking and also an extraordinary tenacity, were to be seen as such. Earl Rosebery once said of him that the impression he gives of great concentration stems from the fact that there is never a thought in his head which might distract him from whatever paper he is studying. When recently a somewhat more lively diplomat expressed admiration for Grey's modest bearing, which never reveals what might be going on in his head, a rather pert secretary said: “A money box filled to the brim with gold sovereigns does not rattle when you shake it. Neither is there a sound if it contains not so much as a single penny. In the case of Winston Churchill, a few coppers rattle so loudly that it gets on your nerves. In the case of Grey there is not a sound. Only the one who holds the money box in his hand can tell whether it is full to the brim or completely empty!” Though impertinent, this is well put. I believe that Grey has the most decent character, though he does sometimes allow a rather unfortunate vanity to mislead him into getting involved with affairs which it would be better to leave alone in the interest of keeping his hands clean. He is always excused by the fact that on his own he is unable to comprehend or think anything through properly. On his own he is no kind of schemer, but the moment a skillful schemer takes possession of him he can appear as the most accomplished schemer. This is why political schemers have always been tempted to choose precisely him for their tool, and to this alone he owes his position.’

We must take note of these things so that we are not tempted to believe that the peace of Europe in July 1914 was in particularly good hands. By using a number of documents referred to in various books anything can be proved. What matters is whether these things were used in the right way in the handling of those forces which are important.

Another thing you must note is that historical processes grow out of one another, they gradually take shape. What led to the events of 1914 had been in preparation for a long time, a very long time. Much has been said about this preparation, for instance, that the countries of the Triple Entente did not have any agreement which was against Central Europe; that the only purpose of the Triple Entente was to cultivate peace in Europe. All sorts of facts have been paraded as ostensible proof for this supposition. I would have to tell you some very long stories if I wanted to prove fully what I have to say. This is not possible, but I want to give you a few points of reference. For instance, I should like to read you some passages from a speech made in France in October 1905, because in the future this will have a certain part to play in history. Such speeches are always one-sided, of course, but if one bears everything in mind—and here there are a number of important points to bear in mind—a judgement can be made. A number of important things may be taken from this speech by Jaurès from the year 1905. I am able to choose this example because I have recently spoken about Jaurès in quite another context. As you know, Jaurès was a democrat, indeed a social-democrat and, whatever else one might think of him, he was certainly a man who was seriously concerned not only with peace which would have been so necessary for Europe, or at least western Europe, but with calling together all those people in the world who seriously longed to keep peace. So in a way Jaurès had a right to speak as he did. In October 1905, shortly after the French democratic government had ditched Delcassé—pardon the flippant expression—when it had become apparent during a session of the chamber that he was capable of endangering peace in Europe in the near future, Jaurès commented as follows:

‘England has recognized Delcassé's dream and is quietly preparing to make use of it. The threat posed by German industry and German commerce, in all markets of the world, to English trade and English profits, is increasing daily.

It would by cynical, it would be scandalous, if England were to declare war on Germany merely in order to annihilate her military might, destroy her fleet and send her trade to the bottom of the ocean.

But if one day a conflict were to arise between France and Germany in which France brought forward legal reasons and the demand for the restoration of her national integrity, then behind these splendid pretexts the calculations of the English capitalists, who want to remove German competition by force, could creep in and use this as a means of achieving their aim.

So when difficulties arose in the Moroccan affair between France and Germany, and the latter, suspecting a coalition between France and England, made a brusque intervention in order to force the two to make declarations, it turned out that England—I have to say this I'm afraid—was all too inclined to fan the flames. It is a fact that, at the very moment when events were reaching a climax, England offered France an offensive-defensive pact in which she guaranteed us the fullest support and committed herself not only to sink the German fleet but also to occupy the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and land one hundred thousand troops in Schleswig-Holstein. If this pact had been signed—and Monsieur Delcassé wanted to do so—this would have meant immediate war. This is the reason why we socialists demanded the resignation of Monsieur Delcassé, and by doing so we have rendered a service to France, Europe and mankind in general.’

Above all, Jaurès knew those things which many people do not know when they arrive at judgements—most essential and important things. He was even careless enough to express these essential and important things in such a way as to hint that he might say more in the future. It is well known to occultists that in the last third of the nineteenth century a member of a certain brotherhood made known to the world certain things which, in the opinion of the brotherhood, should not have been made public. One day soon after he had done this he disappeared; he had been murdered. Jaurès was not an occultist, but we may be excused for being curious as to whether the world will ever hear what led to his death on the eve of the war.

The things which Jaurès said go back to the session of the chamber during which Delcassé, the creature of Edward VII, as well as other creatures who worked behind the scenes, was ditched by the government, perhaps not so much because he wanted to smooth the way for war as for quite another reason.

We are in the year 1905. Russia is still engaged over in the East and it is, therefore, to be hoped that if the flames being fanned by Delcassé in the West really start to flare up the outcome will not be what it would be if Russia were no longer busy in the East. But Delcassé is not a person who takes things lying down. When those who did not want a war accused him of driving matters to the brink of war, he replied that England had let it be known to France that she was prepared to occupy the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and attack Schleswig-Holstein with 100,000 troops and, if France so wished, this offer would be repeated in writing. This piece of news, which Delcassé presented to his ministerial colleagues who were about to turn him out was, of course, the upshot of negotiations he had been conducting behind their backs and in which King Edward VII had also been heavily involved.

I could quote many items which would verify this fact, which was published in Matin, and later also in other journals. But I only want to draw your attention to the fact that at least there was someone, even at the time, who looked at the matter more closely and found it suspicious. This was a personality who is possibly not at all liked by people, particularly in France. He was the clerical senator Gaudain de Villaine who, on 20 November 1906, when Clemenceau's ministry had already begun, asked what was the situation between France and England about which so much was being heard. Clemenceau answered that so far as the idea of revenge was concerned, he was indignant that a French senator could have set such a trap for him, obliging him either to disappoint the Orange Lodge or make a declaration of war, and he would therefore refuse to reply. So Clemenceau responded to the question from a senator as to whether anything existed in the way of a coalition between France and England, which could lead to a European war, by refusing to reply. For if he were to reply he would either have to disappoint the Orange Lodge with regard to the idea of revenge, or he would have to make a declaration of war. So you see: If Clemenceau had been open about the relationship at that time between France and England he would have had to make a declaration of war—not a declaration of peace but a declaration of war. He said this himself in 1906.

We must not forget that what works in every case in the world is what one person hears from another. Can you imagine that it was possible in Central Europe to believe in the ‘peaceful’ intentions of western Europe, while at the same time having to listen to not one, but to countless such facts? To judge such things a number of factors must be taken into account. One of these is the utter absurdity of speaking of Central European militarism in the context of Central Europe in its widest sense. For any such militarism is an obvious consequence of being sandwiched between two military states.

People with absolutely no sense of reality might ask: Were not all sorts of proposals made about disarmament? You need only look at these suggestions for disarmament! A particular goal can be achieved by quite a number of different routes. Of course some people—I do not say nations, I say people—in western Europe would have preferred to achieve what they wanted, and still want, without a war which would spill the blood of hundreds of thousands on all sides. They would have preferred to gloat gleefully and say: Look, we have created peace!

One of the means preferred by western European politicians of a certain calibre was the disarmament proposal, for this was simply a different means of achieving the goal. When it turned out that no headway was made with disarmament proposals, this particular route had to be abandoned as impassable. If it had been possible to fetter Central Europe by means of disarmament this would, of course, have been preferred. But this was only one of several possible methods.

One must not be misled by words or by illusions; one must be clear about what people want. So ever and again it is necessary to stand up for people with a healthy way of thinking, people who really want what they say they want, even if, under the influence of hate and all sorts of other feelings, they are identified as those who are to blame for something. One must stand up for them and be clear about how unfair it is to say: The English did this or that, the English are to blame for this or that. This is not a sensible judgement. But neither is it sensible if an English person feels hurt when facts such as the one just discussed are revealed. One must sit up and take notice when, on a basis of good sense, fingers are pointed to certain factors in the great complex of causes. Thus we find under the heading ‘The German Scene’ in the Daily News of 13 October 1905 a declaration that says the following about the British government of the time, which bears so much of the blame for what is still going on today. I must add that Sir Edward Grey's predecessor was not a nought. Lord Lansdowne knew much more about what was what. But from a certain point onwards, those who stood behind the scenes needed a nought, in order to be able to operate more easily:

‘And it is high time that Lord Lansdowne should explain and defend this chapter in the diplomacy for which he and his colleagues are constitutionally responsible. There has been a tendency of late to place Lord Lansdowne upon a pinnacle, but the country will have little reason to thank him if it be found that he has permitted this country to drift into entanglements directly involving a risk of European war ... The best of courts will sometimes harbour fleeting family feuds, but what have the people of Great Britain or the people of Germany to do with these things? ... The anti-German hotheads in this country and the anti-British hotheads in Germany alone stand in the way of such a consummation [of friendly and stable relations] and for their tempestuous fads vast populations may one day have to suffer dearly.’

You have to take into account the essential things in the right places. But never mind all the facts; good sense alone could prove that the two Central European states had not the least cause to bring about a war. How would the prospect of war have seemed to those who thought about it? France would have had to say that in the event of a European war, unless certain conditions came about, she would be likely to suffer a great deal. However, this was not believed in France because there was still such a strong faith in the France which had ruled Europe for centuries. In Italy the conditions are rather special. Perhaps if we have time we shall discuss them further in another connection. But Italy also, under certain conditions, could not imagine that any great advantages would come of a war which would throw everything in Europe into chaos. In Russia, too, conditions are rather special, as I have already told you in connection with Russia's relationship to the Slav peoples, the Slav race.

This gives me an opportunity, by the way, to quote you an example of the depths of Sir Edward Grey's thoughts. What did his colleague Rosebery say? That the impression he gave of great concentration stemmed from the fact that he never had a thought in his head to distract him? Well, once a thought was infiltrated into his meditating mind by those who worked by infiltrating thoughts into his mind, the upshot was that he suddenly said: The Russian race has a great future and is destined to accomplish great things. He had forgotten that it was the Slav peoples who had been meant and that there is no such thing as a Russian race. When speaking of realities it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between Russianism and the Slav peoples.

In Russia only those who represented Russianism could imagine any great outcome for a European war, namely, the realization, at least partially, of the testament of Peter the Great. Apart from that, a great deal of suffering was expected, but not that suffering on which the representatives of Russianism would have placed any value.

England was able to say to herself that she would lose and risk the least. Now that the sorrowful events of war have been going on for many months, if an assessment were to be made of who had suffered least, or indeed hardly at all—at least in regard to the opinion of world history—the answer would be: England. England will be able to continue waging war for a long time without suffering to any great degree.

But the so-called Central Powers would most certainly have had nothing to gain from a war and they had no desire for such a war. They always displayed two tendencies. On the one hand there was a certain carefree air which arose, not out of a knowledge of what was going on but out of a basic characteristic; for the Austrian character is fundamentally carefree. On the other hand emphasis was always placed on the statement that all they wanted was to keep what they already had, and that any other suggestion was nonsense. There is no question, for instance, that any part of Serbia was to be annexed, if those who attempted to do so had succeeded in localizing the war between Austria and Serbia.

If England had been led by a statesman who had not said as early as 23 July: If Austria makes war on Serbia, this could lead to a European war; if England had been led by one who had said: We shall do everything possible to make sure that the war is localized; then events would have taken quite a different turn. But this would have had to be someone who formed his judgements in a different way from Sir Edward Grey, who was hypnotized from the start by the thought: If Austria makes war on Serbia, there will be a European war. He never asked what Russia had to do with the whole matter of war between Austria and Serbia. This never occurred to him and the suspicion cannot be detected in anything he said. All he ever saw was the justification for Russia's influence in Serbia, a justification for an influence which had been prepared in a remarkable way and was borne on remarkable currents, as I have shown you.

Nothing that has taken place in this connection, including the 364 assassinations between the years 1883 and 1887, has anything whatever to do with any kind of judgement about the Serbian people. All they have done is to fight bravely, and in their present condition they are still doing so. To them alone is owed the only success achieved in recent weeks down there by the Entente. No one who understands these matters will judge against any people, let alone one who, right into its most tragic days, has shown that it is not only willing—to the extent of sacrificing its own blood—but also able to stand up for its true nature, always present and at the ready in grave times, if only it is allowed to be. But we must remember also that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was only the last great blow in a whole series of assassination attempts against Austrian government officials to have taken place within the space of a few months. This was in fact a particular campaign, which was even quite comprehensible and in keeping with certain people. You remember what I told you about the occult background of this individuality, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. You also remember that it is a fact, a paradoxical fact, that this couple, kindly disposed towards the Slavs in the highest sense, were slain by Slavs—or seemingly so. The deeper connections are made more approachable by a certain understanding of the heart. We see a human being, kindly disposed in the highest sense towards the Slavs, slain—together with his wife—by Slav bullets. At the last moment the Duchess espies from her carriage a young female standing quite near; smiles at her, seconds before the bullets strike, because she notices she is a Slav woman, and exclaims: ‘Look, a Slavka!’ Then the bullets strike. What a strange karma this reveals! Before the bullets strike her down, the Duchess exclaims in delight, because her eye has fallen on one of her beloved Slav people.

I described earlier the far-reaching connection existing between machinations in the Balkan countries and a number of well-prepared situations on the Apennine peninsula. And I now want to ask once again a question I have already put to you: Why was it written in a rather inferior Paris journal in January 1913 that it was necessary for the good of mankind for Archduke Franz Ferdinand to be killed? Why was it said twice in this so-called ‘Occult Almanac’ that he would be killed? It is necessary to look at all the facts at once. We will find that the alchemy of the bullets which were used for this assassination was exceedingly complicated and that, although they stemmed from a Serbian arsenal, they had been ‘anointed’ from quite another quarter—if I may put it symbolically.

These are things which expressed themselves in what could be seen, for instance, in Austria. Imagine Switzerland surrounded only by those who hate her. I doubt whether this would have a particularly reassuring influence, especially if the hatred were expressed in sayings such as those which have become current in Romania: Jos Austria perfida!—That is: Down with perfidious Austria!; or: Rather Russian than Austrian!—and so on. If this is how things stand, and if you consider all the things that were written in Italy quite a long time before the war against Austria broke out, then you will understand that the situation was far from reassuring. In this way an extensive campaign was organized which spread far and wide in the countries surrounding Austria. I am not defending any particular state, but merely mentioning facts.

Consider, for instance, also the following: At the Berlin Congress, Austria received, through the significant influence of Lord Salisbury, a mandate to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. When England gave Austria the mandate to undertake this action in the Balkans during the seventies, it turned out that in Austria there was passionate opposition to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina because the Germans in Austria said: We have enough Slavs already; we cannot possibly absorb any more Slavs. If the idea had arisen in Austria to seize some fragment of Serbia by an act of war it would have met with the sharpest opposition in the interests of Austria, which were well understood, for nothing would have been more stupid than to covet some fragment of Serbian territory. The only desire was to hold the empire together in order to counteract the campaign. This was perfectly honest, though it may have been careless. Seen objectively, it becomes perfectly obvious that the war would not have started as a consequence of the ultimatum of Austria to Serbia if Russia had not taken up the stance we all know about, despite knowing perfectly well that Austria was not bent on any form of conquest. In all this, however, we must remember the moods. The consequence of everything we have been discussing was that moods arose, not only in the periphery but also in Central Europe.

Now I want to give you a small example to show you how, despite everything, it is possible to form a judgement about these things if one really sets out in earnest to achieve a valid judgement. It is interesting to look at certain points at definite times, for only in this way can one recognize something. For example, we might ask: What must it have looked like in the soul of someone who felt responsible for Austria, let us say round about the time of the assassination of the heir to the throne—I mean immediately before and immediately after this?

In order to reach a valid judgement with regard to the mood amongst honest people in Austria, the best moment to choose would be that which immediately preceded the assassination, for people were not then influenced by what happened in the aftermath of the assassination. You see how cautious I am trying to be. I am not going to consider the nervous and anxious souls as they were immediately after the assassination. Instead, let us look at what lived in the soul of the honest Austrian under all the influences which, since Delcassé, had made themselves felt coming from western Europe and connecting up with eastern Europe, with Russia. Now, I can place before your souls such a judgement by reading to you a passage from an essay which was written just at the moment in question. Though it appeared after the assassination it was already in the process of being printed when it happened. So it was written by an Austrian in the weeks immediately preceding the assassination:

[Gap in the shorthand report.]

Here you have the judgement of a man whose thoughts are based on common sense, someone who saw all the factors at work in Europe just before the final event, the assassination, took place. Everyone knew that at the instigation of Russia the Balkan states would be forced to declare war on Austria. Therefore, the right thing to do in order to avoid war would have been to start just at this point with attempts to localize the situation, for externally the prospects looked quite good.

It is necessary when making judgements according to one's own feelings—for us, judgements are facts—to look at the facts themselves and use them as the foundation. Today I have only been able to give you a few isolated facts in order to explain what I mean. But I gave them to you expressly for the purpose of developing the facts; nothing more. Let us be clear about the purpose of introducing such facts: the purpose is to promote the truth. The truth, even if, paradoxically, it may be damaging, can never be as damaging as an untruth.

Those who understand the facts know what unending lies were fabricated, from the moment it became possible to lie, unhindered, as a result of the possibility of making oneself heard above the other side—that is, of drowning out the other side by means of the various methods which came to the fore in such a grievous way. But we are concerned with truth and with the admission of the truth. It is quite definitely not the truth to maintain that this war was provoked by Central Europe. Perhaps people cannot speak the truth because they do not know it. Obviously, when something like this war comes about, both parties are usually partly to blame, but in different ways. But I am not talking about blame, I am talking about the uselessness of judgements which have been made, which take no account of the actual truth of the matter. Of course, I do not expect that these judgements will cease to be made, for obviously I know what happens in the course of human evolution and that, especially in our time, there is no inclination to base judgements on valid foundations; for there is so much in our time that prevents judgements being based on valid foundations. But one really ought to state properly what one is talking about.

Those who are connected with certain sources of these grievous world events, which from sheer negligence of thought still tend to be called ‘war’, those who therefore feel connected with what is emanating in the periphery from certain centres, should admit quite openly: Yes, we want what certain centres in the periphery want, we want the people of Central Europe to be partly exterminated and partly condemned to serfdom.

Certain people in these centres, however, do not want the cultural life of Central Europe to perish. They talk of the wonderful science and culture and of the sober modesty which used to exist. In other words, they would be happy to lord it over these territories of culture and modesty by acting in the way the Romans behaved towards the Greeks. Obviously, Greek culture was higher; and the Romans did not destroy it. Similarly, no one in the Entente wants to destroy German culture. On the contrary, these people will be only too pleased if German culture continues to flourish vigorously, but they want a relationship similar to that of the Romans to the Greeks: that is, they want to make a kind of cultural helotry out of what exists in Central Europe. All right, then let them say so! Why deck it out with something so utterly ridiculous! For German militarism—which is not to be denied—has its true origin in French and Russian militarism. Without French and Russian militarism there would be no German militarism.

Let them say that what they want is to helotize Central Europe! Let them say they would be quite content if this could be the outcome! Let them admit that they hate the presence of such a people in the middle of Europe who want to do what all the other surrounding peoples are doing! If someone says: I hate everything German; I do not want the Germans to have what other peoples have—well and good. You can then talk with him about it, or not if he does not want to, but he is nevertheless telling the truth. But if he keeps repeating: I want to destroy German militarism, I don't want the Germans to oppress other peoples, I want the Germans to do this or that—as is said today and has been constantly repeated for years—then he is lying. Perhaps he does not know that he is lying—but he is lying, he really is lying. Objectively he is lying, even though perhaps subjectively he is not.

What matters is to stand on the foundation of truth, even if this truth is perhaps harmful, even if it is embarrassing. It is necessary to admit these things and not anaesthetize oneself with empty phrases about German militarism for which one has a hatred to which one does not want to admit, even to oneself. One must admit that one wants to helotize the German people, yet cannot face up to wanting this. Perhaps an anaesthetic is needed; but it is not the truth! It is most important to stand on the foundation of truth. To have the courage to face the truth always leads one a little step further. But one must have the courage to stand by the truth.

It is a fact that every people, as a people, has a mission within the total evolution of mankind. Every people has a mission, and all these various missions together create a whole, namely, the evolution of mankind. But it is equally true that certain individuals, especially those who come to be familiar with the mission of mankind, have the arrogance to set in train certain things which are in the interest of a limited group, and for this they make use of what lies in human evolution.

Let us take the English people. If what is necessarily meant to come about in the fifth post-Atlantean period through the English people really does come about, then it will never be possible, through the very nature of this English people, for England to start a war. For the true being of the English people in their mission in world history is opposed to any kind of warlike impulse. The real nature of the English people makes them the least warlike nation possible. And yet for centuries there have never been ten consecutive years during which England has not been involved in war. We are living, after all, in the realm of maya. But despite this, truth is truth. In the nature of the English people lies the exclusion of any kind of war, just as for centuries it has been in the nature of the French people—not any longer; now it has to be artificially incited—to conduct war over and over again. It is not in the nature of the English people to wage war, and the reason for this is that the special configuration of the English folk spirit means that its purpose is to evolve what is to be incorporated into the consciousness soul of the fifth post-Atlantean period. This in turn is achieved through all those connections between people arising from logical and scientific thinking on the one hand, and on the other, from commercial and industrial thinking. And when Brooks Adams placed before the world the ideas I mentioned to you earlier, this was an advance thrust, coming from America, pointing towards what the English people must recognize as their mission in world history, based on their deeper nature which contains none of those warlike and imaginative characteristics such as those present, for instance, in the nature of the Russian people.

Now much will depend on whether this deeper nature of the English people will one day come to be understood in a deeper, spiritual scientific sense. In a more external way some individuals have understood it. The work of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill shows that the most inspired spirits have fully understood it, though from their more materialistic standpoint and not, as yet, from a spiritual scientific standpoint. I can recommend that you read with some enthusiasm the political essays of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, for you can learn a very great deal from them. This spirit of peace which, among other things, makes possible in a special way a certain kind of political thinking, in the manner I have already described, has indeed overflowed to Europe from England. Someone who has entered into European life, from as many and varied points of view as I can really claim to have done, knows, for instance, that all the political sciences of Central Europe have certainly been influenced from the direction of England. And it is no coincidence that the founders of German socialism, Marx and Engels, founded this German socialism from England.

It happens very easily that the nature of Central Europe is misunderstood. The true nature of Central Europe is still almost always misunderstood in western Europe. How might it be otherwise? The culture of Central Europe was so permeated by the French element that one of the greatest, most important works of German literature, one which set the tone at the zenith of German culture, Lessing's Laokoon, had a peculiar destiny: Lessing considered seriously whether he should write it in German or French. Educated people in Central Europe in the eighteenth century wrote German badly and French well. This must not be forgotten. And in the nineteenth century Central Europe was in danger of becoming totally anglicized, of being fully taken over by Englishness. It is no wonder that the nature of Central Europe is so little known, since it is constantly being submerged from all sides, even spiritually and culturally. Think, for instance, of Goethe's theory of evolution in respect of animals and plants. This is truly a stage in advance of Darwin's materialism just as, in respect of Grimm's law, the German language is a stage ahead of Gothic-English. Yet in Germany herself materialistic Darwinism was favoured by fortune, and not her own German Goetheanism. So it is not surprising that the German spirit is poorly understood and that little effort is made to really understand it as it should be understood, if justice is to be done to it.

As I said, the political sciences, in particular, were strongly influenced by the English way of thinking. But what is urgently needed now is that the different peoples should come to a certain degree of self-knowledge. Without this self-knowledge, for which Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill are not adequate—but which must be based on spiritual science and on a sense for what spiritual science can give—without this, no healing can come.

Just consider how difficult it is, for example, to grasp the following—whereby no arid theory is meant, but something at the basis of life: There exists in the soul a certain relationship between the thought and the word. This is a fact. Let us imagine that in the structure of the soul the word lies in this field, and the thought in this one:

The French people have the tendency to push the thought right down to the word; thus, when they speak, the thought is pushed right into what they are saying. That is why, especially in this field, there is so easily an intoxication with words, with phrases—and I mean phrases in the best sense:

The English people press the thought down below the word, so that the thought mingles with the word and seeks reality beyond the word:

The German language has the peculiarity of not taking the thought as far as the word. Only because of this was it possible for philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—who it would be impossible to imagine anywhere else in the world—to do their work. The German language does not take the thought as far as the word, it retains the thought in the thought. Because of this, however, people will very easily misunderstand one another. For a true translation in this situation is impossible, it is always only a substitute. It is not possible to say what Hegel said, in English or French. It is impossible; such translations can only ever be a substitute. The fact that some understanding is possible comes about solely because certain basic Latin elements are common to more than one language, for it is the same whether you say ‘association’ in French, or ‘association’ in English; both go back to the Latin element. Such things build bridges. But every people has its own special mission and it is only possible to approach this through a longing to attain such an understanding.

The Slav people push the thought inwards so that it is here:

There, the word is quite far away from the thought. It floats, separately.

The strongest coincidence of thought with word, so that the thought disappears over against the word, is in French. The strongest independent life of the thought is in German. Therefore, a saying formulated by Hegel and the Hegelians: ‘The self-consciousness of thought’, is meaningful only in German. Something that is an abstraction for non-Germans is, for a German, the greatest experience it is possible to have, if he understands it in a living sense. The German language sets out to found a marriage between what is of itself spiritual and what is spiritual in the thought. Nowhere in the world, by no other people, can this be achieved except by the German people.

This has nothing to do with any kind of a Reich, but it will be endangered for centuries to come if people reject what is at present going through the world as the thought of peace. For then not only will a Reich in Central Europe be endangered but also the whole essence of what is German. That is why these times are heavily pregnant with destiny for those who understand these things. Let us at least hope that things will be judged differently this time, differently from the previous time when an impulse of destiny came into play, an impulse of destiny to which much thought should have been given—but was not—when Austria voluntarily declared her willingness to give to Italy what she needed to help her extricate herself from Irredentist ideas and the Grand Orient. But there was no thought in the periphery for what it meant at that time to think little of what Italy, or rather those three people, were doing. Let us hope that, whatever happens, the world will be more inclined this time to take these things seriously.

The German element has its particular task because of the special situation of German thought. If this independently living thought is not brought into play it will never be possible to accomplish the spiritual evolution which must be accomplished. Things must be seen as they really are. The English folk element makes it to a certain extent necessary to materialize what is spiritual. This is not something to be held against the English people; it is simply a fact. Within the English folk element things that are spiritual have to be made material to a certain degree. That is why there will be a greater understanding there for what comes from the folk element as opposed to the element of mankind as a whole, namely mediumistic and other atavistic activities. It is just there that ancient things have their source: the ancient Rosicrucians, the ancient Indians, and so on. This must always be revered there in a certain way, just as the language itself has remained behind at the Gothic stage, where ‘remained behind’ is not a moral judgement, nor one involving sympathy or antipathy, but simply an indication of a position in relation to others. It is a question of how things are arranged, not of getting left behind in evolution.

Let us take things as they are. Obviously every nation today can understand everything. Yet it is true to say that all really fruitful English spiritualism, in the best sense of the word, stems from Central Europe and has been imported. Its origin is in Central Europe, or else it is taken from elsewhere. Since intellectuality is so well-developed in England, this is where spirituality can be systemized, organized. A mind such as that of Jakob Böhme would be impossible, for instance, in France. But while Jakob Böhme was born entirely out of the spiritual thought of Central Europe, he gained a great following through Saint-Martin, the so-called philosophe inconnu, the unknown philosopher, the follower of Jakob Böhme.

Thus, these things have to work together, so there is no point in making judgements on the basis of national feelings. One has to take what is presented to mankind at face value. The moment one takes into account that karma is something serious, that one is connected to one's nation through karma in the way I described yesterday, the moment one sees these things from the point of view of karma and not of passions, one will find the proper attitude. I can imagine a time when even a people as passionate about national matters as the French will come to understand the fact of nationality as something karmic. I can even imagine that with their great talent for spirituality the English nation will come, through a certain science of the spirit, to recognize that there exist other nations who might be accorded some degree of equal status, something for which at present there is not the slightest understanding. This is not a reproach; least of all is it a reproach! But one never knows how often one keeps on saying things which one understands perfectly well oneself, while others think them curious beyond belief. That attitude is surpassed by that of the Americans. With them the total lack of awareness, that there might be others who intend to evolve in accordance with their own characteristics, is even more paradoxical; of course, only for those who do not share the same standpoint.

Because of the great talent possessed particularly by the English people for spirituality, a good deal could be expected to enter this people via the detour of spirituality, especially taking into account that in them there also lies the greatest talent for purely logical, that is, unspiritual thinking, as well as for systemizing everything. Nothing could be a better expression of this organizational talent than the writings of Herbert Spencer. In regard to everything scientific the English people have the greatest organizational talent. That is why they have such a flair for instituting systems for everything all over the world. Only those who prefer empty phrases can say that the Germans have a particular talent for organization. Such people leave unconsidered the fact that the talent for organization is most removed of all from the true nature of the German people.

It must not be forgotten that what has seemingly been achieved recently by Germans in certain directions, both territorially and culturally, has come about as a result of the way Germany is wedged between East and West. Because of this, during the course of the nineteenth century certain characteristics came to be developed more precisely in Germany than among those peoples to whom they really belong. This is eminently understandable. Self-knowledge has not penetrated to every corner yet, and since the Germans are so capable of assimilation and are able to take in and absorb so much in certain respects, the peoples of the West—not the East—have had an opportunity to discover, in certain respects, much about themselves through what the Germans have absorbed from them. Such characteristics, when seen in oneself, are always found to be excellent and obvious—naturally enough! But when they are met in another, one notices for the first time what they really are. You have no idea how much of what the West finds objectionable in Central Europe is no more than a reflection of what has been absorbed from there by Central Europe.

People have no idea what mystery lies hidden here. Looking at the matter objectively, it is most remarkable to discover how some members in particular of the French nation are quite incapable of seeing in themselves things which they find terribly objectionable in others who had absorbed them under French influence in the first place. Perhaps it is not all that nice if it comes to meet you as an imitation. But if mankind is to progress at all then, as I described it in my recent book Vom Menschenrätsel, it will be essential for this collaboration of Central European thought to take place. This is necessary and it cannot be eliminated; and it must not be brutally destroyed either.

Mankind is now faced with having to solve certain quite specific problems. This applies, above all, to something I have already spoken about, which is connected with today's much-admired technology—a consequence of natural science—which is also much admired by spiritual science. In the comparatively near future, this much-admired modern technology will reach a final stage where it will, in a certain way, cancel itself out. In contrast, something will come into being—I have mentioned it in passing here—which will enable people to make use of the delicate vibrations in their etheric bodies as a driving force with which to run machines. Machines will exist which are dependent on people and people will transfer their own vibrations to the machines. People alone will be capable of setting these machines in motion by means of certain vibrations stimulated by themselves. People who today see themselves as practitioners of science will, in the not too distant future, find themselves faced with a complete transformation of what they today call the practical application of science; for the human being is to be tuned in with his will to the objective sphere of feeling in the universe. This is one of the problems.

The second is, that people will, in a certain way, understand what we call the forces of coming-into-being and dying-away, the forces of birth and death. First of all they will have to make themselves morally ready for this. And to this will belong the gaining of insight into things about which nothing but nonsense is talked today. I have pointed this out before in connection with the questions people ask about how to improve the birthrate when it is declining. But they talk utter nonsense because they know nothing about the matter, and because the methods they suggest will certainly not achieve what they are talking about.

The third matter I want to mention is, that in the not too distant future a total reversal in the whole way people think about sickness and health will become apparent. Medicine will become filled with what can be understood spiritually when one learns to see illness as the consequence of spiritual causes.

I have already said it is not as yet fair to say to the spiritual scientist: Show us what you can do with regard to sickness and ill health! First his shackles must be removed! So long as the field is still totally occupied by materialistic medicine it is impossible to do anything, even in individual cases. In this field it is indeed necessary to be truly Christian—that is Pauline—and to know that sin comes from the law and not, conversely, the law from sin.

But none of these things which are supposed to come to mankind within the fifth post-Atlantean period will, in fact, come unless an effort is made to allow the spiritual thinking to work with us on human evolution. We need this spiritual thinking. But for it to be possible it will have to cease being the preserve of the few and become common knowledge. Thus it is necessary, particularly in the English folk element, that a basic reversal in a definite direction should take place. To show you that what I am saying is founded in reality, I want to quote to you a judgement by Lord Acton which you will find very revealing. Lord Acton says: The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. We see how, in the nineties of the last century Lord Acton was thinking in a healthy way by combining most beautifully English rationalism with the English capacity for what is spiritual—even though he himself does not yet possess anything spiritual: he sees the mystic element that underlies English imperialism. Imperialism is a product of recent times; but it has received its stamp from the mystic appearance it gains from English imperialism. And this mystical element—strange though it may seem that I call it ‘mystical’, nevertheless it is correct to do so—has also found expression in external events.

Right up to the nineties, England was the perfect example of honest and upright parliamentarianism, since it was the task of Parliament to give its impulses to external politics. Through the various parliamentary institutions in England the people were able to play a genuine part in external politics. During the time when the things I have hinted at were beginning to take a hold it became necessary to create a special institution, for it was not possible to pull all sorts of strings if everything had to come before Parliament. For this reason the conduct of foreign affairs was taken away from Parliament and also from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and made the preserve of a committee whose members consisted exclusively of the Cabinet and certain officials in the Foreign Ministry. In such a committee far more goes on than what seems to be presided over by someone like Grey. In the nineties the place where all the threads came together was separated from ‘external’ politics, which became nothing much more than a kind of shadow politics, no longer having anything much to say and revealing only what was really going on if one happened to look at it at the right moment. So, at the moment when it became necessary to commence pulling threads, the scene of action was transferred from external view to a hidden place, to a so-called committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lord Acton said:

‘The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. For him, the foundations have been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is accounted for as distinctly as the works of a watch. But with our indigenous constitution, not made with hands or written upon paper, but claiming to develop by a law of organic growth; with our disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles and our reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing equivalent to the vivid and prolonged debates in which other communities have displayed their inmost secrets of political science to every man who can read. And the discussions of constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia, Versailles and Paris, at Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and Berlin, above nearly all, those of the most enlightened States in the American Union, when they have recast their institutions, are paramount in the literature of politics, and proffer treasures which at home we have never enjoyed ...’

And, despite this, it is the country with the perfect example of parliamentarianism, the country with the perfect example of political life, because none of this is actually necessary, since it could be mystical if only it were devoted to the people themselves, the people who, since the nineties, have been left out of account.

Because England has a quite specific task with regard to the consciousness soul of the fifth post-Atlantean period, certain ways of thinking belong to the people as a whole; they need not be the way of thinking of individuals, they belong to the whole people. This is something for which there is no place at all in Central Europe. Let me give you an example.

One of the greatest spirits of all time is Faraday. Michael Faraday expressed how he, as a natural historian, related to matters of religion and his sentences are, I really must say, monumental:

‘Before entering upon this subject, I must make one distinction which, however it may appear to others, is to me of the utmost importance. High as man is placed above the creatures around him, there is a higher and far more exalted position within his view; and the ways are infinite in which he occupies his thoughts about the fears, or hopes, or expectations of a future life. I believe that the truth of that future cannot be brought to his knowledge by any exertion of his mental powers, however exalted they may be; that it is made known to him by any other teaching than his own, and is received through simple belief of the testimony given. Let no one suppose for a moment that the self-education I am about to commend, in respect of the things of this life, extends to any considerations of the hope set before us, as if man by reasoning could find out God. It would be improper here to enter upon this subject further than to claim an absolute distinction between religious and ordinary belief. I shall be reproached with the weakness of refusing to apply those mental operations which I think good in respect of high things to the very highest. I am content to bear the reproach. Yet even in earthly matters I believe that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead,” and I have never seen anything incompatible between those things of man which can be known by the spirit of man which is within him, and those higher things concerning his future, which he cannot know by that spirit.’

With convictions similar to these, Darwin, too, was able to found his materialistic Darwinism and yet remain a pious man in quite a bigoted sense. Newton was the most bigoted man in the world in a dogmatic sense. When Darwinism had been carried to Central Europe and taken up by Haeckel it could no longer be separated from religious feelings. This was because of the characteristic nature of thought in German. In the thinking of Haeckel, Darwinism became a religious system. All these things have the deepest foundations. They show us how people can work together without differentiating between religions, nationalities and so forth, if they are able to distinguish between the missions of the different peoples. Mankind as a whole will have to come to an understanding of this. When this has been achieved, on the one hand justice will be done to the deeper natures of the different peoples and, on the other hand, sad times such as those of today will no longer occur: times which are sad, not only because of all the blood that is being spilt but also because they prove how little sense for truth there is in mankind quite generally. This is why we are allowed to speak about such things here. For our motto is: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’. Especially in times as grave as these is it permitted to draw attention to such things, times in which our hearts bleed terribly. Instead of passing time with all sorts of things people do under the influence of journalism, it would be more useful to make a start on a great many other things.

One positive thought on which to found a judgement is, for instance, the terrible fact that this war is not only being waged from the periphery but is being waged in such a way that it is lasting longer than it need, not because of unavoidable circumstances but because of culpable actions. This is utterly scandalous when you consider how much it matters that the war should not last too long, if it has to be waged in the first place. The war is being conducted from the periphery, not merely conducted, but conducted in a way that would never be possible if only people would see that, under the influence of their own dilettantism and incapacity, they keep avoiding any useful action, and by the very fact of doing nothing they are causing it to drag on so endlessly.

But a time has now come which could reveal whether those who matter—not the people themselves, who will only show whether or not they have learnt anything in all these months of war—whether those who matter are expressing even the semblance of a spark of truth when they say that they, too, want some kind of peace. I say a semblance, for in reality it is something else. For if peace does not come very soon, every child will be able to see who does not want peace! Indeed every child can already see how laughable are the excuses being made at this moment. There is no need to go so far as to set any store by a report in a journal in one of the Entente countries—and the story seems to be true—that, among others, the sentence was printed: To all the missiles Germany has sent us is now added the worst missile of all—peace.

There was no need for it to come to such excesses of madness as are expressed in the saying that peace is the worst missile of all. It would be enough to say that the Germans have invented this or that refinement, have this or that intention. Briand or Lloyd George would be quite capable of thinking up all sorts of motives the Germans might have, but it is not a question of these motives; indeed, they might just as well be presumed to exist. If you were to take the trouble to analyse all the different motives which have so far been mentioned, you could not fail to reach the conclusion: If things really are as Monsieur Briand, or whoever else, presumes them to be, then any true friend of peace must be longing to achieve peace as soon as possible! If only, my dear friends, far from influencing people's judgements, it were possible at least to clear away the huge mountains of rubble piled on top of people's ability to judge!

You cannot imagine how the hearts of those who see what is going on bleed when they see people still capable of listening to or reading, without any kind of holy indignation, what is written so paradoxically today. For if these things were not rooted in something that exists, they could not be written. So merely to complain about the journalists will not get us very far either. It is perfectly possible, perhaps not exactly to throw sand in certain people's eyes, but certainly to obscure the eye of their soul by saying: Watch out, they are about to scatter poison amongst us! It is child's play to convince oneself what nonsense this is, for even if one assumes it is true—why not assume it?—it is still no reason for not doing what must be done for the good of mankind, namely, bringing the bloodshed to an end! None of the allegations that have been made so far have been sufficient reason for not doing this.

I can only think of one category of people who, as a result of their delusions, would not come to their senses, namely, those who still exist even now and who say: We want absolutely permanent, totally perfect peace, and until we can have that we cannot end the war. There are many such people; quite often they call themselves pacifists. Some have just begun to be ashamed of their extreme views and are starting to express more sensible judgements. But it really has happened during all these terrible events that people have said: We are fighting for permanent peace. They do not notice that this is rubbish, for it is quite possible to talk rubbish while giving the impression of proclaiming the highest ideals.

No, my dear friends! The ideal of perfect peace can never be achieved if even the smallest drop of blood is shed by means of an instrument of war. Perfect peace must come into the world in quite another way! And whoever says he is fighting for peace, and must continue to make war till the enemy is annihilated in order to achieve peace, is lying, even if he does not realize it, and regardless of who he may be!

These are things which are hardly considered today. What we all need is spiritual science to be our teacher in forming judgements. Therefore, I do not hesitate from time to time to call a spade a spade and express a judgement that has truly not been arrived at lightly. However, we had better not go on till midnight today, so let us draw to a close for the moment.

[ 1 ] Hegel felt that with his thought structure he had arrived at the goal for which the evolution of world conception had been striving since man had attempted to conquer the enigmatic problems of existence within the realm of thought experiences. With this feeling he wrote, toward the end of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the following words. “The concept of philosophy is the idea that thinks itself; it is knowing truth. . . . Philosophical knowledge has in this manner gone back to its beginning, and the content of logic thus becomes its result as the spiritual element that has revealed itself as truth, as it is in itself and for itself.”

[ 2 ] The experience of itself in thought, according to Hegel, is to give to the human soul the consciousness of being at its true original source. In drinking from this source, filling itself with thoughts from it, the soul is supposed to live in its own true essence and in that of nature at the same time, for both nature and the soul are manifestations of thought. Through the phenomena of nature the thought world looks at the soul, which seizes in itself the creative power of thought so that it knows itself in union with all world processes. The soul thus sees its own narrow circle of self-consciousness enlarged through the fact that the world observes itself consciously in it. The soul thereby ceases to consider itself merely as something that is aware of itself in the transitory sensual body between birth and death. The imperishable spirit, which is not bound to any sensual existence, knows itself in the soul, and the soul is aware of being bound to this spirit in an inseparable union.

[ 3 ] Let us place ourselves in the position of, the soul of a personality who could follow Hegel's trend of ideas to the extent that he believed that he experienced the presence of thought in his consciousness in the same way as Hegel himself. We can then feel how, for such a soul, age-old enigmatic questions appear to be placed in a light that can be highly satisfactory to such an inquirer. Such satisfaction is indeed apparent, for instance, in the numerous writings of the Hegelian thinker, Karl Rosenkranz. As we absorb these writings with concentrated attention (System of Philosophy, 1850; Psychology, 1844; Critical Explanations of the Hegelian Philosophy, 1851), we feel ourselves confronted with a personality who is convinced he has found in Hegel's ideas what can provide a satisfactory cognitive relation to the world for the human soul. Rosenkranz can be mentioned in this respect as a significant example because he is not at all blindly following Hegel every step, but shows that he is a spirit motivated by the consciousness that Hegel's position toward world and man contains the possibility of giving a healthy foundation to a world conception.

[ 4 ] What could a thinker like Rosenkranz experience with regard to this foundation? Since the birth of thought in ancient Greece, and during centuries of philosophical investigation of the riddles of existence with which every soul was fundamentally confronted, a number of major problems have crystallized. In modern times the problem of the significance, the value and the limits of knowledge has moved, as the fundamental problem, into the center of philosophical reflection. What relation has man's perception, conception and thought to the real world? Can this process of perception and thinking result in a knowledge that is capable of enlightening man concerning the questions about which he wants to be enlightened? For a person who thinks like Hegel, this question answers itself through the implication in Hegel's thought concept. As he gains hold of thought, he is convinced he experiences the creative spirit of the world. In this union with creative thought he feels the value and true significance of cognition. He cannot ask, “What is the meaning of knowledge?” for he experiences this significance as he is engaged in the act of knowing. Through this fact the Hegelian is directly opposed to all Kantianism. Witness what Hegel himself has to say against the Kantian method of investigating cognition before the act of knowledge has taken place.

A main point of the critical philosophy consists in the fact that before it sets out to develop a knowledge of God, the essence of things, etc., it is demanded that the faculty of knowledge must be investigated as to whether it is capable of doing such things. One must know the instrument before one undertakes the work that is to be achieved by means of it. If this instrument should prove insufficient, all endeavor would be wasted. This thought has appeared so plausible that it aroused the greatest admiration and agreement, and led knowledge, motivated by an interest in the objects of knowledge, back to itself. If, however, one does not want to deceive oneself with words, it is quite easy to see that other instruments can be investigated and judged in some other way than by undertaking the work with them for which they are meant. But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge; in the case of this so-called instrument, the process to test it is nothing but knowledge itself. To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water.

For Hegel, the main point was that the soul should experience itself as filled with the living world thought. Thus, it grows beyond its ordinary existence; it becomes, as it were, the vessel in which world thought, living in thinking, seizes itself in full consciousness. The soul is not merely felt as a vessel of this world spirit but as an entity conscious of its union with that spirit. Thus it is, according to Hegel, not possible to investigate the essence of knowledge. We must immediately raise ourselves into participation in this essence through its experience and, with that step, we are directly inside the process of knowledge. If one stands inside that process, one is in possession of that knowledge and feels no longer the need to inquire after its significance. If one cannot take this stand, one lacks also the ability to investigate it. The Kantian philosophy is an impossibility for Hegel's world conception because, in order to answer the question, “How is knowledge possible,” the soul would first have to produce knowledge. In that case, the question of its existence could not be raised beforehand.

[ 5 ] In a certain sense Hegel's philosophy amounts to this: He allows the soul to lift itself to a certain height at which point it grows into unity with the world. With the birth of thought in Greek philosophy the soul separated from the world. The soul is felt as in solitude as opposed to the world. In this seclusion the soul finds itself holding sway within itself. It is Hegel's intention to bring this experience of thought to its climax. At the same time he finds the creative world principle in the highest thought experience. The soul has thus completed the course of a perfect circle in separating itself at first from the world in order to search for thought. It feels itself separated from the world only as long as it recognizes in thought nothing but thought. It feels united with the world again as it discovers in thought the original source of the world. Thus, the circle is closed. Hegel can say, “In this manner science has returned to its beginning.”

[ 6 ] Seen from such a viewpoint, the other main problems of human knowledge are set in such a light that one can believe one sees all existence in one coherent world conception. As a second major problem, one can consider the question of deity as the ground of the world. The elevation of the soul that enables the world thought to awaken to self-knowledge as it lives within the soul is, for Hegel, at the same time the soul's union with the divine world ground. According to him, one therefore cannot ask the question, “What is the divine ground of the world?” or, “What is man's relation toward it?” One can only say, “When the soul really experiences truth in the act of knowledge, it penetrates into this ground of the world.”

[ 7 ] A third major question in the above-mentioned sense is the cosmological problem, that is to say, the problem of the inner essence of the outer world. This essence can, according to Hegel, be sought only in thought itself. When the soul arrives at the point of experiencing thought in itself, it also finds in its self-experience the form of thought it can recognize as it observes the processes and entities of the external world. Thus, it can, for instance, find something in its thought experience of which it knows immediately that this is the essence of light. As it then turns its eye to nature, it sees in the external light the manifestation of the thought essence of light.

[ 8 ] In this way, for Hegel, the whole world dissolves into thought entity. Nature swims, as it were, as a frozen part in the cosmos of thought, and the human soul becomes thought in the thought world.

[ 9 ] The fourth major problem of philosophy, the question of the nature and destiny of the soul, seems to Hegel's mind satisfactorily answered through the true progress of thought experience. At first, the soul finds itself bound to nature. In this connection it does not know itself in its true entity. It divorces itself from this nature existence and finds itself then separated in thought, arriving at last at the insight that it possesses in thought both the true essence of nature and its own true being as that of the living spirit as it lives and weaves as a member of this spirit.

[ 10 ] All materialism seems to be overcome with this philosophy. Matter itself appears merely as a manifestation of the spirit. The human soul may feel itself as becoming and having its being in the spiritual universe.

[ 11 ] In the treatment of the problem of the soul the Hegelian world conception shows probably most distinctly what is unsatisfactory about it. Looking at this world conception, the human soul must ask, “Can I really find myself in the comprehensive thought construction of the world erected by Hegel?” We have seen that all modern world conception must look for a world picture in which the entity of the human soul finds an adequate place. To Hegel, the whole world is thought; within this thought the soul also has its supersensible thought existence. But can the soul be satisfied to be contained as world thought in the general thought world? This question arises in thinkers who had been stimulated by Hegel's philosophy in the middle of the nineteenth century.

[ 12 ] What are really the most urgent riddles of the soul? They are the ones for the answers of which the soul must feel a yearning, expecting from them the feeling of security and a firm hold in life. There is, to begin with, the question, “What is the human soul essentially?” Is the soul identical with the corporeal existence and do its manifestations cease with the decay of the body as the motion of the hands of a clock stop when the clock is taken apart? Or, is the soul an entity independent of the body, possessing life and significance in a world apart from that in which the body comes into being and dissolves into nothing? Connected with these questions is another problem. How does man obtain knowledge of such a world? Only in answering this question can man hope to receive light for the problems of life: Why am I subjected to this or that destiny? What is the source of suffering? What is the origin of morality?

[ 13 ] Satisfaction can be given only by a world conception that offers answers to the above-mentioned questions and at the same time proves its right to give such answers.

[ 14 ] Hegel offered a world of thoughts. If this world is to be the all inclusive universe, then the soul is forced to regard itself in its inner substance as thought. If one seriously accepts this cosmos of thought, one will find that the individual soul life of man dissolves in it. One must give up the attempt to explain and to understand this individual soul life and is forced to say that the significance of the soul does not rest in its individual experience but in the fact that it is contained in the general thought world. This is what the Hegelian world conception fundamentally does say. One should contrast it with what Lessing had in mind when he conceived the ideas of his Education of the Human Race. He asked the question of the significance for the individual human soul beyond the life that is enclosed between birth and death. In pursuing this thought of Lessing one can say that the soul after physical death goes through a form of existence in a world that lies outside the one in which man lives, perceives and thinks in his body; after an appropriate time, such a purely spiritual form of experience is followed again by a new earth life. In this process a world is implied with which the human soul, as a particular, individual entity, is bound up. Toward this world the soul feels directed in searching for its own true being. As soon as one conceives the soul as separated from the connection with its physical form of existence, one must think of it as belonging to that same world. For Hegel, however, the life of the soul, in shedding all individual traits, is absorbed first into the general thought process of the historical evolution, then into that of the general spiritual-intellectual world processes. In Hegel's sense, one solves the riddle of the soul in leaving all individual traits of that soul out of consideration. The individual is not real, but the historical process. This is illustrated by the passage toward the end of Hegel's Philosophy of History:

We have exclusively considered the progress of the concept and had to renounce the tempting pleasure to depict the fortune, the flourishing periods of the peoples, the greatness and the beauty of the individuals, the interest of their destiny in sorrow and joy. Philosophy has to deal only with the lustre of the idea that is reflected in world history. Weary of the immediate passions in the world of reality, philosophy emancipates into contemplation; it is the interest of philosophy to recognize the course of development of the self-realization of the idea.

[ 15 ] Let us look at Hegel's doctrine of the soul. We find here the description of the process of the soul's evolution within the body as “natural soul,” the development of consciousness of self and of reason. We then find the soul realizing the ideas of right, morality and the state in the external world. It is then described how the soul sees in world history, as a continuous life, what it thinks as ideas. It is shown how it lives these ideas as art and religion, and how the soul unites with the truth that thinks itself, seeing itself in the living creative spirit of the universe.

[ 16 ] Every thinker who feels like Hegel must be convinced that the world in which he finds himself is entirely spirit, that all material existence is also nothing but a manifestation of the spirit. If such a thinker searches for the spirit, he will find it essentially as active thought, as living, creative idea. This is what the soul is confronted with. It must ask itself if it can really consider itself as a being that is nothing but thought essence. It can be felt as the real greatness, the irrefutable element of Hegel's world conception that the soul, in rising to true thought, feels elevated to the creative principle of existence. To feel man's relation to the world in this way was an experience of deep satisfaction to those personalities who could follow Hegel's thought development.

[ 17 ] How can one live with this thought? That was the great riddle confronting modern world conception. It had resulted from the continuation of the process begun in Greek philosophy when thought had emerged and when the soul had thereupon become detached from external existence. Hegel now has attempted to place the whole range of thought experience before the soul, to present to the soul, as it were, everything it can produce as thought out of its depths. In the face of this thought experience Hegel now demands of the soul that it recognize itself according to its deepest nature in this experience, that it feel itself in this element as in its deepest ground.

[ 18 ] With this demand of Hegel the human soul has been brought to a decisive point in the attempt to obtain a knowledge of its own being. Where is the soul to turn when it has arrived at the element of pure thought but does not want to remain stationary at this point From the experience of perception, feeling and will, it proceeds to the activity of thinking and asks, “What will result if I think about perception, feeling and will?” Having arrived at thinking, it is at first not possible to proceed any further. The soul's attempt in this direction can only lead to thinking again. Whoever follows the modern development of philosophy as far as the age of Hegel can have the impression that Hegel pursues the impulses of this development to a point beyond which it becomes impossible to go so long as this process retains the general character exhibited up to that time. The observation of this fact can lead to the question: [ 19 ] If thinking up to this stage brings philosophy in Hegel's sense to the construction of a world picture that is spread out before the soul, has this energy of thinking then really developed everything that is potentially contained within it? It could be, after all, that thinking contains more possibilities than that of mere thinking. Consider a plant, which develops from the root through its stem and leaves into blossom and fruit. The life of this plant can now be brought to an end by taking the seed from the fruit and using it as human food, for instance. But one can also expose the seed of the plant to the appropriate conditions with the effect that it will develop into a new plant.

[ 20 ] In concentrating one's attention on the significance of Hegel's philosophy, one can see how the thought picture that man develops of the world unfolds before him like a plant; one can observe that the development is brought to the point where the seed, thought, is produced. But then this process is brought to an end, just as in the life of the plant whose seed is not developed further in its own organic function, but is used for a purpose that is as extraneous to this life as the purpose of human nutrition is to the seed of the reproductive organs. Indeed, as soon as Hegel has arrived at the point where thought is developed as an element, he does not continue the process that brought him to this point. He proceeds from sense perception and develops everything in the human soul in a process that finally leads to thought. At this stage he stops and shows how this element can provide an explanation of the world processes and world entities. This purpose can indeed be served by thought, just as the seed of a plant may be used as human food. But should it not be possible to develop a living element out of thought? Is it not possible that this element is deprived of its own life through the use that Hegel makes of it, as the seed of a plant is deprived of its life when it is used as human food? In what light would Hegel's philosophy have to appear if it were possibly true that thought can be used for the enlightenment, for the explanation of the world processes, as a plant seed can be used for food but only by sacrificing its continued growth? The seed of a plant, to be sure, can produce only a plant of the same kind. Thought, however, as a seed of knowledge, could, if left to its living development, produce something of an entirely new kind, compared to the world picture from which its evolution would proceed. As the plant life is ruled by the law of repetition, so the life of knowledge could be under the law of enhancement and elevation. It is unthinkable that thought as we employ it for the explanation of external science should be merely a byproduct of evolution, just as the use of plant seeds for food is a sidetrack in the plant's continuous development. One can dismiss ideas of this kind on the ground that they have their origin in an arbitrary imagination and that they represent mere possibilities without any value. It is just as easily understood that the objection can be raised that at the point at which this idea would be developed we would enter the realm of arbitrary fantasy. To the observer of the historical development of the philosophies of the nineteenth century this question can nevertheless appear in a different light. The way in which Hegel conceives the element of thought does indeed lead the evolution of world conception to a dead end. One feels that thought has reached an extreme; yet, if one wants to introduce this thought in the form in which it is conceived in the immediate life of knowledge, it becomes a disappointing failure. There arises a longing for a life that should spring from the world conception that one has accomplished.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer begins to write his Esthetics in Hegel's manner in the middle of the nineteenth century. When finished, it is a work of monumental importance. After its completion he becomes the most penetrating critic of his own work. If one searches for the deeper reason for this strange process, one finds that Vischer has become aware of the fact that, as he had permeated his work with Hegelian thoughts, he had introduced an element that had become dead, since it had been taken out of the ground that had provided its life conditions, just as a plant seed dies when its growth is cut off. A peculiar perspective is opening before us as we see Hegel's world conception in this light. The nature of the thought element could demand to be received as a living seed and, under certain conditions, to be developed in the soul. It could unfold its possibility by leading beyond the world picture of Hegel to a world conception in which the soul could come to a knowledge of its own being with which it could truly hold its own position in the external world. Hegel has brought the soul to the point where it can live with the element of thought; the progress beyond Hegel would lead to the thought's growth in the soul beyond itself and into a spiritual world. Hegel understood how the soul magically produces thought within itself and experiences itself in thought. He left to posterity the task of discovering by means of living thoughts, which are active in a truly spiritual world, the real being of the soul that cannot fully experience itself in the element of mere thought.

[ 21 ] It has been shown in the preceding exposition how the development of modern world conception strives from the perception of thought toward the experience of thought. In Hegel's world conception the world seems to stand before the soul as a self-produced thought experience, but the trend of evolution seems to indicate further progress. Thought must not become stationary as thought; it must not be merely thought, not be experienced merely through thinking; it must awaken to a still higher life.

[ 22 ] As arbitrary as all this may appear at first, it is nevertheless the view that prevails when a more penetrating observation of the development of modern world conception in the nineteenth century is made. Such an observation shows how the demands of an age exert their effect in the deeper strata of the evolution of history. It shows the aims that men set for themselves as attempts to do justice to these demands. Men of modern times were confronted with the world picture of natural science. It was necessary to find conceptions concerning the life of the soul that could be maintained while this world picture was sustained. The whole development from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, to Hegel, appears as a struggle for such conceptions. Hegel brings this struggle to a certain conclusion. His mode of thinking, as he presents the world as thought, appears to be latent everywhere with his predecessors. He takes the bold step as a thinker to bring all world conceptions to a climax by uniting them in a comprehensive thought picture. With him the age has, for the time being, exhausted the energy of its advancing impulses. What was formulated above, that is, the demand to experience the life of thought inwardly, is unconsciously felt. This demand is felt as a burden on the souls at the time of the middle of the nineteenth century. People despair of the impossibility of fulfilling this demand, but they are not fully aware of their despair. Thus, a stagnation in the philosophical field sets in. The productivity with respect to philosophical ideas ceases. It would have had to develop in the indicated direction, but first it seems to be necessary to pause in deliberation about the achievement that has been attained. Attempts are made to start from one point or another of the philosophical predecessors, but the force to continue the world picture of Hegel fruitfully is lacking.

Witness Karl Rosenkranz's description of the situation in the preface to his Life of Hegel (1844):

It is not without regret that I part from this work, but it is necessary to proceed at some time from becoming to existence. Does it not seem, however, that we are nowadays only the gravediggers and survivors to set monuments to the philosophers who were born in the second half of the eighteenth century, and who died in the first of the nineteenth century? Kant began this march of death of the German philosophers in 1804. He was followed by Fichte, Jacobi, Solger, Reinhold, Krause, Schleiermacher, William von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, Herbart, Baader, Wagner, Windischmann, Fries, and so many others. . . . Do we see a succeeding generation for this harvest of death? Are we capable also of sending into the second half of our century a venerable group of thinkers? Are there living among our young men those who are inspired to immortal exertion for speculative contemplation, by Platonic enthusiasm and Aristotelian joy of painstaking industry? . . . Strangely enough, in our day the talents seem to be not quite able to hold onto their task. They are quickly used up and after a few promising flowers, they become barren and begin to copy and repeat themselves at the very moment when, after having overcome their still immature, imperfect, one-sided and stormy youthful attempts, periods of forceful and concentrated activity should begin. Some of them, full of exaggerated eagerness, go too far in their quest and must, like Constantin Frantz, take back partly in later books what they said in earlier ones . . .

[ 23 ] It can often be seen that, after the middle of the nineteenth century, people found themselves forced to subscribe to such a judgment of the philosophical situation of the time. The excellent thinker, Franz Brentano, made the following statement in the inaugural speech for his professorship, Concerning the Reasons for Discouragement in the Philosophical Field, in 1874:

In the first decades of our century the lecture halls of the German philosophers were overcrowded; in more recent times, this flood has been followed by an ebb tide. One often hears that gifted men accuse the younger generation of lacking the sense for the highest branches of knowledge. That would be a sad but also an incomprehensible fact. How could it be that the entire new generation should be inferior' to the earlier one in spiritual momentum and mobility? It was in reality not a lack of talent but . . . lack of confidence that had the effect of decreasing philosophical studies. If the hope for success had come back, the highest honors in this field would be waiting in vain to be conquered . . .

[ 24 ] In Hegel's lifetime, and for a short time after, there already were people who felt that his world picture showed its weakness in the very point that contained its greatness. His world conception leads toward thought but also forces the soul to consider its nature to be exhausted in the thought element. If this world conception would bring thought in the above-mentioned sense to a life of its own, then this could only happen within the individual soul life; the soul would thereby find its relation toward the whole cosmos. This was felt, for instance, by Troxler, but he did not develop the conviction beyond the state of a dim feeling. In lectures that he gave at the University of Bern in 1835 he expressed himself as follows:

Not only now but also twenty years ago, we have been living with the most intimate conviction, and we have tried to show this in writing and speech, that a philosophy and an anthropology that was to embrace man in his entirety, God and the world, can only be founded on the idea and the reality of man's individuality and immortality. For this fact, the whole book, Insight into Man's Nature, which appeared in 1811, is an undeniable proof. It is also borne out in the last chapter of our Anthropology entitled, “The Absolute Personality,” which had a wide circulation in the form of a booklet. We therefore take the liberty to quote from the beginning of that chapter. “The whole inner nature of man has been constructed on divine misproportions, which are dissolved in the glory of a super-terrestrial destination, as all motivating springs have their origin in the spirit and only the weights are from the world. We have now traced these misproportions with their manifestations from their dark earthly root, and have followed the spiral of the heavenly plant, which appears to wind only around a great and noble stem from all sides and in all directions. We approach the top, which continues to rise, unattainable and continuously beyond our grasp, into the upper, brighter realms of another world whose light is only softly dawning on us and the breath of which we may feel . . .”

Such words sound to a man of the present sentimental and not very scientific, but one only needs to observe the goal toward which Troxler steers. He does not want to dissolve the nature of man into a world of ideas but attempts to lay hold on man in man as the individual and immortal personality. Troxler wants to see the nature of man anchored in a world that is not merely thought. For this reason, he calls attention to the fact that one can distinguish something in the human being that binds man to a world beyond the sensual world and that is not merely thought.

Philosophers of earlier times have already distinguished a subtle, noble soul body from the coarser material body, or, in this sense, assumed a kind of sheath of the spirit, a soul that was endowed with the picture of the body they called model (Schema) and that was the inner higher man for them.

Troxler, himself, divided man into material body (Koerper), soul body (Leib), soul (Seele) and spirit (Geist). He thereby distinguished the entity of the soul in a manner that allowed him to see the latter enter the sense world with its material body and soul body, and extend into a supersensible world with its soul and spirit. This entity spreads its individual activity not merely into the sense world but also into the spiritual world. It does not lose its individuality in the mere generality of thought, but Troxler does not arrive at the point of conceiving thought as a living seed of knowledge in the soul. He does not succeed in justifying the individual members of soul and spirit by letting this germ of knowledge live within the soul. He does not suspect that thought could grow into something during his life that could be considered as the individual life of the soul, but he can speak of this individual existence of the soul only from a dimly experienced feeling, as it were. Troxler could not come to more than such a feeling concerning these connections because he was too dependent on positive dogmatic religious conceptions. Since he was in possession of a far-reaching comprehensive knowledge of the evolution of world conception, his rejection of Hegelian philosophy can nevertheless be seen as of greater significance than one that springs from mere personal antipathy. It can be seen as an expression of the objection against Hegel that arises from the intellectual mood of the Hegelian age itself. In this light we have to understand Troxler's verdict:

Hegel has brought speculation to the highest stage of its perfection and in the very act of doing so he has destroyed it. His system has become for this intellectual current the last word; its indirect verdict is: Up to this point and not a step further!

In this form Troxler asks the question, which, if developed from a dim feeling into a clear idea, would probably have to be expressed as follows: How does the philosophical world conception develop beyond the phase of the mere thought experience in Hegel's sense to an inner participation in thought that has come to life?

[ 25 ] A book that is characteristic of the relation of Hegel's world conception toward the mood of the time was published by C. H. Weisse in 1834 with the title, The Philosophical Secret Doctrine of the Immortality of the Human Individual. In this book is to be found the following passage:

Whoever has studied Hegel's philosophy in its entire inner connection, is acquainted with the manner in which this philosophy, as it is constructed with perfect consistency in its dialectic method, shows the subjective spirit of the finite individual as absorbed into the objective spirit of law, state and morality. The subjective spirit thus becomes subordinated. It is simultaneously accepted and rejected until it finally changes into a dependent element of this higher spirit. In this fashion, the finite individual, as it has long been noted both in and outside Hegel's school, is made into a transitory phenomenon. . . . What purpose, what significance could there be for the continued existence of such an individual after the world spirit has passed through it . . .?

Weisse attempts to contrast this meaninglessness of the individual soul with his own description of its imperishable existence. That he, too, could not really progress beyond Hegel can be easily understood from his line of thought that has been briefly outlined in an earlier chapter of this book.

[ 26 ] The powerlessness of Hegel's thought picture could be felt when it was confronted with the individual entity of the soul, and it showed up again in the rising demand to penetrate deeper into nature than is possible by mere sense perception. That everything presented to the senses in reality represents thought and as such is spirit was seen clearly by Hegel, but whether one had gained an insight into all spirit in nature by knowing this spirit of nature as a new question. If the soul cannot grasp its own being by means of thought, could it not still be the case that with another form of experience of its own being the soul could nevertheless experience deeper forces and entities in nature? Whether such questions are formulated in completely distinct awareness or not is not the point in question. What matters is whether or not they can be asked with regard to a world conception. If this is possible, then such a world conception leaves us with the impression of being unsatisfactory. Because this was the case with Hegel's philosophy, it was not accepted as one that gives the right picture of the world, that is, one to which the highest problems and world riddles could be referred. This must be distinctly observed if the picture that is presented by the development of world conception in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be seen in its proper light. In this time further progress was made with respect to the picture of external nature, which, even more powerfully than before, weighed on the general human outlook on the world. It should be understandable that the philosophical conceptions of this time were engaged in a hard struggle since they had, as described above, arrived at a critical point. To begin with it is noteworthy to observe how Hegel's followers attempted to defend his philosophy.

[ 27 ] Carl Ludwig Michelet (1801–93), the editor of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, wrote in his preface to this work in 1841:

Will people continue to consider it a limitation of philosophy to create only thoughts and not even a leaf of grass? That is to say that it can create only the general, lasting, truly valuable, and not the particular, sensual transitory? But if one should see the limitation of philosophy not only in the fact that philosophy cannot produce the particular, but also in the fact that it does not even know how it is made, then the answer is: This “how” does not stand higher than knowledge but rather lower than knowledge; therefore, knowledge cannot have its limitation in this respect. As the question is asked “how” this change of the idea into the reality takes place, knowledge is lost for the reason that nature is the unconscious idea and the leaf of grass grows without any knowledge. But true creation of general values is the one element of which philosophical inquiry cannot be deprived. . . . And now we maintain that the purest thought development of speculation will be in the most perfect agreement with the results of experience, and its sense for nature will discover nothing in nature but embodied ideas.

In the same preface Michelet also expresses a hope:

Thus Goethe and Hegel are the two geniuses who, in my opinion, are destined to blaze the trail for a speculative physics of the future, as they prepare the reconciliation of speculation and experience … . Especially these Hegelian lectures could best of all have the effect of paving the way for a recognition in this respect, for as they show a comprehensive empirical knowledge, they represent the surest test for Hegel's speculation.

[ 28 ] The subsequent time did not lead to such a reconciliation. A certain animosity against Hegel took possession of ever widening circles. The spread of this feeling against him in the course of the fifties of the last century can be seen from the words that Friedrich Albert Lange uses in his History of Materialism in 1865:

His (Hegel's) whole system moves within the realm of our thoughts and fantasies about things that are given high-sounding names with complete disregard as to the validity that the phenomena and the concepts derived from them can have. . . . Through Schelling and Hegel, pantheism became the dominant mode of thinking in natural philosophy, a world conception that with a certain mystical depth implies at the same time, almost as a matter of principle, the danger of fantastic extravagance. Instead of separating experience and the world of the senses strictly from the ideal element, and instead of trying to find the reconciliation of these realms in the nature of man, the pantheist undertakes the unification of spirit and nature through the verdict of poetic reason without any critical intervention.

[ 29 ] This view concerning Hegel's mode of thinking is, to be sure, as inadequate to Hegel's world conception as possible. (See Hegel's philosophy as described in the chapter, The Classics of World Conception.) It does dominate numerous spirits as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, however, and it gains progressively more ground. A man who, from 1833 to 1872, was in an influential position with the German intellectual life as a professor of philosophy in Berlin, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72), could be sure of meeting strong public approval when he pronounced the judgment that Hegel wanted “to teach without learning” through his method because he was under the impression “that he was in possession of the divine concept, which is hampered by the process of laborious research work.” It was in vain that Michelet attempted to correct such a judgment by quoting Hegel's own words: “To experience we owe the development of philosophy. The empirical sciences prepare the content of the particular to the point where they can be admitted into the realm of philosophy. They also imply thereby the need of thinking itself to come up with concrete definitions.”

[ 30 ] Characteristic of the course of development of the world conceptions of the middle decades of the nineteenth century is an observation made by an important but unfortunately little known thinker, K. Ch. Planck. In the preface of an excellent book published in 1850 and entitled, The World Ages, he says:

To realize consciously that everything is under the condition of a purely natural order of law, and at the same time to produce the full self-conscious freedom of the spirit, the self-dependent inner law of its nature, this twofold tendency, which is the distinguishing fundamental signature of modern history, presents in its most direct and pure form also the task of the present book. The first tendency becomes apparent on all sides since the revival of the sciences in the rebirth of independent and comprehensive natural research and its liberation from the purely religious life. It can be seen in the change of the whole physical world conception caused by this, as well as in the ever increasing matter of factness of the view of things in general. It appears finally, in its highest form, in the philosophical tendency to comprehend the laws of nature according to their inner necessity, but it also shows its practical aspect in the gradual development of this immediate present life with respect to its natural conditions.

The growing influence of the natural sciences is expressed in words like this. The confidence in these sciences was becoming greater. The belief became predominant that through the means and the results of the natural sciences one could obtain a world conception that is free from the unsatisfactory elements of the Hegelian one.

[ 31 ] A picture of the total change that took place in this direction can be derived from a book that can be considered as representative of this period in the fullest sense of the word, Alexander von Humboldt's, Cosmos, Sketch of a Physical World Description. The author, who represents the pinnacle of education in the field of physical science of his time, speaks of his confidence in a world conception of natural science:

My confidence is based on the splendid state 'of the natural sciences themselves, whose wealth consists no longer in the abundance of their facts but in the interconnections of the observations. The general results that impress every educated mind as interesting have wonderfully multiplied since the end of the eighteenth century. The individual facts stand less isolated by themselves; the gaps between the formations are closed. What remained for a long time obscure to the inquiring mind when seen in a narrower horizon becomes explained through the observations that have been obtained on an expedition into the most distant regions. Forms of plants and animals, which seemed to be isolated for a long time, are now falling in line through the discovery of connecting links or through forms of transition. A general interconnection, not in a simple linear direction, but in a netlike, woven texture according to a higher development, or the stunted growth of certain organisms, is what gradually unfolds before the eye of the inquiring natural observer. . . . The general study of nature awakens in us, as it were, organs that have long been dormant. We enter into a more intimate relation with the outer world.

In his Cosmos, Humboldt leads the description of nature only to the gateway of a world conception. He does not make the attempt to connect the wealth of the phenomena by means of general ideas of nature, but links the things and facts in a natural way to each other as can be expected from “the entirely objective turn of his mind.”

[ 32 ] Soon other thinkers emerged who were bold enough to make combinations and who tried to penetrate into the nature of things on the basis of natural science. What they intended to produce was nothing less than a radical transformation of all former philosophical world and life conceptions by means of modern science and knowledge of nature. In the most forceful way the natural science of the nineteenth century had paved the way for them. What they intended to do is radically expressed by Feuerbach:

[ 33 ] To assume God before nature is about the same as to assume the church before you have the stone out of which it is built, or to assume that the art of architecture has put the stones together to make a building before the chemical compounds that make up the stone, in short, before the natural genesis and formation of the stone.

The first half of the century produced many results of natural science that are bricks for the architecture of a new structure of world conception. It is, to be sure, correct that a building cannot be erected if there are no bricks to do it with, but it is no less true that one cannot do anything with these bricks if, independent of them, a picture of the building to be erected does not exist. Just as no structure can come into existence if one puts these bricks together at random, one upon the other and side by side, joining them with mortar as they come, so can no world conception come from the individual known truths of natural science if there is not, independent of these and of physical research, a power in the human soul to form the world conception. This fact was left out of consideration by the antagonists of an independent philosophy.

[ 34 ] In examining the personalities who in the eighteen-fifties took part in the erection of a structure of world conception, the features of three men are particularly prominent: Ludwig Buechner (1824 – 99), Carl Vogt (1817–95) and Jacob Moleschott (1822–93). If one wants to characterize the fundamental feeling that inspires these three men, one need only repeat Moleschott's words:

If man has investigated all properties of the materials that make an impression on his developed sense organs, he has thereby grasped the essence of things. With this accomplishment he arrives at his—that is to say, humanity's—absolute knowledge. Another knowledge does not exist for man.

All philosophy that has been so far advanced has, according to these men, yielded only knowledge without lasting meaning. The idealistic philosophers believe, according to Buechner and those who shared his views, that they derive their knowledge from reason. Through this method, however, one cannot, as Buechner maintains, come to a meaningful structure of conceptions. “But truth can only be gained by listening to nature and her rule,” says Moleschott. At that time and during the following years, the protagonists for such a world conception, directly derived from nature, were collectively called materialists. It was emphatically declared that this materialism was an age-old world conception, concerning which enlightened spirits had long recognized how unsatisfactory it was for a higher thinker. Buechner attacked that opinion. He pointed out that:

In the first place materialism, or the whole philosophical current moving in its direction, has never been disproved. It is not only the oldest form of philosophical contemplation in existence but also one that emerged anew with new energies at every revival of philosophy in the course of history. Furthermore, the materialism of our day is no longer the same as it was formerly with Epicurus or the Encyclopedists, but an entirely different thought current or methods, which is supported by the results of the positive sciences. This is a method that is distinguished from its preceding form by the fact that it is no more like the older materialism, a system, but a simple realistic philosophical contemplation of existence that, above all, traces the uniform principle in the world of nature and of the spirit, striving to show everywhere a natural and law-determined connection of all phenomena of that world.

Goethe's attitude toward Holbach, one of the most prominent materialists of the eighteenth century French Encyclopedists, illustrates the position a spirit, who strives in a most pronounced way for a thinking in accordance with nature and does full justice to the mode of conception of natural science, can nevertheless take toward materialism. Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (1723– 1789) published his Systeme de la Nature in 1770. Goethe, who came across this book in Strassburg, in Poetry and Truth describes the repulsive impression that he received from it.

Matter was to be there from eternity, and it was to have been in motion from eternity. Through this motion, now to the right, now to the left in all directions, it was to have produced without further difficulty all the infinite phenomena of existence. This we might even have accepted as satisfactory if the author had really constructed before our eyes the world out of his matter in motion. But he might have known as little about nature as we did, for after postulating a few general concepts, he again turns away from nature in order to transform what appears higher than nature, or what appears as a higher nature in nature, into the material, heavy nature, to be sure, in motion, but without direction and shape, and he thinks that he gained a great deal in so doing.

Goethe was deeply convinced that “theory in itself and by itself has no value except to make us believe in the connection of the phenomena.” (Sprueche in Prosa, Deutsche Nationalliteratur, Goethe's Werke, Vol. 36, 2, pp. 357.)

[ 35 ] The results of natural science gained in the first half of the nineteenth century were, to be sure, as knowledge of facts, well-suited to supply a foundation to the materialists of the fifties for their world conception. Science has penetrated deeper and deeper into the connections of the material processes insofar as they can be reached by sense observation and by the form of thinking that is based on that sense observation. If one now wants to deny to oneself and to others that there is spirit active in matter, one nevertheless unconsciously reveals this spirit. For what Friedrich Theodor Vischer says in the third volume of his essay, On Old and New Things, is in a certain sense quite correct. “That the so-called matter can produce something, the function of which is spirit, is in itself the complete proof against materialism.” In this sense, Buechner unconsciously disproves materialism by attempting to prove that the spiritual processes spring from the depths of the material facts presented to sense observation.

[ 36 ] An example that shows how the results of natural science took on forms that could be of a deeply penetrating influence on the conception of the world is given in Woehler's discovery of 1828. This scientist succeeded in producing a substance synthetically outside the living organism that had previously only been known to be formed within. This experiment seemed to supply the proof that the former belief, which assumed that certain material compounds could be formed only under the influence of a special life force contained in the organism, was incorrect. If it was possible to produce such compounds outside the living body, then one could draw the conclusion that the organism was also working only with the forces with which chemistry deals. The thought arose for the materialists that, if the living organism does not need a special life force to produce what formerly had been attributed to such a force, why should this organism then need special spiritual energies in order to produce the processes to which mental experiences are bound? Matter in all its qualities now became for the materialists what generates all things and processes from its core. From the fact that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen combine in an organic compound, it did not seem far to go to Buechner's statement, “The words soul, spirit, thought, feeling, will, life, do not stand for any real things but only for properties, qualifications, functions of the living substance, or results of entities that have their basis in the material forms of existence.” A divine being or the human soul were no longer called immortal by Buechner, but rather matter and energy. Moleschott expressed the same conviction with the words:

Energy is not a creative God; no essence of things is detachable from the material basis. It is a quality of matter, inseparable from it, eternally inherent in it. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are the powers that split the firmest rock and transform it into fluid processes in which life is generated. Change of matter and form in the individual parts while the fundamental structure remains the same is the mystery of animal life.

[ 37 ] The research done in the first half of the nineteenth century in natural science enabled Ludwig Buechner to express the view, "In a way similar to that in which the steam engine produces motion, the intricate organic complication of energy endowed materials in the animal body produces a sum total of certain effects, which, combined in a unity, are called spirit, soul, thought by us.” And Karl Gustav Reuschle declared in his book, Philosophy and Natural Science, in Memory of David Friedrich Strauss (1874), that the results of natural science themselves implied a philosophical element. The affinities that one discovered between the natural forces were thought to lead into the mysteries of existence.

[ 38 ] Such an important relation was found by Oersted in 1819 in Copenhagen. He saw that a magnetic needle is deflected by an electric current. Faraday discovered the corresponding phenomenon in 1831, that by moving a magnet toward a spirally twisted copper wire, electricity can be generated in the latter. Electricity and magnetism thereby were shown to be related natural phenomena. Both energies were no longer isolated facts; it was now apparent that they had a common basis in their material existence. Julius Robert Mayer penetrated deeper into the nature of matter and energy in the eighteen-forties when he became aware of the fact that there exists a definite relation that can be expressed numerically between mechanical work and heat. Out of pressure, impact and friction, etc., that is to say, out of work, heat is generated. In the steam engine, heat is again changed into work. The quantity of heat produced by a given amount of work can be calculated from the quantity of this work. If one changes the quantity of heat that is necessary to heat a kilogram of water by one degree centigrade into work, one can with this work lift 424 kilograms to a height of one meter. It cannot be surprising that the discovery of such facts was considered to be a vast progress away from such explanations concerning matter as Hegel had offered: [ 39 ] “The transition from ideality to reality, from abstraction to concrete existence, in this case, from space and time to the reality that appears as matter, is incomprehensible for the intellect and therefore appears to it always as something external and merely given.” The significance of a remark of this kind is recognized only if thought as such can be seen as something valuable. This consideration, however, would not occur to the above-mentioned thinkers.

[ 40 ] To discoveries such as these concerning the unity of the organic forces of nature, others were added that threw light on the problem of the composition of the world of organisms. In 1838 the botanist, Schleiden, recognized the significance of the simple cell for the plant organism. He showed that every texture of the plant, and therefore the plant itself, is made up of these “elementary organisms.” Schleiden had recognized this “elementary organism” as a little drop of mucilaginous fluid surrounded by a cellular membrane. These cells are so multiplied and joined to one another that they form the structure of the plant. Soon after this, Schwann discovered the same general structure for the world of animal organisms. Then, in 1827, the brilliant naturalist, Karl Ernst van Baer, discovered the human egg. He also described the process of the development of higher animals and of man from the egg.

In this way one had everywhere given up the attempt to look for ideas that could be considered fundamental for the things of nature. Instead, one had observed the facts that show in which way the higher, more complicated processes and entities of nature develop from the simpler and lower ones. The men who were in search of an idealistic interpretation of the phenomena of the world became ever more rare. It was still the spirit of idealistic world conception that in 1837 inspired the anthropologist, Burdach, with the view that life did not have its origin in matter but rather a higher force transformed matter according to its own design. Moleschott had already said, “The force of life, as life itself, is nothing more than the result of the complicated interacting and interweaving physical and chemical forces.”

[ 41 ] The consciousness of the time tended to explain the universe through no other phenomena than those that are displayed before the eyes of men. Charles Lyell's work, Principles of Geology, which was published in 1830, brought the whole older geology to an end with this principle of explanation. Up to Lyell's epoch-making work it was believed that the evolution of the earth had taken place in abrupt revolutions. Everything that had come into being on earth was supposed to have been destroyed repeatedly by complete catastrophes. Over the graves of the victims new creations were supposed to have risen. In this manner, one explained the presence of the remnants of plants and animals in the various strata of the earth. Cuvier was the principal representative who believed in such repeated periods of creation. Lyell was convinced that it was unnecessary to assume such interruptions of the steady course of evolution of the earth. If one only presupposed sufficiently long periods of time, one could say that forces today still at work on earth caused the entire development. In Germany, Goethe and Karl von Hoff had already professed such a view. Von Hoff maintained it in his History of the Natural Changes of the Surface of the Earth, Documented by Traditional Sources, which appeared in 1822. [ 42 ] With great boldness of thought, enthusiasts Vogt, Buechner and Moleschott set out to explain all phenomena from material processes as they take place before the senses of man.

[ 43 ] The situation that arose when the physiologist, Rudolf Wagner, found himself opposed by Carl Vogt was typical of the intellectual warfare that the materialists had to wage. In 1852, in the paper, Allgemeine Zeitung, Wagner had declared himself in favor of accepting an independent soul entity, thereby opposing the view of materialism. He said “that the soul could divide itself because the child inherited much from his father and much also from his mother.” Vogt answered this statement for the first time in his Pictures from Animal Life. His position in this controversy is clearly exposed in the following:

The soul, which is to be the substance, the very essence of the individuality of the individual, indivisible entity, is to be capable of dividing itself. Theologists, be sure you catch this heretic. He has been up to now one of your people! Divided souls! If the soul can be divided in the act of conception as Mr. Rudolf Wagner thinks, then it could also be possible that this soul could be divided in death, the portion that was burdened with sins going into purgatory, while the other part would go directly into paradise. Mr. Wagner also promises at the end of his physiological letters some excursions into the field of the physiology of the divided souls.

The controversy became intense when Wagner, at the assembly of natural scientists in Goettingen in 1854, read a paper against materialism entitled, Man's Creation and the Substance of the Soul. He meant to prove two things. In the first place, he set out to show that the results of modern physical science were not a contradiction of the biblical belief in the descent of the human race from one couple. In the second instance, he wanted to demonstrate that these results did not imply anything concerning the soul. Vogt wrote a polemical treatise, Bigoted Faith and Science (Koehlerglaube und Wissenschaft), against Wagner in 1855, which showed him to be equipped with the full insight of the natural science of his time. At the same time, he appeared to be a sharp thinker who, without reserve, disclosed his opponents' conclusions as illusions. Vogt's contradiction of Wagner's first statement comes to a climax in the passage, “All investigations of history and of natural history lead to the positive proof of the origin of the human races from a plurality of roots. The doctrines of the Scripture concerning Adam and Noah, and the twice occurring descent of man from a single couple are scientifically untenable legends.”

Against Wagner's doctrine of the soul, Vogt maintained that we see the psychical activities of man develop gradually as part of the development of the physical organs. From childhood to the maturity of life we observe that the spiritual activities become more perfect. With the shrinking of the senses and the brain, the “spirit” shrinks proportionally. “A development of this kind is not consistent with the assumption of an immortal soul substance that has been planted into the brain as its organ.”

That the materialists, as they fought their opponents, were not merely confronted with intellectual reasons but also with emotions, becomes perfectly clear in the controversy between Vogt and Wagner. For Wagner had appealed, in a paper at Goettingen, for the moral need that could not endure the thought that “mechanical machines walking about with two arms and legs” should finally be dissolved into indifferent material substances, without leaving us the hope that the good they are doing should be rewarded and the evil punished. Vogt's answer was, “The existence of an immortal soul is, for Mr. Wagner, not the result of investigation and thought. . . . He needs an immortal soul in order to see it tortured and punished after the death of man.”

[ 44 ] Heinrich Czolbe (1819–73) attempted to show that there is a point of view from which the moral world order can be in agreement with the views of materialism. In his book, The Limits and Origin of Knowledge Seen in Opposition to Kant and Hegel, which appeared in 1865, he explained that every theology had its origin in a dissatisfaction with this world.

The exclusion of the supersensible, or those incomprehensible things that lead to the assumption of a second world, that is, to naturalism, is in no way forced upon us through the power of the facts of natural science—not even through philosophy that means to know everything—but in the last analysis through morality, namely, through that particular kind of moral behavior in man toward the world that we can call satisfaction with the natural world.

[ 45 ] Czolbe considers the longing for a supernatural world actually a. result of an ingratitude against the natural world. The basic causes of a philosophy that looks toward a world beyond this one are, for him, moral shortcomings, sins against the spirit of the natural world order. For these sins distract us “from the striving toward the highest possible happiness of every individual” and from fulfilling the duty that follows from such a striving “against ourselves and others without regard for supernatural reward and punishment.” According to Czolbe, every human being is to be filled with a “grateful acceptance of his share of earthly happiness, which may be possibly small, and with a humble acceptance of its limits and its necessary sorrow.” Here we meet a rejection of a supernatural world order for moral reasons.

In Czolbe's world conception one also sees clearly what qualities made materialism so acceptable to human thinking, for there is no doubt that Buechner, Vogt and Moleschott were not philosophers to a sufficient degree to demonstrate the foundations of their views logically. Without losing their way in heights of idealistic thoughts, in their capacity as naturalists they drew their conclusions more from sense observations. To render an account of their method by justifying it from the nature of human knowledge was no enterprise to their liking. Czolbe, however, did undertake just that. In his New Presentation of Sensualism (1855), we find the reasons given why he considers a knowledge built on the basis of sensual perceptions valuable. Only a knowledge of this kind supplies concepts, judgments and conclusions that can be distinctly conceived and envisaged. Every conclusion that leads to something sensually inconceivable, and every indistinct concept is to be rejected. The soul element is not clearly conceivable, according to Czolbe, but the material on which the spiritual appears as a quality. He therefore attempts to reduce self-consciousness to visible material processes in the essay he published in 1856, The Genesis of Self-consciousness, an Answer to Professor Lotze. Here he assumes a circular movement of the parts of the brain. Through such a motion returning in its own track, the impression that a thing causes in the senses is made into a conscious sensation. It is strange that this physical explanation of consciousness became, at the same time, the occasion for him to abandon his materialism. This is the point where one of the weaknesses inherent in materialism becomes apparent in him. If he had remained faithful to his principle, he would never have gone further than the facts that are accessible to the senses allow. He would speak of no other processes in the brain than those that can positively be asserted through the means of natural science. What Czolbe sets out to establish is, however, an aim in an infinite distance. Spirits like Czolbe are not satisfied with what is investigated, they hypothetically assume facts that have not as yet been investigated. Such an alleged fact is the circular motion of the parts of the brain. A complete investigation of the brain will most likely lead to the discovery of processes of a kind that do not occur anywhere else in the world. From them, one will be able to draw the conclusion that the psychical processes conditioned by brain processes do occur only in connection with a brain. Concerning his hypothetical circular movements, Czolbe could not claim that they were limited to the brain. They could occur also outside the animal organism, but in that case, they would have to lead to psychical phenomena also in inanimate objects. Czolbe, who is so insistent on perceptual clarity, actually does not consider an animation of all nature as impossible. He asks, “Should not my view be a realization of the world soul, which Plato defended in his Timaeus? Should we not be able to find here the point where the Leibnizian idealism, which has the whole world consist of animated entities (monads), unites with modern naturalism?”

[ 46 ] On a larger scale the mistake that Czolbe made with circular brain motion occurred again in the brilliant thinker, Carl Christian Planck (1819–80). The writings of this man have been completely forgotten, in spite of the fact that they belong to the most interesting works of modern philosophy. Planck strives as intensely as any materialist for a world conception that is completely derived from perceptible reality. He criticizes the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for seeking the essence of things one-sidedly in the idea. “To explain things really out of themselves is to recognize them in their original conditioned state and in their finiteness.” (Compare Planck, The World Ages.) “There is only the one and truly pure nature, so that mere nature in the narrower sense of the word and spirit are opposites only within the one nature in the higher and more comprehensive sense.”

Now the strange thing happens in Planck's philosophy that he declares the real, the world extending before him, to be the element that the explanation of the world has to seek. He nevertheless does not proceed with the observation of the facts in order to reach this element of the real world extending before him, for he believes that human reason is capable of penetrating through its own power to the real. Hegel had, according to Planck, made the mistake of having reason contemplate its own being so that it saw itself again in all things. Planck, however, intended to have reason no longer withheld within its own limits, but to have it go beyond itself into the element of extension, the truly real. Planck blames Hegel because Hegel had reason spin its own cobweb out of itself, whereas he, himself, is bold enough to have reason spin real objective existence. Hegel maintained that the spirit is capable of comprehending the essence of things because reason is the essence of things and because it comes into being in the human spirit. Planck declares that the essence of things is not reason, but he uses reason merely to represent this essence. A bold world construction, brilliantly conceived, but conceived far from real observation, far from real things, yet constructed in the belief that it was entirely permeated with genuine reality—such is Planck's structure of ideas. He considers the world process a living interplay of expansion and contraction. Gravity is for him the tendency of the bodies, spread in space, to contract. Heat and light are the tendency of a body to bring its contracted matter into activity at a distance, and therefore the tendency of expansion.

[ 47 ] Planck's relation toward his contemporaries is most interesting. Feuerbach said of himself, “Hegel maintains the standpoint that he wants to construct the world; my standpoint is to know the world as being; he descends, I ascend. Hegel stands man on his head; I place him on his feet, which are resting on geology.” With these words the materialists could also have characterized their credo, but Planck proceeds in his method exactly like Hegel. He believes, however, that he proceeds like Feuerbach and the materialists. The materialists, if they had interpreted his method in their own way, would have had to say to him, “From your standpoint you attempt to construct the world. Nevertheless, you believe you proceed by recognizing the world as being; you descend, but you take this descent to be an ascent. You stand the world on its head and you are of the opinion that that head is a foot.” The will toward natural, factual reality could probably not be expressed more poignantly than through the world conception of a man who wanted to produce not merely ideas but reality out of reason.

The personality of Planck appears no less interesting when he is compared with his contemporary, Max Stirner. It is significant here to consider Planck's ideas concerning the motivations of human action and community life. As the materialist proceeded from the materials and forces actually presented to the senses to arrive at their explanation of nature, so Stirner started from the real individual personality as a guide line for human behavior. Reason is only with the individual. What reason decides on as a guide line for action can therefore also have validity only for the individual. Life in community will naturally result from the natural interaction of the individual personalities. If everyone acts according to his reason, the most desirable state of affairs will come to pass through the most free cooperation of all. The natural community life comes into being as a matter of course if everyone has reason rule his own individuality since, according to the materialists, the natural view of worldly phenomena comes to pass if one has the things express their nature and if one limits the activity of reason to a mere combination and interpretation of the statements of the senses. As Planck does not explain the world by allowing things to speak for themselves, but decides by his reason what the things allegedly say, so he also does not, in regard to community life, depend on a real interaction of personalities but dreams of an association of peoples with a supreme judicial power serving the general welfare and ordered by reason. Here also, then, he considers it possible that reason should master what lies beyond the personality.

The original general law of right demands necessarily its external existence in a general power of right, for it would itself not be real as a general element in an external form if it were left to the individuals themselves to execute it, as the individuals by themselves are, according to their legal positions, only representatives of their personal right, not as the general right as such.

Planck constructs the general power of right because he can realize the idea of right for himself only in this manner. Five years earlier, Max Stirner had written, “My own master and the creator of my own right—I recognize no other source of right than myself. Neither God, nor state, nor nature, nor man himself with his ‘eternal human rights,’ neither a divine nor a human right.” It is his opinion that the real right of the individual cannot exist within a general right. It is thirst for reality that drives Stirner to take his negative attitude toward an unreal general right. It is the same thirst for reality that, in turn, motivates Planck in his attempt to crystallize out of an idea a real state of right.

[ 48 ] In reading Planck's books one feels that he was deeply disturbed by the thought of a twofold world order. He considered the belief in such an interaction of two world orders—a natural order and a purely spiritual one—as something contrary to nature and intolerable.

[ 49 ] There have been thinkers before Planck's time, of course, who strove for a purely natural-scientific mode of conception. Leaving aside several other more or less clear attempts in this direction, Lamarck, for instance, in 1809 outlined a picture of the genesis and development of living organisms, which, according to the state of knowledge of his time, should have had a great deal of attraction for a contemporary world conception. He thought of the simplest organisms as having come into existence through inorganic processes under certain conditions. Once an organism is formed in this way, it develops, through adjustment to given conditions of the external world, new formations that serve its life. It grows new organs because it needs them. The organisms then are capable of transformation and thereby also of perfection. Lamarck imagines this transformation in the following way. Consider an animal that gets its food from high trees. It is therefore compelled to stretch its neck. In the course of time its neck then becomes longer under the influence of this need. A short-necked animal is transformed into the giraffe with its long neck. The animals, then, have not come into existence in their variety, but this variety has developed in the course of time under the influence of changing conditions. Lamarck is of the opinion that man is included in this evolution. Man has developed in the course of time out of related forms similar to monkeys into forms that allowed him to satisfy higher physical and spiritual needs. Lamarck in this way linked up the whole world of organisms, including man, to the realm of the inorganic.

[ 50 ] Lamarck's attempt at an explanation of the varieties of the forms of life was met with little attention by his contemporaries. Two decades later a controversy arose in the French Academy between Geoffroy St. Hilaire and George Cuvier. Geoffroy St. Hilaire believed he recognized a common structural design in the world of animal organisms in spite of its great variety. Such a general plan was a necessary prerequisite for an explanation of their development from one another. If they had developed from one another, they must have had some fundamental common element in spite of their variety. In the lowest animal something must be recognizable that only needs perfection in order to change this lower form in the course of time into that of a higher animal. Cuvier turned strongly against the consequences of this view. He was a cautious man who pointed out that the facts did not uphold such far-reaching conclusions. As soon as Goethe heard of this conflict, he considered it the most important event of the time. Compared to this controversy, the interest that he took in the July Revolution, a political event that took place at the same time, appears insignificant … . Goethe expressed himself on this point clearly enough in a conversation that he had with Soret in August, 1830. He saw clearly that the adequate conception of the organic world depended on this controversial point. In an essay Goethe supported St. Hilaire with great intensity. (Compare Goethe's writings on natural science, Vol. 36, Goethe Edition, Deutsche National Literatur.) He told Johannes von Mueller that he considered Geoffroy St. Hilaire to be moving in the same direction he himself had taken up fifty years earlier. This shows clearly what Goethe meant to do when he began, shortly after his arrival in Weimar, to take up his studies on animal and plant formations. Even then he had an explanation of the variety of living forms in mind that was more adequate to nature, but he was also a cautious man. He never maintained more than what the facts entitled him to state, and he tells in his introduction to his Metamorphosis of the Plant that the time was then in considerable confusion with respect to these facts. The opinion prevailed, as Goethe expressed it, that it was only necessary for the monkey to stand up and to walk on his hind legs in order to become a human being.

[ 51 ] The thinkers of natural science maintained a mode of conception that was completely different from that of the Hegelians. For the Hegelians, it was possible to remain within their ideal world. They could develop their idea of man from their idea of the monkey without being concerned with the question of how nature could manage to bring man into being in the real world side by side with the monkey. Michelet had simply pronounced that it was no concern of the idea to explain the specific “how” of the processes in the real world. The thinker who forms an idealistic world conception is, in this respect, in the same position as the mathematician who only has to say through what thought operation a circle is changed into an ellipse and an ellipse into a parabola or hyperbola. A thinker, however, who strives for an explanation through facts would have to point at the actual processes through which such a transformation can come to pass. He is then forming a realistic world conception. Such a thinker will not take the position that Hegel describes:

It has been a clumsy conception of the older and also of the more recent philosophy of nature to consider the development and transition of one form and realm of nature into a higher one as an external and real production that one has dated back into the darkness of the past for the sake of clarification. It is characteristic of nature to be so external in its structure that its forms fall apart in differentiated manifestations and that these. forms exist indifferently side by side; the idea, which guides the stages in their succession, is the inner nature of these separated manifestations. Such nebulous conceptions, which are really just sensual conceptions, as, for instance, the alleged progression of plants and animals from water, and then again, the evolution of the more developed animal formations from the lower ones, and so forth, must be given up by a thoughtful contemplation. (Hegel's Werke, 1847, Vol. 7, p. 33.)

In opposition to such a statement of an idealistic thinker, we hear that of the realistic Lamarck:

In the primal beginning only the simplest and lowest animals and plants developed, and only lastly those of a highly complicated organization. The course of the evolution of the earth and its organic population was quite gradual and not interrupted by violent revolutions. The simplest animals and the simplest plants that occupy the lowest stages on the scale of organisms have come into existence, and do so even today, through spontaneous generation (generatio spontanea).

There was in Germany also a man of the same conviction as Lamarck. Lorenz Oken (1779–1859) presented a natural evolution of organic beings that was based on “sensual conceptions.” To quote him, “Everything organic has originated from a slimy substance (Urschleim), is merely slime formed in various ways. This original slime has come into being in the ocean in the course of the planetary evolution out of inorganic matter.”

[ 52 ] In spite of such deeply provocative turns of thought there had to be, especially with thinkers who were too cautious to leave the thread of factual knowledge, a doubt against a naturalistic mode of thinking of this kind as long as the question of the teleology of living beings had not been cleared. Even Johannes Mueller, who was a pioneer as a thinker and as a research scientist, was, because of his consideration of the idea of teleology, prompted to say:

The organic bodies are distinguished from the inorganic not merely by the composition of elements that they represent, but also by the continuous activity that is at work in living organic matter, which creates also teleologically and in a reason-directed plan, by arranging the parts for the purpose of the whole. It is this that is the distinguishing mark of an organism. (Johannes Mueller, Handbuch der Physiologic des Menschen, 3, 1838; Vol. 1, p. 19.)

With a man like Johannes Mueller, who remained strictly within the limits of natural scientific research, and for whom the thought of purpose-conformity remained as a private conviction in the background of his factual research work, this view was not likely to produce any particular consequences. He investigated the laws of the organisms in strict objectivity regardless of the purpose connection, and became a reformer of modern natural science through his comprehensive mind; he knew how to make use of the physical, chemical, anatomical, zoological, microscopical and embryological knowledge in an unlimited way. His view did not keep him from basing psychological qualities of the objects of his studies on their physical characteristics. It was one of his fundamental convictions that no one could be a psychologist without being a physiologist. But if a thinker went beyond the field of research in natural science and entered the realm of a general world conception, he was not in the fortunate position easily to discard an idea like that of teleological structure. For this reason, it is easy to understand why a thinker of the importance of Gustave Theodor Fechner (1801 – 87) would make the statement in his book, Zend-Avesta, or Concerning the Nature of Heaven and the World Beyond (1852), that it seems strange how anyone can believe that no consciousness would be necessary to create conscious beings as the human beings are, since even unconscious machines can be created only by conscious human beings. Also, Karl Ernst von Baer, who followed the evolution of the animals from their initial state, could not resist the thought that the processes in living organisms were striving toward certain goals and that the full concept of purpose was, indeed, to be applied for all of nature. (Karl Ernst von Baer, Studies from the Field of Natural Science, 1876, pp. 73 & 82.)

[ 53 ] Difficulties of this kind, which confront certain thinkers as they intend to build up a world picture, the elements of which are supposed to be taken entirely from the sensually perceptible nature, were not even noticed by materialistic thinkers. They attempted to oppose the idealistic world picture of the first half of the century with one that receives a11 explanation exclusively from the facts of nature. Only in a knowledge that had been gained from these facts did they have any confidence.

[ 54 ] There is nothing more enlightening concerning the inner conviction of the materialists than this confidence. They have been accused of taking the soul out of things and thereby depriving them of what speaks to man's heart, his feelings. Does it not seem that they do take all qualities out of nature that lift man's spirit and that they debase nature into a dead object that satisfies only the intellect that looks for causes but deprives us of any inner involvement? Does it not seem that they undermine morality that rises above mere natural appetites and looks for motivations, merely advocating the cause of animal desires, subscribing to the motto: Let us eat and drink and follow our physical instincts for tomorrow we die? Lotze (1817–81) indeed makes the statement with respect to the materialistic thinkers of the time in question that the followers of this movement value the truth of the drab empirical knowledge in proportion to the degree in which it offends everything that man's inner feelings hold sacred.

[ 55 ] When one becomes acquainted, however, with Carl Vogt, one finds in him a man who had a deep understanding for the beauty of nature and who attempted to express this as an amateur painter. He was a person who was not at all blind to the creations of human imagination but felt at home with painters and poets. Quite a number of materialists were inspired by the esthetic enjoyment of the wonderful structure of organisms to a point where they felt that the soul must have its origin in the body. The magnificent structure of the human brain impressed them much more than the abstract concepts with which philosophy was concerned. How much more claim to be considered as the causes of the spirit, therefore, did the former seem to present than the latter.

[ 56 ] Nor can the reproach that the materialists debased morality be accepted without reserve. Their knowledge of nature was deeply bound up with ethical motivations. Czolbe's endeavor to stress the moral foundation of naturalism was shared by other materialists. They all meant to instill in man the joy of natural existence; they intended to direct him toward his duties and his tasks on earth. They felt that human dignity could be enhanced if man could be conscious of having developed from a lower being to his present state of perfection. They believed that only a man who knows the material necessities that underlie his actions is capable of properly judging them. They argued that only he knows how to judge a man according to his value who is aware that matter is the basis for life in the universe, that with natural necessity life is connected with thought and thought in turn gives rise to good and ill will. To those who see moral freedom endangered by materialism, Moleschott answers:

Everybody is free who is joyfully aware of the natural necessity of his existence, his circumstances, claims and demands, and of the limits and extent of his sphere of activity. A man who understands this natural necessity knows also his right to fight his way through for demands that are in accordance with the needs of the human race. More than that, because only that freedom that is in harmony with the genuinely human will be defended with natural necessity by the species. We can be assured of the final victory over all suppressors in any struggle for human ends.

[ 57 ] With attitudes of this kind, with a devotion to the wonders of nature, with moral sentiments as described above, the materialists were ready to receive the man who overcame the great obstacle for a naturalistic world conception. This man appeared to them in Charles Darwin. His work, through which the teleological idea was placed on the solid ground of natural science, was published in 1859 with the title, The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

[ 58 ] For an understanding of the impulses that are at work in the evolution of philosophical world conception, the examples of the advances in natural science mentioned (to which many others could be added) are not significant in themselves. What is important is the fact that advances of this kind coincided in time with the development of the Hegelian world picture. The presentation of the course of evolution of philosophy in the previous chapters has shown that the modern world picture, since the days of Copernicus, Galileo, etc., stood under the influence of the mode of conception of natural science. This influence, however, could not be as significant as that of the accomplishment of the natural sciences of the nineteenth century. There were also important advances of natural science at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We only need to be reminded of the discovery of oxygen by Lavoisier, and of the findings in the field of electricity by Volta and many others. In spite of these discoveries spirits like Fichte, Schelling and Goethe could, while they fully recognized these advances, nevertheless, arrive at a world picture that started from the spirit. They could not be so powerfully impressed by the mode of conception of natural science as were the materialistic thinkers in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was still possible to recognize on the one side of the world picture the conceptions of natural science, and on the other side of it, certain conceptions that contained more than “mere thought.” Such a conception was, for instance, that of the “force of life,” or of the “teleological structure” of an organism. Conceptions of this kind made it possible to say that there is something at work in the world that does not come under the ordinary natural law, something that is more spiritual. In this fashion one obtained a conception of the spirit that had, as it were, “a factual content.” Hegel had then proceeded to deprive the spirit of all factual elements. He had diluted it into “mere thought.” For those for whom “mere thoughts” could be nothing but pictures of factual elements, this step appeared as the philosophical proof of the unreality of the spirit. These thinkers felt that they had to find something that possessed a real content for them to take the place of Hegel's “mere thought things.” For this reason, they sought the origin of the “spiritual phenomena” in material processes that could be sensually observed “as facts.” The world conception was pressed toward the thought of the material origin of the spirit through the transformation of the spirit that Hegel had brought about.

[ 59 ] If one understands that there are deeper forces at work in the historical course of human evolution than those appearing on the surface, one will recognize the significance for the development of world conception that lies in the characteristic attitude that the materialism of the nineteenth century takes toward the formation of the Hegelian philosophy. Goethe's thoughts contained the seeds for a continuation of a philosophy that was taken up by Hegel, but insufficiently. If Goethe attempted to obtain a conception with his “archetypal plant” that allowed him to experience this thought inwardly so that he could intellectually derive from it such a specific plant formation as would be capable of life, he showed thereby that he was striving to bring thought to life within his soul. Goethe had reached the point where thought was about to begin a lifelike evolution, while Hegel did not go beyond thought as such. In communion with a thought that had come to life within the soul, as Goethe attempted, one would have had a spiritual experience that could have recognized the spirit also in matter. In “mere thought” one had no such experience. Thus, the evolution of world conception was put to a hard test. According to the deeper historical impulses, the modern time tended to experience not thought alone, but to find a conception for the self-conscious ego through which one could be aware that this ego is firmly rooted in the structure of the world. In conceiving this ego as a product of material processes, one had pursued this tendency by simply following the trend in a form easily understandable at that time. Even the denial of the spiritual entity of the self-conscious ego by the materialism of the nineteenth century still contains the impulse of the search for this ego. For this reason, the impulse with which natural science affected philosophy in this age was quite different from the influences it had had on previous materialistic currents. These earlier currents had not as yet been so hard pressed by something comparable to Hegel's thought philosophy to seek for a safe ground in the natural sciences. This pressure, to be sure, does not affect the leading personalities to a point where they are clearly aware of it, but as an impulse of the time, it exerts its effect in the subconscious currents of the soul.