The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we tried to get to know more precisely the world that surrounds us in such a way that we share it with those who have passed through the gate of death and that we also share it with those spiritual and soul beings that we count among the beings of the higher hierarchies. In this way, we have devoted ourselves to a contemplation that is suitable for opening up to us a part of that reality that plays a part in human life, without man, with his sensory perception and also with his mind tied to sensory perception, being able to know anything about it in his ordinary waking consciousness. Since this world is a reality, a reality that plays a part in the shaping of human life, it is understandable that in the time in which we live, in which man is called more and more, take the general destiny of human development into his own hands, as we have often said, that in such a time a knowledge of these supersensible things also sinks into the human soul. Yesterday we ended our meditation, which, as a meditation on the life of the so-called dead, must be deeply penetrating for each individual human soul, with the suggestion that this is particularly necessary in our time. On the other hand, however, there must also be an urgent need to reflect more closely on such things, such as those we touched on in our meditation yesterday. For in our time even half-awake people, dreaming people, should suspect that extraordinarily important decisions are being formed.

In the course of our discussions, I have repeatedly given hints here and there about what can be said from the sources of spiritual research about the character of modern times, the character of our time itself and the near future. Such things could only be given to present-day humanity, and more or less to anthroposophically minded humanity, in a very cautious way. Just see how much of this can be found in the lectures given in Kristiania many years before these catastrophic events, for the understanding of precisely these difficult, catastrophic times. And perhaps it may also be recalled that at a time when it would have been necessary to point out, in one way or another, the seriousness of the impulses at hand, in the lecture cycle that was held in Vienna in the early spring of 1914 – that is, before the outbreak of our present world catastrophe -–, the way in which social life, the way in which human coexistence in our time is spoken of, I chose a sharp, a strong expression: I spoke at the time in these lectures, which were essentially also about the life of man between death and a new birth, of the fact that something is happening in the moral and social life of the present that can be described as a social carcinoma, as a terrible social cancer. Perhaps one or the other at that time found this to be a strong expression. But perhaps one or the other has since been able to convince himself that the facts speak for it, that such a strong expression was allowed to be chosen at the time.

However, what I already hinted at yesterday is correct and should give us much food for thought: despite all this, despite the fact that it can easily be surmised what serious impulses lie in the lap of our time, humanity today is little inclined to really grasp the seriousness of the phenomena. Today, humanity is far too comfortable for that, far too happy to indulge in those comfortable concepts that can be found in the scientific world view today, because these concepts can be gained from the handrails of external experience, because they do not require much inner effort of the mind and yet they flatter people's vanity so much. But what is necessary is that humanity should wake up, really wake up, to much of what the times demand of us today. This awakening will only be possible if certain underlying facts are no longer regarded as fantasies or dreams but as realities that play a part in our times. And so I have often hinted during our discussions that a significant change has occurred to humanity, particularly in the last third of the 19th century. I have also hinted at these things here in Stuttgart. Today, we want to once again call them to mind from a certain point of view.

I have indicated the fall of 1879 as the turning point in the development of humanity in modern times. If we want to understand this development of humanity in modern times more precisely, we must say that what happened in the last third of the 19th century is only the effect of something that happened in the spiritual world before. It began in the spiritual world in the 1840s. And the time from the forties to the end of the seventies of the 19th century is an important and essential, a significant time. What happened then did not happen on the physical plane; but in the year 1879 the repercussions descended on to the physical plane, and since that time these repercussions have been taking place on the physical plane. They are a kind of reflection of what happened before in the spiritual world. If one is to describe what underlies this, one can say that in a particular field in a particular sphere it is the manifestation of what otherwise happens more often in the development of humanity, and what has always been described by those who were still able to observe such things as a struggle between Michael and the dragon. In the most diverse fields, such struggles of normally progressing spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies against spirits of hindrance and obstruction have taken place. For the cultural development of humanity, such a struggle has taken place in spiritual realms, and in those spiritual realms that are directly adjacent to the earth, in the decades from the 1840s to the end of the 1870s. At that time, in 1879, this battle ended with a victory, if one may say so, of the good powers against certain spirits of obstruction, which at that time - one can put it that way - were thrown down from the spiritual worlds into earthly conditions, so that since then they have been working and weaving in earthly conditions. Within that which is developing in the spiritual evolution of humanity, there are spirits of hindrance that were only overthrown at the end of the 1970s and hurled down into the lower world for the upper world, and now rule in people.

If we look at these spirits of hindrance, these spirits of an Ahrimanic nature, with which the spirits that we can call Michaelic spirits have fought a fierce battle, we have to say that these Ahrimanic spirits had a good significance in past periods of human development, they had their tasks in past periods of spiritual development. These tasks were carried out in such a way that they were guided by good higher spirits. We must not imagine the so-called evil spirits in such a way that we think we just have to flee from them in order to get rid of them if possible. That is namely the best way to attach them to oneself if one wants to get rid of them in an egoistic way; rather, one has to imagine that these so-called evil spirits are also in the service of the wise world order. If they are only placed in their right position, they will perform services that are necessary for the wise world order. And so we can say that for centuries, even for millennia, these ahrimanic spirits have performed the task of dividing human beings into those community contexts that have to do with blood ties. People are connected in their earthly associations in such a way that the bonds of blood also trigger and bring about certain bonds of love. People organize themselves into family, tribal, ethnic and racial contexts. All these things are subject to certain laws of the times. These are directed by beings from the higher worlds. That which humanity has specialized, that which humanity has structured in such a way that this structure is based on blood, was guided by these Ahrimanic spirits, but under the guidance of good spirits.

But now a different era was to begin. As long as human beings were guided by blood, so to speak, they could not take their destiny into their own hands in the way that has been suggested several times. For this it was necessary that the service of these Ahrimanic spirits, as it was, be eliminated from the spiritual world. These spirits initially wanted to continue their activity of dividing people according to blood from the spiritual world; but humanity was to be driven to a more general conception of its entire spirit. What is often said in our field, that humanity is to be understood as a whole on earth, is truly not a cliché, but a modern necessity. And this is based on the fact that a strong, intense struggle has taken place between the Michaelic spirits and the spirits of Ahrimanic nature, which in the past differentiated people according to blood.

This battle has ended with the Ahrimanic entities being pushed down and now prevailing among people. They will cause confusion among people, because that is their intention after this defeat: to cause confusion with everything that can be drawn from all kinds of concepts and ideas related to blood ties and blood relationships. It is particularly important to realize that since the last third of the nineteenth century, these impulses have been active in everything that human beings can achieve here on the physical plane through their thoughts and feelings, and that reality cannot be understood without taking these impulses into account. The way in which certain international relationships and the like are discussed today has been confused by these Ahrimanic spirits, who have been defeated by the spirit of Michael.

I have often mentioned that we can say that we have been in the so-called Michaelic Age since the end of the 1970s. Michael can be seen as the Zeitgeist, which has replaced Gabriel as the Zeitgeist. This means a great deal: Michael as the spirit of the age! The spirits of the age that were present in earlier centuries worked differently than this spirit of the age. The other spirits of the age that influenced the development of humanity in earlier centuries did so more or less in the subconscious. The task of the Michaelic Zeitgeist, which has been working in human affairs since the last third of the nineteenth century, is this: to release more and more in human consciousness itself that which is to take place in the evolution of the earth. This Michaelic Zeitgeist has actually descended and is working on the physical plane of the earth.

There is something connected with all this for our time that is extremely easy to misunderstand. Ours is a very, very ambivalent time. If you describe it so superficially, you could easily call our time merely materialistic. But that is not all; the matter is much more complicated. On the whole, one can say that these more recent times are, in their fundamental character, extraordinarily spiritual, extraordinarily spiritual indeed. And there have never been more spiritual concepts and ideas than those that have been brought to the surface by modern science in the development of humanity. But these concepts, if I may express myself in this way, are abstract. In themselves, in their substance, they are thoroughly spiritual; but they are not suited, as they appear, if they are not properly treated, to express spiritual realities. These concepts of natural science, which are being instilled into all education today, are a very double-edged sword, if I may use this paradoxical simile. They can be used as they are applied by academic science today. In that case they are spiritual, but only in so far as they are applied to the external material world; their spirituality is denied. But these scientific concepts can also be applied in such a way that they serve as material for meditation, that one meditates on them. Then they will most surely lead into the spiritual world. If those who today have a scientific world-picture would not be too lazy to apply their concepts in meditation, then these people with a scientific world-picture would very soon enter into spiritual science. It is not the content of the scientific concepts that is at fault, but the way they are treated. The concepts are subtle and intimate, but people apply them in a materialistic sense. It is not so easy to make this clear in all its details, but we must communicate with each other; therefore we must let many such truths approach us only by reflection, as it were.

Thus people live in concepts, in ideas that are thin, that are, I might say, pure distilled spirit, so that one needs only to apply a strong force to arrive at spiritual science; and these concepts are the ones that are to enter the human development precisely through the Michaelic Age. But they are also the ones who are most confused by the indicated, one can already say, from heaven to earth pushed, in heaven overcome ahrimanic spirits of obstacles. They arise in so many areas where man today believes he is thinking and reasoning quite correctly, but where he is exposed to the confusion of these spirits to a high degree.

It is precisely when considering such a matter that it becomes clear how development actually takes place, let us first stay with humanity. We must bring before our soul a significant law of development, which we have also to consider from other points of view. It is, of course, an extremely superficial way of looking at things to think that events in historical life simply arise from one another in such a way that what happens in 1918 is a consequence of 1917, 1916 and so on. That is a superficial way of looking at it. Things happen quite differently; they happen in such a way that what has happened in the spiritual realm continues to have an effect in the following periods, but in a certain way. You can take any year, let us say for example 1879. Then something happens in 1880 that is determined by the fact that what happened in 1878 is repeated retrogressively. In 1881, in a certain respect, what happened in 1877 is repeated retrogressively, and so on. One can start from any point in the development of humanity, as contradictory as this may seem; one will always find that earlier annual cycles show up in later ones as important impulses. One can therefore expect that, especially in an important period of time, this law will also intervene in the development of humanity with particular clarity and importance.

I have often hinted at this, and have often spoken before these catastrophic events of the important period of 1879, and that it is only the effect of what has been taking place in the spiritual world since the forties. If we now apply this law, which I have just mentioned, we can say the following: 1879 is an important period of time; certain spirits were pushed down who had previously worked in the spiritual world as spirits of hindrance, and from then on worked here on the physical plane among people in a hindering and confusing way. What happened in 1879 is, so to speak, the conclusion of an earlier event that began between 1841 and 1844 and has been taking effect over the decades. If we now take the year 1841, we have the period of struggle in the spiritual world from 1841 to 1879. Those entities, which are under the rule of the spirit, who is called Michael – one could also describe him with another name – they prepared themselves in 1841 to take up the strong, intensive fight in the spiritual world, which then found its conclusion for the spiritual world in 1879. It lasted for thirty-eight years. Now I said: That which happens retrogressively has a retroactive effect in the following period. — Now continue calculating from 1879 for another thirty-eight years: 1917. Just as in 1880 what happened in 1878 repeats itself, and in 1881 what happened in 1877, so in a certain way what took place in the spiritual world in 1841 is repeated in the physical world in 1917 as one of the most important struggles. It is indeed the case that the year 1879 marks a turning point, which shows very energetic impulses forward and backward in the observation. And in a certain way, on the physical plane of 1917, 1918, those things are now repeating themselves that had to take place in the spiritual world in the forties, and which can be described as a struggle of normal, forward-driving spirits against certain spirits of obstruction. This is not a calculation that I have only just made today; rather, many of you know that these events have always been referred to, and that from the point of view of these events, the year 1917 must be seen as an important starting point for subsequent events.

Of course, things must not be viewed in such a way that one says: Well, we have experienced the year 1917. Certainly, one has experienced it; but what the events actually were that took place in that year, only a few people have experienced, since few people are inclined to evaluate them in their waking consciousness. That is what it is all about.

Now, through all these things I wanted to point out that we are indeed living in an important moment in the evolution of humanity, and that it is necessary to take some things more seriously at this point in time than they are taken by the present humanity in its masses. I have already pointed out how particularly necessary it is not to ignore the normal spiritual impulses in our time. As this newer time has developed, what has actually become predominant in it? What has really gained influence in this newer time? What is radiated, I might say, into the whole of general education? Basically, only that which has grown on the coarsest field of the scientific world view. But this coarsest field of the scientific world view has only the power to grasp the dead, the inanimate, never the living, which would be so infinitely necessary in this scientific age. Even today, people still do not want to see the connection between such things and general world events. They do not want to see that the more humanity endeavors to develop only concepts that relate to the dead, they are also destroying social and community life from within. It is necessary to bring scientific concepts into flux and to enliven them in such a way that they can actually be applied to human coexistence, that they are, so to speak, suitable for explaining human coexistence.

The course of development has been this way in these newer, in these most recent times: in what has been accepted as actual science, only those concepts have been formed with which one can comprehend external, dead nature. These concepts were quite unsuitable for grasping human life. But they wanted to use them to grasp human life. And so the official scientists applied these concepts to history, to social science, to social policy, and so on. But these concepts are not useful there, and so there is no useful concept for social life at all. As a result, the social life of the earth has become too much for people to handle, has become what it has become over the past four years. People will have to learn to condense their concepts and also to vitalize them.

What the natural scientists themselves develop is certainly ingenious, useful, and conscientiously methodical, but only for the external world. Today, everyone works in their own field and does not extend the concepts that are developed in any field to the totality of the human world view. Take just one example, and you will immediately understand what I actually mean. The ordinary school physicist who today looks at the magnet needle pointing with one end to the north and with the other to the south, explains to his boys that this constant pointing of the magnet needle to the north and to the south comes from the earth's magnetism, that the earth is also a great magnet; and it would be ridiculous if this school physicist were to seek in the magnet needle itself the forces that cause the needle to point in these directions. He tries to explain it in terms of the properties of the earth; he seeks the cause outside in the cosmos. In this purely dead area, the scientific concepts are still of some use, and one or other of them may still be discovered. Therefore, it does not occur to anyone to say of the magnetic needle that it has the inherent power to always point in one direction. One assumes directional forces from the magnetic north and south poles of the earth. The biologist no longer does this. It does not occur to him to develop a similar concept. The biologist sees the chicken in which the egg is formed. It does not occur to him to ask the same question as the physicist asks about the magnetic needle. The biologist simply says: When the egg is formed in the hen, the cause of the egg formation lies in the hen. If he were to proceed as the physicist does with the magnet needle, he would say: Although the hen is the place where the egg is formed, the cosmic forces are involved in the same way as the cosmos is involved in the magnet needle when the egg is formed. I must go beyond the narrow confines of nature and take what is outside to help. In the chicken there is the place where the egg develops, but the forces come from the cosmos, just as they give direction to the magnet needle from the cosmos.

It is urgently necessary to develop such a concept and to implement it methodically. But in the eyes of the official science of biology it is foolish, fantastic, it is ridiculous, because it has completely lost its way into a blind alley of the dead. This official science cannot even apply the comprehensive concepts to such things, much less can it say anything about how people could live together politically or socially in the right way. How can one hope that something so necessary for humanity could come out of this mere natural scientific world view, namely a revival, a refreshing of these concepts? Especially in the important area of human life, this cannot be. Let us make this clear by looking at a concept that we want to grasp spiritually.

Even the mere observation of the human skeleton shows something extraordinarily important, something, I would say, magnificent. When you look at the human skeleton, you see the head, which is actually only placed on the rest of the trunk skeleton; it is a world of its own. The other part of the skeleton is formed quite differently. If we apply Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, we do indeed get the transformation of the trunk into the main skeleton, but the main skeleton is formed spherically, the head is a reflection of the whole sphere of the world. The other is formed more like a moon. This is something extraordinarily significant and indicates to us that if we want to gain fruitful insights into the human being from his form alone, we must look at something that is already indicated in the form. Our natural science is indeed magnificent, but it is illiterate when it comes to knowledge of the world. It proceeds as someone who does not read the pages of a book but writes on them: A is like this, B is like that — that is, not reading but merely describing the letters. But one must proceed to reading, one must understand, describe the forms of nature not merely as science does, but interpret them in their relationships, in their transitions. Then one comes from reading the forms of nature and natural phenomena to unraveling the meaning of the world. Of course, people who hear something like this today and who, with their thick heads, are completely stuck in illiteracy, find such a thing, when it is said, quite dreadful. Good examples could be given of how something is found to be dreadful that is so far-fetched from the human skeleton, but which can be extended to the whole human organism. Man is a dual nature, and this dual nature is already expressed in the fundamental contrast between the head and the rest of the organism.

If one now, through spiritual science, engages with these two aspects of the dual nature – one could specify further aspects, but that is not the point today – then one can already read something tremendously significant from the mere shape of the human being, if one really engages with it. From a spiritual scientific point of view, it can be seen that this human head undergoes a development from birth through physical life on earth, which now differs from the development of the rest of the organism just as the head already differs in form from the rest of the organism. It is very interesting to observe that this head develops three to four times faster than the rest of the organism. If you look at the rest of the organism, you can call it by a common name, in that it is mainly organized by the heart, so that you then get an opposite between the head organism and the heart organism. This heart organism really develops three to four times slower than the head organism. If we were only heads, we would be old people by the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, getting ready to die because the head develops so quickly. The rest of the organism develops four times more slowly, and so we live well into our seventies and eighties. But that does not change the fact that we actually have a head development and a heart development, that we carry these two natures within us. Our head development is also usually fully completed by the age of twenty-eight; the head no longer develops. What then develops is the rest of the organism. It also sends the developmental rays into the head of its own accord. If you are able to observe the shape, the characteristic development of the shape, you could come across confirmation even from external things, even if you cannot come across the thing itself. However, you have to have spiritual knowledge to come across this. But look, who has not looked at a small child and said to themselves when they see it again later: This child only later became so similar to so and so. — This is connected with the fact that the forces of heredity are actually in the rest of the organism. The head is formed entirely out of the cosmos; and only when the forces of heredity work out of the rest of the organism, which happens more slowly, does the physiognomy of the head also resemble the rest of the organism. This is just one example of how external facts can confirm what spiritual science finds. It is important to note that the head develops much faster than the rest of the organism.

You see, knowing this was not so important in the early days when people were more unfree, more directed. In those days, the good spiritual powers took care of things. They effectively established harmony between the pace of head development and the pace of the rest of development. Now the time is coming when people themselves must ensure that such things are harmonized. Therefore, people must be able to understand such things correctly, must be able to deal with them, and they sin against development if they cannot do so. And we have an important area of human life where these things are terribly sinned against. This sin is sporadically expressed today because we have been in it since the last third of the 19th century. It will be expressed in a terrible way if people cannot understand the spiritual impulses. Today they initially express themselves in the following way: No consideration is given to the fact that if a person is to develop normally, something must be given to him that takes into account the fact that his brain development is three to four times faster than that of the rest of the organism. And one area in which this is particularly damaging is that of education and teaching, for the following reasons: Under the influence of the scientific world view, concepts have been developed that have gradually become mere concepts for the development of the head, that do not contribute to the rest of the development, concepts that are acquired at the same pace as the head develops, that cannot be absorbed at the same pace as the rest of the organism develops.

This means an extraordinary amount. Time has gradually developed louder ideas that occupy the head, leaving the heart cool and empty. They come sporadically today, as I said, but the things will increasingly take hold. You can do the test if you can observe life. Because of the dichotomy of the way the head and heart develop, the human being depends on not just developing intellectually in his youth. In youth, the head is the main focus because the other aspects develop more slowly. If we wanted to educate people for the rest of their lives as well as for the head, we would have to keep them in school their whole lives. We can only address the head in school education. But today the head is treated in such a way that it cannot give anything back to the rest of the organism in spiritual and soul terms. The rest of the organism does, of course, give its inherited impulses to the head throughout life, otherwise we would die at twenty-seven, because the head is predisposed to do so. But in return, the head should also give what is cultivated in it. You can see for yourself that today's education does not do this. To prove it, ask yourself: Is it not true that people who receive a school education today only remember what they feel in later life? — Most of the time they do not even do that, but are happy to be able to quickly forget everything. This only means that the rest of the organism observes the formation of the head. If the rest of the organism received from the head the life essence it needs, then one would not only remember in terms of memory, but one would look back on what one's teacher gave one, as on a paradise, to which one thinks back with heartfelt contentment and attachment every hour in later life, into which one plunges again and again and in which one has a source of rejuvenation. It would be a source of rejuvenation if it included education of the heart, not just of the head. Then, throughout his or her life, a person would have something from childhood teaching, from school, for the rest of the organism, which develops four times more slowly, and this would also have an effect on the organism. Today it is only just beginning, and it will get worse and worse. People will become prematurely aged because they will only remember what they have absorbed into their heads, and what has meaning only up to the age of twenty-seven. After that, it remains as useless, remembered memory; and the person ages. He ages inwardly, spiritually, early on, because the formation of the head is not suited to overflow into the four times slower development of the heart.

These things must be taken into account. But if they are to be taken into account, then our school education must become a totally different one, then it must have living concepts instead of the dead concepts that prevail everywhere today. When it comes to a Kant-Laplacean theory, people will always remember it in such a way that they grow old. What is real: the spiritual and soul starting point of our universe, from which the physical has only developed, will, if it is properly incorporated into the teaching material, be a lifelong source of rejuvenation. And it is possible to shape the subject matter, not just by using a methodical approach, but by completely reworking it in the anthroposophical sense, so that throughout one's entire life, there is something that one can recall not just in thought, but that is a lifelong source of continuous rejuvenation. We must consciously work to ensure that people are not old when they are barely fifty years old, but that they can still draw inwardly, spiritually, from what they have taken in during their youth; that they can have a source of refreshment, a refreshing drink from what they have taken in as a child. But then it must be given in such a way that it is not only suitable for the development of the head, but that it is suitable for the development of the whole human organism, which proceeds three to four times more slowly than the development of the head.

To understand such things means to bring to life what are dead concepts for the natural scientist and therefore also for our general education. Do not underestimate the great social significance of what is said here. You might think that this is only important where science in the narrower sense is effective. That is not true. Science has an effect on all of today's education, on the whole breadth of today's human development. These scientific concepts extend even into the Sunday newspapers; and even those who only absorb everything that constitutes their faith today, the real and true faith, from their Sunday newspaper, which they pretend to have towards their church or their office, are infected by science, which can only deliver dead matter, even if this dead matter may be considered in the most spiritual way. These things must be clearly seen through.

So you see: Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is truly not just something that can satisfy subjective curiosity, but something that has to deeply affect our entire development in time. And again, this intervention in our development in time depends, for our consciousness, which can be trained in anthroposophy, on the recognition of what took place in human development from 1841 to 1879 and to 1917, both supersensibly and sensibly, above and on the physical plane. These things cannot be taken seriously enough. For much, very much, has not been taken seriously in recent times. And the recovery of humanity will have to consist in people again being willing to accept perceptions, ideas, feelings about world development. Just reflect on these things!

If you look back over the past few decades, what has the world's ruling class, with the exception of a few individuals, actually done in terms of world views, major world views? At most, it has allowed natural scientific concepts to be popularized in some way, and has used these natural scientific concepts, which it has allowed to be popularized, to demonstrate all kinds of illustrative things using the means of modern times. If you could somehow announce that something from the natural sciences would be demonstrated with slides, you would attract a great deal of attention and popularity. What has the leading social class actually done with questions of world view in modern times? People were very interested if someone could tell what they experienced as a North Pole traveler or as a Brazilian explorer. It is not to be criticized that one is interested in this. When someone talks about the fact that he has somehow been able to unravel the secrets of the egg germ of the May beetle, one has felt the necessity of listening to such lectures as a well-educated bourgeois of modern times, even if one has dozed off after five minutes, unless a slide has awakened one. But where is the real will to elevate the human idea to a worldview? Where it was present, and it is very characteristic, and everyone is actually forced to reflect on it today, where have there been the most lively worldview debates, the most lively interests in worldview questions for decades? There, where the Social Democrats had their meetings. There, worldviews were formed. This is only unknown in other social classes because they guard against really getting to know human life as much as possible.

But what kind of worldview do the Social Democrats teach? One that only works with the same concepts that are enshrined in the machines; a worldview that only develops views of the world in the mechanical sense: historical materialism, materialist conception of history, materialist conception of human coexistence. You can read about these concepts in every socialist magazine. Most people don't do that, but it would be quite useful to get informed. Those people who have been pushed into the machines, who have nothing to do from morning till night but work, and who, when they come away from the machines in the evening, have to deal with a social institution that is actually a copy of the machine, they have a world view that sees the world as if it were a machine. They have developed a world view that takes no account of individuality and organizes everything around the balancing concept of the dead. There is a very good saying: Death makes everything equal; but one could also say: A worldview that only deals with the mechanical, the dead, also makes everything equal, extinguishes all individual existence, all life. — So all individual existence, all life would be extinguished by the worldview that takes its ideal from the machine. As long as the matter was not serious, one allowed these things to befall one while dreaming, while sleeping, and one behaved in such a way that one rejected all questions of world view and gradually lost touch with all the impulses that can permeate human community life, human educational life in an understanding way. And basically, in more recent times, work has only been done in matters of world view where mechanical concepts were used. Even science, after all, only produced mechanical concepts. If you take Theodor Ziehen's book, which is a model for modern science, and read the final chapters, you will see that he is also one of those who say that natural science cannot come up with concepts that ethics, morality and aesthetics provide; but afterwards concepts are developed which state that everything that is not natural science is only dreamed up. Between the lines, everything that is not natural science is defamed. At the end, Theodor Ziehen says graciously: Concepts such as freedom, ethics, morality and so on must come from other fields; only the concept of responsibility should actually be rejected by real science. Man cannot be responsible any more than a flower can be blamed for its ugliness. — From a scientific point of view, this is absolutely correct if you are one-sidedly grounded in natural science, if you apply mere concepts of the dead. But then you are applying concepts that do not even come to the living, and certainly not to the I.

It is interesting to see how Theodor Ziehen talks about the I. In these lectures, which were written down and then printed so that they capture the tone of the lecture, he says about the I: “Gentlemen, it is a complicated concept, the I; when you think about what you actually think when you hear the little word ‘I’, what do you come up with?

you come? First of all, you think of your corporeality. Then you think of your family relationships. Then you think of your property relationships. Then you think of your name and title - he leaves out the medals - then... well, you think of nothing but such things. And what some psychologists have developed, he says, is just a fiction. Yes, the natural scientist, when speaking about the ego, can also come to nothing but what no human being actually thinks about when they seriously consider the matter, when they consider the ego. But the matter is serious, in that the concepts that have been developed out of the dead must also lead to the killing, the destruction, and the devastation of life. A theory that has been made out of the dead machine as a social world-view theory has a destructive rather than a constructive effect when it is introduced into life. Humanity has not decided to grasp this; therefore, it must experience it in the most extreme way. For what has happened? In the area where sources of tremendous future impulses will once arise, in the East, the theory of the dead, the continuation of the mechanistic world view in social views, in Leninism and Trotskyism, is having a destructive effect.

Consider the matter only very seriously. He who recognizes only the dead, and in man also recognizes only the dead, may he be as great a scholar as Theodor Ziehen, when he speaks about the ego, about responsibility, as Theodor Ziehen does, then his true social interpreter is not he himself — who does not dare to do so — but Lenin and Trotsky are the ones who draw the right conclusion for human society. What Lenin and Trotsky carry out are the consequences of that which is already cultivated by the purely scientific world view. But because this scientific world view makes compromises with that which is not the consequence of this world view, only because of this does it, precisely because it does not draw the conclusion, become not Leninism and Trotskyism.

It is also important, however, that things be taken in the sense of reality. What is not true has an objective effect. Thoughts are realities, not mere concepts. You cannot just say: Even if no one knows about a lie, it still works as a power. That is true, but something else is also true: If a lie exists that is not recognized as a lie, that does not change its effect; it works in the real world as a lie. And no matter how well it is meant, it still works as a lie.

There are already works today - I may have mentioned them here already - which treat the question of Christ Jesus from the standpoint of the correct present-day natural science. Very interesting books, because they proceed uncompromisingly. Above all, a Danish book. There are also others who really express what the present-day psychologist, the present-day psychiatrist, who thinks scientifically, must think about Christ Jesus. What does Christ Jesus become? He becomes an epileptic, a pathological person, a person with a morbid disposition. And the Gospels are interpreted in such a way that one sees in every chapter: they are case histories. Of course, all this is nonsense; but to say that it is nonsense, today only the one has the right to do so who sees through the matter spiritually. The one who accepts today's scientific psychology and psychiatry, from his point of view, this Christ teaching is the right one, because it draws the right conclusion there. And a person who speaks as a modern psychiatrist is still a better person, a truer, a more honest person than the one who accepts today's psychiatry and yet thinks differently about Christ, in the sense of those pastors or priests who also accept science in its entirety and yet make compromises.

A lie has an effect, however piously it is dressed up, for it is a real power. Above all, what is needed today is not to cover up life with compromises, but to face squarely what needs to be faced from certain presuppositions. If today's psychiatrist does not want to see Christ as an epileptic, as a lunatic, which according to today's psychiatry he would be, then he must give up psychiatry as it is developed today; then he must place himself on the ground of spiritual science. If people today were able to place themselves squarely on the foundations of that which can be known, then we would, with what can be known, have the right impulses for what must continue to work.

Recently, a note was slipped into my hand about a book that I was already familiar with, which had, in any case, caused the horror of the lady – because it was probably a lady. The note tells me what Alexander Moszkowski has written. I don't have the book here, but you can see from the slip what the book is about: “Anyone who has ever sat on the benches of a grammar school will find the hours unforgettable when, in Plato, he ‘enjoyed’ the conversations between Socrates and his friends, unforgettable because of the incredible boredom that emanates from these conversations. And one might remember that one actually found the conversations of Socrates heartily stupid; but of course one did not dare to express this view, because after all the man in question was Socrates, the “Greek philosopher”. The book “Sokrates der Idiot” (Socrates the Idiot) by Alexander Moszkowski (Verlag Dr. Eysler & Co. Berlin) does away with this unjustified overestimation of the good Athenian. In this small, entertainingly written work, the polymath Moszkowski undertakes nothing less than to strip Socrates of his philosophical dignity almost completely. The title “Socrates – the Idiot” is meant literally. One would not be mistaken in assuming that the book will still be the subject of scholarly debate.

Of course, today's compromisers will say: Well, we have learned enough that Socrates is a great man, and not an idiot; now Moszkowski comes along and says such a thing! But today it is necessary to have a completely different idea about such a thing. Those who know Moszkowski are aware that he stands on the ground of the scientific world view in the fullest sense of the word, right up to the quantum theory, and that he is therefore on the outermost wing of today's scientific world view. And it must be said that this Moszkowski is a much more honest man than the others, who also believe that they stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world-view and yet do not think that they should regard Socrates as a fool who has nothing to say on the concepts important for the world-view; who nevertheless make compromises, depict Socrates as a great man.

The fact is that today things cannot be put right for the simple reason that people do not have the sense of truth to face up to the consequences uncompromisingly in every respect. And anyone who wants to accept Socrates today must not accept the conditions that Moszkowski sets.

But that is difficult today, has been difficult for three to four centuries. Therefore, the matter was left alone until it had developed into what it has become in the last three to four years. Things must be approached at their soul-spiritual core, where their truly deeper impulses lie. It must be faced, which is particularly necessary today, to face the fact that truth and the sense of truth must enter into the souls of human beings! Then the things that are brought into the light of this sense of truth, that are illuminated by the light of this sense of truth, will be able to show their true face. Then one will be compelled to come to spiritual science simply because one sees the true face of things. For the present speaks a lot and speaks urgently, and things can be learned, such as how educational issues and questions of teaching must be studied by spiritual science today. Just as the question of the different pace of head and heart education is important for teaching and education, so there are many questions that are fundamental, important and significant for social life, for historical life, for legal life. We just have to get out of what we have dug ourselves into, out of the terrible belief in authority regarding what the scientific world view alone provides. This is necessary for our time. What the scientific world view calls 'real' provides concepts that can never reach into the realm of human coexistence. Humanity lives under this error today. If you look at things more deeply, you can see this.

That is what I wanted to say to you today. Now, let each one of you draw the conclusion from this that it is important to open our eyes and to illuminate things with the light that we can find from the light of spiritual science itself.

Yesterday I spoke about how our development appears to the Oriental. In many respects, the Oriental sees precisely what is compromising and inconsistent with his naive, intuitive spiritual faculty. And right now there are critical views among outstanding Orientals that are significant and interesting to follow. More and more views are emerging in the Asian East that the Orient must take the further development of humanity into its own hands. These views could be undone if there were more sense for what is proclaimed here as spiritual science! But then this sense must also be a living one; one must not only want to have something interesting in spiritual science, from which one prepares an inner soul voluptuousness, but one must want to have something that permeates one's whole life. And one must be able to see that it is only through the insights of spiritual science that social, moral and legal concepts can truly be grasped. What humanity has conceived under the influence of the scientific world view over the decades has not grown with the spirit that reigns in reality. No, it is at best comparable to those views that today educate people who want to spiritually kill the whole world because they only take their concepts from the world of the dead. Future times, when people will think more objectively about these things again, when the passions that so often guide and direct judgments today will have died down, future times – I am fully convinced that it can be so — will say: One of the most important characteristics of the period around 1917 was that the Weltanschhauung, which is only intended for the head and actually drives people into old age, has become a school-like Weltanschhauung. In the future, perhaps in a distant future, it will be called Wilsonism, in reference to the great schoolmaster from whom a large part of humanity wants to have a socio-political worldview impressed upon them. It is no mere accident that mere school-knowledge, which has nothing to do with the spiritual, has now become one of the most important political factors in the form of Wilsonism. This is an important and tremendously significant symptom of our time. It is just not possible to talk about these things today in a really thorough and comprehensive way that takes everything into account. But from my present allusions you will have gathered how important it actually is to try to understand these things thoroughly, how infinitely important it is to face up to these things not only out of affect, out of emotion, but out of knowledge.

I may have mentioned it here before, but I mention it again because it is important: now it is not difficult to speak out against Wilson within Central Europe; but I can point out how, in a cycle that was held long before these events, when the whole world, including Central Europe, still admired Wilson, I characterized him exactly the same way as I do now. The point is that one approaches the impulses that dominate the present time, which also dominate the present time as errors, from much deeper sources. In our anthroposophical field, our friends had the opportunity to see how, long before there was any external compulsion to see things in the right light, the right thing was pointed out again and again. May these things be better understood in the future than we have decided to understand them in the past! And I would especially urge you to bear this in mind: much of what is coming to light in the field of our anthroposophical science is infinitely better understood than we have so far chosen to understand it. It can penetrate even deeper into the hearts and souls of human beings and be awakened to a more intense life than has happened so far. May it happen! For what happens through it will already be connected with much that can truly be done, not to bring about disaster, but for the good of the future development of humanity, that can be done to make good much that has been neglected and that might perhaps be neglected further if one only listens to that which can be gained outside of spiritual science. Among our friends, too, many have a double bookkeeping of their lives. They have one in anthroposophical studies and books, for the private nourishment of their hearts and souls. The other bookkeeping is for their life outside, where they rely solely on the authority of the natural sciences. Often one does not realize that this is the case; but it is good to be a little conscientious in consulting with one's soul about these things, so that there may be harmony between these two accounts.

Man's life can only be administered in one sense. The spirit must also penetrate the scientific world view. And religious life must also be imbued with the light that can be gained from spiritual science. Take such things as were said and meant here today, and which seemingly lead the considerations of time up to supersensible heights, as they can be grasped in your presentations. Then you will see that anthroposophical education is not only education of the head, that it can also educate the heart for humanity. It is already education of the heart. It already serves all humanity, not just the humanity that might actually die at twenty-seven. It already serves to make people courageous and capable throughout their entire life. Education that fails to take into account the different pace of the development of head and heart will make him old, nervous, disharmonious and torn. Look at life, you will find this confirmed, because life can be a great teacher with regard to the confirmation of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science brings down from the spiritual heights. Take everything that has been said, especially when it is spoken from such points of view as today, as spoken to your hearts, my dear friends, for the education of our hearts by the spirit of the world; and hold together that which should be the bond that links us together as members of our movement. Let us work together and plan to continue working, each in our own place and to the best of our ability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the same preface Michelet also expresses a hope:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Attendees!

As at my previous visits here in Munich, I would like to take the liberty of speaking on one of the two lecture days about a subject that does not strictly belong to the field of spiritual science, but rather touches on general German intellectual life. In these fateful times, this can be considered particularly appropriate.

And the day after tomorrow – on Sunday – I will return to a consideration from the narrower field of spiritual science, as I have been allowed to present it here for years, myself.

But it is not only because of my feelings in the face of the momentous and far-reaching events of our time that I would like to talk about today's topic, but because I may assume, not out of purely national feelings , but because I believe that I can assume, based on the facts, that the spiritual-scientific worldview represented here is intimately connected to very specific currents and aspirations of German intellectual life.

Not, dear ladies and gentlemen, to stoop to the level of Germany's opponents – the opponents of German national identity – who not only accuse but also defame what German intellectual life has produced, not to stoop to that level – I believe that is not necessary within German intellectual , but because I would like to make this observation, because our time requires a kind of self-reflection on the actual essence of the developing German national spirit, also with regard to the attainment of a spiritual world view, because self-reflection on this matter of German spiritual life must arise like a kind of basic need of the soul currently within this spiritual life.

When one engages in such reflection, one's spiritual gaze naturally falls first on the three great figures that I spoke of during my last visit here. And I would like to begin by saying a few words about these three great German thinkers and philosophers, about whom I was already able to speak here last time, even at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before.

First of all, our spiritual gaze must fall on that personality who had grown entirely out of German intellectual life and who, even in one of the most difficult times in German life, found tones that were suited to carry the whole nation along in a world-historically necessary enthusiasm: our spiritual gaze must fall on Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Fichte – I believe one must say of him: on closer, more thorough examination of his work, it becomes apparent how deeply true it is that he expressed what he felt to be his own sentiments in the most diverse forms. The best that he has to say in his world view was born in his soul from an intimate conversation that he repeatedly had with the German national spirit itself.

I do not want to present this as an external judgment, but rather as something that Fichte himself felt in his deepest innermost being. And what exactly is this innermost path of Fichte's striving? I think it can be described as a well-founded conviction: to so power the innermost part of the human soul, the center of the human spirit-soul-being, to so inwardly enliven it that in this heightened experience of the innermost soul life, that which interweaves and lives through the world as divine-spiritual resonates, that one enters into the innermost being of this conviction by , so that what one can go through inwardly in one's own soul - not in everyday life, but in moments of celebration in life - grows together with the spiritual-divine currents themselves, but now not only in our inner being, but also in the whole of nature and in all spiritual, outer spiritual life, which pulsates through the whole world.

Now, in Fichte it is as if something is revealed from a particular side of the soul that has taken root in him, from a soul power that was particularly strongly developed in him, from that soul power that can perhaps be described as follows: Of the three powers of the human soul – thinking, feeling and willing – he felt the willing above all. And he himself felt the I in such a way that the most essential thing in the experience of the I is that the human being can indeed come to say to himself: the I actually consists in the fact that one can will, and always will anew; and that one's eternity is guaranteed by feeling within oneself the authorization to will it again and again; and that into this volition there penetrates what one feels in the very deepest sense as a commitment to life and the world; that in this commitment to life and the world one can at the same time feel something that strikes from the divine-spiritual expanses into one's own being. So that one can say: the highest that one can experience is the duty that reveals itself to one's own soul in the whole of the world, that strikes into one's own being and gives one the certainty that, because one has interwoven into what goes through the world as a duty-bearing will, as an eternally duty-bearing will, one oneself stands in this world as an eternal being.

From such an experience, from the experience of such a relationship to the world, Fichte's entire - one cannot even say “worldview”, but entire - way of thinking and feeling and speaking about the world emerged.

But it did not follow from his nature that one could speak of a theory, of a theoretical side, about the world. It followed from his nature - and he always felt that to be the German thing about his way of thinking about the world - it followed from his nature that what was like a general sense of the world, a general view of the world, was the most direct, personal power of his nature. And so it was the most immediate force of his being that it basically emerged when Fichte was very young, a boy.

And so allow me to describe a few traits that characterize this personal relationship to the world: There we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of poor people, at the age of seven – he was already a schoolboy – there we see him one day standing by the stream that flowed past his father's small weaver's cottage, and he has thrown a book into the stream. He stands there crying; his father comes to him.

What had actually happened? As I said, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was already a schoolboy at the age of seven; and since he had often been praised for his good learning, it was now clear to see how, since his father had given him the book that he had now thrown into the stream, he was no longer as attentive and diligent at school as he had been before; this had often been criticized of him. This book was a description of the deeds of “Horned Siegfried.” And when young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who could already read, got hold of this book, he became absorbed in these great exploits; his attention to school subjects waned, and he was reprimanded for it.

But then the deepest trait of his character immediately showed itself in his soul.

However your inclination may speak, however your enthusiasm may be kindled by the figure of “Horned Siegfried” – he thought to himself – that must not be; duty is the highest. Because he does not want to diminish duty in any way, he throws the book into the water – as a seven-year-old boy! Thus, what later became the keynote of his relationship to the wider world was already alive in the boy: this permeation of the human soul with the will borne by duty, which he later felt to be the fundamental force of the whole universe.

And two years later, the nine-year-old boy Fichte, we see him in the following example: the neighbor of the estate – who later became Fichte's benefactor – had set out to hear the sermon in Fichte's hometown on a Sunday; but this neighbor from the neighborhood had arrived too late. The sermon was already over. The neighboring landowner was a little sad; he would have liked to hear the sermon. And while they were talking, they came up with the idea that there was a boy who knew how to listen to sermons in such a way, even though he was only nine years old, that he was able to repeat them quite faithfully. They fetched young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who appeared in his blue peasant's smock, at first rather awkwardly, then warming up, repeating the whole sermon, not repeating it in such a way that he rattled it off without inner participation, but in such a way that one saw – and this had the effect, as I said, so deeply significant that the estate neighbor later became the benefactor of Johann Gottlieb Fichte – so that one saw: this entire boy's soul was interwoven with every word, and with what lived in each word, and could give the whole sermon anew, as one's own spiritual property!

Interweaving this, the environment, the why, the observation with the innermost of one's own experience in the soul, that is the characteristic that Johann Gottlieb Fichte always felt was the basic feature of the formation of a specifically German world view. This was very much alive in him, that only by strengthening this inner self, by experiencing what sits in the deepest soul, can one also experience what lives and weaves through the world as divine-spiritual.

Something like this lived, for example, in a basic trait that the profound Steffens tells us about, which he himself experienced in Jena when Fichte was already a “professor”. There Johann Gottlieb Fichte stood before his audience and said: First of all, gentlemen of the audience, think of the wall! He did not just want to speak to the audience in such a way that he communicated a content to them, but he wanted to create a living bond between his soul and the soul of the audience. They were to participate in a spiritual process that he allowed to take place directly: Think of the wall! Well, the people could do that. After he had let them think of the wall for a while, he said: So, now think of the one who thought the wall! That was more perplexing; they were no longer fully engaged in the activity he was asking of them. But he immediately pointed to this inwardly grasping and seizing of that which works and lives in the world.

Therefore, the whole way in which Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented was very special. People who heard him say how his speech flowed like rolling thunder, and how the individual words discharged like lightning strikes. Yes, we are told how he seemed like a person who not only inhabits the transcendental realm of ideas, but directly rules in it. And this is a word coined by his loyal listeners.

And indeed, they too have retained such a saying. If you have an ear for tracing history in its more intimate currents, you can follow what became of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's students and how they retained such a saying. People who understood him said: He does not just want to educate good souls, he wants to educate great souls!

This should give a rough idea of the depth of Fichte's work; for when he stood before his audience, he was not really concerned with saying this or that, he was not just concerned that his listeners should take up this or that of his words; he did not prepare himself at all for the individual wording, but he tried to live that which he wanted to bring home to his listeners - to live in it with a living, inner part of the soul. Then he would go before his audience. And, as already mentioned, it was not important to him that they should take up these or those words, but what he experienced in saying them was most important to him: to express the Will of the World, so that the Will of the World would live on in his words. That this should surge and surge to the souls of his listeners, that was what he wanted, this will that felt so alive in him in what underlies the world according to his view.

That is why he was able to find those stirring words to characterize German national character, which he found in his “Discourses to the German Nation.” No one understands their deeper meaning, which is Fichte's soul, and is unable to respond to the deep needs from which they arose. We may say: That which the German spirit had to say to the world was realized through Fichte's personality in terms of the will.

If we consider the second figure — the figure of someone who follows on from Fichte, Schelling — we see a completely different side of the German nature. When Fichte speaks, it is as if the element of will itself were rolling through his words. Schelling did not appear to his listeners that way. Even as a very young professor in Jena, still a youth among youths, Schelling spoke enchantingly, in a way that perhaps no one before or since has achieved through a directly academic speech.

Why does Schelling have this effect? With Fichte, we can say that what he said to the world lived in the will. With Schelling, everything lives from the mind, from that mind for which only the German language has a word, from that mind that wants to convince with love, even when it recognizes that it wants to submerge with love in the things to be achieved. Thus, for Schelling, what it means to be in nature flows together, and he wants to immerse himself in this with love so that all of nature becomes like the outer countenance of his hidden spiritual life, spirit in nature. He went so far that he could utter the one-sided saying, Schelling: “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly a one-sided, in this one-sidedness quite untrue word; but it points us precisely to the essential thing with him, Schelling, to this creating and weaving of the spirit, which lives behind nature, and in which the human spirit wants to grasp itself in order to know itself as one with all natural and with all spiritual existence.

Because he worked in this way, he appeared to his listeners as a seer, so that while he spoke, Schelling was able to convey the spirituality of which he spoke and which surrounded him. While Fichte conveys the will, with Schelling it is as if he had spoken as a seer and directly said what he saw while saying it.

One learns such things most easily – I would say – from direct, traditional observation. Therefore, allow me to describe the impression that a truly deep mind, who was Schelling's friend and first listener – Schubert – had of him; because it is good to put oneself directly into what happened in a certain period of German intellectual development.

“What was it”

as Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert asks.

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

It was not only that.

“There was in his lively words”

indeed

"an absorbing power, which no young soul, wherever it met with any receptivity, could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time

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

"who was not, like me, a young and enthusiastic listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The powerful content of his words, as if measured with mathematical precision in lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to be loosened and from whose hand the unquenchable fire to be received, is the task of the understanding mind."

All of this must have been magical. I myself knew people who got to know Schelling when he was already an old man [...] because he expressed what he, as a shearer of the spiritual worlds, brought to his listeners in such a way that, as people who saw and knew him in those days say, he not only spoke to them, but his words, as he wanted to communicate them, flooded out of his eyes to them. That was still the case in old age; what must he have been like as a youth!” Schubert then says:

"But it was neither the personality nor the invigorating power of the oral communication alone that so soon after their public announcement by writing, evoked such interest and excitement for or against the direction of Schelling's philosophy, as no other literary phenomenon of a similar kind has been able to do for a long time before or since. ... In matters of sense-perceptible things or natural phenomena, one will immediately recognize whether a teacher or writer speaks from his own insight and experience"

from the spiritual world

“speaks or merely speaks of what he has heard from others, or even has thought up according to his own self-made ideas...”

Now, dear audience, it is probably fair to say today that it would be a childish view of the world to believe that by describing such spirits, one is demanding to speak to followers or opponents. In such matters, allegiance and antagonism are not important. One need not subscribe to a single word that Fichte or Schelling have written or spoken, nor need one be their opponent for not subscribing to a single word. The content is less important in this regard. The content of worldviews is in a state of dynamic development.

We will have much to discuss the day after tomorrow, especially about the living development of these worldviews and what the content has to do with it. It is not about defending this or that position that Fichte or Schelling took, but rather about looking at the lives of the personalities – at how they were situated within the whole of German intellectual life.

It is something tremendously significant when such minds try to recognize what nature is and what historical life is, so that they - as Fichte himself was well aware - grasp what is around them in a living way, submerging themselves in the things with their own knowledge. And that was what these minds strove for.

But because of this – and one really does not need to speak out of narrow-minded national sentiment, but one can speak entirely from the factual; as I said – we do not need to fall into the tone in which our enemies today fall! In this, as Fichte also emphasized, life in the German world view shows itself to be different from, say, the Western European, French or British world view.

Last time I pointed out what an enormous difference there is between this kind of Fichte and Schelling and - however much one may fight against them in terms of content - [what an enormous difference there is] between this kind of Fichte and Schelling, between penetrating into the foundations of things, where the whole outer world lives and gains life in knowledge itself, to what Fichte calls the dead world view, the world view of the inanimate among Western European minds [; where the world] of the inanimate begins, we say, within French folklore at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Descartes or Cartesius. But then it develops further, and we find it particularly pronounced, shortly before Fichte and Schelling, as has been described, appeared before their German nation, we find this world view of the dead, of the merely material and mechanical, over in France; we find it expressed, for example, in de La Mettrie.

This world view, as it can be found in de La Mettrie, for example – in this father of materialism, of modern materialism – is not to be fought against; it is only to be pointed out how precisely the French nation, in contrast to the German nation, is moving towards the dead and the mechanical. We see this already in Descartes, in Cartesius, in that for him not only minerals, plants, but also animals are merely moving machines. For de La Mettrie, the world finally becomes what he was able to put down in his book: “Man a Machine”.

Now, of course, dear audience, it is easy to find materialistic and spiritualistic elements in every culture and so on. But I am aware that I am not following this convenient mode of expression, but that I am highlighting precisely the characteristic that is related to the culture, and that for the German culture, Fichte and Schell ing in their striving - even if perhaps not in their thinking, as we shall see shortly - are as characteristic and as significant for German folklore as de La Mettrie - this could be proved in detail - for French folklore.

Everything is explained in such a way – and this is justified because it is self-evident – that one can see how man is dependent on what also works in him materially.

De La Mettrie comes to some strange assertions when he wants to prove how everything that exists depends on what is taken in through eating. Perhaps it is not entirely unnecessary to draw attention to a passage in de La Mettrie's book, “Man a Machine”, and to point out this passage in the Frenchman's book precisely in our present time. Of course, we do not need to endorse this passage in the way it is quoted here. We do not want to think such terrible things of a nation that is now at war with us, as the Frenchman de La Mettrie thought at the time. But it is perhaps interesting to quote what he says in order to prove how an entire nation, by eating in a certain way, acquires very specific mental and spiritual qualities, and thus wants to deduce the dependence of the soul and spirit of an entire nation on what is taken in materially through eating and drinking. So de La Mettrie says in the book 'Man a Machine':

"Raw flesh makes animals wild; men would become wild if they had the same food. How true this is can be seen from the fact that the English nation, which cooks meat less than we do and eats it quite raw and bloody, shows greater wildness, which is partly brought about by such food and partly, of course, by other causes, which only education can suppress. This wildness produces pride, hatred, contempt for other nations, stubbornness and other feelings in the soul that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind in a people whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness."

As I said, we do not need to subscribe to this harsh judgment of a Frenchman about the English; but it is perhaps interesting to recall it, especially in our time, when so much else is heard today, moving in other directions from this side, towards today's English allies.

The third person, who is very much honored by being present, and to whom attention must be drawn, because the third side of the German character speaks through him – and of the soul's character in general – is Hegel.

Of course, when people speak of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel today, the first thing that comes to mind is: Yes, but you really can't expect people to deal with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And most of them will indeed open a book and then close it again because they find it too difficult.

But, dear attendees, anyone who is familiar with the more intimate sides of intellectual life will not entirely disagree with me when I say that the time will come when these three minds will be so grasped in their striving that they can be vividly presented in modern times, so that what is essential – which, of course, had to first be expressed by them in a language that is difficult to understand – can be understood by everyone. And this treasure, which lies in these three minds, will once again bear fruit for every German child, if we are no longer too casual and too lazy to delve into the greatest treasures of the mind.

The third, as I said, is Hegel. If in Fichte it is the will that seeks that which weaves and breathes through the whole world; [if] in Schelling it was the mind, in that love is sought, which can recognize all exteriority in its liveliness – so in the present case it is the conviction that man, when he ascends to the thought that is not permeated by sensuality, when he ascends to the thought that is free of sensuality, and allows this sensuality-free thought to grow and live within him, that this thought, which the soul now experiences within itself, is a flowing in the soul, in which the divine-spiritual thoughts, from which the universe itself is created, work and weave. The soul is permeated by the Divine Being, and the soul thinks free of all sensuality.

The content may be wrong – and you can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – but something significant underlies it, and this in turn resonates with the most intimate trait of German spiritual life: mysticism as a striving, but not mysticism, which attempts to solve the riddles of the world in the dark and confused, which wants to reject all ambiguity, as mysticism so often wants, namely amateurish mysticism, confused mysticism, which we will talk about the day after tomorrow. Hegel's striving is mystical, namely to unite the soul with the very weaving of the world. But the goal is to achieve this mystical experience not in a dark emotional chaos or in a dark inner visionary chaos; but in the full clarity of the world of ideas, in the clarity of the world of ideas of the spirit of all things.

And this mystical connection in clarity is one of the deepest traits of the German character. One almost recoils from finding such a connection to the German character as a German and from emphasizing its significance for the German character. Therefore, let me present to you another characteristic of the German character, esteemed attendees. In 1877, someone noted in his “Diary”:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the source of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the rule of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a result of revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to get back to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention."

So that I cannot be accused of characterizing from a one-sided national sentiment, I bring you this characterization, written from a soul torn by pain, and which – dear lady – was not written by a German, but by the French Swiss Amiel, in 1877! I think it behoves us to be more forgiving of the others, who perhaps have more justification from their feelings and from their observations to express themselves about the relationship of the German spirit to the other national spirits of Europe. And the same Amiel wrote in his “Diary” in Geneva in 1875:

“Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, gloss more than fertility, public opinion more than conscience.”

This is how the French Swiss write; as I said, as a German I would not say it directly.

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

Thus the Frenchman Amiel, a Frenchman who was familiar with German intellectual life, about what he had noticed. Amiel himself says, as early as 1862:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are different enough among themselves, while the French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control the whole of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a spirit of order, didactic art, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves."

The same approach could be taken for other Western European cultures. But it is more important to take a look at these three minds that created a German worldview, which forms the backdrop to what German intellectual life produced in Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder and the others associated with them, as a flowering of intellectual human experience that can only be compared to the flowering that existed in ancient Greece. But when we consider Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in particular, when we look at them in this context, we have a special feeling; we can almost believe that something else is speaking, something higher that lives in all three of them than is expressed in each individual personality. One picture expresses more than one speaks when this feeling is expressed: the German national spirit speaks through these three personalities. And that is perhaps the solution to a riddle that must emerge when we consider the German intellectual life that follows on from these three personalities, albeit in a much more faded and forgotten form, which I will now try to sketch in a few characteristic strokes.

We are witnessing something very special. Within a more or less forgotten current of German intellectual life, which has been forgotten throughout the entire nineteenth century and into our own days – only this forgotten tone has been little studied so far – there are spirits who, in terms of their intellectual makeup, in terms of the extent of what they know and can do, in terms of the their genius, are far below the tone-setters Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but who, curiously enough, when one looks at what must be striven for today through spiritual science, have created more of spiritual science or have created more that corresponds to it than the great inspirers: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.

The lesser minds that come afterwards create more significant things than the great minds that preceded them. It is a striking phenomenon. It does not need to be a cause for great surprise, because it is self-evident that it is easier for those who follow; as lesser minds, they can achieve greater things than those who preceded them under certain circumstances. In the extreme, this can indeed express itself in the fact that every schoolboy can understand and grasp the Pythagorean theorem - and for its first formulation Pythagoras himself was necessary.

Thus the great men had to come; the clever ones are already there, pointing the way into the spiritual world. But that which has come out of the German folk spirit through them lives on now. Even if it is still emotionally restricted and spiritually surrounded – one can also speak of spiritual encirclement – it still forms the vanished, the faded tone in the world view that I would like to talk about now.

Here we find, dear ladies and gentlemen, the son of the great Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte, who was influenced by his father's ideas. But we also find that he is able to penetrate deeper into the knowledge of the spirit than his father, despite being a much lesser spirit than his father. Immanuel Hermann Fichte already speaks of the fact that man, on the one hand, has this physical world. He, Hermann Immanuel Fichte, calls physical the substances and forces that the outer physical world also contains. Through this physical world, man is connected with the physical substances and forces of the earth world, he is connected with what appears to him as something past. But behind this physical body, for Immanuel Hermann Fichte lies what he calls the etheric body; and just as the physical body contains within itself the substances and forces, so the etheric body contains substances and forces of a supersensible nature, which link this inner man, this supersensible spiritual man, to the great world of the spirit and place him in it.

Thus, Immanuel Hermann Fichte sees behind the other person the etheric human being, who is a reality for him, not just an image. And everything that spiritual science has to say about the etheric body, about these supersensible powers of human nature, in the sense often hinted at here in these lectures, can be found very beautifully in Immanuel Hermann Fichte.

But, one might say: Even with regard to the path that has been characterized here more often, an infinite amount already lives in the germ of another, who is to succeed in the world view of the great period of German idealism: For example, we see Troxler. Who knows Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler today? Who reads Troxler? Who, even among those who write the history of philosophy, takes more of an interest in Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler than to scribble five or six lines that say nothing about Troxler! Who is Troxler?

Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler is indeed a mind that – even if he has not yet fully mastered the spiritual science, for which it is only now at the right time – but Troxler is a personality who is on the path to this spiritual scientific research. We see then how Troxler coins strange words that show that something lives in his soul of the living spirit of spiritual science itself. Troxler coins strange words such as “supersensory spirit” and “supersensory mind”.

“Supersensory spirit” is relatively easy to understand; now, “supersensory spirit” is precisely what Goethe calls “contemplative judgment”. For – Goethe, in his real world view, is on exactly the same ground – because “supersensible spirit” is precisely that power of the human soul which unfolds in such a way that, without the help of the body, without external senses and without the sense bound to the brain, the human being directly “looks” into the spiritual environment, just as the spirit itself does – “supersensible spirit”.

But “super-spiritual sense”? By speaking of the “super-spiritual sense”, Troxler shows that he really has an understanding of the essence of spiritual science. I have mentioned it often, as there are people, idealistic philosophers, who say: Yes, of course, that is quite clear: the physical world is not the only one; spirit is present behind the physical world. Spirit, spirit and always spirit — they say. And that's where that pantheism comes out, that worldview that, doesn't it, spreads such a general spirit sauce – it doesn't specialize in that, it's nothing; maybe today you would have to say “dipping sauce” instead of “sauce” – [that worldview that] thinks it has spread such a general dipping sauce over everything that appears before people as physical objects and physical facts, doesn't it.

But that was not the case with Troxler! Troxler would have said: Those who speak only in a pantheistic way of spirit, spirit and spirit again, they seem to me to be saying: Why should we speak of tulips or lilies, of snowdrops, for example? Nature, nature is everything! And why should we speak of individual experiments in the laboratory? Nature, nature is everything. Those who speak of naturalism in this way should just / gap in the transcript /

But what matters is not just to talk in generalities about the spiritual, but to be able to point out that we are surrounded by a spiritual world that consists of individual entities and individual facts just as much as the physical world does.

That is why Troxler, because he knows this, speaks of the “super-spiritual sense” - which is of course a figure of speech, but which testifies that one can really look into, is able to look into the spiritual world and observe it in its details - not just as a “general spirit dip”.

And in yet another way, Troxler – in his “Lectures on Philosophy” in 1835, he speaks very beautifully about all these things – in yet another way, Troxler speaks of a kind of spiritual-scientific path that he has already taken. He says: The most beautiful powers of the soul that rule man here, insofar as he lives in his physical body, that man can make his own, insofar as the soul expresses itself through the physical body, these powers are those of faith, love, hope. But now – Troxler says: faith, love, hope, as great and significant as they are for the life that the soul spends in the physical body, they are – this faith, this love, this hope – the outer shell for the soul's spiritual powers that lie behind them and that this soul will experience when it has discarded the body and passed through the gate of death.

While the soul lives in the body, it lives out – through the bodily organs, of course through the finer bodily organs – the power of faith. [But, says Troxler, this power can be experienced not only as the power of faith, but also – as Troxler believes – as spiritual hearing, as spirit-hearing, in such a way that the power of faith becomes the outer, physical shell for a spirit-hearing of the soul; this organ would allow itself to be experienced free of the body – a wonderful, great thought.]

And love, this bloom of outer physical life on earth, this highest development of outer physical life on earth, insofar as the soul lives in the physical body in earthly life: For Troxler, this love, this love-power, one could say, is the outer shell again for something that the soul has within, that envelops this physical body. And what Troxler now addresses as a spiritual sense, a spiritual feeling - as one today senses physical things with the physical - lies behind the power of love. When the soul is able to free itself from the body or passes through the gate of death, then its spiritual organs unfold. And as it hears through that which lies behind the power of faith, what resounds as facts in the spiritual world, so it is able to feel the spiritual facts and entities through its [“groping”] spiritual organs, which the soul extends out of itself. While when it lives in the physical body, the spiritual feeling powers, touching powers bring themselves as love to revelation.

And in a similar way, behind the power of hope, in the power of an expectant confidence in something, lies for Troxler, spiritually, what he calls “spiritual vision”.

Thus, Troxler knows that a soul dwells in the physical body of man, endowed with spirit-hearing, spirit-touching, spirit-seeing, and that this soul passes through the portal of death with these three powers, but that it is also able to experience, when it frees itself from its ties to the body, that which spiritually surrounds and envelops us.

And, for example, Troxler expresses how he thinks – and I would like to share this with you in his own words – and at the same time points out that he has certain comrades in relation to such a way of looking at the world. He points to these or those spirits. I would like to read one of these passages to you verbatim. He says:

"The philosophers of old distinguished a fine, noble soul from the coarser body (or in this they assumed a kind of shell for the spirit), a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and that was the inner, higher man for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to this dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings? “The inner man,“ he says in another place, ‘this ’veiled God in nature,' is not himself of stone, like the latter.] In the stony limbs” — of man — “his living limbs grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could

”still cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed,

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed that Paul expressed to the Corinthians , saying: “A body that the soul has quickened is laid down, and a body that the spirit has quickened rises, for there is a body that has been quickened by the soul, there is also a body that has been spiritualized. And in this is] the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man.”

And now a remarkable – I would even say a decisive – thought arises for Troxler. He thinks something like the following. It is quite clear when you let his various writings sink in, especially his lectures on those subjects, which he had already written and delivered in 1835. The following thought is on Troxler's mind: There is an anthropology, a knowledge of man, he says. How does it arise – a knowledge of man? Man comes to know it by observing what can be observed of man with the senses and with the intellect, which is connected to the brain – that is how anthropology comes about. But this man who sees with the senses and observes through the intellect – in this man the higher man lives. And we have seen how clearly Troxler can express himself about this higher man. This higher human being, with his “supersensible sense” and with his “supersensible spirit”, can now also observe that which is supersensible and superspiritual in the other human being. In this way, just as anthropology arises in a lower realm, a higher science arises: the science of the spiritual human being - anthroposophy. And Troxler expresses himself about this in the following way:

"While it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history, is now making headway, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler speaks of a foundation of an “anthroposophy” in contrast to “anthropology”!

And so one has the right to speak of the germs of that which must now be incorporated from the universe into the spiritual development of humanity as spiritual science. One has the right to speak of it in such a way that it is present as a germ in these personalities. These germs, however, ladies and gentlemen, are firmly anchored in German intellectual life, in keeping with its nature. I can only hint at how firmly these things are rooted in German intellectual life. And how German intellectual life, through its innermost development, cannot but produce them. Everywhere we look back, we find that this is firmly rooted in German intellectual life, and we can only hope that it can incorporate itself as a spiritual science into the future development of humanity.

Such a tone has been forgotten many times; it has faded away. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, it still exists! And it was able to live in the most diverse fields. Not only does it live, so to speak, in the spiritual heights, but wherever there was spiritual striving, there were also such endeavors as these. And the time will come when people will gain a new understanding of the deepest essence of German striving, and that this must be brought up again.

Much has covered up precisely this innermost part of the German being! This can be seen when one tries to seek out the German essence in very specific, particular, concrete areas. For thirty-three years, esteemed attendees, I have endeavored – forgive me for making this personal – for thirty-three years I have endeavored to show the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors for a true knowledge of nature that penetrates to the essence of things, and the significance of Goethe's dispute with Newton, who is rooted in British nationalism!

But, as I said, it is not only external political life that has been encircled; the deeply, deeply influential, brutal foreign scientific attitude has come to such a pass that it is still a laughing-stock for the physicist to speak of the justification of Goethe's theory of colors! But the time will come when, in this field, there will be a deeper understanding and the chapter “Goethe vindicated against Newton” will be revived, precisely on the basis of the spirituality of the most Germanic nature; and it will be revived in a completely different way than one might have dared to dream of today.

One must then be able to bear the fact that one is regarded as a fool for representing in advance what must come, what must be recognized, when one is fully aware of it. But, as I said, this striving lives not only on the spiritual heights, but also in many ways in the German character. I could cite hundreds and hundreds of cases for this; one for many shall be cited, because we do not have time to cite many. One for many shall be cited: I would like to point to a small booklet published in 1856 by a simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - a small booklet. It was published in 1856 and is called “Contributions to the History of a German Theosophy”. Today, one may find much of what is written in this little book fantastic; one may even be right in much of what is said when calling the little book fantastic. But this little book, published in 1856, shows Pastor Rocholl in an awakened, true spiritual striving that at least wants to penetrate world phenomena with a “supernatural sense,” with a “supernatural spirit.” And in wide-ranging spiritual views, an attempt is made to characterize how natural life and spiritual life, sensual life, are one, and how divine spiritual forces weave and work, and how man has the possibility to ascend to them.

The level of education and the depth of knowledge are the things that come to light in such phenomena, which, as I said, can easily be ridiculed. But we also encounter this in other areas and with other personalities. Here, I would like to draw your attention, most esteemed attendees, to a spirit who, unfortunately, is all too forgotten: Christian Karl Planck.

After the Swabian Vischer – the V-Vischer – referred to him in an essay, I tried again in more recent times, as early as the first edition of my “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century), to draw attention to this primordially German world-view personality, Christian Karl Planck. But what use is that today? People generally have other things to do than to look into the German character, or the most German character.

I can only give a brief description here of what Planck's German nature was. And in his case it was certainly grasped out of his German nature, what he presented. We will see in a moment how conscious he was of the basis of his world view. I will illustrate this with an example.

When people today look at the earth as natural scientists, they see it, let us say, as a geologist would see it. The earth is seen as it is built up from mineral forces, as known from geology. For Planck, such a view of the earth would not have been considered without higher world-view questions. For him, it would have been like looking at a tree and only wanting to accept the wood and bark, but not the leaves, flowers and fruits! It is clear to him that the leaves, flowers and fruits are part of what makes up the essence of the tree, and that anyone who only looks at the wood, bark and roots is not looking at the full tree. To Karl Christian Planck, this seemed to be an earthly consideration that is only held in the sense of geology.

For Planck, the full earthly consideration is not only an ensouled, but also a spiritual-soul being. And man, as he walks on earth as a physical human being, belongs to the earth, to the essence of the earth, which one has to seek if one wants to learn to recognize the earth, just as one has to see the essence of the fruits and the flowers and leaves together with the essence of the tree if one wants to recognize the tree in its essence; a worldview - I would like to say - genuinely spiritual and genuinely interwoven with life.

Christian Karl Planck wrote many books in an effort to gain recognition; he did not succeed! For example, in 1864 he wrote a book, his “Fundamentals of a Science of Nature”. And from this book I will read a passage to prove how much this Christian Karl Planck belongs to that forgotten, faded tone of German intellectual life - the German intellectual development that was conscious for some of the personalities who worked for him, as the work is from the primal power of German nationality. There Planck says in 1864:

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

the author's

"Schrift entgegensteht, dessen ist er sich vollkommen bewusst; allein wie schon die Arbeit selbst, trotz aller Ungunst der Umstände, die zufolge der ganzen Lage und Berufsstellung des Verfassers einem Werke dieser Art sich entgegenstellte, doch ihren Durchführung und ihren Weg in die Öffentlichkeit sich erkauft hat, so ist er auch gewiss, that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

People who have different ways of thinking first see it as pure folly – then it becomes a matter of course. This is how it was with the Copernican worldview; this is how it was with everything that belongs to the development of mankind's worldview. And Planck says words that prove how he consciously penetrated from the German spirit to his spirit-based worldview. And he continues:

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

1864, written before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the rule of which her hero attains, that, conversely, receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Karl Christian Planck wrote this in 1864; he died in 1880. In the last years of his life he had written his Testament of a German, in which he summarized all the individual lines of his world-view. In 1912 the second edition of this Testament appeared; it did not attract much attention and was not much studied. One had other works to deal with, which had appeared in the same publishing house at the time! For example, one had to deal with a world view that is truly not one that has somehow emerged from the German character or is even related to it! You can read more about this in my book, “Riddles of Philosophy.” However, the passage in question was not written under the influence of the war; it was written long before the war. In 1912, people were too busy dealing with Henri Bergson – yes, he is still called Bergson today, Henri Bergson he is still called – to deal with this Henri Bergson, who, as I mentioned last time, tells his Parisians all kinds of slanderous things in prominent places of his intellectual work! Next time he will also do it in Sweden.

When you look at this Bergson: Let us highlight just one aspect of his philosophy, one aspect that does resonate with something that is truly being recognized today: the aspect where he says – I could of course highlight many other things, among other things – the beautiful sentence that has been so admired throughout Europe: that one can only recognize the soul if one comprehends it in its duration and in particular if one understands the sentence in relation to the essence of the soul “Duration endures”. I have had to read an awful lot about this infinitely ingenious sentence by Henri Bergson: “Duration lasts”. I have never been able to find it any differently than when one says “The wood is wooding” or “The money is moneying”. But let's ignore that.

A fruitful world view would only be achieved if one did not start in an abstract way, as some do, who actually start with the most imperfect beings and go up to the most perfect, and believe that they have a perfect derivation, but if one starts from the most perfect, from man, and places man at the origin, and then considers the other kingdoms - animals, plants, minerals - and considers them in such a way that they have arisen like waste from the overall flow.

Certainly, a good thought. But it is presented in a slightly distorted way by Henri Bergson. And what is essential: long before Bergson expressed it - I point this out in the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” - this thought was expressed - as early as 1882 - by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, most recently in his book “Geist und Stoff” (Spirit and Matter), but also in earlier books! There we find this idea powerfully expressed from the very basis that I have just characterized as the very basis of the German essence.

One can now assume two things: Bergson, who expressed this idea later, may not have known Heinrich Preuss – which is just as unforgivable in a philosopher as if he had known him and failed to mention that he got this idea from this source – one could believe the latter, now that it has come out that entire pages of Bergson's books have been copied from Schelling or Schopenhauer! However, this is a basic feature of the times, isn't it, to confront German culture, which appears “mechanistic” to him, and which he says has come down from its great heights and only produces mechanistic things.

I said it before: He probably expected that when the French shoot with guns and cannons, the Germans will come and quote Novalis and Goethe! He could hardly have expected that, could he? But he speaks of a “mechanistic culture”. I would like to know: is copying entire pages from German philosophers and then slandering them the opposite of the “mechanical”?

But we do learn a great deal in this field, and we have to find our way through these things. But the only way to find one's way, dearest attendees, is to try, as a person living in Central Europe today, to delve into that which, from a certain point of view, is able to unfold this Central European and, above all, especially the German essence to unfold, the power that must be present today in the physical world in an external way, so that in our fateful time the German can defend itself against all attacking enemies. This same power lives, expressing itself in a different way, in the German spiritual being. The two are intimately connected. The two cannot be completely separated. In the distant future, when the fateful situation of the Central European German people in this fateful time is judged, history will have to be spoken of in this way.

One needs only to consider a few figures, but these figures, which will speak to the most distant times, must come to mind when the following questions are asked: What, then, is actually confronting what is to unfold in Central Europe with the spiritual content just characterized? Not counting smaller nations: 741 million people encircle 150 million people in Central Europe! And do these 741 million people, who are facing the 150 million people, have reason to envy the ground on which these 150 million people stand?

One need only remember that this humanity encircling Central Europe owns 69 million square kilometers of the earth – compared to 5 to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European population! 69 million square kilometers compared to 6 million square kilometers in Central Europe! 9.5 percent of the earth's population is pitted against 47 percent of the earth's population! So half the world is being called out against Central Europe. That will stand out in history in simple numbers!

And how does this surrounding population, which does not even rely on direct combat but on starvation, how does this surrounding population view this population, this Central European culture, of which one says – the least one can hear –: The spirit – this spirit that is all around – fights against the raw material in the middle!

And this view, we find it in a certain modification also when we look across to the East. And there we find, as it developed throughout the entire nineteenth century, one can say from the simple Russian people, who are predisposed to something completely different - you can read more about this in my little book “Thoughts During the Time of War”, which will soon be available again; at the moment it is out of print. There we find that a Russian intelligentsia is developing from the Russian people – but one could also follow the development in other areas – that grows up to hold very, very strange views. Much of what is in my little book Thoughts During the Time of War would have to be repeated – and much would have to be added to it – if one wanted to even begin to characterize the trend that is taking hold in Russian intellectual life, the intellectual life of the intelligentsia, which draws from the belief that Central Europe in particular, but also Western Europe, is basically an aged, decrepit culture, and that it must be replaced by the culture of the East, that this culture of the East is young and fresh and must be brought into Europe because everything within Europe has become decrepit.

For example, we find – just to mention a few things, although I could of course talk about this for hours – we find, for example, as early as 1827, Kirejewskij indicates a tone that is then found again and again. Only, various things have been done to prevent the good Germans in particular from noticing this tone; sometimes strange ways have been sought to prevent the Germans from noticing this tone. One of these ways is this: after the lecture that I have given in various places about Tolstoy, no one will attribute to me the claim that I do not value Tolstoy precisely as a spirit of the very first order; but precisely with spirits of the very first order, whom one does not need to fight as spirits, one can find the characteristic peculiarities that develop in them out of their nationality. Now, even in Tolstoy's works of fiction, one finds this tone, this sense of the staleness and decrepitude of Central and Western European intellectual life. But, you will say, people have read Tolstoy's works, they can't possibly have forgotten that they found this in them!

Something strange is going on here. Until Raphael Löwenfeld published his complete edition of Tolstoy's works at the end of the 1890s – which is the most accurate – all earlier translations had deleted the passages that were directed against Germanness! All the works that Löwenfeld translated before the complete edition was published – and who had the complete edition by Löwenfeld in their hands? – all of Tolstoy's works that had been translated by others before that, were presented to the German people in this way!

In 1829, Kirejewskij said:

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

You see what the background here is – to make Russia Russian and then generously assign to the individual what one wants to assign to him. And seriously: this tone runs through the whole of Russian intellectual life. And in a strange way, it appears in various places in more recent times. For example, in [Michajlovskij] there is a Russian spirit that takes this - as he thinks - strangely decrepit, crippled, brutalized intellectual product of Central Europe, Goethe's “Faust”, and says: What then is this Goethe's “Faust” actually like as a personality? Well, just as in Central Europe one strives for metaphysics, so Faust strives metaphysically. —- He needs the expression, this Michajlovskij: a metaphysician is a person who has gone mad with fat! I don't know how many metaphysicians one has come to know with this characteristic! But he regards Goethe's Faust as such a metaphysician, who has become alien to all human life.

But let us go to the end of the nineteenth century; there we find a mind like that of Sergius Jushakow; he wrote a book in 1885 that reflects much of what is currently in this Russian intellectual life: he despises Western Europe as something decrepit! He says, Yushakov: “Let us look across to Asia, where we find the fruits of European culture, which must be eradicated through Russia and replaced by something else. Let us look across to Asia, where we find these Western and Central European fruits of culture. There we find these Asian peoples, and it reminds Yushakov of an Asian legend that truly expresses what lies in the development of Asian peoples. He says: “These Asian peoples have expressed their destiny themselves by speaking of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Then there are the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Hindus also belong; they have had to fight against the Turanian peoples, who are under the leadership of Ahriman. And as the people of Ormuzd, the Iranians, to whom the Persians and Hindus belong, have what they have conquered materially and spiritually through their culture, they have conquered it through the kindness of the good spirit Ormuzd against the evil Ahriman.

But then, according to Jushakov, the evil Europeans came and did not help the Asians to continue their Ormuzd culture, but came to take away from them what they had received under Ormuzd and to deliver them to the bondage and dangers of the Ahriman culture. Russia must intervene against this unpeaceful, unloving Western European culture. Russia must turn, says Yushakov, towards Asia and join forces with the Asian peoples languishing under Ahriman, in order to save them from the parasitism of Western European culture.

Yushakov says that it will be two powers that will join forces, two powers that express the greatest, most significant, and strongest cultural forces of the future. It will be two powers that will look towards Asia from Russia – I am not saying it, Yushakov is saying it; so if it sounds strange, read Yushakov! There are two powers: the simple Russian peasantry will join forces with the greatest bearer, with the noblest bearer of spirituality, with the Cossacks! Peasants and Cossacks will rescue the Asian population and the ancient Asian culture from the clutches of the Western Europeans. One day the world will owe this to Russia and its mission, which is made up of the deeds of the peasants and the noble Cossacks.

The book that Sergius Jushakow wrote in 1885 is called: “The” - yes, it is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And he characterizes the Asian peoples from a Western European point of view in terms of what they have suffered. He says, for example: These Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans – he couldn't take the Germans, so he didn't take the Germans – these Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans, he says, as if they existed solely

“to clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English tinsel.”

And then Jushakow continues, summarizing what appears to him to be a great, pan-Asian ideal, so in summary, he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

I do not wish anything similar for my homeland, says Yushakov, a leading Russian, in 1885 – about England! It is probably on this path that we should seek that strange world-historical consequence – the forging of the alliance between Russia and England! For at first little was noticed of the current, of the mission to Asia, which should have come about under the influence of the peasants and Cossacks. For the time being, we can only note that Russia has allied itself with England and France, the latter of which have thus betrayed European culture in reality! It has allied itself in order to uproot the decrepit, decrepit Europeanness root and branch, at least that is what they said.

Dear attendees, it is necessary to speak out, as I said, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us, and anyone who is even a little familiar with this tone knows that today's tone has not tone of the English, French, Russians, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us today, purely on the basis of the facts, can point out what is going on within German intellectual life for self-reflection. There it is, after all, [that what lived in minds like Troxler, Planck, Preuss and so on, and in the minds of others – what was a germ, will also come to fruition as a flower and as fruit]!

However, through this tone of German intellectual life, which still resonates today, a realization must come to those of you who are present: intellectual observers of the world are not the impractical people that they are often made out to be by the very clever people – and especially by the very practical people. Because that is, after all, the general tone, isn't it, that one thinks: Well, people like Planck, like Troxler or like Preuss and so on may have very nice thoughts - but they don't have a clue about practical life. That's where the practical people have to go, those practical people who, in their own opinion, have a practical insight into practical life. Because the others are those impractical idealists!

Well, but I could also give you hundreds and hundreds of examples in support of the refutation of this sentence. Karl Christian Planck, for example, who was one of the most German of Germans, died in bitterness in 1880. And the dullards will no doubt say: something like megalomania sometimes emerges from the last thing he wrote - after time itself had driven him to a certain nervousness because he could not convey to his contemporaries what was in his heart. The dullards will even say: he became megalomaniac. But he died in 1880, and in 1881 his “Testament of a German” was already in print. It contained words that I will read to you now. So they were already written in 1880. Planck – about whom certainly quite practical diplomats, politicians and people who know everything about practical life will judge disparagingly – Christian Karl Planck spoke of the present war, of this war in which we are now embroiled. He spoke the following words in 1880. They were written by this “impractical idealist,” who was, however, a very practical thinker and who should have been put in a practical position, because the power that lives in the spiritual life also knows how to judge practical life correctly. This “impractical” Planck, who in 1880 wrote about the present war, which he knew would come, the words:

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

I ask you, how many diplomats believed – you can point the finger at them – much later, yes, much later, that Italy might still be dissuaded from participating in the war. I will only point out the one point. But these are the “practical” people, they have eaten practice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But the unpractical Christian Karl Planck, in 1880 he characterized what happened in 1914, 1915 and so on, so that what he said back then has appeared again exactly in the real, actual facts!

Oh, one should listen to what a spiritual man creating out of the real depths of the German essence would be able to create if this German essence were to once fully consciously stand on its own feet – symbolically speaking.

But for this to happen, the present moment in world history must provide the right conditions. For the German spirit will also one day solve the problem for the world of the fact that it must be realized from within the German spirit what it means that power – the power of the incompetent, which crushes so many legitimate aspirations – is actually the ruling power in so many parts of the world! It is precisely in this area that the German spirit must have a healing effect. Without in any way seeking to flatter national pride, this can be emphasized in the present fateful hour from the facts themselves.

Finally, let us point out to you, esteemed attendees, how those who were steeped in this German essence, who know how to grasp it with their whole soul, with their whole heart, how they always experienced what has now taken place. I may, since I have spent almost thirty years of my life in Austria and had to go through the last times just at the end of these thirty years within the struggles that Germanism had to wage there, [since I was] in the midst of these difficulties of the German essence, I would like to draw attention to how naturally it lived in a spirit like Robert Hamerling, one of the most German spirits in Austria, one of the best spirits in Central Europe in general, how he expressed what lived in him so beautifully: “Austria is my fatherland; Germany is my motherland!” These words express a vivid sense of the spiritual reality that has forged Germany and Austria into this Mitteleuropa out of necessity in these difficult times. But such minds as Robert Hamerling's not only grasped such a thing in its depth, in its full depth, but also experienced it, esteemed attendees. This is particularly evident when you look at Robert Hamerling – not, of course, in the poem that has been distributed and which so many people have fallen for, even quite clever people have fallen for it, it is, of course, a forgery, the prophetic poem that has now been widely published in the newspapers – I don't mean something like that, of course! Anyone who knows Robert Hamerling even a little recognizes it as a fake from the very first lines. But in Robert Hamerling's work, there are enough clues to see how this Mitteleuropa lived! In 1862, he wrote his “Germanenzug”. Let us highlight the “Germanenzug” from the many. In 1862, he wrote in his “Germanenzug” how the ancestors of the Germans moved among the Germanic peoples from Asia - this is described to us in a wonderful mood , as they camp there - it is evening - how they camp there still in Asia; it is a beautiful evening atmosphere: the setting sun, the rising moon, the Teutons are asleep as they move across. Only one is awake: the blond Teut. And above him appears the genius of the future Germans and speaks with him. And that which one must cite as a fundamental trait of the German striving for knowledge - the genius speaks with him, with the blond Teut of this German future - is expressed by Robert Hamerling through the genius of Germanness to the blond Teut. I would like to say: the beauty of what is a German trait is already evident in the “Philosophus Teutonicus”, in Jakob Böhme, where this Jakob Böhme regards all knowledge in such a way that this knowledge, insofar as it comes from the German mind as knowledge, is at the same time a kind of worship. Jakob Böhme says so beautifully:

"When you look at the depths

, he means the depths of the blue sky

“When you look at the depth of the sky, the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and are you too. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This mood also lived in Robert Hamerling when he let the genius of the German spirit speak to the blond Teut:

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

This mission of the German character - Robert Hamerling was already aware of it at the time he wrote his “Germanenzug” (The German Character).

To see clearly the full world-historical, the all-embracing world-historical significance of this German nature – one can indeed look across to Asia in a different way from that in which Yushakov did: there one sees these Asiatic peoples, how they once, in primeval times, aspired upwards to the spiritual worlds. They brought it from India; they did it by sinking and muffling everything that forms the basis of the human ego, the center of the human being, into a kind of dream life. And by muffling the ego, they created something within themselves that arose out of a dream life, which introduced them to the spiritual that permeates and lives through the whole world. This world cannot and must not arise again as it was, as a witness of what remained from ancient times over there in Asia; for after the greatest impulse that earth-dwelling humanity could experience, the Christ-impulse, had broken into the development of earth-dwelling humanity, something else must come than this former elevation to the spiritual world.

And this other - with the same inwardness, deep inwardness, with which the spirit was once to be experienced in the ancient Orient, with the same inwardness it is to be experienced again through this other; but this other is to develop in the exact opposite way: The ego is not to be paralyzed, it is to be strengthened, it is to be invigorated - precisely by rising up, by living to the full, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, want the other spirits, who are rooted in the depths of German intellectual life, to penetrate into the spiritual world: And so this German essence is to give the Orient what it once had in the form of profound inwardness in pre-Christian times; it is to give the German essence in a new way, as it must be given in the post-Christian era.

This was already clear to Robert Hamerling when he had the genius of the Germans speak to the blond Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples, in his “Germanenzug”. Robert Hamerling draws attention to the fact that all cognition in the German is to be a kind of worship, that the German wants to know himself in such a way that he knows himself as born out of the divine-spiritual powers, living in the divine-spiritual powers, and being buried again with the divine-spiritual powers.

That is why Robert Hamerling lets the genius of Germanness speak these beautiful words to the blond Teut:

"But however proudly you may strive, high above other swarms, you will still keep a blazing, ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of Calm existence
This holy ray, a temple fire, free of smoke, with pure flame, will glow in your chest and soul, remaining your pilot and your rudder! You strive only because you love: your most daring thought will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

So the one who, as a Central European German, feels at home in the intellectual life of Central Europe, which I have tried to characterize today, also in one of its faded tones, in one of its forgotten intellectual currents, but precisely in the intellectual current that shows which seeds, which roots of a striving for the real, for the real spirit, are anchored in German intellectual life.

The insight that this is so will always give the one who recognizes and feels German essence within himself the justified conviction: Whatever arises from the 68 million square kilometers around against what lives on the 6 million square kilometers, whatever has such roots, such germs, will bear its blossoms and its fruits against all enemies in the way and as they are predisposed in it! This hope, this confidence and also this love for the German essence is precisely what characterizes anyone who truly recognizes the German essence.

Let me summarize in four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, after I have tried to characterize such a Central European spirit to you. Let me summarize what can arise in the soul from an objective observation of the German character and immersion in this German character today, in the face of our difficult, fateful events.

I believe that these four simple lines, with which I would like to conclude today's reflection, these four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, which state that it is true, that not only out of national overheating, but out of objective knowledge, it may be said:

“And if ever the day
proves hostile to the German name,
from sea to sea
the German spirit will find its way.”

How are we to conceive of the astral world? The three different worlds of which occultism speaks are as follows:—

1. The physical world.
2. The astral world (Purgatory)
3. The spiritual world, or Devachan in Sanscrit terminology (The Christian Heaven)

There are yet other worlds above and beyond these three but they will not concern us in these lectures. They are, moreover, beyond all human conception. Even the highest Initiates can have but a faint presentiment of them. We will concern ourselves here with planetary evolution within the confines of our solar system.

The physical world encloses us in the narrow span of material existence between birth and death. Between two incarnations we live and move in the astral and devachanic worlds. The kernel of man's being is immutable, reincarnating perpetually but not eternally. The rhythm of incarnation and reincarnation had a beginning and will have an end. Man comes from other-where and passes other-where.

The astral world is not a place but a state, a condition of existence. It surrounds us and we are immersed in it while we live on Earth. We live in it as beings born blind who guide themselves by touch. If sight is opened up for them by operation they see for the first time the forms and colours with which they have always been surrounded.

Thus does the astral world open up to clairvoyant sight. It is another state of consciousness. In Goethe's scientific works there is a wonderful passage on the essence of the light as the language of Nature:

“It is useless to attempt to express the nature of a thing abstractedly. Effects we can perceive, and a complete history of those effects would, in fact, sufficiently define the nature of the thing itself. We should try in vain to describe a man's character, but let his acts be collected and an idea of the character will be presented to us.

“The colours are acts of light—its active and passive modifications: thus considered, we may expect from them some explanation respecting light itself. Colours and light, it is true, stand in the most intimate relation to each other, but we should think of both as belonging to Nature as a whole, for it is Nature as a whole which manifests itself by their means in an especial manner to the sense of sight.

“The completeness of Nature displays itself to another sense in a similar way. Let the eye be closed, let the sense of hearing be excited, and from the lightest breath to the wildest din, from the simplest sound to the highest harmony, from the most vehement and impassioned cry to the gentlest word of reason, still it is Nature that speaks and manifests her presence, her power, her pervading life and the vastness of her relations; so that a blind man to whom the infinite visible is denied, can still comprehend an infinite vitality by means of another organ.

“And thus as we descend the scale of being, Nature speaks to the senses—to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses: so speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer who is nowhere dead nor silent, she has even a secret agent in inflexible matter, in a metal, the smallest portions of which tell us what is passing in the entire mass.” [Theory of Colours. Preface.]

Let us endeavour to form some conception of the astral world. We must accustom ourselves to quite a different mode of vision. To begin with, everything is confused and chaotic.

The first thing to realise is that in the astral world, everything that exists is revealed as it were in a mirror, inversed. In the astral light the cipher 365 must be read backwards: 563. If an event unfolds before us, it is perceived in inverse sequence. In the astral world the cause comes after the effect, whereas on Earth, the effect follows the cause. In the astral world, the aim appears as the cause—proving that the aim and the cause are identical, acting in an inverse sense according to the sphere of life in which we are functioning. The teleological problem which no metaphysician has been able to solve by dint of abstract thought is thus solved by clairvoyance.

Another result of this inverse unraveling of things in the astral world is that it teaches man to know himself. Feelings and passions are expressed by plant and animal forms. When man begins to behold his passions in the astral world he sees them as animal forms. These forms proceed from himself, but he sees them as if they were assailing him. This is because his own being is objectivised—otherwise he could not behold himself. Thus it is only in the astral world that man learns true self knowledge in contemplating the images of his passions in the animal forms which hurl, themselves upon him. A feeling of hatred entertained against another being appears as an attacking demon.

This astral self-knowledge occurs in an abnormal way in those who are troubled with Psychical illnesses which consist in constant visions of being pursued by animals and menacing entities. The sufferers are seeing the mirror images of their emotions and desires.

No psychical trouble arises in true initiation, but the premature and sudden flashing-up of the astral world may give rise to insanity. In clairvoyance, man is liberated from his physical body. Hence the dangers that may threaten the mind and brain of one who attempts this kind of training without being absolutely balanced.

The Rosicrucian initiation involved a discipline which was directed to making man objective to himself, to producing, as it were, an objective self. We must begin by seeing ourselves objectively. This outer personification of the self makes it possible for the astral body to go forth from the physical body.

What happens at the moment of death? After death, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego of man have left the physical body. The corpse alone remains in the physical world. A short time after death the etheric and astral bodies unite. The etheric body imprints in the astral body the memory of the life just passed; then the etheric body slowly dissolves and the astral body passes alone into the astral world.

The astral body then contains all the desires generated by life and, being bereft of the physical body, has no means of satisfying them. This gives rise to a sensation of devouring thirst—the basis of the imagination of the punishment of Tantalus in Greek Mythology. There is also the impression of being immersed in fire—Gehenna or Purgatory. The idea of the fire of Purgatory which is laughed at by materialists is a true expression of the subjective state of man after death. By contrast, unsatisfied thirst for action produces the sensation of cold in the soul. It is this cold—born of action unrealised on Earth—that is said to be sensed by the spirits in mediumistic séances. The soul living in the astral body must learn to break free from the forces of the physical organs and acquire a new organism for existence in the astral world.

The soul now begins to live through the past life in backward order, beginning at death and going back to birth. Not until the life has been lived through in this purifying fire to the point of birth is the soul ready to pass into the spiritual world—into Devachan. Such is the import of Christ's words to His disciples: “Verily, verily I say unto you, unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Man is impelled by desire when he is descending to earthly incarnation. Not for nothing is desire for the Earth born in man. The end and aim is that he shall learn.

We learn through all our experiences and they enrich our store of knowledge. But in order that man may learn on the Earth, he must be allured by, [or] involved in enjoyment.

When the soul is experiencing the past life in the astral world after death, in backward order, there must be abnegation of enjoyment, while the essence of the experience itself is retained. The passage through the astral world is thus a purification whereby the soul learns to forego all taste for physical pleasures.

Such is the purification of the Hindu Kamaloca, of the ‘consuming fire.’ Man must grow accustomed to existence without a physical body. Death gives rise, at first, to the impression of an immeasurable void.

In cases of violent death and of suicide, the impressions of emptiness, thirst and burning are much more terrible. An astral body that is not prepared for existence outside the physical body, separates with great travail, whereas in natural death the detachment of the matured astral body takes place easily and smoothly. In the case of violent death that is not caused by the will of man, the process of separation is less distressing than in the case of suicide.

During life itself a kind of spiritual death may occur, caused by a premature separation of the Spirit from the body. The astral world is confused with the physical world. Nietzsche is an example of this. In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche has all-unconsciously transferred the astral into the physical world. The result is a confusion and chaos of ideas, culminating in error, insanity and death.

The dim, dreamy life of many mediums is an analogous phenomenon. The medium invariably loses his orientation between these different worlds and is unable to distinguish the true from the false.

A lie in the physical world becomes an agent of destruction in the astral world. A lie is a murder in the astral world. This phenomenon is the origin of black magic. The earthly commandment, Thou shalt not kill, may therefore be translated into Thou shalt not lie, in reference to the astral world. The lie is nothing but a word, an illusion. It may do untold harm, but nothing is actually destroyed. In the astral world, every feeling, every idea is a visible form, a living force. The astral lie brings about an impact between the false and true forms, resulting in death.

The white magician would impart to other souls the spiritual life he bears within him. The black magician has the urge to kill, to create a void around him in the astral world because this void affords him a field in which his egoistic desires may disport themselves. He needs the power which he acquires by taking the vital force of everything that lives, that is to say, by killing it.

That is why the first sentence on the tables of black magic is: Life must be conquered. For the same reason, in certain schools of black magic the followers are taught the horrible and diabolical practice of gashing living animals with a knife at the precise part of the body which will generate this or that force in the wielder of the knife. From the purely external aspect, there are certain points in common between black magic and vivisection. On account of its materialism, modern science has need of vivisection. The anti-vivisection movements are inspired by deeply moral motives. But it will not be possible to abolish vivisection in science until clairvoyance has been restored to medicine. It is only because clairvoyance has been lost that medicine has had to resort to vivisection. When man has regained conscious access to the astral world, clairvoyance will enable doctors to enter spiritually into the inner conditions of diseased organs and vivisection will be abandoned as worthless.

Knowledge of life in the astral world leads us to a conclusion of fundamental importance, namely that the physical world is the product of the astral world.

The epidemics which raged notably in the Middle Ages are one example among thousands of the relation of human sins to astral events, as well as of the repercussion in the astral world of sins committed in earthly life. Leprosy was the result of the terror caused by the invasions of the Huns and hordes of Asiatic peoples. The Mongolians, the descendants of the Atlanteans, bore within them the germs of degeneracy. This contact with the European populace produced, in the first instance, the moral malady of fear in the astral world; the substance of the astral body decomposed and this field of astral decomposition became a field for the development of bacteria, giving rise, on Earth, to diseases such as leprosy.

All that we throw out of ourselves into the astral world at one time will reappear in times to come, on the physical plane. What we sow in the astral world we reap on Earth in future times. We are reaping today the fruits of the narrow, materialistic thoughts strewn by our ancestors in the astral world.

This will make us realise how essential it is to nourish ourselves with occult truths. If science would accept the truths of occultism—merely as hypotheses to begin with—the very world would change. Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

What on the Earth we call feeling comes back again to Earth in the form of actuality, event, fact. The nerve-storms that exhaust man have their origin in the astral world.

It is for this reason that the Occult Brotherhoods decided to demonstrate and reveal the hidden truths. For humanity is passing through a crisis and must be helped to regain health and equilibrium. Only by virtue of spirituality can this health and equilibrium be restored.

The spiritual content of the gospel should become more and more accessible to people through the theosophical movement in our time. And this is all the more necessary as the biblical records, especially in our time, are beginning to be more and more fragmented and frayed by historical-scientific research, which is a good thing in and of itself. Modern man has lost sight of spiritual realities.

The external historical research in our days has come to the conclusion that the three synoptic gospels must be understood in a certain way as historical events. In view of the contradictions present in them, this research seeks to make it credible that they came about because these gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, but that the stories were passed from mouth to mouth and only later written down. According to one assumption, the Synoptics should come from an Aramaic source and be oral messages about the events in Palestine. The one who wrote the Gospel of John should not want to give a historical event, but only a confession presented in external images.

But the gospels will be lost to humanity if criticism continues on this path. Only through spiritual research can we find the true facts. This research does not ask for some fantastic Aramaic source, but for the real sources from which the gospels emerged.

Only by examining these can we achieve a deeper understanding. We must turn not to any external documents, but to the mysteries of the past if we are to understand the Gospels. In these mysteries there was something that could be called an initiation ceremony. The person's need for development was known to the Hierophant, and the methods used to lead him into the spiritual world were not as well known and described in ancient times as they are in our days. People were at a different level of development then, and therefore needed different methods than the ones we use. Careful instruction preceded every initiation for years. The content of the instruction given in the Egyptian and Pythagorean places of initiation was somewhat similar to what we today call

The first degree, which followed the preparation, was called “imagination” or “knowledge”. The second degree was called “enlightenment” or “inspiration” and the third “completion through ‘intuition’ or ‘direct spiritual vision’.

These three degrees were not intimate inner experiences as in later times, but purely external actions in which the inner development was reflected. The disciple was prepared by certain sensual models, great symbolic figures that were shown to him in the mystery temples and that were supposed to have a certain magical effect on him. He was also to experience certain dramatic situations and undergo certain physical trials that were intended to awaken and release forces that were still dormant in his soul. These symbolic figures and dramatic situations were intended to make him aware of all the temptations that a person can encounter in the world and show him how far a person can fall if left to his own devices. To escape this, the soul must free itself from everything that binds it. By observing external, often quite drastic situations, the student should be cleansed of all his “urges, desires and passions.” And through this catharsis or cleansing, all that is noblest in the soul should be drawn from the innermost part of the soul. After that, he was ready to enter the first degree, the world of imagination.

This catharsis was all the more necessary because otherwise the pupil would have been exposed to all the dangers in the new world that was opening up to him. The external world was no longer the same, he could no longer live on the account of his surroundings. He could no longer have the help of all these precepts and generally accepted views that build a society, a family. Horrifying images arose in his soul. If he had not been given some firm principles and supporting thoughts through education, he could have fared very badly. From the depths of his soul, quite objective images of all the instincts and desires that he carried within him arose – not only those of which he was aware, but also others that he did not even know. Their effect could make him worse than before if he had not first undergone a process of purification that penetrated to the very core of his soul, a catharsis. In this way, the disciple was slowly led through a number of external means to the second and then to the third degree.

What interests us most is the last degree of initiation, which was the same in the most diverse mysteries. Let us now first look back at the Egyptian mysteries. There we find that the disciple was placed in a lethargic state for a period of three and a half days, during which time he neither saw nor heard with his external senses. He lay as if dead in his coffin or on a cross. During ordinary sleep, as we know, the etheric body remains in the physical body, while the astral body and the ego are drawn out. But in the cataleptic state, the etheric body unites with the other two, and the physical body is left alone. So it was a literal killing of the father principle and a union with the mother principle. This enabled the disciple to have experiences in the spiritual world that underlies the physical, that is, the etheric world, and then, based on his own experience, he could speak of it as its messenger.

But the etheric body was not allowed to move too far away from the physical body, because then it could happen that it could not be recalled at all. The hierophant had to watch over this and recall the disciple at the right time. The disciple then returned to the world with the memory of everything he had experienced, and was then able to put into words what he had seen and heard, and become a witness of the spiritual world. This happened during the Egyptian initiation.

The last act of the initiation took place in a different way in the countries that spread like a broad belt from the Persian Gulf, the Black and Caspian Sea to the west to France and Great Britain. Here it was the Zoroaster religion that left its mark on the peoples. After the disciple had undergone the first two degrees in the Druid or Drotten mysteries, for example, and had been instructed in the mysteries, he was finally introduced to the actual world of ethereal processes, to the spiritual world that surrounds us. The events that are reflected in the cosmos could have a direct effect on him there. Meanwhile, everything that had moved in him before was silenced and poured out into the whole cosmos. [While in the Egyptian initiation the disciple completely stepped out of the context of the outer world and stepped completely into his soul, descended to Persephonaia, the disciple of the Drotten Mysteries was moved up into the cosmic worlds and could pour out his being up to the twelvefold, up to the Zodiac. He knew that the things spoke differently, depending on whether this or that constellation was above the others. Herein lay the difference with the Egyptian initiation. This path was adapted to the different constitution of the people.]

Destined for different peoples, these paths - both the outer and the inner one - led to the same result. In the Christ, they were to unite, flow together into a single path and form the unified Christian initiation. Therefore, anyone who reads the Gospel correctly will find the most important mysteries in it. The Christ Himself had initiated Lazarus and brought him the last act of the Egyptian initiation drama, but He also had him live through the most important part of the Nordic initiation. This can be seen from a passage in the Gospel of John, where something is related that the evangelist could not have seen with his physical eyes, and that only someone who had been initiated by the Christ Himself could have related. “The next day,“ it says, ‘John the Baptist and two of his disciples were standing there with him, and he saw Jesus coming and said, ’Behold the Lamb of God,' and the” - others - “two disciples heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned around... ‘and so on, whereupon the evangelist adds: ’And it was in the tenth hour.”

How should we understand this? Spiritual research is much more realistic than historical research, which, for example, interprets this passage to mean that the evangelist was standing nearby and observed all this. But that is not correct. The words “It was the tenth hour” indicate that the author of the Gospel of John was clairvoyant, so that the positions of the constellations affected him. He was far away, but a certain constellation made it possible for him to turn his clairvoyant gaze to this event. It is impossible to explain this addition in any other way - “It was the tenth hour. Only at this hour was a certain constellation such that he could see this clairvoyantly.

There is nothing in the Gospels that is not based, and the more closely you examine them, the clearer they become. And if we could imbibe the general sense of the incredible depth of the Gospels, we would have gained a great deal.

Now, however, Lazarus and the man who wrote the Gospel of John are the same person. The fact that he becomes clairvoyant through the influence of the constellations indicates that he has undergone the Nordic initiation, and by being raised from the dead he is also an Egyptian initiate. Partly because of this double initiation, and partly because Jesus himself had initiated him, his gospel has such a particularly great significance. The evangelists have all described in their own special way the initiation drama as it takes place in the various temples. Through preparatory scenes and symbolic images, which were different in the various temples, the disciples were introduced to the spiritual world.

But there was something else taught as well. What was depicted in the mysteries, it was taught, should become a reality in the outer physical world. The drama of initiation was to be relived by a son of God, and it was by this very fact that he would be recognized. When Ahura-Mazdao descends and incarnates as a human being, he will experience in real life everything that had previously only been enacted inside the temple. When this happens, the Son of God has come to us. The evangelists knew that this fact had occurred with Christ Jesus. They knew that the mysteries enacted inside the temple had become reality through the event in Palestine. That is why they were also able to describe the initiation ceremony. At the same time, they described it as it had actually occurred. For the event in Palestine coincides with the ancient mysteries and reflects them. It is here, in the ancient mysteries of the past – and not in some Aramaic documents – that we must seek the real source of the Gospel.

The evangelists understood and recognized that once upon a time a man lived on earth whose whole outer life was in everything an image of what was proclaimed in the temples, and that is why they were able to write about it at the same time as they described the ancient methods of initiation.

Writing a biography in the same sense as in modern times was not the point here. You can never find the essence of a person's life in letters and notes that the people concerned have carelessly left behind and that are the main things people look for nowadays. That is not how the story of Jesus was written in those days. The evangelists followed a better method. For them, the essential thing was the events of his life that corresponded to the initiatory drama, and that he, as an historical personality, had really lived through this. For them, he was the greatest of the initiates because he had been awakened to life by virtue of his own divine self, not by the hierophant in an underground temple.

All this was grasped by the three first evangelists and described in connection with their various initiations. Lazarus, who had been initiated by the Christ Jesus himself, had experienced everything as a spiritual eyewitness, and therefore he, who knew best the innermost causes of the great drama, could give the most intimate descriptions of it. He did not need Egyptian documents; the document he followed was given to him by the Christ Jesus himself. We find, therefore, that the Gospels give us, on the one hand, historical reality and, on the other, pictures of the initiation dramas of the mysteries.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he was actually performing an initiation ceremony before [all] the people, and in this fact we have the reason for the fierce persecution by the Jewish authorities. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why they wanted to kill him precisely because he had raised a man who was thought to be dead, yes, why they even wanted to kill the one who had been raised. “This man does many signs,” they said among themselves, “we cannot live with him.” Conservative as they were with regard to their old teaching, they wanted to keep the secrets of the mysteries.

Until now, only a few had known the way to the spiritual world, but now the secrets of the temple had been brought to light. [Now it should be possible to relive the initiation process. The process should be presented to the whole world. First in an exemplary way through the resurrection of Lazarus, then on the cross.] Outside the temple, the great initiation drama had taken place, and in the sight of the people, the initiate had been called to life; this was clear to all who understood what had happened. In the eyes of the conservatives, it was a betrayal of the mysteries and should be punished by death. It was therefore not surprising that the priests said that they could not live with this man.

[One might object: If the initiation process involves dangers, was it allowed to be published? As it had happened, yes. — If it had only been described up to the Lazarus event, it would have been dangerous; but after the twelfth chapter comes the account of what had to happen so that the public would not be endangered.

If we understand the whole Gospel of John, we find in it what made it possible to hint at the initiation process.

What we are about to consider now is completely outside the scope of anthroposophical considerations. It is only indirectly related to it, and is intended to be a purely philosophical consideration. The direct connection is that it is often claimed that anthroposophical spiritual science cannot stand up in the forum of science, that it appears like pure dilettantism that a serious philosopher should not engage with. It will now be shown that it is not anthroposophy that is amateurish, but philosophy.

At present, philosophy is a wholly unsuitable instrument for elevating oneself to anthroposophy. Let us first orient ourselves in philosophy. Let us see how philosophy has developed historically. Then we want to subject the hereditary evil to a certain consideration. We want to show how philosophy today suffers from the fact that at a certain time all philosophical thinking became entangled in a spider's web, and is therefore incapable of gaining a broader perspective in relation to reality.

We must face the fact that all the history of philosophy begins with Thales. In more recent times, attempts have been made to extend philosophy backwards, that is, to go beyond Greek philosophy. People speak of Indian and Egyptian philosophy. Those who do not construct an arbitrary concept of philosophy say that an important period did indeed begin with Thales. If we ask what it is that intervenes in human evolution, what was not there before, we must say: it is conceptual thinking. It was not present before. This is characteristically different from everything that was there earlier. In the past, only what the seer had seen was said. In Plato, the gift of prophecy still predominates. The first conceptual thinker, whose system is no longer based on the old gift of prophecy, is Aristotle. In him we have the purely intellectual system. Everything else was preparation. The gift of living and thinking in pure concepts begins to find its most outstanding expression in Aristotle. It is no mere coincidence that Aristotle is called the “father of logic”. To the seer, logic is revealed at the same time as seeing. But to form concepts, one needed not only his logic, but also the fact that in the following period the revelations of Christianity were re-shaped into thought formations with Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian thinking spread both to the Arab cultural area in Asia, to Spain and to Western Europe, as well as to the south of Europe, where Christianity was influenced by Aristotelian thinking. Anyone observing the 7th to 9th centuries can see that Christian teachers, like anti-Christian elements, expressed their teachings in Aristotelian form, and this remained so until the 13th century.

We will see in a moment what the focus of Aristotelian thought is. In the middle of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas spread the so-called Thomistic philosophy; it is based on Christian revelation and Aristotelian logic. The Christian teachings were not taught in a strictly adhered form of thought, but it was intended to show that these teachings could also be defended in Aristotelian forms of thought, against the Arabs and their students, such as Averroes, who also thought in these forms of thought. They wanted to show how one could use the correctly understood Aristotle not for Arab teachings, but for Christianity. They wanted to refute the objections of the Arab thinkers; hence the zealous study of Thomas Aquinas. At that time, Aristotle dominated all of science, including, for example, medicine.

Now we have to characterize what the earlier scholasticism had of Aristotle. The thinking at that time was quite different from today's. If you compare it with what was done at that time, you have to say: in terms of content, life was poor then. The tremendous inventions were only made later. The essential thing about that time is the strictly trained thinking. Today people laugh at the strict definitions of scholasticism. But when you compare it to today's arbitrary understanding of all concepts, then you first feel the benefit of that view that there must be an understanding of the concepts. It takes a long time to define the concepts, but then you are working on solid ground.

In order to be able to orient ourselves further, we have to go into a few of Aristotle's concepts. He was a good interpreter for Christianity, even from the point of view of anthroposophy. A few concepts should show how sharply Aristotle thought. Aristotle distinguishes knowledge according to sense and intellect. The senses perceive this rose, this person, this stone. Then the intellect enters. It breaks down into an understanding of matter and form. All things contain matter and form. These two concepts take us a long way. Aristotle sees matter and form in every single natural thing that the senses perceive: consider a wolf. It eats nothing but lambs; then it consists of the same matter as the lambs, but a wolf will never become a lamb. What makes the two different is the form. We have the form of the lamb and the wolf. He identifies the underlying form with the genus lamb and the genus wolf. Aristotle makes a clear distinction between the genus and the generic concept. When we are confronted with a flock of lambs, we form the generic concept. What our concept determines in its form is an objective thing outside us, just as if we were to imagine the prototypes of the forms spreading invisibly throughout the world, spurting out the individual genera into which the indifferent matter is poured. Everything around us is based on the generic; for Aristotle, the material is indifferent.¹

With the scholastics, Albertus Magnus, we find what underlies the external entities. The earlier scholastic distinguishes universals before things, in things and after things. Albertus Magnus says about this: the universals before the thing are the thoughts of the divine entities. There we have the genus. These thoughts have flowed into the things. When man encounters things, he forms the universals according to the thing, which is the conceptual form. In this whole description of the development of thinking, there is only talk of sensible things. He identifies the outer sense with the “sense”. Everything else that is there is a concept to him. The generic concept is not identical to the genus. The whole thing is because people had lost the ancient gift of seeing, so that a philosophy could arise.

An old sage would not have understood at all how to make distinctions in this way, because he would have said: With the gift of prophecy, one can perceive the genus. It was only when the gift of prophecy dried up that the actual science emerged. It was only when man was left to his own devices that the necessity arose to develop a thinking art. Scholasticism arose under the influence of this important principle. In ancient times, the spiritual worlds were still accessible to man. Now the scholastics could refer all the more to Aristotle, because he spoke of the gift of prophecy: Ancient reports tell us that the stars are gods, but the human intellect can no longer make anything out of them. But we have no reason to doubt it.

Scholasticism replaced what was seen with revelation. It placed what was to be taught in the once inspired word. At first, humanity must become accustomed to developing the theory of thought in relation to external things. Where would it end if it were to roam into all possible supersensible things? We want to deny ourselves that; we want to educate ourselves in the things that are around us. So says Thomas Aquinas. When objects come to us, they are given to us for the senses. Then we are compelled to form concepts of them. Behind the things, divine powers rest, which we do not dare approach. We want to educate ourselves from thing to thing. Then, by strictly adhering to the sensual, we finally come to the highest concepts. So we adhered to two things: to the revealed teaching material, which is given in the scriptures, to which thinking does not approach. It has been taken over by the seers. Furthermore, they adhered to what was being worked out in the sensory reality. With this, we only just reach the Bible and Revelation. For a time, the higher world is withdrawn from human thought. But there is no final renunciation of the supersensible worlds. When man has conquered the sensual world, he can get a presentiment of the supersensible worlds. Man can free himself from the physical body and have revelation directly. But first the intellect must be trained. When the human being forms concepts about external things, these concepts depend on the human organization in form, but not in content. In scholastic epistemology, it is never considered that something unrecognized may remain. The objective enters into knowledge; only the form in which concepts are formed depends on the organization of the human mind.

This earlier scholasticism is called realism. It believed in the reality of content. Scholasticism then became nominalistic. People have lost touch with the objective external world. They said: the mind forms concepts; they are not real. The concepts became mere names; they were only abstractions. What is to be achieved with the concept is lost. Therefore, the nominalists had to say to themselves: Sensual reality is spreading before us. We summarize it as our minds will. Nothing real corresponds to our concepts. One must guard the actual revelation against human thinking and renounce all understanding. This view reached its climax in Zuther's saying that human reason is powerless, the deaf, blind, foolish fool who should not presume to approach the teaching material.

This is an important turning point. Luther condemns Aristotle. From this point on, the suggestion that gave birth to Kantianism goes. Kant was a Wolffian until the end of the sixties, like almost all philosophers at the time. Wolff taught: Reason is able to make something out about the supernatural worlds. He distinguishes between rational and empirical science. It is possible to gain a certain amount of human knowledge. The a posteriori knowledge has only relative validity.

[Gaps and deficiencies in the transcript. For a description of Wolff's philosophy, see the lecture of March 14, 1908 in this volume.]

At first, Kant also followed in Wolff's footsteps. Hume disturbed him. Hume developed skepticism. He said that no wall should be built between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. All knowledge is knowledge of habit; there is no rational knowledge. Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber. But he could not completely go along with it. He said: Hume is right; we gain everything from experience. Only mathematics is an exception; what it says has absolute validity. He therefore advocates two things. First, there are absolutely certain judgments a priori. Second, all knowledge must be gained from experience. But experience is governed by our judgments. We ourselves give laws to experience. Man confronts the world with his organization of thought. All experience is governed by our form of knowledge. Thus Kant linked Hume with Wolff.

Now man is ensnared in this philosophical web. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are exceptions. Individual natural scientists also follow this path. Helmholtz says: What man has before him is spun out of his organization. What we perceive of the thing is not even an image, but only a sign. The eye makes only perceptions on the surface. Man is completely ensnared in his subjectivity. The thing in itself remains unknown. – It had to be so. Nominalism has lost the spiritual behind the surface. The human interior has been enervated. The inner working becomes purely formal. If man wants to penetrate behind reality, his inner being gives him no answer. The whole of 19th-century philosophical thinking does not find its way out of this. Hartmann, for example, does not go beyond the idea. A simple comparison can clarify this. A seal contains the name Müller. Nothing, not even the smallest material thing, can come from the brass of the seal into the sealing wax. Consequently, nothing objective can come from the seal; the name Müller must form itself out of the sealing wax. The thinker is the sealing wax. Nothing passes from the object to the thinker. And yet the name Müller is in the sealing-wax. Thus we take the content out of the objective world, and yet it is the true content that we take out. If one takes only the material, it is true: nothing passes from the seal to the stamp and vice versa. But as soon as one sees the spirit, the higher principle, which can embrace the objective and the subjective, then the spirit passes in and out into the subjective and the objective. The spirit carries everything over from objectivity into subjectivity. The ego is objective and subjective in itself. Fichte showed that. -²

The entire epistemology of the 19th century resembles a dog chasing its own tail. You end up with: I have created everything. The world is my imagination. Everything has spurted out of my inner being. I also have the right to kill everything.

Kant uses very convoluted terms. Kant says: I have destroyed knowledge to make room for faith. He has limited knowledge and established a practical faith because everything is spun out of the subjective.

Kantianism is the last result of nominalism. Today the time for it has expired. Man must train his thinking again in reality in order to form real concepts; then we can recognize the supersensible truths again. The scholastic attitude is time-bound, the spiritual had to be withdrawn from thinking for a time. Now the revealed teaching material must again become teaching material to be examined. We must again examine everything with reason. It is a light with which one can penetrate everywhere. One can investigate, understand, grasp everything. Reason is the lowest form of clairvoyance, but it is a seeing, hearing, and intelligent power. Thus we extricate ourselves from the net. Philosophy must free itself from this net and allow itself to be fertilized by logic to achieve true thinking.

• 1. See note
• 2. The rest of the lecture was only recorded by the transcriber in fragmentary notes, as the following sentences show.

The phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion, in which research is currently taking a lively interest, are of such a nature that the representatives of the most diverse intellectual fields feel the need to deal with them. Hypnosis seems to provide the physician with a means of distinguishing functional from organic diseases, and at the same time the possibility of curing the former by suggestive intervention. The legal scholar will not be able to avoid taking into account the effect that auto-suggestion and external suggestion have on a person in questions in which free will and personal responsibility come into consideration. Judicial practice will always have to be mindful of the fact that suggestive influence can cause the statements of both the accused and the witnesses to take on a form that deviates more or less from the truth. In the field of religious and cultural history, many things can be better explained with reference to hypnotism than without it. That from here an explanatory light also falls on the phenomena of artistic imaginative activity seems to me undoubted. And this brings me in an informal way to that science which is interested in the question of hypnotism above all other fields, namely psychology. I must agree with Hans Schmidkunz (Psychologie der Suggestion,.5) when he seeks here an important addition to our existing psychology. And it is highly regrettable that a researcher like W. Wundt is guilty of the most incredible distortions of individual assertions in Schmidkunz's book in his assessment of it. Wundt has rendered great services to psychology through his experimental investigations and has earned a high reputation among his philosophizing and philosophically educated contemporaries. We do not wish to deny the former, nor rebel against the latter, when we count his recently published work on "Hypnotism and Suggestion" among those that create confusion rather than enlightenment in the field of psychology. The one-sided, in a certain sense purely mechanical way in which Wundt views the life of the soul makes him completely misjudge the value which, for example, the assumption of a double consciousness (superconscious and subconscious) has for the elucidation of the facts in question. He finds in it "a pronounced example of that kind of psychological pseudo-explanation which consists in introducing a new name for the things to be explained" (p. 36). Wundt overlooks the fact that such theories, even if they are not called upon to speak the last word about the facts, nevertheless keep the real moments that continually flow into one another in reality conceptually sharply apart, which is the first step towards a real explanation. Wundt's own views seem completely inadequate to me. He wants to derive all the facts under consideration from a functioning of the ordinary mechanism of imagination that differs only gradually from the normal one. But I cannot see how this can explain the behavior towards the outside world that we observe in hypnosis. It only seems comprehensible to me if in hypnosis such a modification of our conscious functions occurs that we enter into an interaction with our surroundings which is one step closer to the purely physical relationship than that of our ordinary mental life. This interaction is concealed by our higher spiritual life like a weaker light by a stronger one; but it makes itself felt when the normal consciousness is obscured. In the latter case we descend one step on the ladder of world effects; we are in intimate contact with purely physical nature. The processes of the latter affect us without passing through our higher consciousness. Without giving the matter this turn into the universal philosophy of nature, we will not get any further.

I would like to summarize my view of Wundt's writing as follows. When I consider the concept that this psychologist has of consciousness, it does not seem to correspond at all to what emerges from an exhaustive immersion in the life of the human soul. If Wundt's concept of consciousness were correct, then man would always be in hypnosis, and our states of consciousness would be suggested to us by the mechanically operating mechanism of imagination. It is only because Wundt's psychology does not rise above that level of consciousness which receives its content more or less by way of suggestion that it does not see the profound difference between a suggested and a mass of imagination received by the waking consciousness.

In physiological terms, I find the explanation most acceptable that they serve subcortical brain centers to mediate those functions which take place in the state of hypnosis, and this by switching off the cerebral cortex, which is only active during waking consciousness.

In addition to Wundt's work, I have a number of others on the same subject. If you are looking for an easy-to-follow guide through the entire field of these phenomena, I recommend H. Schmidkunz: "Der Hypnotismus".¹ Appearances, application, views and dangers of hypnotism are clearly presented by a knowledgeable hand. An inserted somnambulistic case history and an excellent chapter on the history of hypnotism further enhance the value of this book, which is excellent in every respect, Anyone who wants to learn about a typical case of hypnosis (with four modifications of consciousness) and the views of an eminent clinician on this field must consult the book by v. KrafftEbing ² reach. In the "Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens" is by C. Ziegler ³ A treatise appeared which takes the standpoint of the so-called "great hypnotism" of the Paris school. The latter (with Charcot at its head) sees only special cases of hysteria in the phenomena in question. The author's view is somewhat clouded by this, but the book seems to me to be worth reading because of the good compilation of the phenomena. I have similar things to say about a brochure by Dr. Karl Friedr. Jordan.⁴ What is confusing here is the fact that the author is a follower of Prof. Gustav Jäger's theory of the life agent. According to Jordan, a quantity of this agent in excess of the usual amount flows from the hypnotist to the person being hypnotized and causes the somnambulistic state in the latter. Leaving aside this view, which is not supported by observation, this book also provides a good summary of what is relevant to hypnotism.

A study on hypnotism by Otto von Berlin seems to me to be confused and unclear.⁵ It is, however, to be taken more seriously than the latest publication by Dr. F. Wollny.⁶ We are dealing here with a very strange gentleman. Wollny senses secret societies which have the power to exert a magnetic influence on the individual as well as on whole masses of people and to induce them to all kinds of actions. The author has already expressed the same in a number of earlier writings, and has even made a petition to the imperial authorities to prosecute the alleged mischief. I believe that Wollny suffers from the kind of partial insanity that we often have occasion to observe. His writing is therefore only of pathological interest.

Following on from these remarks, I would like to say a few words about a question which, with regard to the experience of hypnotism, interests the philosophical thinker above all others. things. I mean that of the relation of suggestion to the conviction gained by logical means. There can be no doubt that, despite the qualitative difference between the hypnotic and the normal consciousness, auto-suggestion and external suggestion also play a great part in the latter, and that a large part of what we believe and consider to be true has taken root in us in a suggestive way. However, a complex of ideas that has come about through suggestion must never claim the value of a conviction. It is therefore all the more important to keep the designated areas strictly separate. After all, only that which is a logically acquired conviction can have scientific significance.

How does a judgment come about? We would never be able to connect ideas logically if the real unity of the universe did not appear to us as a multiplicity of ideas. The reason for the latter lies in our mental organization. If we were organized differently, we would see the entire (physical and spiritual) cosmos with a single glance. There would be no scientific thinking. The latter consists precisely in uniting the separate elements of the world through conscious activity. Through the development of this activity we approach more and more that overview of the world with a single glance. If this unification is to be a truly logical one, then two things are necessary. Firstly, we must see through the elements of world phenomena in their separate state exactly according to their content; secondly, from this content we must find the way in which we can objectively integrate the separate details into the unified whole of the world. Only if the world elements given to us behave completely passively in this unification and this only comes about through our "I" can the result be given the name of a conviction.

But there is no question that the same union of ideas which is brought about by our "I" can also take place independently of it merely through the attraction of the ideas themselves. This will happen if the "I" is switched off in some way, put into inactivity. The human psyche unites two moments: it takes in the world as a multiplicity, as a sum of details, and at a higher level it combines them again into the unity from which they originate. Because they belong to such a unity, they will strive for unification even if they are present in consciousness and the "I" does not confront them as a regulating factor. If this is the case, then we are dealing here with suggestion in the broadest sense. For a monistic view of the world, the latter is completely understandable. What is rooted in a unity strives for connection when it appears somewhere as a multiplicity. Since the totality of a person's life phenomena is always the result of the forces active in his consciousness, it can assert itself in two ways. If the process of imagination is regulated by the "I", then the phenomena of the personality can only be derived from its activity; if, on the other hand, the "I" is extinguished, then the cause of what takes place in and with the personality must be sought outside it. Every complex of imagination or every action of the latter kind is to be regarded only as a suggestion. There is only a gradual difference between the person acting in deep hypnosis and the scholar whose method is not based on considerations of his own "I" but on those of the head of the school. Only he who sees through the connections of the world in such a way that his judgment becomes completely independent of any external influence, raises the content of his imagination above a sum of suggestions. We can tell how so many people will act or think in a given case because we know the suggestions under whose influence they are. A person living under the influence of a suggestion is integrated into the chain of lower natural processes, where the causes of a phenomenon must always be sought not in it but outside it. Only the "I-consciousness" lifts us out of this chain, breaks the connection with the rest of nature in order to close it again within consciousness. To have given this central position to the "I" in the field of science is a merit of Joh. Gottlieb Fichte that cannot be appreciated enough. In this thinker, the development of human reason made a leap forward that cannot be compared with anything else. It is characteristic of contemporary German philosophy that it has no idea of this leap. The man who rises to the understanding of Fichte must experience a change in himself, like a man born blind who is given sight by an operation. All aberrations, both those of spiritualism and those of physiological psychology, can only be judged by those who know Fichte. It would never occur to Du Prel to place the action of a somnambulistic person higher than that conditioned by "ego-consciousness" if he had grasped the latter in a more intimate view. He would then know that everything that is not conditioned by the "I" is one step closer to physical nature than that which is. By making the suggestions of the consciousness alienated from the "I" the content of their teachings, the spiritualists make a mockery of science, since this can only consist of the judgments carried out by the "I". They place themselves on the same level as the believers in revelation, who also make the suggested contents of the imagination from outside the content of their views. It is quite characteristic of the dullness and cowardice of thinking reason in our time that the tendency to gain a view of the world with the exclusion of thought appears every moment.

• 1. Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfaßlicher Darstellung. With a somnambulistic case history. By Dr. Hans Schmidkunz. Stuttgart 1893 (VI, 266 p.).
• 2. An experimental study in the field of hypnotism together with remarks on suggestion and suggestion therapy. By Dr. R. v. Krafft-Ebing. 3rd ed. Stuttgart 1893 (108 pp.).
• 3. Der Hypnotismus. By C. Ziegler (Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens, XVI, 1). Stuttgart 1892 (63 pp.).
• 4. The riddle of hypnotism and its solution. By Dr. Karl Friedr. Jordan. 2nd ed. Berlin 1892 (IV, 79 p.).
• 5. Kaleidoscopic study on hypnotism and suggestion. By Otto von Berlin. Freiburg 1892 (73 p.).
• 6. In Sachen der Hypnose und Suggestion. A Vademecum for Herm Prof. Wundt. By Dr. F. Wollny. Leipzig 1893 (24 pp.).

My experience in reading this writing

A discussion of ¹ with the anthroposophy of Alois Mager could be of profound interest to me. This prompts me to write down here, as a kind of soliloquy, the thoughts that have arisen in me while I was studying Mager's writing “Theosophy and Christianity”. (I must confess that I have only now found the time to read the writing, which was published as early as 1922).

There are few people who believe that one can be fair to an opponent. But regardless of the reasons that such people have for their opinion, it seems to me that there are few conditions for me to be unfair to Alois Mager from the outset, even if he appears as my opponent.

He belongs to an order that I hold in high esteem and love.

Not only do I have many memories of noble, lofty, and far-reaching intellectual achievements that can be attributed to the order in general, without going into the work of the individual members of the order to whom this achievement is owed; but I have also had the good fortune to know and esteem individual members of the order. I have always had a sense for the spirit that prevails in the writings on science by such personalities. While I feel that much of what comes from other contemporary scientific works is foreign to me, there is not a little that comes from this side that touches my soul without any foreignness, even when the content seems to me to be incorrect, one-sided, or prejudiced.

And so I was also able to take up with much sympathy what Alois Mager wrote without reference to anthroposophy. This applies to his thoughts on the life of the soul in the presence of God, which are deep in mind and spirit, in particular.

I expected Alois Mager to be an opponent. For I know that from the side to which he belongs, either only silence about my anthroposophy can come, or opposition. Anyone who has illusions about this knows little about the world.

But what Mager presents had to seem significant to me.

And I would like to write down here the thoughts that have come to me about this, like a soliloquy.

The essay “Theosophy and Christianity” discusses in four chapters, essentially the Anthroposophy I have described. Mager admits this. On page 31f. we find the words: “I consider it futile to broadly present the goals and teachings of neo-Indian theosophy. We must devote a separate treatise to Steiner's Anthroposophy and its relation to science. There the essentials of Theosophy will be discussed as well.

The first chapter, “Theosophy in the Past and Present,” contains a spirited argument that what Mager calls Theosophy was revealed in a great spiritual way in the non-Christian world in Plotinus and Buddha. Mager sees the search of the human soul to come into contact with the divine in a way that naturally follows from the nature of this soul, most vividly realized in the two minds mentioned. For, what appears on Christian ground in this way, Mager does not judge, of course, as coming naturally from the nature of the soul, but as a result of the prevailing divine grace.

It seems unnecessary to me to point out here that, especially in earlier times, the state of soul indicated, even if not in the scientific formulation of Plotinus or in the religious depth of Buddha, was much more present in the spiritual life of humanity than Mager assumes when he orients his whole presentation towards the two personalities.

But what strikes me most is this: Mager wants to judge the anthroposophy I have presented. He wants to discuss what part of humanity is actually seeking by taking the anthroposophical path of the soul among many others. He wants to develop the content of what is alive in anthroposophy, otherwise what should give meaning to his investigation. Now the whole essence of what I have called anthroposophy is immediately distorted if, in order to explain its content, one refers to earlier descriptions of the spiritual worlds.

I have said that I am recording these thoughts as a soliloquy. I do this in order to be able to present unreservedly what only I myself can know with complete certainty from the subjective experience of the matter immediately, but which I must know in just this way.

And here I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize again and again that everything essential to my anthroposophy comes from my own spiritual research or insight, that I have borrowed nothing from the historical record in the matter or in the substantiation of the matter. If something I had found myself could be illuminated by being shown in some form or other as already existing elsewhere, then I did so. But I never did it with anything but what had been given in my own view before. Nor did I have any other method while I was referring to the theosophical society's own writings in my own writings. I presented what I had researched and then showed how one or the other appears in those writings.

Only the terminology has been borrowed from what already existed, where an existing word made such borrowing desirable in terms of its content. But this has as little to do with the essential content of anthroposophy as the fact that language is used to communicate what has been self-explored has to do with the independence of what is said. One could, of course, also assume that a well-known linguistic expression is borrowed when one uses it in a presentation of something completely new.

In the strictest self-knowledge, I have repeatedly asked myself whether this is the case, whether I can speak with my own exact knowledge when I say that what I present as a spiritual view comes from my directly experienced view, and that the historical given plays no role in this. In particular, it was always important to me to be clear about the fact that I did not take any details from what had been handed down historically and insert them into the world of my views. Everything had to be produced within the immediate life of contemplation; nothing could be inserted as a foreign entity.

In wanting to bring this into clarity within myself, I have avoided all illusions and sources of illusion with the greatest effort of consciousness. After all, one may rely on a clarity of self-awareness that knows how to distinguish between what is experienced in consciousness in direct connection with the objective being and what emerges from some uncontrollable depths of the soul through something read or otherwise absorbed.

I now believe that anyone who really engages with the presentation in my writings should also be able to see through my relationship to spiritual observation as a result. Alois Mager does not do this. For if he had tempted correctly, he would not have presented the content of anthroposophy with reference to Plotinus and Buddha first, but would have shown first how this content arises from the continuation of the development of modern consciousness on the basis of the spirit of science.

But what led Mager to write his first chapter leads him in the sequel (page 47) to say: “What strikes us most and most irrefutably about Steiner's Anthroposophy is that it is composed of pieces of thought and knowledge from all peoples and all centuries. Greek mythology, which Steiner became acquainted with at the gymnasium, provides him with the Hyperboreans, Atlanteans, Lemurians, and so forth. He borrowed from the oriental mystery religions, from the Gnostic and Manichaean teachings. The Kant-Laplacean Urn Nebula served as a model for his spiritual primeval world being...

This conclusion drawn by Mager about my anthroposophy is a complete objective untruth, in view of the true facts. It is dismaying to see that a fine mind, which wants to apply the means of its objective search for truth correctly in order to arrive at a true-to-life context, misses the truth and presents an illusion as reality.

This sense of dismay overshadows all the other feelings I have about Mager's writing, for example that it is antagonistic towards me, that it becomes quite strangely unjust in many places and so widens.

My consternation is heightened when I come across another objective untruth. In the second chapter, “Anthroposophy and Science”, Mager gives a commendable account of anthroposophical ideas, considering the brevity of the presentation to which he is obliged. Indeed, he proves himself to be a good judge of certain impressions that are given to spiritual perception as a finer materiality, for example, between the material and the soul. One can see that he has many qualities that enable him to engage with anthroposophy, if it were not for the inhibitions that come from other sides.

But now, in this chapter, there is another objective untruth. Mager first tries to put my way of spiritual thinking on the same level as spiritistic or vulgar occult practices. He even uses Staudenmaier's book “Magic as Experimental Science” for this purpose, which a sense of spiritual differences should have protected him from.

But now he comes to the following assertion: “The world view that Steiner presents to us, which at first glance appears imposing and seemingly complete, is not the result - as a philosophical world view is - of rational, scientific knowledge, but is gained through spiritual vision, anthroposophical clairvoyance” (page 45). “Steiner has all the knowledge he ever sipped and caught in his life, as he floated and wandered through all fields of knowledge, with an incomparable skill in clairvoyant threads into a bizarre unity.” Mager presents everything as if I had given my ideas about the spiritual world on the basis of an unchecked, unscientifically applied clairvoyance.

Is there nothing to be said against such an assertion, considering what can be found in my writings about Goethe, in my “Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's World View”, in “Truth and Science”, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” ? I have presented this as a philosophical primal experience, that one can experience the conceptual in its reality, and that with such an experience one stands in the world in such a way that the human ego and the spiritual content of the world flow together. I have tried to show how this experience is just as real as a sensory experience. And out of this primal experience of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual content of anthroposophy has grown. I endeavored step by step to use 'intellectual, scientific knowledge' with the precision that I acquired in the study of mathematics to control and justify the spiritual view and so on. I only worked in such a way that the spiritual view emerged from 'intellectual, scientific' knowledge. I have strictly rejected all spiritualism and all vulgar occultism.

Again, Mager's scientific approach does not lead to an understanding of the true facts, but to the assertion of objective untruths about anthroposophy and my relationship to it.

Indeed, one is bound to be dismayed when one sees that an 'investigation' into anthroposophy gradually erodes the very soil in which anthroposophy is to be found.

The anthroposophical spiritual researcher sees through the reasons for such mental states, which cannot come to objective facts, from his insights; but Mager is not to be presented here from the point of view of anthroposophy, but merely from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, which he indeed wants to assert in his writing.

I ask now: can it still be fruitful to deal with what an opponent presents, when one sees that everything falls to nothing, that he presents to the world about Anthroposophy? Can one discuss assertions that cannot possibly refer to Anthroposophy because they not only paint a distorted image of it, but a complete opposite?

(It is no wonder that Mager is unjust to me even in small matters. A clear misprint in one edition of my Theosophy, where the numbering of “mind soul” and “sentience soul” is incorrect – despite the fact that what comes before and after makes it quite clear that this is a misprint — he uses it to make the following comment: “It is characteristic of Steiner's scientific method that he places the intellectual soul before the sentient soul here, which contradicts his usual presentation.”

In view of what has been presented, there is no opportunity to enter into a discussion about whether, in Mager's description of Aristotle's psychology in the third chapter, “Soul and Soul Migration”, which Mager even finds quite stimulating, there is the seed for transforming ideas about the soul from what can be observed externally to what is seen spiritually internally; whether, then, the path from Aristotelian intellectualism to anthroposophy does not emerge as a more straightforward one.

The legends of the gods and heroes of the Nordic peoples are based on profound occult facts. Even within Europe, there were occult lodges of the white brotherhood in ancient times. From Scotland up to northern Russia. They were called “Trotten Lodges” or “Druid Lodges.” The development of the spiritual life of the ancient peoples was entrusted to these lodges. Druid comes from Drus [...]. The legend that Boniface cut down the oak when he brought Christianity is a beautiful parable for the fact that the old highly religious Druid religion was overcome by Christianity. Six to seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, the old religion began to decline. The last part moved south. The ancient Truscans, from whom the Etruscans later emerged, settled in Italy; further east, another branch moved to ancient Greece. If we take the matter of the northern population as a whole, we find a deep connection in the spiritual realm, between the west and the east.

Let us take a look at Buddhism. This highly spiritual religion hardly found any lasting place in its native country India; it was soon absorbed by Brahmanism; on the other hand, it took root in the peoples descended from the Atlanteans, the Mongols.

The ancient Germans also descend from Atlantis. The similarity of the religions is evident from the names. The Nordic god “Wotan” is equivalent to “Buddha”. The ancient religion comes from Atlantis. It was well aware of the lost continent. The last echoes of the old Druid religion died out under the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the last Druid lodges were abolished.

The old teaching knew two traditions. In the south, the tradition of the Lemurian race that perished in the fire was alive, in the north, the memory of Atlantis that perished in the water. The former was symbolized in the saga by “Muspelheim”, the warm sunny land, and the second by “Nifelheim”, the land of fog. It is also very interesting to trace the relationship between the ancient Egyptians and the Nordic peoples. We can follow it in the religions. Osiris is dismembered by his brother and the pieces scattered, from which the earth then arises. In Egypt you find many Osiris graves, where the pieces of the Osiris body were buried, as it were. In the Book of the Dead, Osiris - the higher self - is addressed directly: “The Osiris and so forth. The task of the priesthood was to awaken the dead Osiris in man.

In the North, we have the giant Ymir. He is slain, and from his parts the earth is created. His hair makes the forests, his bones the rocks, his blood the rivers, and so on, all his limbs are divided. We recognize that this myth has been drawn from the same source as the worship of Osiris.

The Edda is an echo of the immigration of Atlantis. “Edda” and “Veda” are the same word. Thus we recognize the connection between all ancient and old religions.

The entire history of Europe is preserved in the heroic sagas. All the sagas can be traced back to the great Nordic initiate “Sig”, who was initiated for Europe. Siegfried, Sieglinde, Sigurd are all names that point back to him. In terms of depth, the Nordic tradition surpasses even that which comes from India. What strikes us about all the sagas is the prophetic and tragic element that runs through everything. Everything points to what is to come. We see this in the Twilight of the Gods. It was known that the gods they worshipped would not find lasting worship. They said to them: “You are there for the north, but another will come after you who is higher than you.

The story of Siegfried clearly shows what is meant by initiation. He killed the lindworm, bathed in its blood, became invulnerable – all things that symbolize initiation. The initiate is invulnerable – only one spot between the shoulder blades was vulnerable, and that is the spot where Christ carried his cross and thus also made this spot invulnerable. Siegfried had to be replaced by Christ. This is depicted in the Nibelungen. We see the transition of the two currents in the Middle Ages, which finally merged: the old pagan current and the new Christian current. The old pagan current leads directly back to the downfall of Atlantis. It was replaced by the Franks and led over into the Christian current. The Nibelungs come from the Land of the Fogs, the land surrounded by water and fog. The hoard of the Nibelungs is sunk into the Rhine. For the peoples, the Rhine belonged to the great waters that had engulfed Atlantis with the golden city and all its treasures.

Then we see King Arthur's Round Table. It represents the 'White Lodge of ancient paganism'. The contrasts in the Middle Ages become more and more pronounced, in the form of the 'Ghibellines' = Nibelungs - the imperial party - and the 'Wibelungen' = Welfs, the party of the Pope, of Christianity.

What came to Europe from Christianity did not come only from Christian monks, but also from Oriental brotherhoods. The great spiritual brotherhood of the 'White Lodge', the 'Gral Lodge', brought the deepest part of Christianity. Barbarossa wants to get the Grail. He does not reach his goal, but drowns on the way. He was far ahead of his time and therefore could not yet fulfill his task. Now he waits in the Kyffhäuser until the spirit of his people has progressed so far that he can lead them further. Development had not yet reached its low point. There are those who cannot go down as deeply, they have to wait until the others have come through the depths to their point of view, then they can move on with them. So Barbarossa sits and waits. The ravens are to bring him word when the time has come. The ravens are the initiates of the first degree; they are scouts, they bring tidings from the world of the spirit.

The emperor – the warriors – have not found the initiation. Who is suited to seek it? This type is represented by a great, noble, inward-looking mind. The pure fool: Parzival. The Holy Grail did come to the land in the time of Barbarossa, but it was only sensed in dullness. Parzival sees it, but out of ignorance, out of misunderstanding the prohibition of questioning, he misses the question. Now he must go through all the degrees of initiation. He must prove himself as a child of his time, in the worldly knighthood. He goes through doubt: [“Is doubt the birth of hearts?”] Finally, after going through everything, he comes to the Grail. There the entire initiation is symbolically represented. His successor was Lohengrin.

In the history of the Middle Ages, we saw the flourishing of a great cultural movement. Thriving cities emerged, and in them the creative, industrious, but more self-contained bourgeoisie. From Scotland to Novgorod, a circle of flourishing cities emerged. This represents a great step forward in the development of the world. This development of the bourgeoisie corresponds to the female side of man. The masculine seeks its own in the outside world, represented by [gap in the transcript]

The inner being of man is feminine and must be fertilized by the great “White Lodge”. This is presented to us in the Lohengrin saga. The blossoming city-being is represented by Elsa of Brabant. She calls on Lohengrin, the knight of the Holy Grail, for her protection, marries him and loses him again because she asks about his origin.

There is a sacred law among the initiates that one must not ask about their physical origin.

Lohengrin's messenger is the swan. This is the third degree of chelaship, which is designated as follows: They know the name of all things.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, who died in 1225 and to whom we owe the Parzival saga, could neither read nor write. And Jacob Boehme, the poor cobbler, will not have occupied himself with reading books either; but that is no reason why he should not have left us such spiritual truth and wisdom. Walter von der Vogelweide boasted that he was something very special because he could read and write [...]; in the Middle Ages, that was a very rare skill.

All these northern sagas of gods and heroes contain the basis of occultism, which the great initiate Sig proclaimed. “Wotan” underwent four initiations to prepare the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race, which had the task of merging the Greek and Celtic races. The fourth sub-race found its greatness in the south. Here in the north, a corresponding countermeasure was taken. Four stages had to be gone through here first, while high culture was already developing down in the south. From the south came Christianity. In the north, four elementary classes of “Wotan” were gone through so that one would be able to receive Christianity.

“Wotan”, “Wille”, “We” – the trinity.

Creative power, will and we – the power of the mind was developed, the tragic trait that runs through everything.

What did the ancient Germans learn from the Druids? One example: imagine yourself on the moon. There, the lower three kingdoms were not what they are now on Earth. The mineral kingdom had not yet solidified, it was still alive, mobile, best compared to a spinach mass or rather to peat than to rock. There were no stones back then. Life had not yet escaped from it. The same applied to the plant kingdom. The plants of that time could only grow on living things. So living things grew on living things. Now some beings have not achieved the goal that was set on the moon. There are still plants that are unable to sustain their life from dead soil; they can only grow on living things; they are called parasite plants. These include, among others, mistletoe, which can only grow on trees; it is a moon plant. Mistletoe juice is antagonistic to the earth, which is why it is or was used as a poison in medicine.

From the above, we see that on the moon the three kingdoms were not yet completely separated from each other. The mineral kingdom was plant-like, and the plant kingdom was between the plant and animal kingdoms. When certain plants were touched, they produced sounds.

The earth sun is

All these things can only be recognized by those who are familiar with the conditions on earth. At the time of the ancient Druids, these things were told to us as fairy tales by the Druid priests. This is how we have been prepared to understand Theosophy today.

The initiates speak to the souls, not to the respective people.

Thus, today's theosophy prepares us again for the reality of later ages.

Various things, presumably from a question and answer [with comments by the transcriber]

Richard Wagner intuitively grasped the great realities and reflected them in his great operas. Various attempts have been made by the spiritual currents to bring these realities to the attention of mankind today. Just as Richard Wagner was inspired as an artist, so the attempt has been made to make the truth clear to the consciousness of the mind. Nietzsche was chosen as the tool for this. His brain did not hold up. He had to atone for the attempt with death. [...] The European race was too thick-skinned. None of it was of any use until Helena Petrovna Blavatsky got it through. - We were dealing with Kali Yuga, the dark age. We are in the middle of the fifth root race and have passed the low point. Jesus Christ: When Christianity emerged, Jesus of Nazareth was a highly developed chela, third degree, the swan. For him, the whole world is what the human ego is for the ordinary person, that is, he knows the true divine in every thing. He knows the whole world inwardly. Every thing tells him its true name.

[In response to a request for further clarification, Dr. Steiner tried to make it clear to us:] As I speak to you, I move the air, the sound waves reach your ear and you absorb the words in your soul. The air is in perpetual motion, the auditory nerves catch the sound. Now imagine the air with its different vibrations, because each word produces different vibrations [...]. Now imagine that from the beginning, when a thing was created, a word was spoken for every thing, and that the air waves that formed this word were made firm, made rigid. Imagine that my words were made rigid, then they would fall visibly on the floor here. That was indeed the case with creation.

Christ can be found in the astral world. Master Jesus teaches how to find Christ. Christ will come again as a spiritual man when he will incarnate again in the sixth root race.

He will have a forerunner, John the Baptist. The sun was in Aries in the spring at the time of Christ, hence Christ = the Lamb. But it is slowly moving forward. It used to be in the sign of Taurus, hence the service of Taurus; even earlier in Gemini, Perse - Ormuzd and Ahriman. A solar period lasts two thousand six hundred years. Now it is coming to Pisces. In the Middle Ages, reference was made to the Age of Pisces. An element, a sea of spiritual life was to come. Later comes Aquarius, after two thousand six hundred years. The Templars taught that John would return - John the Baptist

In the wisdom schools of Plato and Pythagoras, students were only allowed to penetrate to the higher sources of knowledge after studying mathematics. Eternal wisdom was only revealed through pure selflessness, and mathematics was the only science that could educate people to this, because it serves no purpose, no selfish satisfaction, and only teaches the pure relationships, the pure laws of the basic forms.

Man's development is a descent from the All-Unity to the particular and a gradual ascent in conscious freedom to the realization of his connection with the All and return to the General. Therefore, from the mental point of view, the dead stone is a model of the higher for man. In it the great connection is still preserved; in it only the law of causality is effective; what sets it in motion, it gives to the outside world. It extends from the mental into the physical, for pure thought is enclosed within it. Its life is only form. Thus the sun, which as a physical image of the Logos is at home in the mind, and the whole mineral kingdom can be regarded as a great laboratory of physical and chemical forces.

With the plant, which has its origin one stage lower, in the astral, life begins and with it the process of isolation. It draws nourishment into itself from outside in order to increase in size; it wants to grow and spread. It is the beginning of egoism. However, the plant can develop one stage higher; it develops from the astral through the physical realm up to the etheric sphere. The animal that arises in the etheric sphere already feels, it not only wants food to grow, it wants to take from the outside world that which creates pleasure for itself and appropriate it. It feels life as pleasure and suffering; it rises and develops to the astral.

And man as such, who has his origin in the physical and, as a creature of nature, has reached the point of perceiving the outside world and perceiving himself as an individual, is at his lowest in his egoism, yet he can elevate himself in thought to the mental sphere, although he can only perceive in the physical, because he lives with his brain and his visible body in the mineral kingdom. But he carries all the elements of the universe within him, he has passed through all the realms, and the powers of all rest in him as principles; he can consciously develop them from within himself. What we see is the physical body, it belongs to the mineral kingdom, but through prana, the life principle, it also lives in the etheric sphere of the plant world, it has its etheric body; and further, it also lives through sensation in the astral world, in its astral body, and through rational perception in the mental world, through the kama-manas principle. In the lower world, man possesses four bodies with the principles. But he is also connected to the higher world, since he has his origin there. He can develop his mental body and advance from the conception of the individual and the many to the idea of the type; he can develop the causal body and ascend to the higher world of the trinity of manas-budhi-atma. In the sphere of Budhi he will form his thoughts out of astral matter, he will be able to create the Mayavi-rupa body, he will live and work out of his causal soul, be a creator himself and become one again with the totality.

This upper trinity, to which man must develop, is, however, in truth deeply hidden within him, it underlies his being; he must liberate it in succession – “As above, so below”. The multiplicity that we see is nothing other than the principle of unity, the Logos, which has dissolved into multiplicity. Disharmony can only arise in multiplicity because the many separateness, which are all parts of the spirit, can come into conflict with each other. When this multiplicity reunites to form a whole, our cosmos becomes a whole again, it becomes the Logos again, harmony. “As above, so below!” – Atma, the highest principle in our cosmos, in our mineral kingdom, to which we count the stars with their orbits and all the stars and all the forces in nature, has at the same time penetrated the deepest into matter; our physical organs are essentially animated and held together by Atma. Atma as the highest principle has its counterpart in the physical realm.

The Budhi principle has only penetrated into the etheric and astral spheres, forming the essence of the plant and animal world, their etheric and astral bodies. When man, originally still in connection with the divine geniuses, forming a whole with them, separated into an individual being in the astral sphere and attained to ego-consciousness through imagination, then Manas, the third principle, descended into the astral sphere: united with Kama, enclosed in the brain of man, he formed his Kama-Manas body. Man has passed through all realms on the descending arc of his development. We carry Atma as a mineral cosmos within us; it is our physical body; Budhi as a living, sentient cosmos in our prana and kamakörper; and Manas, in its connection with Kama, forms our Kama-Manas-body. He is the fourth principle in the lower world and at the same time forms the transition to the higher mental world. It is the connecting bridge to it. When freed from all lower sheaths, manas reunites with budhi in selfless radiance into the universal.

Of all the entities, the human being is most deeply immersed in egoism and a separate existence. He has absorbed everything and carries the whole trinity of Atma-Budhi-Manas within himself. In the mineral kingdom, Atma is spread out; it rests in its entirety in the rock, which is still directly connected to the cosmos. In the plant and animal world, dualism is already present; Budhi penetrates into the etheric and astral worlds, and the plant and animal world is built from life and sensation. Manas, wisdom, hovers above them and brings about the wisdom that is expressed in nature, in the wonderful conformity to law of the structure of all animals' rational actions. But man draws Manas into himself. Wisdom can no longer affect him from the outside. Bound up with Kama, enclosed in his mental body, wisdom is clouded for him. Man is a condensation into the single form of chemical-physical processes that take place in the mineral cosmos. Man is also active in the astral world through his feelings, desires and passions. He ceaselessly creates astral beings in that sphere, which have a truly living, material existence there, because the matter of the astral world consists of surging sensations such as envy, hatred, goodwill, anger and so on. There, the beings created by human feelings lead their special existence as elemental beings; there are also beings from other worlds that require the astral sphere for their development, and then there are the astral bodies of the souls awaiting their human incarnation. Furthermore, there are the devas, who also come from other worlds and often seek to influence people. There are the four Deva-Rajas, who form the physical bodies according to the astral scheme from the four elements of fire, water, air and earth, which the Lipikas, the lords of karma, have formed from the mental substance of the individuality.

The higher development of man depends on conscious concentration and meditation, which must be practiced daily and carried out according to certain rules. By detaching himself daily, in the morning hours, even if only for five minutes, from all impressions of the outside world and directing all his concentration to a revealed thought of eternity, he will gradually connect with the cosmos and take part in its rhythmic movement. Through this consistent daily retreat from the transitory world of appearances, for the short time of his meditation, man gradually ascends to the Arupa sphere. By thinking through a sentence that contains an eternal universal truth, so that it takes on life, the human being draws out its entire content and absorbs it. The control of thought and meditation, strictly practiced daily, must not serve the individual's own education and expansion of the mind; it must be done with the awareness that in doing so we are helping and working with the development of our cosmos. All our uncontrolled, “real” thinking constantly disturbs this regular process. The person who wants to develop his astral senses must also learn to control his feelings and awaken in himself a sense of reverence for the wisdom of highly developed beings; and he must cultivate a devotional surrender, in proper appreciation of the distance to that higher wisdom. Every evening, the person practicing meditation should review the past day, look upon failures without regret or remorse, and learn from them in order to benefit from the experiences and improve. Meditation should not be forced; it should not separate the person from their surroundings or change their usual existence. On the contrary, the person should surrender to their nature without worry. He will learn more from the collection and overview at the end of the day than if he tried to force himself to become a better person.

If man wants to ascend to higher development, where the first Logos flows into the second, he must become a chela and develop the qualities of a chela within himself. He must gradually develop four main qualities within himself:

First: the power of discrimination, the distinction between the permanent and the transitory; that is, man must learn to recognize in the transitory, in that which he perceives, the formative power that is permanent. All things that our senses perceive have an inherent power that seeks crystallization, just as salt, which is dissolved in warm water, [forms crystals when the water cools]. The arable soil is ground crystal, the seed contains the power to become a plant and fruit, and the vertebral bone has the potential to develop into a skullcap. Thus the lancelet, which consists only of the spinal column, is a miniature image of the first living, sentient form in which the Logos manifested itself. The enormous first fish, which consisted only of a gelatinous mass, is the ancestor that carried in its vertebrae the possibility for the development of amphibians, fish, mammals and humans. Thus, the physical human being is to be understood only as a temporary phenomenon that changes its mineral substances daily and whose sense organs will not remain as they are today, but will adapt to the higher human stages of development and carry the power of transformation within themselves.

The second quality to be developed is the appreciation of what is lasting. Knowledge becomes perception. We learn to value what is lasting more highly than what is passing, which increasingly loses its value in our estimation. And so the developing chela is led by the development of the first two qualities to the third by itself, to the development of certain soul abilities.

a) Thought control.

The chela must not allow himself to look at things from only one point of view. We grasp an idea and consider it to be true, while in fact it is only true from that one aspect or point of view; we must later also look at it from the opposite point of view and hold up the reverse side to every obverse. Only in this way do we learn to control one thought with another.

b) Control of actions.

Man lives and acts in the material world and is placed in the temporal. He can only comprehend a small part of the world of phenomena and is bound by his activity to a certain circle of the transitory. Daily meditation helps the chela to focus and control his actions. He will consider only the enduring in them and place value only on the action with which he can helpfully serve the higher development of his fellow human beings. He will lead the abundance of the phenomenal world back to the highest unity.

c) Tolerance.

The chela will not allow himself to be dominated by feelings of attraction and repulsion. He will seek to understand all - criminals and saints - and although he experiences emotionally, he will judge intellectually. What is correctly recognized as evil from one point of view can be judged as necessary and logical from a higher aspect.

d) Tolerance.

Accepting good and bad fortune with equanimity, not letting them become determining powers that can influence us. Not letting joy and pain push us out of our direction. Keeping oneself free from all external influences and influxes and asserting one's own direction.

e) Faith.

The chela should have a free, open, unbiased heart for the higher spiritual. Even where he does not immediately recognize a higher truth, he should have faith until he can make it his own through knowledge. If he wanted to proceed according to the principle of “testing everything and keeping the best,” he would apply his judgment as a standard and place himself above the higher spiritual, closing himself to its penetration.

f) Equilibrium.

The last soul ability would result as the outcome of all the others as equilibrium, as a sense of direction, soul balance. The chela gives direction to himself.

And so he would now have to develop the fourth quality within himself: the will to freedom, to the ideal. As long as we still live in the physical, we cannot attain full freedom, but we can develop the will to freedom within us, strive towards the ideal. We can free ourselves from external circumstances and no longer react to external impulses, but make the law within us, the enduring, the guiding principle of our thinking and acting, living not in the passing personality, but in our individuality, which is enduring and strives for unity.