The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us take the standpoint of the universe and look at the world from the point of view of consciousness, life and being, or vice versa. Here, too, we have to distinguish between body, soul and spirit. Body would correspond to being, soul to life, spirit to consciousness. This also gives us a trinity.

If we take the body in a cosmic sense, Indian philosophy calls this Adi-Buddha = All-Body. Christian esotericism refers to the same thing as Kyriotetes - Empire. Indian philosophy refers to the All-Soul as Adi-Atma. Christian esotericism calls the same Dynamis-Power. Then All-Spirit: Indian AdiDeva, Christian esoteric: Exusiai - Revelation or Violence. So that from the standpoint of the microcosm we have to distinguish:

The gods circle the axis/staff 7x7 times, and the seven circles are the seven realms. However, each time the gods circle around, they move up one step, so that in the present mineral realm man is ruled by the light gods, but in the mineral realm of the next round he is already ruled by the power gods.

In all three, we have to distinguish seven levels, seven regions of the Adi-Buddha, then of the Adi-Atman - seven levels of living consciousness. - In the case of Adi-Deva, we also have to distinguish seven levels.

The 'day consciousness' reveals itself in the fourth round of the earth in the mineral kingdom, and from the outside the forces of light reveal themselves.

So, if we look at the three-part world from the point of view of the universe, we have bright day consciousness inside the mineral kingdom. When we look at the body, we see that it [gap in transcript] and what manifests itself in it are the forces of light.

When the light reveals itself on the physical plane, darkness must reveal itself with it, because the counter-forces of the realm oppose it and cause cloudiness.

On the plane of deception, the forces cannot reveal themselves other than in the twilight, so that the forces of darkness are necessarily opposed to the forces of light.

If we look at the formation of the Earth from this point of view, the forces of light and thus those of darkness are revealed first. Let us first consider the forces of light: Elohim.

Now, as one kind of force reveals itself, the earth passes through all the kingdoms: the first, the second and the third elemental kingdom, the mineral, the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom.

Adi-Atma goes through seven stages, and these are called “planetary developments” or “chains.

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In each of these realms, seven stages are passed through. In each

round, seven globes again; these are the forces. An Atman has to go through 343 cycles to reach its goal.

7 x 7 - 7 stages of consciousness, 7 rounds, in each 7 globes.
Planetary development
Round development
Globe development
The forces of warmth used to be outside us, now they are within us.
1. The soul reaches 7 levels of consciousness. Each level of consciousness is called a “planetary chain”.
2. At each level of consciousness, the soul passes through all 7 realms - Buddhas. Each realm is called a 'round'. 3. In each round, one of the 7 different devas rules. Each type of deva government is a 'globe' or a 'planet'.

In Christian scriptures, the devas are called “angels of the ages”. The humans themselves are manifestations of the soul of the world in the mineral kingdom.

Before, before our earth came to the point of view that the Elohim revealed themselves on it, it was surrounded by a sea of warmth. Then we had an organ, the pineal gland, outgrown, it was also the one eye of the Cyclops; they were the people of fire. A great eye of warmth, with which he would swim around in this sea, which was then the earth, and perceive everywhere. That was the globe of warmth. Even earlier the globe of ether and before that the globe that was only life.

Returning to this state, we would arrive at the third round. During the third round, the various powers would appear seven times. Powers of warmth in the mineral kingdom. During the previous second round, the powers of fire ruled in the mineral kingdom.

1. The Arupa-Devas rule during the first round in the mineral kingdom.
2. The Rupa-, fire-Devas rule during the second round in the mineral kingdom.
3. The astral-Devas or warmth-spirits rule during the third round in the mineral kingdom.
4. The light-spirits rule during the fourth round in the mineral kingdom.
5. The Power Spirits rule during the fifth round in the mineral kingdom.
6. The Creative Spirits rule during the sixth round in the mineral kingdom.
7. The Divine Spirits rule during the seventh round in the mineral kingdom.

If we follow this, we have: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” - Arupa-Devas emerged.

“The Earth was formless and empty” - It continues to develop from globe to globe.

“God separated the light from the darkness and called the light Day and the darkness Night.”

Description of the first round. The first round is the first day of creation; darkness is pralaya, which now passes over to the second round.

After the light spirits, the power spirits rule in the second round, and they are to pass over to the next round. “Then God made the firmament.”

When the third round is over, it dismisses its deities as creating spirits. The fourth round will dismiss godly spirits. Exactly the same as before, but now evolved. The fourth round is described in the Bible accordingly:

“Let lights be made” - light spirits, exusiai, elohim.

The fifth, sixth and seventh days represent the future.

The eight lectures of Rudolf Steiner were given at the Stuttgart Free University Courses between March 16th and 23rd, 1921. There were other subjects and also other speakers. The invitation was directed to students and scientists. One main intention is formulated by Steiner in his concluding address: “We have attempted to introduce the seminar work in such a way that perhaps it could really be recognized that a genuine scientific spirit is our aspiration”—that no sectarianism or desire to found a new religion is at work ...

The time was that of social upheaval in Germany after World War I. In that period Steiner and his co-workers were intensely active in scientific, social, educational and medical work. In the brief span of not quite seven years after the end of World War I (1918) and Steiner's death in 1925, an incredible amount of advice and concrete instruction was given; but also given were new tasks as to what to investigate, individual prescriptions for doctors (including curative education), to farmers for what is now called Bio-dynamic agriculture and last but not least to Waldorf Education in lectures and regular teacher's conferences.

Growing recognition of Waldorf Education and Bio-dynamic Farming—to name just two representative fields—lead quite naturally to the question: in which form were these things given? Thus, there is a legitimate demand for the lectures given in that period.

Among the different lecture series of that time the one offered here is of special methodological nature. Already the long title gives an idea of the scope of subjects treated.

There could be raised an objection: Mathematics has changed in the more than 70 years that have elapsed. Indeed, it has changed as never before a science has changed its methods, its object and general outlook. No science has moved farther away from the intuitive notions of space and of number which had been the basis of geometry and calculus as developed in the 2000 years before our century.

A similar objection can be raised with regard to the Experiment. Even the hectic search in the forties of this century for the properties of uranium-235 and of plutonium—both didn't even exist in weighable quantities—was still straightforward experimentation of the known type even though refined e.g. to purity of ingredients unthinkable up to then. But compared with them, the more recent experiments at Livermore, CERN, Dubna have completely different goals, quite aside of their difference in method. They do not handle any longer material substances and do not investigate properties of such, they are directed to hypothetical particles like “quarks.”

These, often enough, do not “exist” in a form similar to that of a physical solid, they exist “virtually”; they are thought of first and “produced” afterwards—and by that their outcome verifies a theory or, as to that, refutes it if the particles in question do not turn up, let us say, in predicted numbers. But coming back for a moment to pure mathematics. What is said in the first lecture about the certainty of mathematical knowledge is today far more evident than in those days when still one could believe that mathematical concepts were abstracted from Nature (like John Locke's contention that concepts are only percepts stripped of unnecessary details). Today, we know with absolute certainty that mathematical concepts are free creations of the human mind.

The problems, it is true, connected with the foundations of mathematics have raised some doubts about its "certainty" by questioning whether mathematics is absolutely exempt of contradictions. But for all scientific purposes mathematical reasoning still stands as a model of exactness.¹

Steiner really does not just pay lip service to the scientific method of Natural Science. In this book one will find very brief and concrete descriptions of the step from the ordinary approach to knowledge to the mathematical—and from there to “Imaginative Cognition.” It is discussed how one can proceed from the study of the eye as a physical apparatus to an entity permeated with life and to form an Imagination of the etheric body in the eye. “Through imaginative activity one has grasped the etheric nature of the human being in the same way as one grasps the external inorganic world through a mathematical approach.”(Lecture 3, p. 51)

And it is discussed in detail how to proceed from imagination to inspiration. In comparison to the, so to speak, general method of the “Path of Knowledge” (As in Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, here, a method for the scientist is given. Furthermore, whether this method is scientific in the general sense of the word was put to the listener's own judgement as it will be now for the reader.

There is a remarkable passage where Steiner relates the conversation between a pupil of the brain researcher MENGER who had made a drawing an the blackboard of the hypothetical connections between parts of the brain explaining in his opinion its functioning—and a man who spoke in the sense of HERBART stating that he would make the same drawing, but now for the thought masses and their combinations. I think this is quite remarkable because N. WIENER relates in his book Cybernetics (1947, p 32 and 164) a similar situation. In a Symposium about how to make a reading apparatus for blind people, there was a drawing on the blackboard describing a possible circuitry. The connections should symbolize layers of electrical switches (nowadays just called neurons as in anatomy) in a network that should be able to extract shape (“Gestalt”) from the imitation of a retinal image in the eye. Then a brain anatomist (Dr. VON BONIN) saw the drawing and immediately asked whether this represented the fourth layer of the visual cortex of the brain.

Steiner's event must have taken place somewhere in the nineties of the last century; Wiener's event about half a century later in the forties of our century. Of course, there is a difference: Steiner pointed to an archetypical correspondence between certain thoughts, Wiener relates something that was planned for technical development, which now is becoming hardware.

I do not hesitate to take this "coincidence" as a Symptom for the lasting actuality of the lectures presented here.

Georg Unger, Ph. D.
February 1992
Dornach, Switzerland

• 1. Some mathematical concepts have been expressly created in mathematical physics in order to show certain structures which would correspond to this or that “model” and thus would give substance to hunches or pipe dreams of the theorizing physicist, enabling him, in the ideal case, to check this theory with predicted numerical values or else to either refute or modify his brainchild.

We shall most easily understand the progress of humanity through the three incarnations, Saturn, Sun, and Moon, preceding the Earth, if we add a further survey of man in sleep, in dream.

When man is asleep the seer beholds the astral body with the ego enveloped in it as though floating over the physical body. The astral body is then outside the physical and etheric bodies, but remains connected with them. It sends threads, as it were, or rather currents into the universal cosmic body, and seems partly embedded in it. Thus in the sleeping man we have the physical, the etheric and the astral body, but this last sends out tentacles towards the great astral universe.

If we picture this condition as an enduring one, if here on the physical plane there were only human beings who had the physical body interpenetrated with the etheric body, while above hovered over them an astral soul with the ego, then we should have the condition in which mankind existed on the Moon. Except that on the Moon the astral body was not strongly separated from the physical body; it sank down into the physical body just as strongly as it expanded into the cosmos.

But if you picture a state of sleep where no dream ever comes then you have the condition in which humanity existed on the Sun. And if you now imagine that the human being has died, that even his etheric body is outside him, united to the astral body and ego, but yet that the link is not quite dissolved, so that what is outside, embedded in the whole surrounding cosmos, sends down its rays and works upon the physical substance—you then have the condition in which mankind existed on Saturn.

Below on the cosmic globe of Saturn there was only what we have in our purely physical body; it was surrounded, so to speak, by an etheric astral atmosphere, in which the egos were embedded.

Human beings were already actually in existence on Saturn but in a dull, dull consciousness. These souls had the task of maintaining in an active and mobile state something that belonged to them down below. They worked from above on their physical body, like a snail fashioning its shell; they acted from outside, just like an instrument, on the bodily organs. We will describe the appearance of that on which the souls above were working; we must give some little description of this physical Saturn, of Saturn in general.

I have already said that the part of the physical body elaborated then was the foundation of the sense organs. The souls outside worked upon the Saturn surface, upon what lived in man as rudiments of the senses. They were actually in the cosmic space surrounding Saturn below were their workshops, there they worked out the types for eyes and ears and for the other sense organs.

Now what was the fundamental quality of this Saturn-mass? It is hard to characterise, for we have scarcely a word in our language which is suitable; our words are quite materialistic, they are only adapted to the physical plane. There is one word however, that can express the delicate work that was carried out there. One can denote it with the expression: Reflection. The Saturn globe in all its parts had the quality of reflecting everything, such as light, tone, perfume, taste, that reached it from without; all was thrown back again; one perceived it in cosmic space as a reflection in the mirror of Saturn. One can only compare it with the effect of looking into the eye of our neighbour, when our own picture looks out from it towards us.

Thus all the human souls were aware of themselves, but not only as a picture in colour they perceived themselves in taste, in scent, in a definite feeling of warmth. Saturn was thus a reflecting planet. The human beings living in the atmosphere threw their essence and being into it and out of the pictures that then arose, the rudiments of the sense organs began to take form, for they were pictures that worked creatively.

Imagine yourself standing before a mirror from which your own figure confronts you, and that this figure begins to create, is not a dead form as in our modern lifeless mirror. There you have the creative activity of Saturn, there you have the kind of way the human beings lived on Saturn and accomplished their work.

This took place below on the Saturn globe; up above, the souls were in the deep trance consciousness of which I spoke yesterday. They knew nothing of this mirroring, they only occasioned it. In this dull trance consciousness they had within them the entire cosmic All, and thus the whole cosmic All was mirrored from their being. They themselves, however, were embedded in a basic substance of a spiritual nature, they were not independent but were only a part of the spirituality surrounding Saturn. They could not therefore have a spiritual perception, higher spirits perceived by means of them, they were the organs of perception for other spirits.

A whole number of higher spirits were in the surroundings of Saturn; all those whom Christian esotericism has called Divine Messengers, Angels, Archangels, Primal Forces, Powers of Revelation. All these were contained in the Saturn atmosphere. Just as the hand belongs to the organism so did the souls belong to these Beings, and just as little as the hand has an independent consciousness, so little had they at that time a consciousness of their own. They worked out of the consciousness of higher Beings, the consciousness of a higher world; they thus fashioned the forms of their sense organs, which then became creative, and they also moulded the Saturn substance. You must not think of this substance of Saturn as being as dense as the present human flesh. The densest condition that it could attain at all was not as dense as our present physical air. Saturn became physical, but only reached the density of fire, of warmth, the warmth in which our modern Physics no longer admits any matter to exist. Warmth, however, for the occultist is a finer substance than gas it has the characteristic of continuous expansion. And since Saturn consisted of this substance it had the power of spreading from within outwards, of raying out everything, of reflecting. Such a body radiates everything; it has no need to keep it all within itself.

Saturn was not a uniform substance but of such a composition that one could have perceived a differentiation, a configuration. Later the organs became rounded into cell-like balls, only that cells are small and those were large—as if you took a mulberry or blackberry. You could not as yet have seen on Saturn, for the reflecting process threw all light that came from outside back again. Within this Saturn mass all was dark, only towards the end of its evolution was it somewhat illumined. A number of beings were present in the surrounding atmosphere of Saturn; not only you yourselves were active on your sense organs. For the soul of man was not yet so far developed as to be able to work alone, you worked in conjunction with other spiritual beings, under their guidance, so to speak.

Certain beings worked on Saturn as independently as modern man; they stood then at the human level. They could not be formed like modern man, for warmth was the only substance of Saturn. In respect of their intelligence, their ego-consciousness, however, they stood at the level of present man though they could form no physical body, no brain. Let us observe them somewhat closer. The present-day human being consists of four members: Physical body, Etheric body, Astral body and the Ego, and, prefigured in the ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man (Manas, Budhi, Atma). The lowest, although of its kind the most perfect member on the Earth planet, is the physical body.

The next higher is the etheric body, then the astral body and the ego. Now there are also beings who have no physical body, whose lowest member is the etheric body. They have no need of the physical body in order to occupy themselves in our sense world; in compensation they have a member which is higher than our seventh.

Others have the astral body as their lowest member and in compensation a ninth, and again others who have our ego as lowest member, have in compensation a tenth member. When we consider the beings who have the ego as lowest member we must say that they consist of:

• Ego
• Spirit-Self
• Life-Spirit
• Spirit-Man.

Then come the eighth, ninth and tenth members, that which Christian esotericism calls the Divine Trinity:

• Holy Spirit
• Son or Word
• Father.

In theosophical literature one is accustomed to call these the three Logoi.

These beings, whose lowest member is the ego, are those who come into special consideration for us in the Saturn evolution. They were at the stage where humanity stands today. They could exercise their ego under the quite different conditions that I have described. They were the human beings of Saturn and the ancestors of our present humanity.

They irradiated the surface of Saturn with their ego-hood, their external nature, they were the implanters of ego-hood in the physical corporeality that was forming on the surface of Saturn.

Thus they made it their care that the physical body was prepared in such a way that it could later become the bearer of the ego. Only such a physical body as you have today, with feet, hands and head and the sense organs incorporated in it could be ego-bearer on the fourth stage, the Earth. To this end the nucleus of it had to be already implanted on Saturn. One also calls these ego-beings of Saturn, Spirits of Egoism. *[Later called by Dr. Steiner, Spirits of Personality.]

Egoism has a two-fold character; it is excellent and desirable or obnoxious and evil. If at that time on Saturn and on the succeeding planets the essential nature of egoism had not been again and again implanted, man would never have become an independent being who can say “I” to himself. Into your bodily nature there has been instilled ever since Saturn the sum of forces which stamps you as an independent being, cutting you off from all other beings. To this end had the Spirits of Egoism, the Asuras, to work.

Among them are to be found two kinds, apart from slight deviations. The one kind has elaborated egoism in a noble, self-reliant way, and has risen higher and higher in the perfection of the sense of freedom: that is the rightful independence of egoism. These spirits have guided mankind through all the successive planets; they have become the educators of men towards independence.

Now on each planet there are also Spirits who have remained behind in evolution, they have remained stationary and not wished to progress. You will recognise a law from this: If the most outstanding fall and commit the “great sin” of not advancing with evolution, then they become the very worst of all.

The noble sense of liberty has been reversed into wickedness, into its opposite. Those are the Spirits of Temptation, and they must be taken gravely into account; they lead to the evil side of egoism, even today they are still in our environment, these evil Spirits of Saturn. All that is bad draws its power from these Spirits.

When each planet has completed its evolution and becomes spiritual again, it is, so to speak, no longer in existence. It passes over into a condition of sleep in order to come forth once more. So too was it with Saturn. Its next incarnation is the Sun, a Sun which you would obtain if you were to mix together as in a cauldron all that is on the sun, the moon and the earth, together with all the terrestrial and spiritual beings. The Sun evolution is distinguished by the fact that the etheric body drew into the prepared physical body below. The Sun has a denser substantiality than Saturn, it is to be compared with the density of the present air. The human physical substance, your own body which you formed for yourselves, is to be seen on the Sun interpenetrated by the etheric body. You yourselves belonged to a body of air, as on Saturn to a body of warmth. Your etheric body was already down below, but your astral body with your ego was enveloped in the great general astral body of the Sun. And there you worked down into the physical and etheric bodies, just as today in sleep when your astral body is outside it works upon the physical and the etheric body. At that time you were elaborating the first rudiments of all that today are organs of growth, metabolism and reproduction. You were transforming the elements of the sense organs from Saturn, some of which maintained their character, while others were transformed into glands and organs of growth.

All organs of growth and organs of reproduction are sense organs taken hold of by the etheric body and transformed. When you compare the body of the Sun with Saturn you find a certain difference. Saturn was stiff like a reflecting surface, it rayed back everything that it received of taste, smell and all sense-perceptions. This was not so in the Sun. Whereas Saturn rayed back everything direct, without taking possession of it, the Sun permeated itself with it, and then rayed it back; being able to do so by virtue of having an etheric body. Its body, penetrated by an etheric body, did as the plant does today with the sunlight. The plant takes up the sunlight, permeates itself with it and then gives it back again. If it is put in some dark place, it loses its colour and languishes. There would be no green colouring matter without light. So it was with your own body on the Sun, it permeated itself with light and with other ingredients too, and as the plant sends back the light after having drawn strength from it, so did the Sun once upon a time ray back the light after having worked it over inwardly. But it not only permeated itself with the light, but with taste, scent, warmth, everything, and radiated it out again.

Hence your own body too was at the stage of the plant on the Sun. It had not the appearance of a plant in the modern sense, for this has only been formed on the Earth. What you bear within you as glands, organs of growth and reproduction, were upon the Sun as mountains and rocks are upon the Earth today. You worked upon them as one nowadays tends and cultivates a little garden. The Sun radiated back the ingredients of cosmic space, it shone in the loveliest colours, a wonderful tone rang forth, an exquisite aroma streamed out from it. The ancient Sun was a wonderful being in cosmic space. Thus at that time on the Sun men worked at their own substance like certain creatures, corals for instance, work from outside on their structure. This took place under the guidance of higher beings, for there were higher beings in the Sun's atmosphere.

We must concern ourselves with one special category who then stood at the level reached by men today. On Saturn we have the Spirits of Egoism who implanted the sense of freedom and self-reliance and stood at the human level. On the Sun it was other beings, who had as lowest member, not the ego but the astral body. They possessed astral body, ego, Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man and the eighth member, named in Christian Esotericism “Holy Spirit,” and finally the ninth member, the Son, “the Word” in the sense of St. John's Gospel. They had not as yet the tenth member and instead of this they had a lower member, the astral body. These were the Spirits who were active on the Sun, they guided all astral activity. They differ from modern man inasmuch as man breathes air, since air is in the earthly environment; these Spirits, however, breathed warmth or fire.

The Sun was itself a kind of being of air, surrounded by that substance which had previously formed Saturn-fire, warmth. The part that had densified had formed the gaseous Sun, and what had not densified was a surging sea of fire. These beings could live on the Sun and inhale and exhale warmth, fire; they were therefore called the Spirits of Fire. They stood at the human level on the Sun and they worked in the service of humanity. One calls them Sun Spirits or Fire Spirits. Man at that time was at the stage of sleep-consciousness, the Sun-Fire Spirits had already the ego consciousness. Since then they too have developed further and ascended to higher degrees of consciousness. One calls them in Christian Esotericism Archangels. And the highest evolved Spirit Who was on the Sun as Fire Spirit, Who today is still active upon the Earth, with very highly evolved consciousness, this Sun or Fire Spirit is the Christ. In the same way the most evolved Saturn Spirit is the Father God.

Christian Esotericism knows that there was incarnated in the body of flesh and blood of Christ-Jesus precisely such a Sun-Fire Spirit, and indeed the highest, the Regent of the Sun Spirits. That He might come on to the Earth He had to make use of a physical body, He had to live under the same earthly conditions as man, in order to be able to manifest here.

Thus on the Sun we are concerned with a Sun-body, as it were, a body of the Sun planet with Ego-Spirits, who are Fire Spirits, and with a Regent of the Sun, the most highly evolved, the Christ. While the Earth was the Sun, this Spirit was the central Spirit of the Sun; when the Earth was Moon, He was more highly developed, but He remained with the Moon; when the Earth was Earth, He was very highly developed and remained with the Earth. He forms thus the highest planetary Spirit of the Earth. The Earth today is His Body as at that time the Sun was. Therefore you must take St. John's words literally, “Whoever eats my bread, treads me under foot.” For the Earth is the Body of Christ. And when men who eat bread, taken from the body of the earth, walk upon the earth, then they tread under foot the Body of Christ. Take these words quite literally, as all religious documents must be taken. Only one must first know the true meaning of the letters and then seek for the spirit.

One thing more. Not all beings within this Sun-mass came to the stage of evolution of which I have spoken to you. Many stayed behind at the stage of the Saturn existence. They could not receive into themselves what streamed in from cosmic space and send it back after receiving it; they had to send it back direct, they could not permeate themselves with it. These beings therefore appeared on the Sun as a kind of dark intermixture, as something that could not send out its own light. Since they were enclosed in the Sun-mass surrounded by a mass sending out its own light, they worked as dark places. We must therefore distinguish between those places in the Sun which radiated out into cosmic space what they had received, and those which could radiate out nothing. Thus they worked as dark wedges within the Sun-mass, they had learnt nothing in addition to what they had on Saturn. Just as in the human body you do not find glands and organs of growth everywhere, but the body is interspersed with dead parts which have been incorporated, so was the Sun interspersed with these dark wedges.

Our present sun is the descendant of the Earth-Sun-body; it has cast out the moon and the earth and has retained the most advanced part. What was present in the former Sun-body as relics of Saturn are still to be found in the present sun, as the so-called sunspots. They are the last vestiges of Saturn, which remain in the shining sun-mass as dark portions. Our occult wisdom discloses the hidden spiritual sources of physical facts. Physical science substantiates the physical causes of the sunspots through its astronomy and astrophysics; the spiritual causes, however, lie in that residue remaining from Saturn.

We now ask what kingdoms were there on Saturn? Only one kingdom, the last traces of which are contained in the present mineral. When we speak of man's passing through the mineral kingdom, we must not think of the present mineral. The last descendants of the Saturn mineral must far rather be seen in your eyes, ears and other sense organs. Those are the most physical, the most mineral parts of you. The apparatus of the eye is like a physical instrument and even continues unchanged for some time after death.

The single Saturn kingdom progressed on the Sun to a kind of plant existence. Man's own body confronts us there growing like a plant. What was left behind as Saturn kingdom was a kind of mineral kingdom of the Sun, which had the form of stunted sense organs which could not reach their goal. But all these beings on the Sun, these developing human bodies, had as yet no nervous system within them. That was incorporated for the first time on the Moon by the astral body. Plants too have no nervous system. It is an error of physical science when it ascribes one to them.

But the astral bodies, especially those that proceeded from the Fire Spirits, sent a kind of stream into the substance that was down below as physical and etheric bodies. These light streams divided in tree-like forms. Their last traces are to be found in densified form as the organ we call the Solar Plexus. This goes back to the ancient in-streaming on the Sun, densified to substance and hence the name Solar-plexus.

You must picture the bodies which you had on the Sun as if currents from above streamed into you, currents interlaced as a branching tree. Thus the Sun is represented in the numberless interlacings which are your solar-plexus. These branches were represented in German mythology as the World Ash, which, however, means very much besides.

Then the Sun passed into a sleep-condition and was transformed into what in occult science we call the Moon. In this we have to do with yet a third incarnation of the Earth, which will again introduce to us a directing Central Spirit.

As the highest Regent of Saturn, the Ego Spirit appears to us as the Father God, the highest God of the Sun, the Sun-God, as Christ, so will the Regent of the Moon-stage of the Earth appear to us as the Holy Spirit with His Hosts, which in Christian esotericism are called the Messengers of the Godhead, the Angels.

We have completed two Days of Creation, which in the esoteric language are called:

• Dies Saturni
• Dies Solis

To them we must add: Dies Lunae (the Moon-Day).

The existence of a directing Godhead of Saturn, Sun and Moon has always been known.

The words Dies = Day and Deus = God have the same origin, so that Dies may be translated either Day or Godhead. One can just as well say for Dies Solis Sun-Day or Sun-God and mean by both the Christ Spirit.

Theosophy and Contemporary Intellectual Currents

[ 1 ] Anyone who knows the essence of the theosophical school of thought and the reasons why it has become, in the present day, a subject of public lectures, magazines, literary works and so on, rather than a matter of concern for the souls of a few individuals, also knows to what extent it must prove itself in the spiritual life of humanity. What underlies it is necessary as an active force in this spiritual life; and it will not only be accepted by it, but even demanded. In this, however, it will not depend on names and designations, but on the matter itself. Whether the name “Theosophy” as a designation for this spiritual current will recede into the background for justified reasons or out of prejudice is of no importance for the way of thinking in question and for its work in life.

[ 2 ] What is important, however, is that those who profess this way of thinking should not be under any illusions as to the difficulties that stand in the way of the acceptance of their ideas and feelings, especially in the spiritual life of the present day. And there is much in our time that makes it difficult for a wider circle to understand the real nature of the theosophical way of thinking. It is in the nature of things that someone who does not delve deeper into this nature will judge the peculiarity of theosophy by what appears to him to be the characteristic of such spiritual activities, which he throws together with it. No matter how often it is pointed out that the theosophical way of thinking would be completely unfaithful to its foundations if it were to lapse into “sectarianism”, those who do not have the will to engage with it will not stop calling its adherents a “sect”. Who, for example, would think of calling a number of people who have acquired a certain amount of knowledge of nature a sect? And who would want to accuse a society that has set itself the task of cultivating a certain branch of natural knowledge of “sectarianism”? But those people who are striving to acquire certain truths about the soul and spirit in the same way will be dismissed by many as a “sect”. And those who do so will not want to recognize that people who join together to cultivate certain insights into the life of the soul and spirit need to do so with no different attitude than that which leads to the formation of a group of people who have the cultivation of scientific truths as their goal.

[ 3 ] A discussion will not be of much use against prejudices that arise from such foundations. However, it will be useful to become clear about the reasons for such prejudices.

[ 4 ] There are three main reasons why people today may be led to accept the theosophical way of thinking. The first is a certain healthy sense of the truth of this way of thinking. The second arises from entering the path that is outlined in these books as the path to “acquiring knowledge of the higher worlds”. The third is a thorough philosophy that goes to the very last consequences. The first path can be the way of many. Such people will not engage in much philosophy or speculation; they will not want to delve deeply into scientific explanations of the pros and cons. They will let their immediate feelings work on what is presented in Theosophy, and this healthy feeling, untainted by philosophy and scientific criticism, tells them that what is presented is correct. Many of those who have had no opportunity or reason to become acquainted with philosophical or scientific teachings in their lives will belong to this type of theosophical adherents, but who, due to their entire mental state, cannot possibly be satisfied with what the world has to offer in terms of satisfying the great riddles of existence. Those who become theosophists in this way are, in a certain sense, the most important and valuable. When the word “blind” is often used to describe such believers, who accept certain insights without thorough examination, it is precisely because they do not realize that this human “feeling” is not based on error, but on truth. A person whose sense of feeling has not been taken away by a clever intellect really does feel the truth. And if the theosophist is also a judge of character, he will have every reason to be deeply satisfied with such followers of his school of thought. For he will recognize in them persons of a genuine, healthy and original sense of truth. He will never fall into the error of speaking of lack of judgment where the feeling judges so correctly. And it must be said that it will be to the great benefit of the present and the near future if many of those who, for one reason or another, cannot enter the higher path of knowledge and are also unable to engage in deeper philosophical thought, will, out of their healthy sense of truth, profess the Theosophical truths.

[ 5 ] The second path consists in acquiring the higher faculties of knowledge. Much is said about this in the articles of this journal that deal with it. The situation at present is such that more and more possibilities will open up to lead the honest seeker at least to the first steps of this path. How far someone gets depends on many things. The first condition is that the source from which he draws his instructions for higher knowledge is a right and pure one. The seeker has hardly any other means at his disposal than the trust he can have in the one from whom such instructions proceed. Many may regard this trust as a questionable thing. One can only reply to them: if this trust is based on calm and serene feelings in the seeker, if nothing passionate in a certain sense, if no selfishness is at play, then the questionable disappears. Caution is certainly something that cannot be recommended strongly enough in this area. Anyone who is seized by wild desire and passion for higher knowledge can certainly be easily deceived. Anyone who seriously examines whether his striving arises from the duty that every person has to increase his abilities as much as possible will hardly need to be deceived. And in all such instructions, which rightly exist, the seeker will soon be able to acquire the feeling that there is something true and good in his instructions. And although this feeling is a much more intimate one than the direct one for the theosophical truths described above, it can nevertheless also be an infallible guide.

[ 6 ] A second factor to be taken into account is the spiritual level of development of the seeker. Because of this, one will progress faster and another slower. Some may soon see the first signs, which they can interpret as evidence of their penetration into the higher worlds; others may struggle for years without seeing anything of the kind. It would not be quite correct to say that the corresponding progress depends on the degree of development of the seeker. It also depends on whether the source from which the instructions come finds the right thing for the personality in question, and on what speed of progress a teacher can and will take responsibility for with the seeker. The latter depends on many circumstances. And in our present time there are many things that force the teacher not to go too far in some cases. For he, for his part, is subject to the strict law that he must not harm anyone. The outsider can only have a slight idea of the severity of this law. But it must be emphasized again and again: no one is harmed by a real teacher in this field.

[ 7 ] The more people from the circles of those who profess to be Theosophists who enter this path, the better it will be for many things in the present and the near future. But no one should be led to it by anything other than his own untroubled free will. For that which Theosophy must by its very nature desire can only be meaningful to those seekers whose search progresses in such a way that an ever-increasing, unwavering loyalty to spiritual knowledge and an increasing understanding of the nature of the spiritual worlds develops within them. If, on the other hand, impatience and a sense of disappointment arise because one believes that one is not making sufficient progress on the path one has chosen, this is harmful to the seeker and to humanity. And it is easy to understand why such a sense of disappointment arises in someone who finds that certain ideas he has formed about his progress are not at all applicable. And yet this progress need not be really lacking. It may be present in a certain way and remain unnoticed by the seeker for a long time. Without, therefore, certain elementary, disordered higher experiences being held in low esteem - this is certainly not done by the true teacher - it is nevertheless true that in many cases the secret teacher must prefer progress in other areas to progress in the elementary higher experiences. Development can often proceed all the more surely if such experiences are initially, and for a long time, completely absent. They will surely come at some point. And the seeker will then also realize that it was good that he had to wait so long for them.

[ 8 ] The third of the indicated paths is that through a thorough philosophy and scientific knowledge, a person is led to the theosophical way of thinking. Admittedly, discoveries cannot be made in this way in the higher worlds. To investigate what goes on in these worlds and what beings are there, the supersensible faculties of perception developed by the path of knowledge are needed. But when things have been investigated and communicated by an investigator, those who have been thoroughly trained in philosophy can see their possibility and correctness. He can find all that which one might call rational reasons for the truth of what has been researched in the higher worlds. However, this requires a truly thorough philosophy, not one that stops halfway. For just as a perfect philosophy and a thorough science lead to the recognition of the theosophical way of thinking, so do superficial science and incomplete philosophy offer the greatest obstacles to its understanding. It is precisely these that must declare the teachings of Theosophy to be fantasies, dreams, wild “mysticism,” etc. etc. It would be so beneficial if a great many people were to engage in such thorough training in philosophy, but this is not the case at present. A thorough philosophy requires a strong devotion to many things that can only arouse the slightest interest in many people. Even that such a thing is beneficial, few will readily understand. And many will soon drop the matter after the first steps in a corresponding study. Either he will find that he is not sufficiently trained, or he will not be able to muster the energy of renunciation. It may seem more tempting to arrive at direct insight on the path of knowledge; but it should not be forgotten that for the researcher in the higher realms of existence, serious thought work is by no means a superfluous addition, but rather the best conceivable support.

[ 9 ] If we now ask ourselves how, under present conditions, wider circles relate to these three paths, which lead to theosophy, we will soon become aware of many obstacles that stand in the way of unprejudiced understanding.

[ 10 ] The healthy sense of truth described above is lacking in many people because they are under the influence of what is so often presented as the result of “strictly scientific facts”. The way in which such facts are presented by leading personalities and circles is also a factor. And this cannot be easily seen through. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, it is quite understandable when people who allow the scientific results to sink in come to the conclusion that, in the face of the certain facts of science, the “claims” of Theosophy are nothing but fantasies, wild 'dreams. And it is true that, from their point of view, such people are right. But it is no less true that theosophists would be madmen if they asserted things that contradict the established facts of science. No theosophical truth can seriously contradict the findings of sensual and rational science. But in the presentation of scientific results, it is not just the established facts that are communicated; rather, a very specific way of thinking is transferred to the reader or listener along with the facts. This is most strongly the case in the so-called “popular” presentations of scientific results; but the learned and “strictly scientific” achievements are by no means free from it. The presenters are usually not even aware of the extent to which this is the case. And the learners and readers are even less aware of it. Many people believe that they are only communicating facts, but their presentation is completely dominated by a world view that is transferred to the learner and reader. The latter receives an inspiration; and this fact is so far removed from his consciousness that he thinks he has formed a judgment purely from facts. What he has received with the facts through inspiration – suggestion is an unsuitable word, but one that is used a great deal today – is capable of depriving him of all possibility of recognizing anything real in the facts of the soul and spirit. If one were to think fully about what is said with these things, one would indeed look at the current teaching and literature with different eyes than is often the case. One would know that not only Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle), but also many seemingly quite harmless representations of zoological, botanical, geological, astronomical facts, in truth inoculate a world view. And many would not be credulous “monists” etc. if they were not inoculated in such a way with the facts, at the same time in a way imperceptible to them.

[ 11 ] In addition, there are the feelings and emotions of the age. These also tend to recognize only that as real which is palpable and evident to the senses. If someone is even an “expert” in a particular field, then he must look down on the “amateur fantasist” and “enthusiast” as the theosophy devotee can only appear to him. (The following article, “Prejudices from Supposed Science,” illustrates the above truths with a few specific examples. This latter article is also included because it is intended to provide as complete a picture as possible of the obstacles that the theosophical worldview currently faces. ) Now, “expert” judgments are reaching the widest circles in a thousand and one ways. And when something goes under the flag of “science” today, then this catchword alone overwhelms all one's own ability to judge. Theosophy must clearly face this situation. It must understand the reasons for the objections against it. Those who have been inoculated with their world view in the manner described above will often criticize the “lack of judgment” of those who profess Theosophy simply because of their sense of truth, and say that they have no idea how ridiculous their “belief” is in the face of the established facts of science. It should certainly not be denied that there are those who profess Theosophy and who, when confronted with objections from the side of “science”, behave quite clumsily, even childishly. This is then a gift for those who want to ridicule the blind “superstition” of the Theosophists. But it remains true that, in the face of the healthy sense of truth of many people, the judgments of those who refer to their “scientifically based” world view are of no significance. Once we learn to present only the facts that can be perceived by the senses and their rational consequences, we will also recognize that true knowledge of nature can provide the perfect foundation for theosophy.

[ 12 ] For the time being, however, things are at their worst for the really learned circles and their followers. It is not the facts that they research and whose discovery is a blessing for humanity that envelop them in prejudice, but rather the way of thinking and world view that is customary in these circles. This is so to such an extent that it is not only compromising for a member of such circles to approach theosophy, but it is actually an absolute impossibility. One need not apply a harsh critical standard to such facts. It is better to try to understand them as a necessary phenomenon of the times. One will then know that many, because of the spiritual context in which they find themselves, cannot but strictly reject Theosophy. This is not at all said with reference to those who come to such a rejection out of external considerations. Rather, it is meant of those numerous, fundamentally honest souls who, with their judgments, are prisoners of their spiritual context.

[ 13 ] For the path that is called the path of knowledge, many people's understanding must necessarily be limited. For everything that is said in the present day about the “necessary limits” of human knowledge is directed against it. There is much talk of development: but when someone says that the powers of knowledge which man has at his present level are not a conclusion, but that they can be consciously developed to a higher degree, then such a statement meets either with complete doubt or with indifference. People will always try to determine what man is able to recognize according to the measure of his abilities; that he can penetrate into new worlds by increasing these abilities, many do not want to admit. The theosophist will certainly never claim that the faculties referred to by many of his opponents can penetrate into higher worlds; but he knows that it is possible for man to awaken such faculties in himself, which lead to these worlds. Many of our contemporaries consider it to be arrogance and self-conceit when someone speaks of the ability to penetrate into supersensible worlds. But is it arrogance to speak of what can be perceived under certain conditions; or should it not rather be called arrogance when someone considers it a matter of course that everything he does not know or does not want to know must be nonsense and fantasy? Theosophy can only take the standpoint that one should not decide about what one does not know.

[ 14 ] The third of the paths to theosophy also presents great difficulties in our time. These difficulties are the most difficult to speak about, because what needs to be said can all too easily be interpreted as presumption. One would prefer to remain silent about this point, if it were not useful, even necessary, to occasionally point out the facts in this direction. The philosophical education of our time is by no means a high or thorough one. There are many reasons why this is so. Our philosophy is barren in terms of free thinking, which could confront the facts of sensory experience with sovereign judgment. It is burdened by an anxiety, of which the philosophers are unaware, to lose the secure ground under their feet. It looks everywhere for supports and foundations for its statements, but not where they are to be found, in certain inner facts of self-producing thought that gives itself its certainty. It should not be denied that here and there one can find some pleasing beginnings. But the spirit of the times weighs most heavily on philosophical thinking. And this contemporary attitude has the weakness of not opening up the sources of certainty within the human being, but of allowing certainty to be given by something outside of the human being. In natural science this can be a blessing in many respects, because undisciplined philosophizing can easily lead to enthusiasm; but for philosophy this attitude is paralyzing. The matter is downright bad in the case of epistemological investigations. They are currently being pursued quite eagerly, and were even more so in the last few decades. But a healthy state of mind cannot arise in them as long as one does not get beyond the prejudice that man only lives in his representations, and that these do not absorb objective reality. It is something monstrous for many epistemologists, but it must be said: the judgment that nothing of reality enters into the idea is like that: nothing of the metal of the seal enters into the impression in the sealing wax. Certainly nothing of the matter of the seal enters into the seal impression; but that which matters can be seen completely in the impression. It is the same with the world of human ideas. The whole world, with all its secrets, can be found through them, if one does not allow oneself to be deceived from the outset by the fact, which is doubtless true but of no significance, that the “table in itself” does not enter into the “idea” of the table. (In my “Philosophy of Freedom” one can read exhaustive accounts of these things.) It is unfortunately only too true that the philosophy currently in vogue is not very suitable for leading to theosophy. And anyone who is under the authority of this philosophy has only an obstacle to understanding the higher worlds.

[ 15 ] The latter fact in particular is bad for Theosophy. For it is thereby placed in the position of appearing to want to rebel against all legitimate scientific phenomena of the time. But there could be nothing better for the Theosophists than to be able to point out everywhere where there is something for their full recognition and approval. Theosophy has no vocation at all for opposition; and it should avoid such as long as it possibly can. Those who look more closely will also easily recognize that genuine Theosophy only gives positive things and does not want to play the role of opponent anywhere. But it cannot close its eyes to the fact that its very nature means that certain opponents will arise from the moods of the times. And it must calmly characterize these opponents in their own way. If it did not do so, a large part of its work would remain fruitless. For the natural opponents would rightly come to believe that the Theosophists were unworldly people who understood nothing of the certain refutations of their “assertions”. Theosophy would not need to concern itself with this belief as such if it were only a matter of theoretical refutation. This could be left entirely to one's own devices. What matters, however, is to work with open eyes and to organize one's work in such a way that it does not rebound ineffectually from the resistance erected by the sensibilities and prejudices of the present day.

According to incomplete, summary notes

Dear attendees, there is no need to dwell on the reasons why these two lectures are dedicated to the consideration of German intellectual life in these fateful times. Our feelings must naturally be directed towards what the German people have to defend, locked inside a great fortress. Not only do our enemies today talk about their own bravery in such a way that they not only count on their weapons, but also on the hunger over which they believe they have power. They are also trying hard to persuade themselves and others that the German people have a spiritual essence within them that is not worth preserving. We are like being locked in a fortress, not only surrounded by the roar of weapons, but also, in a cowardly manner, by hunger. The question arises as to what the German essence, the German spirit is, which is to be defended in the face of the changing winds. It goes without saying that spiritual science can only be expressed as a result, as an attitude. What was most attacked before spiritual science emerged in modern culture was something that modern culture had more or less lost. The concept of the folk soul is not abstract for certain character peculiarities, but it is a real entity for the spiritual eye, so that, as we allocate the entity of outer nature to the four realms, we recognize beings with individuality in spiritual science, beings with individuality. Therefore, we speak of different folk souls of the individual peoples, as one speaks of what is in reality of the outer senses. Only when one tries to see the German national soul within the German nation does one get a true idea of spiritual science. However, one must then also speak of the soul of the individual. Psychology speaks of it, but in such a way that it sees a chaotic jumble of will impulses and thoughts. Spiritual science cannot speak in this way.

The world will increasingly recognize that a genuine scientific consideration of the soul must take into account the threefold nature of the soul. Just as a physicist distinguishes the rainbow shades of yellowish-reddish, green, and blue-violet in light, so too, in the same genuine scientific sense, spiritual science will have to acknowledge that the soul expresses itself in three forms: as a sentient soul, inasmuch as it encompasses everything instinctual that does not arise from the brightness of thought, as in the reddish-yellowish. In green, the soul of reason reveals itself. As the blue-violet is in the light, so is the human soul, which can be called the soul of consciousness. This distinction is not arbitrary, but arises from a closer examination of what it means to be human, what is connected to the human spirit through the noblest core, what goes through birth and death, the eternal, where it all leads to, what is in the subconscious, even in the dream-like: the eternal core of being. The intellectual soul stands in the midst of the soul's nuances, like the color green in the midst of light. Through ideas and concepts, it is connected to the eternal and pours out onto the outside with the temporal and the transitory. In the present, it lives out with all the qualities that keep the human being firmly grounded, but which are also the temporary ones that only reveal themselves between birth and death. This structure is something truly real. The light lives in all color nuances, and so the human ego lives as the actual self-grasping in all three soul nuances.

The folk souls in the sense of spiritual science differ in such a way that one folk soul, for example, preferably takes hold of the individual in the scale of feeling. Of course, the individual human being can rise above the popular to the general human. What I say applies as long as he experiences himself in his nationality. The way in which the human being stands in his nation offers, as it were, a relationship between the sentient soul and the national soul. What works in will take hold of the drives and passions. We have this in the Italian nationality. In a second case, when the national soul works in the intellectual soul, permeating the views, thinking, concepts and ideas of individual nationalities, we can observe this within the French nationality. And where the national soul works in the consciousness soul, which is currently the most transient and is completely bound to the physical world, we can observe this in the British people at the present time.

I am aware that what I am saying is not based solely on observations of the present. Many here know that I have been saying this for years. On the other hand, I know that it will gradually become part of human knowledge, just as light in its various colors is part of physical science. Since a direct relationship to the folk soul is expressed in all three soul-members, to the whole rule and weave of the soul within the human being, we have considered the relationship of the individual German, insofar as he belongs to Germanness, to his folk soul. In this way, one can gain insights into the peculiar national cultures of the individual peoples. One can say even more for the sake of enlightenment.

The Western nations had a special link to the collective soul of the folk soul. They added this to the culture in such a way that they participate in a folk age that is different from that of the Germans. They tie in with what comes from Greco-Roman and earlier cultures. So they tie in with what emerged as a current from ancient times, which appears as an immature age of nations compared to the German one, where the individual grasps himself as a special thinker, where he does not listen to mythologies, to something coming from outside, but seeks to arrive at a worldview through his own judgment. The German entered European culture in manhood. Thus, one people can be understood while another people is going through a completely different age. One must know that all peoples went through a clairvoyant age before that. I have mentioned how Ludwig Laistner has not yet fully recognized that all myths, all pictorial narratives, come from a time when people still had clairvoyance, not a dream state, but not fully awake, a state that shows reality, but in images. What the Greeks, the Romans, the peoples of Europe depict in their myths and legends is only one expression of what the individual peoples have really experienced. This has already been done in the “Riddles of the Sphinx”. It depends on how a people goes through the transition from ancient clairvoyance to later clairvoyance, one could say to scientific knowledge. We find everywhere that the world view of the German goes into the whole disposition, while the others were still in a less mature state of mind when they came out of ancient clairvoyance. Their world view has formed itself as if [instinctively]. Their self was not fully present. Even Christianity is still felt as if it were brought from outside. When one sees pictures, one says, they are there, so say these peoples, the world view is there.

The German people are different. They confront us as they experience the great clash with the Romance peoples of the south; there they are already beyond the stage that we have in the oldest stories, myths, the personality is what is emphasized. We feel in the “Nibelungenlied” that everything depends on the human personal qualities playing out, courage and so on, what the human being can suffer. The other people are confronted with what they are looking at. In the “Nibelungenlied”, the German is personally linked to what he has had depicted. When the “Nibelungenlied” was already overcome, a figure from it was used by Richard Wagner; Brünhilde, Hagen, Siegfried. In the “Nibelungenlied” we see how the Central European Germanic peoples connected with other cultures. It was necessary for the Germanic peoples to form a worldview through their own efforts. It had to differ from that which was unfolding all around them. What appeared at the height of Italian art in Dante must be compared with Wolfram von Eschenbach's “Parzival”. In Dante's “Divine Comedy”, a sum of images leads up, connected at the top with medieval scholasticism. And how Dante's personalities are shaped by the passions. How isolated Dante's “Divine Comedy” is from the human. In “Parzival,” the portrayal of the human soul is such that the soul itself is present with everything that lives in it, that the soul only progresses through that with which it lives in its most intimate. Then we see that the German spirit cannot go to a worldview that is presented to it as a revelation, but that it wants to have it as an intimate experience of the soul, as every concept wants to be experienced.

One must see in the time of German mysticism, Meister Eckhardt, Tauler, how they describe the coexistence of the individual human souls with the spirit. It is, as it were, a dialogue between the individual German and the spirit of the people, in which the soul is present with all its sufferings and bliss. The soul must become very still, throw out what it is itself, and be only in its secret closet, then it is with its God, experiences what pervades it as the divine. The mood that it can undergo is wonderful, what rules and moves in the universe, when it lets God rule in it. Later, in Angelus Silesius, this intimate togetherness is expressed in dogmatic sayings. He mentions:

I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, he also lives for and for.

I die and live God: if I want to live for him forever,

Then I must also give up the ghost for him forever.

The soul is filled with the divine spiritual, but since God cannot die, death is only an appearance. Thus, someone like Jakob Böhme, who is very popular in German spiritual life, feels the soul, which does not pass through the vital organs but is the eternal core of being within the body, still fully conscious in the body.

Dying is a new birth: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies,” that is, he who does not turn his attention to what passes through the portal of death. Wherever we look, we can see the German spirit's world view in such a way that nothing shines forth from the old point of view into the time when he wants to gain a new world view. His self is firmly established in carrying all his strength and efficiency into the outer world of sense. We see, when in the Romanic culture the nations accepted Christianity, how a strong ascetic current emerges, how the human self separates, its thinking separates. But the German cannot so easily cast aside what is his own self, and so he will carry this into many views of the spiritual and divine in nature, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs, lamentation is derived from bliss and sorrow from suffering. Nature cannot fully satisfy the soul; if it does not see the supersensible in it, it must appear tragic until one sees through the veil of nature that by which one does not perish. Therein lie the roots of German spiritual life.

What was produced later produced the flower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which leads to a worldview. Always in the national, not in the individual, we see everything in Italy coming out in relation to the passions, in France that which stimulates the mind, that which encourages abstract ideas-tendencies. All schematizing, all bringing into a system, behind which the self runs. They say there that rhymeless verses are not poetic, that there is no rounding off. It is the same everywhere, especially in relation to rationalism. It is the same in all fields, one cannot see beyond it, one must elevate oneself with the self to what is schematized. The German essence should live intimately in what it unfolds as experience up to the supersensible. In alliteration, the soul's immediate feeling passes over, there it is striven for by the intimate progression of the soul itself, not by rhyme.

Within British nationality, that which relates to the transitory, to the external sense world, would be. It is empiricism, as rationalism is in French nationality. Idealism is basically the original field, which becomes the direct roots of German intellectual life. From this it can be understood how Darwin's system of nature was able to pursue the purely material from the British mind, as with the philosopher Locke, and to glimpse the religious aspect alongside it, without grasping it through experience, as the German mind does.

The English mind was prevented from making the same radical mistake by its adherence to matter that Haeckel made out of the merits of the German mind: to make a monistic world view out of Darwin's system of nature. Little by little, spiritual science must unfold in such a way that it not only has idealism, but also imbues it with spiritual weaving. It is uncomfortable to live up to the great German philosophers in terms of what they experienced at the full sap of their thoughts. One sees how this includes the fruit of real, actual spiritual realizations. The German spirit has advanced from the root to the flower, which includes the hope that the fruit, the spiritual realization, will come from it. This German spiritual insight will still have much to say about the development of the world as a whole. It concerns us, and it is this that will have to be defended against the enemies who rail and revile, who go so far as to fall prey to mental illness over the German essence.

In the prime of German intellectual life stands Lessing. I would like to draw your attention to his testament, “The Education of the Human Race.” He sees himself forced to assume that the soul must pass through life not just once, but repeatedly. Clever people say that Lessing was already growing old at the time. One can move from Lessing to Herder, who, in opposition to Voltaire's rationalism that ideas should live out in history, said that it is not ideas, but behind them are weaving, real entities, concrete spirit. He already points to spirit-cognition, says that the culture of the earth will not perish before enlightenment has occurred.

One flowering of this intimate coexistence of the individual soul with the spiritual, of the striving for a worldview from within the real personality, is “Faust”, which no other nation can match. It is not artistically rounded off, and the second part is aesthetically contestable in many ways. But the striving for a popular worldview becomes in it a continuous experience of the self, of the I. Faust strives to go beyond what can be given from the outside, to enter into dialogue with the concrete spirit. He really has it around him in all reality, and when he wants to lead it to the sources of life, his counterpart Mephisto comes to meet him. Faust calls out to him: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All”. This is a truly German saying, it does not lead to nothingness, but to the source of existence. Through pain and suffering, Faust seeks what is inadequate for the merely external. Those who immerse themselves in the intimate striving of the German spirit are left with the impression of madness, as expressed by the world in a journal that has indeed gone mad: “Robbery was the slogan of the German race at all times”.

That is how far the European world has come in its judgment of the German spirit with the unilluminated intellectual! Hebbel said: “Everyone basically hates the German essence - that was a long time ago - as the bad hate the good. If they would succeed in eradicating it, they would have to scrape it out of the grave with nails afterwards.”

The moods that are now coming from abroad as pathological phenomena have long since been formed as intellectual currents from the passions present in the nationalities, to which only one image of the soul is assigned, while the German must sacrifice the whole soul on the altar of intellectual existence. Only the sacrificed soul gives back what arises from the sacrificial fire. The others seek only through individual shades of the soul. This may now be emphasized, where the German essence is so reviled.

Is there not some truth in the words of someone who says: “Germany made [the most significant revolution of modern times], the Reformation.” This is a proud word about the German essence, which relates to the others as higher mathematics relates to elementary mathematics. It was said in Paris in 1870 by Ernest Renan. In the same letter, when compared with it, one can see what a contrast there is between what Central Europe strives for in terms of world view and how it wants to live it out, and how it is in the West, even when tackling the highest problems such as “The Life of Jesus”.

We always have to hear that Central Europe wanted the war. But let us listen from France to Germany. He – Renan – believes that the Germans should be careful not to take land from the French, and that the French would then improve and realize that they had started the war unjustly. David Friedrich Strauß, to whom the letter was addressed, replied that Renan should forgive him, but that he could not see Gaul as a penitent Magdalene. Renan then says that there is a current in France that says that if France's integrity is saved, we – the French – will make up for the mistake of the previously stolen Alsace-Lorraine, not through revenge; it is different if they have to cede Alsace-Lorraine, then there will be hatred, and the eternal goal will be the destruction of the German race.

Rationalism is capable of saying: just as in higher mathematics, annihilation follows from the alliance with anyone who offers himself. Such logic is a bitter pain, a contradiction that mocks everything that is natural feeling. There is no need to sing the praises of self in order to characterize what has become of the German people through the pursuit of an intimate worldview.

In the West and Northwest, among the British people, there is no understanding; it is impossible for them to even absorb the basic nerve of the German being, nor in the East. Slavophilism has developed there, and it is imbued with the idea that what lives in the West as culture is rotten and must be replaced by what it itself has. And we are in the West of Russia! The individual Russian person is so attached to his or her national soul that it does not yet have an effect on them, that it has not yet taken hold of either the individual soul nuance or the whole self, but rather it hovers like a cloud over what the individual person experiences. The individual soul is not yet reached by it.

In what Italian culture produces in the way of emotional culture, in French rationalism, in British empiricism, we can see the popular soul coming to life. With the Russian people, it hovers over the experience, which is why the Orthodox religion, which has become completely rigid, is allowed to spread over the individual, who bows down under it but is not seized by it. He does not strive to receive spiritual life, but humbles himself under the yoke, bending from the outside. It is a saddening impression to attend such an Orthodox service at the Österfeiern, as the individual behaves quite impersonally towards what is happening, taking in nothing personal. It is precisely in this that superiority to the West is sought. In what is produced as a necessary result of the whole Central European spirit, salvation could be found there in the east, but in Slavophilism they resist developing the mind, absorbing something of what should have been incorporated into the soul of the Russian people. Those who have risen above the level of brutal Slavophilism, who have brought the torch of war and brutal warfare, have realized this.

One of these discerning minds was Solowjow. He is not a Faustian soul, but wants to look up in humility. Therefore, what remains in him is what lives in the individual Russian soul, an anarchy of the soul. We can follow it up to Solowjow, despite his tremendous greatness. [...] Solowjow had to ask himself: What can we offer from here in Central Europe? There is a deep misunderstanding between the East and Central Europe. Why is Central Europe hated by Eastern Europe? He says: When Europe looks at our pretensions and demands, it is heard that it is something great, but what we can offer from the substance of our people, we can only babble phrases.

Even where the German spirit is fully experienced, there is everywhere such hatred, which had been preparing for a long, long time, as it is now, one can say, in a morbid way. What presents itself as a sign in this fateful time is an admonition to the German soul to become truly aware of its mission. This war can be a kind of warning for many. We will have to unlearn many things if we are to become aware of the German spirit.

It was possible that this man was admired as one of the reconciling spirits between Germany and the West. The novel was celebrated as a work of art, as if born out of the spirit of music itself, according to the critic Stefan Zweig of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. Then people were amazed that Romain Rolland joined the chorus of vilification against Germany. There we see how the events that are now unfolding have been prepared.

One can only say that from all that this time will and must bring, from the sum of blood, suffering, death, but also of courage and bravery, a warning must arise for everyone to become aware of what that body, which can be called the German people, holds in its striving to grasp the spiritual world, to grasp that which can enlighten people about their destiny. Nothing can be emphasized sharply enough in the present to lead to a deepening of that which has emerged from the roots over the centuries to flourish, and which now gives the hope of also bearing fruit. Anyone who takes spiritual science concretely and not just as an abstract hope can say that the individual person can die, but that a nation must not die before it has fulfilled its task. It is therefore feelings of hope and confidence that this event can awaken in us if we immerse ourselves more and more in the roots and blossoms of German intellectual life.

I will not choose my words to summarize, but rather a poem from the collection of an Austrian poet, Fercher von Steinwand, “German Sounds from Austria”: “Kyffhäuser Guests”. Each person in this poem expresses in his own way how the German spirit works, but one person expresses very deeply and powerfully what the German people can express when they draw from the roots and blossoms of the German spirit: what springs from the riddles of this earth,

what finds hearts, what masters minds,
What flows eternally speaking from the stars
And discloses an inimitable God;
What seemingly has been lost from time and world
And yet shoots around us in a thousand streams:
That is the primal power inherent in the German spirit,
To speak this out clearly, he has consciously sworn!

In the course of these lectures, I have often emphasized that it is quite natural, as a matter of course, that from the point of view of the majority of people today, objections about objections must be raised against spiritual science. But I also emphasized in the lecture I gave here on the question of immortality from the point of view of spiritual science that genuine. Spiritual Science wants nothing to do with what is all too often done in its name, but that it is in complete harmony with natural science. But it is also in complete harmony with what a healthy philosophy has to say. Since this is noteworthy for our consideration today, I would like to emphasize this harmony with philosophical thinking in a few introductory remarks.

What spiritual science always has to assert is not based on philosophical speculation, but on what has been called the inner experience, the inner experience of spiritual facts; it has to assert the independence, the self-contained nature of the human soul — to put it more popularly: that the human being has a spiritual-soul existence that goes beyond the physical-bodily. I said that this is entirely consistent with a healthy philosophy based on scientific principles, because many people, from the way of thinking of our time, perceive such an assertion as the extreme of all unscientificness. It is easy to say from a scientific point of view: How can one speak of the human soul as something independent when physiologists show that everything is dependent on what develops physically in the human being. We see how, when a part of the brain is injured, disturbances occur immediately due to the loss of a part of the brain functions. Must we not be led to the thought that the soul activities lie in the normally behaving nervous system or brain? One can point out how mental abilities grow with the adolescent human being, how in old age, when the external system withers, hardens, mental abilities decrease and so on. On the basis of such observations, many a train of thought could be formed that would have to suggest the idea that spiritual experience basically consists in nothing other than the activity of the nervous system and the rest of the organism. Let us hear what an astute philosopher, Otto Liebmann, whom I have mentioned in my book “Riddles of Philosophy,” has to say about this. He is not one of those who make assertions based on superficial thinking, but rather he states what the facts of the analysis of human thought are capable of providing. He deals with the belief that the human soul exists only in the physical, and says remarkable words, corresponding to a sharp-witted philosophy that coincides with the current state of natural science. In summary, he says: It is by no means certain what Munk and others have established regarding the dependence of mental activity on the brain, because, for example, an injured part of the brain can be replaced by other functions. But if we had reached our goal, then in principle nothing would have changed. That is to say, modern philosophy says that no matter how far one advances in the study of the connection between the soul and the physical, one can only know that one must use certain internal organs in order to think, feel and will. We can draw the parallel that we need certain parts of the brain for the soul, just as we use the hand to grasp. But when we use this hand to grasp, the mechanical action of the hand is added to the soul. We cannot speak of the soul actions of the brain in this way. However, this is only because the investigations of natural science are not complete. As it moves forward to prove the connection between the physical and the soul, it will find that there is a different connection between thinking, feeling, willing and the nervous system than between the hand and grasping. It will find that they are connected in the same way as the imprints that feet make in soft soil are connected to the soil.

What specifically can be found in the brain can be derived from the soul's activity, just as footsteps can be derived from feet on the earth. Just as there could be no connection between walking and footprints without solid ground, so it is with everything that is done in the physical body. Everything that a person thinks and wills leaves an imprint in the nervous system in the physical body; but it does not emerge from it, any more than footprints emerge from the earth. One needs the physical body as a surface for resistance, just as one needs solid earth to walk on. Therefore it is self-evident that one must find imprints. It is a scientifically legitimate endeavor to find them; but it is unscientific to want to extract from the physical what has been impressed by the soul-spiritual. In this respect, Liebmann's assertion is false. The imprint is only the accompanying phenomenon of the soul-spiritual. It is precisely this that natural science will prove in the most eminent sense by its means; it will show how one can follow the traces, but will not want to explain them from within the organism. Natural science is already on this path; today, full-fledged proof of this could be provided. Spiritual science does not dispute any of the facts of natural science; spiritual science fully recognizes natural science. It only rebels against the unwarranted claim of the natural scientists to be doing something that they themselves do not know about — against the despotism of the scientists. This goes even further. One could almost grasp how they are driving individual philosophers into what spiritual science wants to present, following on directly from the example already given by Otto Liebmann. What he says is exemplary in terms of acumen and dissection. He says that someone might say that a hen's egg contains not only egg white and yolk but also a ghost; that it embodies itself, pecks open the shell, runs out and immediately pecks up the scattered grains. One could understand that someone would take this as a joke. But Otto Liebmann certainly does not mean it as a joke. He continues by saying that there is no reason to object to this, except that the preposition “in” must be understood not spatially but metaphysically. Understood in this way, it is quite correct, says Otto Liebmann. The fact is that an astute philosopher must admit: one cannot object to the statement that a chicken egg contains not only yolk and egg white, but also an invisible ghost that materializes. Otto Liebmann does not believe, however, that one should form a worldview immediately after reading a few books, but wants to carefully consider how one sets one's thinking in motion. From the spiritual science lectures, one can see how what Otto Liebmann addresses here as a “ghost” that materializes is present in the human being himself as a supersensible being.

Today I cannot talk about the methods that are used to detach the soul and spiritual from the physical and bodily, and to discover something in thinking of which one knows nothing in ordinary life; likewise to discover something underlying the will and feeling, of which the will and feeling are only an impression. For the spiritual researcher, what Otto Liebmann describes here in theory in regard to the chicken egg can become an inner experience for the human being. Spiritual science will not claim that it can present it ghost-like, for instance in a halo of light, to the physical eye; if it did so, it would be a physical and not a spiritual experience. But it can be realized consciously, just as the experience is mediated by the bodily in everyday life, but only by detaching oneself from the bodily. Otto Liebmann sensed that the bodily is based on a spiritual. Spiritual science proceeds by showing how the spiritual-soul methods lead to developing the consciousness of what Otto Liebmann speaks of. This consciousness can be developed. Just as the outer, sensory world becomes an object for ordinary consciousness, so too, when a person frees their soul and spirit, they become an object themselves: they look at themselves from the outside.

It could be objected that one would then claim to be in harmony with philosophy, but it remains to be seen whether Otto Liebmann would accept these musings or declare them to be just that – musings. But suppose that in the time when the telephone was yet to be discovered, one physicist had spoken to another about it, and the other had said that it was impossible. Does that mean that the telephone as we know it today is not in line with what physics was at that time? This is how it is with spiritual science. With a way of judging as suggested, one would be forced to fight against all human progress from the prejudices of a once adopted point of view.

Man can truly free himself from the physical body. From this point of view, some light will be shed on the mysteries of sleep and death. When man frees himself from the physical body, he enters a state in which he can see through his entire humanity as it is in the physical world. Only now is true self-knowledge possible. Only now do you become an object, like the hydrogen that is otherwise in the water only becomes an object when it is released by the chemist. Now you are able to relate this new insight to states of consciousness that cannot be related to each other in ordinary everyday consciousness: the experience of being awake in relation to the experience of being asleep.

When a person is absorbed in sleep, the spiritual and mental have stepped out of the physical. Otto Liebmann's “ghost” temporarily detaches itself from the physical, and a purely spiritual-soul relationship is established between the state as one gains it through spiritual development and the state of sleep; a relationship as between what I am now experiencing and a memory of what I once experienced. As I look at what I once experienced, so I look at the state of sleep and find that the spiritual and soul-life is outside the physical and bodily from the moment I fall asleep until I wake up. One must connect with it spiritually and mentally. So one overlooks the two parts of human nature, the physical body that has remained in bed and that which has left, just as one overlooks hydrogen and oxygen when they have been separated from water. But even more: one sees that what has remained as corporeality is indeed a duality, namely the physical body and that which prevents it from following its own chemical laws, which makes it a living being; this is the etheric body – the word is not important – a finer body of forces. The word etheric body should not be pressed; it has nothing to do with what is called ether in physics today.

What goes out during sleep, namely the word used for it, can be ridiculed. Let people ridicule. What goes out is the astral, the actual soul body and the I. So we have the fourfold human nature before us: on the one hand the bodily and the etheric, on the other the soul, in which the I-nature is embedded, as it were. In ordinary sleep, the I is not able to produce consciousness because, at the present stage of humanity, it is developing its I-activity in connection with the bodily-physical. You can't walk on air either, and just as little can the I-consciousness develop without the resistance of the bodily-physical; it develops from it. In sleep it does not find this resistance and therefore cannot come to consciousness. It develops a dull consciousness; but this is only a paradoxical expression, since it does not come to consciousness.

Likewise, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the soul body is continuously active. We could compare it to the way we are active when we think about something that happened some time ago. Its activity is a reverberation of what it has experienced in the etheric and physical body. We can imagine the meaning of this reverberation as follows: We think, feel and want in our waking hours with our etheric body, which offers resistance within the physical body. That is, only the thoughts that reflect the effect of the etheric body resonate. Because we are so active in the etheric body, we imprint the after-effects on it: what we think during the day is impressed on it. But the ether body offers resistance; it has its own inner movements. It is these that constitute the life that permeates the physical body. By forcing into it what is carried out in our thinking, we impose something alien on it; after all, its primary purpose is to convey life. Because of the tensions that arise between the ether body's two activities, the astral body cannot absorb what has been imprinted on it. During sleep, it resonates with what we ourselves have pushed into our ether body during the day; it is like a memory of what we have thought, felt and willed during the day. Thus we can say that the human being cannot develop consciousness in relation to his ego during sleep, but that the astral body resonates with everything that has taken place in us during the day through the activity of the soul. This activity of the astral body cannot come to consciousness either; for if it continued for a long time, it would intensify to such an extent that we would become fully conscious of it every morning, with a clear memory of what had been forced into the astral body. We do not have to visualize all the individual acts we have performed during the day, but rather the activity of thinking, feeling and willing. By exercising these, we give the astral body a structure, a general imprint – not through the individual acts – in which it resonates. Then, in the morning, we have, in the image suggested, we can say, in what we experienced the day before, not in thinking, feeling, willing, something new. We would overlook this if the astral body did not have to develop the urge to return to the physical and ether bodies, that is, to wake up. The highest tension leads us to submerge into the physical body. Otherwise, one should be able to draw out, at least for a very short time, the force that one has to leave behind in the physical body and in what is called the etheric body during sleep. In what can be called the real, spiritual view, one actually revives what can be called the unconscious power of the etheric body, making it flash. One must then wait for the moments when the etheric body also detaches itself during waking life; it is like a blood pulsation: the etheric body is first more intimately connected to the physical body – and then withdraws. By using such moments, one gains consciousness of the etheric body for a brief moment. Then the supersensible consciousness flashes: one is in the spiritual world and can ask questions in it.

We see what an intimate process underlies it. What really happens is like something that flits by. If you want to put it into scientific forms, what remains is like a memory, like a memory of dreams that flit by. Therefore, in spiritual science one does not arrive at success by stringing together conclusion after conclusion on what one already has. It is not a logical recollection, not a thinking, but a growth arises through such fleeting moments. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, when writing down what he gains in this way, cannot proceed as one who describes from memory. He cannot, for instance, claim that a lecture he is giving for the twelfth time will be easier because it is fixed in his memory. If one really wants to be honest, in spiritual science one cannot allow anything to become fixed in one's memory; rather, one must always speak anew out of the inner work of the soul, not out of memory. That is why a lecture is as new the fourteenth or fifteenth time as it was the first time. It is much more a deliberate performance, a continuous active process in the soul that develops activity. Therefore, in the case of an honest spiritual presentation, the person who presents something from direct contact with the spiritual world will try to shape the words anew each time. It is precisely for this reason that only inner, genuine honesty can lead to the presentation of spiritual science. It is said that anyone who wants to lie must have a good memory. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, must be imbued with honesty to the highest degree. He must not color; then what he says will already correspond to what he does not need to remember in the ordinary way. But the way of remembering of ordinary consciousness cannot be applied. |

Through such insight into the structure of the human being, one sees through the nature of sleep. In Vienna, I described this process as the separation between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, and the astral body and the I on the other. This is only to be understood relatively; relationships remain and are established. While the astral body, as it were, resonates in its feeling back, it encounters the ether body in its ordinary experience, and in this way, what it would experience purely is mixed with what happens in ordinary life, and dreams arise. They are chaotic or more or less lawful, even prophetic, mixed with what can happen in ordinary life. If Schopenhauer had not judged merely from the ordinary philosophical point of view, he would not have seen the world merely as will and representation; but he would have seen that the representation can be condensed in itself, that one can soul-spiritual can be consciously experienced in it as spiritual, and that what he sees as will in the human organism pours out into the whole environment and is revealed for the spiritualization of the entire world. In the astral body, that which makes a person more at the end of the day than at the beginning resonates. The same occurs in all of life. To understand this, let us think of a plant and the ripening seed; let us let this image take effect on us. But that remains in the etheric body; the astral body only resonates. But it takes the ether body with it through the gate of death: and now, drawn out of the physical body, the astral body can develop full consciousness together with the ego; it is now suddenly imbued with the life-force of the ether body, and consciousness emerges. But then, when it is so animated – because the etheric body is actually the provider of life for the physical body and cannot serve for more – when the extract is drawn from it, so to speak, what only maintains the life functions is expelled into the rest of the etheric world. Through the spiritually held consciousness, which arises from the impetus of the astral body and the ego on the extract of the ether body, the human being must first struggle until he comes to the use of the new consciousness, in which he spends the time between death and a new birth. During this time, the human being accomplishes a great deal. We can only gain insights into the length of time that passes if we consider the individual human life in the context of all earthly lives. Then we can see what attracted him to the earth, what led him from the spiritual realm to this life; the forces that led the human being down have thus found their conclusion, their goal. Meanwhile, the earth must have changed so much that the person can experience something new. Therefore, it takes centuries for a person to gather his strength to descend into a new life on earth.

In the time between death and a new birth, one must also imagine two alternating states of inner experience. In everyday life we have waking and sleeping; in the time between death and a new birth, there are alternating periods, successive states of inner activity and of isolation from the spiritual environment, where one knows nothing of the spiritual environment but inwardly lives out what one has previously absorbed in it. These experiences are like a mighty inner image arising from within oneself. Then again, one is completely absorbed in the spiritual worlds and incorporated into them.

One can assume a spiritual center in the time between death and a new birth. In the first half, what has newly begun in the last life on earth is processed; in the second half, what is taken up is what makes the spiritual-soul permeate the physical person in a new life on earth.

What is presented as spiritual science only appears to contradict natural science. In the future, spiritual research into the values of human life will advance in the same way as the physical sciences do in their own field. Spiritual science still appears to many to be a fantasy because they shrink from the strict mental work and mental discipline it demands. Many would like to arrive at spiritual science by easier means than are possible. They do not want to take the difficult step, which consists in a further development of consciousness. The progress of chemistry can be utilized without being a chemist; in the same way the results of spiritual research can be appropriated. And even if one cannot engage in spiritual research oneself, one should at least endeavor to cast aside one's prejudices. But many would like to arrive at spiritual science by a more comfortable route than by overcoming their prejudices, and then use it primarily for their own benefit in life. Misunderstanding of spiritual science is the result of such an attitude.

Natural science will increasingly reveal itself not as the source of answers but as a field that poses questions in new ways. The answers will then come from spiritual science – the answer that Faust craves:

Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and with screws.

You cannot penetrate its inner workings with levers and screws. You have to illuminate it with the light and power of the soul.

Today I shall add to what has been said over the past few days, both, before and after Christmas, about the Being of Christ. Our angle of approach to the question of Christ will be to relate it in a brief sketch chiefly to the world-wide social question. Mankind has at the present time an urgent need to reach a global understanding. Yet whatever sphere of life we turn to, we find precious little of any such understanding. The need for an understanding is there. What is not there is any talent on the part of human beings to come to such an understanding. We see how attempts are made to consult one another about important aspects of life. We see congresses taking place everywhere. With regard to the matters being discussed at these congresses, what is to be found in the depths of human souls is quite different from the words which are exchanged there. In the words exchanged at these congresses there are appearances which are deceptive. These appearances are supposed to give the impression that individual human beings everywhere desire to come to terms with one another, or something similar. But such coming to terms cannot be achieved anywhere, because it is not actually individual human beings who are speaking with one another but members of various nations. Only the external appearance makes it seem as though individuals were speaking with one another. What is actually speaking through each one are the very varied beings of the different nations. And since it is in the very nature of human beings these days to notice only the verbal content of words and not the source of the words—not the soil in which they are rooted—since human beings fail to discern these fundamental aspects of life, it is simply not noticed that it is the folk daemons who are speaking with one another, rather than human being with human being.

We would be hard put to it to find clearer proof of the fact that Christianity is today not realized in the world. Christianity is not realized, for fully to understand Christ means: to find man as man within oneself. Christ is no folk god, no god of any race. Christ is not the god of any group of human beings. He is the god of the individual, in so far as the individual is a member of the human race as a whole. Only when we can understand the Christ-being, through all the means available to us, as the God of mankind, only then will Christ come to have what will certainly be the greatest possible social significance for the globe as a whole.

We have to understand very clearly that there are things which hold sway in the depths of the soul, things which do not find their way into those words that remain stuck in empty phrases as a result of the differences between the folk daemons. Out of the situation in which people are content to reside at present, it is not possible to bring about what can actually only be brought about today out of the profound depths of man's being. Today what is needed is profundity, a willingness to enter into the profound depths of man's being, if forces of advance, forces of fruitful progress are to enter into earth evolution. What can be heard today in every corner of the earth does not to any extent even touch the surface of all that is rooted in the human being. What ought now to enter into mankind is the quest for what is most profoundly rooted in the being of man.

Let us now show in a few simple outlines the main differences that exist in people's attitudes to what could lead to a recognition and an understanding of the question of Christ. I have often drawn the distinction for you between people of the West, people of the East, and people of the middle region between West and East. This distinction can be viewed from very varied standpoints. Justice can only be done to it if it is considered without any kind of prejudice and with the utmost impartiality, if we refrain from looking with sympathy or antipathy at one or other of these divisions, perhaps because we happen to belong to one or the other of them ourselves. Today all the people of the world must work together in order to bring forth true unity in Christ. It can certainly be said that in the most varied parts of the world, in the very depths of mankind, the impulse exists towards finding this unity. But the search must take us into the profound depths.

Turning first to what appears now in the civilizations of the West, we discover that the essential element in these western civilizations finds an expression in the type of spirituality which is valid today. This special spirituality of today has the characteristic of taking the form of abstractness; it celebrates its greatest triumphs in ideas and abstractions. These ideas, these abstractions, are most suited to gaining a knowledge of nature as it appears to our senses, and a knowledge of that aspect of social life which has to take place as a result of the forces of the sense-perceptible world. With these forces, which I shall call the western forces, it is quite possible to penetrate into the depths of the human being and of the universe. Above all, these forces of the West have provided the foundation for scientific thinking and have sought those impulses of social life which derive from scientific thinking and which mankind will need in the future in order to shape life on earth in a possible way. What follows will show this to be so. By no means all the treasures of western spiritual life have been brought to the surface.

To start with, it is perfectly true that today's natural science could only be founded on those fundamental forces of man's being which can be most adequately expressed in the spirituality of abstractness and ideas. But it is also true that in everything that has been revealed there is another essential element as well. What has been revealed in the thought processes of natural science, and the social thought processes that go with it, can indeed be taken right up to the spiritual realm. A progression can be made from the laws of nature to a recognition of the spiritual beings within nature. These beings of nature are divine and spiritual. And if Christianity is to be understood in a way that befits mankind's most current needs, it will have to be permeated with that very spirit which has so far only poured itself out into natural science and its social consequences through the forces of the West. Any world conception gained out of these forces of the West can only be satisfying if it can be expressed in clearly defined, sharply contoured concepts and ideas. Human beings will need such clear, sharply defined concepts for the future of the earth. They will have to learn to present the highest spiritual content to mankind in terms which are every bit as clearly defined as are the natural and social concepts arising out of the forces of the West.

Let us turn now to the forces of the East. Here, what is made clearest to us is the following: If, out of the forces of the East, we want to attempt to describe Christianity, or indeed anything divine and spiritual, in sharp, clearly-defined terms, our efforts will be invain. Starting with Russia and going eastwards through Asia, the whole of the East brings forth forces in its peoples which are not capable of rising up to spiritual, divine realms in sharply defined concepts. The forces here are suitable for rising up to the spirit out of the depths of feeling.

In order to describe Christianity in a manner befitting the West we need philosophy, we need a concept of the world which is clothed in modern thought forms. But to describe Christianity with the forces of the East we cannot find such thought forms if we remain at the level of outer nationality. If we remain in the external, sense-perceptible world we have to grasp other means. For instance, we have to describe the feelings which are found as soon as we start going further and further eastwards, even in the regions of central Europe bordering on the East. Look at the living rooms of simple people and see the altar with the Mother of God in the corner. See how the image of the Mother of God is greeted by visitors as they arrive. Everywhere the first greeting is for the Mother of God, and only then are greetings exchanged with the people in the room. This is something that emanates from all the forces of the human being, with the exception of those of abstract ideas. There exists a radical contrast between West and East in the inmost feelings for what is divine and spiritual. Yet all these forces are root forces which can develop further, which can put forth leaves and shoots and finally bear fruit, if only they can come to a fundamental understanding of themselves.

The West is capable of reaching a conception and a feeling of the Father God in a manner which befits the new human spirit, a conception and a feeling beside which those other divine spiritual beings, the Son and the Spirit, can stand. But above all it is the task of the West to contribute to the world concepts and feelings about the Father God which are different from those possible in earlier times, when only vague presentiments could be achieved in this respect. On the other hand, if the forces mainly present in the East are developed—the forces which can only be described suitably in what might be called a non-intellectual way with the help of external gestures—if these forces are developed with the feelings and will impulses they entail, and if they take up also the forces streaming towards them from the West, they will be able to come to a fitting concept and a fitting feeling of the Son God. In this way mankind's development into the future can only be rightly understood when the things that are achieved in the different regions of the earth are taken to be contributions to a total outcome.

Especially the more outstanding spirits in the West—though mostly they are not aware of this themselves—may be seen to be struggling for a concept of the Father God, a concept arising from the foundations of natural science. And in the East we see in the external gestures of the people, in what comes out of their feelings and their will, how they are wrestling for an understanding of the Son God, the Christ. The middle region stands between these two extremes. This is shown clearly by what has been developing more recently in the culture of the middle region. It is characteristic of modern theology in Central Europe that it is uncertain in its understanding of the Father and also in its understanding of the Son, the Christ. Endeavours to find such an understanding are taken immensely earnestly. But this very earnestness has caused the endeavours to be split in two separate directions. On the one hand we see knowledge developing, and on the other we see faith. We see how knowledge is to contain only what applies to the sense-perceptible world and everything that belongs to it. And we see how faith, which must not be allowed to become knowledge, is allotted everything that makes up man's relationship to what is divine and spiritual. These divergent endeavours express the quest, a quest which cannot achieve an adequate concept and feeling for either the Father God or the Son God without joining forces with the other regions of the earth, with East and West.

How such a global working together in the spirit should take place can be seen especially in the beginnings made by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.¹ This Russian philosopher has taken western thought forms into his own thinking. If you are thoroughly familiar with the thought forms of the West, you will find them everywhere in Soloviev's work. But you will find that they are handled differently from the way in which they are handled in the West. If you approach Soloviev with a thinking prepared in the West you will have to relearn something—not about the content of thoughts, but about the attitude of the human being towards the content of thoughts. You will have to undergo a complete inner metamorphosis.

Take what I regard as one of the cardinal passages in Soloviev's work, a passage he has invested with a great deal of human striving towards a knowledge of man's being and his relationship with the world. He says: Human beings must strive for perfection. This endeavour is expressed in the way they strive for the truth. By uniting truth ever more and more closely with their souls they will become ever more and more perfect. Without this movement towards perfection human life would be worthless. Human beings must have the prospect of reaching the highest pinnacles of perfection through truth, as otherwise their lives would be null and void. At the same time they must have a part in immortality, for a striving for perfection destined only to be forfeited in death would be a fraud of universal proportions.

This is expressed by Soloviev in words and thought forms which imitate those of the West, or rather the thought forms are borrowed and the word forms imitated. But the way in which it is expressed, and the way the impulse to express it is present—this is impossible in the West. You will not find it expressed in this way by any western philosopher. Just imagine Mill or Bergson saying such a thing! It is unimaginable. These are the things for which we must develop a sense nowadays. We must develop a sense for the living sources from which words flow. The content of words is growing ever more insignificant in comparison with world concepts. A sense for the living source of things is what has real significance.

We can today only imagine a person to be capable of speaking in the way Soloviev does if he still has a true experience of what every one of his compatriots does before the icon of the Mother of God. Such a person must stand immersed in his people, a people capable of bringing proof without having to base it on abstract, logical foundations, a people for whom proofs based on mere abstract logic are less important than those which come out of the whole human being.

We feel in these words of Soloviev how, coming from the East, what is said comes out of the total being of man, not just out of mere intellectual human understanding. Because Soloviev speaks and thinks and feels out of the very foundations of his people, the whole of his world conception tends in the direction of the Christ. Because he has also taken on, as something from outside, the thought forms of the West, his world conception at the same time tends in the direction of the Father God as well as the Christ. Thus we discover in him something which it is almost impossible to find anywhere in the present, and that is a fundamental, clear distinction in the feelings of a human being between the way to the Father God and the way to Christ, the Son God. In a spirit such as Vladimir Soloviev we find a hint of what must come about in the future. For what must come about is a working together of the different regions of the earth, and this cannot come about if any one region imagines itself to be in possession of the whole.

Mankind came forth out of a unity. If we go back into the obscure, remote antiquity of human evolution we come to an archetypal wisdom which was still instinctive and which, because of this, still filled the whole human being. Throughout the whole of the earth people communicated with one another, not yet by means of the logical content of language but externally, by means of the then still existing inner capacity to communicate in gestures, of which today we no longer have the faintest idea. People communicated with one another by means of something which today, if at all, remains only in those remnants of the treasure-house of language which we call interjections. Naturally, if you exclaim: Whew! or sigh: Oh! you will be understood world over. This kind of understanding resembles the communication that took place at the time of instinctive archetypal wisdom. Today we no longer know how to feel in language as a whole what the archetypal wisdom felt in it. All that remains for us is our feeling or the interjections which, of course, we only use occasionally. In parenthesis let me add that it is quite in keeping that, out of people's dissatisfaction arising from the whole chaos of our spiritual life, authors are starting to write novels in interjections. This does happen nowadays. I am not quoting, but simply mention that you can find prose passages today which read: Ah! Oh! Wow! Eh! Then the writer begins: Once there was—and then come more interjections. Some recent novels are tending in this direction. As symptoms they are not without significance. As I said, this just in passing.

We have lost the ability to invest the whole of language with what we today only invest in interjections. Consider the following: ‘Anthropos’ means man, human being. ‘Anthropoid’ means man-like, that is, the higher animals. The final syllable, ‘oid’, is connected with the word which means ‘like, similar to’. Now there is a remarkable connection between Greek and, for instance, German. In German the final syllable meaning ‘like’ is ‘ig’. This is pronounced ‘ich’. If we speak this final syllable by itself, we have the German word for ego, for our own being. This is one kind of etymological truth. The ‘ich’ in the human being is what strives in its totality to become like the universe. ‘Ich’ is like, is similar to, everything; microcosm compared with macrocosm. Of course to go into things in this way cannot be done in the superficial manner in which etymology and linguistics are conducted nowadays. One has to go down to a more profound level and gain a sense for the way in which the sounds are connected with one another.

I brought this up merely to show one of the facets of what we must do to enter into language in search of a far more alive content than exists nowadays in the languages of the world. We must strive not to take words merely as words but to seek out their living roots. We must learn to understand that two people can say the same thing and yet mean something quite different, depending on the way of life from which it stems. We shall need such a deepening of our feelings in order to enter into the kind of global working together which will be necessary if mankind is to set out once more on the upward path.

It is not enough to address Christ as: Lord, Lord! Christ must become something which fills the whole human being. This can only happen if we support our understanding with something which comes to meet us when we look towards the archetypal wisdom of the world and remind ourselves that that wisdom made mankind into a totality. It was, though, a totality in which all individuality was lost. But evolution progressed. Human beings became ever more individualized. They felt more and more that they were approaching the point at which each one feels separated from all the others, for that alone guarantees the experience of freedom. So something had to be poured out into human evolution which might once more bring unity to the whole earth. This was the Christ-being. The Christ-being will only be fully understood when we gain from it a feeling for the impulse to bring about a social unity of human beings over the whole earth. Or looked at the other way round: Only the Christ-being, fully understood, can lead to a right social impulse throughout the world.

We look to the archetypal wisdom, which developed out of instinctive foundations to a certain high degree of vision—not our vision but an ancient vision. We find this vision in its final phase expressed in the archetypal symbol of what the three wise men, the three Magi from the East, brought to Christ Jesus. What led them to Christ Jesus was the most ancient and, at that time, the highest wisdom of mankind. And at the same time we are told by another evangelist how the individual human being, out of the inmost forces of his soul, as though in a dream—for the individual is alone when he dreams, even though he may be in company with others—is also led to Christ Jesus, how the shepherds in the field, dreaming in their solitary souls, are led to Christ Jesus: the first beginning of a new age. By the fourth century AD mankind had lost the wisdom of the Magi from the East. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the highest archetypal wisdom—about to fade—meets and mingles with something that appears at first utterly devoid of wisdom, something which must be developed ever further, until in the end it can take root in every individual human being, uniting all mankind.

In his youth, Augustine² endeavoured to save the last remnants of the wisdom brought to Christ Jesus by the Magi from the East. But Augustine had already received it in a form to which he could not confess in the long run. It was even then too degenerate. So he had to turn to what had been present at the beginning of evolution, to what will have to progress ever further and further, to what must be sought in order that mankind may once again find unity over the whole face of the earth.

If we pursue these hints—for that is all they are for the moment—in the right way, they will give us forces which will lead ever more profoundly into an understanding of the Christ-being, to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what I wanted to add to what we have been saying about the Being of Christ.

• 1 . Vladimir Soloviev, 1853-1900. The quotation in German is from Die geistigen Grundlagen des Lebens, Part One (The Spiritual Foundations of Life), Selected Works translated by H Kohler, Stuttgart 1922.
• 2 . See Lecture One, Note 4

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 Fichte's 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.”

Wieland's significance

[ 1 ] There are historical figures to whom posterity cannot quite do justice. They seem destined by fate to prepare the way for others. These others become the leaders of humanity. Their names will be inscribed in golden letters in the books of history. What they have produced will be gratefully remembered and will live on from generation to generation. But these leaders of humanity have teachers. And the names of the teachers are often obscured by the students. And that is only natural. For the teachers of great pupils need not be great. But even if they themselves are great, they easily fall into the general fate. - In the great age of German poetry at the end of the eighteenth century, this was the fate of three personalities: Klopstock, Herder and Wieland. They were completely eclipsed by the great triumvirate of Lessing, Schiller and Goethe. And it is not only their age that owes an immeasurable debt to them, but also Schiller and Goethe themselves. Herder was Goethe's teacher in the best sense of the word. And Goethe himself beautifully expressed Klopstock's attitude to the German people and their education: "Our literature would not have become what it is now without these mighty predecessors. With their appearance, they were ahead of their time and, as it were, dragged it after them" (Conversations with Eckermann: November 9, 1824). And Goethe also found the right words about Wieland's importance. "The whole of Upper Germany owes its style to Wieland. It has learned a great deal from him, and his ability to express himself properly is not the least of it" (Conversations with Eckermann: January 8, 1825). This is supplemented by Goethe's words in "Dichtung und Wahrheit". There he also speaks of the influence that he himself had experienced through Wieland. "How many of his brilliant productions fall into the period of my academic years. Musarion had the greatest effect on me, and I can still remember the place and the spot where I saw the first sheet that Oeser gave me. It was here that I thought I saw antiquity alive and new again. Everything that is plastic in Wieland's genius showed itself here in the most perfect way." - Such words clearly describe Wieland's position in German intellectual life. And no one can have a judgment of what was going on in this intellectual life during the second half of the eighteenth century who does not at least acquaint himself with Wieland's most important creations. If one takes a closer look at them, one finds how wonderfully they complement those of Klopstock, Lessing and Herder. Klopstock's cozy religiosity, Lessing's critical severity and Herder's philosophical height are complemented by Wieland's grace and gracefulness. And thus the latter was even closer to the immediate needs of man than the others. In a certain sense, he brought the ideas that those on the heights of humanity represented down into bourgeois thinking and feeling. What they showed in their holiday dress, he put on his everyday coat. It would be unfair to forget the essence of his character above the lighter dress. An impartial examination of his life and his creations can teach us this.

Boyhood

[ 2 ] Wieland grew out of a school of thought that was widespread in Protestant regions in the middle of the eighteenth century. This was expressed in a certain unpretentious piety, which was less concerned with grasping high religious truths than with cultivating the mind and heartfelt intimacy. A "good man" must find the way to honest, sincere piety in his heart, so said this direction. It did not seek lofty doctrines, but the pure soul. This movement is called pietism. One must not close oneself off from either its light or its dark sides if one wants to understand the emergence of a spirit like Wieland's from it. In circles that cannot rise to particular spiritual heights, it promotes a true and healthy ideality and a direct judgment in questions that go beyond the everyday. But it also entails a certain narrow-mindedness. The pietist struggles to make an honest judgment; but he also easily regards this, his judgment, as the only authoritative one, and becomes - without actually wanting to - intolerant of others. - And this also characterizes the pietistic home from which Christoph Martin Wieland grew up - he was born on 5 September 1733 as the second son of the Protestant preacher from Oberholzheim in Upper Swabia, Thomas Adam Wieland. Both his father and his mother, Regina Katharina, were excellent people. When Christoph Martin was three years old, his father was transferred to nearby Biberach. The boy spent his early childhood there until he was fourteen. A sensible, precocious boy grows up in a small middle-class home, whose head is primarily concerned with the souls of his fellow human beings, under conditions that can perhaps be well described by saying that he learns to know the greatness of humanity from a small mirror, rather than in reality. The small mirror is the books. And the boy Wieland was a little bookworm. He absorbed the writings of Cornelius Nepos and Horace and was already busy turning out long Latin poems and German verses in his twelfth year. Among his works was a heroic poem about the destruction of Jerusalem.

[ 3 ] At the age of fourteen, Wieland was able to swap the pietistic atmosphere of his father's house for that of the school in Kloster-Bergen (near Magdeburg). The pious Abbot Steinmetz ran this school. It was probably in the nature of things, given the boy's previous education, that he used the more ample opportunity here to get to know the world through reading. Horace, Xenophon, Cicero, Lucrez, the materialist writer of antiquity, Bayle, the influential doubter of the time, Wolff, the leading philosopher, and the mighty Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire occupied his lively mind. Under such influences, it was inevitable that some of the ideas he had received in his pious father's house or encountered at school would falter. Doubts about Christianity, as he had come to know it, sank into his soul. And it took all the fervent power of Klopstock's "Messiah" to give his mind the stability it needed at that time. The first three cantos of this poem had just been published at that time. Wieland read them, like so many others, with delight. The power of pious feeling that flowed from them was stronger than any ideas that could be aroused by doubters and enlighteners. - But the young man, who was not in a position to transform the material he had absorbed from the books into a secure judgment of his own through any kind of life experience, was assailed by much. He soon became acquainted with Haller's poems, which were based on the view of nature at the time, and with Breitinger's critical studies, which set completely new standards in the evaluation of artistic works. In addition, in 1749 he was allowed to stay temporarily with his relative in Erfurt, Wilhelm Baumer, who was a doctor and professor of philosophy. He introduced him to the most important philosophical doctrines and to Cervantes' "Don Quixote". In this way, the young Wieland was simultaneously introduced to the thought systems through which mankind sought to solve its great mysteries and to the humorous treatment of a rapturous idealism in "Don Quixote".

Student days

[ 4 ] These circumstances determined the state of mind in which Wieland returned to his father's house in 1750 and in which he soon afterwards went to the University of Tübingen. It would be to completely misjudge Wieland's inner life if one were to attach too much importance to a love affair that entered his life at that time. It was with Sophie von Gutermann from Augsburg, who was visiting relatives in Biberach around this time. Although the relationship was an intimate one, it played no more of a significant role in Wieland's development than some later ones. Incidentally, it dissolved of its own accord when Sophie married la Roche, the electoral court councillor, in 1753. Even if this "infidelity" put him in a gloomy mood for a while, it did not have a profound effect on his development. In particular, it should not be attributed to this mood that he took a pious, moralizing direction in the following years. Rather, this had a completely different origin. When he was in Tübingen, he had little interest in the chosen science of law. Instead, he recently immersed himself in Klopstock's "Messiah" and added to this the study of Platonic idealism. He also became acquainted with Leibnizen's philosophical writings. From all this, he drew for himself an idealistic view of the world, which he expressed in the poem "The Nature of Things". His wonderful talent for form, which he had developed from Klopstock, was immediately revealed. The philosopher Meier from Halle, to whom Wieland sent the poem without naming himself, liked it so much that he immediately ordered it to be printed. Wasn't such recognition supposed to bring the young man, who had little stability, completely into the direction that had followed Klopstock at the time? And so it came about that the subsequent poems "Lobgesang auf die Liebe" and "Hermann" ran entirely along Klopstockian lines. - And that was what forged a direct personal relationship between Wieland and the critic of Klopstock's school, Bodmer.

Entrance into literary life. Wieland and Bodmer

[ 5 ] This introduced Wieland to a school of thought that was particularly decisive for German educational life at the time. Among other names, it was also linked to Bodmer's. And it signified a kind of intellectual turnaround in Germany. Until the middle of the century, Gottsched, who worked in Leipzig, had been the guiding spirit in literature. His work was comprehensive. Whatever he said about any contemporary phenomenon was considered authoritative. His position was shaken by two events. One was that he refused to recognize Klopstock. The second was Lessing's rejection of his admiration of France. With regard to Wieland, the first event comes into consideration first. Bodmer had gained the upper hand over Gottsched as a critic. He stood up for Klopstock; and those who went along with Klopstock as a poet naturally gravitated towards the new critical direction, which in Bodmer and his followers enthusiastically advocated the Messiah poet. - It was therefore a great encouragement to Wieland when Bodmer judged the former's "Hermann" in the most favorable way. He virtually portrayed the young man as Klopstock's rival and thus provoked feelings of gratitude in the strongest possible way. As a result, Wieland not only continued to write in the Klopstockian manner, but also, after his return to Biberach in 1752, wrote a treatise on Bodmer's epic poem "Noah", in which he placed the revered man on an equal footing with Milton and Klopstock. How much Bodmer's poetry is really worth, and how much Wieland's judgment was biased, cannot be of interest in a consideration of the latter's development. What matters is that through this process the young Wieland moved to Zurich in 1752 at Bodmer's invitation, and that this stay became immeasurably important to him. He lived in Bodmer's house as a guest for a whole year. That was his first direct contact with life. Whatever one may think of Bodmer, he was in a certain sense a powerful personality, a whole man. For someone who had previously only got to know great people from books, getting to know such a personality meant a lot. It is a different thing to read about important things or to see them spring to life directly from a soul. - This vividness and immediacy matter much more than whether one or the other finds that the personality in question was not really a great one. - But Bodmer was a characteristic figure. He had gradually come to see the moral world view as the deeper foundation of art. The forms of poetry should lead man to his highest ideas. Beauty should be an expression of the highest truth. These views settled in Wieland's soul. And he increasingly came to advocate them quite vigorously himself. It may now please some to think little of this transitional stage in Wieland's development. It has also been suggested that the marriage of his beloved Sophie, which had just taken place, had made him world-weary and driven him into this moralizing manner. But one might mock the fact that he said at the time, in reference to the poet Uz, that "one should prefer even the worst church hymns to the most charming song of Uz an infinite number of times"; precisely in the direction that Wieland's creations later took, this point of passage in his development was infinitely important. He subsequently freed himself completely from any moralizing direction and became a master of a style devoted purely to beautiful forms. Grace and grace in the depiction of the sensual became one of his elements. The fact that he always retained his majesty and firmness is due to the fact that he had really learned to know moralizing judgement from his own life. As a result, he came to know it in a justified way as one-sidedness. You have to have gone through certain things yourself if you want to gain a correct relationship to them.

[ 6 ] In 1754, Wieland accepted a position as court master. He gradually freed himself from Bodmer. He was particularly influenced by his reading of the Englishman Shaftesbury, who saw the morally good as a sister concept to the beautiful. Beauty is what pleases man; and the good is the beautiful in action. The fact that Wieland was able to gain an impression of such a world view shows the direction in which Bodmer's view had taken. This living-in had proved particularly fruitful for the development of very noteworthy pedagogical ideas in Wieland. His "Plan von einer neuen Art von Privatunterweisung", published in 1753, had brought him the above-mentioned position of tutor. In 1758, he added a "Plan for an academy to educate the minds and hearts of young people".

[ 7 ] Wieland's thinking and outlook on life became increasingly free. His epic poem "Cyrus" appeared (as a fragment) in 1759. The ideas of the Enlightenment that were increasingly emerging at the time had taken hold of him in a particular form. He idealized the Persian king as a hero of freedom. For him, it was less a depiction of the historical Cyrus than the idea that an enlightened person has of a ruler who rules in the spirit of an age thirsting for freedom. Wieland also tried his hand at drama. His tragedy "Lady Johanna Gray" was performed to great acclaim in Winterthur in 1758 and even found favor in the eyes of the critical Lessing. - By this time, Wieland had already become known in wider circles as a writer. His outer life changed in 1759 when he exchanged his position as a tutor in Zurich for one in Bern. However, he gave this up after a short time and supported himself for a while by teaching various subjects on a freelance basis.

Wieland in Switzerland

[ 8 ] In Bern, he met an intellectual lady, Mademoiselle Bondeli. She had also become famous as Rousseau's friend. The fact that Wieland became engaged to her is of less importance, as life broke off the engagement. However, it was important to him that in Bern he had the opportunity to engage in animated conversation with a witty personality who was at home in almost all areas of human knowledge and who was able to judge the world from a high point of view. Her image accompanied Wieland throughout his life; many of her features can be found in the female figures in his poems, and as an old man he made the beautiful judgment about her "that she was the most beautiful, brightest, most educated and in every respect most perfect female spirit, which was connected with a heart so regular, at the same time so tender and strong, so loving and so completely free of all weakness".

[ 9 ] The time had come when Wieland had to think about finding a more stable position in life. His relatives and friends at home helped him in this. They made it possible for him to be appointed senator in Biberach on April 30, 1760. Such a senator was entitled to certain positions in the municipal office, which constituted a bread provision. Wieland received one in July of the same year as director of the chancellery. However, the appointment remained provisional for four years. Biberach was divided in religious terms. A Catholic and a Protestant party fought over the appointment of the posts, and Wieland only later became the definitive town clerk. In 1765, he married Dorothea von Hillenbrand from Augsburg, who had been brought to him through the efforts of her relatives. It was a marriage without enthusiasm, but the basis for a lasting happiness in life, a quiet, contented companionship, which lasted until his wife's death in 1801. The keynote of this companionship can be found in the words that Wieland wrote about his wife: "My wife is one of God's most excellent creatures in the world, a model of every feminine and domestic virtue, free from every fault of her sex, with a head without prejudice and a moral character that would do honor to a saint. The twenty-two years that I have now lived with her have passed without my once wishing that I were not married; on the contrary, she and her existence are so interwoven with mine that I cannot be away from her eight days without experiencing something akin to Swiss homesickness. Of the thirteen children she has borne me, ten are living, kind, good-natured creatures, healthy in soul and body, who, together with their mother, constitute the happiness of my life."

Shakespeare translation

[ 10 ] During his time in Biberach, Wieland undertook one of the most important and influential deeds of his life. He began translating Shakespeare's plays in 1762. By 1766, he had succeeded in making twenty-two of these plays accessible to the German public. If one considers that until then Shakespeare had been virtually unknown in Germany and that since that time he had gained an influence on German intellectual life that can only be compared to that of Schiller or Goethe himself, one will see the fundamental importance of Wieland's work in the right light. Lessing therefore immediately paid tribute to it in the right way. And both Goethe and Schiller owe Wieland a debt of gratitude in this respect, for it was through him that Shakespeare was first and foremost communicated to them.

New artistic style

[ 11 ] The petty circumstances in Biberahh were made somewhat more bearable for Wieland by the fact that the former Electorate of Mainz minister Count Stadion had settled in the neighboring castle of Warthausen in 1761, where the government councillor la Roche also lived with his wife Sophie. She was Wieland's former girlfriend. Wieland entered this house as a good friend and always welcome guest. French taste, a certain free, even light view of life and experience of the world was at home here. For the poet, who was also warmly befriended by Sophie la Roche, there was the most wonderful stimulation. What was said was very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment, in many respects had the character of doubtfulness and was based on Voltaire, Rousseau, the French encyclopaedists d'Alembert, Diderot and others. - As a result of all this, Wieland himself lost the heaviness that his lifestyle had still had due to his earlier circumstances. A purely artistic view of the world became more and more prevalent. Sobriety, immersed in grace and graceful beauty, became more important to him than a view of the supernatural heights of the ideal. Such an attitude places life higher than all reflection and contemplation about life. Even if man's reason is not sufficient to exhaust the actual depths of existence, this reason is there, and one abides by it. Even if sensuality is deceptive, this sensuality is given to man and he should rejoice in it. The confession that appears as the background behind Wieland's creations during his time in Biberach can be summarized in words such as these. In 1764 he published the novel "The Victory of Nature over Enthusiasm, or the Adventures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva". In 1765 his "Comic Tales", and in 1766 and 1767, in two volumes, the "History of Agathon". With "Don Sylvio" and the "Comic Tales" he now incurred the disgust of the Klopstockians, just as he had previously been accepted into their circle with joy. - And it was inevitable that the new style of his work would soon find uncalled-for imitators who were not interested in depicting the sensual in an artistic form, but simply in depicting the abject itself. Wieland had to expressly emphasize that he had nothing to do with such unartistic beginnings. - It cannot be said that in the two works mentioned the poet had already achieved what he obviously had in mind. For "Don Sylvio" he had the style of "Don Quixote" in mind. In this style, he wanted to protest against superstition and false idealism in favor of a healthy natural sense. In the "Comic Tales", material from Greek mythology is used to create graceful but nonetheless rather questionable descriptions.

Wieland's idiosyncrasy

[ 12 ] Only a complete impartiality, which does not want to judge but to see into a person's soul with understanding, can do justice to Wieland in this point of his artistic development. The way in which he had to acquire a view of life was not suitable for creating a fixed center in his own personality. He had absorbed the thoughts of many people in the mirror of books. Such a way produces peculiar effects, especially in the case of great talent tending towards artistic perception. Man lets the various opinions of his fellow men pass by his mind more like pictures. Such strong inclinations, such firm judgments are not formed as is the case when life itself is the teacher. One is more partial to the one, less to the other; but one gives up one's whole personality to neither. This remains unstable. People who do not get to know much in this way arrive relatively quickly at a fixed view of life. Life forces such a view on them. After all, life usually only takes hold of people from one side. It makes them one-sided, but firm. People who develop like Wieland are different. They get to know life through its reflections in many people's minds. And every world view has a certain justification. Few people can think of anything that doesn't have some justification within certain limits. Anyone who has to deal with opinions about things rather than with the things themselves will easily have to let firmness take a back seat at the expense of versatility. It would only be worse if he lost all inner stability. But this was not even remotely the case with Wieland. The core of his being was rooted in the noble traits of the German bourgeoisie. - Indeed, in a certain respect, his entire significance was based on this. Through the easy flexibility of his style, he was able to conquer the refinement of French taste and the artistic transfiguration of sensuality in the sense of the Greek view of the world for German intellectual life, and yet remained related to this intellectual life in its popular character through his own essence. He never lost the German spirit over French grace and Greek grace.

[ 13 ] But as a "man of books" he was unsparingly exposed to the impact of living people in the two cases in which he was confronted with a firm world view. So it was in Zurich with Bodmer, so it was in Warthausen with Stadion and the la Roches. There the moralism, here the worldly manner flowed into his own blood.

[ 14 ] Wieland now felt the need to enlighten himself about his change. The poet does this through poetry. This became the novel, the "History of Agathon". However, he presents his own development in the guise of a process from the ancient Greek world of the fourth century BC. The idealist Agathon, who initially lives entirely in Platonic higher worlds, is contrasted with the worldly child Hippias. Hippias stands on the ground of a world view that is based purely on the satisfaction of human selfishness and material well-being. Although Agathon feels repelled by such a view, his contact with it does not remain without consequences for his development. He undergoes the transformation from an idealist who is turned away from the world to a man who surrenders to immediate reality. - In his search for reality, Wieland focused on Greekness. His transformation was not aimed at a common reality, but at an artistically ennobled one, one filled with spirit. Thus it is not arbitrary that he clothed his own path of development in Greek garb. Certainly others have seen Greekness differently. The way in which Wieland saw it corresponded to a necessity in his time. And Goethe, by his own admission, learned a great deal from Wieland in this respect. He also did in other respects. The "Agathon" created a new style of novel. And the seeds that were sown in it were later developed in Goethe's style in "Wilhelm Meister". Goethe also points to such things when he speaks of Wieland having given the German educated a style. In this way Wieland became a pathfinder. He himself bore the fruit of his striving in the beautiful sense when, in 1764, he conceived the plan for the work that was then printed in 1768: "Musarion, oder die Philosophie der Grazien", a poem in three books. Goethe's assessment of this work has already been mentioned above. It rightly bears the significant subtitle "Philosophy of the Graces".

"Musarion"

[ 15 ] Wieland was increasingly confronted with an important question in life: does idealism have any value if it does not come from the innermost nature of man? And this main point was naturally linked to a series of secondary questions: does idealism not often only appear as an inwardly untrue enthusiasm? Should one not prefer the more or less sensual but true enjoyment of life, which moves in lower regions, to untrue idealism? These are the questions at the heart of the "Musarion". This is why Wieland contrasts the Stoic Cleanth and the Pythagorean Theophron with the Musarion, who is devoted to the graceful enjoyment of life. The former is untrue and phrase-like; the latter is true, even if it does not rise to supernatural heights. The grace of a free treatment of verse is poured over the whole. Wieland philosophizes in a playful manner, but the play is art, and philosophy is like a witty conversation. But the conversation is one conducted by a personality who is at the full height of the situation. - One must not for a moment disregard the fact that neither true idealism nor crude sensuality is opposed in the "Musarion". Those who can observe both without bias will not feel their feelings hurt in any direction.

The sensual in Wieland

[ 16 ] A similar question and a similar attitude are expressed in the unfinished poem "Idris and Zenide", written between 1766 and 1767. Here too, in an artistically graceful manner, spiritually refined love is juxtaposed with the supernatural flight of fancy on the one hand and raw sensuality on the other. The fact that the poet at times through his choice of subject matter

[ 17 ] as in "Nadine" has not been able to avoid the impression of lasciviousness, must certainly be admitted. However, it must not be assumed that the poet resorted to Greek paganism clothed in sensual forms in order to offer his readers a frivolous thrill of entertainment. Rather, he was concerned with a serious question of life, namely: what role does and may the sensual play in human existence? The poet's judgment should not depend on how this or that person views such a question. - Some of Wieland's later works also belong to the same period and soul direction: "Grazien" (published in 1770), the "Neue Amadis" (1771) and "Aspasia" (1773); according to the plan and also in the essential parts, they were written some time before their publication.

[ 18 ] The departure of Count Stadion von Warthausen brought about a change in Wieland's life. What had made his work in Biberach bearable for the poet no longer applied. The count also died soon afterwards in 1768.

University teacher. Activity in Erfurt

[ 19 ] Just as the thirty-six-year-old Wieland was beginning to find his work and surroundings rather dull, his life took a turn for the worse. At the court of the Elector of Mainz, attention had long been drawn to the writer, who dealt with the things that interested the worldly circles at the time with such great talent. Elector Emmerich Joseph ruled in Mainz. He saw in Wieland the right man to bring his declining University of Erfurt back to prominence and appointed him professor there. Wieland's acceptance of this appointment could not have been in doubt. He had long had pedagogical inclinations. This had become apparent in the two writings mentioned on the occasion of his stay in Switzerland. And so it was that our poet arrived in Erfurt as professor of philosophy in July 1769. - His work was extraordinarily important for the university. Even if Wieland was not a pioneer in the field of philosophy, he had nevertheless acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the great world questions and intellectual heroes within the limits that had once been set for him. And it always has an invigorating effect when someone is able to speak of these things to his listeners in such a way that they feel something of how the riddles of the world can be not just school questions, but questions of life. Wieland's lectures gave the university a new, fresh impetus. He spoke about philosophical, literary and historical matters. - And it is essential that the whole thing had an effect on Wieland's own style. He had to think things through again in a systematic context that had previously passed through his mind more fragmentarily. In addition, the times made certain demands on every thinker in this direction. It was the high tide of the Enlightenment. The effects of Rousseau, of the French Enlightenment and scientific materialists, of German free-spirited philosophy, had set thought in motion. Wieland's appointment to a philosophical chair coincided with an epoch in which humanity was intensively reflecting on its tasks, its purpose, its freedom and self-determination. It was natural that Wieland had to deal with all this. Rousseau had seen in the state of nature the only possibility of happiness and in all civilization only a development towards unhappy conditions. Whoever did not want to give in to despair at the progress of mankind or to indifference towards it, had to ask himself about the ways in which a higher development is possible. There was a feeling everywhere that mankind had progressed from a kind of immature state to maturity. Ancient beliefs had begun to waver. In an essay on the Enlightenment, Kant answered the question: "What is Enlightenment?" with the words: "Man, make bold to make use of your reason". All of these questions played a part in Wieland's thinking when he was preparing what he had to say to his Erfurt listeners. And they initially took on a form that corresponded to his inclination towards pedagogical tasks. This resulted in the novel "Der goldene Spiegel, oder die Könige von Scheschian", which was published in four volumes in 1772. In the guise of an oriental tale, he presents his thoughts on the best form of government and the education of the people. He shows what can lead to the ruin of a state and what can be a blessing. In the character of Danischmend, he embodies a statesman who also educates his prince. - Wieland wanted to create a thoroughly contemporary book. And he succeeded. For he made a great impression on many. The ideas of the time also play a role in the "Contributions to the Secret History of the Human Mind and Heart. Drawn from the Archives of Nature". The underlying idea is that the happy state of nature painted by Rousseau is an illusion. Humanity should not dream of a bliss that it once possessed and lost, but should see its task in the further development into the future.

[ 20 ] The full wealth of Wieland's humor came to light in the prose work "Socrates mainomenos, oder die Dialoge des Diogenes von Sinope", which was published in 1770. Here he attempts to portray the cynical philosopher Diogenes in a more unbiased light than is usually the case. In Erfurt, he also put the finishing touches to the poem "The Graces", which in a certain respect contains a confession of faith by Wieland. The Graces are portrayed as the creators of sensual and spiritualized beauty. A feeling rather than a thought hovers over the whole. All the difficult questions of life are supposed to find their transfiguration in a lifestyle ennobled and made easy by beauty. And the same feeling is poured out over the "New Amadis", which was also begun in Biberach and completed here. Here, the characters of the heroes are distorted into the foolish, those of the heroines into the tawdry, in order to show the value of spiritualized as opposed to merely sensual beauty in light artistic play.

Calling to Weimar

[ 21 ] As beneficial as Wieland's work in Erfurt was for the university, he found little inspiration for himself there. There was little intellectual activity to be found among the other professors, and they had not exactly welcomed Wieland with joy, as he "did not belong to the subject". There were therefore rays of hope in his life again when he was able to visit the la Roche family in Ehrenbreitstein near Koblenz on a journey in 1771 and make the acquaintance of Georg and Fritz Jacobi, as well as Johann Heinrich Merck in Darmstadt. All of these personalities later became friends of Goethe. In particular, Merck, who was very discerning and well versed in science and life, was a good advisor not only for Wieland but also for Goethe. Of particular importance, however, was the fact that Wieland was introduced to Duchess Anna Amalie of Weimar in November 1771 during one of his excursions there. She was in charge of the government on behalf of her son Karl August, who had not yet reached adulthood. With her own open eye, she recognized Wieland's importance. It suited her fine-minded, refined nature to have such a man close to her. She therefore soon suggested that he take over the education of the hereditary prince. And with Wieland's consent, the first of the four great personalities who would make this city the center of German intellectual life for decades to come moved to the princely court in Weimar. Goethe came in 1775, followed soon after by Herder and finally Schiller. From 1772 to 1775, Wieland was Karl August's tutor. From then on, he lived with a pension as a friend of the court and the Weimar intellectual greats, appreciated and loved by all. His princess had found in him what she was looking for and needed, a loyal friend and advisor who also appealed to her sense of beauty and her need for spiritual entertainment through the lightness of his art. The young hereditary prince gained complete trust in his teacher and retained it in the friendliest and most liberal manner when he outgrew his education and came to the government.

[ 22 ] The combination of Wieland's graceful art and the court's need for entertainment resulted in a series of occasional poems by the poet for festive occasions. This placed his graceful muse in a not unworthy service; and it even resulted in something that was significant in a certain direction: Wieland's Singspiel. In "Aurora" and "Alceste", Wieland provided fine texts, which the talented composer Schweitzer then set to music. What was striven for there is significant because the ideal was to strive for a harmonious unison of poetry and music, an endeavor that led to such great success in the field of musical drama much later.

[ 23 ] Wieland used his muse to accomplish what he was virtually predestined to do by all his talents: he founded a journal for German education in the "Teutscher Mercur". If anyone, he was now called to create such a center of German intellectual endeavor. The way he worked corresponded precisely to what the widest circles needed. He was not a cosmopolitan, but a man who lived at the height of education, who, through his own character, was rooted in the emerging German education, and who, through his immersion in French taste and the beauty of the old world, was able to broaden people's horizons. He may well have annoyed Goethe with the first issues of the "Mercur", who had expected great things in his youthful urge and now thought he was only looking at a medium level of education; however, Wieland met the needs of his time and satisfied them.

"History of the Abderites"

[ 24 ] However, Wieland was not a man who flattered people's weaknesses. He showed this most clearly when he began his novel "Geschichte der Abderiten" in the second volume of "Mercur", although its completion was delayed until 1780. - The plot is also set in a distant place and time. It describes the goings-on in the small Thracian town of Abdera. The well-traveled, well-versed Democritus is placed in the midst of a population who, in their foolishness, understand nothing of his greatness and yet, in their naïve arrogance, judge everything the wise man says and does. The "Abderites" alone are suitable to give Wieland a permanent place in German literary history. Human narrow-mindedness, silliness, arrogance, lack of judgment, nosiness, etc. are portrayed here with the most delicious satire. Abdera is mentioned, but "all the world" is meant. Wieland had experienced enough of this kind of Abderitism in Biberach and Erfurt. This novel not only brilliantly portrays those who understand nothing in the narrowest of parochial politics and participate in everything in order to accomplish the most stupid things, but also those who are least aware of it. After all, they are often the ones who are up to their eyeballs in philistinism and philistinism. They see the philistine in everyone else; their arrogance and self-delusion protect them from discovering it in their own nature. Wieland portrays this type with inexhaustible humor. And the portrayal is really such that it fits all times and countries. All criticism of the unevenness of this novel, all criticism of the poor composition at this or that point should fall silent in the face of the delicious humor that permeates the whole, and above all in the face of the universality with which all sides of more or less open or secret philistinism come into their satirical own.

[ 25 ] A number of other achievements date from Wieland's first Weimar period. The poem "An Psyche", later called "Die erste Liebe", and the story "Der Mönch und die Nonne auf dem Mittelstein", which was later called "Sixt und Klärchen", should be mentioned here. "Die erste Liebe" was written in 1774 for the wedding of the Weimar court maid Julie von Keller to the Gotha chief magistrate von Bechtolsheim. The young lady, who wrote the poem herself, was generally regarded as an extraordinarily charming figure. Wieland, however, put into the poem the feelings he had retained for Sophie la Roche, whom he had loved in his youth. He himself considered the poem to be one of his best. (Cf. his letter to Sophie la Roche of August ro, 1806.)

[ 26 ] In the narrative poem "Sixt und Klärchen", which appeared in the "Teutschen Mercur" in 1775, Wieland draws on a legend linked to the two rocky peaks on the Mittelstein (or Mädelstein) near Eisenach. In these rocky peaks, the imagination can see two people embracing. Legend has it that they are a monk and a nun who were petrified here as punishment for their embrace. This is the only time that Wieland treats a German subject. Otherwise it is old-world or new but foreign material that he deals with. - Duchess Amalie was so pleased with Wieland's creation that he treated it again for her in the cantata "Seraphina", for which the Weimar composer Ernst Wilhelm Wolf provided the music. - In 1776, the poetic story "Gandaliin, oder Liebe um Liebe" was published, whose subtly ironic tone was extremely popular with Wieland's circle of friends.

Goethe in Weimar

[ 27 ] While Wieland was gaining love and esteem in wider circles, especially in his immediate Weimar circle, Goethe appeared in Weimar in 1775 (November 7) at the invitation of Karl August. The first meeting of the two men in the city, where they were to live together as friends for a long time to come, was preceded by something that put Wieland to a hard test and showed his character and essence in the most beautiful light. Shortly before this, Goethe had written the wicked farce "Gods, Heroes and Wieland", in which Wieland had been mocked in the worst possible way. Goethe had probably not originally thought of publishing the mocking poem, but then allowed it to be published. The mockery was provoked by Wieland's imprudence. In 1773, Wieland had written letters to a friend about the German Singspiel "Alceste", in which he placed his Alceste above Euripides in certain respects. In this farce, Goethe bitterly rejected what he considered to be naïve vanity. Wieland had already shown greatness of character in that he brought the farce into the "Mercur" quite objectively and by fully recognizing its good qualities. He was so little swayed by it against Goethe that he did not in the least alter the opinion he had previously formed of the latter's poetic genius. Nevertheless, the way Wieland behaved both inwardly and outwardly at his first meeting with Goethe in Weimar was a masterpiece of strength of soul. The whole of this behavior is illuminated with a bright ray when one considers the letter that the man who had been so badly affected shortly before wrote to Jacobi on io. November 1775 to Jacobi: "Goethe arrived in Weimar on Tuesday, the 7th of this month at 5 o'clock in the morning. O, best brother, what can I tell you? How completely the man was after my heart at first sight! How enamored I became of him as I sat at table that very day at the side of the splendid youth! All I can tell you now, after more than one crisis that has been going on in me these days, is this: since this morning my soul has been full of Goethe, like a drop of dew from the morning sun." Soon afterwards, Wieland wrote to Zimmermann about Goethe: "In all observations and from all sides, he is the greatest, best, most glorious human being that God has created." - A beautiful friendship based on full mutual recognition, respect and love developed between the two personalities, which lasted for a long time. Goethe not only appreciated Wieland as a person and as a poet; he also enjoyed spending time in his house and was always able to emphasize to friends what wonderful times he had had with Wieland and his friends. In his poem "To Psyche", written in 1776, Wieland sketches a brilliant picture of Goethe, completely imbued with true understanding and the most devoted admiration. Both Wieland and Goethe were visiting the estate of Frau von Keller near Erfurt at the beginning of 1776 with the aforementioned Frau Julie von Bechtolsheim. This visit, during which Goethe probably read scenes from his "Faust", inspired Wieland to write the above-mentioned poem.

Poetic tales

[ 28 ] As Goethe was particularly impressed by Wieland's poetic stories, he felt encouraged to write more of this kind. Through the "Winter Fairy Tale", written in 1776, the style and mood of the oriental fairy tale of "One Thousand and One Nights" found its way into German poetry. In contrast, the "Summer Fairy Tale", written a little later (1777), was borrowed from the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table. Wieland found the material in the "Bibliotheque universelle des Romans". This fairy tale is written in the tone of light artistic play, through which Wieland introduced the German public to a circle of legends that had been almost forgotten since the Middle Ages. Goethe and Merck, as well as others, held it in high esteem. The short poem "Hann und Gulpenheh, oder: Zuviel gesagt, ist nichts gesagt" (Hann and Gulpenheh, or: Too much said is nothing said), written in 1778, is based almost exactly on an oriental tale. The story comes from a Turkish novella collection "The Forty Viziers"; and Wieland found it in the "Bibliotheque universelle des Romans". - The poem "Der Vogelsang, oder die drei Lehren" is also from the same period. The material is borrowed from a translation of "One Thousand and One Nights", which Galland had published under the title "Contes Arabes". Here, Wieland has the opportunity to portray a king as he should not be. The content of the story is not unrelated to an essay that Wieland had published shortly before in "Mercur" on "The Divine Right of Authority". In it, he argued against what he considered to be the one-sided view that no power from above should impose a right on a people, but that all rights must emanate from the people themselves. Wieland, on the other hand, argued that the circumstances of life could not be governed by such abstract demands, but that the course of history meant that government fell to one or the other. - "Pervonte, or the Wishes" is adapted from an Italian folk tale. The first two parts were written in the spring of 1778, but the third was not added until 1795. Wieland also found this material in the "Bibliotheque universelle des Romans". But it is precisely this poem by Wieland that shows what free, rich imagination and complete mastery of form can make of a given material. At Wieland's funeral (1813), Goethe said to Falk about this creation: "The sculpture, the willfulness of the poem are unique, exemplary, indeed completely priceless. In these and similar products, it is Wieland's true nature, I would even say at its very best, that gives us pleasure."

"Oberon"

[ 29 ] Wieland reached the pinnacle of his creativity in his "Oberon". This romantic epic was written between November 1778 and February 1780 and was published in "Mercur" in the first months of 1780. Two intellectual currents flowed together in this poetic work. One arose from Wieland's interest in the character of Oberon, the fairy or elf king in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The second came from the "Bibliorh&que universelle des Romans" so often used by our poet. It is the story of a knight from the time of Charlemagne, Huon of Bordeaux. According to an old book of chivalry, it was incorporated into the aforementioned French library through an excerpt prepared by Count Tressan. - Wieland has now interwoven the quarrel and reconciliation of the ghost king Oberon with his wife Titania with the love and knightly adventure of the old Frankish hero, who travels to the Orient to conquer his wife under the greatest dangers and battles, and who then has to undergo the strongest tests of courage, privation and loyalty with the latter before he achieves his happiness. These tests are imposed on him by Oberon himself. For the test of his and his wife's fidelity must also lead to a turn for the better in the fate of Oberon and Titania. - In the most beautiful way, our poet develops these threads, half earthly, half supernatural, in true Romantic style. The whole can be followed like a grandly unfolding dream plot. For just as the dream creates and resolves conflicts, so it happens here. But the progress is always based, if not on an external, then all the more on an inner spiritual necessity and lawfulness. And this regularity is completely dramatic throughout the long twelve cantos. The treatment of verse and language is masterly in every respect. Goethe fully recognized all this and therefore wrote to Lavater after the poem was published: "Oberon will be loved and admired as a masterpiece of poetic art as long as poetry remains poetry, gold gold and crystal crystal." - Many have objected to the composition of the poem, believing that the poet has not fully succeeded in uniting the two plots linked to the couple Huon and Rezia on the one hand and Oberon on the other. Anyone who penetrates into the basic romantic character of the whole cannot make such an assertion. In such a style, the free interplay of motifs, the weaving in a dreamlike twilight, is not only possible, but quite appealing. And with such a style it is inadmissible to demand a strictly realistic motivation, an intellectual, dry clarity. Wieland also felt completely in his element during this work. He wrote to Merck on August 19, 1779: "My fifth and sixth cantos seem to me, entre nous, so good that it only annoys me not to be able to keep such a work until after my death. Then, I am sure, it would make a sensation from its rising to its passing." In a letter to a friend in Zurich, he calls Oberon the best thing that his head and heart have produced together since the former matured and the latter became calmer. When the work was published, Goethe even delighted his friend with a laurel wreath, to which he added the following significant lines: "When reading your Oberon, I would often have wished to testify my applause and pleasure to you quite vividly; there are so many things I have to tell you that I will probably never tell you. But, you know, the soul falls from the manifold into the simple when it thinks long; therefore, instead of everything, I send you here a sign, which I beg you to take in its primitive sense, as it is very significant. Receive from the hands of friendship what fellow and posterity will gladly confirm to you." It is by no means too much to say that many of the best of his age were quite in line with Goethe in their judgment of "Oberon".

[ 30 ] In a style similar to that of Oberon, Wieland then worked on a story whose basis was taken from an Italian novel of the sixteenth century: "Clelia and Sinibald, a legend from the twelfth century." However, he was unable to reach the heights of the former work. - The short story "The Water Skid" was also begun at that time, but was probably not completed until 1795.

[ 31 ] Through the latter creations, Wieland became the father of the important intellectual movement known as "German Romanticism". Even if he is less often mentioned in this context, in essence he certainly belongs in this direction with some of his finest achievements.

[ 32 ] Between all these works lies the three-act Singspiel "Rosamund", which was intended for performance on the Mannheim stage in 1777. In order to attend the latter, Wieland traveled to Mannheim in the winter of 1777 to 1778 and, to his deepest satisfaction, was able to meet the admirer of his muse, Goethe's mother, Frau Rat in Frankfurt am Main, who was a friend of his. - This was a very fruitful time for Wieland's work. The light dramatic works "La Philosophie endormie" and "Pandora" were also written during these years. The inspiration for the essay "Einige Lebensumstände Hans Sachsens", which was written in 1776, came from his correspondence with Goethe.

Wieland and older schools of thought

[ 33 ] Lavater's "Physiognomics" prompted Wieland to write "Thoughts on the Ideals of the Ancients" in 1777. In such prose writings, the richness, diversity and style of his mind became apparent. What can be said of these "Ideals" in this direction also applies to the "Dialogues in Elysium" written in 1780, the "Conversations on Some Recent World Events" (1782), the "Conversations with the Gods" (1789 to 1793) and especially the "Introduction to the Seventh Letter of Horace" (1781 to 1782), the "Epistle to a Young Poet" (1782). In the latter, he turns against immature young poets who turn to famous personalities in the belief that they are special geniuses, often making them quite uncomfortable. As editor of the "Mercur", Wieland naturally had to endure such an onslaught in particular. - The essay "Was ist Hochteutsch" (What is High German) belongs to the year 1782. Wieland also worked as a translator during this time. He published "Horace's Letters" (1781 to 1782), his "Satires" (1784 to 1786) and "Lucian of Samosata's Complete Works" (until 1789). - In his light, witty manner, he treated the much-maligned cynic Peregrinus Proteus (in the "Secret History of the Philosopher pp.") from 1789 to 1791, for whom he acted as advocate, as he did a few years later for the often-attacked Apollonius of Tyana in the novel "Agathodaemon". In this last work, he had the opportunity to address the cultural conditions at the time of the emergence of Christianity and its first form itself. He knew how to treat this difficult subject with spirit and dignity, in his own way. He was no less successful in doing this for the conditions in Greece at the time of the fourth century BC in the novel "Aristipp and some of his contemporaries" (1800). The work is written in epistolary form and shows an in-depth knowledge of the period from which the material originates. And this knowledge has been artistically processed in the free, intelligent drawing of personalities and events. - The poet also chose the epistolary form for two other stories that deal with a somewhat later culture in a similar way: "Menander and Glycerion" (1802) and "Krates and Hipparchia" (1804). In the first work, Wieland wants to give an unvarnished picture of Greek love life; in the second, he wants to show that the idea of a spiritualized conception of love was not at all alien to this life. - A number of novellistic stories are combined under the overall title "Das Hexameron von Rosenhain".

Wieland's last works

[ 34 ] In 1804, "Euthanasia. Conversations on life after death". Here, Wieland turned against the narrow-minded notion that virtue only acquires its value through its reward in a future life, rather than carrying it within itself.

[ 35 ] Of occasional poems, the following are worthy of attention due to the beauty of their language and the warmth of their content: "To Olympia" and "On October 24, 1784". They are addressed to Duchess Amalia, his "Olympian patron queen", while "Merlin's prophesying voice" is addressed to the hereditary princess Maria Pavlovna. The latter poem marks the end of Wieland's poetic career.

[ 36 ] Wieland's patriarchal nature was often emphasized in his circle of friends. And for the quiet nature of his Weimar life, which flowed with participation in all things human, this description is certainly apt. His personal existence is characterized by this calmness and a harmony of soul that is quite congenial within certain limits, and this is also reflected in all his later creations. Only in such a way was it possible to find the tones that we encounter in "Aristippus", only such inner unity can the spiritual irony with which Athenian life at the time of Pericles is richly depicted. The character portrayal of Socrates in this epistolary novel also stems from the same view of life and attitude. - For all the unpretentiousness of his nature, Wieland imprinted his own character on all his works. It has been shown that he borrowed his material either from other literary creations or from cultural and intellectual history. As such, he knew how to put his stamp on the foreign, the appropriated. Its significance lies in the way it is treated. And this form of Wieland's independence can even be seen in his translations of Lucian, Florazen and Cicero.

[ 37 ] Nowhere are his translations literal, but they are always real conquests of the foreign for German intellectual life.

Wieland's last years

[ 38 ] The effect that Wieland achieved is probably best expressed in the fact that the Göschen publishing house in Leipzig was able to begin a complete edition of his works in 1794, even in four different editions. This had grown to 36 volumes by 1802. - From 1797 onwards, the poet was able to live on the Osmannstedt estate, which he had purchased. Wieland's long-desired quiet solitude was marred by the fact that in September 1800 he had to watch Sophie Brentano, the granddaughter of his childhood friend la Roche, who had become very dear to him, pass away at the most beautiful age. She had visited Osmannstedt twice, in 1799 and 1800, the first time with her grandmother. The other loss that hit Wieland was the death of his wife in November 1801. - He was no longer able to stay on his estate alone; he sold it and spent the rest of his life back in Weimar. - He had to mourn loved ones even more often, such as Herder in 1803, to whom he was deeply attached as a friend, Sophie la Roche in February 1807 and the noble woman to whom he owed so much, Duchess Amalie, in April of the same year. In 1806, he also witnessed the storm of war that blew over Germany and, like Goethe, got to know Napoleon personally. The latter even decorated him with the Legion of Honor. In the period that followed, Wieland was even quieter than before, since the friends mentioned were still alive. He also knew how to enjoy and make use of this peace and quiet. And on January 20, 1813, the life of the octogenarian died quietly and calmly. He was buried on the 25th in the Osmannstedt garden, which used to be his property and where Sophie Brentano and his wife are buried. There is a small memorial on the grave with the inscription: "Love and friendship embraced the kindred souls in life / And their mortal lives are covered by this common stone." - Goethe gave a funeral oration honoring his friend in the most beautiful way in the "Amalia" lodge of the Freemasons, which Wieland had joined in 1809.

[ 39 ] If Wieland's posthumous fame could not be fully realized by the great stars Lessing, Schiller and Goethe, the greatest of the three, Goethe himself, did much to ensure that the esteemed contributor to the development of German intellectual life was given his due.

AT the point of time in modern spiritual evolution when we see the dawn of the new world-conception breaking forth, at that time in which we must record the great achievements of Kepler and Galileo, in which Giordano Bruno, in a certain measure, outlines the great problem of a modern world-conception,—at this moment we meet the solitary thinker to whom the present reflections shall be dedicated, the simple shoemaker of Goerlitz, Jacob Boehme. He struggled with the highest problems of existence in a way which can occupy our thinking and feeling to this day in the deepest manner, and will probably occupy the thinking and feeling of human beings for a long time to come.

A peculiar figure this Jacob Boehme, a figure who strove and struggled in solitude, whereas elsewhere in the spiritual life the single currents united to form a great comprehensive tableau. And in a certain sense one might say that the solitary striving of Jacob Boehme appears almost as interesting, from a certain standpoint, as the flowing together of the different points of view which meet us elsewhere in that epoch. And then we see how, very strangely, what Jacob Boehme found in his own solitary mind, even in his century, received the greatest imaginable dissemination—the greatest imaginable dissemination we may say, considering the fact that we are dealing with a deeply significant spiritual matter. Precisely through the manifestations of his adversaries we see how far his influence extended after only a few decades had passed since his death. Again and again, Jacob Boehme was the object of appreciative and admiring, or rejecting and ridiculing, contemplation. And when we observe what came into being as his following, or as his opposition, we have the impression that both the adherents and the attackers knew they were dealing with a very strange phenomenon.

This phenomenon is strange, especially to those who wish to understand every personality that appears in the spiritual life of humanity on the basis of the immediate conditions, so to speak, of the age and the surroundings. We see, for instance, how people try to understand Goethe by collecting all sorts of details of his life, even the most unimportant, and believe that by assembling these details they can acquire this or that to explain his corresponding spiritual life. It is not possible in this manner really to acquire much for the understanding of Jacob Boehme. External influences are difficult to verify through external science, and it is still harder to understand how Jacob Boehme grew out of that which constituted the spiritual life of his time.

Many, therefore, have professed the opinion that in Jacob Boehme we have to do with a kind of spiritual meteor. All that arose there, all that this personality had to give, appears as if it had suddenly sprung up, revealing itself out of the depths of his strange soul. Others then have tried to explain that many a turn of expression, many a way of presenting his ideas, shows similarity in words and turns of expression to the formulae of the alchemists, or to some philosophical or other tendencies that were still alive in his time. But whoever enters more deeply into the whole mentality of Jacob Boehme will find that such a procedure has hardly more value than if one were to examine the “language” in connection with an eminent personality, who, after all, must always express himself in a language. For when Jacob Boehme makes use of alchemistic formulae, or such things, it is only verbal clothing. That which makes such an exceedingly powerful impression, however, on one who seeks to understand him presents itself with an originality such as is found only in the very greatest minds.

In contrast to this, there are a few clues which are not quite compatible with modern thinking—with the modern world-conception—but which, for the person who is capable of entering into such things, throw light on how Jacob Boehme was able to soar up to his high spiritual standpoint. In order to connect our reflections with his life, to the extent that it has a bearing here, we need mention only a few biographical facts.

Jacob Boehme was the son of very poor parents and came from Alt-Seidenberg in the vicinity of Goerlitz. He was born in 1575. In his youth he had to tend the cattle with other village boys. As is apparent from this, he grew up in complete poverty, and since a person growing up in this way does not have any particular means of education, we shall find it understandable that even as a boy of twelve or thirteen years Jacob Boehme could hardly read and only barely write. But another experience confronts us even during his boyhood, of which a faithful biographer heard from him out of his own mouth. We shall first tell this experience. As we have said, it is not one of those things which are quite intelligible to modern consciousness.

When Jacob Boehme was once tending the cattle with other shepherd boys, he withdrew from the company of the boys and climbed a moderately high mountain in the vicinity of his native locality, the “Landskrone.” He declared that he had seen there in the bright noontime something like an entrance-gate into the mountain. He went inside and there found a vessel, a kind of vat, filled with pure gold. That made such an impression of fearful awe on his soul that he ran away and retained only the memory of this peculiar experience.

One can, to be sure, speak of a “dream dreamed in the waking state.” One may, for all that, grant the right to those who are satisfied with such an explanation. But the essential point is not whether one calls such an occurrence a “dream,” or gives it another name, but what it releases in the mind of the person who “dreams” it, what effect it produces in the soul. And from the way in which Jacob Boehme later told this occurrence to his friend we see that it had engraved itself deeply on his mind, that it had released significant forces in his soul so that it had the highest psychological significance for him.

Let us, therefore, grant to the rationalists the right to explain such an experience, which was in any case a significant happening in Jacob Boehme's soul, in the way in which they likewise wish to explain the event of the appearance of Christ before Paul at Damascus. Only, an explanation which resorts to these things must also admit that such significant work as that of Paul, which is so intimately connected with Christianity, proceeded from a “dream.”

Even the boy Jacob Boehme, when he had this experience, felt something like the deepest stirring up of soul forces which are otherwise not active in the soul. The important thing is this inner releasing of deeper-lying forces of the soul. The important thing is the testimony of such a fact which proves that we have to do here with a human being who could descend to a far greater profundity in his soul life than thousands and thousands of others.

Another event of a similar nature must also be borne in mind, of which we must again say that it remained so fixed in Jacob Boehme's memory that the brightness and the significance of this event shone over his whole life, in so far as this life was an inner one.

In his fourteenth year Jacob Boehme was sent to a shoemaker as an apprentice and often had to stand guard, so to speak, in his master's shop. He was not permitted to sell anything. On one occasion—and this story, again, came from the mouth of his loyal biographer, Abraham von Frankenberg—an individuality who immediately made a singular impression on Jacob Boehme came into the shop and wanted to buy shoes. But, because the boy was forbidden to sell shoes, he said this to the stranger. The latter offered him a high price and it came about that the shoes were sold.

Then, however, the following took place, which remained in Jacob Boehme's memory throughout his life. When the stranger had departed and a short time had passed, Jacob Boehme heard his name called: “Jacob, Jacob!” and when he went out the stranger seemed to him even more singular than at first. There was something sun-like, shining in his eyes and he said words to him which sounded very strange: “Jacob, you are now still small, but you will once become an entirely different human being, about whom the world will break out in amazement. But remain humble before your God and read the Bible diligently. You will have to endure much persecution, but be strong, for your God loves you and will be merciful to you.”—Jacob Boehme regarded such an occurrence as much more essential than any other, external biographic experiences.

And his biographer relates further how Jacob Boehme himself told him the following: It was in the year 1600 when, during seven days, Jacob Boehme felt as if withdrawn from his physical body, felt as if he were in an entirely different world, felt as if, with regard to his soul, he was re-born.

We have to do here—if one wants to call it that—with a permanently abnormal condition of the soul. But Jacob Boehme experienced this, his “re-birth,” also simply more or less as something which could, according to his conception, take place with a human soul. He did not become, let us say, a visionary or a false idealist through this, nor did he become an arrogant person, but continued to practice his shoemaker's trade in all humility—or, we might say, in all sobriety. And even the experience of the year 1600, the withdrawal into another world, remained to him a phenomenon of which he said to himself: “You have looked into a kingdom of joy, into a kingdom of spiritual reality, but that is a thing of the past.” And he continued to live from day to clay pursuing his trade in his sober manner.

In the year 1610 this experience of re-birth was repeated. He then began to record what he had experienced in his states of exaltation, since he felt called upon to do this. Thus, in 1612 his first work, The Dawn in Its Ascent, came into being, later entitled Aurora. Regarding it, he said that he did not write it down through his ordinary ego, but that it was given to him word for word; that, in comparison with his ordinary ego, he lived in a being which was encompassing, which reached into all parts of the world and immersed itself in this world.

To be sure, the revelations did not do him much good. When several people noticed what he had to say, what he had written down, a few copies of the manuscript of Aurora were made and circulated. The result was that Gregorius Richter, the deacon of Goerlitz—where Jacob Boehme had meanwhile, in 1594, established himself as shoemaker—railed at Jacob Boehme from the pulpit and not only condemned his work, but also succeeded in having him called before the council of the city of Goerlitz. About this I will now simply repeat the words that we know from his biographer. He relates that the verdict of the council was that Jacob Boehme must be forbidden to write further, for only those who were academicians were permitted to write and Jacob Boehme was not an academician, but an idiot, and must, therefore, refrain from writing!

Thus Jacob Boehme was branded as an idiot. And, since he was a good-natured man on the whole, who could not quite believe—because of the simplicity in his nature—that he would be considered one of the damned entirely without reason, he did indeed resolve to write nothing further in the near future.

But then came the time when he could no longer do otherwise. And in the years 1620 to 1624, up to his death, he wrote rapidly, one after another, a great number of his works, as for instance: The Book of the Contemplative Life, De Signatura Rerum, or Concerning the Birth and Designation of All Beings, or the elucidation of the first book of Moses. But the number of his works is rather large and in this connection, many a reader may fare strangely. Some have said that Jacob Boehme repeats himself again and again. It is true; one cannot deny that certain things appear over and over again in his writings. If, however, a person draws the conclusion from this that you know the whole Jacob Boehme if you know a few of his works, because he always repeats himself—though we cannot simply contradict persons who say this—it must be said that whoever contents himself with having read one work of Jacob Boehme's and has no appetite to read the other works also, does not understand much of Jacob Boehme. But whoever takes the trouble to go through his other works will not rest, in spite of all the repetitions, until he has read even the very last ones.

If, from this characterization of his nature, we try to penetrate more into his train of thought, into the spiritual nature of Jacob Boehme, it must be said that for modern man, who lives only in the cultural life of our time, much indeed must be unintelligible, not only in the content of Jacob Boehme's works, but also in his whole manner of presentation. At first the presentation appears completely chaotic. To be sure, one becomes slowly accustomed to it. But then there still remains for many persons something that is a hard nut to crack. We find that he has very peculiar definitions of words—quite unintelligible for the modern mind. Thus we find that in his explanation of the world he again and again uses words such as “salt,” “mercury” and “sulphur.” And if he wishes to analyse what “sul” signifies, what “phur” signifies, and finds all sorts of deep thoughts therein, then these modern minds must say to themselves that one cannot do anything with this, for what can be the significance of offering explanations about a universal principle by explaining the syllables of a word individually, such as “sul” and “phur”? That is quite alien to the modern mind.

To be sure, if a person enters further into the mind of Jacob Boehme, he will find that Jacob Boehme clothes what he wishes tó say in all kinds of alchemistic formulae. But only when one penetrates through to what expresses itself livingly as the spirit of Jacob Boehme in what he found available, only then does one find that something entirely different lives in these formulae from what we know today as scientific thinking, as thinking with regard to world-conceptions, or any other thinking.

What lives in Jacob Boehme's soul resembles most closely that which has been characterized here in these lectures as the first stage of a higher spiritual life, as the stage of imaginative cognition. We have emphasized the fact that he who ascends from ordinary life in the sense world comes, through a special development of his soul, to the point where he perceives a new world of pictures, of imaginations. And we have stressed the fact—I beg you to call to mind precisely the character of this discussion¹ that, when the human being has brought it about that he does not only form imaginations, but that pictures, imaginative conceptions, shoot up out of the unknown depths of the soul-life and he experiences a new world, then he who desires to ascend to new cognition must make the firm resolution to suppress completely this first flashing up of an imaginative world in the soul and to wait until it rises up a second time from a much deeper-lying world.

The whole state of soul, the whole inner mood to which Jacob Boehme comes is, therefore, most nearly comparable to that which meets a person in his soul-life who ascends to supersensible knowledge. Nowhere, to be sure, does it appear that something like that which modern spiritual-science proclaims as its conscious methods is already to be found in Jacob Boehme. But whoever were to believe that all this appeared in Jacob Boehme as if of its own accord would, nevertheless, be wrong. He himself once said that he had striven unceasingly for the spirit's—for God's—assistance, and that a luminous, imaginative world resulted from this unceasing striving.

Thus, we cannot say that he was simply a naive, imaginatively cognizant person, but we must say that he grasped naively at the means which lead the human being to the height of imaginative cognition. It is to be assumed, naturally, that such an imaginative force was in his soul. In other words, he arrived at imaginative cognition by just the same paths, only more quickly, more as a matter of course, than one can arrive at it through such methods as are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Thus Jacob Boehme stands before us as an imaginatively cognizant human being. But this imaginative knowledge struggles to the surface with primal power, as if it were a matter of course, as if borne by a strong inner will.

Thus, we see this strong inner will, which cannot express itself in external deeds—his humble occupation prevents this—surrounding his soul like a flood, so that the soul immerses itself in this flood. We see powerful pictures being born out of this will, through which he tries to solve the riddles of the universe. In Jacob Boehme, it is not so much the individual results that matter, as this mood and condition of his soul. And he feels that, in his striving, he is driven to something which is not the ordinary cognizing human ego, but which is connected with the forces that bind the human being—out of the subconscious in his soul, out of the depths of his soul—to the whole cosmos; that is, to what lives and weaves outside in nature.

The human being who really has an earnest desire for knowledge feels that there is not only something rational in the act of cognition, but something that he achieves for himself through suffering and pain, and through the overcoming of suffering and pain. And he notices, when he tries to penetrate into nature and existence with present-day, ordinary means, how he really separates himself from nature and existence through all such means. But when we expose forces in our soul which rest otherwise in the subconscious, then we feel that these are connected with nature and existence in quite another, more intimate sense. In order to explain this, I should like to draw upon the following.

It is a well-known fact, and one hears it often related, that in regions where an earthquake or some other elemental event is imminent, certain animals flee from the locality of the earthquake or some similar occurrence, or at least become restless, so that they are like prophetic announcers of what is to happen. We may say that the instinctive life of the animal is more closely connected with what takes place outside in nature than the whole state of soul of the human being. But in the depths of the human soul, there lives something which is not the same as the instinct of animals, but which is deeper than this animal instinct, and which is also closely connected with the forces of nature. And in descending into the depths of his soul, Jacob Boehme felt himself more closely interwoven with the forces of nature.

But one thing stands out particularly. It has been emphasized that only when that which appears as imaginations and an imaginative world has been suppressed, extinguished, and then lights up again as if of its own accord,—only then does this second imaginative world have value. (As I said, I beg you to call to mind the earlier discussions.) Now, it is most singular if we compare the path of Jacob Boehme with this.

In the year 1600 he experiences a re-birth, feels himself transported into a spiritual world, into a “kingdom of joy.” Then he continues to live in sober simplicity. For ten years it is as if what he had experienced were submerged. Then it emerges a second time in the year 1610. Did not then the path which we represented as the right one appear as a natural phenomenon in Jacob Boehme's soul? For us, it is this that makes Jacob Boehme approach so closely that upon which we ourselves have focused our attention as being the natural way into the supersensible worlds. If we take this into account his experience will not seem as strange to us as it may have seemed at first sight.²

It will have no value for the objective cognition of the sceptic, to be sure, if one reflects profoundly on the combination out of the syllables “sul” and “phur,” or about other such things. But I beg you to call to mind what we explained concerning human speech once on an earlier occasion³ how we showed that in the course of human evolution “speech” really preceded abstract, conceptual thinking, and how Jean Paul is entirely right when he emphasizes that the child learns to think through speech, instead of forming speech through thinking. Speech, therefore, is something more elementary, primal than thinking. When we see how the whole of nature arises again in our thoughts, then we feel how thought is separated from the realities of nature by a world chasm. But, when the sound as something more like the sounds in nature—and, after all, speech was originally composed of such sounds,—when the sound of speech is wrested from the human soul, then something of the whole system of law in the universe works into the depths of the soul. And then a kind of echo in relation to nature tears itself loose in an entirely different way from that occurring when something is released out of thoughts as an echo.

A soul of the present time no longer has any feeling for the affinity of speech and sounds in nature. As a contemporary soul one can only slowly struggle through to the feeling that in all speech there is something which directly resembles an echo of the impressions of the external world. In such a personality as Jacob Boehme, who draws deeper forces from his soul with elemental power, it is only natural that in this respect also, in feeling also, as it were, he is carried back to that impression of speech which was once characteristic of humanity and which the child, more or less unconsciously, still develops.

And now if we extend what has just been set forth to include the strange analyses concerning the joining together of syllables into words, then we can understand that what nature brings about in the human soul is only a feeling by means of the sounds; that nature wishes to create her own language through sound itself. Precisely because Jacob Boehme stood closer to nature in his soul, he also lived more in speech than in thought, and his whole philosophy is more a feeling with, a sympathizing with, that which lives and weaves outside in nature than any abstract grasping of things. What I mean to say is that, when a person lets a thought of Jacob Boehme's really have its effect on him, he feels as if the thought were as akin to what Jacob Boehme observed as he himself is akin only to that which he senses as some kind of taste, when he also feels contact with nature.

Thus, does Jacob Boehme feel the contact with nature. He feels in the inner being what weaves and works and lives outside in nature. He lives nature's life with it, and in his representations he gives, really, that wherein he participates, so that one feels what he perceived vibrating in his words. To him, therefore, words are something which he feels especially to be like that which is the “How” in nature itself. One does not have to ponder, therefore, over the question whether such discussions as the above-mentioned about “sul” and “phur” mean anything particular in Jacob Boehme, but one should try to re-experience in connection with this soul how it makes the experience of the universe into the experience of the soul and gives as its revelations that which the soul can experience.

No one understands Jacob Boehme who simply supposes that he perceived thunder and lightning, clouds, or cloud transformations, or the growth of grass like a modern human being. A person understands him only if he knows that with the flashing lightning, with the rolling thunder, with the changing clouds something is transformed for his soul-life, so that something takes place in his soul which stands there as the solution of the corresponding riddle. Thus, what takes place in the world becomes for Jacob Boehme a riddle of his own experience.

And now, if we look at him thus, we understand how he could wrestle with a task which meets us elsewhere during his time also, and which long occupied other spirits, even the greatest spirit of recent times. This same sixteenth century, in which occurred the birth of Jacob Boehme, gave birth to the Faust riddle, which places next to the striving and struggling man the enemy of man, who drags down man's striving nature into the base, sensual—into that which Jacob Boehme's age called “the

Devilish.” Poetically, Goethe still struggled with the problem which places “evil” in the world structure. Must not the human being ask again and again: How does it come about that the irregular, the unsuitable, places itself antagonistically in the harmonious universe, in the wise guidance of the world? And the question of the origin of evil lies in the riddle of Faust. It is really already in the book of Job, but it appeared especially powerfully in the sixteenth century.

In what manner could this question appear before the mind of Jacob Boehme?

We need only to take a few words from the Dawn in Its Ascent and we shall see at once how that which is elsewhere a world problem becomes for Jacob Boehme at first an inner soul problem. There he says approximately the following words: If an understanding and thoughtful man shows himself anywhere in the world, the Devil at once meddles with his soul and seeks to drag his nature down into the vulgar, common, sensual,—seeks to ensnare the man in pride and conceit.

Here we see at once how the problem is grasped by Jacob Boehme as a soul problem. We see how he searches in the soul itself for the power of evil, which interferes with the good soul forces. And the question arises for him: What does the soul have to do with the soul forces that strive towards evil? Thus the problem of evil becomes for Jacob Boehme finally an inner soul question.⁴ But because for him soul and universe correspond to each other, the soul at once expands into a universe. And now the peculiar thing for him is that the question of evil is transformed into an entirely different question, into the question of human consciousness—in fact, of all spiritual consciousness, of the whole character of the life of consciousness.

It is difficult today with our current conceptions to illuminate Jacob Boehme's soul life and what the cosmic questions and their solutions became for him, and a person cannot make himself very clear if he uses the words of Jacob Boehme, because they are no longer current coin in our time. I will try, therefore — entirely in the spirit of Jacob Boehme, but with somewhat different words — to approach what he wished to say about the question of evil, which becomes with him a question concerning the whole nature of spiritual consciousness in general.

Let us once try to think how our consciousness works, what our whole consciousness would be if we were not in a position to hold fast in memory, as thought, what we once experienced in our soul, in our consciousness. Let us try to think how our consciousness would have to be something entirely different if we were not capable of drawing up out of our memory what we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday, years ago. The whole content of consciousness rests on the fact that we can remember past experience, and our consciousness does not extend back beyond that point of time to which we can remember. We began then to grasp ourselves as an “ego,” to have the coherent thread of our consciousness, to be at home in our soul life.

Upon what, therefore, does the whole nature of consciousness depend? Upon the fact that we know: Now we are at this moment experiencing something in our consciousness. When we experience something, we are directly connected with this experience. In the moment when we experience something we are nothing else than our experience itself. A person who visualizes a red colour is united with the experience of it at the moment when he visualizes this red colour. Whoever conceives an ideal is, at that moment, one with the ideal. I le distinguishes himself only afterwards from his experience, while before he was one with it. Thus our whole consciousness is something that we first experienced and then stored up as an objective thing in our inner soul life. Such storing away in the objective makes our consciousness possible. We could not develop any consciousness if everything that we experienced were always forgotten—completely removed. By placing our experience before ourselves as counterpart (Gegenwurf),⁵ as Jacob Boehme says,—by confronting ourselves with it as with an opposite—only thereby does our real consciousness ignite. We must observe this in connection with the simplest fact of our consciousness.

In his clairvoyant contemplation Jacob Boehme extends this experience, which any and every consciousness can have, over all the world. He says: And if a Divine Being in the world had once had the capacity only to live in Himself, but not to confront Himself with His experience—as counterpart—consciousness would never have come to be, even in a Divine Being. But for the Divine Being the counterpart is the world. Just as we confront ourselves with our conceptions, just as we become conscious of ourselves through the object, so the counterpart for Divine Consciousness is the world. And everything that surrounds us Divine Consciousness set out of Itself, in order to become aware of Itself thereby,—just as we develop our consciousness only when we set up our own experiences as counterpart.

For Jacob Boehme the grasping of this thought was not a theory, but something that brought him satisfaction with regard to a question which signified a matter of destiny for him—the great Faust question. He could now say to himself: “If I am carried back in thought into Divine Consciousness prior to the world, as it were, this Divine Consciousness could come to Itself, become real consciousness, only by confronting Itself with the world, in order to become aware of Itself through Its counterpart.” Thus, everything that lives and weaves and is took its rise from the Divine-Psychic, from a Will of this Divine-Psychic, which developed the craving, as Will, to become aware of Itself. And in that moment (this now became clear to Jacob Boehme) when the Unitary Consciousness set up Its counterpart and wanted to become aware of Itself—that is, duplicated Itself, created, as it were, the reflected image of Itself—It created this reflected image in a variety, in the multiplicity of single members, just as the single human soul does not have its life only in single limbs, but in limbs that have a certain independence, such as hand, and foot, and head. A person does not get close to the reality of Jacob Boehme if he describes him as a pantheist. He must go through the train of thought in a similar way, must understand how Jacob Boehme conceived everything that appears before us as a “counterpart of the Godhead.”

To the counterpart of the Godhead, which the Godhead set out of Itself in order to become aware of Itself thereby, belongs also the human being as he is. From this point of view of his. Jacob Boehme says: Men direct their gaze upwards; see the stars, the masses of clouds, the mountains and the plants, and would often assume the existence of still another special region of the Godhead. But I say to you, you unreasoning human being, that you yourself belong to the counterpart of the Godhead; for how could you sense anything and become aware of anything of Divine Being in yourself if you had not flowed forth from this Divine Being? You have sprung from this Divine Being. He placed you opposite Himself, as He also gave birth to you out of Himself, and you shall be buried in Him. And how could you be raised from the dead if an alien Godhead stood confronting you? How could you call yourself a child of God if you were not one with the substance and being of God!

That he does not refer to any ordinary pantheism is expressed by him through the fact that he says: “The external world is not God; it will never in eternity be called God, but a being in which God reveals Himself. … If one says that God is all. that God is heaven and earth and also the external world, it is true, for everything has its origin and genesis in Him. But what can I do with such a speech, which is no religion?”

One cannot call him a pantheist. Just as the question concerning the essential nature of the world is not, for him, something artificially sought after, neither is that which he gives himself as an answer to it. Rather is it an experience for him. He felt the prerequisite conditions determining his own consciousness and extended these over Divine Consciousness, because he knew clearly that the nature of his own capacity for consciousness was an echo of the actualities of the world.

And in the answer to the question of the soul and the Divine in the soul he finds also the answer to the question concerning the origin of evil. This is something exceedingly characteristic of Jacob Boehme, which has again and again aroused the admiration of profound thinkers. Thus, for instance, Schelling was very significantly affected when he became aware of the manner in which Jacob Boehme approached the question concerning the significance of evil in the world, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century also admired the profundity of thought with which Jacob Boehme took hold of this question.

One may say, with regard to many persons who have sought an answer to the question concerning the origin of evil, that they searched for the primal cause of evil. It is characteristic of Jacob Boehme that he went further than that point which, according to the opinion of many people, is the sole and only limit to which one can go. For where else should a person go if he does not wish to stop at this primal cause? Jacob Boehme goes beyond the primal cause when he wishes to solve the question concerning the significance of evil. He goes to that which he calls, significantly, not the primal cause, or primal ground (Urgrund), but the groundlessness, (Ungrund), and here we actually stand before an experience of the human soul in Jacob Boehme which can be admired in the highest degree if one has the requisite organ.

Certainly, the ordinary soul which has its roots in the modern world conception does not, perhaps, possess this organ; but one can have this organ which feels admiration when, in Jacob Boehme, the transition is made from the primal ground to the groundlessness. And, after all, it is really something like the egg of Columbus, something exceedingly simple. For, at the moment when Jacob Boehme had solved the world riddle for himself in the way we have just described—when it was clear to him that there is a relationship between God and the world like that between the soul and the limbs of the body—then he could also say to himself: When the world came into existence as counterpart of the Godhead, there appeared in this counterpart the dividedness, the differences among the limbs, as we should say.⁶ The dividedness of the single limbs of the body confronting the single soul made its appearance. Is not every single limb of the body good with regard to functions of the soul? Can we not say that the right hand is good, the left hand is good, everything is good in as much as it serves the functions of the soul? But cannot the right hand, because of its relative independence, indeed just because of its excellence, injure the left hand?

Here we have the independence of the corporeal, that which needs to have “no ground” (cause), set up against that which constitutes harmony. We see this placed in the primal ground (cause), which simply results from the fact that from the “primal ground” we pass on to the “groundlessness.” Just as we do not need to seek in light the cause of darkness, so we do not need to seek in good the cause of evil. But as the world proves itself, for Jacob Boehme, to be the counterpart of the Godhead, the possibility arises in this world of dividedness for the individual limbs to work against each other, in that, because they must have their independence for the sake of the purpose of the world—according to the goal-seeking character of the world—they must also develop this independence.

Thus, for Jacob Boehme, evil does not have its roots in that which one explains, but in that which we find as “groundlessness” without the need for explaining it. But the latter appears thereby, as if of its own accord, as a counterpart of good. And now evil, the unsuitable, the harmful in the world becomes for Jacob Boehme itself a counterpart, in contrast to good,—just as we become aware of ourselves through contact with an object. We move along in space; we do not think of ourselves. But we begin at once to think of ourselves if, for instance, we knock our head against a window. Then we become aware of ourselves through the counterpart, through the object. Just as Jacob Boehme confronts consciousness with the counterpart, just as he experiences himself through the counterpart, so the good, the suitable, the advantageous and useful becomes aware of itself, for Jacob Boehme, through the fact that it has to preserve itself in the presence of the harmful and unsuitable. It becomes aware of itself in that “evil” became the counterpart of good, like the objects that are experienced through collision with the external world.

Thus Jacob Boehme sees in good the force which assimilates its counterpart, just as man, in his memory, assimilates more and more what he himself first set out of his consciousness. We find thus a constant absorption of evil and, thereby, an enriching of the good with the evil. And as darkness relates itself to light, in that light shines into darkness and thereby first becomes visible, so does good first become effective by working into evil and relating itself to evil as light to darkness. Just as light graduates to the different colours through darkness and could not appear as light if darkness were not opposed to it, so can good perform its world-function only by experiencing itself through its counterpart, through evil.

Thus Jacob Boehme looks into the world. He sees the good effective in such a way that it finds itself confronted by evil, but that it takes evil into its own domain, absorbs it, so to speak. Thus a pre-earthly occurrence appears for Jacob Boehme in such a way that he says to himself: The Deity once placed other spiritual beings opposite Himself. These were, like our present nature at a later stage, a counterpart of the Deity. Thus these beings were already a counterpart of the Deity, whereby the Deity achieved consciousness of Himself. But they behaved towards the Deity like the limbs that turn against their own body.

Thereby the Being Lucifer came into existence for Jacob Boehme. What is Lucifer for him? He is the Being who, after the counterpart was created, used the separateness, the multiplicity, to rebel against his Creator as independent counterpart. Thus, in the forces of the world which differ from and struggle against one another Jacob Boehme finds that which must be, but which contributes to the general evolution, nevertheless, by being absorbed in the course of development. In the same way he also conceives that all deeds of the opponent of the Gods—in order that the deeds of the Deity Himself may come to realization so much the more powerfully through the counterpart—are absorbed by the Deity, and that the self-realization of the Deity becomes only so much the more glorious through the forces which the opponent develops.

Into the depths of the world Jacob Boehme pursues the thought which extends the experiencing of consciousness to the cosmic experience of the origin and primal state of evil. And he puts into a simple formula—not what he gave theoretically, we must say, as the solution of the cosmic riddles, but what he experienced,—into the formula: No “Yes” without a “No,” for the “Yes” must first experience itself through its counterpart, through the “No.” “No Yes without a No” is the simple formula into which Jacob Boehme brought the whole problem of evil. And it is not a theoretical formula, but in this philosophy, there lies something like a most primal, most elemental experience.

For to know that there is no Yes without a No, that evil is absorbed by good and contributes to the evolution of the world,—that may yet be nothing. But it is something else to be a struggling soul, a soul that experiences pain and suffering, temptations and seductions, and to say to oneself: “All of this must be present, and although it is present I can procure for myself out of my living philosophical word—not by theorizing—the certainty and the consolation and the hope that the best in me will find the possibility of overcoming what is only the counterpart, the “No,” through the primal, through the Primordial Impulse (Wurf),⁷ through the “Yes.” And no matter how much I become entangled in evil, and no matter how small the ray of light is that extends over it,—I can and may hope for liberation, so that the good in me and not the evil will win the victory!

If such a philosophy passes over into certainty of redemption, then it is something which is, in this manner, connected with the personality, to be sure, but which has with this character of personality at the same time general human significance. If a person allows this to work upon his soul, he will gladly go on from this struggling soul which rises into the cold abstractions of the “Yes” and “No” in order to acquire therefrom the warmest soul content and the warmest soul experiences—then he will gladly go on from this soul, which gains through struggle confidence in its world conception, to the lonely man in Goerlitz who had no opportunity to found a school, for the time which men, under other circumstances, spend in spiritual things he had to spend in making shoes ... he had to gain the time by strenuous effort for his numerous works. Such a person will gladly go to the man whose books reveal how he struggled with language because his external education was so limited, but whose teachings, nevertheless, were disseminated and spread abroad after his death; who sat on his shoemaker's bench and had only few friends to whom he could open his heart. He had friends, it is true, to whom he wrote letters, but their number was small.

One sees him thus in his loneliness and feels as if a necessary connection existed herein. Just as one can think of Giordano Bruno only as journeying through the world, moving from land to land in order to proclaim something about the world as if with trumpet tone—just as one feels in him, who enters into the multiplicity of phenomena, that this journeying belongs to this world conception—so does one feel in the other case that this lonely shoemaker experienced something which could be experienced only in such a way that it took place as if in a solitary dialogue with the spirits of existence—in this solitary seership which we characterized at the beginning.

If we feel thus, then the sentiment grows in us, with regard to what the human being needs in order to solve the riddles of the world in a thoughtful, feeling way, that the greatest which the human being can experience in the world is independent of place and time, is subject only to the human soul's capacity for profound meditation, and that the soul can undertake the greatest world-migrations, the migrations into the spirit-regions, everywhere and always. Then there rings out to us from Jacob Boehme's soul, and touches our understanding, that which characterizes his world conception in such a significant expression when he says:

Wem Zeit wie Ewigkeit
Und Ewigkeit als wie die Zeit,
Der ist befreit von allem Streit.

To whom time is like eternity
And eternity like time,
He is freed from all strife.

This does not characterize his world conception in a theoretical respect, but it characterizes what his world conception really came to be through the fact that he was such a very special human being. For we have been able to emphasize that through his whole being he was more intimately connected with nature than the normal human being,—that he experienced the weaving and activity of nature in his own soul experiences. This leads us to sense a certain necessity in a designation which Jacob Boehme's friends gave him. They gave him a happy designation. For let us just consider the following:

When there was already a widely diffused, wonderfully detailed science over in the East, in the Orient, whose wisdom we admire if we learn to know it, we still find the very simplest spiritual culture on Central European soil. We find that something lives in all the souls of Central Europe which is like an intimate connection of the forces in the depths of the soul with the forces of nature and the nature-beings, and that the people threw twigs on the ground and saw in the “Runes” which took form all kinds of riddles which they sought to solve. These human beings were decipherers of “Rune riddles.” And of all that speaks out of the souls of the human beings in the forests of ancient Germania about what lives in nature, about what rustles through the trees, or lives mysteriously in human souls themselves,—we feel as if something of all this were active in Jacob Boehme's soul.

Then something in Jacob Boehme may well become comprehensible to us which would otherwise be the most difficult thing for us to comprehend today. We are not forcing things if we compare with the picture of the decipherer of runic riddles, who solves all sorts of riddles through the twigs which have been thrown on the ground and claims to perceive the revelations of the Divinity Himself—if we compare with this the way, for instance, in which Jacob Boehme sets up the syllables “sul” and “phur” runically out of his relationship with the feeling for speech, and wants to solve world riddles thereby. Here he appears to us like a last offspring of the forests of ancient Germania, and we understand why his friends gave him the name “Philosophus Teutonicus.” This includes, however, his significance for the coming times.

We look towards him and see how he struggled with the most exciting problems that can play into the human soul, how he arrived at peace in this struggle, and how his last words: “I enter into Paradise” were the seal to consistency of soul, to soul-practice. It is this that led him to peace of the soul. A breath of faith lives in all his books, and from this point of view Jacob Boehme can have significance for us and for all times. When it comes to the practical life consequence of a philosophy, this “Philosophus Teutonicus” will always be a dominant influence as regards that which he can really be for the soul if it becomes familiar with him.⁸

His adversaries sometimes make a strange impression—beginning in the year 1684, when the first rather strong refutation of Jacob Boehme by Kallo appeared, up until our time, when we also have a writing against Jacob Boehme, by a Leipzig scholar of the past century, Dr. Harles. It seems rather peculiar how Harles wishes to show that Jacob Boehme did nothing but warm up old alchemistic things, and then says that, after he had often tormented himself for days in order to present Jacob Boehme in this way, he was often glad when he could approach Matthias Claudius in the evening in order to find recuperation and edification in his words, after he had had to concern himself thus with Jacob Boehme throughout the day. And he desires also for his readers that they not allow themselves to be beguiled by the glistening and glimmering formulae of Jacob Boehme, but that they also take refuge in the simple and naive Matthias Claudius, whose gift to the soul is such that the soul does not have to seek its salvation in being elevated to the highest heights of spiritual life.

It may be that this Dr. Harles, the antagonist of Jacob Boehme, had to take refuge in Matthias Claudius in order to escape from the glistening, high-flown formulae of Jacob Boehme, and that he could find peace in Claudius, in contrast to his experience with Jacob Boehme. Only, it makes a strange impression on one who knows that Matthias Claudius himself took refuge, after he had achieved what Dr. Harles found in his works, in some one who not only knew Jacob Boehme, but even translated him—in Saint Martin, who was a faithful pupil of Jacob Boehme! Thus it is very good not only to know wherein Dr. Harles, the antagonist of Jacob Boehme, sought edification, but also to know wherein Matthias Claudius sought his edification!

But the world conception of Jacob Boehme is one that is suited to lead beyond contradictions, if only one does not stop at it. The whole nature of the lectures that have been given here has shown that within the world conception which is represented here we should not remain standing at any one phenomenon, but that whatever of the spiritual world can be grasped directly through the forces of our age should be grasped. Certainly Jacob Boehme remains a significant personality, a star of the first magnitude in the spirit-heavens of humanity—yet no one will stop at him. The representations of spiritual-science which are given today are, therefore, by no means given from the standpoint of Jacob Boehme, but from that of our age, and the next time we shall show, in contrast, what an entirely modern spirit has to say.⁹

But Jacob Boehme becomes still more interesting if we transport ourselves into his spirit-nature—which stands upright in simplicity and solitude, and takes flight with his soul into the highest region of clairvoyance,—and if we find how this spirit-nature could spread peace over Jacob Boehme's soul, which can subsequently be felt by all who approach him with understanding or, at least, seeking for understanding. For this reason, intellectual characterizations will not come close to the reality of Jacob Boehme, but only such characterizations as endeavour to feel what a human being like Jacob Boehme felt, what streamed forth from him—as, for instance, in the three lines which I have cited.

And only then can the words with which I essayed to characterize Jacob Boehme gain their significance if those present feel that they were not said in order to culminate in a theory or theoretical characterization of Jacob Boehme, but to culminate in this: that, when we are directly confronted by the personality of Jacob Boehme, something streams out from it—and streams out so much the more warmly and intensively the more we learn to know it—which can sum up what has been said in words designating his peace, his serenity:

To whom time is like eternity
And eternity like time,
He is freed from all strife.

• 1. See lecture by Rudolf Steiner entitled: Die Wege der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis.
• 2. See also: Rudolf Steiner, Kosmischc und menschliche Geschichte,, Vol. V, Lecture 3.
• 3. See: Rudolf Steiner - Geisteswissenschaft und de Sprache.
• 4. See also: Rudolf Steiner, Geisteswissenschaft als Forderung unserer Zeit; Vol. VII, Das Böse im Lichte der Erkenntnis vom Geiste.
• 5. The term Wurf is almost untranslatable. It is apparently intended to suggest the primordial source from which all that is takes its rise. Gegenwurf is that which is created by the Wurf, its counterpart.
• 6. He did not use these words, but we wish to characterize according to the essence rather than the words, for we shall, thereby, come closer to understanding him.
• 7. The term Wurf is almost untranslatable. It is apparently intended to suggest the primordial source from which all that is takes its rise. Gegenwurf is that which is created by the Wurf, its counterpart.
• 8. Compare: Rudolf Steiner—Die Rätsel der Philosophie, Vol. I.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner, Die Weltanschauung eines Kulturforschers der Gegenwart (Herman Grimm) und die Geistesforschuug.