The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us transport ourselves in imagination toRammenau in Oberlausitz, a spot not far from Kamenz in Saxony, the birthplace of Lessing. The year is 1769. A house of no great size stands beside a brook. The generations inhabiting this house, as records show, had been engaged in the ribbon-weaving industry, from father to son, ever since the period of the Thirty Years' War. The standard of life prevailing at this time in the house was not even as high as tolerable comfort, indeed it was very near to poverty. By the brook that flowed past the house, in this year of 1769, stood a seven-year-old boy, fairly small, rather sturdily built for his age, with red cheeks and expressive eyes, that at this moment were showing signs of deep distress. The boy had just thrown into the brook a book that was floating away. At this juncture his father appeared on the scene from the house and must have spoken to the boy more or less to the following effect: “Why, Gottlieb, whatever are you thinking of? You are flinging into the water what your father bought for you with hard-earned money to give you pleasure!” The father was very angry, for just before this he had given the book as a present to his son Gottlieb, who till then had had no acquaintance with books apart from the Bible and the hymn book.—Now what had really happened? Hitherto young Gottlieb had received with the most serious attention whatever had been taught him of the contents of the Bible and hymn book, and he was a boy good at his lessons at school. Wishing to please him, his father bought him one day for a present the book of folk tales called Der Gehörnte Siegfried (The Horned Siegfried). Gottlieb plunged deeply into the study of this book, with the result that he had to be scolded for his forgetfulness and inattention to all his lessons, which he had till then found so interesting. That went to the boy's heart. He was so fond of the Gehörnte Siegfried, his newly acquired book; it aroused in him such deep interest and sympathy. But on the other hand this thought was vividly present to his mind: “You have neglected your duty.” Such were the thoughts in the mind of the seven-year-old boy. So he went off to the brook and forthwith flung the book into the water. He was punished for it, because though he could tell his father the facts, he could not explain the real underlying reason.

Let us now follow the boy Gottlieb at this stage of his life into other situations. For instance, we catch sight of him one afternoon on a lonely moor far away from his parents' house, standing there from 4 o'clock onwards and gazing into the distance, utterly absorbed in the view of the solitary spaces surrounding him. And thus he was still standing at five and at six o'clock and even when the bell sounded for evensong. Then a shepherd came by, and seeing the boy standing there, gave him a cuff and told him to come along home.

Two years after this time, in 1771, Baron von Miltitz was visiting the landowner in Rammenau. He had come over from his own estate in Oberau one Sunday, in order to dine with the neighbouring squires and enjoy their society; and before the meal he had intended to hear the morning sermon. However, he arrived too late to hear the clergyman of Rammenau, well known to him as a worthy man; for much to his regret the sermon was already over. When the visitors, his host and the other persons present were talking amongst themselves about this, somebody made the suggestion: “Oh there is a boy in the village who might perhaps repeat the sermon by heart; it is known that he can do so.” And so Gottlieb, now nine years of age, was fetched, and came along in his blue peasant smock. A few questions were put to him which he answered briefly with “yes” and “no.” He felt very ill at ease in this high-class society. Then it was suggested to him to repeat the sermon which he had heard just before. He paused to meditate and then, speaking as it were from the depth of his soul, as if he felt intimately every word, he repeated from beginning to end the sermon which he had heard, in the presence of the visiting landowner and the company. And he repeated it in such a way that all felt as if everything that he said were proceeding directly out of his own heart; he seemed to have so imbibed it that it had become part of himself. Thus with inward fire and animation, which increased as he went on, the nine-year-old Gottlieb recited the whole sermon. ... This nine-year-old Gottlieb was the son of Christian Fichte, the ribbon-weaver. The landowner von Miltitz was profoundly astonished at this experience, and declared that he must himself take charge of the boy's education. In view of the straitened circumstances of the boy's parents, the relief from such a responsibility was bound to be extremely welcome to them, even though they deeply loved the boy. For after Gottlieb many other children had come, till they were now a large family; and so they had no choice but to grasp the helping hand which Baron von Miltitz so generously offered. And Baron von Miltitz was so strongly impressed by his encounter with the boy that he wanted to take young Gottlieb away with him immediately. And so he took him away to his own home at Oberau near Meissen. ... Young Gottlieb, however, felt by no means at home in the mansion, which formed so great a contrast with everything to which he had been accustomed in the poor ribbon-weaver's cottage. He felt indeed altogether unhappy over the whole affair, till he was sent to Niederau nearby to a clergyman named Leberecht Krebel. And there Gottlieb grew up in an environment full of intimacy and affection, in the household of this excellent minister Krebel. With his unusual gifts the boy found himself deeply attracted by all the gleams of truth which he divined in his talks with the worthy pastor. And when Gottlieb reached the age of thirteen he was able, with the support of his benefactor, to enter the Schulpforta School.

He was transferred to the strict discipline of Schulpforta, which did not by any means suit him. He observed that the manner in which the pupils lived together involved much concealment towards the teachers and officials, and much duplicity in behaviour. Further he was altogether out of harmony with the system by which the older boys were set in authority over the younger as prefects. Gottlieb had already at that time absorbed Robinson Crusoe and many other tales, and had been influenced by them. At first this school life seemed intolerable to him. He could not reconcile it with his conscience that there should be—as he felt—concealment, duplicity, deceit in any place intended to promote spiritual growth. What was to be done? He resolved to escape secretly into the world outside. Accordingly, he made ready and simply ran away. On the way there arose in his mind, prompted by his innermost feelings, the thought: “Have you done right? ought you to do this?” Where should he now turn for counsel? He fell upon his knees, addressed a prayer to Heaven and waited for a sign to be given him from the spiritual worlds as to what he should do. The sign from within urged him to turn back, and he willingly did so. Very fortunately there was then at Schulpforta an unusually sympathetic headmaster, by name Geisler, who persuaded young Gottlieb to relate the whole affair to him and showed deep understanding. Instead of punishing him, he even made it possible for Gottlieb to be on happier terms with himself and his environment, as happy indeed as he could wish. He was able also to make friends with the most gifted among the staff.

It was not easy for him to obtain satisfaction for his intellectual needs. Already aspiring, even at that age, towards the highest, he was not free to study the authors of whom he had heard so much; for Goethe, Schiller, and in particular also Lessing, were at that period forbidden fruit at Schulpforta. However, there was one of the masters who obtained for him a remarkable book, Lessing's Anti-Goeze, that inspired polemic against Goeze, which contained the whole substance of Lessing's profession of faith, his lofty and valiant outlook, expressed in free and outspoken language.

Thus Gottlieb in these early years imbibed from this Anti-Goeze all that it was able to give him. It was not only the ideas which he appropriated, indeed that was the least important part; he also made his own the manner of approach towards the highest things and the attitude towards various views of the world.

And so Gottlieb's schooldays went by at Schulpforta. When he had to write his examination thesis on leaving, he chose a literary subject. It was a remarkable piece of work. It was altogether lacking in the quality characteristic of many young people who introduce all kinds of philosophical ideas into their school compositions. This essay contained no trace of philosophy or of philosophical ideas and notions. On the other hand it already betrayed the fact that the young man made it his special aim to observe human beings, to look into the depth of their heart; and it was this acquired knowledge of men which found expression above all in this school essay.

In the meantime his benefactor Baron von Miltitz had died. The funds so generously supplied for the young man stopped. Fichte passed his final examination at Schulpforta, went to Jena, and had to live there in the direst poverty. He could take no share at all in anything that then made up the student life of Jena. Day by day he had to earn by hard toil what he required for his bare subsistence. And he could only find in rare hours the opportunity of nourishing the aspirations of his spirit. Jena proved to be too small, so that Fichte was unable to find his spiritual food there. It struck him that he would have better facilities at Leipzig, a larger city, and went there to try. He tried to prepare himself there for the situation in life which was the ideal of his father and mother, deeply god-fearing people; namely for the Saxon ministry, for a post as minister and preacher. Indeed one may say he had shown himself predestined for the office of preacher. He had proved so capable of assimilating the truths of Holy Writ that even in his father's house he was frequently invited to make comments on this or that passage in the Bible, and similarly while he was living with the good clergyman Leberecht Krebel. And whenever he was able to visit his home for a short time, in the place which contained his parents' unpretentious cottage, he was allowed to preach there, for the local minister was a friend of his. And he would preach in such a way, prompted as it were by a sacred enthusiasm, that what he was able to impart was the very word of God, in a version that was at once individual and yet altogether in conformity with the Bible itself.

So he went on trying, at Leipzig, to train himself for his calling as a country pastor. But it proved difficult. It was hard for him to secure any teaching position which he thought himself able to fill. He occupied himself with correcting work, with tutoring, but this life became very hard for him. And above all he found himself in the course of it unable to make any progress with his own intellectual aims. He was already twenty-six, and these were hard times for him. One day he had no more resources left and no prospect of securing anything during the next few days; no prospect either that, if things were to go on in the same way, he could ever secure entry to even the most modest profession which he had set himself as an aim. His people at home could support him only to a very meagre extent; for, as I have said, it was a family abundantly blessed with children.

And so one day he stood at the edge of an abyss and in his soul, like a desperate temptation, the question arose: “Have I no prospects for this life of mine?” Though it may not have been quite present to his consciousness, yet in the background of his mind was the idea of a voluntary death. Then, just at the opportune moment, appeared the writer Weisse, who had become one of his friends. Weisse offered him a post as tutor at Zurich and took steps to ensure that he should really be able to take up this post within three months. And so from the autumn of 1788 onwards we find our Fichte at Zurich. Let us try once more to picture him with the mind's eye, as he stood in the pulpit in the Zurich Minster, now completely possessed with his own conception of the Gospel of St. John, already quite intent on the endeavour to reproduce the teachings of the Bible in a form of his own. He did this in such a way that those who heard his inspiring words resound through the Zurich Cathedral must have thought that a man had arisen who was capable of rendering the scriptures with quite a new eloquence, in a new way, with a fresh inspiration. Many, doubtless, who heard him then in the Cathedral at Zurich, must have carried away this impression.

And now we can follow him again into a new situation. He became a tutor in the Ott household, in the inn “Zum Schwert” at Zurich. There he encountered a peculiar narrow-minded outlook to which he could only partially adapt himself. He succeeded in getting on good terms with his pupil, but less so with the parents. And we can trace what Fichte really was in the following incident. One day the pupil's mother received a singular letter from her son's tutor, who was living in the house. What were the contents of this letter? Roughly as follows. Education was a task, the writer said, to which he, Fichte, would willingly lend himself. What he knew of his pupil gave him an assured prospect of being able to do great things with him. But the process of his education would have to be developed in one particular point: it was essential above all to educate his mother! For a mother who behaved in such a way towards a pupil was the greatest obstacle to any education under her roof! I need not dwell upon the peculiar feelings with which Frau Ott read this epistle. However, the incident was passed over, and up to the spring of 1790, that is for about eighteen months, Fichte was able to pursue a fruitful activity in the Ott household at Zurich.

But Fichte was not by any means the man to circumscribe within the limits of his profession the thoughts which filled his soul. It was not in his nature to avert his attention from the spiritual processes taking place around him. Through his inner zeal and the close interest he felt for all the spiritual changes going on around him, he became closely absorbed also in what was going on in his own environment. There in Switzerland his thoughts turned to the ideas which were then filling the minds of all men, to the mental reactions provoked by the outbreak of the French Revolution. We can, so to speak, overhear him discussing at Olten, whenever he found any specially gifted people to talk to, the questions which were then dominating France and the world with their imperious significance; making up his mind that those were the ideas which deserved primary attention, and associating all the preoccupations derived from his deep religious feeling and acute intellect with the new ideas of human happiness, human rights and the high ideals of humanity.

Fichte was no egoist, capable only of developing his soul rigidly from within. This soul of his grew in communion with the outer world. His soul knew unconsciously the duty of existing for something beyond one's self, of standing as a personification of the world's purpose in the age in which one lives. That was one of Fichte's deepest convictions. And thus, just at the period when his spirit was most sensitively aware of the processes at work in his environment, he developed in close communion with the Swiss element. And we always find that this German-Swiss element left a permanent mark on the whole personality of Fichte in his later life and work.

It is necessary to understand the deep-seated difference between Swiss life, and life a little further north, in Germany, in order to grasp the impression which the Swiss environment, the Swiss character and endeavour made upon Fichte. For example, this Swiss element is distinguished from other forms of German life especially by the way in which it infuses a kind of self-conscious element into all the intellectual life, so that all cultural activity acquires a political expression; everything is so conceived that the current conceptions serve to put the individual into touch with immediate action, with the world. For this German-Swiss character art, science, literature are only separate tributaries of the whole river of life.

It was this element which appealed so happily to Fichte's own spiritual character. He too was a man who could not conceive any human activity or any human endeavour in isolation. For him too every individual factor had to be linked with the entirety of man's action, meditation and feeling and with man's whole philosophy. Moreover, in Fichte his capacity for achievement was intimately linked with his ever unfolding personality. No one who reads Fichte to-day, who approaches those writings of his which often seem so arid in their substance, or those particular writings and treatises which radiate intelligence, can have any notion of what Fichte must have been when he poured into his discourse, upon a cause which he deeply felt and espoused, all his inner fire and intensity. For into his discourse there passed also what he was. He even attempted at that time—it was an abortive attempt—to establish at Zurich a school of public speaking. For he believed that through the manner in which spiritual things are set before men a different and more effective influence could be exerted than merely through the ideas themselves, however excellent these may be.

At Zurich, in the household of a Swiss named Rahn, then well-to-do, a brother-in-law of Klopstock, Fichte found stimulating society which made a strong impression upon him. He formed a deep attachment to the daughter, Johanna Rahn. With this niece of Klopstock he formed a close intimacy, at first a friendship, which developed gradually into love. By now his position as tutor at Zurich was no longer really tenable, and he needed to look further afield. He did not want at that moment, before he had made his way in the world—as he frequently remarked at the time—to enter the Rahn household as a member of it, and perhaps live on its resources. He wanted to make his way further in the world—with him we cannot say his “fortune”—but his way.

He returned again to Germany, to Leipzig. He thought of remaining there for a while, hoping to find what his real vocation might be, to find that form of spiritual expression which he sought as his object in life. He intended then to return after a while, to work out in freedom what he had brought into harmony within himself. But then an unexpected event happened which upset all his plans. Disaster overtook Rahn, for he lost his whole fortune. Fichte was now not only tormented by the knowledge that the people dearest to him had sunk into poverty, but he himself was compelled to resume his wanderings through the world, abandoning the cherished plans which he had nursed in his innermost heart.

The first thing that offered was a post as tutor at Warsaw. However, as soon as he arrived and presented himself there, the aristocratic lady whose house he was to enter formed the impression that Fichte's manners, which then and subsequently struck many people as downright and vigorous, were really uncouth and that he had no talent for adapting himself to social life. When this was pointed out to him, he could not endure it and took his departure.

His way now led him to that place where he might expect to find a man whom he revered more than anybody, not only among his contemporaries but in his whole generation, towards whom he had been drawn when for a while he was immersed in the study of Spinoza and his philosophy; a man towards whom he had been drawn while studying his writings, with which he was now wholly in accord. As at an earlier date his thoughts were filled with the Bible and other works, so now the writings of this man, Immanuel Kant, confronted him as a new creation. So he made his way to Königsberg and sat at the feet of the great teacher. And he found himself altogether in harmony with the image reflected in his soul of this teaching, which he held to be the greatest ever bestowed upon mankind. And in Fichte's soul, all the ideas derived from his own devout nature, from his meditation on the divine guidance of the world and on the way in which the mysteries of this guidance have been revealed throughout eternity to mankind—all this was blended with what he learned and heard from Kant. And he projected all that arose in his soul into a work which he entitled Kritik aller Offenbarung (A Critique of all Revelation). This was in 1792, when Fichte was thirty years of age. Then a remarkable thing happened. Kant immediately recommended a publisher for the book, which aroused his enthusiasm. It went out into the world without the author's name, and nobody supposed it to be anything but a work by Immanuel Kant himself. Thus favourable criticisms were showered upon it from every quarter. Meanwhile Fichte, again through Kant's intervention, had secured in the excellent Krockov household near Danzig a tutoring post which this time was very congenial to him, and in which he could freely cultivate his spiritual aspirations; and it was intolerable to him so to appear before the world that the public, when discussing his book, in fact associated it with another author. He could not endure that; and when the first edition, which was soon exhausted, was followed by a second, he published his name. And now he had a singular experience. A great many critics at least found it impossible to say the exact contrary of what they had said before; but the judgment at first passed upon the book was now toned down. This was for Fichte yet another lesson in his study of human psychology.

After he had spent some time in the Krockov household he felt able, in view of his present status in the world, not indeed in a mundane sense, but intellectually—for he had proved that he was capable of something—he felt able to prepare for his return to the Rahn household. Only thus had he resolved to win Klopstock's niece, and now he could do so. So in 1793 he went back again to Zurich, and Klopstock's niece became his wife.

He set to work now, with the utmost intensity, not only to develop in himself the ideas he had assimilated from Kant, but also to immerse himself more deeply in all that had occupied his mind during his first stay at Zurich, in all those ideas about the aims and ideals of humanity which were now permeating the world. And he mingled the substance of his own thoughts about human ideals and endeavours with the ideas now passing through the world. He was so independent a nature that he could not refrain from communicating to the world his inevitable conclusions on the ideas about human progress then held by the most radical thinkers. The book now published by him in 1793 was entitled: Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (Suggestions for the Enlightenment of Public Opinion on the French Revolution).

Simultaneously with the elaboration of this book there went on in his mind a perpetual revision of those views of the world which he had formed for himself from contact with the outlook of Kant. There must be, he said to himself, a philosophy of life which, in the light of a supreme impulse, could illuminate the whole domain of knowledge for the human mind. And this philosophy, aspiring so strongly towards the highest that no higher ideal of knowledge could ever be found, was the ideal which now hovered before Fichte's eyes.

By a singular concatenation of circumstances, while he was still engaged in working out his ideas within himself, he received a message from Jena. The impression made there by Fichte's achievement was such that on the strength of it he was invited, when Karl Leonhard Reinhold resigned his post at Jena University, to succeed him there as Professor of Philosophy. Those who were then directing the intellectual life in that University welcomed with the utmost satisfaction the idea of introducing into this famous College (then the highest in prestige of any in Germany) the remarkable personality who, while in one aspect he struck them as a hot-head, in another made the impression of a man striving, especially in his quest for a philosophy of life, towards the highest levels of thought.

And now let us just attempt to view him in imagination as he discharges the duties of his new appointment. He desired to transmit to those who now from 1794 onwards were his pupils, the outlook on the world which had formed itself within him. But Fichte was not a teacher like any other. Let us first consider the results of his spiritual evolution. It would take too long to explain this in his own words, but it can be characterized out of his own spirit as follows. He aspired towards a supreme ideal of such a kind that the human spirit might apprehend the stream and mystery of the world at a point where the spirit is directly one with this stream and mystery. So that man gazing into this mystery of the universe might be able to link his own existence with it, that is to say, to know it. This result could not be attained in any exterior sensuous existence. It could not be reached by any eye, any ear, any other sense, nor by everyday human understanding either. For all that can be apprehended outwardly by the senses must first be co-ordinated by human intelligence; it has its existence in the outer world. It can only be considered as real when its existence is, so to speak, confirmed by the observations of the senses. But that is no real existence; or at least no opinion can be formed at first about the real existence of what is only apprehended by the senses. The source of all knowing must rise in the depth of the Ego itself. That cannot be a something complete in its existence, for a completed existence in the inner self would be equal to what appears as completed existence within the outer senses. It must be a creating reality. This is the Ego itself, that Ego which recreates itself every moment, that Ego which is grounded not on a completed being, but on an inward activity. This Ego cannot be deprived of its being, since that being consists in its creation; in its self-creation. And into this self-creation flows everything that has real being. Away then with this Self out of the world of the senses, and into those spheres where the spirit moves and has its being, where the spirit works as creator; we must lay hold of this spiritual life and act from the point where the Ego unites with the spiritual processes of the world. We must plunge into that current which is not external complete being, but which from the source of the divine world- existence creates the Ego, first as Ego and then as human ideals, as the great conceptions of Duty.

Such was the form which the Kantian philosophy had assumed in Fichte's soul. And thus he did not want to present his hearers with a ready-made doctrine; with that this man was not concerned. With Fichte it was not a lecture like another lecture, a doctrine like another doctrine. No; when this man took his place at the lecturer's desk, then what he had to say there, or rather to do there, was the fruit of a long meditation of many hours during which in thought he saw inwardly the divine being, the divine spiritual ebb and flow streaming through the world, and permeating in its course the Ego which ever recreates itself, by a sublime process above and beyond all sensuous existence. After having brooded long in self-imposed debate as to what the world's spirit had to impart to the soul about world mysteries, then, and only then, did he come before his audience. But then he was not concerned to convey his message, but to create an atmosphere of communion between himself and his hearers. His endeavour was that what had come to life in his soul concerning the world mysteries should come to life likewise spontaneously in the souls of his listeners. His purpose was to awaken spiritual activity and spiritual being. From the souls of his hearers, as they hung upon his words, he sought to call forth a self-renewing spiritual activity. He did not merely communicate ideas. The following is an instance of what he sought to give to his hearers; one day he was attempting to illustrate this self-renewing faculty of the Ego, how all mental activity can arise in the Ego and how man can only reach a real grasp of world mysteries by laying hold of this self-renewing faculty within himself; and when he was attempting to illustrate this, entering the spiritual world with his hearers, and, as it were, taking each one by the hand to guide him into the spiritual world, he said: “Now may I ask you just to fix your attention for a moment upon the wall. Well, you have now, I hope, formed a mental picture of the wall. The wall is now present in your minds as an image. And now think of a person thinking of the wall. Detach your minds altogether from any thought of the wall itself. Fix your attention entirely on the person thinking of the wall.”

This direct manner, this direct relation which Fichte sought to establish with his hearers made many of them uneasy, but at the same time impressed them profoundly. The spirit at work in Fichte had to come to grips with the spirit of his hearers.

Thus for several years the man worked on, never repeating the same lecture, but continually creating anew. For he did not care about imparting in sentences this or that information, but strove ever and again to awaken a new response in his hearers. This is evident from his oft-repeated assertion: “It matters nothing that what I have to say to men should be repeated by this person or that, but rather the essential is that I succeed in kindling a flame in men's souls, a flame which shall induce every one to think for himself. Let no one repeat my words after me, but let each one be stimulated by me to deliver his own message.” Fichte's aim was to produce, not pupils, but original thinkers. If we follow out the history of Fichte's influence, we can understand how it was that this man, the most German of the German philosophers, did not train any real students of philosophy. He founded no school of philosophy. But the direct relationship which he established with his pupils again and again produced men of mark.

Now Fichte was aware—inevitably, since he sought to lead the minds of men up to a direct contact with creative spiritual reality—he was aware that he must speak in quite a special way. Fichte's whole style was indeed hard to follow. None of those who attended any of his courses at Jena had ever come into contact with such teaching before. Schiller himself was astonished at it, and Fichte once discussed with Schiller how his, Fichte's, teaching activity and his manner of presentation appeared to himself. For example, Fichte remarked; “Of course, if people just read what I have said, then it is impossible, as people read to-day, that they should comprehend what I am trying to say.” Then, taking up one of his books, he attempted to illustrate how, in his judgment, his work should be read aloud. Then he said to Schiller: “You see, people nowadays do not know how to recite inwardly. But people can only grasp the inner meaning of my lectures by really reciting them mentally, otherwise it is lost.” Certainly Fichte's own rendering of his lectures was no mere reading, it was direct speech itself. Therefore even to-day we ought in studying Fichte to recite his words mentally against the background, as it were, of his whole spiritual life, which merits our attention as representing the spiritual life of the whole German people. Even to-day we ought still to train ourselves in reciting and listening inwardly to those passages of Fichte which otherwise seem so dry and so bare.

We have now reviewed in our minds Fichte's spiritual development and reached one of the peaks of his spiritual life. It is right therefore to glance back for a moment over this remarkable evolution. We first visualised Fichte as he stood before Baron von Miltitz in his blue peasant smock, a sturdy red-cheeked peasant boy who had no other education than that open to his class, but who, even as a nine-year-old child, had assimilated that education till it had become the most fundamental possession of his soul. In him we have an example of a soul grown to maturity wholly out of the midst of the German people, without at first receiving any culture other than that which belongs to the common every-day life of the German people. We have followed this spirit through difficult phases; this spirit—whose ideal it really is to remain within the people, but yet is bound to yield to the deepest motives of his being—can be followed in his course as he rises to the loftiest heights of inner spiritual growth and work, until at last he becomes, as we have been able to illustrate, a moulder of men. We are following the road traversed by a German spirit growing directly out of the people and climbing by its own strength alone to the topmost peaks of spiritual being.

Thus up to the spring of 1799 Fichte discharged the duties of his teaching post at Jena. Even before that time all sorts of dissensions had arisen, for it must be admitted that Fichte was not by any means the kind of man who is easy in intercourse, the kind of man willing for the sake of friendly relations to use roundabout methods and facile gestures in his dealings with other people. But here we come to an important point, which has significance for the whole of the German life of that epoch.

One person in particular felt deep satisfaction—a feeling which Goethe also shared—at having been able to call Fichte to his University at Jena: this person was the Duke, Karl August. And we may well, I think, record here the singular tolerance shown by Karl August in calling to his University the man who had most freely applied the Kantian philosophy in criticism of revealed religion; and moreover in inviting to his University the man who had most boldly and outspokenly taken a stand for the freest ideals of human development. It would be, I feel, a failure to do justice to Karl August, that noble spirit, if we passed on without pointing out what unusual broad-mindedness this German prince must then have needed, in calling Fichte into his service. This invitation was described by Goethe as a piece of audacity; and I should like to remind you of the world of prejudices which Karl August and Goethe, who in the nature of things were bound to be the chief authors of this invitation, had to face in taking it on themselves to bring Fichte to Jena. As I say, it would be almost an injustice not to point out Karl August's remarkable freedom from all prejudice. And to illustrate this I should like to read out a passage from Fichte's book entitled: Suggestions for the Enlightenment of Public Opinion on the French Revolution:

“They (Fichte is referring to the European princes, including those of Germany) are for the most part brought up in indolence and ignorance, or if they know anything it is a kind of knowledge specially concocted for them; it is a notorious fact that once they are on the throne they neglect to go on with their education, that they read no new works except perhaps shallow sophistries and that they are invariably behind their times by at least as many years as they have reigned.”

That passage is from the last book which Fichte had then written—yet the Duke Karl August invited this man to his University!

Anyone who gives a little attention to the whole situation of Fichte and those who had sent for him will come to this conclusion: that those people who held the view of the great and magnanimous Karl August and Goethe had undertaken a campaign against the people of their immediate circle, who were altogether and absolutely in disagreement with the idea of sending for Fichte. And this was a campaign which was not easy to undertake; for as already stated, it was not possible with Fichte to make use of manoeuvres such as are so generally practised in the world. Fichte was a man who by his awkwardness, by his bluntness often offended the very people whom it was most desirable to avoid offending. He was not a man to make smooth gestures: he was a man who, if something did not please him, would strike out with his fist against the world. And the manner in which Fichte was then using his whole energy to impart his message to the world was admittedly such as to cause Goethe and Karl August some distress; it was not easy for them, it was very hard for them to put up with it, and they were distressed.

And so little by little the storm-clouds gathered. First of all, Fichte wanted to give a course of ethical lectures, those which are printed under the title “Lectures on the Morality of the Scholar.” The only suitable hour that he could find was on Sunday. But this was a shocking suggestion to all who held that it would be a profanation of the holy day to address the Jena students on a Sunday on the subject of morality as Fichte conceived it. And protests of every sort and kind poured in upon the Weimar Government, upon Goethe and Karl August. The whole Senate of Jena University passed a unanimous resolution to the effect that a deplorable sensation and infinite mischief would result if Fichte were to deliver lectures on morals in the University on Sundays—he had selected the hour of the afternoon church service. In this affair Karl August was forced for the time being to leave Fichte's adversaries in possession of the field. But once again it would not be right to pass on without drawing attention to the manner in which he did it. The following is an extract from the letter sent by Karl August to the University of Jena:—

“In accordance with your request we have resolved that the above-mentioned Professor Fichte shall be permitted to continue his moral lectures on Sunday only after the close of the afternoon church service.” However, Karl August was brought to this decision only on account of “a circumstance so unusual as the arrangement of lectures of this kind during the hours appointed for Divine Service.” In the official decree sent by the Duke to the University Senate he wrote in reference to these lectures:—“We have been glad to assure ourselves that if his (Fichte's) moral lectures resemble the accompanying admirable essay from his pen, they may well prove to be of the highest value.”¹

But the attack was pressed home. The enemy never afterwards let go their hold. And so, in 1799, came about that unhappy controversy over the charge of atheism, as a result of which Fichte had to relinquish his position as lecturer at Jena. A younger man named Forberg had contributed to the periodical Fichte was then editing, an article which incurred from a certain quarter a charge of atheism. Fichte, for his part, thought that what this young man had written was rather imprudent, and wished to add marginal comments. Forberg disagreed with this suggestion; so that Fichte in that lofty manner of his which he used not alone in great matters but also in the smallest ones, would not hear of rejecting the article because he disagreed with it, and would not add marginal notes against the author's will; however, he wrote in the form of a preface some lines about the basis of the belief in the divine governance of the world. These lines of his were wholly imbued, through and through, with the spirit of genuine and deeply-felt reverence and piety, exalted to that spiritual level of which Fichte said that it was the only true reality, that we can only grasp reality when the Ego feels itself moving in the sphere of the spirit, immersed in the spiritual stream of the world. We must not, therefore, he added, apprehend the existence of God by any external revelation or external knowledge whatever. We must apprehend the existence of God in the living process of creation. We must sense the creative process of the world by standing in the stream of it, ourselves ceaselessly creating and so attaining our own immortality.

But in consequence of this article the charge of atheism was now turned against Fichte himself. It is impossible to relate here the full details of this controversy. It is indeed grievous to observe how Goethe and Karl August, against their will, had to take sides against Fichte; who, however, would never be restrained, when he felt impelled to communicate his appointed message to the world, from retorting to an attack by a direct blow. So matters went on till Fichte heard that steps were to be taken against him, that he was to be reprimanded. Goethe and Karl August would have preferred to see the matter settled by a reprimand. But Fichte said to himself that to accept a reprimand for ideas drawn from the deepest sources of the human spirit, would mean an offence against honour, not his personal honour, but that of the spiritual life itself. And so he then wrote a private letter, which however was viewed as an official communication and filed among the official documents, to the Minister Voigt at Weimar, to the effect that he would never accept any reprimand, no, rather he would take his departure! And whenever Fichte wrote about matters of this kind he wrote as he spoke. It used to be said of him that he had a sharp tongue when necessary; and in correspondence too he could be cutting towards anybody, whoever it might be. Thus the authorities had no alternative, unless everything were to be turned upside down at Jena, but to accept the resignation which Fichte had not really meant to tender, for his private letter had been treated as an official communication. At any rate that was how it came about that Fichte had to give up his post as teacher at Jena, which had been blessed with such fruitful influence.

Shortly afterwards we see him appear at Berlin. He has now approached from a fresh angle the position of the Ego in the ever-moving stream of the world-spirit. The book which he then wrote (and which can now be bought cheaply in Reklam's Universal Library) was called Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Destiny of Man). Into the composition of this work he threw his whole being and energy. In it he strove to show how those who only view the world of the senses from outside, co-ordinating it with the understanding, can only point the way towards a meaningless view of the world. The gist of Part I is to show how in this fashion one arrives only at a dream-reflection of life. The object of Part II is to show how the mind thus comes to regard the world as a chain of exterior necessities. And in Part III we come to the enquiry as to how the soul fares when it seeks not merely an image but a direct participation in that great creative process of all existence. After putting the finishing touches to the work, Fichte wrote to his wife, whom he had then left behind at Jena: “I have never before looked so deeply into religion as during the composition of the last part of this work, The Destiny of Man.”

Apart from a short interval in 1805, which he spent at the University of Erlangen, Fichte passed the remainder of his life in this world at Berlin. At first he gave private lectures at the various houses in which he lived, lectures of an impressive character; subsequently he was invited to assist in the newly-founded University, to which we must now turn our attention.

As I said, apart from the short interlude in 1805 at Erlangen, his work now lay in Berlin. He was still drawing from ever fresh sources in his soul the ideas which he had to impart to the public. So at Erlangen, continually recasting his ideas in a fresh mould, he presented his theory of knowledge, his outlook on the world. Strangely enough, whereas at Jena he had from the beginning of his course a fair audience which steadily increased, and similarly in Berlin, the number of his hearers in Erlangen dwindled by one half in the course of the term. Everyone knows how professors generally take such a falling-off; anyone who has any experience knows that they simply have to accept it. But Fichte did not react to it in that way. One day when his audience at Erlangen had diminished to one half, he referred to it, taking for granted that his words would reach also those who had stayed away, in one of those thundering tirades in which he demonstrated to people that, if they would not hear what he had to say, then they were good only for external historical knowledge, not for intellectual knowledge. And after going on to discuss what a man should become in life if in his spiritual strivings he rejected this intellectual kind of knowledge, he continued as follows:—“Now as to the time of my lectures. I have heard how much dissatisfaction is felt at the choice of time. I will not consider this strictly according to principles which are really self-evident and which would have to be applied here. I will take it that the persons concerned are only misinformed, and will try to put them right. No doubt they may say that there is a tradition in this matter dating from long ago. Supposing that this were the fact, I should have to reply that grave abuses must have existed in the university from the earliest times. ... I myself have held at Jena from six to seven o'clock in summer and winter a course such as this, attended by hundreds, whose numbers used to increase considerably towards the close. I must say openly that when I arrived here I selected this hour because no other was available. Now that I have realised the point of view adopted towards it, I shall select it deliberately for the coming summer.

“At the back of all these difficulties we find a deep-seated incapacity in people to occupy themselves and a great deal of shallowness and ennui, so that after a meal has been taken, by God's grace, at midday, people find it unendurable to stay any longer in the town. And even if you were to give me proofs—which I hope it would be impossible to supply—that such has been the custom at Erlangen since its foundation, in the whole of Franconia, indeed throughout South Germany, then I would not hesitate to answer that in that case shallowness and futility must have made their headquarters at Erlangen and the whole of South Germany.” Whatever one may think of such outbursts as this, it is truly characteristic of Fichte as regards his intense concentration on the spiritual message which he was trying to deliver to mankind. Whenever he spoke he did not seek merely to say something but to do something for men's souls, to lay hold on them; thus every soul who stayed away was a real loss, not for himself but for the purpose which he was trying to realise for mankind. For Fichte the word was also an act. Since he himself dwelt within the spiritual world, it was possible for him through spiritual communion to gather others around him within that world, because he was himself within it and was no mere theoretical champion of the principles he professed when he said: “Reality is not in the outer world of the senses but in the spirit; and whoever knows the spirit can perceive behind all sensuous existence the spiritual reality.”

And to him this was no mere theory, it was also a practical reality, as was proved at a later date at Berlin by the following incident. One day when his audience was assembled in the lecture hall, which was near the Spree Canal, a terrible message was brought. Some children, with Fichte's son among them, had been playing down there; a boy had fallen into the water and it was thought to be Fichte's son. Fichte and a friend set out, and in the presence of all his students, they pulled the boy out of the water. Although the boy bore a close resemblance to Fichte's son, it was not in fact he. Yet for a moment Fichte had been convinced that it was his son. He did what he could for the child, who however was dead when taken from the water. Anybody who knows the intimate family affection in Fichte's household between him, his wife Johanna and their only son, will realise something of what Fichte went through at that moment; the terrible shock that he underwent and then the transition from this shock to the deepest joy when he was able to clasp his son in his arms. When he had done this and changed his clothes, he proceeded to deliver the remainder of his two-hour lecture just as he always did, that is, wholly intent on his subject.

This was not a unique instance. Often and often did Fichte give similar proofs of his integral loyalty to the world of the spirit. For example, it was at this period at Berlin that he delivered public lectures which were intended as a criticism and a severe indictment of his age. He passed in review one by one the various epochs of history. But it was, he said, the age in which he lived, which had brought selfishness to the extreme limit. And in that age of selfishness he found himself confronting the personality of Napoleon, in whom, in his view, this selfishness was incarnate. During all this period when the Napoleonic chaos was enveloping north and central Germany, Fichte never in his heart viewed himself otherwise than as Napoleon's spiritual antagonist. And so we get his character study of Napoleon, of which it may be said that an image of the Emperor, profoundly German in its approach and in its vigour and based on the loftiest philosophical standpoint, had shaped itself in the mind of this German thinker who had grown out of that peasant boy in a blue smock of whom earlier we had a glimpse. We have come now to a state of human existence at the present time, said Fichte, in which people have lost their consciousness of the spiritual influence which pulsates through the world and also through human existence and evolution, and which, in the form of the moral impulses, carries mankind forward from epoch to epoch; of the truth that in the march of history man is only of value in so far as he is sustained by what is permanent from age to age in the moral impulses and the moral order of the world. Of all this people no longer know anything. We have arrived at an epoch in which we see one generation succeed another like links in a chain. Even the best minds, said Fichte, have forgotten the moral principles which must pervade these links. And in such a world we encounter the personality of Napoleon, an inexhaustible source of energy indeed, but a man who, though he may have had in his soul occasional glimpses of freedom, has never formed any true notion of the real all-embracing ideal of freedom as it works from age to age in men's moral aspirations and in the moral framework of the world. And from this fundamental deficiency that a personality which is only a shell, without any true spiritual core, can yet wield such immense force, from this phenomenon Fichte traced the personality, the whole “catastrophe” as he expressed it—Napoleon.

In mentioning this and in placing side by side these two personalities—Fichte, the most forceful exponent of the German outlook with his view of Napoleon, and on the other side Napoleon himself—reference should be made to an observation attributed to Napoleon at St. Helena, after his downfall; for it is only in this light that the whole situation can be clearly grasped. At St. Helena, after his downfall, Napoleon expressed himself as follows: “Everything would have gone all right. I should not have fallen before all the Powers which ranged themselves against me. With one factor only did I fail to reckon, and it is this that really brought about my downfall, namely—the German philosophers!” Let narrow minds say what they will about the value of philosophy; this piece of self-revelation from Napoleon's own lips has more weight, I think, than all the objections that might be raised against Fichte's idealism, which indeed had a thoroughly practical aspect.

Finally, it is possible to adduce another proof, a proper historical proof, that it is not so difficult for an idealist such as Fichte to be practical when occasion demanded. It had become necessary for him to enter as a partner into his father's business, which had now been taken over by his brothers. We see him accordingly as a partner in the family ribbon-weaving business. His parents were still alive; and we may note that he proved to be a good and prudent business man, capable of lending valuable assistance to his brothers, who had remained simply men of business. A man such as Fichte has many critics who say: “Oh these idealists, they dwell in a dream-world, they understand nothing of practical life!” But it may well be imagined that Fichte from the depth of his being, and especially in his lectures on Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (The Vocation of the Scholar), had something to say which cannot be too often repeated in the face of those who point to the unpractical nature of idealism, of the spiritual world altogether. In the introduction to this course of lectures Fichte made the following observations:—

“That ideals cannot be demonstrated in the actual world is a fact which we know perhaps as well as our critics, perhaps better. We merely assert that reality must be judged with reference to these ideals and must be modified by those who feel in themselves the strength to do so. Supposing however that our critics cannot even concede so much; well, seeing that they are what they are, this inability will mean small loss to them, and none to the world. It will simply mean that they do not count in the process towards the ennoblement of mankind, which anyway will go forward without any doubt; as to these others, may kindly nature have them in her keeping, granting them in God's good time rain, sunshine, wholesome nourishment and proper circulation of the blood, and, in addition to all these—right thoughts!”

The significance of ideals, the significance also of practical life, was something already quite clear to the mind of this German. But then Fichte's was a nature which stood by itself. He may be called one-sided; but this one-sidedness must occur sometimes in life, just as there are certain forces which must occasionally overshoot the mark in order to achieve the best results.

Undoubtedly Fichte's behaviour often had a rough side to it, as when apart from his lectures on the principles of morality, he attempted to take practical steps at Jena against the tyranny of routine, and against drinking and loafing ways among the students. He had by now a certain following in student circles. Further, as a result of his influence, petitions had been presented to the authorities asking for the abolition of this or that society which was particularly given to disorder. As we have seen, Fichte was a rugged nature, not skilful in making smooth gestures, but quite likely, metaphorically of course, to strike out fiercely with his fist now and then; and indeed matters came to such a pass that the majority of the Jena students were altogether opposed to Fichte and his practical moral influence. So they banded themselves together and smashed his windows. To Goethe, though he respected Fichte and was respected by him, the incident suggested a humorous comment. “Why yes,” said Goethe, “that is the philosopher who derives everything from the Ego! It is truly an inconvenient way of being assured of the existence of the non-ego, to have one's windows smashed; that was not what one assumed as the contrary of the Ego.”

All this, however, does not mean that there was any lack of harmony between Fichte's and Goethe's philosophical outlook. And Fichte was profoundly right in the feeling he expressed in a letter to Goethe on 21st June, 1794, soon after the beginning of his lectures at Jena, when sending to Goethe the proofs of his work on the Theory of Knowledge:

“I regard you, and have always done so, as representing the purest spirituality of feeling at the point so far reached by human progress. Philosophy rightly turns towards you, for your feeling is its best criterion.”

And Goethe wrote to Fichte, after receiving the pages of the Theory of Knowledge: “There is nothing in your work which is not altogether in line with my own customary way of thinking.” Again, in another letter to Fichte, referring also to the Theory of Knowledge: “These ideas are indeed now in harmony with nature; but men's minds must also come into harmony with them and I believe that you will be able to present them in the right way.” And if anyone to-day should assert that he finds this Theory of Knowledge, as then published by Fichte, dry and unlike Goethe, or that Goethe would have had no taste for such things, one must reply to this criticism as I replied when publishing the letters of Fichte to Goethe, in the Weimar Schiller-and-Goethe Archives, in the Goethe Year-Book of 1894.² In the Goethe-Schiller Archives there are extracts from Fichte's Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's own hand, accompanied sentence by sentence by the ideas inspired in him reading Fichte; and after all it is intelligible that Goethe, one of the most German among Germans, out of the pure spirituality of feeling with which he sought for a fresh outlook on the world, should inevitably hold out his hand to the man who as the most German of all Germans was in quest of a philosophical outlook based on the force of pure reason alone. Goethe once also, by the way, expressed very aptly his relationship towards the philosophy of Kant. What he said was—not word for word, but in substance—as follows: Kant had argued that, by turning his attention outward upon the world, man can only arrive at sense-knowledge. But his sense-knowledge is nothing but appearance, merely something which man himself by his point of view introduces into the world. Knowledge must be deposed from its seat, for it is only by a belief that it is possible to arrive at freedom, at infinity, at a conception of the divine spiritual existence. And this attempt to arrive not at a belief, but at a direct insight into the spiritual world, this attempt to bring the individual creative process into communion with the creativeness of the divine world spirit, this attempt which Kant believes to be impossible, would be, as he terms it, the “venture of reason” and Goethe's comment on this is: “Very well then, an attempt must certainly be made to undertake, undaunted, this venture of reason! And assuming that a man has no doubts of the spiritual world but believes in freedom and immortality in God, why should he not face this venture of reason and with the creative element of the soul transport himself into the heart of the creative process which ebbs and flows through the world?” In Fichte, Goethe found a conception of the same venture, only imagined in another way.

And indeed it had to emerge sooner or later, albeit in a rugged form, this urge towards spirituality, towards the apprehension of the all-creating world-intelligence, towards the state where the creative Ego indwells in the creative world-being and is one with it. And in Fichte's view the impulse in this direction was to be given by his Theory of Knowledge. In this theory the very spirit of the German people produced before the world what it had to utter about life and the world and the aims of mankind; it was as it were a direct gesture from the German people, from out of which we see Fichte's soul mount upwards to the heights. Indeed he himself was aware that his philosophy was always rooted in his living intercourse with the spirit of the German people. This spirit found here, it is true, only such expression as it could, seeing that it had first to emerge through the medium of such a rough-hewn personality as Fichte's. No, truly, his was not a personality easy to deal with. Of this we find again another illustration in the following connection. When a University was to be founded at Berlin, and it fell to Fichte to work out a scheme for it, his plan, worked out to the smallest details, showed what his conception of a University was like. And what was his idea? In this University to be started at Berlin he wanted to build something so fundamentally novel, especially for the beginning of the nineteenth century, that—we may say it without the slightest fear of contradiction—this novelty is as yet unrealised anywhere in the world, and the world is still waiting for it. Needless to say, Fichte's scheme was not put into practice, though indeed he was aiming at nothing else than, as he expressed it, to make the University into a “School of training in the scientific application of intelligence.” What was this University to become? A place of nurture, which might be termed a school of training for the scientific use of the intelligence! Accordingly, it was to turn out, not specialists in this subject or that, such as philosophers or natural scientists or physicians or jurists, but human beings so closely fitted into the structure of the world as to have entire command over the art of using their intelligence. Only imagine what a blessing it would mean if such a University really existed anywhere in the world! if actually we could find realised anywhere a school that would turn out people who have made their inner soul so vital that they could move freely within the essential logic of existence!

But truly this personality was not easy to deal with! It was something massive which existed in order to leave a distinctive mark on history. Fichte became the second Rector of the new University. He filled the position so energetically that he was only able to remain Rector for four months; for neither the students nor the authorities concerned could tolerate any longer what he was attempting to accomplish. All this however, just as with Fichte himself, is typical of German national feeling. For when he delivered his Reden an das deutsche Volk (Addresses to the German People), to which, and indeed to the whole great phenomenon of Fichte, I have already repeatedly referred here, not only during the war but also before it—when he delivered these Addresses he knew that he was trying to communicate to the German people what he had, so to speak, overheard in his meditative conversations with the world-spirit. The only response at which he was aiming was to arouse in their souls whatever can be aroused out of the deepest sources of the German being. This manner which Fichte adopted towards his time and towards those whose souls he hoped to raise to a level sufficient for the tasks of the wider universe, all this was unlikely to make any impression on idlers or superficial people, except perhaps to excite their curiosity. But this latter response was the last which Fichte sought to evoke. Needless to say, when such an intellectual phenomenon as Fichte appears in the world, the very easiest course is to turn it into ridicule; there is nothing easier than to play the critic and to laugh at it. People did this a good deal, and the result was sometimes to place Fichte in difficult situations. For example, immediately after his arrival at the University of Jena, he found himself in quite a serious dilemma through his inability to agree with others who after all were also philosophers. Thus there was at the Jena University a man who was the traditional professor of philosophy, a man by the name of Schmid. This man had expressed such vehement condemnation of Fichte's previous work that it was really outrageous that Fichte was now to become his colleague. Thereupon Fichte in turn published a few remarks in the periodical in which Schmid's criticism had appeared. And so the affair went on, backwards and forwards. Fichte assumed his position at Jena just at the time when he was writing in the Jena periodical to which Schmid had contributed “I declare that for me Herr Schmid will no longer exist in this world.” It was a serious matter to take his place beside his colleague in such an atmosphere. A less serious, but no less characteristic incident, was as follows: at that time there was appearing at Berlin a periodical called Der Freimütige (The Independent) directed by the “celebrated” German writer Kötzebue and another man. It was impossible to make out (indeed I believe that even by the most intimate clairvoyance it would not have been possible) the reason why this Kötzebue attended Fichte's lectures. But these doubts lasted only for a while, and presently the reason became clear when Der Freimütige, then a very prominent magazine at Berlin, began to publish the most vicious attacks upon Fichte's lectures. One day Fichte found it more than he could stand. Thereupon he took a number of this magazine Der Freimütige and dissected it before his audience, ridiculing the opinions expressed in the article with the inimitable humour which he had at his command. The countenance of one member of the audience, whose presence there so far had been unexplained, grew longer and longer. And finally Herr Kötzebue stood up with a very long face and announced that he did not see why he should listen to this any longer; so he went off and did not return. But Fichte was heartily glad to be rid of him.

Through the way in which he adapted himself in practice to life, when he was trying to remould the innermost depths of human existence, Fichte knew how to find the tone precisely adapted to the situation before him. Even though he dwelt altogether in the spiritual world, he was yet no otherworldly idealist, but he was a man standing altogether by himself and was accustomed to pay earnest heed to what he felt to be the innermost promptings of his own nature. Accordingly, at a certain time when Napoleon had conquered Berlin and the French were in occupation, he was unable to remain in the city. He did not choose to remain in a city which was under the French yoke. He went therefore first to Königsberg, subsequently to Copenhagen, returning only when he was ready to come forward as the German who could put before his compatriots the very soul of his nation and its national characteristics, in his Addresses to the German People.

Fichte is rightly regarded as a direct expression of German national sentiment, as an expression of that spirit which eternally and profoundly—in so far as we are able to apprehend the spirit of German nationality—dwells in our midst—and not merely in thought. A philosopher, Robert Zimmerman, by no means in accord with Fichte in his philosophical outlook, has finely characterised this aspect of Fichte in the following passage:

“As long as there beats in Germany a heart capable of feeling the shame of foreign domination, so long will the memory of this brave man persist among us; at a moment of the deepest humiliation, amid the ruins of the monarchy of Frederick the Great, in the midst of the French occupation of Berlin, within sight and hearing of the enemy, surrounded by spies and informers, there was a man who yet undertook the task of regenerating from within by the spirit the energies of the German people which had been broken from without by the sword; and at the very moment when Germany's political existence seemed as if annihilated for evermore, this man undertook to recreate it for future generations by the inspiring thought of universal culture.”

It is true that to-day we may think quite differently as to the substance of many of the ideas expressed in the Addresses to the German People, and indeed in Fichte's other writings; but that, as I should like to repeat once more, is not the main question. The main thing is that we should feel the German spirit which pervades his productions, and the renewal of the German spirit in its relations with the world at large, the revival which breathes forth from the Addresses to the German People. The main thing is that we should feel this as the spirit which is now alive amongst us and which we can perceive only in this one instance of Fichte, who has thus taken his place in German evolution—at first, indeed, in a style which attracted widespread notice. Power and energy combined with profound introspection—such were the qualities with which this soul strove to take his place in world evolution. Accordingly, at the period when the end of his life was approaching, in the autumn of 1813, Fichte again found an opportunity of repeating in the most intimate form before his Berlin audiences his whole Theory of Knowledge, after remoulding and recasting it, as a result of further meditations, till it embodied his deepest thoughts. In these Addresses, once more penetrating the souls of his hearers in the way described earlier, he considered again the impossibility for man to go behind the veil of his existence unless he be willing to embrace this existence in the spirit, beyond all sensuous reality. But to those men who believe themselves able to apprehend the truth of existence through the sense-world and the results of sense-experience alone, to these people Fichte proclaimed in these lectures, which are among his last:

“All their knowledge only leads to misunderstanding and vain words; and for that they praise themselves and think all is well. For example, as regards sight: the image of an object is thrown on the retina. Similarly the image of an object is reflected in the surface of still water. Do we therefore hold that the surface of the water can see? What is that further factor which makes the difference between that image in the water and real seeing, the factor which exists in us but not in the water? But these people have not even an inkling of this, for their minds do not reach so far.”

We must become aware, says Fichte, of a special sense, a new sense within one's self, if we mean to experience that existence in the spirit which alone makes all other existence intelligible. “I am, and I am with all my aims only in a supersensuous world.” These words are Fichte's own, and they run like a leitmotiv through all Fichte's utterances throughout his life, which he again confirmed in another way in that autumn of 1813. And what was it that he spoke of then? Of the necessity for men to become conscious that with the outlook on things and the world current in ordinary life and ordinary knowledge one could never get behind the reality of being. We must, he said, become aware that a supersensuous mind dwells in every one of us, and that man can merge his being in a world beyond the senses, and with this supersensuous mind can become, as a creative Ego, one with the stream of the creative pervading world-spirit. It is, he says, as though a seeing man comes to a world of the blind and tries to explain to the inhabitants colour and form, and the blind people deny that these exist. Even so the materialist denies, because he does not possess the requisite sense, like the man who knows: “I am, and I am with all my aims and deeds in the supersensuous world.”³ And with such emphasis did Fichte then impress upon his hearers this existence in the supersensuous, this life in the spiritual, that he said: “Accordingly the new sense is the sense of the spirit; the sense for which only spirit and nothing else whatever has being, and for which also that other, the every-day existence assumes the form of spirit and is transformed into it, for which therefore being as such has actually disappeared.”

It is a glorious fact that in German spiritual development there should have been someone to bear witness in this way to the life of the spirit, in the presence of those who were eager to hear what the German nation, on its highest level, and speaking from the depth of its being, has to utter. For that is what this German nation communicated through Fichte, and it is true of Fichte more than of any other man, that he represented the German soul speaking, at the level it had then reached, to the German nation itself.

Whether we consider this Fichte externally, or whether we look with the inner eye into his soul, always he appears to us as the most direct expression of German nationality itself, not that which is present only at a particular time within the German people, but what is ever present, what is ever there in our midst, if we only know how to perceive it. Through his personality Fichte presents himself to us in such a way that we desire to have his image as if plastically before our souls; and with the mind's eye clearly to see him and hear him as he creates that atmosphere which rises as he speaks between his soul and that of his hearers, so that we seek to draw quite close to him. The result is that we can feel his presence, as I would put it, like that of a legendary hero, a hero of the spirit, who with the eyes of the spirit can always be seen as a leader of his people, if this people only know itself aright! His own people can visualize him, by bringing his image plastically before their souls as one of their chief spiritual heroes.

And to-day, in this age of deeds, in this age when the German people is wrestling as never before for its very existence, we shall do well to evoke with the vision of the spirit the image of this man, who was able to depict German nature and character from the loftiest point of view, but also in the most vigorous individual style, so that of him more than of any other we may believe that, if we understand him rightly, we still have him actually among us. For everything in him is cast so wholly in one mould, he comes forward so directly towards us that as we look at him, he seems to stand before us in his fashion as he lived; whether each single feature stands out from his complete being, or whether we let ourselves be influenced by the most intimate aspects of his soul, in either case he stands before us as a whole. We cannot comprehend him else, for otherwise we comprehend him only blunderingly and superficially.

Yes, we can catch a glimpse of him at his work of kindling among his compatriots the souls of men to surrender themselves, creative in the stream of creation, to the vital forces of the world; ascending, in company with those others, to spiritual experience and entering as a living influence into the process of development of his people. We need but to open the eyes of the spirit. It is only thus plastically that he can be understood; but if we open the eyes of the spirit to his greatness as a national figure, then we shall find him standing in our midst. He endeavoured, as we have seen, to produce effects different from those of other teachers by using language as a medium of doing rather than saying when he came before his audience; in such a way that it was indifferent to him what he said, because he aimed solely at kindling the hearer's soul to deeds of his own, because something had to take place in the souls of his hearers to make them undergo a change between entering and leaving the hall. All this has the quite unusual result that we find his living image, that of a man of the people moulding his fellows, present to our minds; and that we seem to hear him transforming into the words which are themselves deeds those thoughts overheard, as it were, in the solitary meditations and dialogues with the world-spirit, whereby he prepared himself for every single lecture; so that when he had finished speaking, he dismissed his audience as changed people. They had become other beings, not through his strength but through the awakening and kindling of their own. If we understand him rightly in such a way, then we may believe that we hear him clairaudiently as he strives to reach with the sharp edge of his words the spirit which he has already apprehended in the soul, seeking ever—as was said of him—to send out into the world, through his cultivation of the soul, not merely good but great men.

If we indeed form within us a living image of what he was, we cannot fail to hear his words, those words which seemed to be but using this Fichte to communicate a message from the heart of the world, kindling as it came fire and warmth and light. Fortitude vibrated in his words, and moral energy emanated from them. In others too fortitude was kindled by his words as they poured through the ears into the souls and hearts of those who heard him, and from these utterances streamed out into the world a flow of moral energy, when Fichte's followers, with their souls thus aflame with the fire of his eloquence, went out into the world, as we so often learn from contemporaries, as the most capable men of their time. By opening the ears of the spirit we can hear Fichte, if we understand him at all, directly as if he were a living presence speaking out of the heart of his people. And whoever has any ear for such national greatness will hear it still in our midst. It is rare indeed to find ourselves confronted with any spirit in whom we can trace all that he is into every single act of his life. That sense of duty, of the moral order the world, which he embodied at the climax of his philosophical development, can it not already be noted in the seven-year-old boy who threw the Gehörnte Siegfried into the water, because he had conceived a passion for it which he felt to be in contradiction to his duties? The brooding man preparing by meditation for his lectures, with his spirit intent on the mysteries of the world, can he not be found already in embryo in the boy who stood for hours on the moor with his eyes fixed in one direction, lost in the mysteries of nature till the shepherd passed and led him home? That intense fire which inspired Fichte in his teacher's chair at Jena and later when, as he said, he was speaking to the representatives of his whole nation in the Addresses to the German People—can we not feel it already in the incident when he so impressed Baron von Miltitz by his reproduction of the country clergyman's sermon? And if we possess even a little spiritual divination, can we not feel this spirit very near to us in every single act, even in the slightest act of his life? Can we not feel how fortitude of soul, moral energy stream out from this spirit throughout the whole subsequent German development? Can we not feel the lasting vitality, even if we can no longer agree with the ideas in detail, in the Addresses to the German People? Although the work was twice confiscated by the censorship in 1824, it could not be killed; it is alive more than ever to-day, and is destined to live on in men's souls.

How clearly we can see him, this Fichte, standing in our midst! How clearly we can hear him, if we understand him rightly! If we use our spiritual sense we can feel how he thrilled the hearts of his followers, and beyond that of the whole German people in all its subsequent evolution; and we can feel that what he created, the stream of spiritual energy which he contributed to the ever-moving current of his nation's development, must remain something imperishable! We cannot help ourselves, if we understand him aright, we must feel this spirit of Fichte to be

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner: Sonderdruck aus dem Goethe-Jahrbuch, fünfzehnter Band 1894: Neue Mitteilungen. Sieben Briefe von Fichte an Goethe. Zwei Briefe von Fichte an Schiller. (Reprint from the Goethe Year-Book, Vol. 15: New Communications. Seven Letters from Fichte to Goethe. Two Letters from Fichte to Schiller.)
• 2. See Rudolf Steiner: Reprint from the Goethe Year-Book, Vol. 15, 1894: Further Communications; Seven Letters from Fichte to Goethe; Two Letters from Fichte to Schiller. That Goethe was keenly interested in Fichte's philosophy and by no means adopted a negative attitude towards it, is proved by a passage in a letter to Fichte of 24th June, 1794, in which he says about the first sheets of the Theory of Knowledge: “There is nothing in the pages you have sent me which I do not understand or at least believe that I understand, nothing which cannot be easily assimilated to my accustomed way of thinking.” Further evidence of this can be seen in the fact that Goethe made long extracts from this work, still preserved in the Goethe Archives.
• 3. “Imagine a world of people blind from birth, for whom therefore only those things and their relationships are known which can be apprehended by touch. Go among these, and talk to them of colour and the other relationships which are present only through light to the sense of sight. You will be talking to them of nothing, and it is all the better if they say so; for thus you will soon perceive your error and, unless you have the power of opening their eyes, you will desist from useless explanation.”

I find myself in a somewhat difficult situation as far as today's lecture is concerned, because it will be necessary, due to the nature of the subject, to sketch results arising from spiritual-scientific research from a wide spectrum of different fields and it might seem desirable for some people to hear details which support and confirm these results. It will be possible to present such details in later lectures; this evening, however, it will be my task to sketch the field of knowledge with which we are concerned. In addition, it will be necessary for me to use expressions, ideas and mental representations about the soul and the body which are grounded in the lectures which I have already held here. I shall have to limit myself strictly to the theme, to the characterization of the relationship between the human soul and the human body.

This is a subject about which one can say that two of the spiritual directions of thought and investigation of recent times find themselves in misunderstanding of the greatest conceivable degree. And if one engages oneself with these misunderstandings, one finds that, on one hand, the thinkers and researchers who have sought in recent times to penetrate the field of psychological, of soul phenomena, don't know where to begin when they approach the admirable achievements of natural science—especially in relation with the knowledge of the human physical organism. They are unable to build the bridge in the right way from what they understand as observation of soul phenomena to the manifestations of the body. On the other hand, it must also be said that the representatives of natural scientific research are, as a rule, so estranged from the realm of soul phenomena, from the observation of psychic experience, that they, too, are unable to build the bridge from the truly awe-inspiring results of modern science to the field of soul phenomena. Thus, one finds that soul researchers, psychologists, and natural scientists speak two different languages when they come to speak about the human soul and the human body; one finds that they basically don't understand each other. And just through this fact, those who seek to gain insight into the great riddles in the realm of the soul and their connection with the universal world riddles, are misguided, indeed one can say that they find themselves in utter confusion.

I want to begin by pointing out where, in fact, the mistake in thinking lies. A curious circumstance has developed—I do not criticize, I only wish to present the fact—in regard to the way in which the human being today relates to his concepts, to his ideas. In most cases he does not take into consideration that concepts and ideas, no matter how well they may be grounded, are tools only with which to judge reality as it presents itself to us individually in every single instance. The human being today is convinced that when he has mastered an idea, then this idea, this concept, may be immediately applied in the world. The reigning misunderstandings which I have characterized rest on this peculiarity of contemporary thinking which has taken root in all scientific striving. One overlooks the fact that a concept can be entirely correct, but, despite the fact that it is correct, can find an entirely mistaken application. I will make this clear by means of perhaps grotesque examples which however, could well occur in life, in order, from the outset, to characterize this assumption as a method of thought. You will agree that one may be quite justified in holding the conviction that sleep, healthy sleep, is an excellent cure for illness. That can be an entirely correct concept, a correct idea. If, however, in a particular instance it is incorrectly applied something like the following may result: someone, somewhere, pays a visit and comes upon an old man who is not well, is ill, in one way or another. The visitor brings his wisdom to bear on the situation by saying: I know how very good healthy sleep can be. When he leaves, someone perhaps remarks to him: now, look here, this old man sleeps all the time. Or it can also happen that someone else is of the opinion that in certain illnesses taking a walk, setting oneself in motion, is extraordinarily health giving. He advises someone in this sense. The latter, however, raises the objection: You forget that I am a mail carrier!

With this I only want to point to the principle: one can have thoroughly correct concepts, but these concepts only become useful when they are rightly applied in life.

So also, in the different branches of science one can find the correct concepts which can be strictly proved so that to contradict them would be very difficult. Yet the question must always be asked: Are these concepts also applicable in life? Are they useful tools in order to come to an understanding of life? The illness of thought which I indicated and wanted to make clear through these grotesque examples is enormously widespread in our contemporary thinking. As a result, many a person is so little aware where the limits of his concepts lie, where it is necessary for him to extend and broaden his concepts through the facts—whether these facts are physical or spiritual. And perhaps there is no realm in which such a broadening of concepts, of ideas, is as much needed as in the sphere about which we want to speak today.

About that which has been achieved in this sphere from the standpoint of natural science, which is indeed the most important standpoint today, one can only say, again and again: It deserves admiration, it is magnificent. Also, on the other side, in the psychological, the soul realm, significant work has been achieved. But these achievements do not provide insight into the most important soul questions and they are, above all, unable to extend and broaden their concepts in such a way that they can withstand the onslaught of modern natural science—which, in one way or another, turns against everything of a spiritual nature. I want to link what I have to say to two literary publications of recent times which contain results of research in these fields, publications which clearly indicate how necessary it is to strive for a broadening of concepts through an extension of research. In this connection there is the extraordinarily interesting work of Theodor Ziehen, Physiological Psychology. In this Psychology is shown in an outstanding way—even though to a certain extent the still inconclusive results of research are completed hypothetically—how, according to modern natural scientific observations, one is to think about the brain and nervous mechanism in order to arrive at an idea how the nerve-sense organism functions as we form our mental representations and link our representations with each other. It is just in this sphere that it can be clearly seen that the natural scientific methods of observation, as these are applied to the realm of soul phenomena, lead to narrowly limited concepts which do not penetrate into life. Theodor Ziehen is able to show that for everything which occurs in the process of forming mental representations, of thinking, something like counter images can be found within the nerve mechanism. And if one acquaints oneself with the research in this field in regard to this question, then one finds that it is especially the school of Haeckel which has achieved outstanding results in this field. One needs only to draw attention to the excellent work which the Haeckel pupil, Max Verworn, has undertaken in the Goettingen laboratory showing what occurs in the human brain, in the human nervous system, when we connect one representation with another, or, as one says in psychology, when one mental representation associates with another. It is on this linking of representations that our thinking, fundamentally, rests. How one is to conceive of this linking of representations, how one is to think about the coming into existence of memory representations, how certain mechanisms are present which, one might say, preserve these representations in order that they can later be called up out of memory, all of this is presented in a comprehensive and beautiful fashion by Theodor Ziehen. When one surveys what he has to say about the mental life of thinking and what corresponds with this in the human nervous system, with all this one can indeed go along. But then Ziehen comes to a further curious result.

One knows, of course, that the life of the human soul does not only contain the activity of forming mental representations. However, one may conceive of the connection of the other soul activities, in the sense of forming mental representations, one cannot, to begin with, ignore the fact that one must at least recognize other soul activities, or capacities, in addition to representing. We know that in addition to representing we have feeling, the activity of feeling in its whole wide scope, and, in addition, the activity of will. Theodor Ziehen speaks in such a way as if feeling were actually nothing else than an attribute of representation. He does not speak about feeling as such but rather of a feeling tone of sensations or mental representations. The mental representations are there. They are there, not only as we think them, but endowed with certain attributes, which give them their feeling tone. Thus, one can say: In regard to feeling such a researcher has no other recourse than to say: That which transpires in the nervous system does not extend to feeling. As a result, he ignores feeling as such and considers it merely as an appendage to representation. One can also say: In pursuing the nervous system, he does not grasp within the nerve mechanism that aspect of the soul's life which manifests as the life of feeling. Therefore, he omits the life of feeling as such. However, he also does not uncover anything in the nerve mechanism which requires him to speak of willing. For this reason, Ziehen denies altogether the justification to speak of a willing in relation to the knowledge of soul and of the body in the context of natural science. What occurs when a human being wills something? Let us assume, he walks, he is in motion. In this regard one says—so thinks such an investigator—the movement, the willing, has its origin in his will. But, in general, what is actually there? Nothing else is there than, in the first instance, the representation, the thought of the motion. I imagine, in a sense, what will occur when I move through space; and then nothing else occurs than that I then see, or feel myself, in other words, I perceive my movement. The perception of the movement then follows upon the remembered intention—the remembered representation of the intended movement—will, an act of willing, is nowhere to be found. The will, therefore, is simply eliminated by Ziehen. We see that by pursuing the nerve mechanism one does not arrive at feeling and also not at will; therefore, one must, more or less, and for the will entirely, leave these soul activities on one side. And then one tends to say, charitably: Well, well, one leaves all this to the philosophers, but the natural scientist has no basis on which to speak of these things, even if one does not go as far as Verworn, who says: The philosophers have imagined much into the life of the human soul, which, from the standpoint of natural science, turns out to be unjustified.

A significant researcher of the soul comes to a similar conclusion as Ziehen who proceeds entirely on the basis of natural scientific data. I have frequently mentioned him here and have said that he is more significant than one generally thinks. This is Franz Brentano. However, Franz Brentano proceeds from the soul. He tried, in his Psychology, to investigate the life of the soul. It is characteristic that of this work only the first volume has appeared, with nothing further since the seventies. For one who knows the circumstances knows that just for the reason that Brentano works with limited concepts, in the sense of the previous characterization, he was unable to get beyond the beginning. But one thing is extraordinarily significant with Brentano: that he distinguishes “representation” and “feeling” in the course of his attempt to work through the manifestations of the soul and to group them in certain categories. But in the course of going through the soul, as I might say, from top to bottom, he never comes to will. Willing is, basically, for him a subordinate aspect of feeling. So also, a soul researcher fails to reach the will. Franz Brentano relies upon such things as this: that language itself indicates that when one speaks about soul phenomena one does so in such a way that what we generally designate as will is basically nothing but feeling. For, indeed, it is only feeling which is expressed when I say: I have repugnance for this or that. Nevertheless, when I say “this or that is repugnant to me” I instinctively give expression to the fact that will, within the soul's life, belongs with feeling. [In the original German, Rudolf Steiner uses the word “Widerwillen,” (antipathy), “Ich habe Widerwillen gegen etwas,” so that in the everyday use of language the word “will” appears as an attribute of feeling.] From this one example you may see how impossible it is for this investigator of the soul to free himself from the limitation of a particular conceptual circle. Without doubt, what Franz Brentano presents is conscientious, careful soul research; yet, it is equally without doubt that the experience of the will, the passage within the soul's life to outward action, the birth of the external deed out of the impulse of will, is an experience which cannot be denied. The psychologist, therefore, fails to discover that which, in itself, cannot be denied.

One cannot maintain that all the researchers who take their stand on the ground of natural science and occupy themselves with the relationship of the life of the soul with bodily existence are necessarily materialists. Ziehen, for example, thinks of matter as a pure hypothesis. But he comes to a very curious point of view, namely, that no matter where we look, there is nothing else than the element of soul. There may, perhaps, be something of the nature of matter out there, this matter must in its processes first make an impression upon us; in order that while the material facts make an impression on our senses, that which we experience in our sense perception is already a manifestation of soul. Now, we experience the world only through our senses; everything, therefore, is fundamentally a manifestation of soul. This is the conception of a researcher like Ziehen. In this sense, the entire realm of human experience is actually of the nature of soul, and we would have, in fact, no right to speak in any other way than that everything can only be conceived as having hypothetical reality—except for we ourselves, except for our own experiences of soul. Fundamentally, according to such conceptions, we weave and live within the encompassing realm of soul phenomena and do not get beyond it.

Eduard von Hartmann, at the end of his Handbook Concerning Soul Knowledge characterizes this conception in drastic fashion, and this characterization, although grotesque, is indeed interesting to contemplate. He says: In the sense of this “Pan-psychismus”—one even constructs such words—one can imagine such an example: two persons are sitting at a table and drinking—well, let's say, harking back to better times—are drinking coffee with sugar. One of the persons is more distant from the sugar bowl than the other and in the naive experience of the ordinary human being, the following occurs: one of the two persons asks the other for the sugar, saying: “Please pass me the sugar!” The second person gives the other the sugar. According to Eduard von Hartmann, if the conception of a universal soul element is correct, how must this procedure be conceived? It must be conceived that something occurs in the human brain or nervous system which forms itself in consciousness in such a way that the mental representation awakes: I would like to have the sugar. But what is actually out there, of this the one in question hasn't the faintest notion. There then links itself on to the representation “I would like to have the sugar” another—but that is also only a representation in the soul realm—that something which appears to him like another person—for what is objectively there cannot actually be known, it only creates the impression—and this “apparent person” then passes him the sugar. It is the opinion of physiology, Hartmann says, that what happens objectively is the following: In my nervous system, if I am one of the two persons, a process unfolds which reflects itself as an illusion in consciousness “I ask for the sugar.” Then this same process, that has nothing to do with the nature of consciousness, sets the speech muscles into motion, and once again something objective arises out there, of which one knows nothing about what it actually is, but which, nevertheless, is again reflected in consciousness, whereby one receives the impression that one speaks the words, “I ask for the sugar.” Then these movements, which are called forth as vibration in the air, are transmitted to another person, whom one again assumes hypothetically, and produce vibrations, stimuli, in his or her nervous system. Through the fact that the sensory nerves in this nervous system are stimulated, motoric nerves are set in motion. And while this purely mechanical process plays itself out, there is reflected in the consciousness of the other person something like “I give this person the sugar bowl.” Also reflected is everything else that hangs together with this process, everything which can be perceived, the movement, and so forth.

Here we have the peculiar conception that everything which takes place in reality outside us remains unknown to us, is only hypothetical, but appears to be nerve processes which swing, as vibrations in the air, to the other person, and there spring over from the sensory to the motor nerves, the nerves producing motion, which then carry out the perceptible action. This latter is entirely independent of that which occurs in the consciousness of the two persons, it occurs automatically. But in this way one gradually comes to the point of no longer being able to gain insight into the connection between that which occurs automatically outside us and what we actually experience. For what we experience, if we assume the standpoint of universal ensoulment, has nothing to do with anything which might be objectively present in the world. In a curious way, everything, the entire world, is absorbed into the soul. To which individual thinkers have countered with weighty objections. If, for instance, a businessman is expecting a telegram with a certain content, only a single word needs to fail and instead of joy, unhappiness, sorrow, pain may be let loose in his soul. Can one say then that what one experiences within the soul, happens only in the soul realm, or must one not assume that, according to the immediate consequences, something has actually occurred in the external world which is then experienced also by the soul? And, on the other hand, if one places oneself in the standpoint of this automatism, one might say: Yes, Goethe wrote Faust, that is true, but this only bears witness to the fact that the entire Faust lived in Goethe's soul as mental representation. But this soul has nothing to do with the mechanism which has described this mental representation. One does not escape from the mechanism of the soul's life to that which is outside there in the world.

As a result of all this, the conception has gradually formed, which is now widely disseminated, that what is, in a certain sense, of the nature of soul, is only a kind of parallel process to that which is out there in the world; that it only supplements what is out there and that one cannot know what really takes place in the world. Fundamentally, one can well come to the point of view which I characterized in my book Of the Human Riddle (Vom Menschenrätsel) as the standpoint which developed in the 19th century and has, in certain circles, become more and more dominant, and which I called “illusionism.” Now, one will ask oneself the question: Does this illusionism not rest on very sound foundations? This might well seem so. It really seems as if there were nothing to say against the proposition that there may be something out there which affects my eye, and that only then the soul translates what is out there into light and color, so that one indeed only has to do with soul experience. It seems justified to assume that one cannot get beyond the limits of the soul realm; that one would never be justified to say: This or that out there corresponds to that which lives in my soul. Such questions only apparently have no significance for the greatest questions concerning the soul, for instance, the question of immortality. They have, indeed, a deep significance for us as human beings, and in this regard certain indications can be made today. But it is just from this foundation that I want to take my start.

The direction of thought which I have thus characterized never thinks about the fact that, in relation to the life of the soul, it only reckons with what occurs when, from outside, through the sense world, impressions are made on the human being and the human being then develops mental representations of these impressions by means of his nerve-sense apparatus. These ways of looking at phenomena do not take into consideration that what occurs in this way applies only to the human being's intercourse with the outer sense world. But one overlooks the fact that one comes to very special results—also when one examines this matter in the sense of spiritual scientific research—when one investigates the intercourse with the outer world. In this regard it becomes evident that the human senses are built up in a very particular way. However, what I have to put forward here about the structure of the senses, and especially in relation to the finer details of this structure, is not yet accessible to external science. Something is built into the human body in the organs which we use as our senses which is excluded from the general inner life of the human bodily organism to a certain degree. As a symptomatic example we can consider the human eye. The eye is built into our skull organism almost like an entirely independent being and is connected with the interior of the entire organism only by means of certain organic elements. The whole could be described in detail, but for today's considerations this is not necessary. However, a certain degree of independence exists. And such independence is actually inherent in all the sense organs. So that what is never taken into consideration is that something very special occurs in sense perception, in sense experience. The sense perceptible outer world continues by way of the sense organs into our own organism. What occurs there outside through light and color, or better said, what occurs in light and color, continues its activity into our organism in such a way that the life of our organism does not, to begin with, participate in its activity. Thus, light and color enter our eye in such a way that, I should like to say, the life of the organism does not hinder the penetration of what occurs out there. In this way the stream of outer occurrence penetrates through our senses into our organism up to a certain point as if through gulfs or channels. Now the soul participates, to begin with, in what flows in through the fact that she herself enlivens what at first penetrates non-livingly from without. This is an extraordinarily important truth which comes to light through spiritual science. As we perceive with our senses we constantly enliven that which out of the flow of outer events continues to penetrate into our body. Sense perception is an actual living penetration, indeed an enlivening of that which, as something dead, continues its activity within our organism. Thereby we really have the objective world immediately within us in the activity of sense perception, and as we digest it by means of our soul, we experience it. This is the actual process and is extraordinarily important. For in relation to the experience of our senses one may not say that it is merely an impression, that it is only the result of an effect from outside. That which occurs outwardly really enters into our inner being, as a bodily process, is then taken into the soul and is permeated with life. In our sense organs we have something within which the soul lives, yet in which, fundamentally, our own body does not live directly. At some future time, one will approach the ideas which I have developed here also out of natural scientific considerations when one will understand in the right way the fact that in the eyes of certain species of animals—and this one can extend to all the senses—certain organs are to be found which are no longer found in human beings. The human eye is simpler than the eyes of the lower animals, indeed even than animals which stand close to man. One will then ask: Why, for example, do certain animals still have the so-called Pectin in their eye, a special organ made up of blood vessels; why do others have the so-called “Schwertfortsatz;” again an organ of blood vessels? When one asks these questions one will realize that, with these organs penetrating into the senses in the animal organism, the immediate bodily life of the organism still participates in that which occurs in the senses as the continuation of the outer world. Therefore, the sense perception of the animal is definitely not such that one can say the soul experiences the outer world directly as it penetrates into the organism. For the soul element in its instrument, the body, still penetrates the sense organ; the bodily life permeates the sense organ. Just through this, however, that the human senses are formed in such a way that they are enlivened through the activity of soul it becomes clear to the one who grasps sense experience truly in its essential nature that we actually have outer reality in sense perception. Kantianism, Schopenhauerism, all modern physiology, is not equal to denying this. These sciences are not yet able to allow their concepts to press forward to a correct understanding of sense experience. Only when that which occurs in the sense organ is taken up into the deeper nervous system, into the brain system, only then does it pass over into a sphere into which the body's life penetrates directly and, as a result, interior bodily processes occur. Thus, the human being has the zone of his senses at the periphery, and within this zone of the senses he has the zone of direct encounter with the outer world where the outer world comes to meet him directly, with no intervention, inasmuch as it approaches him through the senses. For, in this process, no intervention occurs. Then, however, when what was sense impression becomes mental representation, then we stand within the deeper lying nervous system in which every process of ideation, of representation, corresponds with a process in the nerve mechanism. When we construct a mental representation drawn from sense perception, an occurrence in the human nervous organism always comes into play.

And, in this regard, one must say: In what has been accomplished by natural science, especially also the discoveries of Verworn in regard to the processes which occur in the nervous system and in the brain when this or that is represented, we have an achievement which deserves our admiration. Spiritual science must only be clear about the following: When we encounter the outer world through our senses, we find ourselves confronted by the actual sequence of facts in the outer world. While we form mental representations, for instance, in calling up memories, or thinking about something, without connecting this to something outside ourselves, but rather inwardly linking together impressions which have been derived from outside, in such a case, our nervous system is unquestionably engaged. And that which occurs in our nervous system, which lives in its structures, its processes, this is truly—the further one goes in investigating this fact, the more one discovers—a wonderfully projected image of the soul's realm, of the life of representations. One who enters, even only a little, into what can be learned from brain physiology, from nerve physiology, discovers the structure and the dynamics of movement within the brain to reveal the most wonderful insights that one can come to in this world. However, spiritual science must then be clear: Just as we stand face to face with the external world, when we direct our glance outward, so do we also stand face to face with our own bodily world when we are attentive to the play of thoughts which are derived from the world around us. It is only that this latter fact is rarely brought to consciousness. But when the spiritual scientific researcher raises his consciousness to what he calls imaginative thinking, he then recognizes that - - though the process remains within dreamy awareness—in the weaving of mental representations, when left to itself, the human being grasps his inner activity in the brain and nervous system as he otherwise grasps the outer world. By means of such meditations as I have described one can strengthen one's life of soul to become able to know that one in no way stands differently in relation with this inner nerve world than with the outer world of the senses; only that in relation with the external sense world the impression created is a strong one, coming as it does from without, and, as a result, one forms the judgment: the outer world makes an impression; while that which arises from within, out of the bodily organism, does not intrude itself so forcefully—despite the fact that it constitutes a wonderful play of material processes—and, as a result, one has the impression: my mental representations, my mental images, arise of themselves.

In regard to everything which I have so far indicated about the human being's intercourse with the outer sense world, what I have said holds true. The soul observes, as she penetrates the body, at one time the external reality, at another time, the soul observes the play of her own nerve mechanism. Now a certain conceptual view has concluded from this fact—and the misunderstanding arises as a result—that this is the only way in which the human being relates with the outer world. When, arising out of this conception, the question is asked: How does the outer world work upon the human being? Then the question is answered as it must be from the standpoint of the wonderful accomplishments of brain anatomy and brain physiology. The question is answered in the way we just characterized: One describes what happens when the human being either gives his attention to the mental images which arise from the outer world, or as he may later recall them out of his memory. That is—so says this conceptual view—the only way the human being relates to the outer world. As a consequence, this conception must come to the conclusion that, in fact, all soul life runs parallel with the outer world. For it certainly must be a matter of indifference to the outer world whether we form mental images about it or not; the world goes on as it goes on; our mental representations are merely added on. Indeed, what holds good here is a fundamental principle of this world conception: Everything we experience is of the nature of soul. But in this soul element there lives at one time the outer world and at another the inner. And, indeed—this is the consequence—at one time, according to the external processes and the next time according to the processes in the nerve mechanism. Now, this conception of things proceeds from the assumption: All other soul experiences must also stand in a similar relation with the external world, feeling, as well as volition. And when such investigators as Theodor Ziehen are honest with themselves, they do not find such relations. As a result, as has been demonstrated, they deny the reality of feeling in part, and of the will entirely. They do not find the feelings within the mere nerve mechanism, and, least of all, the will. Franz Brentano does not even find willing within the human soul being. Where does this come from?

Spiritual science will one day throw light on this question when those misunderstandings which I have today described have vanished and one has accepted the help which spiritual science has to offer in these matters. For the fact, which I have only indicated, is indeed this: What we designate as the sphere of feeling within the soul's life, has to begin with—strange as this may sound—as it first arises, absolutely nothing to do with the life of nerves. I know very well how many assertions of contemporary science I thereby contradict. I also know very well all that can be brought as well-founded objections. However, as desirable as it might be to enter into all details, I am today only able to present results. Ziehen is quite right when he fails to find either feeling or willing in the mechanism of the nervous system, when he only finds the forming of mental representations, mental images. Ziehen says in consequence: Feelings are merely tones, that is attributes, accentuating the life of representation; for only the life of mental representation is to be found in the nerves. Willing is altogether non-existent for the natural scientist, for the perception of the movement is linked immediately with the mental image of the movement and follows it immediately. There is no will in between. Nothing of human feeling lies in the nerve mechanism. This consequence, however, is not drawn, but it lies within the assumption. When, therefore, human feeling expresses itself in the bodily organism, with what is this connected? What is the relationship of human feeling to the body, when the relationship of forming mental images to the body is as I have described it for sense impressions as they relate to the nerve mechanism? Just as spiritual science shows that forming mental images is connected with perception and the interior mechanism of the nervous system—as strange as this still sounds today, it will eventually be documented by natural scientific research, and can, already today, be presented as a fully secured result of spiritual science—so feeling is connected, in a similar way, with everything which belongs organically with human breathing and related activities. Feeling as it arises has, in the first place, nothing to do with the nervous mechanism, it belongs, rather, with the breathing organism. However, at least one objection which lies close at hand should be dealt with here: Well, the nerves, nevertheless, stimulate everything which has to do with breathing! I shall come back once again to this objection in connection with willing. The nerves stimulate nothing which is connected with breathing, rather, just as we perceive light and color by means of our optic nerve, so we perceive the process of breathing itself, although in a more subdued way, by means of those nerves which connect our breathing organism with the central nervous system. These nerves, which are usually designated motor nerves in relation to breathing, are nothing else than sensory nerves. They are there, like the brain nerves, only more dully, in order to perceive the breathing as such. The origin of feeling, in its entire spectrum from the slightest emotional disturbance up to a quiet, harmonious feeling, is connected organically with everything which takes its course in the human being as breathing process and what belongs to it as its continuation in one direction or another in the human organism. One will one day think quite differently about the bodily characteristics of feeling when one will once see through the circumstances and will no longer insist that certain streams which stimulate the breathing process run from a central organ, from the brain, but will recognize that the opposite is actually the case. The breathing processes are there, they are perceived by certain nerves; they come in this way into connection with them. But the connection is not of that nature that the origin of the feeling is anchored in the nervous system. And with this we come to a field which has not yet been worked on, in spite of the admirable natural science of the present day. The bodily expressions of the life of feeling will be wonderfully illuminated when one studies the finer changes in the breathing processes, especially the more subtle changes in the effects of the breathing process while one or the other feeling takes its course within us.

The process of breathing is a very different one from the process which plays itself out in the human nerve mechanism. In regard to the nerve mechanism one can say, in a certain sense, that it is a faithful after image of the human soul's life itself. If I wanted to use an expression—such expressions are not yet available to us in our language and one can, therefore, only use approximations—if I wanted to use an expression for the wonderful way in which the soul life is mirrored in the human nervous system, then I might say: The soul life portrays itself in the life of the nerves; the life of the nerves is truly a portrait, a picture, of the soul's life. Everything which we experience in our soul in relation to our perceptions of the outer world, portrays itself in the nervous system. It is just this which enables us to understand that already at birth the nervous system, in particular of the head, is a faithful reflected image of the life of the soul as it comes out of the spiritual world and unites itself with the life of the bodily organism. The objections which today arise just from the standpoint of brain physiology against the union of the soul with the brain, with the head organism, as the soul descends out of the spiritual world, just this will one day be brought forward as a proof of this connection. The soul prepares before birth or conception out of spiritual foundations that wonderful structure of the head, which is built up and formed by the human life of soul. The head—which, for example, grows only four times heavier than it is at birth, whereas the entire organism grows twenty-two times heavier during the course of its later development—the head appears at birth as something formed through, if one may use the expression, as something complete in itself. Already before birth it is, fundamentally, a picture of the soul's experience, because the soul works on the head out of the spiritual world for a long time before any of the physical facts develop in the embryo—facts with which we are well acquainted—and this work leads to human existence in the physical world. For the spiritual researcher it is just the wonderful structure of the human nervous system, which is the projected mirror image of the human life of soul, which is both the confirmation that the soul descends out of the spiritual realm, as well as of the fact that in the spiritual world the forces are active which make the brain a portrait picture of the soul's life.

If I should now use an expression for the connection between the life of feeling and the breathing life that would characterize in a similar way the relationship between the life of representation and the nervous system, which I have just characterized by saying: “The life of the nerves is a picture, a portrait, of the soul's life in its activity of forming mental images, of thought representations”—then I would say that the breathing life with everything which belongs to it, is an image of the soul's life, which I would compare with picture writing, with hieroglyphics. The nervous system—a true picture, a real portrait; the respiratory system—only a hieroglyph. The nervous system is so constructed that the soul only needs to be completely at one with herself in order to “read” from her portrait (the nervous system) what she wishes to experience of herself. With the picture writing, the hieroglyph, one must interpret, here one must already know something, here the soul must occupy herself more actively with the matter. Thus, it is in connection with the respiratory system. The breathing life is less a faithful expression—if I were to characterize this more exactly, I would have to point to the Goethean principle of metamorphosis, for which our time today is too short—less a faithful pictorial expression of the soul's experience. It is far more an expression of such a kind that I would wish to compare it with the relation of picture writing, to its meaning and significance. The soul's life is, therefore, more inward in the life of feeling, is less bound to the outer processes. For this reason also, the connection escapes a more rudimentary physiology. For the spiritual researcher, however, it is just this which makes it clear: just as the breathing, the life of respiration, is connected with the life of feeling, so must the life of feeling be freer, more independent in itself, because this breathing life is a less exact expression of the feeling.

Thus, we comprehend the body from a different perspective when we consider it as the formative expression of the life of feeling than when we consider it only as the formative expression of the life of mental images. Through the fact, however, that the life of feeling is connected with the life of breathing, within the life of feeling the spiritual is more active, more inward, than in the mere life of representation—in that life of representation which does not rise to Imagination but is rather a manifestation of outer sense experience. Feeling life is not as clear, not as bright and transparent, just as little as picture writing expresses as clearly what it signifies as an actual picture does—here I can only speak in more comparative terms—but just because of this, in that which expresses itself in the life of feeling the spiritual is more within it than in the ordinary life of representation. The breathing life is less a defined tool than is the nervous system.

And if we come now to the life of will, then one finds oneself in the situation that when one begins to speak, as spiritual researcher, about the facts as one observes them, one may well be decried as an extreme materialist. But when the spiritual scientist speaks about the relationship of the human soul to the human body, he must consider the relationship of the entire soul to the entire body, not merely, as is customary today, to speak of it in relation with the nervous system only. The soul expresses itself in the entire organism, in everything which goes on in the body. If one now wants to consider the life of will, what can one take as one's starting point? One must begin with the most basic, the deepest level of will impulses which appear to be still entirely bound to the body's life. Where do we find such a will impulse? Such a will impulse manifests itself very simply when, for example, we are hungry, when certain substances in our organism are used up and must be replaced. We descend into that region where the processes of nourishment occur. We have descended from the processes in the nerve organization, through the processes in the breathing organism, and arrive at the processes in the organism of nourishment. We find the most basic will impulses bound to the organism through which we assimilate and digest our food. Spiritual science shows us that when we speak of the relationship of willing to the human organism, we must speak of it in relation with the digestive, metabolic system. A relationship similar to that between the process of mental representation and sensation with the nerve mechanism; of that between breathing and the life of feeling is also to be found between the digestive metabolic organism and the will-life of the human soul—only, now, the relationship is still a looser one. Indeed, other things, which have further ramifications, also are connected with this. And, in this connection, one must become clear, once and for all, about one thing which, fundamentally, only spiritual science speaks about today. I have presented this aspect in more limited circles over many years, which I now bring forward publicly as a result of spiritual scientific investigation. Contemporary physiology is convinced that when we receive a sense impression it stimulates a sensory nerve and—if, indeed, physiology admits the existence of the soul—is then taken up by the soul. But then, in addition to these sensory nerves, contemporary physiology recognizes so-called motor nerves, nerves giving rise to motion. For spiritual science—I know how heretical what I am about to say is—for spiritual science such motor, motion-producing nerves do not exist. I have indeed occupied myself for many years with this matter and I know, of course, that one can make reference in regard to just this point to so much that appears to be well-founded. One takes, for instance, someone ill with locomotor ataxia, or someone whose spinal cord has been pinched, in whom, as a result, from a certain organ down his lower organism is as if dead. These things do not contradict what I am saying, rather, indeed, if one sees through them in the right way, they, in fact, substantiate what I am saying. There are no motor nerves. What contemporary physiology sees as motor nerves, as nerves causing motion, as will impulse nerves, are actually sensory nerves. If the spinal column has been damaged in a certain section, then what goes on in the leg, in the foot, is simply not perceived, and the foot, therefore, because it is not perceived, cannot be moved; not because a motor nerve has been severed, but because a sensory nerve has been severed which cannot perceive what happens in the leg. I can only indicate this because I must press on to the significant consequences in this matter.

One who acquires habits of observation in the realm of soul-bodily experience knows, for instance, that what we call “practice,” let us say in playing the piano, or in something similar, has to do with something quite different than what is today referred to as “scouring out the motor nerve pathway.” This is not what is happening. In regard to every movement which we carry out with our will nothing else comes into consideration as an organic process than a metabolic process in the organism. What originates as an impulse of will originates from the metabolism. If I move my arm, it is not the nervous system, to begin with, which comes into consideration, rather it is the will itself—whose existence the physiologists, as we have seen, deny—and the nerve has no other function than to see that the metabolic process which occurs as a consequence of the impulse of will is perceived by means of the so-called motor nerve, which is, in reality, a sensory nerve. We have to do with metabolic processes in the entire organism as bodily activators of those processes which correspond with the will. Because all systems in the organism interact, these metabolic processes occur also in the brain and are bound up with brain processes. The will, however, has its bodily formative expression in metabolic processes; nerve processes have, in reality, only to do with this in that they transmit the perception of the will processes. Natural science will in the future come to recognize this. When, however, we consider the human being from one aspect as a nerve being, and from another as a breathing being, with all that belongs with this, and from a third aspect as a metabolic being—if I may coin the expression—then we have the whole human being. For all the organs of movement, everything in the human body that can move, is connected in its motion with metabolic processes. And the will works directly on the processes of metabolism. The nerve is only there to perceive this occurrence.

In a certain sense one finds oneself in an unhappy situation when one has to contradict such an apparently well-founded assumption as that of the two types of nerves; however, one has, at least, support in the fact that up to the present time no one has yet discovered a significant difference either in their mode of reaction or in regard to their anatomical structure, between a sensory and a motor nerve. They are in every respect identical. When we acquire an ability in some field through practice, then what we acquire through this practice is that we learn to master processes in our metabolism through our will. It is this which the child learns as it gains mastery of the metabolic processes in their finer configurations after having at first tossed its limbs in all directions without carrying out any ordered movement of its will. And if, for instance, we play the piano or have acquired some similar ability, we learn to move our fingers in such a way that we master the corresponding metabolic processes with our will. The sensory nerves—which are actually the otherwise so-called motor nerves—they register more and more what is the correct action and the correct movement, for these nerves are there in order to feel out, to trace, what occurs in the metabolism. I would like once to ask someone who can really observe soul-bodily processes whether through such an accurate self-observation he does not feel how what is actually happening is not a “scouring out of motor nerve pathways” but that he is learning to feel out, to perceive, dimly to represent, the finer vibrations of his organism which he calls forth through his will. It is actual self-observation which we exercise. In this whole realm we have to do with sensory nerves. From this point of view, someone should sometime observe how speech develops out of the unformed babbling sounds of a tiny child. It is truly based in the fact that the will learns how to take hold of the speech organism. And what is learned by the nervous system is only the finer perception of what occurs in the metabolic processes.

In volition, we have to do, therefore, with what expresses itself organically in the metabolism. And the characteristic expression of the metabolism are movements, even into the bones. This could be shown without difficulty if one would enter into the real results of natural scientific observations of the present day. But the metabolism expresses even less than breathing that which transpires soul-spiritually. As I have compared the nerve organism with a picture, the breathing organism with a hieroglyph, I can only compare the metabolic organism with a mere letter script, an indicative sign, as we have it today in our alphabet in contrast with the pictorial script of the ancient Egyptian or the ancient Chaldean. These are mere signs, letters, and the soul's activity must become still more inward. As a result, however, of the fact that in willing the activity of soul must become still more inward, the soul—which I would like to say engages itself only loosely in the metabolism—enters the realm of the spirit with the greater part of its being. The soul lives in the spiritual. And thus, just as the soul unites herself through the senses with material substance, so she unites herself through the will with the spirit. Also in this regard once again, the special relation of the soul-spiritual comes to expression, a relationship which spiritual science reveals by means of those methods which I spoke about in my last lecture. What results is that the metabolic organism as it exists today—in order to characterize this more exactly I should have to enter into the Goethean idea of metamorphosis—presents only a provisional indication of that which in the nervous system, in the head organism, is a complete picture. In that which the soul carries out in the metabolism as she, so to speak, finds her right relation with the metabolism, she then prepares that which she then carries over through the gates of death into the spiritual world for her further life in the spiritual realm after death. She carries, of course, all that across with her through which she lives with the spirit. She is inwardly most alive, as I have characterized it, just there where she is most loosely united with the material, so that in this realm the material process acts merely as a sign, an indication, for the spirit; thus, it is in regard to the will. It is, therefore, for this reason that the will must be especially developed if one wishes to attain spiritual perception. This will must be developed to become that which one designates as actual Intuition—not in the trivial sense, but in the sense as I recently characterized it. Feeling can be developed so that it leads to Inspiration; mental representation, thinking, when it is developed in the sense of spiritual scientific research, leads to Imagination. By these means, however, that other element, the spiritual in its true reality, enters objectively into the life of the soul. For just as we must characterize sense experience in such a way that the outer world projects gulfs, or channels, into us, because of the way in which the human sense organs are constructed, so that we experience ourselves in them, so in willing we experience the spirit. In willing the spirit sends its being into us. And no one will ever comprehend freedom who does not recognize this immediate life of the spirit in willing.

On the other side one sees how Franz Brentano, who only investigates the soul, is right; he does not reach through to the will, because he only investigates the soul, he arrives only at feeling. What the will sends down into the metabolism, with this the modern psychologist does not concern himself, because he does not wish to become a materialist; and the materialist does not concern himself with it because he believes that everything is dependent on the nervous system. As, however, the soul unites itself with the spirit to such a degree that the spirit in its archetypal form can penetrate into the human being, that it can project its gulf-like channels into the human being, so is that which we are able to place within the world as our highest, as our moral willing—what we are able to place within the world as spiritual willing—truly, indeed, the immediate life of the spirit within the realm of the soul. And through the fact that we experience the spirit directly within the soul, the soul element in those mental representations, which I have characterized in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as providing the basis for a free willing, is truly not isolated in itself, but is rather, to a very considerable degree, conscious within the spirit in a higher, and above all, in a different way. It is a denial of this standing within the spirit, when, as the physiologist—like Theodor Ziehen—in relation with the will, also the psychologist wishes to hear nothing of those finer will impulses, which are, in fact, a matter of real experience. They cannot, indeed, be found in the realm of soul, but the soul experiences the spirit within herself and as she experiences the spirit within the will, she lives in freedom.

In this way the human soul and the human body are so related with each other that the entire soul stands in relation with the entire body, and not merely the soul in relation with the nervous system. And with this I have characterized for you the beginning of a direction of scientific research, which will become especially fruitful just through the discoveries of natural science when these are looked at in the right way. This research will show that the body also, where it is considered in its entirety as the expression of the soul, actually confirms the immortality of the soul, which I characterized from an entirely different point of view in my last lecture and shall characterize from yet another aspect in my next lecture.

A certain scientific-philosophical direction of recent times, just because it could not come to terms with the life of the soul and body, for the reasons which have been indicated, has sought refuge in the so-called subconscious. The chief representative of this direction, apart from Schopenhauer, is Eduard von Hartmann. Now the assumption of a subconscious in our life of soul is certainly justified. But in the way in which Eduard von Hartmann speaks of the subconscious, it is impossible to understand reality in a satisfactory fashion. In the example that I quoted of the two persons sitting opposite to one another, of whom one wants to have the sugar bowl passed to him by the other, von Hartmann analyzes in a curious way how consciousness dives down into the subconscious and then what occurs in the subconscious arises again in consciousness. But with such a hypothesis one does not come near the insights which can be gained through spiritual science. One can speak about the subconscious, only one must speak about it in two different ways: one must speak about the subconscious and about the superconscious. In sense-perception something which in itself is unconscious becomes conscious, in as much as it is enlivened in the manner which I characterized today. In this case the unconscious penetrates up into the consciousness. In like manner, where the nerve-sense organism is considered in the inner play of mental representations, a subconscious element rises up into consciousness. But one may not speak of an absolute subconscious, rather one must speak of the fact that the subconscious can rise up into consciousness. The unconscious is, in this sense, also only a matter of time, is only in a relative sense unconscious; the unconscious can become conscious. In the same way one can speak of the spirit as the superconscious which enters the realm of the human soul in the form of an ethical idea or a spiritual scientific idea which itself penetrates into the spiritual. When this occurs, the superconscious enters into consciousness.

You see how many concepts and mental representations must be corrected if one wants to do justice to life. And out of the corrections of these concepts the insight will, for the first time, be freed to grasp the truth in relation to the human life of soul. However, to fully develop the far- reaching significance of such a way of considering the relationship between soul and body is a matter which must be reserved for next time. Today, in conclusion, I should only like to draw your attention to the fact that recent developments in education have tended to lead away from those ideas which can throw a clear light onto this field. On one hand it has confined the entire relationship of the human being to the outer world to that aspect which recognizes only the relation between the outer world and the human nervous system. As a result, there have arisen in this field a sum of mental representations which are materialistically colored to a greater or lesser degree; and it is just because one's attention has not been in any way directed to those other aspects of the relationship of the human spirit and the human soul to the bodily organism that this insight has been narrowed and confined. And this narrowing of vision has, in fact, been extended to all scientific endeavor as a whole. As a consequence, one experiences sadness when one reads in an otherwise relatively good lecture which Professor Dr. A. Tschirch held on November 28, 1908, as a festival lecture on the occasion of his installation as rector at the University of Bern, Switzerland, under the title “Nature Research and Healing.” Those among my listeners who have attended these lectures more often will know that, as a rule, I only attack those whom, in other connections I genuinely esteem and that it is my custom only to express criticisms in self-defense. In this lecture by Prof. Tschirsh a curious confession is to be found, which arises exactly out of the misunderstandings and out of the helplessness to understand the relationship between soul and body. Here Prof. Tschirch says: “It is, however, my opinion, that we do not need to trouble our heads today whether or not, in reality, we shall ever penetrate into ‘inner life.’”

He means, penetrate into the inner aspect of the world. It is out of this attitude that all that springs which is present today as antipathy against potential spiritual-scientific research. Prof. Tschirch continues in this vein: “We have, indeed, more necessary and pressing things to do.”

Now, in the face of the great, burning questions which concern the human soul, for someone to be able to say, “We have, indeed, more necessary and pressing things to do,” in regard to such a one, one would have to question the seriousness of his scientific attitude of mind, if it were not understandable out of the direction—as has been characterized—which thinking has taken, and especially when one reads the sentences which follow:

“The ‘inner aspect of nature,’ about which Haller has somewhat similar thoughts, which Kant later called ‘thing in itself,’ is at the present time, for us so deep in the ‘within,’ that millennia will pass, until we—always assuming that a new ice age does not destroy our entire civilization—even come close to it.”

These personalities concern themselves so casually about the spirit, which is actually the inner world, that they can say: We don't need to concern ourselves about it but can calmly wait for thousands of years. If this is science's answer to the burning questions of the human soul, then the time has come for an extension of this science, through spiritual science. The attitude of mind characterized above has led to the situation in which the soul element, one might say, has been summarily discarded, and in which the point of view has arisen that the soul element is, at most, an accompanying phenomenon of the bodily organism—a view which the renowned Prof. Jodi has put forward almost to the present day; but he is only one among many.

But where does this way of thinking lead? Well, it celebrated a triumphal festival when, for instance, Prof. Dr. Jacques Loeb—once again a man whose positive research achievements I value most highly—lectured on September 10, 1911 at the first congress of monistic thinkers in Hamburg on “Life.” In this instance we see how that which actually is based on a misunderstanding is transformed into a general attitude and thus becomes—pardon the expression—brutal toward soul research. The hypothetical conviction which arises from this research becomes a matter of authority, of power. It is in this sense that Prof. Jacques Loeb begins that lecture by stating:

“The question which I intend to discuss is whether, according to the current stand of science we can anticipate that life, that is the sum total of all living phenomena, can be completely explained in terms of physical and chemical laws. If, after earnest consideration, we can answer this question in the affirmative, then we must build our social and ethical structures of life on purely natural scientific foundations and no metaphysician can then claim the right to prescribe modes of conduct for our way of life which are in contradiction with the results of experimental biology.”

Here you have the striving to conquer all knowledge by means of that science of which Goethe lets Mephisto say “It makes itself an ass and knows not how!” This is how it appears in the older version of Goethe's Faust where the following passage occurs:

Who will know the living and describe it,
Seeks first to drive the spirit out,
Then the parts lie in his hand,
Missing only, sadly! the spirit's band!
Encheiresin Naturae so says our chemistry,
Mocks thus itself and knows not how it came to be.

(tr. HB)

Today there stands in Faust: “Mocks thus itself and knows not how it came to be”—but the young Goethe wrote: “It makes itself an ass and knows not how!”

What has come to be based on these misunderstandings tends in the direction of eliminating all that knowledge which is not merely an interpretation of physical and chemical processes. But no science of the soul will be fortified to withstand such an attack which is not able out of its own insight to press forward into the human bodily nature. I appreciate all that has been achieved by such gifted individuals as Dilthey, Franz Brentano and others. I recognize it fully. I value all these personalities; but, the ideas which they have developed are too weak, too clumsy to hold their ground against the results of today's scientific thinking. A bridge must be erected between the spiritual and the bodily. Just in relation with the human being must this bridge be erected by our achieving strong spiritual-scientific concepts, which lead to an understanding of the bodily life of the organism. Because it is just in the understanding of bodily life that the great questions, the question of immortality, the question of death, the question of destiny, and of similar riddles will find their comprehension. Otherwise, if a sense for this science of the spiritual does not awaken in humanity, a sense also for the earnestness of these urgent times, then we shall experience that we find ourselves confronted with views, such as come to expression in the following: A book can be found which has come over from America, and has been translated into German, a book by an American scholar Snyder. In this book one can read a quaint sentence, which, however, expresses the attitude and gesture of the entire volume, which is entitled “The World Conception of Modern Natural Science.” And translator, Hans Kleinpeter, indeed draws special attention to the fact that this attitude must gradually lead to the enlightenment of the present and future time. Now, allow me to quote in conclusion a sentence, I would say, a key, central sentence from this book:

“Whatever may be the brain cell of a glow worm or the feeling for the harmonies of ‘Tristan and Isolde,’ the substance, of which they consist, is, essentially, the same; what is of concern is evidently more of a distinction in their structure than a difference in their substantiality.”

And, with this, something essential, something enlightening is thought to have been said! But it is an attitude of mind, an inner gesture which does hang together with what I have today brought forward. And it is deeply characteristic for the present time that such points of view can find adherents, that they can be put forward as something of significance.

I am well able to appreciate philology, as well as those sciences which today are undervalued by many people. Wherever true science is at work, in whatever field, I can appreciate it. But when someone comes and would say to me: Goethe wrote Faust; sitting next to him was his secretary Seydel, who was perhaps writing a letter to his beloved; the difference between Faust and Seydel's letter may have been whatever it was, but the ink is the same in both! Both assertions are at the same level, only one is considered to be a great advance of science, and the other is taken as a matter of course to be that which those of my audience who laughed about it have demonstrated it to be.

In contrast to this, we must reach back and build on that attitude of mind, which is also scientific, but which has laid the foundations for a science which arises out of the whole of the human soul and out of a deep contemplation of the world—an attitude of mind which is also present in Goethe's natural scientific considerations. The basic elements which spiritual science would want to develop further and further, lie in Goethe's work, and in many a word of Goethe's, so beautifully and paradigmatically expressed, there lies the true, the genuine attitude of soul which can lead to a truthful contemplation of the world. I would like to close these considerations by bringing before you Goethe's many-sided observations of the relationship of spirit and outer matter in particular in their relationship with the human body. As Goethe contemplated Schiller's skull and sought to feel his way through the contemplation of this noble soul's fragmentary outer form into the relation of the whole spirit and the whole soul to the entire human bodily organism, he wrote the words which we know in his beautiful poem, to which he gave the title “On the Contemplation of Schiller's Skull.” Out of these words we become aware of the attitude of heart and mind which is necessary for a many-sided contemplation of spirit and nature:

What can a man win more in life,
Than that God-Nature reveal to him,
How she lets solid substance to spirit run,
How she binds fast what is from spirit won.<.p>

(tr. HB)

And we can apply these words to the relation of the human soul and the human body and say:

What can a man win more in life,
Than that God-Nature reveal to him,
How she lets matter to spirit run,
And how in matter spirit self-knowledge is won!

Thus, this God-Nature reveals to the human being how the body is the expression, the image and signature of the soul, and how thus the body physically proves and reveals the immortal soul and the eternal spirit.