The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It's important for a modern to be aware of what he's doing and what changes in him when he takes up an esoteric life.

We've often heard that two paths take us into spiritual worlds; one of them is when a man descends deep within him to find a connection with God; the other is when he tries to go out into the macrocosm. We have the forces in us that we seek, that created us; we look for them because we don't recognize them and not because we don't have them. In theosophy we learn about both paths that are supposed to balance each other, for a modern is no longer suited to go on one path alone Each path has its dangers, that we'll discuss later, and they're both very difficult. We treat the inner path in our meditations in inspiration, and the outer one through a thorough study of theosophical teachings about world evolution in imagination. This study develops our intellect and also influences our feelings, and after years of thorough study of these ideas, we'll notice that we've become different human beings. Theosophy works on men whether they bring a receptivity for it with them or not. Moderns are divided into two groups—those who seek theosophy because it gives them what they were striving for and those who don't know what to do with it and are opposed to it. Since November, 1879, a few men have become mature enough to take in theosophical teachings, but it's only a small host, whereas other moderns are till unable to acquire the teachings, consider them to be fantastic ideas and dreams or even get angry about them.

When people who prove to be receptive for theosophical teachings let the latter work upon them, their etheric body begins to oscillate slightly. Whereas someone who loses himself in external things gets an expanded and rarified etheric body. When such a person hears some spiritual teachings it's as if the wind were blowing through a cleft in the etheric body, which announced itself in him as fear, but appears outwardly as doubt. Such a man only notices the doubts, but they're the expression of fear and anxiety that have moved into his rarified etheric body as into a vacuum and have become noticeable there as doubt. We can't help a man who behaves in a rejective manner. It's better not to bother him with theosophy But wherever an opportunity rises we should quietly let theosophical ideas flow in according to the principle “steady dripping hollows the tone.” For we only have another 400 years or so to give these teachings in a theosophical form to all men. So that everyone will have an opportunity those who resisted them now will be born again in the next four centuries. A suitable number of men must be present then who represent theosophy in the right way.

Men could only tread the inner path for a long time before the event of Golgotha. Men who went out into the macrocosm in ancient India would have become lost in it as in darkness and emptiness, because their inner members had a different relationship to each other then. This kind of union with God existed until medieval times, because man changes but slowly. Mystics like Eckhart, Tauler and Molinos teach us the inner path an describe it exactly. Miguel de Molinos speaks of five stages of immersion He says that we must turn away from all creatures that corresponds to the forces of our etheric body, from our talents that correspond to the astral body, and from our ego that coincides with our fourth part and that we must merge with God.

But it gradually became necessary for men to tread the inner and outer paths simultaneously, and that's why the Rosicrucian, esoteric schools that taught both ways rose in the 11^th and 12^th centuries.

The writer of the Apocalypse points to the outer path for the first time. He shows us that we must become entirely separated from our personality to treat it. In a modest way he says that he was caught up by the spirit on Patmos Island. This has a particular meaning. In order to tread this outer path or to find the union with the divine in the macrocosm one must choose a firm point from which one concentrates oneself. So John the theologian calculated the stars' position on September 30, 395 A.D. and he had his visions from this point. On that day the sun stood before the Virgo sign and the moon was under her feet. We showed this picture on one of the seven seals. One can also calculate this time exoterically. Scholars have done this and have concluded that John Chrysostum wrote the Apocalypse around this time. But in reality we're touching upon a great secret here, for of course the Apocalypse arose much earlier, and its writer only moved himself ahead into the year 395.

Both paths have dangers for which an esoteric must watch. One who takes in theosophical teachings is attacked by many doubts; that's only natural and better than accepting things on faith. Of course he must eliminate these doubts and this will make him stronger.

A second danger into which an esoteric can get on this outer path is instability. One who has studied world evolution seriously will have felt that intense interests that he had previously disappear and that he doesn't have a firm hold on anything earthy. The danger here is that one's instability is disguised in the form of a high ideal that one is striving towards or a mission that one has to fulfill. But if we see through this and recognize it as a disguised instability we'll make rapid progress on the right path.

In descents into our interior two dangers threaten us. We can have a certain sensual pleasure, a comfortable feeling from the divine through the immersion in us and can thereby fall prey to a fine egotism, so that we turn away from everything that surrounds us and that should still interest.

The second danger is that a man can take what approaches him on immersion into himself to be spiritual revelations, when they may just be his own feelings.

Medieval mystics didn't have theosophical teachings yet. We don't find the latter anywhere in them. Their union with the divine is like a Neo-Buddhism. They didn't need the outer path yet.

Mystics also use the saying In Christo morimur in the form: In Christ we live.

[ 1 ] In the year 1858, Hermann Grimm wrote an essay entitled “Schiller and Goethe.” It begins with these words: “The true history of Germany is the history of the spiritual movements among her people. Only when enthusiasm for some great thought has inspired the nation and set its frozen forces flowing, do deeds of great and shining fame occur.” And further on we read: “... the names of the German emperors and kings are not milestones of the nation's progress.”

[ 2 ] Only a revival of the attitude underlying such words can shed light upon the troubled time that has come upon the German people. That something else from this attitude may yet awaken amid the commotion and labor of present times is the one hope to be cherished by he who holds it necessary above all for the German people to turn for help to the saving power of thoughts. Those who say today that one must first wait to see what shall come of the general situation and what relations with the people of the West and East shall result from new world conditions, have no concept of the age's necessities.

This view has led to everything said in these pages about the idea of the threefold social order. I believe that in the previous essays I have sufficiently answered the constant objection that our first thought must be the outcome of our relations with foreign nations before we can turn our attention to social ideas, like that of the threefold system. This objection rests on a fallacy that may prove bitterly fatal to the German people. Germany has come out of the world catastrophe in such a way that she must first create a basis for future relations with the nations around her. Her economic life (if its development were detached from the political life of laws and from the cultural field) would take on a form that could give it a place in the whole system of world economy. As I have tried to show in these essays, it would be in the interest of other nations to give an economic life of this kind its place in the system of world economy. An independent cultural life can be regarded by no other nation as a ground for hostility; a political-legal life among the German people based on the equality of all adults could not be viewed as a hostile element by non-Germans without their deriding themselves.

[ 3 ] However, an idea like the threefold order must come before the world with the driving force of a definite will in public affairs. The moment this idea is observed on the way toward becoming fact, it can become such a revelation of the innermost German being as will give the rest of the world something firm with which to reckon. Facing modern circumstances, facing the lack of faith in the practical efficacy of living ideas, one might well ask what has become of the German spirit. In ideas such as those written by Hermann Grimm sixty years ago, the voice of the greatest spirits of their own history speaks to the German people. In such ideas, these great spirits intended to utter the deepest will and purpose of their people. Shall the descendants of these spirits be deaf to them?

[ 4 ] These descendants are in a situation where truly it is not enough merely to remember the ideas of their forefathers, but where they must carry forward these ideas in a new form suited to modern times. Would the German deny his own being through lack of faith in ideas, and thus lose his very self? Surely the best part of the German spirit lies in this faith in the potency of ideas. And a revelation of the German spirit, once displayed in its genuine truth, would be one with which the world must reckon.

[ 5 ] A large enough number of Germans who share the heritage of faith in the intellectual world, and bring to it all the forces of their souls, must be the saving of their people. No negotiations with the world abroad will be of any good to the German people if carried on with indications of disbelief in ideas and their practical utility, for in all such negotiations the very core of the German spirit is absent.

[ 6 ] All objections stemming from the view that now is not the time to indulge in ideas should be silenced. There can be no question of any time that will bear in it the seeds of any real possibility of life for the German people, until the power of ideas has been recognized by a sufficiently large number of people. Not a faith that trims its ideas according to outer events, but a faith in ideas—that shall be the force that moves the German nation. What results may be confidently awaited in the same faith; to thrust it aside and to wait idly in a round of false activity while destiny pursues its course—this, for every German, is a sin against his own being, a sin against the spirit of this world hour, a sin against the demand of true self-awareness.

[ 7 ] Is not the influence of this sin plain enough to see? Are not the grievous effects of this sin already with us? Do not distress and want proclaim the sin in language comprehensible enough? Have the German people lost the power to recognize the sin they have committed against their own true spirit? These are questions that may well tear at the souls of all who study the public life of the German people. The pain should rightly lead to an awakening. Were the great spirits of the German past, with their faith in ideas, mere dreamers? Such questions find answers only in real life. What kind of solution can b e found? Yes, they were dreamers if their descendants dream away their ideas; but they were radiant spirits of reality if these descendants receive their ideas as a force for living, awakened will and purpose.

We are dealing with a progressive development of our planet. The purpose of our Earth is to develop this consciousness within us. Each planet goes through metamorphoses of seven successive levels of consciousness:

[1. Trance consciousness
2. Deep sleep consciousness
3. Dream consciousness
4. Wakefulness consciousness]
5. Soul consciousness
6. Oversoul consciousness
7. Spiritual consciousness

We have now established the [seven] metamorphoses of the father principle. Each of these seven metamorphoses of the father principle now undergoes seven principles in itself. Seven times seven.

Now we come to the son principle:

1. Elemental kingdom
2. Elemental kingdom
3. Elemental kingdom
4. mineral kingdom
5. plant kingdom
6. animal kingdom
7. human kingdom = 49 metamorphoses

Each of these 49 metamorphoses undergoes seven transformations, and the transformations through the spirit principle.

Each realm undergoes the seven powers once. For example, plant consciousness undergoes the seven powers once through the seven realms and seven times seven – each realm seven times the powers.

su>run The father metamorphoses seven times in seven levels of consciousness. All – plant – animal – human [gap in the transcript]

Puruscha: The Father metamorphoses seven times in seven stages of consciousness: All-consciousness - plant consciousness - animal consciousness - human consciousness - soul consciousness - oversoul consciousness - spirit consciousness.

Pakriti: The son metamorphoses seven times at each of these levels: first elemental realm, second elemental realm, third elemental realm, mineral realm, plant realm, animal realm, human realm.

Mahat: The mind metamorphoses seven times in each realm: Divine Spirit, Fire Spirit, Warmth Spirit, Light Spirit, Power Spirit, Creative Spirit, Blissful Spirit.

The way the realms are arranged in the individual levels of consciousness, however, makes us think as we describe them.

On the first planetary chain, the forces of light rule the first elemental realm in the fourth round. That is a fixed point. On the second chain or level of consciousness, the forces of light mainly rule the second elemental realm in the fourth round. On the third chain or level of consciousness, the forces of light rule the third elemental realm, and on the fourth, our level of consciousness, the forces of light rule the mineral realm. This is important because the rulers are not always the same. During each round, all seven forces are experienced, but not in the same way. On the moon, the mineral kingdom was ruled by the forces of warmth, -— previously by the forces of fire, on the first / gap in the transcript] by the forces of life. When Mars completed its fourth stage, its mineral state, its angel of orbital period was the divine spirit. Consciousness was an all-consciousness. When the beings arrived in the mineral kingdom, they were ruled by divine spirits.

On the first globe (arupa), the power spirit rules.
On the second globe (rupa), the creator spirit rules.
On the third globe, the blessed spirit rules.
On the fourth globe, the divine spirit rules.
On the fifth globe, the fire spirit rules.
On the sixth globe, the warmth spirit rules.
On the seventh globe rules the spirit of light.

Because this goes in a circle, Mars concludes with the highest development of light. Now he has developed light to the highest degree; the second planet begins. And what he has conquered in the previous one, he carries over. Now he shines and is called esoterically: the sun. Now he has during his

the creator spirit,

the blessed spirit,

the divine spirit. Now the sun reveals itself during its mineral state as fire, the plants are cooked. - Now it continues:

Fire
Warmth
Light
Strength

and hands over the power to the moon, and the power becomes that which permeates the moon, therefore it organizes [gap in the transcript] the moon period begins with creative spirit, develops arbitrariness, man arises as pleasure and pain.

Arupa stage – blissful mind
Rupa stage – divine mind
Astral stage – fire mind
Mineral stage – warmth

Warmth is revealed on the moon while it is physical.

The earth begins with

Arupa stage – Divine spirit
Rupa stage – Fire spirit
Astral stage – Warmth spirit
Physical stage – Light spirit

We are ruled by the light spirit, which is why the sun shines for us.

Now it depends on when a certain stage of Pitri is reached. Imagine you remain behind, a certain constellation of the stars comes, in which violence has a different relationship to the realm; the spirit to the son in another relationship, and that is decisive, as we are in our state of development. That is esoteric astrology. He must know at which level the Pitri stands and what the relationship between father and son is.

This is also the danger of the higher development of man: he comes out and into other cosmic influences. - He practices black magic by being carried away and coming into another sphere of influence. - Look at the diagram:

Each time we have seven kingdoms that go through certain stages of development. These are the son principle; hence 343 states, but only after every 49 states - so that every time a person has gone through 49 states, they have a particular turning point in their development. Something special is revealed to them. They enter a new series of 49. The Son reveals Himself. The human being becomes more inward-looking. The kingdom principle is evoked through the Son, and so the Son, Christ, reveals Himself. So Christ appears each time.

Our Christ is the one. And when the experience of Christ is fully realized within a person, they have undergone the 172nd metamorphosis. After the 343rd metamorphosis, they have returned to the Father. This is why Christ can say: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

There are
343 human stages
49 Christs
7 Fathers.

Our Christ was the twenty-fifth; in every kingdom the Son reveals Himself once. 49 times in a planetary development. The Father reveals Himself in the constellation.

On our Earth it is the fourth, on the planetary chain the twenty-fifth.

7 x 49 = 343. The Son reveals Himself every 49th time.

49
49
49
343
21
172 stages of development
3
171 171

The human soul can develop; its present state can be changed by training, especially of the etheric body. People who are ahead of others in their inner development are called initiates. The path they walk and teach is that of secret discipleship. Our root race, the Aryan, descends from the most highly developed sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Proto-Semitic, which last inhabited approximately the area of present-day Ireland. The island of Poseidonis mentioned by Plato can be seen as the last remnant of the sinking Atlantis. Manu, a leader of the Atlanteans, led the most mature people to the east. From there they migrated to the area of present-day India. An ancient culture arose there. This primeval Indian culture antedates the time when the Vedas originated by a long way. It was still somewhat dream-like and purely inward-looking. The state of mind of the ancient Indian was quite the opposite of our own today. He regarded everything external and visible as maya, as illusion, and reality was only the Brahman and what could be grasped by the Brahman.

A next culture emerged further west. This second culture is the proto-Persian, whose inaugurator and main leader was the great Zarathustra or Zoroaster. The Persians already reconciled spirit and matter and began to transform and reshape the material world through the human spirit.

A third culture emerged even further to the west, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture. Here, people focused even more on the material world, the external sciences emerged, the study of natural forces and their laws. From time immemorial, this ancient science of our earth has said the following: The earth is also a being that is subject to re-embodiment. It has gone through earlier stages and will have further embodiments in the future. There are said to be seven planetary conditions or “planets” through which the earth develops. The names of these “planets” do not refer to our present planets, but to past or future states of the earth. These states are related to those of the planets from which they take their names. The first embodiment of the earth is called “Saturn”. Then follows the Sun, and after that the Moon. Mars and Mercury are the names given to the first and second halves of the development of the Earth. The remaining conditions are Jupiter and Venus. These seven embodiments of the Earth are intimately connected with the development of man and are therefore reflected even in everyday life in the names of the days of the week:

Thus, the world of stars was closely linked to everyday life. The ancient Egyptians were able to determine exactly when the Nile would flood and then recede after the Dog Star appeared, and they could organize their agriculture accordingly.

A fourth cultural epoch is the Greco-Latin one. The ancient Greeks and Romans not only believed in the laws of wisdom, but they also tried to impress this wisdom on things. This is how their works of art were created. The deed of Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha, takes place in the midst of this culture.

We ourselves live in the fifth cultural period of the fifth root race of the fifth Earth period. This is the Germanic-English-American culture. Its main task is the conquest of the physical plane. The subsequent sixth cultural period will have the task of leading the outer culture back to a higher spiritual life and that is what theosophy is working towards. The future task of the entire culture is to reconnect with the spirit. Each epoch has its special tasks. Present-day science has set aside Ptolemy's world system as false and recognized Galileo and Copernicus as true. For the astral plan, however, the Ptolemaic system is correct, since one has to start from completely different perspectives there. The sixth cultural period is still in a germinal state in Eastern Europe. It will be the bearer of the spiritual culture of the future.

There will come a time when man will have overcome the dualism of the sexes. Lower abilities, sexual drives, will be transformed into higher ones. It is not a matter of destroying the drives, but of ennobling them. For example, fantasy is a result of the ennobling of the spirit; it is an effect of the already purified passions. The higher development of the imagination leads to clairvoyant vision. As initiates can already do, so in the future all people will be able to perceive the soul content of their fellow human beings. Today, the word can pass on spiritual experiences through the air, later one will bring forth living beings through the word, and finally the word itself will be creative: then people will be magicians of the word.

The information about the occult training comes from a deeply rooted science. Two qualities are fundamental for this, which a person must have. He must be able to endure what is called great loneliness, and he must gain a certain basic mood of devotion. As for the first, loneliness in the midst of active life is meant for a few minutes a day, when one devotes oneself to meditation and concentration. This alone gives the soul inner strength. In the beginning, inner emptiness and sadness will arise, but these must be overcome. All people who have achieved a great deal have used this inner solitude for their concentration. The second main requirement is devotion, looking up with reverence to something higher. If you want to ascend, you must first be down and feel down. The Indian secret training requires complete submission of the disciple to his guru. The Rosicrucian initiation is the right one for the present-day man of the West. Before that, the Christian initiation arose. All three types of initiation are basically an expression of the same initiation, but the methods must change with the times.

The human soul is capable of development, its present state may be changed by training, particularly by a training of the etheric body. People who precede others in their inner development are called Initiates. The path which they tread and teach is that of occult schooling.

Our root-race (5th post-Atlantean epoch), the Aryan, descends from the most highly developed sub-race of the Atlanteans, the original Semitic race, that lived approximately in the region of present-day Ireland. The island Poseidonis mentioned by Plato may be considered as a last remnant of descending Atlantis. Manu, a leader of the Atlanteans, guided the most mature men to the East. From there, they wandered into the region of present-day India. An ancient civilisation arose: This ancient Indian civilisation arose long before the time of the Vedas. It still had a dream-like, altogether inner character. The soul-constitution of the ancient Hindoo was the very opposite of our modern one. To him everything external and visible was Maya, Illusion; he saw reality only in Brahman and in what could be grasped by Brahman.

A second civilisation arose further west. This second culture is the ancient Persian one, whose inaugurator and chief guide was the great Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. The Persias were already able to harmonize spirit and matter and. began to work and to transform the physical world through the human spirit.

A third civilisation arose still further west, namely the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture. Man's gaze turned still more towards the physical world, the external branches of science arose, with the study of the forces of Nature and of their laws.

From the very outset, this ancient primeval science revealed the following truths concerning our earth: The earth too is a being subjected to reincarnation. It passed through earlier stages and in future it will pass through further incarnations. One speaks of seven planetary conditions or Planets", through which the earth passes in its development. The names of these "Planets" are not identical with our present planets, but refer to past or future condition of the earth. But these conditions are related to the planets after which they are named. The first incarnation of our earth is called. "Saturn". Then comes the "Sun", followed by Moon"; "Mars" and Mercury" are the designations for the first and second half of the earth's development. The conditions which will follow are "Jupiter" and "Venus", These seven incarnations of the earth are intimately connected with man's development and are therefore even mirrored in ordinary life; names of the days of the week.

Saturday - Saturn
Sunday - Sun
Monday - Moon
Tuesday - Zeus-day, Mardi - Mars
Wednesday - Mercredi, Mercury
Thursday - Wotan-day, Jupiter
Friday - Freya-day, Vendredi, Venus

The world of the stars is thus closely connected with ordinary life. The ancient Egyptians still arranged their whole civilisation in accordance with the stars, the affairs of State, agriculture, and so forth. The genius of the Dog-star, Sirius, was the one who indicated the inundations of the Nile, when that star appeared in a special constellation. A fourth epoch of culture is the Graeco-Latin one. It imprints on matter the Wisdom of things. This is how works of art arise. In the middle of this epoch falls the deed of Christ; the Mystery of Golgotha.

We ourselves live in the fifth epoch of culture, of the fifth root-race belonging to the fifth age of the earth. This is the Germanic-English-American culture; its chief task is the conquest of the physical plane. The task of the subsequent sixth epoch will be to lead external civilisation again to a more spiritual life. Its standard-bearer is Anthroposophy. The future task or civilisation as a whole consists in becoming reunited with the Spirit.

Every epoch has its particular tasks. Modern science has rejected the Ptolemaic world-system as erroneous and has adopted the world-systems of Galilei and Copernicus: but for the astral plane the Ptolemaic system is correct; for there one sets out from quite different perspectives. The sixth epoch of Culture still reposes as a seed in the East of Europe; it will be the carrier of the spiritual culture of the future.

A time will come when the human being will have overcome bi-sexuality. Lower forces, sexual instincts will change into higher ones. It is not a question of destroying any instinct, but of refining, ennobling them. Thus phantasy is a product of spiritual ennoblement, the result of already purified passions. When phantasy reaches a higher stage of development it leads to clairvoyant imagination. In future all human beings will be able to perceive as Initiates do now, the soul-content of their fellows. To-day the word can transmit spiritual experiences through the medium of the air; in the future spiritual beings will be produced through the word, and finally the word itself will become creative; then the human beings will be magicians of the word.

The indications on occult training come from a deeply-founded knowledge. There are two fundamental qualities which man must have; he must be able to bear what one calls great loneliness, and he must gain a certain fundamental mood of devotion. In regard to the first, the loneliness of a few minutes each day is meant, in the middle of the active life of daily living, minutes dedicated to concentration and meditation. Even this can give inner strength to the soul. At first there will be an inner feeling of emptiness and sadness; but this must be overcome. All people who achieved a great deal require this inner loneliness for their concentration. The second fundamental requirement is devotion, the capacity to look up to something with feelings of reverence and devotion. Those who wish to ascend to higher stages of development must first be below and feel that they are there below.

The occult training of India calls for a complete submission of the pupil to his Guru. The Rosicrucian Initiation is the right one for Modern people of the West.

Before that there was the Christian Initiation. All three kinds of Initiation are in reality the expression of one and the same initiation, but the forms of initiation must change with the times.

The confusion in the economic conditions of Central and Eastern Europe is beginning to cause a kind of political nightmare for the leading circles of Western countries. There is a fear of being drawn into the general decline. Those who can look this fear in the eye without prejudice can see the perplexity in the conduct of public affairs.

This lack of orientation is rooted in the lack of will to look beneath the surface of public life. People shy away from doing so. Because they sense that such a look would reveal things that cannot be dealt with by the means to which one has become accustomed. So people organize congresses and conferences: for the time being, it is taken for granted that they only think of these familiar means.

But these means will inevitably fail in every case, because they do not address the forces that prevail in the depths of the life of nations. And it is in these depths that the questions that trouble the world are now taking shape. We should act on the realization that something in these depths is crying out for a change in our outlook on life and our way of life.

In its view of world events, humanity has been torn out of real life. Even in the most practical questions of life, it dreams of goals that must falter in the face of reality. Only a keen observation of this reality can lead to recovery.

All political and economic life is ultimately rooted in the spiritual. How people think is how they act. But healthy forces can only flow into action if the spiritual life has healthy nourishment. This nourishment is lost when the spirit denies itself. When it expresses not itself but spiritlessness in its revelations.

Humanity has been thrown into this state in the most recent times. People have become accustomed to expressing not the spirit but only the spiritless, the materiality of life, through the spirit. But those who seek the truth in this way will ultimately lose it altogether. For the truth wants to be shaped out of the spirit even when it draws the material processes of life into its realm.

A search for truth that cannot draw its juices from the spirit itself will, out of inner necessity, end up with the phrase. And the phrase is today the hallmark of public life. The parties coin the phrases. They agitate with the phrases; they find credence with the phrases.

Phrases lack the lifeblood of the spirit. They will therefore never be able to permeate the reality of life. But they numb. They cast a spell over people's souls. They believe that through them they can master public life. However, recovery will not come until a sufficiently large number of people have recognized the infertility of phrases in their lives. Until then, we will not even be able to see the roots of the current widespread diseases. We will see reality sailing in the confusion of foreign currencies; but we will speak of “improving conditions” in party slogans.

And when the slogan becomes the mistress of intellectual life, it also does not allow the truth to prevail in political and legal life. The behavior of men towards one another cannot take on the form of law. For the law must take root in the feelings. But phraseology withers the feelings. Law becomes convention. In the legal and political sphere, convention is the companion of phraseology, which lives out itself on the spiritual plane.

Convention can eke out its existence in dead laws and administrative measures; real life needs the law rooted in the soul in the social sphere, just as the spiritual life needs the spirit, and under the power of phraseology it withers away.

In economic life, routine develops under the influence of phraseology and convention instead of real practice. And this routine actually dominates the economic side of existence today. Economic life does not unfold in harmony with the other needs of the human way of life. It has gradually become an element of existence to which man devotes himself because he simply has to live, but which he does not include in the whole of his life's development. When the spirit and the law shape the mind in their truth, then in the economic field arises the genuine practice of life. But when the management of the purely material-technical in economic life prevails, then the bloodless, heartless routine arises. Like an automatic mechanism, the processes of economic life roll under the power of routine. They draw human life itself into their cycle.

Today's humanity groans under the power of routine in economic life. It deserts the genuine sense of justice; it creates indifference to the spiritual and an inclination to get carried away by empty phrases. For in life, the cause not only produces the effect, but the effect also has an effect on the causal agent. Phrase and convention push towards routine; routine allows phrase to flourish, and the warm-hearted human coexistence in a fertilizing sense of right degenerates into heartless, life-paralyzing convention.

A tripartite division of the social organism has arisen under the force of modern life, which expresses itself in phrase, convention and routine. The “threefold social organism” seeks to overcome this threefold division. It is criticized for wanting to divide what is social unity. It really wants the opposite. It wants it because it believes it has the knowledge that under that striving for unity, which is held against it, the threefold division of social life into phrase, convention and routine is forming. This tripartite division can only be remedied by the healthy interaction of the three elements of the social organism. The unreality of the phrase must be recognized through the impulses of a free spiritual life, the coldness of convention through the recovery of the sense of right, and the barrenness of routine through the mechanization of existence. Existence is only viable through truth in the spirit, justice in the coexistence of people, and genuine practice in economic activity. Just as the whole organism of the individual suffers when a limb is deprived of its very own conditions of life, so the social organism cannot flourish when the spiritual life wastes away in empty phrases, the legal life dies in convention, and the economic life mechanizes in routine. Even if this is expressed in the famous old Roman parable, humanity suffers particularly today from the fact that its leaders sin against it. This parable has also become a cliché.

The ancient Oriental felt that he was part of a spiritually ordained social order. The commandments of the spiritual power, which his leaders brought to his attention, gave him ideas about how he had to integrate himself into this order. These leaders had these ideas from their vision into the supersensible world. The follower sensed in them the guidelines for his spiritual, legal and economic life, which had been conveyed to him from the spiritual world. The views on man's relationship to the spiritual, on the behavior of man towards man, and also on the management of economic affairs, came to him from the same source of the spirit-willed commandments. In experience, spiritual life, the legal order, and economic management were a unity. The further culture spread to the West, the more the legal relationships between people and the management of economic affairs became separated from the spiritual life in the consciousness of people. The spiritual life became more independent. The other elements of the social order still remained as a unity. As civilization advanced further to the West, these too became separated. Alongside the legal-state order, which for a time also regulated all economic activity, an independent economic way of thinking developed. The Westerner still lives in the process of this latter separation. And at the same time, the task arises for him to shape the three separate elements of social life – intellectual life, legal and state behavior, and economic management – into a higher unity. If he succeeds in doing so, the Easterner will look sympathetically at his creation, for he will rediscover what he once lost, the unity of human experience.

Among the partial currents, whose interaction and mutual struggle constitute human history, is the conquest of labor by human consciousness. In the ancient Orient, man worked in accordance with the spirit-willed order imposed on him. In this sense, he found himself as a master or a worker. With the westward march of cultural life, the relationship between human beings entered human consciousness. Interwoven into this was the work that one person does for another. The value of labor found its way into legal concepts. A large part of ancient Roman history depicts this growing together of the concepts of law and labor. As culture advanced further westward, economic life took on ever more complicated forms. It absorbed labor, but the legal form which it had previously taken did not meet the demands of the new forms. Disharmony between labor and legal conceptions arose. To restore harmony between the two is the great social problem of the West. How labor can find its form in the legal system without being torn out of its essence by the economic administration, that is the content of the problem. If the West, through insight and social calm, sets out on the path of solution, the East will meet it with understanding. If in the West the problem gives rise to a way of thinking that lives out in social upheaval, the East will not be able to gain the trust of the West in the further development of humanity.

Unity of spiritual life, legal system and economic management in the sense of an order willed by the spirit can only exist as long as agriculture predominates in the economy, and trade and industry are integrated as subordinate to land management. Therefore, the spiritually inspired social thinking of the ancient Orient essentially supports the economic management of agriculture. With the spread of civilization to the West, trade first emerges as an independent economic activity. It demands the provisions of the law. It must be possible to trade with every human being. Only the abstract legal norm can meet this need. As civilization progresses further west, trade in industry becomes an independent element in the provision of economic services. One can only produce goods fruitfully if one lives in a way that corresponds to human abilities and needs with the people with whom one has to work in production. The development of the industrial spirit requires associative links shaped by economic life, in which people know that their needs are met, as far as natural conditions allow. Finding the right associative life is the task of the West. If it proves equal to this task, the East will say: our life once flowed in brotherhood; it has faded over time; the progress of humanity has taken it from us. The West will make it flourish again through associative economic life. It will restore the vanished trust in true humanity. In the old East, when man composed poetry, he felt that the powers of the spirit were speaking through him. In Greece, the poet allowed the muse to speak to his fellow men through him. This consciousness was the heritage of the ancient Orient. With the westward course of spiritual life, poetry became more and more the revelation of man. In the ancient Orient, the spiritual powers sang through people to people. The word of the world resounded from the gods down to men. — In the West it has become the word of man. It must find the way up to the spiritual powers. Man must learn to write poetry in such a way that the spirit may listen to him. The West must shape a language that is appropriate to the spirit. Then the East will say: the word of the gods, which once flowed out to us from heaven to earth, finds its way back from human hearts to the spiritual worlds. In the rising human word, we see and understand the world word, whose descent our consciousness once experienced.

The Eastern man has no sense of “proof”. He experiences the content of his truths by looking at them and thus knows them. And what one knows, one does not “prove”. — The Western man demands “proof” everywhere. He struggles to the content of his truths through the outer reflection of thought and thus interprets them. But what one interprets, one must “prove.” If the Westerner frees the life of truth from his proofs, then the Easterner will understand him. If, at the end of the Westerner's concern for proof, the Easterner finds his unproven truth dreams in a true awakening, then the Westerner will have to greet him in the work for human progress as a colleague who can achieve what he himself cannot.

A better understanding of anthroposophy would be gained than is the case today from some quarters if one were to delve into the nature of the intellectual struggles that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This was the time when certain thinkers believed that the victory of scientific research over philosophical endeavor, as it had been active in the previous epoch, seemed decisive. They pointed to Hegel, who, in the opinion of these thinkers, had wanted to develop the whole world out of the idea, but who had completely lost the world of reality in his thought constructions; while the sovereign natural science started from this reality and only engaged with ideas to the extent that observation of the sensory world allowed.

This way of thinking seemed to be confirmed in every respect by the positive results of natural science. One has only to read books such as Moriz Carriere's “Moral World Order,” published in 1877, and one will become acquainted with a spiritual warrior who wanted to defend the right of idealism against “sovereign natural science.” There were many such spiritual fighters in those days. It may be said that the prevailing school of thought has stepped over them, in the knowledge that their cause is lost. Gradually, no more attention has been paid to them. Through their scientific idealism they wanted to save for humanity the knowledge of the spiritual world. They realized that “sovereign natural science” must endanger this knowledge. They contrasted what could be observed with the world of ideas living in human self-awareness and believed that this was a testimony to the fact that spirit rules in the world. However, they were unable to convince their opponents that the world of ideas speaks of a different reality than the one on which natural science is based.

Anthroposophy, looking back at these spiritual warriors, feels differently than the thinkers standing on the ground of “sovereign natural science”. It sees in them personalities who came as far as the door of the spiritual world, but who did not have the strength to open it. Scientific idealism is right; but only as far as someone who sets out to enter a region, but only has the will to reach the border of the region, but not to cross that border.

The ideas to which Carriere and his like pointed are like the corpse of a living being, which in its form points to the living, but no longer contains it. The ideas of scientific idealism also point to the life of the spirit, but they do not contain it. Scientific idealism aspired to the ideas; anthroposophy aspires to the spiritual life in the ideas. Behind the thinking power that rises to the ideas, it finds a spiritual formative power that is inherent in the ideas like life in the organism. Behind thinking in the human soul lies imagination. Those who can only experience reality in relation to the sense world must see imagination as just another form of fantasy.

In our imagination, we create a world of images to which we do not ascribe any reality in relation to our sensory existence. We shape this world for our own enjoyment, for our inner pleasure. We do not care where we got the gift of creating this world. We let it spring forth from our inner being without reflecting on its origin.

In anthroposophy, we can learn something about this origin. What often prevails in man as a frequently exhilarating imagination is the child of the power that works in the child as it grows, which is active in the human being at all when it forms the dead materials into the human form. In man the world has left something of this power of growth, of formative power, something that it does not use up in fashioning the human being. Man takes possession of this remnant of the power that shapes his own being and develops it as imagination. One of the spiritual warriors referred to here also stood at the threshold of this knowledge. Frohschammer, a contemporary of Carrieres, has written a number of books in which he makes imagination the creator of the world, as Hegel made the idea or Schopenhauer the will.

But we cannot stop with fantasy any more than we can with ideas. For in fantasy there is a remainder of the power that creates the world and gives form to the human being. We must penetrate behind fantasy with the soul.

This happens in imaginative knowledge. This does not merely continue the activity of imagination; it first stops in it, clearly perceiving why, in contrast to the sense world, it can only acknowledge unreality, but then turns around and, moving backwards, reaches the origin of imagination and thinking. She thus enters into spiritual reality, which reveals itself to her through inspiration and intuition (spiritual perception) as she advances. She stands in this spiritual reality as sensory perception stands in physical reality.

Imagination can only be confused with fantasy by those who do not feel the jolt of life between the consciousness that depends on the senses and the consciousness that lives in the spirit. But such a person would be like someone who awakens from a dream but does not feel the awakening as a jolt of life, but instead sees both experiences, dreaming and being awake, as equivalent.

The abstract thinker fears that imagination will continue to be fantasized; the artistic person feels slightly uncomfortable that the imaginative activity, in which he wants to develop freely, undisturbed by reality, should accept another activity, of which it is a child, but which reigns in the realm of true reality. He imagines that this casts a shadow over the free child of the human soul. But that is not the case. Rather, the experience of spiritual reality only makes the heart beat faster in the realization that the spirit sends an offspring into the world of the senses through art, which only appears unreal in the world of the senses because it has its origin “in another world”.

Anthroposophy wants to open the gate where noble spiritual fighters stood in the second half of the nineteenth century, without the strength to unlock this gate. The power of thought showed them the way to the ideas; but this power of thought froze in the ideas; Anthroposophy has the task of melting the frozen power.

In addition to the seven known forms of consciousness, there are five more, twelve levels in total. The consciousness of deep trance, dreamless sleep consciousness, dream sleep consciousness, waking consciousness, psychic consciousness, super-psychic consciousness, spiritual consciousness.

Spiritual consciousness on the volcano is so high that the person becomes a kind of creator. But what about the higher beings that have begun to develop even higher abilities than merely knowing, doing and creating everything? With spiritual consciousness, the person would be a magician, he could create beings. But there is one thing he still cannot do: emanate from his own being, give off substance. That is the ability of the five higher levels of consciousness: the ability not only to shine, to radiate light, but to radiate matter, to give off one's own substance.

We can distinguish between emanating consciousness, perceiving consciousness and active consciousness, that is, consciousness that creates forms. When we create forms, substance is already there; we merely give it form. When we perceive, form is already there; we emanate images. When we have emanating consciousness, we let the substance itself flow out.

The actual emanating consciousness is the stages twelve, eleven, ten and nine of consciousness; the stages of perceiving consciousness are eight, seven, six, five, and of forming consciousness four, three, two, one. Before something is formed or perceived, something must first be there, and therefore the emanating consciousness first has the task of radiating the material for such a world, of spinning the material out of itself, so to speak. This is called the 'first emanation': the emanating consciousness emits the substance. The substance should not be underestimated; it arises from the sacrifice of a higher consciousness. Where does the substance come from? It comes from where the future substance will come from, it comes from consciousness.

The second thing that happens is that the forming consciousness intervenes; that is the 'second emanation'. And when this forming consciousness has created forms, the perceiving consciousness can take them up – the 'third radiation'. The first emanation that emanates the material is also called the third logos; the forming one that builds the plastic figures is called the second logos; and the perceiving consciousness is called the first logos. Christian esotericism calls the world of the third logos, in which the gods sacrifice their consciousness, radiate: the heavenly world; the world of the second logos: the underworld; and the world of the first logos: the human world.

Let us apply these general concepts to our own humanity. On Saturn, we have the emanation of a matter; on the Moon, the emanation of a spirit. The spirits of will emanate matter out of their consciousness. The human body is formed out of this matter. The primal forces – Asuras – first embody themselves in it; they become human, so to speak. [Christian Science also calls the spirits of the personality primal forces.] On the sun, it is the spirits, the Sons of Fire, the Agnishvattas, who become men. On the moon, the spirits of the twilight, the Lunar Pitris, become men. On the earth, men become real men. On Jupiter, lower beings become men – these are the evil ones. Man rises higher, becomes an angel in a certain sense; on Venus he becomes an archangel and on Vulcan a primal power.

We now have to fall back on radiating matter on the part of the spirits of will. From this matter the physical body is formed on Saturn, transformed on the Sun, on the Moon and on the Earth, and now it begins to crumble, to peel off from the human being - when he becomes an angel, an angel of light. We have an analogy in the coral colony; it is rooted in the water, more and more lime is deposited on it, and more and more little animals form on it, which die; the coral grows as a result. In this way our planet will deposit more and more coal.

Nothing is without matter; when one loses itself, a new one, albeit thinner, must take its place. People move into the angelic stage, lose physical matter, but maintain the etheric body. Etheric matter forms the body up to the volcano, where it loses itself, as does physical matter here.

The other beings, who were already higher, will naturally continue to ascend. The spirits of twilight – Lunar Pitris – are on Earth one step higher than humans, and accordingly, they progress upwards. This level of entities will not only be endowed with spiritual consciousness on Vulcan, but also on Venus. On the level before that, on Jupiter, the Agnishvattas – archangels – have spiritual consciousness. And still one level earlier, on Earth, the elemental forces – Asuras – have their spiritual consciousness, so that in the normal course on Earth, those spirits of personality who had reached their humanity on Saturn attain their spiritual consciousness. They are endowed with free will, so they can stray here. Therefore, here on Earth, the battle takes place between the elemental forces that turn away and those who follow their ascent. This battle between the elemental forces of light and those of darkness is described in the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Enoch. It takes place at the moment of human incarnation. Two elemental forces are born, one group under the leadership of the descending one, another group under the leadership of the ascending one; the latter is called Christ by Christian esotericism.

[Do you remember the image?] The plant represents the inverted human being. In the plant, the head is directed downwards; in the human being, it is directed upwards. The incarnation is an inversion. As a lower being, the human being was directed head downwards; later, he turned upwards. When we remember Hephaestus, it is an image of the crumbling away of the parts that are directed downwards. Hephaistos is wounded by the evil leader. The good primal power — Christ — shines forth from the earth from humanity in the forefront with a consciousness that will only be granted to man himself on Vulcan. Christ is the first to reveal himself from the new matter emanating from earthly existence. The first to manifest in the new matter independently of the old matter is Christ. This manifestation is called: the birth out of the virgin matter [or out of the Virgin]; out of the second Logos, the beginning of the Gospel of John.

Thus, the appearance of Christ on earth is the center of the whole evolution. It is a cosmic event that has significance for the whole evolution.

Dear Attendees!

The momentous events in which the German nation finds itself justify my speaking, as I have done for many years in other German cities, about subjects related to spiritual science. This year, as in the past, last year, I shall not speak about a narrow subject of spiritual science itself, but about something that is intimately connected with the spiritual life of the German people, with that which is suitable to reveal something about the position of the German people within the overall development of humanity.

If I do this, it is certainly not to give expression to mere emotional views, which are particularly close to the soul in these difficult but also, in a certain sense, hopeful times, but because it is not based on dark feelings and perceptions , but rather, as I believe, on real facts, cognitive facts, well-founded conviction, that what has always been characterized here as spiritual science, that it is rooted in the innermost depths of precisely those expressions of German intellectual life that we can count among the peaks of that intellectual life.

We have no need, dearest ones present, as Germans in the present, to express our feelings and thoughts by denigrating and even slanderously distorting, before all things – as it is also done by the most outstanding personalities in the ranks of our enemies – that which what is outside of German life - as it is done from the other side in relation to the German essence - but we can look at it from a purely factual point of view, based on the German national character.

It should be mentioned briefly in the introduction that spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that it is possible, from within the human soul – through processes of the soul's life, which have been described here in this city many times and which can also be found in our literature can be found in our literature, that it is possible to develop such powers in the human soul that lead a person to an understanding of that which is not exhausted in the time between birth and death, but which goes through births and deaths and represents the eternal, the immortal essence of man. That such a deepening of the soul life is possible, and such a strengthening of the powers of the soul life, that the human being becomes aware within himself within his physical body that which has shaped this physical body out of the spiritual world and which, when the human being passes through the passes through the gate of death, returns to the spiritual world, that such knowledge is possible, and that such knowledge must gradually be incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity in our time, that is the spiritual-scientific conviction as it is meant here.

And this spiritual-scientific conviction, which – as I believe – is true spiritual science, is contained in the most beautiful and meaningful striving of the German people.

Now, precisely one objection could be raised: it is supposed to be about spiritual science, about that which gives the mind a similar knowledge to that of natural science for external nature, so it is supposed to be about a science. People who stand at a certain point of superficiality will immediately object: Yes, science is something completely international!

This objection is so overwhelming for many because it is so endlessly superficial. One could say: superficial to the point of being taken for granted; because the moon, for example, is also common to all peoples internationally. But what the individual peoples have to say about the moon, what struggles out of their souls to characterize the moon, that differs from people to people. And if one could also say that this is limited to poetry, then the one who is not merely a scientist, who sees in science not only that which is a description of external things in the most external way, but also that which one can know about things , emerges from the foundations, from the basic forces and basic drives of the human being, and is individual, as the human souls themselves are individual, that is to say: that is why they are shaped so differently, depending on the way in which the individual peoples are predisposed to knowledge of the world. But these predispositions, these inner impulses of the individual people, are what carries humanity forward – not what can be described as “international” in a superficial sense that takes for granted everything that has gone before.

If we want to characterize the German quest for knowledge, what immediately comes to mind are three figures, three great figures, which should only be mentioned in the introduction to today's discussion. But the development of German thought rests on the ground they prepared. These three figures are perhaps not often mentioned in the general German nation today. But that is not important. What is important is that these three figures are difficult to understand in what they created, but that these three figures will nevertheless play an ever greater and greater role in the development of German intellectual life in the future. And these three figures are: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – the three figures who, as world-view thinkers, formed an enormous background, [who] from the depths of German nationality provided that from which the great creations of German intellectual life also flowed, which we encounter in Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, and which, after Greek culture, represented a greatest cultural flowering in the development of humanity.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, what do we see before us? He who only appears to be a difficult philosopher to understand, who rather felt that what he had to give as so-called philosophy is really, in the highest sense, the result of a dialogue that he himself held with the German national spirit. And when we approach Fichte, what does he show us?

He shows us how a personality rooted in the essence of Germanness, in its quest for knowledge, starts from the premise that the human soul itself has something through which it can grasp and inwardly see that which lives and weaves through the world as spiritual and divine in its own inner experience.

In terms of the power with which this came to expression in Fichte's soul, one might say that Fichte stands almost completely alone in the history of human development. Fichte tried to get into his own soul what pulsates and lives and weaves through the world. He was clear about the fact that one could not get to that point, [to experiencing in one's own experience what pervades the world as its fundamental essence, divinely and spiritually], through external observation, [not] through the senses, nor through the mind that is bound to the brain, but only by invoking the soul's deep, hidden powers. And in this he shows a fundamental disposition of the German character: this growing together in the innermost part of the soul with the secrets of the world, this not being able to be satisfied otherwise than by experiencing in the innermost part of the soul what spreads in the great, wide universe as the most hidden, the most mysterious.

One need only recall a few details about this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which I will mention because they are so characteristic of a figure like Fichte, and one will see how we have to revere in him a personality who, by virtue of his innermost disposition, must seek to give himself completely with his soul to that which he can call experiencing the mystery of the world. Fichte, the son of very simple people, from a simple Saxon village, is seven years old; he was already at school and was a good schoolboy. As a reward, he received a book from his father for Christmas when he turned seven: 'Gehörnte Siegfried' (The Horned Siegfried). After a while, it became apparent that he, who had previously been very eager to learn, was becoming careless about his studies. This was pointed out to him. One day, his father meets him standing by the stream that flows past the simple house: “Der gehörnte Siegfried”, which the boy had thrown into the stream, is floating in it.

An extremely characteristic trait for seven-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. What had passed through his soul? What had passed through his soul was that he said to himself: I have neglected my duty by taking an almost irrepressible interest in this great, powerful material of Siegfried; but duty is what must come before everything else. That is why the book is thrown into the water! To live up to his duty.

And another example: our Johann Gottlieb Fichte is nine years old; the neighboring landowner comes to the simple village one Sunday to listen to the pastor's sermon. He comes too late. The landowner is very sorry that he was unable to hear the village pastor's sermon. Then one reflects and realizes that there is a nine-year-old boy who remembers well what the pastor said in his sermon. They call the nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte; he steps forward, awkwardly, in his blue peasant's smock; but soon he gets into the rendition, so that he repeats the entire sermon with heartfelt sympathy for the neighboring estate owner – not from a dead memory, but he repeats it because his soul has grown together with what he heard and what then tinged his ear to his soul.

This is what is characteristic of this growing together of Fichte's own soul with that which is experienced. And so this develops more and more in Fichte, so that in the end the whole universe is pulsating with will. The world will, the divine world will, it weaves and lives through all spaces and through all times, it sends its currents into the soul weaving of the human being.

And when this weaving of the soul has been completely surrendered, then the soul experiences within itself a stream of the infinite world-will. Then one is united with that which pulsates through the world as Divine-Spiritual. Then one is borne by that which flows as the world-duty on the waves of the will, which shines into our soul and which is the highest that Fichte sought to grasp. Thus, his world view arises from the innermost essence of his personal character. This is the most German thing, to seek out the most personal and the most objective. Fichte is not seeking some soul essence that can be proven, but rather a soul essence that continually participates in the divine-spiritual creative power of the world, so that it can create itself in every moment. And in this inner creativity, which rests in the divine-creative, lies for Fichte the guarantee of the eternal, which goes through births and deaths and which lives in the spiritual world even after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

In his beautiful speeches in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a blessed life”, Fichte says of what flows from the eternal duty of the divine power into the soul of man, in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a blessed life” - of which Fichte says: People talk about the fact that the immortal essence of man only comes into its own after death. The one who really gets to know the soul knows that immortality can be grasped directly in life within this body; and that is why he is immediately certain that - even if this body disintegrates into its elements - that which is grasped within it through real knowledge goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

But Fichte is also convinced that the eternal spirit must be grasped in the most intimate inner self at the same time. Therefore, as a teacher at the then-famous University of Jena – because it was the home of the greatest German men – he is fundamentally quite different from any other teacher. He does not teach in order to impart a certain content, a certain set of propositions to his students, but prepares himself in such a way that what he has to teach is first an inner life in his soul, so that he experiences what he wants to let flow into the souls of his listeners.

One listener who understood him well once said beautifully: Fichte's speech rushes along like a thunderstorm. What he had to say in words escaped him as if in a raging thunderstorm. It is clear that he does not just want to educate good people, he wants to educate great souls. Therefore, his endeavor was not just to communicate something to people, but to let something pass into them, so that these souls became something else when they left than they were when they entered the lecture hall. And more and more he referred to the power of the soul, to the strength that lies within the human being, which is beautifully demonstrated in the following sentence. In his lectures, there was always a striving for the direct coexistence of one's own soul life with that of the audience, which he sought to achieve through such beautiful things as this one, for example. An audience member, the naturalist Steffens, described it like this. In the course of his lecture, Fichte called upon the audience: “Think of the wall!” So they thought of the wall. He let this happen for a while – so said the man, Steffens. “And now think of the one who thought of the wall!” [was Fichte's next prompt].

There the human being was referred to himself. There the listeners were taken aback at first; they could not grasp it immediately. But it was the way to refer the human being to his own soul, as to the power that can arise from it, in order to live together with the divine-spiritual powers of the world.

And so there he stands, this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, truly such that enthusiastic listeners could say of him: He lives in the realm of concepts as if in a transcendental world; but in such a way that he not only dwells in this transcendental world, but also rules over this transcendental world. And Fichte was aware that what lived in his soul had been in intimate dialogue with the spirit of the German people itself.

In saying this, I am not characterizing something out of national narrow-mindedness, but rather something that Fichte experienced directly as his perception, and through which he was able to have such a great, such a significant and supportive effect on this German nation in one of the most difficult times for the German people.

One need only compare what it means that a worldview like Fichte's could arise from a particular nationality with what is the pinnacle of the Romance worldview, a worldview that in turn arose entirely from the essence of the French national spirit. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we have the French philosopher – one of the greatest and precisely one of those who most strikingly characterizes French nationality: Descartes or Cartesius.

He also started from what lives in the human soul. He can therefore be compared favorably with Fichte. His “I think, therefore I am,” the “Cogito ergo sum,” has become famous. But what does it consist of, what he says: “I think, therefore I am. - Cogito ergo sum”? – By the fact that the thought lives in me, I can prove that I remain myself. That which lives in the soul is revealed, it is proved by a logical conclusion. Fichte wants to grasp it in direct life, that is the distinguishing feature. This extends to the broadest aspects of the world view. You can see this from a single detail.

Dear attendees, you see, Descartes, who creates out of French folklore, comes to form a view of the world. What is this view? Yes, this view is this, that – I have to pick out one example because we don't have much time to characterize everything in detail – that he comes to see not only the external nature as one – one might say soulless, but that he also sees the animals as a soulless world. Only humans have a soul because they can experience it inwardly within themselves. Thus Descartes says: animals are no more than moving machines.

This then continued to have an effect on the French world view well into the eighteenth century, when man was also made into a machine. When this world view then confronted Goethe, Goethe, out of his German consciousness, said: Yes, they offer us a world view in which the whole world is a machine, nothing but atoms and molecules bumping into each other. And if they could at least explain to you how the beautiful, glorious world comes from this mechanical pushing, then one could still be interested in such an undertaking. But they simply put the world machine in place without explaining anything about it. That was Goethe's objection to what comes from the French West as a mechanistic worldview.

However, Fichte's view can be compared with this, which wants to immerse itself in every single creature and being, to live with everything, in order to recognize the will, the divine will in everything. This immersion in the world of beings is German.

This confronting, only seeing soul in oneself, making everything a machine - [that is not spoken out of national narrow-mindedness] - that is the French way of doing things, for example.

Now we are looking at Fichte's world view from a different perspective. For him, that which is only revealed to the senses is what he called: a material field for the fulfillment of duty. Everything that is not divine spiritual will, which weaves and lives through all beings, that which only presents itself to the senses, that is, as Fichte says, material material for duty to have an object on which it can exercise itself. That is the great thing that Fichte wants to experience – the spiritual in his own soul – and that he brings to the world, experiencing this spiritual in his own soul also from the other things.

Let us compare this with what emerges, for example, within the English world view, insofar as this English world view has emerged entirely from English nationality. Of course, it is not the individual who is meant; the individual can always rise above his nation; but what is meant is that which is connected with nationality. We see that not only in older times the world view of Bacon of Verulam is based merely on the useful, merely on that which presents itself externally to the senses, for which the spirit, which experiences in itself, stands only as bands that bind together so that the spirit can find its way. There the spirit is only the means to bring the external sense into a system. There is no co-experiencing with what lives as spiritual in all sensuality. And that has been preserved until today. We see pragmatism at work there. For pragmatism is a word for something that, placed next to the Spruce worldview, really looks like darkness next to light.

What is pragmatism? For pragmatism, there is not a truth for its own sake – truth that is sought so that one experiences it as truth in the soul – but the truth: Now, that is something that man forms as a concept, as an idea, so that he can find his way in the outside world. So man forms the concept of the “uniform soul”; but he does not want that in his soul, which is something like soul unity, but because man shows different expressions of his being, does this and does that. And one finds one's way around by assuming a concept like “uniform soul”. It is useful for holding together external, sensory things, for inventing something like truth. Truth only exists because it allows us to orient ourselves in sensory things. And in that which can be experienced at all, truth has no independent meaning.

The opposite is the case in Fichte's quest for a worldview. What is external and sensual is certainly not underestimated; we are not dealing with a false, world-alien knowledge. But we are dealing with a desire for the soul to grow together with the world spirit and with an assertion of truth, which is experienced in the spirit as the most original, living and breathing in the world. For Fichte, things are there to reveal the world, not as they are for the pragmatists as the only reality; while that which is called truth is only there to have such bindings and brackets with which to summarize the externally coincident sense world so that the mind can comfortably survey it.

I am not exaggerating, that is how things are! And so Fichte, in developing this view more and more, stands in 1811, 1813, before his Berlin students and tells them that anyone who wants to penetrate the world must look to the spirit. He speaks of a new spiritual sense – Fichte – and means by this that this sense can be developed, that when one speaks of the experiences of this sense, it is really, in the face of people who do not want to admit it, as if a single seer were speaking among a crowd of blind people! But Fichte strives to achieve in the human being that which directly connects the soul with the spiritual world. And from this he also draws the strength that is so profoundly evident in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at one of the most difficult times for the German people, through which he wanted to pour supporting forces into the future of the German people, into their souls.

One can only characterize this extraordinary personality in these few words because of the shortness of the time! The even lesser known Joseph Wilhelm Schelling then stands there as his follower. But precisely this shows the infinite versatility of the German nature: that Schelling, too, wants to arrive at a world picture through the soul's living together with the secrets of the world, but — I would like to say — through completely different soul forces. While Fichte is the powerful man who wants to experience the will in himself and, in his own will, creates the world will, the eternal world will. Schelling creates out of the soul. And through this out-of-the-mind-creation, a world picture arises for him, through which nature and spiritual life grow together wonderfully. Even if it is difficult to read today what Schelling created - it is not at all important that one accepts the content, but the striving - even if it is difficult to read: one does not have to accept it like a teaching, in relation to which one must become a follower or an opponent. Look at people who have striven in this way – who have striven from the very heart of the German national character. Schelling strove to penetrate into every single being; to experience that which works within the being as a spiritual being. In this way, nature became for him a physiognomic expression of the spirit. And the spirit was that which built itself on the soil of nature. Just as the present human soul is built on the basis of its memories, so, in Schelling's sense, man felt himself to be facing nature with his spirit, as if he had lived through all times, but had left nature behind. And as he now looks at it, it offers him the memory of what he had previously created unconsciously, so that the ground for his consciousness could then be there. In this way, soul and nature grow together in Schelling.

While Fichte had to be characterized by his contemporaries as the one who, above all, stood before them in German power, those who listened to Schelling, and who appreciate him, characterized him as a seer, as a personality who, when he spoke, was surrounded by what immediately showed that he was shaping words while his mind looked into a completely different world.

Perhaps I may read such a word of a student and friend of Schelling, because it shows more than anything else how Schelling was seen by those who knew him. Even as a young man in Jena, Schelling had such an effect that the young men around him were immediately convinced that he not only had something to tell them that would immediately ignite their souls, but that, as he spoke, his spirit lived in the spiritual world and he spoke from within it. That is why Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, a man who himself tried to descend into the spiritual depths of the human soul, says the following. He characterizes Schelling as follows:

“What was it that attracted young people and mature men alike to Schelling's lectures, from far and near, so powerfully? Was it only the personality of the man or the peculiar charm of his oral presentation, in which this attractive power lay?”

No, Schubert believes, it was not only that.

“There was a compelling power in his lively words, which, wherever it met with even a little receptivity, none of the young souls could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time,”

— Schubert writes down in 1854 what he had experienced with Schelling in the 1890s,

"who, unlike me, was not a youthfully participating listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading and hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The mighty content, which lay in his speech, as if measured with mathematical precision in the lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to dissolve and from whose hand to receive the unquenchable fire, is the task of the understanding mind."

So it was once possible, esteemed attendees, to speak to the German people in such a way that it made this impression, from the spiritual world, that it could make this impression!

Those who knew Schelling, and I myself knew people who still heard him in his old age, say that what he had to communicate was effective simply through the glance of his eyes, which still burned in his old age; so that one saw: it is the personality itself that wants to grow together with the world by giving a world-view.

And the third of those who, coming from the depths of the German folk-soul, wanted to penetrate to a Weltanschhauung, is Hegel. Hegel, from whom those who do not want to make any effort when they are to absorb something flee at the first sentences - Hegel, what did he want?

Schelling tried to create a world picture through the German soul. To penetrate into the spirit and the spiritual worlds through the will: Fichte. Through that which thought is, through the pure thought that lives in the soul when this soul does not turn its eye to the outer world of the senses, does not want to devote itself to the outer world of the senses with the mere intellect, through that which lives as pure, crystal-clear thought in the soul, Hegel tried to grow together in his own soul with that which is at work in the world. So that he says: When I think the thought purely, when I give myself to the life of thought, to the life of thought free of sensuality, in my own soul, then it is no longer my own arbitrary thoughts that live in the thoughts that live in the soul, but they are the thoughts that the divinity itself is in its soul. Then that which is light and illuminates the whole world ignites a little flame in one's own soul, and through this little flame the soul grows intellectually together with the world spirit. The soul rests in the world thought. In the German way, there is a striving for that which can be called mystical, but not a mysticism that revels and wants to revel in dark, confused feelings, but a mysticism that, while emotionally striving for what all mysticism strives for - a living together of one's own soul with the secrets of the world - does so on the basis of crystal-clear thinking.

And this, in turn, is something characteristic of the German character: that the highest is striven for in all-spiritual clarity, not in confused, chaotic feelings. This is the world view that is in the background and from which it has also grown – from the same mother soil – from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other great works of art and literature of that time have grown, they too have grown from this same soil, as it were. And Goethe basically stands on this same soil.

And Goethe says – in contrast to Kant – in a small, beautiful essay on “Contemplative Judgment,” he expresses how he strives for a knowledge that has indeed resounded within the soul, but which is an immediate revelation of that which is to develop out of it in the world. The soul does not limit itself to merely looking at the external world of the senses and judging it; but when the soul withdraws into itself, then something should awaken in this soul, so that the judging power itself becomes a contemplation - so that one learns to see spiritually.

Goethe speaks of spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, which look directly into the spiritual, just as the physical eyes and ears look directly into the physical world. This permeates the Goethean soul.

And Fichte could rightly say when he published his seemingly quite abstract trains of thought in 1794, he could write to Goethe:

[“Philosophy has not yet reached its goal, as the results of reflective abstraction do not yet nestle against the purest spirituality of feeling. I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the latter at the present level of humanity. Philosophy rightly turns to you. Your feeling is the same touchstone.”]

There is a close harmony between what has emerged as the greatest, also in a poetic sense, from German intellectual life, and what lives in the background as a world view. Even if, in the period that followed, simply because the height of the outlook was simply astounding, something else came to the surface within the development of German thought than a pure continuation of the powerful thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, these thoughts are, after all, what lies at the depths of the German essence, what will continue to develop, has also continued to develop, as we shall see shortly, and what must lead to the most beautiful blossoms and fruits of the German essence.

When we call to mind the spirits of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, we see that they reveal from three different sides what can be gained from a different kind of dialogue with the German national spirit. But behind them, as if invisible, is the German national spirit itself. And one expresses more than a mere image when one says: like a shade of the German national spirit itself, what comes to the surface through Fichte, Schelling and Hegel is like a shade of that which the German national spirit itself expresses. And behind that, one senses what passes through the currents of German intellectual life as an even more powerful wave.

Hence the peculiar phenomenon can occur that the great minds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were followed by lesser minds, who were less talented and who, in a certain way, sought to present that which had passed through German intellectual development as an aspiration through the German intellectual development in an even more beautiful, even brighter light.

It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon, is it not, that minds that were less talented than these greats had more opportunities in later times, precisely because the German national spirit also stood behind the greats, which could then continue to work through the following, who already had the inspiration of the preceding ones. We see one such in the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Hermann Immanuel Fichte.

Immanuel Hermann Fichte says it outright: that which the senses can see of man, which the mind, bound to the brain, can recognize of man, but can recognize through science, that is merely the outside of man; that contains only the powers that hold man together more for earthly things. But in this physical human being, according to Immanuel Hermann Fichte's view, there lives an etheric human being who permeates this physical human being and who is just as connected in his powers with the eternal world forces as the powers that live in the physical human being are connected to the actually perishable powers of the earth.

What has been described here in these lectures over the years as the spiritual background of man, as the etheric human being, is laughed at by the current, but even within Germany , because it is influenced by foreign countries —, this etheric man has also been pointed out here in this city in lectures over the years, again and again.

But we see an even higher, even more magnificent pointer to what Fichte saw in the human soul as a mere potential force, but which can be drawn out so that these eternal forces weave and live more and more. We see this even more clearly, even more magnificently, in an almost completely forgotten spirit, Troxler: Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. Who still knows him? But he stands on the shoulders of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And he delves even deeper into the spiritual background of the world than his predecessors, who were far greater in terms of intellectual gifts than he was. He was simply able to receive the stimulus from them.

What do we see in this Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler? We see in this Troxler how he definitely points out that when a person develops their soul, when a person brings out of their soul that which cannot be there for the outer life of the senses, then spirit is found in the human soul, that which Troxler calls on the one hand the “supernatural spirit”. And by this he means that if a person develops what lies dormant in his soul, he is then in a position to have nothing in his soul life when he turns his senses away from the outer world, but that an awakening can take place that goes beyond the senses – a supersensible spirit, a spirit that sees spiritual processes in the world as the senses see sensual processes and beings: a supersensible spirit. Even those who, as idealists, as abstract idealists, want to grasp the world through ideas and concepts will admit this.

But Troxler goes further. He not only speaks of the supersensible spirit, but also of the 'super-spiritual sense'. What is super-spiritual sense?

When this spirit, which looks at the world, is able to speak not only of concepts, not only of ideas, but when it can describe actual concrete entities, which it can describe as one describes an individual animal, so that one ascends to a world of higher beings that cannot be seen with the ordinary s , but which the “super-spiritual sense” can see - something that, again, popular science can easily laugh at, but which, as an energetic striving in this faded, forgotten tone, of which I will now speak to you, comes to us in such a wonderful way within the development of German thought.

It becomes even more wonderful when we see the following in Troxler. Troxler says: When the human being brings forth the most beautiful thing that can live in his soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body; when he brings forth the most beautiful thing from his soul, the most beautiful thing in the soul that is bound to the body – when the soul becomes cosmic and is confronted with the world as a cosmic soul, then it develops in faith, in love, in hope. But faith, love, hope, for Troxler they are what outwardly reveals itself as the flower of earthly life, but only for this earthly life. Behind faith, behind the power of faith, which belongs to the soul insofar as the soul lives in some way, behind this power of faith, a higher power lives in the soul; the supersensible hearing, says Troxler. And faith is only the outer manifestation of a supersensible hearing, through which one can hear, as the sensory ear hears the sensory tones, the spiritual tones of the spiritual world, the spiritual language of the spiritual world , in a sense the soul in its world, because such a spiritual hearing takes place and because the soul lives in the body between birth and death, this spiritual hearing takes on the form of faith in the physical embodiment. This faith is the external revelation for the spiritual hearing.

Love, this most beautiful, this most glorious flower of the soul's life within the body, is the outer revelation for the spiritual seeker of what he calls spiritual sensing, spiritual feeling. Just as one physically reaches out to touch material things, so behind the power of love lies another power, the purely spiritual power, through which the soul can extend its spiritual feelers to sense what lives as a concrete spiritual being in the spiritual world.

In 1835, the beautiful lectures were published in which Troxler speaks so much about the spiritual-soul person who stands behind the believing, loving, hoping person. And behind what is the power of hope, the power of confidence, lies, in the soul, what Troxler now calls: spiritual vision, spiritual seeing.

When the soul enters the body, it transforms spiritual hearing into faith, spiritual feeling into the power of love, and spiritual vision into the power of hope.

And when the soul passes through death, that which was in its power of faith in the body between birth and death is transformed into spiritual ears; that which was in its power of light is transformed into spiritual touch; that which was in its power of hope is transformed into spiritual vision, into seeing the spiritual world.

Thus Troxler speaks of “sensitive thoughts” - where thoughts do not pass ordinary judgments on the outer world, but where thoughts are inwardly so seized, so vividly seized, that through thoughts the spiritual world is directly grasped. And he speaks of “intelligent feelings,” where the soul does not judge through the intellectual power of mere intellectual science, as Schelling once expressed himself - that is strong, of course, but great people have the faults of their virtues - , but where the soul really judges in such a way that it lives with its thoughts together with the outer world, as it otherwise only lives with the feelings, but in clarity; Troxler speaks of “intelligent feeling”. Truly, this forgotten tone of the German world view, of the development of German thought, is wonderful. It is not necessary to be offended by the fact that this wonderful, faded tone has not continued to live externally visible; that does not matter, esteemed attendees: The important thing is that it is there and that, although it has not become outwardly visible, it nevertheless lives on in what Germanness strives for and hopes for in the world, and that it will revive again in the midst of even this materialistic science; and that the world position of the German people is precisely in the spiritual realm: to bring man and his soul to the spirit, as it lies in the sense of this faded, forgotten sound - only externally forgotten sound - of the German development of thought.

Troxler quotes a beautiful sentence from his book in which he describes how he now conceives of the ethereal human being, the human being who is bound to eternal forces within the physical human being, who is bound to temporal power. Troxler says:

"In the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which for them was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about Bonnert's under-skirt and Platner's soul-laced bodice Platner's soul-string-bodice, which are supposed to be hidden in the coarser body-coat and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What was the point of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? ... In the stony limbs”

of man

“grow and mature in a way that is unknown to us.” “We could

continue to

"we could cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and poetizing, which in the end are only different views and conceptions in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

That is a tone of the development of German thought that has faded away, but has not ceased to have an effect, and it is a great, powerful tone! If the German people today have the task of securing their place in the world through external forces, then what must be fought for today through the weapons is only the other side of the same essence, hidden in the depths of the German soul, which, through its versatility, could ascend to these peaks of thought life. - And Troxler says beautifully elsewhere:

"If it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... reveals itself in every anthroposophy, it is nevertheless undeniable that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of the human being must not be confused with either what it posits as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler is clear about the fact that there is a higher human being within each of us. And when this inner human being begins to work, then first comes not anthroposophy – anthropology, human science, first comes when the outer mind observes the human being, anthropology comes first, Troxler says. When the inner human being comes to the fore and gets to know the higher forces, the spiritual forces, the spiritual feelings, then anthroposophy comes. One therefore has the right to call a science that has grown out of the innermost striving of a German national being anthroposophy.

And this must be stated, esteemed attendees, because it must not remain merely a forgotten and forgotten sound, but must become part of German national life again. And we shall see – perhaps official science will not accept the things, but it is only a prejudice that these things are too difficult to understand – a time will come when it will be recognized that the simplest person – it is precisely the simple souls that show this when they are approached in the right way – will understand that these things can be incorporated into the education of every child! Then this education of children will also be able to create from the very depths of German national character.

This must be mentioned because one truly does not need national narrow-mindedness to characterize the world position of the German and his task in the overall development of humanity, because one does not need to lapse into a tone like that of some Frenchmen, like for example, leading world-view thinkers like Boutroux and Bergson – yes, it is still called Bergson, although it does not sound very French – like Boutroux and Bergson, who are still talking such nonsense to their French. You wouldn't believe it! For example, this striving of the German to grow together with what lives outside in things, what the soul wants to grasp within itself. Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany before the war, who was also allowed to teach at German universities, was allowed to preach, who spoke of the fraternization of the German and the Latin, Romanic being, now, for example, he speaks of the fact that he says: the French have no expression for “Schadenfreude”. The Germans are characterized precisely by the fact that they have the word 'Schadenfreude', they have such a word; so they have Schadenfreude. On the other hand, they have no word for 'generosity', only the French have that. So the Germans don't have that, generosity, only the French have that. He also indoctrinates his French with other things. For example, the French are very easily inclined to treat everything with a certain wit.

In this regard, it is perhaps not unnecessary to read the judgment on the French character. One could still have a small spark of faith that I also wanted to speak out of narrow-minded nationality here. Therefore, I will give another judgment - a judgment on the French character, French intellectual endeavor:

“Thirst for truth”

is the verdict of this judgment.

"is not a French passion. Appearance, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the center of gravity of the Frenchman is not within himself, but in the others, in the great multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it suffocates in the soul the courage to resist, the power of judgment, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

Everywhere just the opposite of what we have seen today. ... it suffocates everything!

So I am not speaking; not even a German speaks, but Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss Amiel, who as a French Swiss wrote these words on January 22, 1875. I have chosen the words of this man, this man of spirit who seeks to understand life, Henri Frederic Amiel, because he is actually a French Swiss who has only just become acquainted with German life, and can therefore compare it with what he knows within the French character. The Frenchman cannot easily understand this desire to grow together with the innermost essence that lives and moves in the most outwardly sensual thing!

That is why Boutroux gives a speech in which he ridicules the German who wants to grasp everything from within: “The Frenchman,” he says, “who wants to get to know a camel goes to the menagerie, where he gets to know the camel. The Englishman goes on a journey and seeks out the camel in its environment; yes, he travels to distant countries on earth to get to know the camel where it lives. The German withdraws into his study, goes neither to the menagerie nor on a journey to distant lands, but rather deals with the camel in himself, as he can recognize it from his own soul.

From this Boutroux draws the conclusion – yes, you can present this to your French people today, present it to your Parisians – from this Boutroux draws the conclusion: the Germans imagine that what they experience in their own soul is the delusion that this is the whole world. That is the one that really matters. And that is why, says Boutroux to his French audience, the Germans also imagine that they are something in the world. And then they don't look at the world any further; rather, what they imagine they are is directly divine-spiritual. And to explain that, he then made this joke.

The French are, as everyone knows, a witty people; but the joke that Boutroux made was by Heinrich Heine! And so it is not even a joke. It was born on French soil, on French intellectual soil.

Within German intellectual life, what I have called a forgotten tone is by no means something that perhaps only presents itself on the heights of philosophical endeavor, but it lives, it really lives. Isn't it, for example, truly wonderful? In 1856, a book was published, a small pamphlet by a simple pastor in Waldeck, in the countryside, in Sachsenberg, in the Principality of Waldeck. His name was Rocholl, and he was a simple parish priest; the little booklet is called “Contributions to the History of German Theosophy,” which shows, I would like to say, how its author is completely immersed in a view of the world as it reveals itself to the spirit. Even if some of it may not appear so simple as true in this little book today, but only fantastic, it does not matter whether one becomes a follower or an opponent, but it does matter that one sees how what man's striving is towards the spirit of the world can really reveal itself everywhere, especially within German intellectual life.

If I had time, I could give you hundreds and hundreds of examples that show how, in our time – but that was not so long ago, a decade ago – a foreign essence, which also has taken over German intellectual life, [how] in an incredible way, only what can live within German intellectual life has been forgotten at first by foreign influence; for it is precisely because of this that the German people will have to take their great position in the eternity of time development.

And that is what now has to defend itself in the small, relatively small area of Central Europe against the immense superiority of the rest of the world. For how will history speak one day about what is happening in the present? One can say in simple words how history will speak: 777 million people against a maximum of 150 million people in Central Europe! That is what history will have to record: 777 million people encircling 150 million people, defaming and slandering the spiritual life of these people.

They need not be envious of the size of the earth's surface, these 777 million people! Because they have 68 million square kilometers, the 777 million people, compared to 6 million square kilometers that the Central European powers have - 6 million square kilometers that are surrounded! History will have to record that. And history will say that these 777 million people, with 68 million square kilometers, did not want to conquer the 150 million people on the 6 million square kilometers by bravery alone, but by starving them.

The German may feel what is living in his national soul and what significance this has in the overall development of humanity. The German may live with calmness and confidence towards the future, precisely because he is aware of the forces that live in the depths of his national soul. They have always lived on; for what matters is not whether they have become famous, but that which is not known externally is revealed internally as the significant, the great.

It is often difficult to bring out what is actually German spirit in contrast to foreign spirit. For example – I may mention this because I myself have been in the middle of a struggle of more than thirty years in relation to this: Goethe, in his German scientific consciousness, turned against Newton's mechanistic optics, which is still not at all understood today. But physics is so inundated with Western mechanism that today every physicist still sees nonsense in Goethe's optics. And for thirty-three years I have endeavored to establish what may be called: Goethe's right over Newton. It will take some time before people realize the situation regarding the chapter 'Goethe's Right over Newton'.

Despite everything overwhelmingly self-evident that physics has presented to Goethe, there have always been individual German minds who knew whose side the law was on in this field! From Grävell, who wrote the beautiful book “Goethe Right Against Newton,” to what I myself have written about Goethe's physical-optical studies, about his color studies, one is dealing with something that, in terms of truly entering into German intellectual life, is still reserved for the future. But that future will come.

In the 1850s, from the same stream of the faded, forgotten sound of German intellectual life, a man emerged: Planck, Christian Karl Planck. He wrote beautiful writings, wanting to see nature everywhere as itself imbued with spirit, forming the subsoil for the spirit, beautiful writings: “Truth and shallowness of Darwinism”, “Foundations for a science of nature”, “Spirit and Nature” - wonderful writings, entirely arising from - as he was aware, as he himself was aware - from the very deepest power of German thinking, German feeling, German scientific ethos, he describes the German essence. I can only emphasize one example: when we speak of the Earth today, how does external science speak of the Earth, how does a geologist speak of the Earth? The Earth is a material sphere, and it is only mentioned in passing that man also walks on it. For Planck, it is not. For Planck, the Earth is that to which all living beings belong. Christian Karl Planck seeks to develop a conception of the Earth that corresponds to what someone looking at the Earth from the outside would see, with all that it spiritually carries. It is not just an organism, but a spiritual being, and man belongs to the Earth as part of it. And to merely imagine the earth in terms of pure physical geology, that would be for Planck's consideration as if one would only look at the tree in relation to the trunk, at a lignified trunk, and does not see that what blossoms and fruits are, is connected with the innermost nature of the tree. Just as these belong to the tree, blossoms and fruits, according to its essence, so when one has the earth before one, one cannot be satisfied with a mere geological view. And so it is with Planck.

And so, in Planck's view, something comes into play that he wanted to use to have a powerful effect on his contemporaries, but was unable to do so because they were not yet mature enough to absorb this view so directly. He wanted to say: By living with nature, one lives not only with external nature, but together with the spirit of nature. That is what he wanted, that the religious consciousness of humanity should be included in the moral, in the sense of right and wrong. The time in which Christian Karl Planck lived has not yet had the opportunity to see things in perspective. It has ultimately branded him as an “overly nervous person”. Such a thinker can often stand alone, not only in life. So that his last written work was published after his death by his dear friend Köstlin, under the title Testament of a German.

All that I have mentioned led to Planck being spoken of as a hyperexcitable person; so that those who today only have a vague idea of the matter might speak of a megalomaniac. But he is a person who lives deeply and consciously within the forgotten tone of German intellectual life – so consciously that in 1864 Karl Christian Planck was able to write about what he wanted to seek as a German scientist:

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

of the author

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

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

Now he continues:

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

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the power of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by her hero, is, conversely, fulfilled and made real purely naturally in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Thus Planck in 1864, with the awareness that he could bring forth a spiritual-scientific discipline out of the German tradition.

Now, many people will say, won't they, “Well, a poor philosopher who dreams in his mind doesn't know anything that actually lives in reality!” In addition, there are the practical people who know how to handle and judge practical life in the right way. When such philosophers come with their ideals: But what do they know of reality? Yes, I would like to give you an example of this Christian Karl Planck. The man died in 1880; in 1881 his Testament of a German was published – in 1881, ten years after the Franco-Prussian War had changed some of the German conditions. Let us note this point in time. How many Germans have since then believed different things about European affairs, have imagined what would come, statesmen and non-statesmen, diplomats and non-diplomats, what have they all imagined the “practical” people, who know how things are going out there! What have they all imagined! How they smiled at the idealists who, from their dream world of ideas, formed an idea about the currents in the world! Well, the “impractical idealist” Christian Karl Planck wrote in 1880 at the latest – because he died in 1881 – he wrote in his “Testament of a German”: A great European war will come!

"No political wisdom, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For more powerful than all wisdom is the nature of circumstances; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because it could not be given a free hand in everything, but rather a certain goal had to be set. And if it should come to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst.

And now I ask you to listen carefully to these words:

“And should it ever come to a fight, then, however much we may have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not find us on our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South; hostile national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst on all sides.”

This is the “dreaming philosopher” of 1881, who says to people: You will be able to do whatever you want, I no longer believe it today - he couldn't say it then, but there is something in his words that clever people still [believed] in 1913, 1914, that for example Italy would be on the side of the Central Powers. The “impractical man”, the “impractical philosopher” Christian Karl Planck no longer believed it as early as 1880! You just have to get to know the true situation of life as it is today, the true situation of life that rests in the depths of the spiritual being, the whole situation as it is today was written down by a philosopher, by a German philosopher in 1880. It can be read by everyone! In 1912, the second edition of this “Testament of a German” was published by a publishing house that, at that time, had much more to do in its printing work than to deal with the “Testament of a German.” Rather, it preferred to focus on the numerous translations of the works of the French philosopher Bergson in Germany, as they say, popularized, that Bergson - I have in my “Riddles of Philosophy in their History as an Outline” also referred to Bergson in the new edition of the work “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century”. But however difficult it may have been, or in fact still is, to realize that, although I pointed out the full significance of Christian Karl Planck as early as 1900 in my “Welt- und Lebens-Anschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century) – supplemented by a prehistory of Western philosophy and continued up to the present – and conscious of the fact that a German philosopher can speak in this way, it did not even have the effect that I was able to point out in the past – written down even before the war – what, for example, is accepted as a particularly significant idea by those ignorant of Bergson, such as the famous sentence “Duration endures.” You could see that as saying nothing more than ‘Duration endures.’ It would be the same as saying ‘The heart beats.’ But what could be seen as something different was that in Bergson's work, the next thing that man has to consider in terms of a world view [...] is that he starts from man and puts the human being at the forefront, and the other beings as it were fall away from human development - that first the human being is there, then something arises from the realm of minerals, plants, animals, which some will consider madness, but which is the actual real world view - one admired that and pointed it out. One might say that in this case, because there is no full diversity among those who have so enthusiastically turned to Bergson's philosophy and regurgitate many things. One was somewhat saddened when Bergson concluded his speech by saying that during the war the Germans had sunk so low – and I already mentioned this last year here that the Germans have come down so low from their heights, as they once had in Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, [as they had it] in a Goethe -, [that the Germans] have come down so low now that everything is mechanistic with them, [that they] want to let everything merge into machines and the industrial. The good Bergson probably believed that the Germans would declaim a Novalis, a Goethe or a Schiller for them.

But I was able to show you at the time – this happened before the war – that what had been so admired as a weaker thought in Bergson, that in the German Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – but in the works that appeared as early as the 1870s, especially in 1882 —, [that this] appeared and was advocated in a much more powerful way by the German Preuss!

There we see how Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, in his 1882 work “Geist und Stoff” (Mind and Matter), cites this entire forgotten and forgotten pursuit and current of German intellectual life as an example, and he very energetically points out that one must start from the human being. And only a view of nature that is not at all aware of the real connection between the human spirit and the spiritual can start from the lower beings and develop everything up to the human being, while what is otherwise present is seen as splintering. Preuss says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary strength to produce further human germs. What emerged was animal or plant...

Did Bergson not know whether he had actually known Preuss, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss? Which would be just as big a mistake as if he had known him and simply written what Preuss's property is without pointing out that it is from Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss.

It would be conceivable for him – the latter as well; for it has now become sufficiently well known that Bergson – who accuses the Germans of a mechanical world view in order to prove how they have degenerated in the present day – has himself taken a very strange path. It is sufficiently well known that Bergson copied entire pages of his books – Bergson's books! from Schelling, Schopenhauer and other German philosophers, simply copied – not a mechanical way of writing his books! And to copy pages and pages from the personalities of a people, a people that is so reviled and slandered! You simply copy, and thereby gain great fame and praise.

These are things that are so easily forgotten in the present. Some people already see how things are! For example, Henry Frederic Amiel once said:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the origin of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the sway of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to penetrate to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention. The root of the problem lies in the question of the connection between God and the world: immanent or transcendent - it decides from stage to stage the significance of everything else. If the spirit is outside of things, then it does not need to adapt to them. If the spirit lacks truth, then it must be given to it by the prophets. Then thought despises nature and is subject to the church, that is the Latin world."

Thus Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss, who wrote these words about the Germanic spirit and the French, Spanish and Russians in 1877, when he was staying in Ems.

Through such things, dear attendees, you get to know what actually lives in the six million square kilometers that are now not only being enclosed, but also vilified and defamed by the prominent personalities of those who live on the 68 million square kilometers.

But if we try to extract the essence, the most significant part of the individual national spirits as they now have to fight with each other, yes, we can truly say: if we look at the Italian national soul – I am sure there are many listeners here who know that I have been the war, not only to Germans but also to other European nations, so that they are not just caused by the mood of this war, these words, but are based on objective knowledge of the facts. If you look at the Italian people's soul, you can find a simple word to characterize it. The Italian turns to the world – of course I do not mean the individual, but insofar as he belongs to his people – the Italian turns to the world; but he says: this world must be such that I like it! Quite solely from this point of view – nationality is that.

The Frenchman also turns to the world. But he says: This world must think nothing but what I want, what I, in my French concepts, imagine the world to be. And if he encounters different thinking somewhere, then it must be subordinated. Woe betide if something exists that the Frenchman cannot understand from his Frenchness.

The Englishman, the Briton, thinks: Yes, the world is good too; the world, right, very good; but it must be made in such a way that it serves the Briton, that the Briton can assert his ego in this world above all else, and that it is otherwise arranged in such a way that it serves him. You can read about it in detail, especially in those who believed that they were creating from the depths of the English national soul - historians, philosophers - wherever you look, you can see it everywhere.

The German in his development of thought thinks: The world is there, and as I stand as a human being before the world, I want to develop my human soul so that it becomes the threefold image of the great world. That is the essence of German thinking and feeling.

The Russian, who thinks: the world as it is, is worth nothing at all; it must be replaced by another. And it is a matter of putting that world in the place of this world, in which the Russian person can flourish. That is the mood of the Russian people.

Henri Frederic Amiel, the Swiss Frenchman, once painted a strange picture of what it would be like if the Russian national character were to flood and dominate Europe - as it wanted, and as the entire Russian national current in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually portrayed it from its own impulses. Henri Frederic Amiel says:

“What terrible masters the Russians would be if they ever extended the power of their rule over the countries of the south!”

He names Russia as the country of the north, and includes France and Germany among the countries of the south.

"What they would bring us would be polar despotism, a tyranny the world has never known, silent as the fog, cutting as ice, rigid as iron, with the loveliness of falling snow and its cold splendor; slavery without return or relief. But probably they will gradually lose the virtues and vices of their semi-barbarism. The centuries will mature these sons of the north, and they will intervene differently than as a threat or discordant note in the harmony of nations...

In relation to Germany and Austria, the peoples allied with them, as we know, that time has not yet come. But just as the East, the Russian East, gradually learned to think about the European West in the course of the nineteenth century – what the European West is for it, which in the nineteenth century included not only Central Europe but also Western Europe, France and England – that which lies in the Russian people, incited by an incomprehension of the Western intellectual culture, especially also the German spiritual culture, has heated up to the point of megalomania, which has truly not only been counteracted in the “Testament of Peter the Great”, in the falsified or non-falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but has been counteracted in the whole developmental principle of leading personalities in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia.

You can read more about this in my booklet “Thoughts During the Time of the War. For Germans and Those Who Don't Hate Them”; it is currently out of print, but the second edition will be coming out soon. It is therefore not available at the moment because it is out of print.

It is a strange process. More and more, one sees in Russian literature, in the descriptions of Russian philosophers, a development of thought that says: everything that lives in the West, especially in German intellectual life, these thoughts that have emerged from Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the others, are abstract thoughts that do not grasp the depths of what is happening. It is all decrepit; it is a world that must be done away with. And in its place must come the Russian world, the world that the Russian man will create. Kireyevsky is one of those who started with this way of thinking. In 1829, it was already a tone that had become dominant, then became political, and when the Russian steamroller was now to be sent over Europe. This Kireyevsky, who writes:

“The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay all our debts to them a hundredfold.”

... 1829! So: all European goods, as soon as Russia extends over all of Europe. This is not only the political program, it is also the literary program, the artistic-aesthetic program, to possess all of Europe and then, out of good nature, to share as much as one sees fit - according to Kireyevsky.

But Russian intellectual life did not immediately embrace the West. As late as 1885, we find a book by Yushakov, who dreams, as is typical of deeply rooted Russian identity, of having to exert an influence in Asia first – a kind of Pan-Asianism. Yushakov constructs a curious theory: he says that there are peoples living over there in Asia who once had a wonderful spiritual and economic culture. They themselves – these Asian peoples – have in a wonderful but true legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman that which has arisen and developed within their lives. They call Ormuzd the good god; Ahriman was always the evil god. But the Iranian peoples, to which the Indians and the Persians also belong, have placed themselves in the service of Ormuzd. They have taken from the evil Ahriman that which opposed them, so to speak, that which Ahriman left to them, the evil Ahriman left to them, took from him. And in 1885, Yushakov looks particularly at the West, at the Western peoples of Europe, and especially at one Western European people: the English. How were they robbed of their gifts of the good Ormuzd by these English, these Asians! These English treated the Asian peoples in such a way, intervened with what could come out of their worldview. But what did they bring to these Asian peoples? - says Yushakov in his book “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”, 1885. These English came to the Asian peoples and thought that they were only there to dress in English clothes, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles.

Then he goes on to say: Now the Russians have to take charge of the cultural blessings. They will not take away from the Asians what Ormuzd has given them, but they will ally themselves with the poor people enslaved by Ahriman and share their Ormuzd with them, in order to work their way up with them and collect Ormuzd's goods anew in Asia. In their hearts, with the hearts of the Asian peoples, they will be - not I say this, but Jushakow. So it will be that they will go over from Russia, those from Russia who are the real future types of humanity from Russia, the farmer and the Cossack, the greatest bearers of the moral world order, the greatest bearers of selfless humanity. From the union of the peasant and the Cossack will come forth that which will make Asia happy again.

And then he, Yushakov, goes on to say, pointing again to England - 1885:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula.”

So England's existence. And then he continues:

“I wish my fatherland”

my Russian fatherland

“nothing similar – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. This was said by a Russian in 1885 about England, who longs for a state and is grateful that Russia is sufficiently far removed from what England brings upon the world.

In such things lie the reasons, not the logical ones, but perhaps the illogical ones, who will then experiment on the world, who will then take the place where the Russian people have treated relations with the Asians, which, in the opinion of these people, and which one would have to free from Ahriman again that the Russians did not initially ally themselves with the Asians to fight the evil Ahriman and destroy him with them, but that the Russians initially allied themselves with the evil Western peoples, with the evil English, to crush Europe. We need not descend into the [tone] into which so much has been descended today on the part of the opponents of Germanness [...], who for martial reasons have also become opponents of the German essence and national character. With the characterization of Christian Karl Planck given earlier, we can say:

"[...] the German mind has not in vain devoted its deepest and most intimate strength to this, [not in vain has even its poetry made the image of this indelible urge to understand itself and reality. That unbiased, purely objective and universal sense, by which it has become possible for the German alone to fully appreciate foreign education and nationality, and which gives him the genuinely human consecration in religious, moral and artistic respects, it also includes the knowledge of the general natural law of things, as soon as in the perfection of time] the mind has matured for it."

Therefore, we prefer to look at what, from a world-historical point of view, in terms of pure fact, the German spirit must strive towards. There we see something that existed long before the appearance of Christ on earth, in the form of spiritual striving in Asia. There they also tried to unite with the spirit that permeates and animates the world, the whole world, to attain a culture – for no culture can be attained otherwise. But how they tried to achieve this in Asia! By weakening, by extinguishing the I, by extinguishing the I as much as possible!

This world view must belong to the past, now that the Christ Impulse, the greatest impulse to have come to Earth, has entered into life on Earth, and given it true spirit and meaning. This world view of the Orient can no longer found a real spiritual view. There the I must not extinguish itself, but must strengthen and uplift itself, and through this elevation grow as I into the spiritual universe, into the spiritual universe.

Panasiatism has thus shown this Hinduism, whose height had been reached by extinguishing the ego. In more recent times, after the influence of the Christ Impulse, the realization of the self has been sought through knowledge, not by damping down the self, but by the self becoming aware of itself, experiencing itself, so that in its experiencing it has a sense of the world. The German receives this as his task; such a task was always present in the depths of the German people's striving for knowledge. And those who lived in Central Europe as Germans were united in such striving.

And finally, I would like to mention a few words from an Austrian German, an Austrian German who says of Austria, “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland,” to express in the 1860s - it is 1862 written in 1862 to express how a shared spirit unites what was later – it only happened after Robert Hamerling's death – was later welded together so firmly by external ties, as Central Europe now stands. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, Austria's greatest poet in the second half of the nineteenth century, summarized this in the words: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland.”

I, as a closer compatriot of Hamerling, I, who myself lived almost thirty years of my life in Austria among Austrian Germans and fought with them, I may point out precisely this seriousness of the German character within the German-Austrian. Robert Hamerling expresses this trait, this trait in world history, beautifully in his “Germanenzug” (The German March) – as I said, written in 1862 – where he describes, as in a dream, how the ancient Germanic peoples migrate from Asia to Europe – and in them, as in a germ, the later Germans – how they seek out their new European homeland. It is beautifully described: the moon rises; it is evening. The Teutons lie down to sleep, these future Teutons migrating to Europe; only one is awake: the blond Teut. The genius of Teutonia, the genius of the later, the future Germany, speaks to Teut. He speaks of the spirituality that must rest in striving, which is German striving. Then Hamerling says, that is, he lets the spirit of the German people say it to the blond Teut:

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

This is the very deepest knowledge that can be derived from the tone of the partially forgotten tones quoted today from the development of German thought. It is a tone that can never be anti-religious, the tone that will also grasp all knowledge in man in such a way that this knowledge is offered as if on the altar to the world spirit, to the spiritual, real world. that tone of which Jakob Böhme, the “Philosophus teutonicus” - as he was also called - has spoken in the beautiful words that suggest the true popular character of German knowledge:

Wenn du, O Mensch, die Tiefe

he means the depth of heaven, the blue

and the stars and the earth,
so you walk in God,
so you strive in God,
so you die in God,
and so you will be buried in God.

These are deep, German words.

And Robert Hamerling, Austria's great German, who knew how to empathize with even the smallest German being – just by the way, I mention that in 1884 a statue of Strasbourg was erected in Paris and the German flag in front of the statue was burned, that went so close to Hamerling's heart that he wrote the words:

"May you believe in revenge
And in the victor's wreath in the future

he wrote to the French

Hope not to rob back
A clod of German land!
You may rave like ravens<
Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore!

So it sounded from Austria to the French as they danced around the Strasbourg statue and burned the German flag.

But Hamerling also knew how to remind people of the fact that the German spirit is the continuation of the greatest that once appeared in the world spirit in the ancient Orient, from which the ancient ancestors of the Germanic peoples emerged; he knew how to point out that, just in a pre-Christian manner, by a lowering of the ego, man wanted to merge with the universe, but how this still lives, is raised to a higher level, lives in the German character, which has to bring the greatest that the world once created in the Orient to this world in a new form, as befits Christian development.

This connection with the whole development of humanity comes to Robert Hamerling's mind – also in his “Germanenzug” – this basic trait that everything the German recognizes should grasp his deepest being, become one with his whole personality; but that at the same time it is something that is a world-historical mission and ties in with the highest aspirations of humanity in the past. Therefore, Robert Hamerling again lets the spirit of the German people speak:

"But however proudly you may strive,
high above other swarms,
you will always keep the ancient, sacred fire:
the dream-filled, drunken drunkenness of God,
drunken with God, the blissful warmth of the heart
of the ancient Asian homeland.
This holy ray, a temple fire
of humanity, free of smoke, with a pure flame
will glow in your chest and soul
and remain a pilot at your helm!
You strive only because you love: your most daring thought

We may and must actually immerse ourselves today in that which can bring us to the realization of how truly the roots of a high spiritual striving live, which must have an effect on the future for the benefit of humanity. This spirituality lives in the most beautiful expressions of German intellectual life in the 6 million square kilometers that are threatened today by people who live in 68 million square kilometers.

And one does not need to speak out of national sentiment, but out of objective knowledge, when one speaks of the world vocation of the German people, which cannot be overcome by those who today - not understanding it - not only revile but slander it.

We Germans may look back to that which, in Germany's greatest spiritual period, has incorporated itself into the development of German thought and what lives in it and will flourish again. And we may look to what has presented itself to us in such a way that we look to it as to roots and germs. And by recognizing the rooting and germinating power of that which has passed, we have faith in the continued effect of this past. And in this belief in what we have to cherish and cultivate not only for the sake of the German people, but for the sake of humanity, we may love these roots of German national identity and cherish the hope and confidence that what has been recognized as germs and roots will bear blossoms and fruit in the future! Despite everything and everyone who rises up against it today, we are imbued with the power that expresses itself on the one hand in German intellectual life and that today has to undergo such trials in relation to our external daily life. We look to the future and trust this power, which must carry the German essence in the future as it has carried it in the past.

From this, what was meant by these arguments can be briefly summarized, according to feeling. Again, in the words of Robert Hamerling, looking at what is being said against us, the Germans, and against our name, today, looking at what the German essence must be in the development of humanity, what I wanted to express today out of true, discerning feeling can be summarized in four short lines by Robert Hamerling, an Austrian German who sensed how strongly what is today welded together by the same, by such great and such sorrowful and such trials and tribulations rich time conditions in Central Europe belongs together. He, Robert Hamerling, who felt this, he coined the beautiful words with which we want to conclude this reflection:

“And when ever the German name
sees a hostile day,
From ocean to ocean
will find its way the German mind.”