The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We can no longer go on as we have done up to now. Morality, which has been trampled deep into the dust, must be revived! So thought a number of well-meaning people, and they founded an "Association for Ethical Culture". The news has just gone out from Berlin that this new institution for the salvation of mankind has come into being, and the invitation to join. And among the founders we find many a name that belongs to a personality we admire. The purpose of the association should be to emphasize the general humanity of all religious and moral characteristics of the individual religions and cultures and to make this the carrier of its world view and way of life. This is to be achieved through literary (lectures, discussions and the publication of writings) and practical (acts of charity and efforts to improve the situation of the suffering population) association activities. In view of the first part of the program, a discussion of this association probably belongs in this section of a literary journal.

The basic error at the root of this is the belief in a general human morality. As little as "man in general" is possible, but only a conceptual fiction, so little can we speak of ethics in general. Every people, every age, indeed every individual has their own morality. The thinker can then seek out what all these moral views have in common, he can search for the driving forces that are equally effective in all of them. But the result obtained in this way has only theoretical value. It is infinitely important for the realization of man's ethical nature, his moral essence; it can never be made the basis for the conduct of life. And there can be nothing more satisfying than that this is not possible. Otherwise, the individual expression of national and human natures, of ages and individuals would be replaced by the template-like actions of moral puppets, which would always be strung up on the strings of the general human moral doctrine.

Nowhere more than in moral life can the principle apply: Live and let live! The respective morality of a person or an age is the unconscious result of his view of the world and life. According to a certain way of thinking and feeling, action acquires an individual character; and there can never be any thought of a separate cultivation of the latter. Today, an elite of educated people is working on a reorganization of our view of life, both in terms of science as well as religion and art. Everyone is doing their bit. What comes out of this will determine our actions. The cultivation of knowledge, truth and artistic views can be the content of common endeavors. It will then automatically lead to a common ethic in many areas. If everyone openly presents what he knows, if he puts on the public agenda what he has achieved; in short, if he expresses himself in every direction: then he will be more to the whole than if he approaches it with the pretension of being able to tell it how it should behave. Many of our contemporaries have finally had enough of all the talk about what we should and should not do. They want insight into the workings of the world. If they have this, then they also know how to behave in the world they recognize. And anyone who does not have this insight and yet approaches them with good teachings for our actions is considered a moral philosopher. Our task within humanity results simply from our realization of the nature of that part of it to which we belong. For those who recognize the truth of these propositions, aspirations such as those underlying the "Association for Ethical Culture" are considered unfashionable and backward.

We have other things to do than think about how we should behave. Our whole life is in a period of transition because our old views are no longer adequate for modern consciousness, and because the materialism that the natural sciences want to put in its place is only a view for flatheads. We may soon be at the point where someone speaks the redeeming word that solves the riddle of the world from the side from which mankind of the present has posed it. We are again suffering from the great questions of knowledge and the highest problems of art. The old has become rotten. And when the great solution is found, in which many people will be able to believe for some time, when the new gospel is there, then, as always in this case, the new custom will also arise of its own accord as a necessary consequence. New world views bring forth new moral teachings all by themselves. The Messiah of truth is always also the Messiah of morality. We have no use for popular educators who have a lot for our hearts but nothing for our heads. The heart follows the head if the latter only has a certain direction.

If efforts such as those of the "Association for Ethical Culture" have long been the order of the day in America, we Germans have no reason to imitate them. Among peoples with predominantly practical, materialistic tendencies, a certain slackness has set in with regard to questions of knowledge. They do not have the lively interest in questions of knowledge and truth that is still native to us in Germany. It is therefore convenient for them to be able to make themselves comfortable on the resting bed of a general human moral doctrine. The stereotypical morality does not hinder them in what they think about. They do not know the torments of the thinker, not those of the artist. At least not those who belong to the societies for ethical culture. But whoever, like the German, has ideal life in him, whoever wants to advance spiritually, the path must be free and open for him, not obstructed by moral rules and popular education measures. To repeat an often-used expression, everyone must be able to be happy in his own way. Therefore, no modern thinker can join the association in question or approve of its tendencies. I have no doubt that the word "tolerance", which the association has written on its banner, will exert its talmigold-like effect on broad sections of society. It will certainly achieve just as much as the other, no less abused, words: Liberalism and humanity. Goethe said that he wanted nothing to do with liberal ideas; only attitudes and feelings could be liberal. A sworn liberal, when I once quoted the great poet's view to him, was soon finished with his judgment: it was just one of the many weaknesses that Goethe had in himself. To me, however, it seems like one of the many views that Goethe has in common with all people who are energetically active in the intellectual field: the ruthless advocacy of what is recognized and understood as true, which is at the same time combined with the highest respect for the individuality of others. Only those who are something themselves can also recognize the other, who likewise means something. The average person, who wants to be everything and therefore nothing, demands the same kind of nothingness alongside his own. Those who live according to the template themselves also want to shape others according to it. That is why all people who have something to say are also interested in others. But those who really have nothing to say speak of tolerance and liberalism. But by this they mean nothing more than that a general home should be created for everything that is insignificant and shallow. But they should not count on those who have tasks in the world. For them it is hurtful if they are expected to bend under the yoke of any generality, be it that of a general standard of art or that of a general morality. They want to be free, to have free movement of their individuality. The rejection of any norm is the main characteristic of modern consciousness. Kant's principle: Live in such a way that the maxim of your actions can become universal, has been dismissed. It must be replaced by: Live in the way that best corresponds to your inner being; live yourself fully, completely. It is precisely when each individual gives to the whole what no one else can give, but only he, that he does the most for it. Kant's principle, however, demands the performance of what all can do equally. However, the right person is not interested in this. The "Society for Ethical Culture" has a poor understanding of our times. Their program proves that.

[ 1 ] Our view as to the sources of our knowledge cannot be with out influence upon our view in regard to practical conduct. Man behaves according to thought characterizations which lie within him. What he performs is directed according to purposes, goals, which he sets up for himself. But it is obvious that these goals, purposes, ideals, etc., will bear the same character as the rest of man's thought world. Thus a dogmatic science must result in a practical truth essentially unlike that which follows from our theory of knowledge. If the truths to which a person attains in knowledge are determined by objective necessity residing outside of thought, such also will be the ideals which he sets up as the bases of his conduct. In that case a person behaves according to laws in whose establishment he has no part in any real sense: he thinks a norm for himself which is fore-ordained for his behavior from without. But this is the character of a commandment which man has to obey. Dogma as a practical truth is moral commandment.

[ 2 ] The case is entirely different when the theory of knowledge here presented is made basic. This recognizes no other basis for truths than the thought content residing within these. When, therefore, a moral ideal comes into existence, it is the inner power lying in its content which governs our conduct. It is not because an ideal is given to us as a law that we conduct ourselves according to it, but because the ideal, by virtue of its content, is active within us, directs us. The impulse toward conduct lies, not without us, but within us. If we felt ourselves subjected to the commandment of duty, we should be compelled to behave in a definite manner, because it was so ordered. Here shall comes first and afterwards will, which must unite itself to the former. This is not true according to our point of view. The will is sovereign. It performs only what lies as thought-content in the human personality. Man does not receive laws from an external Power; he is his own lawgiver.

[ 3 ] Who, indeed, according to our world view, should give these to him? The World-Fundament has poured itself out completely into the world; it has not drawn back from the world in order to control it from without, but impels it from within; it has not withheld itself from the world. The highest form in which it emerges within the reality of ordinary life is that of thought and, with this, human personality. If, then, the World-Fundament has goals, these are identical with the goals which man sets up for himself as he manifests his own being. Man is not behaving in accordance with the purposes of the Guiding Power of the world when he investigates one or another of His commandments, but when he behaves in accordance with his own insight. For in him the Guiding Power of the world manifests Himself. He does not live as Will somewhere outside of man; He has renounced his own will in order that all might depend upon the will of man. If man is to be enabled to become his own lawgiver, all thought about world-determinations outside of man must be abandoned.

[ 4 ] We take this opportunity to call attention to the very excellent treatment of the subject by Kreyenbühl inPhilosophische Monatsheften(Vol. 18, No. 3). This paper correctly explains how the maxims of our conduct result directly from the determination of our individuality; how everything which is ethically great is not given through the power of the moral law but is performed on the basis of the direct impulse of an individual idea.

[ 5 ] Only from such a point of view is a true human freedom possible. If man does not bear within himself the reason for his conduct, but must guide himself in accordance with commandments, he then acts under a compulsion; he stands under a necessity almost like a mere entity of Nature.

[ 6 ] Our philosophy is, therefore, in the highest sense a philosophy of freedom. It shows first theoretically how every force which controls the world from without must fall away in order to make man his own master, in the best of all senses of that word. When man acts morally, this is not, from our point of view, the fulfillment of duty, but the expression of his wholly free nature. Man acts, not because he ought, but because he wills. This point of view Goethe also had in mind when he said: “Lessing, who was reluctantly conscious of many sorts of limitations, causes one of his characters to say, ‘No one must, must.' A brilliant and happy man said: ‘He who wills must.' A third—to be sure, an educated person—added, ‘He who has insight also wills.'” There is no impulse, therefore, for our conduct save our own insight. The free man acts according to his insight, without the intrusion of any sort of compulsion, according to commands which he gives to himself.

[ 7 ] It is about these truths that the well known Kant-Schiller controversy revolves. Kant took the standpoint of the commandment of duty. He thought it degrading to the moral law to make it dependent upon human subjectivity. According to his view, man acts morally only when he banishes all subjective motives in his conduct and simply bows to the majesty of duty. Schiller saw in this point of view a degradation of human nature. Must this be so evil that its own impulses must be thus completely set aside if it is to be moral! Schiller and Goethe's world-conception can recognize only the point of view we have set forth. The point of departure for human action is to be sought in man himself.

[ 8 ] For this reason, in history also, the subject of which is man, we must not speak of influences upon man's conduct from without, of ideas which reside in the age, etc. Least of all must we speak of a plan constituting the basis of history. History is nothing but the evolution of human action, points of view, etc. Goethe said: “In all ages it is only the individuals that have been effectual for science, not the age. It was the age that put Socrates to death with poison; the age that burned Huss; the ages have always remained alike.” All a priori constructions of plans which are supposed to form the basis of history are contrary to the historical method as this issues from the nature of history. The goal of history is to learn what men contribute for the advancement of their race; to learn what goal this or that personality has set for himself, what direction he has given to his age. History is to be based entirely on human nature. The will, the tendencies of human nature, are to be grasped. Our science of knowledge excludes all possibility that a purpose should be ascribed to history, as if men were educated from a lower stage of perfection to a higher, etc. In the same way it seems fallacious from our point of view when the effort is made (as Herder does in Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Humanity ) to set historical events in due order like facts of Nature, according to the succession of cause and effect. The laws of history are of a far higher sort. One fact in physics is so determined by another that the law stands above the phenomenon. A historical fact, as something ideal, is determined by the ideal. Here one can speak of cause and effect only when one depends wholly upon the external. Who could believe that he is in keeping with the facts when he calls Luther the cause of the Reformation? History is a science of ideas. Its reality consists of ideas. Therefore devotion to the object is the sole correct method. Every step beyond that is unhistorical.

[ 9 ] Psychology, the science of peoples, and history are the leading forms of spiritual, or cultural, science. Their methods, as we have seen, are based upon the direct grasp of the ideal reality. Their subject is the Idea, the spiritual, as that of inorganic science is the natural law and that of organics is the type.

Among the accusations that are currently being made against spiritual science and spiritual research, one of the most significant is that these spiritual science or spiritual research would be in opposition to the well-established results of natural science, the natural science that is rightly called the pride of our present spiritual life, indeed of our entire present cultural life. Should the accusation be substantiated that spiritual science and spiritual research intend to oppose these established results of natural science, then, it can be said, spiritual research would truly be in a bad way. Not only would its possibility of finding access to the understanding and heart of the modern human being be in doubt, but its very justification would be in question. Therefore, in addition to everything that has been said in the previous lectures about the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, today this particular episodic consideration may be added about the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, before the next time we look at a figure who is only accessible to spiritual science in the eminent sense: the figure of Jakob Böhme.

Spiritual research, as it is meant here in these reflections, undoubtedly presents itself as something that often appears new in the face of the habits of thought and spiritual aspirations of our time, as something that falls outside the usual ways of thinking, the modes of representation of contemporary spiritual life. And the question suggests itself: how is it that precisely at a time when the educated person who is interested in spiritual questions at all places all hope in what science can give – how is it that at such a time this spiritual science wants to gain recognition, that it places itself in the middle of the triumph of scientific thinking?

Perhaps the easiest way to answer this question is to take a brief look at intellectual life in the last third or perhaps the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when not only did scientific research rise to its zenith, experiencing victory after victory, but it was also the time when hopes grew ever greater that all possible information about the meaning of what can be called spirit and spiritual life would come from the natural sciences. Anyone who was fully aware of the intellectual life in the last third of the nineteenth century, or let us say, anyone who was able to let the great hopes of this intellectual life of the nineteenth century take effect on them, for example in the eighties nineteenth century, could not fail to notice how questions were coming from all areas of scientific research, questions that seemed to force all human thought to be placed on a new footing that broke with the old. Only one point will be emphasized. In the 1770s and 1780s, anyone interested in intellectual life could become acquainted with what was more or less new in the field of natural science at the time, for example, the mechanical theory of heat. Those who were familiar with natural science recognized that something like the mechanical theory of heat was an enormous achievement of the human mind. But perhaps we are less interested in the point of view of such a person than in the point of view of someone for whom the question of spiritual knowledge was of primary importance. What did such a person see?

Such a person might have noticed that among the many sensory impressions that assail the human being when using his senses, there is the sensation of what is called heat or, let us say, heat and cold. Like color, like light and like sound, warmth is, after all, also a sense impression. Through his senses, man feels that the world around him is in a certain state of warmth, and he perceives this warmth first as an impression on his sensation. At that time, as has just been mentioned, it was considered a fact proven by research at that time that what man calls warmth, what he believes to be the case, and what he perceives as being spread out in space, permeates bodies and affects beings, that this objectively out there in nature is nothing other than the movement of the smallest parts of the body. So you could say to yourself: When you put your hand into lukewarm water and perceive a certain state of warmth, this sensation of a state of warmth is only an appearance. What appears to you as an immediate impression is only an appearance, it is only an effect on your organism that is caused by something outside. It is only a small kind of movement; you do not perceive the movement. The smallest parts of water are active, but you do not perceive the activity, the movement. Rather, because the movement is so fast, you do not perceive it as such, but it gives you the impression of warmth. When books appeared at that time, such as “Heat, considered as a form of motion,” it was considered a great achievement of the time, and we younger people at that time had to study how the smallest molecular parts move in a liquid, in a gas gas, bumping into the walls, colliding with each other internally, and it was clear that what is going on internally is, in sensation, what gives the appearance of what is called heat. From there, a certain habit of thinking emerged, a certain way of looking at natural phenomena, and I myself still remember how, when I was a little boy, my school principal, enthusiastic about this scientific achievement of his time , regarded all natural forces, from gravity to heat and chemical and magnetic forces and so on, as mere appearances and saw the truth in those movements, in those fine states of motion inside the body. That school director, Heinrich Schramm his name was, saw gravity, the force of falling, for example, only as a movement of the smallest parts of the body. In the light of such a view of nature, there was indeed something that could lead one to say: So everything “real” is just, let us say, space extended to infinity, matter situated in this space and divided into the smallest parts, and the movements of this matter! And the hope could well arise that, just as heat, electricity, magnetism and light could be explained as a fine activity of the smallest particles of matter, so too would one day the activity of thinking, the activity of the soul, be able to be explained as a fine activity of that matter which composes the human or animal body.

There then followed a number of phases in the development of the scientific-theoretical way of thinking. For example, in the 1880s, if you were a physicist, you had to understand light and the whole world of colors as a kind of glow and study infinitely complicated, fine movements and motions within matter and the ether. Then, in the course of the 1880s, it became apparent that people were becoming skeptical of these fine motions and limited itself more to considering the phenomena, the facts, as they present themselves, to express them through the calculation, to describe them, and not so much to speculate about what is supposed to be imperceptible, but only supposed to underlie everything: about the finer activities of matter and ether. That was more in the field of physics.

In the field of physics, there was no real possibility of getting out of the habitual thinking that arose when one considered these fine movements of matter in relation to something that was supposed to make it possible to grasp the spirit in its immediacy. Something was holding us back, so to speak, from the natural sciences, from looking at the spirit in the way that was asserted in the last lectures here. In addition, there were quite different things. Anyone who was involved in the development of natural science at that time was not only confronted with what has just been characterized, but also with the repercussions of all that had been revealed, for example, by the great discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann in the first half of the nineteenth century, through which the smallest parts, the cells, were found within the plant and animal organism. This did not prove the reality of atoms and molecules, but the organic forms were reduced to their smallest building blocks, to cells whose forms were only accessible to the microscope. Then there was the fallout from what was associated with the name Darwin, and one was further under the impression of the great deed of Ernst Haeckel, who in the 1860s had extended Darwin's theory to include humans.

Thus, a scientific approach was adopted that started with the simplest things in the plant and animal world and observed how, from the imperfect to the more perfect beings and up to to man, the individual organs themselves arose in such a way that, by comparison, one could, as it were, determine the process by which the individual organs, which were more complicated, developed from the simpler ones. An enormous amount of material was collected. The breadth and scope of this material was so great that, for example, in the 1870s, one of the most important comparative anatomists of the present day, Carl Gegenbaur, was able to say in his “Comparative Anatomy” (1878) that, especially in the last few decades, an enormous amount of individual knowledge had been collected that showed how related living beings are in terms of their organs, and that one had to wait for the possibility - so Gegenbaur thought - to raise knowledge to “insight”; and he promised himself from the Darwinian method that it would be possible to show what the comparison of the organs of the highest living beings with those of less perfect beings would irrefutably reveal, that there is also a so-called physical descent of the perfect living beings from the imperfect ones. Thus, as it were, the chain was seen to close in the evolution from imperfect living beings to more perfect ones, even up to man, and it could be said that the most complicated being we know, the human body, arises through a kind of summation of those forces and activities prevail even in the simplest creatures, and even through a summation of the forces and activities in inanimate nature itself, the most complicated being we know, the human body, would ultimately come into being.

Enormous hopes were pinned on this scientific ideal. In fact, at that time it was difficult to distinguish between what were scientific facts and what was thought or speculated into the facts, because for anyone who thought deeply, a distinction between facts and theories did indeed exist. The difference was that one could say to oneself: If one proceeded as carefully and subtly as Darwin himself, especially in his earlier years, one would find an enormous amount of material on the mutual relationships and points of comparison between the individual living creatures, from the imperfect ones of the animal and plant kingdoms up to man. But there is a difference, one could say, between what emerged as a fact from the similarity of the external structure and from the similarity of the internal processes, and what could only be imagined: the hypothesis, the assumption of the descent of the perfect living beings from the imperfect ones, because this descent could not be traced according to the facts known so far. One had before one the sum of living beings, more perfect and less perfect. But for anyone who could think thoroughly, descent as such always remained only a hypothesis if one wanted to remain on scientific ground. But the material was impressive.

The results of scientific research penetrated deep into the soul, sometimes with a shattering effect due to the magnitude of the insights that could be gained. In addition, there were many other things. Today's introductory lecture must refer to many individual aspects. For example, reference must be made to the tremendous discovery made by Helmholtz in the field of light phenomena and the effects of light on the human organ of sight, and also made by Helmholtz in relation to sound and tone phenomena and the effect of sound and tone on the human ear and the human organ of hearing. In this way, knowledge of the visual process, which had previously remained mysterious, was acquired. We also learned to recognize what happens in the ear, for example, what a complicated miracle, one might say, a piano-like apparatus is located in the ear. In place of much of what previously seemed merely imagined, there now came a more precise knowledge of the structure of the human organs. One could say to oneself: What appears on the outside as mere movement and activity is transformed — such a transformation, as we have just seen, essentially resulted from the mechanical theory of heat — by the wonderful workings in the organs, in relation to the perceptions that live in the soul. And the inner life of the soul is ultimately built up from what our organs shape out of the workings of matter and space.

In many cases, the whole spiritual process that took place in the souls at that time can actually be described by saying that the souls were stunned by everything that was found there, both on a large and on an individual scale. One had to say to oneself: an earlier time knew nothing of all this. Many traditions about the human soul life seemed obsolete now that one was only beginning to study the effect of matter and its movements on the human organism, to study it scientifically in the true sense of the word.

For the spiritual scientist, the whole thing was, let us say, less important because of the details than because one had to admit: in order to enter into the wide perspectives that are opened up into a world of pure fact, something is needed that one does not initially believe to be present in the old considerations of the soul or spiritual life. In many souls that experienced all this in the last third of the nineteenth century, the following feeling arose, for example. These souls could say to themselves: Of course, in the old days many things were thought about the big questions, for example, about the change from sleep to waking and back, about the question of the immortality of the human soul, about the questions of life and death, about the origin of existence, and so on. But if we compare the entire methodical way of thinking, the entire way of conducting spiritual research in those ancient times, from which such traditions of soul research arise, and compare it with the strict, conscientious way of modern scientific research, then what has come down to us from those ancient times simply falls short of the strict and conscientious method of today's scientific research. Even if the spiritual researcher was not affected by the results of natural research, and perhaps was not even carried away by the results, the one thing that had a tremendous effect on the spiritual researcher was the rigor of scientific thinking, the conscientiousness, the tremendous sense of truth in scientific thinking.

In the face of such facts, anyone who was at all concerned with science, whether natural science or the humanities, had to develop the urge that can be characterized as follows: Science in the most serious sense of the word, which can set the tone for the spiritual life of the present day, can only seek its salvation in the strict thinking, in the truly conscientious research that can be learned from natural science. Such an urge gradually transforms itself, and also had to transform itself, into a kind of scientific conscience in the spiritual-scientific researcher. One could say to oneself: Certainly, as in all ages, so also in modern times the soul has the urge and the impulse to get to know its own nature and essence, and above all to get to know the processes that reach beyond birth and death. But only that which presents itself in the form of a scientific way of thinking can make an impression on the culture of our time for those who look clearly and impartially. One certainly saw many things about all kinds of psychological questions that one would like to say today — appear on the spiritual market. One saw many things that were and are truly quite far removed from conscientious methods of thinking developed through natural science; but one could say: Such things may sometimes make an impression here or there for a while, due to the carelessness and convenience of contemporary thinking make an impression here and there for a while, but such an impression cannot endure, for even the most casual will eventually ask themselves: What can conscientious thinking, trained in natural science, say to that which has supposedly been researched about the spiritual world?

Thus, the need arose for the soul researchers to conduct research entirely according to the model of natural science. One might say that psychology, the doctrine of the soul by Franz Brentano, who has already been mentioned here, is a kind of ideal that has not been fully realized, a psychology that was intended to fill many volumes. But of all these volumes, only one appeared, the first, in the spring of 1874. And although it was promised that the next volume would appear in the fall of the same year, it has not appeared to this day.

Brentano did not proceed according to the pattern of those psychologists of whom it was said last time that they completely exclude the great questions, for example, about the nature of the alternation of sleep and waking, the question of the immortality of the human soul, and the like, but he wanted to treat all these questions entirely according to the pattern of strict scientific methodology. He failed. And why did he fail? Franz Brentano could never bring himself to take the path that has shown itself to be necessary for the present precisely because a mind like Brentano's failed after he did not want to take it. This path has been characterized in the past lectures and especially last time. From this path it was shown how it alone is suitable to lead us into the higher regions, into the spiritual regions of existence, into that which also reaches beyond birth and death. Franz Brentano could not bring himself to go this way. That one must go this way if one wants to reach an end, a goal, he has literally proved negatively by the fact that his psychology stopped at the first volume, which has nothing to do with any of the great questions just mentioned, that he could not yet approach the great questions, as he wanted to.

I have tried to give you a picture of the spiritual life of the 1880s, the period in which anyone seeking access to the spiritual realms would have found themselves. If one allowed everything that has been mentioned to take effect, one could not so easily be satisfied with the then emerging, initially sporadic products of the burgeoning spiritual science. I will only point out, how a work like “Esoteric Buddhism” by A. P. Sinnett came at the same time into the middle of not only scientific research itself, but also into the scientific education of the time.

I do not want to discuss the title question, that here Buddhism has nothing to do with the Buddha and with Buddhism as it is meant as a religious confession, but note that with this book, which in German-speaking areas in the eighties years of the nineteenth century, was initially an overview of world phenomena, of the great course of cosmic events and also of the questions that arise in connection with the nature of man, as well as in the relationships beyond birth and death. What was communicated in this book could at first seem striking. For anyone who turned their gaze to spiritual things could, as such, agree with much of what was written in Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” in a certain respect. Much of it did not contradict what one could and was allowed to think, even if one stood strictly on the ground of natural science. But there was one thing that contradicted the scientific education of the time, one thing that made it impossible to simply accept this book as an interesting product of its time: the way in which the book was presented, the way in which it summarized things and the way in which these things were, for example, sources, was in no way justified before the strict scientific education and truthfulness, and that a person educated in natural science, no matter how much he agreed with the individual results and messages of this book, had to feel repelled by the whole way of presenting them.

The same applied to many other works that appeared in this field. It was even the case with the book by A. P. Blavatsky, who was justifiably famous to a certain extent, that appeared at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s: “The Secret Doctrine”. Anyone who had to do with these things could say to themselves: There is profound knowledge and insight into spiritual things in this book, but the whole way of presenting it is so chaotic, so mixed up with scientific dilettantism, which is particularly evident in the refutation of scientific theories and hypotheses, that those who have been scientifically educated cannot go along with this book at all.

Thus, two things emerged, so to speak: for someone who had a heart and mind for the existence of a spiritual world, on the one hand there was the scientific way of thinking, the whole scientific way of conceiving things. He could use it to develop his scientific conscientiousness, to free himself from all dilettantism, if he seriously engaged with it. But he could also learn from it how to conduct rigorous research into the factual, and how, through such research, to arrive at verified results that really intervene in life, that are not only foundational for a theory but for the facts of life. On the other hand, however, he could say to himself: But where one seeks to gain something for a spiritual interpretation of life's phenomena from natural science itself, where natural science tries to do so through itself, little can be squeezed out of it for the spiritual, and the less so the more rigorously it proceeds in the realm of the factual. Therefore, someone in such a position had good reason to look back a little at the history of the development of mankind. There he could learn that, even if one disregards spiritual-scientific research, something is gathered together in the various spiritual documents of the peoples and epochs, something purely externally documentary lies there that encloses a grandiose spiritual core of knowledge, which, if one looks at it more closely, is not to be taken lightly take it lightly, but the more one delves into this compilation, the more it offers in the way of insights into spiritual life, even if one cannot approach the way it is presented, or even the way it must be found according to this way of presentation.

Only for those who approach the subject superficially can what ancient Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom contains be no more than a collection of human musings. Those who delve deeper will not find musings, but will actually see how plausible ideas about the nature of the spirit and its effectiveness are contained in these things in a variety of forms that look grotesque to today's world. And just as with Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom, this turns out to be particularly true for ancient Indian wisdom, as far as it has been handed down. Of course, one will not be able to see something like Indian wisdom with the grandiose, significant impression that it must make on everyone, for example, with the eye of a modern philosopher like Deußen, but one will have to immerse oneself in it without prejudice in terms of certain spiritual connections that are obvious from within. But one thing is striking: from the way the whole is presented, it is evident that spiritual knowledge of the kind that we encounter here is not gained in the same way and by the same method as our present-day research methods, by which natural science strides from triumph to triumph. If one is open-minded enough to confidently recognize natural science on the one hand and, on the other, to how a spiritual achievement and spiritual work from ancient times resound, then one will be able to let the overwhelming insights into the spiritual life sink in, and at the same time one will see how completely different the methods must have been with which those spiritual-scientific insights were gained in ancient times.

Now spiritual research itself shows us how very differently that which we can properly call, for example, ancient Indian wisdom, is gained. This wisdom reveals insights that penetrate deeply into the essence of things. We find that this wisdom was not gained through external observation, not through the kind of thinking we call natural science today, but through a kind of soul self-knowledge similar to the one we have been able to characterize here for modern times. Yoga methods, methods of self-education of the soul, were used. These led the soul to see and perceive and recognize not only in the way one perceives and recognizes in ordinary everyday life, but to feel that higher powers of knowledge are emerging within it, which can see into the spiritual worlds that open up around us if we only open up the organs for them within us. But for our existence within the physical life, everything that confronts us as soul activity is, in a certain way, bound to the instrument of the physical body. And now spiritual research shows us how the ancient Indian research was itself connected to the instrument of the physical body in a different way than our present research, as it is common practice in science. Today, science conducts research through the senses and through the mind, which is connected to the instrument of the brain. What did the yoga method lead to? What it brought him to can only be briefly indicated here, because we only want to orient ourselves about the relationships between natural science and spiritual science.

Yoga method initially led people to a certain extent to switch off the brain's thinking instrument, even to switch off everything that the rest of the higher nervous system conveys. In the yoga methods, the instrument of that strictly inward vision was made precisely that part of the human nervous system which today appears to us in science as a subordinate part, but which is in the strictest sense bound up with the workings of the human organism itself, that which we call the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. Just as our present-day scientific research is connected with the higher nervous system, so these ancient methods of enlightenment were connected with the nervous system that we today even regard as a lower one, in a sense. But because this subordinate nervous system is connected to the forces of existence and the life forces and is intimately related to that through which the human being is immersed in the divine-spiritual existence, because it is thus related to the sources of human existence, one recognized not only the penetration of the human organism by spiritual forces, but just as one looks with the eye into the worlds of light, so with the instrument of the sympathetic nervous system one looked into the spiritual worlds, beholding concrete facts and entities in them. Anyone who is able to understand how a person who is able to penetrate into his own depths, even to the instrument, is able to relate to the universe also understands how that ancient oriental wisdom has come to us. If we follow the old wisdom, we find it discovered everywhere, coming to the surface of human thought through ancient methods of research, through ancient yoga methods. We find the most diverse wisdoms among the most diverse peoples, and by merely occupying ourselves with them, we penetrate more and more into their depths and recognize how people came to have them in those times when they knew relatively little about today's physical astronomy, anatomy, physiology, and so on. The ancient wisdom of India did not know as much as we do today about the workings of the human physical body, but it was possible to place oneself in the position of the organism by applying the deeper-lying nervous system. And it was the same with other peoples.

Now, by letting one's gaze wander, so to speak, over everything that was effective as such old wisdom up to the sixth century BC, one can penetrate as far back as, for example, ancient Greek times. There we find, apart from everything else, an outstanding thinker, a thinker who has been misunderstood just as often for the good as for the bad: Aristotle, who was active only a few centuries before the founding of Christianity. He still seems strange to us today. If we take him at his word, then we find in him, first of all, in many fields, something of what is today called natural science. For in the old wisdoms, natural science in the modern sense is not present. Even in the nineteenth century, people who wanted to stand strictly on the ground and only on the ground of natural science spoke in the most laudatory terms about what Aristotle had contributed to natural science. So we find in Aristotle the starting points of what can be called scientific research even today. In addition, we find in his works a well-developed doctrine of the human soul.

We shall not go into the details of his psychology, but merely point out how Aristotle's doctrine of the human soul relates to what has been handed down from ancient times about the human soul and its connection with the great spiritual worlds. One can only understand what Aristotle wrote about the soul if one realizes that all this is given to him as a tradition of ancient, primeval thinking, gained in the way just described. Aristotle is no longer familiar with the research methods of ancient times; they are foreign to him. But what he was able to say about the structure, the organization of the human soul, about the difference between what is bound to the physical body and thus to death and what, after death, participates in a spiritual life in eternity, what Aristotle is able to say about all this, that is like something handed down from ancient times, which he knows in terms of content, which he has received in such a way that he could say: it makes sense to my mind. But he only knows the individual parts, what he calls, for example, the vegetative soul, the spiritual soul, and so on. But how the individual parts are connected with the spiritual world, that he no longer knows. He can enumerate the parts, describe them rationally and classify them, and make them plausible to the intellect, but he can no longer show how these parts of the human soul are connected with the spiritual world.

Aristotle's way then passed over to later times. Natural science became more and more developed. Of course there was the medieval low and the new dawn of natural science at the beginning of the modern age, but if we disregard that, we can say that natural science became more and more developed.

What is the basis of man's relationship to science and to the objects of science? If we consider what it would mean for the individual human being if he were alone with his senses, if he could not open his senses and, as it were, attach them to the realms of nature that are poured out around us, what would individual human life be without its integration into nature? Let us look at the matter very fundamentally. We could perhaps squeeze our eyes if we could not connect them with nature, and would thereby be able to have something that would be like a shining of the inner light. But compare the poor inner life in the whole physical world, which man could only have through himself if he could not connect with the realms of nature. Compare it with the rich life that opens up when man opens his eyes and the other sense organs to the riches of nature and its impressions. We are human beings not only by living within ourselves, but by opening the organs to the riches of nature that are poured out around us, and by interacting with these riches. If we knew only what the eye, what the other sense-organs can produce for themselves, how poor in content we would be as human beings here in the physical world! Compare this with what the life of the soul gradually became in the times when natural science was just emerging and leading from triumph to triumph.

In relation to the life of the soul, what Aristotle had given was, so to speak, continued. They only occupied themselves with the observation of the phenomena of the soul itself. But this is the same as allowing the senses to be active only within themselves - and up to our time, official soul science has done it that way. Up to our time, the content of official soul science is nothing other than what can be compared to the mere inner activity of our sense organs or our brain when the brain's thoughts are not directed out into the world. But we have already seen in the previous lectures how, through the methods of spiritual science, and this was also the case with the old spiritual science, the soul is attached to spiritual realms above, which are just as concretely and internally structured as the realms around us in the physical world, to which the sense organs are attached.

These spiritual realms, these very concrete spiritual facts and entities, were not accessible for a certain period of time, which was precisely what allowed external scientific research to mature. As a result, knowledge of the soul's life became increasingly impoverished because of the lack of a spiritual perspective that provided concrete confirmation of the spiritual world. At best, the soul was still investigated in its inner life, as Franz Brentano did in the 1870s, as you can see for yourself in his “Psychology”. But his research is like investigating the eye only in terms of what it can do by itself, and not in terms of what it can do when it is directed towards the facts of nature.

Now it may be said that precisely because of the ever more precise examination of the physical processes of the human being, the view was diverted from the spiritual worlds with which the soul is connected. — On the one hand, the soul is connected with these spiritual worlds, which it enters when it has passed through the gate of death, or when it enters another world through sleep. But the soul is connected to the physical world through its organs, through the entire nervous system and through the entire blood circulation. The fact that natural science has become more and more significant in its methods has directed people's attention to the connection between the soul and the physical world. The results of natural science were so magnificent in this respect that it completely filled people, for example, with how the soul lives out in its connection with the bloodstream and so on. Every new triumph of natural science was in a sense detrimental to directing the gaze of the soul to the connection with the spiritual world.

Nothing else applies either. If you want to get to know a clock, you will get to know it poorly in its entirety as an organism if you say: “There I see how the hands of the clock move forward, there may be a little demon inside that moves the hands forward.” If someone who says something like this still felt so exalted above someone who merely studies the mechanism of the clock,

you would be laughed at, because you only get to know the clock if you really study its mechanism. And it is a different matter again to get to know the spiritual life of the watchmaker or the person who invented the watch through the mechanism of the watch. You can go both ways: examine the mechanical operation of the clockwork and get to know the human train of thought that led to the invention of the watch. But it would be nonsense if someone wanted to infer the existence of demons that set the whole clockwork in motion.

This was gradually lost to mankind for the study of mankind, which in the case of the clock would correspond to the tracing of the ingenious mechanism back to the thoughts of the inventor. For it would correspond to the human soul to trace thoughts back to the entities of the spiritual world. In natural science, on the other hand, it went triumphantly from fact to fact, which corresponds to the clockwork. It is interesting to note that the knowledge handed down from ancient times is usually lost to mankind in those epochs in which a particular piece of knowledge can be precisely investigated by natural science. It is remarkable that at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see that the philosopher Cartesius still had a certain idea that something similar to a spirit in the human being works from the heart to the head, to the human being's head. Cartesius still speaks of certain spirits of life that are not of a physical nature, but whose forces play between the heart and the head. Then we see how such knowledge increasingly disappears in the spiritual life of humanity.

Those who wonder why this is so can get the following answer. We see that, historically, at the same time as this disappearance of knowledge of spiritual processes related to the heart, the knowledge of the physical organism of the heart and of blood circulation emerged. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see first the English physician Harvey publishing his discovery of blood circulation, and Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, as an anatomist, showing for the first time the blood circulation of the frog, how artful the whole blood circulation is. Thus, attention was drawn to the sensory process. Knowledge of spiritual facts was, so to speak, pushed down by the exact knowledge of the sensory process. While it is a triumph for natural science that Francesco Redi, born in 1624, formulated the proposition that contradicted many assertions of earlier times, “everything alive comes from living things.” While this proposition is a triumph, we can say: By reducing the organic to its germ, to the physically indeterminate organic germ, humanity lost sight of how the spiritual itself, independently of the organic germ, intervenes in evolution. Humanity lost its understanding of the spiritual germ. It was step by step. The more science advanced, the more the view of the spiritual world was lost.

Such things are not just coincidences, nor are they something that can be blamed or criticized, but they are necessary developmental processes in the shaping of humanity as a whole. That is how it has to be. Often, while one thing rises and develops upwards, another thing goes down. What we today admire in natural science, indeed recognize as necessary, presents itself to us, if we are true connoisseurs of natural scientific development, in such a way that we say: spiritual science has not the slightest reason to fight natural science in any way, provided it keeps within its limits, nor has reason to complain about the one-sidedness of natural science. For it is only by refraining from mixing all kinds of speculation into scientific research and instead keeping one's gaze calmly fixed on physical and sensory processes that the great achievements of science have been achieved to date. Yes, one can see, especially at the dawn of the newer spiritual life, how only through resistance to Aristotelianism, and also to the justified content of Aristotelianism, such minds as Galileo or Giordano Bruno came to their successes, by refusing to mix anything into their research other than what spread out before their senses and was instructive enough.

Today, the humanities researcher must confront the natural sciences researcher in such a way that he says: the more natural science research itself is kept pure from all speculation and all philosophy, the more one turns one's gaze purely to the facts and does not invent all sorts of spiritual essences, but only takes what one can actually research, the better it is for natural science. The spiritual scientific researcher in particular would like to advocate keeping the scientific facts pure of all scientifically or spiritually speculated talk. Therefore, on the one hand, one can be a spiritual scientific researcher today and, on the other hand, advocate the authenticity and soundness of scientific research. And it is only a prejudice to believe that the spiritual researcher has to turn against natural science.

It is a different matter when there are numerous theories that are already approaching spiritual science and that one would like to derive from natural science theories. In this case, the natural science researcher himself enters the path of spiritual science, in which he is, in most cases, only very little familiar. But one thing remains, even for spiritual science and spiritual research, from natural science knowledge: that is the conscientious method, the conscientious sense of truth, which we have already characterized in the past lectures and also characterized, and which is to remain with the facts.

How do these facts arise? We have seen that through the fact that certain powers unfold in the human soul, which from this soul also reveal the connection with the higher worlds, just as the senses reveal the connection with the physical world. Just as the senses are meant to fathom the facts of the physical world and leave them at that, not to distort them by speculation, so it is important not to philosophize and speculate about the results of clairvoyant observation, but to take the strict standpoint of the facts here too. Then one stands quite firmly on the standpoint of spiritual science, but quite similarly in its field, as one stands firmly on the ground of natural science in relation to it. That is the kind of spiritual science as it is represented here.

This is the only thing that can be the subject of a spiritual research that feels responsible for the spiritual needs of our time. And this is also the case with strict scientific research into the facts that are available to spiritual science, which is immediately apparent when science, understanding itself, reaches its limits.

This again, purely from the facts, gives rise to very strange results. I would just like to remind you of what results when we take the views of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, as expressed in his speeches. Perhaps the most significant speech was the one on the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which he gave at the forty-fifth meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Leipzig on August 14, 1872. There is a passage in it – and I still remember the deep impression this passage made on me as a very young person when I first heard the speech – a passage that roughly says: When we have a person before us in their waking life, science cannot say anything about how sensation, perception, desire, passion or affect arise from the activity of the smallest parts of the brain. “What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the original, not further definable, undeniable facts for me: “oh feel pain, feel pleasure; I taste sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see roses, and the certainty flowing just as directly from it: ”so I am?” — It is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not care how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they lie and will move.

Du Bois-Reymond considered it impossible to understand the soul life in a natural scientific way in the waking state of man. Therefore, he said: When we have the sleeping human being before us, in whom the life of sensations, of perceptions, desires, affects, passions has been extinguished, then we can explain the sleeping human being scientifically; then we have something before us that we can call an inner organic activity. But as soon as this organism is awakened and life, sensation, desire, imagination, etc., are infused into it, it is different. Then this life, this soul content, cannot be explained scientifically from what the scientist can recognize. Sleeping man, Du Bois-Reymond believes, is scientifically comprehensible, but not waking man.

That is one side of the story. On the other hand, read the more recent treatises on the nature of sleep: you will find it admitted everywhere that natural science, so to speak, knows nothing about the reasons for sleep, that it knows nothing about the sleeping person, who, according to Du Bois-Reymond, should be fathomable after all. On the one hand, we see indications of the brilliant progress of natural science, but we also see it admitting its limitations by admitting that the waking human being with his or her soul life cannot be scientifically understood. On the other hand, however, we have, as in our days, the confession that man's sleep cannot be explained to this day. Why not? Not because sleep belongs to those areas where the spirit plays into ordinary life, because we cannot explain sleep if we cannot explain waking.

In one of the first lectures of this winter semester, I pointed out how, at best, a mechanism can be conceived scientifically that automatically, after a certain period of time, causes the urge to switch off consciousness and sensory activity in order to eliminate fatigue. But as I said, if we want to limit ourselves to the fact that sleep is brought about by a kind of independent process in the organism that happens automatically, then we have no explanation for the reindeer that did not work but still takes its afternoon nap, nor do we have an explanation for the sleep of the small child that sleeps the most. On the other hand, I have pointed out that sleep can only be explained if we assume that in the sleeping person we have only the physical body and the etheric body lying in bed, and that when they fall asleep, a spiritual element, namely the astral body and I, moves out of the human being's being. What happens when, during sleep, the soul-like part of the human being is, as it were, outside the physical body and the etheric body? We will talk about these things in more detail. Today, only the following should be mentioned.

As the soul-like part goes out of the physical body and its animator, something is evoked that is opposed to the waking activity of the soul. In its waking activity, the soul is active. No limb moves without the soul knowing it. At the very least, representations are evoked without the soul making use of the brain as an instrument. The soul must be active in the waking state. The opposite is the case in sleep. We can say that the soul enjoys its own body in the sleep-life. If we proceed according to spiritual research, we have, according to the difference, soul activity and soul enjoyment in wakefulness and in the state of sleep, and we understand the interrelation between soul work and soul activity and soul enjoyment, which must pour into soul activity if it is to continue in an appropriate way. Now it is no longer the reindeer taking its afternoon nap that confounds us, although it is not at all tired, but we know that the soul, when it enjoys its body, can exaggerate, and that one can sleep when one is not at all tired. We understand it when we know how, in certain constitutions, the enjoyment of the bodily can be experienced to an exaggerated degree.

All this can be understood if we know how to explain sleep from a spiritual scientific point of view. That is to say, there is an area in which natural science believes itself to have unlimited sway, and where spiritual science has only so much to say, namely that spirit permeates everything, including natural processes. But then there begins an area where there is no longer anything that science can investigate. There are facts, but they are facts that can only be seen when the seeing is not a sensual seeing but a supersensible beholding. If spiritual science proceeds with the same conscientiousness and becomes accustomed to thinking as strictly in its field as natural science in its, then it cannot come into conflict with natural science. But with that, spiritual science stands on ground that in many respects contradicts what has gradually emerged in the course of humanity's spiritual life.

Thus we see how those who can be regarded as forerunners of genuine spiritual research, Goethe for example, had to fight against what was opposed to spiritual research activity. We see it most clearly when we look at how Goethe once defended himself against Kant. It was Kant who first sought to determine how the knowledge that has emerged in modern times is bound to the instrument of the brain, how it must be limited to external experience and cannot penetrate into the depths of the world with which our spiritual and soul life is connected. Hence Kant's strict boundary between “science” and what he calls “belief”; and for Kant, higher realms are only accessible through belief. Therefore, he replaces knowledge about a world of eternity or of the divine-spiritual with a belief that is to be based on the “categorical imperative”. Thus, he decrees that what should be knowledge in spiritual science is mere belief. But Goethe says in his beautiful essay on “Contemplative Judgment” with reference to Kant: “If one can already feel one's way in the intuited sense into a spiritual region in which the divine-spiritual is rooted, from which the moral arises, why should the human spirit, when it rises into this spiritual region, not also really pass the adventure of reason? For Kant called it a “daring adventure of reason” when man wants to penetrate into regions in which, according to Kant, knowledge cannot exist. For Western thinking, the question is: how do you get from science to the humanities? The fact that you do not have to fight science, but that you fully recognize it, yes, you can be a loyal recognizer of its successes, nevertheless, you can expand human knowledge to those areas, according to the model of scientific research, with which the soul is connected in its spiritual foundations in those impulses that give it life even after it has left the physical body and is preparing for a new form of a later physicality.

It will be the task of true spiritual research to increasingly move away from the unjustified mocking or refutation of the legitimate claims of science in our time. Of course, this will depend on spiritual research being recognized only as justified if it is familiar with the state of scientific research at present, and if it therefore does not act in an amateurish way against what can be legitimately demanded from the scientific education of the present day. But just as the natural scientist cannot stop at investigating only the inner nature of the eye, the ear, the sense of warmth, and so on, but must direct what the senses are able to experience within themselves outwards to the rich concrete environment of the physical, so the soul must be recognized by the soul living together with that with which it is connected in the spiritual, and that only begins where scientific research has its limits.

This is precisely the relationship between natural science and spiritual science, but it also offers the possibility of real continuity and peace and mutual understanding between natural science and spiritual scientific research. If what has already been said in this respect in the previous lectures is combined with what I was able to sketch out today about the relationship between scientific and spiritual scientific research, it will be possible to gain understanding for the legitimacy of spiritual scientific research, and also for the possibility of spiritual research to stand on an equal footing with natural science in our time. And it may be hoped that the justified objections and the justified doubts which still exist on the part of natural scientists today will gradually disappear when natural scientists see not only all kinds of confused stuff, as well as arbitrary assertions and superstition, in the field of spiritual research, but how spiritual research is well acquainted with what the present-day scientific education demands.

If this happens, then spiritual research will appear more and more justified before the scientific conscience of the present, and then, from what arises within the facts of spiritual life, one will gradually be able to understand that spiritual research is really possible and really justified, and that the objections against spiritual research actually belong to an area in relation to which one can say something similar to what Goethe once said in relation to another area, namely in relation to rising above all ignorance and all illogic.

In summarizing the relationship of the spiritual researcher to those who appear as enemies of spiritual scientific research, I would like to end with a few words that are comparative and remind you of something that Goethe once said in reference to something quite different. Goethe was thinking of an old Greek doctrine and exposition on motion, which, however, still influenced much of more recent philosophy. This doctrine says: If any object moves, it can be observed as being at rest at every moment, and at every moment, even at the shortest point in time, it is at rest. It is at rest, even if only for a moment. Thus there could be no such thing as “movement,” because at every moment a moving body is at rest and therefore has no movement. Such is the Zen conclusion of movement, and such is how Greek thought came to haunt us until recent times.

Goethe found this objection to movement very strange, and he once said the beautiful words:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

I cannot help but think of this saying when I see how much has been said in recent times to the effect that 'spirit', what you call 'spirit', is the result of purely material activity, material processes and movements; that spirit arises from matter. Just as movement, in the sense of what has just been said, only emerges from rest and is nothing real, so spirit is nothing real apart from matter.

If, in the sense in which we are attempting to penetrate into the spiritual world in these reflections, one tries to gain knowledge of the spiritual and thus really enters into the nature of what the spiritual is, then one may well describe what spiritual scientific research brings to light about the spirit in its relationship to opponents and enemies of spiritual science enemies of spiritual science, then, with a slight alteration of the words of Goethe just quoted, one might perhaps describe it in the following way, and with this I would like to summarize today what I have to say about the relationship between natural science and spiritual science:

Adversity may arise,
But thou shalt remain calm, remain cheerful!
And even if they deny the spirit,
Thou shalt not brood over it,
And in the end thou shalt prove them right:
Their spirit is in a bad state indeed.

The isolation of man's ideas (especially his mathematical ideas) from his direct experience has proved to be the outstanding feature of the spiritual development leading to modern scientific thinking. Let us place this process once more before our mind's eye.

We were able to look back into ages past, when what man had to acquire as knowledge of the world was experienced in communion with the world. During those epochs, man inwardly did not experience his threefold orientation—up-down, left-right, front-back—in such a manner that he attributed it solely to himself. Instead, he felt himself within the universal whole; hence, his own orientations were to him synonymous with the three dimensions of space. What he pictured of knowledge to himself, he experienced jointly with the world. Therefore, with no uncertainty in his mind, he knew how to apply his concepts, his ideas, to the world. This uncertainty has only arisen along with the more recent civilization. We see it slowly finding its way into the whole of modern thought and we see science developing under this condition of uncertainty. This state of affairs must be clearly recognized.

A few examples can illustrate what we are dealing with . Take a thinker like John Locke, who lived from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. His writings show what an up-to-date thinker of his age had to say concerning the scientific world perception. John Locke⁴³ divided everything that man perceives in his physical environment into two aspects. He divided the characteristic features of bodies into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities were those that he could only attribute to the objects themselves, such as shape, position, and motion. Secondary qualities in his view were those that did not actually belong to the external corporeal things but were an effect that these objects had upon man. Examples are color, sound, and warmth. Locke stated it thus: “When I hear a sound, outside of me there is vibrating air. In a drawing, I can picture these vibrations in the air that emanate from a sound-aroused body and continue on into my ear. The shape that the waves, as they are called, possess in the vibrating air can be pictured by means of spatial forms. I can visualize their course in time—all this, belonging to the primary qualities, certainly exists in the external world, but it is silent, it is soundless. The quality of sound, a secondary quality, only arises when the vibration of the air strikes my ear, and with it arises that peculiar inner experience that I carry within me as sound. It is the same with color, which is now lumped together with light. There must be something out there in the world that is somehow of a corporeal nature and somehow possesses shape and movement. This exercises an effect on my eye and thus becomes my experience of light or color. It is the same with the other things that present themselves to my senses. The whole corporeal world must be viewed like this; we must distinguish between the primary qualities in it, which are objective, and the secondary qualities, which are subjective and are the effects of the primary qualities upon us.”

Simply put, one could say with Locke that the external world outside of man is form, position, and movement, whereas all that makes up the content of the sense world exists in truth somehow inside us. The actual content of color as a human experience is nowhere in the environment, it lives in me. The actual content of sound is nowhere to be found outside, it lives in me. The same is true of my experience of warmth or cold.

In former ages, when what had become the content of knowledge was experienced jointly with the world, one could not possibly have had this view because, as I have said, a man experienced mathematics by participating in his own bodily orientation and placing this orientation into his own movement. He experienced this, however, in communion with the world. Therefore, his own experience was sufficient reason for assuming the objectivity of position, place, and movement. Also, though in another portion of his inner life, man again had this communion with the world in regard to color, tone, and so forth. Just as the concept of movement was gained through the experience of his own movement, so the concept of color was gained through a corresponding internal experience in the blood, and this experience was then connected with whatever is warmth, color, sound, and so forth in the surrounding world. Certainly, in earlier times, man distinguished position, location, movement, and time-sequence from color, sound, and warmth, but these were distinguished as being different kinds of experiences that were undergone jointly with different kinds of existence in the objective world.

Now, in the scientific age, the determination of place, movement, position, and form ceased to be inward self-experience. Instead, they were regarded as mere hypotheses that were caused by some external reality. When the shape of a cannon is imagined, one can hardly say: This form of the cannon is actually somehow within me. Therefore its identification was directed outward and the imagined form of the cannon was related to something objective. One could not very well admit that a musket-ball was actually flying within one's brain; therefore, the hypothetically thought-out movements were attributed to something objective.

On the other hand, what one saw in the flying musket-ball, the flash by which one perceived it and the sound by which one heart it, were pushed into one's own human nature, since no other place could be found for them. Man no longer knew how he experienced them jointly with the objects; therefore, he associated them with his own being.

It actually took quite some time before those who thought along the lines of the scientific age perceived the impossibility of this arrangement. What had in fact taken place? The secondary qualities, sound, color, and warmth experience, had become, as it were, fair game in the world and, in regard to human knowledge, had to take refuge in man. But before too long, nobody had any idea of how they lived there. The experience, the self-experience, was no longer there. There was no connection with external nature, because it was not experienced anymore. Therefore these experiences were pushed into one's self. So far as knowledge was concerned, they had, as it were, disappeared inside man. Vaguely it was thought that an ether vibration out in space translated itself into form and movement, and this had an effect on the eye, and then worked on the optic nerve, and finally somehow entered the brain. Our thoughts were a means of looking around inside for whatever it was that, as an effect of the primary qualities, supposedly expressed itself in man as secondary qualities. It took a long time, as I said, before a handful of people firmly pointed out the oddity of these ideas. There is something extraordinary in what the Austrian philosopher Richard Wahle⁴⁴ wrote in his Mechanism of Thinking, though he himself did not realize the full implications of his sentence: “Nihil est in cerebro, quod non est in nervis.” (“There is nothing in the brain that is not in the nerves.” It may not be possible with the means available today to examine the nerves in every conceivable way, but even if we could we would not find sound, color, or warmth experience in them. Therefore, they must not be in the brain either. Actually, one has to admit now that they simply disappear insofar as knowledge is concerned. One examines the relationship of man to the world. Form, position, place, time, etc. are beheld as objective. Sound, warmth, experience and color vanish; they elude one.⁴⁵

Finally, in the Eighteenth Century, this led Kant⁴⁶ to say that even the space and time qualities of things cannot somehow be outside and beyond man. But there had to be some relationship between man and the world. After all, such a relationship cannot be denied if we are to have any idea of how man exists together with the world. Yet, the common experience of man's space and time relationships with the world simply did not exist anymore. Hence arose the Kantian idea: If man is to apply mathematics, for example, to the world, then it is his doing that he himself makes the world into something mathematical. He impresses the whole mathematical system upon the “things in themselves,” which themselves remain utterly unknown.—In the Nineteenth Century science chewed on this problem interminably. The basic nature of man's relation to cognition is simply this: uncertainty has entered into his relationship with the world. He does not know how to recognize in the world what he is experiencing. This uncertainty slowly crept into all of modern thinking. We see it entering bit by bit into the spiritual life of recent times.

It is interesting to place a recent example side by side with Locke's thinking. August Weismann,⁴⁷ a biologist of the Nineteenth Century, conceived the thought: in any living organism, the interplay of the organs (in lower organisms, the interaction of the parts) must be regarded as the essential thing. This leads to comprehension of how the organism lives. But in examining the organism itself, in understanding it through the interrelationship of its parts, we find no equivalent for the fact that the organism must die. If one only observes the organism, so Weismann said, one finds nothing that will explain death. In the living organism, there is absolutely nothing that leads to the idea that the organism must die. For Weismann, the only thing that demonstrates that an organism must die is the existence of a corpse. This means that the concept of death is not gained from the living organism. No feature, no characteristic, found in it indicates that dying is a part of the organism. It is only when the event occurs, when we find a corpse in the place of the living organism, that we know the organism possesses the ability to die.

But, says Weismann, there is a class of organisms where corpses are never found. These are the unicellular organisms. They only divide themselves so there are no corpses. The propagation of such beings looks like this:

One divides into two; each of these divides into two again, and so on. There is never a corpse. Weismann therefore concludes that the unicellular beings are immortal. This is the immortality of unicellular beings that was famous in nineteenth-century biology. Why were these organisms considered immortal? Because they never produce any corpses, and because we cannot entertain the concept of death in the organic realm as long as there are no corpses. Where there is no corpse, there is no room for the concept of death. Hence, living beings that produce no corpses are immortal.

This example shows how far man has removed himself in modern times from any connection between the world and his thinking, his inner experiences. His concept of an organism is no longer such that the fact of its death can be perceived from it. This can only be deduced from the existence of something like a corpse. Certainly, if a living organism is only viewed from outside, if one cannot experience what is in it, then indeed one cannot find death in the organism and an external sign is necessary. But this only proves that in his thinking man feels himself separated from the things around him.

From the uncertainty that has entered all thinking concerning the corporeal world, from this divorce between our thoughts and our experience, let us turn back to the time when self-experience still existed. Not only did the inwardly experienced concept exist alongside the externally excogitated concept of a triangle, square, or pentagram, but there were also inwardly experienced concepts of blossoming and fading, of birth and death. This inner experience of birth and death had its gradations. When a child was seen to grow more and more animated, when its face began to express its soul, when one really entered into this growing process of the child, this could be seen as a continuation of the process of birth, albeit a less pronounced and intensive one. There were degrees in the experience of birth. When a man began to show wrinkles and grey hair and grow feeble, this was seen as a first mild degree of dying. Death itself was only the sum total of many less pronounced death experiences, if I may use such a paradox. The concepts of blossoming and decaying, of being born and dying, were inwardly alive.

These concepts were experienced in communion with the corporeal world. No line was drawn between man's self-experience and the events in nature. Without a coastline, as it were, the inner land of man merged into the ocean of the universe. Owing to this form of experience, man lived himself into the world itself. Therefore, the thinkers of earlier ages, whose ideas no longer receive proper attention from science, had to form quite different ideas concerning something like what Weismann called the “immortality of unicellular beings.” What sort of concept would an ancient thinker have formed had he had a microscope and known something about the division of unicellular organisms? He would have said: First I have the unicellular being; it divides itself into two. Somewhat imprecisely, he might have said: It atomizes itself, it divides itself; for a certain length of time, the two parts are indivisible; then they divide again. As soon as division or atomization begins, death enters in. He would not have derived death from the corpse but from atomization, from the division into parts. His train of thought would have been somewhat as follows: A being that is capable of life, that is in the process of growth, is not atomized; and when the tendency to atomization appears, the being dies. In the case of unicellular beings, he would simply have thought that the two organisms cast off by the first unicellular being were for the moment dead, but would be, so to speak, revived immediately, and so forth. With atomization, with the process of splitting, he would have linked the thought of death. If he had known about unicellular beings and had seen one split into two, he would not have thought that two new ones had come into being. On the contrary, he would have said that out of the living monad, two atoms have originated. Further, he would have said that wherever there is life, wherever one observes life, one is not dealing with atoms. But if they are found in a living being, then a proportionate part of the being is dead. Where atoms are found, there is death, there is something inorganic. This is how matters would have been judged in a former age based on living inner knowledge of the world.

All this is not clearly described in our histories of philosophy, although the discerning reader can have little doubt of it. The reason is that the thought-forms of this older philosophy are totally unlike today's thinking. Therefore anyone writing history nowadays is apt to put his own modern concepts into the minds of earlier thinkers.⁴⁸ But this is impermissible even with a man as recent as Spinoza. In his book on what he justifiably calls ethics, Spinoza follows a mathematical method but it is not mathematics in the modern sense. He expounds his philosophy in a mathematical style, joining idea to idea as a mathematician would. He still retains something of the former qualitative experience of quantitative mathematical concepts. Hence, even in contemplating the qualitative aspect of man's inner life, we can say that his style is mathematical. Today with our current concepts, it would be sheer nonsense to apply a mathematical style to psychology, let alone ethics.

If we want to understand modern thinking, we must continually recall this uncertainty, contrasting it to the certainty that existed in the past but is no longer suited to our modern outlook. In the present phase of scientific thinking, we have come to the point where this uncertainty is not only recognized but theoretical justifications have been offered for it. And example is a lecture given by the French thinker Henri Poincaré⁴⁹ in 1912 on current ideas relating to matter. He speaks of the existing controversy or debate concerning the nature of matter; whether it should be thought of as being continuous or discrete; in other words, whether one should conceive of matter as substantial essence that fills space and is nowhere really differentiated in itself, or whether substance, matter, is to be thought of as atomistic, signifying more or less empty space containing within it minute particles that by virtue of their particular interconnections form into atoms, molecules, and so forth.

Aside from what I might call a few decorative embellishments intended to justify scientific uncertainty, Poincaré's lecture comes down to this: Research and science pass through various periods. In one epoch, phenomena appear that cause the thinker to picture matter in a continuous form, making it convenient to conceive of matter this way and to focus on what shows up as continuity in the sense data. In a different period the findings point more toward the concept of matter being diffused into atoms, which are pictured as being fused together again; i.e. matter is not continuous but discrete and atomistic. Poincaré is of the opinion that always, depending on the direction that research findings take, there will be periods when thinking favors either continuity or atomism. He even speaks of an oscillation between the two in the course of scientific development. It will always be like this, he says, because the human mind has a tendency to formulate theories concerning natural phenomena in the most convenient way possible. If continuity prevails for a time, we get tired of it. (These are not Poincaré's exact words, but they are close to what he really intends.) Almost unconsciously, as it were, the human mind then comes upon other scientific findings and begins to think atomistically. It is like breathing where exhalation follows inhalation. Thus there is a constant oscillation between continuity and atomism. This merely results from a need of the human mind and according to Poincaré, says nothing about the things themselves. Whether we adopt continuity or atomism determines nothing about things themselves. It is only our attempt to come to terms with the external corporeal world.

It is hardly surprising that uncertainty should result from an age which no longer finds self-experience in harmony with what goes on in the world but regards it only as something occurring inside man. If you no longer experience a living connection with the world, you cannot experience continuity or atomism. You can only force your preconceived notions of continuity or atomism on the natural phenomena. This gradually leads to the suspicion that we formulate our theories according to our changing needs. Just as we must breath in and out, so we must, supposedly, think first continuistically for a while, then atomistically for a while. If we always thought in the same way, we would not be able to catch a breath of mental air. Thus our fatal uncertainty is confirmed and justified. Theories begin to look like arbitrary whims. We no longer live in any real connection with the world. We merely think of various ways in which we might live with the world, depending on our own subjective needs.

What would the old way of thought have said in such a case? It would have said: In an age when the leading thinkers think continuistically, they are thinking mainly of life. In one in which they think atomistically, they are thinking primarily of death, of inorganic nature, and they view even the organic in inorganic terms.

This is no longer unjustified arbitrariness. This rests on an objective relationship to things. Naturally, I can take turns in dealing with the animate and the inanimate. I can say that the very nature of the animate requires that I conceive of it continuistically, whereas the nature of the inanimate requires that I think of it atomistically. But I cannot say that this is only due to the arbitrary nature of the human mind. On the contrary, it corresponds to an objective relating of oneself to the world. For such perception, the subjective aspect is really disregarded, because one recognizes the animate in nature in continual form and the inanimate in discrete form. And if one really has to oscillate between the two forms of thought, this can be turned in an objective direction by saying that one approach is suited to the living and the other is suited to the dead. But there is no justification for making everything subjective as Poincaré does. Nor is the subjective valid for the way of perception that belonged to earlier times.

The gist of this is that in the phase of scientific thinking immediately preceding our own, there was a turn away from the animate to the inanimate; i.e., from continuity to atomism. This was entirely justified, if rightly understood. But, if we hope to objectively and truly find ourselves in the world, we must find a way out of the dead world of atomism, no matter how impressive it is as a theory. We must get back to our own nature and comprehend ourselves as living beings. Up to now, scientific development has tended in the direction of the inanimate, the atomistic. When, in the first part of the Nineteenth Century, this whole dreadful cell theory of Schleiden⁵⁰ and Schwann⁵¹ made its appearance, it did not lead to continuity but to atomism. What is more, the scientific world scarcely admitted this, nor has it to this day realized that it should admit it since atomism harmonizes with the whole scientific methodology. We were not aware that by conceiving the organism as divided up into cells, we actually atomized it in our minds, which in fact signifies killing it. The truth of the matter is that any real idea of organisms has been lost to the atomistic approach.

This is what we can learn if we compare Goethe's views on organics with those of Schleiden or the later botanists. In Goethe we find living ideas that he actually experiences. The cell is alive, so the others are really dealing with something organic, but the way they think is just as though the cells were not alive but atoms. Of course, empirical research does not always follow everything to its logical conclusion, and this cannot be done in the case of the organic world. Our comprehension of the organic world is not much aided by the actual observations resulting from the cell theory. The non-atomistic somehow finds its way in, since we have to admit that the cells are alive. But it is typical of many of today's scientific discussions that the issues become confused and there is no real clarity of thought.

• 43. John Locke: Wrington by Bristol 1632–1704 Oates, Essex. Theologian, philosopher, and physician. Because raised Protestant and Puritan, he was persecuted in England and had to flee to Holland until after the English Revolution of 1689. From 1675–1689 Locke worked with many interruptions at his main work. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Originally he had planned a critical presentation of the already recognized teaching of primary and secondary sense characteristics, but then it grew to a perception theory or world view. His Essay was published 4 times in his lifetime. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom, trans. Michael Wilson (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1964) and “Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa” in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 44. Richard Wahle: 1857–1935, Vienna, Professor of Philosophy. Only valued perceptions, imaginations, and feelings, but rejected all philosophy hitherto written as theories of cognition. The “Ego” is for him “a summary of surface-like, physiologically accompanied pieces of consciousness, which are brought into being by invisible forces.” Some writings: The Whole of Philosophy and Its End, 1894; About the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life, 1906; The Tragic Comedy of Wisdom, 1915; Development of Characters, 1928; Basics of a New Psychiatry, 1931.
• 45. See Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 4.
• 46. Immanuel Kant: 1724–1804. Lived in Koenigsberg, which he seldom left. Philosopher, scientist, mathematician. Professor in Koenigsberg 1770–1794. Critique of Pure Reason, 1781. Its popular edition Dissertation on Any Future Metaphysics, 1783, his ethic Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, aesthetic and natural theology is handled in Critique of Judgment, 1790. He wrote the first mechanical cosmology 1755. It was taken up and changed by Laplace (1796) and known as the Kant-LaPlace Theory. Rudolf Steiner's exposition on Kant's theory is found in Truth and Knowledge, The Philosophy of Freedom, and An Autobiography, ed. Paul M. Alien, 2nd ed. (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, Garber Communications, 1980).
  
  E.g. in Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic, Common Remarks”: “We wanted to say that all our opinions are nothing but the conception of the appearance; that the things we look at are not actually what we take them for, nor is their relation constituted as they appear to us, and that if we would suspend our subject or even our subjective constitution of our senses as a whole, the whole constitution, all relationships of objects in space and time, even time and space itself would disappear. They would only exist in us, not as phenomena in themselves.”
• 47. August Weismann, Frankfurt A.M. 1834–1914 Freiburg. Biologist, genetic scientist. Theory of polarity between cells (soma) and seed plasma. Determinants as heredity carriers. Writing: Studies on the Descent Theory.
• 48. Goethe's recital from Faust I, Act 1, Scene 2, “Night,” Gothic Room, Wagner and Faust:
  
  “My friend, the time of past
  Is a book with seven seals.
  What you call the Spirit of Time
  Is fundamentally the Gentleman's own spirit,
  In which the times reflect themselves.”
• 49. Henry Poincaré: Nancy 1854–1912 Paris. Author of the popular philosophical writings Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905), Science and Method (1909), and Last Thoughts (1912). The lecture in question was held by Poincaré shortly before his death in a lecture cycle Conferences de Foi et de Vie printed in Le Materialisme Actuel with M.M. Bergson, H. Poincaré, Ch. Gide, Ch. Wagner, Firm Roz, De Witt-Guizotfriedel, Gaston Rion. (Paris: 1918), page 53.
• 50. Mathias Jakob Schleiden: Hamburg 1804–1881 Frankfurt A.M. Lawyer, physician, and, mainly, biologist. Developed a cell formation theory in Contributions to Phylogenesis (1838).
• 51. Theodor Schwann: Neuss 1810–1882 Cologne, biologist. Founded the cell theory with his Microscopic Examinations of the Harmony in Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants (1839).

Living Education

In these five lectures my task has been to describe briefly some guidelines for Waldorf education. Here I have not tried to get into details but describe the spirit of this method as a whole, which should flow from anthroposophy. Perhaps even more than details—though they may be important—contemporary humanity needs a complete renewal and strengthening of all spiritual life. Aside from the spiritual substance that is of course necessary, all spiritual callings require a renewed enthusiasm that springs from knowledge of the world—a worldview that has been taken hold of in spirit. Today it is becoming obvious to a wide range of people that teachers—who must be soul-artists—need such enthusiasm more than anyone else. Perhaps people seek along paths that cannot lead to the goal, because people everywhere continue to fear a thorough investigation of spiritual matters. We base our educational method on the discovery of a teaching method—conditions that will make education viable through reading human nature itself; such reading will gradually reveal the human being so that we can adjust our education to what is revealed to every step of the curriculum and schedule.

Let’s for a moment go into the spirit of how we read the human being. We have seen that children are naturally completely open—in a religious attitude, as it were—to their immediate human surroundings; they are imitative beings, and they elaborate in themselves through will-imbued perception all that they experience unconsciously and subconsciously from their environment. Children’s bodily nature has a religious disposition, from the moment of entering the world until the change of teeth—of course, not in terms of substance, but in its constitution as a whole. The soul is initially spirit, which reveals itself outwardly as a natural creation. Human beings do not enter the world without predispositions—they do not arrive only with the physical forces of heredity from their ancestors but with forces individually brought from a previous earthly life. Consequently, they may at first be equally open to beauty and ugliness, to good and evil, to wisdom and foolishness, to skillfulness and unskillfulness. Our task, therefore, is to work around children—to the degree that we control our very thoughts and feelings—so that children may become beings who imitate goodness, truth, beauty, and wisdom.

When we think in this way, life flows into our interactions with children; education very obviously becomes a part of that life through our interactions with them. Education, therefore, is not something we work at in isolated activities, but something lived. Children develop in the right way in their growth to adulthood only when education is lived with children and not forced on them.

Morality and the Child’s Natural Religious Feeling

What we have educated in children very naturally in a priestly way—what is really a religious devotion—we must now be able to reawaken at a higher soul level during the second stage of life, between the change of teeth and puberty. We do this by transforming pictorially everything we bring them, by transforming education into an artistic activity; nevertheless, it is a truly subjective and objective human activity. We educate children so that, through their relationship to the teacher, they are devoted aesthetically to beauty and internalize the images. Now it becomes essential that, in place of the religious element, a naturally artistic response to the world arises. This naturally artistic human attitude (which must not be confused with the treatment of “art as a luxury,” which is so much a part of our civilization) includes what now would be seen as a moral relationship to the world.

When understood correctly, we realize that we will not get anything from children between the change of teeth and puberty by giving them rules. Prior to the change of teeth, moralizing won’t get us anywhere with children; moralizing is inaccessible to a child’s soul during the first period of life. Only the morality of our actions have access at that age—that is, the moral element children see exprEssentialEd in the actions, gestures, thoughts, and feelings of those around them. Even during the second period of life—between the change of teeth and puberty—moralistic rules will not get us very close to a child. Children have no inner relationship to what is contained in moral commands. To them, they are only empty sounds.

We get close to children during this stage of life only by placing them in the context of natural authority. Children who cannot yet understand abstractly beauty, truth, goodness, and so on may develop this impulse through a sense that the teacher acts as the incarnation of goodness, truth, and beauty. When we understand children correctly, we understand that they have not gained any abstract, intellectual understanding for the revelations of wisdom, beauty, and goodness.

Nevertheless, children see what lives in the teacher’s gestures, and they hear something revealed in how the teacher’s words are spoken. It is the teacher whom the child calls—without saying it—truth, beauty, and goodness as revealed in the heart. And this is the way it must be.

When a teacher corresponds to what the child needs at this age, two things gradually grow in the child. The first is an inner aesthetic sense of pleasure and displeasure in the moral realm. Goodness pleases children when our whole personality exemplifies it. We must plan education so that the natural need to take pleasure in goodness can develop—and, likewise, displeasure in evil. How do children ask questions? Children do not ask intellectually with words, but deep in their hearts. “May I do this?” or, “May I do that?” They will be answered, “Yes, you may,” if the teacher does it. “Should I leave this undone?” “Yes, because my teacher shows that it may be left undone.”

This is how children experience the world through the teacher—the world as goodness or evil, as beauty or ugliness, and as truth or falsehood. This relationship to the teacher—the activity of the hidden forces between the child’s heart and that of the teacher—is the most important aspect of the teaching method; the conditions for life in education are contained in this.

This is how pleasure in morality and displeasure in immorality should develop between the change of teeth and puberty. Then, however, something appears in the background of that growing moral feeling. What first existed naturally during the first period of the child’s life—as a religious surrender to the environment—is resurrected, as it were, in a different form in this moral development; and, if the teacher’s soul forces are equal to it, it is easy to relate what arises as pleasure in good and displeasure in evil to what flows as soul through the manifestations of nature. First a child is surrendered naturally to nature itself; since the moral element in the environment is perceived as a part of nature, a moral gesture is felt, imitated and made part of the child’s being. But as we unfold the child’s sense of pleasure in the good, this religious and natural attitude is transformed into a soul quality.

Now consider what this means. Until the change of teeth, through the magic of completely unconscious processes, we allow the child’s religious attitude to develop naturally, through pure imitation; thus, we ground the religious element while we cannot yet touch the force of the inner, free individuality. We educate through nature and do not interfere with the soul and spirit. And when we approach the soul element between the change of teeth and puberty—since it is then that we must approach it—we do not force a religious feeling but awaken the child, and thus evoke the I in the human being.

In this way, we are already practical philosophers of freedom, since we do not say: You must believe this or that of the spirit; rather, we awaken innate human beliefs. We become awakeners, not stuffers of the souls of children. This constitutes the true reverence we must have for all creatures placed in the world by the Godhead, and we owe this especially to the human being. And thus we see how the I arises in the human being, and how moral pleasure and displeasure assume a religious quality.

Teachers who learn to observe what was initially a purely natural religious aspect as it strives toward transformation in the soul, embody through their words something that becomes a pleasing image of goodness, beauty, and truth. The child hangs on to something in the adult’s words. Teachers and educators are still active in this, but their methods no longer appeal only to imitation but to something that exists behind imitation. It no longer stimulates outer bodily nature but the soul element. A religious atmosphere permeates moral pleasure and displeasure.

The Intellect after Puberty

The intellect becomes active in its own way once children reach puberty. Because of this, I have suggested that it is actually a matter of bringing human beings to the point where they find within themselves what they must understand—draw from their own inner being what was initially given as spontaneous imitation, then as artistic, imaginative activity. Thus, even during the later period, we should not force things on the human being so that there is the least feeling of arbitrary, logical compulsion.

It was certainly a great moment in the development of spiritual life in Germany when—specifically in reference to moral experience—Schiller opposed Kant’s concept of morality. When Kant said, “Duty, you sublime and powerful name—you who bear no enticements but demand stern submission,” Schiller stood against it. He opposed this concept of duty, which does not allow morality to arise from goodwill but only from subjection. Schiller replied to Kant’s idea of duty with the remarkable words containing a true moral motto: “I willingly serve my friend, but unfortunately I serve him from inclination; alas, I therefore lack virtue!”

Indeed, moral life as a whole arises from human nature in purity only when duty becomes a deep human inclination, when it becomes, in the words of Goethe, “Duty—that is, where people love what they tell themselves to do.” It was a great moment when morality was purged of Kant’s influence and made human again through Schiller and Goethe.

What came at that time from German spiritual life nevertheless became immersed in nineteenth-century materialism, as it still is today. Something appeared in civilization because we forgot this powerful action in the moral realm, and our task is now to raise humanity out of it. This rehabilitation of the human being as a fully human and moral being is the special task of those who have to teach and educate. In this consciousness, the impulse of living education will be able to arise. We may say that the sun of German spiritual life shining in Schiller and Goethe in the moral sphere should shine down especially in the actions of those teachers and educators of the present who understand the task of this their own age, and who seek to develop through education a really human relationship of human beings to their own being and to the real needs of the civilization of the age. The task of this educational conference was to speak of the position of education in regard to human individuality and the culture of the age. We shall only accomplish this task if we can think with gratitude of the impulses that flowed into the evolution of Central Europe through great and shining spirits like Goethe and Schiller. When we seek to comprehend our true situation in the world, it is not merely in order to develop a critical sense, but above all things a gratitude for what has already been accomplished by human beings before us.

One could say, of course, that self-education should refer only to the education people give themselves. However, all education is self-education, not just in this subjective sense, but in an objective sense as well—in other words, educating the self of another. To educate (erziehen) means to “draw out,” and it is related to “drawing” (ziehen). The essence of what we invoke is left untouched. We do not smash a stone in order to pull it out of the water. Education does not demand that we in any way injure or overpower those who have entered the world; on the contrary, we must guide them to experience particularly the stage of culture reached by humanity as a whole when it descended from the divine-spiritual worlds into the sensible world. All these ideas, felt and experienced, are a part of the teaching method. The people who least understand the situation of education in our time are those in whom such ideas do not live.

In the moral realm we allow pleasure in the good and displeasure in the evil to grow; we allow the religious element, which was originally natural in the child, to awaken in the soul. In the depths, however, between the change of teeth and puberty there develops the seed and foundation—something already was present—that becomes free understanding after the age of puberty. We prepare a free understanding of the world that includes the religious and moral spheres. It is great when a person can recognize how pleasure and displeasure were experienced as a permeation of the whole life of feeling as the moral qualities of good and evil during the second period of life.

Then the impulse arises: The good that pleased you—this is what you must do! And what displeased you, you must not do. This principle of morality arises from what is already present in the human I, and a religious devotion toward the world arises in the spirit, which had been a thing of nature during the first period, and a thing of the soul during the second. The religious sense—and will applied to the religious impulse—becomes something that allows human beings to act as though God were acting in them. This becomes the expression of the I, not something imposed externally. Following puberty, if the child has developed in accordance with a true understanding of the human being, everything seems to arise as though born from human nature itself.

As I have already suggested, in order that this can happen, we must consider the whole human being during the earthly pilgrimage from birth to death. It’s easy to say that one will begin education by employing the principle of simply observing the child. Today people observe the child externally and experimentally, and from what they perceive in the child they think they can discern the method of teaching. This is impossible, since, as we have seen, a teacher whose uncontrolled choleric temperament leads to angry behavior sows a seed that will remain hidden, and later develop as gout, rheumatism, and disease of the whole organism.

This is what happens in many other relationships; we must keep in mind the earthly life of the whole human being. We must remember this when we are concerned with an event in a particular life period. There are those who limit themselves to a triviality often known as “visual instruction.” They entrench themselves behind the rule—as obvious as it is foolish—that children should be shown only what they can comprehend, and they fall into absurdities that could drive a person crazy. This principle must be replaced by that deeper principle that helps us to understand what it means for the vitality of a person when, at the age of forty, a sudden realization occurs: For the first time I can understand what that respected authority thought and accomplished earlier. I absorbed it because, to me, that individual embodied truth, goodness, and beauty. Now I have the opportunity to draw from the depths what I heard in those days.

When things are reinvigorated in this way, there is an infinitely rejuvenating and vitalizing effect on later life. The human being is deprived of all this at a later age if the teacher fails to insure that there actually is something in the depths that will be understood only later on. The world becomes empty and barren, unless something can arise anew again and again from the essence of human nature—something that permeates outer perception with soul and spirit. Therefore, when we educate this way, we give the human being full freedom and vitality for the rest of life.

Materialism and Spirit in Education

At this point, let me mention something I have often spoken of. A true teacher must always keep in view all of human life. A teacher must, for example, be able to see the wonderful element that is present in many older people, whose very presence brings a kind of blessing without much in the way of words; a kind of blessing is contained in every gesture. This is a characteristic of many people who stand at the threshold of death. From where does this come? Such individuals have this quality because, during childhood, they developed devotion naturally. Such reverence and devotion during childhood later becomes the capacity to bless. We may say that at the end of earthly life, people cannot stretch out their hands in blessing if they have not learned to fold them in prayer during childhood. The capacity for blessing when one grows old and comes near the threshold of death originates with folding one’s hands in prayer with reverent, childhood devotion. Everything visible as a seed in the child will develop into good or evil fruit as the person progresses farther along in earthly life. And this is something else that must be continually within view in order to develop a genuine teaching method based on real life in education.

Thus—at least in rough outline—we have the foundation for an attempt to bring anthroposophy to fruit in education through Waldorf schools. This education conference should illuminate what has been attempted in this way and practiced for some years. It has been illuminated from various perspectives and we have shown what the students themselves have accomplished—though, in relation to this, much has yet to be demonstrated and discussed.

At the beginning of today’s lecture, I was addrEssentialEd with loving words from two sides, for which I am heartily grateful; after all, what could be done with impulses, however beautiful, if there were no one to realize them through devotion and selfsacrifice? Therefore, my gratitude goes to the Waldorf teachers who try to practice what needs to underlie this kind of renewal in education. My gratitude also goes out to today’s youth, young men and women who, through their own educational experiences, understand the true aims of Waldorf education. One would be happy indeed if the cordiality felt by young people for Waldorf education carried their message to our civilization and culture.

I believe I am speaking for the hearts of all of you when I respond with words of gratitude to those who have spoken so lovingly, because, more than anything else, education needs human beings who will accomplish these goals. A painter or sculptor can work in solitude and say that even if people do not see the work, the gods do. When a teacher performs spiritual actions for earthly existence, however, the fulfillment of such activities can be expected only in communion with those who help to realize them in the physical realm of the senses.

As teachers and educators, this impulse must live in our awareness, especially in our time. Therefore, as we conclude these lectures—this lecture must be the last, since I am wanted elsewhere and cannot remain in Stuttgart—allow me to point to something. Based on anthroposophy and not forcing it on people as a worldview—based on anthroposophy because it gives a true knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit—let me conclude by saying that this education serves, in the most practical way possible, the deepest needs and conditions of our modern civilization. The people of Central Europe can hope for a future only if their actions and thoughts arise from such impulses.

What is our most intense suffering? By trying to characterize our education I repeatedly had to point out that we stand with reverent awe before the human I-being placed in the world by divine powers helping to develop that I. The human I is not truly understood unless it is understood in spirit; it is denied when understood only in matter. It is primarily the I that has suffered because of our contemporary materialistic life, because of ignorance, because of the wrong concept of the human I. This is primarily due to the fact that—while we have hammered away at perception of matter and at activity in matter—spirit has been shattered, and with it the I.

If we place limits on knowledge, as is common, saying that we cannot enter the realm of spirit, this implies only that we cannot enter the human realm. To limit knowledge means that we remove the human being from the world as far as knowing is concerned. How can a soul be educated if it has been eliminated by materialistic concepts? Elimination of the soul was characteristic of the kind of materialism we have just passed through, and it still prevails throughout human activity.

What has happened in the materialistic attitude of the more modern time? It is an attitude that, as I have said, was justified from a different perspective because it had to enter human evolution at some point, but now it must pass away. In expressing this attitude, we may say that the human being has surrendered the I to matter—connected it to matter. Consequently, however, the genuine, living method of teaching, the real life of education has been frozen; only external techniques can survive in a civilization bound by matter. But, matter oppresses people. Matter confines each person within the bodily nature, and each individual thus becomes more or less isolated in soul. Unless we find other human beings in spirit, we become isolated souls, since human beings cannot, in fact, be found in the body.

Thus, our civilization’s materialistic view has produced an age when human beings pass each other by, because their perceptions are all connected with bodily nature. People cry out for a social life out of the intellect, and at the same time develop in their feelings an asocial indifference toward one another as well as a lack of mutual understanding. Souls who are isolated in individual bodies pass one another by, whereas souls who awaken the spirit within to find spirit itself also find themselves, as human beings, in communion with other human beings. Real community will blossom from the present chaos only when people find the spirit—when, living together in spirit, they find each other.

The great longing of today’s youth is to discover the human being. The youth movement came from this cry. A few days ago when the young people here came together, it became evident that this cry has been transformed into a cry for spirit, through the realization that the human being can be found only when spirit is found; if spirit is lost, we lose one another.

Last evening, I tried to show how we can find knowledge of the world—how the human being living on earth in body, soul, and spirit can develop out of such knowledge. I tried to show how a worldview can develop into an experience of the cosmos, and the Sun and Moon may be seen in everything that grows and flourishes on Earth. When we educate young people with this kind of background, we will properly develop the experience of immortality, the divine, the eternally religious element in the growing child, and we implant in the child’s being an immortal aspect destined for further progress, which we must carry in spirit through the gate of death.

This particular aspect of education is not what we are discussing here. The relationship between education and the human I, as well as culture, is what we had to look at first. Nevertheless, we may be sure of one thing; if people are educated properly on Earth, the heavenly being will also be educated properly, since the heavenly being lives within the earthly being. When we educate the earthly being correctly, we also promote the true development of the heavenly being through the tiny amount of progress that we make possible between birth and death.

In this way we come to terms with a view that progresses, in the true sense, to a universal knowledge—a knowledge that understands the need for human cooperation in the great spiritual cosmos, which is also revealed in the realm of the senses. True education recognizes that human beings are coworkers in building humankind. This is what I meant yesterday when I described the view of life that I said must form the background of all teaching and education.

From this, it follows that we cannot understand the world as a one-sided subject of the head alone. It is untrue to say that we can understand the world through ideas and concepts. And it is equally false to say that the world can be understood through feeling alone. It has to be understood through ideas and feeling, as well as through the will; human beings will understand the world only when divine spirit descends into will. Humankind will also be understood then—not through one aspect, but through the whole being. We need a worldview not just for the intellect, but for the whole human being—for human thinking, feeling, and willing—a concept of the world that discovers the world in the human body, soul, and spirit.

Only those who rediscover the world in the human being, and who see the world in human beings, can have a true concept of the world; because, just as the visible world is reflected in the eye, the entire human being exists as an eye of spirit, soul, and body, reflecting the whole cosmos. Such a reflection cannot be perceived externally; it must be experienced from within. Then it is not just an appearance, like an ordinary mirrored image; it is an inner reality. Thus, in the process of education, the world becomes human, and the human being discovers the world in the self.

Working this way in education, we feel that the human race would be disrupted if all human experience were tied to matter, because, when they deny their own being, souls do not find one another but lose themselves. When we move to spirit, we find other human beings. Community, in the true sense of the word, must be established through spirit. Human beings must find themselves in spirit; then they can unite with others. If worlds are to be created out of human actions, then the world must be seen in human beings.

In conclusion, allow me to express what was in the back of my mind while I was speaking to you. What I said here was intended as a consideration of education in the personal and cultural life of the present time. Now, in conclusion, let me put this in other words that include all I have wanted to say.

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

I. Report in “Germany”, Third Sheet, dated December 13, 1903

On Friday evening, Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave the third of six announced theosophical lectures in the recreation room. The title of the lecture was: “World Law and Human Destiny – a Christmas Meditation”. He explained the following:

From time immemorial, man has been regarded as a “world in miniature” (microcosm) in relation to the “world at large” (macrocosm). This view is not only arrived at by the intellect but also by the feelings, which rise up to the lofty starry heavens and to the ideals of the human spirit with equal reverence and enthusiasm. Two things, says Kant, fill the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe: “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” But one can just as easily say: How unequal the “great” and the “small world” are. The starry sky with its eternally unchanging laws and the moral and spiritual nature of man, which follows its laws only gropingly and uncertainly, straying every moment. In the face of the starry sky, even the greatest admirers arise in those who know and study its laws. Keppler literally shouted in admiration when he had researched the secrets of planetary orbits. The human heart, on the other hand, with its fickleness and confusion, evokes the most reservations in those who know it best. Goethe, one of the greatest experts on human nature, repeatedly fled from its labyrinths to the unerring laws of external nature. Goethe himself pointed the way to finding his way around such feelings. He said: “Noble, helpful and good, let man be.” That is a commandment that no one imposes on nature. Man can be blamed for leaving the paths of justice and virtue, but not the volcano that wreaks untold havoc. You have to find harmony with nature, even if it seems destructive. We know that its laws are immutable. Have they always been? No, the laws of planetary motion, at the discovery of which Kepler rejoiced, were only given to the solar system after a long cosmic struggle. Harmony is born out of the chaotic primeval nebula. The research that is able to penetrate to supersensible facts shows that external nature is born out of spirit, out of the thought of the world, just as human actions are born out of human thoughts. Here, Theosophy explains the difference between human beings and external nature. Man is not just the physical being that can be perceived with the external senses. Within his physical body, he still has the soul organism (astral body) and within the latter, only the eternal spirit (mental body), in which thoughts, in which moral feeling, the voice of conscience, have their origin. Between these three components of his being, the struggle that has come to a preliminary conclusion in the outer nature still exists in man. This outer nature, too, was once a world of thought; it passed through the stage of the soul (astral) existence before it became what it is today. But the struggles in this field are over. In inanimate nature, there are no longer any unsatisfied desires and passions that have their seat in the soul (astral) body. This is not yet the case in man. His development, his perfection, is only to lead him to the point where his eternal laws, which lie in the world of thought, find their harmonious expression in outer physical existence, in action. This lack of harmony is also evident in the relationship between destiny and character, between attitude and action. The good often have to suffer, while the wicked are happy; an act of cruelty often bears the same fruit in the outer, sensual existence as a noble deed. Only by placing oneself in the position of the great law of spiritual causes and effects, which brings about a balance in the many lives of the human spirit that can never be understood in one life, can one arrive at a solution to this apparent injustice in the world. Not only the theosophists of the present day know that the human spirit does not embody itself only once, but many times, but deeper spirits of all times have professed this view. Giordano Bruno and Lessing need only be cited as examples. Much in a person's life seems incomprehensible because it has its cause in previous lives. Someone who is particularly clever has the disposition to be clever because he has had experiences in a previous life that led him to be clever. All the painful experiences we have had in the past life as a result of merely indulging in pleasure and pain in our actions have brought about the voice of conscience in the present life. And actions and thoughts that do not bear the fruits corresponding to them in the present life will do so in subsequent embodiments. This is the great law of karma, of spiritual causes and effects in the human world. For everyone there will come a time when they are so perfect that their memory will shine for all their previous incarnations. Then they will recognize karma as the just law of harmonious balance and perfect justice. And they will then be able to shape their lives in such a way that they no longer grope in error, but move within immutable laws, just as the sun, in the course of a year, shows us only regular positions. Therefore, nations have always taken the (apparent) course of the sun in the sky as a symbol for the great role models, for the sons of the gods, for the saviors of the world, who already prematurely carry within them the divine soul, towards which human beings develop. The Christians, too, in the fourth century fixed the birth of their savior of the world on December 25, the time of the winter solstice. Just as this solstice brings light again, so the Son of God brought spiritual light by showing that man progresses towards perfection and by exemplifying this perfection himself. From the sounds of Christmas, if we understand the true meaning, we hear the goal of human development resound: the former harmony between world law and human destiny.

II. Report in the “Weimarische Zeitung”, Second Supplement, December 13, 1903

Weimar, December 12.

World Law and Human Destiny. Dr. Steiner's lecture yesterday, which was poorly attended, was intended as a Theosophical Christmas meditation. Apparently, as was explained in it, there is an unbridgeable contradiction between world law and human destiny. However, this is not the case in reality. The fact that the spiritual substance, the bearer of eternal law in man, can only work through the medium of the astral body and therefore loses much of its power and purity, creates disharmony in human destiny. In the great nature, this dispute has apparently been resolved. The Kant-Laplace theory of the formation of this planetary system out of the primeval nebula is correct, but this world was preceded by an astral world and a spiritual world. External nature is therefore, as it were, a model for human beings, an invitation to hurry towards the goal, towards perfection. Dr. Steiner answered the question as to why good people are often unhappy in this life, while villains are happy, by saying that people are what they have made themselves in previous lives. The justice of the law of karma is based on its effectiveness over all the lives of the individual. The wisdom of men is also the experience of countless embodiments, and the only reason why there are different kinds of wisdom is that people have had different experiences in the past. This is known by those who are alive today and have acquired the ability to look back on their past lives, explained Dr. Steiner. Everyone will be able to look back in the same way once they have reached a certain level, and then their path of development will appear completely harmonious. During his lecture, Dr. Steiner felt compelled to explain that he had been misunderstood in connection with his lecture “The Pilgrimage of the Soul”. This misunderstanding had found expression in a critical note in the “Weimarische Zeitung”. No polemic with Dr. Steiner is intended here, but the speaker cannot be spared the reproach that in his lecture yesterday he again allowed Theosophy to be in possession of universally valid truth. When he took the precaution of always using the expressions, “We (the Theosophists) know,” or “The Theosophists know,” or “Those who have become sufficiently wise know,” this only means that the rest of humanity is not yet as wise as the small group of Theosophists. But since, according to Dr. Steiner's own words, what he proclaims is actually the truth for those who have been theosophically trained, it is difficult to see how the critical note in question in the “Weimarische Zeitung” could have been inspired by a misunderstanding. Every founder of a religion, every leader of a sect, every architect of a philosophical system believed himself to be in possession of the one universally valid truth. Not only the speculative minds believed it, but every human being, no matter how little developed, every animal, every manifestation of nature believes it. Only that truth then bears the name “right”. From the fact that, as Schopenhauer says, every phenomenon is felt behind it by the whole of nature, the bellum omnium contra omnes arose. If now, once again, the only truth is to be found, it is certainly justified to put an ironic question mark behind this message!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the three talks of this week, I would like to discuss the results of the spiritual-scientific research concerning the human being. In this talk I would like to establish a basis to consider the supersensible human being next time and in the third talk two most significant questions, those of the freedom of will and the immortality of the soul.

Concerning our discussion today I am in a somewhat difficult situation, first because the following will be considered in particular compared with the contents of this talk what I have often brought to your attention in the course of these discussions: the fact that the results of spiritual-scientific research are, indeed, in full harmony with everything that natural sciences have performed as great achievements up to now but that which shall be said from the viewpoint of spiritual science just in harmony with the scientific results is in full contrast to that which the naturalists or those who interpret scientific results today say about these scientific results concerning the human being and his nature. On one side complete harmony with the facts, on the other side almost an unequivocal contradiction compared with those who are used to speak about these facts today—this is one objective difficulty. The other difficulty is that I have this talk only, and that that which we will discuss today would have to be the object of at least thirty talks if it should be treated in detail. Thus, I can represent the results only sketchily and can easily be misunderstood in many respects. However, today I do not intend to inform details, rather I would like to evoke a sensation of the direction which spiritual-scientific thinking has to take if it wants to discuss the question of the nature of the human being with the scientific views of the present.

The scientific views have particularly suggested the question of the relation of the human being to the animal realm and of everything that arises from this relationship to the understanding of the human being. What has worked on this question very suggestively is the form that the wholly scientific theory of evolution assumed in the last time. However, one forms wrong mental pictures of the scope and the real character of this theory of evolution, because one grasps the question always too straight, I would like to say, too trivially. So one has the idea today, as if the relationship of the human being with the animals was determined by “strictly scientific research,” the evolution of the human being from the animal realm and again within the animal realm itself the development from imperfect to more perfect beings.

Now it is not at all right to believe that the view that the human physical organisation is connected with the animals is new. It is not new at all. Even if you disregard the fact that you find the traces of it—or, actually, more than traces—already in the science of Greek antiquity, and basically also already with the Church Fathers, nevertheless, something important is contained in the fact that, for example, already Goethe as a very young person had to work his way through certain fantastic ideas of development which asserted themselves just in his time. Someone who knows Goethe from his own biography knows how he rebelled against the idea: if one only produced certain living conditions, animals could change into other animals, or even into human beings. Goethe rebelled against that, although he stood like Herder on the ground of the emergence of one organism from the other, and although they were followers of the “theory of evolution.” Besides, it is important to consider that not the theory of evolution is new as such, but that an older view was immersed into certain materialistic mental pictures that bring on the human organisation to the animal one in other ways as well. The character of interpretation, the whole way of thinking about the things is, actually, essential which has appeared in modern time. If you consider this, it will not be so difficult to find the transition to those mental pictures of evolution that we have to consider here today.

Someone who believes today to stand with a certain materialistic direction of thought on the firm ground of science and to have to characterise this theory of evolution says at first, the modern view of the origin of the human being from the animals stands in contrast with the superstitious biased way which still goes back anyhow to the Mosaic history of creation.—It cannot be my task today to speak about the Mosaic history of creation. I believe that it has often led to misunderstandings about what forms its basis, and that one deals with it in reality with an ancient human wisdom. That just as a side note. What is important to be considered today is that in an especially significant point the scientific theory of evolution is in full harmony with the Mosaic history of creation. That means this that in the course of the evolution of the living beings the human being appeared as it were as the most perfect animal or anything else when the remaining animals had anticipated their development already before him that he appears as it were as human being after the animals. The modern scientific worldview has this in common with the Mosaic history of creation.

Just the today's consideration must oppose that in particular. Thus, one could say, the novel aspect of this spiritual-scientific history of evolution consists of the fact that it must break just with that what faces it as a quite sure result today. Indeed, some of the mental pictures that can originate only on the ground of spiritual science are necessary if understanding should develop for such things, which are discussed today. It is necessary, for example, that one gets clear about such theoretical disputes, as they are quite usual that they must disappear, however, and will disappear, just if spiritual science settles more in the human souls.

Today you still meet the different worldviews that are apparently contradictory. On the one side, there are those human beings who interpret the world and its phenomena materialistically. One calls them “materialists.” The “spiritualists” are on the other side—not the “spiritists.” are meant, but “spiritualists” in the sense of German philosophy. The former represents the view that only the material is the basis of all being and becoming, and that the spiritual develops as it were from the material and its processes. The spiritualists emphasise, above all, that the “spirit” is to be observed as such in the human being that one has to take the spirit as starting point in case of every world consideration. It is completely irrelevant to spiritual science whether somebody takes materialism or spiritualism as starting point. The only which spiritual science demands from itself and from others is that one thinks the inner contents of thoughts and research through to the end. Let us assume that somebody becomes a materialist by his special disposition: if he really envisages the material and its phenomena and does research until the end, he gets without fail from the material to the spirit. If anybody is a spiritualist and does not deal with the spirit purely theoretically, but grasps it in its reality in such a way that he also grasps the manifestations of the spirit in the material, then the spiritualist also understands the bases and ramifications of the material processes. The starting point of the true spiritual-scientific researcher is quite different. It concerns that one has the inner courage to think the things through to the end really. However, this requires a certain power first which wants to think the things through to the end and secondly the ability to consider the phenomena really which one faces. Concerning the latter one can do strange discoveries. Who believes, actually, today that he stands more on the ground of the facts? This one stresses at every opportunity.

I have repeatedly pointed to an event in the sixties of the last century. However, it is always interesting to point to this fact once again. The philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann attempted to overcome the materialist interpretations of scientific results. When the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, the naturalists agreed that there a completely dilettantish philosopher talked about nature in such a way and knew, nevertheless, nothing right about that. Refutations of the Philosophy of the Unconscious were written. Among these refutations, one appeared by an anonym under the title The Unconscious from the Viewpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. The author of this writing set himself to oppose this dilettantish opponent of Darwinism. Haeckel, Oscar Schmidt, and others said about this writing: it is a pity that this anonymous has not been called; we consider him as one of ours; since nobody can say the truth better than this anonymous against this scientific dilettante Hartmann.—They also contributed to the fact that the writing was quickly out of print. The second edition appeared, now with the name of the author: it was—Eduard von Hartmann!—This was once a lesson which was necessary and by which all those should be lectured who believe that somebody must always be a dilettante who does not speak about scientific results like a scientist.

Those listeners who were present at the former talks know that I have emphasised a book of the last time as an especially valuable one, namely The Origin of Organisms - a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922). I regard this book as especially excellent and especially typical for our time for following reason: Oscar Hertwig, a disciple of Ernst Haeckel, came as a young man from the more or less materialist interpretation of the Darwinist research results.

In his book Oscar Hertwig unravelled—it is a kind of Penelope problem—everything that one regarded as particular achievements of the Darwinist research results. Now from the same Oscar Hertwig a book was published which deals more with other problems; it is called: On the Defence of the Technical, Social, and Political Darwinism. I am in a special position now: I will always regard The Origin of Organisms as one of the best books that was written about these things, and I will have to regard Hertwig's last book as one of the most thoughtless, most impossible products of modern thinking. It shows how clumsy the modern naturalist becomes if he should go over from the accustomed ground to another area. Such a fact is very instructive, and one is in a tragic conflict if one has to admire on one side and to condemn radically on the other side. Now I do not want to speak about this last writing by Hertwig generally and in detail; but I would like to mention one thing only:

I have said just now, every naturalist will stress that he stands on the “ground of facts.” You find a place in this impossible book by Hertwig that one reads possibly in such a way: one has to admire how the modern natural sciences have been initiated by the astronomical researches of Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler. Science has become great because it got used to looking at the things of physics, chemistry and biology just like at the astronomical things. Now I ask you, the consideration of the facts that are immediately round us should take place after the pattern of that area where the facts are so far away from us? I am convinced that most readers overlook such an unbelievable contradiction. It appears just in such a contradiction that a significant researcher cannot think so far that this research can be lifted into the spiritual.

Because of those and similar things it has happened that the whole modern theory of evolution has taken its starting point from too straight, too abstract mental pictures which are not able at all to approach the real facts, in particular not the facts which also refer to the solution of the big riddle of the human being.

This human riddle is to be characterised from the start in such a way that the human being seems to be assigned by his whole position in the world not to know at first what he represents in the world and how he stands there in it to get that only from the depths of his being what can enlighten him about his real being. This is also the sense of spiritual-scientific research that that is brought up from the depths of the human mind by special exercises which slumbers, otherwise, in him, which the usual consciousness does not apply at all, and which enables the human being for the “beholding consciousness.” Not before from the depths of the human soul that is brought up what I have called the beholding consciousness in my book The Riddle of Man where the human being has to deal with that which one can call “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” to have a spiritual world around himself, then only one can generally tackle a solution of the big riddles.

These explanations should confirm it: the human being oversleeps his being. A part of the talks should show that the human being oversleeps a part of his being and continues the sleeping state into the waking state. In the depths of his being, something is perpetually sleeping, and his being must be awakened only. As you need that in the usual day life which sleep gives, you need for the usual knowledge if it should be fertile that which the human being oversleeps in his being perpetually. I said, we have to consider the facts at first that are round us. It matters in particular that you put yourself in the position to consider the difference of human being and animal from the viewpoint of the beholding consciousness; since, otherwise, you cannot attain knowledge of the development and origin of the human being and the animal. Now I want to explain sketchily what one can say from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint about the difference of human being and animal.

The animal realm faces us in most different forms. The animals are variously developed. Hence, one divides them into “genera” and “species.” You know that there have been numerous philosophers who were of the opinion that that which one calls “genus” or “species”—“wolves,” “lions,” “tigers” and so on—are only comprising names. What we meet in reality, is always the “material” which is formed most different by its own configuration only. Against it, one has to observe once impartially what there is, actually. There I have to recall a picture repeatedly which my old friend, Professor Vincenz Knauer (1828-1894, Austrian theologian and philosopher) always used when was talk of these things. He said, nevertheless, those people who state that these are only names that are expressed in these genera and species that it is, however, everywhere the same material they should think about whether it is really the same material that is in a lamb and in a wolf. Indeed, one cannot deny that, scientifically considered, it is the same material. However, one should feed a wolf for longer time with nothing but lambs, and one should try once whether he has assumed something of the lamb nature. There it is quite clear that that which constitutes the “wolf” which determines his configuration is not a mere “name” but something that encloses the material in this configuration.

With which is that associated that develops and configures these different animal species in its way? I have to confess, I touch personal relations very reluctantly, but because I can only outline, it is necessary that I do such a personal remark.

For about thirty years, I look at everything that physiological research produces in relation to these questions and compare it to that which the spiritual-scientific research has to say. It would be very attractive to hold a series of talks by which is proved what I state now. What configures itself in the different animal forms is intimately connected with the correlation of forces in the animal structure. Study the structure of an animal very exactly, but not only in such a way as it presents itself to the outer eye, but study the structure of an animal according to its correlation of forces: how different an animal behaves to gravity and how it overcomes gravity if the hind legs are formed different from the forelegs how different an animal appears according to whether it has hooves or claws and the like.

Study how the animal positions itself with its balance in the given relations, and then you find the most intimate relation between the conditions of earthly balance and the kind how the animal is positioned in these conditions of balance. Just these conditions of balance are radically different with the human being and in the animal realm. The human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance in which the animal is put, by the fact that the line that runs through the spinal cord, runs with the animal in parallel with the earth surface but with the human being, it runs vertically to the earth. I do not mean the wholly outer position, because of course the human being also is in parallel to the earth surface if he sleeps. The human being is organised in such a way that the gravitational direction of the earth coincides with the line of his spinal cord. With the animal, the cerebral line is in parallel to the earth surface. The gravitational line of the human being that runs through his head coincides in certain respect with the main line of the remaining organism. His head rests on the gravitational line of the body; with the animal, it overhangs.

The human being is thereby put in a condition of balance that is different from that of the animal; thereby he is in that condition of balance which he gives himself only during the time of his life, because he is born in a similar condition of balance as the animal. While the human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance that are forced upon the animal, he lifts himself out of all forces, which form the basis of the different genera and species; he becomes a “genus,” a “species.” He gets free from that what is with the remaining animal beings the reason of the manifold creation; he himself creates his figure, while he gets free from this determinative reason by his upright position.

Everything that is expressed in the human language, in the human thinking is intimately connected with these conditions of balance. Indeed, just the materialist research in the second half of the nineteenth century brought this to our attention; however, it could not completely make use of this fact. Since someone who thinks his way into the subtle configuration of the material can realise that one being in another way takes up the material of the outer nature, it is brought in directions quite different from all other beings. The human being thereby towers above the remaining animal realm. With it is connected that the whole human condition of balance comes about in full measure in the organism itself, while that of the animal comes about related to the world.

Take the coarsest only: the animal stands on all fours; the human being is bound to a certain balance that is not determined from without but is formed in his own organism. Now something particular is connected with this other condition of balance. Since the human being has a vague feeling of this equilibrium position that is similar to dream. This feeling is as vague as a dream, sometimes only vague as the sleep. As what does this sensation of resting on the own body live in the usual consciousness? This sensation is identical with the self-consciousness. What we get to know in the next talk as the human “mind,” which reveals itself in the ego at first, seizes itself in the human organisation in these conditions of balance that the animal does not have. I said, the modern theory of evolution-has something suggestive, so that one can believe that everything is dilettantish that is said against it. It has something fascinating if one says that the human being has as many bones and muscles as an animal has, how could he be a different being? However, in that which the human being has as the same with the animal the ego does not at all live. The ego does not live in the bones and muscles, does not intervene there, but seizes itself in the feeling at first that rests in the equilibrium.

However, there is something else. The animal realm has manifold shapes. Is this manifold configuration not significant for the human being? Because the human being separates by his other equilibrium from all conditions of balance in which the animal is forced, he has his own figure that appears like a summary of the animal figures. However, everything that works in the animal figures enjoys life in him. It is in him, but it is spirit. What is spread out as phenomena manifest to the senses about the most different animal figures is spiritual in the human being. What is it in him?

To the Imaginative observation arises that completely the same lives in the human being that gives the sensory figure to the animal, but as a supersensible nimble element. It lives in his thinking. What causes that we can think about the things is—in supersensible way—the same as that what the manifold genera and species of the animals are. Because the human being breaks away from the diversity of the animals and gives himself his independent figure that is the dwelling place of the ego, he appropriates invisibly what is visible in the animal world. This lives in his thinking. In the animal realm is poured out in the most manifold forms what is poured out in us, while we survey the world with thinking. We pursue what we can observe; we form thoughts about that. Of course, I know everything that can be argued against it. I also know the objection: are you able to behold into the animals? May the animal not have a kind of thinking as the human being has? However, someone who can adopt the Goethean principle that the phenomena are the right teaching if one observes them properly knows that that which becomes obvious in the phenomena is also decisive for the observation. One of the most essential signs is that that which is poured out sensorily about the manifold animal forms lives in the human being in extrasensory way.

While he freed his figure from the formative forces of the animals, he can take this in his supersensible. The animals are more advanced in relation to the sensory configuration than the human being is. The human being has an unstable figure. The animal is built according to the whole earth. With the human being, it is different; he has taken it in his figure. That is why he can grasp that spiritually what is expressed in the sensory form of the animal.

Already in this point, one sees what, actually, the modern theory of evolution suffers from. I am allowed to say, just because I have become a follower of the modern theory of evolution but have tried to lead it really to an end, I have found what it suffers from. It represents everything straight: the imperfect animals, then the more perfect ones, the even more perfect ones, up to the human being. However, the matter is not that way. Someone who considers the phenomena independently, gets on that this only ascending development is actually one-sided; since it lacks an essential element, which is considered here and there, indeed, in our time, but is not really investigated to an end and applied to the single one. One has to deal with a perpetually ascending development and with a perpetually descending development. The descending development would signify what is just so important for the understanding of the human being, and also there I advise you again to consider physiological matters, but without prejudice.

If one stops at the general trivial ideas of evolution, one imagines that the human being is the most perfect one of the animals that even his single organs, even if really here and there descending developments are admitted, are basically in ascending development. This is not the case. I could bring in many examples.

I want to mention one thing only. Study the human eye and compare it to the eyes of the vertebrates: if you go down in the animal realm, you find a more complex construction than with the human being. With him, the eye has become simpler again. I only want to mention that the xiphoid process and the pecten that exist with the eyes of lower animals are not to be found with the human being. The development has forced back them again. The human eye is a more imperfect organ than that of lower animals. The complete human organism has not only become more perfect if one studies it really compared with the animal organisms, but it has also receded. What has happened?

Because certain forces have been disabled, the human being could become a bearer of the spiritual-mental, could take up this spiritual-mental. What I have called up to now is nothing but a degeneration, “devolution,” in contrast to “evolution.” Take that which gives the single animal the form, which it has, and another animal another form: this thought completely determines the whole organisation of the animal. The human being, however, forms back his organisation. It does not advance so far to be determined completely, it goes back to a former level. Thereby he can give himself the equilibrium position which nature does not give him; thereby he gets free from that which nature forces upon the other beings. The whole formation of the human being has stayed behind; from it that originated which became an organ of thinking in the human being. What forms the basis of thinking is the organ of thinking because it is formed back because it has not advanced as far as the animal form has advanced, which expresses the figure externally. The human being lives the form back and can live out the form in thinking in supersensible way as the animal lives out it in the sensory realm.

One more point: we deal with the human being not only with evolution, but also with devolution, with involution. Just because the human being is more formed back than the animal, he can become the bearer of something spiritual-mental generally. With everything that I have explained up to now, something else is connected. Someone who can really observe how in the animal is expressed what must be an organ of imagination, of percipience, of feeling, so the anterior parts of the animal organisation, finds out that that which expresses itself in the form expresses itself objectively. He finds that this part has to deal with imagining, perceiving and feeling, and that the posterior part deals with the will element. Of course, both sides are connected. Because the animal is put in its equilibrium, it has that side by side which the human being has on top of each other: the will organisation on the one hand and the intellectual and instinctive organisation, on the other hand. There is another connection in the animal between the intellectual, imaginative and will element. With the human being, the organs of imagination are above the organs of will. An inner contact is thereby created between the organs of will and those of imagination. Someone who knows to observe the soul life realises that this human life of imagining is characterised by the fact that the will extends into it. Study the problems of attention, you will realise that the will works into it. Thereby the ability of abstract thinking originates which the animal cannot have because its imagination originates beside the will and not above it. And vice versa: the will and the imagining life work together, so that also the will is influenced by imagination.

Only because the organs of will belong to the subconscious ones, the will itself is expressed only like in the sleeping consciousness. The human being has the real will process in the sleeping consciousness as the other processes of the sleeping consciousness. The whole connection of imagining and willing which is typical for the human being is thereby emphasised: imagining is lightened by the will which is with the animal always in a vague, dream-like state. Likewise, the will is more intimately connected with imagining with the animal, it feels much more connected with its will. This causes again that with the human being the free emotional life relates different to imagining and will, enjoys life much more intensely than with the animal. With the animal the emotional life rests in the organisation; it is as it were only a formal arrangement of the life of thought. On the other side, the emotional life of the animal is only an inhibited or uninhibited will life, depending on whether it can reach or not reach something. This is expressed in its whole life. Just thereby, it is much more connected with the whole outer world.

If we envisage this, we can understand something else that, however, only a careful observation of the human soul life can give. Spiritual science has to proceed in many a respect different from the other science that takes up the things often from the trivial imagination and rejects them then because it cannot get on how the things are to be explained. The spiritual researcher will aim more at the positive, will not be content to take up, for example, the idea of immortality, of the continuance of the soul being, but will primarily ask, how does the human being generally get around to having the “immortal” as a thought or as a feeling in himself? How does he get around to assuming that the immortal can play a role in his soul life?

One can understand this only if one can expand the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis so far that one can approach the question, to what extent is the human being dependent on his lower nature in relation to his higher nature that is expressed by his head? While we have tried up to now to understand the special connection of thinking and willing with the human being and animal, now one has to go into that what connects the human being with the animal concerning something that is intimately connected with the problem of evolution. This enters in the animal and human life by the two phenomena of conception—I do not say of birth—what one considers as the first origin of the human, the combination of the male and the female elements, and death on the other side. Conception and death are bound to certain parts of the human and animal organism; in case of conception, this is evident from the start.

Now one has to realise that that which appears at one place in any animal form—it is similar with the plants—is also expressed in other organ systems but transformed. I would like to call attention to the following from the start: how does that behave with the human being and with the animal what is connected with conception and death, because one has already found out, nevertheless, one difference that is directly bound to the organisation? There it becomes apparent that the human and animal head is, actually, only a higher organised, transformed abdomen, as strange as it sounds, just as after the worldview of Goethe the bones of the skull are transformed dorsal vertebrae.

With the physical creation one deals with the fact that the single organ systems are real transformations of each other, and the functions of the organ systems are transformations of each other. What is “percipience”? Percipience relating to the outside world with the senses is a higher developed conception, specified by the different senses. Because the head organism stunts certain other organs, forces them into the limbs, the organism of conception develops to the higher sensory organism of the head on the one side, and thus the progressive conception corresponds to the advanced sense perception of the head. Every organic system develops the whole organism in a way; the head everything that the abdomen contains, the abdomen everything that the head contains. Because the formative forces of the limbs have atrophied that is expressed spiritually what belongs to their life in the head. The ability of production changes into the developing of thoughts. In the head, the organ of thinking is developed simply because the conceptual is developed unilaterally and the productive is formed back, but the productive thereby gives again the basis of the thoughts. Since as animal and human being produce their equals by the other organism, the human being produces himself spiritually: just the world of thought. The world of thought is the spiritualised human being.

This thought has a big scope, and only with deep regret, I exhaust such things in one single talk. Since such things are the result of decades of spiritual research. However, they must be pronounced once, because these things have to be popularised, so that someone who can investigate it in the medical centres and laboratories can also investigate the details, as they must be investigated.

In the animal life, conception and death are apart like beginning and end of the animal life. Conception and everything that is connected with it leads to the knowledge of the progressive development. Everything, however, that determines the death of the animal out of the relations of the earthly life is connected with the retrograde development. One gets on only spiritual-scientifically what conception and death are real for the animal, for the whole evolution of the animal. The animal is seized by everything that is associated with conception and production. This evolution is the highest development of the organic life. It is just like with an increase of the organic life, with fever if you like, that the usual state of consciousness, which is right for its being, is forced back. Thus, a reduction of consciousness is connected with the excitement of the organic life, and the consciousness is increased with everything that is connected with a retrograde. The moment of highest clarification, of most intensive consciousness is the moment of death—and as a spiritual researcher, I am allowed to say, a moment where the animal element approaches the human one; try only once to observe animals at death. These two moments of the highest reduction and the greatest increase of consciousness, conception and death, are with the animal like two widely separated points, like beginning and end.

With the human being, it is different. Because the head lifts out itself in the described way from the remaining organisation, the human being is so organised that he experiences the interplay of conception and death perpetually. This happens during the whole life. We are so organised that we experience in the brain which forms the basis of our thinking in its connection between percipience and will perpetually, transferred to the spiritual, with every production of a thought—but like sleeping or even subconsciously—what the animal experiences, otherwise, only once during conception. On the other hand, death is perpetually involved in our consciousness because the organism changed into the head has the head as its spiritual organism. We are dying at every moment. Precisely expressed: whenever we grasp a thought, the human will is born in the thought; whenever we will, the thought dies into the will. Will and thought belong together in such a way, as, for example, the young man and the old man, while the will thereby becomes will that the thought has died down in it, and on the other hand the will goes through its youth while the thought is born in it.

The human being is perpetually experiencing birth and death. I have described the human spatial configuration with the help of the balance relationships. Concerning time, it is in such a way that with the human being that runs through the whole life which the animal can experience only at the beginning and end; in a dreamish way he experiences conception and death perpetually in his subconsciousness. Because this lives below in the depths of the human souls, emerges from there and the human being becomes vaguely aware of that which he carries as conception and death in himself and not beside himself and thereby has the feeling: his being lives after death and birth, it encloses more than that which starts with conception and ends at death. The human being carries conception and death in himself. I pronounce it in short words. However, if you investigate everything that physiology and psychology can give presently, you will find it confirmed. This generates the idea of immortality in the human being. Thereby he carries the sensation, the thought of immortality really in himself. Only then, you can consider the connection of animal and human being if you regard this.

How does the human being stand there finally? He is more retrograde than the animal is, and this just gives him the basis of his spiritual being. If you check him completely, you find the strange: as the eye is retrograde, everything of his appearance is retrograde, is formed back into the spiritual compared with the animal. He unfolds this on the same conditions on which the animal unfolds its being. The same relations work on the animal and the human being. They work on the human being, while they provide him as it were with a “shell.” What I have described now is, actually, the inside of the human being. This is transformed in such a way that he can produce his own equilibrium that he has that, which takes shape with the animal, in the versatile forms of his thoughts. Thereby he faces the outside world like concluded by a shell.

Spiritual science actually is able to discover only what you can discover in the human being. It can penetrate through this shell. However, what turns out then? Something similar as with the memory. We perceive the outside world as it is, and process it. However, we remember in the later life what we have taken up from the outside world. Today I cannot explain what the organism of memory is based on; but it is based of course not on the organisation of the body periphery, but on that of the body inside. If you go with the beholding consciousness into that what the shell conceals, then you bring up what causes everything in the depth of the human nature that I described today.

The shell is evoked by that which determines the today's animal realm. How does that differ from it, which lives in the human inside? This becomes to the seer like an increased, beheld memory; there he gets up something from the human being that becomes vivid. As well that appears to the usual consciousness which the senses have experienced, something presents itself to the beholding consciousness, if one delves into that what is down there. Then one finds that that time of development which the human being spent together with the animals—the time of the earthly evolution—followed another time for the human being in which the today's animals could not yet develop. The human being developed before the animal realm, but in another figure of course; since he assumed the today's figure because he was put in relations that formed the animals. However, what rests in the “shell” leads back to a former creation of the earth, to a state that we do not get to know by geologic conclusions. We recognise that the human being is older than the animals that the animals originated later. They are related with the human beings but they originated later. Since we come back to a form of the planet when the animals did not yet exist. The planet looked in such a way that on the effect of its conditions that could form which must be protected today with the outer shell, which faces the animal world today.

The seer experiences that as vision first which I have explained as a thought today: he looks back at former states of the earth. However, this gives just the impulse to look at the developmental states in such a way as they are as they must be, so that one can see what one finds if one only looks.

However, there are still other relations. Today one agrees in the trivial scientific life completely to consider the phenomena of the earth like the astronomical phenomena; but it has taken some time until this thought asserted within the modern humanity. One can have an experience. If you come to Mülhausen (now: Mulhouse) in Alsace, you find a monument: On top is a celestial sphere, before it a statue of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777, Swiss-Alsatian physicist, philosopher), a contemporary of Kant who invented something similar, but much more brilliant than the so-called Kant-Laplace theory. If one still added something that Lambert thought, one would not be far away from that which spiritual science is today.

However, today one is ready that the monument of that man is erected by the decisions of the city council who has a share of modern astronomy. However, if one goes back hundred years from the erection of the monument, one meets something different. At that time, Lambert was a young son of a poor dressmaker. Few people anticipated what was in him, Kant, for example, called him the “greatest genius of the century,” and his father submitted request about request to the city council that the son could get further. Then there one gave him forty francs, but only on the condition that he should leave the city and not return. This was hundred years ago. After hundred years—the monument was erected! Thus, the human development takes place, one example of many.

I come back to my starting point: The modern scientific way of thinking has the same thought with the Mosaic history of creation in common that the human being appears after the animals. Against it, modern spiritual science has to say that the human being precedes the animals, and that one has to go back to such a state in which the human being could only develop that which he was at that time while he had to expose himself to the outer conditions. There one comes back to developmental states of our life on earth, which look different from what one calls Kant-Laplace theory. Externally a primeval nebula may have developed and conglomerated. Some time ago, I have quoted significant words of Herman Grimm: the fact that once later generations will have a lot of trouble to think about the eccentricity of the present, which believed that from such a primeval nebula everything developed that is there now. However, it will take long time, until humanity will be so ripe for a spiritual understanding of the things that one can consider the riddle of the human being as I have done it today.

Then, however, another idea of development arises, and I do not shy away from repeating something that I have already brought to your attention, because I have to show repeatedly from which side life and movement have to be brought in the scientific thinking of our time.

One can have scientific correct thoughts, but these can be very far away from reality. There I have pointed over and over again to that lecture of Professor James Dewar (1842-1923) in London at the Royal Institution in which he explained how the earth would be after 200,000 years. It is calculated quite correctly and one cannot doubt it, just as one can calculate the Kant-Laplace theory quite correctly. One can also calculate this final state of the earth, cooled down below 200 degrees centigrade. There is no mistake: then our atmosphere is condensed into water. Dewar explains it in all details that then the things on earth have assumed other aggregate states. Milk will be solid of course. Indeed, I do not know how it should be produced then; but it will be solid of course. Certain objects will fluoresce; one will be able to coat the walls with protein so that one can read newspapers at night. There is no mistake. However, the question is whether it is not only “right,” but whether it is also “real” whether the thinking knows where it has to stop because it is no longer in reality. Which methods are used to calculate these things? Methods, as for example the following: anybody studies the stomach of a 30-year-old person; he pursues it for more than 300 years and calculates how after 300 years the stomach of this person would be. He can calculate this as well as Professor Dewar calculates the final state of the earth.

Only that is the mistake that then the human being does no longer live, just as the earth does no longer exist after 200,000 years. Likewise, one could calculate how the earth looked 300,000 years ago, because in the same way one can also calculate the Kant-Laplace theory; but at that time the earth did not yet exist. It concerns that one learns to distinguish realistic thinking and only “correct” thinking.

With it, I have said a lot. Since the thought that one gets by the study of the human being to relations where the earth looked completely different is only to be gained if one applies realistic thinking. Then one can also have a thought about how the human being who is protected with the characterised outer shell from the present earthly conditions—which will be quite different from those which Professor Dewar describes—, so that the human being develops into times when the earth will be very different when the today's animals will no longer exist.

This was a spiritual-scientific discussion about the origin and the development of the human realm and the animal realm. Next time I want to show how the human being returns in repeated lives on earth, so that one can again accept Lessing's view of repeated lives on earth. Today I wanted to create a basis to show that spiritual science gets to quite different initial and final states of our earth, and that, indeed, one has to break with the opinion that the animal realm was there first and the human being could then develop on its basis. The human being precedes with his development. Spiritual science will assert these things. A very spirited and vigorous researcher of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss (1853-1909) had an anticipation of it.

There you find the first beginning of these things, but there everything remains more or less assertion. These things can be investigated first if one penetrates with the beholding consciousness into the spiritual-mental of the human being, about which natural sciences cannot speak at all. Since they can only ask, how is the human being related as a spiritual-mental being to the animal organisation? However, the highest of the spiritual-mental does not relate at all to the animal organisation, but it lifts out the organisation, produces quite different equilibrium relationships, so that the experience of conception and death coincides at one moment, so that in the human being by the continuous perception of conception and death the experience of immortality vaguely lights up.

(At the end, Steiner briefly summarises the contents of this talk.)

Why did Friedrich Nietzsche think himself mad about the big questions of human morality? It would have been much easier to listen to the philosophy professor from America Felix Adler on the "morality common to all good people" and proclaim what he heard to the German people as a doctrine of salvation. This is what an elite of German educated people did and founded a "Society for Ethical Culture", whose purpose is to make this "commonality" the mainstay of the lives of educated people. I note from the outset that the founders of the society include men whom I hold in high esteem. But the foundation itself stems from a backward view of life. Official philosophers, who today still regurgitate the old Kant concept-cripple, Nietzsche calls him-stand firmly on the standpoint of believing that there is such a thing as a morality "common to all good men"; modern thinking, which grasps its time and looks a little into the future, is beyond that. "Act in such a way that the principles of your actions can apply to all people"; that is the core sentence of Kant's moral doctrine. And this little saying rings in our ears in every key from the confessions of those who call themselves freethinkers, liberals, apostles of humanity etc.. But today there is also a circle of people who know that this sentence is the death of all individual life, and that all cultural progress is based on living out individuality. What is special in every human being must emerge from him and become part of the development process. If one disregards this special something that everyone has for himself, then all that remains is a very banal "general" that cannot advance humanity by a single step. A few rules of expediency for mutual intercourse, that is all that can emerge as something "common to all good people". But the ethical life of man in the true sense of the word only begins where these laws based on utility end. And this life can only come from the center of the personality and will never be the result of implanted doctrines. There is no such thing as general human ethics. Modern feeling must reply to the Kantian proposition with the exact opposite: Act as, according to your particular individuality, only you can act; then you will contribute most to the whole, for you will accomplish what another cannot. This is how all the people of whom history tells us have acted. That is why there are as many different moral concepts as there have been and are peoples, ages, indeed basically as many as there are individuals. And if this natural law were to be replaced by that which is considered correct by moral philosophers who think in the Kantian sense: a bland uniformity of all human action would be the necessary consequence. Such "general" moral principles have often been established; but no human being has ever organized his life according to them. And the realization that this is a business for idle minds should be the hallmark of all modern thinking.

But it is lamentable to hear that these dreary moral maxims are to be inculcated into the education of young people. Mr. von Gizycki has spoken the harshest words about the pedagogically reprehensible influence of purely confessional education. Hardly any modern thinker will argue with him about this. But what the denominations do with their moral principles is what the "ethical society" wants to imitate with general human principles. There and here, however, nothing is achieved but the killing of the individual and the subjugation of life through lifeless, rigid laws. The priests of religion are to be replaced by the priests of general human morality. But things are even worse with the latter than with the former. The denominational moral doctrines are the results of certain world views, which after all constitute the legitimate cultural content of mankind; the general human moral doctrine is a sum of commonplaces; they are scraps gathered from all possible moral views, which do not stand out from the background of a great contemporary view. Anyone who considers such things to be viable or even suitable for reforming the ethical content of our culture is giving a poor testimony to their psychological insight.

Among the statutes of the "Society for Ethical Culture" are also some that will have a favorable effect. The initiation of a more lively discussion of religious issues, the striving to improve the living conditions of the poorer sections of the population are all things that deserve recognition. But all this has nothing to do with the basic tendencies of society, which want to push back all conceptions of ethical life to a level that has been overcome by modern consciousness. The spread of these basic ideas could only hinder the development of truly modern views.

[ 1 ] We have established that the elements for explaining reality are to be taken from the two spheres: perceiving and thinking. As we have seen, it is our organization that determines the fact that the full, complete reality of things, our own subject included, appears at first as a duality. Cognition overcomes this duality by combining the two elements of reality: the perception and the concept gained by thinking, into the complete thing. If we call the world as it confronts us before it has attained its true aspect by means of cognition, “the world of appearance,” in contrast to the unified whole composed of perception and concept, then we can say: The world is given us as a duality (dualistic), and cognition transforms it into a unity (monistic). A philosophy which starts from this basic principle may be called a monistic philosophy, or monism, in contrast to the theory of two worlds, or dualism. The latter does not assume that there are two sides of a single reality, which are kept apart merely by our organization, but, rather, that there are two worlds, completely different from each other. Then in the one world it tries to find the principles that can explain the other.

[ 2 ] Dualism rests on a misunderstanding of what we call knowledge. It divides the whole of existence into two spheres, each of which has its own laws, and it lets these spheres stand opposite to and outside of each other.

[ 3 ] It is from a dualism such as this that there arises the distinction between the perceived object and the thing-in-itself which Kant ⁴¹ introduced into science and which so far has not been expelled. From our discussion can be seen that it is due to the nature of our intellectual organization that a particular thing can be given us only as perception. Thinking then overcomes this separateness by referring each perception to its rightful place in the world whole. As long as the separated parts of the world whole are defined as perceptions, in this elimination we are simply following a law of our subjectivity. If, however, we consider the sum-total of all perceptions as constituting one part, and confront it with the “thing-in-itself” as a second part, then our philosophizing loses all foundation. It then becomes a mere playing with concepts. An artificial opposition is constructed, but it is not possible to attain a content for the second part of this opposition, since such content for a particular thing can be drawn only from perception.

[ 4 ] Every kind of existence which is assumed outside the realm of perception and concept belongs to the sphere of unjustified hypotheses. The “thing-in-itself” belongs in this category. It is quite natural that a dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection between a universal principle which he hypothetically assumes, and the given, known by experience. One can obtain a content for the hypothetical universal principle only by borrowing a content from the sphere of experience and then shutting one's eyes to the fact of the borrowing. Otherwise it remains an empty concept, a non-concept, which is nothing but a shell of a concept. Then the dualistic thinker usually maintains that the content of this concept is not accessible to our knowledge. We can know only that such a content must be present, but not what it is. In both cases it is impossible to overcome dualism. Even if one brings a few abstract elements from the sphere of experience into the concept of the thing-in-itself, it still remains impossible to derive the rich concrete life of experience from those few qualities which, after all, are themselves taken from perception only. DuBois-Reymond ⁴² thinks that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling by means of their position and motion, and then comes to the conclusion: We can never find a satisfactory explanation of how matter and motion produce sensation and feeling, for

“It is absolutely and forever unintelligible that it should be other than indifferent to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, etc., how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, or how they will lie and will move. It is impossible to see how consciousness could come into existence through their interaction.”

This conclusion is characteristic of this whole trend of thought. Position and motion are abstractions derived from the rich sphere of perceptions. They are then transferred to the imagined world of atoms. Then astonishment arises that real life cannot be evolved out of this principle which is self-made and borrowed from the sphere of perceptions.

[ 5 ] That the dualist who works with a completely empty concept of the “in-itself” of things can reach no explanation of the world, already follows from the definition of his principle indicated above.

[ 6 ] A dualist is always compelled to set impassable barriers to our faculty of knowledge. The follower of a monistic world view knows that everything he needs for the explanation of any given phenomenon in the world must lie within this world itself. What hinders him from reaching the explanation can be only contingent limitations in space and time, or shortcomings of his organization. And, indeed, not of the human organization in general, but only of his own particular one.

[ 7 ] It follows from the concept of cognition, as defined by us, that one cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Cognition is not a concern of the universe in general, but one which men must settle for themselves. Things claim no explanation. They exist and act on one another according to laws which thinking can discover. They exist in indivisible unity with these laws. Our egohood confronts them, grasping at first only what we have called perceptions. In the inner core of our egohood, however, we find the power to discover the other part of reality also. Only when the egohood has again combined for itself the two elements of reality which are indivisibly united in the world, is the thirst for knowledge satisfied: the I has again come to reality.

[ 8 ] Therefore, the conditions required for cognition to arise, come about through and for the I. The I sets itself the problems of cognition. And it takes them from the element of thinking, in itself absolutely clear and transparent. If we ask questions we cannot answer, then the content of the question cannot be clear and distinct in all its details. The world does not set us the questions; it is we ourselves who set them.

[ 9 ] I can imagine that it would be quite impossible for me to answer a question which I happened to find written down somewhere, without knowing the sphere from which the content of the question was taken.

[ 10 ] In knowledge we are concerned with questions which arise for us through the fact that a sphere of perceptions, conditioned by time, space, and our subjective organization, is confronted by a sphere of concepts pointing to a world which is a unity. My task is to reconcile these two spheres, well known to me. One cannot speak here of a limit of knowledge. It may be that at a particular moment, this or that remains unexplained because, through our place in life, we are prevented from perceiving all that is involved. What is not found to-day, however, may be found tomorrow. The limits due to these causes are only transitory, and can be overcome by the progress of perceiving and thinking.

[ 11 ] Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the antithesis of object and subject, which has significance only within the sphere of perceptions, to purely invented entities outside this sphere. But as the separate things within the field of perception remain separated only as long as the perceiver refrains from thinking, which cancels all separation and shows it to be due to merely subjective factors, so the dualist, in fact, transfers to entities behind the sphere of perceptions definitions which, even for perceptions, have no absolute but only relative validity. In doing this he splits up the two factors concerned in the process of cognition, perception and concept, into four: 1) the object-in-itself, 2) the perception which the subject has of the object, 3) the subject, 4) the concept which relates the perception to the object-in-itself. The relation between object and subject is considered to be real, that is, the subject is considered to be really (dynamically) influenced by the object. This real process is said not to appear in consciousness. But it is supposed to evoke in the subject a response to the stimulation from the object. The result of this response is said to be the perception. This at last enters our consciousness. The object is said to have an objective reality (independent of the subject), the perception a subjective reality. This subjective reality is said to be referred by the subject to the object. This latter reference is said to be an ideal one. The dualist, in other words, splits up the process of cognition into two parts. One part, i.e., the production of the perceptual object out of the thing-in-itself, takes place, according to him, outside of consciousness, the other part, the union of perception with concept and the reference of this to the object, within consciousness. These presuppositions make it clear that the dualist believes he receives in his concepts only something subjective, which represents what confronts his consciousness. The objectively real process in the subject, by means of which the perception comes about, and still more the objective relationships between things-in-themselves, remain inaccessible to direct cognition for such a dualist. In his opinion, man can obtain only concepts that represent the objectively real. The bond of unity which connects things with one another and also objectively with our individual spirit (as thing-in-itself), lies beyond consciousness in a being-in-itself of whom we likewise can have in our consciousness only a concept that represents it.

[ 12 ] The dualist believes that the whole world would be nothing but a mere abstract scheme of concepts if he did not insist on “real” connections between the objects beside the conceptual ones. In other words, the ideal principles which can be discovered by thinking seem too airy for the dualist, and he seeks, in addition, “real principles” with which to support them.

[ 13 ] Let us examine these “real principles” a little more closely. The naive man (naive realist) regards the objects of external experience as realities. The fact that his hands can grasp and his eyes can see these objects is for him the proof of their reality. “Nothing exists that cannot be perceived” is, in fact, the basic axiom of the naive man, and it is held to be equally valid in its converse: “Everything which can be perceived, exists.” The best proof for this assertion is the naive man's belief in immortality and in ghosts. He thinks of the soul as a fine kind of physical matter which, in special circumstances, may actually become visible to the ordinary man (naive belief in ghosts).

[ 14 ] In contrast to this real world of his, the naive realist regards everything else, especially the world of ideas, as unreal, as “merely ideal.” What we add to objects by thinking is mere thoughts about the objects. Thought adds nothing real to perception.

[ 15 ] But it is not only with reference to the existence of things that the naive man regards sense perception as the sole proof of reality, but also with reference to happenings. According to him, one thing can act upon another only when a force actually present to sense perception issues from the one and seizes upon the other. The older physicists thought that very fine substances emanate from the objects and penetrate through the sense-organs into the soul. They thought the actual seeing of these substances to be impossible only because of the coarseness of our sense-organs in comparison with the fineness of these substances. In principle, the reason for attributing reality to these substances was the same as that for attributing it to the objects of the physical world, namely, the form of their existence, which was thought to be analogous to that of physical reality.

[ 16 ] The self-dependent nature of what can be experienced, not physically but ideally, is not regarded by naive consciousness as being real in the same sense. Something grasped “merely as idea” is regarded as a chimera until sense perception can provide conviction of its reality. In short, in addition to the ideal evidence of his thinking, the naive man demands the real evidence of his senses. This need of naive man is the reason why primitive forms of belief in revelation arise. For naive consciousness, the God who is given through thinking always remains a God merely “thought.” Naive consciousness demands that the manifestation should be through means accessible to physical perception. God must appear in bodily form; little value is attached to the evidence of thinking, but only to the Divine Nature being proved by the changing of water into wine in a way which can be testified by the senses.

[ 17 ] The act of cognition, too, is regarded by naive man as a process analogous to sense-perception. Things must make an impression on the soul or send out images which penetrate the senses, etc.

[ 18 ] What the naive man can perceive with his senses he regards as real, and that of which he has no such perception (God, soul, cognition, etc.) he regards as analogous to what is perceived.

[ 19 ] A science based on naive realism will consist in an exact description of the content of perception. Concepts are only means to this end. They exist to provide ideal counterparts of perceptions. For things themselves, they have no significance. For the naive realist, only the individual tulips which are seen or could be seen, are real. The one idea of the tulip, is to him an abstraction, is to him an unreal thought-picture, which the soul has put together for itself out of the characteristics common to all tulips.

[ 20 ] Naive realism, with its fundamental principle of the reality of all perceived things, is contradicted by experience, which shows us that the content of perceptions is of a transitory nature. The tulip I see, is real to-day; in a year it will have vanished into nothingness. What persists is the species tulip. This species, however, for the naive realist is “merely” an idea, not a reality. Thus, this world view finds itself in the position of seeing its realities arise and perish, while what it regards as unreal, in contrast to the real, persists. Hence the naive realist has to allow for the existence of something ideal besides the perceptions. He has to accept entities which he cannot perceive by means of the senses. He justifies this by imagining their existence to be analogous to that of physical objects. Such hypothetically assumed realities are the invisible forces by means of which objects perceptible to the senses act on one another. Heredity is thought of in this way; it goes beyond the individual and is the reason why a new being develops from the individual which is similar to it, and by means of it the species is maintained. The life principle permeating the organic body is also thought of in this way, and so is the soul, for which one always finds in naive consciousness a concept based on an analogy to sense-reality, and finally so, too, the naive man thinks of the Divine Being. This Divine Being is thought of as active in a manner exactly corresponding to what can be perceived as actions of men, that is, the Divine Being is thought of anthropomorphically.

[ 21 ] Modern physics traces sense-impressions back to processes in the smallest particles of bodies and to the infinitely fine substance, the ether, or to something similar. For example, what we sense as warmth, is, within the space occupied by the warmth-giving body, movement of its parts. Here again, something imperceptible is thought of on the analogy of what is perceptible. The physical analogon to the concept “body” is, in this sense, something like the interior of a totally enclosed space in which elastic balls are moving in all directions, impinging on one another, bouncing on and off the walls, etc.

[ 22 ] Without such assumptions, for naive realism, the world would collapse into a disconnected chaos of perceptions with no mutual relationships to unite them. It is clear, however, that naive realism can arrive at these assumptions only by inconsistency. If it remained true to its fundamental principle that only what is perceived is real, then it would not assume a reality where it perceives nothing. The imperceptible forces which proceed from perceptible things are essentially unjustified hypotheses from the standpoint of naive realism itself. And as the naive realist acknowledges no other realities, he invests his hypothetical forces with perceptual content. In doing this he applies a form of existence (perceptual existence) to a sphere where he lacks the only means that can give any evidence of such existence: perceiving by means of physical senses.

[ 23 ] This self-contradictory world view leads to metaphysical realism. Beside the perceptible reality, the metaphysical realist constructs an imperceptible one which he thinks of on the analogy of the former. Metaphysical realism therefore, is of necessity dualistic.

[ 24 ] Where the metaphysical realist observes a relation between perceptible things (mutual approach through movement, becoming conscious of an object, etc.), there he regards a reality as existing. But the relation that he notices he can, however, express only by means of thinking; he cannot perceive it. The relation, which is purely ideal, is arbitrarily made into something similar to what is perceptible. Thus, according to this line of thought, the real world is composed of perceptual objects which are in ceaseless flux, arising and disappearing, and of imperceptible forces which are permanent and produce the perceptual objects.

[ 25 ] Metaphysical realism is a contradictory mixture of naive realism and idealism. Its hypothetical forces are imperceptible entities endowed with the qualities of perceptions. In addition to the sphere, for the form of existence of which he has a means of cognition in its perceptibility, the metaphysical realist has decided to acknowledge another sphere to which this means is not applicable, a sphere which can be ascertained only by means of thinking. But he cannot at the same time decide also to acknowledge the form of existence which thinking mediates, namely the concept (the idea), as being of equal importance with perceptions. If one is to avoid the contradiction of imperceptible perceptions, then it must be admitted that the relation thinking mediates between perceptions can have no other form of existence for us than that of the concept. When the untenable part of metaphysical realism is rejected, we then have the world before us as the sum of perceptions and their conceptual (ideal) relations. Then metaphysical realism merges into a world view which requires the principle of perceptibility for perceptions and that of “think-ability” for the relations between the perceptions. Side by side with the realm of perceptions and that of concepts, this world view cannot acknowledge a third realm for which both principles, the so-called real principle and the ideal principle, have equal validity.

[ 26 ] When the metaphysical realist maintains that beside the ideal relation between the perceptual object and the perceiving subject, there must also exist a real relation between the “thing-in-itself” of the perception and the “thing-in-itself” of the perceptible subject (of the so called individual spirit), then this assertion is due to the mistaken assumption of the existence of a process, analogous to a process in the sense-world, but imperceptible. Further, when the metaphysical realist says: I have a conscious ideal relationship with my world of perceptions, but with the real world I can have only a dynamic (force) relationship, he then makes the above mistake to an even greater degree. One can only speak of a force-relationship within the world of perceptions (in the sphere of the sense of touch), not outside that sphere.

[ 27 ] Let us call the world view characterized above, into which metaphysical realism merges if it discards its contradictory elements, monism, because it unites one-sided realism with idealism in a higher unity.

[ 28 ] For the naive realist, the real world is an aggregate of objects of perception; for the metaphysical realist also the imperceptible forces are realities. Instead of forces, the monist has ideal connections which he attains by means of his thinking. The laws of nature are such connections. For a law of nature is nothing other than the conceptual expression for the connection of certain perceptions.

[ 29 ] The monist never has any need to ask for factors other than perceptions and concepts, with which to explain reality. He knows that in the whole sphere of reality there is no need to ask for this. In the sphere of perceptions, directly accessible to his perceiving, he sees half of a reality; in the union of this sphere with the sphere of concepts, he finds the full reality. The metaphysical realist may make the objection to the adherent of monism: It could be that for your organization your knowledge is complete in itself, that no part is lacking; but what you do not know is how the world is mirrored in an intelligence organized differently from your own. To this the monist would reply: If there are intelligences other than human, if their perceptions have a different form than ours, then all that would be of significance for me would be what reaches me from them by means of perceptions and concepts. By means of my perceiving and, in fact, by means of this specifically human manner of perceiving, as subject I am placed over against the object. The connection of things is thereby broken. The subject restores this connection by means of thinking. In doing so, things are re-inserted into the world whole. Since it is only through our subject that this whole appears rent in two at the place between our perception and our concept, so likewise the union of these two factors gives us a true knowledge. For beings with a different world of perceptions (if, for example, they had twice as many sense-organs), the connection would appear broken in another place, and the restoration would, accordingly, have a form specific for such beings. The question concerning limits of knowledge exists only for the naive and metaphysical realists, both of whom see in the content of the soul only an ideal representation of the world. For them, what exists outside the subject is something absolute, something self-dependent, and the content of the subject is a picture of this absolute and is completely external to it. How complete is knowledge of this absolute would depend on the greater or lesser degree of resemblance between the picture and the absolute object. A being with fewer senses than man would perceive less of the world, one with more senses would perceive more. The former's knowledge would therefore be less complete than that of the latter.

[ 30 ] For the monist, things are different. It is the organization of the perceiving being that determines how the world unity appears to be torn apart into subject and object. The object is not something absolute, but is only something relative in relation to this particular subject. The bridging of the contrasting entities can, therefore, take place again only in the quite specific way that is characteristic of the human subject. As soon as the I, which, in perceiving, is separated from the world, reinserts itself into the connection of things through thinking investigation, all further questioning ceases, since all questions arose only as a result of the separation.

[ 31 ] A differently constituted being would have a differently constituted knowledge. Our knowledge suffices to answer the questions asked by our nature.

[ 32 ] The metaphysical realist should ask: How does what is given as perception come to be the given; what is it that affects the subject?

[ 33 ] For the monist, the perception is determined by the subject. But in thinking, the subject has, at the same time, the means for canceling this determination, caused through the subject itself.

[ 34 ] The metaphysical realist is faced by a further difficulty when he seeks to explain the similarity of the world picture, of different human individuals. He cannot but ask himself: How is it that the world picture which I build up out of my subjectively determined perceptions and out of my concepts, turns out to be like that which another individual builds up out of the same two subjective factors? How, from my subjective world picture, can I infer anything about that of another human being? The metaphysical realist believes he can infer, from the fact that people come to terms with one another in practical life, that their subjective world pictures must be similar. From the similarity of these world pictures he then further infers that the “individual spirits” behind the single perceiving human subjects, or the “I-in-itself” behind the subjects, must also be similar.

[ 35 ] Therefore this inference is drawn from a sum of effects to the nature of their underlying causes. It is believed that from a sufficiently large number of instances, the situation can be so recognized that one can know how the inferred causes will behave in other instances. Such an inference is called an inductive inference. It will be necessary to modify the results if, from further observation, some unexpected element is discovered, because the result, after all, is determined only by the particular form of the earlier observation. The metaphysical realist maintains that this stipulated knowledge of causes is quite sufficient for practical life.

[ 36 ] Inductive inference is the methodical foundation of modern metaphysical realism. At one time it was believed that out of concepts could be evolved something that is no longer a concept. It was believed that from concepts could be derived the metaphysical realities which of necessity, metaphysical realism must have. This kind of philosophizing is now superseded. Instead, it is believed that from a sufficiently large number of perceptual facts one can infer the character of the thing-in-itself which underlies these facts. Just as in the past one tried to derive the metaphysical from concepts, so to-day one tries to derive it from perceptions. As concepts are transparent in their clarity, it was believed that one could also deduce the metaphysical from them with absolute certainty. Perceptions are not of such transparency. Each later perception is always a little different from those of the same kind that preceded it. Therefore, anything inferred from the earlier perception is, in reality, somewhat modified by each following one. The aspect of the metaphysical arrived at in this way, therefore, can be said to be only relatively correct, for it is subject to correction by future instances. Eduard von Hartmann's metaphysics is of a kind that is determined by this methodical principle. This is expressed in the motto he gave on the title-page of his first major work: “Speculative results according to the inductive method of natural science.”

[ 37 ] The form which the metaphysical realist gives to his things-in-themselves today is obtained by inductive inferences. His consideration of the process of knowledge has convinced him that a connection of things, which is objectively real, exists side by side with the “subjective” connection that can be known through perception and concept. The nature of this objective reality he believes he can determine by inductive inferences from his perceptions.

[ 38 ] Addition to the Revised Edition, (1918): Certain representations which arise from investigations of natural phenomena tend, again and again, to disturb unprejudiced observation—as the effort has been made to describe it above—of how we experience concepts and perceptions. Such investigations show that in the light-spectrum the eye perceives colors from red to violet. However, within the spectrum's sphere of radiation, but beyond the violet there are forces to which corresponds no color perception of the eye, but a chemical effect and, similarly, beyond the limit of the red there exist radiations which have only effects of warmth. Investigation of these and similar phenomena has led to the opinion that the range of man's sphere of perceptions is determined by the range of his senses, and that he would have before him a very different world if he had more or altogether different senses. Those who are inclined to flights of imagination, for which the glittering discoveries of recent scientific research in particular offer such tempting opportunities, may come to the conclusion: Nothing can enter man's field of observation except what is able to affect the senses of his bodily organization, and he has no right to regard what he perceives, by means of his limited organization, as being in any way a standard for ascertaining reality. Every new sense would give him a different picture of reality.—Within its proper limits, this opinion is entirely correct. But one who allows this opinion to prevent him from observing without prejudice the relationship between concept and perception, as explained here, will put obstacles in the way to any realistic knowledge of man and world. To experience thinking in its own nature, that is, to experience the active working-out of the sphere of concepts, is something entirely different from the experience of something perceptible through the senses. Whatever senses man might possibly have, not one would give him reality if through the activity of thinking, he did not permeate with concepts the perceptions they conveyed to him; and indeed, every sense, of whatever kind, if thus permeated, gives man the possibility to live within reality. Speculations about quite different perceptual pictures conveyed by other senses, has nothing to do with the question concerning man's relation to reality. It is essential to recognize that every perceptual picture derives its form from the organization of the perceiving being, but the perceptual picture when permeated by thinking which is livingly experienced leads man into reality. A fanciful description of how different the world would appear to other than human senses cannot act as an incentive to man to seek for knowledge concerning his relationship to the world; rather will this happen through the insight that every perception gives us only a part of the reality it conceals, that, therefore, it leads away from its reality. This then brings us to the further insight that it is thinking which leads into that part of reality which the perception conceals within itself. An unprejudiced observation of the relation between perceptions, and concepts worked out by thinking, as here described, may also be disturbed by the fact that in the sphere of applied physics it becomes necessary to speak not at all of directly perceptible elements, but of non-perceptible magnitudes, such as lines of electric or magnetic force, etc. It may appear as if the elements of reality, spoken of in physics, had nothing to do either with what is perceptible or with concepts actively worked out by thinking. But such a view is based on self-deception. What matters is that all that is worked out in physics—as long as it is not based on unjustifiable hypotheses which must be excluded—is obtained by means of perceptions and concepts. By a correctly working instinct for knowledge in the physicist, what is apparently a non-perceptible content will always be placed into the field of perceptions, and will be thought of in concepts belonging to this field. The magnitudes in electric and magnetic fields, etc., are attained, owing to their nature, by no other process of cognition than the one which takes place between perception and concept.—An increase or a transformation of the human senses would give a different perceptual picture; it would be an enrichment or a transformation of human experience. But a real knowledge of this experience also could be attained only through the interplay of concept and perception. A deepening of knowledge depends upon the active power of intuition contained in thinking (see p. 30). In the living experience within thinking, this intuition can dive down into lesser or greater depths of reality. Through extension of the perceptual picture this diving down of intuition can receive stimulation and thus be indirectly strengthened. But never should this diving into the depths to attain reality be confused with being confronted with a wider or narrower perceptual picture, in which there would always be contained only a half-reality determined by the organization of the cognizing being. If one avoids getting lost in abstractions, it will be recognized how significant, also for knowledge of the being of man, is the fact that in physics one has to include the existence, in the field of perceptions, of elements for which no sense organ is directly tuned as for color or sound. The essential being of man is determined not only by what confronts him through his organization as direct perception, but also by the fact that he excludes something else from this direct perception. Just as life needs, in addition to the conscious waking state, an unconscious sleeping state, so, for man's self-experience is needed besides the sphere of his sense-perceptions, another sphere also—indeed, a much larger one—of elements not perceptible to the senses, but existing within the same field where sense-perceptions originate. All this was already indirectly indicated in the first edition of this book. The author here adds these amplifications to the content because he has found by experience that many readers have not read accurately enough.—Another thing to be considered is that the idea of perception, as presented in this book, is not to be confused with the idea of external sense-perception, which is but a special instance of perception. The reader will gather from what has already been said, but even more from what will follow, that here perception includes everything that man meets, physically or spiritually, before he has grasped it in actively worked out concepts. We do not need what we usually mean by senses in order to have perceptions of a soul or spiritual kind. It may be said that such extension of the ordinary use of a word is inadmissible. Yet such extension is absolutely necessary if one is not to be barred by the current use of a word from enlarging the knowledge of certain fields. If the word perception is applied to physical perception only, then one cannot arrive at a concept that can be of use for attaining knowledge even of this (physical) perception. Often it is necessary to enlarge a concept in order that it may preserve in a narrower field the meaning appropriate to it. Or it is sometimes necessary to add something different to the previous content of a concept in order that its first content may be justified or even readjusted. For example, it is said in this book (p. 32) “A representation, therefore, is an individualized concept.” It has been objected that this is an unusual use of the word. But this use of the word is necessary if we are to find out what a representation really is. What would become of the progress of knowledge if, when compelled to readjust concepts, one is always to be met with the objection: “This is an unusual use of the word”?

• 41. Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, was born in Königsburg April 22, 1724. He entered the university there in 1740, enrolled for the study of mathematics and physics. His studies were interrupted by the death of his father, which left him in poverty. After he supported himself by tutoring for 9 years, the kindness of a friend enabled him to resume his studies, to graduate as a doctor and to qualify as a privatdocent. He occupied this position for 15 years. His lectures widened from physics to include much philosophy. Finally, after unsuccessful attempts, in 1770 he was given the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsburg. In 1781 his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason appeared, and in 1783, his Prolegomena. After the appearance of the 2nd edition of the Kritik in 1787, Kant became famous everywhere in German intellectual circles, and his views were regarded as those of an oracle. From 1792–97 he was engaged in a struggle with the government concerning his religious views. In 1794 he withdrew from society, and gave up all teaching except for one public lecture course on logic. In 1797 Kant terminated a teaching activity that had extended over 42 years. He died in Königsburg on February 12, 1804 near the end of his 80th year. Little more than five feet tall, deformed in his right shoulder, his chest almost concave, Kant had a weak constitution. He never married, and followed an unchanging program of activities from youth to old age. For example, he never failed to rise at 5 o'clock, studied for 2 hours, lectured for 2 more, and spent the rest of the morning at his desk. He dined at a restaurant and spent the afternoon in conversation with friends. He then walked for about an hour—a walk which for years followed exactly the same course—studied for 2 hours more, and retired between 9 and 10. He was a prolific reader, especially in history, science, travel, and philosophy. He knew English history and literature intimately, especially in the period of Queen Anne. He read little of Goethe or Schiller, but often re-read Voltaire and Rousseau. He had little interest in nature, and in 80 years never traveled more than 40 miles from his native Königsburg. For further biographical details, works and translations, consult any standard encyclopedia.
• 42. Emil DuBois-Reymond, German physiologist and educator. Born Berlin, November 7th, 1818, in 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, where his teacher was Johannes Müller, above). In 1840 he became the latter's assistant in physiology. His great work was the study of animal electricity, and his famous book was Researches on Animal Electricity, 1848–84. For many years he exerted great influence as a teacher. In 1858, upon the death of Müller, he was appointed to the latter's chair in physiology. In 1851 he had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin; in 1867 he became its permanent secretary. His closest friend after Müller's death was von Helmholtz, who also had been a student of Müller. DuBois-Reymond died in Berlin on November 26, 1896. Rudolf Steiner makes many references to his work in lectures and writings.