The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The same room as in Scene 1. Capesius and Strader.

Capesius (to Strader who is entering):
A hearty welcome to the friend whose tongue
With many a disputatious argument
Stoutly withstood me! 'Tis long time since
Thou crossed this threshold. Yet in earlier days
Thou wast my constant welcome visitor.

Strader:
Alas I have not had the time to spare;
My life hath undergone a curious change.
No longer do I plague my weary brain
With hopeless problems. Now I dedicate
The knowledge I have won to honest work,
Such as may serve-some useful end in life.

Capesius:
Thou meanest, thou hast given up thy quest?

Strader:
Say rather, that it hath abandoned me.

Capesius:
And what may be thy present labours' goal?

Strader:
There are no goals in life ordained for man
Which he may see and clearly understand.
It is a mighty engine by whose wheels
We are caught up and wearied, and cast out
Into the darkness when our strength is spent.

Capesius:
I knew thee in the days when eagerly
And undismayed thou didst set out to solve
The riddles of existence. I have learned
How thou didst see thy treasured knowledge sink
Into the bottomless abyss, and how
Thy soul, profoundly shaken, had to drain
The bitter cup of disappointed dreams.
But never for one moment did I think
That thou couldst drive the impulse from thy heart
Which had become so fully master there.

Strader:
Thou hast but to recall a certain day
On which a seeress by her truthful speech
Made clear to me the error of my ways.
I had no choice but to acknowledge then
That thought, however hard it toil and strive,
Can never reach the fountain: head of life.
For thought cannot do otherwise than err,
If it be so that highest wisdom's light
Can be revealed to that dark power of soul
Of which that woman showed herself possessed.
The rules of science cannot ever lead
To such a revelation; that is plain.
Had this been all, and had I only met
This one defeat whilst following my quest,
I do believe I could have brought myself
To start afresh by striving to unite
My methods with those other different ones.
But when I saw how some strange spirit cult—
Born of hallucinations as I deemed—
Impotence into creative strength could change,
Hope disappeared, and left me in despair.

Dost thou recall the artist, that young man
We both encountered whilst he was engrossed
Following the dubious course of spirit-ways
After such buffetings from fate I lived
For many weeks benumbed, to madness nigh
And when by nature's aid I was at last
Restored to sense, I made a firm resolve
To meddle with such seeking never more.
Long, long it was before I had regained
My body's health and 'twas a joyless time.
I made myself proficient in those things
That lead to business and to normal life.
So now I am a factory manager,
Where screws are made. This is the work I thank
For many hours in which I can forget
My bitter sufferings in a futile quest.

Capesius:
I must confess I scarce can recognize
My friend of former days; so different
Is now the guise in which he shows himself.
Beside those hours of which thou spak'st just now
Were there not others full of storm and stress,
In which the ancient conflicts were renewed
That urged thee forth from this benumbing life?

Strader:
I am not spared those hours in mine own soul
When impotence 'gainst impotence doth strive.
And fate hath not so willed it in my case
That rosy beams of hope should force their way
Into my heart, and leave assurance there
That this my present life is not an utter loss.
Renunciation is henceforth my goal.
Yet may the force which such a task requires
Endow me later on with faculty
To follow up my quest in other ways—

(Aside.)

If this terrestrial life repeats itself.

Capesius:
Thou spak'st,—if I indeed have heard aright,—
Of repetition of thy life on earth.
Then hast thou really won this fateful truth,
Found it on spirit-journeys, which to-day
Thou none the less condemnst as dubious?

Strader:
This was the third thing—thou hast spoken it
That finally did strengthen my resolve
To make a fresh beginning in my life.
I sought upon my sick-bed once for all
In comprehensive survey to embrace
The field of knowledge traversed by myself.
And this I did, ere seeking other aims.
I must have asked myself an hundred times
What we can learn from nature, and infer
From what we know at present of her laws.
I could not find a loophole for escape.
The repetition of our earthly life
Cannot and must not be denied by thought
That doth not wish to tear itself away
From all research hath found for ages past.

Capesius:
Could I have had one such experience
Then should I have been spared much bitter pain.
I sought through many a weary wakeful night
For liberating thoughts to set me free.

Strader:
And yet it was this spirit lightning-flash
Which robbed me of my last remaining powers.
The strongest impulse of my soul hath been
Ever to seek for evidence in life
Of what my thought hath forced on me as truth.
So it befell, as if by chance, that I
Wen in those days of misery should prove,
And by my own life testify the truth,
That cruel truth with all that it involves:
Which is, that all our sorrows and our joys
Are but results of what we really are.
Aye! this is often very hard to bear.

Capesius:
Incredible seems such experience.
What can there be to overshadow truth,
For which we search unwearying, and which
Unto our spirit firm assurance gives!

Strader:
For thee it may be so, but not for me.
Thou art acquainted with my curious life.
By chance it seemed my parents' plans were crossed,—
Their purpose was to make a monk of me;
And naught so hurt them, they have often said,
In all their life as my apostasy.
I bore all this, yea and much more besides;
Just as one bears the other things in life
So long as birth and death appear the bounds
Appointed for our earthly pilgrimage.
So too my later life and all the hopes
That came to naught, to me a picture seemed
That only by itself could be explained.
Would that the day had never dawned, on which
I altered those convictions that I held,
For—bear in mind—I have not yet confessed
The total burden laid on me by fate.
No child was I of those who would have made
A monk of me, but an adopted son
Chosen by them when but a few days old.
My own real parents I have never known,
But was a stranger in my very home.
Nor less estranged have I remained from all
That happened round me in my later life.
And now my thought compels me to look back
Unto those days of long ago, and see
How from the world I stole myself away.
For thought is linked with thought to make a chain:
A man to whom it hath been thus ordained
To be a stranger in the world, before
His consciousness had ever dawned in him,
This man hath willed this fate upon himself
Ere he could will as consequence of thought.
And since I stay that which I was at first,
I know without the shadow of a doubt
That all unknowing I am in the power
Of forces that control my destiny,
And that will not reveal themselves to me.
Do I need more to give me cruel proof
How many veils enshroud mine inmost self?
Without false thirst for knowledge, judge this now;
Hath my new truth revealed the light to me?
It hath, at any rate, brought certainty
That I in mine uncertainty must stay.
Thus it portrays to me my destiny
And like in its own way, is my reply,
Half anguish and half bitter mockery.
A fearful sense of horror on me grew.
Tortured by scorn I must confront my life;
And scoffing at the mockery of fate
I yielded to the darkness. Yet there stayed
One single thought which I could realize:
Do with me what thou wilt, thou life-machine;
I am not curious how thy cog-wheels work!

Capesius:
The man whom I have recognized in thee
In such condition cannot long remain
Bereft of Knowledge, even if he would.
Already I can see the days approach
When we shall both be other than we are.

The curtain falls, leaving them standing opposite one another

Upon those who admire the writings of Albert Steffen he has bestowed a lyric gift. We must say a “gift,” for whoever has found in this poet the earnest searcher into the riddles of human destinies who wills, through striving formative power, to reveal mysteries of the world in the nature of the soul, had a longing for this most personal communication. He must be grateful for the gift.

The booklet is small in the number of its pages. The gift is great. For cut of a fullness of heart and soul one here bestows gifts who has much to say of such a nature as enriches the life which receives it. It is good for all who receive it, but one alone could give it just as it is—Albert Steffen. For that which everyone. should behold he beholds with an utterly personal artist's eye.

The first impression may be strange. For Steffen really lives in realms of feeling which are his own wholly personal possession. But one can quickly come to feel at home in these realms. For the dwelling place in which the poet Steffen molds the world in his special way is permeated through and through with warmth of heart and is filled with genuine goodness. Steffen's images are often brought up from very deep mines, but they have been shaped by a man who never loses his living artistic sense in the depths of his thinking.

Steffen often confronts world problems in whose presence others become philosophers. He remains the artist. Others draw all sorts of rounded lines. Steffen makes a few strokes and creates many angles. The whole is then more pictorial than the rounded forms of the others. Many remain on the surface lest they should become lyric brooders. Steffen frequently descends to a great depth below the surface, but there he can speak with such penetration that all brooding vanishes for the listener.

Steffen's compositions arise from that region of the soul where one beholds cosmic mysteries and feels human riddles. But the spirit who there ventures often into abysmal depths in vision and in feeling, and often soars aloft to the stars, remains the molder of images, the creator of tones, is never misled into the coldness of mere ideas. Steffen paints in words. The words have colors. And the colors work like those of paintings which have outlived the centuries and still remain.

Steffen strides through nature likewise seeing and feeling. And nature reveals through him her spirit beings. In this revelation there is wisdom—tragic wisdom, wisdom filled with goodness, wisdom that wakens love, wisdom that is unveiled to the interpreter of riddles who, while interpreting, is wholly filled with the power of the poet, and in molding forms is wholly sustained by the artist's serene enthusiasm.

Steffen descends into the depths of the soul. He brings up pictures which are like copies of the beings of nature—of a nature not seen with the eyes and without whose accessibility to fantasy the world seen with the eyes would be a deception. These pictures of spirit-nature are sharply outlined, but their outlines are drawn, not by the intellect, but by the human heart.

In the presence of these images, one often has the feeling that an unknown power in the poet has compelled nature to yield them, and that, once this power had set them there, Steffen drew their forms.

Steffen, the poet, never stands alone. He is always surrounded by a world. He does not utter only his own feelings. When he expresses his own feelings, he causes one to sense always an immeasurable world around him. His images often give the impression at first of having been taken out of empty space; then, when one has fully understood the images, they acquire a background. Then they reveal a world, whereas at first, they seemed to manifest only themselves. Frequently they are like human beings who are at first very reserved but later emanate a love-bestowing warmth. It will sometimes seem as if a poem of Steffen's were an assertion of defiant willfulness, and this seeming willfulness holds one fast. But one then finds that the seeming willfulness is a veil concealing devotion to truth such as can be attained only through purification of soul.

Steffen's lyrics frequently have their source in the mountains; but, as offspring of the mountains, they have wandered through the plains, like brooks that become rivers. They still bear within them their mountain birth, but on the plain, which gives them stillness, they mirror the sun and they magically create there also for the soul of one who enjoys them the reflected moonlight and the stars. They whisper riddles of nature, and the whisper becomes to the ear a familiar language.

A tender poem, Felicitas, penetrates to the heart as if awaking emotions which stream out into cosmic space. One is in the quiet chamber and yet in the expanse of the universe; a child of man with his suffering and yet a creature of the starry worlds.

Oft, wenn ich in der Nacht
von bangem Traumgesicht
emporgeschreckt, betracht,
wie leicht der Leib zerbricht,
wenn immer schwerer lasten Angst und Wahn,
ich weinen muss ob meiner dunklen Bahn:

Lauf ich zum Fenster schnell,
die Sterne anzuschaun,
wie scheinen sie so hell,
dann darf ich doch vertraun,
ich weis es ja, dass mich an Kindesstatt
der Sternenhimmel angenommen hat.

Oft when I in the night,
By fearful vision waked,
Reflect with doleful fright
How fragile bodies break,
My heart o'erburdened with the dream and fear
I must bewail my road of life so drear.

To open window then
I run the stars to view,
How brightly they do shine,
And so, with faith renewed,
I know in truth that they have taken me,
The starry heavens, as their own child to be.

And how deep the reverent devotion that speaks from Steffen's lyrics! It is a reverence that dares to brood because, in brooding, it never loses touch with the heart. It is a piety that dares to give form to that which evokes the deepest reverence, because in molding this into form it preserves always the inner quality of prayer.

Ich geh durch rote Aecker:
es schläft der Keim.
Ich geh durch grüne Saaten:
es sprosst der Halm.
Ich geh durch goldne Felder:
es reift der Korn.
Ich find den Müller
und der Müller spricht:
Die Erde is der Angesicht
des Menschensohnes.
Und “wer mein Brot verzehrt,
der setzt den Fuss auf mich.”
Ich knie nieder,
und er reicht der Speise,
dass ich mich sättige
auf meiner Erden-Reise.

I walk through brown-red acres:
The germ still sleeps.
I walk through greening earth:
The shoots appear.
I walk through golden fields:
The grain grows ripe.
I find the miller
And the miller speaks:
The earth is the countenance
Of the Son of Man.
And “he who eats my bread
He sets his foot on me.”
I kneel me down,
And he hands me food,
That I be sated
On my earthly road.

Such is the mood which fills the heart with experiences drawn from the realm of the eternal in the human soul. The personal is elevated to the level of the impersonal, not to be lost in this but to find itself in its truth and its essential being. And this finding has its reflection in Steffen's lyric poetry itself. The poet feels himself to be in the stream of cosmic being, and he says:

Die Sprache formt Schicksal,
gemäss den Lauten,
streng oder milde.
Näh oder Ferne vom ewigen Urwort Bestimmt meine Freiheit und Not.

Speech forms destiny,
In accord with the sounds,
Stern or mild.
Nearness or farness from primordial Word
Determines my freedom and need.

One who hears such words from the poet soul of Steffen senses that in him destiny searches for the secrets of language in order to shape life's need as “stern or mild,” and in the freedom of the spirit to give meaning to existence.

When Steffen carries his pain to “bush or tree” in order to make the trees his teachers in peace of soul, his feeling is then revealed in the strictness of the sonnet form, and one has the feeling that what is said can be revealed in this form alone. The compositions of this kind in Weg-Zehrung (Bread of Life) are like the receiving of the form by the poet, who finds peace in this for his emotion, which, without this form, would tend to strive outward into the infinite.

The fact, however, that in Steffen emotion also can bear its own measure within itself is evident when, in soaring upward from the personal to participation in the experience of the World Being, he expresses himself in the form of the hymn, and likewise when he finds the possibility of imparting himself in such a way that silence, while the heart is full, is forborne only to the very least degree.

Du blickst so irr,
so hoffnungsleer
warum, warum?
O sag's, o deut's.

Thou seem'st so lost,
So void of hope,
But why, but why?
Oh tell me, explain!

Christus in mir—
Ist es so schwer.
Er geht herum:
Ich bin sein Kreuz.

To Christ in me—
It is so hard.
He moves about:
I am His Cross.

Preliminary note: Carl Unger's lecture was not written down. However, he spoke about the subject matter on several occasions, for example in his lectures “On the Epistemological Foundations of Natural Science” (1916) and “On the Path from Natural Science to Spiritual Science” (1917), both of which were published in volume I of his “Writings”, Stuttgart 1964.

Rudolf Steiner: The relationship between supersensible knowledge and the will has been asked about here. Now, if we want to form a clear idea about this, we must first consider the relationship between what we usually call will in our daily lives and what we call idea, and then we have to recognize the further path from the idea to supersensible knowledge.

Today, Dr. Unger has spoken to you about pure thinking. Anyone who wanted to make a substantial distinction between the will and pure thinking would probably proceed as one would if asking: What actual difference is there, say, between a boy born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749 who lived at

63 such-and-such, and the privy councillor who lived in Weimar in 1827? One and the same person, one and the same being: it was Goethe. Seen inwardly, the will as the essentially active element is, of course, quite the same as thinking, for that which is active in pure thinking is will — only that one gains nothing for epistemological discussions by emphasizing the will-character of pure thinking.

In order to characterize thinking epistemologically, one must proceed in the same way as the speaker this evening. I would say that thinking is only essential in a different age than the will. The will, where it has not yet struggled through to pure thinking, is younger, so to speak, still in adolescence. When it has developed further and further, it reaches a certain age – this is, of course, a figurative way of speaking – and then it is able to live as pure thinking, which is a further step. This has been demonstrated quite well to you this evening: pure thinking is meditation. Meditation leads to the life of the supersensible world.

Now meditation, pure thinking in general, truly pure thinking, is not possible without further developing the will. This pure thinking as a human capacity is only possible through a particularly intensive effort, a particularly intensive exercise of the will. But everything that one exercises, one trains, one develops. And it is a very special training of the will when one moves from pure thinking to meditation. It can certainly be said that this entire development of the human being, who initially lives in unclear ideas, towards pure thinking and then towards meditation, this entire effort is essentially a training of the will. Therefore, what is needed to really grasp spiritual knowledge is essentially an effort of the will. And anyone who makes an effort to respond to spiritual knowledge exercises willpower, and in doing so exercises their will in general. Therefore, it can be said that it would be quite good for today's humanity if it would at least respond to spiritual knowledge, because in doing so it would truly develop the will, it would strengthen the will.

It would seem that in modern humanity, the will has basically become something about which one can only entertain illusions – if one is still willing to believe that it exists at all. If we look around today, for example, to see what volitional impulses led to the events of the war in recent years that have so terribly shaken the world, we cannot possibly answer, because the will of human beings was least of all at work in them. There was a kind of determination by powers that had seized control of people's decisions. Almost everywhere we see that in 1914, when decisive resolutions were made, we cannot even begin to hold people responsible. It would be a psychological absurdity to somehow blame Berchtold's diplomatic clumsiness for the Serbian ultimatum or the like. Such things may be part of the campaign of confusion and lies that is sweeping the world today, but they cannot stand up to serious psychological scrutiny. On a large scale, what is expressed on a small scale must be carefully examined.

Analyze what in everyday life is called the will. I call your attention to the fact that most people lie to themselves about what they want. They get up every morning at a certain time. Do you believe that they want to do this in the true sense of the word? If you analyze the whole fact that is expressed in this getting up in the morning, then you come to wanting just as well or just as badly as if you say that the clock strikes 8 o'clock in the morning. That is a complex of facts when the clock strikes 8 o'clock. When a person's legs move out of bed, hands reach for this or that, then that is a different complex of facts. And that in one case we speak of automatism and in the other of will, my dear audience, is based only on an illusion or on a confused psychology. In truth, the human being is only placed in a position to speak of volition when he is approaching pure thinking and then, through pure thinking, rises to the comprehension of supersensible truths. Then the real volition is integrated or, I might say, poured into his organism – the volition that can truly be called volition. And all the impulses that are present in the traditions for a real will are by no means the result of the automatic activity that has almost become the habit of all people today, but rather from older times, when there was still - albeit in an atavistic way, more instinctively - a will that was independent of the usual automatism of life.

That it is not always the thought that must guide the will is best seen from the fact that people, if they are sufficiently emotional, have the greatest influence on their fellow human beings precisely when they have dream-like thoughts, when they have somewhat enigmatic thoughts. As a rule, clear thinkers, who are more inclined to abstractions, have less influence on their fellow men than those who, with a certain inner brutality, are attuned to emotional thoughts.

All this, if properly carried out and followed through to its logical conclusion, will show you that it is precisely the path of development that the human soul takes to pure thinking, to supersensible understanding, that is the path by which the will is at the same time brought out of the depths of the human being, so that one can truly say: The will, which is the actual object of ethics, which is the actual object of moral teaching, this will is cultivated as a reality precisely by the spiritual scientific method.

It is this will that has been virtually lost under materialism. Modern humanity has been seized by the automaton-like. I would like to analyze the will factor, let us say in the case of a current-day philosophy professor who is constantly on the go or in the case of a university professor in general. Yes, my dear attendees, if you disregard what he does in continuous automatization, which has entered into him during his education, what actually remains for his will? What remains for his will is what is contained in the law of appointment, in the decree of appointment; he does what he is driven to do by his being integrated into some state or professorial context or the like. Analyze what actually lies in the element of will in such an activity, that is, in the activity of a quite leading personality, and then try to compare how differently this element of will must be grasped by what spiritual scientific development is in a human being. Then you will get an idea of how this spiritual science is called upon to lead the human being out of the stage of the automaton and to make him truly an individuality.

The fact that today one does not even have an inkling of how to arrive at an understanding of the will proves to you that now even a strange idea has found its way into the newer scientific way of thinking: the strange idea that plants also have something like ensouled will, because there are those among them which, when insects or something like that come near them, fold up their leaves and consume these insects. That means, to summarize a mere external fact, a mere external 'complex of acts, an external complex of phenomena, under the concept of will - but which in this case is only an illusion. I have often said in lectures that I know of another creature that, when small animals come near, also takes the opportunity to get them into its burrow and kill them there, just like the [carnivorous] plant does the insect: namely, a mousetrap. And with exactly the same right with which one thinks of the Venus flytrap as ensouled, one can think of a mousetrap as ensouled.

These things, as they occur today in scientific thinking, are just beginning to prove that there can be no question of an illusion-free conception of will in today's thinking. We will only get a correct idea of the will, of the experience of the will, when the will is actually practised in spiritual science, as it is meant here, in anthroposophy. On the other hand, one could even say that people do not approach this spiritual science because it requires a real inner effort of the will, an exercise of the will, and because the human souls of the present time are actually sleeping souls that are quite happy to surrender to the automatism of thinking and also of willing.

Thus the question as to whether supersensible knowledge has a relation to the will must be answered with a strong yes. For this supersensible knowledge will redeem the sleeping will of present-day humanity, it will awaken the souls, and that is what matters today. The sleeping souls of today will not solve the great tasks of the present time. The will will solve them, and it can be redeemed precisely through devotion to supersensible knowledge.

In the Middle Ages, we can trace a mystical current from Meister Eckhart to Jakob Böhme. Goethe descended into the depths of mystical wisdom. A merely scholarly explanation of Goethe's works is not sufficient. Goethe was a profound connoisseur of mysticism in all its depth. In his gospel, his “Faust”, he provided a picture of his theosophical or mystical worldview.

The theosophist is convinced that man carries a core within himself that is soul, that is spirit. Giordano Bruno was also convinced that the soul and the spirit have a significance that extends beyond the material. That is the conviction of the theosophist. Theosophy elevates religion to wisdom; it elevates faith to knowledge. That there is a God-man in man, who has emerged from the divine womb, develops and returns to the Godhead, is taught by theosophy. It sees in nature an expression of the divine origin.

From his youth, Goethe sought the God in nature and the reflection of the divine being in his own heart. He saw in natural products an expression of the divine spirit. The other science is concerned only with the sensual realm; it knows nothing of the spiritual realm. Man is placed [in nature] and wages his battle in this physical world. Goethe describes [in “Faust”] the great human struggle that leads man to his higher development, through which man gains insight into the spiritual and intellectual world and recognizes that he is forming a divine self, a divine ego. Goethe wants to suggest that the struggle is rooted in the spiritual world, in the prologue in heaven. The struggle takes place between good and evil. It is the battle of spiritual world powers. When the mystic ascends to the highest world, he speaks of the music of the spheres in the sense of the Pythagoreans; he speaks of the fact that this highest world is a world of tones and harmonies.

In the starry sky, the mystic sees the creative world spirit in resounding harmony.

The sun sounds in the old way,

says Goethe. The world is the expression of the divine world thought. The thoughts of men are replicas of the divine world thought.

What floats in fluctuating appearance
is fastened with lasting thoughts.

Faust wants to recognize the spiritual. Spirits are in the world; the human spirit, the planetary spirit, the spirit of the solar system, Goethe quotes the earth spirit. The physical earth is only the expression of a real earth spirit. Goethe's description of the Earth Spirit is appropriate. If we study life on Earth, in its arising and passing away, we find an Earth Spirit that is very different in nature from the spirits of other planets. Working on the divinity of immortal clothing is actually the task of the Earth Spirit.

When we look at the whole striving Faust, we recognize that he wants to penetrate more and more into his inner self. We can only know ourselves when we go through experience. Faust goes through the whole world scene. This is shown in the first part. Theosophy teaches that man acquires human abilities through experience and ascends to higher levels of existence. Faust has experienced everything that a human being, who is a sensual and intellectual being, can learn about. But he wants to know what lies beyond that.

Goethe was convinced that man can approach the highest source of knowledge only as a prepared, purified human being. Faust first goes through all the individual sensual experiences, through the experiences of the lower self. The tempting forces are now represented in Mephistopheles. Only by overcoming resistance does man make himself perfect, better.

When Faust has gone through the struggle of life, he remembers that the earth spirit is at the same time an expression of the divine spirit. This shows him the kinship of man with all of nature and then leads him to self-knowledge. This is the expression of how man is led from the transitory to the lasting. But man must first gain experience. Faust succumbs to temptation. He becomes the seducer. Afterwards, we see him in the deepest contrition and depression, as the inner self cannot come out.

The second part shows a transition in which the spiritual world moves into the sensual world. Goethe shows us how Faust's inner being is stirred when he listens to the spiritual world. Again, the sounding spiritual world appears, in harmony with all mysticism.

Faust is to ascend inwardly to the heights of humanity. We are led to the imperial court. We are shown how Faust, as a human being, works not only for himself but also for the lower self of many people. Faust creates sensual prosperity for people. Faust undergoes a greater lesson, but still within sensuality. He is to be led higher. Faust should be able to show something that cannot be achieved with the senses. What was originally alive is still present in the spirit. The spiritual archetypes are present somewhere. The tempter has been able to lead him through the sensual world. Mephistopheles has the key to the eternal depths of things, to the spiritual world, but not the power to penetrate it himself. That is why he gives Faust the key to the realm of the mothers.

Mysticism throughout the ages has always described the highest soul as feminine. The mystic imagines the whole world as a fertilizing father. The soul is the eternal feminine, which becomes ever more mature through fertilization from outside. The highest soul-spiritual realm is where the deity originally resided. It is the realm of archetypes, of mothers.

The theosophist recognizes that the deepest essence is expressed in three forms. Faust finds the glowing tripod. It corresponds to the deepest essence of man, which the theosophist calls “Atma, Budhi, Manas”. These are the three highest principles of man.

The realm of the Mothers contains the archetypes of all things. Faust is able to bring up the archetypes of all things. Faust has brought up the spirit from Paris and Helena.

How human beings live together as body, soul and spirit is wonderfully depicted in the second part of “Faust”. One may only approach the spirit in purity, not with desire. Man must first be purified from desires, from longing. Faust must still be purified and gain higher insights. This will be explained in more detail. Faust returns to the laboratory. The homunculus is the soul. The spirit dwells with the mothers, the sources of spiritual life. The soul is presented in the homunculus. The soul dwells in the physical body, [like the homunculus in the glass vial], but is itself immortal. It can perceive through the physical body with the senses. The mystic knows through his practical experience of incorporeal vision.

The soul's eye is clairvoyant. The homunculus lacks physical properties, but not soul properties. The homunculus sees Faust's dream. The vivid way in which Goethe describes the homunculus, how he longs for embodiment, for penetration into the physical world, shows how the soul lives in the soul world with such properties as those possessed by the homunculus. The human body in its connection with soul and body is presented here.

In the classical Walpurgis Night, we are told how the homunculus [begins to embody itself] in the lowest realm and develops through all the realms of nature. As the homunculus develops from the mineral kingdom up to the plant kingdom, it is said, to hint at this:

It grunts so.

Then, when sexual life begins, Goethe lets Eros appear. Finally, Homunculus crashes into the shell carriage of Galathea. He has passed through all the realms of nature and connects with the spirit and becomes human.

Now that body, soul and spirit are connected, Helena can appear in the flesh. In Helena, the feminine is presented to us. In her outward form, Helena is to show Faust the soul. It is a development of Faust towards the soul. Then self-knowledge occurs for Faust, a mystical experience. This arises from the fact that in the moments of celebration of life, man can look into a spiritual world. Then he gives birth to the divine spirit within him. In Faust this is represented by the birth of Euphorion. Man unites with his higher self - the feminine, Helena. The son of both is Euphorion. Euphorion represents the way in which each person, in this or that way, gives birth to the spiritual within themselves. For one person it is poetry, for another mystical contemplation. This knowledge of the higher worlds in the solemn moments of life is individual.

When man returns to everyday life and then remembers what he has born in the festive moments of life, then he hears the words:

Let me not, Mother, in the gloomy realm,
leave me alone!

Faust is still not ready for the mystical life to become the cornerstone of his being. But Goethe himself defined his Faust as a mystic. He said to Eckermann about the second part of “Faust”: “For the initiate, the deeper meaning is noticeable.

Faust finally gains the opportunity to live as a selfless person. He wants to become a messenger of divine cosmic activity. But he still clings to the outer, sensual view. He is not yet above all sensuality. He once again causes destruction - destruction of the hut. Now the last step to ascent follows. He still makes progress in doing so. Even when a person has reached a higher level of development, he is still preyed upon by base thoughts and worry. Through worry he grows blind. His outer, sensory perception fades away. But a bright light shines within. His inner sense has been opened. In Faust, Goethe presents everything that a person can recognize and understand. He shows what the soul will be at the beginning and at the end. At the beginning, there is the innocent Gretchen – at the end, Gretchen is once again the feminine in man, the soul. At the pinnacle of development, there is the inadequate event. Faust can see what cannot be seen with the senses. In Faust, we have the development from the lower self to the higher self.

Oswald Spengler has now issued the second volume of his Decline of the West. He calls it Perspectives of World History¹ One feels compelled to compare the beginning and end of these perspectives.

The beginning directs our observation toward nature. “Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you—a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free—he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will. A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in which an accident made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of every flower—these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.”

Throughout the whole book one feels that the “world-historic perspectives” are colored by this glance at the sleeping plant-life to which we are exhorted at the very beginning. Just why should we look at this? Is this what the man of the present is naturally driven to when the riddles and disturbances of his epoch rage in his mind? Is the mood provoked by this gaze at nature especially suited to penetrating the essence of present-day culture in such a way that it can be evaluated?

At the very end of the volume one is placed before the whole tragedy of the man of the present. “The passion for invention declares itself as early as the Gothic architecture—compare this with the deliberate form-poverty of the Doric!—and is manifest throughout our music. Book-printing appeared, and the long-range weapon. On the heels of Columbus and Copernicus come the telescope, the microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly the immense technological corpus of the early Baroque. Then followed, however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the invention of the steam-engine, which upset everything and transformed economic life from the foundations up. Till then nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke as a slave, and her work was, as though in contempt, measured by a standard of horse-power. ... As the horse power runs to millions and billions, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a product of the machine, which insists on being used and directed, and in return centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of the machine, human life becomes, precious ... The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it ... And what now develops, in the space of hardly a century, is a drama of such, greatness that men of a future Culture, with other souls and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that in our times nature herself was tottering ... And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric ... Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little life-units have by sheer force of their intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves ... But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation ... The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the machine has bred and trained up in the course of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and tne factory-worker.”

Why should man, who seems to be placed in such a relation to the machine, undertake to evaluate this position with the gaze directed toward the sleeping life of the plant?

It was certainly not gazing in this direction that brought man into the midst of wheels, cranks, motors, and so forth. Much more was it looking at lifeless nature. Ever since man approached this with a contemplation which wanted its objects to be as transparent as those of mathematics, he has moved toward modern technology. The newer thinking has trained itself to look at the spiritually transparent. This thinking learns something about itself when it understands how it conceives the impact of two elastic balls or the trajectory of a body. In the same way as it conceives these it would fain grasp all the phenomena which confront it in a physical or chemical laboratory. Spiritually transparent phenomena are what it desires. If someone objects that the impact of two elastic balls is not spiritually transparent because the force of elasticity remains dark and impenetrable, we may justifiably answer that this is not the point, that we need not know the nature of the ink in which a letter is written when we want to understand the letter.

In lifeless nature man sees in complete clarity all that he needs to construct a machine. For that purpose, he needs ideas which can dispense with all but what inorganic nature shows in full transparency.

But in the soul of man these ideas are mere pictures. Our consciousness recognizes them as such. They live without force in our consciousness; they are related to what they portray as mirror-pictures are related to the objects which stand before the mirror. One mirror-picture does not strike another, yet together they may give a coherent picture of a blow. In this picture-knowledge modern thinking has its greatness and its deficiency. If it understands itself in its greatness and deficiency, it is plunged into riddles and disturbances.

This picture-knowledge has its transparency. One who feels this will confess that all knowledge worthy of the name must be thus transparent. But already in the plant-world this transparency is no longer present if one seeks only for the same cognition as in the case of the pictures of lifeless nature. Goethe felt this. Therefore, he sought a differently formed cognition for the plant-world. He sought for the picture of the archetypal plant, out of which the single plant-form may be grasped as the single physical phenomenon is grasped out of “natural laws.”

We can cognize the living as thoroughly as the lifeless only if we expand our faculties of comprehension. In the cognition of the lifeless, men saw for the first time what knowledge could really be. But this cognition reveals only what is foreign to the real human essence. We cannot advance from the grasp of the lifeless to the experiencing of the true human essence if we cling to this method.

In the machine we have something which is transparent but which is foreign to us. We have bound up our lives with this foreign element. The machine stands there cold and alien, a triumph of “reliable” cognition. Besides it stands man himself, with only darkness before him if he looks into himself with this cognition.

Nevertheless, men had to acquire this insight into the dead-and-transparent if they were to be fully awake. They need the picture-knowledge of what is alien to their nature in order to wake up. All previous knowledge was drawn out of the darkness of man's own nature. It becomes clear for the first time when the human soul becomes simply a mirror, reflecting only pictures of things alien to man. Formerly when a man spoke of knowledge he had in his mind the impulses and contents of his own nature, which cannot be clear. His ideas were permeated with life, but they were not clear. The pictures of the lifeless world are clear. In such pictures, however, he has not only a revelation of the lifeless, but inner experiences as well. Pictures can cause nothing through their own nature. They are impotent. But if a man experiences his moral impulses in the picture-world as he has trained himself to experience lifeless nature, then he raises himself to freedom. For pictures cannot influence the will as passions and instincts do. The epoch which developed this mathematical picture-thinking in the lifeless is the first which can lead man to freedom.

Cold technology gives human thinking a stamp which leads to freedom. Among the gears and levers and motors there is only a dead spirit: but in this realm of death the free human soul awakes. It must awaken in itself the spirit which previously dreamed more or less as it ensouled nature. Thinking rises from its dream through the coldness of the machine.

Waking vision, which can be directed toward the machine, again becomes dreaming if, as in Spengler's contemplation, it is driven back to the plant. For this contemplation does not, like Goethe's, go forward to achieve transparency in observing plants; on the contrary it retreats into the twilight in which life appears when we look at it as men looked at the lifeless in the pre-technical period.

The observation to which we are challenged at the beginning of Spengler's contemplation allows technics to appear as something devilish. But this is only because he denies the clarity which is achieved through technics. Through this denial man recoils from his own wakefulness. In place of winning from this clearness the strength to kindle the free human spirit through the machine, this plant-contemplation calls up a fear which says: “These wheels, cylinders, and levers no longer speak. Everything which is decisive withdraws into the inner realm. Man feels the machine to be devilish, and rightly so.” But it seems necessary to drive the devil out of the machine. May one, if one intends to do that, thus frame the beginning and end of his thinking, and place “world-perspectives” in between as Spengler does? We will seek an answer to this question in the continuation of this article.

• 1. The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler; Volume II: Perspectives of World History. Translated by Atkinson. (Knopf).

A woodland meadow. In the background, high cliffs on which stands a castle. Summer evening. Country folk; Simon, the Jew; Thomas, the Master miner; the Monk. Countryfolk walking across the meadow, and stopping to talk.

First Countryman:
See yon vile Jew; he surely will not dare
To take the same road that we take ourselves;
For things might very well come to his ears
On hearing which they'd burn for many a day.

Second Countryman:
We must make clear to his effrontery,
Aye, very clear indeed, that we no more
Will tolerate his race in our good land
Across whose bounds he hath contrived to slink.

First Countrywoman:
He is protected by the noble knights.
Who live in yonder castle; none of us
May enter; but the Jew is welcome there.
For he doth do whate'er the knights desire.

Third Countryman:
'Tis very hard to know who serves the Lord
And who the devil. Thankful should we be
To our good lords who give us food and work.
What should we be if it were not for them?

Second Countrywoman:
The Jew shall have my praise his remedies
Have cured the evil sickness that I had.—
Besides, he was so good and kind to me;
And many more can tell the selfsame tale.

Third Countrywoman:
Yet did a monk let slip the truth to me,—
The Jew employs the devil's remedies
Beware his drugs; transformed within the blood
They grant an entrance to all kinds of sin.

Fourth Countryman:
The men who wait upon the knights oppose
Our ancient customs, saying that the Jew
Hath stores of knowledge both to heal and bless
Which will in days to come be rightly prized.

Fifth Countryman:
New times and better are in store; I see
Their coming in my spirit, when my soul
Pictures to me what eyes cannot behold.
The knights intend to bring all this about.

Fourth Countrywoman:
We owe the Church obedience, for she guards
Our souls from devil-visions, and from death,
And from hell-fire. The monks bid us beware
The knights, and their vile sorcerer, the Jew.

Fifth Countrywoman:
Only a short time longer need we bear
In patience the oppression of the knights.
Soon will their citadel in ruins lie.
Thus hath it been foretold me in a dream.

Sixth Countrywoman:
I fear such tales betoken mortal sin—
That noble knights do plot to bring us harm—
Nought do I see but good come from their hands;
I needs must count them Christians, as ourselves.

Sixth Countryman:
What men shall think of them in days to come
'Twere best to leave to be adjudged by those
Who shall live after us. Mere tools are we,
Used by the knights in their satanic arts
To war against true Christianity.
If they be driven out we shall be freed
From their pernicious sway, and live our lives
As we shall choose, in this our native land.
Now let us go to vespers, there to find
That which our souls require, and that which is
In harmony with our ancestral ways.
These novel teachings suit us not at all.

(Exeunt the countryfolk.)

(Simon, the Jew, enters from the wood.)

Simon:
Where'er I go, I find awaiting me
The ancient hatred and the bitter taunts.
And yet I suffer not a whit the less
Each time I find myself exposed to them.
There seems to be no reasonable cause
Why people should behave towards me thus.
And yet one thought pursues me evermore
Which Makes the truth apparent to my soul,—
That nothing can befall us without cause.
So too a reason there must be for this,
That suffering is the lot of all my tribe.
So with the lords of yonder citadel,
I find their lot is near akin to mine.
They have but chosen of their own free will
That which by nature is imposed on me.
They set themselves apart from all mankind,
And strive in isolation to acquire
The powers through which they may attain their goal.
Thus can I feel the debt I owe to fate
And find her blessing in my loneliness.
Forced to rely on mine own soul alone
I took the realms of science for my field,
And recognized from what I learned therein
That ripe for new attainments was our time.
The laws of nature, hitherto unknown,
Must now reveal themselves unto mankind
And make him master of the world of sense
Whence he will be allowed to liberate
Powers he can put to use for his own ends.
So have I tried, as far as in me lay,
To make fresh progress in the healing art.
This toil endeared me to the brotherhood;
Its members made me free of their estates
To seek to find the forces that reside
In plants and 'neath the surface of the ground,
That they may yield for us new benefits.
My actions therefore march with their designs,
And I confess that I have plucked with joy
Much goodly fruit whilst going on my way.

(Exit into the wood.)

(Thomas, the Master miner, enters from the wood. Enter the Monk.)

Thomas:
Here will I sit and rest a little while.
My soul hath need of rest to find itself
After the shocks which I have had to bear.

(The Monk comes up to him.)

Monk:
I greet thee heartily, most valiant son.
Thou hast come here in search of solitude.
Thy work well done, thou wouldst have peace and quiet
In which to turn thy thoughts to spirit-worlds.
To see my well-loved pupil thus employed
Rejoiceth me. But why so sad-thine eyes?
'Twould seem anxiety weighs down thy soul.

Thomas:
Pain oft is neighbour unto highest bliss;
That this is so mine own life proves to-day.

Monk:
Hast thou then met with bliss and pain at once?

Thomas:
I told thee, reverend father, that I loved
The overseer's daughter, and confessed
That she was also greatly drawn to me.
She is to marry me and share my life.

Monk:
She will be true to thee, come weal, come woe;
She is a faithful daughter of the Church.

Thomas:
Such an one only would I take to wife;
Since, honoured master, I have learned from thee
The meaning of obedience to God's will.

Monk:
And art thou also certain of thy soul,
That it will walk still further in the way
Of righteousness, which I have pointed out?

Thomas:
So sure as in this body beats a heart
So sure will I, thy son, be true for aye
To those exalted teachings which of old
From thine own lips I was allowed to learn.

Monk:
And now that thou hast told me of thy bliss
Let me,hear also from thee of thy woe.

Thomas:
Oft have I told thee what my life hath been.
Scarce had I left my childhood's days behind
Than I began to travel and to roam.
I never worked for long in any place.
Ever I cherished in my heart the wish
To meet my father, whom I loved, although
I had not heard a good report of him.
He left my dear good mother all alone
Because he wished to start his life anew
Unhampered by a wife and children twain.
The impulse for adventure dwelt in him.
I was a child still, when he went from us;
My sister was a tiny new-born babe;
My mother died of grief in no long time.
My sister was adopted by good folk
Who later moved away from my old home,
And of her fate I never more heard tell.
Some relatives assisted me to learn
A miner's work, in which I grew expert,
So that I found employment where I wished.
The hope that some day I should once more find
My father, never vanished from my heart.
And now at last my hope is realized
But also is for ever torn from me.
Matters of business led me yesterday
To seek for speech with my superior.
Thou knowest how lightly I esteem the knight
Who issueth directions for my work,
Since I have learned he is thine enemy.
From that time forward I made up my mind
Not to remain in service under him.
For reasons which remain unknown to me
The knight alluded in our interview
To matters which allowed him to declare
Himself to be—the father whom I sought.
What followed ... I would gladly leave untold.
It would not have been hard to overlook
My mother's sufferings at his hands, and mine,
When he and I once more stood face to face,
And when he spoke, grief-burdened, of old days.
But in his form, stood facing me, thy foe.
And one thing then was manifest to me:—
How deep a gulf must ever separate
Myself from him, whom I so fain would love,
And whom I sought so long and ardently.
Now have I lost him for the second time,—
Such is the lot that hath befallen me.

Monk:
I would not e'er estrange thee from those ties
Imposed on thee by blood-relationship.
But what I can bestow upon thy soul
Shall ever be to thee a gift of love.

Curtain

[ 1 ] Among the manifold streams in the spiritual life of mankind, there is one we can follow which may be described as the overcoming of the concept of purpose in realms where it does not belong. Purposefulness has its own particular nature within the sequence of phenomena. It is a truly real purposefulness only when, in contract to the relationship of cause and effect where a preceding event determines a later one, the reverse applies and a subsequent event affects and determines an earlier one. This happens, to begin with, only in the case of human actions. A person carries out an action, which he pictures to himself beforehand, and lets himself be moved to his action by this mental picture. What comes later, the action, works with the help of the mental picture upon what comes earlier, the person who acts. This detour through mental picturing is, however, altogether necessary in order for a connection to be purposeful.

[ 2 ] In the process which breaks down into cause and effect, the perception is to be distinguished from the concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply remain side by side within our consciousness if we were not able to connect them with each other through their corresponding concepts. The perception of the effect can only follow upon the perception of its cause. If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, then this can only be through the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect is simply not present at all before that of the cause. Whoever maintains that the blossom is the purpose of the root, which means the former has an influence upon the latter, can maintain this only about that factor of the blossom which he can establish through his thinking. The perceptual factor of the blossom has as yet no existence at the time when the root comes into being. For there to be a purposeful connection, however, not merely the ideal lawful connection of the later with the earlier is necessary, but also the concept (the law) of the effect must really, through a perceptible process, influence the cause. A perceptible influence of a concept upon something else, however, we can observe only in human actions. Here alone, therefore, is the concept of purpose applicable. The naive consciousness, which accepts as real only what is perceptible, seeks—as we have repeatedly noted—to transfer something perceptible even into an area where only something ideal is to be known. Within perceptible happenings it seeks perceptible connections, or, if it cannot find such, it dreams them up. The concept of purpose valid for subjective actions is an element which lends itself to such dreamed-up connections. The naive person knows how this makes something happen and concludes from this that nature will do it in the same way. Within the purely ideal interconnections of nature he sees not only invisible forces, but also unperceivable real purposes. Man makes his tools to suit his purposes; the naive realist has the Creator build organisms by this same formula. Only quite gradually is this incorrect concept of purpose disappearing from the sciences. In philosophy, even today, it is still up to its mischief in a very harmful way. There people ask about the purpose, outside the world, of the world, about the determinants (and consequently, about the purpose), outside man, of man, and so on.

[ 3 ] Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It seeks laws of nature, but not purposes of nature. Purposes of nature are arbitrary assumptions just as unperceivable forces are (see page 109f). But also purposes of life which man does not give himself, are unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of monism. Only that is purposeful which man has first made to be so, for only through the realization of an idea does purposefulness rise. The idea however, becomes operative in the realistic sense only within man. Therefore human life has only the purpose and determination which man gives to it. To the question: What kind of task does man have in life?, monism can only answer: the one which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders.

[ 4 ] Ideas are realized purposefully only through human beings. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of history as the embodiment of ideas. All such expressions as: “History is the development of man toward freedom,” or the realization of the moral world order, and so on, are untenable from the monistic point of view.

[ 5 ] The adherents of the concept of purpose believe that to give up purpose, they would have to give up all order and unity in the world at this time. Listen, for example, to Robert Hamerling (Atomistic Theory of the Will)¹ “As long as there are drives in nature, it is foolishness to deny purposes in nature.”

[ 6 ] “Just as the form of a limb of the human body is not determined and controlled by an idea of this limb that is hovering somewhere in the air, but rather by its connection with the greater whole, with the body to which the limb belongs, so the form of every being of nature, whether plant, animal, man, is not determined and controlled by an idea of the same hovering in the air, but rather by the formal principle of the greater whole of nature which purposefully expresses itself and gives shape to everything.” And on page 191 of the same volume: “The theory of purpose maintains only that, in spite of the thousand discomforts and sufferings of our creaturely existence, a lofty purposefulness and plan are unmistakably present within the forms and developments of nature—a plan and purposefulness, however, which realize themselves only within the laws of nature, and which cannot aim for some fool's paradise where no death confronts life, and no decay with all its more or less unpleasing but simply unavoidable intermediary stages, confronts growth.”

[ 7 ] “When the opponents of the concept of purpose bring a small, laboriously collected rubbish heap of partial or complete, imaginary or real examples showing lack of purpose, against a world full of wonders of purpose such as nature shows in all its realms, then I just find that ludicrous.”

[ 8 ] What is here called purposefulness? A harmonizing of perceptions into a whole. Since, however, underlying of perceptions, there are laws (ideas), which we find through our thinking, so the systematic harmonizing of the parts of a perceptual whole is, in fact, the ideal harmonizing of the parts of an ideal whole contained within this perceptual whole. The notion that the animal or the human being is not determined by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, is all askew, and when it is set right, the condemned view automatically loses its absurd character. The animal is, to be sure, not determined by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, but is very much determined by an idea which is inborn and which constitutes the lawful nature of its being. Precisely because the idea is not outside the thing, but rather works within it as its very being, one cannot speak of purposefulness. Precisely the person who denies that a being of nature is determined from outside (whether by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, or by an idea existing outside the creature in the mind of a world-creator, makes no difference at all in this connection_ must admit that this being is not determined purposefully and according to plan from outside, but rather causally and lawfully from within. I construct a machine purposefully when I bring its parts into a relationship which they do not have by nature. The purposefulness of the arrangement consists then in the fact that I have incorporated the machine's way of working into it as its idea. The machine has become thereby an object of perception with a corresponding idea. The beings of nature are such entities as well. Whoever calls a thing purposeful because it is lawfully formed should then apply this term also to the beings of nature. But this lawfulness should not be confused with that of subjective human actions. For purpose, it is in fact altogether necessary that the cause which is at work be a concept, and indeed the concept of the effect. In nature, however, concepts as causes are nowhere to be found; the concept always shows itself only as the ideal connection of cause and effect. Causes are present in nature only in the form of perceptions.

[ 9 ] Dualism can talk about purposes of the world and of nature. Where a lawful joining of cause and effect appears to our perception, there the dualist can assume that we are only seeing the copy of a relationship within which the absolute world being realizes his purposes. For monism, with the falling away of the absolute world being who cannot be experienced but is only hypothetically inferred, there also falls away any reason for ascribing purpose to the world and to nature.

Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 10 ] If one thinks through without prejudice what has been set forth here, one could not conclude that the author, in his rejection of the concept of purpose outside the human domain, stands on the same ground as those thinkers who, by throwing out this concept, create the possibility of grasping everything which lies outside human actions—and then these also—as only a happening of nature. The fact that in the book the thought process is represented as a purely spiritual one should guard against any such conclusion. When here the thought of purpose is also rejected for the spiritual world lying outside of human actions, then this is done because in that world something higher than the purpose which realizes itself within humanity comes to manifestation. And when a purposeful destiny of the human race, thought up along the lines of human purposefulness, is spoken of as an erroneous idea, then by this is meant that the individual person gives himself purposes and out of these the result of the total activity of mankind is composed. This result is then something higher than its parts, the purposes of men.

• 1. Atomistik des Willens

[ 1 ] Among the manifold currents in the spiritual life of humanity there is one which we may call the overcoming of the concept of purpose in spheres to which it does not apply. Adaptation to purpose is a special kind of sequence of phenomena. Such adaptation is genuinely real only when, in contrast to the relation of cause and effect in which the antecedent event determines the subsequent, the subsequent event determines the antecedent. This applies, first of all, only to human actions. Man performs actions which he first represents to himself, and he allows himself to be determined to action by this representation. The consequent, i.e., the action, influences by means of the representation ¹ the antecedent, i.e., the human agent. For the connection to have purposive character this detour through the representation is absolutely necessary.

[ 2 ] In the process which we can analyse into cause and effect, we must distinguish percept from concept. The percept of the cause precedes the percept of the effect. Cause and effect would simply stand side by side in our consciousness, if we were not able to connect them with one another through their corresponding concepts. The percept of the effect must always be consequent upon the percept of the cause. If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, it can do so only by means of the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect simply does not exist prior to the perceptual factor of the cause. Whoever maintains that the flower is the purpose of the root, i.e., that the former influences the latter, can make good this assertion only concerning that factor in the flower which his thinking establishes in it. The perceptual factor of the flower is not yet in existence at the time when the root originates.

In order to have a purposive connection, it is not only necessary to have an ideal connection of consequent and antecedent according to law, but the concept (law) of the effect must really, i.e., by means of a perceptible process, influence the cause. Such a perceptible. influence of a concept upon something else is, however, to be observed only in human actions. Hence this is the only sphere in which the concept of purpose is applicable. The naive consciousness, which regards as real only what is perceptible, attempts, as we have repeatedly pointed out, to introduce perceptible elements even where only ideal factors can actually be found. In sequences of perceptible events it looks for perceptible connections, or, failing to find them, it imports them by a dream-like fantasy. The concept of purpose, valid for subjective actions, is very convenient for inventing such imaginary connections. The naive man knows how he produces events, and consequently concludes that nature proceeds likewise. In the connections of nature which are purely ideal he finds, not only invisible forces, but also invisible real purposes. Man makes his tools to suit his purposes. On the same principle, so the Naive Realist imagines, the Creator constructs all organisms. It is but slowly that this mistaken concept of purpose is being driven out of the sciences. In philosophy, even at the present day, it still does a good deal of mischief. Philosophers still ask such questions as: What is the extra-mundane purpose of the world? What is the extra-human destination (and, consequently, purpose) of man, etc.?

[ 3 ] Monism rejects the concept of purpose in every sphere, with the sole exception of human action. It looks for laws of nature, but not for purposes of nature. Purposes of nature, no less than imperceptible forces (p. 93), are arbitrary assumptions. But even life-purposes which man does not set up for himself are, from the standpoint of Monism, illegitimate assumptions. Nothing is purposive except what man has made so, for only the realization of an Idea originates anything purposive. But an Idea becomes effective, in the realistic sense, only in man. Hence human life has no other purpose and destination than the one which man gives to it. If the question be asked: What is man's task in life? Monism has but one answer: The task which he gives to himself. I have no predestined mission in the world; my mission, at any one moment, is that which I choose for myself. I do not enter upon life's voyage with a fixed route mapped out for me.

[ 4 ] Ideas are purposively realized only by human beings. Consequently, it is illegitimate to speak of the embodiment of Ideas by history. All such statements as “history is the evolution of man towards freedom,” or “the realization of the moral world-order,” etc., are, from a Monistic point of view, untenable.

[ 5 ] The supporters of the concept of purpose believe that, in surrendering it, they are forced to surrender also all order and unity in the world. Listen, for example, to Robert Hamerling (Atomistik des Willens, vol. ii, p. 201): “As long as there are instincts in nature, so long is it foolish to deny purposes in nature. [ 6 ] Just as the structure of a limb of the human body is not determined and conditioned by an Idea of this limb, floating somewhere in mid-air, but by its connection with the more inclusive whole, the body, to which the limb belongs, so the structure of every natural object, be it plant, animal, or man, is not determined and conditioned by an Idea of it floating in mid-air, but by the formative principle of the more inclusive whole of nature which unfolds and organizes itself in a purposive manner.” And on p. 191 of the same volume we read “Teleology maintains only that, in spite of the thousand misfits and miseries of this natural life there is a high degree of purpose and plan unmistakable in the formations and developments of nature—a purposiveness, however, which is realized only within the limits of natural laws, and which does not tend to the production of some fantastic fairy-land, in which life would not be confronted by death, growth by decay, with all the more or less unpleasant, but quite unavoidable, intermediary stages between them. [ 7 ] When the critics of Teleology oppose a laboriously collected rubbish-heap of partial or complete, imaginary or real, maladaptations to a world full of wonders of purpose, such as nature exhibits in all her domains, then I consider this just as amusing—”

[ 8 ] What is here meant by purposiveness? Nothing but the consonance of percepts within a whole. But, since all percepts are based upon laws (Ideas) which we discover by means of thinking, it follows that the coherence according to plan of the members of a perceptual whole is nothing more than the ideal coherence of the members of the ideal whole which is contained in this perceptual whole. To say that an animal or a man is not determined by an Idea floating in mid-air is a misleading way of putting it, and the view which the critic attacks loses its apparent absurdity as soon as the phrase is put right. An animal certainly is not determined by an Idea floating in mid-air, but it is determined by an Idea inborn in it and constituting the law of its being. It is just because the Idea is not external to the natural object, but is operative in it as its very essence, that we cannot speak here of purposiveness. Those who deny that natural beings are determined from without (and it does not matter, in this context, whether it be by an Idea floating in mid-air or existing outside the being, in the mind of a creator of the world) are the very men who ought to admit that such a being is not determined by purpose and plan from without, but by cause and law from within. A machine is produced in accordance with a purpose, if I establish a connection between its parts which is not given in nature. The purposive character of the combinations which I effect consists just in this, that I embody my Idea of the working of the machine in the machine itself. In this way the machine comes into existence as an object of perception linked with a corresponding Idea. The natural objects are beings of this kind. Whoever calls a thing purposive because its form. is in accordance with plan or law may, if he so please, call natural objects also purposive, provided only that he does not confuse this kind of purposiveness with that which belongs to a subjective human action. In order to have a purpose, it is absolutely necessary that the effective cause should be a concept, more precisely the concept of the effect. But in nature we can nowhere point to concepts operating as causes. The concept is never anything but the ideal nexus of cause and effect. Causes occur in nature only in the form of percepts.

[ 9 ] Dualism may talk of cosmic and natural purposes. Wherever for our perception there is a nexus of cause and effect according to law, there the Dualist is free to assume that we have but the copy of a nexus in which the absolute Cosmic Being has realized its purposes. For Monism, all ground for assuming purposes in the world and in nature drops away with the rejection of an absolute Cosmic Being, whose existence can never be directly experienced and is only hypothetically inferred.

Addition to the Revised Edition, 1918

[ 10 ] No one who, with an open mind, has followed the preceding argument, will come to the conclusion that the author, in rejecting the concept of purpose for extra-human facts, intended to side with those thinkers who reject this concept in order to be able to regard first, everything outside human action and, next, human action itself, as a purely natural process. Against such misunderstanding the author should be protected by the fact that the process of thinking is in this book represented as a purely spiritual process. The reason for rejecting the concept of purpose even for the spiritual world, so far as it lies outside human action, is that in this world there is revealed something higher than a purpose such as is realized in human life. And when we characterize as erroneous the attempt to conceive the destination of mankind as purposive according to the pattern of human purposiveness, we mean that the individual sets purposes before himself, and that the result of the total activity of humanity is composed of these individual purposes. This result is something higher than its component parts, the purposes of individual men.

• 1. See Translator's Preface

Anyone knowing Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic as Science of Expression will look forward with eager anticipation to the study on Goethe by this distinguished man, published first in 1918 and available since 1920 in the delightful German rendering by Julius Schlosser.¹

The perusal of this book may perhaps be described as an experience of a dramatic nature. We pass from the Author's Preface through the chapters on 'Moral and Intellectual Life' and 'The Life of the Poet and Artist,' and come to the description of Werther. Throughout this portion of the book we are filled with expectation. Every page seems fraught with the promise: there will arise before us a highly individual and attractive picture of Goethe, conceived with open-hearted sympathy, portrayed with artistic skill.

The opening words already raise our hopes:—'During the sad days of the world war I re-read Goethe's works and gained deeper consolation and greater courage from him than I could have gained perhaps in equal measure from any other poet. This inspired me with a desire to write down certain critical ideas which suggested themselves again during my reading of his works and which had always led me to a true understanding of them.'

Croce would like to enter into Goethe without that heavy burden with which, alas, inartistic learning has so long encumbered him. How few among our Goethe students seem to be aware that he too has the right to be seen in the picture which emerges from his Works—from the real gift of his spirit to the world. In the prevailing Goethe literature the Works are too often eclipsed behind the Life, with all the mass of biographical detail which is available in his case. In this matter Croce preserves his clarity of vision. 'He who said that if Goethe had not been a great poet in verse, he would yet have been a great artist in life, made a statement which cannot be defended in the strict sense of the word, as it is impossible to imagine the life he lived without the poetry which he produced.' Croce recognises that in Goethe above all the Work of the poet and his Life must be seen as one; for Goethe himself incessantly brings life and freshness, from a deep self-observation, to his great vision of the World. 'Nevertheless,' continues Croce, 'the author of the statement has traced in a rather picturesque manner the relation of Goethe's life to his poetry, a relation which is like that of a whole to one of its parts, a very conspicuous part. For is it not true that the greater number of volumes of Goethe's works (even omitting his letters and his "conversations ") consist of reminiscences, annals, diaries, accounts of his travels, and that several other volumes contain autobiographical matter interspersed or concealed, to which critics are still endeavouring to discover the keys?'

By the splendid clearness with which he sees this twofold aspect, Croce is enabled to place the picture of Goethe in such a light that we feel at first: Here we have Goethe's position in the history of culture most pregnantly expressed. 'His own biography, together with his works, offer us a complete and classic course in noble humanity, per exempla et praecepta. It is a treasure which in these days deserves to be used to a much greater extent by educators, and by those who would educate themselves.'

Croce would eliminate from his portrait of Goethe the 'wildness of genius' which is read into him by the fertile imaginations of some people.

For they, wishing to 'live' as they conceive it, scorn the 'banality' of real life—which, as it happens, cannot be without gravity and earnestness. '… the personality of Wolfgang Goethe consists of calm virtue, earnest goodness and justice, wisdom, balance, good sense, sanity, and, in a word, all those qualities which are generally laughed at as being "bourgeois." . . . He was deep but not "abysmal," as some critics of to-day would wish to consider him. He was a man of genius, but not diabolical.'

The fulness of an all-round human nature, to which Goethe in his whole life and work inclined, is powerfully stressed by Croce:—'And what, in substance, did he teach? To be above all, whatever else one may be, thoroughly and wholly human, ever working with all one's faculties in harmony, never separating feeling and thought, never working on externals or as a pedant; a task which, in the turbulent years of youth and fascinated by eccentric minds like Hamann, Goethe may have conceived in a somewhat material or fanciful sense, but which he immediately deepened, and therefore made clearer and corrected, rendering concrete its mystical and ineffable totality by determining it more closely.'

Goethe in Croce's description comes before us as the man who would educate himself 'not to desire and to dream, but to will and to act.' And as Goethe stands before him in this light, Croce is able to place Werther, in a masterly way, both in relation to Art and Life. The life which Werther lives is far removed from that of the poet who creates him. Werther is ill. Goethe feels how possible it is for the Werther illness to take hold on life. For him it becomes a question of feeling the illness truly, and of truly describing it. It is as a healthy man that he undertakes the task. Croce calls Werther, in relation to Goethe's own state of soul, 'a vaccination fever rather than a real malady.' With clear discrimination Goethe's own inner condition is removed from all that drives Werther into the calamity. 'This explains the childishness which makes us smile and almost feel embarrassed when we read the account of, and the documents concerning, the relations of young Goethe with Charlotte Buff and with her betrothed and husband, excellent, patient Kestner. These are matters which biographers and anecdote-writers have in truth emphasized in much too gossiping a fashion, usually misunderstanding their psychological meaning and yielding to the bad advice of immersing again and drowning the work of art in biographical material, by exaggerating and perverting the legitimate ethical interest which Goethe's person arouses. . .

In Croce's eyes the creation of Werther takes place in Goethe's life as an artistic, ethical catharsis. Goethe wished to make the Werther fever an inner artistic experience, so that he might by this very means thoroughly cure himself of all attacks. 'Werther—"unhappy Werther"—was not an ideal for the poet as he was for his contemporaries. Goethe immortalises in Werther neither the right to passion nor nature versus society, nor suicide, nor the other ideas we have just mentioned; that is to say, he does not depict them as mental conditions which, at that moment, predominate in him. But he depicts the "sorrows," as the title expresses it, the sufferings and, finally, the death of young Werther; and just because he looks upon Werther's fate as sorrow, barren sorrow, and its unfolding calculated to lead not to the joy and delight of feeling oneself superior to and rising high above others, but to self-destruction, the book is a liberation or a catharsis…'

Unlike so many others, Croce will not see in Werther 'a sublime legend of love.' On the contrary, to him it is 'a book of malady,' and the Werther way of loving is 'an aspect or an acute manifestation of the malady.' When his mother and his friends urge him to bestir himself and take up fruitful work, Werther replies, 'But am I too not active now? And after all is it not all the same whether I count peas or lentils?' It is the answer of a man given to 'idling, day-dreaming, nay to passionate raving.' Goethe—as Croce very properly remarks—confronts this 'hero' of his book, not as one having ought in common with him, but as a calm and clear observer seeking the cure for a disease. Werther is 'the work of one who knows, of one who understands, and who, without being Werther, discerns Werther completely, and, without raving with him, feels his heart throb with his.'

When we have read thus far in Croce's book, our experience in thought has been not unlike the opening of a drama. With anticipation growing more tense from page to page, we ask ourselves, what will the author eventually have to say on Goethe?

Then comes the chapter 'Wagner the Pedant'—a real surprise, quite in keeping with the quality of drama. For Croce comes forward with a kind of vindication of Wagner's character in Faust. It is as though he had been annoyed once too often by the literary pedants who mock at Wagner in the words of Faust, and feel themselves, no doubt, with quite a touch of genius, nay of the Faust-nature, as they do so. Against these pedants wearing the mask of 'the Free,' Croce comes out with a kind of apologia for Wagner. 'I confess that I cherish a certain tender feeling for Wagner, the famulus, Dr. Faust's assistant. I like his sincere and boundless faith in knowledge, his honest ideal of a serious student, his simple straightforwardness, his unaffected modesty, the reverence which he shews … towards his great master.'

Indeed, a strange antithesis shines through in Croce's description. Faust with his whims and worries, his fancies, his indeterminate spiritual longing, seems like a half-unsteady dreamer and complainer beside the sterling Wagner who steers straight forward to the certain goal of his scholarship. And a curious touch of thought suggests itself to Croce:—'Be careful what you do, when you resolve to take a wife: lest, if you do not happen to choose one of those timid silent creatures, such as Jean Paul frequently places beside his erudite maniacs, but there fall to your lot as a companion a Faust in petticoats, a female Titan, a Valkyrie, you receive no longer merely biting philosophical lashes, but find yourself the object (and this you hardly deserve) of aversion, hatred and nausea…'

Croce does not wish the tenderly loved Wagner so terrible a fate. 'For Wagner's ideal is neither more nor less than the humanistic ideal … the admiring study of ancient histories in order to deduce from them prudential maxims and rules, … and the search for the laws of Nature in order to turn them to social utility.'

Is this 'vindication' of Wagner no more than a dramatic interlude; will it but serve to reveal Goethe's Faust in his real greatness?—The reader feels impelled to ask the question. Great is the tension at this point.

The thickening of the plot—and the catastrophe—these I would describe in the next number.

• 1. English Version: Goethe, by Benedetto Croce, with an Introduction by Douglas Ainslie, Methuen, 1923.—The passages which we take from this translation do not always convey quite the same shade of thought as in the rendering from which Dr. Steiner quotes.

What we have to understand exactly are the relationships between the concepts of existence, life and conscious awareness. What are they seen to be in mystic terms? Let us think of a child learning to write and of all the situations connected with the process, each on its own—the teacher, materials put ready in preparation, with the child not present. If we think of this as the first thing which is part of writing, we have the first aspect of existence. Now [let us consider] on their own all the activities, the movements of the hand which the child learns—life seen separate from existence. We then leave the first and second aspects aside and take the one we have when the child has finished with those activities. All we consider now is what has given the child the power to write—conscious awareness. We always have the three aspects of existence, life and conscious awareness.

Let us define these terms exactly, for wrong ideas tend to creep in when people speak of existence (form), life and conscious awareness in theosophy. It is a matter of existence interacting with life, resulting in conscious awareness. Let us now apply the terms we found in yesterday’s lesson [evolution, involution]. If we look at the interaction between existence and life, we find that existence merges into life, life takes it into itself. Anything of a life taken into existence in this way veils itself in involution again, merging into conscious awareness. We are thus able to say that any conscious awareness is evolution of life and existence which are in involution. If we are able to investigate a conscious mind we ask: What kind of life is in involution in this conscious awareness, and what kind of existence in this life?

Let us now take our conscious awareness, the awareness we have now—self-awareness. If we investigate it we will characterize it the way I tried to do in the book [Theosophy], taking up Jean Paul’s thought: self-awareness is—I am I.⁹¹

Let us now look for anything which is in involution in this. The life of this conscious awareness must be in involution. This conscious awareness, which is now self-awareness, must earlier on have been a life in awareness, and this life in awareness is in involution in there. If we leave aside the ‘I am I’—the ‘I’, then this conscious mind is not saying: ‘I’ [am conscious mind] but ‘I am life.’ The conscious mind has only evolved from it. Being at the level of self-awareness we have aware conscious awareness and not living awareness. Before, we had the extant conscious awareness: I am existence.

Let us do a proper translation of this.

‘I am the I’ is easy to translate: the given situation which the human being experiences.

‘I am life’ is something where we need to take a closer look. Doing so we’ll find that we go beyond the mere ‘I’ to the foundation and have to ask ourselves how ‘I am life’ has developed. There must be interaction between existence and life. Existence is in involution within life. If we consider this, we get a concept of the human being himself, for it is the human being before he became I who lives in the concept ‘I am life’. ‘Human’ is general, ‘I’ specific. The human being is in involution within the I, it comes to evolution in the ‘I’. Uttering the words at this lower level [‘I am life’], we have to say: ‘I am a human being’. When we say these words we bring out from the most inward part what has been woven into it in an occult way, and understand what we no longer are but once have been and what is contained in us in a state of involution.

Third statement: ‘I am existence’. Taking this, we must be clear in our minds that this is a sum of external circumstances which have now slipped wholly into the inside, as the inmost core, the third layer, which lies hidden deep down in us.

I am I = what is given today; I am life = [gap]; I am conscious mind: we address the whole outside world on the level of the conscious mind; we have our essence as such, which is our foundation, for before there was no conscious mind and life, but conditions, conditions that came together and became our inmost essence. We must then change the words to ‘I am an element’. For that is the elemental.

We thus have three levels of conscious awareness which we are able to trace within us:

1) I am I
2) I am a human being
3) I am an element.

If we were to go further, the thread of our three concepts would leave us, but it repeats itself all the time. It becomes ‘existence’ again by connecting with others.

The fourth, then, is union. So that in moving higher we come to the words: I am in union. The I then is like the earlier given situations that united to find their way into life. I-awareness is thus taken up into existence again. In the same way existence has been conscious awareness before. So that the first existence already had an earlier state of consciousness in involution within it. If we now go back from the words ‘I am an existence, an element,’ we come to ‘I am a pre-awareness’. This may also be put as ‘I am a dhyan chohan.’ In Christian esoteric language it is put like this:

I am a god
I am a glory (element)
I am a might (human being)
I am a power (princedom)

Earlier, we called this

All awareness (now pre-awareness)
Life awareness (or plant awareness, i.e. the elemental)
Human-animal awareness or dream consciousness (I am human, humanity awareness)
(now reached) intellectual awareness: (self-awareness).

We thus have the microcosm once more, in its chain.

Let us consider that now the next level breaks through. In union, the I becomes element again.

I am a dhyan chohan = pre-awareness
I am an element = existence
I am a human being = life
I am I = awareness - self-awareness
Existence = psychic awareness
Life = hyperpsychic awareness
Conscious awareness = spiritual awareness

Now self-awareness is raised to existence. What we grasp in our thinking today becomes existence, so that we shall one day have awareness of the whole of humanity in that we make the I cover all human beings. This is then called psychic awareness. The next level will be the one where the I of every other individual comes alive in us—hyperpsychic awareness. At the highest level of all we take the whole world into our conscious awareness: all is in us—spiritual awareness. (Everything that is outside is already inside—divine awareness.)

Let us imagine [demonstrating with a sheet of paper] that the paper is the pre-awareness. Now it narrows down:

1) I am an element

Now it narrows down to something less than that:

2) I am human

Then:

3) I am I

1) The I then itself becomes
2) existence and goes to the outside.
3) It also shines out over life.
4) It shines out over the whole of elemental existence and then comes out again into what it was before.

Recapitulating we find that in the I lies an involution which is as great as we can imagine, so that it contains the complete triad in involution; its essential nature keeps this I completely hidden in the dark. If we examine what entered into this dark element, we find it was life; it brought light into the darkness, shone into it. And before this, existence shone into life, and in existence pre-awareness was in involution. The revelation of pre-awareness is once again the Word.

We are thus able to say: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Through him everything entered into existence and without him nothing entered into existence. What existed was life in him and the life of the light of mankind. And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not taken hold of it.’

The I must let what it is inside, occult, shine out. Nothing from the outside must harm the I, the I must grow strong. What it has inside must emerge in outer strength. What does it find? The tempter, the serpent which evolved earlier and is twisting and turning out there. The I must overcome the serpent, and now we have to understand that this is the sign that someone has given birth to the living Christ in himself in overcoming the deadly, the tempter, death, the prince of this world.

Mark 16: 17-18. Those who believe will have signs which accompany them. In my name they will cast out demons, and they will speak in new tongues. They will pick up serpents and if they drink any poison it will certainly not hurt them. They will place their hands on sick people and they will be well.

If your eye be single, your whole body will be full of light. (It will let the light pass through).

If, however, you are a rogue, there will be darkness in you. If there is darkness in you, how great, then, must darkness be altogether.⁹²

State before the year 30:

I - superhuman I - Christ
I - human chela I - Jesus : Palestine
I - human chela I - John the evangelist: Alexandria
State after 30: Christ in Jesus; Jesus in John

• 91. humorist. Here reference is made to his description of his first Iexperience, published [in German] in his Theosophie (1. Kap., Abschnitt Leib, Seele, Geist): ‘I’ll never forget something which happened in me and which I have never told anyone; it was the birth of my self awareness, and I am able to state the place and the time. One morning I was standing in the front door, a very young child, looking to the left, where the firewood was stacked, and suddenly the inner vision ‘I am an I’ came to me like a bolt of lightning from heaven; it has remained, luminous, ever since. There I saw my I for the first time and for ever.’ First described [in German] in Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben. Kindheitsgeschichte von ihm selbst geschrieben (3 Hefte in 2 Baenden), Breslau 1826 - 1828; 1. Heft, S. 33.
• 92. Matthew 6: 22-23.