The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the background of all these considerations stands a question which is looked upon in the present age in the light of materialism, and which is far more materialistic in its fundamental conceptions than can be imagined. This question refers to the origin of certain historical events. People speak of historical necessity; namely, that the events which took place, for instance, in the past year, were historically the result, as it were, of events which took place in the preceding years.

What I characterize here as “historical” reaches, of course, into everything that proceeds out of human actions—that is, into social life and civilized life in general. The materialistic conception does not only consist in leading spiritual phenomena back to the sphere of natural science or to a material cause, but it also consists in many other things. The materialistic conception would like to investigate the idea of free will in a full light. It would also like to interpret the events taking place in the course of history in the same way in which it contemplates scientific matters; namely, that a preceding cause always produces, with a certain necessity, something which follows it as an effect. Then people say, and believe they are thinking very clearly when they say this, that all events, also those that have broken into our world-happenings with such a catastrophic force, are a necessity.

In this sense, that is, in the meaning of scientific necessity, this is perfect nonsense, although the expression—all events are a necessity—is justified in other directions. If you consider the things that passed before our souls yesterday—namely, the complicated organization of human nature, you will gain an insight, not only with your understanding but also with your feeling, into the depths of the universal order of laws. You will also gradually lose the habit of thinking that this reality can be embraced in abstract scientific ideas limited to strict laws. Then your gaze will fall on certain phenomena in Nature that reveal many things, if they are looked upon in their true light. For instance, a phenomenon like the following one: Every year a great number of life-germs develop in the ocean, germs which do not become living beings. The life-germs, or eggs, are laid—and perish. Only a small part of these grow into real living beings. This, of course, does not only happen in the wide ocean, but in the whole of Nature. Consider how many life-germs are supposed to become living beings, even in the short space of one year! How much is meant to become alive and does not attain life, when eggs are laid which do not develop! Must we not say that all these germs of life contain causes that do not produce effects? Indeed, anyone who does not consider Nature with theoretical prejudices, especially not with the precise theoretical opinion that every cause has its effect and every effect has its cause—anyone who considers Nature in an unprejudiced way will find that there are countless things in Nature which must be designated, in the fullest meaning of the word, as causes, although they do not produce effects such as should be the case if the causes would live themselves out completely. There are countless instances where life is interrupted, as it were, and does not attain its goal.

This is something that you can see outside in physical Nature. If the spiritual investigator asks himself what corresponds to this in the spiritual world—he will find something very strange. He will find something which corresponds, in a certain sense, exactly to this standing still of life in Nature, but in the way in which spiritual things correspond to things in Nature. Many considerations have shown us that often, not always, the spiritual must be characterized as follows:—Its qualities are the exact opposite of the qualities to be found in Nature—they are the exact opposite. Just as we have seen natural causes that bring about no results—that is, the process is interrupted and what is inherent in the cause (“inherent” is one of the worst possible words for the comprehension of reality) does not develop further—so spiritual investigation shows us that effects arise in the spiritual world; we can say just as little that these are determined by causes, as in the cases which we have just characterized. Yet here we have effects.

Let us ask concretely:—What does the spiritual investigator see when the eye of his soul sees such repressed processes of life? The physical eye sees that eggs, or germs, perish in this case, but the eye of the soul, or of the spirit, sees that where such eggs apparently perish, something endowed with being arises in an earlier stage, in a stage which is not as yet material. If we wish to investigate what really happens in such a case in which material causes have, as it were, no results, then we must dream in a cosmic sense, if I may use this expression. In our usual consciousness we can only dream egoistically. When we dream at night, our dreams are connected with the organism; in our dreams we are not connected with the surroundings. If we are connected with the surroundings and develop the same forces that we develop otherwise in dreams, we experience in the form of imaginations. What is kept back in the processes of Nature and does not reach the stage of physical living beings, becomes something which can very well be experienced in the consciousness of imaginative thought. Beings arise from such repressed life-germs that are only accessible to imaginative thought.

If we would not dream as human beings, but as beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, we could dream of them. In fact, if I may use ttii.s expression, the Angeloi dream of the beings that rise up every year in great numbers from the sea and from the earth, as elementary forms; these are nothing but the products of the life-germs that have apparently perished.

If you try to picture this very vividly, you can see a kind of elementary life rising out of the earth; in this elementary life we ourselves are embedded with our own soul. But we are in this elementary life more intensely still, for we take part in the process I have just mentioned. As human beings we participate very intensely in this process, and also the animals take part in this. How? Well, there is no difference between that which happens when a certain quantity of fish eggs are laid in the sea—eggs that do not develop and only give rise to elementary existence—and that which happens when we see the seeds growing out of the earth, let us say wheat. How many grains of wheat are predestined to become wheat halms,¹ and yet they do not grow into halms because we eat them! In this case we ourselves and our processes are linked up with the universe; we connect ourselves with what arises as elementary existence.

In the grains of wheat and in other products that we use for our food, we interrupt the progressive process. We do not allow the life germs to become real beings, but through our own existence we cause that, which was destined for something else, to become an elementary process, which can be seen only through imagination. But the reality that lies at the foundation of this imaginative life takes place because we ourselves are placed into the process and participate in it. From the grains of wheat or rye, from everything else in Nature which we consume in this way, from all this, an elementary life arises. This elementary life permeates us. We take up this elementary life and are placed within it.

You have here the foundation of elementary life. We can, as it were, exist only because we interrupt another progressive process and spiritualize it. Even when we eat, we spiritualize a process that would otherwise take a purely material course.

The opposite is to be found in the spiritual world. There we find effects which have no causes, for instance, like a moving billiard ball which moves because another one hits it these effects exist as it were without a cause, no cause can be indicated in their case; when we contemplate such things, the idea of cause and effect loses its meaning. Effects arise in the life of our soul and spirit, effects from the spiritual world, of which we cannot say that they have been caused. We face the elementary results (which arise as it were in the form of vapor from the processes just described) with desires arising from necessities of life. We must eat; hence we must spin ourselves into these elementary processes. Just as we face such elementary processes with a certain lust, or desire, so we face spiritual effects, which are in a certain sense devoid of causes, with antipathy, inasmuch as we are human beings on the physical plane. Inasmuch as we are physical human beings, we strive to prevent these effects from the spiritual world from entering into us.

If you try to grasp this somewhat subtle thought, you will see that we are, as it were, surrounded by a spiritual will, which strives to enter into us; at first we do not face it with desire; we are not even inclined to accept it. It is as if will motions were constantly floating around us in the air, motions which we reject. When the clairvoyant consciousness develops, it soon comes into the insight that imaginative things surround us and that we are hindered by inner obstacles from taking up this imaginative element.

Let us consider this imaginative element as a reality. Just as here on the earth a certain number of life-germs perish every year, so do spiritual imaginative things live in the world that always surrounds us as a spiritual world; they can indeed be reached through imagination, but through our human disposition we place obstacles in the way. These obstacles are not to be looked upon in an abstract way, or in general; they must be grasped as concrete and differentiated obstacles. What develops every year from physical life as an ascending elementary life, develops spiritually at some other time. Then it descends and becomes something that we reject in another period. These periods of time are not very regular, for there are times in which the spiritual life surges around us very strongly and many things wish to come to us. There are other times in which the spiritual air around us is not so full. We may take up a more or less receptive attitude, although generally speaking we do not feel inclined to take up this imaginative kind of existence that can be reached only through imagination. But certain conditions may enable us to take up a receptive attitude—we shall still speak of this—or we may take up an entirely rejecting attitude.

Let us suppose that in a certain period of time many such Beings are there, Beings who wish, as it were, to approach man in a spiritual way, and that man is disinclined to accept them. What will happen? It then happens that by rejecting these spiritual beings who wish to come to him, man creates the possibility (he creates the opportunity within mankind itself) for a continuation of the old processes within him, processes that have withered, and continue to spin their dry threads, so that they produce dead results instead of bringing about a living result. It is just the same as if a plant that has reached the end of its life were not taken away, but were to continue as a dried-up, lifeless plant to the damage of its surroundings.

In the course of historical events this takes place in the following way:—An age approaches—the beginning of the 20th century was essentially such an age—in which spiritual Beings wait, as it were, to approach man, an age in which man is called upon in every way to open his soul to new revelations. Yet he does not take up these new revelations, but rejects them. Then the old continues to spin beyond its limits, for this old needs to be fertilized anew through man. This does not happen. What has not been fertilized continues to spin on in a dry and barren way and this causes such events as the present catastrophic one.

One of the most important causes to be found in the spiritual world is the fact that, as the 20th century approached, evolution took a course that made human beings oppose the new revelation, for reasons which we shall still discuss. One might say that the spiritual world was full of all that was offered to mankind in the form of new spiritual knowledge, new spiritual impulses, yet mankind rejected this. Why? Undoubtedly such things are connected with conditions of human evolution. We know that the materialistic age had to come—it has its good qualities from certain other aspects. The materialistic age came, and one of its consequences was that man formed ideas which were connected only with one side of human nature. Think of what we discussed yesterday.

Yesterday we said that the human being, consisting of four members, physical, etheric, and astral body and ego (roughly speaking) is really of a different age, as far as each one of these members is concerned. When a human being is 28 years old, he is 28 only as far as his physical body is concerned (I said this yesterday); as far as his so-called etheric body is concerned he is 21; as far as the astral body is concerned, 14; and as far as the ego is concerned only 7 years old. Yesterday's considerations can very well show you this. A human being of 28, is really 28 years old only as a physical human being. The ego lives in him, for instance (without considering the other members) and lives more slowly, so that it is still a child of 7 years when the human being has reached the age of 28. When a man is 28 years old according to his physical body, this child of 7 is indeed connected with quite different worlds from the one where scientific necessity is to be found. But in the materialistic age man has become accustomed to form only those ideas that can be applied to the relationship of the physical body with its surroundings, and everything is judged according to this. The human being, such as he stands in the world, is really a complicated being, as we have seen yesterday from many aspects. What a human being believes that he knows about himself, what he says about himself in our materialistic age, is only a quarter of all that concerns man. It is only that part which concerns the physical body. We can speak of a scientific necessity only in regard to the relationship of the physical body with its surroundings. Of what must we speak when we consider, for instance, what is contained, as a child of 7, in a man of 28 (without taking into consideration the other members)? Here we must speak of something quite different, something from which this illuminated age, this infinitely clever age, has turned away completely. Strange as it may sound to a modern human being, we must speak in this case of wonders, of miracles. Wonders in the sense in which people often imagine them, or as they are imagined by people who like to go to spiritistic séances, are things which cannot be considered by a real spiritual science. Wonders lie in entirely different spheres; wonders lie in spiritual happenings. Just as necessities lie in the outer events of Nature, so do wonders lie in spiritual events. No human being who enters the physical world from the spiritual world, and proceeds to a physical incarnation, is a physical necessity. He is a necessity only inasmuch as he himself determines this necessity, because he has taken the superconscious decision in the spiritual world to connect himself with a certain hereditary stream. The cause need not lie in father and mother; they merely provide an opportunity. The appearance of every human being in the physical world is a miracle, a wonder. The entrance into the physical world of the human being that is 7 years old when the physical body is 28 is always a true wonder, and in respect to this, every question from a scientific point of view concerning the "cause" is nonsense. It is nonsense to ascribe to heredity that part in us which lives so slowly that it is only 7 years old, when we are 28. If we really want to find out its origin, and ask whence comes that which is only 7 years old when we are 28, we reach the spiritual world, the world that we share with the so-called dead, and in which we lived before descending to our body. Men who were able to think in an unprejudiced way could, indeed, form thoughts concerning such things, even though with great difficulty in our materialistic age.

Think how much Goethe occupied himself with scientific thoughts and how exemplary his scientific thoughts are. He had, as you know a constant longing to go to Italy before he ever saw Italy. And when he finally saw the great works of art in Italy which gave him a conception of the creative artistic activity of the Greek, he wrote to his friends at Weimar: “Here is necessity—here is God.” He wrote of a necessity that is not the one of natural science. His previous scientific thoughts gave him an inkling of the other necessity—the necessity that shines from the spiritual world and is the same as wonder, or miracle. This is what he felt when he saw Italy.

But our age is an illuminated one; our contemporaries are very clever. For this reason they have not only rejected the unjustified conception of “wonder,” but have banished wonder as such even from the spiritual world. But to banish wonder from the spiritual world implies nothing less than to do everything possible in order to misunderstand the spiritual world thoroughly. For the things coming from the spiritual world appear to us only as effects; if we look for the causes we cannot find them. For a spiritual investigator, this is an unquestionable truth. At the end of the 19th century men had no feelings of wonder and reverence for that which sought to come to them as a revelation from the spiritual world; this lack of feeling had increased to such an extent that there was an aversion to such revelations. For these revelations come to man in the same measure in which he develops reverence for all that is profound in the world.

That which can enter into the world's order of laws as wonders may also not take place—not be there. This dulling of human feelings in respect to wonder is the consequence of the omissions in the age approaching the 20th century. If we wish to speak of the causes of our present catastrophic events, we will find that these causes are not things done by human beings. Instead these causes are sins of omission. This is the essential point.

In lectures which I have held repeatedly in past years, I have pointed out that an excellent philosopher lived in the middle of the 19th century, Karl Christian Planck. In many places I have seized the opportunity of drawing attention to Karl Christian Planck, because he wrote a book that is, as it were, his philosophical, literary testament. This book sketches the details, even the spiritual details, of the present world catastrophe. Indeed, one may say that he describes them in advance. The book was written in 1880. Why? Because Karl Christian Planck belongs to those spirits who saw at the right time what was taking place. If you have a house that begins to grow dilapidated, it must be repaired in time. If you wait until it cannot be repaired any more, it falls together and the catastrophe occurs. Our present catastrophe is nothing but a collapse. If we look at it from a real aspect it is a collapse. The right time to bring about what might have taken place instead was during the decades 1870, 1880 of the past century. Men like Karl Christian Planck, who pointed out what was bound to come, never become—as we all know—leading personalities in outer life. When a leading personality is sought, when a statesman or someone similar must be found, one does not naturally turn to those who know something in the sense of Karl Christian Planck! These cannot be used—is it not so? Instead one chooses others, who very often can do nothing to repair and support the falling house. If we only look into the backgrounds of life, it can be proved historically (Karl Christian Planck is not the only one, there are many others) that the revelations from the spiritual world were given to many men at the right moment—the revelation of the event which mankind was facing. There might still have been time to avert the course of such an event. Of course, no one listened to Karl Christian Planck, and even now, who listens to those who speak of what must be said years before the catastrophe takes place, if this is to be averted?

Unfortunately we must say that the way in which humanity has lived through this catastrophic event up to now clearly shows that if it lasts another four years, human beings will have grown accustomed to it and will accept it as they accept normal life. Indeed, this has progressed to a high degree. He who understand the times, however, asks today:—What must take place? For, if something does not take place, the consequences will necessarily arise after decades, because something was left undone at the right time.

But what should take place according to the present conditions of time cannot be discovered in the surrounding physical world. If we wish to hear the right things it is, indeed, necessary today to listen to those who are able to speak out of the spiritual world. Of course, in less important things, events take place more quickly. One may say, in five years perhaps, human beings will recognize that they ought to have listened to many things, and they might already have known many things, if they had listened at the right moment. But they do not like to hear these things. They only like to hear things that show visible signs in the outer physical world. But this physical world has no significance for the historical course of events. It does not show the impulse, the motive force behind events. That which is to be the starting point and impulse for events in the social and ethical life must come from the spiritual world.

In our age humanity should be educated to understand a very great event in the course of human evolution, namely, to believe in free will also in historical evolution. At a certain point of spiritual life humanity today should be led with the greatest force to believe in freedom or free will—and wonder is identical with this. This point lies in the conception of the Christ impulse, of the Mystery of Golgotha. In earlier times humanity took an entirely different attitude toward the Mystery of Golgotha, and the more we go back in history the greater we find this difference. We have often spoken of this. Today it is not possible for human beings—especially for those human beings who are most advanced in the sense of the spirit of the age—to understand the Event of Golgotha as an historical event resembling other historical events. As a foundation for the argument to be dealt with here, I only need to point out that the significance of the Gospels as historical documents has, as you know, been shaken. We cannot consider the Gospels as historical documents in the same way in which we consider the documents concerning Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, or Caesar as historical documents. We cannot, according to methods of historical research, consider the Gospels or the other writings in the New Testament dealing with the Event of Golgotha, as documents in the same sense. The way of thinking adopted in modern historical research loses every possibility of considering the Gospels as historical documents and of looking upon the Event of Golgotha, described in the Gospels, as an historical event, in the sense in which other historical events and facts are historically proved. It is not possible to speak of Christ Jesus as an historical personality in the same way in which one speaks of Charlemagne as an historical personality, according to so-called historical sources.

He who sees through such things will realize that the time has come in which those who love truth and try to understand things through truth must say that what used to be considered as historical sources for the Mystery of Golgotha has been shaken, owing to the attitude adopted by modern historical investigation. One must, indeed, be very dull—for instance like Adolph Harnack, the famous theologian, to stand up again and again and state that what can be asserted concerning Christ Jesus on a quarto page constitutes an historical document in the meaning of modern history! Of course, these things standing on a quarto page are just as little historical documents as the Gospels—according toe Harnack—are historical documents. But an attempt like the one of Harnack (to which hundreds and hundreds of others may be added) is connected with the lack of truthfulness of our age in regard to such things; it is never willing to draw radical conclusions, nevertheless just these are the right conclusions.

The conclusion which must be drawn is that, in accordance with what lies before us, we must confess that it is impossible to find Christ Jesus if we seek him in an outward historical way; we cannot find him in this way. We must find him through spiritual investigation. But in this way we shall surely find him. We shall find the historical event of Golgotha. Why? Because the historical event of Golgotha occurred in human evolution through freedom—freedom of will, in a much higher sense than in the case of other historical events; and because this free event must approach the human being in our age in such a way that nothing compels him to accept it as valid; instead he must accept its validity through inner freedom. Events that can be proved historically cannot be accepted freely. Events for which there is no outer historical proof are accepted for spiritual reasons, and on a spiritual foundation we are free. One becomes Christian through freedom, and in our modern age we must understand, above all, that one can be a Christian in a real sense only through complete freedom and not through the compulsion of historical documents. The task destined for our age is that Christianity shall gain the truth through which it will become the great impulse for the human understanding of freedom. That this shall be understood belongs to the fundamental truths of our age—then an insight must be gained into the fact that the evidence for Christianity must be sought in the spiritual world.

If this insight becomes as intense in human nature as it should become it will produce further insight—it will give rise to other things. What it should produce first of all is that man should learn to answer for himself this question:—How shall I make myself more receptive for the recognition of that which is not forced upon me from the physical world, against which I may at first even feel an aversion, an antipathy? What makes me more inclined toward this?

I am not led by personal vanity or conceit, but only because I wish to bring a concrete example. I have pointed out again and again, on similar occasions, that I began my literary career by refraining, at first, from setting forth my own opinions; instead everything which I set forth was connected with Goethe's spirit, in a conscious retrospect of a spirit who ascended to the spiritual kingdom of the so-called dead, already in the year 1832. But read what I wrote in connection with Goethe, in the time that preceded my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The so-called Goethe investigators study these books chiefly with respect to the question, whether or not they render Goethe's opinions. They find Goethe-opinions only if the writer is a literary "ruminant," in other words, if he ruminates what Goethe said during his incarnation up to 1832. I was always of the opinion that schoolmasters, and also I myself, really need not repeat what Goethe said, for Goethe himself said far better what he wished to say. It is always better to read Goethe's own works than the opinions of schoolmasters, even when they are such excellent schoolmasters as, for instance, Lewes, who wrote the famous Goethebiography. What I tried to write is based on the inspiration of a Goethe who is no longer on the earth—It is the continuation of his ideas in a certain sphere after death. I wrote what could be written out of a certain feeling of a living relationship with so-called deceased souls. I mention this as an example and indeed not out of conceit and vanity, but because it is connected with the question as to what human beings must do in order to become more receptive for that which comes out of the spiritual world.

Human beings must seek a connection with the dead; they must find the way into the worlds where the dead live, but in a sensible, sound way, in a really fitting way and not spiritistically. The dead continue to speak after their death and we have seen that what they say, and what they send down as impulses, is alive. It is alive, not in the experiences we gain through our sense and not in our thoughts, but in our feelings, and in the reality of the impulses of our will. This is where it lives. But then we must also find within us that which inclines us to approach the spiritual world. Antipathy for imaginations is connected with unbelief in the possibility of being able to approach the spiritual world—antipathy for imaginations which wish to enter from the spiritual world in the form of impulses permeating our actions, and wish to enter also the social events and the moral, ethical events in human evolution. They alone can make human beings free.

Two things are needed in our age: To realize that the acknowledgement of the Mystery of Golgotha must be a free deed of the human soul and to penetrate wholly into this truth. And then, to seek in a real way the bridge to the dead, not merely in an abstract way, or in an abstract faith. In our age there is a great aversion also to this. People do not see at once through all that speaks against it. What ideal have human beings today, as far as social life is concerned? They think: “We are clever people; we were born and went to school—and that is why we are so clever; we are clever human beings, and consequently we know very well what must happen in social life. We call together meetings, elect officers, councilors, parliaments, and whatever all the rest may be called. There people discuss what must happen in social life. Naturally, for we are clever; and when such clever people as those of the present age come together, the right things must result”—This is the idea, but it is based on an assumption which is not correct—namely, that people know right away what is right.

Have you met anyone who knows what is the right thing for the year 1917 (the year of this lecture)? Not those who are now twenty years old, and love to sit in Parliament in order to talk and determine what is the right thing for 1917! Those who died long ago know this best of all. We should ask them what attitude we should adopt. This answers to a great extent the question as to how we can improve our social life—When we learn to consult the dead.

As physical human beings up to the end of our life, we know as a rule only what is convenient to us personally. Only when we are dead does our knowledge become really mature. Then it is mature to such an extent that it can really be applied to social life. But one must not think that the dead can have a direct influence, as it were, physically in the course of events, more or less like physical human beings. The dead know more than the living what must happen socially, but human beings must listen to them. And the human beings living on the physical plane must be the instruments carrying out the knowledge of the dead. Modern human beings must learn above all to become instruments. But—let us use this expression even though it is an unpleasant one—parliaments where human being will strive to let the dead be heard also will not exist for a long time to come. But no well-being can come in certain spheres unless the dead are consulted, unless social life is spiritualized also from this direction. Before believing that the knowledge gained here on earth through birth, surroundings, and schooling is ripe for social impulses, we should penetrate into that which has really become ripe for social impulses—the wisdom of those who have already laid aside the physical body, a wisdom which can reveal significant points of view if we really investigate it. Just imagine how much deeper the life of feeling becomes, what a deepening the human soul experiences, when that which I have now expressed in the form of thoughts becomes feeling, and when the ancient myths which connected human beings with their ancestors are replaced by the link which I have mentioned—when a concrete spiritual life will again permeate our spiritual atmosphere, and what can thus be grasped through spiritual science, in the form of thoughts, passes into the soul and feelings, and human beings will really live in this!

• 1. haulm: stems of beans and peas and potatoes and grasses collectively as used for thatching and bedding.

From the lectures that I have been privileged to give here over the course of many years, it will have become clear that the world view from which the content of these lectures was drawn is based on a very specific, one might say, attitude, or at least that at least one such attitude is associated with that world view, which can be more closely defined by saying: It is not possible to give a correct lecture within theosophy or spiritual science if the soul is not imbued with a certain tolerance towards every system of belief, an inner tolerance that can bring a devoted understanding to every kind of belief. For the actual school of thought that comes into consideration within spiritual science only makes sense if it is kept far removed from everything that can be called fanaticism and sectarianism. Such things are so widespread in our time that when someone views the world from his own point of view, he is apt to think that anyone with a different line of thought must be a blockhead, or at least lacking in earnest sense of truth or in powers of perception and conscientiousness. For external reasons alone, it would be a pity if Theosophy were to pay homage to such fanatical sentiments, because it must be admitted that, to gain a thorough and comprehensive grasp of the Theosophical world-view, a great deal of patience and time is necessary for those who wish to penetrate deeply into it. large part of our contemporaries who draw their convictions from spiritual science or theosophy do not do so on the basis of a thorough knowledge of all the underlying principles of truth, but rather, understandably, form their convictions out of certain emotional and sentimental interests. This does not mean that the latter are denied their right! Naturally, everyone has a personal right to their own conviction, but it is equally impossible to thoroughly defend the spiritual science world view if the conviction has been gained only in this way. Moreover, since it is only possible to become familiar with spiritual science through difficult, dedicated work, it is understandable that some of our contemporaries feel repelled by Theosophy, and as a rule these are not the people with the worst sense of truth.

We must find it understandable that, as things stand, those of our contemporaries who draw their convictions from science and culture will have difficulties upon difficulties to come to Theosophy; for such people in particular, refutations and contradictions pile up in abundance in the face of what confronts them as Theosophy. But to speak of ill will would be contrary to the tolerance that Theosophy should always practice. Therefore, the task for this evening should be to give a picture of the doubts that may confront the honest seeker of truth when he approaches Theosophy, and then the task for the lecture the day after tomorrow - “How to Justify Theosophy” - is how such doubts can be dispelled.

Even if today's lecture appears to be somewhat disconcerting, that is because it is intended to put itself in the opponent's shoes and present the main lines of his well-founded doubts and refutations. This will also best achieve what is to be shown, namely that the objections of the opponents should be taken as seriously as possible. I do not want to present my opinion, but to make a serious attempt to put myself completely in the position of the opponent, without touching on those lightly-worded objections that are already answered by saying that the opponent should try to get to know Theosophy more closely. Thus, I do not want to address the immature, but rather the concerns that really arise for those who, from the culture of the present, want to take note of the theosophical worldview and then cannot go along with Theosophy, because otherwise they would have to break with everything with everything that arises from the culture of the present, a culture whose reasons cannot be refuted, and which must rather raise justified and thoroughly justified objections, which Theosophy as such must recognize without being able to refute them to the same extent.

Therefore, I would first like to present an extract of the theosophical worldview to you, in the way that it has already been explained in as much detail as possible in many lectures. First of all, in Theosophy you will find the assumption of a supersensible world behind the world of the senses and the mind. Then Theosophy invokes certain methods of research that differ from what is taught in our time by the methods of research and thinking. The world of the senses, it is said, teaches that it is explainable from within itself and for this purpose does not need to seek a supersensible world behind it. Or the opinion is expressed by others that a supersensible world must indeed be assumed behind the sensory world, but that man cannot penetrate it, hence the limits of knowledge must be assumed.

Theosophy emphasizes that man, with his ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the external world of the intellect and, in addition to this, on that of the inner observation of the soul, but that it is also possible to bring the inner life of the soul to a high level of development. When this happens through certain inner exercises, the practitioner, if he practices in the right way and with sufficient persistence, will encounter a high transcendental world from the depths of his soul as he develops his spiritual and mental faculties, so that the sufficiently advanced researcher in the field of the spiritual world can recognize transcendental facts. Then a person developed in this way will be able to think about the nature of man differently than the ordinary consciousness is able to do, which can only recognize the part of the environment that can be perceived by the senses.

Now, however, Theosophy teaches that with heightened consciousness, three supersensible parts can be recognized in the human being itself. Namely, the “etheric body” is said to still be active in the physical human body as the actual animator and shaper of the physical body, which can also be found in animals and even in plants, and which works to ensure that the substances composing the outer body do not follow their otherwise inherent forces and laws as long as they are under the influence of the ether body in the organism, but only after death, when they are left to themselves again. Theosophy or secret science recognizes a third aspect of human nature in the so-called astral body; every living being that develops consciousness does so through the powers of the astral body, which permeates the physical and etheric bodies, which we find in humans and animals, but not in plants. Human nature, however, has a fourth element, the so-called ego, which elevates man from animality and thereby presents him as the crown of earthly creation.

Further pursuit and deeper penetration into the knowledge of man reveals that man differs essentially from the sleeping when awake; spiritual science teaches that in the latter, the astral body with the ego separates from the physical and etheric bodies, and these latter two go into the spiritual world. But in this world, both are then surrounded by darkness from falling asleep to waking up, since for the normally developed person without his physical-etheric tools and without the tool of his mind, nothing is perceptible, and with these only in the physical world, because he does not yet possess any organs for recognizing the spiritual world.

In this view of waking life, spiritual science points out that everything a person has experienced through his senses in his mind, and everything that has happened to him as luck or misfortune, has been deposited in his soul, which carries it through the gate of death in the higher spiritual limbs of the human being. These remain with the human being in a certain way, namely as the I, the astral body and as the essence of the etheric body. With these elements of his being, the human being undergoes experiences in the spiritual world after death, in which he then gathers strength from everything and processes it in a unique way, in order to then, after a longer or shorter time, be able to move back into a physical body that is made available to him within the line of inheritance. In this way it will receive certain qualities from the parents, but the essential abilities will be formed in it, that is to say in its physical body and the next higher members, by its own spiritual-soul core, which his life between death and a new birth, in the purely spiritual world, under different physical and earthly conditions, had further experiences that led him to develop powers that made him suitable for a new life on earth. Everything that the person has experienced in the way of important thoughts, impulses and feelings carries over into a new life, so that this, in its peculiarity, is partly a consequence of the previous life(s).

The various elements of human nature belong to several worlds; the spiritual-mental is of earlier origin than the physical-etheric part, so that we can speak of a spiritual-mental world preceding the physical world, which is, as it were, an earlier embodiment of our earth planet. We must turn our gaze to this and many other things, as well as to the future formations of the same, in order to get an idea of the basis of theosophical science.

If a person with a serious scientific mind approaches such ideas, they will get the impression that everything that the humanities and science of the last few centuries have researched has been turned upside down, for example the fact that the physical body, in all its organs, is permeated by an etheric body, which is seen as the carrier of life. Should not anyone who has immersed themselves in science, especially that of the last two centuries, say that with such a view, Theosophy adopts an amateurish position that is not justified by anything, because what is this etheric body if not the resurgence of the vital force that has been broken since the eighteenth century? The chemical compounds, mixtures and separations can be explained by the forces that can be recognized in chemistry and physics! Apart from these, certain compounds of substances are also seen to occur that are only seen to form in the living organism, not in the external, non-organic nature; hence it was said in the past that there is a life force in the living organism that permeates the organs of the same in a peculiar way.

In the nineteenth century, science made progress with Liebig and Wöhler, namely in that these two researchers also produced in their laboratories those compounds that apparently could only form in the living organism, without claiming the organism's supposed life force. What was more natural than to assume that, once such compounds had been produced outside the organism, they would also have come about inside the living organism without the help of the assumed life force? If science were sufficiently developed, there would be no reason to assume that further, more complicated substances could not be produced in the future, and indeed in the laboratory, without the help of the so-called life force.

If we continue this train of thought, we must eventually be convinced that the living organism also contains only those forces that can be found in the natural world, so that with sufficient scientific progress, even simply organized living beings could be represented! It should be readily admitted that the fact that this possibility does not yet exist does not in any way contradict the possibility of such hopes at a later stage. What, then, is the etheric body of theosophy other than a transfer of the life force long since rejected by science? What else is apparent than that theosophy does not know the above-indicated scope of scientific discoveries and the well-founded prospects associated with them? Nothing but pure lay thinking, only dilettantism is the assumption of an etheric or life body.

This objection is fully justified from our intellectual culture, and a serious scientist cannot lightly dismiss it.

But if we now look at what we have characterized as the astral body, the vehicle of consciousness, we see that these appearances of consciousness present themselves as supersensible experiences, and everything we know of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and impulses of the will belongs to the supersensible world. Nineteenth-century natural scientists also went this far; one need only recall the famous speech given in 1872 by Du Bois-Reymond in Leipzig on the limits of natural knowledge. According to the then prevailing view, the brain was thought to be composed of atoms, so it was not possible to penetrate to an understanding of how the appearances of consciousness should arise from the constant or changing position of these atoms. This radical difference between external appearances was already seriously noticed by natural scientists at that time, who took into account substances and supersensible soul experiences. The latter were regarded as constant accompaniments of the former. The life of ideas changes, for example, with a greater or lesser influx of blood to the brain, so that the phenomena of consciousness are bound to material processes, and the natural scientist therefore finds no difference between such phenomena and, for example, the force of gravity, which is also supersensible and can only be perceived in its effects, not itself, just as supersensible as consciousness. It is bound to substances that attract each other in inverse proportion to the square of the distances and in direct proportion to the masses [...].

Accordingly, for example, Benedict says in his 'Seelenkunde': The phenomena of consciousness within our soul life are no different in their attachment to the substances of our body than gravity, magnetism, [electricity] and the like; why should not such or similar forces emanate from our brain as those forces as accompanying phenomena of material processes? The sentence cannot be defended against exact scientific reasoning, that the phenomena of the soul are something other than the accompanying phenomena of matter. And we must admit: Benedict's principle is one that a person from the point of view of contemporary culture cannot easily get away from, but instead would have to accept that the soul forces of man would be released in death, and in the same way, gravity would have to be be able to break away in the destruction of the material, in order to pass in the meantime into a special realm, a kind of gravity realm [gravity heaven], until it finds an opportunity to reincarnate in a new material. That is a logical objection that a scientific conscience cannot easily get over.

Let us turn to what Theosophy says about the phenomena of sleeping and waking; in contrast to this, the modern scientist believes that the explanation is completely in the air that a supersensible part of the being emerges from the sleeping person. We will therefore try to explain sleeping and waking on the assumption that soul processes are bound to the substances of the body like gravity is bound to every physical substance. We therefore assume that the waking activity, through its wear and tear, leads the human organism to a state where the individual organs are no longer able to maintain waking consciousness, namely in such a way that certain poisons are produced and accumulated, which ultimately cause the person to fall asleep. Because consciousness is thus extinguished during sleep, the purely [animalistic], or rather, [vegetative] activity of the human being sets in, which works out the fatigue or toxin substances again, so that he is regenerated and can enter into the consciousness of waking again.

Thus, we would have a self-regulating mechanism in sleep and wakefulness throughout life. This is an explanation that is entirely in line with our materialistic way of thinking. Hypotheses of this kind can be justified in detail, if erroneous, but because of materialism; it depends here mainly on whether they can be thought logically without the assumption that when you fall asleep something goes out of the person and returns to him when he wakes up. So, from its point of view, scientific thinking must reject the theosophical explanation of sleeping and waking.

In the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, we find ourselves on completely uncertain ground with regard to the latter conditions, while spiritual scientific thinking can only conceive of the present life as the effect of previous lives. But there are also models in natural science thinking that point to this, so that, for example, according to the so-called biogenetic law, all animals and humans must go through all stages of their ancestors' earlier development. human germ shows fish forms 21 days after fertilization, indicating that in times long past, his bodily ancestors were fish-like; thus, there is a certain indication in the present developmental process of earlier bodily conditions. This is how one could characterize old developmental states. Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that it is not possible to explain all the characteristics of a person from his ancestors, but only by assuming a spiritual-soul core of being, for example by pointing out that children of the same parents should actually be much more similar than twins usually are.

But all this will not suffice for scientific thinking, which objects that every human being must arise from the mixing of the characteristics of father and mother in their mutual interaction, so that accordingly children of different ages of the parents would have to take different forms, since they would have arisen from the most diverse mixing ratios. Furthermore, at the present stage of advanced research, or precisely despite it, scientific thinking can say: Who should be able to assess the fine structures of the mixing germ?

In addition, it seems frivolous to the modern, materialistic thinker to want to trace the most diverse properties back to earlier lives; because first you would have to eliminate everything that happened in early childhood. Thus, for example, in the case of a sculptor, one would be tempted to trace an outstanding talent back to a past life, whereas it could just as easily be explained by the fact that the person in question had frequent and stimulating contact with sculptures and artists in his youth. (We no longer know for sure, but it had an effect on the subconscious.) You can never be too careful in gathering all the relevant information, in order to provide the appropriate and correct explanation.

In science, there is something called a useful working hypothesis. For example, sunlight used to be seen as the radiation of a fine luminiferous substance that travelled from the sun to the planets, including our earth. But since this could not explain all the phenomena of light, the hypothesis or theory of the cosmic ether was adopted, although no one can directly prove whether a substance flows or the ether moves in waves. But if the undulation theory is correct, then it can be used to explain the phenomena of light and colors and to predict them under certain conditions. Even if the processes take place differently, this theory proves to be useful. It is similar with the Darwinian theory, which cites fish as an intermediate link in the development of humans; it is, after all, possible to understand, for example, the fins of fish as the original limb for the locomotor organs of higher animals and so on, and to bring the lower animals in their development to higher ones in the most diverse organic areas through this explanatory hypothesis with humans in connection.

The assumption of repeated lives on earth could prove fruitful in explaining happy or unhappy physical and social living conditions. But seriously, one cannot treat reincarnation and karma in the same way that a natural scientist proceeds with his working hypotheses, because in natural science we have only one explanation for many phenomena; we trace many phenomena back to a single principle. Thus, as already indicated, the higher animals can be traced back to fish-like ancestors, an assumption that can be elevated to a law through an infinite number of cases and traced back to a single principle. On the other hand, with every human being, we would have to come up with a new hypothesis for each of the many previous lives; if a natural scientist were to attempt this in his field, it would be declared absolutely inadmissible, since, on the contrary, he endeavors to find a common explanation for as many individual events as possible. The idea that all human beings live according to karma is only an abstraction, because each person must be traced back to their own past life. In this way, one could, in the most diverse ways, create justified difficulties from conscientious thinking, raising countless objections from a scientific point of view.

But special objections arise for the materialistic-scientific thinker when he observes how the spiritual researcher invokes a higher, spiritual vision, which the researcher tells him can only be formed through higher soul powers, whereby this spiritual scientific method of the researcher is diametrically opposed to the materialistic-scientific requirement that at any place, at any time and for any person, provided that the essential prerequisites are met, a verification of the established claim should be possible, quite independently of the processes in the interior of his soul. These are completely irrelevant for the scientific researcher for the application of his research method; rather, the second and third researchers should be able to determine the same as the first. This fundamental requirement is contrary to the spiritual scientific method, according to which something can be researched by developing subjective psychic powers; but this is unacceptable to the scientific researcher; the results of such a research method are unprovable to him. He can therefore only classify them in the realm of mere belief, to which everyone can relate as they wish. Thus, all this appears unacceptable to the materialistically thinking person, and to anyone who approaches Theosophy with his own methods and then experiences what and how it researches and teaches.

Numerous other objections arise in the moral, religious and spiritual spheres of life. It is objected that in the theosophical view, what we experience is a consequence of previous lives, and the thoughts and actions of the present life are the cause of the phenomena of the coming life; it is objected that such a view leads to an egotistical morality and conduct if evil is to lead to something that must be compensated for by pain and so on, while good would bring happiness and joy. Would not a selfish morality develop if, for the reasons indicated, one refrained from evil and practiced good? Compared to such a selfish conception of morality, what we encounter from the materialistic view of morality seems like heroism, which assumes that with death the phenomena of consciousness are extinguished like a flame whose fuel has been consumed; a view that assumes that the deeds of the individual gain nothing for himself, but that their consequences, good and evil, flow only in the general world process. Even if this theory can be refuted, it still depends on external reality, not on logical reasons, but on the effect that such a theory has in life.

Among noble minds in the West, we find the views of materialistic morality described above, for example in the Munich Frohschammer, who put forward a very noteworthy moral objection when he said: What does the constant recurrence of a spiritual-soul core lead to? To the view that precisely that which we here in life regard as one of the noblest relationships, namely the love between the sexes, provides the cause for repeatedly, without end, imprisoning one soul after another in a physical body; therefore, I consider reincarnation morally reprehensible. Anyone who devotes themselves to the contemplation of the transcendental world, who turns away from the external world and falls into a state of estrangement from it through a life-denying asceticism, will by no means consider reincarnation to be an ethical or moral teaching. The personal experiences of the spiritual researcher can and will easily be met with contradiction, and how can we be sure that these subjective experiences are not just an illusion?

Such a view is also theoretically refutable, but for anyone who is trying to decide whether or not to turn to Theosophy, such doubts weigh very heavily on the soul, especially when they are combined with Kepler's example, who, as we know, also practised astrology, a peculiar form of astronomy involving high spiritual concepts. We learn from him how he was repeatedly compelled to cast horoscopes for prominent personalities, and then wondered anxiously whether he should explain the future events in full or rather communicate them in veiled terms. So we can see that even the great Kepler, despite his scientific conscience, sometimes comes close to charlatanry. Abysses of a peculiar kind open up at the transition from an old to a new science, at the boundary of which stands the figure of Kepler. If such a significant man is, as is thought, not always protected from dubious obscurities, how is an ordinary person to develop the steadfast qualities when he reaches supersensible insights in an unfree and often immature state, in order to be the bearer of an immovable sense of truth under all circumstances!

Thus, the fear arises that clairvoyant qualities, when penetrating into higher spiritual worlds, lead to dishonesty as a side effect of such abilities, and opponents of Theosophy therefore say: “Morally contestable is even the method, not the development itself, which is supposed to lead to seeing into higher worlds.” Thus, for example, we see how Faust is accompanied by Mephistopheles, the bearer of magical powers; we can sense how close this comes to him when Goethe has him say:

If I could remove magic from my path, forget the spells altogether...

What is not readily within a person thus approaches him from outside as a temptation to immorality.

In religious terms, it is one of the noblest or perhaps the noblest view of man that he stands before a divine being that has created and redeemed him. What does Theosophy make of this supreme divine being? It regards the soul and spiritual core of the self as a spark in the totality of the divine being; the human ego does good and evil, bears the redemption within itself and does not look up to the God of retributive justice, who is instead relocated in one's own soul and can lead the human being to a delusion of unjustified esteem. The core of feeling and perception of religion, the sense of childship, is therefore in danger of being perverted into a worship of self-righteousness.

Thus we have seen how the theosophical line of reasoning and general view of the world and life, and so on, is incompatible with that of other thinkers. For example, human conscience cannot be understood externally, but here the scientific thinker says – compare the book on conscience by Dr. Paul Ree – that conscience is the final result of human development. In the face of this view, spiritual science has to develop an inner tolerance and not describe the opponent as a drip or even as a malicious person, but it should respond to his objections, which seem worthy of consideration due to their weight. Present-day scientists are indeed demanding completely different ways of proving the supersensible truths of the higher worlds, for example in the way shown by Ludwig Deinhard in the first half of his book 'The Mystery of Man', where he leads to the assumption of survival after death and to an understanding of the survival of the same individuality, which is identical with that of the physical-earthly life. This path has often been tried by honest scholars, and we can see that all of them are led from the same established phenomena to the same hypothesis, that after death man exists as a spirit.

For example, the so-called cross-correspondence could make a significant impression on researchers working in this field, in which two or more people, prompted from the depths of their souls, write down the same thing, which then collectively points to a recently deceased personality who was a leader or enthusiastic participant in a movement that had set itself the goal of researching such relationships and it borders on the conscientiousness of the argumentation and the completeness of the same, as the natural scientist demands in his field of phenomena, when in such a cross-correspondence a lady in India sends the messages from the spiritual world that have come to her through the use of her hidden powers of the soul to a personality in London, at an address that is given to her in the same occult way and vice versa. Now there are two types: on the one hand, there are people who allow themselves to be convinced of the existence of a transcendental world by means of processes that border on scientific methods, such as Weber and Zöllner; on the other hand, there are people like the philosopher Wundt, who believed that the researchers mentioned earlier are not entitled to draw such momentous conclusions from the observed phenomena, that the scholar is too gullible and naive for observation and judgment, and that the conjurer is the most suitable examiner for this. He points to the events in a meeting in which samples of excellent mind reading were demonstrated by a medium who had both eyes carefully bound, and in which the impresario was given the information to be transmitted on pieces of paper. The impresario then apparently energetically signaled the medium what was written down and then asked what was on the piece of paper. The medium then stated this with great certainty. Careful observation ruled out any agreed signals, and yet the medium reproduced the most peculiar and intricate messages. The explanation of this phenomenon was provided by a conjurer who recognized the impresario as a ventriloquist whose medium, without speaking herself, only moved her lips during the messages. Professor Weber, who, as already indicated, was keenly interested in the study of occult phenomena and supersensory worlds, had convinced himself of their reality through his experiments; he once saw a sleight of hand artist operating with a banknote, which he made grow to enormous size before the eyes of his audience, without the help of four-dimensional forces, but only by using his sleight of hand skills. Weber was extremely affected when he saw this. Therefore, skepticism may arise when it comes to scrutiny by scholars.

In the first-mentioned experiment of cross-correspondence, one does not even need to raise the objection that someone in India might have read the address of a lady in London without remembering it, and might unconsciously remember this fact from it; one could indeed completely repeat the whole experiment to eliminate such doubts. But apart from that, if one wants to prove something through experiments with such writings, especially that a deceased personality still lives as an individuality in a spiritual world, one is easily tempted to want to prove too much, since the possibility must be admitted that the effect, even of a deceased person, on people still living as a spiritual movement that continues to vibrate after their death, and therefore the premature proof of identity has been questioned. Just as electric waves can be spread over the whole earth by wireless telegraphy, so it is conceivable that the activity and thinking of a person could continue to have an effect for years after his death without the help of mechanical aids, without it being necessary to assume the survival of a human individuality after death.

Thus, as we have already heard in the short time of this lecture, there are objections upon objections, without these themselves being chosen as easy objections, so that one would have to take the view that Theosophy cannot be reconciled with present-day science. In the next lecture, the attempt will be made to show whether this test cannot be made in another way.

To illustrate this in advance, it may be recalled that when Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published in 1867, in which, among other things, the unsuitability of the purely materialistic view, for example that of Darwin, was shown, there was a storm of indignation among natural scientists, in which the arguments of Hartmann's work were described as dilettantism. Many refutations appeared, among them one entitled: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Descent...”. In it, everything that could possibly be said against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was collected. This writing appeared as the best against Hartmann's presumptions, and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better than the anonymous author of this excellent refutation. Then Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author, the storm of approval soon ceased, and people no longer wanted to recognize him as a member of the materialistic school of thought after he had shown that he could say everything that could be said by the opposing side if he were to take the position of his opponents.

But is it the case that such objections can or cannot be upheld, or, in the former case, is there a possibility for Theosophy to establish its case and refute the objections? We must therefore try to gain a point of view within spiritual science from which Theosophy can be established. If this is possible, then it will become clear whether the arguments put forward in this way are appreciated by the opponents of Theosophy, whether it is actually able to refute the objections of these loyal opponents and to show what it still has to say.

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.

[ 1 ] Those who struggled for clarity in the great problems of world and life conceptions at the end of the eighteenth century looked up to two men of great intellectual-spiritual power, Kant and Goethe. Another person who strove for such a clarity in the most forceful way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he had become acquainted with Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote:

I am living in a new world. . . . Things I had thought could never be proven to me, for instance, the concept of absolute freedom and duty, now have been proven to me and I feel much happier because of it. It is incomprehensible what a high degree of respect for humanity, what strength this philosophy gives us; what a blessing it is for an age in which morality had been destroyed in its foundation, and in which the concept of duty had been struck from all dictionaries.

And when, on the basis of Kant's conception, he had built his own Groundwork of all Scientific Knowledge, he sent the book to Goethe with the words:

I consider you, and always have considered you, to be the representative of the purest spiritual force of feeling on the level of development that mankind has reached at the present time. To you philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is its touchstone.

A similar attitude to both representative spirits was taken by Schiller. He writes about Kant on October 28, 1794:

I am not at all frightened by the prospect that the law of change, which shows no mercy to any human or divine work, will also destroy the form of the Kantian as well as every other philosophy. Its foundation, however, will not have to fear this destiny, for since the human race exists, and as long as there has been a reason, this philosophy has been silently acknowledged and mankind as a whole has acted in agreement with its principles.

Schiller describes Goethe's conception in a letter addressed to him on August 23, 1794:

For a long time I have, although from a considerable distance, watched the course of your spirit, and with ever increasing admiration I have observed the path you have marked out for yourself. You are seeking the necessary in nature, but you are seeking it along the most difficult road, which any spirit weaker than yours would be most careful to avoid. You take hold of nature as a whole in order to obtain light in a particular point; in the totality of nature's various types of phenomena, you seek the explanation for the individual. . . . Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and from the cradle been surrounded by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened; perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With the first perception of things you would have caught the form of the Necessary, and from your first experiences the grand style would have developed in you. But now, having been born a German, your Greek spirit having thus been cast into a northern world, you had no choice but that of becoming a northern artist yourself, or of supplying your imagination with what it is refused by reality through the help of your power of thought and thus, to produce a second Greece, as it were, from within and by means of reason.

[ 2 ] Seen from the present age, Kant and Goethe can be considered spirits in whom the evolution of world conception of modern times reveals itself as in an important moment of its development. These spirits experience intensely the enigmatic problems of existence, which have formerly, in a more preparatory stage, been latent in the substrata of the life of the soul.

[ 3 ] To illustrate the effect that Kant exerted on his age, the statements of two men who stood at the full height of their time's culture may be quoted. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788:

For heaven's sake, do buy two books, Kant's Foundation for a Metaphysics of Morals and his Critique of Practical Reason. Kant is not a light of the world but a complete radiating solar system all at once.

Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement:

Kant undertook the greatest work that philosophical reason has perhaps ever owed to a single man. . . . Three things remain unmistakably certain if one wants to determine the fame that Kant bestowed on his nation and the benefit that he brought to speculative thinking. Some of the things he destroyed will never be raised again, some of those to which he laid the foundation will never perish; most important of all, he brought about a reform that has no equal in the whole history of human thought.

[ 4 ] This shows how Kant's contemporaries saw a revolutionary event in the development of world conception in his achievement. Kant himself considered it so important for this development that he judged its significance equal to that which Copernicus's discovery of the planetary motion holds for natural science.

[ 5 ] Various currents of philosophical development of previous times continue their effect in Kant's thinking and are transformed in his thought into questions that determine the character of his world conception. The reader who feels the characteristic traits in those of Kant's writings that are most significant for his view is aware of a special appreciation of Kant for the mathematical mode of thinking as one of these traits. Kant feels that what is known in the way mathematical thinking knows, carries the certainty of its truth in itself. The fact that man is capable of mathematics proves that he is capable of truth. Whatever else one may doubt, the truth of mathematics cannot be doubted.

[ 6 ] With this appreciation of mathematics the thought tendency of modern history of philosophy, which had put the characteristic stamp on Spinoza's realm of thoughts, appears in Kant's mind. Spinoza wants to construct his thought sequences in such a form that they develop strictly from one another as the propositions of mathematical science. Nothing but what is thought in the mode of thought of mathematics supplies the firm foundation on which, according to Spinoza, the human ego feels itself secure in the spirit of the modern age. Descartes had also thought in this way, and Spinoza had derived from him many stimulating suggestions. Out of the state of doubt he had to secure a fulcrum for a world conception for himself. In the mere passive reception of a thought into the soul, Descartes could not recognize such a support yielding force. This Greek attitude toward the world of thought is no longer possible for the man of the modern age. Within the self-conscious soul something must be found that lends its support to the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, this is supplied by the fulfillment of the postulate that the soul should deal with thought in general as it does in the mathematical mode of conception. As Descartes proceeded from his state of doubt to his conclusion, “I think, therefore I am,” and the statements connected with it, he felt secure in these operations because they seemed to him to possess the clarity that is inherent in mathematics. The same general mental conviction leads Spinoza to elaborate a world picture for himself in which everything is unfolding its effect with strict necessity like the laws of mathematics. The one divine substance, which permeates all beings of the world with the determination of mathematical law, admits the human ego only if it surrenders itself completely to this substance, if it allows its self-consciousness to be absorbed by the world consciousness of the divine substance. This mathematical disposition of mind, which is caused by a longing of the “ego” for the security it needs, leads this “ego” to a world picture in which, through its striving for security, it has lost itself, its self-dependent, firm stand on a spiritual world ground, its freedom and its hope for an eternal self-dependent existence.

[ 7 ] Leibniz's thoughts tended in the opposite direction. The human soul is, for him, the self dependent monad, strictly closed off in itself. But this monad experiences only what it contains within itself; the world order, which presents itself “from without, as it were,” is only a delusion. Behind it lies the true world, which consists only of monads, the order of which is the predetermined (pre-established) harmony that does not show itself to the outer observation. This world conception leaves its self-dependence to the human soul, the self-dependent existence in the universe, its freedom and hope for an eternal significance in the world's evolution. If, however, it means to remain consistent with its basic principle, it cannot avoid maintaining that everything known by the soul is only the soul itself, that it is incapable of going outside the self-conscious ego and that the universe cannot become revealed to the soul in its truth from without.

[ 8 ] For Descartes and for Leibniz, the convictions they had acquired in their religious education were still effective enough that they adopted them in their philosophical world pictures, thereby following motivations that were not really derived from the basic principles of their world pictures. Into Descartes's world picture there crept the conception of a spiritual world that he had obtained through religious channels. It unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity of his world order and thus he did not feel that his world picture tended to extinguish his “ego.” In Leibniz, religious impulses exerted their influence in a similar way, and it is for this reason that it escaped him that his world picture provided for no possibility to find anything except the content of the soul itself. Leibniz believed, nevertheless, that he could assume the existence of the spiritual world outside the “ego.” Spinoza, through a certain courageous trait of his personality, actually drew the consequences of his world picture. To obtain the security for this world picture on which his self-consciousness insisted, he renounced the self-dependence of this self-consciousness and found his supreme happiness in feeling himself as a part of the one divine substance.

With regard to Kant we must raise the question of how he was compelled to feel with respect to the currents of world conception, which had produced its prominent representatives in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. For all soul impulses that had been at work in these three were also active in him, and in his soul these impulses effected each other and caused the riddles of world and mankind with which Kant found himself confronted. A glance at the life of the spirit in the Age of Kant informs us of the general trend of Kant's feeling with respect to these riddles. Significantly, Lessing's (1729–1781) attitude toward the questions of world conception is symptomatic of this intellectual life. Lessing sums up his credo in the words, “The transformation of revealed truths into truths of reason is absolutely necessary if the human race is to derive any help from them.” The eighteenth century has been called the century of the Enlightenment. The representative spirits of Germany understood enlightenment in the sense of Lessing's remark. Kant declared the enlightenment to be “man's departure from his self-caused bondage of mind,” and as its motto he chose the words, “Have courage to use your own mind.” Even thinkers as prominent as Lessing, however, at first had succeeded in no more than transforming rationally traditional doctrines of belief derived from the state of the “self-caused bondage of mind.” They did not penetrate to a pure rational view as Spinoza did. It was inevitable that Spinoza's doctrine, when it became known in Germany, should make a deep impression on such spirits.

Spinoza really had undertaken the task of using his own mind, but in the course of this process he had arrived at results that were entirely different from those of the German philosophers of the enlightenment. His influence had to be so much the more significant since the lines of his reasoning, constructed according to mathematical methods, carried a much greater convincing power than the current of Leibniz's philosophy, which effected the spirits of that age in the form “developed” by Wolff. From Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth, we receive an idea of how this school of thought impressed deeper spirits as it reached them through the channels of Wolff's conceptions. Goethe tells of the impressions the lectures of Professor Winckler in Leipzig, given in the spirit of Wolff, had made on him.

At the beginning, I attended my classes industriously and faithfully, but the philosophy offered in no way succeeded in enlightening me. It seemed strange to me that in logic I was to tear apart, isolate and destroy, as it were, the intellectual operations I had been handling with the greatest ease since the days of my childhood, in order to gain an insight into their correct use. I thought I knew just about as much as the lecturer about the nature of things, the world and God, and on more than one occasion it seemed to me that there was a considerable hitch in the matter.

About his occupation with Spinoza's writings, however, the poet tells us, “I surrendered to this reading and, inspecting myself, I believed never to have seen the world so distinctly.”

There were, however, only a few people who could surrender to Spinoza's mode of thought as frankly as Goethe. Most readers were led into deep conflicts of world conception by this philosophy. Goethe's friend, F. H. Jacobi, is typical of them. He believed that he had to admit that reason, left to its own resources, would not lead to the doctrines of belief, but to the view at which Spinoza had arrived—that the world is ruled by eternal, necessary laws. Thus, Jacobi found himself confronted with an important decision: Either to trust his reason and abandon the doctrines of his creed or to deny reason the possibility to lead to the highest insights in order to be able to retain his belief. He chose the latter. He maintained that man possessed a direct certainty in his innermost soul, a secure belief by virtue of which he was capable of feeling the truth of the conception of a personal God, of the freedom of will and of immortality, so that these convictions were entirely independent of the insights of reason that were leaning on logical conclusions, and had no reference to these things but only to the external things of nature. In this way, Jacobi deposed the knowledge of reason to make room for a belief that satisfied the needs of the heart. Goethe who was not at all pleased by this dethronement of reason, wrote to his friend, “God has punished you with metaphysics and placed a thorn in your flesh; he has blessed me with physics. I cling to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave everything to you that you call, and may continue to call, religion. Your trust rests in belief in God; mine in seeing.” The philosophy of the enlightenment ended by confronting the spirits with the alternative, either to supplant the revealed truths by truths of reason in the sense of Spinoza, or to declare war on the knowledge of reason itself.

[ 9 ] Kant also found himself confronted with this choice. The attitude he took and how he made his decision is apparent from the clear account in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason.

Now let us assume that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in its strictest sense) as a property of our will, pleading practical principles inherent in our reason that would be positively impossible without the presupposition of freedom. Speculative reason, however, having proven that this is not even thinkable, the former assumption, made on behalf of morality, would have to give way to the latter, whose opposite contains an obvious self-contradiction and therefore freedom, and with it morality, would have to give way to the mechanism of nature. But since, as the case lies, for the possibility of morality nothing more is required than that the idea of freedom be not contradictory in itself, and may at least be considered as thinkable without the future necessity of being understood, such that granting the freedom of a given action would not place any obstacle into the attempt of considering the same action (see in other relation) as a mechanism of nature. In this way, the doctrine of morality maintains its place . . . which could, however, not have happened if our critical philosophy had not previously enlightened us about our inevitable ignorance with respect to things in themselves, restricting all that we can know theoretically to mere phenomena. In the same way, the positive value of the critical principles of pure reason can be brought to light with regard to the concepts of God and of the simple nature of our soul, which I do, however, leave undiscussed here for the sake of brevity. I cannot even assume God, freedom and immortality for the use of practical reason if I do not at the same time deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to excessive insight. . . . I, therefore, had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief. . . .

We see here how Kant stands on a similar ground as Jacobi in regard to knowledge and belief.

[ 10 ] The way in which Kant had arrived at his results had led through the thought world of Hume. In Hume he had found the view that the things and events of the world in no way reveal connections of thought to the human soul, that the human mind imagined such connections only through habit while it is perceiving the things and events of the world simultaneously in space and successively in time. Kant was impressed by Hume's opinion according to which the human mind does not receive from the world what appears to it as knowledge. For Kant, the thought emerged as a possibility: What is knowledge for the human mind does not come from the reality of the world.

[ 11 ] Through Hume's arguments, Kant was, according to his own confession, awakened out of the slumber into which he had fallen in following Wolff's train of ideas. How can reason produce judgments about God, freedom and immortality if its statement about the simplest events rests on such insecure foundation? The attack that Kant now had to undertake against the knowledge of reason was much more far-reaching than that of Jacobi. He had at least left to knowledge the possibility of comprehending nature in its necessary connection. Now Kant had produced an important accomplishment in the field of natural science with his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which had appeared in 1755. He was satisfied to have shown that our whole planetary system could be thought to have developed out of a ball of gas, rotating around its axis. Through strictly necessary mathematically measurable physical forces, he thought the sun and planets to have consolidated, and to have assumed the motions in which they proceed according to the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant thus believed he had proven, through a great discovery of his own, the fruitfulness of Spinoza's mode of thought, according to which everything happens with strict, mathematical necessity. He was so convinced of this fruitfulness that in the above-mentioned work he went so far as to exclaim, “Give me matter, and I will build you a universe!” The absolute certainty of all mathematical truths was so firmly established for him that he maintains in his Basic Principles of Natural Science that a science in the proper sense of the word is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, it would be out of the question to assume such a certainty for the knowledge of mathematical natural science, for, in that case, this knowledge would consist of nothing but thought habits that man had developed because he had seen the course of the world along certain lines. But there would not be the slightest guarantee that these thought habits had anything to do with the law-ordered connection of the things of the world. From his presupposition Hume draws the conclusion:

The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession, but the power of force which actuates the whole machine is entirely concealed from us and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body.

(Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. VII, part 1.)

If we then place the world conception of Spinoza into the light of Hume's view, we must say, “In accordance with the perceived course of the processes of the world, man has formed the habit of thinking these processes in a necessary, law-ordered connection, but he is not entitled to maintain that this ‘connection’ is anything but a mere thought habit.” Now if this were the case, then it would be a mere deception of the human reason to imagine that it could, through itself, gain any insight into the nature of the world, and Hume could not be contradicted when he says about every world conception that is gained out of pure reason, “Throw it into the fire, for it is nothing but deception and illusion.”

[ 12 ] Kant could not possibly adopt this conclusion of Hume as his own. For him, the certainty of the knowledge of mathematical natural science was irrevocably established. He would not allow this certainty to be touched but was unable to deny that Hume was justified in saying that we gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and by forming for ourselves thoughts about their connection that are based on this observation. If a law-ordered connection is inherent in things, then we must also extract this connection out of them, but what we really derive from the things is such that we know no more about it than that it has been so up to the present time. We do not know, however, whether such a connection is really so linked up with the nature of things that it cannot change in any moment. If we form for ourselves today a world conception based on our observations, events can happen tomorrow that compel us to form an entirely different one. If we received all our knowledge from things, there would be no certainty. Mathematics and natural sciences are a proof of this. That the world does not give its knowledge to the human mind was a view Kant was ready to adopt from Hume. That this knowledge does not contain certainty and truth, however, is a conclusion he was not willing to draw. Thus, Kant was confronted with the question that disturbed him deeply: How is it possible that man is in possession of true and certain knowledge and that he is, nevertheless, incapable of knowing anything of the reality of the world in itself?

Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the grounds of the world. Our reason could never claim certainty about anything in a world lying spread out around us so that we would be affected by it through observation only. Therefore, our world can only be one that is constructed by ourselves: A world that lies within the limits of our minds. What is going on outside myself as a stone falls and causes a hole in the ground, I do not know. The law of this entire process is enacted within me, and it can proceed within me only in accordance with demands of my own mental organization. The nature of my mind requires that every effect should have a cause and that two times two is four. It is in accordance with this nature that the mind constructs a world for itself. No matter how the world outside ourselves might be constructed, today's world may not coincide in even a single trait with that of yesterday. This can never concern us for our mind produces its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human mind remains unchanged, it will proceed in the same way in the construction of the world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain the laws of the external world but those of our mental organization. It is, therefore, only necessary to investigate this organization if we want to know what is unconditionally true. “Reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature.” Kant sums up his conviction in this sentence, but the mind does not produce its inner world without an impetus or impression from without. When I perceive the color red, the perception, “red,” is, to be sure, a state, a process within me, but it is necessary for me to have an occasion to perceive “red.” There are, therefore, “things in themselves,” but we know nothing about them but the fact that they exist. Everything we observe belongs to the appearances within us. Therefore, in order to save the certainty of the mathematical and natural scientific truths, Kant has taken the whole world of observation in the human mind. In doing so, however, he has raised insurmountable barriers to the faculty of knowledge, for everything that we can know refers merely to processes within ourselves, to appearances or phenomena, not to things in themselves, as Kant expresses it. But the objects of the highest questions of reason—God, Freedom and Immortality—can never become phenomena. We see the appearances within ourselves; whether or not these have their origin in a divine being we cannot know. We can observe our own psychic conditions, but these are also only phenomena. Whether or not there is a free immortal soul behind them remains concealed to our knowledge. About the “things in themselves,” our knowledge cannot produce any statement. It cannot determine whether the ideas concerning these “things in themselves” are true or false. If they are announced to us from another direction, there is no objection to assume their existence, but a knowledge concerning them is impossible for us. There is only one access to these highest truths. This access is given in the voice of duty, which speaks within us emphatically and distinctly, “You are morally obliged to do this and that.” This “Categorical Imperative” imposes on us an obligation we are incapable of avoiding. But how could we comply with this obligation if we were not in the possession of a free will? We are, to be sure, incapable of knowledge concerning this quality of our soul, but we must believe that it is free in order to be capable of following its inner voice of duty. Concerning this freedom, we have, therefore, no certainty of knowledge as we possess it with respect to the objects of mathematics and natural science, but we have moral certainty for it instead. The observance of the categorical imperative leads to virtue. It is only through virtue that man can arrive at his destination. He becomes worthy of happiness. Without this possibility his virtue would be void of meaning and significance. In order that virtue may result from happiness, it is mandatory that a being exists who secures this happiness as an effect of virtue. This can only be an intelligent being, determining the highest value of things: God. Through the existence of virtue, its effect is guaranteed, and through this guarantee, in turn, the existence of God. Because man is a sensual being and cannot obtain perfect happiness in this imperfect world, his existence must transcend this sensual existence; that is to say, the soul must be immortal. The very thing about which we are denied possible knowledge is, therefore, magically produced by Kant out of the moral belief in the voice of duty. It was respect for the feeling of duty that restored a real world for Kant when, under the influence of Hume, the observable world withered away into a mere inner world. This respect for duty is beautifully expressed in his Critique of Practical Reason:

Duty! Thou sublime, great name that containest nothing pleasurable to bid for our favor, but demandest submission, ... proclaiming a law in the presence of which all inclinations are silenced although they may secretly offer resistance...

That the highest truths are not truths of knowledge but moral truths is what Kant considered as his discovery. Man has to renounce all insight into a supersensible world, but from his moral nature springs a compensation for this knowledge. No wonder Kant sees the highest demand on man in the unconditional surrender to duty. If it were not for duty to open a vista for him beyond the sensual world, man would be enclosed for his whole life in the world of the senses. No matter, therefore, what the sensual world demands; it has to give way before the peremptory claims of duty, and the sensual world cannot, out of its own initiative, agree with duty. Its own inclination is directed toward the agreeable, toward pleasure. These aims have to be opposed by duty in order to enable man to reach his destination. What man does for his pleasure is not virtuous; virtue is only what he does in selfless devotion to duty. Submit your desires to duty; this is the rigorous task that is taught by Kant's moral philosophy. Do not allow your will to be directed toward what satisfies you in your egotism, but so act that the principles of your action can become those of all men. In surrendering to the moral law, man attains his perfection. The belief that this moral law has its being above all other events of the world and is made real within the world by a divine being is, in Kant's opinion, true religion. It springs from the moral life. Man is to be good, not because of his belief in a God whose will demands the good; he is to be good only because of his feeling for duty. He is to believe in God, however, because duty without God would be meaningless. This is religion within the Limits of Mere Reason. It is thus that Kant entitles his book on religious world conception.

[ 13 ] The course that the development of the natural sciences took since they began to flourish has produced in many people the feeling that every element that does not carry the character of strict necessity should be eliminated from our thought picture of nature. Kant had this feeling also. In his Natural History of the Heavens, he had even outlined such a picture for a certain realm of nature that was in accordance with this feeling. In a thought picture of this kind, there is no place for the conception of the self-conscious ego that the man of the eighteenth century felt necessary. The Platonic and the Aristotelian thought could be considered as the revelation of nature in the form in which that idea was accepted in the earlier age, and as that of the human soul as well. In thought life, nature and the soul met. From the picture of nature as it seems to be demanded by modern science, nothing leads to the conception of the self-conscious soul. Kant had the feeling that the conception of nature offered nothing to him on which he could base the certainty of self-consciousness. This certainty had to be created for the modern age had presented the self-conscious ego as a fact. The possibility had to be created to acknowledge this fact, but everything that can be recognized as knowledge by our understanding is devoured by the conception of nature. Thus, Kant feels himself compelled to provide for the self-conscious ego as well as for the spiritual world connected with it, something that is not knowledge but nevertheless supplies certainty.

[ 14 ] Kant established selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit as the foundation of moral life. In the realm of virtuous action, such a devotion is not compatible with a surrender to the sensual world. There is, however, a field in which the sensual is elevated in such a way that it appears as the immediate expression of the spirit. That is the field of beauty and art. In our ordinary life we want the sensual because it excites our desire, our self-seeking interest. We desire what gives us pleasure, but it is also possible to take a selfless interest in an object. We can look at it in admiration, filled by a heavenly delight and this delight can be quite independent of the possession of the thing. Whether or not I should like to own a beautiful house that I pass has nothing to do with the “disinterested pleasure” that I may take in its beauty. If I eliminate all desire from my feeling, there may still be found as a remaining element a pleasure that is clearly and exclusively linked to the beautiful work of art. A pleasure of this kind is an “esthetic pleasure.” The beautiful is to be distinguished from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable excites my interest because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to be made real by me. In confronting the beautiful I have no such interest that is connected with my person. What is it then, by means of which my selfless delight is attracted? I can be pleased by a thing only when its purpose is fulfilled, when it is so organized that it serves an end. Fitness to purpose pleases; incongruity displeases, but as I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful thing, as the mere sight of it satisfies me, it is also not necessary that the beautiful object really serves a purpose. The purpose is of no importance to me; what I demand is only the appropriateness. For this reason, Kant calls an object “beautiful” in which we perceive fitness to purpose without thinking at the same time of a definite purpose.

[ 15 ] What Kant gives in this exposition is not merely an explanation but also a justification of art. This is best seen if one remembers Kant's feeling in regard to his world conception. He expresses his feeling in profound, beautiful words:

Two things fill the heart with ever new and always increasing admiration and awe: The starred heaven above me and the moral law within me. At first, the sight of an innumerable world quantity annihilates, as it were, my importance as a living creature, which must give back to the planet that is a mere dot in the universe the matter out of which it became what it is, after having been for a short while (one does not know how) provided with the energy of life. On second consideration, however, this spectacle infinitely raises my value as an intelligent being, through my (conscious and free) personality in which the moral law reveals to me a life that is independent of the whole world of the senses, at least insofar as this can be concluded from the purpose-directed destination of my existence, which is not hemmed in by the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite.

The artist now transplants this purpose-directed destination, which, in reality, rules in the realm of the moral world, into the world of the senses. Thus, the world of art stands between the realm of the world of observation that is dominated by the eternal stern laws of necessity, which the human mind itself has previously laid into this world, and the realm of free morality in which commands of duty, as the result of a wise, divine world-order, set out direction and aim. Between both realms the artist enters with his works. Out of the realm of the real he takes his material, but he reshapes this material at the same time in such a fashion that it becomes the bearer of a purpose-directed harmony as it is found in the realm of freedom. That is to say, the human spirit feels dissatisfied both with the realms of external reality, which Kant has in mind when he speaks of the starred heaven and the innumerable things of the world, and also with the realm of moral law. Man, therefore, creates a beautiful realm of “semblance,” which combines the rigid necessity of nature with the element of a free purpose. The beautiful now is not only found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is nature-beauty as well as art-beauty. This beauty of nature is there without man's activity. It seems, therefore, as if there were observable in the world of reality, not merely the rigid law-ordered necessity, but a free wisdom-revealing activity as well. The phenomenon of the beautiful, nevertheless, does not force us to accept a conception of this kind, for what it offers is the form of a purpose-directed activity without implying also the thought of a real purpose. Furthermore, there is not only the phenomenon of integrated beauty but also that of integrated ugliness. It is, therefore, possible to assume that in the multitude of natural events, which are interconnected according to necessary laws, some happen to occur—accidentally, as it were—in which the human mind observes an analogy with man's own works of art. As it is not necessary to assume a real purpose, this element of free purpose, which appears as it were by accident, is quite sufficient for the esthetic contemplation of nature.

[ 16 ] The situation is different when we meet the entities in nature to which the purpose concept is not merely to be attributed as accidental but that carry this purpose really within themselves. There are also entities of this kind according to Kant's opinion. They are the organic beings. The necessary law-determined connections are insufficient to explain them; these, in Spinoza's world conception are considered not only necessary but sufficient, and by Kant are considered as those of the human mind itself. For an “organism is a product of nature in which everything is, at the same time, purpose, just as it is cause and also effect.” An organism, therefore, cannot be explained merely through rigid laws that operate with necessity, as is the case with inorganic nature. It is for this reason that, although Kant himself had, in his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, undertaken the attempt to “discuss the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire world structure according to Newtonian principles,” he is of the opinion that a similar attempt, applied to the world of organic beings, would necessarily fail. In his Critique of Judgment, he advances the following statement:

It is, namely, absolutely certain that in following merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even become sufficiently acquainted with organisms and their inner possibility, much less explain them. This is so certain that one can boldly say that it would be absurd for man to set out on any such attempt or to hope that at some future time a Newton could arise who would explain as much as the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws into which no purpose had brought order and direction. Such a knowledge must, on the contrary, be altogether denied to man.

Kant's view that it is the human mind itself that first projects the laws into nature that it then finds in it, is also irreconcilable with another opinion concerning a purpose-directed entity, for a purpose points to its originator through whom it was laid into such an entity, that is, to the rational originator of the world. If the human mind could explain a teleological being in the same way as an entity that is merely constituted according to natural necessity, it would also have to be capable of projecting laws of purpose out of itself into the things. Not merely would the human mind have to provide laws for the things that would be valid with regard to them insofar as they are appearances of his inner world, but it would have to be capable of prescribing their own destination to the things that are completely independent of the mind. The human mind would, therefore, have to be not merely a cognitive, but a creative, spirit; its reason would, like that of God, have to create the things.

[ 17 ] Whoever calls to mind the structure of the Kantian world conception as it has been outlined here will understand its strong effect on Kant's contemporaries and also on the time after him, for he leaves intact all of the conceptions that had formed and impressed themselves on the human mind in the course of the development of western culture. This world conception leaves God, freedom and immortality, to the religious spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge in delineating a territory for it inside the limits of which it recognizes unconditionally certain truths. It even allows for the opinion that the human reason is justified to employ, not merely the eternal rigorous natural laws for the explanation of living beings, but the purpose concept that suggests a designed order in the world.

[ 18 ] But at what price did Kant obtain all this! He transferred all of nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of this mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and placed this order on a purely moral foundation. He drew a sharp line of demarcation between the realm of the inorganic and that of the organic, explaining the former according to mechanical laws of natural necessity and the latter according to teleological ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality, for the teleological form that is to be observed in the beautiful has nothing to do with real purposes. How a beautiful object comes into the world is of no importance; it is sufficient that it stimulates in us the conception of the purposeful and thereby produces our delight.

[ 19 ] Kant not only presents the view that man's knowledge is possible so far as the law-structure of this knowledge has its origin in the self-conscious soul, and the certainty concerning this soul comes out of a source that is different from the one out of which our knowledge of nature springs. He also points out that our human knowledge has to resign before nature, where it meets the living organism in which thought itself seems to reign in nature. In taking this position, Kant confesses by implication that he cannot imagine thoughts that are conceived as active in the entities of nature themselves. The recognition of such thoughts presupposes that the human soul not merely thinks, but in thinking shares the life of nature in its inner experience. If somebody discovered that thoughts are capable not merely of being received as perceptions, as is the case with the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but that it is possible to experience thoughts by penetrating into the entities of nature, then this would mean that again a new element had been found that could enter the picture of nature as well as the conception of the self-conscious ego. The self-conscious ego by itself does not find a place in the nature picture of modern times. If the self-conscious ego, in filling itself with thought, is not merely aware that it forms this thought, but recognizes in thought a life of which it can know, “This life can realize itself also outside myself,” then this self-conscious ego can arrive at the insight, “I hold within myself something that can also be found without.” The evolution of modern world conception thus urges man on to the step: To find the thought in the self-conscious ego that is felt to be alive. This step Kant did not take; Goethe did.

[ 20 ] In all essential points, Goethe arrived at the opposite to Kant's conception of the world. Approximately at the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his creed in his prose hymn, Nature, in which he placed man completely into nature and in which he presented nature as bearing absolute sway, independent of man: Her own and man's lawgiver as well. Kant drew all nature into the human mind. Goethe considered everything as belonging to this nature; he fitted the human spirit into the natural world order:

Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, incapable of leaving her domain, incapable of penetrating deeper into her. She draws us into the rounds of her dance, neither asking nor warning, and whirls away with us until we fall exhausted from her arms... All men are in her and she is in them... Even the most unnatural is Nature; even the clumsiest pedantry has something of her genius ... We obey her laws even when we resist them; we are working with her even when we mean to work against her... Nature is everything... She rewards and punishes, delights and tortures herself... She has placed me into life, she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was Nature who spoke it all, true and false. Nature is the blame for all things; hers is the merit.

This is the polar opposite to Kant's world conception. According to Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature because nature itself is spirit. It is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy:

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was completely outside my world. I attended many conversations concerning this book, and with some attention I could observe that the old main question of how much our own self contributed to our spiritual existence, and how much the outside world did, was renewed. I never separated them, and when I philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with an unconscious naiveté, really believing that I saw my opinion before my very eyes.

We need not waver in this estimate of Goethe's attitude toward Kant, in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favorable judgment about the philosopher of Koenigsberg. This opposition between Kant and himself would only then have become quite clear to him if he had engaged himself in a thorough study of Kant, but this he did not do. In the above-mentioned essay he says, “It was the introductory passages that I liked; into the labyrinth itself, however, I could not venture to go; I was kept from it now by my poetic imagination, now by my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself furthered.”

Goethe has, nevertheless, expressed his opposition distinctly on one occasion in a passage that has been published only from the papers of the residuary estate in the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2; Abteilung, Band XI, page 377). The fundamental error of Kant was, as here expressed by Goethe, that he “considers the subjective faculty of knowledge as an object and discriminates the point where the subjective and the objective meet with great penetration but not quite correctly.” Goethe just happens to be convinced that it is not only the spirit as such that speaks in the subjective human faculty of cognition, but that it is the spirit of nature that has created for itself an organ in man through which it reveals its secrets. It is not man at all who speaks about nature, but it is nature who speaks in man about itself. This is Goethe's conviction. Thus, he could say that whenever the controversy concerning Kant's world view “was brought up, I liked to take the side that gave most honor to man, and I completely agreed with all those friends who maintained with Kant that, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it nevertheless does not originate from experience.” For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit, but for this reason, they were not merely the subjective laws of the spirit for him, but the objective laws of the order of nature itself.

It is for this reason also that Goethe could not agree when Schiller, under the influence of Kant, erected a forbidding wall of separation between the realms of natural necessity and of freedom. Goethe expressed himself on this point in his essay, First Acquaintance with Schiller:

Schiller and some friends had absorbed the Kantian philosophy, which elevates the subject to such height while apparently narrowing it. It developed the extraordinary traits that nature had laid into his character and he, in his highest feeling of freedom and self determination, tended to be ungrateful to the great mother who had certainly not treated him stingily. Instead of considering nature as self-supporting, alive and productively spreading order and law from the lowest to the highest point, Schiller took notice of it only in the shape of a few empirical human natural inclinations.

In his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy, Goethe points to his difference with Schiller in these words. “He preached the gospel of freedom; I was unwilling to see the rights of nature infringed upon.” There was, indeed, an element of Kant's mode of conception in Schiller, but so far as Goethe is concerned, we are right in accepting what he himself said with regard to some conversations he had with the followers of Kant. “They heard what I had to say but they could not answer me or further me in any way. More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted to me with a surprised smile that my conception was, to be sure, analogous to that of Kant, but in a curious fashion indeed.”

[ 21 ] Goethe did not consider art and beauty as a realm that was torn out of the interconnection of reality, but as a higher stage of nature's order. At the sight of artistic creations that especially interested him during his Italian journey he wrote, “Like the highest works of nature, the lofty works of art have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything that is arbitrary and merely imagined fades away before them. Here is necessity; here is God.” When the artist proceeds as the Greeks did, namely, “according to the laws that Nature herself follows,” then his works contain the same godly element that is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is “a manifestation of secret natural laws.” What the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human completion of nature, for “as man finds himself placed at the highest point of nature, he again considers himself a whole nature and as such has again to produce a peak in himself. For this purpose he raises his own existence by penetrating himself with all perfections and virtues, produces choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally lifts himself as far as to the production of the work of art.” Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest of man's works of art, and everything in this nature is ruled by the same “eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws,” such that “the godhead itself could not change anything about it” (Poetry and Truth, Book XVI).

[ 22 ] When, in 1811, Goethe read Jacobi's book, On Things Divine, it made him “uneasy.”

How could the book of a so warmly beloved friend, in which I was to see the thesis developed that nature conceals God, be welcome to me! My mode of world conception—purely felt, deeply-seated, inborn and practised daily as it was—had taught me inviolably to see God in Nature, Nature in God, and this to such an extent that this world view formed the basis of my entire existence. Under these circumstances, was not such a strange, one-sided and narrow-minded thesis to estrange me in spirit from this most noble man for whose heart I felt love and veneration? I did not, however, allow my painful vexation to linger with me but took refuge in my old asylum, finding my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza's Ethics, and as my inner education had progressed in the meantime, to my astonishment I became aware of many things that revealed themselves to me in a new and different light and affected me with a peculiar freshness.

[ 23 ] The realm of necessity in Spinoza's sense is a realm of inner necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides of its essence. “The sun sheds its light over those good and evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars shine brightly.” [ 24 ] Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature, Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his moral order and his art.

What God would just push the world from without,
And let it run in circles on his finger?
Him it behooves to move it in its core,
Be close to nature, hug her to her breast
So that what lives and weaves in him and is,
Will never lack his power and his spirit.

[ 25 ] In these words Goethe summed up his credo. Against Hailer, who had written the lines, “Into nature's sacred center, no created spirits enter,” Goethe turns with his sharpest words:

“Into nature's sacred center,”
O, Philistine past compare
“No created spirits enter”
Wished you never would remind
Me and all those of my kind
Of this shallow verbal banter.
We think we are everywhere
With every step in Nature's care.
“Happy he to whom she just
Shows her dry external crust.”
I hear that repeated these sixty years
Curse under my breath so no one hears,
And to myself I a thousand times tell:
Nature has neither core nor shell,
Everything yields she gladly and well.
Nature is at our beck and call
Nature herself is one and all.
Better search yourself once more
Whether you be crust or core.

[ 26 ] In following this world conception Goethe could also not recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had ascertained in his Critique of Judgment. Goethe tended to explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless nature is explained. Concerning the various species in the plant world, the leading botanist of that time, Linné, states that there were as many species as there “have been created fundamentally different forms.” A botanist who holds such an opinion can only attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not consent to such a view of nature. “What Linnaeus wanted with might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as striving into union.” Goethe searched for an entity that was common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step.

The many plants I have heretofore been used to see only in buckets and pots, here grow merrily and vigorously under the open sky, and while they thus fulfill their destination, they become clearer to us. At the sight of such a variety of new and renewed forms, my curious and favorite idea again occurred to me. Could I not discover in this crowd the archetypal plant (Urpflanze)? There really must be such a thing. How should I otherwise know that this or that given form is a plant if they had not all been designed after one model?

On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this archetypal plant by saying, “It is going to become the strangest creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and necessity.” As Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, exclaims, “Give me matter and I will build you a world out of it,” because he has gained insight into the law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe pronounces here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one would be in possession of the law of their origin and their development. What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he tells Herder about his discovery of the archetypal plant, he adds, “The same law will be applicable to all other living beings,” and Goethe applies it, indeed. In 1795, his persevering studies of the animal world led him to “feel free to maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man, were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms daily through propagation.”

In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a risky “adventure of reason,” should reason attempt to explain the living with regard to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit for such an explanation.

It is of infinite importance for reason not to eliminate the mechanism of nature in its productions, and not to pass by this idea in their explanation because without it no insight into the nature of things can be obtained. Even if it is admitted to us that the highest architect has created the forms of nature as they have been forever, or predetermined those that form according to the same model in the course of their development, our knowledge of nature would thereby nevertheless not be furthered in the slightest degree because we do not know at all the mode of action and the ideas of this being that are to contain the principles of the possibility of the natural beings and therefore cannot explain nature by means of them from above.

Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers:

If, in the moral realm through faith in God, virtue and immortality, we are to lift ourselves into the higher region and to approach the first Being, we should be in the same situation in the intellectual field, so that we, through the contemplation of an ever creative nature, should make ourselves worthy of a spiritual participation in its productions. As I had at first unconsciously and, following an inner instinct, insisted upon and relentlessly striven toward the archetypal, the typical, as I had even succeeded in constructing an appropriate picture, there was now nothing to keep me from courageously risking the adventure of reason, as the old man from Koenigsberg himself calls it.

[ 27 ] In his archetypal plant, Goethe had seized upon an idea “with which one can ... invent plants to infinity, but they must be consistent, that is to say, even if they do not exist, nevertheless they could exist and are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination but have an inner truth and necessity.” Thus, Goethe shows that he is about to find not merely the perceptible idea, the idea that is thought, in the self-conscious ego, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego experiences a realm in itself that manifests itself as both self-contained and at the same time appertaining to the external world, because the forms of the latter prove to be moulded after the models of the creative powers. With this step the self-conscious ego can appear as a real being. Goethe has developed a conception through which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it feels itself in union with the creative entities of nature. The world conception of modern times attempted to master the riddle of the self-conscious ego; Goethe plants the living idea into this ego, and with this force of life pulsating in it, it proves to be a life-saturated reality. The Greek idea is akin to the picture; it is contemplated like a picture. The idea of modern times must be akin to life, to the living being; it is inwardly experienced. Goethe was aware of the fact that there is such an inward experience of the idea. In the self-conscious ego he perceived the breath of the living idea.

[ 28 ] Goethe says of Kant's Critique of Judgment that he “owed a most happy period of his life to this book.” “The great leading thoughts of this work were quite analogous to my previous creations, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, the unfolding of the activity in both cases from within, was distinctly expressed in this book.” Yet, this statement of Goethe must not deceive us concerning his opposition to Kant, for in the essay in which it occurs, we also read, “Passionately stimulated, I proceeded on my own paths so much the quicker because I, myself, did not know where they led, and because I found little resonance with the Kantians for what I had conquered for myself and for the methods in which I had arrived at my results. For I expressed what had been stirred up in me and not what I had read.”

[ 29 ] A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole universe reveals its law structure—“from the brick that falls from the roof to the brilliant flash of inspiration that dawns on you and that you convey.” For “all effects of whatever kind they may be that we observe in experience are interconnected in the most continuous fashion and flow into one another.”

A brick is loosened from a roof. We ordinarily call this accidental. It hits the shoulder of a passerby, one would say mechanically, but not completely mechanically; it follows the laws of gravity and so its effect is physical. The torn vessels of living tissue immediately cease to function; at the same moment, the fluids act chemically, their elementary qualities emerge. But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and tries to restore itself. In the meantime, the whole human being is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered. Upon regaining consciousness the person feels ethically deeply hurt, deploring the interrupted activity of whatever kind it might have been, for man will only reluctantly yield to patience. Religiously, however, it will be easy for him to ascribe this incident to Providence, to consider it a prevention against a greater evil, as a preparation for a good of a higher order. This may be sufficient for the patient, but the recovered man arises genially, trusts in God and in himself and feels himself saved. He may well seize upon the accidental and turn it to his own advantage, thus beginning a new and eternally fresh cycle of life.

Thus, with the example of a fallen brick Goethe illustrates the interconnection of all kinds of natural effects. It would be an explanation in Goethe's sense if one could also derive their strictly law-determined interconnection out of one root.

[ 30 ] Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at the most significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the attitude of those who were interested in the highest questions was fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, depending trustfully on his healthy nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that in Goethe he could only turn “to the representative of the purest spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity that has been reached at the present time.” But he had the opinion of Kant “that no human mind can advance further than to the limit at which Kant had stood, especially in his Critique of Judgment.” Whoever penetrates into the world conception of Goethe, however, which is presented in the cloak of naiveté, will, nevertheless, find a firm foundation that can be expressed in the form of clear ideas. Goethe himself did not raise this foundation into the full light of consciousness. For this reason, his mode of conception finds entrance only slowly into the evolution of philosophy, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it is Kant's position with which the spirits first attempt to come to clarity and with whom they begin to settle their account.

[ 31 ] No matter how great Kant's influence was, his contemporaries could not help feeling that their deeper need for knowledge could not become satisfied by him. Such a demand for enlightenment urgently seeks after a unitary world conception as it is given in Goethe's case. With Kant, the individual realms of existence are standing side by side without transition. For this reason, Fichte, in spite of his unconditional veneration for Kant, could not conceal from himself the fact “that Kant had only hinted at the truth, but had neither presented nor proved it.” And further:

This wonderful, unique man had either a divination for the truth without being aware of the reasons for it, or he estimated his contemporaries as insufficient to have these reasons conveyed to them, or, again, he was reluctant during his lifetime to attract the superhuman veneration that sooner or later would have been bestowed upon him. No one has understood him as yet, and nobody will succeed in doing so who does not arrive at Kant's results in following his own ways; when it does happen, the world really will be astonished.

But I know just as certainly that Kant had such a system in mind, that all statements that he actually did express are fragments and results of this system, and have meaning and consistence only under this presupposition.

For, if this were not the case, Fichte would “be more inclined to consider the Critique of Pure Reason the product of the strangest accident than as the work of a mind.”

[ 32 ] Other contemporaries also judged Kant's world of ideas to be insufficient. Lichtenberg, one of the most brilliant and at the same time most independent minds of the second half of the eighteenth century, who appreciated Kant, nevertheless could not suppress significant objections to his philosophy. On the one hand he says, “What does it mean to think in Kant's spirit? I believe it means to find the relation of our being, whatever that may be, toward the things we call external, that is to say, to define the relation of the subjective to the objective. This, to be sure, has always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but it is questionable if they ever proceeded so truly philosophically as did Herr Kant. What is and must be subjective was taken as objective.”

On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg observes, “Should it really be an established fact that our reason cannot know anything about the supersensible? Should it not be possible for us to weave our ideas of God and immortality to as much purpose as the spider weaves his net to catch flies? In other words, should there not be beings who admire us because of our ideas of God and immortality just as we admire the spider and silkworm?”

One could, however, raise a much more significant objection. If it is correct that the law of human reason refers only to the inner worlds of the mind, how do we then manage even to speak of things outside ourselves at all? In that case, we should have to be completely caught in the cobweb of our inner world. An objection of this kind is raised by G. E. Schulze (1761–1833) in his book, Aenesidemus, which appeared anonymously in 1792. In it he maintains that all our knowledge is nothing but mere conceptions and we could in no way go beyond the world of our inner thought pictures. Kant's moral truths are also finally refuted with this step, for if not even the possibility to go beyond the inner world is thinkable, then it is also impossible that a moral voice could lead us into such a world that is impossible to think. In this way, a new doubt with regard to all truths develops out of Kant's view, and the philosophy of criticism is turned into scepticism.

One of the most consistent followers of scepticism is S. Maimon (1753–1800), who, from 1790 on, wrote several books that were under the influence of Kant and Schulze. In them he defended with complete determination the view that, because of the very nature of our cognitive faculty, we are not permitted to speak of the existence of external objects. Another disciple of Kant, Jacob Sigismund Beck, went even so far as to maintain that Kant himself had really not assumed things outside ourselves and that it was nothing but a misunderstanding if such a conception was ascribed to him.

[ 33 ] One thing is certain; Kant offered his contemporaries innumerable points for attack and interpretations. Precisely through his unclarities and contradictions, he became the father of the classical German world conceptions of Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher. His unclarities became new questions for them. No matter how he endeavored to limit knowledge in order to make place for belief, the human spirit can confess to be satisfied in the true sense of the word only through knowledge, through cognition. So it came to pass that Kant's successors strove to restore knowledge to its full rights again, that they attempted to settle through knowledge the highest needs of man.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) seemed to be chosen by nature to continue Kant's work in this direction. Fichte confessed, “The love of knowledge and especially speculative knowledge, when it has laid hold on man, occupies him to such an extent that no other wish is left in him but that to pursue it with complete calm and concentration.” Fichte can be called an enthusiast of world conception. Through this enthusiasm he must have laid a charm on his contemporaries and especially on his students. Forberg, who was one of his disciples, tells us:

In his public addresses his speech rushes powerfully on like a thunderstorm that unloads its fire in individual strokes of lightning; he lifts the soul up; he means to produce not only good men but great men; his eye is stern; his step bold; through his philosophy he intends to lead the spirit of the age; his imagination is not flowery, but strong and powerful; his pictures are not graceful but bold and great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of his object and he moves in the realm of concepts with an ease that betrays that he not only lives in this invisible land, but rules there.

The most outstanding trait in Fichte's personality is the grand, serious style of his life conception. He measures everything by the highest standards. In describing the calling of the writer, for instance, he says:

The idea itself must speak, not the writer. All his arbitrary traits, his whole individuality, all the manner and art peculiar to himself must have died in his utterances so that the manner and art of his idea alone may live, the highest life it can obtain in this language and this age. Since he is free from the obligations of the oral teacher, he is also free to conform to the-receptivity of others without their excuses. He has not a given reader in mind but postulates the one who reads him, laying down the law as to how he must do so.

But the work of the writer is a work for eternity. Let future ages swing up to a higher level in the science he has deposited in his work. What he has laid down in his book is not only the science, but the definite and perfect character of an age in regard to this science, and this will retain its interest as long as there are human beings in this world. Independent of all vicissitude, his writing speaks in all ages to all men who are capable of bringing his letters to life and who are stirred by his message, elevated and ennobled until the end of the world.

A man speaks in these words who is aware of his call as a spiritual leader of his age, and who seriously means what he says in the preface to his Doctrine of Science: “My person is of no importance at all, but Truth is of all importance for ‘I am a priest of Truth’.” We can understand that a man who, like him, lives “in the Kingdom of Truth” does not merely mean to guide others to an understanding, but that he intended to force them to it. Thus, he could give one of his writings the title, A Radiantly Clear Report to the Larger Public Concerning the Real Essence of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Force the Readers to Understand. Fichte is a personality who believes that, in order to walk life's course, he has no need of the real world and its facts; rather, he keeps his eyes riveted on the world of idea. He holds those in low esteem who do not understand such an idealistic attitude of spirit.

While in the narrow horizon that is given through ordinary experience, people think and judge more objectively and correctly than perhaps ever before, most are, nevertheless, completely confused and dazzled as soon as they are to go even one step further. Where it is impossible to rekindle the once extinguished spark of the higher genius, one has to leave them within the circle of their horizon and, insofar as they are useful and necessary in this circle, one can grant them their value in and for it without curtailment. But when they now demand of us to bring down to their level everything they, themselves, cannot reach up to, when they, for instance, demand that everything printed should be useful as a cookbook, or as a textbook of arithmetic, or as a book of general regulations and orders, and then decry everything that cannot be used in such a fashion, then they are very wrong indeed.

We know as well, and possibly better than they, that ideals cannot be presented in the real world. What we maintain, however, is that the reality has to be judged by them, to be modified through those who feel the necessary strength for it within themselves. Suppose they could not convince themselves of this necessity. Then they would lose very little of what they are by nature anyway, and humanity would lose nothing at all. Their decision would merely make clear that they alone are not counted on in the scheme of providence for mankind's perfection. Providence will doubtless continue to pursue its course; we commend those people, however, to the care of a kind nature, to supply them in due time with rain and sunshine, with wholesome food and an undisturbed circulation of their gastric juices, at the same time endowing them with clever thoughts!

Fichte wrote these words in the preface to the publication of the lectures in which he had spoken to the students of Jena on the Destination of the Scholar. Views like those of Fichte have their origin in a great energy of the soul, giving sureness for knowledge of world and life. Fichte had blunt words for all those who did not feel the strength in themselves for such a sureness. When the philosopher, Reinhold, ventured the statement that the inner voice of man could also be in error, Fichte replied, “You say the philosopher should entertain the thought that he, as an individual, could also be mistaken and that he, therefore, could and should learn from others. Do you know whose thought mood you are describing with these words? That of a man who has never in his whole life been really convinced of something.” [ 34 ] To this vigorous personality, whose eyes were entirely directed to the inner life, it was repugnant to search anywhere else for a world conception, the highest aim man can obtain, except in his inner life. “All culture should be the exercise of all faculties toward the one purpose of complete freedom, that is to say, of the complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves, our pure Self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours. . . .”

This is Fichte's judgment in his Contributions Toward the Corrections of the Public Judgments Concerning the French Revolution, which appeared in 1793. Should not the most valuable energy in man, his power of knowledge, be directed toward this one purpose of complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves? Could we ever arrive at a complete independence if we were dependent in our world conception on any kind of being? If it had been predetermined by such a being outside ourselves of what nature our soul and our duties are, and that we thereby procured a knowledge afterwards out of such an accomplished fact? If we are independent, then we must be independent also with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has come into existence without our help, then we are dependent on this something. For this reason, we cannot receive the highest truths. We must create them, they must come into being through us. Thus, Fichte can only place something at the summit of his world conception that obtains its existence through ourselves. When we say about a thing of the external world, “It is,” we are doing so because we perceive it. We know that we are recognizing the existence of another being. What this other being is does not depend on us. We can know its qualities only when we direct our faculty of perception toward it. We should never know what “red,” “warm,” “cold” is, if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of the thing, nor can we subtract anything from them. We say, “They are.” What they are is what they tell us. This is entirely different in regard to our own existence. Man does not say to himself, “It is,” but, “I am.” He says, thereby, not only that he is, but also what he is, namely, an “I.” Only another being could say concerning me, “It is.” This is, in fact, what another being would have to say, for even in the case that this other being should have created me, it could not say concerning my existence, “I am.” The statement, “I am,” loses all meaning if it is not uttered by the being itself that speaks about its own existence. There is, therefore, nothing in the world that can address me as “I” except myself. This recognition of myself as an “I,” therefore, must be my own original action. No being outside myself can have influence on this.

[ 35 ] At this point Fichte found something with respect to which he saw himself completely independent of every “foreign” entity. A God could create me, but he would have to leave it to myself to recognize myself as an “I.” I give my ego-consciousness to myself. In this way, Fichte obtained a firm point for his world conception, something in which there is certainty. How do matters stand now concerning the existence of other beings? l ascribe this existence to them, but to do so I have not the same right as with myself. They must become part of my “I” if I am to recognize an existence in them with the same right, and they do become a part of myself as I perceive them, for as soon as this is the case, they are there for me. What I can say is only, my “self” feels “red,” my “self' feels “warm.” Just as truly as I ascribe to myself an existence, I can also ascribe it to my feeling, to my sensation. Therefore, if I understand myself rightly, I can only say, I am, and I myself ascribe existence also to an external world.

[ 36 ] For Fichte, the external world lost its independent existence in this way: It has an existence that is only ascribed to it by the ego, projected by the ego's imagination. In his endeavor to give to his own “self” the highest possible independence, Fichte deprived the outer world of all self-dependence. Now, where such an independent external world is not supposed to exist, it is also quite understandable if the interest in a knowledge concerning this external world ceases. Thereby, the interest in what is properly called knowledge is altogether extinguished, for the ego learns nothing through its knowledge but what it produces for itself. In all such knowledge the human ego holds soliloquies, as it were, with itself. It does not transcend its own being. It can do so only through what can be called living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world, then it is no longer alone by itself, talking to itself. Then its actions flow out into the world. They obtain a self-dependent existence. I accomplish something and when I have done so, this something will continue to have its effect, even if I no longer participate in its action. What I know has being only through myself, what I do, is part and parcel of a moral world order independent of myself. But what does all certainty that we derive from our own ego mean compared to this highest truth of a moral world order, which must surely be independent of ourselves if existence is to have any significance at all? All knowledge is something only for the ego, but this world order must be something outside the ego. It must be, in spite of the fact that we cannot know anything of it. We must, therefore, believe it.

In this manner Fichte also goes beyond knowledge and arrives at a belief. Compared to this belief, all knowledge is as dream to reality. The ego itself has only such a dream existence as long as it contemplates itself. It makes itself a picture of itself, which does not have to be anything but a passing picture; it is action alone that remains. Fichte describes this dream life of the world with significant words in his Vocation of Man:

There is nowhere anything permanent, neither within myself nor outside, but there is only a never ceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any being, not even of my own being. I, myself, do not know at all, and I am not. Pictures are; they are the only thing that is, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures; hovering pictures that pass by, without anything that they pass: interconnected through pictures of pictures, pictures without anything that is depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I, myself, am one of these pictures; in fact, I am not even that but only a confused picture of pictures. All reality is changed into a strange dream without a life of which to dream, without a spirit to do the dreaming; it changes into a dream, which is held together by a dream of itself. Seeing—this is the dream; thinking—the source of all beings, of all reality, which I imagine, of my being, my strength of my purposes. This is the dream of that dream.

In what a different light the moral world order, the world of belief, appears to Fichte:

My will is to exert its effect absolutely through itself, without any tool that would only weaken its expression, in a completely homogeneous sphere, as reason upon reason, as spirit upon what is also spirit; in a sphere to which, however, my will is not to give the law of life, of activity, of progression, but which contains this in itself. My will, then, is to exert itself upon self-active reason, but self-active reason is will. The law of the supersensible world accordingly would be a will. . . . This sublime will, therefore, does not pursue its course separated from the rest of the world of reason in a detached fashion. There is a spiritual bond between the sublime will and all finite rational beings, and the sublime will itself is this spiritual bond within the world of reason. . . . I hide my face before you and I lay my hands on my lips. What you are for yourself and how you appear to yourself, I can never know as surely as I can never become you. After having lived through a thousand spirit worlds a thousand times, I shall be able to understand you as little as now in this house of clay. What I understand becomes finite merely through my understanding it, and the finite can never be changed into the infinite, not even through an infinite growth and elevation. You are separated from the finite not by a difference in degree but in kind. Through that gradation they will make you into a greater and greater man, but never into God, into the infinite that is capable of no measure.

[ 37 ] Because knowledge is a dream and the moral world order is the only true reality for Fichte, he places the life through which man participates in the moral world order higher than knowledge, the contemplation of things. “Nothing,” so Fichte maintains, “has unconditional value and significance except life; everything else, for instance thinking, poetic imagination and knowledge, has value only insofar as it refers in some way to the living, insofar as it proceeds from it or means to turn back into it.”

[ 38 ] This is the fundamental ethical trait in Fichte's personality, which extinguished or reduced in significance everything in his world conception that does not directly tend toward the moral destination of man. He meant to establish the highest, the purest aims and standards for life, and for this purpose he refused to be distracted by any process of knowledge that might discover contradictions with the natural world order in these aims. Goethe made the statement, “The active person is always without conscience; no one has conscience except the onlooker.” He means to say that the contemplative man estimates everything in its true, real value, understanding and recognizing everything in its own proper place. The active man, however, is, above everything else, bent on seeing his demands fulfilled; he is not concerned with the question of whether or not he thereby encroaches upon the rights of things. Fichte was, above all, concerned with action; he was, however, unwilling to be charged by contemplation with lack of conscience. He, therefore, denied the value of contemplation.

[ 39 ] To effect life immediately—this was Fichte's continuous endeavor. He felt most satisfied when he believed that his words could become action in others. It is under the influence of this ardent desire that he composed the following works. Demand to the Princess of Europe to Return the Freedom of Thought, Which They Have Heretofore Suppressed. Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness 1792; Contributions Toward the Correction of the Public Judgment Concerning the French Revolution 1793. This ardent desire also caused him to give his powerful speeches, Outline of the Present Age Presented in Lectures in Berlin in 1804–5; Direction Toward the Beatific Life or Doctrine of Religion, Lectures given in Berlin in 1806; finally, his Speeches to the German Nation, 1808.

[ 40 ] Unconditional surrender to the moral world order, action that springs out of the deepest core of man's nature: These are the demands through which life obtains value and meaning. This view runs through all of Fichte's speeches and writings as the basic theme. In his Outline of the Present Age, he reprimands this age with flaming words for its egotism. He claims that everybody is only following the path prescribed by his lower desires, but these desires lead him away from the great totality that comprises the human community in moral harmony. Such an age must needs lead those who live in its tendency into decline and destruction. What Fichte meant to enliven in the human soul was the sense of duty and obligation.

[ 41 ] In this fashion, Fichte attempted to exert a formative influence on the life of his time with his ideas because he saw these ideas as vigorously enlivened by the consciousness that man derives the highest content of his soul life from a world to which he can obtain access by settling his account with his “ego” all by himself. In so doing man feels himself in his true vocation. From such a conviction, Fichte coins the words, “I, myself, and my necessary purpose are the supersensible.”

[ 42 ] To be aware of himself as consciously living in the supersensible is, according to Fichte, an experience of which man is capable. When he arrives at this experience, he then knows the “I” within himself, and it is only through this act that he becomes a philosopher. This experience, to be sure, cannot be “proven” to somebody who is unwilling to undergo it himself. How little Fichte considers such a “proof” possible is documented by expressions like, “The gift of a philosopher is inborn, furthered through education and then obtained by self-education, but there is no human art to make philosophers. For this reason, philosophy expects few proselytes among those men who are already formed, polished and perfected. . . .”

[ 43 ] Fichte is intent on finding a soul constitution through which the human “ego” can experience itself. The knowledge of nature seems unsuitable to him to reveal anything of the essence of the “ego.” From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thinkers arose who were concerned with the question: What element could be found in the picture of nature by means of which the human being could become explainable in this picture? Goethe did not see the question in this way. He felt a spiritual nature behind the externally manifested one. For him, the human soul is capable of experiences through which it lives not only in the externally manifested, but within the creative forces. Goethe was in quest of the idea, as were the Greeks, but he did not look for it as perceptible idea. He meant to find it in participating in the world processes through inner experience where these can no longer be perceived. Goethe searched in the soul for the life of nature. Fichte also searched in the soul itself, but he did not focus his search where nature lives in the soul but immediately where the soul feels its own life kindled without regard to any other world processes and world entities with which this life might be connected. With Fichte, a world conception arose that exhausted all its endeavor in the attempt to find an inner soul life that compared to the thought life of the Greeks, as did their thought life to the picture conception of the age before them. In Fichte, thought becomes an experience of the ego as the picture had become thought with the Greek thinkers. With Fichte, world conception is ready to experience self-consciousness; with Plato and Aristotle, it had arrived at the point to think soul consciousness.

[ 44 ] Just as Kant dethroned knowledge in order to make place for belief, so Fichte declared knowledge to be mere appearance in order to open the gates for living action, for moral activity. A similar attempt was also made by Schiller. Only in his case, the part that was claimed by belief in Kant's philosophy, and by action in that of Fichte, was now occupied by beauty. Schiller's significance in the development of world conception is usually underestimated. Goethe had to complain that he was not recognized as a natural scientist just because people had become accustomed to take him as a poet, and those who penetrate into Schiller's philosophical ideas must regret that he is appreciated so little by the scholars who deal with the history of world conception, because Schiller's field is considered to be limited to the realm of poetry.

[ 45 ] As a thoroughly self-dependent thinker, Schiller takes his attitude toward Kant, who had been so stimulating and thought-provoking to him. The loftiness of the moral belief to which Kant meant to lift man was highly appreciated by the poet who, in his Robbers, and Cabal and Love, had held a mirror to the corruption of his time. But he asked himself the question: Should it indeed be a necessary truth that man can be lifted to the height of “the categorical imperative” only through the struggle against his desires and urges? Kant wanted to ascribe to the sensual nature of man only the inclination toward the low, the self-seeking, the gratification of the senses, and only he who lifted himself above the sensual nature, who mortified the flesh and who alone allowed the pure spiritual voice of duty to speak within him: Only he could be virtuous. Thus, Kant debased the natural man in order to be able to elevate the moral man so much the higher. To Schiller this judgment seemed to contain something that was unworthy of man. Should it not be possible to ennoble the impulses of man to become in themselves inclined toward the life of duty and morality? They would then not have to be suppressed to become morally effective. Schiller, therefore, opposes Kant's rigorous demand of duty in the epigram:

Scruples of Conscience.

Gladly I serve my friends, but, alas, I do so with pleasure
And so I oftentimes grieve that I lack virtue indeed.

Decision.

There is no better advice; you must try to despise them
And with disgust you must do strictly as duty commands.

[ 46 ] Schiller attempted to dissolve these “scruples of conscience” in his own fashion. There are actually two impulses ruling in man: The impulses of the sensual desire and the impulse of reason. If man surrenders to the sensual impulse, he is a plaything of his desires and passions, in short, of his egoism. If he gives himself completely up to the impulses of reason, he is a slave of its rigorous commands, its inexorable logic, its categorical imperative. A man who wants to live exclusively for the sensual impulse must silence reason; a man who wants to serve reason only must mortify sensuality. If the former, nevertheless, listens to the voice of reason, he will yield to it only reluctantly against his own will; if the latter observes the call of his desires, he feels them as a burden on his path of virtue. The physical nature of man and his spiritual character then seem to live in a fateful discord. Is there no state in man in which both the impulses, the sensual and the spiritual, live in harmony? Schiller's answer to this question is positive. There is, indeed, such a state in man. It is the state in which the beautiful is created and enjoyed. He who creates a work of art follows a free impulse of nature. He follows an inclination in doing so, but it is not physical passion that drives him. It is imagination; it is the spirit. This also holds for a man who surrenders to the enjoyment of a work of art. The work of art, while it affects his sensuality, satisfies his spirit at the same time. Man can yield to his desires without observing the higher laws of the spirit; he can comply with his duties without paying attention to sensuality. A beautiful work of art affects his delight without awakening his desires, and it transports him into a world in which he abides by virtue of his own disposition. Man is comparable to a child in this state, following his inclinations in his actions without asking if they run counter to the laws of reason. “The sensual man is led through beauty . . . into thinking; through beauty, the spiritual man is led back to matter, returned to the world of the senses” (Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man; Letter 18).

The lofty freedom and equanimity of the spirit, combined with strength and vigor is the mood in which we should part from a genuine work of art; there is no surer test of its true esthetic quality. If, after an enjoyment of this kind, we find ourselves inclined to some particular sentiment or course of action, but awkward and ill at ease for another, then this can serve as infallible proof that we have not experienced a pure esthetic effect; this may be caused by the object or our mode of approach, or (as is almost always the case) by both causes simultaneously. (Letter 22.)

As man is, through beauty, neither the slave of sensuality nor of reason, but because through its mediation both factors contribute their effect in a balanced cooperation in man's soul, Schiller compares the instinct for beauty with the child's impulse who, in his play, does not submit his spirit to the laws of reason, but employs it freely according to his inclination. It is for this reason that Schiller calls the impulse for beauty, play-impulse:

In relation to the agreeable, to the good, to the perfect, man is only serious, but he plays with beauty. In this respect, to be sure, we must not think of the games that go on in real life and that ordinarily are concerned with material objects, but in real life we should also search in vain for the beauty that is meant here. The beauty existing in reality is on the same level as the play-impulse in the real world, but through the ideal of beauty, which is upheld by reason, an ideal is also demanded of the play-impulse that man is to consider wherever he plays. (Letter 15.)

In the realization of this ideal play-impulse, man finds the reality of freedom. Now, he no longer obeys reason, nor does he follow sensual inclinations any longer. He now acts from inclination as if the spring of his action were reason. “Man shall only play with beauty and it is only with beauty that he shall play. . To state it without further reserve, man plays only when he is human in the full sense of the word and he is only wholly human when he is playing.” Schiller could also have said: In play man is free; in following the command of duty, and in yielding to sensuality, he is unfree. If man wants to be human in the full meaning of the word, and also with regard to his moral actions, that is to say, if he really wants to be free, then he must live in the same relation to his virtues as he does to beauty. He must ennoble his inclinations into virtues and must be so permeated by his virtues that he feels no other inclination than that of following them. A man who has established this harmony between inclination and duty can, in every moment, count on the morality of his actions as a matter of course.

[ 47 ] From this viewpoint, one can also look at man's social life. A man who follows his sensual desires is self-seeking. He would always be bent on his own well-being if the state did not regulate the social intercourse through laws of reason. The free man accomplishes through his own impulse what the state must demand of the self-seeking. In a community of free men no compulsory laws are necessary.

In the midst of the fearful world of forces, and in the awe-demanding sanctuary of laws, the esthetic formative impulse is imperceptibly building a third delightful realm of play and appearances in which man is released from the fetters of all circumstances and freed from everything that is called compulsion, both in the physical and in the moral world. (Letter 27.)

This realm extends upward as far as the region where reason rules with unconditional necessity and where all matter ceases; it stretches below as far as the world in which the force of nature holds sway with blind compulsion.

Thus, Schiller considers a moral realm as an ideal in which the temper of virtue rules with the same ease and freedom as the esthetic taste governs in the realm of beauty. He makes life in the realm of beauty the model of a perfect moral social order in which man is liberated in every direction. Schiller closes the beautiful essay in which he proclaims this ideal with the question of whether such an order had anywhere been realized. He answers with the words:

As a need, it exists in every delicately attuned soul; as an actuality it can probably only be found, like the pure church and the pure republic, in a few select circles where, not the thoughtless imitation of heterogeneous customs, but the inherent beautiful nature guides the demeanor, where man goes with undismayed simplicity and undisturbed innocence through the most complicated situations without the need of offending the freedom of others nor of defending his own, without need of offending his dignity in order to show charm and grace.

[ 48 ] In this virtue refined into beauty, Schiller found a mediation between the world conceptions of Kant and Goethe. No matter how great the attraction that Schiller had found in Kant when the latter had defended the ideal of a pure humanity against the prevailing moral order, when Schiller became more intimately acquainted with Goethe, he became an admirer of Goethe's view of world and life. Schiller's mind, always relentlessly striving for the purest clarity of thought, was not satisfied before he had succeeded in penetrating also conceptually into this wisdom of Goethe. The high satisfaction Goethe derived from his view of beauty and art, and also for his conduct of life, attracted Schiller more and more to the mode of Goethe's conception. In the letter in which Schiller thanks Goethe for sending him his Wilhelm Meister, he says:

I cannot express to you how painfully I am impressed when I turn from a product of this kind to the bustle of philosophy. In the one world everything is so serene, so alive, so harmoniously dissolved, so truly human; in the other, everything is so rigorous, so rigid and abstract, so unnatural, because nature is always nothing but synthesis and philosophy is antithesis. I may claim, to be sure, to have in all my speculations remained as faithful to nature as is compatible with the concept of analysis; I may, indeed, have remained more faithful to her than our Kantians considered permissible and possible. I feel, nevertheless, the infinite distance between life and reflection, and in such a melancholy moment I cannot help considering as a defect in my nature what, in a more cheerful hour, I must regard as merely a trait inherent in the nature of things. In the meantime, I am certain of this at least: The poet is the only true man and, compared to him, the best philosopher is merely a caricature.

This judgment of Schiller can only refer to the Kantian philosophy with which he had had his experiences. In many respects, it estranges man from nature. It approaches nature with no confidence in it but recognizes as valid truth only what is derived from man's own mental organization. Through this trait all judgments of that philosophy seem to lack the lively content and color so characteristic of everything that has its source in the immediate experience of nature's events and things themselves. This philosophy moves in bloodless, gray and cold abstractions. It has sacrificed the warmth we derive from the immediate touch with things and beings and has exchanged the frigidity of its abstract concepts for it. In the field of morality, also, Kant's world conception presents the same antagonism to nature. The duty-concept of pure reason is regarded as its highest aims. What man loves, what his inclinations tend to, everything in man's being that is immediately rooted in man's nature, must be subordinated to this ideal of duty. Kant goes even as far as the realm of beauty to extinguish the share that man must have in it according to his original sensations and feelings. The beautiful is to produce a delight that is completely “free from interest.” Compare that with how devoted, how really interested Schiller approaches a work in which he admires the highest stage of artistic production. He says concerning Wilhelm Meister:

I can express the feeling that permeates me and takes possession of me as I read this book no better than as a sweet well-being, as a feeling of spiritual and bodily health, and I am firmly convinced that this must be the feeling with all readers in general. . . . I explain this well-being with the quiet clarity, smoothness and transparence that prevails throughout the book, leaving the reader without the slightest dissatisfaction and disturbance, and producing no more emotion than is necessary to kindle and support a cheerful life in his soul.

These are not the words of somebody who believes in delight without interest, but of a man who is convinced that the pleasure in the beautiful is capable of being so refined that a complete surrender to this pleasure does not involve degradation. Interest is not to be extinguished as we approach the work of art; rather are we to become capable of including in our interest what has its source in the spirit. The “true” man is to develop this kind of interest for the beautiful also with respect to his moral conceptions. Schiller writes in a letter to Goethe, “It is really worth observing that the slackness with regard to esthetic things appears always to be connected with moral slackness, and that a pure rigorous striving for high beauty with the highest degree of liberality concerning everything that is nature will contain in itself rigorism in moral life.”

[ 49 ] The estrangement from nature in the world conception and in all of the culture of the time in which he lived was felt so strongly by Schiller that he made it the subject of his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. He compares the life conception of his time with that of the Greeks and raises the question, “How is it that we, who are infinitely surpassed by the ancients in everything that is nature, can render homage to nature to a higher degree, cling to her with fervour and can embrace even the lifeless world with the warmest sentiments.” He answers this question by saying:

This is caused by the fact that, with us, nature has vanished out of humanity and we therefore find her in reality only outside humanity in the inanimate world. It is not our greater naturalness, but, quite to the contrary, the unnaturalness of our lives, state of affairs and customs that drives us to give satisfaction in the physical to the awakening sense for truth and simplicity, which, like the moral faculty from which it springs, lies without corruption and inextinguishably in all men's hearts because we no longer can hope to find it in the moral world. It is for this reason that the feeling with which we cling to nature is so closely related to the sentiment with which we lament the loss of the age of childhood and of the child's innocence. Our childhood is the only unspoiled nature that we still find in civilized humanity, and it is, therefore, no wonder that every footstep of nature leads us back to our own childhood.

This was entirely different with the Greeks. They lived their lives within the bounds of the natural. Everything they did sprang from their natural conception, feeling and sentiment. They were intimately bound to nature. Modern man feels himself in his own being placed in contrast to nature. As the urge toward this primeval mother of being cannot be extinguished, it transforms itself in the modern soul into a yearning for nature, into a search for it. The Greek had nature; modern man searches for nature.

As long as man is still pure nature and, to be sure, not brutal, he acts as an undivided sensual unity and as a harmonizing whole. His senses and his reason, his receptive and his self-active faculties, have not as yet separated in their function and certainly do not act in contradiction to each other. His sentiments are not the formless play of chance; his thoughts, not the empty play of his imagination. These thoughts have their origin in the law of necessity; the sentiments, in reality. As soon as man comes into the state of civilization, and as soon as art enters into his sphere of life, the sensual harmony is dissolved and he can now only act as a moral unity, that is to say, as striving for unity. The agreement between his perception and his thought, which in his former state was actual, is now merely ideal; it is no longer in him, but beyond him; as a thought whose realization is demanded, it is no longer a fact of his life.

The fundamental mood of the Greek spirit was naive, that of modern man is sentimental. The Greeks' world conception could, for this reason, be rightly realistic, for he had not yet separated the spiritual from the natural; for him, nature included the spirit. If he surrendered to nature, it was to a spirit-saturated nature. This is not so with modern man. He has detached the spirit from nature; he has lifted the spirit into the realm of gray abstractions. If he were to surrender to his nature, he would yield to a nature deprived of all spirit. Therefore, his loftiest striving must be directed toward the ideal; through the striving for this goal, spirit and nature are to be reconciled again. In Goethe's mode of spirit, however, Schiller found something that was akin to the Greek spirit. Goethe felt that he saw his ideas and thoughts with his eyes because he felt reality as an undivided unity of spirit and nature. According to Schiller, Goethe had preserved something in himself that will be attained again by the “sentimental man” when he has reached the climax of his striving. Modern man arrives at such a summit in the esthetic mood as Schiller describes it in the state of soul in which sensuality and reason are harmonized again.

[ 50 ] The nature of the development of modern world conception is significantly characterized in the observation Schiller made to Goethe in his letter of August 23, 1794:

Had you been born a Greek and been surrounded since birth by exquisite nature and idealizing art, your road would have been infinitely shortened; perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With the very first perception of things, you would have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experience, the grand style would have developed within you. As it is now . . . since your Greek spirit was cast into this nordic creation, you had no other choice than either to become a nordic artist yourself or to supplement your imagination by means of thought for what reality fails to supply, and thus to give birth from within to another Greece.

Schiller, as these sentences show, is aware of the course that the development of soul life has taken from the age of the ancient Greeks until his own time, for the Greek soul life disclosed itself in the life of thought and he could accept this unveiling because thought was for him a perception like the perception of color and sounds. This kind of thought life has faded away for modern man. The powers that weave creatively through the world must be experienced by him as an inner soul experience, and in order to render this imperceptible thought life inwardly visible, it nevertheless must be filled by imagination. This imagination must be such that it is felt as one with the creative powers of nature.

[ 51 ] Because soul consciousness has been transformed into self-consciousness in modern man, the question of world conception arises: How can self-consciousness experience itself so vividly that it feels its conscious process as permeating the creative process of the living world forces? Schiller answered this question for himself in his own fashion when he claimed the life in the artistic experience as his ideal. In this experience the human self-consciousness feels its kinship with an element that transcends the mere nature picture. In it, man feels himself seized by the spirit as he surrenders as a natural and sensual being to the world. Leibniz had attempted to understand the human soul as a monad. Fichte had not proceeded from a mere idea to gain clarity of the nature of the human soul; he searched for a form of experience in which this soul lays hold on its own being. Schiller raises the question: Is there a form of experience for the human soul in which it can feel how it has its roots in spiritual reality? Goethe experiences ideas in himself that present themselves to him at the same time as ideas of nature.

In Goethe, Fichte and Schiller, the experienced idea—one could also say, the idea-experience—forces its way into the soul. Such a process had previously happened in the world of the Greeks with the perceived idea, the idea-perception.

[ 52 ] The world and life conception that lived in Goethe in a natural (naive) way, and toward which Schiller strove on all detours of his thought development, does not feel the need for the kind of universally valid truth that sees its ideal in the mathematical form. It is satisfied by another truth, which our spirit derives from the immediate intercourse with the real world. The insights Goethe derived from the contemplation of the works of art in Italy were, to be sure, not of the unconditional certainty as are the theorems of mathematics, but they also were less abstract. Goethe approached them with the feeling, “Here is necessity, here is God.” A truth that could not also be revealed in a perfect work of art did not exist for Goethe. What art makes manifest with its technical means of tone, marble, color, rhythm, etc., springs from the same source from which the philosopher also draws who does not avail himself of visual means of presentation but who uses as his means of expression only thought, the idea itself. “Poetry points at the mysteries of nature and attempts to solve them through the picture,” says Goethe. “Philosophy points at the mysteries of reason and attempts to solve them through the word.” In the final analysis, however, reason and nature are, for him, inseparably one; the same truth is the foundation of both. An endeavor for knowledge, which lives in detachment from things in an abstract world, does not seem to him to be the highest form of cognitive life. “It would be the highest attainment to understand that all factual knowledge is already theory.” The blueness of the sky reveals the fundamental law of color phenomena to us. “One should not search for anything behind the phenomena; they, themselves, are the message.”

The psychologist, Heinroth, in his Anthology, called the mode of thinking through which Goethe arrived at his insights into the natural formation of plants and animals, an “object-related thinking” (Gegenstaendliches Denken). What he means is that this mode of thinking does not detach itself from its objects, but that the objects of observation are intimately permeated with this thinking, that Goethe's mode of thinking is at the same time a form of observation, and his mode of observation a form of thinking. Schiller becomes a subtle observer as he describes this mode of spirit. He writes on this subject in a letter to Goethe:

Your observing eye, which so calmly and clearly rests on things, keeps you from being ever exposed to the danger of going astray in the direction where speculation and an arbitrary, merely introspective imagination so easily lose their way. Your correct intuition contains everything, and in a far greater completeness, for which an analytical mind searches laboriously; only because everything is at your disposal as a complete whole are you unaware of your own riches, for unfortunately we know only what we dissect. Spirits of your kind, therefore, rarely know how far advanced they are and how little cause they have to borrow from philosophy, which in turn can only learn from them.

For the world conception of Goethe and Schiller, truth is not only contained in science, but also in art. Goethe expresses his opinion as follows, “I think science could be called the knowledge of the general art. Art would be science turned into action. Science would be reason, and art its mechanism, wherefore one could also call it practical science. Thus, finally, science would be the theorem and art the problem.” Goethe describes the interdependence of scientific cognition and artistic expression of knowledge thus:

It is obvious that an. . . . artist must become greater and more erudite if he not only has his talent but is also a well-informed botanist; if he knows, starting from the root, all the influences of the various parts of a plant on its thriving and growth, their function and mutual effect; if he has an insight into the successive development of the leaves, the flowers, the fertilization, the fruit and the new germ, and if he contemplates this process. Such an artist will not merely show his taste through his power of selection from the realm of appearances, but he will also surprise us with his correct presentation of the characteristic qualities.

Thus, truth rules in the process of artistic creation for the artistic style depends, according to this view, “. . . on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as it is permissible to know it in visible and touchable forms.” The fact that creative imagination is granted a share in the process of knowledge and that the abstract intellect is no longer considered to be the only cognitive faculty is a consequence of this view concerning truth. The conceptions on which Goethe based his contemplation's on plant and animal formations were not gray and abstract thoughts but sensual-supersensual pictures, created by spontaneous imagination. Only observation combined with imagination can really lead into the essence of things, not bloodless abstraction; this is Goethe's conviction. For this reason, Goethe said about Galileo that he made his observations as a genius “for whom one case represents a thousand cases . . . when he developed the doctrine of the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.” Imagination uses the one case in order to produce a content-saturated picture of what is essential in the appearances; the intellect that operates by means of abstractions can, through combination, comparison and calculation of the appearances, gain no more than a general rule of their course. This belief in the possible cognitive function of an imagination that rises into a conscious participation in the creative world process is supported by Goethe's entire world conception. Whoever, like him, sees nature's activity in everything, can also see in the spiritual content of the human imagination nothing but higher products of nature. The pictures of fantasy are products of nature and, as they represent nature, they can only contain truth, for otherwise nature would lie to herself in these afterimages that she creates of herself. Only men with imagination can attain to the highest stages of knowledge. Goethe calls these men the “comprehensive” and the “contemplative” in contrast to the merely “intellectual-inquisitive,” who have remained on a lower stage of cognitive life.

The intellectual inquisitive need a calm, unselfish power of observation, the excitement of curiosity, a clear intellect . . . ; they only digest scientifically what they find ready-made.

The contemplative are already creative in their attitude, and knowledge in them, as it reaches a higher level, demands contemplation unconsciously and changes over into that form; much as they may shun the word “imagination,” they will, nevertheless, before they are aware of it, call upon the support of creative imagination. . . The comprehensive thinkers who, with a prouder name, could be called creative thinkers, are, in their attitude, productive in the highest sense, for, as they start from ideas, they express from the outset the unity of the whole. From then on, it is the task of nature, as it were, to submit to these ideas.

It cannot occur to the believer in such a form of cognition to speak of limitations of human knowledge in a Kantian fashion, for he experiences within himself what man needs as his truth. The core of nature is in the inner life of man. The world conception of Goethe and Schiller does not demand of its truth that it should be a repetition of the world phenomena in conceptual form. It does not demand that its conception should literally correspond to something outside man. What appears in man's inner life as an ideal element, as something spiritual, is as such not to be found in any external world; it appears as the climax of the whole development. For this reason, it does not, according to this philosophy, have to appear in all human beings in the same shape. It can take on an individual form in any individual. Whoever expects to find the truth in the agreement with something external can acknowledge only one form of it, and he will look for it, with Kant, in the type of metaphysics that alone “will be able to present itself as science.” Whoever sees the element in which, as Goethe states in his essay on Winckelmann, “the universe, if it could feel itself, would rejoice as having arrived at its aim in which it could admire the climax of its own becoming and being,” such a thinker can say with Goethe, “If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call this truth; in this way everybody can have his own truth and it is yet the same.” For “man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact apparatus of physics that is possible. Yet, that the experiments separated, as it were, from man, and that one wants to know nature only according to the indications of artificial instruments, even intending to limit and prove in this way what nature is capable of, is the greatest misfortune of modern physics.” Man, however, “stands so high that in him is represented what cannot be represented otherwise. What is the string and all mechanical division of it compared to the ear of the musician? One can even say, ‘What are all elementary phenomena of nature themselves compared to man who must master and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to himself to a tolerable degree.’ ”

[ 53 ] Concerning his world picture, Goethe speaks neither of a mere knowledge of intellectual concepts nor of belief; he speaks of a contemplative perception in the spirit. He writes to Jacobi, “You trust in belief in God; I, in seeing.” This seeing in the spirit as it is meant here thus enters into the development of world conception as the soul force that is appropriate to an age to which thought is no longer what it had been to the Greek thinkers, but in which thought had revealed itself as a product of self-consciousness, a product, however, that is arrived at through the fact that this self-consciousness is aware of itself as having its being within the spiritually creative forces of nature. Goethe is the representative of an epoch of world conception in which the need is felt to make the transition from mere thinking to spiritual seeing. Schiller strives to justify this transition against Kant's position.

[ 54 ] The close alliance that was formed by Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries between poetic imagination and world conception has freed this conception from the lifeless expression that it must take on when it exclusively moves in the region of the abstract intellect. This alliance has resulted in the belief that there is a personal element in world conception. It is possible for man to work out an approach to the world for himself that is in accordance with his own specific nature and enter thereby into the world of reality, not merely into a world of fantastic schemes. His ideal no longer needs to be that of Kant, which is formed after the model of mathematics and arrives at a world picture that is once and for all finished and completed. Only from a spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that has an inspiring effect on the human individuality can a conception like that of Jean Paul (1763 – 1825) arise. “The heart of a genius, to whom all other splendor and help-giving energies are subordinated, has one genuine symptom, namely, a new outlook on world and life.” How could it be the mark of the highest developed man, of genius, to create a new world and life conception if the conceived world consisted only in one form? Jean Paul is, in his own way, a defender of Goethe's view that man experiences inside his own self the ultimate existence. He writes to Jacobi:

Properly speaking, we do not merely believe in divine freedom, God and virtue, but we really see them manifested or in the process of manifestation; this very seeing is a knowing and a higher form of knowing, while the knowledge of intellect merely refers to a seeing of a lower order. One could call reason the consciousness of the only positive, for everything positive experienced by sense perception does finally dissolve into the spiritual, and understanding carries on its bustle only with the relative, which in itself is nothing, so that before God all conditions of “more or less,” and all stages of comparison cease to be.

Jean Paul will not allow anything to deprive him of the right to experience truth inwardly and to employ all forces of the soul for this purpose. He will not be restricted to the use of logical intellect.

Transcendental philosophy (Jean Paul has in mind here the world view following Kant) is not to tear the heart, man's living root, out of his breast to replace it with a pure impulse of selfhood; I shall not consent to be liberated from the dependence of Love, to be blessed by pride only.

With these words he rejects the world-estranged moral order of Kant.

I remain firmly with my conviction that there are four last, and four first things: Beauty, Truth, Morality and Salvation, and their synthesis is not only necessary but also already a fact, but only in a subtle spiritual-organic unity (and for just this reason it is a unity), without which we could not find any understanding of these four evangelists or world continents, nor any transition between them.

The critical analysis of the intellect, which proceeded with an extreme logical rigor, had, in Kant and Fichte, come to the point of reducing the self-dependent significance of the real life-saturated world to a mere shadow, to a dream picture. This view was unbearable to men gifted with spontaneous imagination, who enriched life by the creation of their imaginative power. These men felt the reality; it was there in their perception, present in their souls, and now it was attempted to prove to them its mere dreamlike quality. “The windows of the philosophical academic halls are too high to allow a view into the alleys of real life,” was the answer of Jean Paul.

[ 55 ] Fichte strove for the purest, highest experienced truth. He renounced all knowledge that does not spring from our own inner source. The counter movement to his world conception is formed by the Romantic Movement. Fichte acknowledges only the truth, and the inner life of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the world conception of the romanticists acknowledges only the inner life, and it declares as valuable everything that springs from this inner life. The ego is not to be chained by anything external. Whatever it produces is justified.

[ 56 ] One may say about the romantic movement that it carries Schiller's statement to its extreme consequence, “Man plays only where he is human in the full sense of the word, and he is only wholly human when he is playing.” Romanticism wants to make the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed man knows no other norms than the laws he creates through his freely ruling imaginative power, in the same way as the artist creates those laws he impresses into his works. He rises above everything that determines him from without and lives entirely through the springs of his own self. The whole world is for him nothing but a material for his esthetic play. The seriousness of man in his everyday life is not rooted in truth. The soul that arrives at true knowledge cannot take seriously the things by themselves; for such a soul they are not in themselves valuable. They are endowed with value only by the soul. The mood of a spirit that is aware of his sovereignty over things is called by the romanticists, the ironical mood of spirit.

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819) gave the following explanation of the term “romantic irony”: The spirit of the artist must comprise all directions in one sweeping glance and this glance, hovering above everything, looking down on everything and annihilating it, we call “irony.” Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), one of the leading spokesmen for the romantic turn of spirit, states concerning this mood of irony that it takes everything in at a glance and rises infinitely above everything that is limited, also above some form of art, virtue or genius. Whoever lives in this mood feels bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of his activity for him. He can “at his own pleasure tune himself to be either philosophical or philological, critical or poetical, historical or rhetorical, antique or modern.” The ironical spirit rises above an eternal moral world order, for this spirit is not told what to do by anything except himself. The ironist is to do what he pleases, for his morality can only be an esthetic morality. The romanticists are the heirs of Fichte's thought of the uniqueness of the ego. They were, however, unwilling to fill this ego with a moral belief, as Fichte did, but stood above all on the right of fantasy and of the unrestrained power of the soul. With them, thinking was entirely absorbed by poetic imagination. Novalis says, “It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that the poet represents a special profession. It is not anything special by itself. It is the mode of activity proper to the human spirit. Are not the imaginations of man's heart at work every minute?” The ego, exclusively concerned with itself, can arrive at the highest truth: “It seems to man that he is engaged in a conversation, and some unknown spiritual being causes him to develop the most evident thoughts in a miraculous fashion.

Fundamentally, what the romanticists aimed at did not differ from what Goethe and Schiller had also made their credo: A conception of man through which he appeared as perfect and as free as possible. Novalis experiences his poems and contemplation's in a soul mood that had a relationship toward the world picture similar to that of Fichte. Fichte's spirit, however, works the sharp contours of pure concepts, while that of Novalis springs from a richness of soul, feeling where others think, living in the element of love where others aim to embrace what is and what goes on in the world with ideas. It is the tendency of this age, as can be seen in its representative thinkers, to search for the higher spirit nature in which the self-conscious soul is rooted because it cannot have its roots in the world of sense reality. Novalis feels and experiences himself as having his being within the higher spirit nature. What he expresses he feels through his innate genius as the revelations of this very spirit nature. He writes:

One man succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Saris. What did he see then? He saw—wonder of wonders—himself.

Novalis expresses his own intimate feeling of the spiritual mystery behind the world of the senses and of the human self consciousness as the organ through which this mystery reveals itself, in these words:

The spirit world is indeed already unlocked for us; it is always revealed. If we suddenly became as elastic as we should be, we should see ourselves in the midst of it.

It has probably become clear to those people who attended the lectures which I was permitted to hold here this winter more or less regularly that this lecture cycle has dealt with a series of far-reaching questions concerning the soul. It is the intention of today's lecture, also, to deal with such a question, namely the nature of sickness and healing.

What might be said on the relevant facts in life from the point of view of spiritual science, in so far as they are only physical expressions of spiritual causes, was explained in earlier lectures held here—for example “Understanding Sickness and Death”³⁰ or “Illusory Illness” and “The Feverish Pursuit of Health “.³¹ Today I want to deal with significantly deeper questions in the understanding of sickness and healing.

Sickness, healing and sometimes the fatal course of some illnesses deeply affect the human life. And since we have inquired repeatedly into the preconditions, the spiritual foundations which lie at the base of our reflections here, we are justified in also inquiring into the spiritual causes of these far-reaching facts and consequences of human existence. In other words, what can spiritual science say about these experiences?

We will have to investigate deeply once again the meaning of human life as it develops in order to clarify how illness, health, death and healing stand in relation to the normal course of development of the human being. For we see the events referred to affecting this normal course of development. Do they perhaps contribute something to our development? Do they advance or retard us in our development? We can only reach a clear conception of these events if here, too, we take the whole of the human being into account.

We have often said here that the latter is constituted of four members: first, the physical body which the human being has in common with all mineral beings of his environment which take their form from the physical and chemical forces within them. The second member of the human being we have always called the ether or life body. This he has in common with all living things; that is, with the plant and animal beings of his environment. Then we spoke of the astral body as the third member of man's being; this is the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of all the emotions, images, thoughts and so on which flood through us throughout the day. This astral body the human being has in common only with the animal world of his environment. And then there is the highest member of the human being which makes him the crown of creation; the bearer of the ego, his self-consciousness. When we consider these four members, we can say in the first instance that there appear to be certain differences between them, even to the superficial view. The physical human body is there when we look at the human being, at ourselves, from outside. The external physical sense organs can observe the physical body. With the thinking which is tied to these organs, the thinking which is tied to the instrument of the brain, we can understand this physical body of the human being. It is revealed to our external observation.

The relation to the human astral body is quite different. We have already seen from previous descriptions that the astral body is only an outward fact, so to speak, for the truly clairvoyant consciousness; the latter can see the astral body in the same way as the physical one only by schooling the consciousness as has been frequently described. In ordinary life the astral body of the human being is not observable from the outside; the eye can only see the outer expression of the instincts, desires, passions, thoughts and feelings which surge through it. But in contrast, the human being observes within himself these experiences of the astral body. He observes what we call the instincts, desires, passions, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Thus it can be said that the relationship between the astral and the physical body is such that in normal life we observe the former internally, but the physical body externally.

Now in a certain sense the other two members of the human being, the ether body and the bearer of the ego, are situated between these two extremes. The physical body is observable purely from the outside, the astral body purely from the inside. But the intermediary member between the physical body and the astral body is the ether body. It cannot be observed from the outside, but it affects the outside. The forces, the inner experiences of the astral body initially have to be transferred to the ether body; only then can they act on the physical instrument, the physical body. The ether body acts as an intermediary member between the astral body and the physical body, forming a link between outside and inside. We can no longer see it with the physical eyes, but that which we can see with the physical eyes is an instrument of the astral body only because the ether body is connected towards the outside with the physical body.

Now in a certain sense the ego acts from the inside to the outside, whilst the ether body acts from the outside inwards to the astral body; for by means of the ego and the way it affects the astral body the human being gains knowledge of the outside world, the physical environment, from which the physical body itself originates. Animal existence takes place without individual, personal knowledge because the animal does not have an individual ego. The animal inwardly lives through all the experiences of the astral body, but does not use its pleasure and pain, sympathy or antipathy to gain knowledge of the outside world. What we call pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sympathy or antipathy are all experiences of the astral body in the animal; but the animal does not commute its pleasure into a celebration of the beauty of the world, but it remains within the element which causes the pleasure. The animal lives immediately within its pain; the human being is guided by his pain beyond himself into discovery of the world because the ego leads him out again and unites him with the outside world. Thus we see on the one hand how the ether body is directed inwards into the human being towards the astral body, whereas the ego leads into the outside world, into the physical world which surrounds us.

The human being leads an alternating life. This alternating life can be observed everyday. From the moment of waking in the morning we observe in the human soul all the in and out flooding experiences of the astral body—joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, feelings, images, etc. We see how at night these experiences sink down to a level of undefined darkness as the astral body and the ego enter an unconscious, or perhaps better said, subconscious state. When we look at the waking human being between morning and evening, the physical body, ether body, astral body and ego are interwoven, are inter-linked in their effects. When the human being goes to sleep at night, the occult consciousness can see that the physical body and the ether body remain in bed and that the astral body and the ego return to their proper home in the spiritual world, that they withdraw from the physical body and the ether body. It is possible to describe this in still a different way which will enable us to deal with the present subject in the appropriate way.

The physical body, which only presents us with its outward aspect, sleep remains in the physical world as the outward human being and keeps the ether body, the mediator between inner and outer, with it. That is why in the sleeping human being there can be no mediation between outer and inner because the ether body, as mediator, has entered the outside world. Thus one can say in a certain sense that in the sleeping human being the physical body and the ether body are merely the outer human being; one could even describe the physical and ether bodies as the “outer human being” per se, even though the ether body is the mediator between outer and inner. In contrast, the astral body in the sleeping human being can be described as the “inner human being”. These terms are also true of the waking human being, because all the experiences of the astral body are inner experiences under normal circumstances and what the ego gains in knowledge of the outside world in waking life is taken up inwardly by the human being to be assimilated as learning. The external becomes internalised through the ego. This demonstrates that we can speak of an “outward” and an “inward” human being, the former consisting of a physical and ether body, the latter of ego and astral body.

Now let us observe the so-called normal human life and its development in essence. Let us ask the question: Why does the human being return with his astral body and his ego to the spiritual world every night? Is there any reason for the human being to go to sleep? This subject has been mentioned before, but it is necessary for the topic we are dealing with today. Normal developments have to be understood in order to recognise the apparently abnormal states as they manifest themselves in sickness and healing. Why does the human being go to sleep every night?

An understanding of this can only be reached if one considers fully the relationship between the astral body and the ego and the “outer human being”. We described the astral body as the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of instincts, desires, passions, of the surging imagination, perceptions, ideas and feelings. But if the astral body is the bearer of all these things, why is it that at night the human being does not have these experiences, even though the actual inner human being is connected with the astral body in such a manner that the physical and the ether bodies are not present? Why is it that during this period these experiences sink down into an undefined darkness? The reason is that the astral body and the ego, although they are the bearers of joy and sorrow, judgments, the imagination, etc., cannot experience directly those things of which they are the bearers. In our human life the astral body and the ego under normal circumstances are dependent on the physical body and the ether body for awareness of their own experiences. Our soul-life is not something which is immediately experienced by the astral body. If this were the case, then we would also experience it during the night when we remain united with the astral body. Our daytime soul-life is like an echo or a mirror-image. The physical body and the ether body reflect the experiences of the astral body. Everything which our soul conjures up for us between waking up and going to sleep, it can only do because it sees its own experiences in the mirror of the physical and ether or life bodies. At the moment when we leave the physical and ether bodies at night we still have all the experiences of the astral body in us but we are not conscious of them because in order to be conscious of them the reflecting qualities of the physical body and the ether body are required.

Thus in the whole of our life as it takes its course from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night we see an interaction between the inner and the outer human being, between the ego and the astral body on the one hand and the physical body and the ether body on the other. The forces which are at work here are the forces of the astral body and the ego. For under no circumstances could the physical body as the sum of physical attributes bring forth our soul-life out of itself and neither could the ether body. The reflecting forces come from the astral body and the ego in the same way as the image which we see in the mirror does not originate in the mirror but in the object which is reflected in the mirror. Thus all the forces which cause our soul-life lie in the astral body and the ego, in the inward nature of the human being. And they become active in the interaction between inner and outer world, they reach out, so to speak, for our physical and ether bodies, but at night we see them enter the state which we call “tiredness”. We see them exhausted at night. And we would be unable to continue our life if we were not in a position to enter a different world each night than the one which we inhabit from morning to evening. In the world which we inhabit when we are awake we can make our soul-life perceptible, we can create it before our soul. That we do with the forces of the astral body. But we also exhaust these forces and cannot replenish them out of our waking life. We can only replenish them out of the spiritual world which we enter each night and that is why we sleep. We would be unable to live without entering the world of night and fetching from the spiritual world the forces which we use during the day. Thus the question what we bring into the physical world when we enter our ether and physical bodies is answered.

But do we not also carry something from the physical world into the spiritual world at night? That is the second question, and it is just as important as the first one.

In order to answer this question, we have to deal with a number of things which are a part of normal human life. In ordinary life we have so-called experiences. These experiences are significant in our life between birth and death. An example which has often been mentioned here will illuminate this, the example of learning to write. When we put pen to paper in order to express our thoughts, we practise the art of writing. We can write, but what are the conditions required that we can do so? It is necessary that in a certain span of existence between birth and death we have a whole series of experiences. Think of all the things which you went through as a child, from the first clumsy attempts to hold the pen, put it to paper, etc., etc. One might well thank God that one does not have to recall all those things. Because it would be a dreadful situation if every time that we wanted to write we had to recall all the unsuccessful attempts at tracing the lines, perhaps also the punishments connected therewith, and so on in order to develop what we call the art of writing. What has taken place? Development in an important sense has taken place in the human life between birth and death. We have had a whole series of experiences. These experiences took place over a long period of time. Then they were refined, as it were, into an essence which we call the “ability” to write. All the other things have sunk into the indeterminate shadow of forgetfulness. But there is no need to remember them, because our soul has developed to a higher stage from these experiences: our memories flow together into essences which appear in life as our capabilities and abilities. That is our development in the existence between birth and death. Experiences are transformed initially into abilities of the soul which can then come to expression by means of the outer tools of the physical body. All personal experiences between birth and death take place in such a manner that they are transformed into abilities and also into wisdom.

We can gain an insight into how this transformation takes place if we take a look at the period between 1770 and 1815. A significant historical event took place during this period. A large number of people were contemporaries of this event. How did they respond to it? Some of them did not notice the events passing by them. Impassively they neglected to turn the events into knowledge, wisdom of the world. Others transformed them into a deep wisdom, they extracted the essence.

How are experiences transformed in the soul into ability and wisdom? They are transformed by being taken in their immediate form into our sleep each night, into those spheres where the soul or the inner human being reside during the night. There the experiences which occur over a period of time are changed into essences. Any observer of life knows that if one wants to master and co-ordinate a series of experiences in a single sphere of activity it is necessary to transform these experiences in periods of sleep. For example, a thing is best learnt by heart by learning it, sleeping on it, learning it again, sleeping on it again. If one is not able to immerse the experiences in sleep in order for them to emerge as abilities or in the form of wisdom or art, then they will not be developed.

This is the expression on a higher level of what we are faced with as necessity on a lower one. This year's plant cannot become next year's one if it does not return to the dark lap of the earth in order to grow again the following year. Here development remains repetition. Where it is illuminated with the human spirit it is a true “development”. The experiences descend into the nocturnal lap of the unconscious and they are brought forth again, initially still as repetition; but eventually they will have been transformed to such an extent that they can emerge as wisdom, as abilities, as life experience.

Thus life was understood in times when it was still possible to observe the spiritual worlds more deeply than is the case today. That is why, where leading personalities of ancient cultures wanted to speak of certain things by means of an image we see indications of these significant foundations of human life. What would someone have to do if he wanted to prevent a series of daytime experiences catching fire in his soul and being transformed into certain abilities? What, for example, happens when someone experiences a certain relationship with another person over a period of time? These experiences with the other person descend into the night-time consciousness and re-emerge from night-time consciousness as love for another person, which, when it is healthy, is an essence, as it were, of the consecutive experiences. The feeling of love for the other person has come about in such a way that the sum of experiences has been drawn together into unity, as if woven into a fabric. Now what would someone have to do to prevent a series of experiences turning into love? He would have to take the special measure of preventing the nightly natural process which turns our experience into essence, the feeling of love, from taking place. He would have to unravel again at night the fabric of daytime experience. If he can manage this his achievement is that his experience of the other person, which turns into love in his soul, has no effect on him.

Homer was alluding to these depths of human soul-life in his image of Penelope and her suitors.³² She promises marriage to each one after she has completed a certain fabric. She manages to avoid having to keep her promise only by unravelling each night what she has woven during the day. Great depths are revealed where the seer is also artist. Today there is little feeling left for these things and such interpretations of poets who were also seers are declared arbitrary and phantastical. This can harm neither the ancient poets nor the truth, but only our time, which is thus prevented from entering into the depths of human life.

Thus something is taken into the soul at night which returns again. Something is taken into the soul which the soul develops and which raises it to ever higher levels of ability. But now it must be asked: where does this development of the human being reach its limit? This frontier can be recognised if we observe how the human being when he wakes up in the morning always returns to the same physical body and ether body with the same abilities and talents, the same configuration which they have possessed from birth. This configuration, these inner structures and forms of the physical and ether bodies cannot be altered by human being. If we were able to take the physical or, at least, the ether body into the state of sleep then we would be able to change them. But in the morning we find them again unchanged from the evening. Here there is a clear limitation to what can be achieved by development in the life between birth and death. Development between birth and death is essentially restricted to experiences of the soul; it cannot extend to physical experience.

Thus for all the opportunities someone might have to pass through experiences which could deepen his musical appreciation, to awaken in his soul a profound musical life, it could not be developed if he did not have a musical ear, if the physical and etheric formation of his ear did not permit him to establish the harmony between the outer and the inner human being. In order for the human being to be whole, all the members of his being have to form a unity, to be in harmony. That is why all the opportunities which a person with an unmusical ear might have to go through experiences which would enable him to rise to a higher level of musical appreciation have to remain in the soul, have to resign themselves. They cannot come to fruition because the boundary is drawn each morning by the structure and form of the internal organs. These things are not dependent merely on the more rough structures of the physical and ether bodies but on very subtle relationships therein. Every function of the soul in our current normal life has to find expression in an organ; and if the organ is not formed in a suitable way then this is prevented. Those things which cannot be demonstrated by physiology and anatomy, the subtle sculpting within the organs, are precisely the things which are incapable of transformation between birth and death.

Is the human being completely powerless, then, to transfuse into his physical and ether bodies the events and experiences which he has taken into his astral body and ego? For when we look at people we can see that the human being can even shape his physical body within limits. One only needs to observe a person who has spent ten years of his life in deep inner contemplation: the gestures and physiognomy will have changed. But this occurs within very narrow confines. Is it always the case?

That this is not always confined to the narrowest of limitations can only be understood if we take recourse to a law which we have often mentioned here, but which needs to be recalled frequently because it is so alien to our present time, a law which can be compared with another one which became established for mankind in the 17th century on a lower level.

Up until the 17th century it was believed that the lower animals, insects, etc., could originate from river mud. It was believed that nothing more than pure matter was required to generate earth-worms and insects. This was thought to be true not only by amateurs but also by scholars. If we go back to earlier times we find that everything was systematised in such a way that, for example, instructions were given on how to create life from the environment. Thus a book from the 7th century AD³³ describes how the carcass of a horse has to be beaten tender in order to create bees. Similarly bullocks created hornets, donkeys, wasps. It was in the 17th century that the great scientist Francesco Redi³⁴ first pronounced the axiom: life can only originate from life! Because of this truth, which is taken as self-evident today so that no one can understand how anything else could ever have been believed, Redi was considered a dreadful heretic still in the 17th century and he barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

It is always like that with such truths. At first those who proclaim them are branded as heretics and fall prey to the inquisition. In the past people were burned or threatened with burning. Today this type of inquisition has been abandoned. No one is burnt anymore. But those who today sit on the curule chair of science regard all those who proclaim a new, higher level of truth to be fools and dreamers. People who today espouse in a different way the axiom regarding living things which Francesco Redi put forward in the 17th century are considered to be fools and dreamers. Redi pointed out that it is inexact observation to believe that life can originate immediately from dead matter but that it must be traced back to similar living matter, to the embryo which draws its matter and strength from the environment. Similarly spiritual science today must point out that what enters existence as soul and spiritual nature must originate from soul and spirit and is not an assembly of inherited characteristics. As the embryonic form of the earth-worm draws on the matter of its environment to develop, so the soul and spiritual kernel equally has to draw on the substances of its environment in order to develop. If we pursue the soul and spiritual nature in the human being backwards, we come to an earlier soul and spiritual element which exists before birth and which has nothing to do with heredity. The axiom that soul-spiritual elements can only arise from soul-spiritual elements entails in the last instance the axiom of repeated earth lives, of which a closer study of spiritual science furnishes the proof. Our life between birth and death leads back to other lives which we went through in earlier times. The soul and spiritual element originates in the soul and in the spirit, and the causes of our present experiences between birth and death lie in a previous soul and spiritual existence. When we pass through the gates of death we take with us what we assimilated in this life as transformation from causes into abilities. This we return with when we enter a future existence through birth.

In the time between death and birth we are in different circumstances than when we enter the spiritual world each night through sleep from which we wake up again in the morning. When we wake up in the morning, we find our physical and ether bodies as we left them the previous evening. We cannot transform them with our experiences in life between birth and death. We find our limitation in the finished ether and physical bodies. But when we enter the spiritual world through the gate of death we leave the physical and ether bodies behind and retain only the essence of the ether body. In the spiritual world we have no need to take account of an existing physical and ether body. In the whole period between death and a new birth the human being can work with purely spiritual forces, he is dealing with purely spiritual substance. He takes from the spiritual world what he requires to create the archetype of his new physical body and ether body and forms these archetypes up to the time of his new birth, weaving into them all the experiences which the soul was unable to utilise between birth and death in the previous physical and ether bodies. Then the moment arrives when this purely spiritual archetypal image has been finished and when the human being is able to sculpt into the physical and ether bodies what he has woven into the archetypal image; the archetype is thus active in this particular state of sleep which the human being is passing through.

If the human being were able to bring with him in a similar manner his physical body and ether body each morning on waking up, then he would be able to form them from out of the spiritual world; but he would also have to transform them. But birth means waking up from a state of sleep which encompasses the physical and ether bodies in the existence before birth. It is at this point that the astral body and ego descend into the physical world, into the physical body and the ether body, into which they can now sculpt everything which they could not form into the complete bodies of the previous life. Now, in a new life, they can express in an ether body and a physical body everything which they were able to raise to a higher stage of development but which they were unable to put into practice in the previous life because the complete ether body and physical body made it impossible.

Were we not able to destroy our physical and ether bodies, were the physical body unable to pass through death, it would be impossible to integrate our experiences into our development. However much we regard death with fear and shock and feel pain and sorrow at the death which will affect us, an objective view of the world teaches us in fact: we have to want death! For death alone gives us the opportunity to destroy this body in order to enable us to construct a new one in the next life so that we can bring into life all the fruits of earthly existence.

Thus two currents are active together in the normal course of human life: an inner and an outer. These two currents reveal themselves to us in parallel in the physical and the ether bodies on the one hand and in the astral body and the ego on the other. What can the human being do between birth and death in relation to the physical and ether bodies? Not only the astral body is exhausted by the life of the soul, but the organs of the physical body and the ether body are also exhausted. We can now observe the following: whilst the astral body is in the spiritual world during the night, it also works on the physical body and the ether body to restore them to their normal state. Only in sleep can what has been destroyed during the day in the physical and ether bodies be restored. Thus the spiritual world does indeed work on the physical and ether bodies, but with limitations. The abilities and structure of the physical body and ether body are given at birth and cannot alter except within very narrow margins. Two streams are active in cosmic development, as it were, which cannot abstractly be made to harmonize. If someone tried to unite these two streams in abstract reflection, tried to develop lightly a philosophy which said: “Well, the human being has to be in harmony, therefore the two streams have to be harmonious in man!” he would be making an enormous error. Life does not work according to abstractions. Life works in such a way that these abstract visions can only be achieved after long periods of development. Life works in such a manner that it creates states of equilibrium and harmony only by passing through stages of disharmony. This is the living interaction in the human being and indeed it is not meant to be made harmonious by reflection. It is always an indication of abstract, dry thinking if a harmony is imagined into a situation where life has to develop towards a stage of balance through disharmony. It is the fate of human development that we must have harmony as an aim which cannot, however, be reached if it is merely imagined into a given stage of human development.

It will now be easier to understand when spiritual science says that life presents different aspects, depending on whether we regard it from the point of view of the inner or outer human being. The person who wanted to combine these two aspects by some abstraction would leave out of account that there is more than one ideal, one judgment, but that there are as many judgments as there are points of view and that it is only when these different points of view act together that the truth can be found. This allows us to assume that life's view of the inner human being might be different from its view of the outer human being. An example will make clear that truths are relative, depending on whether they are regarded from one aspect or another.

It is certainly quite appropriate for a giant who has a hand the size of a small child to talk of his little finger. Whether a dwarf the size of the small child can also talk of the giant's little finger is another matter. Things by necessity are complementary truths. There is no absolute truth as regards outer things. Things have to be looked at from all different points of view and truth has to be found through the individual truths which illuminate one another. That is also the reason why in life as we can observe it the outer human being, physical body and ether body, and the inner human being, astral body and ego, need not in a given period of life be in complete harmony. If there were complete harmony then the case would be that when the human being enters the spiritual world at night he would take the events of the day with him and would transform them into the essence of ability, of wisdom, and so on, and the forces which he brought with him from the spiritual world in the morning into the physical world would be used only in relation to the soul life. But the frontier which we described and which is drawn for the physical body would never be crossed. Then, also, there would be no human development. The human being has to learn to take note of these limitations himself; he has to make them part of his judgment. The possibility must be given for him to breach these limits to the greatest possible extent.

And he breaches them continually! In real life these frontiers are crossed continually so that for example the astral body and the ego do not keep within the limits when they affect the physical body. But in doing so they breach the laws of the physical body. We then observe such breaches as irregularities, as disorganisation of the physical body, as the appearance of sickness, caused by action of the spirit—the astral body and the ego. Limits can be breached also in other ways, namely that the human being as inner being does not manage to correlate with the outside world, that he fails to relate fully to the outside world. This can be shown in a very dramatic example.

When the famous eruption of Mount Pelee³⁵ in Central America took place, very noteworthy and instructive documents were found in the ruins afterwards. In one of them it said: “You need not fear any more because the danger is past; there will be no more eruptions. This is shown by the laws which we have recognised as the laws of nature.” These documents, which stated that further volcanic eruptions were impossible according to the current state of knowledge of nature, had been buried—and with them the scholars who had written these documents on the basis of their normal scholarly knowledge. A tragic event took place here. But that precisely demonstrated the disharmony of the human being with the physical world quite clearly. There can be no doubt that the intelligence of the scholars who investigated these natural laws would have been adequate to find the truth if they had been sufficiently trained. For they were not lacking in intelligence. But although intelligence is necessary, it is insufficient on its own, Animals, for example, leave an area if such an event is imminent. That is a well-known fact. Only the domesticated animals perish with the human beings. The so-called animal instinct is therefore sufficient to develop a far greater wisdom as far as those future events are concerned than human wisdom today. “Intelligence” is not the decisive factor; our current intellect is present also in those who commit the greatest follies. Intelligence is therefore not lacking. What is lacking is sufficiently matured experience of events. As soon as the intelligence lays something down which appears plausible to its narrow limited experience it can come into disharmony with the real outward events and then the outer events break down around it. For there is a relationship between the physical body and the world which the human being will gradually learn to recognise and grasp with the forces which he possesses today already. But he will only be able to do this once he has accrued and assimilated the experiences of the outside world. Then the harmony which will have developed as a result of this experience will have been created by no other intellect than the one we have today; for it is precisely in the present that our intellect has developed to a certain stage. The only thing lacking is the ripening of experience. If the maturing of experience does not correspond to the outside then the human being becomes disharmonious with the outside world and can be broken on events in the outer world.

We have seen in an extreme example how disharmony between the physical bodies of the scholars and the stage which they had reached inwardly in the development of their soul came about. Such disharmony occurs not only when momentous events happen to us; such disharmony is given in principle and in essence always when any outer harm befalls our physical and ether bodies, when outer harm affects the outer human being in such a way that he is not capable of countering this harm with his inner forces, to ban it from his life. This applies whether it is externally visible or an internal sickness, which is, however, in reality only an external one. For if we have an upset stomach, then that is essentially the same as if a brick drops on our head. This is the situation which occurs when conflict arises—or is allowed to arise between the inner human being and the external world, when the inner human being cannot match the outer human being.

Fundamentally all illnesses are such disharmony, such breaching of the division between inner and outer human being. Something is created by the continual breach of these divisions which will become harmony only in the far distant future, which remains an abstraction if our thinking tries to impose it on our life. The human being only develops his inner life by beginning to realise that at his present stage he is not yet able to match outer life. This is true not only of the ego, but also of the astral body. The human being experiences consciously between waking up and going to sleep those things which are penetrated by the ego. The working of the astral body, the way in which it breaches its limits and is impotent to create proper harmony between the inner and the outer human being, lies outside normal human consciousness. But it is present, nevertheless. All these things reveal the deeper inner nature of sickness.

What are the two possible courses which an illness can take? Either healing or death occurs. In the normal development of life death must be seen as the one side and healing as the other.

What does healing signify for the development of the human being? First of all it must be clarified what sickness means for the overall development of the human being.

In sickness there is disharmony between the inner and the outer human being. In a certain way the inner human being has to withdraw from the outer one. A simple example is when we cut our finger. We can only cut the physical body, not the astral. But the astral body always transfuses the physical one and the result is that the astral body does not find in the cut finger what it should find when it penetrates into its smallest recesses. It feels disconnected from the physical part of the finger. That, in essence, is the nature of a whole number of illnesses that the inner human being feels disconnected from the outer, that it cannot penetrate the outer human being because an injury causes a division. Now health can be restored to the human being by outer means or the inner human being can be strengthened to such an extent that it is able to heal the outer human being. The link between outer and inner human being is re-established to a greater or lesser degree after healing, the inner human being can again live in the healed outer one.

This is a process which can be compared to waking up: after an artificial withdrawal by the inner human being we return to the experiences which are only available in the outside world. Healing makes it possible for the human being to return with those things which he could not otherwise bring back. The healing process is assimilated into the inner human being and becomes an integral part of this inner human being. Return to health, healing, is something which we can look back on with satisfaction because in a similar manner that sleep makes the inner human being progress we are given something by healing which allows the inner human being to progress. Even if it is not immediately visible, we are elevated in our soul experience, are enhanced in our inner human being by a return to health. In sleep we take with us into the spiritual world the things we have won through healing and the latter is therefore something which strengthens us as far as the forces which we develop in sleep are concerned. All these thoughts on the mysterious relationship between healing and sleep could be developed in full if there were the time, but it can be seen, nevertheless, how healing can be equated with what we take into the spiritual world at night; with that which brings progress into our processes of development in so far as they can be made to progress at all between birth and death. Those things which in normal life we draw in from outer experience come to expression in our soul-life between birth and death as higher development. But not everything which assimilated through healing emerges again. We can also take it through the gate of death and it can be of benefit to us in the next life. But spiritual science shows us the following: we should be thankful each time that we are healed, for each healing signifies an enhancement of our inner human being which can only be achieved with the forces which we have assimilated inwardly.

The other question is: what is the significance for the human being of the illness which ends in death?

In a certain sense it means the opposite, that we cannot restore the disturbed balance between the inner and the outer human being, that we cannot in the correct way cross the frontier between the inner and the outer human being in this life. As we have to accept our unchanged healthy body when we wake up in the morning we have to accept our unchanged damaged body when an illness ends with death and are incapable of making it change. The healthy body remains as it is and receives us in the morning; the damaged body can no longer receive us and we end up in death. We have to leave the body because we are no longer able to re-establish its harmony. But we then take our experiences into the spiritual world without the benefit of an outer body. The fruits which we gain as a result of our damaged body no longer receiving us become an enrichment for the life between death and a new birth. Thus, also, we have to be thankful to an illness which ends in death because it gives us the opportunity of enhancing the life between death and a new birth and to gather together the forces and experiences which can only mature during that time.

Thus we have here the consequences for the soul of illnesses which end in death and illnesses which end in healing. That gives us two aspects: we can be thankful to an illness which ends in healing because we have become strengthened in our inner self; and we can be thankful to an illness which ends in death because we know: in the higher stage which we enter in the life between death and a new birth death is of great significance for us because we will have learnt from it that our body must be different when we construct it for the future. And we will avoid the harmful aspects which caused us to fail before. The healing process makes our inner life progress, death influences the development in the outer world.

The necessity therefore arises that we take two different points of view. Nobody should think that it would be correct to say from the point of view of spiritual science: if death, which results from illness is something for which we must be grateful, if the course of an illness is something which elevates us in our next life, then we should really permit all illness to end in death and not make any attempt at healing! To speak like that would not be in the spirit of spiritual science, for the latter is not concerned with abstractions but with those truths which are arrived at from different points of view. We have the duty to make every attempt at healing with all the means at our disposal. The task to heal to the best of our ability lies embedded in the human consciousness. Thus the view that death, when it occurs, is something to be grateful for is not one which is normally present in ordinary human consciousness, but can only be won if we transcend it. From the “viewpoint of the gods” it is justified to let an illness end in death; from the human viewpoint it is justified only to do everything to bring about healing. An illness which ends in death cannot be judged on the same level. Initially these two views are irreconcilable and they have to progress in parallel. Any abstract harmonising is of no use here. Spiritual science has to advance to a recognition of the truths which stem from one particular side of life and of other truths which are representative of another side.

The sentence “healing is good, healing is a duty” is correct. But so is the other sentence “death is good when it occurs as the result of illness; death is beneficial for overall human development.” Although these two sentences contradict one another, both of them contain living truths which can be recognised by living knowledge. Precisely where two streams, which can only be made harmonious in the future, enter human life it is possible to see the error of thinking in stereotypes and the necessity to regard life in broad outline. It has to be clearly understood that so-called contradictions, when they refer only to experience and a deeper knowledge of the matter, do not limit our knowledge but lead us gradually into a living knowledge because life itself develops towards harmony.

Normal life proceeds in such a manner that we create abilities from experiences and that the things which we cannot assimilate between birth and death are woven into the fabric which we then make use of between death and a new birth. Healing and fatal illness intertwine with this normal course of human life in such a manner that every healing is a contribution to the elevation of the human being to a higher stage, and every fatal illness, too, leads the human being to higher levels. The former as far as the inner human being is concerned and the latter as far as the outer human being is concerned. Thus there is progress in the world in that it moves not in one but in two opposing currents. It is precisely in sickness and healing that the complexities of human life become visible. If sickness and health did not exist, normal life could only proceed in such a manner that the human being would spin the thread of his life hanging on to the apron strings of existence, never going beyond his limits. And the forces to construct his body anew would be given to him from the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In such a situation the human being would never be able to unfold the fruits of his own labour in the development of the world. These fruits can be unfolded by the human being in the close confines of life only in that he can err. For only by a knowledge of error can truth be arrived at. It is only possible to assimilate truth such that it becomes part of the soul, such that it influences development, if it is extracted from the fertile soul of error. The human being could be perfectly healthy if he did not interfere in life with his errors and imperfections by breaching his limits. But health which has the same origins as the inwardly recognised truth, health for which the human being wrestles from one incarnation to the next with his own life, such health only comes about through the reality of mistakes, through illness. The human being learns to overcome his mistakes and errors in healing on the one hand, and on the other he meets the mistakes which he was not able to overcome in life in the existence between death and a new life so that he learns to surmount them in the next life.

We can now return to our dramatic example and say: the intellect of those scholars who made such a wrong judgment at the time will not only become more cautious in jumping to conclusions, but it will let the experience ripen in order gradually to create harmony with life.

Thus it can be observed how healing and sickness affect human life so that the human being could never achieve his aims by his own effort without them. We can see how their seemingly abnormal intervention in our development belongs to human existence, as does error, if our aim is to recognise truth. We could say the same about sickness and healing as a great poet in an important epoch said about human error: “The striving human being errs.”³⁶ This might give the impression as if the poet had wanted to say: “The human being always errs!” But the sentence is reversible and might be said: “Let the human being strive whilst he still errs!” Error gives birth to renewed striving. The sentence “The striving human being errs” need not, therefore, fill us with despair, for every error brings forth new striving and the human being will continue to strive until he has overcome the error. That is as much as to say that error in itself points beyond itself and leads to human truth. And similarly it can be said: sickness may occur in the human being, but he must develop. Through illness he develops to health. Thus illness points beyond itself in healing and even in death, and produces a state of health which is not alien to man but which grows out of the human being and is in accord with this being.

Everything which appears in this context is well suited to showing us how the world in the wisdom of its existence avails the human being at every stage of his development of the opportunity to grow beyond himself in the sense of the saying by Angelus Silesius with which we concluded the lecture “What is Mysticism?” At that time we were referring to more intimate spheres of development; now we can expand its meaning to the whole field of sickness and healing and we can truly say:

If you transcend yourself in God's prevailing,
Then in your spirit will ascension reign!³⁷

• 30. “Wie begreift man Krankheit und Tod”, Berlin, 13th December 1906, in: Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen in unserer Zeit und deren Bedeutung für das heutige Leben, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 55)
• 31. “Der Krankheitswahn im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft”, Berlin, 13th February 1908; “Das Gesundheitsfieber im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft”, Berlin, 27th February 1908. The parallel lectures held in Munich (3rd and 5th December 1907) are printed in Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 56)
• 32. See Odyssey, 19th Book, 1.137 ff.
• 33. The reference is to the work De Natura Rerum by Isidore of Seville, c. 560-636, the last Occidental Church Father. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 18th January 1912 in Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. (GA 61)
• 34. Francesco Redi, 1626–1698. Italian doctor, scientist and poet. Cf. his work Osservazione intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684.
• 35. Volcano on the West Indian island of Martinique; largest eruption on 8th May 1902.
• 36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, Prologue in Heaven, 1.317.
• 37. See note 20.

In the course of our studies I have spoken of the events in the early development of Western civilization. My aim was to ascertain from these enquiries into the past what is of importance for the present, and with this object in view I propose to pursue the matter in further detail. Our present epoch, as we can see from a cursory glance, is an epoch when only thoughts derived from the Mystery teachings concerning human evolution can exercise effective influence. Now in order to grasp the full implication of this claim we must not only have a clear understanding of many things, but we must also look closely into the needs and shortcomings of contemporary thinking, feeling and willing. We shall then begin to feel that our present epoch has need of new impulses, new thoughts and ideas, and especially of those impulses and thoughts which spring from the depths of the spiritual life and which must become the subject of spiritual-scientific study.

At the present time there is much that fills us with sadness. We must not allow ourselves to be depressed by this mood of sadness, rather should it be something that can prepare us and teach us to work and strive in our present circumstances. I recently came across a publication which I felt would give me the greatest pleasure. The author is one of the few who are receptive to the ideas of Spiritual Science and the more is the pity that he was unable to introduce into his writings the fruits of anthroposophical endeavour. The book to which I am referring is The State as Organism, by Rudolf Kjellén (note 1), the Swedish political economist. After reading the book, I must confess that I was left with a feeling of disappointment because I realized that here was a person who, as I said, was receptive to the ideas of Spiritual Science, but whose thoughts were still far removed from the thoughts we stand in need of today, thoughts which must be clearly formulated and become concrete reality, especially today, so that they may enter into the evolution of our time. In his book Kjellén undertook to study the State and its organization, but at no time does one feel that he possessed the ideas or the intellectual grasp which could offer the slightest chance of solving his problem. It is a melancholy experience to be disillusioned time and again—but let us not be discouraged, let us rather brace ourselves to meet the challenge of our time.

Before I say a few words on these matters I should like to call your attention once again to those ancient Mysteries which, as you can well imagine from the statements I recently made about the iconoclasm of the (Christian) Church, are known to history today only in a mangled version. It is all the more necessary therefore for our present age that Spiritual Science should bring an understanding of these Mysteries. I mentioned in my last lecture the unprecedented fury with which Christianity in the first centuries destroyed the ancient works of art and how much that was of priceless value was swept away. One cannot take an impartial view of Christianity unless one is prepared to see this destructive side with complete objectivity. And bear in mind at the same time that the various books which deal with this subject present a particular point of view. Everyone today who has received a minimum of education has a picture of the spiritual development of Antiquity, of the spiritual evolution that preceded Christianity. But how different this picture would be if Archbishop Theophilus (note 2) of Alexandria had not burnt in the year 391 seven hundred thousand scrolls which contained vitally important records of Roman, Egyptian, Indian and Greek literature and their cultural life. Just imagine how different would be the picture of Antiquity if these seven hundred thousand scrolls had not been burnt. And from this you will realize how much reliance can be placed on the history of the past which has documentary support—or rather how little reliance!

Let us now follow up the train of thought which I touched on in my lecture yesterday. I pointed out that the forms of Christian worship were in many respects borrowed from the symbols and ceremonies of the ancient pagan Mystery cults, that the forms of these Mystery cults and symbols had been totally eradicated by Christianity in order to conceal their origin. Christianity had made a clean sweep of the pagan forms of worship so that people had no means of knowing what had existed prior to their time and would simply have to accept what the Church offered. Such is the fate of human evolution. We must be prepared to recognize without giving way to pessimism that the course of human evolution is not one of uninterrupted progress.

I also showed in the course of my lecture yesterday that the rites and rituals of the Roman Church owed much to the Eleusinian Mysteries which had been interrupted in their development because Julian had been unable to carry out his intentions; his plan had failed to materialize. But the rites and sacraments of later years owed still more to the Mithras Mysteries. But the spirit of the Mithras Mysteries, that which justified their existence, the source from which they derived their spiritual content, can no longer be investigated. The Church has been careful to remove all traces of it and to close the door to enquiry. Knowledge of this can only be recovered if we strive to come to an understanding of these things through Spiritual Science. Today I propose to touch upon only one aspect of the Mithras Mysteries (note 3). I could of course speak at greater length about the Mithras Mysteries if I had more time at my disposal, but in order to understand them we must first gradually become conversant with their details.

In order to grasp the true spirit of the Mithras Mysteries whose influence spread far into the West of Europe during the first post-Christian centuries, we must be aware that they were based upon a central core of belief (which was right for the world of Antiquity and perfectly justified up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha), that the community or the individual communities, for example, the folk-communities or other groups within the folk-communities consisted not only of the individual units or members, but that, if they were to have any reality, communities must be imbued with a community spirit which has a super-sensible origin. A community was determined not only by the counting of heads, but for the people of Antiquity it represented the external form, the incarnation, if I may use the word in this connection, of a genuinely existing communal spirit. The aim of those who were received into these Mysteries was to participate in this spirit, to share the thoughts of this group-soul; not to insulate themselves from the community by obstinately pursuing their own egoistic thoughts, feelings and volitional impulses, but to live in such a way that they were receptive to the thoughts of the group-soul. In the Mithras Mysteries in particular the priests maintained that this union with the group-soul cannot be achieved if one looks upon a larger community simply as an external manifestation, for thereby that which lies in the community spirit is in the main obscured. The dead, they claimed, are part of our immediate environment and the more we can commune with those who have long been dead the better we shall order our present life. Therefore the longer these souls had been discarnate, the more beneficial they found it to commune with these souls. And in order to be able to commune with the spirit of the ancestor of a tribe, folk-community or family they found it best to make contact with the ancestral soul. It was assumed that this soul develops further after passing through the gates of death and therefore has a deeper insight into the future destiny of the Earth than those who are living on this Earth in their present physical bodies. Thus the whole purpose of these Mysteries was to establish those dramatic representations which would put the neophyte into touch with the souls of those who had long passed through the gates of death.

Those who were admitted to these Mysteries had to undergo a first stage of initiation which was usually characterized by a term borrowed from the bird-species; they were called “Ravens”. A “Raven” was a first-degree initiate. Through the particular Mystery rites, through the potent use of symbols and especially through dramatic performances he became aware not only of the sensible world around him or of what one learns through contact with one's fellow-men, but also of the thoughts of the dead. He acquired a certain capacity which enabled him to recall memories of the dead and the ability to develop it further. The “Raven” was under the solemn obligation to be conscious in the moment, to be alert and responsive to the world around, to be aware of the needs of his fellow-men and to familiarize himself with the phenomena of nature. He who spends his life in day-dreaming, who has no feeling for the indwelling spirit of man and nature was considered to be unsuitable material for reception into the Mysteries. For only the ability to see life around him clearly and in its true perspective fitted him for the task which he had to fulfil in the Mysteries. His task was to participate as far as possible in the changing circumstances of the world in order to widen the range of his experience, to share in the joys and sorrows of contemporary events. He who was unresponsive or indifferent to contemporary events was an unsuitable candidate for initiation. For the first task of the aspirant was to “reproduce”, to re-enact in the Mysteries the experiences gained through participation in the life of the world. In this way these experiences served as a channel of communication with the dead with whom the Initiates sought to make contact. Now you might ask: Would not a high Initiate have been more suitable for this purpose? By no means, for the first-degree Initiates were eminently suited to act as intermediaries because they still possessed all the feelings, shared all the sympathies and antipathies which fitted them for life in the external world, whilst the higher Initiates had more or less purged themselves of those emotions. Therefore these first-degree Initiates were specially suited to experience contemporary life in terms of the ordinary man and to incorporate it into the Mysteries. It was therefore the special task of the “Ravens” to mediate between the external world and those long dead. This tradition has survived in legend. As I have often stated legends as a rule have deep implications. The Kyffhäuser legend tells how Friedrich Barbarossa who had long been dead is instructed by Ravens, or how Charles the Great in the “Salzburg Untersberg” is surrounded by Ravens that brought him news of the outside world. These are echoes of the ancient pagan Mysteries and especially of the Mithras Mysteries.

When the aspirant was ready for the second degree of initiation he became an adept or “occultist” as we should say today. He was then able not only to incorporate into the Mysteries his experience of the sensible world, but also to receive clairvoyantly the communications from the dead, the impulses which the super-sensible world (this world of concrete reality which the dead inhabit) had to impart to the external world. And only when he was fully integrated into the spiritual life which originates in the super-sensible and is related to the external, sensible world was he considered to be adequately prepared for the third degree, and he was now given the opportunity to give practical expression to the impulses he had received in the Mysteries. He was now singled out to become a “warrior”, one who mediates to the sensible world that which must be revealed from the super-sensible world.

But was it not a gross injustice, you may ask, to withhold vital information from the people and to initiate only a select few? You will only understand the reason for this if you accept what I stated at the outset, namely, that the people were dependent upon a group-soul and were content for these select few to act on behalf of the whole community. They did not look upon themselves as separate individuals but as members of a group. It was only possible therefore to pursue this policy of selection at a time when the existence of a group-soul, when the selfless identification with the group was a living reality.

And when, as a “warrior” the initiate had championed for a time the cause of the super-sensible, he was considered fitted to establish smaller groups within the framework of the larger group, smaller communities within larger groups as the need arose. If, in those ancient times, anyone had taken into his head to found an association on his own initiative, he would have been ignored. Nothing would have come of it. In order to establish a union or association the initiate must become a “lion”, as it was termed in the Mithras Mysteries, for that was the fourth degree of initiation. He must first have reinforced his spiritual life through association with those impulses which existed not only amongst the living, but which united the living with the dead. From the fourth degree the initiate rose to a higher degree of initiation which permitted him through certain measures to take over the leadership of an already existing group, a folk-community in which the dead also participated. The eighth, ninth and tenth centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha are totally different from those of today. It would never have occurred to anyone to claim the right to choose arbitrarily the leader of their community; such a leader had to be an initiate of the fifth degree. Then, at the next higher degree, the initiate attained to those insights which the Sun Mystery (of which he had recently received intimations) implanted in the human soul. Finally he attained the seventh degree of initiation. I do not propose to enter into the details of these later degrees of initiation, for I simply wished to characterize the progressive development of the initiate who owed to his contact with the spiritual world his capacity to take an active part in community life.

Now you know that the group-soul nature has gradually declined in accordance with the necessary law of human evolution. It was at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha that man first developed ego consciousness. This had been prepared for centuries, but the crisis, the critical moment in this development had been reached at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. One could no longer assume that the individual had the power to carry the whole community with him, to transfer his feelings and impulses to the entire community in a spirit of altruism.

It would be foolish to imagine that the course of history could have been other than it has been. But sometimes a thought such as the following may prove fruitful: what would have happened if, at the time when the message of Christianity first made its impact on human evolution, the pagan traditions had not been eradicated root and branch, but if historically a certain knowledge (which would be transparent even to those who relied on documents) had been transmitted to posterity? But Christianity was opposed to such a possibility. We will discuss later the reason for this attitude; today I wish simply to register the fact that Christianity was opposed to the transmission of this knowledge. Thus Christianity was confronted by a totally different kind of humanity which was not so much attached to the group-souls as that of former times, a humanity in which the approach to the individual had to be totally different from that of ancient times when the individual was virtually ignored and when men looked to the group-soul for guidance and acted out of the group-soul. Through the fact that Christianity suppressed all documentary evidence of the early centuries the people were kept in ignorance; Christianity in fact consciously fostered ignorance of the epoch when it had first developed. This Christianity borrowed those aspects of the pagan teaching which served its purpose and incorporated them in its traditions and dogmas and especially in its cults or religious ceremonies and then effaced all traces of the origin of these cults. The ancient cults have a deep symbolic meaning, but Christianity gave them a different interpretation. The performance of cult acts or ceremonies was still a familiar sight, but the source of the primeval wisdom from which they derived was concealed from the people.

Take for example the bishop's mitre of the eighth century. This mitre was embroidered with swastikas which were arranged in different patterns. The swastika which was originally the Crux Gammata dates back to the earliest Mysteries, to the ancient times when man was able to observe the activity of the “lotus flowers” in the human etheric and astral organism, how that which was active in the lotus flower was one of the chief manifestations of the etheric and astral forces. The bishop wore the swastika as a symbol of his authority, but its significance was lost and it had become a dead symbol. All traces of its origin had been eradicated. What history tells us of the origin of such symbols is only dry bones. Only through Spiritual Science can we rediscover the living spiritual element in these things.

Now I said earlier that people were consciously kept in ignorance, but the time has now come to dispel this ignorance. And over the years I think that I have said enough and in a variety of ways to show that it is essential at the present time to be alive and alert to these questions. For our epoch is an epoch in which the necessary period of darkness has run its course and when the light of spiritual life must dawn again. It is devoutly to be wished that as many as possible should feel in their hearts that this spiritual light is a necessity for our time and that the failures and endless sufferings of our time are connected with all these questions. We shall realize that superficial judgements are inadequate when we come to speak of the causes of our present situation. So long as we speak only from a superficial standpoint we shall be unable to develop thoughts or impulses which are sufficiently potent to dispel the ignorance which is the source of our attendant ills. It is indeed remarkable how mankind today—but this need not depress us, rather should it encourage us to observe and understand our present condition—is unwilling to face up to the situation because, for the most part, man is as yet unable to perceive what is really necessary for our evolution. It is heartbreaking to see what Nietzsche felt about the prevailing darkness and confusion of our age, a man who suffered deeply from, and was driven to the point of madness by the chaos and confusion of the second half of the nineteenth century. We shall not come to terms with a personality such as Friedrich Nietzsche if we look upon him as someone whom one blindly follows, as so many have done. For he answered these blind followers in the original prelude to the “Gay Science”.

I am sufficient unto myself
I owe allegiance to none,
And I laugh at every master
Who cannot laugh at himself.

That is also the underlying mood of the whole of “Thus spake Zarathustra”. But this did not prevent Nietzsche from being surrounded by many who were merely hangers-on. They, in any case, have nothing positive to contribute to our present situation. But the other extremists—and between these two groups can be found every shade of opinion—are equally of no help, for they say that although Nietzsche had many creative ideas, he ultimately lost his reason and so can be safely ignored. Friedrich Nietzsche is a strange phenomenon; one need not be his willing slave, yet the fact remains that even in his period of mental sickness he was acutely sensitive to the darkness and chaos of the age.

Indeed the account of the distress which Nietzsche suffered in his time provides us with a good yardstick with which to measure the difficulties of our own time. I propose to read two passages from Nietzsche's posthumous writings: “The Will to Power; the Transvaluation of all Values” (note 4) which was written at a time when his mind was unhinged, passages which could have been written today with a wholly different intent than Nietzsche's and could have been written to expose the deeper underlying cause of our present situation. Nietzsche wrote:

“What I am about to relate is the history of the next two centuries. I shall describe what is foreshadowed and from which there is no escape—the triumph of nihilism. This history can be written now, for necessity is already at work here. This future is already presaged by a hundred different omens; this destiny announces its presence everywhere; for the music of tomorrow all ears are pricked. The whole of European culture is slowly moving towards catastrophe in an agony of suspense which increases from decade to decade—restless, violent, precipitate like a river in spate hastening to its ocean bed, and which refuses to reflect and even dreads reflection.”

Judge then of your own reactions in the light of these words from the pen of a man of rare sensitivity at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century and compare these words with another passage which I will now read to you and which vividly portrays the deep distress he felt and which everyone can experience himself.

“My friends, we had a hard time in our youth; we even suffered from youth as if it were a serious disease. This is owing to the age in which we are born—an age of great internal decay and disintegration which, with all its weakness and even with the best of its strength is opposed to the spirit of youth. Disintegration, that is to say a sense of insecurity, is peculiar to our age; nothing stands on solid ground or on sound faith or belief. People live for the morrow, because the day after tomorrow is uncertain. Our path is slippery and dangerous and the ice that still bears us has become precariously thin: we all feel the mild and ominous breath of the thaw-wind. Within a short space of time the path we are treading will never be able to know the footsteps of man again.”

It is clear that these sentiments were born of a profound insight into the realities of the time. He who would understand the age in which we live and especially the task that faces the individual, he who can look beyond the moment and the day will himself feel what is expressed in those passages and will perhaps say: Nietzsche's mental derangement prevented him from adopting a critical attitude to the ideas which arose in him. None the less these ideas stemmed from an acute sensitivity to the immediate realities of the present age. Perhaps we shall one day draw a comparison between Nietzsche's response to his age and the customary pronouncements of “experts” which do not even touch the fringe of the causes which lie at the root of our present difficult times. We shall then change our attitude and see the necessity for Spiritual Science today. People are unwilling to listen to the teachings of Spiritual Science; but in saying this I have no wish to imply reproach. Far be it from me to attach blame to anyone. The people to whom I am referring are for the most part those for whom I feel great respect and who, in my opinion, would be the first to take to Spiritual Science. I simply wish to point out how difficult it is for the individual to be receptive to Spiritual Science if he is impervious to spiritual appeal, if he succumbs entirely to the Zeitgeist, to the superficial trends of the time. One must be fully aware of this.

At this juncture I can now revert to Kjellen's book, The State as Organism. It is a curious book because the author strives with every fibre of his being to clarify the question: What is the State in reality?—and because he does not believe in the capacity of man's ideas and concepts to understand this question. It is true that the book contains many fine things which have been praised by contemporary critics, but the author has not the slightest idea of the deeper layers of understanding and knowledge which are necessary in order to rescue mankind from its present predicament. I have only time to refer to the central theme of his book. Kjellen raises the question: What is the relation of the individual to the State? And in attempting to answer this question he immediately came up against a difficulty. He wished to depict the State as a reality, as an integrated whole, in other words, as an organism primarily. Many have already described the State as an organism and are then always faced with the question: an organism consists of cells, what then are the cells of the State? Clearly the individual members of the State!—And on the whole Kjellen also shared this view: the State is an organism as the human or animal organism is an organism, and just as the human organism consists of individual cells, so too the State consists of individual cells, of human beings who are the cells of the State.

One can hardly imagine a more misguided or misleading analogy. If we follow up the analogy we shall never arrive at a clear understanding of man. Why is this? The cells of the human organism are juxtaposed, and this juxtaposition has a special significance. The whole structure of the human organism depends upon this juxtaposition. In the organism of the State the individual units or members are not contiguous like the individual cells in the human or animal organism. That is out of the question. In the totality of the State the human personality is something wholly different from the cells in the organism. And even if at a pinch we compare the State with an organism we must realize that we and the whole of political science are sorely mistaken if we overlook the fact that the individual is not a cell; only the productive element in man can sustain the State, whilst the organism is an aggregate of cells and it is they which determine its functioning. Therefore the present State in which the group-soul is no longer the same as in ancient times can only progress through the endeavour or initiative of the single individual. This cannot be compared with the function of the cells. As a rule it is immaterial what we choose to compare, but if we make a comparison between two objects they must be related objects. As a rule it is accepted that analogies are valid to some extent, but they should not be so far fetched as Kjellén's analogy. There is no objection to his comparing the State with an organism; one could equally well compare it with a machine (there is no harm in that) or even with a penknife—doubtless points of similarity can be found here too—but, if the comparison is carried through, it must be consistent. But people are not sufficiently familiar with the principles of logic to be aware of this.

Now Kjellén is perfectly entitled to compare the State with an organism if he so wishes. But if he wishes to make this comparison he must look for the right cells. But they cannot be found because the State has no cells! If we think about the matter concretely the analogy breaks down. I simply wish to point out that one can only carry this analogy through if one thinks in an abstract way like Kjellen. The moment one thinks realistically, one demurs, because the idea has no roots in reality. We find that the State has no cells. On the other hand we discover that the individual States can perhaps be compared to cells and that the sum total of States on Earth can be compared to an organism. A fruitful idea then occurs to us. But first we must answer the question: what kind of organism? Where can one find something comparable in the kingdom of nature where the cells fit into each other in the same way as the individual “State cells” fit into the entire organism of the Earth? Pursuing this idea we find that we can only compare the entire Earth organism with a plant organism, not with an animal organism and still less with a human organism. Whilst natural science is only concerned with the inorganic, with the mineral kingdom, political science must be founded on a higher order of ideas, on the ideas of the plant kingdom. We must look to neither the animal nor the human kingdom and we must free ourselves from mineralized thinking, dead thought forms to which the scientists are so firmly attached. They cannot rise to the higher order of ideas embodied in the plant kingdom, but apply laws of the mineral kingdom to the State and call it political science.

In order to arrive at this fruitful conception mentioned above our whole thinking must be rooted in Spiritual Science. We shall then be able to satisfy ourselves that the whole being of man by virtue of his individuality is far superior to the State, he penetrates into the spiritual world where the State cannot enter. If therefore you compare the State with an organism and the individual member of the State with the cells, then, if you think realistically, you will arrive at the idea of an organism consisting of individual cells, but the cells would everywhere extend beyond the epidermis. You would have an organism with its cells which extends beyond the epidermis; the cells would develop independently of the organism and would be self-contained. You would therefore have to picture the organism as if “living bristles” which felt themselves to be individuals were everywhere projecting beyond the epidermis. Living thinking thus brings us into touch with reality, and shows us the impossible difficulties that must face us if we wish to grasp any idea that is to be fruitful. It is not surprising therefore that ideas which are not impregnated with Spiritual Science have not the capacity to sustain us in coping with our present situation. For how can one reduce to order the chaos in the world if one has no idea of its cause? No matter how many Wilsonian manifestos are issued by all kinds of international organizations or associations and the like, so long as they have no roots in reality, they are so much empty talk. Hence the many proposals which are put forward today are a sheer waste of time.

Here is an example which demonstrates how imperative it is that our present age should be permeated with the impulses of Spiritual Science. It is the tragedy of our time that it is powerless to develop ideas which could reconcile and control the organic life of the State. Hence everything is in a state of chaos. But it must now be clear to you where the deeper causes of this chaos are to be sought. And it is not surprising therefore that books such as Kjellen's The State as Organism conclude in the most remarkable manner. We are now living in an age when everybody is wondering what is to be done so that men may once again live in harmony, when with every week they are increasingly determined to live in enmity and to slaughter each other. How are they to be brought together again? But the science which deals with the question of how men are once again to develop social relationships within the State concludes in Kjellen's case with these words: “This must be the conclusion of our enquiry into the State as organism. We have seen that for compelling reasons the State of today had made little progress in this direction and has not yet become fully aware that this is its function. None the less we believe in a higher form of State which recognizes a more clearly defined rational purpose and which will make determined efforts to achieve this goal.”

That is the concluding passage in his book; but we do not know, we have no idea what will come of it. Such are the findings of a painstaking and conscientious thinking that is so caught up in the stream of contemporary thought that it overlooks the essentials. One must face these problems squarely; for the impulse, the desire to gain insight into these problems only arises when we face them squarely, when we know what are the driving forces in our present age.

Even without looking far beneath the surface we perceive today an urge towards a kind of “socialization”, I do not mean towards socialism, but towards “socialization” of the Earth organism. But socialization—because it must be conscious, and not proceed from the unconscious as in the last two thousand years—socialization, reorientation or reorganization, is only possible if we understand the nature of man, if we learn to know once again the being of man—for that was the object of the ancient Mysteries. Socialization applies to the physical plane. But it is impossible to establish a social order if one ignores the fact that on the physical plane are to be found not only physical men, but men endowed with soul and spirit. Nothing can be achieved if we think of man only in physical terms. You may socialize, you may order social life in accordance with contemporary ideas, and within twenty years everything will be in chaos again if you ignore the fact that man is not only the physical being known to natural science, but a being endowed with soul and spirit. For soul and spirit are active agents and exercise a powerful influence. We may ignore their existence in our ideas and representations, but we cannot abolish them. If the soul is to inhabit a physical body which participates in a social order appropriate to our time it must have freedom of thought and opinion. Socialization cannot be realized without freedom of thought. And socialization and freedom of thought cannot be realized unless the spirit is rooted in the spiritual world itself.

Freedom of thought as an attitude of mind or way of thinking, pneumatology, spiritual maturity and spiritual science—as scientific foundation of all ordinances and directives—these are inseparably linked. We can only discover through spiritual science how these things are related to man and how they can he realized practically in the social order. Freedom of thought, that is, an attitude to one's neighbour that fully recognizes his right to freedom of thought, cannot be realized unless we accept the principle of reincarnation, for otherwise we look upon man as an abstraction. We shall never see him in the right light unless we look upon him as the result of repeated lives on Earth. The whole question of reincarnation must be examined in connection with the question of freedom of thought and opinion. The life of man will be impossible in the future unless the inner life of the individual can be rooted in the life of the spirit. I am not suggesting that he must become clairvoyant, though this will certainly occur in individual cases, but I maintain that he must be firmly rooted in the life of the spirit. I have often explained that this is perfectly possible without becoming clairvoyant. If we look around a little we shall find where the major hindrances lie and in what direction we must look for the source of these obstacles. It is not that people are unwilling to search for the truth—and as I have said, I do not wish to reprove or to criticize—but they erect psychic barriers and are the victims of their many inhibitions.

Often an isolated instance is so instructive that we are able to gain a real understanding of many contemporary phenomena from these symptoms. There is one symptom peculiar to our own time which is most remarkable. It is curious how people who are normally so brave and courageous today, are terrified when they hear that the claims of spiritual knowledge are to be recognized. They are bewildered. I have often told you that I noticed that many who had attended one or two lectures were not seen again for some time. Meeting them in the street I asked why they had never turned up again. “I dare not”, came the reply. “I am afraid you might convince me.” They find such a possibility dangerous and disturbing and are not prepared to expose themselves to the risk. I could cite many other examples of a similar kind from my own experience, but I prefer to give examples from the wider field of public life.

A short time ago I spoke here of Hermann Bahr (note 5) who recently gave a lecture here in Berlin entitled “The Ideas of 1914”. I pointed out how he attempted—you need only read his last novel Himmelfahrt—not only to move a little in the direction of Spiritual Science, but he even tried in his later years to arrive at an inner understanding of Goethe, that is, to follow the path which I would recommend to those who wish to provide themselves with a sound background for their introduction to Spiritual Science. There are very many today who would like to speak of the spirit once again, who would welcome any and every opportunity to revive knowledge of the spirit. I do not wish to lecture or criticize, least of all a person such as Hermann Bahr for whom I feel great affection. Even if it is far from our intention to sermonize, we none the less have the strange feeling that an outlook such as that of Hermann Bahr has contributed to the corruption of thought and has infected human thinking with original sin.

Now in his Berlin lecture Hermann Bahr expressed many fine and admirable sentiments; but many astonishing things come to light. He began by saying that this war had taught us something completely new. It had taught us to integrate the individual once again into the community in the right way, to sacrifice our individualism, our ego centricity for the benefit of the whole. This war has taught us, he said, to make a clean sweep of the past with its antiquated ideas and to fill our inner life with something completely new. And he proceeded to describe the inestimable benefits this war has brought us. I have no wish to criticize, quite the reverse. But after a lengthy disquisition on how the war has transformed us all, how we shall be completely` changed through the war, it is strange to come upon the concluding passage: “Man always cherishes hope of a better future, but himself remains incorrigible. Even the war will leave us much as we are.” As I said before, I have no wish to criticize, but I cannot help being touched by these high hopes. These people are motivated by the best of intentions; they wish to find once again the path to the spiritual. And Bahr therefore emphasized that we had relied too much upon the individual; we had practised the cult of individualism far too long. We must learn once again to surrender to the whole. Those who belong to a nation have learned to merge with the nation, to sacrifice their separativeness. And nations too, he believes, are only totalities of individual characteristics, parts of a greater whole which will later emerge. Thus Bahr sometimes betrays, and especially in this lecture, the paths he none the less follows in order to arrive at the spirit. Sometimes he gives only vague indications, but these indications are most revealing. Ring out the old, the past is dead, is his motto. The Aufklärung wished to found everything on a basis of reason; but all to no purpose, everything has ended in chaos. We must find something that brings us in touch with Reality and saves us from chaos. And in this context Bahr once again makes astonishing revelations:

“Perhaps nations and individuals would then have learned what is most difficult for them to learn—to grant to others the right to individuality that each individual claims for himself, for, in the final analysis, the individuality of others is the precondition of one's own. If we were all alike there would be no distinguishing features. And they would have learned that just as each individual with his distinctive gifts in his own particular field is necessary to the nation, in order through his self-fulfilment to sustain the nation and thus at the same time to be self-sufficient and also to serve the nation, so too the universality of mankind, the common membership of all mankind that reaches to the Divine grows out of nations and transcends nations.”

That is a hint, if not a broad hint, at least it is a clear hint. People are striving to find the way to God, but are unwilling to follow the path that is appropriate to our time. They are looking therefore for a different path which already exists, but it never occurs to them that this traditional path was indeed effective up to 1914 and now, in order to obviate its consequences, they want to return to it again!

The symptoms manifested here are, I think, deserving of quiet examination, for these are the views not of a single individual, but of a vast number of people who feel and think in this way. A book by Max Scheler (note 6) recently appeared with the title Der Genius des Krieges and der deutsche Krieg. It is a good book and I can safely recommend it. Bahr too thinks highly of it. He is a man of taste and well informed and has every reason to commend it. But he also wishes to publicize the book and proposes to write a highly favourable review, a puff to boost Scheler. He wonders how best to proceed. To scandalize the public is not the right approach; some other way must be found to attract their attention. What was he to do? Now Hermann Bahr is a very sincere and honest man and leaves no doubt as to what he would do in such a case. In his article on Scheler he begins by saying: Scheler has written many articles to show how we could escape from our present predicament. Scheler caught the public eye. But, says Bahr, people today do not approve of being told whom to read; it goes against the grain. And so Hermann Bahr characterizes Scheler in the following way: “People were curious about him and yet rather suspicious of him; we Germans want to know above all where we stand in relation to an author. We do not like indefinition.”

Let us have therefore a clear picture. This is not achieved by reading books and accepting their arguments; something more is needed. Bahr now gives a further hint: “Even the Catholics preferred to reserve judgement (on Scheler) lest they should be disappointed. His idiom displeased them. For every mental climate creates in the course of time its own native idiom which gives a particular flavour and meaning to words of common usage. In this way one recognizes who `belongs’, with the result that ultimately one pays less attention to what is said than to how it is said.”

Hermann Bahr decided to announce Scheler with a flourish of trumpets. Now, like Bahr himself, Scheler hints at those remarkable catholicizing endeavours—always tentatively at first, he never commits himself immediately. Now according to Bahr, Scheler does not speak like a genuine Catholic. But Catholics want to know where they stand in relation to Scheler, and especially Bahr himself since he intends to puff Scheler in the Catholic periodical “Hochland”. After all, people must know that Scheler can be safely recommended to Catholics. They do not like to be left in the dark, they want to know the truth.

And this is the crux of the matter. People will know where they stand if they are told that it is perfectly safe for Catholics to read Scheler! The fact that he is exceptionally clever and witty is of no consequence; Catholics have no objection to that. Bahr, however, proposes to hold up Scheler as an outstanding personality in order to boost his importance, but at the same time he does not wish to offend people. First of all he bewails the fact that mankind has become empty and vapid, that man has lost all connection with the spirit; but he must find his way back to the spirit once again. I quote a few passages from Hermann Bahr on Scheler which touch upon this subject:

“Reason broke away from the Church and arrogantly assumed that of itself it could understand, determine, order, command, shape and direct life.”

Hermann Bahr lacks the courage to say: reason must now seek contact with the spiritual world. He therefore says: reason must look to the Church once again.

“Reason bloke away from the Church and arrogantly assumed that of itself it could understand, determine, order, command, shape and direct life. It (reason) had scarcely begun to take the first steps in this direction than it took fright and lost confidence in itself. This self-awareness of reason, the consciousness of its boundaries, of the limitations of its own power when bereft of the divine afflatus, began with Kant. He recognized that reason of itself cannot achieve that which by its very nature it is constrained to will; it cannot achieve the goal it has set itself. He called a halt to reason at the very moment where it promised to be fruitful. Kant set boundaries to reason, but his disciples extended these boundaries and each went his own way. Ultimately godless reason had no other choice but to abdicate. It realized finally that it can know nothing. It searched for truth so long until it discovered that either truth was non-existent or that there was no truth to which man could attain.”

Enough has now been said in defence of the modern outlook and all those fine sentiments about the “boundaries of knowledge.”

“Since that time we have lived without truth, believing there is no truth. We continued to live however as if truth must none the less exist. In fact, in order to live we had to live by denying our reason. And so we preferred to abandon reason completely. We committed intellectual suicide. Soon man was regarded simply as a bundle of impulses. He was proud of his dehumanisation. And the consequence was 1914.”

And so Hermann Bahr praises Scheler because of his Catholicizing bent. Then he proceeds to give a somewhat distorted picture of Goethe, for he had been at pains for some time to depict him as a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. And then goes on to say:

“The modern scientist denied his spiritual birthright. Science abandoned presuppositions. Reason no longer derived from the divine the ‘impulse’ which is imperative for its effectiveness. What other path was open to it? None, save the appeal to the instincts. The man without established values was suspended over an abyss. And the result was—1914.”

“If we are to build afresh it must be from totally new foundations. If we are to bring about a spiritual renewal we must make a complete break with the past. It would be presumptuous to aim at the immediate spiritual rehabilitation of Europe. We must first rehabilitate man and restore his lost innocence; he must become aware once again that he is a member of the spiritual world. Freedom, individuality, dignity, morality, science and art have vanished from the world since faith, hope and love are no more. And only faith, hope and love can restore them. We have no other choice, either the end of the world or—omnia instaurare in Christo” (to renew all things in Christ).

But this “omnia instaurare in Christo” does not imply a search for the spirit, a move towards the investigation or exploration of the spirit, but the inclusion of the nations in the Catholic fold. How is it, Bahr asks, that men are able to think for themselves and yet are able to remain good Catholics? We must look to those who are suited to the present age. And Scheler fits the bill for he is not such a fool as to speak for example of an evolution into the spiritual world, or to specify a particular spiritual teaching. He is not such a fool as to commit himself openly, as is the case with those who speak of the spirit and then suggest: the rest will he added unto you if you enter the Church, i.e. the Catholic Church—for that is implied both by Bahr and Schelerwhich in their opinion is sufficiently all-embracing. In this way conflicting opinions can be reconciled under the umbrella of the Church. None the less people today want to think for themselves and Scheler adapts himself to their thoughts. Indeed, Bahr believes that Scheler in this respect is a master of giving people what they want:

“Scheler attracts attention because he does not gesticulate or raise his voice. Involuntarily people ask who can it be who appears to be so sure of his influence that he does not feel it necessary to raise his voice. It is a favourite device of seasoned orators to open on a quiet note and thus command the silent attention of the audience; the orator must also have the power to hold them spellbound. Scheler can do this in masterly fashion. He so captivates his listener that the listener is unaware whither he is being led and suddenly finds himself at a destination that was wholly unforeseen. Starting from unexpected propositions which the listener innocently accepts, Scheler forces him imperceptibly to conclusions which he would have actively resisted had he been in any way forewarned. In this respect Scheler's art of persuasion is unrivalled. He is a born educator; I know of no one who can lead us so easily but firmly to the truth.”

Indeed it is a special art to be able to take people by surprise in this way. First one makes statements that are unexceptionable; then the argument proceeds slowly and leads to a conclusion at which the audience would have demurred had they been aware of it from the start. How does one account for this, Bahr asks, and what must be done in order to act with the right intentions? In this review of Scheler Bahr gives his honest and candid opinion:

“The question now is whether the average German can grasp the magnitude of the moment and all that it portends. He is animated by the best of intentions, but still fondly imagines that belief is no longer possible for modern man since it has been scientifically refuted. He does not suspect that this `science or dogma of unbelief’ has itself long been refuted scientifically. He knows nothing of the quiet preparatory work in this direction of the outstanding German philosophers of our time—Lotze, Franz Brentano, Dilthey, Eucken, and Husserl.” (note 7).

I now beg you to give special attention to the following:

“The ordinary person still hears in the last faint echo of the Münchausen posthorn, the latest aberration which, unbeknown to him, has already been refuted. Amidst this confusion a calm clear voice will soon be heard which gives no suspicion of the sentimental day dreaming, romanticism or mysticism which fills the ordinary person with unholy dread. And precisely because Scheler pleads the cause of a recovery of faith straightforwardly and unemotionally and in the customary jargon of the ’cultivated man of our time’, he is the man we need today.”

So now we know! Now we know why Bahr approves of Scheler. He (Scheler) cannot be accused of being a visionary or a mystic, for the average German is mortally afraid of them. And woe betide anyone who does not respect this fear, for if he were take it into his head to banish this fear or recognize the need to struggle against it, it would need more than a little courage to venture on such an undertaking.

Because I have great respect and affection for Hermann Bahr I would like to show that he is typical of those who find great difficulty in accepting a spiritual teaching of which our time stands in need. But there is promise of hope only if we overcome that terrible fear, if we have the courage to acknowledge that Spiritual Science is not an idle fancy, that the greatest clarity of thought is called for if we wish to make the right approach to Spiritual Science, for there is little evidence of clear thinking in the few examples which I have quoted to you today from Hermann Bahr and other contemporary writers. Spiritual courage is called for if we wish to develop ideas that are strong and effective. We need not go all the way with Nietzsche, nor need we wholly share the view he expresses in a passage which none the less may attract our attention; but when this sensitive spirit, stimulated perhaps by his illness, expresses his boldest and most courageous opinions we must nevertheless go along with him. The fear of being misunderstood must not deter us. It would he the greatest calamity that could befall us today if we were to be afraid of being misunderstood. We must sometimes perhaps pass judgements like the following judgement of Nietzsche, even though it may not be sound in every detail; that is not important. In his treatise “On the History of Christianity” he wrote:

“Christianity as a historical reality must not be confused with that one root which its name recalls: the other roots from which it has sprung are by far the more important. It is an unprecedented abuse of language to associate such manifestations of decay and such monstrosities as the ‘Christian Church’, ‘Christian belief’ and ‘Christian life’ with that Holy Name. What did Christ deny?—Everything which today is called Christian!”

Although this is perhaps an extreme view, Nietzsche nevertheless touched upon something which has a certain truth; but he expressed it somewhat radically. It is true to the extent that one could say: What would Christ most vigorously condemn if He were to appear in our midst today? Most probably what the majority of people call “Christian” today, and much else besides, which I will discuss in our lecture on Tuesday next.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. Rudolf Kjellen (1864–1922), Swedish historian, professor at Upsala. Belonged to the school of “geopolitics”, the doctrine of the interaction of geographical and political factors in the constitution and development of States.

Note 2. Theophilus. Patriarch of Alexandria 385–412. He condemned Origen at the Synod of Alexandria 408. “He deprived the pagans of Alexandria of a temple ... and apparently destroyed other temples. A riot ensued and a number of Christians were slain. With Theophilus at their head the Christians retaliated by destroying the celebrated temple of Serapis on the ruins of which the patriarch erected a church.” (Quotation from the Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, 1913.)

Note 3. Mithras Initiation. According to R. J. Vermaseren, in Mithras, the Secret God (Chatto & Windus, 1963) he who had acquired sufficient knowledge “could gain successively the title of Raven (Corax), Bride (Nymphus), Soldier (Miles), Lion (Leo), Persian (Perses), Courier of the Sun (Heliodromus) and Father (Pater)”. This book is a classic in the study of Mithraism. There are figures in the text and illustrations.

Note 4. Nietzsche. “The Will to Power and the Transvaluation of all Values.” According to P. Tillich “will” here means “the universal dynamics of all life processes and ‘power’ the affirmation of one's own individual existence. It is the power of the best.” The transvaluation of all values implies that since “God is dead”, i.e. that traditional and ethical values no longer stem from belief in a transcendent authority, man himself must re-create them. The “Übermensch” must be developed. He is the “superior” man physically, mentally and spiritually, the man of self-discipline who has learned to command and obey, to accept responsibility, whose watchword is duty and honour. It is an aristocratic ideal. According to Nietzsche his antitype is mass man, the “herd man” who has succumbed to ideologies that promise happiness and well-being. He is timid, bored, conformist, opposed to tradition and culture. This “slave morality” is utilitarian and keeps only its own advantage in view and prepares the ochlocracy, the “nihilism” towards which we are moving (p. 13 in the English text).

Note 5. Hermann Bahr (1863–1934). Austrian dramatist, novelist and essayist. In his later years he returned to the Church and represented the Catholic school of thought, cf. his novel Himmelfahrt.

Note 6. Max Scheler (1874–1928). Professor of Philosophy at Cologne, 1920–21. His writings have a strong theistic flavour and he was a subtle advocate of Catholicism.

Note 7. Lotze (1817–81), Dilthey (1833–1911), R. Eucken (1846–1929), Husserl (1859–1938) were philosophers of idealism. They were opposed to the mechanistic scientific philosophy of the age and pleaded the cause of ethical idealism.

My dear Friends,

today we will take first a reading from Goethe that will illustrate for you many of the things of which we have been speaking in the previous lectures. You will have seen from the readings you listened to a few days ago—taken first from the earlier, and then for comparison from the later Iphigenie—what sort of an ideal for drama was living in Goethe at the beginning of his work as a playwright. He brought this form of drama to a kind of perfection in Götz von Berlichingen, also in some of the scenes in Faust, Part I. Goethe was working here essentially out of a feeling for prose—not yet out of an artistic forming of speech.

The first Iphigenie, which may be described as the German Tasso, proclaims itself at once, in contradistinction to the Roman, as a striking example of well-formed prose, although a prose that has, under the influence of the poetic content, been allowed to run into rhythm.

It was on his visit to Italy that Goethe began to interest himself in the artistic forming of speech. Contemplation of Italian art awakened in him a perception of how man's formative powers work, how they shape and mould a material artistically. With the whole strength of his soul, Goethe set himself to work his way through to what he now saw to be art in its purity. And this led him to feel that wherever possible he must re-mould his earlier work, he must form it anew, letting its form arise now from the language, from the formative qualities of speech.

Goethe accomplished this in an eminent manner with the material he had at hand in his earlier Tasso and Tasso. And in Tasso he succeeded even in letting the speech shape the whole drama throughout. This was an achievement of remarkable originality. There is perhaps no other work of its kind where the conscious endeavour has been made to develop a drama entirely within the formative activity of speech itself.

Now, it will of course be evident from what I was saying yesterday that speech formation alone is not enough; drama must have in addition mime and gesture. The intellect of the spectator—for that too should undergo artistic development as he watches the play—needs to see the gesturing as well as to hear the words. This was not sufficiently clear to Goethe at the time when he was working at his Roman Tasso and Tasso; he had not yet realised the importance of mime and gesture as an integral part of drama. Hence it is that we have in Tasso so striking an example of a drama where it is all a matter of speech, where everything follows from the forming of the speech.

But now put yourself in the position of having to produce Goethe's Tasso. As you begin to develop your picture of the stage, scene by scene, you will find that many different possibilities are open to you for your stage settings. It will certainly not be easy to introduce modifications into the form of the speech, for speech has here been brought to a certain artistic perfection; but your picture of the stage you will find you can plan in the most varied ways. There is, however, a passage in Tasso where, as producer, you will come up against an insuperable difficulty. It is in the scene where Tasso makes himself intolerable to the Princess, acting in such a way as to give a most unfortunate turn to the whole drama. Here the producer is helpless. There is, in fact, no way out. Call on all the artistic means at your disposal, and see whether as producer you can make a success of this passage. You will not be able to do it. That such moments occur in plays must be known and recognised, if the art of the stage is to be cultivated in the right manner. You will of course finally manage to devise some way of meeting the situation, but you will not be able to give artistic form to your pis alle.

This instance from Tasso can serve to show that in his work as dramatist Goethe did not altogether find the way from the forming of speech to the development of full drama that lives and weaves on the stage. That, one must admit, is an important fact; and the importance of it can be clearly seen in the further development of Goethe's work. For what do we find?

In his Tasso and Tasso, Goethe may be said to live in the speech, to live in it as a supreme and perfect artist. In the sphere of speech, these two plays are unsurpassed. Goethe himself knew well of course that drama could not stop here, that it must develop further. While still in Italy, he composed also many scenes for his Faust. These, however, did not take on a Roman character. The ‘Witches' Kitchen’, for example, was composed in Italy, and is thoroughly northern, thoroughly Gothic in the old sense. Goethe knew that for these scenes he must wrest himself free of the Italian influence that surrounded him, must forget all about it and be a complete northerner. This comes out also in the letters he was writing at the time. What had been possible with Tasso and with Tasso was not possible with the material he was dealing with in Faust.

And now we can follow the development a step further. Goethe began to write Die natürliche Tochter. In this play he shows that he wants to come right out on to the stage. He is not going to continue working in speech alone, he means to concern himself with the whole picture presented to the audience. He planned here a trilogy, but it was never completed; we have no more than the first part. As a matter of fact, only fragments, mere torsos, remain to us of all the plays that Goethe began after this time. Even Pandora—a work that was grandly conceived, as can be seen from the rough sketch the author made of the whole—was never completed. Faust alone was finished, but finished in such a way that only in the speech was the poet happy and successful; for the rest, he drew on tradition. The last grand scene is derived from the traditional imaginative conceptions of Roman Catholicism. Goethe did not find in himself the sources for that scene.

Inherent of course in all this lies Goethe's profound honesty; Faust alone he finishes, and that, as can plainly be seen, out of a certain inability! The other plays he leaves unfinished, because he knew he could not complete them without entirely re-forming them. A dishonest artist would have finished them. Naturally, it is easy enough to polish off plenty of plays if one has no inclination or ability to delve down to the very deeps and make contact with the Archai of all creating. Oh yes, one can then complete many things to one's own satisfaction!

A number of different people have set out to complete Schiller's Demetrius, for example, but not one among them all has left us an artistic creation; no single ending proposed can be said to develop the play artistically. And it is art that we must really begin again to care about and expect to find. We must get to know art in its foundations, we must develop again a genuine artistic sensitiveness. For a long time this has been lacking. Traditions have survived, they have been handed down; but sensitiveness to true art—that is what our civilisation needs. The art of the stage has unique opportunity for helping this sensitiveness to develop: it can turn to good account the living relationship that subsists between stage and spectator. Unless we seize on this opportunity, we shall not get any farther.

In order to show you—or I should rather say, remind you, for I assume you are all of you familiar with the play—in order to remind you how far the forming of the speech dominated Goethe's dramatic work in the period of its highest attainment, we will ask you now to listen to the first scene from his Torquato Tasso. Frau Dr. Steiner will recite it for us.

(Frau Dr. Steiner): Let me first recall to you the setting of the scene. It takes place in a garden ornamented with columns carrying the busts of epic poets. In the foreground are Virgil on the right and Ariosto on the left.

(PRINZESSIN, LEONORE)

PRINZESSIN

Du siehst mich lächelnd an, Eleonore,
Und siehst dich selber an und lächelst wieder.
Was hast du? Lass es eine Freundin wissen!
Du scheinst bedenklich, doch du scheinst vergnügt.

LEONORE

Ja, meine Fürstin, mit Vergnügen seh' ich
Uns beide hier so ländlich ausgeschmückt.
Wir scheinen recht beglückte Schäferinnen,
Und sind auch wie die Glücklichen beschäftigt.
Wir winden Kränze. Dieser, bunt von Blumen,
Schwillt immer mehr und mehr in meiner Hand;
Du hast mit höherm Sinn und grösserm Herzen
Den zarten, schlanken Lorbeer dir gewählt.

PRINZESSIN

Die Zweige, die ich in Gedanken flocht,
Sie haben gleich ein würdig Haupt gefunden:
Ich setze sie Virgilen dankbar auf.
(Sie kränzt die Herme Virgils.)

LEONORE

So drück' ich meinen vollen frohen Kranz
Dem Meister Ludwig auf die hohe Stirne—
(Sie kränzt Ariostens Herme.)
Er, dessen Scherze nie verblühen, habe
Gleich von dem neuen Frühling seinen Teil.

PRINZESSIN

Mein Bruder ist gefällig, dass er uns
In diesen Tagen schon aufs Land gebracht:
Wir können unser sein und stundenlang
Uns in die goldne Zeit derDichter träumen.
Ich liebe Belriguardo, denn ich habe
Hier manchen Tag der Jugend froh durchlebt,
Und dieses neue Grün und diese Sonne
Bringt das Gefühl mir jener Zeit zurück.

LEONORE

Ja, es umgibt uns eine neue Welt!
Der Schatten dieser immer grünen Bäume
Wird schon erfreulich. Schon erquickt uns wieder
Das Rauschen dieser Brunnen. Schwankend wiegen
Im Morgenwinde sich die jungen Zweige.
Die Blumen von den Beeten schauen uns
Mit ihren Kinderaugen freundlich an.
Der Gärtner deckt getrost das Winterhaus
Schon der Zitronen und Orangen ab.
Der blaue Himmel ruhet über uns,
Und an dem Horizonte löst der Schnee
Der fernen Berge sich in leisen Duft.

PRINZESSIN

Es wäre mir der Frühling sehr willkommen,
Wenn er nicht meine Freundin mir entführte.

LEONORE

Erinnere mich in diesen holden Stunden,
O Fürstin, nicht, wie bald ich scheiden soll.

PRINZESSIN

Was du verlassen magst, das findest du
In jener grossen Stadt gedoppelt wieder.

LEONORE

Es ruft die Pflicht, es ruft die Liebe mich
Zu dem Gemahl, der mich so lang entbehrt.
Ich bring' ihm seinen Sohn, der dieses Jahr
So schnell gewachsen, schnell sich ausgebildet,
Und teile seine väterliche Freude.
Gross ist Florenz und herrlich, doch der Wert
Von allen seinen aufgehäuften Schätzen
Reicht an Ferraras Edelsteine nicht.
Das Volk hat jene Stadt zur Stadt gemacht,
Ferrara ward durch seine Fürsten gross.

PRINZESSIN

Mehr durch die guten Menschen, die sich hier
Durch Zufall trafen und zum Glück verbanden.

LEONORE

Sehr leicht zerstreut der Zufall, was er sammelt.
Ein edler Mensch zieht edle Menschen an
Und weiss sie festzuhalten, wie ihr tut.
Um deinen Bruder und um dich verbinden
Gemüter sich, die euer würdig sind,
Und ihr seid eurer grossen Väter wert.
Hier zündete sich froh das schöne Licht
Der Wissenschaft, des freien Denkens an,
Als noch die Barbarei mit schwerer Dämmrung
Die Welt umher verbarg. Mir klang als Kind
Der Name Herkules von Este schon,
Schon Hippolyt von Este voll ins Ohr.
Ferrara ward mit Rom und mit Florenz
Von meinem Vater viel gepriesen! Oft
Hab' ich mich hingesehnt; nun bin ich da.
Hier ward Petrarch bewirtet, hier gepflegt,
Und Ariost fand seine Muster hier.
Italien nennt keinen grossen Namen,
Den dieses Haus nicht seinen Gast genannt.
Und es ist vorteilhaft, den Genius
Bewirten: gibst du ihm ein Gastgeschenk,
So lässt er dir ein schöneres zurück.
Die Stätte, die ein guter Mensch betrat,
Ist eingeweiht; nach hundert Jahren klingt
Sein Wort und seine Tat dem Enkel wieder.

PRINZESSIN

Dem Enkel, wenn er lebhaft fühlt wie du.
Gar oft beneid' ich dich um dieses Glück.

LEONORE

Das du, wie wenig andre, still und rein
Geniessest. Drängt mich doch das volle Herz,
Sogleich zu sagen, was ich lebhaft fühle;
Du fühlst es besser, fühlst es tief und—schweigst.
Dich blendet nicht der Schein des Augenblicks.
Der Witz besticht dich nicht, die Schmeichelei
Schmiegt sich vergebens künstlich an dein Ohr:
Fest bleibt dein Sinn und richtig dein Geschmack,
Dein Urteil grad, stets ist dein Anteil gross
Am Grossen, das du wie dich selbst erkennst.

PRINZESSIN

Du solltest dieser höchsten Schmeichelei
Nicht das Gewand vertrauter Freundschaft leihen.

LEONORE

Die Freundschaft ist gerecht, sie kann allein
Den ganzen Umfang deines Werts erkennen.
Und lass mich der Gelegenheit, dem Glück
Auch ihren Teil an deiner Bildung geben;
Du hast sie doch, und bist's am Ende doch,
Und dich mit deiner Schwester ehrt die Welt
Vor allen grossen Frauen eurer Zeit.

PRINZESSIN

Mich kann das, Leonore, wenig rühren,
Wenn ich bedenke, wie man wenig ist,
Und was man ist, das blieb man andern schuldig.
Die Kenntnis alter Sprachen und des Besten,
Was uns die Vorwelt liess, dank' ich der Mutter;
Doch war an Wissenschaft, an rechtem Sinn
Ihr keine beider Töchter jemals gleich,
Und soll sich eine ja mit ihr vergleichen,
So hat Lucretia gewiss das Recht.
Auch, kann ich dir versichern, hab' ich nie
Als Rang und als Besitz betrachtet, was
Mir die Natur, was mir das Glück verlieh.
Ich freue mich, wenn kluge Männer sprechen,
Dass ich verstehen kann, wie sie es meinen.
Es sei ein Urteil über einen Mann
Der alten Zeit und seiner Taten Wert;
Es sei von einer Wissenschaft die Rede,
Die, durch Erfahrung weiter ausgebreitet,
Dem Menschen nutzt, indem sie ihn erhebt;
Wohin sich das Gespräch der Edlen lenkt,
Ich folge gern, denn mir wird leicht, zu folgen.
Ich höre gern dem Streit der Klugen zu,
Wenn um die Kräfte, die des Menschen Brust
So freundlich und so fürchterlich bewegen,
Mit Grazie die Rednerlippe spielt;
Gern, wenn die fürstliche Begier des Ruhms,
Des ausgebreiteten Besitzes, Stoff
Dem Denker wird, und wenn die feine Klugheit,
Von einem klugen Manne zart entwickelt,
Statt uns zu hintergehen, uns belehrt.

LEONORE

Und dann, nach dieser ernsten Unterhaltung,
Ruht unser Ohr und unser innrer Sinn
Gar freundlich auf des Dichters Reimen aus,
Der uns die letzten lieblichsten Gefühle
Mit holden Tönen in die Seele flösst.
Dein hoher Geist umfasst ein weites Reich,
Ich halte mich am liebsten auf der Insel
Der Poesie in Lorbeerhainen auf.

PRINZESSIN

In diesem schönen Lande hat man mir
Versichern wollen, wächst vor andern Bäumen
Die Myrte gern. Und wenn der Musen gleich
Gar viele sind, so sucht man unter ihnen
Sich seltner eine Freundin und Gespielin,
Als man dem Dichter gern begegnen mag,
Der uns zu meiden, ja, zu fliehen scheint,
Etwas zu suchen scheint, das wir nicht kennen
Und er vielleicht am Ende selbst nicht kennt.
Da wär' es denn ganz artig, wenn er uns
Zur guten Stunde träfe, schnell entzückt
Uns für den Schatz erkennte, den er lang'
Vergebens in der weiten Welt gesucht.

LEONORE

Ich muss mir deinen Scherz gefallen lassen,
Er trifft mich zwar, doch trifft er mich nicht tief.
Ich ehre jeden Mann und sein Verdienst,
Und ich bin gegen Tasso nur gerecht.
Sein Auge weilt auf dieser Erde kaum;
Sein Ohr vernimmt den Einklang der Natur;
Was die Geschichte reicht, das Leben gibt,
Sein Busen nimmt es gleich und willig auf:
Das weit Zerstreute sammelt sein Gemüt,
Und sein Gefühl belebt das Unbelebte.
Oft adelt er, was uns gemein erschien,
Und das Geschätzte wird vor ihm zu nichts.
In diesem eignen Zauberkreise wandelt
Der wunderbare Mann und zieht uns an,
Mit ihm zu wandeln, teil an ihm zu nehmen:
Er scheint sich uns zu nahn, und bleibt uns fern;
Er scheint uns anzusehn, und Geister mögen
An unsrer Stelle seltsam ihm erscheinen.

PRINZESSIN

Du hast den Dichter fein und zart geschildert,

Der in den Reichen süsser Träume schwebt.
Allein mir scheint auch ihn das Wirkliche
Gewaltsam anzuziehn und festzuhalten.
Die schönen Lieder, die an unsern Bäumen
Wir hin und wieder angeheftet finden,
Die, goldnen Aepfeln gleich, ein neu Hesperien
Uns duftend bilden, erkennst du sie nicht alle
Für holde Früchte einer wahren Liebe?

LEONORE

Ich freue mich der schönen Blätter auch.
Mit mannigfalt'gem Geist verherrlicht er
Ein einzig Bild in allen seinen Reimen.
Bald hebt er es in lichter Glorie
Zum Sternenhimmel auf, beugt sich verehrend
Wie Engel über Wolken vor dem Bilde;
Dann schleicht er ihm durch stille Fluren nach,
Und jede Blume windet er zum Kranz.
Entfernt sich die Verehrte, heiligt er
Den Pfad, den leis ihr schöner Fuss betrat.
Versteckt im Busche, gleich der Nachtigall,
Füllt er aus einem liebekranken Busen
Mit seiner Klagen Wohllaut Hain und Luft;
Sein reizend Leid, die sel'ge Schwermut lockt
Ein jedes Ohr, und jedes Herz muss nach—

PRINZESSIN

Und wenn er seinen Gegenstand benennt,
So gibt er ihm den Namen Leonore.

LEONORE

Es ist dein Name, wie es meiner ist.
Ich nähm' es übel, wenn's ein andrer wäre.
Mich freut es, dass er sein Gefühl für dich
In diesem Doppelsinn verbergen kann.
Ich bin zufrieden, dass er meiner auch
Bei dieses Namens holdem Klang gedenkt.
Hier ist die Frage nicht von einer Liebe,
Die sich des Gegenstands bemeistern will,
Ausschliessend ihn besitzen, eifersüchtig
Den Anblick jedem andern wehren möchte.
Wenn er in seliger Betrachtung sich
Mit deinem Wert beschäftigt, mag er-auch
An meinem leichtem Wesen sich erfreun.
Uns liebt er nicht—verzeih, dass ich es sage!—
Aus allen Sphären trägt er, was er liebt,
Auf einen Namen nieder, den wir führen,
Und sein Gefühl teilt er uns mit; wir scheinen
Den Mann zu lieben, und wir lieben nur
Mit ihm das Höchste, was wir lieben können.

PRINZESSIN

Du hast dich sehr in diese Wissenschaft
Vertieft, Eleonore, sagst mir Dinge,
Die mir beinahe nur das Ohr berühren
Und in die Seele kaum noch übergehn.

LEONORE

Du, Schülerin des Plato! nicht begreifen,
Was dir ein Neuling vorzuschwatzen wagt?
Es müsste sein, dass ich zu sehr mich irrte;
Doch irr' ich auch nicht ganz, ich weiss es wohl.
Die Liebe zeigt in dieser holden Schule
Sich nicht, wie sonst, als ein verwöhntes Kind:
Es ist der Jüngling, der mit Psychen sich
Vermählte, der im Rat der Götter Sitz
Und Stimme hat. Er tobt nicht frevelhaft
Von einer Brust zur andern hin und her;
Er heftet sich an Schönheit und Gestalt
Nicht gleich mit süssem Irrtum fest, und büsset
Nicht schnellen Rausch mit Ekel und Verdruss.

PRINZESSIN

Da kommt mein Bruder! Lass uns nicht verraten,
Wohin sich wieder das Gespräch gelenkt:
Wir würden seinen Scherz zu tragen haben,
Wie unsre Kleidung seinen Spott erfuhr.

---

TORQUATO TASSO
by Goethe
Act I. Scene 1.

(PRINCESS and LEONORA, habited as shepherdesses.)

PRINCESS

Smiling thou dost survey me, Leonora,
And with a smile thou dost survey thyself.
What is it? Let a friend partake thy thought!
Thou seemest pensive, yet thou seemest pleased.

LEONORA

Yes, I am pleased, my princess, to behold
Us twain in rural fashion thus attir'd.
Two happy shepherd-maidens we appear,
And like the happy we are both employed.
Garlands we wreathe, this one, so gay with flowers,
Beneath my hand in varied beauty grows;<
Thou hast with higher taste and larger heart
The slender pliant laurel made thy choice.

PRINCESS

The laurel wreath, which aimlessly I twin'd,
Hath found at once a not unworthy head;
I place it gratefully on Virgil's brow.
(She crowns the bust of Virgil.)

LEONORA

With my full joyous wreath the lofty brow
Of Master Ludovico, thus I crown—
(She crowns the bust of Ariosto.)
Let him whose sportive sallies never fade,
Receive his tribute from the early spring.

PRINCESS

My brother is most kind, to bring us here
In this sweet season to our rural haunts;
Here, by the hour, in freedom unrestrain'd,
We may dream back the poet's golden age.
I love this Belriguardo; in my youth
Full many a joyous day I linger'd here,
And this bright sunshine, and this verdant green,
Bring back the feelings of that bygone time.

LEONORA

Yes, a new world surrounds us! Grateful now
The cooling shelter of these evergreens.
The tuneful murmur of this gurgling spring
Once more revives us. In the morning wind
The tender branches waver to and fro.
The flowers look upwards from their lowly beds,
And smile upon us with their childlike eyes.
The gardener, fearless grown, removes the roof
That screened his citron and his orange-trees;
The azure dome of heaven above us rests;
And, in the far horizon, from the hills
The snow in balmy vapour melts away.

PRINCESS

Most welcome were to me the genial spring,
Did it not lead my friend away from me.

LEONORA

My princess, in these sweet and tranquil hours,
Remind me not how soon I must depart.

PRINCESS

Yon mighty city will restore to thee,
In double measure, what thou leavest here.

LEONORA

The voice of duty, and the voice of love,
Both call me to my lord, forsaken long,
I bring to him his son, who rapidly
Hath grown in stature, and matured in mind,
Since last they met—I share his father's joy.
Florence is great and noble, but the worth
Of all her treasur'd riches doth not reach
The prouder jewels that Ferrara boasts.
That city to her people owes her power;
Ferrara grew to greatness through her princes.

PRINCESS

More through the noble men whom chance led here,
And who in sweet communion here remain'd.

LEONORA

Chance doth again disperse what chance collects.
A noble nature can alone attract
The noble, and retain them as ye do.
Around thy brother, and around thyself,
Assemble spirits worthy of you both,
And ye are worthy of your noble sires.
Here the fair light of science and free thought
Was kindled first, while o'er the darkened world
Still hung barbarian gloom. E'en when a child,
The names resounded loudly in mine ear,
Of Hercules and Hippolyte of Este.
My father oft with Florence and with Rome
Extoll'd Ferrara! Oft in youthful dream
Hither I fondly turn'd, now am I here.
Here was Petrarca kindly entertain'd,
And Ariosto found his models here.
Italia boasts no great, no mighty name,
This princely mansion hath not call'd its guest.
In fostering genius we enrich ourselves;
Dost thou present her with a friendly gift,
One far more beautiful she leaves with thee.
The ground is hallow'd where the good man treads;
When centuries have roll'd his sons shall hear
The deathless echo of his words and deeds.

PRINCESS

Yes, if those sons have feelings quick as thine;
This happiness full oft I envy thee.

LEONORA

Which purely and serenely thou, my friend,
As few beside thee, dost thyself enjoy.
When my full heart impels me to express
Promptly and freely what I keenly feel,
Thou feel'st the while more deeply, and—art silent.
Delusive splendour doth not dazzle thee,
Nor wit beguile; and flattery strives in vain
With fawning artifice to win thine ear;
Firm is thy temper, and correct thy taste,
Thy judgment just, and, truly great thyself,
With greatness thou dost ever sympathise.

PRINCESS

Thou shouldst not to this highest flattery
The garment of confiding friendship lend.

LEONORA

Friendship is just; she only estimates
The full extent and measure of thy worth.
Let me ascribe to opportunity,
To fortune too, her portion in thy culture,
Still in the end thou hast it, it is thine,
And all extol thy sister and thyself
Before the noblest women of the age.

PRINCESS

That can but little move me, Leonora,
When I reflect how poor at best we are,
To others more indebted than ourselves.
My knowledge of the ancient languages,
And of the treasures by the past bequeath'd,
I owe my mother, who, in varied lore
And mental power, her daughters far excell'd.
Might either claim comparison with her,
'Tis undeniably Lucretia's right.
Besides, what nature and what chance bestow'd
As property or rank I ne'er esteem'd.
'Tis pleasure to me when the wise converse,
That I their scope and meaning comprehend;
Whether they judge a man of bygone times
And weigh his actions, or of science treat,
Which, when extended and applied to life,
At once exalts and benefits mankind.
Where'er the converse of such men may lead,
I follow gladly, for with ease I follow.
Well pleas'd the strife of argument I hear,
When, round the powers that sway the human breast,
Waking alternately delight and fear,
With grace the lip of eloquence doth play:
And listen gladly when the princely thirst
Of fame, of wide dominion, forms the theme,
When of an able man, the thought profound,
Develop'd skilfully with subtle tact,
Doth not perplex and dazzle, but instruct.

LEONORA

And then, this grave and serious converse o'er,
Our ear and inner mind with tranquil joy
Upon the poet's tuneful verse repose,
Who through the medium of harmonious sounds
Infuses sweet emotions in the soul.
Thy lofty spirit grasps a wide domain;
Content am I to linger in the isle
Of poesy, her laurel groves among.

PRINCESS

In this fair land, I'm told, the myrtle blooms
In richer beauty than all other trees;
Here, too, the Muses wander, yet we seek
A friend and playmate’mong their tuneful choir
Less often than we seek to meet the bard,
Who seems to shun us, nay, appears to flee,
In quest of something that we know not of,
And which perchance is to himself unknown.
How charming were it, if in happy hour
Encountering us, he should with ecstasy
In our fair selves the treasure recognise,
Which in the world he long had sought in vain!

LEONORA

To your light raillery I must submit,
So light its touch it passeth harmless by.
I honour all men after their desert,
And am in truth toward Tasso only just.
His eye scarce lingers on this earthly scene,
To Nature's harmony his ear is tuned.
What history offers, and what life presents,
His bosom promptly and with joy receives,
The widely scatter'd is by him combined,
And his quick feeling animates the dead.
Oft he ennobles what we count for naught;
What others treasure is by him despis'd.
Thus moving in his own enchanted sphere,
The wondrous man doth still allure us on
To wander with him and partake his joy;
Though seeming to approach us, he remains
Remote as ever, and perchance his eye,
Resting on us, sees spirits in our place.

PRINCESS

Thou hast with taste and truth portray'd the bard
Who hovers in the shadowy realm of dreams.
And yet reality, it seems to me,
Hath also power to lure him and enchain.
In the sweet sonnets, scattered here and there,
With which we sometimes find our trees adorn'd,
Creating like the golden fruit of old
A new Hesperia, perceiv'st thou
not The gentle tokens of a genuine love?

LEONORA

In these fair leaves I also take delight.
With all his rich diversity of thought
He glorifies one form in all his strains.
Now he exalts her to the starry heavens
In radiant glory, and before that form
Bows down, like angels in the realms above.
Then stealing after her through silent fields,
He garlands in his wreath each beauteous flower;
And should the form he worships disappear,
Hallows the path her gentle foot hath trod.
Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade,
From his love-laden breast he fills the air
And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaints.
His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief
Charm every ear, enrapture every heart—

PRINCESS

And Leonora is the favour'd name
Selected for the object of his strains.

LEONORA

Thy name it is, my princess, as’tis mine.
It would displease me were it otherwise.
Now I rejoice that under this disguise
He can conceal his sentiment for thee,
And am no less contented with the thought
That this sweet name should also picture me.
Here is no question of an ardent love,
Seeking possession, and with jealous care
Screening its object from another's gaze.
While he enraptur'd contemplates thy worth
He in my lighter nature may rejoice.
He loves not us—forgive me what I say—
His lov'd ideal from the spheres he brings,
And doth invest it with the name we bear;
His feeling we participate; we seem
To love the man, yet only love in him
The highest object that can claim our love.

PRINCESS

In this deep science thou art deeply vers'd,
My Leonora, and thy words in truth
Play on my ear, yet scarcely reach my soul.

LEONORA

Thou Plato's pupil! and not comprehend
What a mere novice dares to prattle to thee?
It must be then that I have widely err'd;
Yet well I know I do not wholly err.
For love doth in this graceful school appear
No longer as the spoilt and wayward child;
He is the youth whom Psyche hath espous'd;
Who sits in council with the assembled gods.
He hath relinquish'd passion's fickle sway,
He clings no longer with delusion sweet
To outward form and beauty, to atone
For brief excitement by disgust and hate.

PRINCESS

Here comes my brother! let us not betray
Whither our converse hath conducted us;
Else we shall have his raillery to bear,
As in our dress he found a theme for jest.
(From the translation by Anna Swanwick.)

(Dr. Steiner): One fact has been entirely forgotten in the drama of recent years. When I tell you what it is, you will not very easily believe me; but I have been present at scarcely a single performance in recent years where the fact that we hear with our ears has not been forgotten. It seems such a simple obvious fact; and yet, from the point of view of art, it has been quite overlooked. The drama of our time has been working on the peculiar assumption that we hear- with our eyes ! It is accordingly considered necessary that whenever an actor is listening to another actor, he shall look straight towards him. In real life, it is certainly customary to turn to the person who is speaking, and it is perhaps justified there as a mark of politeness. Politeness is undoubtedly a praiseworthy virtue, it may even in certain circumstances be reckoned as one of the virtues that go to make up the moral code; and I am far from wanting to imply that there is no need for an actor to be polite; on the contrary! The actor on the stage, however, owes politeness first of all to the audience. (I do not mean some individual there; I shall have important things to say about the audience in the later lectures.) The only politeness that is due from the actor is in his relation to the audience, but in that he must not fail. It must never once be allowed to happen, for instance, that the audience see before them an actor speaking from the back of the stage, and four or five or more others standing in the foreground, turning their backs on the auditorium. That the stage should ever present such a picture is due to the intrusion there in recent years of the dilettantism that wants merely to imitate life. Blunders of this kind will disappear altogether as soon as we begin to take account again of style.

And where a true feeling for style is present, what difference will it make? We shall find we are perfectly able to arrange our positions on the stage so that only on the rarest occasion does an actor need to turn his back to the audience—only, that is, where a particular situation in the play absolutely requires it. As a matter of fact, nothing should ever happen on the stage for which there is not a compelling motive inherent in the play itself.

Take the case of smoking. In what I said yesterday I did not at all mean to convey the impression that I am against the smoking of cigarettes on the stage. But can there be any genuine motive behind it, when a number of persons, obviously merely to fill up dead moments with a bit of mime, are continually lighting cigarettes and smoking them in between their words, or even—as I have often seen—trying to cover their ignorance of rightly formed speech by standing there talking, holding cigarettes in their mouths as they speak? Yes, that does happen. All manner of detestable tricks of this sort have been finding their way on to the stage.

If, however, a boy of seventeen or eighteen years old comes on the stage and lights a cigarette, then there may well be a perfectly definite motive behind the action: we are to understand that the young fellow is anxious to pose as grown-up. He wants us to see that he is quite a man. In that case, the lighting of the cigarette has behind it a conscious motive that originates in the play itself, and I would thoroughly commend it—as I certainly do when in the plays of today I see boys and girls of seventeen or eighteen (the age of the part, of course, not of the actor) lighting their cigarettes. There, it is right and good; the action must, however, always be prompted directly by the situation in the play.

Do you see what is implied here—what demand we are making on behalf of art? We are asking that everything done on the stage shall be directly consequent on the inner texture of the play as an artistic creation. If our work is to have form and style, we must be able to see how every single detail in the acting springs straight from the fundamental intentions of the play. I have mentioned the matter of cigarettes merely as an example.

Suppose it happens in a play that one person is giving a command, and one, two or three others are receiving it. There you have a clear situation to be staged. As to the manner and bearing of the one who is giving the command, I need only refer you to what I said the other day, when we went through the several gestures for the variously spoken word—the incisive, hard, gentle, etc. What we have now to consider is the behaviour, in dumb show, of those who are receiving a command. Naturally, what they would find easiest would be to stand with their backs to the audience, for then there would be no need for them to act at all. But there is no occasion for them to take up such a position; in fact, it mustn't be done, it would be quite inartistic.

There are two things the audience must be able to see in one who is receiving a command. First, it must be evident that he is listening while the command is being given. And this, even when instead of facing the speaker he faces them, the audience will have no difficulty in seeing. If an actor who is receiving a command should ever turn his back to the audience, then we would have necessarily to conclude that he had some very particular reason for doing so. Imagine the speaker standing behind him, on his right; then the listener can still quite properly face the audience. He will be listening with his right ear and the audience will be able to see that he is doing so, by the way he turns just a little in that direction. No situation can possibly occur in a play where a listener is not perfectly well able to face the audience. And then, if the actor has his mime under proper control, the audience can see also in his countenance the impression that the command is making upon him. For that has to be seen too; it is the second of the two things that must be clearly visible to the spectator. The listener will therefore present to the audience a three-quarter profile more or less, his head inclined a little in the direction of the voice and slightly forwards. And if he has gone through beforehand the other exercises that I described yesterday, then as he assumes this position and enters into the feeling of it, his facial muscles will instinctively be set working in such a manner that the audience will see expressed in his countenance the nature of the command he is receiving. And if, in addition, he shows a tendency to move his arms and hands—not outwards, but more in the way of drawing them towards him—the gesture will be complete, will be exactly as it should be.

And now, my dear friends, you will probably be wanting to say: But if I were to arrange the stage with three or four actors all listening in the way you describe, it would look stereotyped, it would look as if it were according to some set plan.

Raphael would not have said so ! He would no doubt have introduced slight modifications into the gesture of the second listener, or of the third and so on, but the essential spirit and character of the gesture he would have maintained in them all. Raphael was not of course a producer; but he would, as onlooker, as critic, have demanded that gesture. He would, as I said, have modified it a little here and there, but the very similarity of gesture in the listeners would have impressed Raphael as aesthetically right. And should it ever be a case of some individual actor wanting his own way, then no question but that the stage picture as a whole must always receive the first consideration.

What I have been describing has reference to the receiving of a command. We can, however, also consider how it will be with mere listening. One actor is speaking and others are listening. The gesturing here will naturally be not unlike what we have found to belong to the receiving of a command. The speaker's gesture will of course again be from among those I indicated in connection with the different categories that I named for the word : incisive, gentle, etc.; the precise gesture of the listener will have to be carefully determined in the following way.

Let us suppose the content of what he has to say requires the speaker to speak quite slowly, so that his speaking falls into the category we named: slow, deliberate. We know then what his gesture will be. But what kind of a gesture will the listener have to make? The listener will have to adopt the gesture of a speaker who utters quick, decided words. Why is this?

When someone speaks in a quick, incisive tone of voice, he tends involuntarily to make sharply defined gestures; you will remember how we designated them as ‘pointing’ gestures. The narrator, who is speaking slowly, will not make these pointing gestures; he will make the movements with the fingers that I showed at the end of yesterday's lecture. The listener, however, will—silently, to himself– accentuate, as he listens, the important words. He will thus be in • the condition for incisive speaking—speaking, as it were, inaudibly, within; and he will accordingly be right in making the pointing gestures. Then you will have a perfect harmony of gesture: the one making those finger movements that belong to the telling, the other making the’ pointing’ finger movements that rightly accompany the listening. These are suggestions that you can study and work out in detail for yourselves.

Take another case. Again we have an actor relating something; but this time the content has the effect of making him speak his words out abruptly, as though they were cut short. This kind of speaking will always mean that the speaker particularly wants to drive home what he is telling; otherwise he would not tell it in that manner When the dramatist lets us see that a great deal depends on getting some information across to the listener, then the narrator will have to speak in this way, cutting his words short, and he will at the same time make the corresponding ‘flinging away’ gesture with his fingers—this gesture that you will remember I showed you before. The listener, on the other hand, will be true to his part and show the right response if he listens with all his ears—comes, that is, inwardly into the mood of a speaker who gives his words their full tone and value. Suppose someone wants to make sure of my taking in what he is telling me. Then I must stand before him in the manner of a full-toned speaker; for since I have to feel in full measure what he is saying, I must make the gesture that we saw to be right for the word that is spoken in full measure. These are ways to establish a right relationship between speaker and listener.

It must only not be forgotten that what I have now been recommending should never be noticeable on the stage; it should have been so thoroughly worked with that it has passed over entirely into an instinctive sensitiveness for what is true in art. If ever a movement gives the appearance of being studied or artificial, that movement is immediately false. For in art, everything is false unless it is the artistic itself that the spectator has before him—the artistic itself as style.

Consider in this connection what a difference there will be in their whole manner of speaking between some character in a drama who wants to convince, and one who wants to persuade. This difference must be brought out on the stage.

Situations occur where we want to persuade another person, we want to talk him round. One can have this desire in a good or in a bad sense—or somewhere between the two. You have a classic and grand instance of persuasion in the famous saying of Wallenstein: ‘Max, bleibe bei mir! ’ (Max, stay with me!).¹ There you have, not the will to convince, as will be evident from the context, but the will to persuade.

Now, you could not imagine Wallenstein standing in front of Max Piccolomini, wringing his hands and saying: ‘Max, bleibe bei mir!’ But you can, and indeed you must, imagine him clapping Max on the shoulder, or showing at least an inclination to do so. That is the gesture that belongs properly to the words. Where, on the other hand, it is a question of trying to carry conviction by reasoning, the speaker must make some gesture upon his own person. He will have to clasp his hands, for example, or touch himself somewhere with his hands. He feels a need to discover within himself the power of conviction—as it were, to track it down. If, however, the speaker wants to persuade, he should make the gesture of touching the other person—or at least let it begin, making a movement, that is, which, if carried further, would be a complete gesture of touching.

Note carefully also the fine distinctions we have to make for different kinds of persuasion. We may, for example, be using persuasion with the intention of giving comfort. Much will then depend on our powers of persuasion in the good sense of the word, for the one who needs comfort has not time to be convinced; what he wants, as a rule, is to be persuaded, not to be convinced by reason. We shall find, however, it makes a great difference whether we are in this way using persuasion to bring comfort, or are, for instance, wanting something from the other person.

If we want to bring comfort, then we make this gesture of touching; it will work naturally and harmoniously, whether we only begin it, or carry it to completion. It need really only be begun. We can take the other's hand, or lay the palm of our hand on his forearm. The audience will then instinctively receive the right impression.

This gesture will, however, not be right if you are wanting something for yourself, as in the famous example I quoted just now, not even if your wish be inspired by the very best intentions. ‘Max, bleibe bei mir !’ The actor who says these words will not lay his hand on Max's arm; he will have to place his hand on Max's shoulder or on his head, or anyway make a gesture of beginning to do so. Things like this will have to be grasped in all their exact detail, if we are ever to have again a genuine art of production that concerns itself with the whole practical work of the stage.

And now let us go a little farther; for there are many more details of gesture and posture that require to be studied. We need, for example, to develop an artistic perception for the following. When a person is standing in front of you, you may be seeing him in profile, in part profile, or in full face; and there is a meaning for each of these three ways of being seen. Anyone who is an attentive observer of life will know how people sometimes place themselves instinctively so that others are seeing them in one or other of these ways. In real life a kind of affectation lies behind it, but in art it is done for artistic reasons. I once knew a professor (he was a German) who never lectured without presenting himself in profile to his audience—and not only before ladies, to whom he frequently gave lectures, but before his own men students too; and he knew very well what it meant.

Standing in profile always calls up instinctively in the onlooker a sense of being in the presence of intellectual superiority. You cannot look at a person in profile without being impressed with his intellectual superiority—or inferiority, as the case may be; for in real life inferiority also occurs. The front-face view can never, for unprejudiced observation, tell us whether the person is clever or stupid. Looking him full in the face, we can remark whether he is a good or a bad man, whether he is kindly disposed or selfish; but if we want to observe whether he is clever or dull, we must see him in profile. And since one who makes use of profile is sure to be a person who believes himself to be clever, we shall know he is wanting in this way to show us his cleverness.

The actor should also make here an additional gesture; he should at the same time hold his head back a little. Then the audience will be bound to feel that he is impressing his hearers with his intellectual superiority. If therefore you want the acting to be artistic, you must arrange that an actor who is to speak a passage wherein he has to appear superior to the one he is addressing shall turn his complete profile to the audience, holding his head back a little as he speaks. We must, you know, once and for all rid the stage of dilettantism. We must create again the possibility for students to learn the preliminaries for the art of the stage, just as painters have to learn how to use colour. For unless one has learned and studied these things, one is not an actor, one is not acting artistically, but at best merely performing à la Reinhardt or Bassermann!

But now, suppose you stand before the audience in part profile. That will express, not intellectual superiority but intellectual participation in what the other is saying, especially if at the same time the head be inclined forward a little, so. A listener can in this way show to the audience that he is following the speaker with his understanding. It may, however, be that you want rather more the listener's feelings to be apparent to the audience. In this case, whilst the other is speaking, the listener must as far as possible allow the audience to see him full face.

The situation on the stage can really come alive when the speaking is accompanied by these postures in the listener. Where the speaking is intended to make an impression on his intellect, you will choose for the listener the profile position; where it is rather his heart that is to be touched, you will let him stand full face to the audience. When details of this nature begin to be clearly envisaged and understood, then the art of the stage will be able to emerge from dilettantism and once again acquire content. We shall be able to see from the way an actor stands or walks, whether it is more with the intellect or with the feelings of the heart that he is participating in the situation.

Passing on now to consider the will, we find that for the expression of will there has always to be movement, and here you will have to pay particular regard to what I said about form in movement. The expression of will or resolve calls forth in another an answering impulse of will. We know how this happens in life. Someone gives expression to his will in a certain direction. We listen to him. We can fall in with his will, or we can ourselves ‘will’ to hinder it. There you have the two extreme situations, and there are naturally many intermediate possibilities.

A will that gives in to the will of the other must always be accompanied with a movement from left to right, either of the whole person or of the arms. Try it out for yourselves on the stage. Let one actor say something that has will in it, and another be standing there and making this gesture—that goes from left to right. You will feel at once that there is agreement on the part of the listener; the gesture expresses that he too wills the same thing Let him, however, make a right-to-left movement, and he is obviously on the defensive and may even be considering how he can put hindrances in the other's way. Still greater emphasis can be given to this’ will to oppose’ if the movement is made expressly with the head—naturally, the rest of the body also sharing in it.

These are among the things that will have to be taught in a school for production that sets out to be comprehensive and take the whole art of the stage for its province. You will remember I told you yesterday—it may have seemed as though I were making rather paradoxical statements—I told you that in practising running one learns instinctively the walking that is required for the stage, and that leaping helps to modify the walking in the right way, making it now quicker, now slower, and that wrestling develops hand and arm movements, and so on. How is all this to be put into practice?

The first thing the school will have to do is to arrange for the students to practise Running, Leaping, Wrestling, something in the nature of Discus-throwing, something like Spear-throwing; for that will help them to come easily and readily into all the bodily movements that are needed on the stage. Then we shall at any rate be saved from a feeling one has sometimes nowadays about an actor as soon as ever he comes on: that fellow, we feel, has no proper control of his body. How often we have the impression that all those people who are dancing and hopping about up there on the stage have not their bodies under control! They would have quite a different relation to their bodies if, right at the beginning of their training, they had practised these exercises.

The next thing will be to draw forth from each exercise the particular ability it can develop for the stage. Let the students practise running for a quarter to half an hour, and then for half to three-quarters of an hour stage-walking; and the same with leaping and wrestling. For they must be able to unite the two : the exercise, and the skill in movement that the exercise helps them to acquire. And in order that, when they come to the last exercise, they may really succeed in drawing forth from their body the forming of the word, the four preceding exercises should be practised in the following way.

For the practice of walking, and of modified walking, for the practice also of arm and hand movement and of play of countenance, you should have a reciter who does the speaking, while the student makes, in silence, the corresponding gesture or facial expression. And as far as these first four steps in the training are concerned, the same method should be continued even later on for one who is wanting presently to appear on the stage. He should practise his gestures, to begin with, without yet saying a word, while the speaker of the company does the speaking. This will give him the opportunity to make himself entirely familiar with the gestures in dumb play. When the students come to the fifth exercise, they can begin to speak; they can accompany the gesture with the speaking—which up to now they have been practising only separately, without gesture, in recitative. These two, gesture and the forming of the word, have then to be consciously combined, consciously fitted into one another. Only so will our acting have the necessary artistic style.

The men of ancient India had a theory of the origin of man which, while it resembled our modern one, bespoke more feeling for the spiritual. For they too looked upon a certain species of ape as akin to man; but they were more consistent than we in their adherence to the mistaken theory. These apes, they said, can speak; they only don't want to—partly out of obstinacy and partly because they are a little bashful about it. If they are in any way human, if they are on the way to becoming man, then it follows that they must be able to speak. That was the conclusion, the perfectly correct conclusion of the ancient Indians. And I am always reminded of it when I meet with lack of temperament in the very people who need it. For I know well that these people have temperament; they are only unwilling to show it. I mean that quite seriously; the people of today are far more temperamental than they seem. We think it improper to show temperament; but it is by no means always so, and especially not in the case of little children. And yet how annoyed we often are when children begin to show temperament! But there too, you know, we shall have to learn to be more understanding!

When we have a school of dramatic art, planned in the way I have indicated, we shall not need to have any misgivings about arranging for the students to practise leaping and wrestling and discus-throwing. If only the teacher has temperament, and does not go about with a long face, but is a person gifted with some humour, then that of itself will help to evoke in the students the necessary temperament. They will soon stop being shy of exhibiting it. We have the means at our disposal for evoking temperament, we only don't use them. And for art, in so far as its practice is concerned, temperament is an essential factor. My dear friends, we must know this; we must know how intrinsically temperament belongs to art.

To write books on mysticism may not require temperament. If the books please, well and good; the readers do not the the author. But in those arts where the human being presents himself in person, there has to be temperament; there has to be also enhanced temperament—that is to say, humour. And therewith the moment is reached where it can all begin to be esoteric. And that is what we are minded to achieve in these lectures—that our study shall take us right into the esoteric aspect of the whole matter.

• 1. Schiller's Wallenstein, Act III, Scene 18.
• 2. Heinrich Laube (1806–1884). In an article written in 1898, Rudolf Steiner referred to Laube as this master of all producers.' He worked mainly in Vienna.

Don't think that I want to take the floor here today to talk about that cheap understanding with regard to the social question that so many people would like to talk about today and who would like to be heard by name. I would like to speak of a completely different kind of understanding, the kind of understanding that seems to me to be called for by the loud, loudly speaking facts that are spreading across a large part of Europe today: understanding with the historical forces at work in the present and in the future, which call for a very specific, clear and energetic approach to what has been called the social question for more than half a century. How can we speak today of that other understanding mentioned at the beginning? Has not too much been lost for this understanding? Has not a certain part of modern humanity taken a long time to seek such an understanding? Today, a deep chasm is opening up between those who have been the leading classes of humanity up to now and those who are pressing forward with newer demands that have necessarily arisen from the times, i.e. between the leading classes of humanity up to now and the proletariat with its justified demands.

Let us take a look at recent life in order first of all to gain a judgment on the impossibility of easy understanding today. Much has been said for decades about this modern civilization, about this civilization which is supposed to have brought about such great and mighty things for mankind. How we have heard it again and again, the praise for modern technology, for modern transportation! Have we not heard them, all the phrases about how it is possible for people today - yes, which people are possible! - to traverse vast distances of land in a relatively short time, how it has become possible for thoughts to cover almost any distance, how it has become possible to expand so-called intellectual life? Well, I don't need to go into detail about the whole song of praise that has been heard so and so often. But what has all this, to which such a song of praise is sung, risen above? Without what would it not have been possible? It would not have been possible without the work of the greater part of mankind, that part which was not allowed to participate in all that has been so praised, that part which had to provide for these comforts of life under physical and mental privations, without being able to participate in any way in all the achievements of modern civilization.

Let's take a closer look at how, for more than half a century, we have come to the point where we still have to say that the abyss exists today. And if there is much talk of understanding today, it is precisely because people are afraid, because they are afraid of the facts that are looming so threateningly for some people. What, for example, has the moral world view of these leading classes been particularly preoccupied with - to start with a favorite subject of the leading classes since then? The world-view, the moral world-view of these leading classes has been particularly fond of dealing with, in endless speeches, in unctuous expositions, in words that seemed to overflow with feeling, with how men must develop love for one another, how men must see to it that brotherhood spreads, how men can only conquer the spiritual world by entering into such brotherhood. Such speeches, seemingly dripping with deep feeling, have indeed been made quite often by the leading spiritual circles of the hitherto leading class of mankind. Let us put ourselves in the place of such speeches in halls of mirrors or the like, and think how they preached about love of man, about charity, about religiosity, preached over a furnace heating provided by coal - I would like to draw attention to this in order to characterize a little the course of the present facts - which was extracted from those coal mines about which an English inquiry at the beginning of the newer labour movement brought quite strange things to light. Down there in the shafts of the earth, nine-, eleven-, thirteen-year-old children worked all day long in the shafts, children who never saw the sunlight except on Sunday, for the simple reason that they went down into the pits when it was still dark, and were only brought up again when it was no longer light. Men stood down there, completely naked, next to women who were pregnant and who also stood half-naked down there and had to work.

That was the first time that a government inquiry was held to draw attention to what was actually going on among the people, that such experiences were made, about which thoughtlessness had never wanted to enlighten itself, despite all the preaching of humanity, charity and religiosity. Admittedly, that was at the beginning of the modern proletarian movement. But it cannot be said that what has at least to some extent improved the situation of wide circles of people stems from the understanding that would have been gained in the hitherto leading classes of mankind. A large part of these leading classes of mankind are today just as uncomprehending of the true demands of the time, which follow from such facts, as they were fifty or more years ago.

There is no need to go as far as a hitherto leading, or at least seemingly leading, personality of humanity has gone: the former German Emperor, who called the socialist-minded people: Animals that gnaw at the foundations of the German empire and are worth exterminating. These are his own words. As I said, there is no need to go that far, but the judgments that are still made in certain circles today are not so very different from this particularly characteristic judgment just mentioned.

If we now look at what has taken place in the course of the last five to six decades, since what is now called the social question came into existence, we see on the one hand the thoughtless lack of understanding with regard to everything that has come up in the development of humanity, and on the other hand we see the onslaught, the justified onslaught of the broad proletarian masses, which has always been crowding into the words: It cannot go on like this. But today the facts speak a completely different language than they have in recent decades. And how do the judgments that some people make compare with the facts? The terrible catastrophe we have lived through in the last four to five years is a good lesson in this.

Please allow me to make the following personal comment. That which I have had to form for decades as a judgment on European political conditions, I had to summarize it in a lecture which I gave in the spring of 1914 in Vienna to a small circle - a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time - I had to summarize that which was then woven among the people of Europe, among those people of whom one could say that they had something to do with the shaping of political destiny in Europe. At that time one had to say, if one looked at the times with an unbiased eye: With regard to the political and state relations of Europe, we are suffering from a creeping ulcer, a cancerous disease that will have to break out in a terrible way in the very near future. The time when this cancer broke out came very soon. But what did the “practitioners” say? What did the “statesmen” say? Today, when we talk about statesmen, we are always tempted to put quotation marks around the word. What did the “statesmen” say? What the leading foreign secretary of state in the German Reichstag said back then was the following. He said: “Thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, we can say that European peace will be secured for the foreseeable future. - That was said by a leading statesman in May 1914. This peace was so secure that since then twelve to fifteen million people have been shot dead, three times as many have been crippled. Just as in those days these statesmen spoke about what was in the political sky, so today many people speak about what is being said by the whole educated world through facts of the most significant and energetic kind. This is how people often speak about the social question. There is no idea in many circles of what must come and what will certainly come, and of what every reasonable person must be able to judge.

What I have to say on this matter is truly not based on any theoretical view. For many years I was a teacher at the workers' educational school founded in Berlin by Wilhelm Liebknecht, the old Liebknecht, I taught in the most diverse branches, and from there I also worked within the educational system of the modern proletariat in trade unions, in cooperatives and also within the political party. It is precisely when one has lived among and worked with those who have endeavored to carry the modern workers' movement forward from real thoughts, from real intellectual foundations, that one can perhaps say that one can form a judgment, not as one who thinks about the proletariat. Such judgment has no value today. Today, only a judgment formed with the proletariat, formed from the midst of the proletariat itself, can have any value.

In the hours that the workers spent after the hard work of the day, in which they went to the theater or played skat while other classes - I don't want to list all the nice things - in the hours in which the proletarian tried to enlighten himself about his situation, in those hours one could learn how the modern proletarian question has become and will become something quite different from a mere wage or bread question, as many still believe today, namely a question of human dignity. A question of a humane existence, that is what lies behind all proletarian demands, and has done for a long time.

Today's proletarian demands can be said to rest on three foundations. The one foundation is very often described by the proletarians themselves by referring to the great teacher of the proletariat, Karl Marx, as the existence of so-called surplus value. Surplus value, it was always a word that penetrated deep into the soul of the modern proletarian; it was a word that had an incendiary effect on the feelings of this modern proletarian. What word did the hitherto leading classes oppose to this surplus value? One will perhaps be surprised if I contrast the following two things.

The leading classes opposed this surplus value with the word of the great, important spiritual life which the civilization of mankind has brought forth. What did the proletarian know of this spiritual life? What was the great question of humanity for him? He knew that the surplus value he produced was used to make this spiritual life possible and to exclude him from this spiritual life. For him, surplus value was the very abstract basis of spiritual life. What kind of spiritual life was that? It was the intellectual life that arose in the dawn of the modern bourgeois economic order. It is often said, certainly not unjustly, that the modern proletariat was created by modern technology, by modern industrialism, by modern capitalism, and we shall speak of these things in a moment. But at the same time as this modern technology, with this capitalism, something else arose which we can call the modern scientific orientation. There it was - it was quite a long time ago - that the proletariat placed the last great trust in the bourgeoisie in the face of what the modern bourgeoisie brought up as the modern scientific orientation. And this last great trust, world-historical trust, has been disappointed.

What was the actual situation? Well, out of old worldviews, the justification of which we really don't want to examine today, what is today an enlightened, scientific worldview was formed. The proletarian, who has been called away from the medieval craft to the soul-killing machine, has been harnessed into modern capitalism, could not accept what the old classes had absorbed in their spiritual life. He could only accept, so to speak, the most modern product, the most modern outflow of this spiritual life. But for him this spiritual life became something quite, quite different from that of the leading classes. One need only visualize this with reference to all the depths of the proletarian soul. One must imagine how people from the hitherto leading classes, even if they were such enlightened people as the naturalist Vogt or the scientific popularizer Büchner, how they could be enlightened people with their heads, with their minds, in the sense of today's science; but they were such enlightened people only because they lived with their whole human being inside a social order that still came from the old religious and other world views in which the old still lived on. Their life was different from the one they professed, however honest they were in theory. The modern proletarian was compelled to take what remained to him as the legacy of the bourgeoisie in the fullest human seriousness. One need only have seen what it meant to the modern proletarian when he was told, as Lassalle once was, about science and the workers.

I stood - if I may also make this personal remark - more than eighteen years ago in Spandau, near Berlin, on the same speaker's platform with Rosa Luxemburg, who recently met her tragic end. We were both speaking to a proletarian assembly about science and the workers. At the time, Rosa Luxemburg said words that you could see had a powerful effect on the souls of these proletarian people who had come on a Sunday afternoon and had brought their wives and children with them; it was a heart-warming meeting. She said that, under the influence of modern science, people can no longer imagine that they have come up from conditions that were like angels, from which the modern differences of rank and class would be justified. No, she said almost literally: man, the physical man of today, was once highly indecent, climbing around on trees, and if one remembers this origin, then one really finds no reason to speak of today's class differences.

This was understood, but differently than by the leading circles. It was understood in such a way that the whole man wanted to be placed in this world view, which was to answer the question of the proletarian languishing in the barren machine: What am I as a human being? What is man in the world at all?

Now, however, the modern proletarian could gain nothing from this whole science other than what he could call a mirror image of what has emerged as the modern capitalist economic order. He felt that people speak as they must according to their economic circumstances, according to their economic situation. They had placed him in this economic situation; he could only judge from it. The leading circles said: the way people live now is a result of the divine world order, or a result of the moral world order, or a result of historical ideas and so on. The modern proletarian could only feel all this by saying to himself: “But you have put me into this economic life, and what have you made of me? Does that show what you have made of me, this divine world order, this moral world order, these historical ideas?

And so the concept of surplus value - the surplus value that he produced, that was extracted from him, that made this life of the leading classes possible - ignited in his emotional world and the opinion arose in him that everything that is produced by the leading circles in terms of spiritual life is only the reflection of their economic order.

Finally, for the last few centuries the proletarian theoretician was undoubtedly right in this view. The last few years have amply demonstrated this in the most diverse areas. Or can one believe that the people who taught history, for example, or wrote about history in the various schools - I don't want to say mathematics and physics, there's not much you can do in world views - can one say that they ultimately expressed anything other than a reflection of what the state-economic order was? Just look at the history of the states that entered the world war. The history of the Hohenzollerns will certainly look different in the future than the German professors have written in recent years and decades. It will, however, be made, this history, by people who have been told - yes, it is also a word of the German emperor - that they are not only enemies of the ruling class, but enemies of the divine world order.

So what was the spiritual life of the ruling classes became for the proletarian a dull ideology, a luxury of humanity, something for which he could muster no understanding. Nevertheless, his deepest longing was to find something that told him what human dignity, what human worth was. That is why the first proletarian demand is a spiritual demand. And one may say what one likes here or there, the first proletarian demand is a spiritual demand, the demand for such a spiritual life in which one can feel what one is as a human being, in which every human being can feel what human life on earth is worth. That is the first proletarian demand in the spiritual sphere.

The second proletarian demand arises in the field of legal life, of the actual political state. It is difficult to talk theoretically about what the law actually is. In any case, law is something that concerns all men, and one need only say the following about law: just as one cannot talk to a blind man about what a blue color is, but one does not need to theorize much about the blue color with one who sees, so one cannot talk about law with those who are blind to law. For the law rests on an original human awareness of the law. On the commandments of the political state, which the ruling classes have so finely carved out for themselves in recent centuries, the proletarian sought his right, his right above all in relation to his field of labor. What did he find? At first he did not find himself harnessed to the constitutional state, he found himself harnessed to the economic state. And there he saw that in contrast to all ideas of humanity, in contrast to all ideas of pure humanity, there remained for him a remnant of old inhumanity, a terrible remnant of old inhumanity. That, in turn, is something that Karl Marx so passionately impressed on the souls of the proletariat. There were slaves in ancient times. The whole human being was bought and sold like a commodity. Later there were serfs. There was less buying and selling of people than in the old days of slavery. Even now, people are still bought and sold like commodities. What Karl Marx and his successors have repeatedly and again so understandably expressed for the proletarian soul is that human labor power is sold. In the modern commodity market, where there should only be commodities, labor power itself is treated like a commodity. This rests in the depths, albeit often unconsciously, of the proletarian soul, so that it says to itself: the time has come when my labor power may no longer be a commodity.

This is the second proletarian demand. It springs from the legal ground. In drawing attention to this relationship, Karl Marx was once again speaking one of his most incendiary words. But we must be even more radical in this area than Karl Marx himself was in his approach. It must become clear: a world order, a social order must emerge in which man's labor power is no longer a commodity, in which it is completely stripped of the character of a commodity. For if I have to sell my labor power, I can also sell my entire human being. How can I retain my human being if I have to sell my labor power to someone else? He becomes master of my whole person. Thus the last remnant of the old slavery, but truly not in a lesser form, is still there today in this “humane” age.

So the proletarian, with his labor power and its sale, found himself thrust out of legal life into economic life. And when it is said, well, the labor contract exists, it must be countered that as long as a contract can be concluded between the employer and the worker about the labor relationship, the slave relationship with regard to labor power exists. Only then, when the relationship with regard to labor between labor manager and physical workers is transferred to the mere legal ground, only then is there that which the modern proletarian soul must demand.

However, this can only be the case when a relationship is no longer concluded only about wages, but only about what is produced jointly by the physical and the intellectual worker. There can only be contracts about goods, not about pieces of people. Instead of knowing that his labor relationship is protected on the basis of law, what did the modern proletarian find on this legal basis? Did he find rights? When he looked at himself, he really did not find any rights. Certain people had gradually become accustomed to perceiving this modern state as a kind of deity, as an idol. Almost as Faust spoke to Gretchen about God in the first part, so certain people spoke about the modern state. One could well imagine a modern labor entrepreneur instructing his workers about the divinity of the modern state and saying of this state: “The all-preserver, the all-embracer, does he not grasp and sustain you, me and himself?” He will probably always think: especially me. - Rights awaited the consciousness of humanity on the soil of the state. The modern proletarian found the privileges of those who had gained them from economic life, especially in recent times. Instead of that which must be demanded in regard to all rights - the equality of all men - what did the modern proletarian find? If one looks at what he found there on the ground of the constitutional state, one comes to his third demand; for he found on the ground on which he was to find the right, namely the right of his labor and the opposite right, the right of the so-called owner, he found the class struggle. For the modern proletarian, the modern state is nothing more than the class-struggle state.

Thus we designate the third proletarian demand as that which aims at overcoming the class state and replacing it with the constitutional state. Labor and labor management are objects of law. What, after all, is property? In the course of modern times it will have to become something that belongs to the old rusty things; for what is it in reality? In the social organism we need only the concept which says: possession is the right of any man to make use of any thing. Possession is always based on a right. Only when rights are regulated on the basis of a true democratic social order will workers' rights stand in opposition to so-called property rights. Only then, however, can that which is the legitimate demand of the modern proletarian be fulfilled.

If you look at the facts of today, which speak so loudly, then you come to the conclusion that what has gradually emerged as a social organism under the influence of modern technology, under the influence of modern capitalism, must be looked at more closely. - And one need only look at the three demands of the modern proletariat just characterized, then one will also see what is necessary for the recovery of the social organism. A spiritual, a legal and an economic aspect - these are the three aspects that must be looked at. But how have these three aspects been treated in the modern historical order, which is currently under the influence of technology and capitalism?

This is where we come from the critique of what has been formed by the ruling classes of the present, to what emerges today as a historical demand. I can imagine that some people will not fully agree with me in what I am about to say. But do not the facts that have developed show that people's thoughts have often lagged behind these facts? That is why it is perhaps justified to listen when someone says: “We not only need all kinds of talk about the transformation of conditions, no, today we need to move forward to completely new thoughts. New thoughts must enter the human brain, because the old thoughts have shown what they have made the human social order into. Rethinking and relearning, not just trying things out, is necessary today. And if what I have to say differs in some respects from the usual thoughts, I ask you to take it in such a way that it is taken from the observation of the facts of life and is just as honestly meant as many other things that are honestly put forward for the recovery of the newer social conditions.

I see, for example, how in recent times, precisely under the influence of the bourgeois social and economic order, economic life has increasingly grown together with legal life, how the political state and the economic state have become one. Let us take a very characteristic example of the present. Let us take the example of Austria, which has just succumbed to its fate. When, in the sixties of the 19th century, this Austria finally decided to establish a so-called constitutional life, how was the Imperial Council, this old blessed Imperial Council - because they wanted to have such a clear and short name, they called this Austrian state, apart from Hungary and the lands of the so-called Holy Crown of St. Stephen, “the kingdoms and lands represented in the Imperial Council”, - short name for Austria! - was elected? Elections were held for this Imperial Council according to four curiae, firstly the large landowners, secondly the chambers of commerce, thirdly the cities, markets and industrial towns, fourthly the rural communities. The latter were only allowed to vote indirectly. But what are all these curiae? They were economic curiae. They had to represent purely economic interests, and they elected their deputies to the Austrian Imperial Council. What was to be done there? Rights were to be established, political rights. What ideas did they have about political rights by basing the Austrian Imperial Council on these four curiae? Well, they had the idea that in the Imperial Council, where the law was to be decided, economic interests were merely transformed into rights. And so it was, and still is, that basically the state representations include, mostly openly or covertly, the mere economic interests. Look at the Farmers' Union in the German Reichstag; you can refrain from giving me closer examples. Everywhere we see how the tendency of modern times has been to merge economic life with the political life of the state proper. This was called progress. They began with those branches which were particularly convenient to the ruling classes, the postal, telegraph and railroad systems and the like, and extended them more and more. That is one thing that was welded together. The other thing that was merged, that was welded together, was intellectual life and the political state.

I know that I am to a certain extent treading on ice when I speak of this fusion of intellectual life with the political state, when I speak today of the fact that this fusion has led to the disadvantage, to the harm, to the illness of the social organism. Certainly, it was necessary for the ruling classes in the last centuries, and especially in the 19th century. But one must not merely believe that the administration, the operation of science and other branches of intellectual life has been corrupted, impaired by the state administration, but the content of science itself. Here, too, there is no need to go as far as the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, who once called the members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences “the Hohenzollern's scientific protection force” in a beautiful speech - gentlemen always speak very, very beautifully when they talk about such things.

In an enlightened age, there was a lot of mockery about how in the Middle Ages external science and worldview, the handmaiden, was the servant of theology. Certainly, we will never want to return to those times. Anyone who looks at things today with unbiased judgment knows that a later time will judge ours in a similar way. In many cases, scholars no longer carry the train of theology, well, I don't want to say that they clean the boots of the states concerned, but in many respects the bearers of the train of the states concerned have already become the bearers of the train. That is what one must keep in mind again and again if one wants to talk about what it has actually brought about that in recent times, on the one hand, economic life has merged with political state life, and on the other hand, intellectual life has merged with precisely this political state life. Anyone who looks into these things does not now ask, as so many people ask: What should the League of Nations do, which is now to be founded from one point of view or the other? The other day in Berne I heard a gentleman who considers himself particularly clever say: The League of Nations must establish a supranational state, it must create a supra-parliament. Yes, you see, anyone who looks with an unbiased eye at what the previous states have achieved in these four terrible years really does not want to ask with regard to the League of Nations: How should the various measures and institutions of the previous states be transferred to this League of Nations? What should be done to make this League of Nations as similar as possible to the state? - He will probably ask differently. He will perhaps ask: What should this state refrain from doing? - After all, what it has done in the last four years has not really borne much fruit. Gradually, if you really look into the workings of modern social life with a healthy mind, you come to say what the historical powers and forces really demand in modern times.

While the world war was raging, I spoke to many people about what I am also saying here. I preached to deaf ears. I said to quite a few people: You still have time now; as long as the cannons are thundering, it is advisable that those states that want to end this war sensibly speak words into the thunder of the cannons, words that are demanded by the times, words that will definitely be realized in the next ten or twenty years. Today you have the choice of either accepting reason and realizing it through reason, or, if you don't want that, you will face cataclysms and revolutions. Like sound and smoke, that went past our ears.

What the times demand of us is that we really make up our minds to create independent social entities: a free, self-reliant intellectual life, a political state to which we leave only legal life, and an economic life that we place on its own foundation. - How dreadful it is for some who, in the sense of the old habits of thought, consider themselves practitioners, that one should now approach the complicated, three juxtaposed social organisms, a special spiritual organization, a special legal organization and a special economic organization! Just think what effect this will have on economic life, for example. On the one hand, economic life is limited by the natural basis, climate and soil conditions. On the one hand, nature can be dealt with by making all kinds of technical improvements, but there is a limit beyond which we cannot go. The natural basis forms one limit of economic life. One need only recall extreme examples. Think of a country where many people can feed themselves from bananas. It takes a hundred times less work to bring the banana from its place of origin to consumption than it does to bring our wheat in our regions from sowing to consumption. Well, such extreme examples clear things up. But even if things are not so extreme in a closed social territory, the natural basis is there. It is one limit of economic life. There must be another boundary. This is the one formed by the state, which stands independently alongside economic life. Within this state, which must stand on a purely democratic basis, because it deals with what applies equally to all men, what all men must agree upon, because it must emerge from the consciousness of right which is rooted in the soul of every man, in this constitutional state, measure, time and many other things relating to human labor will also be determined quite independently of economic life. Just as the seed is not already part of economic life in relation to the forces that grasp it under the earth, but just as these natural forces determine economic life itself, so labor law must also form the basis of economic life on the part of the independent state. The price of the commodity must be determined, as by the natural basis on the one hand, so on the other hand by the labor law independent of economic life. Commodity prices must be dependent on labor law, not, as is the case today, labor prices on commodity prices.

That is what every real worker secretly, in the depths of his soul, basically expects, that the regulation of labor power and also the regulation of so-called property, which will thus no longer be property at all, will be separated from economic life, so that in the economic field there can no longer be a compulsory relationship between employer and employee, but merely a legal relationship. Then there will be in economic life only that which belongs solely to economic life: the production of goods, the movement of goods, the consumption of goods. And what can be realized is precisely what socialist thought strives to realize, that from now on production will no longer be in order to profit, but that production will be in order to consume. This can only happen if the rules are made about labor and work performance just as independently as the rules themselves are made by nature for the economic order independently of this economic order. Only then will that come into its own in the field of economic life which is today developing as the cooperative system, the associative system; this must find a proper administration on the ground of economic life. Production life must be regulated in associations, in cooperatives, according to the needs of consumption. Above all, the entire regulation of currency must be taken away from the political state. Currency, money can no longer be something that is subject to the political state, but something that belongs to the economic body. What will then be that which is the representative of money? No longer some other commodity, which is really only a luxury good and whose value is based on human imagination, gold, but what will correspond to money - I can only hint at this, you will find it explained in my book on the social question, which will appear in a few days' time - what will correspond to money will be everything that is available in the way of useful means of production. And these useful means of production, they will be able to be treated as they should actually be treated in the sense of modern social thought, they will be able to be treated in the same way as today only that which is regarded in our time as the most abominable property is treated.

What is considered to be the worst property in our time? Well, of course the intellectual, the spiritual property. In our time we know that we have it from the social order. Yes, no matter how clever a person is, no matter how much he can achieve, no matter how beautiful things he produces, it certainly corresponds to his talents, and to some other things as well, but insofar as it is utilized in the social organism, insofar as one has it from the social organism. It is therefore just that this intellectual property should not remain with the heirs, but should, at least after a number of years, pass into the social organism, become common property, to be used by those who are suited to it by their individual abilities. This most precious property, intellectual property, is treated in this way today. This is how all so-called property will be treated in the future. Only it will have to be transformed much earlier into common property, so that those who have the abilities for it can in turn contribute these abilities to this property for the benefit and purpose of the social organism. Therefore, in the book that will be published in a few days, I have shown how it is necessary that the means of production remain under the management of one person only as long as the individual abilities of this person justify the management of these means of production, that everything that is profited on the basis of the means of production, if it is not again put into the production itself, must be transferred to the community. Through the spiritual organism, we can seek out those who, in terms of their individual abilities, can pass this on to the social community.

If one has really come to know this social organism from life, it is not so easy to fulfill this modern demand that the means of production no longer be transferred to private ownership so that they remain in this private ownership. But the means must be found by which this private property loses all meaning, so that the so-called private owner is then only the temporary leader, because he has the ability to manage the means of production best for the good of the community through his skills.

When, on the one hand, workers' rights are regulated in the political state, when, on the other hand, property thus becomes a property cycle in the true sense of the word, only then will a free contractual relationship between worker and labor leader concerning communal production be possible. There will be workers and labor leaders, entrepreneurs and employees no longer.

I can only briefly outline all these things. Therefore, please allow me to point out that, in addition to the independent economic area, which on the other side will have the independent political state, the constitutional state, which will stand independently and sovereignly next to the economic area, like nature itself, there will be spiritual life. This spiritual life can only develop according to its own, true, real forces when it is placed on its own ground in the future, when the lowest teacher up to the highest leader of any branch of teaching or education is no longer dependent on any capital group or on the political state, but when the lowest teacher and all those who are involved in spiritual life know: what I do is only dependent on the spiritual organization itself. Out of a good instinct, even if not exactly out of a special appreciation of religion, out of a good instinct, modern social democracy has coined the word with regard to religion: religion must be a private matter. In the same sense, as strange as it may still sound to people today, all spiritual life must be a private matter and must be based on the trust that those who wish to receive it have in those who are to provide it. Of course, I know that many people today fear that we will all, or rather our descendants, become illiterate if we can choose our own school. We won't become illiterate. It is perhaps precisely members of leading circles, hitherto leading circles, who today have quite a lot of cause to think this way about education; they remember how much trouble it has been for them to acquire the little bit of education that secures their social position. But that which the tripartite social organism demands of people will certainly not lead to illiteracy in a free intellectual life, especially under the influence of the modern proletariat.

I am completely convinced that if one is able to realize in this way the completely democratic constitutional state, which secures workers' rights, in which every person has a say in what is the same for all people, then the modern proletariat in particular will not be preoccupied with preaching illiteracy, then it will demand of its own accord, even in a free intellectual life, that people should not be led to the ballot box in the way that can now sometimes be heard from individual regions of a neighboring state, where the monks and country priests have cleared out the asylums for idiots and lunatics in order to lead those people who did not even know what their names were to the ballot box.

Whoever wants to believe in these things and hope for these things must, however, have faith in real human power and real human dignity. Anyone who, like me, has been independent of any kind of state order all his life, who has never submitted to any kind of state order, has also been able to preserve his impartiality for that which can be built up as a spiritual life that is independent of the state and stands on its own. This spiritual life will not cultivate the individual human faculties in the way that the luxury spiritual life, the ideology of the previous spiritual life, has done. The spiritual life that is built on itself will also not be a philistine, bourgeois spiritual life, it will be a humanity spiritual life, a spiritual life that will reach down from the highest, very highest members of spiritual creation into the individual details of human work and its management; the leaders of the individual economic areas will be pupils of the free spiritual life and will not develop out of this free spiritual life what has today become the entrepreneurial spirit, the spirit of capitalism.

There are labor contracts, but no real contract can actually be made about labor. What is today a labor contract is a lie, because in reality labor is not comparable to any commodity. Therefore one must say: if any contract is to be concluded in the future, it will be concluded about the jointly performed product, and then one will feel all the more: What was this previous employment contract actually about? What was it based on? - It was not based on any right, but on an abuse of personal, individual abilities. Basically, it was an overreaching. But overreaching, where does it come from? From the cleverness that today's intellectual life has often displayed. The spiritual life that I imagine, which is left to its own devices, will not produce this cleverness, it will not produce the lie of life, it will produce the truths of life. There will no longer be protective troops for any thrones and altars, but the spirit itself will administer the individual abilities of man right down to the individual branches of mankind. Capitalism is only possible if the spiritual life on the other side can be enslaved. If the spiritual life is liberated, then capitalism in its present form will disappear. I wanted to think about how capitalism can disappear. You can read in my book on the social question in a few days' time that this capitalism will disappear when spiritual life is truly emancipated and the truths of life are put in the place of the lies of life.

In essence, what I have outlined to you today in a brief sketch has been resounding through humanity for a long time. At the end of the 18th century, the words “liberty, equality, fraternity” rang out like a mighty motto in France. - In the course of the 19th century, very clever people repeatedly proved that these three ideas contradict each other in the social organism. Liberty, on the one hand, demands that individuality can move freely. Equality excludes this freedom. Fraternity, on the other hand, contradicts the other two.

As long as one was under the hypnosis of the dogma: The All-holder, All-embracer, does he not embrace you and me, himself? As long as one was under the hypnosis of this idol of the unitary state, these three ideas were contradictions. At the moment when mankind will find understanding for the threefold healthy social organism, these three ideas will no longer contradict each other, for then freedom will prevail in the field of the independent, sovereign spiritual organism, and equality of all in the field of the state organism, the legal organism, the equality of all men, and in the field of the economic organism, fraternity, that fraternity on a large scale which will be based on the cooperatives of production and consumption, which will be based on the associations of the individual professions, which will administer economic life in an appropriately fraternal manner. The three great ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity will no longer contradict each other when the three areas - spiritual, legal and economic - have come into their own in the world. Take this today as something that is still little thought of, but it is not a utopia, it is not something that has somehow been thought up, but something that has been gained from decades of observation of modern political, economic and spiritual conditions, something that can be believed to rest in the womb of human development itself like a seed that wants to be realized in the near future. And one can perceive in the loudly speaking facts of today, one can perceive in the demands of the proletariat, even if much is still expressed differently, that the longing for such realization is already present today.

Many people call what I am saying a utopia. It is taken from a reality-friendly, reality-appropriate way of thinking. This idea of a tripartite division is not a utopia. It can be tackled immediately everywhere from any social condition if one only has the good will, which is unfortunately so often lacking today. If you believe that what I am saying is a utopia, then I would like to remind you that what I am saying here about the healthy social organism is not what is usually said. People who otherwise speak of social ideas are setting up programs. I am not thinking of a program, I am not thinking of wanting to be cleverer than other people and to know the best about everything, how to do it and so on, but I am only thinking of structuring humanity, which should decide for itself what is true, what is good, what is expedient, in the right way. And it seems to me that if it is organized in such a way that people stand within it firstly in a free spiritual life, secondly in a free political legal life, thirdly in an economic life properly administered by economic forces, then people will find the best for themselves; I am not thinking of legislation about the best, but of the way in which people must be called upon to find through themselves that which is pious for them. Nor am I thinking, as some have believed, of a rebirth of the old estates and classes: The teaching class, the military class, the nurturing class - no, the opposite is what I am talking about here. People should not be divided into classes. Classes, estates, they are to disappear by dividing up life outside man, objective life. Man, however, is the unity that belongs in all three organisms. In the spiritual organism his talents and abilities are cultivated. In the state organism he finds his rights. In the economic organism he finds the satisfaction of his needs.

I believe, however, that the modern proletarian will develop a true consciousness of humanity out of his class consciousness, that he will find more and more understanding for what has been pointed out here: for the true liberation of humanity. And I hope that once the modern proletarian's soul will clearly realize how he is called to strive for the true goal of humanity, that he will then become, this modern proletarian, not only the liberator of the modern proletariat - he must certainly become that - but that he will become the liberator of everything human, everything that is truly worth liberating in human life. That is what we want to hope for, that is what we want to work towards. When it is said: Words are now spoken enough, let us see deeds - I wanted to speak today in such words that can really turn directly into deeds.

Discussion

1st speaker (Mr. Handschin): Spoke very spiritedly of the oppression of the worker by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie imposes violence on the proletariat. The private property of the propertied classes has been created by the workers. Only communism would bring peace.

2nd speaker (Mr. Studer). Points to the ideas of free money and free land, which should enable the liberation of economic life.

3rd speaker (Mr. Mühlestein): Shows how in Germany the old powers are re-emerging and nothing has changed. Criticism of Social Democracy and the Center. Criticism of the threefold structure: it removes the law from economic and intellectual life; but justice must prevail in all three areas, not just in the constitutional state.

4th speaker: Wants to report on a “Swiss Federation for Transitional Reforms”; but is interrupted and the discussion is closed.

Rudolf Steiner: You will have noticed that the first two speakers in the discussion have basically not put forward anything against which I would need to argue, since, at least in my opinion, what has been put forward by the two gentlemen essentially shows - at least to me - how very necessary it is to take seriously what I have tried to do in a perhaps weak but honest way to contribute to the solution of the social question in the present serious times, as far as it is humanly possible. And that this is necessary, that today is the time to do so, you will at any rate have been able to gather from what the first speaker in the debate has just said to you from a soul that is certainly warmly felt.

Since the time is already well advanced, I would like to address just a few points here. The word “free land, free money” was used by the honorable second speaker. You see, this hints at something that is like a lot of things in the present day, if you want to approach the social question in precisely those ways, as I said, in real ways, as I tried to do in my presentation. On such occasions I have very often been in the situation of having to say: I am in complete agreement with you; the other person just usually, or at least very often, doesn't say it to me! The thing is, if I believed that my ideas were simply plucked out of the air from somewhere, then I wouldn't bore you with them, I would believe that they had long since not matured. That is precisely what I believe, that there is something essential about the ideas presented to you today. You will find the material, the building blocks everywhere. I gave a similar lecture in Bern the other day. A gentleman came to me then, not only in the discussion, but the next day for a conversation, and also spoke about “free land, free money”. After an hour, however, we were able to agree that what is actually wanted in the regulation of the currency question, in the creation of an absolute currency, will simply be achieved if this tripartite division that I have spoken of today is carried out properly - properly indeed - if the administration of values, the administration of money, is simply taken away from the political state and transferred to economic life. As I have said, I will show in my book “Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft” that the basis of the currency will then be quite different from what it is today, and that it will also become international. As long, of course, as the leading state, England, clings to the gold currency, the gold currency will have to apply in foreign policy; but internally, those who now really have the one true currency will no longer need gold in the social organism; for the only real true currency will consist in the means of production, which will then be there to be the currency for money. Money is completely misunderstood today. Money is only understood if it can be grasped as the complete opposite of the old natural economy.

What is money for today's social organism? It is the means of conducting a common economy. Just imagine the whole function of money. It consists simply in the fact that for what I work myself I have an instruction for something else that someone else works. And as soon as money is something other than this instruction, it is unauthorized in the social organism.

I could go on at length to confirm this, but I will only say briefly that this is what money must become! It will become so when all other machinations that play a part in the circulation of money cease. For only money is the common index which is there for the common comparison of the mutual values of commodities. That is what can also be achieved through the nature of this tripartite division, and what is partially, individually sought by the free-money movement; that is why I have said in such a case: I am in complete agreement with this movement - because I always try to see the individual movements in their justification, and I would like to lead them into a common great stream, precisely because I do not believe that one person, or even a group of people, can find what is right, but because I believe democratically that people together in reality, working together, properly organized alone, will only find what is right.

This is what I have described as a view of reality, not as some objective development. But I believe that the real human being will find what is right for the social organism out of his healthy human experience in association with other people.

We have one thing that everyone knows is only possible in social life - today's egoists would probably also like to have it for themselves - and that is language for a closed organism. Again and again it is preached in schools: If man had grown up on a lonely island, in solitude, he would not be able to speak; for speech can only be formed in social life. One must recognize [...] that all those things which are hidden behind private capital, property, which are hidden behind the mastery of some kind of work and the like, that all these things, including human talents, individual gifts, just like language, have social functions, that they belong to social life and are only possible within it. There must come a time when it becomes clear to people in schools what they are through the social organism and what they are therefore obliged to give back to the social organism. So what I am counting on is social understanding, which must come, just as the multiplication tables are taught in schools today. We will also have to relearn this. There were times when people learned something completely different in schools than they do today; just think of the Roman schools. There will come a time when children will be taught social understanding in schools. Because this has been neglected under the influence of modern technology and capitalism, we have ended up in today's conditions, in the pathological conditions of the social organism.

As far as Mr. Mühlestein is concerned, I must say that I am also in a position to have nothing against what he has put forward; I only believe that if his ideas continue to develop, they will then lead to what I have said.

For example, he has not at all considered that I am not - of course not! - want to take law out of economic life and intellectual life. No, on the contrary, I want to keep it in. And because I want it inside, I want to have developed an independent social science in which it can really be developed, created. When it has been generated, then it can have an effect on the other areas. Comprehensive thinking will show you this. If you consider the following, for example: Today, even scientific thinking does not yet really think logically and appropriately in relation to the natural human organism. People today think: the lungs - a piece of meat; the brain - also a piece of meat, and so on. Science says otherwise, but it does not say much else; for it regards these individual members of the human organism as parts of a great centralization. In truth, they see nothing else. The human being as a natural organism is a tripartite system: we have a nervous-sensory organism. The one is centralized and has its own outlets at the sensory organs. - We have a rhythmic organism, the lung-heart organism; it has its own outlets in the respiratory tract. - We have the metabolic organism, which in turn has its own outlet to the outside world. And we are this natural human being precisely because we have these three limbs, these three centralized limbs of the organism.

Can anyone now come along and say - if I say, as I have now done in my last book, “Of Riddles of the Soul”, that simply the proper scientific observation results in these three members of the human natural organism - can anyone come along and say that nature should not have developed these three members, because what matters is that all three members have air? - Of course all three limbs have air! - When the air is first inhaled through the lungs and processed accordingly, the metabolic members and the brain have their air, so that this air is drawn in and processed, and can therefore also be treated with all natural care in a specially separated member of the human natural organism. I do not want, like Schäffle, or like Meray or others, to play this analogy game between physiological and social concepts, that does not even occur to me; I only want to draw attention to the fact that a thoroughly formed thinking does not understand man as a natural organism if one only thinks: everything is centralized into one - but one understands man if one understands his three organ systems centralized in themselves.

It is precisely because man is perfect that he has these three centralized organ systems. This will be a great advance in natural science when we realize this! And the thinking that thinks so healthily about the human being also thinks healthily about the social organism, and feels healthily about the social organism. Spiritual life will be freest and best organized when it is emancipated. For in the field of emancipated spiritual life the people are already to be found who will provide for this free spiritual life. There will arise those who will actually bring the necessary dominion to this spiritual life. Those who do not bring it are those who are servilely dependent on capitalism or other things. Those who will be free as spiritual administrators will also be able to bring the blessings of spiritual life to the other two members.

And so, if justice is really produced in a state of law existing for itself, really centralized in itself, one will not have to worry that the other two members will not have justice, certainly in favorable distribution; in all the things that have been touched upon by Mr. Mühlestein, there must be justice; that will come in when it is first produced.

So it is not in order to have justice in one separate organ and not in the other that I take these three parts, but precisely in order to have justice in all three, I see the necessity that it should first be produced.

I would like to know if anyone can say: In a house, there are father, mother, children, the maidservants; but now you divide this house into father, mother, maidservants, and two cows that give milk, but all need the milk, so all must produce milk, not just the two cows? - No, I say: the cows must produce the milk so that everyone in the house can be properly supplied with milk. And so the constitutional state must have the law according to plan, produce the law, then the rights will be where they are needed. And that is precisely when they will be - forgive the somewhat trivial comparison - when they can be milked by the rule of law!

That is what I would like to emphasize; that what is important today is not to somehow pursue favourite ideas, but precisely to summarize that which pulsates in many hearts as a demand, that which is already present in many minds, even if more or less unconsciously, out of the forces of the times, and to really grasp that in the impulses that are there as the great forces of the times, which want to be realized, which we should now realize through reason. But if we do not want to realize them through reason, this will not prevent them from entering into reality.

Dear readers, we either have the choice to be reasonable or to wait in some other way for the realization of that which must be realized because it wants to realize itself out of the forces of history.

In this sense, however, I believe that proletarian consciousness is capable of grasping these demands, which lie in history itself, and thus of really striving for and achieving what I said at the end, insofar as it is possible for human beings: the liberation of everything in humanity that is worth liberating.

It seems obvious to me today that what has been discussed here, from this point of view, during these days, the harmony of the subjective and the objective, is now emerging as an introduction to my lecture, also based, so to speak, on a feeling. Yesterday morning, the reflections concluded with the speech of Professor Römer, which gave me great satisfaction – that is the subjective aspect – for the reason that it showed how a specialist, who is thoroughly and fully immersed in his field, can feel the need for the spiritual science to shed light on such a specific subject. It will also have become clear to you from what Professor Römer has already been able to cite from his field of expertise today, that above all, for this interweaving, strong, vigorous work must be developed on the part of the relevant spiritual science itself. For what has been given so far - and this should be fully recognized - are initially individual guidelines that require verification with reference to external science.

In all that has been brought to me through this lecture to a certain subjective satisfaction, there was a consideration of the teeth. So yesterday we concluded with the teeth – now I come to the objective. And allow me to start with the teeth again today, though not with something that I want to tell you about the teeth on my own initiative, but with a saying that emerged from the scholarship of the 11th century, as it was in Central Europe at the time. This saying goes:

When thy tongue catcheth the wind

and draweth it into thy mouth,

and with thy teeth thou choosest

the word that thou shalt speak.

This means: just as the tongue catches the wind from its surroundings and draws it into the mouth, so it draws the word it speaks out of the teeth.

Now, that is a product of 11th-century Central European scholarship. It means that the tongue draws the word out of the teeth just as it draws air into the mouth from the outside world.

Now a sample of 19th-century scholarship, from the last third of the century, a word pronounced by the philologist Wilhelm Scherer, who was revered by a large number of students as a modern idol, and which you will find in his “Deutsche Sprachgeschichte” (History of the German Language), where he also uses this word that I have just read to you. The word he uses in contrast to this is this: “We laugh at such a word in the present”.

That is the scientific confession from the 19th century about this word from the 11th century; it expresses the scientific attitude that still prevails today in the broadest sense and that the representatives of the corresponding field are still likely to express today in further references.

If we first consider this contrast from the point of view that has been adopted here more often, that a complete change has taken place in relation to the state of mind of people since the first third of the 15th century, then we have in the time that lies between the first quoted saying and the saying of Wilhelm Scherer, we have contained approximately just what has elapsed in time since the dawning of that state of mind that existed until the beginning of the 15th century, and the direction that has emerged since then and has so far undergone a certain development.

Wilhelm Scherer now continues the sentences that he began by saying that he had to laugh at such a word from the 19th He says that all efforts in the present must be directed, with regard to linguistics, to bringing together what physiologists have to say about speaking and word formation based on the physiological organization of the human body with what philologists have to say about the development of language from ancient times to the present. In other words, physiology and philology should join hands in this field of science. And Wilhelm Scherer adds that unfortunately he has to admit that the philologists are very, very far behind and that it cannot be hoped that they will meet the physiologists halfway in terms of what they have to say about the physical organization for the formation of speech. So that physiology and philology are two branches of science whose lack of mutual understanding a man regarded as a man of his time acknowledges in no uncertain terms.

This points to a phenomenon that is a dominant one in our time: that the individual sciences with their methods do not understand each other at all, that they talk alongside each other without the person who is placed in the midst of this scientific activity and hears what the physiologists on the one hand and the philologists on the other have to say, and who hears what they say, is able to do something with it – forgive the perhaps somewhat daring comparison – other than to be skewered from two sides in relation to his soul by the formations of concepts.

In a sense, although I do not want to say much more with this than something analogous, a certain contrast is already expressed in the word designation, which, I would like to say, is unconsciously taken seriously by the newer currents of science. The word 'physiology' expresses the fact that it wants to be a logos about the physical in man, so to speak, that which grasps the physical in a logical, intellectual way; the word 'philology' expresses: love of wisdom, love of the Logos, love of the word; so the word designation is taken from an emotional experience. In one case the word designation is taken from a rational experience, in the other from an emotional experience. And what the physiologist wants to produce as a kind of intellectual Logos about the human body, that - namely the Logos - the philologist actually wants to love. As I said, I am only trying to make an analogy here, but if we pursue it further, if we follow it historically, it will take on a certain significance. I would advise us to follow it more closely historically.

But we can point out something else that comes to us from prehistory, from the forerunner of that which has emerged in human consciousness since the beginning of the 15th century. We know that what is called logic and which, in a certain respect, has its image in language, at least essentially, is a creation of Aristotle. And if one were to claim that, just as a person today who has not studied logic nevertheless lives logic in his soul activity, logic also lived in people's soul activity before Aristotle, one overlooks the fact that the transformation of the unconscious into the conscious nevertheless has a deeper significance in the course of human events. The elevation of the logical into consciousness is also a real process, albeit an inwardly real process, in the development of the soul of humanity: in older times there was an intimate relationship between the concept and the word. Just as there was such an intimate relationship between the concept or idea and the perception, as you will find explained in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, there was also an intimate connection, an interlocking, I would say, of words and ideas.

The distinction that we have to make today, psychologically, between the word and the content of the idea – particularly when considering mathematization, this emerges with all clarity – was not made in older times. And it was precisely this distinction that Aristotle first arrived at. He singled out, within the life of the soul, that which is conception or concept from the fabric of language and made it into something that exists separately for knowledge. But in doing so, he pushed that which lives in language further down into the unconscious than it was before. In a sense, a gulf was created for knowledge between the concept or the conception and the word.

The further back we go in the consideration of human language, the more we find that the word and the concept or idea are experienced as one and the same thing, that man, so to speak, hears inwardly what he thinks, that he has a word-picture, not so much a thought-picture. The thought is linked externally to the sense perceptions and internally to the word. But in this way, even in these early times, a certain intuitive perception was present, which can be characterized as follows: as people expressed themselves in words, they felt as if what resounded in their words had entered their speech directly from a hidden, subconscious, instinctive aspect of things. They felt, as it were, that a real process takes place between what lives in things, and especially in facts, and what inwardly forms the impulse for the sounding of the word. They felt such a real connection as a person today still feels a real connection between the substances that are outside, say egg, veal, lettuce, and what then happens inside with the content of these substances when they are digested. He will see a real process in this process, which unfolds from the outside of the substances to what happens inside in the digestion. He experiences this real process subconsciously. What one experienced in language was subconscious — even if much more clearly, already permeated by a certain dim awareness. One had the feeling that something living in the things is related to the sounds, to the words. Just as the substances of the materials one eats are connected with what happens internally in the metabolism of the human being, one felt an inner connection between what takes place in the things and facts, which is similar to words, and what sounds internally as a word. And in that Aristotle raised to consciousness what was felt to be a real process, where concepts come into play, the same was achieved for language as a person achieves when he reflects on what the substances of the materials in his organism do. Thinking about digestion is, of course, somewhat further removed from the actual process of digestion than thinking about language. But we can gain an idea of the relationship by clarifying this idea by moving from the more immediate to the more distant, and by becoming clearer in the distance.

Now, for us, if we replace today's abstract view of history with a more concrete one, the fact that things that happened in Greece in the pre-Christian era, also in the pre-Aristotelian era, happened later for the Central European population - who still perceived the Greeks as barbaric, that is, at a lower level of culture - is clear. And we will be right, and spiritual science gives us the guidance to raise this feeling to certainty, if we imagine that the mental state from which we speak is spoken emotionally, “the tongue draws the outer air into the mouth just as it draws the word out of the teeth,” that this way of looking at things , this remarkably pictorially expressed view was roughly the same as that which prevailed in pre-Aristotelian times within Greece, and in the place of which there arose what was bound to arise through the separation of logic, of the logos, through the separation of the conceptual from that which is expressed in language.

You are aware that in that erudition which developed first in the 15th century and from which the various branches of the individual specialized sciences have emerged, that in this erudition as education much has contributed what has asserted itself as late Greek culture. The philologists, in other words, those who are supposed to love the logos, were thoroughly influenced by what emerged from late Greek culture. And just imagine such a late Greek as a Germanic scholar, like Wilhelm Scherer, confronted with early Greek, and it tells him: the tongue pulls the language out of the teeth – then he naturally rejects it, then he wants nothing to do with it from his point of view. One must consider such facts in a light that tries to shine a little deeper into the historical context than what is often available in the ordinary popular science of history today, both in the field of external political or cultural history and in the field of language history.

Now the question is what paths must be sought in order to scientifically penetrate into the structure of the language organism itself, if I may express it in this way.

Even in external appearances, it is expressed how the soul, which has gradually been elevated into the realm of abstract concepts, has moved away from what was felt about language in the pre-Aristotelian period. What, for example, has been produced, as an opinion about the origin of language, by this research, which is in the sign of Aristotelism? Well, it was elevated into the abstract, and thus alienated from its direct connection with the external world, through which one could experience what really corresponds to the formed word in things. It was alienated from this, but still sought to understand what such a connection might look like, and it then also translated this connection into all kinds of abstractions. What she felt inwardly, she placed in the realm where concepts are formed externally, based on sensory or other external observations. Because it was impossible to delve into things to search for the process of how the word works from things into the human organization, an abstract concept was used in place of such an understanding, for example in the so-called Wauwau theory or in the Bimbam theory. The wauwau theory says nothing more than that what appears externally in the organic as sound is imitated. It is a completely external consideration of an external fact with the help of abstract concepts. The Bim-Bim theory differs from the Bow-Wow theory only in that it takes into account the inorganic way in which sound is released from itself. This sound is then imitated in an external way by the human being who is confronted with and influenced by external nature. And the transformation of that which children call — though not everywhere, but only in a very limited area of the earth — when they hear the dog bark: woof-woof, or that which comes into their sense of language when they hear the bell ring: ding-dong-dong, this transformation is then followed by a curious method. Thus, what has then formed into the organism of language can be seen in the indicated 'theories', which, it is true, have not been replaced by much better ones to this day.

We are therefore dealing with an inwardness of the observation of language. Above all, the aim of spiritual science, as it is meant here, is to make the study of language an inward one again, so that through what can be achieved in the ascent from sensory to supersensible knowledge, what was once thought about language through feeling and instinct can be found independently again, but now in a form appropriate to advanced humanity. And here I must point out (owing to the limited time I have only to indicate the directions in which the empirical facts can be followed) how spiritual science takes a strictly concrete path when it wants to understand how the human being develops from childhood to a certain age. You will find what I am trying to suggest here outlined, for example, in my booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'.

First of all, it must be pointed out how the entire soul-physical configuration of the human being in the period before the change of teeth is essentially different from what it becomes after the change of teeth. Anyone who has observed this fact knows how much is metamorphosed in the soul-physical life during the period when the second teeth replace the first. And anyone who does not seek the relationships between body, soul and spirit through abstractions such as the followers of psychophysical parallelism, but seeks them in concrete phenomena, seeks them according to a truly further developed scientific method, and is able to grasp the inner structure of the soul life in the concrete, will find just how what later, in a more soul-like way, in the peculiar configuration of conceptual life, in the implementation of that which is experienced conceptually, with will impulses, which then lead to the formation of the judgment, as something that has been working in the physical organization until the change of teeth. And he will not speculate about what can “work spiritually” in the physical organization from birth to the change of teeth. Rather, he will say to himself, what is then released during the change of teeth, released from a body in which it was previously latent, that has previously been active in a latent and bound state in the physical organization of the human being. And this particular type of physical organization, in which what can later be observed in the soul is active, comes to an end with the eruption of the second teeth, which you were also made aware of yesterday.

Now, the facts at hand must be considered not only from a physiological point of view, but also from the perspective of the human soul. Just as the physiologist, with his senses and the mind bound to them, penetrates into the physical processes of the human organism, so too does the soul, with its faculties of imagination and inspiration. If one really penetrates into these processes, then one must see in the real, which is first latent from birth to the change of teeth, and then becomes free, also in terms of imagination and knowledge. That is why my writing on “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, in summarizing this process in a formulaic way, speaks of the fact that with the change of teeth, the etheric body of the human being, which previously worked in the physical body, is only born free to be active in the soul life. This “birth of the etheric body” is expressed in the change of teeth.

It is necessary to have such formulaic expressions at the starting point of anthroposophical spiritual scientific observation, such as “birth of the etheric body from the physical body”, which corresponds to an actual event. But when we seek to make the transition from spiritual science in the narrower sense — which is concerned with the observation of the human being's direct experience of the day — to the approach taken in the individual specialized sciences, then what is initially expressed in such a formulaic way becomes something similar to a mathematical formula: it becomes method, method for dealing with the facts. And that is why this spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences, without always merely continuing into the individual sciences that which, admittedly, must be clearly borne in mind at the starting point: that the human being is structured into a physical body, etheric body, and so on. At the beginning one can and must know such things; but if spiritual science is to bring about a fruitful influence, they must become active, they must become a method, a way of treating even the empirically given 'facts'. And in this respect spiritual science, because it rises from the inorganic, where it can do little, through the organic into the spiritual realm, I would like to say, not only in the way the individual sciences can fertilize can, but it will, as a result of its findings, have confirmations of facts to hand over to them, which will shed light on what is gained from the other side through sensory-physical observation and then seen through with the mind. Spiritual and sensory-physical research must meet. And it is one of the most important tasks for the future to ensure that this spiritual research and this sensory-physical research meet.

In the process that manifests itself externally during the change of teeth, it becomes clear that what is designated as the etheric body – but by taking a concrete view, not a word concept, into the eye of the soul – becomes freely active for the entire human organism, after previously having had an organizing effect in the physical body. Now it rises into the soul, becomes free and then consciously works back to the whole human being to a certain degree.

Something similar occurs again with what manifests externally as sexual maturity. There we see how, once again, something arises in human experience that expresses itself, on the one hand, in a certain metamorphosis of the physical organism and, on the other hand, in a metamorphosis of the spiritual. And an essential part of the spiritual researcher's work is to acquire a concrete way of looking at what occurs in the soul and spirit, just as someone who only wants to educate themselves through external observation acquires a concrete way of looking at what they can see with their eyes and combine with their mind. Soul cannot be looked at in this way, but can only be looked at in its reality through imagination. There is no true psychology that does not begin with imaginative observation, and there is no way to find the interrelationship of body and soul or physical body and spiritual soul other than to build a bridge between what is given to external physical sensory perception as the physical body, and what falls away from this perception, what can only be given as reality in the ascent to supersensible knowledge, the spiritual-soul.

If we now turn to what occurs during puberty, we must say: here we see, in a certain sense, the reverse process of what took place when the teeth changed. We see how what plays as the capacity for desire in man, what is the instinctive character of his will, takes hold of the organism in a way it did not take hold of it before. Summarizing the whole broad complex of facts that this involves in a formulaic way, it comes about that one says: the one in which the nature of desire slumbers, the astral body of the human being, becomes free when sexual maturity occurs. It is this body that now, if I may express it in this way, sinks freely into the physical organism, takes hold of it, permeates it, and thus materializes desire, which finds expression in sexual maturation.

Now, what does an appropriate comparison of these two processes show? We see, so to speak, when the change of teeth occurs, a liberation of the etheric body of the human being. How does what is happening actually express itself? It expresses itself in such a way that the human being becomes capable of further developing the formation of concepts, in general the movement in the life of ideas, which used to be more bound to his whole organism, bound to the organization of the head. To a certain extent we see, and spiritual science sees it not only to a certain extent but in its reality, that the etheric, which we ascribe to the human being as an etheric body, withdraws with the change of teeth to that which only lives in the rhythm of the human organism and in the metabolic limb-organism, and that it develops a free activity in the formation of the head, in the plastic formation of the head, in which the consciousness life of the human being participates in the imagination. In a sense, the organization of the head is uncovered during this time. And if I may express myself figuratively about a reality that certainly exists, I must say that what drives itself to the surface from the entire human organization in the second teeth is the soul-spiritual activity that previously permeates the entire bodily organization and then becomes free. Before, it permeated the whole human being right into the head. It gradually withdraws from the head; and it shows how it withdraws by revealing its no-longer-to-the-head activity in that it stops and produces the second teeth. You can visualize this almost schematically. If I indicate schematically what the human physical organization is with the white chalk, and what the etheric organization is with the red chalk, then the following would result schematically (see figure):

In the figure on the left, you see the human being in his spiritual, soul and physical activity as he stands before you until his teeth change. In the second figure, which is to your right, you see how the etheric element has withdrawn from the immediate effect of the head organization, how it has become free in a certain respect, so that from there it can freely affect the human head organism. And the last thing that happens in the physical organism as a result of this activity of the soul-spiritual is the eruption of the second teeth. I would say that you can observe in its image what is being communicated to you here as a spiritual view if you take the skulls that Professor Römer showed you yesterday, because you can compare the insertion of the first teeth with the insertion of the second teeth. If you want to follow this logically, then you have to take as a basis what has been gained here from spiritual science. Then you have to say to yourself, the first teeth, with all that is expressed in them, are taken out of the whole human organization, including the head organization. What is expressed in the second teeth is taken out after the inner soul organization, insofar as it concerns the etheric body, has slowly withdrawn into the rhythmic and metabolic organism and become free for the main head organization. In a similar way, we can say — as I said, I can only give guidelines — that something is happening with sexual maturity. What we call the astral body is sunk into the physical body, so that it finally takes hold of it and brings about what constitutes sexual maturity.

But now what happens in the human being takes place in the most manifold metamorphoses. Once one has truly understood a process such as that which is expressed through sexual maturity, which brings about a certain new relationship in human development, in the development of the human being to the outer world, once one truly understands such a process inwardly, one then also recognizes it when it occurs in a certain metamorphosis. What occurs at puberty, in that it takes hold of the whole person, in that it, so to speak, forms a relationship between the whole person and their environment, is, I would say, anticipated in a different metamorphosis at the moment when language develops in the child. Only what takes place with sexual maturation in the child takes place in a different metamorphosis in the formation of speech. What takes hold of the whole human being at sexual maturation and pours into his relationship with the outside world takes place between the rhythmic and limb human being and the human being's head organization. To a certain extent, the same forces that take hold of the whole person during puberty and direct their relationship to the outside world assert themselves between the lower and upper human beings. And as the lower human being learns to feel the upper human being in the way that the human being later learns to feel the outside world, he learns to speak. A process that can be observed externally in a person at a later age must be followed in its metamorphosis until it appears as an internal process in the human organism, in the learning to speak: the process that otherwise occurs in the whole person at puberty.

And once we have grasped this, we are able to comprehend how the interaction of the lower human being — the rhythmic and the limb-based human being — in its reciprocity develops an inner experience of something that is also present externally in the nature around us. This inward experiencing of what is outwardly present leads to the fact that what remains outwardly mute in things as their own language begins to resound as the human language in the human inner being. Please proceed from this sentence as from a regulative principle. Proceed from this sentence that what is in things, as they become external, material, falls silent, that in dematerialization it becomes audible in the human being and comes to speak. Then you will find the way in which you do not develop a yap-yap or a bim-bim theory, but on which you see that which is external to things – and cannot be perceived by external observation because it is silent and only exists in a supersensible way – as language in the human interior.

What I am saying here is like drawing a line to indicate the direction in which one would most like to paint a wide-ranging picture. I can only present this rather abstract proposition regarding the relationship between the things and facts of the external world and the origin of human language in the inner life. And you will see everything you can sense about language in a new light when you follow the path from this abstractly assumed sentence, which initially sounds formulaic, to what the facts connect for you in terms of meaning. And if you then want to apply what has been philologically obtained in this way to physiology, you will be able to learn about the connection between external sexual metamorphosis and linguistic metamorphosis by studying facts that are still present as a linguistic remnant of the sexual maturation metamorphosis in the change of the voice, that is, of the larynx in boys, and in some other phenomena that occur in women. If you have the will to engage with the facts and to draw the threads from one series of facts to another, not to encapsulate yourself in barren specialized sciences, but to really illuminate what is present in one science as fact , through the facts that come to light through other sciences, then the individual special sciences will be able to become what man must seek in them if he is to make progress on the path of his knowledge as well as on the path of his will.

In a context that might seem unrelated, we will see tomorrow in a very natural way how we can go from the change of teeth to the appearance of speech and then further back to what is the third on this retrogressive path: we see, so to speak, in what is expressed in the change of teeth, an interaction between the physical body and the etheric body. We see, in turn, in what is expressed in language, an interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And thirdly, we must seek an interrelationship between the I and that which lives in man as an astral body, and we will be led to that which is the third in this retrospective consideration: to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul, to that which is born in the spiritual-soul. If one seeks the path from the change of teeth through the emergence of speech, the third stage is the stage of uniting the pre-existing human soul with the physical.

By walling up the way out of his consideration of the change of teeth to the consideration of language through his abstraction, Aristotle was forced to resort to the dogma that a new spiritual soul is born with each new human being. Due to a lack of will to continue on a path of knowledge, knowledge of human preexistence has been lost, and with it knowledge of all that truly leads to the knowledge of the human soul.

We see a historical connection, which, however, comes to expression in the treatment of certain problems, and we can say in conclusion: Today, according to the dictum of a philologist who is quite significant in the contemporary sense, philology and physiology are so opposed that they cannot understand each other. Why is this so? Because physiology studies the human body and does not come back to the mind in this study. If one pursues true physiology, then one finds the spiritual and psychological in man through the bodily in physiological observation. What happens when one pursues true philology? If one pursues true philology, then one does not reduce the logos to an abstraction, for which one then seeks to see through after-images, after-images in a scientific method, but one seeks to penetrate into that which one supposedly loves as a “philo”-logist, through imaginative and other forms of observation. But then, when one penetrates into that which has become shadowy and nebulous for today's philology, namely the genius of language, the creative genius of language, when one penetrates into it, then one penetrates through the spirit to the external corporeality.

Physiology finds the spirit by way of the inner body. Philology, when viewed correctly, finds what speaks and has fallen silent in things on the way out through the genius of language. It does not find bark and bim-bam, but rather finds the reason why words and language arise in us in the things that physically surround us. Physiology has lost its way because it stops at the body and does not penetrate inwardly through the body to the spirit. Philology has lost its way because it stops at the genius of language, which it then only grasps in the abstract, and does not penetrate into the inner being of the outer things from which what lives in the word resounds. If philology does not speak as if the wauwau and bimbam are imitated in an externally abstract way by man, but speaks about the external physicality in such a way that it becomes clear to it in imaginations, how the word arises from this external physicality, which echoes internally, so that when physiology has found spirit and philology has found physicality, they will find each other.

In this way I have traced the path that spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense wants to lead in conscientious work. I have only given a few hints in this particular field of introductory linguistics.

Now, these things are discussed among us, these things are striven for by us. While we strive for these things, so that they may bear witness to what is being striven for on a path of knowledge that arises entirely out of the spirit of our time. And while you can see from what is being striven for that there is probably a certain seriousness that can be measured against the seriousness that exists in other areas of life, Stuttgart, a meeting raged that trampled on most of our speakers, that had no intention of listening to anything, that did not want to engage with what we had to say, but that, through trampling and similar things, sought to crush what is being seriously pursued. And, addressing my fellow students, I may say: yesterday evening in Stuttgart, your colleagues were absent – not from the other faculty, but from the other attitude – they were not absent, they were present in the trampling.

Dear attendees, my dear fellow students! It will become ever clearer and clearer that there are those who, because they cannot be refuted – because they do not want to be refuted – because they do not want to engage with the new at all by inertly continuing with the old that has outlived itself, they will want to trample down on that with external force. Well, I would just like to appeal to you here in the sense that I do have faith in you, that you may say to yourself: We still have a say in this trampling down procedure! – But may this word become action.

Third evening of disputations

The questions did not relate to the theme of the day, “Linguistics”, but drew on problems dealt with earlier.

Dr. Steiner. Here is the question: It has been said that the three dimensions of space are not equal in structure – what is the difference?

In any case, the sentence was never formulated in this way: the three dimensions of space are “not equal in structure”, but what is probably meant here is the following. First of all, we have mathematical space, the space that we imagine – if we have an exact idea of it at all – as three mutually perpendicular dimensional directions, which we can thus define by the three mutually perpendicular coordinate axes.

In the usual mathematical treatment of space, the three dimensions are treated absolutely equally. We make so little distinction between the dimensions up-down, right-left, front-back that we can even think of these three dimensions as interchangeable. In the case of mere mathematical space, it does not matter whether, when we have the X-axis and the Z-axis perpendicular to each other, and the Y-axis perpendicular to them, we call the plane on which the Y-axis stands “horizontal” or “vertical” or the like. Likewise, we do not concern ourselves with the limitations of this space, so to speak. Not that we imagine it to be limitless. One does not usually ascend to this notion, but one imagines it in such a way that one does not concern oneself with its limits, but rather tacitly assumes that one can start from any point – let us say, for example, the X-direction and adding another piece to what you have already measured in the X-direction, to that again a piece and so on, and you would never be led to come to an end anywhere. In the course of the 19th century, much has been said against this Euclidean-geometric conception of space from the standpoint of meta-geometry. I will only remind you of how, for example, Riemann distinguished between the “unboundedness” of space and the “infiniteness” of space. And initially, there is no necessity for the purely conceptual imagination to assume the concept of “unboundedness” and that of “infiniteness” as identical. Take, for example, a spherical surface. If you draw on a spherical surface, you will find that nowhere do you come up against a spatial boundary that could, as it were, prevent you from continuing your drawing. You will certainly enter into your last drawing if you continue drawing; but you will never be forced to stop drawing because of a boundary if you remain on the spherical surface. So you can say to yourself: the spherical surface is unlimited in terms of my ability to draw on it. But no one will claim that the spherical surface is infinite. So you can distinguish, purely conceptually, between unlimitedness and infinity.

Under certain mathematical conditions, this can also be extended to space, can be extended to space in such a way that one imagines: if I add a distance in the X or Y axis, and then another and so on, and am never prevented from adding further distances, then this property of space could indeed speak for its unlimitedness, but not for the infinity of space. Despite the fact that I can always add new pieces, space does not need to be infinite at all; it could be unlimited. So these two concepts must be kept separate. So one could assume that if space were unbounded but not infinite, it would have an inward curvature in the same way as space does now, that is, in some way it would likewise recede into itself, like the surface of a sphere recedes into itself.

Certain ideas of newer metageometry are based on such assumptions. Actually, no one can say that there is much to be said against such assumptions; because, as I said, there is no way to derive the infinity of space from what we experience in space. It could very well be curved in on itself and then be finite.

Of course, I cannot go into this line of thought in detail, because it is almost the only one followed by the whole of modern metageometry. However, you will find sufficient evidence in the works of Riemann, Gauss and so on, which are readily available, to explore if you value such mathematical ideas.

From the purely mathematical point of view, therefore, this is what has been introduced into the, I would say rigid, neutral space of Euclidean geometry, which was only derived from 'unboundedness'. But what is indicated in the question is rooted in something else. Namely, that space, with which we initially calculate and which is available to us in analytical geometry, for example, when we deal with the three coordinate axes that are perpendicular to one another, that space is initially an abstraction. And an abstraction – from what? That is the question that must first be raised.

The question is whether we have to stop at this abstraction of “space” or whether that is not the case. Do we have to stop at this abstraction of space? Is this the only space that can be spoken of? Or rather, if this abstract concept of space is the only one that can legitimately be spoken of, then there is really only one objection that can be raised, and this is sufficiently addressed in Riemannian or any other metageometry. The fact of the matter is that, for example, Kant's definitions of space are based on the very abstract concept of space, in which one does not initially concern oneself with infinity or boundlessness, and that in the course of the 19th century, this concept of space was also shaken internally, in terms of its conceptual content, by mathematics. There can be no question of Kant's definitions still applying to a space that is not infinite but unlimited. In fact, much of the further development of the “Critique of Pure Reason” would be called into question, for example the doctrine of paralogisms, if one were obliged to move on to the concept of unlimited space curved in on itself.

I know that for the ordinary conception this concept of curved space causes difficulties. But from the purely mathematical-geometric point of view, nothing can be objected to what is assumed there, except that one is moving in a realm of pure abstraction that is initially quite far from reality. And if you look more closely, you will find that there is a strange circularity in the derivations of modern meta-geometry. It is this, that one starts out from the idea of Euclidean geometry, which is not concerned with the limitations of space. From this, one then gets certain derived ideas, let us say ideas that relate to something like a spherical surface. And then, in turn, by undertaking certain reconciliations or reinterpretations with the forms that arise, one can make interpretations of space from there. Actually, everything is said under the assumption of Euclidean coordinate geometry. Under this assumption, one arrives at a certain measure of curvature. One arrives at the derivations. All of this is done with the concepts of Euclidean geometry. But then one turns around, so to speak: one now uses these ideas, which can only arise with the help of Euclidean geometry, for example the measure of curvature, in order to arrive at a different idea that leads to a reorganization and can provide an interpretation for what has been gained from the curved forms. Basically, we are moving in an unrealistic area by extracting abstractions from abstractions. The matter would only be justified if empirical facts made it necessary to conform to the ideas of these facts according to what is obtained through such a thing.

The question, then, is: what is the experiential basis for the abstraction “space”? After all, space as such, as presented in Euclid, is an abstraction. What is the basis for what can be experienced, what can be perceived?

We must start from the human experience of space. Placed in the world, human beings, through their own activity of experience, actually perceive only one spatial dimension, and that is the dimension of depth. This perception, this acquired perception of the dimension of depth by the human being is based on a process of consciousness that is very often ignored. But this acquired perception is something quite different from the perception of the plane-like, the perception of extension in two dimensions. When we see with our two eyes, that is, with our total vision, we are never aware that these two dimensions come about through an activity of their own, through an activity of the soul. They are, so to speak, there as two dimensions. Whereas the third dimension comes about through a certain activity, even if this activity is not usually brought to consciousness. We actually have to first acquire the knowledge and understanding of how deep in space something lies, how far away from us any object is. We do not acquire the extent of the surface, it is given by observation. But we do acquire the sense of depth through our two eyes. The way in which we experience the sense of depth is indeed on the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious; but anyone who has learned to focus his attention on such things knows that the semi-unconscious or unconscious, never conscious, activity of judging the depth dimension is much more similar to an intellectual, or even a soul activity, an active soul activity than to everything that is only viewed on the plane.

Thus, the one dimension of three-dimensional space is already actively conquered for our objective consciousness. And we cannot say otherwise than: By observing the position of the upright human being, something is given in relation to this depth dimension — front-back — which is not interchangeable with any other dimension. Simply because a person stands in the world and experiences this dimension in a certain way, what he experiences there is not interchangeable with any other direction. For the individual, this depth dimension is something that cannot be exchanged for any other dimension. It is also the case that the grasping of two-dimensionality – that is, up-down, right-left, of course also when it is in front of us – is also tied to other parts of the brain, since it lies within the process of seeing, that is, within the sensory process of perception; while, with regard to localization in the brain, the emergence of the third dimension is quite close to those centers that are to be considered for intellectual activity. So here we can already see that in the realization of this third dimension, even in terms of experience, there is an essential difference compared to the other two dimensions.

But if we then move up to imagination, we get out of what we experience in the third dimension altogether: in imagination, we actually move on to two-dimensional representation. And now we have yet to work out the other imagination, the imagination of right and left, although this has been hinted at just as quietly as the development of the third dimension in objective imagining; so that there is again a specific experience in right and left. And finally, when we ascend to inspiration, the same applies to up and down.

For ordinary imagining, which is tied to our nervous sense system, we develop the third dimension. But when we turn directly to the rhythmic system by excluding the ordinary activity of the nervous sense system – which in a certain respect occurs when we ascend to the level of inspiration; it is not entirely precise to say this, but it does not matter for now – then we have the experience of the second dimension. And we have the experience of the first dimension when we ascend to inspiration, that is, when we advance to the third member of the human organization.

Thus that which we have before us in abstract space proves to be exact because everything we conquer in mathematics we extract from within ourselves. What arises in mathematics as three-dimensional space is actually something that we have within ourselves. But if we descend into ourselves through supersensible representations, it is not abstract space with its three equally valid dimensions that arises, but three different valences for the three different dimensions: front-back, right-left, up-down; they cannot be interchanged. From this follows yet another: if these three are not interchangeable, there is no need to imagine them with the same intensity. That is the essence of Euclidean space: that we imagine the X-, Y-, Z-axis with the same intensity – this is assumed for any geometric calculation.

If we hold the X-, Y-, Z-axis in front of us, then we must – if we want to stick with what our equations tell us in analytical geometry, but assume an inner intensity of the three axes – imagine this intensity as being of equal value. If we were to elastically enlarge the X-axis with a certain intensity, for example, the Y- and Z-axes would have to enlarge with the same intensity. That is to say, if I now grasp intensively that which I am expanding, the force of expansion, if I may say so, is the same for the X-, Y-, Z-axis, that is, for the three dimensions of Euclidean space. Therefore, applying the concept of space in this way, I would like to call this space rigid space.

Now, this is no longer the case when we take real space, of which this rigid space is an abstraction, when we take space as it is experienced by a human being. Then we can no longer speak of these three intensities of expansion being the same. Rather, the intensity is essentially dependent on what is found in the human being: the human proportions are entirely the result of the intensities of spatial expansion. And we must, for example, if we call the up-down the Y-axis, imagine this with a greater intensity of expansion than, for example, the X-axis, which would correspond to the right-left. If we were to look for a formulaic expression for this real space, if we were to express in formulaic terms what is meant by 'real' here, then again we would end up with a three-axis ellipsoid.

Now we also have the reason to imagine this three-axis space, in which supersensible thinking must live, in its three quite different possibilities of expansion, so that we can also recognize this space, through the real experience of the X-, Y- and Z-axis given to us with our physical body, as that which simultaneously expresses the relationship of the world bodies situated in this space.

When we imagine this, we must bear in mind that everything we think of out there in this three-dimensional cosmic space cannot be thought of as simply extending in different directions with the same intensity of expansion along the X-, Y- and Z-axes Z-axis, as is the case with Euclidean space, but we must think of space as having a configuration that could also be imagined by a triaxial ellipsoid. And the arrangement of certain stars certainly supports this. Our Milky Way system is usually called a lens and so on. It is not possible to imagine it as a spherical surface; we have to imagine it in a different way if we stick to a purely physical fact.

You can see from the treatment of space how little newer thinking is in line with nature. In ancient times, in older cultures, no one had such a conception as that of rigid space. One cannot even say that in Euclidean geometry there was already a clear conception of this rigid space with the three equal intensities of expansion, and also the three lines perpendicular to one another. It was only when people began to treat space in the manner of Euclidean geometry, in their calculations, that this abstract conception of space actually arose. In earlier times, quite similar insights had been gained, as I have now developed them again from the nature of supersensible knowledge. From this you can see that things on which people today rely so heavily, which are taken for granted, only have such significance because they operate in a sphere that is divorced from reality. The space that people use in their calculations today is an abstraction; it operates entirely in a sphere that is divorced from reality. It is abstracted from experiences that we can know through real experience. But today, people are often content with what abstractions are. In our time, when so much emphasis is placed on empiricism, abstractions are most often invoked. And people don't even notice it. They believe that they are dealing with things in reality. But you can see how much our ideas need to be rectified in this regard.

In every concept, the spiritual researcher does not merely ask whether it is logical. Although, in a certain sense, it is only a branch of Euclidean space, it is not really possible to grasp it conceptually, because one arrives at it through a completely abstract train of thought, in which one comes to a conclusion and, as it were, turns one's whole thinking upside down. When imagining, the spiritual researcher does not merely ask whether it is logical, but whether it is also in line with reality. That is the deciding factor for him in accepting or not accepting an idea. He only accepts an idea if this idea is in line with reality.

And this criterion of correspondence to reality will be given when one begins to deal with such ideas in an appropriate way, which is the justification for something like the theory of relativity, for example. It is logical in itself, I would like to say, because it only comprehends itself within the realm of logical abstraction, as logically as anything can be logical. Nothing can be more logical than the theory of relativity! But the other question is whether its ideas are realizable. And there you need only look at the ideas that are listed there as analogous, and you will find that they are actually quite unrealistic ideas that are just thrown around. It is only there for sensualization, they say beforehand. But it is not just there for symbolization. Otherwise the whole procedure would be in the air.

That is what I would like to say about the question. You see, it is not possible to answer questions that touch on such areas very easily. Now there is a question regarding the sentence: “The organism of an ancient Egyptian or Greek was quite different from that of modern man.

Dear attendees, I certainly did not say that! And at this point I must definitely draw attention to something that I often draw attention to, and really not out of immodesty: I am in the habit of expressing myself as precisely as I possibly can. And it is actually an extremely painful fact, not just for me personally, since it is tolerable, but from the point of view of the anthroposophical spiritual movement, that in the face of many things, for the formulation of which I have used all possible precautions to formulate the facts as adequately as possible, then everything possible is done, everything possible is said, and then these assertions are sent out into the world as “genuine anthroposophical teachings”. One of these assertions is that I am supposed to have said, “The organism of an ancient Egyptian or Greek was quite different from that of a modern man”.

It can be reduced to the following. I said: the modern way of thinking imagines too strongly that man, as a whole being, has basically always been as he is today, right down to a certain historical time. I usually only speak of “completely different,” of metamorphoses of man as such, where there are great differences, where man becomes “completely different” in a certain respect: in prehistoric times. But anyone who is able to penetrate to the subtleties of the structure and the innermost fabric – as a human being can in spiritual science – will find that a metamorphosis of the human being is constantly taking place, that, for example, the modern human being differs from the Egyptian or the Greek. Of course not in terms of external, striking characteristics, which are as striking as external physiognomy and the like. That is probably what is meant in the question, but that is not my opinion, because in terms of striking characteristics, modern man is of course not “completely different” from the Egyptian. But in terms of finer internal structural relationships, spiritual science comes to the following conclusion, for example. It has to be said that since the first third of the 15th century, humanity has become particularly adept at abstract thought, at moving more and more towards abstract trains of thought. This is also essentially based on a different structure of the brain. And through the method of spiritual science, the spiritual researcher can recognize the matter. Then it turns out that it is really the case that the brain has indeed changed in its finest structures since Egyptian times. The brain of the Egyptian was such that, to take one example, he also belonged to those of whom Dr. Husemann spoke, that the ancient Egyptian also had no sense for the blue color nuance and so on. In any case, we can see that the sense of abstraction occurs to the same extent as the nuances of blue emerge from mere darkness. What occurs in the life of the soul corresponds entirely to a physical metamorphosis. It is extremely important that we do not stop at the coarser aspects of human nature, as they are presented when we go back, for my sake, to the long periods of time that lie before history. Rather, if we want to consider human beings as humanity, we must also consider the finer structural changes during their historical existence.

Question: It would be interesting to hear, in a more intimate way, how this fact behaves.

Well, quite a lot has actually been said in these days, let us say, also through the things that Dr. Husemann has presented, about how this fact behaves. And if we were to go into other fields of fact, there would certainly be much that could be said about these other, very fine, intimate structural relationships of the human being.

Question: How do you explain the phenomenon of the well-known horse that solved all arithmetic and mathematical problems without difficulty, to the amazement of all scholars, and only then failed completely when the problems were written on pieces of paper in front of the examiner? If it is the case with the horse that none of those present in the room could see the problem, is this based on a strong suggestiveness on the part of the animal? And how does that come about?

I never want to talk about anything other than what I have investigated myself. And so, in answering this question, I would only like to share what I have experienced myself. For example, I don't know the famous Elberfeld horses. I also don't know the dog Rolf, I never had the honor of meeting him. Now, with regard to such things, I could always state that the story is all the more wonderful the less one is embarrassed by not really being able to see through it, to really get to know it. But I once saw Mr. von Osten's horse in Berlin. I can't say that the calculations that Mr. von Osten presented to the horse were extraordinarily complicated. But I was able to get an instant idea of what it was all about from what was going on there – although you had to look very closely.

I could only marvel at the strange theories that had been advanced about these things. There was a lecturer, I think his name was Fox or something like that, who was supposed to examine this whole story with the horse; and he now put forward the theory that every time the gentleman from the east gave some task, terribly small movements would occur in the eye or something like that. Another small movement would occur when Mr. von Osten says “three” like that, or when he says it like that; another movement would occur when he says “two”. So that a certain fine series of movements would come about if Mr. von Osten said, “three times two”; then the same sign of this movement would come again, six! And Mr. von Osten's horse should now be particularly predisposed to guess these fine movements, which the lecturer in question said he did not perceive in any way, but only assumed hypothetically. After all, the whole “theory” was based on the fact that Mr. von Osten's horse was much more perceptive, to a much greater extent in reality, than the lecturer who put forward this theory.

If you stick to the flashy blue thinking in hypothesizing, you can set up hypotheses in the most diverse ways. For those who have some insight into such matters, certain circumstances were of extraordinary value. During the entire time that Mr. von Osten presented his experiments to the amazed public with his horse, he gave the horse nothing but sweets – he had huge pockets in the back of his coat. And the horse just kept licking, and that's how it solved these tasks.

Now imagine that this has created a completely different relationship between the horse and Mr. von Osten himself. When Mr. von Osten continually gives the horse sugar, a very special relationship of love and intimacy develops between them. Now the animal nature is so extraordinarily variable due to the intimacy of the relationship that develops, both from 'animal to human and from human to animal'. And then effects come about that are actually wrongly described when they are called “mind reading” in the sense in which the word is often understood, but they are mediators for that which is not “subtle twitchings” that a private lecturer hypothetically posits, but which he himself says he does not see! No subtle twitches are needed to convey the solutions. It can be traced back to the following: imagine what went through the mind of Herr von Osten, who of course was vain enough to realize that the tension in the audience, made up of sensation-hungry people, was going through the most incredible twists and turns as he noticed it, and when he was then standing in front of the solution to the task, he gave the horse a piece of sugar. And add to that the effect on the horse of the mental relationship. It was truly not a command given by words or twitching, but an intimately given command that always went from Mr. von Osten to the horse when he gave him sweets to eat. Suggestion is probably not the right word. Relationships that take place between people cannot be transferred to every living being.

I have tried to show these things in concrete terms by highlighting a circumstance that many will consider trivial: the constant giving of sugar as something extraordinarily essential.

Question: Is there a possibility for pointing out a point of view that is just as stimulating for systematics in the field of mineralogy and crystallography as the idea of the primal plant is for botany or a new understanding of the periodic system of elements is for chemistry?

When we speak of crystal forms, we are dealing with forms that are actually different in their overall relationship to the cosmos, in their entire position in the world, than the forms that one can imagine in the Primordial Plant and, again, in the plant forms derived from the Primordial Plant, that is to say, in the possibility of real existence. For example, the principle applied to the design of the primeval plant could not be applied to the field of mineralogy or crystallogy. For there one is dealing with something that must be approached from a completely different angle. And one must first approach it by actually approaching the field of polyhedral crystal forms. And this approach, I can only hint at now. I have explained it in more detail in its individual representations in a lecture course that I gave for a smaller group. This approach is taken when one starts from the consideration, an internal dynamic consideration of the state of aggregation, let us say first of all from the gaseous state downwards to the solid. I can only draw the lines now; it would take too long if I were to explain it in detail, but I will hint at it. If one descends – if I may express it this way – from the gaseous state to the liquid state, then one must say: the liquid state of aggregation shows itself in that, as the one in the whole coherence of nature, a level-limiting surface, which is a spherical surface, and the degree of curvature of which can be obtained from any point on the surface by means of the transition to the tangent at that point. What you get there includes the shape that has its outer circumference in the spherical surface, and a point in the interior that is the same distance from this spherical surface everywhere.

If we now imagine the drop in an unlimited way, I do not say in an infinite way, but enlarged in an unlimited way, we get a level surface approaching the horizontal, and we have certain relationships in mind that are perpendicular to this level surface.

But we arrive at the same idea by observing the connections that arise when we simply regard our earth as a force field that can attract surrounding objects that are not firmly attached to it. If we regard the earth not as a center of gravity but as a spherical surface of gravity, then we arrive at the same result for this, I would say, gravitational figure as we need in another respect for the material constitution of the drop. So for a pure force context, we get something that corresponds to a material context. And in this way we arrive at a possibility for studying the formal relationships in the inorganic.

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So that we can say that in this context of forces, which is present in the whole body of the earth, we are always dealing with the horizontal plane. If we now move from this state of forces to one in which, let us say, there is not a point in the center to which the level surface refers as in the 'drop to the one center point', but rather several points, we would find a strangely composed surface. These relationships of the line to these 'centers' I would have to draw in the diagram in something like the following way: But if we now proceed—and now I am taking a great leap, which is well-founded, but in the short time available I can only hint at the true content—if we now proceed to assume these points not inside, within the system we are dealing with, but outside, then perhaps we would get a diagram that can be made diagrammatically in the following way: If we transfer the points into immeasurable distances, not into infinite distances, but into very great distances, then these curved surfaces, which are indicated here by curved lines, by curves, pass over into planes, and we would get a polyhedral form, which approximates to what we have before us in the known crystal forms.

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And indeed, spiritual scientific observation leads us to look at the crystal in such a way that we do not merely derive it from certain inner figurative forces in some material substance, but we relate it to the exterior of the cosmos, and we seek in the cosmos the directions that then, through the distribution of their starting points, result in what the individual crystal form is. In the individual crystal form, we actually get, so to speak, impressions of large cosmic relationships. All of this needs to be studied in detail. I fear that what I have been able to hint at, albeit only in a few very sparse lines, may already seem to you to be something very daring. But it must be said that today people have encapsulated themselves in their world of ideas in a very narrow area, and that is why they feel so uncomfortable when one does not stick to the conceptual world that is usually taken as a basis today, I would say is taken as a basis in all sciences. Spiritual science demands an - as experience makes necessary - immeasurable expansion of concepts compared to the present situation. And that is precisely what makes some people uneasy. They cannot see the shore, so to speak, and believe they are losing their way. But they would realize that what is lost through the expanse is gained again as a certain inner firmness and security, so that there is no need to be so afraid of what appears to be an expansion into the boundless.

Of course, it is much easier to make up some model or other — as was also mentioned today in a certain question — than to advance to such ideas. It is easier to say: the truth must be simple! — The reason why one says that the truth must be simple is not, in fact, that the truth really must be simple, because the human organism, for example, is incredibly complicated. Rather, the reason why it is said that the true must be simple is that the simple is convenient in thinking. That is the whole point. And it is necessary, above all, to advance to the fuller content if one really wants to understand reality bit by bit.

The question that was raised here still required that one should present three hours of theory. One cannot speak about the sun through “a brief answer to the question,” because one would be completely misunderstood. And I do not want that. — So, first of all, the answerable questions are answered provisionally.

Question: Does spiritual science find a transformation of the material earth with the entry of the Christ-Spirit into the earth? Is the effect of the power of Christ perhaps particularly expressed in one of the elements found in modern times?

What is the question? — Not true, one must only consider from which point of view such a question can be asked. The question is posed: Is the effect of the power of Christ expressed in the material earth? — You must only bear in mind that spiritual science, based on its research, has a very definite idea about the earth that does not coincide with what one imagines about the earth when one speaks of the “material earth” in the sense of the word “material” in today's language. So the question is actually without real content. If one speaks of something like an “influence of the power of Christ on the earth”, then, since this idea is in turn borrowed from spiritual science, one must also have the idea of the earth that applies to anthroposophy, to spiritual science. And how the power of Christ stands in a certain relationship to the whole metamorphosis of the earth can only be presented in the overall context that I have given in Occult Science. And there one also finds what is necessary to answer the question, if it is formulated correctly.

In response to requests from many course participants, a gentleman from Stuttgart will give a brief report on the lecture given the previous evening by the Pan-German General v. Gleich at a mass meeting in Stuttgart on “Rudolf Steiner as the prophet of a questionable teaching” (see Rudolf Steiner's reference to this at the end of the morning lecture, $. 139/140).

I would just like to add that the aforementioned General v. Gleich, quite a long time before, for weeks before, he proceeded to his lecture and to the writing of his pamphlet, wrote a letter to our friend Mr. Molt, as a concerned father, concerned about the misfortune that he, as the owner of a forty-year-old nobility, not only “handed over” his son to anthroposophy, but also to a completely un-noble lady who is an anthroposophist! As a concerned father, he wrote to our friend Molt, asking him to visit him. Mr. Molt did so, but said that he did not know what to do with him. This was clear to him from the fact that Mr. v. Gleich demanded that we “of the threefold social order movement” should henceforth pay the son of General v. Gleich, who was employed by us, so little that the young man would not be able to marry, and that we should at least protect General v. Gleich from this marriage of his son by paying him so little. After these events, it was understandable that one could not expect the best from General von Gleich's lecture. We then actually saw even the worst expectations exceeded! It was the case with this lecture that Gleich essentially presented the content of a brochure – somewhat more fully developed, we might say – that appeared in Ludwigsburg at the same time. It had already been arranged that this brochure should appear at the same time as the lecture. In this brochure, he makes various accusations against anthroposophy in the most uninformed way, without providing any evidence for what he says – anyone who reads this brochure can see that for themselves – by actually only using the opponents of anthroposophy. This is clear from the brochure's table of contents: a few references to literature where one can find out about anthroposophy. One would think that these would be the anthroposophical books, but no, there are about twenty opponents, with the most shameless one right at the front: Max Seiling! Von Gleich essentially brings nothing new to the table that cannot be found in Seiling's brochure, only in the way General von Gleich used to give his lecture. And it was the case that this lecture was announced “without discussion”. There were numerous followers of the anthroposophical movement in the audience. After he had finished the lecture, which was full of the harshest expressions and included some of the most crude slander, he simply left the hall without entering into any discussion. And when someone tried to get a word in edgewise, and when Mr. Molt, who was there and was also personally attacked several times in the lecture, shouted: “He hereby publicly declares – he shouted this into the hall, in which there was a raging was a raging crowd of Mr. v. Gleich's supporters, he did not consider it worth replying to anything. He had already left the hall. On the other hand, the supporters, who were equipped with whistles and other noisy instruments, tried to shout down the anthroposophists who wanted to object. And it was quite close to a brawl. It was very difficult to protest against the most serious defamations, since the whole meeting immediately took on a threatening character, and it was clear that it would come to a brawl.

There followed some reports about the previous lecture by v. Gleich in Ludwigsburg. Finally, a letter from General v. Gleich to his son was read out.

I would just like to say a few words. Can I have this letter again? I would just like to make a formal comment, a comment that does not concern the matter itself. So, in the letter from Mr. v. Gleich to his son, it says: “[...] If only God had willed that you, a decent Christian nobleman, had fallen for your fatherland, then I could at least mourn you with pride [...] I pray to God to take the blindness from you again, so that you may awaken from it again [...].” (space in the postscript).

As you can see, a lot has been said about Mr. von Gleich's own Christianity; I would like to emphasize this: his own Christianity, in comparison with the unreasonable demand that we have been made to pay our son so badly that he cannot marry. That seems to me a very Christian act! And I do not want to be distracted by these “little piquant matters”, which are also on this program, and talk about the seriousness of the situation. Because I know very well that what happened yesterday in Stuttgart is not an end, but a beginning, that behind it stands a strong organization. And it is precisely out of this feeling that I may thank such a personality as the one who has just spoken - out of a real inner feeling for what Anthroposophy at least wants to be. But I would like to point out the seriousness of the situation and the necessity to act in the spirit of this serious situation.

What I want to say must, of course, be distinguished from a certain understanding that one can also have of such Christians as General von Gleich, for example, who is a Christian! I do not want to make a comparison, not even a formal one, but I just want to say something that I had to remember with this kind of Christianity. There are, in fact, very different kinds of Christianity, even of Orthodox Christianity. When the criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt started working and writing in criminal anthropology, he initially found little understanding in Vienna. He then found extraordinary understanding in a director of a home for dangerous criminals in Hungary. He was given the opportunity to examine the skulls of criminals, including the skulls of the most dangerous Hungarian criminals. Among them were the strangest people, including a very devout Orthodox Christian, who, of course, could not behave towards Professor Benedikt in accordance with his Christian intentions. He was very angry with him because he was allowed to examine his skull. And he was especially angry about it because he had heard that the prison director had agreed that Professor Benedikt would get to study particularly characteristic criminal skulls after death. And since he was not released to the professor Benedikt in this institution, he wanted to be at least presented to this Benedikt in chains. During this presentation, he said that he could not admit that, given his Christian beliefs, he should allow his skull to be sent to the professor Benedikt in Vienna after his death; he would then be buried here, and his skull would lie around in Vienna! And he wanted to know how his body and his skull would be brought together at the resurrection. He believed so much in his bodily resurrection – he was a real criminal, I think even a murderer.

[ 79 ] The "Young Germany" and revolutionary poetry around the middle of the century strove for an intimate interpenetration of the general cultural ideas of political interests with artistic creation. The demands of the time found expression in the works of the poets. In the fifties, a literary movement emerged that took a different stance towards art. People now asked less what they wanted to express in poetry; they focused first and foremost on the most perfect way in which a process, an idea, a feeling could be shaped. What must a drama, a novel, a novella and so on be like? These were questions that preoccupied the consciousness of the time. Strict demands were made with regard to the technical perfection of the individual art forms. Two theoretical works by creative poets are clear testimony to this school of thought: Gustav Freytag's "Technik des Dramas" (1863) and Friedrich Spielhagen's "Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans" (1883). All the details of both types of poetry are carefully discussed in these two writings. In the creations of Friedrich Spielhagen, this basic trait of the artistic attitude is particularly clear. This poet has the most lively need to deal with all the questions and ideas that move his time; but the demands of art are more important to him than this. He strives for inner harmony and organic structure in all his works. In his first major novels "Problematische Naturen" (1860), "Durch Nacht zum Licht" (1861), "In Reih und Glied" (1866), "Hammer und Amboß" (1868), this striving for the pure art form still takes a back seat to the social goals that the poet sets himself. It appears at its most pronounced in "Sturmflut" (1876). In the former novels, the aim is to show the contrasts in the views and lifestyles of different classes and social strata or to portray the relationship of the individual to the whole. In these works, Spielhagen's interest in cultural history and his enthusiasm for freedom and progress have an equal share with his artistic intentions. In "Sturmflut", the phenomena of natural and human life are no longer juxtaposed as they appear to direct observation, but as the purpose of art demands. In the past, the poet was concerned with illustrating which currents in life are capable of defeating others; now he is primarily concerned with creating exciting conflicts and satisfying solutions. Spielhagen has remained true to this direction in his work to the present day. "Plattland" (1879), "Uhlenhaus" (1884), "Ein neuer Pharao" (1889), "Sonntagskind" (1893) are poems that still make a significant impression on those who do not take offense at the fact that art is in a certain sense alienated from real life. To an even greater degree than to Spielhagen, the above is applicable to Paul Heyse. He brought the form of the novella to its most mature development. He is a master in the artful interlinking of mental processes and relationships. He knows how to give the simplest conflicts a highly exciting development by giving them unexpected twists and turns. For him, art has become an end in itself. Heyse does not face reality like an impartial observer, but like a gardener of the plant world, who asks himself with every natural species: in what way can I refine it? He succeeds equally well in portraying the immediate life of the present ("Die kleine Mama") and the sensibilities and perceptions of past times ("Frau Alzeyer", Troubadour-Novellen); his tone sounds with perfect beauty, whether it is serious ("Der verlorene Sohn") or humorous ("Der letzte Centaur"). Heyse is not a creative nature in the highest sense of the word, but a perfecter of inherited artistic vision and outlook on life. The novel with which he achieved great success in the seventies, "Children of the World" (1873), grew out of the movement of thought that Hegel's successors (see page 48 ff.) had aroused. How the children of the world, who seek to satisfy their religious needs through the free views of the present, find their way in life is portrayed here by a poet in whom this new faith has taken on a worldly form. A calm, serene beauty is the basic character of this and the following novels by Heyse: "Im Paradiese" (1875), "Der Roman der Stifisdame" (1886), "Merlin" (1892). A luxuriant sensuality that is able to present itself gracefully, a wisdom that gives no thought to the hardships of existence, confront us everywhere in Heyse's creations, especially in his Iyric poems. Dramatic art is not suited to such a way of looking at things. The lively movement that drama needs can only emerge from the essence of a personality that descends deep into the abysses of life. This is why Heyse was unable to make an impression with his numerous dramas. Adolf Wilbrandt and Herman Grimm move along similar lines. Although the former loves powerful motifs and strong passions that unfold in glaring contrasts, he softens them both as a playwright and as a narrator through the softness of his lines and the dull colors. Herman Grimm is a personality whose whole soul is absorbed in aesthetic contemplation. He is only interested in nature and cultural development to the extent that they can be viewed with the judgment formed by art. His novel "Insurmountable Powers" (1867) and his "Novellas" depict reality as if it had been shaped not by the laws of nature but by the educated taste of a world artist. The pursuit of formal beauty reached its peak with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. With him, the external artistic perfection of his creations corresponds to a significant content. His imagination deals with the strong passions and drives of the soul, and he is able to portray personalities on a characteristically drawn historical background. A novel such as "Jürg Jenatsch" (1876) or novellas such as "The Temptation of Pescara" (1887) and "Angela Borgia" (1890) shine a light into the abysses of the soul and are at the same time of sublime beauty. His Iyrian achievements "Ballads" (1867) and "Poems" (1882) were often marred by his imagination, which was always focused on great contrasts. He was all the more able to express himself in the illumination of heroic natures, as can be seen in his poem "Huttens letzte Tage" (1871). The poems of the Austrian Robert Hamerling are also based on similar points of view. He strives for the perfection of formal beauty as well as for a deep understanding of the world. In his "Ahasuerus in Rome" (1866), he contrasts the eternal, restless struggle of striving humanity, which longs for peace and redemption, with the passionate urge to live; in the epic "The King of Sion" (1869), a cultural-historical poem that combines the classical verse form of hexameter with a colorful, glowing style of depiction, he deals with the urge for a humane existence. In the novel "Aspasia" (1876), he seeks to present us with a picture of the Greek world, drunk with beauty and full of life, and in "Homunculus" (1888) he castigates the excesses of his time in a grotesque manner. His poetry presents itself less as that of a directly feeling poet and more as that of a contemplative, pathetic poet. A pessimistic streak runs through Hamerling's entire oeuvre. The poetry of Hieronymus Lorm (Heinrich Landesmann) is completely dominated by such a world-wearied mood. He combines the ability of a witty feuilletonist with that of an interesting storyteller and a moving lyricist. A hard personal fate has given his gloomy world view an individual character.

[ 80 ] While poets such as Spielhagen, Grimm, Meyer, Heyse and Hamerling differ from the naive view only in their artistic treatment, this is also the case with Hermann Lingg, Felix Dahn and Georg Ebers with regard to the subject matter of their works. In addition to their impulsive imagination, the traditional artistic education of the latter also played a part in their work, while in the latter the learned culture of their time also played a role. In his epic poem "Die Völkerwanderung" (1866-68), Lingg incorporates a wealth of historical ideas and scientific insights, and the tendency towards historical images is also noticeable in his poetry. Felix Dahn searched for content for his poetry in Germanic prehistory and in the events of the migration of peoples, Georg Ebers in the ancient Egyptian world. Neither the one nor the other can deny that arduous study is one of the roots of their works. Dahn's "Kampf um Rom" (1876) and "Odhin's Trost" (1880) as well as Ebers' "Eine ägyptische Königstochter" (1864) are large-scale cultural paintings, but not the result of direct poetic power.

[ 81 ] A poet, on the other hand, who is rooted in real life with all his feelings and thoughts, is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from Galicia. The glaring contradiction between the baseness of human instincts and passions and the noble ideals that the mind dreams of occupies his imagination. Man wants to be a god and yet is only a plaything of his animal desires: this confession speaks from Sacher-Masoch's works. Idealism is a pious delusion that dissolves into nothing when nature is seen in its true form. In order to express this basic sentiment, this poet has at his disposal an imagination directed towards the piquant and garish, which revels in sumptuous images and does not shy away from depicting the wildest processes. Since Sacher-Masoch, in the course of his development, gave in to the latter tendency of his nature and to sensationalist prolific writing, the promising attempts he made in works such as "The Legacy of Cain" (1870) remained without effect. Influenced by him and Hamerling, the Viennese poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie attempted to portray the idealistic dreams of humanity in their worthlessness in the face of the blind, base forces of nature in artistic poems and in a comprehensive epic "Robespierre" (1894).

[ 82 ] An art that cares little for the great questions of existence, but instead seeks to accommodate an educated taste that penetrates little into the depths of things in a virtuoso manner, can be found in Julius Wolff and Rudolf Baumbach. The former's "Wilder Jäger" (1877) and "Tannhäuser" (1880) and the latter's "Zlatorog" (1877), as well as his "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" (1878) met the needs of a large audience in the 1980s. For Catholic circles, the Westphalian Friedr. Wilh. Weber provided a historical epic in his "Dreizehnlinden" (1878).

[ 83 ] The poetry of Theodor Storms grew out of the Romantic view of art. This view, however, is in close harmony with a pithy mind firmly rooted in the life and nature of his native Schleswig-Holstein and a gift for observation that sees the outside world in soft, often misty shapes, but always in a healthy, natural way. He is a master at drawing atmospheric pictures. His depictions appear like a landscape covered in a delicate mist. A lyrical undertone speaks from all his creations. The novella "Aquis submersus" (1877) is of shattering tragedy; a powerful art of representation speaks from the "Schimmelreiter". Storm also has a gift for humor. As a lyrical poet, he is a master of expression, finding all tones from the most tender mood to pithy, sharp characterization. Related to Storm in his whole disposition is Wilhelm Jensen. His thinking is rooted in the social, liberal views of the present; his style of depiction is reminiscent of the fantastical spirit of Romanticism. He needs exciting scenes, bright lights to express what he wants. His novels "Um den Kaiserstuhl" (1878), "Nirwana" (1877), "Am Ausgange des Reichs" (1885) depict historical events in such a way that atrocity scenes and gruesome human destinies appear in comfortable breadth. Jensen's poems are characterized by lyrical verve, an artistic language, but also often a peculiar way of feeling.

[ 84 ] As Heyse and Grimm stand by Goethe's conviction of art, Storm and Jensen by that of the Romantics, so the humorist Wilhelm Raabe by that of Jean Paul. Like the latter, Raabe interrupts the course of the narrative and speaks to us in his own person; like his predecessor, he does not develop the plot according to its natural course, but anticipates things or returns to them. His choice of subject matter is also reminiscent of Jean Paul. He moves in a circle of quiet, modest, idyllic sufferings and joys. He always seeks humor in the inner contradictions of human characters. He draws people and situations in sharp outlines, with a decided tendency towards the bizarre. Whether he is depicting nerdiness, as in "Hungerpastor" (1864), or philanthropy, which appears comical because it takes unsuitable paths, as in "Horacker" (1876), Raabe always succeeds in creating clear, distinct physiognomies. Original characters and social contrasts are his field. Hans Hoffmann's importance also lies in the humorous portrayal of characters. The main character in the novel "Ivan the Terrible and his Dog" (1889), a grammar school teacher, is comical because of everything about him: his appearance, his movements, his helplessness towards his pupils. The collection of novellas "Das Gymnasium zu Stolpenburg" (1891) reveals the jovial, serious artist on every page. Fritz Mauthner made a name for himself as a satirist. His talent for parody led him to caricaturingly imitate the style and sensibilities of others in his book "Nach berühmten Mustern" (1879). In his "Villenhof" (1891) he castigates discord in Berlin social life. Among the humorists must also be Friedr. Theod. Vischer, who in his novel "Auch einer" (One too) portrayed the comic type of a person whose mental state is thrown off balance every moment by the small, random disturbances of life. What is interesting about Vischer is the constant interplay between the theoretical results of his aesthetic studies and speculations and an unmistakable original poetic natural disposition. Because he has explored all types of artistic representation, he displays a rare fluency of form and style in many areas in his "Lyrical Walks" - because he is a poet by nature, he captivates us with the expression of his feelings and the bold sweep of his imagination. Vischer's treatises "Kritische Gänge" and "Altes und Neues" are gems of German literature due to the profundity of their ideas, the courage of their thinking that does not shy away from consistency and no less due to their mastery of the essay style. He is a universal mind that reaches out in all directions. He follows the philosophical, artistic, religious and scientific phenomena of the time and comments on them with critical judgments that make him appear as a leader of the intellectual movement of his time and at the same time as a pithy character who follows his own sure path. Vischer's development clearly reflects the turnaround that has taken place in German intellectual culture in recent decades. He started out from the idealistic convictions of Hegel's philosophy. He wrote his "Aesthetics" in the 1940s and 1950s based on this and then retracted important principles of these views in a self-criticism.

[ 85 ] Like Vischer himself, Hegelian philosophy as a whole retreated from new views in the second half of the century. The great scientific results obtained by careful observation of natural facts and by experiment shook the faith in pure thought by which Hegel and his disciples had erected their proud edifice of ideas. Thus it came about that the consciousness of the time opted for philosophical directions that were characterized less by rigour and consistency of thought than by external means such as an easy, popular way of presentation and a spirited approach to things. Schopenhauer, with his dazzling, piquant, coarse style, prepared the ground for this trend. Only in such a mood could philosophical presentations such as Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" (1869) or Eugen Dühring's writings be applauded. It was not the undoubtedly valuable ideas contained in these works that made an impression, but the way in which they were presented. In the seventies and eighties, the philosophical spirit steadily disappeared from German education. This can be seen very clearly in the writing of literary history and in literary criticism. The subtle literary-historical observation of Hermann Hettner, which was directed through the facts to the driving ideal forces, the kind of Julian Schmidt, Gervinus et al, who searched for the causes of literary phenomena, were abandoned, and they were replaced by the approach of Wilhelm Scherer, who in his "History of German Literature" (1883) confined himself purely to the grouping of facts and to the visible parts of historical development.

[ 86 ] It is understandable that in a period in which the educational materials gained in long intellectual struggles are in the process of dissolution, a wealth of literary products appears that is as unequal in value and effect as possible. Busy prolific writing, which only aims to satisfy the public's need for light entertainment, appears alongside unclear ideological literature; there are writers with a light, witty gift for presentation, as well as serious spirits who are unable to go their own way and cannot find a firm point of reference in the confusion of contemporary trends. Of the latter type is Eduard Grisebach, who uses Heine's style to express Schopenhauerian ideas in his poems "Der Neue Tannhäuser" (1869) and "Tannhäuser in Rom" (1875). Something similar can also be said of the highly ambitious Albert Lindner, who created dramas in a pathetic style, which nevertheless clearly bear the stamp of an epigonism striving for originality. More fortunate was Ernst von Wildenbruch, who created a long series of dramas with a certain poetic verve and excellent skill in scenic construction. A noble enthusiasm for heroic grandeur and an idealizing style of representation are characteristic of Wildenbruch, and in his short stories and poems an intimacy of feeling and a sympathetic disposition come to the fore. Richard Voß is a spirit who, out of an unhealthy nervousness, searches for stirring, strongly arousing motifs and lets them work in a blatant, often bloodcurdling way. But he also has the ability to depict intimate states of mind, which he, however, associates with all too stormy events, as in the dramas "Eva" and "Alexandra". That he also understands the pulse of the present is shown in his drama "Die neue Zeit", in which a pastor's son, who has grown into the free-spirited views of our time, comes into conflict with his father, who clings to the prejudices of the old world. Rudolf Gottschall, who sticks to the academic-aesthetic templates as a playwright and lyricist, Julius Grosse, who has proven himself to be a tasteful but uninspiring artist in drama, novels and poetry, and finally Hans von Hopfen, whose achievements hardly rise above mere light fiction,

[ 87 ] A personality who deserves the highest respect is Adolf Friedrich Graf Schack, a poet who strives for depth and makes the highest demands on form. His ethical and artistic seriousness is admirable. This is expressed not only in his witty essays on literary history and in his self-biography "Half a Century", but also in the generous support he gave to artists and artistic endeavors. Heinrich Leuthold is also a master of strict artistic form, whose melancholy tones are partly the expression of agonizing personal experiences, but also of a deeply pessimistic view of the world. A reflective poet in the fullest sense of the word is the Swiss Dranmor (Ferdinand von Schmid), who is very similar to Leuthold in his passionate, restless manner and his gloomy view of the world. Schack, Dranmor and Leuthold are primarily lyric poets. Isolde Kurz with her "Florentinische Novellen" (1890), which emerged from a refined taste and a vivid imagination, can be seen as a pupil of Conrad Ferd. Artur Fitger appeared as a lyricist and dramatist. The gloomy view of the world that we have found in so many poets of the seventies and eighties is also a basic feature of his lyrical creations. His powerful drama "The Witch" (1876), although not very original in its structure, met with the liveliest applause for a time. The poems of Martin Greif were born out of a tender spirit in which the finest impulses of nature tremble harmoniously. He succeeded in writing songs of genuine Goethean simplicity and naturalness; for dramatic art, in which he also tried his hand, this soft and delicate spirit lacks creative power and sharpness of characterization. The South German Johann Georg Fischer is a sharply characterized poetic physiognomy. With him, one senses healthy strength and a joyful zest for life everywhere, which emerge in splendid language, often with unsought pathos, often with the simplest folksiness. He too is not up to the demands of the dramatic structure.

[ 88 ] A genuine North German poet of austere beauty is Theodor Fontane. As a lyric poet, he is reserved in his feelings and extraordinarily succinct in his expression. He juxtaposes the impressions that arouse his feelings and then leaves us alone with our hearts. His imagination creates in monumental images and has a simple grandeur, which comes into its own in his "Ballads" (1861). Similar peculiarities also characterize him as a storyteller. His style is almost sober, but always expressive. Prussian life and North German nature have found a classic actor in him. He paints equally well in broad strokes as in the smallest details. His novels "Adultera", "Irrungen - Wirrungen", "Stine", "Stechlin" are equally appreciated by the public seeking only interesting reading and by the strictest critics. The Austrian Ludwig Anzengruber is a true dramatist of admirable accuracy in characterization and the ability to portray events in vivid development. His dramas are rooted in the intellectual life of the Austrian peasantry and middle class in the 1970s. In particular, he knew how to portray the striving for a free-minded view of religious ideas and the struggles that the peasant mind had to endure as a result of such goals, for example in "Pfarrer von Kirchfeld" (1870) and "Kreuzelschreibern" (1872). In "Meineidbauer" (1872), "G'wissenswurm" (1874) and "Fleck auf der Ehr" (1888), he showed how deeply he was able to draw motifs from the peasant soul. Ludwig Ganghofer, who wanted to treat Upper Bavarian folk life in plays such as "Der Herrgottschnitzer von Ammergau" and "Der Geigenmacher von Mittenwald" in a similar way to Anzengruber's treatment of Austrian folk life, did not hit the "true-to-nature" notes like Anzengruber did. In contrast, Lower Austria has an epic writer in Joseph Misson, who in his unfortunately unfinished poetic tale "Da Naz, a Niederösterreichischer Bauernbui, geht in d'Fremd" (1850) expressed the mood, imagination and behavior of his people in an incomparable way. The Styrian Peter Rosegger achieved the same to a high degree with his compatriots in a series of prose works that were born of a sensible mind, a brave character and a cozy narrative gift. In the second half of the century, folk poetry, which in most cases also seeks to intimately reflect the form of expression and way of looking at things of the people in the form of dialect poetry, blossomed beautifully. Franz von Kobell and his pupil Karl Stieler produced precious gems of folk poetry in the Upper Bavarian dialect. Franz Stelzhammer created poems in Austrian dialect that are so natural that they seem to have arisen from the spontaneity of the people. The dialect poetry of the Viennese J.G. Seidl is inspired by warm feelings, but of a much lesser power and originality. The Silesian dialect has found a poet of naive, humorous expression in Karl von Holtei, whom we have already mentioned (p. 58) as a storyteller and dramatist. The North German dialect was cultivated by Klaus Groth and Fritz Reuter. Groth, the singer of "Quickborn" (1852), writes like an educated man who has grown out of folk life, but his love of his homeland and his striving to make his dialect heard make up for what he lacks in originality. Fritz Reuter's poems stem entirely from the soul of the people, from their most intimate thoughts and feelings. He is a first-rate character painter. Reuter's first collection of poems, "Läuschen un Rimels" (1853), immediately won him a large circle of admirers. His brilliant narrative talent is at its best when he weaves his own experiences into the narrative, as in "Ut mine Festungstid" (1862) and "Ut mine Stromtid" (1863 to 1864). He vividly depicts the mood of the people before the events of 1812. It is the urge for the primal sources of poetry that is expressed in the rich applause that poems such as Anzengruber's, Rosegger's, Groth's and Reuter's found in almost all circles. People believed that they could find in the simple popular mind what they had distanced themselves from in the highly developed art poetry of the Heyses, Meyers and Hamerlings. At the same time as this trend, there was another, which renounced higher artistic demands and sought satisfaction in amiable wit, in brisk, if not very profound depiction. This direction found its field particularly in the lightly thrown feuilleton and in the skillfully constructed, sensationally exciting drama. Paul Lindau, Oskar Blumenthal, Hugo Lubliner, Adolf l'Arronge, Franz v. Schönthan, Gustav v. Moser, Ernst Wichert and others. were responsible for this taste, which gradually took hold in such wide circles that protests such as that of Hans Herrig, who in his essay "Luxustheater und Volksbühne" (1886) wanted to recapture the theater of true art, were initially ineffective. Above all, Herrig wanted to win over the people to his ideas, and this was also the goal of his Luther Festival.

[ 89 ] However, even in the 1970s and 1980s, a strong receptiveness to genuine art remained clearly perceptible in individual circles. Proof of this is the steadily growing recognition that Gottfried Keller has received. However, the creations that he added, after a long intervening period, to those we had already acknowledged earlier (p. 62) were on a par with them. The "Seven Legends" (1872) represent a reform of the legendary style on a completely new, realistic basis. The "Sinngedicht" (1881) is a warmly felt, mature creation. The "Züricher Novellen" (1878) are cultural pictures from Zurich's past, painted with simplicity and grandeur; "Martin Salander" (1886) depicts the political situation in Switzerland with superior humor. While each new creation by Keller also testified to a higher level of artistry, Gustav Freytag continued to cultivate the style he had once acquired. Neither his "Pictures from the German Past" (1859-67) nor the series of novels "The Ancestors", which appeared after 1870, represented any artistic progress. One personality who reflects the true character of the last four decades in poetry is Wilhelm Jordan. Unfortunately, he lacked the poetic power to give artistic expression to his world view, which was fully in tune with the times. In his "Demiurgos" ($.65), he prophetically proclaimed Darwin's world view in advance; when it was scientifically substantiated, it also appeared with full clarity in his poetic products. The characters in his rewriting of the German heroic epic "Nibelunge" (1868-74) grew out of this view, and his novels "Die Sebalds" (1885) and "Zwei Wiegen" (1887) were written entirely in the spirit of contemporary scientific thought. If Jordan must be described as a genuinely modern spirit because of his world view, it was he who saw the truly poetic in going back to the simple, primitive conditions of cultural development. He wanted the last form of the Song of the Nibelungs that has come down to us to be regarded only as an attenuation of an older, much grander form. This is why he did not base his work on the later German Nibelungenlied, but on the older Nordic sagas. In such striving for the original sources, one can clearly see an echo of Goethe's and Herder's way of looking at things, which sees the root of the poetic in the naive and childlike world of imagination. Wilhelm Jordan's restoration of the stave rhyme can also be traced back to such a view.

[ 90 ] In the 1980s, the younger generation of German poets became convinced that the paths that poetry had taken up to that point were no longer fruitful. They no longer wanted to solve the artistic tasks set by the views of Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the Romantics. After all, life and the circles of ideas had changed considerably since the times in which those minds had formed their thoughts. Scientific discoveries had led us to see the processes of the outside world and their relationship to man in a new light. Technical inventions had changed the way of life and the relations of the various classes of people. Entire classes that had previously not taken part in public life entered into it. The social question with all its consequences was at the center of thought. In the face of such a change in culture as a whole, it was felt impossible to hold on to old traditions in poetry. The new life should bring forth a new poetry. This call grew ever stronger. In 1882, the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart led the way with their "Kritische Waffengänge", in which they used harsh language against the traditional, the outdated. They were then followed by other poets of the younger generation. In 1885, a selection of poems entitled "Modern Poetry Characters" was published, in which the striving for a new style of art was resolutely asserted. In addition to the Harts, Wilhelm Arent, Hermann Conradi, Karl Henckell, Arno Holz, Otto Erich Hartleben, Wolfgang Kirchbach participated in the new movement. In the same year, Michael Georg Conrad founded the "Gesellschaft" in Munich, a "Realistische Monatsschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben", which was guided by the same goals, and Karl Bleibtreu issued a strong rejection of everything traditional in his "Revolution der Literatur". Alongside much immaturity, many a pleasing gift appeared within this movement. Karl Henckell's social songs often pulsate with true passion, despite his preference for party slogans. Hermann Conradi's phrase-like novels vividly reflect the ferment of the times, and in his Iyrian creations one finds the heart-warming tones of a man who unreservedly expresses himself, with all the faults and sins of human nature. Julius Hart's poems also express a genuine empathy with everything that arouses the times. In 1885, Arno Holz published his "Book of the Times", in which he found effective words for social hardship. Above all, it was the artificial, the life in ideas that had lost their connection with life, to which war was declared. They did not want to work according to old templates, according to the artistic sensibilities of a bygone era, but according to the needs and inspirations of their own individuality. Under the influence of such sentiments, a poet came into his own who, however, developed completely independently of the conscious, deliberate striving for something new: Detlev v. Liliencron. He is a nature full of vitality and artistic creativity, a fine connoisseur and depictor of all the charms of existence, a poet who has all tones at his disposal, from the wildest exuberance to the delicate depiction of sublime natural moods. In 1883 he drew attention to himself with his "Adjutant's Rides", and since then he has proved himself to be one of the most outstanding contemporary poets in a series of lyrical collections. Following in his footsteps were Otto Julius Bierbaum and Gustav Falke, the latter in particular having achieved something worthy of recognition through his striving for perfection of form. Karl Busse also made a good impression on his first appearance, but was unable to maintain the same level. Richard Dehmel is an energetic lyricist who, however, cannot find harmony between abstract thought and immediate feeling. The search for new goals generates the most diverse directions in the present. In contrast to idealism, which placed the spirit too high and forgot that sensuality underlies all spirituality, a counter-current emerged which indulged in the latter and sought only the raw animal instincts in every expression of life. Hermann Bahr celebrated true orgies in this area in his stories "Die gute Schule" (1890) and "Dora" (1893). In his drama "Toni Stürmer" (1892), Cäsar Flaischlen also sought to portray the idealism of love as contradictory and to show that only natural passion brings the sexes together. The social movement also had an impact on poetry. Works such as "Schlechte Gesellschaft" (1886) by Karl Bleibtreu, "Die heilige Ehe" (1886) by Hans Land and Felix Holländer and in Max Kretzer's "Die Betrogenen" (1882) and "Die Bergpredigt" (1889) are sharply critical of existing social conditions and the prevailing moral views. In his dramas "Hanna Jagert" (1893), "Erziehung zur Ehe" (1894) and "Sittliche Forderung" (1897), Otto Erich Hartleben shows the self-dissolution of social ideas and depicts human weaknesses with great satirical power in his novellistic sketches. As a lyric poet, he is characterized by a beautiful sculpture of expression and a simple, tasteful naturalness. John Henry Mackay gives expression to the striving for complete liberation of the individual, which has found a philosopher in Max Stirner (p. 5o), in his cultural painting "The Anarchists" (1891), in stories such as "The People of Marriage" (1892) and in his poems, which place the ideal of personal independence above all else (collected and published in 1898). Hermann Sudermann deals with the clash between the moral concepts of different classes in his dramas "Die Ehre", "Die Heimat" and "Glück im Winkel". In his more recent stage works "Johannes" and "Die drei Reiherfedern", he has set himself higher tasks. He portrays the tragedy inherent in human nature itself, a goal he also pursued in his stories "Frau Sorge" and "Der Katzensteg". The influence of the modern scientific world view on the human soul is illustrated by Wilhelm Bölsche in his novel "Mittagsgöttin" (i8g91). The most recent drama strives for the truth of nature in that it does not allow the development of events in poetry to proceed according to higher, artistic laws, but seeks a photographically faithful depiction of reality. Johannes Schlaf and Arno Holz led the way in this direction with their dramas "Meister Olze" and "Familie Selicke", in which the truth of nature is exaggerated to the point of merely copying external events. They were followed by Gerhart Hauptmann, who in his first works "Vor Sonnenaufgang" (1889) and "Das Friedensfest" (1890) still created entirely in this style, but in "Einsamen Menschen" (1891) rose to the level of depicting significant emotional conflicts and cohesive dramatic composition. In his "Colleague Crampton" (1892), he then delivered a character painting that was as true to nature as it was artistic. In "Hanneles Himmelfahrt" and "Versunkene Glocke", his style becomes idealistic and romantic despite its fidelity to nature. In "The Weavers" (1892), the depiction of reality becomes a complete dissolution of all dramatic form; in "Henschel the Carriage Driver", Hauptmann shows that he can unite fidelity to nature and poetic composition. Max Halbe was much acclaimed for his romantic drama "Jugend" (1893) with its atmospheric depiction of youthful passions. When he set himself higher goals, as in his character dramas "Lebenswende" and "Der Eroberer", he was unable to break through. Ludwig Jacobowski set himself a great task in his "Loki" (1898), the "novel of a god", in which he shines a light deep into the abysses of human nature and illustrates its eternal striving through the battle of the destructive Loki against the creative Asen. With his lyrical collection "Shining Days" (1899), he joined the ranks of the most outstanding modern poets. He combines simple beauty of expression with a harmonious view of the world and life. In the last decade, Friedrich Nietzsche exerted an incomparable influence on contemporary thought. Through a radical "revaluation of all values", he sought to portray the entire path that Western culture has taken since the foundation of Christianity as a great idealistic error. Humanity must discard all belief in the hereafter, all ideas that go beyond real existence, and draw its strength and culture purely from this world. Man should not see his ideal in the likeness of higher powers, but in the highest enhancement of his natural abilities up to the "superman". This is the meaning of his main poetic and philosophical work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".

[ 91 ] In France, literature in the last third of the century initially continued along the same lines as before. Through Emile Augier, Alexander Dumas the Younger and Victorien Sardou, drama developed into a morality play and social drama. In the latter, the main aim was to illustrate a moralizing tendency through exciting entanglements and corresponding solutions. Alongside this, a dramatic genre developed that placed the main emphasis on witty dialog and social satire. It has its main representative in Edouard Pailleron. The training in skillful scene direction blossomed in Labiche, Meilhac, Bisson. The truth and probability of events play no role in them, only the development of the plot, which is calculated for effect and must be rich in surprising twists and turns. In poetry, the striving for correctness of form, for smooth, pleasing expression prevails in the "school of the Parnassiens". Frangois Coppée, R. F. A. Sully-Prudhomme and Charles Leconte de Lisle particularly cultivated this style. Anatole France also belongs to it with his lyric poetry, which strives for a classical style of representation. In contrast, Charles Baudelaire is a genuinely Romantic poet who prefers to be in a state of intoxication of the soul and loves to depict the uncanny, demonic forces of the human interior. He wants to expose all dark instincts. He literally revels in feelings of fear and lust. A healthier sense can be found in Gustav Flaubert and especially in the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who strive to restrain the artistic imagination through the objective spirit of science. Under their influence, a naturalism emerged that did not want to shape reality according to subjective arbitrariness, but rather to make use of the objective laws of knowledge for the poetic depiction of things. It does not want aesthetic laws, but only those based on the mere observation of facts. This direction found its perfect expression in Emile Zola. He no longer wants to shape things and processes artistically. Just as the scientific experimenter brings substances and forces together in the laboratory and then waits to see what develops as a result of their mutual influence, Zola experimentally juxtaposes things and people and seeks to continue the development as it would have to result if the same things and people stood opposite each other in the same way in objective reality. In this way he develops the experimental novel. In doing so, he leans on the achievements of modern science. Alongside this Zolashian naturalism, another of the Balzacian type continues, which has its main representative in Alphonse Daudet. Guy de Manpassant is a storyteller with a brilliant power of perception that penetrates the depths of the soul. Important cultural phenomena of our time are recorded in his novels and in stylistically masterful novellas. As a draughtsman of character, he portrays people with sharp contours, and his depiction of actions is as much characterized by natural truth as by artful composition. In France, Victor Cherbuliez, Hector Malot and Georges Ohnet satisfied that part of the public which in Germany found its satisfaction in Lindau, Blumenthal and others. A subtle artist with a refined technique is Pierre Loti, who, however, cultivates a style of art that is more suited to the artist's developed taste than to a wider circle.

[ 92 ] In the Dutch language, under the name "Muliatuli", Eduard Douwes Dekker created narrative poems and philosophical works of ideas, which from a bold, out of a bold, free spirit, they make powerful accusations against everything in contemporary culture which, seen from the vantage point of true humanity, is ripe for destruction, but which is preserved by brute force and robs the valuable and noble of the space for free development. Multatuli does not shy away from any sharpness, even one-sidedness of expression, when he wants to hit what he considers necessary for persecution. A kind of leading spirit of Dutch folklore in Belgium is Hendrik Conscience, who made a great impression with his intimate depictions of modest living conditions and has also found imitators in his homeland. The Belgian M. Maeterlinck takes a mystical view of nature and the human soul. He is less interested in clear thoughts and perceptible processes than in the dark forces that we sense in the events of the outside world and in the depths of our unconscious soul. He depicts them in his dramas and seeks to approach them philosophically in his subtle essays.

[ 93 ] The English poetry of this period is characterized by the works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. He is of a romantic nature, a fiery depictor of sensuality, a draughtsman of great passions, but also of the tender vibrations of the soul and atmospheric images of nature. The sea with its manifold beauties is a favorite area for him. His lullabies are characteristic of his sensuous mind. In the dramatic field ("Atalanta in Calydon") he strove for Greek perfection of form. In addition to him, Matthew Arnold and Dante Gabriel Rosetti also come into consideration. The former is reminiscent of Byron in his world view and expression, while the latter seeks to achieve a simple style through ancient artistic means. William Morris is an original nature with a powerful gift for depiction. From close observation, Rudyard Kipling depicts Indian-English life in captivating novellas, novels and popular-sounding poems.

[ 94 ] In America, a literature independent of the English mother country has developed since the middle of the century. A universal spirit and strong artist is Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. As a lyric poet he has achieved recognition throughout the educated world. His poems speak of a noble, great character. Those of his creations in which he movingly sings of the fate of slaves are characteristic of his humane view of the world. He is also an excellent storyteller with a soft, heartfelt and humorous tone. In "Hiawatha" Longfellow has described the ancient cultural conditions of the Indian people, in "The Golden Legend" he deals with the eternal poetic problem, the striving and wandering man as a symbol of the whole human species. Contemporary English prose has found an outstanding master in Washington Irving. His humor has a sentimental streak. Francis Bret Harte, the author of the world-famous Californian tales, and the thoughtful humorist Mark Twain differ most in style from the mother country. In Walt Whitman, the American imagination and sensibility found a particularly characteristic expression. From the thoughts he expresses to his treatment of language, everything is modern in the most genuine sense.

[ 95 ] In recent decades, the change from old to new views has been most rapid in northern Europe. It developed under the influence of a merciless, unsparing criticism of tradition. Georg Brandes, the intellectual Dane, led the way. A bold, enthusiastic free spirit gave him the broadest impact. His intellectual horizon is of rare greatness. He was able to familiarize himself with the various cultures of Europe with a keen sense and thus acquired a breadth of vision that enabled him to follow the intellectual currents of all countries in their essential characteristics. By seeking out fruitful ideas everywhere and instilling them into the education of Denmark, he became the reformer of the entire world view of his fatherland. In the field of poetry, the lyric poet Holger Drachmann and the great stylistic artist J. P. Jacobsen, who is both a thorough and profound connoisseur of the human soul, and who is able to depict inner processes and abysses of the mind in an atmospheric way, were active in Denmark.

[ 96 ] In Norway, Björnstjerne Björnson, Henrik Ibsen and Arne Garborg are the creators of a type of poetry whose influence can be felt everywhere in Europe today. They were preceded like prophets by Jonas Lie and Alexander Kjelland, the former as an important psychologist and depictor of popular life, the latter as a sharp satirist in the field of moral views and social grievances. Björnson is a poet who serves the liberal ideals of his fatherland with his art. He is a political spirit who always has the progress of culture in mind in all his work and who is able to give his characters clear, clear outlines from his firm convictions. A revolutionary spirit is Henrik Ibsen. He has incorporated everything that is revolutionary in modern culture into his personality. He is a rich, versatile nature. His works therefore show great differences in style and in the means with which he presents his world view. He traces the germs of decomposition that lie in the views, customs and social orders of the present ("Stützen der Gesellschaft" 1877), the lies of life ("Volksfeind" 1882), the position of the sexes ("Nora" 1879, "Ghosts" 1881), the position of the sexes ("Nora" 1879, "Ghosts" 1881), he depicts demonic forces in the human soul as a deep psychologist ("Frau vom Meere" 1888, "Hedda Gabler" 1890, "Baumeister Solneß" 1892), he characterizes the mystical in the soul ("Klein Eyolf" 1894). Ibsen's basic theme is the tragedy of human life in "Brand" (1866) and "Peer Gynt" (1867). Pastor Brand is intended to portray the Faustian struggle of man living in the imaginative and emotional mode of the present. The hero knows only one love, that of his rational ideals, and does not allow the language of feeling to come into its own. Instead of taking possession of human hearts in order to achieve the fulfillment of his demands through them in a benevolent manner, he pursues them with ruthless harshness. He becomes intolerant out of idealism. Therein lies the tragedy of his personality. In contrast to him is Peer Gynt, the man of fantasy, whose ideas are not rooted enough in reality to inspire their bearer with the kind of energy that enables people to assert themselves in life. The versatility of Ibsen's art is revealed particularly clearly when we consider the "Comedy of Love" (1862), which shows us the poet as a doubter of life's goals, alongside the "Crown Pretenders", written just one year later, in which certainty and confidence are expressed in the creator's world view. The dependence of man on the external environment, on views within which he lives and which he receives as tradition, is depicted in "Bund der Jugend" (1869), while "Kaiser und Galiläer" (1873) illustrates the determination of the will through the unalterable, natural necessity of all things. "The Wild Duck" (1884) and "Rosmersholm" (1886) are paintings of the soul from which the deeply penetrating psychological connoisseur speaks.

[ 97 ] In place of Greek fate and the divine order of the world, he sets natural law as the driving force of the drama, which does not punish the guilty and reward the good, but governs people's actions as it rolls a stone down a slippery slope ("Ghosts"). Arne Garbor does not, like Ibsen, have the art of depicting broad lines, but he paints the life of the soul faithfully and is a sharp accuser of social institutions. Sexual life is at the center of his approach. The two Swedes August Strindberg and Ola Hansson are also powerful painters of the soul, but they like to take their material from unhealthy nature. Strindberg's pessimism, which, however, stems from deeply painful life experiences, presents itself almost like the distorted image of a healthy world view.

[ 98 ] Russian intellectual life also underwent great spiritual upheavals during this period. While the older Russian literature proved to be an imitator of Western European culture in its ideas and conceptions as well as in its means of expression, the national spirit now deepened and sought to build its views from the depths of its own national essence. Here, too, criticism leads the way. In W. Belinskij Russia has an aesthete and philosopher of great spiritual vision and high aims. From a purely logical point of view, his critical activity lacks consistency; Belinsky is a constant seeker who wants to bring clarity to the confused ideas and dark impulses of his people. In doing so, he is guided more by his sure feelings than by any abstract ideas. The creations of Nicolai Gogol, who hurls the most terrible accusations against his fatherland, but accusations that speak of a deep, heartfelt love, prove how unfathomably deep and at the same time how dreamy and confused the spirit of the people is. A mystical sense underlies his imagination, which drives him restlessly forward without him seeing any clear goal before him. In N. Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and in F. M. Dostoyevsky, this dark urge gradually works its way into clarity. Turgenev is, however, still strongly influenced by Western European ideas. In delicate images, he mainly depicts suffering people who somehow cannot come to terms with life. Goncharov and Pissemsky are depictions of Russian social life, without any further outlook on a world view. Dostoyevsky is an ingenious psychologist who descends into the depths of the soul and reveals the innermost depths of man in brilliant, albeit sometimes gruesome, images. His "Raskolnikov" was regarded throughout Europe as a model of psychological representation. Count Leo Tolstoy is a representative of Russian intellectual life as a whole. He developed from a powerful storyteller ("War and Peace" 1872, "Anna Karenina" 1877) to a prophet of a new form of religion that sought its roots in a somewhat violent interpretation of primitive Christianity and elevated complete selflessness to the ideal of life. Tolstoy also sees all art that is not aimed at human compassion and the improvement of coexistence as a superfluous luxury that a selfless person does not indulge in. In Hungary, we encounter the imaginative storyteller Maurus Jókai and the playwright Ludwig Doczi, as well as Emerich Madách, who provided the Hungarian Faust in his "Tragedy of Man".

[ 99 ] The most successful of the more recent Italian poets is Giosuè Carducci, who strives for classical and beautiful expression. A singer of fiery sensuality is Lorenzo Stecchetti, and the playwright Pietro Cossa is an important characterizer. Giovanni Verga deals with Sicilian peasant life in lively stories. Italy has its social poets in Guido Mazzoni and Ada Negri. In the field of drama, the idealist Felice Cavallotti and the naturalist Emilio Praga stand opposite each other. - From Spain, José Echegaray briefly captured the attention of European audiences, to whom he delivered a much-discussed drama in his "Galeotto", whose structure is reminiscent of the abstract consistency of a calculus.