The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have been trying to come to grips with the following question: Why does man not notice how different—different spiritually and in their culture—are the several periods in which, during our present earth-cycle, he has spent his repeated earth-lives. We need to understand clearly why it is so widely believed that Man has altered very little during thousands of years, since history began, whereas Spiritual Science shows how greatly souls changed in their essential character during the third; fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean epochs—the fifth being our present one. These changes are confirmed by Spiritual-Scientific knowledge, but we find very little trace of them if we scan outer history, as usually presented and written.

I have already tried to show, in approaching this question, that, if one pays a little attention to the soul-element in history the changes spring to lisht. I have endeavoured to make comprehensible the difference between the feelings of the human soul, in, for instance, the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and those of the of the human soul of to-day. As an example I tried to illuminate for you the soul of Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Such examples might be multiplied, but before we go further in this direction, we will revert once more to the kernel of our question: What is it that prevents man from observing rightly how his various earth-lives differ in this respect?

He is chiefly prevented by the circumstance that, as constituted in the present earth-era, he has exceedingly little perception of his real ego, his true human self. But for certain hindrances, he would have quite a different idea of his nature and being, We will deal with these hindrances presently. For the moment I would like to point out,—you can take it, to begin with, simply as an hypothesis—how man would appear to himself if his real being were revealed to him.

If this were possible, he would above all notice a great and constant change in his personal life between birth and death. Looking back from whatever age—20, 30, or 50—towards his birth, he would see himself in perpetual metamorphosis. He would perceive by-gone changes morn clearly and realise hopefully that further changes are in store for him in the future. These I have mentioned in other lectures.

Because present-day man is too little inclined to realise himself as a soul-being, he has not much idea of how he has altered in the course of time. Strangely, but truly, his idea of himself is divided into two parts. He sees his bodily part on the one hand, a more or less constant factor in his life between birth and death. He is conscious, of course, that he “grows”, that he was tiny and became bigger, but that is almost all he knows consciously about his outer physical being. Take a simple example. You cut your nails—why? Because they grow. That shows, if you think about it, that a continual process of shedding takes place in your organism as regards the outer bodily part of it. In fact you drive that part out, so that in a certain time, at most in six or seven years, the material of the body is completely changed. You continually get rid of your material outfit. Man, however, is not conscious of this outer dissolution and continual reconstruction from within. Just fancy, how differently we should know ourselves, if we were conscious of how, as it were, we shed the external part of our physical body, dissolve it, and rebuild ourselves anew from within—we should be observing the metamorphosis of our own being!

Something else would be linked with this. If we really took into our consciousness that the body we bear is our possession for only seven years, that we have thrown off all we possessed of it before that, we should appear to ourselves much more spiritual. We should not have the deceptive notion, “I was a little child to begin with—then I grew bigger and different”—but we should know that though the material of the child-substance is somewhere, what has remained is not material, but absolutely super-substantial. If man could bring this metamorphosis into consciousness, he would be looking back at something retained ever since childhood. He would recollect himself as a spiritual being. If we knew what takes place in us, we should have much more spiritual conceptions of ourselves.

Yet again—suppose we looked at ourselves much less abstractly, we talk about ourselves as though we had a “Spiritual centre.” We speak of our Ego and we have the idea: “Our Ego was there in our childhood, and accompanied us further,” and so on; but we really picture it simply as a kind of spiritual centre. If only we could rise to the other conception—that of outer dissolution and inner reconstruction—we could not help regarding the Ego as the efficacious, active cause of it. We should see ourselves as something very real and inwardly active. In short, we would look upon our Ego not as something abstract, but would survey its inwardly active work on our body, leading this from one metamorphosis to another. We should correct any erroneous conceptions which we cherish on the subject at present. They are even embodied in the expression of speech. We say “we grow,” because we have the notion that we were to begin with, children, and have grown taller; but the matter is not as simple as that. The truth is that in a tiny child the bodily and the soul-spiritual activities are experienced more as a unity wherein the head-organism and the reproduction-organism (sex-organism) are closely associated. The two experiences of head and body separate later, becoming alien to one another. The material organism of childhood does not increase, for it is thrown off, dissolved; but the two poles of our own being grow wider apart. By this means, later on, in a fully formed body, in which the poles have separated from one another, our substance is organised from within. It seems to us as mere growth, but that is not so; we are organised inwardly, therefore we are connected with different outward things in earlier and later periods of life. As time goes on, the head-organism needs to move itself further away from the immediate earth-forces. The head rises; consequently, we “grow.”

All these conceptions would change if we accepted the actual truth—which we do not do. We leave out of account the constantly changing body, the body that is always becoming different we ignore it and imagine that it grows of itself and becomes larger; and so we fail to notice what a rich, mobile, living, inward entity is the ego, which works on us unceasingly between birth and death. Such a conception would give us a really coherent idea of ourselves if we could but grasp it, but modern man is not capable of that. This is to some extent connected with the destiny of the human race, with the whole development of our epoch. Man does not really identify himself with his living, active, ego, which actually builds his organism from year to year, but he divides it; on the one side he looks at his organism, which he imagines to be solid and enduring, and on the other at his ego, which he makes into an abstraction, a figure of straw. Such a man says: We have on the one side a sense-organism, a bodily one, through which we cannot approach things because they can only make “impressions” on us: the essential nature of the thing does not reveal itself to us at all; the “thing-in-itsef!” cannot be apprehended, we have only phenomena. Certainly, to look on the body as enduring substance gives this argument some justification. Then he looks at this insubstantial ego and says: There, within, there is something like a “feeling of duty,” and he sums it up as the “categorical imperative.” The unity is split up. If we thus divide the unity in human nature, criticising it from two sides, we become followers of Kant. What I am now saying goes into the very depths of present-day human thought.

Man of this age is little fitted to comprehend himself as a complete being in the word. He divides himself in the way I have described. The result is that we never contemplate our real soul-being with the eye of the spirit, or we would see that this part of ourselves is what continually works upon and changes the body. We look merely at the abstract body and the abstract ego and do not trouble about what the whole undivided human being may be. To become aware of that would at once lead us to recognise that this undivided being is different from incarnation to incarnation. The true, genuine human ego, concealed as it is, hidden at present from the soul's gaze, differs from life to life. Of course, if we are thinking of the abstraction, “ego,” not of the concrete human ego, we cannot arrive at the idea of the ego being so different from life to life. The result of thinking abstractly in this way is that things which are in any way similar are ultimately reduced to a featureless uniformity. Souls of course are similar in successive earth-lives; but on the other hand, they also differ, because from life to life a man passes through the course of human development. Because man does not in truth behold either the mutability of his body, or the real, whole activity of his ego, he does not see his true being. This is, as it were, a golden rule for gaining real knowledge of man and insight into his nature. And why?

The answer to this question lies in what you know of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements. We divide our being in such a way that on the one side we place our body, which we regard as having been small once and having expanded and grown, whereas it has in reality continually renewed itself. What is it that appears to us if we look at the body in this way? The Ahrimanic element, active within ourselves. But this Ahrimanic element is not our real human being; it belongs to the species and indeed remains the same though all ages. Therefore in looking at the body, we are really looking at our Ahrimanic part, and this is all that modern scientific anthropology describes in man. That is one thing we see—the corporeal part of ourselves, which we hare conceived of as being dense. The other is the abstract ego, which is in reality fluctuating, living strongly within us only; while we form a conception of ourselves, between birth and death. There we have our individual education, our uselessness and also our value,—there we survey our own personal life between birth and death; but we do not see our ego as it is in reality, as it works upon the metamorphoses of our physical body; we see it as Lucifer shows it to as, rarified. We see our physical part materialised, densified by Ahriman; our soul-spiritual part rarified by Lucifer.

If this was not so, if we did not divide ourselves so that one pole of our being is Ahrimanic and the other Luciferic, we should have a much more intimate connection with the dead who are always among us, because we should be more closely related to the spirituel world. We should comprehend the complete reality, to which belongs also the world in which man is after he passes through the gate of death, and before he returns to this world through the gate of conception.

Thus we never have our real being before us, but on the one side the physical-corporeal Ahrimanic phantom, on the other the soul-spiritual Luciferic phantom; two phantoms, two delusive images of ourselves, yet between that, imperceptible to us, lives the real man, that being to which we must refer when we say “man,” because this is the true man, progressing from life to life.

We must in all seriousness consider what this means for human knowledge. In this way we shall come to understand why it could be imagined that throughout the various epochs man remains the same. What we see are the incorrect thoughts about man; on the one side the idea of what does remain true to the species through long ages, and on the other, the real soul-spiritual psychic being, which is supposed not to extend beyond the life between birth and death. An understanding of how the soul-spiritual element alters the body from year to year would lead to a grasp of the mighty transition which occurs when it envelopes itself in the physical-corporeal through conception or leaves it again through death. We pay no heed to the work performed by the soul-Spiritual element on the body.

All this can be expressed in a different way. What we conceive of as our complete organism is but a small part of what we are as human beings. We only “dwell” in this organism. What we are accustomed to look upon as our organism, densified through Ahriman as we see it, has its real origin much more in our last incarnation than in this one. From the various studies of this year and former years you will gather that your physiognomy, in its present form, results from your preceding incarnation, your last earth-life. In a person's physiognomy we can really see a connection with his former life. Everything belonging to the physical corporeal organism is much more deeply connected with the last life than with the present one. Man of to-day is easily beguiled into saying: inasmuch as we have had no previous life, it cannot give us our present form, whether great or small. That is only self-persuasion. If we were to understand ourselves correctly, we should be obliged to look back to a former life. Paying attention to what forms our organism, in the way I have set forth, would bring enlightenment. A sudden light would be thrown on what we ourselves cannot form, and we would see how it has been formed by an earlier life. We can really have insight into someone if we know how his soul-spiritual part has fashioned his organism. This comes forth, as it were, out of his personality, and behind it remains what Ahriman makes visible as the result of th earlier embodiment.

For anyone who is accustomed to look upon man as a real living being, it is, when meeting a fellow-man, as though an entity emerged from him. Ths entity is his present self: only as a rule it is invisible. The other entity remains a little behind the first, and this it is which was formed from the past life. In the emerging entity something soon presents itself. At first, this entity is, I might say, perfectly transparent, but it rapidly becomes opaque, because the soul-spiritual element, appearing as an active power, densifies the entity which has just emerged. And then appears something else, which seems to be a seed for the ensuing earth-life.

For him who can perceive the connections, present-day man is seen as threefold. All sorts of myths convey this in their symbols. Call to mind numerous descriptions in which three consecutive generations are set forth, obviously to illustrate the threefold nature of man. Remember many of the renderings of Isis, also various Christian portrayals in which three figures are described as belonging together. Man's threeford nature is what is really meant. Of course a materialistic interpretation is possible—“Grandmother, Mother and Child,” if you like; but the threefold character is put there because it corresponds to a reality which can be perceived. We can most truly picture earlier times if we divest ourselves of the fantastic ideas of modern learning (which always tries to spin a meaning round pictorial representations), and take notice of what humanity's perceptions were in a past not so very far behind us, and how these were expressed artistically.

This kind of consideraticn is of the utmost importance. if we are to bring home to ourselves that the Christ, Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, has His relation (of which we speak so often), to the true human ego. If we consider St. Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” this “in me” refers to the true, hidden ego, invisible to view as yet. Man must in a sense look on it as a Spiritual being if he would find the right connectiona with the Christ. One would like to know how certain passages in the Gospels can possibly be understood, if this is not taken into account. For instance, the passage at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. John, where John speaks as go the Christ came to man as to the abode where He belongs. The (German) translators usually construe it “He came unto His own estate, and his own people received Him not,” yet the Gospel goes on to say: “But to as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on His Name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John I. 12,13.). And it is made quite clear that He desired to come to all men who had this consciousness; yet those without, indeed all men, are certainly born “of blood” and “of the will of man”. The being I have been describing as the “true man”, not born of blood nor of the will of man, comes indeed from the spiritual world, and clothes himself in physical heredity. The Gospel is speaking of the man of whom I have told you to-day, and that is why it is so difficult to understand and is so erroneously expounded, fettered as it is by the conceptions current, to-day. Without the conceptions conveyed by Spiritual Science, the underlying, aspects of the Gospels cannot be understood; with them, a sudden light breaks in.

In respect of all these relationships, something tremendous happened at the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of humanity. Before then, as you know, the complete human ego lived differently in the body. The Mystery of Golgotha marked a point of time in which the whole consciousness of man was changed, as the result of the Union of the Christ-Being with earthly evolution. Now the time has , for an increasing comprehension of the Mystery of Golotha and its conneetion with mankind.

A knotty point for the many expositors of the Gospels, for instance, is the saying which, however epressed or translated., always has the same ring—the saying that “The Kingdom of Heaven has descended.” Amongst those who have entirely misconceived this expression is H.P. Blavatsky, who seized upon it and asserted that Christians therefore maintained that with the Mystery of Golgotha a sort of heavenly kingdom had come down to earth, and yet nothing different has happened—the ears of corn and the cherries have not become twelve times is large, etc.; intimating that on the physical earth nothing is altered. This “descent of the Kingdom of Heaven,” of the spiritual kingdom, crates great difficulties for many commentators of the Gospels, because they do not clearly understand it. The meaning really is that until the Mystery of Golgotha, men had to experience what they could of the spiritual on the physical plane by means of atavistic clairvoyance. After that, they had to lift themselves up to the spiritual, and discern things in the Spirit, which really has drawn near to them. There is no need for the word-spinning arguments which are brought forward from all quarters; the' truth must be recognised, and this truth is as follows:—

The effect for men of Christ having passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is that they can no longer receive spiritual life mearly through the fact of their physical existence, but only by living in the spiritual world. Anyone who now lives only in the physical world, is no longer living on the earth, but below the earth; because from the Mystery of Golotha onwards, the possibility is given us of living in the spirit. The spiritual kingdom has in truth come among us. Taken in this sense; the expression is at once understood, but only in connection with the Christ. This, however, was to be temporarily hidden. As man made the effort to acquire it, it would be gradually communicated to him; and only by gaining insight into it can the real course of, modern history since the Mystery of Golgotha be understood. Christianity, as it had come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, was in its early centuries implanted in the Gnosis, which was then more or less still in existence. It embodied very spiritual views of the real nature of Christ Jesus. Then the Church took on a defined form. This form can be traced historically, but you must bear in mind what its task was from the third, fourth, fifth century onwards. The explanation now given must not on any account be misunderstood. Spiritual Science, as here advocated, stands on the ground of genuine, active tolerance for all existing religious revelations. Spiritual Science must therefore be able to discover the relative truth of the different religious creeds. It is not that Spiritual Science leans more or less sympathetically towards this or that creed; its aim is to distinguish the truth contained in the different religious denominations; it weighs them all with care, and refuses to be one-sided. Spiritual Science must not be proclaimed as leaning towards this or that Creed: it is the Science of the Spirit. It can for instance, fully appreciate that it is a pity that for many people the inner content of Catholic ritual is lost. It knows how to appreciate the special virtues of Catholic ritual in relation to the course of civilisation, and also that a certain artistic output is closely related to Catholic ritual, which indeed is only a continuation of certain other religious creeds, much more so than is commonly thought. In this ritual there resides a deep element of the Mysteries. However, what I have to say essentially concerns sonething else, at all events not the Catholic ritual, which has its full inner justification as an extraordinary impulse for human creative achievement. What I now have to set forth is this: that ecclesiastical forms were given certain tasks—which are indeed still theirs to a certain extent, but were given for the most part at the time when such ardent souls as Bernard of Clairvaux found their way to their God through the Church. We must always discriminate between the Churches and such personalities as Bernard of Clairvaux and multitudes of others. What then, was the task of the Church? Its task was to keep souls as far away as possible from an understanding of Christ, to bring it about that souls should not approach too near to Him: The history of Church-life in the third or fourth century, and later on, is substantially the story of the estrangement of the human mind from a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha; in the development of the Church there is a certain antagonism towards an understanding of Christ. This negative task of the Church has its justification in the fact that men must always strive anew through the force of their own minds and souls to reach the Christ, and fundamentally through all these centuries man;s approach to the Christ has been a continual struggle of the individual against ecclesiasticism. Even with such men as Bernard of Clairvaux, it was so. Study even Thomas Aquinas. He was reckoned a heretic by the orthodox; he was interdicted, and only later did the Church adopt his teaching. The path to Christ was really always a “defensive action” against the Church, and only slowly and gradually could men win their way to Christ. We have but to think, for instance, of Petrus Waldus, the founder of the so-called sect of the “Waldenses,” and his associates in the twelfth century, none of whom at that time had any knowledge of the Gospel. The spreading of Church-life had come on without the Gospels. Just think of it! From those around Petrus Waldus a few persons were chosen who could translate something of the Gospels; thus they learnt to know the Gospels, and as they learnt, a holy, lofty Christian life flowed to them from the Gospels. The outcome was that Petrus Waldus was declared a heretic by the Pope, against the will of his contemporaries. Up to this time a certain amount of gnostic knowledge had spread even in Europe, as for instance among the “Catharists” translated as “Purified Ones;” it was directed to acquiring concepts, concrete concepts, about the Christ and the Mystery theof Golgotha. From the standpoint of the official Church this was not allowed, therefore the Catharists were heretics: “hetzer” (German for “heretic”) is only an alteration of their neme—it is the same word.

It is very necessary to take that of which I am now speaking in its full strictness, in order to distinguish the path of Christianity from that of the Church, and thus to grasp how, in our age, through the principles of Spiritual Science, a way must be paved tothe true Christ, to the real Christ-concept. Very many features of the present day become clear when we realise that not all that called itself Christian was intended to communicate the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but that much was even intended to hinder that understanding, to raise a barrier against it. Does this barrier exist to this day? Indeed it does! I would like to give you a case in point.

Manifold endeavours, including that of Protestantism, were always in opposition to the Church, because the Church in many ways had the task of erecting a barrier against the understanding of Christ, and men could do no other than strive for that understanding. Petrus Waldus felt that need when he had recourse to the Gospels. Until then, there was only the Church—not the Gospels. Even now, many strange opinions are held about this relation of the Church to the Gospels. I want to read you a passage from a modern writer, very characteristic of this state of things, from which you will recognise that the opinion which condemnned Petrus Waldus to excommunication is deeply rooted even now. Take it as an example of what is being said even to-day:

“The Gospels and Epistles are for us incomparable written records of revelation but they are neither the foundation on which our Faith was built, nor the unique source from which the content of the latter is spontaneously created. In our view the Church is older than the sacred writings; from her hand we receive them, she guarantees their trustworthiness, and as regards the dangers of hand-written transcriptions, and of the changing of the text in translation into all languages of the earth, the Church is the only authoritative interpreter of the sense and import of every particular utterance.” (“The Principles of Catholicism and Science”, by George von Hertling, Freiburg 1899.)

This means that the actual content of the Gospels is irrelevant; all that matters is what the Church declares is to be found in them. I have to say this, for the simple reason that even in our own circles there is much simple mindedness on the subject. Again and again one hears the view that it would be useful if we could approach the Catholic Church, saying that our interpretation is entirely favourable to the Christ. But that would not help us at all, it would only blacken us in the eyes of the Church, because she allows nothing to be upheld about the Christ, or about any conclusions beyond those of Natural Science, unless the Church herself recognises it as in agreement with her doctrine. Whoever among us upholds a conception of Christ, and believes thereby to vindicate himself in the eyes of the Church, really accuses himself—is indeed regarded as having done so, because he has no right to declare anything about the Christ from any other source than the Church's owm doctrine .

The same author from whose work I have just read, speaks very clearly on the subject: “Believers are in just the same position as is the investigator of nature with the facts of exoerience.” He means that the believer must receive what the Church dictates to him about the spiritual world, just as the eyes take in the facts of nature.

“He must neither take anything away nor add anything, he must take it as it stands; above all the very purest reception of the true content of the matter is expected of him. The truths of revelation are something given, for him who grasps them in faith. For him, they are conclusive and complete. No enrichment of them has been possible since Christ: their volume cannot to decreased, and any change in their content is out of the question”.

So speaks one who subscribes fully to the genuine orthodox Catholic view—a view which must dissociate itself, for instance, with a certain aversion from any train of thought such as Lessing's, which leads-towards a renewed search for the Spiritual. Lessing's views went as far as to embrace repeated earth-lives; they are a product of modern spiritual life. The bitterest opposition is bound to exist between the Catholic Church and such Cerman spiritual life as flowed through Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. This same person (von Hertling) writes further:

“The edifice of Church dcctrine, as it appears to the Theologian of to-day and is presented by him, was not complete and ready-made from the beginning. What Christ imparted to the Apostles, what they proclaimed to the world, was not a methodical, fully prepared system, developed at all points: it was a rich store of truths, all united as in a focus in one event of sacred history: the story of the Redemption, of the Incarnation of the Divine Logos; but the instruction of the believers, and the necessary defence against heathen assaults, as well as against the misrepresentations of heretics, made it necessary tc unite these truths in a system, to develop their full content, to determine their purport.—This was done by the unwearying proclamation of the doctrine by those specially chosen as instruments, according to the Catholic interpretation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but at the same time vith the co-operation of the learning of the early Church.

“No new language was creeted by this revelation, but what was already current was used; the sense and meaning of individual words being recoined and heightened. Theology, which undertook to think out the content of Revelation while setting it in order for expository purposes, needed for the task certain tools and resources: sharply circumscribed ideas for organising the subject-matter; special exnression for making comprehensible relationships which far exceeded the experience of everyday life. A new task in the history of the world thereby devolved upon Greek philosophy. It had the vessels ready Prepared, into which an infinitely richer content, springing from a higher source, was to be poured. Platonism was the first source of this creative work. The drift of its speculation on the super-sensible distinctly singled it out for the task. Much later, after the lapse of more than a thousand years, when the most important essentials of revelation had at last been formulated in dogma, the close union of theological science with Aristotelian philosophy was completed and exists to this day”.

(Because, therefore, the philosophy of Aristotle was united with the Church as long ago as the Middle Ages, its value for the Church today is beyond question!)

“With its help, the sainted Thomas Aquinas, the greatest master of system known in history, raised the great edifice of doctrine, which, only modified here and there in detail, has determined Catholic theology as to form, expression and method of teaching ever since.”

The author in question regards what he calls Church doctrine as having come about by means of a certain union between the Christian wisdom-element and Greek Aristotelian Philosophy. He does recognise the possibility that in a very distant future, (he says expressly “in a future by no means near as yet”), Christianity might be approached through quite different ideas He says: Supposing that Christianity had not been spread abroad throurth Greek philosophy, but as it might have been, through the Indian, it would have come forth in an entirely different form. However, it must remain in the form it has received: it must not, be changed by any novel view, arising in modern times. But he in certainly aware that there are points where he is treading on thin ice:—

“I am only against a spiritual disposition which, in realms where full freedom is accorded to Scientific investigation, is deaf to all the fundamental objections, and holds fast to tradition.”

Yet he holds strongly enough to tradition!

And finally, it is then necessary to give way, as was done in the case of the Copernican system."

That waseonly in 1827! He turns away from legitimate endeavours to understand Christianity afresh, with a modern consciousness. That is remarkably little to his taste. He says:

“I could conceive that a far-distant future might loosen the union of Theology and Aristotelian philosophy, replacing it's no longer comprehensible or satisfying concepts with others, which would correspond to a knowledree improved in many ways.” He “could conceive”—that what nobody in any case understands to-day might be replaced by something equally incomprehensible.

“It would not be offending against the warning of the Gospel, because it would not be pouring new wine into old skins, for on the contrary new vessels would be produced, to preserve therein the never-failing wine of the doctrine of salvation, in its essential character, and to purvey it to the faithful.”

But that must not happen. He goes on:

“But the vessels must be chosen ones. The attempts made by Cartesianism in the seventeenth century, and by the philosnphy of Kant and Hegel in the nineteenth, exhort us to prudence. A school of ideas which would replace Aristotelianism would have to arise, just as that did, From fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness.”

Then these same men would oppose it, because they at any rate are not the offspring of “fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness”.

“It would have to acquire equal authority over wide circles of thinking humanity, and even then its transformation into ecclesiastical theology would hardly be attained without errors and perplexities on all hands.”

It would be necessary to “labour” to bring about understanding. “As, for instance, in the thirteenth century, when through the Arabs the complete philosophy of Aristotle was brought to the Christian West. Its reception aroused severe opposition. Even a Thomas Aquinas was not spared hostility. He was held by many to be an innovator, against whom the champions of the well-tried old order had to marshal their forces.”

It is remarkable how it is with this principle of over coming an old way of understanding. “Christianity—men may think it quite a good principle, but they absolutely will not admit its validity in their own epoch. It cannot be said that such a thing is done in simplicty. It is very learned, for the pamphlet concludes with a really significant reference—a reference to an Order which has at all times had reputation for shrewdness—a brotherhood which has a different standing from that of Bernard of Clairvaix or Francis ef Assisi, whose reputation rested or a certain mystical tendency. This other Order reckoned mystical piety aad such-like of less value than a certain shrewdness and understanding of worldly affairs. Hence the pamphlet says in conclusion:

“I end with an utterance of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which has been incorporated into the constitution of the Jesuit Order, and has ben referred to of late in different quarters: “Scientific pursuits, if they are undertaken with pure stiving in the service of God, are on that account, because they comprehend the whole of humanity, not less, but more pleasing to God than pennance.”

The endeavour has been made in our own time to awaken clear understanding on all sides. I will prove this to you by an example. I have been reading to you from this author so that you may see the position taken up by those who hold certain views, as regards a movement I was describing. This attitude of theirs was perceived by a writer who published a short time ago, (it is importent to note that it is of recent date) an article on the author of this pamphlet. I will read an extract from it:

“At the Conference in 1893, on the subjct of Catholic Science and the position of Catholic savants at the present day this declaration was made:

“We Catholic-Scientists of the nineteenth century are convinced that there is no antagonism between Science and Faith, but that they are ordained to combine in inner harmony. We are convinced that no two sides of truth exist, or can exist. God is the source of all truth; He has spoken to us through the Prophets and the incararnated Logos; He speaks to us through the ordained ministry of the Church, and no less in the laws of logic, which we must hold to when we strive for knowledge of the truths of Nature. eBcause God cannot contradict Hinself, therfore no antagonism can exist between supernatural and natural truths; between the teachings of revelation and a science which earnestly, honestly brings to light the laws and the rules of method.”

“This really means, however, that philosophy is reduced to silence. Its freedom is just the same for us as that of a flock of sheep in its enclosure, or the prisoners within walls. Philosophy, as regards its own principles, is just as little free under the determining, limiting rule of faith as they—who are allowed to walk about on their own feet, to use their own-hands and to move as they like, but in a strictly—enclosed space. The phrase “Catholic philosophy” embodies a direct contradiction, for by its own account of itself it is not unconditionally free.”

If our Spiritual Science were not independent, it would not be what it ought to be.

“Catholic philosophy has to follow a prescribed line of march. A philosophy claiming to be based. on scientific method must hold firm, regardless of consequences, to nothing outside the results of its own researches and its own thinking. It is bound by strict rules of investigation and verification, and is forbidden to take its stand within any particular religion or on any point of ecclesiastical dogma. Otherwise it is not science but unscientific dogmatism, governed not by principles of knowledge, but by faith and the power of faith. In that case it does not go its way unhindered and uninfluenced, nor does it follow impartially its own laws, but it acknowledges as a matter of course an ordained truth, and, in relation to that, resigns its independence.” (Dr. Bernhard Münz. “The German Imperial Chancellor as Philosopher” in the “Austrian Review”, 15th April 1918.)

That is precisely the task of the present time, to find the way for every hman being to stand on his own feet. A man who maintains such things as you have just heard quoted stands in sharpest contradiction to this task. There are neople who see that such opinions preclude any possibility of a scientific view of the universe; but it seems very difficult at the present time to prove the impartiality of one's judgment, however necessary it may be. The further progress of civilisation will depend on men comin to learn how in their soul-being they are connected with the Spiritual world; whoever shuts his eyes to this, hinders the most important task of his own day. There is no escape from this conclusion. The remarkable thing to-day is that people can look at the matter, and in a marvellous way draw other conclusions from it. The author of this article writes of the man from whose pamphlet I have read to you, which culminated in the confession of Jesuitism. The “subject” of the article is Georg von Hertling, now “Count” Hertling.—The author of the article, however, in spite of having said that the outlook he is criticising “excludes all science”, adds in conclusion:

“Count Hertling is a decided, strongly-marked individuality. Individuality literally means indivisibility, but in this case it implies divisibility, inner blending, universal organisation. Individual soul, family soul, and nation-soul meet and are accentuated side by side in this man: this trinity-of soul it is that makes him so strong and stamps him as the predestined Chancellor of the German Empire.” A need of our time is to find a way of touching the nerve through which the current of Spiritual Science must flow, and this can be none other than the one which enables the soul to find its onn way to the spiritual world. This must be thoroughly understood, for it is bound un with the deepest needs, the most indispensible impulses, our age. Our time demands of man that he should be able, in noticing a thing, to admit it, and to draw the real conclusions from it. Spiritual Science can be genuine only in those who have the courage to face truth and to maintain it; otherwise such experiences as I have described will become more frequent. I must add this, because more and more simple minds are to be found amongst us who hear with joy any praise of Spiritual Science, or what appears like it. Discrimination precisely in these very points is necessary. “Praise” can be far more hurtful and run far more counter to our efforts, than adverse criticism, when honestly meant.

Hermann Heisler, a protestant theologian, gave seventeen sermons in Constance and published them afterwards under the title of “Vital questions of the Day”. By chance a characteristic review of his book fell into my hands, and our unsophisticated friends would perhaps count it as something to be pleased with, inasmuch as it is unadulterated praise:

“These sermons deserve particular attention, on account of their authorship. Heisler was for ten years an evangelical Pastor in Styria and Bohemia, then, alarmed at the danger of becoming numbed by the routine of his office, resigned it for the time being, in order to devote himself for a year to studying the fundamentals of natural science and philosophy. Finally, urged by an inner call, he returned to his spiritual sphere with new joyfulness and love. As he could not serve his country with the colours, he offered his spiritual services to the Church of his native Baden, and was entrusted with a cure of souls at Constance, where these seventeen addresses were given in 1917. They are remarkable as regards their substance. They are all based on deep spiritual effort, and expect hearers and readers alike to share in it. They are not, designed to arouse beautiful feelings but to lead through earnest thinkins to convinced knowledge. They avoid the sermonising tone, and read almost like scientific treatises developed in a popular way about religious problems. I would instance the sermon on that many-sided conception, freedom. It arrives at the true conclusion: ‘Of course there always remains as absolute necessity which directs us. Even as free human beings, we still follow the aim which most attracts us; but the divine gift of freedom which Christ brings us is that the lower attractions of the sense-world lose their constraining power over our souls, and the majesty of the spiritual world gains inner sovereignty over us.’ ” The peculiar feature of Heisler's preaching, however, does not lie in the powerful grasp of his thinking, but in its special content: Heisler is a convinced, inspired Theosophist. He himself would rather use the term, “follower of Spiritual Science”. That must not be confused with the spiritualistic belief in the materialisation of spirits. It calls for a purely spiritual activity, bound to no material means. Our thoughts are forces, which, invisible yet powerful, stream out from us and impress the seal of our being on the whole of Nature, beneficially or the reverse. This belief in the imperishable power of the spirit is set forth for our comfort in the address, ‘Our Dead are Alive;’ it takes an amazing form in the one on ‘Destiny.’ Based on the account in St. John's Gospel of the man born blind, the old Indian and Orphic doctrines of the soul's pilgrimage, its reincarnation in an earthly body, is taught; the preacher would thereby solve the riddle of how fate so often seems unjust, and, like Lessing in his “Education of the Human Race,” would arouse a belief in a carefully planned divine education of humanity. When I add that Heisler looks upon this teaching, indeed on all his Spiritual Science, as a return to the New Testamet, lecturinrg upon it as science, and consciously overstepping the Kantian boundary between knowledre and faith, I have sketched his schene of thoght it its main features.”

“Well, we might say, what more is wanted! Really nothing better could be written! But the author of the review concludes his considerations thus: “I myself reject this Spiritual Science and abide by Kant; but after all, the sermons contain so much that is good, and Theosophy is for the moment agitating theology in so significant a way, (cf. for example, Rittlemeyer's writings in the Christliche Welt), that I believe I do many theologians and laity a service by drawing attention emphatically to these addresses.” (D. Schuster in “The Hanover Courier”, 18th July, 1913.)

That is often the way of thought in our age: inner force and courage are lacking in it. The man has “nothing but good” to say; one notices that he has insight into the good, because he can define it in charming words; but then—“I personally reject this Spiritual Science”! There you have the fruits of what I began by describing, and much in the present time is connected with these “fruits”. In the next lecture I will deal further with the tendency I have been discussing, and its effpcts in social democacy and Bolshevism.

[ 1 ] Present⁵ day philosophy suffers from an unhealthy belief ⁶ in Kant. This work is intended to be a contribution toward overcoming this. It would be wrong to belittle this man's lasting contributions to the development of German scholarship. But the time has come to recognize that the foundation for a truly satisfying view of the world and of life can be laid only by adopting a position which contrasts strongly with Kant's. What did he achieve? He showed that the foundation of things lying beyond the world of our senses and our reason, and which his predecessors sought to find by means of stereotyped concepts, cannot be known, is inaccessible. From this he concluded that our scientific efforts must be limited to what is within reach of experience, and that we cannot attain knowledge of any supersensible primal grounds, of the “thing-in-itself”. But suppose the “thing-in-itself” and something’s transcendental primeval grounds are nothing but illusions! It is easy to see that this is the case. It is an instinctive urge, inseparable from human nature, to search for the deep nature of things and their primal principles. This is the basis of all scientific activity. [ 2 ] There is, however, not the slightest reason for seeking these primal grounds outside the given physical and spiritual world, so long as a comprehensive investigation of this world does not lead to the discovery of elements within it that clearly point to an influence coming from beyond it.

[ 3 ] Our discussion therefore seeks to show that everything necessary to explain and account for the world is within the reach of our thinking. The adoption of principles lying outside of our world shows merely the prejudiced preconception of a dead philosophy living in ingeniously contrived dogmatic illusions. Kant himself would have come to this conclusion had he really investigated the powers inherent in our thinking. Instead of this, he shows in the most complicated way that we cannot reach the ultimate principles existing beyond our direct experience, because of the way our knowing faculties are set up. There is, however, no reason for transferring these principles into another world. Kant did indeed refute “dogmatic” philosophy, but he put nothing in its place. This is why Kant was opposed by the German philosophers who followed. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel did not worry in the least about the limits to knowing erected by Kant, but sought the ultimate principles within the world accessible to human common sense and reason (Vernunft). Though he maintained as eternal and irrefutable the truths Kant concluded in his critique of sense and reason, even Schopenhauer found himself compelled to search for primal world causes along paths very different from those of his master. The mistake of these thinkers was in seeking an inner familiarity with the highest truths without having first laid a groundwork by investigating the nature of knowing itself. Therefore, the proud thought-structures of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stand without a foundation, the lack of which had a damaging effect on their thought-process. Without familiarity with how the pure world of ideas is connected to the realm of sensory perception, they built error on error, bias upon bias. It is no wonder that their all too daring systems could not withstand the fierce opposition of an epoch so ill-disposed toward philosophy, so that much of good quality was swept away with the pitiful bad.

[ 4 ] The aim of the following inquiry is to remedy the lack described above. Unlike Kant, the purpose here is not to show what our faculty of knowing cannot do, but rather to show what it can do.

[ 5 ] The outcome of this investigation into what is generally taken as truth is not merely an ideal reflection of something real, but rather is a free production of the human spirit, in that nothing at all can exist unless brought forth by ourselves. The object of knowing is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new arena, which when combined with the world given by our senses constitutes complete reality. Engaging in this spiritual creativity is a person’s most noble activity, and is organically connected to general world happenings. Without this activity, world events could not be thought of as a self-contained whole. Concerning the course of world events, a person is not a passive onlooker, merely replicating pictures within his spirit of what takes place in the cosmos without his own activity, but rather is the active co-producer of world processes, and inner knowing is the consummate arm within the organism of the universe.

[ 6 ] For the laws of our actions, for our moral ideals, this viewpoint has the important consequence that these also cannot be viewed as the image of something external to us, but rather as something that only exists within us. A powerful entity, whose commandments we must regard as our moral laws, is in this way also rejected. We do not know any “categorical imperative”,⁷ which similarly is a voice external to us, that stipulates what we are to do, or what we are to allow to happen. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We must carry out only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. The viewpoint of truth grounded on free activity is therefore also a moral teaching, whose foundation is the completely free personality.

[ 7 ] Of course, these sentences only apply to that part of our actions whose laws we infuse with idealism in complete consciousness. So long as motives are still innate, conceptually unclear, or unconscious, someone of a higher spiritual level can probably recognize to what extent these laws of our actions are founded merely on individuality and circumstance, even though we ourselves perceive them to be affecting us from outside, compelling us. Every time we succeed in infusing our motives with clarity, with conscious awareness, we make a conquest in the field of freedom.

[ 8 ] How our outlook is related to the most significant philosophical work of the present, for instance the world-view of Eduard von Hartmann, the reader will learn in detail in our discussion, insofar as the problem of knowing ⁸ comes into consideration. [ 9 ] It is a philosophy of freedom, made as a prologue to a more detailed work soon to follow.⁹

[ 10 ] Increasing the fullness of existence-awareness of human beings is clearly the real goal of science (Wissenschaft). Anyone who does not pursue this intentionally is only following the work of whomever his master is; he is “researching” just by chance. He can never be called “an independent thinker”.

[ 11 ] What gives the development of science its true value is the philosophical presentation of the meaning and value of its results for humankind. It is my aim to contribute to this. But perhaps modern science does not ask for justification! If so, two things are certain. First, that I shall have written a superfluous work, and second, that modern scholars are striving in vain, and do not know their own aims.

[ 12 ] In concluding this preface, I cannot omit a personal remark. Until now, I have always presented my philosophical views in connection with Goethe's world-view. I was first introduced to this by my honored teacher Karl Julius Schröer,¹⁰ who in my view reached the heights as a Goethe-scholar because he always looked beyond the particular to the idea.

[ 13 ] In this work, however, I hope to have shown that the whole structure of my thought rests on its own foundation, and need not be derived from Goethe's world-view. My thoughts set forth here, and further amplified in my forthcoming book Philosophy of Freedom, have been developed over many years. And it is with a feeling of deep gratitude that I here acknowledge how the friendliness of the Specht family in Vienna, while I was engaged in the education of their children,¹¹ provided me with an ideal environment for developing these ideas. To this should be added that I owe the final shape of many thoughts now found in my Philosophy of Freedom to some stimulating talks with my deeply appreciated friend, Rosa Mayreder ¹² in Vienna. Her own literary works, which spring from a sensitive noble artistic nature, presumably will soon be published.

Written in Vienna in the beginning of December 1891.
Dr. Rudolf Steiner

• 5. t/n Known also as Truth and Knowledge
• 6. t/n Glauben. Belief, of Anglo-Saxon derivation, suggests intellectual assent, whereas faith, of PIE derivation, (Vertrauen in German), involves trust in a direct perception of truth, and is not used here. .
• 7. t/n Categorical imperatives for Kant are actions that are imperative due to their belonging to a category of actions that we ought to hold as universal law due to their nature.
• 8. t/n Erkenntnisproblem, AKA epistomology
• 9. t/n The Philosophy of Freedom, originally known in English as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
• 10. t/n Schröer was Steiner’s professor at the Technical College of Vienna, a German language professor, who lectured on Goethe, Schiller, and Walther von der Vogelweide, and who recommended Steiner to be the editor of Goethe’s natural scientific writings.
• 11. t/n From July 1884 to September 1890, Rudolf Steiner tutored the 4 Specht sons. This was reviewed in Steiner’s autobiography.
• 12. t/n Rosa Mayreder 1858–1938, an author, painter, musician, and feminist, circled in a plethora of artists, writers, and philosophers, including Rudolf Steiner. Her husband became rector of the Technical University of Vienna where Steiner was a student.

Rudolf Steiner's lecture at the Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society

Those who portray the spiritual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thinking in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is frequently held that the latter personalities are to be recognized as mere laborers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field; but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite far removed from actual occult research and real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little gain from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time because they find it fruitless. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the firm ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard for positive reality. And anyone interested in occultism will find that they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer side of spiritual development, it is not easy to come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the undercurrents, the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy-fairy notions can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of mankind. During this time in Germany, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual [literary histories] are only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths is left unconsidered, and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the leading literary discussion; but the spirit of these experiences continued to live. One can see how this spirit lived on in Herder, for example. Public discussion led both Herder and Goethe to the study of Spinoza. In the work that he called “God”, the former sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were guiding his pen. It is also from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, the ideas of reincarnation emerged in a mind as rationally inclined as Lessing's was. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions led a full life within Germany, not on the surface of literary discussion, but in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without them being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “Theosophy of Julius,” by which he means the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this [idealized] image of the spirit entered into reality and the born world fulfilled the plan of its creator – allow me this human representation – so the task of all thinking beings in this existing whole is to find the first drawing again, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now only remains strange to me because it exists to symbolically describe the [manifold] expressions of that [being]. Everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being combines to make itself understandable to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this [realm of truth], gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, Linnaeus's system of nature classification: these things seem to me to be, in their very origin, what an antique, unearthed in Herculaneum, reveals to me – both mere reflections of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a being similar to myself. [...] There is no longer any wilderness in all of nature for me. Where I discover a body, I suspect a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I guess a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his benevolence, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To express its omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal idea of three successions: nothing, its will [and] something. It is desolate and dark – God calls: light – and there is light. If we had a real idea of its active omnipotence, we would be creators, like Him.” Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, then, the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue. Love is only the reflection of this one primal power, an attraction of the excellent, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession; hatred of men is a prolonged suicide; egotism is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From this starting-point Schiller seeks to find an idea of God corresponding to his own feeling, which he presents in the following sentences: ”All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are two entities that are completely equal to each other... There is one truth that runs like a fixed axis through all religions and systems: Approach the God you mean.

If one compares these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, one will find that in the latter, there are sharply defined contours of thought, which in Schiller's works appear as the exuberant outpourings of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a certain view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to present it in the case of Schiller because it has become a driving force of the nation in his epoch-making works. It can be said that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the world of feeling, in the intuitions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer saw directly with the “sense organs of the spirit”. We are dealing with an epoch of veiling of spiritual vision, but of a kind that is based on feeling, on an intuitive sense of this world.

This entire process is based on a certain law-governed necessity. What entered the hidden world as spiritual insight emerged as artistic life in this period of German spiritual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer, sensual form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on a completely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his [letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”]. The dogmatist of occultism will perhaps find nothing in these “letters” either but the spirited speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give instructions for a different state of consciousness than the ordinary one. A stage on the way to the “higher self” is to be described. The state of consciousness Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the life of experience of the astral or devachanic, but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead man beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world rules in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions, and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, etc., so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason within himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in the sense of Schiller. A life led in this way can also be described as one in which a harmonious balance has been established between the “lower and higher self”. Man has so ennobled his desire nature that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”; and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, an approach to this ideal takes place. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus, the creative artist lives in the spirit; but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So one is dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled by the spirit; the spiritual has come to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions also seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he presents a social constitution within which the individual feels the “higher self” of the whole to be so strong that he acts “selflessly” out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature: for Schiller, they are also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core statements is: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man penetrate into the realm of knowledge.”

Thus, from Schiller's view of the world, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One can say: What Schiller presents here is the mysticism of the older period of German intellectual life that has become aesthetic and artistic.

It might now appear that it is not easy to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same time, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative mind, as an intellectual thinker. Now it is true that thought is his domain and that anyone seeking spiritual heights above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thoughts. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. Rather, it is one that corresponds completely to occult experience. Fichte considers only thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers them as an occultist would. It is for this reason that he himself is thoroughly conscious of living in higher worlds. We have only to refer to his lectures in Berlin in 1813, where he says: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, who know only those things and their relations that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are only present through light for those who can see. Either you speak to them of nothing, and that is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop the futile talking. Or they want to give your teaching a reason for some reason: so they can only understand it from what they know through touch: they will want to feel the light and the colors and the other relationships of visibility, feel that they are feeling, and lie to themselves about something they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret it.” At another time, Fichte states directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, one that reaches beyond them, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for which there is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to which even the other, the given existence, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to which therefore existence in its own form has in fact disappeared... It has been seen with this sense ever since man has existed, and all that is great and excellent in the world, and which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself, and in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense, was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of intellectual life. It is indeed true of the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of intellectual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly mentioned; but its deeper basis was, as has already been explained, unknown in Fichte's time for the prevailing literary and scholarly discussion. For the means of expression of German philosophy at that time, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he took something quite different as the starting point of his thinking than other philosophers. As a teacher, he demanded of his students, and as a writer, of his readers, that they should, above all, perform an inner act of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside themselves, but rather he called on them to perform an inner action. And through this inner action they should ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kant's philosophy very far, just like Schiller. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his readers and listeners from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might go something like this. Every thing and every fact perceived by a person imposes its existence on that person. It is there without any action on the part of the person, at least as far as their innermost being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a luminous apparition and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for him to establish the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different for the “I” of man. The “I” is only there to the extent that it attains being through its own activity. Therefore, the sentence “I am” means something completely different than any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one become aware of this self-creation as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the “I” he must be the creator. And he can only perceive his “I” by looking at himself as the creator of this “I”. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the “I” than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, “Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an ego... Anyone who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him in all his affairs without any effort on his part.” To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. We should not want to see without an eye; [but should] also not claim that the eye sees.

This very sharply defines the boundary where ordinary experience ends and the occult begins. Ordinary perception and experience extend as far as the human being's objective perception organs are built in. Occultism begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel like a creature. When he begins to feel like the creator of his being, he enters the realm of so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even if he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason, it is also so easy to confuse his world view with mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's lines of thought. One would compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thought to the summit from which entry into the land of occultism can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the nature of human desire and covetousness (from the human being's astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. If the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, in relation to this “self”, man remains without any thought content at all if he does not give himself such a content from within. For all the rest of the world's content, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills man. He needs - according to Fichte's words - basically nothing but the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outside world fills it with content, if it does not come from within. The realization “I am” can therefore never be anything other than the human being's most intimate inner experience. So there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But this apparently quite empty affirmation of one's own self is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become more meaningful and full of life, but they retain the same form. Through the ego experience as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, initially in the purely intellectual realm. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And just because this happens in a purely mental form, so many people do not want to recognize it.

Now, however, a limit to knowledge had to be reached precisely by the keenest minds that followed in the footsteps of Fichte. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any thought-experience, no matter how refined, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more out of a general feeling than out of a necessary organic connection with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the esoteric original wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relation to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that art at this time was to be brought to the center of spiritual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensual-physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What extends beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find immediate expression in art. Art does cast its reflection into the supersensible realm, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality.

Therefore, in the case of a personality of the marked epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely imbued with a theosophical attitude, is present in some of his poetry and in a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. This attitude flows from every page of his creations to the reader; but everything is so that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young man's nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer by undergoing thorough mathematical and scientific training. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any kind of sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings such as the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it. ... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with devotion and read it like the word of God does not understand it. ... Miracles, as unnatural facts, are amathematical, but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called that is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial dimensions, but the realization that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the purely sensual-free mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer numerical and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Mankind is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this limb with the upper world, the eye that looks up to heaven.” The identity of the human ego with the fundamental essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “Fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical – only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” At Noyalis, Noyalis's position is particularly evident, which was dictated by his awareness of art and artistic feeling at the time. For him, art is something through which man rises above his narrowly defined “lower self” and connects with the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces at work. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works after nature. Both must do it at the same time, out of their own choice for their own sake and out of the other's choice for the sake of the other.... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, then we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyrical poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period were based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines. It is not difficult to see that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual and intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas in their own way. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that on the one hand points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit; on the other hand, through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection of living beings, it is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism. Steffens could be cited, who sought reflections of a cosmic spiritual life in the processes of earth development; Eckartshausen (1752–1803) could be referred to, who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way ; Ennemoser (1787–1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature; and the brilliant works of Justinus Kerner and Karl Gustav Carus are rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling moved more and more from pure Fichteanism to theosophy, and then, in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation”, which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions back to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong the history of philosophy is in regarding this profound spiritual experience of the soul as mere speculation. All this would require a detailed work if it were to be treated exhaustively. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is I. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works, in particular, the “Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen” (Glimpses into the essence of man), published in 1812, come into consideration. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially differentiates between four parts of the human being: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body in his sense coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not just something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by falling back on the term used by the ancient researchers, the astral body. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times foresaw and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροιδες (Soma astroeides) [and ομραγιον σῶμα (Uranion soma)], or as a σχημα πνευματιχον ([scheme] pneumatikon) [sensed] and proclaimed, and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of immortal and mortal life.” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he himself comes upon much of what is found in the ancient wisdom teachings. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.

Today I would like to begin by telling you a little story from the world of knowledge in the 19th century, so that we can use it to orient ourselves to the great changes that have taken place in the soul of Western man. I have emphasized it often: the person of the present time has a strong awareness that people have actually always thought, felt and sensed as they do today, or that if they felt differently, it was because they were children developing, and that only now, I would say, has the human being advanced to the right manliness of thinking. In order to really get to know the human being, one must be able to put oneself back into the way of thinking of older times, so that one is not so sure of victory and haughty about what fills human souls in the present. And when one then sees how, in the course of just a few decades, the thoughts and ideas that existed among the educated have changed completely, then one will also be able to grasp how radically the soul life of human beings has changed over long periods of time, which we were indeed obliged to point out again yesterday.

One of the most famous Hegelians of the 19th century is Karl Rosenkranz, who, after various residences, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg for a long time. Rosenkranz was a Hegelian, but his Hegelianism was, first of all, colored by a careful study of Kant – he saw Hegel, so to speak, through the glasses of Kantianism – but, in addition, his Hegelianism was strongly colored by his study of Protestant theology. All of this – Protestant theology, Kantianism, Hegelianism – came together in this man from the mid-19th century.

Hegelianism had disappeared from the horizon of educated Central Europe by the last third of the 19th century, and it is hard to imagine how deeply thinking people in Central Europe were steeped in it in the 1840s. That is why it is difficult today to get an idea of what it actually looked like in a soul like that of Karl Rosenkranz.

Now, after all, Rosenkranz was a person who, in the 1940s, thought in a way that was expected of someone who had abandoned old, useless thinking, who had submitted to modern enlightenment and was not superstitious, according to the educated way of thinking at the time. One could think that Rosenkranz was such a person, who was, so to speak, at the height of the education of the time.

Now this Karl Rosenkranz – it was in 1843 – once went for a walk and on this walk met a man named Bon, with whom he had a conversation that was so interesting for him, for Rosenkranz, that Rosenkranz recorded this conversation. Bon was a Thuringian, but by no means, in the sense that Rosenkranz, a man who had grown entirely out of his time. Bon, for his part, probably thought of Rosenkranz as being obsessed with the latest ideas, and as a person who, although unprejudiced in a sense, no longer understood the good old wisdom that Bon still possessed.

And so these two – as I said, it was in 1843 – entered into a conversation. Bon had been educated at the University of Erlangen and had been mainly a student of the somewhat pietistic philosopher Schubert, who, however, was still full of older wisdom, of wisdom that placed a great deal of emphasis on using special dream-like states of consciousness to get into the essence of a person. Schubert was a man who thought very highly of the old wisdom handed down and who had the belief that if one cannot bring something to life in oneself through a meaningful inner life of the good old wisdom, then one cannot really seriously know anything about man through the new wisdom. In this respect, Schubert's works are extremely interesting. Schubert liked to delve into the various revelations of human dream life, including the abnormal states of mind, as we would perhaps say today, the states of mind of the medium who was not a fraud, the states of that clairvoyance that had been preserved as if atavistically from ancient times, in short, the abnormal, not the fully awake states of mental life. In this way he sought to gain insight into the human being.

One of Schubert's students was Bon. But then Bon had come here to Switzerland and had adopted a spiritual life in Switzerland that today's Swiss are mostly unaware of, that it once existed here. You see, Bon had adopted so-called Gichtelianism in Switzerland. I don't know if much is still known among today's Swiss that Gichtelianism was quite widespread; not only in the rest of Europe – it was at home in the mid-19th century in the Netherlands, for example – but it was also quite common in Switzerland.

This Gichtelianism was namely that which remained in the 19th century, also through the 18th century, but still in the 19th century, of the teachings of Jakob Böhme. And in the form in which Gichtel represented Jakob Böhme's teachings, this teaching of Jakob Böhme then spread to many areas, including here to Switzerland, and that is where Bon got to know Gichtelianism.

Now, Rosenkranz had read a lot, and even if he, due to his Kantianism, Hegelism and Protestant theologism, could not find his way into something like that in an inwardly active way as Jakob Böhme's teachings or their weakening in Gichtel, then at least he understood the expressions, and he was interested in how such a remarkable person, a Gichtelian, spoke.

Now, as already mentioned, Rosenkranz recorded the conversation that took place in 1843. Initially, they discussed a topic that was not too incomprehensible for either Kantians or Hegelians of the 19th century. In the course of the conversation, Rosenkranz said that it is actually unfortunate when you want to reflect deeply on some problem that you can be disturbed by all sorts of external distractions.

I would like to say that, when Rosenkranz says this, one already feels something of what came later to a much higher degree: the nervousness of the age. One need only recall that among the many associations that formed in pre-war Central Europe, one originated in Hanover and was called “Against Noise.” The aim was to strive for laws against noise, so that in the evening, for example, people could sit quietly and reflect without being disturbed by noise from a neighboring inn. There are magazine articles that propagated this association against noise. The intention to establish such an association against noise is, of course, a result of our nervous age. So one senses from Karl Rosenkranz's speech that one could be so unpleasantly disturbed by all sorts of things going on in the environment when one wants to reflect or even when one wants to write a book. One can sense some of this nervousness. And Bon seems to have had a lot of sympathy for the complaint of a man who wants to think undisturbed, and he then said to Rosenkranz: Yes, he could recommend something good to him, he could recommend the inconvenience.

Rosenkranz was taken aback. He was now supposed to do exercises in inconvenience, so Bon recommended that he should learn to develop inconvenience within himself. Yes, said Rosenkranz, it is unpleasant when you are disturbed by all sorts of things. - Then Bon said: That's not what I mean. And now Bon explained to Rosenkranz what he actually meant by inconvenience. He said: “You have to see that you become so firm within yourself that you are not affected in your own constellation by the turba of other events in the surrounding area, so that the pure tincture can develop in your own astra.”

Now, that's what Bon had learned here in Switzerland from the Goutuelians, to say that one should take care not to be disturbed in one's own constellation by the turba of the other processes in the surrounding area, so that the pure tincture of one's own astrum could remain. As I said, Rosenkranz understood the expressions. I believe that today not even everyone understands the expressions, even if they want to be a very learned person.

What did the Goutelian Bon actually mean back then? Well, you see, Bon lived in the propagated ideas of Jakob Böhme. I recently characterized this Jakob Böhme a little. I said that he collected the wisdom that had remained popular from all folklore. He has absorbed a lot from this popular wisdom that one would not believe today. This popular wisdom has even been preserved in many cases in the expressions of so-called reflective people, as I have just quoted them from the mouth of Bon. And one could imagine something under these expressions that had a certain inner vitality. Traditions still existed of what an older humanity had absorbed in the older clairvoyance. This older form of clairvoyance consisted of forces that emerged from the physicality of the human being. It is not necessary to say that this old form of clairvoyance lived in the physical. That would be to misunderstand that everything physical is permeated by the spiritual. But actually the old clairvoyant drew what he had placed before his soul in his dreamlike imaginations from the forces of his physicality. What pulsated in the blood, what energized the breath, even what lived in the transforming substances of the body, all this, as it were, evaporated spiritually into the spiritual and gave the old clairvoyant grandiose world pictures, as I have often described them here. This old clairvoyance was drawn from the physical.

And what was revealed to you when you were living, as if you felt the whole world in a violet light, felt yourself as a violet cloud in violet light, so that you felt completely within yourself, that was called the 'tincture'. And that was felt as one's own, as that which was connected with one's own organism. It was felt as one's own Astrum. This inwardness, sucked out of the body, was called by the Gouthelean Bon the pure tincture of one's own Astrum.

But the time had come – actually it had long since come – when people could no longer extract such things from their physicality. The time had long since come when the old clairvoyance was no longer suited to man. Therefore, people like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel felt that it is difficult to bring these old ideas to life. Man had simply lost the ability to live in these old ideas. They, as it were, immediately passed away when they arose. Man felt insecure in them, and so he wanted to use everything to hold on to these fleeting inner images, which still, I might say, came up through the inner sound of the old words. And just as he felt the pure tincture of his own astral within him, so he felt when anything else approached that it would immediately displace the images. This other, that which lived spiritually in the things and processes of the environment, was called Turba. And through this Turba one did not want to let one's own constellation, that is, one's soul state, be disturbed, in which one could be when one really immersed oneself in the inner sound of the old words, in order to, so to speak, have one's humanity firmly through the preservation of this traditional inner life. Therefore, one strove not to accept anything external, but to live within oneself. One made oneself “inconvenient” so that one did not need to accept anything external.

This inconvenience, this life within oneself, is what Bon recommended to the Rosary in the form I have just shared with you. But you see, this is actually a glimpse into the spiritual life of a very old time, which was still present within the circles of Goutelianism in the mid-19th century, albeit at dusk, fading away. For what was dying away there was once an inner experience of the divine spiritual world in dream-like, clear-vision images, through which the human being felt much more like a heavenly being than an earthly one.

And the prerequisite for that old state of mind was that the person had not yet developed the pure thinking of more recent times. This pure thinking of more recent times, which has only really been spoken about in full awareness in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, is something that is not really felt much about today. This pure thinking is something that has initially developed in connection with natural science.

If we look at a part of this natural science that shows us what is to be said here in a particularly characteristic way, we turn to astronomy. Through Copernicus, astronomy becomes purely a world mechanics, a kind of description of the world machinery. Before that, there were still ideas that spiritual beings were embodied in the stars. Medieval scholasticism still speaks of the spiritual essence of the stars, of the intelligences that inhabit the stars, that are embodied in the stars, and so on. The idea that everything out there is material, thoughtless, that man only thinks about it, is a recent development. In the past, man created images for himself, images that combined with his view of a star or constellation. He saw something living, something weaving for itself in there. Not pure thinking, but something soul-living connected man with his environment. But man has developed pure thinking in this environment first.

I have said here before that older people also had thoughts, but they received the thoughts at the same time as their clairvoyance. They received clairvoyant images from their environment, and then they drew their thoughts from the clairvoyant images. The elderly did not directly extract pure thoughts from external things. It is a peculiarity of modern times that man has learned to embrace the world with mere thought. And in this embrace of the world, man first developed this pure thinking.

But now something else is linked to all these things. Those people to whom something like what the Bon said about the rosary still points back, these people did not experience sleep in the same way as the merely thinking modern person experiences sleep. The merely thinking modern person experiences sleep as unconsciousness, which is interrupted at most by dreams, but of which he rightly does not think much. For, as the state of mind of man in modern times is, dreams are not of much value. They are, as a rule, reminiscences of the inner or outer life and have no special value in their content. So that actually unconsciousness is the most characteristic feature of sleep. It was not always that. And Jakob Böhme himself still knew a kind of sleep in which consciousness was filled with real insights into the world.

A person like Jakob Böhme, and then also Gichtel, who still worked hard to find his way into such a state of mind, said: Well, if you observe the things of the senses with your eyes, grasp the world with your other and then further grasps with thoughts that which one grasps there with the senses, then one can indeed learn many beautiful things about the world; but the real secrets of the world are not revealed there. Only the outer image of the world is manifested.

As I said, Jakob Böhme and Gichtel knew such states of consciousness, where they neither slept nor merely dreamt, but where the consciousness was filled with insights into real world secrets hidden behind the sensual world. And they valued this more than what was revealed to their senses and to their minds. Mere thinking was not yet something significant for these people. But the opposite was also present for them, namely the awareness that a person can perceive without his body. For in such states of consciousness, which were neither sleep nor dreaming, they knew at the same time that the actual human being had largely detached himself from his body, but had taken with him the power of blood, had taken with him the power of breathing. And so they knew: Because man is inwardly connected with the world, but his waking body obscures this connection for him, man can, if he makes himself independent to a certain extent from this waking body, through the finer forces of this body, which the old clairvoyance, as I have explained, has sucked out of the body, gain knowledge of the secrets of the world.

But in this way, precisely when he entered into such special states of sleep, man came to an awareness of what sleep actually is. People like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel, who said to themselves: When I sleep, then with the finer limbs of my being I am also outside in the finer nature. I submerge myself in the finer nature.

They felt themselves standing in this finer nature. And when they woke up, they knew: That with which I, as a finer human being, was in the finer nature during sleep, also during unconscious sleep, that also lives in me while I am awake. I fill my body with this when I feel, when I think, which at that time was not just pure thinking. So when I think and create images in my mind, this finer humanity lives in these images.

In short, it had a real meaning for these people when they said: That which I am in my sleep also lives on in me during waking. And they felt something like a soul blood pulsating on into sleep during the waking states of consciousness.

A person like Jakob Böhme or Gichtel would say to themselves: When I am awake, I continue to sleep. Namely, what happens in me during sleep continues to have an effect when I am awake. This was a different feeling from that of the modern person, who has now moved on to mere thinking, to pure intellectual thinking. This modern person wakes up in the morning and draws a sharp line between what he was in his sleep and what he is now awake. He does not carry anything over from sleep into waking life, so to speak. He stops being what he was in his sleep when he begins to wake up. Yes, modern humanity has grown out of such states of consciousness as still lived in a person like Bon, who was a Goutelian, and in doing so it has actualized something that has actually been present in the first third of the 15th century. It has actualized this by moving into the waking day life of mere intellectualistic thinking. This, after all, dominates all people today. They no longer think in images. They regard images as mythology, as I said yesterday. They think in thoughts, and they sleep in nothingness.

Yes, this actually has a very deep meaning: these modern people sleep in nothingness. For Jakob Böhme, for example, it would not have made sense to say, “I sleep in nothingness.” For modern people, it has become meaningful to say, “I sleep in nothingness.” I am not nothing when I sleep; I retain my self and my astral body during sleep. I am not nothing, but I tear myself out of the whole world, which I perceive with my senses, which I grasp with my waking mind. During modern sleep, I also tear myself out of the world that, for example, Jakob Böhme saw in special, abnormal states of consciousness with the finer powers of the physical and etheric bodies, which he still took with him into his sleeping states.

The modern person not only breaks away from his sensory world during sleep, but also from the world that was the world of the ancient seer. And of the world in which the human being then finds himself in from falling asleep to waking up, he cannot perceive anything, because that is a future world, that is the world into which the earth will transform in those states that I have described in my 'Occult Science' as the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan states. So that in fact the modern man, who is trained in intellectualistic thinking - forgive the expression - lives in nothing during sleep. He is not nothing, I must emphasize it again and again, but he lives in nothing because he cannot yet experience what he lives in, the future world. It is nothing for him yet. But it is precisely because the modern human being can sleep in the void that his freedom is guaranteed; for from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, he lives into the liberation from all the world, into the void. It is precisely during sleep that he becomes independent. It is very important to realize that the special way in which the modern human being sleeps guarantees his freedom.

The old seer, who still perceived from the old world, not from the future world, who perceived from the old world, could not become a completely free human being, because he became dependent in this perception. Resting in the void during sleep actually makes the modern human being, the human being of the modern age, free.

Thus, there are two counter-images for the modern human being. First, during waking hours he lives in thought, which is a mere thought, no longer containing images in the old sense; as I said, he regards them as mythology. And during sleep he lives in nothingness. In this way he frees himself from the world and gains a sense of freedom. Thought images cannot force him because they are mere images. Just as little as the mirror images can force, can cause anything, the thought images of things can force man to do something. Therefore, when man grasps his moral impulses in pure thoughts, he must follow them as a free being. No emotion, no passion, no internal bodily process can cause him to follow those moral impulses that he is able to grasp in pure thoughts. But he is also able to follow these mere images in thought, to follow this pure thought, because during sleep he finds himself freed from all natural laws in his own physical being, because during sleep he truly becomes a pure free soul that can follow the non-reality of thought; while the older person also remained dependent on the world during sleep and therefore could not have followed unreal impulses.

Let us first consider the fact that the modern man has this duality: he can have pure thoughts, which are purely intellectualized, and a sleep spent in nothingness, where he is inside, where he is a reality, but where his surroundings show him a nullity. Because now comes the important part. You see, it is also rooted in the nature of modern man that he has become inwardly weak-willed as a result of everything he has been through. Modern man does not want to admit this, but it is true: modern man has become inwardly weak-willed. If one only wanted to, one would be able to understand this historically. Just look at the powerful spiritual movements that have spread in the past, and the will impulses with which, let us say, religious founders have worked throughout the world. This inward will impulsiveness has been lost to modern humanity. And that is why modern man allows the outer world to educate him in his thoughts. He observes nature and forms his purely intellectualistic thoughts from natural processes and natural beings, as if his inner life were really only a mirror that reflects everything. Yes, man has become so weak that he is seized with a terrible fear when someone produces a thought of his own, when he does not merely read thoughts from what external nature presents. So that at first pure thinking developed in the modern man in a completely passive way.

I do not say this as a rebuke; for if humanity had immediately proceeded to actively produce pure thought, it would have brought all sorts of impure fantasies from the old inheritance into this thinking. It was a good educational tool for modern humanity that people allowed themselves to be tempted by the grandiose philistines, such as Bacon of Verulam, to develop their concepts and ideas only in the outside world, to have everything dictated to them by the outside world. And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to not living in their concepts and ideas, in their thinking itself, but to letting the outside world provide their thinking. Some get it directly by observing nature or looking at historical documents. They get their thoughts directly from nature and history. These thoughts then live within them. Others only get it through school. Today, people are already bombarded from an early age with concepts that have been passively acquired from the outside world.

In this respect, the modern human being is actually a kind of sack, except that it has the opening on the side. There he takes in everything from the external world and reflects it within himself. These are then his ideas. Actually, his soul is only filled with concepts of nature. He is a sack. If the modern human being were to examine where he gets his concepts from, he would come to realize this. Some have it directly, those who really observe nature in one field or another, but most have absorbed it in school; their concepts have been implanted in them.

For centuries, since the 15th century, man has been educated in this passivity of concepts. And today he already regards it as a kind of sin when he is inwardly active, when he forms his own thoughts. Indeed, one cannot make thoughts of nature oneself. One would only defile nature by all kinds of fantasies if one made thoughts of nature oneself. But within oneself is the source of thought. One can form one's own thoughts, yes, one can imbue with inner reality the thoughts that one already has, because they are actually mere thoughts. When does this happen? It happens when a person summons up enough willpower to push his night person back into his day-time life, so that he does not merely think passively but pushes the person who became independent during sleep back into his thoughts. This is only possible with pure thoughts.

Actually, that was the basic idea of my “Philosophy of Freedom”, that I pointed out: into thinking, which modern man has acquired, he can really push his I-being. That I-being, which he - I could not yet express it at the time, but it is so - frees during the state of sleep in modern times, he can push it into pure thinking. And so, in pure thinking, man really becomes aware of his ego when he grasps thoughts in such a way that he actively lives in them.

Now something else is linked to this. Let us assume that Anthroposophy is presented according to the model of modern natural science. People take in Anthroposophy, at first they take it in the way that modern people are accustomed to, in the manner of passive thinking. One can understand it if one's human understanding is healthy, one does not need to apply mere belief. If the human intellect is merely healthy, one can understand the thoughts. But one still lives passively in them, as one lives passively in the thoughts of nature. Then one comes and says: Yes, I have these thoughts from anthroposophical research, but I cannot stand up for them myself, because I have merely taken them in - as some people like to say today: I have taken them in from the spiritual-scientific side. We hear it emphasized so often: the natural sciences say this, and then we hear this or that from the spiritual-scientific side. What does it mean when someone says, “I hear this from the spiritual-scientific side”? That means he points out that he remains in passive thinking, that he also wants to absorb spiritual science only in passive thinking. For the moment a person decides to generate within himself the thoughts that anthroposophical research transmits to him, he will also be able to stand up for their truth with his entire personality, because he thereby experiences the first stage of their truth.

In other words, in general, people today have not yet come to pour the reality that they experience as independent reality in their sleep into the thoughts of their waking lives through the strength of their will. If you want to become an anthroposophist in the sense of absorbing anthroposophical thoughts and then not simply passively surrendering to them, but rather infusing through a strong will what you are during every night of dreamless sleep into the thoughts, into the pure thoughts of Anthroposophy, then one has climbed the first step of what one is justified in calling clairvoyance today, then one lives clairvoyantly in the thoughts of Anthroposophy. You read a book with the strong will that you do not just carry your day life into the anthroposophical book, that you do not read like this: the day before yesterday a piece, then it stops, yesterday, then it stops, today, then it stops, etc. Today people read only with one part of their lives, namely only with their daily lives. Of course you can read Gustav Freytag that way, you can also read Dickens that way, you can read Emerson that way, but not an anthroposophical book. When you read an anthroposophical book, you have to go into it with your whole being, and because you are unconscious during sleep, so you have no thoughts - but the will continues - you have to go into it with your will. If you want to grasp what lies in the words of a truly anthroposophical book, then through this will alone you will at least become immediately clairvoyant. And you see, this will must also enter into those who represent our anthroposophy! When this will strikes like lightning into those who represent our Anthroposophy, then Anthroposophy can be presented to the world in the right way. It does not require any magic, but an energetic will that not only brings the pieces of life into a book during the day. Today, by the way, people no longer read with this complete piece of life, but today when reading the newspaper it is enough to spend a few minutes each day to take in what is there. You don't even need the whole waking day for that. But if you immerse yourself in a book that comes from anthroposophy with your whole being, then it comes to life in you.

But this is what should be considered, especially by those who are supposed to be leading figures within the Anthroposophical Society. Because this Anthroposophical Society is being tremendously harmed when it is said: Yes, Anthroposophy is proclaimed by people who cannot stand up for it. We must come to a point where we can find our way into these anthroposophical truths with our whole being, rather than just passively experiencing them intellectually. Then the anthroposophical proclamation will not be made in a lame way, always just saying, “From the spiritual-scientific side we are assured...” Instead, we will be able to proclaim the anthroposophical truth as his own experience, at least initially for what is closest to the human being, for example for the medical field, for the physiological field, for the biological field, for the field of the external sciences or of external social life. Even if the higher hierarchies are not accessible at this first level of clairvoyance, what is around us in the form of spirit can truly be the object of the human soul's present state. And in the most comprehensive sense, it depends on the will whether people arise in our Anthroposophical Society who can bear witness to this, a valid witness, because it is felt directly, felt as a living source of truth, a valid living witness to the inner truth of the anthroposophical.

This is also connected with what is necessary for the Anthroposophical Society: that personalities must arise in it who, if I may use the paradoxical expression, have the good will to will. Today one calls will any desire; but a desire is not a will. Some would like something to succeed in such and such a way. That is not will. The will is active power. That is missing today in the broadest sense. It is lacking in the modern man. But it must not be lacking within the Anthroposophical Society. There calm enthusiasm must be anchored in strong will. That also belongs to the living conditions of the Anthroposophical Society.

Those who describe the intellectual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thought in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is widely believed that the latter personalities should be recognized merely as workers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field, but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite remote from actual occult research, from real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little profit from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time, because they find it unproductive. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the solid ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard to positive reality. And for those interested in occultism, they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer aspects of the spiritual development, one will not easily come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the underlying currents, then the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy constructs of mere thought can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of humanity.

In Germany at this time, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual literary histories is only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment is ignored.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found there. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the prevailing literary discussion, but the spirit of these experiences continued to live on. One can see how, for example, this spirit lived on in Herder. Public discussion led Herder, like Goethe, to the study of Spinoza. In the work which he called “God,” Herder sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were his guides. It is from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, a rationalist spirit such as Lessing was, could have incorporated ideas about reincarnation. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions may not have been on the surface of literary discussion in Germany, but they certainly lived a full life in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without their being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “theosophy of Julius” and by which he refers to the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal image of the spirit had passed over into reality and the born world fulfilled the design of its creator – allow me this human conception – so the vocation of all thinking beings is to seek out in this existing whole the first drawing, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon, and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now remains strange to me only because it exists, symbolically describing to me the manifold expressions of that being. Everything in and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being puts together to make itself understood to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this realm of truth, gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, the Linnaean system of nature, mean to me originally just what an antique, excavated in the Herculaneum - both only a reflection of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a similar being to me ... There is no longer any wilderness for me in all of nature. Where I discover a body, I sense a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I divine a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his goodness, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To describe his omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal notion of three successions: Nothing, His Will, and Something. It is waste and dark – God calls: Light – and there is Light. If we had a real idea of His active omnipotence, then we would be creators, like He is...

Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, therefore, - the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue – love is only the reflection of this one power, an attraction of excellence, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession—hatred of men is prolonged suicide; selfishness is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From there, Schiller then seeks a God idea that corresponds to his feelings, which he presents in the following sentences: “All perfection in the universe is united in God. God and nature are two forces that are completely equal... It is a truth that, like a fixed axis, runs through all religions and systems - ‘Draw near to God, you who believe’.”

If we compare these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, we will find that the latter have sharply defined thought contours that appear in his work as the exuberant expression of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a definite view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to describe it in his case, because in his epoch-making works it has become a driving force for the nation. One can say that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of facts of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the realm of feeling, in intuitive perceptions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer directly saw with the “spiritual senses.” We are dealing with an epoch in which spiritual vision was veiled, but in which feeling and intuitive sensing of this world were not.

All this process is now based on a certain lawful necessity. What entered into seclusion as spiritual vision emerged as artistic life in this period of German intellectual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer sensuous form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on an entirely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. The occult dogmatist will perhaps find nothing in these Letters either but the brilliant speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give a guide to a different state of consciousness from the ordinary one. They describe one stage on the way to the “higher self”. The state of consciousness that Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the astral or devachanic life of experience; but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead people beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world prevails in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, and so on, so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason in himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in Schiller's sense. A life led in this way can be characterized as one in which a harmonious balance has been achieved between the lower and higher selves. Man has ennobled his desire nature to such an extent that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”, and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, there is an approach to this ideal. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus the creative artist lives in spirit, but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So we are dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled to the spirit, the spiritual comes to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he posits a social constitution within which the individual feels the 'higher self' of the whole to be so strong as his own being that he acts 'selflessly' out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature, are for Schiller also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core sayings is: Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man enter the land of knowledge.

Thus, from Schiller's world view, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One could say that what Schiller presents here is the aesthetic-artistic mysticism of the earlier period of German intellectual life.

It might now appear that it is difficult to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same period, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative thinker, as an intellectual. It is true that his domain is that of thought, and that those who want to seek out spiritual heights that lie above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thought. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. It is one that corresponds entirely to occult experience. Fichte only considers thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers these as an occultist would. Therefore, he himself is quite aware of leading a life in higher worlds. One need only see how he expresses himself in the lectures he gave in Berlin in 1813: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, to whom only those things and their relationships are known that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are perceived only through the light of sight. Either you speak to them of nothing, and this is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, you will stop talking to no avail... Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching reason after all: so they can understand it only in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume they feel it, contrive something within the feeling and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret.” At another time, Fichte says directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, reaching beyond these, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for the one who is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to whom even the other, the given being, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to whom therefore being in its own form has indeed disappeared... This sense has been seen in this way since the beginning of time, and everything great and excellent in the world, which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, and life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of spiritual life. For the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West, it is indeed true that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of spiritual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly expressed; but, as already mentioned, the deeper basis for this was unknown in the prevailing literary and scholarly discussions of Fichte's time. In the terminology of contemporary German philosophy, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he started from something quite different than other philosophers. As a teacher he demanded of his students, and as a writer of his readers, that they should first of all perform an inner deed of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside of themselves, but he did make the demand that they perform an inner act. And through this inner act they were to ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kantian philosophy very far, just as Schiller did. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his listeners and readers from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might be expressed something like this: Every thing and every fact perceived by man imposes its existence on him. It is there without any action on the part of man, as far as his deepest inner being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a light phenomenon and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for man to determine the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different with the “I” of man. It is only there in so far as it attains being itself through its own activity. Therefore the sentence “I am” means something quite different from any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one should become conscious of this self-creative process as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the case of the “I” he must be creative. And he can perceive his “I” only by looking at himself as the creator of this “I. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the ‘I’ than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, ”Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an I...” He who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him without any effort of his own in all the business he has to carry out. To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. - We should not want to see without the eye; but we should not claim that the eye sees either."

This very sharply delineates the boundary between ordinary experience and the occult. Ordinary perception and experience extend no further than the organs of perception that are objectively built into the human being. The occult begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel himself to be a creature. When he begins to feel himself as the creator of his being, he enters the realm of the so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even though he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason it is also all too easy to mistake his world view for mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's thought paths. One might compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thinking to the summit from which entry into the land of the occult can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the desire and covetousness of man (from his astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. When the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken, and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, with regard to this “self”, man remains without all thought content if he does not give himself such from within. For all the rest of the world, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills the human being. He needs - in Fichte's words - basically to be nothing more than the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outer world fills it with content if it does not come from within. Therefore, the realization “I am” can never be anything other than man's most intimate inner experience. Thus, there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But the way this seemingly empty affirmation of one's own self occurs is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become richer in content and more vital, but they retain the same form. Through the experience of the I, as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, at least in the purely mental sphere. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And it is only because this happens in a purely mental form that so many people do not want to recognize it.

But now, precisely with the keenest minds, which walked in such ways as Fichte, a limit of knowledge had to occur. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any experience of thought, no matter how subtle, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more from a general feeling and are not necessarily and organically connected with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the original esoteric wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relationship to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that at this time art was to be placed at the center of intellectual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensuous, physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What projects beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find expression in art directly. Art does reflect the supersensible, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality. Therefore, in the case of a personality from the characterized epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely permeated by theosophical sentiment, is contained in a few poems and a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. From every page of his creations, this attitude flows towards the reader; but everything is such that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer through a thorough mathematical and scientific education. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings like the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician. ... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain to mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with reverence and read it as the word of God does not understand it... Miracles as unnatural facts are amathematical – but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called a miracle is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial magnitudes, but the idea that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the pure, sensuality-free, mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer, numerically and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Humanity is, as it were, the higher meaning of our planet, the eye that it raises to heaven, the nerve that connects this limb to the upper world.” The identity of the human ego with the essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical - only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” In Novalis, the position that the consciousness of the time assigned to art and artistic feeling is particularly evident. For him, art is something through which man grows beyond his narrowly defined “lower self” and through which he relates to the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces of action. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works for nature. Both must do it at the same time, of their own choosing, for their own sake, and of the other's choosing, for the sake of the other... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyric poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period was based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines.

It will not be difficult to see, however, that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual-intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas themselves in part in their own way from this whole life. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully for us from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that, on the one hand, points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit, and, on the other hand, is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection between living beings. Steffens could be cited, who sought in the processes of the development of the earth reflections of a cosmic spiritual life. One could refer to Eckartshausen (1752-1803), who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way. Ennemoser (1787-1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature and the spirited explanations of Justinus Kerner, and Karl Gustav Carus are also rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling went from pure Fichteanism more and more to theosophy, and then in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation,” which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong it is in the history of philosophy to consider this profound spiritual experience of the soul to be mere speculation. All this requires, if it is to be treated exhaustively, a detailed work. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is J. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works include, in particular, “Glimpses into the Essence of Man”, published in 1812. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially distinguishes between four elements of human nature: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body as he understands it coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by resorting to the term astral body used by the ancient researchers. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times sensed and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροειδες (Soma astroeides) and οὐρανόν σῶμα (Uranion soma), or as a σχῆμα πνευματικόν (schema pneumatikon), and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of the immortal and the mortal life?” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he comes to many of the ancient wisdom teachings through his own efforts. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.

(Representation of a scene from Faust, Part II, Act II High-vaulted, narrow Gothic Room—Laboratory.)

It is to be hoped that the scenes just witnessed may have effect and meet with a really intelligent reception in the widest circles today. For these scenes contain many germs of the evolution within which also flows the stream of Spiritual Science. We can say that, in writing these scenes out of his long and varied experience, Goethe foreshadowed much that like a seed will spring up through Spiritual Science. These scenes from the second part of “Faust” stand before our souls not only as a record of cultural history, but also as an expression of deep knowledge. To help us to a full understanding in our approach to this deepest manifestation of Goethe's spirit we may now call to our aid the already familiar ideas of Spiritual Science. For, in these ideas, all that Goethe's inner imagination develop out of the experiences of his time is formulated and brought to full consciousness.

In the first of these two scenes, above all, we have an important document of cultural history. Goethe had been matured by all that he had absorbed from natural science, and by the deepening of all his concepts through his studies and mysticism as well as what he received from Grecian art. And, at the very time when he was giving form to the ideas thus living in him, the spirits of men were seeking with infinite enthusiasm for knowledge to grapple with the highest problems of existence. Something that should not, cannot, surprise people in our circle is the fact that a really intensive striving towards the spiritual world should actually promote caricatures of itself. Both mystical striving and the deeper striving after philosophical knowledge produce their caricatures. In Goethe's immediate circle a really important endeavor, that might be described as both philosophical and theosophical, was developing at the time when the scenes were living in unfolding in Goethe's mind. It was then that Johann Gottlieb Fichte was teaching with an immense enthusiasm for knowledge. From the brief account given in my book, and from what is said about Fichte both in the development of the “Riddles of Philosophy” and in the more recent “Riddles of Man,” you can see by all that is said there about him how he strove an elemental way to formulate the divine spiritual dwelling in man's innermost soul, in such a way that, by developing this in his soul, man may become conscious of his divine spiritual origin. Fichte tried to grasp the full life of the ego in the soul of man, the active, creative ego, and also the ego filled with God. By this means he sought to feel the union of the inner human life with the whole life of the cosmos. And out of this enthusiasm he spoke. It is very easy to understand how such a spiritual thrust should meet with opposition. Naturally Fichte could not then speak in the concrete way of Spiritual Science, the time was not yet ripe for this. We might say that he tried by abstract, all-round concepts, to give life to the feeling that can then be wakened to full life in man by the impressions of Spiritual Science. Hence his language has often much about it that is abstract; this is penetrated, however, by living feeling and experience. And for what Fichte had to say to be taken seriously at all, the strong impression was needed that a personality such as his could produce. He often expressed himself strangely and in paradox—to even greater degree than is necessary in Spiritual Science, for, to those unaccustomed to it, what is true often appears foolish. This is why such a great spirit as Fichte, who had at that time to express the truth in abstract form, was thought ridiculous.

On the other hand, those who had been strongly impressed by Fichte might easily have exaggerated things, as happens often in life. Then came caricatures of him, caricatures of others as well who, inspired by the same convictions were also teaching in Jena at the time. Among these was Schelling who, striving like Fichte, actually fought his way—as I have often stressed—to a very deep conception of Christianity, even to a very deep conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. This conception gradually developed into a kind of Theosophy then expressed—though without being understood by his contemporaries—in his “Philosophy of Manifestation.” It was embodied too in the treatise on human freedom and other subjects akin to it written round Jakob Boehme. It was already living in his discourse on Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, and lived especially in his splendid treatise on the Mysteries of the Samothracian Divinities, where he gave a picture of what in his opinion had dwelt in those old Mysteries. Then there were such spirits as Friedrich Schlegel, who energetically applied to the different branches of human knowledge what to those more philosophically constituted natures sought to charm from the heart of the world order. Hegel had begun to formulate his philosophy. And all this had been going on around the Goethe. These men sought to penetrate beyond what is relative in the world, beyond all that controls mankind in day-to-day life, to the Absolute, to what is not merely the background of the relative. Thus, Fichte tried to penetrate beyond the ordinary, everyday ego to the absolute ego, anchored in the Godhead, and weaving its web in eternity. Thus Schelling and Hegel sought to press through to absolute Being.

All this was naturally taken at the time in various ways. Today, particularly, when Spiritual Science can penetrate our hearts, we are able to form a very clear idea of the frame of mind of men like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, when on talking about all that was so vividly before their spiritual eye people remained apathetic—apathetic and hostile. One can understand, too, how the youthful Fichte, meeting antiquated pedants in Jena, who each in their own way of thought they knew everything, might sometimes flare up. Fichte often flared up, not only when he was banished from Jena but also when he saw that, giving of his best, it found no entrance into any heart, any soul; for they all thought themselves wiser with their old traditional knowledge and ideas. So we can understand that when such a spirit as Fichte was faced with the pundits of Jena and had to deal with them, that he was driven to declare that everyone over thirty should be put to death!—It was a spiritual struggle of the first magnitude raging at that time in Jena, and everything going on there was vilified. Kotzebue, a poetaster who nevertheless had his public, wrote a very interesting and witty dramatic pamphlet—witty because it describes a type of young graduate educated at Jena, who when he goes home to his mother speaks in the empty phrases he learnt there. These are all given word-for-word in the pamphlet that is called “Hyperborean Ass or the New Education”. All this appears no doubt, very witty but it is really nothing more than a vulgar attack on a fine effort. We must not, of course, confuse it with what Goethe sought to denounce—the caricaturing of what is great—for we must be clear from the correspondence between Goethe and Fichte and between Goethe and Shelling, that Goethe was well able to appreciate the spirit striving after the Absolute. Although we did not find Goethe elaborating into a system any occult principles, yet we can say that he was a spiritual dwelling wholly within the aura of the occult, and knowing that what lives in the progress of good in world-evolution may incline on the one hand to the ahrimanic, on the other to the luciferic. He does not use these particular expressions but that is of no importance; he knew that actually the pendulum of world-evolution is always swinging between the ahrimanic and the luciferic. And Goethe wished to work everything out from its very depths, and everywhere to show how, fundamentally, even the striving after the highest may at the same time be dangerous. What is there that may not be so? It stands to reason that all that is best may be dangerous. And how dangerous the best may be when Ahriman and Lucifer take a hand in things, was precisely the problem Goethe had so vividly in mind.

Thus he had his Faust in mind—the Faust who strove after the deepest secrets of existence, who was to be the realisation of what stood ever before Goethe's soul, namely, the direct perception of the living and spiritual in all nature and in all history. Goethe himself was striving to find again the spiritual secrets of the early Greek days. He wanted to unite himself with all that was alive and creative in a past epoch—in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This is what he wanted to put into form in the striving of his Faust after what was still living in Helen. Goethe sought the paths by which he could lead Faust to Helen. But he was quite conscious of the danger here. However justifiable, however high-minded, the striving might be, because it could so easily lead into luciferic channels it meant danger.

Thus Goethe first showed us Faust being drawn into the luciferic channel, paralyzed by the sudden appearance of Helen, paralyzed by association with the spiritual. Faust has called up Helen from the ‘realm of the Mothers’, at first having her before him only as a spiritual force. He is paralyzed by what he experiences spiritually. Inwardly he is filled with what he has absorbed. He lives in a living, spiritual element of ancient Greece but through it becomes paralyzed.

And in this condition we find him when Mephistopheles has brought him back to his cell, to his laboratory, paralyzed by his contact with the spiritual element of the past:

“Whom Helen paralyzes, use
Not likely to regain their reason.”

as Mephistopheles says. We see, too, how a certain rift has arisen between Faust, who has been drawn into the luciferic channel, and Mephistopheles. Whether the experience is altogether conscious or not, Faust with his soul, through luciferic impulse, has entered a different spiritual channel from that of Mephistopheles. They are now separated as if by the limits of their consciousness.

Faust is dreaming—as ordinary language would have it. He knows nothing of his old world in which he is presently living. But Mephistopheles is in it, through him everything ahrimanic also comes to life. Thus, in this sense we have essentially the two worlds clashing, and this is in accordance with truth. This collision is made clear to us, and it is remarkable how deeply Goethe, in his instinctive way, goes deeper than what is Spiritual Science. This collision is made clear to us through the unsuspecting Famulus now introduced, who imperturbably swings like a pendulum between the tremendous dangers surrounding him.

We may regard him as representing the type of man who is the victim of an unimaginative, unobservant nature, from which, often, he cannot escape. He sees nothing of what goes on around him. It is in the sense that we must understand all he says.

The whole milieu in which we now find ourselves is changed by Mephistopheles meeting with his former pupil who has now taken his degree. It looks as if he were right outside the picture I have just given you; however, he represents a caricature of it. He has been infused with all that the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy was able to give, and by Schlegel's interpretation of it all; but he takes this in a very narrow, egoistic sense. We may ask why he does so? This is indeed a pertinent question. Why has the graduate become what we now see? Is it possible that in him Goethe was wishing perhaps to make fun of the Jena philosophy he so much appreciated? Most certainly not! But in his opinion the student who had received from Mephistopheles the precept Eritus sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum, would have been on this philosophical channel:

“Follow the ancient saw, follow the snake, my cousin,
God's image as thou art, thou'lt rue the way thou'st chosen.”

This impulse of the one-time student received from the Mephistopheles himself. Mephistopheles cannot complain if this old student gives him occasion to say: “How crude thou art, my friend, thou scarcely know'st” for he himself has planted all that in his soul, it is a seed of his sowing. This matured scholar has indeed taken the advice and followed Mephistopheles' cousin, the famous snake. And to begin with he has no qualms; they will come later. He is not made uneasy by the thought of his affinity with God, that he clearly refers to when announcing that he has created the world, it is he who has fashioned it.—This indeed has been accepted as the Kantian philosophy by many caricature-lovers, and even today it is still widely accepted.

Yes, my dear friends, we may indeed get to know people who take the philosophy of Kant even more egoistically than this scholar. We once knew a man who was so infected with this philosophy of Kant and Fichte that he did actually believe he had created the whole world. It had become an idée fixe with him that he had created it. I said to him at the time: Why, yes, certainly an an idea, as your idea, you have created the world, but there is something to be added to the idea. You created the idea of your own boots, but it was the shoemaker who made those boots of yours. You cannot say you made your own boots, though you may have created the idea of them.—Fundamentally, every genuine refutation, even Schopenhauer's philosophy of The World as Idea, is based on this problem of the shoemaker. Those things, however, are not always seen in the right light.

Thus the scholar meeting Mephistopheles in this way, is to some extent his victim. Philosophers have striven after the Absolute. In this man the striving after the Absolute has become a caricature. Mephistopheles has to caution him:

“Pray don't go home quite absolute.”

We see the connection with the spiritual culture of that time represented by Goethe in a very witty way. It is because the scenes are based on living reality that they are so vivid and so extraordinarily dramatic. Goethe strove again and again lead men beyond the ideas that savour rather of the tavern, ideas so often heard, such as: Ah, we should like to keep to what is good and to flee from Lucifer and Ahriman, have nothing to do with them.—It is because Goethe does not like these notions that he sometimes makes Mephistopheles quite sympathetic and kindly. For how pleasant it all is when the scholar, becoming altogether too absolute, the good Mephistopheles turns his chair round from this one scholar to the general public, to the younger pit-goers, looking there, as Goethe imagined it, for sympathy. And he makes Mephistopheles speak not merely like a devil but in a very apt way, because he knows how much of what belongs to Mephistopheles must be mixed with life for life to thrive at all, and how unwholesome are the ideas which, in the way we have shown, smell of the tavern. It is quite worth-while for once to reflect how Goethe himself did not remain cold with the coldness of the apathetic crowd. For this reason he makes his Mephistopheles expressed itself rather heatedly about the people who, as he observes, receive his wise maxims so indifferently. Goethe even then wanted to point out this coldness, though it was a long way from being as cold as the usual opinions and mood of soul today towards all that can penetrate to man from the spiritual life.

And now we see a genuine ahrimanic activity developing in the creation of Homunculus. It was not easy for Goethe to write a particular part of his Faust we have had before us here. Poets of a lesser degree can accomplish anything; circumstances permitting, such a poet would easily solve the problem of bringing Faust and Helen together. But Goethe was not a poet of that calibre; poetical creation was to him difficult and harassing. He had to find a way to bring Faust with all reality together with talent, with whom, as we have seen, he lived in another state of consciousness. He had to find some way, but was by no means clear how to find it. Faust had first to be taken down to the underworld, there to beg the help of Persephone in procuring him Helen in bodily form. But when Goethe wish to show Helen being fetched by Persephone, he felt that no ideas or concepts from the scene were forthcoming. For just think what was involved. Faust has got as far as reaching Helen imaginatively, in his soul's subconscious; he had, however, to reach her with those faculties natural to him in life. For that, Helen had to enter this sphere of consciousness. Therefore Goethe had to bring about, to a certain degree, Helen's embodiment. To this end he had recourse to what he knew from Paracelsus, whose works he had really studied, the treatise De Generatione Rerum being especially useful to him. There Paracelsus shows how homunculi may be produced by means of certain processes. It is easy, of course, for the modern man to say: Yes, but that was merely a mediaeval pre-possession of Paracelsus'. It is also easy for him to say: surely no one is asked to believe this phantasy of Paracelsus'.—True, as far as I'm concerned nobody need believe it. But it is well to consider that in this treatise De Generatione Rerum Paracelsus expressly assures us that by means of certain processes it is possible to produce something having indeed no body—mark that, please. Paracelsus expressly says that it has nobody, but faculties similar to those of the human soul, and rising to clairvoyance. Thus, Paracelsus was of the opinion that there were certain devices enabling men to produce a being that, without a physical body, develop a kind of understanding, a kind of intellectuality like human beings, and even something higher. It was of this that Goethe made use. Perhaps he thought to himself: Helen has entered the sphere of Faust's consciousness in a purely spiritual sense, but she must become more substantial.

This substantiality he brought about through the kind of being we have in Homunculus, who is as it were a bridge between the purely spiritual and the physical; for he himself has no physical body but a favorable moment originates from physical devices. So that we may say: The presence of Homunculus makes it possible to bring a quite spiritual Helen into the corporeal world where Faust has his home.

Now for all this Goethe naturally needed some kind of error, and this error is brought about in a roundabout way through Wagner. Through his materialistic mind Wagner is misled into the belief that Homunculus is entirely a material production. He could not have brought a real homunculus into being; for that, there would be required spiritual forces not at his disposal. These spiritual forces are supplied when Mephistopheles, the ahrimanic element, appears. For the ahrimanic impulse is given when something actually comes into being out of what Wagner has compounded. Had Wagner—either alone or perhaps with the help of the everywhere latent forces—succeeded in his experiment, it might have happened to him as it did to a man who wrote me some time ago saying that, at last, after endless effort, he had really brought little men to life in his room, but then could not get rid of them, he could not escape them. He wanted advice as to how he could save himself from these creatures, these living mechanisms, he had produced. They have since pursued him everywhere. One can well imagine what happens to the mind of such a man. There are, of course, still men today who have these adventures, just as there are still those who scoff at such things.

Through a coincidence, but only coincidence, at the time Goethe was writing the scene Johann Jakob Wagner, in Wurzburg, was maintaining that homunculi could be produced, and he gave the method for doing this. But it goes without saying that it is not true that Goethe took the name from him; for the name Wagner come from the old “Faust” then still in existence. This scene was first written down when Johann Jakob Wagner was still an infant.

It is due to Mephistopheles that, out of what Wagner has achieved, the Homunculus comes into being. But he does come into being, and is represented in the way Goethe had learnt from Paracelsus' instructions. And Homunculus does in fact immediately become clairvoyant, for he is able to see Faust's dream. he describes what Faust—more or less under the influence of Lucifer—is experiencing in another state of consciousness—how he has actually gained access to the Grecian world. In the description Homunculus we recognise the meeting of Zeus with Leda, the mother of Helen.

Thus we see how Goethe places a close juxtaposition the spiritual that lives in Faust, and Homunculus who knows how to grasp and interpret it. We see how Goethe works round to the ordinary physical world so that Helen can then enter it. And for all that is pictured later in the “Classical Walpurgis-night”, we see how Goethe tries to form the physical out of the eternal spiritual in Helen, with whom Faust has lived, while Homunculus traverses all the kingdoms of nature, and now taking to himself a physical body unites with Helen's spiritual element. By dint of Homunculus traversing the rounds of nature Helen becomes, externally on the physical plane, all that we find her in the third Act of the second Part of “Faust”. Thus Helen is born anew through Homunculus, through the metamorphosis is able to bring about in conjunction with all Faust is living through spiritually. This is what Goethe had in mind. This is why he introduces Homunculus and why he shows the relation between what Faust is, in a way, is dreaming, and what Homunculus sees.

With all this, Goethe comes very near true Occultism, that through Occultism of which I have often spoken, from which we are led away by abstract thinking and the desire to live in abstract concepts. I have often called attention to the way a certain one-sided cultivation of the principles of Christianity leads to the maturing of unreal, shadowy concepts as world-outlook, that are powerless to come to any understanding of real-life. And men stands to-day at the mercy of such concepts. On the one hand they have a purely mechanical knowledge of nature that, however, is no knowledge but merely a system out of which all life has been driven.

“Encheiresis naturae, Chemistry calls it,
Mocking itself, not knowing what befalls it.”

says Mephistopheles. This on the one hand that wants merely to copy down what happens outwardly, and on the other hand concepts drawn from any kind of spiritual source, either represented pantheistically or existing in some cloud-cuckoo-land of shadowy concepts, neither capable of entering right into life, nor of grasping its reality.

It is for this reason I have been pointing out how Spiritual Science is able to understand once again the real, actual, human being, for example, and to say: This human head is, from one point of view, only what the anatomist makes of it by describing it purely externally, but it is not merely what is outwardly the body for an abstract concept of a soul floating in cloud-cuckoo-land; this head must be understood as having undergone a transformation, a metamorphosis, from the body of a previous incarnation and is formed, as I have explained in recent lectures, out of the spheres of the entire cosmos. The essential thing for which concrete spiritual science must strive is to fit what is thus formed into the material world by means of concepts—concepts that do not float in the general and abstract. For what is most feared today by many bigotted Christian pastors, and people of that kind, with their unsubstantial abstractions of God and eternity, is precisely this living comprehension of the world, this concrete grasping of the material that is, indeed, at the same time a revelation of the spiritual. This diving into the real world with concepts is what man today will not have. And it is just this to which Goethe wants so vigorously to point. Hence he contrasts the spirit of Homunculus, the real, genuine spiritual that then lives on, though in a different way, in the consciousness of Faust, this way of beholding, he contrasts with the world as Mephistopheles would have it—a world derived from the association-forming tendency of the Christian middle-ages, in which is extinguished everything spiritual that approaches man's soul. Therefore Homunculus sees what is visible neither to Wagner not to Mephistopheles. Hence because Mephistopheles says:

“Marry, what moonshine dost thou not narrate!
Small as thou art, thou art a dreamer great.
Naught see I—”

Homunculus answers:

“No! The North thy heritage is,
Thy birth was in the misty ages,
The waste of priesthood and of chivalry.
And how should there thine eye be free?
In murkiness thou art at home.”

Goethe is consciously striving for a concrete grasp of reality.

I have drawn attention to the fact that here, in the passage of course where Homunculus is speaking to Mephistopheles, by some mischance a line has been left out. For in all the editions we read:

“No! The North thy heritage is,
Thy birth was in the misty ages,
The waste of priesthood and of chivalry.
And how should there thine eye be free?
In murkiness thou art at home.”

The rhyme to ‘home’ is missing.

“Dingy-brown stone-work, mouldered, horrid,
And Gothic-arched, ignoble, florid.”

Now there is no reason why the rhyme here should be missing; it must have happened therefore by some accident in the dictation that a line was missed that must perhaps have run like this:

“But what we make of this gloom?”

Thus Homunculus, having seen that Mephistopheles does not understand him, shows him clearly how by living in abstractions men have separated themselves from the concrete, spiritual world. This has arisen through the misty concepts that have been developed and have led to the narrowness in all the affairs of life in which Faust grew up, from which, however, he grew away. But the devil in Mephistopheles feels at home there. This is perhaps why Homunculus says:

“No! The North thy heritage is,
Thy birth was in the misty ages,”

By the ‘misty ages’ he means the Middle Ages, but with a play upon the old German name Nivelheim. (The line in German runs Im Nebelalter jung geworden.) Jung geworden (grown young) is an old expression—and a very good one. Just as one grows old in the physical world, so one grows young when one is born into the spiritual world. Thus, in the old German expression, to ‘become young’ meant to ‘be born,’ and is clear evidence that in language there was an understanding of the spiritual.

And now he looks about him in the gloom and sees all that is there:

“Dingy-brown stone-work, mouldered, horrid,
And Gothic-arched, ignoble, florid.”

Then:

“Awakens he here, new cares we've got.”

for he must be brought into a life that is fully living if he has no wish for merely abstract concepts. Faust has no desire, for example, to have ancient Greece pictured according to the humanists or philologists; he wants to live, really live, within ancient Greece, by having Helen, as its representative, appearing bodily before him.

Thus throughout this scent we see Goethe's wonderful feeling for the concrete. We may say indeed that every word of the poetry Goethe wrote in his old age came out of a profound experience of the world. And that gives weight to these words, enormous weight, and gives them also immortality. For how fine in this respect are the words here spoken by Mephistopheles—words acquiring their special colouring from this fact:

“Alack! Away! Forbear of yonder squabble
'Twixt tyranny and slavery to babble!
It irks me. Scarce 'tis ended when de novo
With the whole farce they start again ab ovo,
Yet none doth mark he is but made a fool
By Asmodeus who the strings doth pull.”

(By the devil of discord, with whom Mephistopheles feels himself thoroughly akin.)

“They fight for freedom—so themselves they flatter.” We feel ourselves transported almost into the present, for now too we fight for freedom. But Goethe retorts:

“Slaves against slaves, if you but sift the matter.”

To sum up, my dear friends, we might say: If only the time might come when all the striving of such a poem, as we find it revealed in Goethe by this scene, might be continued on into what should arise through present-day Spiritual Science, if only what lies in such a story of endeavour might take more hold on men, might find a haven in their souls—then we might indeed go forward as real men.

But instead, since the days of Goethe, the abstraction of all endeavour has made infinitely greater progress. Here is the point where the striver after Spiritual Science—whether or not he rises to Goethe's level—should try to become clear as to the difference between concrete spiritual endeavor and the spiritual endeavor that is abstract. You see, the study of Spiritual Science gives us concepts by means of which we can really immerse ourselves in reality and learn to understand it. Materialism gives no real concepts only the shadows of them. So how can materialism understand the difference we have made clear between the human head and the rest of the body? Or how can it understand the following, for example. Let us take a concept that is infinitely important.

We know that man has his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body and his ego. The animal has its physical body, etheric body and astral body. Let us look at the animal. It is interesting to watch animals when, having eaten their fill in the meadow, they lie down to digest. It is very interesting to watch this—and why? Because the animal with its astral being has withdrawn entirely into the etheric body. What then is its soul doing while the animal is digesting? The soul is taking part with infinity satisfaction in what is happening to the body. It lies there and watches itself digesting and this gives the animal immense satisfaction. It is interesting to see a cow, for instance, digesting spiritually as she lies there, to see how all the processes involved when foodstuffs are received into the stomach and utilised in the other parts of the body are inwardly visible to her. The animal looks on at these processes with inner satisfaction, because of the intimate correspondence between her astral and ether bodies. The astral is living in what the etheric body reflects of the physico-chemical processes whereby the foodstuffs are introduced into the organism. It is a whole world that the cow sees! True, this world consists only of the cow and the processes taking place within her, but truly, though all that this astral body perceives in the etheric body of the cow consist sonly of the processes within her own horizon, within her sphere, everything is so magnified that it is as large in the consciousness of the cow as our human consciousness when it reaches to the firmament. I should have to draw the processes taking place between the stomach and the rest of the cow's organism as a large sphere growing and expanding to a vast area, since at this moment for the cow there is nothing beyond the cow-cosmos—and this is of a gigantic size.

This is no jest but a fact. And the cow has a feeling of exaltation when seeing her cosmos thus, seeing herself as cosmos. Here we have an insight into the concrete nature of animals. For, man having an ego, the astral body is torn by it from that intimate union with the etheric body existing, for example, in the cow. Astral body and etheric body are torn asunder. Hence, when man digests after a meal he is deprived of the capacity to survey the whole digestive process of the cosmos. He remains unconscious of it all. Against that, the ego by its activities so restricts the impulses of the etheric body that they are only grasped by the astral body in the region of the sense organs. So that what in the animal forms a whole with the astral body is in men concentrated in the sense organs. That is why the sense-process in man is as great as in certain moments the animal process is for the animal.

It is in a measure a defect in man that, when he begins his afternoon nap, he cannot as he dreams look on at his digestion, for he would then see a whole world. But the ego tears man's astral body away from that world, and only allows him to see as cosmos what is going on in his sense organs.

I wanted to refer to this merely as an example, for from it we see that concrete Spiritual Science mut enter into the very essence of things with concepts that are not shadowy but go deep into reality. All concepts of Spiritual Science should be such that they go deep into reality. It is a characteristic phenomenon, however, of the materialistic age that it despises concepts of this nature; it will have nothing to do with them. Where knowledge of nature is concerned this leads in reality to lack of any knowledge at all. In life it leads to a much greater lack. It makes it impossible for man to have any sense of concrete concepts, concepts full of content. Hence, materialistic education is at the same time an education in shadowy concepts, empty of content. The two things run absolutely parallel—not to be able to understand reality in a spiritual way, to lack upon everything as a mechanism; and to be incapableof forming any concepts that can really enter into the connections of the world or of humanity.

And it is from this point of view that the present time must be understood, for that is precisely where the difficulties today arise. There are now, certainly, people with idealistic natures, but they are the idealists of a materialistic age, and for that reason talk in shadowy, general concepts, unable to gras reality, or at best grasping it only indirectly through emotion, and these idealists blow their own trumpets in the world as loudly as possible. While on the other hand as regards knowledge of nature the capacity to understand her is lacking, on the other hand we have the inevitable parallel phenomenon—the holding forth of shadowy concepts. And when men talk so, they are indeed not talking of anything that is unreal in itself but of what is connected in the worst possible way with the painful events of the present time.

In Goethe's day things had not gone so far, but today we are confronted with a wide-spread lack of power to see any difference at all between a shadowy and a real concept. Wagner, as pictured by Goethe, lives entirely in shadowy concepts, and Homunculus even tries to prove to him that he does so. For instance, when Wagner has anxiously asked:

“And I pray
What becomes of me when you all go away?”

Homunculus answers:

“Oh
Thou'llt stay at home, most weighty work to do.
The ancient parchments thou'llt unroll, no doubt,
The elements of life by precept single out,
And each to other fit with foresight due. Ponder
The what, more to the how thy thoughts apply.
Whillst through a portion of the world I'll wander
Belike I'll find the dot upon the i.”

When I read this passage it always makes me realise anew how it is taken straight from life, particularly the life of the pundits. For I know of a medical examination in which a young student came up before a very learned man, a historian, and as such pre-eminently an authority on old documents, and a professor of Historical Science. It was chiefly under him that the young medical student had studied. Among the questions he asked was this: Now, tell me, Mr X, in which papal Bull was the dot over the i first used? The student knew that at once and answered: Innocent IV's. Now another historian, of a different kind, was present. He wanted to play the part of Mephistopheles a little, so he said: Look here, my dear colleague, as I am the other examiner let me now ask the candidate a question. Tell me, Mr. X, when did this Innocent IV ascend the Papal Chair? The student did not know. Then when did Innocent IV die? The student did not know. Well then, tell me anything else at all you know about Innocent IV beyond the fact that in his Bulls the i was first dotted. But the candidate again could give no answer. Then the Professor who had to do with ancient documents and parchments said: But Mr. X, you seem to be a complete blockhead today. Then the other, still wishing to play Mephistopheles, replied: But, my dear colleague, is not this your favourite pupil? What can have turned him into a blockhead?

So then, the good Wagner, being different from Homunculus, was able to discover the dot over the i in his parchment. But since that time, thought that is abstract and purely conceptual has become universal and historic. Thus it has become possible for us to see the spectacle playing a profound part in the whole world-history—that, in an important affair, there appears before the world a document living entirely in shadow concepts. Nothing more unreal and less in conformity with the actual can be imagined thatn the note recently sent by Woodrow Wilson to the Senate of the United States of America. Today when it is only of use to understand the realities of the world, weakness is found in high places. Something different is needed from shadowy concepts, concepts that are mere shadows.

And here we may well ask ourselves whether suffering is to continue endlessly because in high places men of a materialistic civilisation flee reality, and can only grasp shadows instead of concepts? I know, my dear friends, that when we are comng up against events of such sadness as those of the present, there is little understanding to be found, for today there are very few men who can grasp the difference between shadowy concepts and reality. For the pure idealist—naturally idealism is always worthy of recognition—not understanding spiritual reality, will think it fine, infinitely fine, when people speak beautifully of Freedom and the Rights of Man, of International Federation and things of the kind. They do not see where the harm lies in these things; the lack of such insight is wide-spread.

So little understanding is there, that it makes us see the meaning of what Mephistophleles says after leaving Nicodemus. For, after all, many who rank today as people of importance speak as the scholar spoke, and even if they do not claim to have created the whole world, at any rate wish to govern it according to their dreary shadow concepts. Men have no wish to make progress in such things. They remain children forever, children who can believe that it is possible to rule the world with dummy concepts. Hence we can appreciate the meaning of those words of Mephistopheles:

“I see my word hath left you cold,
Ye artless bairns. Yet I'll not take it evil.
Think though, the Devil is old; grow old
If ye would understand the Devil.”

Those who believe the world can be governed by shadow concepts, do not understand anything of what Goethe is saying through the mouth of the Devil when the Devil speaks the truth.

We may take the Homunculus scene in the second Part of Goethe's Faust as a lecture on the understanding of the real, the actual, in our age that is dominated by dummy concepts. But these matters must really be taken very seriously. And for us in particular, my dear friends, it is most important to form really clear concepts about all the various pronouncements so plentiful in the world today and during many past decades, which have finally brought us to the present situation.

For the reasons expressed in the previous chapter, it is impossible to speak adequately about the relation between anthropology (natural science) and anthroposophy (spiritual science) in connection with Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul. But I believe that this relation can become visible if I place here what I wrote with a different intention, in memory, namely, of the philosopher Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in March 1917. The departure of this man, whom I held in the highest esteem, had the effect of bringing before my soul anew his significant life's work; it moved me to express the following.

[ 2 ] At this moment when the death of this revered person has interrupted his work, it seems to me that I might make an attempt, from an anthroposophical viewpoint to arrive at a view of Franz Brentano's philosophical life's work. I believe that the anthroposophical viewpoint will not let me fall into a one-sided evaluation of Brentano's world view. I assume this for two reasons. Firstly, no one can accuse Brentano's way of picturing things of having even the slightest tendency in an anthroposophical direction. If he himself had had any cause to judge it, he would certainly have rejected it decisively. Secondly, from my anthroposophical viewpoint, I am in a position to approach the philosophy of Franz Brentano with unconditional reverence.

[ 3 ] With respect to my first reason, I believe I am correct in saying that if he had arrived at an assessment of what I mean by anthroposophy, Brentano would have shaped it the way he did his judgment on Plotinus' philosophy. As with it he would certainly also have said of anthroposophy: “mystical darkness and an uncontrolled fantasy roving into unknown regions.” As with neo-platonism he would have urged caution with respect to anthroposophy “so as not, enticed by empty appearances, to lose oneself in the labyrinthine passages of a pseudophilosophy.” Yes, he may also have found anthroposophy's way of thinking to be too dilettantish even to be worthy of being reckoned to the philosophies which he judged the way he did those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In his inaugural Vienna address he said of them: “Perhaps the recent past has also been an ... epoch of decay, in which all concepts ran together in a muddy way, and no trace was to be found of a method in keeping with facts.” I believe that Brentano would have judged in this way, even though I also of course not only consider this judgment to be totally unfounded, but also regard as unjustified any pairing of anthroposophy with the philosophies with which Brentano would probably have paired it.

[ 4 ] Now with respect to my other reason for coming to terms with Brentano's philosophy, I must confess that for me his philosophy belongs to the most inviting accomplishments in soul research in modern times. It is true that I was only able to hear a few of Brentano's lectures in Vienna some thirty-six years ago; but from then on I have followed his literary activity with warmest interest. Unfortunately, when measured against my wish to hear from him, his publications came at too great an interval from each other. And these writings are mostly of such a kind that one peered through them as though through little openings into a room filled with treasures; one looked, so to speak, through occasional publications upon a broad realm of the unpublished thoughts that this exceptional man bore within himself—bore within himself in such a way that it strove in continuous evolution toward lofty goals of knowledge. When, therefore, in 1911, after a long interval there appeared his book on Aristotle, his brilliant book Aristotle's Teaching on the Origin of the Human Spirit, and his republishing of the most important sections of his Psychology, with its penetrating addenda, the reading of these books was a series of festive joys for me.

[ 5 ] With respect to Franz Brentano I feel myself imbued with a kind of soul disposition of which I believe I may say that one acquires it when the anthroposophical viewpoint— out of scientifically acquired conviction—in fact takes hold of one's soul disposition. I strive to gain insight into the value of his views, even though I am under no illusion about the fact that he could—yes, would even have had to—think about anthroposophy in the way indicated above. I am truly not saying this here in order to fall foolishly into a vain self-critique of my soul disposition when confronted by hostile or differing views, but rather because I know how many misunderstandings of my assessments of other spiritual streams have occurred through the fact that in my books I have so often expressed myself in a way stemming from this soul disposition. [ 6 ] It seems to me that the whole methodology of Brentano's soul research is permeated with the basic thoughts that moved him in 1868 to set up his guiding principle. As he was entering his philosophical professorship at that time in Wurzburg, he placed his way of picturing things into the light of the thesis: True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that which is considered valid in natural-scientific cognition. “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est.” ¹ When he then published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874—at the time of entering his Vienna professorship—he sought to present soul phenomena scientifically, in accordance with the above guiding principle. What Brentano wanted to accomplish with this book and its further manifestations in publications during his lifetime pose a significant scientific problem for me. As is clear from his book, Brentano counted on a series of books to contain his psychology. He promised to publish a second book shortly after the first. But no sequel was ever published to his first book, which contained only the preliminary ideas of his psychology. When he published the lecture he had given in 1889 to the Vienna Bar Association, entitled The Origins of Moral Knowledge, he wrote in the preface:

It would be a mistake, just because of the chance request for this lecture to regard it as the passing work of the moment. It offers the fruits of years of reflection. Of everything I have published so far its contents are definitely the ripest creation. They belong to the thought complex of a "descriptive psychology" which I dare to hope I will be able to reveal in its full scope to the public in the not too distant future. Its far removal from any tradition and more especially the significant development of my own views as presented in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint will clearly show that I have not in fact been idle during my long literary retirement.

But this “descriptive psychology” also never appeared. By reading his Research into the Psychology of the Senses (1907), which is restricted to one small area, devotees of Brentano's philosophy can reckon what they would have gained from such a descriptive psychology.

[ 7 ] The question must be asked: What made Brentano hold back ever and again from continuing his publications, and then not to publish at all something he believed would be ready shortly? I confess that I was shaken to the core when I read the following words in the memorial to Brentano written by Alois Höfler in May 1917: “Brentano was working ahead so confidently on his main problem, proof of God's existence, that a few years ago an excellent Viennese doctor and close friend of Brentano's told me that Brentano had assured him a short while ago that he would now have his proof of God's existence ready in a few weeks ...” I felt the same way when I read in another memorial (by Utitz): “The work that he loved the most fervently, that he applied himself to his whole life long, remains unpublished.”

[ 8 ] It seems to me that Brentano's destiny with respect to his projected publications represents a weighty, spiritual-scientific problem. It is true that we can approach this problem only if we are willing to study, in its own special character, what Brentano was able to communicate to the world. [ 9 ] I consider it important to note that Brentano wants, with real acumen, to establish as a basis for his psychological research a pure mental picture of the genuine soul element. He asks himself: What is characteristic of all the occurrences that one must address as soulful? And he found what he expressed in the following way in the addenda of his Psychology (1911): “What is characteristic of every soul activity consists, as I believe I have shown, in its relation to something as object.” Mental picturing is a soul activity. Characteristic of it is that I not only picture but that I picture something, that my mental picture relates to something. Borrowing from medieval philosophy, Brentano calls this characteristic of soul phenomena an “intentional relation.” In another place he said:

The characteristic common to everything of a soul nature is what is often called “consciousness,”—to use a term that unfortunately can be quite misleading—i.e., it is a subjective activity, in a so-called intentional relation to something that perhaps is not real but nevertheless is given in an inwardly objective way. No hearing without something heard; no believing without something believed; no hoping without something hoped for; no striving without something striven for; no joy without something to be joyous about; and so on.

This intentional inner awareness, therefore, is something which in fact guides us as a kind of leitmotiv in such a way that through it one recognizes everything to which we can apply it as being of a soul nature.

[ 10 ] Brentano contrasts soul phenomena with physical phenomena: colors, sound, space, and many others. He finds that these last are different from the soul phenomena through the fact that an intentional relation is not characteristic of them. And he limits himself to attributing this relation to soul phenomena and to denying it to physical phenomena. But now, precisely when one learns to know Brentano's view on the intentional relation, our inner vision is led to the question: Does not a viewpoint like this require us to look at physical phenomena also from the same viewpoint? Now someone who, in the sense of Brentano, tests physical phenomena for a common element as he did with soul phenomena will find that every phenomenon in the physical realm exists through (by virtue of) something else. When a body dissolves in a fluid, this phenomenon of the dissolved body occurs through the relation to it of the dissolving fluid. When phosphorus changes color under the influence of the sun, this phenomenon points in the same direction. All the qualities of the physical world exist through the interrelations of things to each other. What Moleschott says is correct for physical existence: “All existence is an existence through qualities. But there is no quality that does not exist through a relation.” Just as everything of a soul nature contains something in itself by which it points to something outside itself, so conversely, a physical thing is so constituted that it is what it is through the relation to it of something outer. Someone like Brentano who emphasizes with so much acumen the intentional relation of everything of a soul nature, must he not also direct his attention upon a characteristic element of physical phenomena that results from the same train of thought? At the very least, it seems certain that a study like this of the soul element can discover the relation of this soul element to the physical world only if it takes this characteristic element into consideration.²

[ 11 ] Now Brentano discovers three kinds of intentional relations in our soul life. The first is the mental picturing of something; the second is the acceptance or rejection that expresses itself in judging; the third is the loving or hating that is experienced in our feeling. If I say, “God is just,” I am picturing something to myself; but I do not yet accept or reject what I am picturing; but if I say, “There is a God,” I accept what I am picturing through a judgment. If I say, “I like to feel pleasure,” I am not only judging, I am experiencing a feeling. From such presuppositions Brentano distinguishes three basic categories of soul experiences: mental picturing, judging, and feeling (or the phenomena of loving and hating). He replaces the usual division of soul phenomena (into mental picturing, feeling, and willing) with these three basic categories. So whereas many people put mental picturing and judging into the same category, Brentano separates them. He does not agree with combining them, because, unlike other thinkers, he does not regard judgments as merely the connecting of mental pictures, but rather, in fact, as the acceptance or rejection of what has been pictured, which are not activities of mere mental picturing. On the other hand, with respect to their soul content, feeling and will, which other people separate, merge for Brentano into one. What is experienced in the soul when one feels oneself drawn to do something, or repelled from doing it, is the same as what one experiences when one is drawn to pleasure or repelled by pain.

[ 12 ] It is evident from Brentano's writing that he sets great store in having replaced the traditional division of soul experience into thinking, feeling, and willing by the other one into mental picturing, judging, and loving/hating. By this division he seeks to clear the way for an understanding of what truth is, on the one hand, and moral goodness on the other. For him truth is based on right judgment; moral goodness on right love. He finds that “We call something true when its acceptance is right. We call something good when the love we bring to it is right.”

[ 13 ] One can see from Brentano's presentations that when he observes the right acceptance in judgment with respect to truth and the right experience of love with respect to moral goodness, he is taking a sharp look at soul phenomena and circumscribing them. But, within his thought sphere, one can find nothing that would suffice to make the transition from our soul experience of mental picturing to that of judging. No matter where we look in Brentano's thought sphere we seek in vain the answer to the question: What is happening when the soul is conscious of not merely picturing something to itself, but also of finding itself moved to accept this something though judgment?

Just as little can one escape a question with respect to our right love of the morally good. Within the region that Brentano circumscribes as the "soul element," the only phenomenon pertaining to moral action is right loving. But does not a relation to the outer world also belong to a moral action? With respect to a characterization of a deed for the world, is it enough to say: It is a deed that is rightly loved? ³

[ 14 ] In following Brentano's trains of thought, we mainly have a feeling that they are always fruitful because they take up a problem and move it in one direction with acumen and scientific thoroughness; but one also feels that Brentano's trains of thought do not reach the goal that his starting points promise us. Such a feeling can come over us when we compare his threefold division of our soul life into mental picturing, judging, and loving/hating to the other division into mental picturing, feeling, and willing. One follows his views with a certain amount of agreement, but ultimately remains unconvinced that he has done sufficient justice to the reasons for membering the soul the other way. Let us just take the example of the conclusions he draws from his soul division about the true, the beautiful, and the good. Whoever members our soul life into cognitional mental picturing, feeling, and willing can hardly do otherwise than closely connect our striving for truth with mental picturing, our experience of beauty with feeling, and our accomplishment of the good with willing. The matter looks different in the light of Brentano's thought. There the mental pictures as such have no relation to each other by which the truth as such could already reveal itself. When the soul is striving to perfect itself relative to its mental pictures, its ideal cannot therefore be the truth; beauty is its ideal. Truth does not lie on the path of mere mental picturing; it lies on the path of judging. And the morally good does not find itself as essentially united with our willing; it is a content of our feeling; for, to love rightly is a feeling experience. For our ordinary consciousness, however, the truth can be sought, after all, in our mentally picturing cognition. For, even though the judgment that leads to the truth does not lie only in the connecting of mental pictures but rather is based on an acceptance or rejection of the mental pictures, still the acceptance or rejection of these pictures can only be experienced by our consciousness in mental pictures.

And even though the mental pictures in which something beautiful presents itself to the soul do manifest in certain relationships within our life of mental pictures, still, the beauty is experienced, after all, by our feeling.

And although something morally good should call forth the right love in our soul, still the essential factor in the morally good after all, is the accomplishment through the will of what is rightly loved.

[ 15 ] One only recognizes what we actually have in Brentano's thoughts about the threefold division of our soul life when one realizes that he is speaking of something completely different from what those thinkers mean who divide it into mental picturing, feeling, and willing. The latter simply want to describe the experiences of ordinary consciousness. And this consciousness experiences itself in the different kinds of activity of mental picturing, feeling, and willing. What does one actually experience there? I tried to answer this question in my book The Riddle of Man ⁴ and summarized the findings presented there in the following words:

Human soul experience, as it manifests in thinking, feeling, and willing, is at first bound to the bodily instruments. And this experience takes shape in ways determined by these instruments. If someone asserts, however, that when he observes the manifestations of the soul through the body he is seeing the real life of the soul, he is then caught up in the same error as someone who believes that his actual form is brought forth by the mirror in front of him just because the mirror possesses the necessary prerequisites through which his image appears. Within certain limits this image, as image, is indeed dependent upon the form of the mirror, etc.; but what this image represents has nothing to do with the mirror. In order to completely fulfill its essential being within the sense world, human soul life must have an image of its being. It must have its image in consciousness; otherwise it would indeed have an existence, but no picture, no knowledge of it. This image, now, that lives in the ordinary consciousness of the soul is fully determined by the bodily instruments. Without these, the image would not be there, just as the mirror image would not be there without the mirror. But what appears through this image, the soul element itself, is—in its essential being—no more dependent upon the bodily instrument than the person standing before the mirror is dependent upon the mirror. The soul is not dependent upon the bodily instruments; only the ordinary consciousness of the soul is so.⁵

If one is describing the realm of consciousness that is dependent upon our bodily organization, one is correct in membering it into mental picturing, feeling, and willing.⁶ But Brentano is describing something different. Bear in mind to begin with that by “judging,” he means an acceptance or rejection of a content of mental pictures. Our judgment is active within our life of mental pictures; but it does not simply accept the mental pictures that arise in the soul; through acceptance or rejection it relates them to a reality. If one observes more closely, this relating of our mental pictures to a reality can only be found in a soul activity that occurs within the soul itself. But this can never totally correspond to what the soul produces when, through judging, it relates a mental picture to a sense perception. For there the compulsion of the outer impression holds sway, which is not experienced in a purely inner way, but only as an echoed experience, and as a mentally pictured, echoed experience leads to its acceptance or rejection. On the other hand, what Brentano describes corresponds totally in this respect with the kind of cognition that we called "Imaginative cognition" in the first essay of this book. In Imaginative cognition the mental picturing of our ordinary consciousness is not simply accepted; it is developed further in inner soul experience so that out of it the power emerges to relate the soul's experiences to a spiritual reality in such a way that this reality is accepted or rejected. Brentano's concept of judgment, therefore, is not perfectly realized in our ordinary consciousness, but only in the soul that is active in Imaginative cognition.

Furthermore, it is clear that, through Brentano's complete separation of the concept of mental picturing from the concept of judgment, he takes mental picturing to be mere image. But this is how ordinary mental picturing lives in Imaginative cognition. So even this second quality that anthroposophy attributes to Imaginative cognition is to be found in Brentano's characterization of soul phenomena.

What is more, Brentano addresses the experiences of feeling as manifestations of love and hate. Whoever ascends to Imaginative cognition must, in fact, for supersensible vision, transform the kind of soul experience that manifests in ordinary consciousness as loving and hating—in Brentano's sense of the words—in such a way that we can confront certain characteristics of spiritual reality that are described in my book Theosophy, for example, in the following way:

Among the first things one must acquire for an orientation in the soul world is the ability to distinguish between its different kinds of entities in the same way that one distinguishes in the physical world between solid, fluid, and gaseous entities. To attain this, one must know the two basic forces that are of primary significance here. One can call them “sympathy” and “antipathy.” The way these basic forces work in a soul entity determines its kind.

Whereas loving and hating remain something subjective for the life of the soul in the sense world, Imaginative cognition lives along with objective occurrences in the soul world through inner experiences that are equivalent to loving and hating. There also, where he is speaking about soul phenomena, Brentano describes a characteristic of Imaginative cognition through which this cognition already extends into the realm of a still higher kind of knowledge ⁷ and from the fact that he presents moral goodness as right loving one can see that he has a mental picture of an objective kind of loving and hating in contrast to ordinary consciousness' subjective kind of feeling.

Finally, one must pay particular attention to the fact that for Brentano willing is absent from the realm of soul phenomena. Now, the willing that flows out of ordinary consciousness belongs entirely to the physical world. Although in itself it is a purely spiritual being manifesting in the physical world, our willing, in the form in which it can be thought by ordinary consciousness, realizes itself totally in the physical world. If one is describing the ordinary consciousness present in the physical world, willing must not be absent from this picture. If one is describing the seeing consciousness, nothing from our mental pictures about ordinary willing must pass over into these descriptions. For, in the soul world to which Imaginative consciousness is related, what happens as the result of a soul impulse is different from what occurs through the acts of will characteristic of the physical world. So when Brentano focuses on the soul phenomena in that realm in which Imaginative cognition is active, the concept of willing must evaporate for him.

It really seems obvious that, in describing the essential being of soul phenomena, Brentano was actually compelled to depict the essential being of seeing cognition. This is clear even from certain details of his descriptions. Let us look at one example from the many that could be introduced. He says: “The characteristic common to everything of a soul nature is what is often called ‘consciousness’—to use a term that unfortunately can be quite misleading...” But, when one is only describing those soul phenomena which by belonging to ordinary consciousness are determined by the bodily organization, this term is not at all misleading. Brentano has a sense for the fact, however, that the real soul does not live in this ordinary consciousness, and he feels impelled to speak about the essential being of this real soul in pictures that, to be sure, must be misleading if one wants to apply the usual concept of consciousness to them.

[ 17 ] Brentano proceeds in his investigations in such a way that he pursues the phenomena of the anthropological realm up to that point where they compel an unbiased person to form pictures of the soul that coincide with what anthroposophy, following its own paths, discovers about the soul. And the findings on both paths prove to be in fullest harmony with each other, precisely through Brentano's psychology. Brentano himself, however, did not wish to abandon the anthropological path. He was hindered from doing this by his interpretations of the guiding principle he had set up for himself: “True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that considered valid by the natural-scientific kind of cognition.” A different interpretation of this guiding principle could have led him to recognize that the natural-scientific approach is seen in the right light precisely at the point when one becomes aware that tills approach, in accordance with its own essential nature, must transform itself in dealing with this spiritual realm. Brentano never wished to make the true soul phenomena—which he called soul phenomena “as such”—into objects of an avowed consciousness. If he had done this, he would have progressed from anthropology to anthroposophy. He feared this path, because he was only able to regard it as an erring into “mystical darkness and an uncontrolled roving of fantasy into unknown regions.” He would not permit himself to investigate at all what his own psychological view demanded. Every time he was faced with the necessity of extending his own path into the anthroposophical realm he stopped short. He wished to answer by anthropology the questions that can only be answered by anthroposophy. This effort was doomed to failure. Because it had to fail, he could not proceed in a satisfying way to develop further what he had begun. To judge by the findings in the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, if he had continued on with it, it would have to have become anthroposophy. If he really had produced his Descriptive Psychology, anthroposophy would have to have shone through it everywhere. If he had carried further the ethics in his book The Origins of Moral Knowledge—in a way corresponding to its starting point—he would have to have hit upon anthroposophy.

[ 18 ] Before Brentano's soul there stood the possibility of a psychology that could not be given a purely anthropological form. Anthropology cannot even think at all about the most significant questions that must be raised about human soul life. Modern psychology only wants to be anthropological because it considers anything going beyond it to be unscientific. Brentano says, however:

The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body... And if the difference between these two views really did signify the inclusion or exclusion of the question of immortality, this would have to be called an extremely portentous difference, and a metaphysical investigation of substance as the bearer of [soul] states would be unavoidable.

Anthroposophy shows that metaphysical speculation cannot take one into the region indicated by Brentano; the only way to enter it is through activation of soul powers which cannot descend into ordinary consciousness. Through the fact that in his philosophy Brentano portrays the essential being of the soul in such a way that the essen79 tial being of seeing cognition comes to clear expression in this portrayal, this philosophy is a perfect vindication of anthroposophy. And one can regard Brentano as a philosophical investigator whose path takes him to the very doors of anthroposophy, but does not wish to open these doors, because the picture he has made for himself of natural- scientific thinking created the belief in him that by opening these doors he would land himself in the abyss of nonscience.

The difficulties often confronting Brentano when he wishes to extend his picture of the soul stem from the fact that he relates his picture of the essential being of the soul element to what is present in ordinary consciousness. He is motivated to do this by his wish to remain in the thought mode that seems to him to be scientifically valid. But this approach, with its means of cognition, can only in fact attain to that part of the soul element that is present as the content of ordinary consciousness. This content, however, is not the real soul element but only its mirror image. Brentano grasps this image only from the side of intelligent understanding, and not from the other side, the side of observation. In his concepts he paints a picture of the soul phenomena that occur in the reality of the soul; when he observes, he believes himself to have a reality in his mirror image of the soul element.⁸

Another philosophical stream that Brentano met with the strongest antipathy—that of Eduard von Hartmann— also took its start from a natural-scientific way of picturing the world. Eduard von Hartmann has recognized the image character of ordinary consciousness. But he also utterly rejects any possibility of bringing its corresponding reality into human consciousness in any way. He consigns this reality to the region of the unconscious. He grants the power to speak about this region only to the hypothetical application of the concepts which one has formed through ordinary consciousness and extended beyond it.⁹ Anthroposophy maintains that spiritual observation can go beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. And that concepts are also accessible to this spiritual observation that no more need to be merely hypothetical than those acquired in the sense-perceptible world.

For Eduard von Hartmann the supersensible world is not known directly; it is inferred from what we know directly. Hartmann belongs to those present-day philosophers who do not wish to form concepts without having, as a starting point for forming these concepts, the testimony of sense observation and of their experiences in ordinary consciousness. Brentano forms such concepts, however. But he is mistaken about the reality in which they can be formed through observation. His spirit proves to be curiously divided. He would like to be a pure natural scientist, thinking in the natural-scientific mode that has developed in recent times. And yet he must form concepts that this mode would only consider justified if one did not consider this mode to be the only valid one. This division in Brentano's investigative spirit can be explained if one really studies his first books: The Manifold Significance of “Being,” According to Aristotle (1862), The Psychology of Aristotle (1867), and The Creationism of Aristotle (1882).

In these books Brentano follows Aristotle's trains of thought with exemplary scholarship. And in this pursuit he acquires a kind of thinking that cannot be limited to the concepts that hold sway in anthropology. In these books he has in view a concept of soul that derives the soul element out of the spiritual element. This soul element, stemming from the spiritual element, uses the organism—formed by physical processes—to form mental pictures for itself within sense-perceptible existence. What forms mental pictures for itself in the soul is spiritual in nature; it is Aristotle's “nous.” But this “nous” is a twofold being; as “nous pathetikos,” it only suffers things to happen to it; it allows itself to be stimulated to its mental pictures by the impressions given it by the organism. In order for these mental pictures to appear as they are in the active soul, however, this activity must work as “nous poetikos.” What the “nous pathetikos” provides would be mere phenomena within a dark soul existence; they are illuminated by the “nous poetikos.” Brentano says in this connection: “The ‘nous poetikos’ is the light that illumines the phantasms and makes visible to our spiritual eye the spiritual within the senseperceptible.” If one wants to understand Brentano, the point is not only how far he went in taking up Aristotle's mental pictures into his own convictions, but above all that he moved about in these pictures with his own thinking in a devoted way. In doing so, however, his thinking was active in a realm in which the starting point of sensory observation—and along with it the anthropological basis for forming concepts—is not present. And this basic characteristic of his thinking remained in Brentano's research. True, he wants to grant validity only to what can be recognized as conforming with the present-day, natural-scientific mode; but he has to form thoughts that do not belong in that realm. Now, according to the purely natural-scientific method, one can only say something about soul phenomena insofar as they are mirror images—determined by the bodily organization—of the real being of the soul; i.e., insofar as, in their nature as mirror images, they arise and pass away with the bodily organization. What Brentano must think the reality of the soul to be, however, is something spiritual, something independent of the bodily organization, in fact, that through the “nous poetikos” makes visible to our spiritual eye the spiritual within the sense-perceptible.

The fact that Brentano can move about with his thinking in such realms prohibits him from conceiving of the soul's essential being as something arising through the bodily organization and passing away with it. Because he rejects supersensible observation, however, he can observe within the soul's essential being no content that extends beyond physical existence. The moment he tries to ascribe a content to the soul that the soul could unfold without the help of the bodily organization, Brentano feels himself to be in a world for which he finds no mental pictures. In this frame of mind he turns to Aristotle and finds there also a picture of the soul that gives him no content other than that acquired in bodily existence. Characteristic in its one-sidedness is something Brentano wrote in this connection in his Psychology of Aristotle:

Now just as a person, when he has lost a foot or another limb, is no longer a complete substance, so, when his whole bodily part has fallen prey to death, he is of course much less a complete substance. To be sure, the spiritual part continues to exist; but those are very much in error who, like Plato, believe that the separation from the body is a benefit to them and, as it were, a liberation from an oppressive prison; the soul, after all, must now renounce all the numerous services that the bodily forces have rendered.

Brentano got into an extraordinarily interesting dispute with the philosopher Eduard Zeller over Aristotle's conception of the essential being of the soul. Zeller maintained that it is in line with Aristotle's views to accept a pre-existence of the soul before its union with the bodily organization, whereas Brentano denied any such view to Aristotle, and only allowed Aristotle to think that the soul is first created into the bodily organization; so the soul has no pre-existence, but does indeed have an after-existence when the body disintegrates. [ 19 ] Brentano maintained that only Plato accepted pre-existence, but Aristotle did not. It is undeniable that the reasons Brentano brings for his opinion and against Zeller's are weighty ones. Irrespective of Brentano's intelligent interpretation of Aristotle's relevant assertions, we are indeed faced with a difficulty in ascribing to Aristotle a belief in the pre-existence of the soul when we consider that any such belief seems to contradict a basic principle of Aristotelian metaphysics. Aristotle states, namely, that a “form” could never exist before the "substance" that bears the form. A spherical shape never exists without the substance that fills it. Since Aristotle considers the soul element to be the “form” of the bodily organization, however, it seems that we cannot ascribe to him the belief that the soul could exist before the bodily organization arose.

[ 20 ] Now Brentano, with his concept of the soul, became so caught up in the Aristotelian picture of the impossibility of pre-existence that he could not see how this picture breaks down at a crucial point. Can one really think of “form” and “matter” in such a way that one accepts the view that form could not exist prior to the matter that fills it? The spherical shape could not after all be present prior to the substance filling it? The sphere, as it appears in a substance, is certainly not present prior to the balling up of the substance. Before the substance comes together like this, however, those forces are present which act upon this substance and whose effect upon the substance reveals itself in its spherical shape. And within these forces, prior to the appearing of this spherical shape, this shape is certainly living already in another way.¹⁰ Had Brentano not felt bound, through his interpretation of the natural-scientific approach, to find the content for his concept of the soul from observation of the bodily organization, he would perhaps have noticed that the Aristotelian concept of the soul is itself burdened with an inner contradiction. Thus, through his study of Aristotle's world view, he could only think up pictures of the soul that lift it out of the realm of the bodily organization, but without indicating a soul content that allows me, with unbiased thinking, to be able to really picture the soul as independent of the bodily organization.

Besides Aristotle, Leibnitz is another philosopher whom Brentano particularly appreciates. It is especially Leibnitz's way of viewing the soul that seems to have attracted him. Now one can say that Leibnitz has a way of picturing things in this realm that seems to be a significant extension of Aristotle's view. Whereas, Aristotle makes the essential content of human thinking dependent upon sense observation, Leibnitz frees this content from its sensory foundation. Following Aristotle one will accept the statement: There is nothing in thinking that was not previously in the senses (nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu); Leibnitz, however, is of the view that there is nothing in thinking that was not previously in the senses, except thinking itself (nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus). It would be incorrect to ascribe to Aristotle the view that the essential being active in thinking is the result of forces working in the body. However, by making the “nous pathetikos” the passive receiver of sense impressions and the “nous poetikos” the illuminator of these impressions, nothing remained in his philosophy that could become the content of a soul life independent of sensory existence. In this respect, Leibnitz's statement proves to be more fruitful. Through it our attention is especially directed toward the essential being of the soul that is independent of the bodily organization. This attention, to be sure, is limited to the merely intellectual part of this essential being. And in this regard, Leibnitz's statement is one-sided. Nevertheless, this statement is a guideline that in our present-day “natural-scientific” age can lead to something that Leibnitz could not yet attain. In his time our picture of the purely natural origin of the characteristics of the bodily organization was still too imperfect. This is different now. To a certain extent today one can know scientifically how the organic bodily forces are inherited from one's ancestors, and how the soul operates within these inherited organic forces. To be sure, many who believe that they are taking the correct "natural-scientific standpoint" will not acknowledge the following view, even though, for a correct grasp of natural-scientific knowledge, it proves necessary: that everything by which the soul operates in the physical body is determined by the bodily forces that proceed from ancestor to descendant in a line of physical inheritance, with the exception of the soul content itself. This is how we can extend Leibnitz's statement today. And then it represents the anthropological validation of the anthroposophical way of looking at things. Then it directs the soul to seek its own essential content within a spiritual world, and to do this in fact through a different kind of cognition than that customary in anthropology. For, anthropology has access only to what is experienced by the bodily organization in ordinary consciousness.¹¹

[ 21 ] The view is quite tenable that Brentano had all the prerequisites, with Leibnitz as his starting point, for opening our vision to the essential being of the soul as an entity anchored in the spirit, and for strengthening the results of this vision through today's natural-scientific knowledge. Anyone who pursues Brentano's presentations can see the path laid out before him. The path that leads to a purely spiritual, recognizable soul being, could have become visible to him, if he had developed further what already lay in the sphere of his awareness when he wrote such statements as these:

But how are we to picture the engagement of the Godhead in the appearance of a human soul in a body? After creatively bringing forth the spiritual part of man out of all eternity, did the Godhead then connect it with an embryo in such a way that this spiritual part—existing up till then as a distinct spiritual substance unto itself—now ceased to be a real entity unto itself and became a part of a human nature, or did the Godhead only then bring forth this spiritual part creatively? When Aristotle accepted the first possibility, he had to believe that the same spirit would be connected again and again with ever different embryos; for, according to him, the human race perpetuates itself by endless procreation, while on the other hand, the number of spirits existing through all eternity can only be a limited one. All Aristotle interpreters agree, however, that he rejected palingenesis ¹² in his more mature period. Therefore, this possibility is out of the question, (see his book Aristotle and his World View 1911)

Although the validation of a spiritual vision of the soul's repeated earth lives through palingenesis does not lie in Aristotle's train of thought, it could have resulted for Brentano through his connecting his soul concept, which he had refined through his work with Aristotle, with the knowledge of modern natural science.

Brentano's receptivity to the epistemology of medieval philosophy would have made it all the easier for him to have taken this path. Anyone who really grasps this epistemology acquires a number of ideas able to relate the results of modern natural science to the spiritual world in a way that is not visible to the ideas arising in the purely natural-scientific research of anthropology. In many circles today one fails to recognize how much a way of picturing things like that of Thomas Aquinas can deepen natural science in a spiritual direction. In such circles one believes that modern natural-scientific knowledge requires a turning away from that way of picturing things. The truth is that one wishes at first to encompass what natural science recognizes as the being of the world with thoughts that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be incomplete in themselves. Their completion would consist in our considering them to be the kind of essential entities in the soul that they are thought to be in Thomas Aquinas' way of picturing things. And Brentano did find himself on his way to gaining the right relation to this way of picturing things. He writes, after all:

In writing The Manifold Significance of Being According to Aristotle and later my Psychology of Aristotle, I wished to further our understanding of his teachings in a twofold way: first and foremost, directly through an illumination of several of the most important points of his teachings; then secondly and indirectly—but in a more general way—by opening new and helpful sources of understanding. I drew the reader's attention to the incisive commentaries of Thomas Aquinas and showed that one can find in them truer presentations of many of Aristotle's teachings than are to be found in later interpretations.¹³

Brentano barred the path that such studies could have revealed to him, because of his inclination toward Bacon's and Locke's way of picturing things and toward everything philosophically connected with that approach. He regarded that approach above all as according with the natural-scientific method. Precisely this approach, however, leads one to think that the content of our soul life is utterly dependent upon the sense world. And since this way of thinking wants to proceed only anthropologically, only that enters into its domain as psychological results which, in truth, is not a soul reality, but only a mirror image of this reality, i.e., the content of ordinary consciousness.

If Brentano had recognized the image nature of ordinary consciousness, he would not have been able, in his pursuit of anthropological research, to stop short at the gates leading into anthroposophy.

One could of course counter my view with the opinion that Brentano simply lacked the gift of spiritual vision and so did not seek the transition from anthropology to anthroposophy, even though he was moved by his own particular spiritual disposition to characterize soul phenomena in an interesting form and so intelligently that this form can be validated through anthroposophy. I myself am not of this opinion, however. I am not of the view that spiritual vision is attainable only as a special gift of exceptional personalities. I must regard this vision as a faculty of the human soul that anyone can acquire for himself if he awakens in himself the soul experiences that lead to it. And Brentano's nature seems to me to be quite especially capable of such an awakening. I believe, however, that one can hinder such an awakening with theories that oppose it; that one keeps this vision from arising if one is entangled in ideas that from the beginning call into question the validity of such vision. And Brentano kept this vision from arising in his soul through the fact that for him the ideas that so beautifully validate this vision always succumbed to the ideas that reject it and that make one fear that through such vision one could “lose oneself in the labyrinthine passages of a pseudo-philosophy.” ¹⁴

[ 22 ] In 1895 Brentano published a reprint of a lecture he had given in the Literary Society in Vienna with reference to a book by H. Lorm, Baseless Optimism. This lecture contains his view about the “four phases of philosophy and their present status.” There Brentano expresses his belief that the course of development of philosophical research can be compared, in a certain respect, with the history of the arts.

Whereas other sciences, as long as they are practiced at all, show a continuous progress interrupted only occasionally by periods of inaction, philosophy, like the arts, shows decadent periods, in addition to those of positive development, that are often no less rich—yes, even richer—in epoch-making occurrences than periods of healthy fruitfulness.

Brentano distinguishes three such periods in the course of philosophy's development where healthy fruitfulness has passed over into decadence. Each of these periods begins with the fact that out of a purely philosophical astonishment over the riddles of the world, a truly scientific interest stirs and that this interest then seeks knowledge out of a genuine, pure drive to know. This healthy epoch is then followed by another in which the first stage of decadence appears. The purely scientific interest recedes, and people look for thoughts by which to regulate their social and personal lives, and to find their way among them. There, philosophy no longer wishes to serve a pure striving for knowledge, but rather the interests of life. A further decline occurs in the third period. Through the uncertainty of thoughts that did not arise out of purely scientific interests, one loses confidence in the possibility of true knowledge and falls into skepticism. The fourth epoch is one of complete decay. In the third epoch, doubt had undermined the whole scientific foundation of philosophy. Out of unscientific dark depths one seeks to arrive at the truth through mystical experience in fantastical, blurred concepts. Brentano pictured the first cycle of development as beginning with Greek natural philosophy; according to him, this healthy phase ended with Aristotle. Within this phase he holds Anaxagoras in particularly high esteem. He is of the view that even though the Greeks stood at the very beginning then with respect to many scientific questions, still their kind of research would be considered valid by a strictly natural-scientific way of thinking. The Stoics and Epicureans follow then in the second phase. They already represent a decline. They want ideas that stand in the service of life. In the New Academy, especially through the influence of Aenesidemus, Agrippa, and Sextus Empirikus one sees skepticism root out all belief in established scientific truths. And in Neo-Platonism, among philosophers like Ammonius Sakkas, Plotinus, Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and Proklus scientific research is replaced by a mystical experience straying into the labyrinthine passages of pseudo-philosophy.

In the Middle Ages, though perhaps not so distinctly, one sees these four phases repeat themselves. With Thomas Aquinas a philosophically healthy way of picturing things begins, reviving Aristotelianism in a new form. In the next period, represented by Duns Scotus, an art of disputation holds sway—analogous to the first period of decline in Greek philosophy—that is taken to grotesque extremes. Then follows Nominalism, bearing a skeptical character. William of Occam rejects the view that universal ideas relate to anything real, and in doing so assigns to the content of human truth only the value of a conceptual summary standing outside of reality; whereas reality supposedly lies only in the particular individual things. This analogue of skepticism is replaced by the mysticism—no longer striving along scientific lines—of Eckhardt, Tauler, Heinrich Suso, the author of German Theology, and others. Those are the four phases of philosophical development in the Middle Ages.

In modern times, beginning with Bacon of Verulam, a healthy development begins again, based on natural-scientific thinking, in which then Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz work further in a fruitful way. There follows the French and English philosophy of Enlightenment, in which principles, as one found them compatible with life, determined the style of the flow of philosophical thought. Then, with David Hume, skepticism appears; and following it, the phase of complete decay sets in, in England with Thomas Reid, in Germany with Kant. Brentano sees an aspect of Kant's philosophy that allows him to compare it with the Plotinian period of decadence in Greek philosophy. He criticizes Kant for not seeking truth in the agreement of our mental pictures with real objects as a scientific researcher does, but rather in believing that objects should conform to our human capacity for mental picturing. Brentano believes, therefore, that he must ascribe to Kant's philosophy a kind of basic mystical character that then manifests a totally unscientific nature in the decadent philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Brentano hopes for a new philosophical upsurge arising from a scientific work in the philosophical sphere modeled upon the natural-scientific way of thinking that has become dominant in modern times. As an introduction to such a philosophy, he set forth the thesis: True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that considered valid by the natural-scientific kind of cognition. He wanted to devote his life's work to this thesis.

[ 23 ] In the preface to the reprint of the lecture in which he presented his view of the "four phases of philosophy," Brentano states that:

His view of the history of philosophy might strike many people as odd in its newness; for me, however, it has been an established fact for many years and has been the foundation of academic lectures in the history of philosophy given by me and several of my students now for more than two decades. I am under no illusion about the fact that my view will encounter prejudices and that these may perhaps be too strong to dispel with the first clash. Nevertheless, I hope that the facts and considerations I present cannot fail to make an impression upon anyone who pursues them thoughtfully.

[ 24 ] It is altogether my opinion that one can receive a significant impression from Brentano's presentations. Insofar as from a particular point of view, they represent a classification of phenomena arising in the course of philosophical development, they are based on well-founded insights into the course taken by this development. The four phases of philosophy present differences that are founded within reality.

As soon as one enters into a study of the driving forces within the individual phases, however, one does not find that Brentano has accurately characterized these forces. This is evident at once in his insight about the first phase of the philosophy of antiquity. The basic features of Greek philosophy from its Ionic beginnings up to Aristotle do, indeed, reveal many features that justify Brentano in seeing in them what he considers to be a natural-scientific way of thinking. But does this way of thinking really arise from what Brentano calls the natural-scientific method? Are not the thoughts of this Greek philosophy far more a result of what they experienced in their own souls as the essential being of man and his relation to the world-all? Anyone who answers this question in accordance with the facts will find that the inner impulses for the thought content of this philosophy came to direct expression—precisely in Stoicism and Epicurianism—in the whole practical philosophy of life of later Greek times. One can see how, in the soul forces that Brentano finds to be at work in the second phase, there lies the starting point for the first phase of the philosophy of antiquity. These forces were directed toward the sense-perceptible and social form of manifestations of the world-all, and therefore could only appear in an imperfect way in the phase of skepticism—which was driven to doubt the direct reality of this form of manifestation—and in the following phase of a seeing cognition, which must go beyond this form. For this reason these phases of ancient philosophy appear decadent.

And which soul forces are at work in the course of philosophical development in the Middle Ages? No one who really knows the relevant facts can doubt that Thomism represents the peak of this course of development with respect to those relationships that Brentano is investigating. But one cannot fail to recognize that, through the Christian standpoint of Thomas Aquinas, the soul forces at work in the Greek philosophy of life no longer operate merely out of philosophical impulses, but have taken on a more-than-philosophical character. What impulses are working in Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is a philosopher? One need have no sympathy for the weaknesses of the Nominalist philosophy of the Middle Ages; but one will indeed be able to discover that the soul impulses working in Nominalism also form the subjective basis for the Realism of Thomas. When Thomas recognizes the universal concepts synthesizing the phenomena of sense perception to be something that relates to a spiritually real element, he thus gains the strength for his Realistic way of picturing things out of his feeling for what these concepts signify within the existence of the soul itself, apart from the fact that they relate to sense phenomena. Precisely because Thomas did not relate the universal concepts directly to the events of sense-perceptible existence, he experienced how in these concepts another reality shines through to us, and how actually they are only signs for the phenomena of sense-perceptible life. Then, as this undertone of Thomism arose in Nominalism as an independent philosophy, this undertone naturally had to reveal its one-sidedness. The feeling that the concepts experienced in the soul establish a Realism in relation to the spirit had to disappear and the other feeling had to become dominant that the universal concepts are mere synthesizing names. When one sees the being of Nominalism in this way, one also understands the preceding second phase of medieval philosophy—that of Duns Scotus—as a transition to Nominalism. However, one cannot but understand the whole force of medieval thought work, insofar as it is philosophy, out of the basic view that revealed itself in a one-sided way in Nominalism. But then one will arrive at the view that the real driving forces of this philosophy lie in the soul impulses that, in keeping with Brentano's classification, one must designate as belonging to the third phase. And in that epoch which Brentano calls the mystical phase of the Middle Ages it becomes quite clear how the mystics belonging to it, persuaded of the Nominalistic nature of conceptual cognition, do not turn to this cognition but rather to other soul forces in order to penetrate to the core of the world's phenomena.

If, in line with Brentano's classification, we now pursue the activity of the driving soul forces in the philosophy of our time, we find that the inner character traits of this epoch are completely different from those indicated by Brentano. Because of certain of its own character traits, the phase of the natural-scientific way of thinking that Brentano finds realized in Bacon of Verulam, Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz absolutely resists being thought of purely as natural-scientific in Brentano's sense. How can one deal in a purely natural-scientific way with Descartes' basic thought: “I think therefore I am;” how is one to bring Leibnitz's Monadology or his “predetermined harmony” into Brentano's way of picturing things? Even Brentano's view of the second phase, to which he assigns the French and English Enlightenment philosophy, creates difficulties when one wants to remain with his mental pictures. One would certainly not wish to deny to this epoch its character as a time of decadence in philosophy; but one can understand this epoch in light of the fact that, in its main representatives, those non-philosophical soul impulses which were energetically at work in the Christian view of life were lamed, with re result that a relation to the supersensible world powers could not be found in a philosophical way. At the same time the Nominalistic skepticism of the Middle Ages worked on, preventing a search for a relation between the content of knowledge experienced in the soul and a spiritually real element.

And if we move on to modern skepticism and to that way of picturing things that Brentano assigns to the mystical stage, we then lose the possibility of still agreeing with his classification. To be sure, we must have the skeptical phase begin with David Hume. But the description of Kant, the “critical” thinker, as a mystic proves after all to be a too strongly one-sided characterization. Also, the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the other thinkers of the period after Kant cannot be regarded as mystical, especially if one bases oneself on Brentano's concept of mysticism. On the contrary, precisely in the sense of Brentano's classification, one will find a common basic impulse running from David Hume, through Kant, to Hegel. This impulse consists in the refusal, based on mental pictures gained in the sensory world, to depict any philosophical world picture of a true reality. As paradoxical as it may seem to call Hegel a skeptic, he is one after all in the sense that he ascribes no direct value as reality to the mental pictures taken from nature. One does not deviate from Brentano's concept of skepticism by regarding the development of philosophy from Hume to Hegel as the phase of modern skepticism. One can consider the fourth modern phase as beginning only after Hegel. Brentano, however, will certainly not wish to bring what arises there as the natural-scientific picture anywhere near mysticism. Still, look at the way Brentano himself wishes to situate himself with his philosophizing into this epoch. With an energy that could hardly be surpassed he demands a natural-scientific method in philosophy. In his psychological research he strives to keep to this method. And what he brings to light is a validation of anthroposophy. What would have to have arisen as the continuation of his anthropological striving, if he had gone further in the spirit of what he pictured, would be anthroposophy. An anthroposophy, to be sure, that stands in complete harmony with the natural-scientific way of thinking.

Is not Brentano's life work itself the most valid proof that the fourth phase of modern philosophy must draw its impulses from those soul forces that both Neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism wished to activate but could not, because they could not arrive with their inner soul activity at the kind of experience of spiritual reality that occurs with fully conscious clarity of thinking (or of concepts)? Just as Greek philosophy drew its strength from the soul impulses which Brentano sees as realizing themselves in the second philosophical phase out of a practical philosophy of living, and just as medieval philosophy owes its strength to the impulses of the third phase—that of skepticism—so must modern philosophy draw its impulses from the fundamental powers of the fourth phase—from that of a knowing seeing. If, in accordance with his way of picturing things, Brentano can regard Neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism as decadent philosophies, so one could recognize the anthroposophy that complements anthropology as the fruitful phase of modern philosophy, if one leads this philosopher's own ideas about the development of philosophy to their correct conclusions, which Brentano himself did not draw but which follow quite naturally from his ideas.

[ 25 ] The picture we gave of Brentano's relation to the cognitional demands of our day explains why his reader receives impressions that are not limited to what is directly contained in the concepts he presents. Undertones sound forth all the time as one is reading. These emerge from a soul life that lies far deeper behind the ideas he expresses. What Brentano stimulates in the spirit of the reader often works more strongly in the latter than what the author expresses in sharply-edged pictures. One also feels moved to go back often and reread a book by Brentano. One may have thought through much of what is said today about the relation of philosophy to other cognitional views; Brentano's book The Future of Philosophy, will almost always rise up in one's memory when one is reflecting in this way. This is a reprint of a lecture to the Philosophical Society in Vienna in 1892 which he gave in order to oppose—with his view of the future of philosophy—what the jurist Adolf Exner had to say on this subject in his inaugural address on Political Education (1891). This publication of the lecture contains notes that offer far-ranging historical perspectives on the course of mankind's spiritual development. In this book all the tones are sounded of what can speak to an observer of today's natural-scientific outlook about the necessity of progressing from this outlook to an anthroposophical one.

[ 26 ] The representatives of this natural-scientific way of picturing things live for the most part in the belief that this outlook is forced upon them by the real being of things. They are of the opinion that they organize their knowledge in accordance with the way reality manifests itself. In this belief they are deluding themselves, however. The truth is that in recent times the human soul—out of its own active development over thousands of years—has unfolded a need for the kind of mental pictures which comprise the natural-scientific picture of the world. It is not because reality presented this picture to them as the absolute truth that Helmholtz, Weisman, Huxley, and others arrived at their picture, but because they had to form this picture within themselves in order through it to shed a certain light upon the reality confronting them. It is not because of compulsion from a reality outside the soul that one forms a mathematical or mechanical picture of the world, but rather because one has given shape in one's soul to mathematical and mechanical pictures and thus opened an inner source of illumination for what manifests in the outer world in a mathematical and mechanical way.

Although generally what has just been described holds good for every developmental stage of the human soul, it does appear in the modern natural-scientific picture in a quite particular way. When these mental pictures are thought through consistently from a certain angle, they destroy any concepts of a soul element. This can be seen in the absolutely not trivial but most dubious concept of a “soul science without soul” that has not been thought up only by philosophical dilettantes but also by very serious thinkers.¹⁵ The mental pictures formed by natural science are leading to ever more insight into the dependency of the phenomena of ordinary consciousness upon our bodily organization. If the fact is not recognized at the same time that what arises in this way as the soul element is not this soul element itself, but only its manifestation in a mirror image, then the true idea of the soul element slips away from our observation, and the illusory idea arises that sees in the soul element only a product of the bodily organization. On the other hand, however, this latter view cannot stand up before an unbiased thinking. To this unbiased thinking, the ideas that natural science forms about nature show a soul connection— to a reality lying behind nature—that does not reveal itself in these ideas themselves. No anthropological approach, out of itself, can arrive at thorough-going mental pictures of this soul connection. For, it does not enter ordinary consciousness.

This fact shows up much more strongly in today's natural- scientific outlook than was the case in earlier historical stages of knowledge. At these earlier stages, when observing the outer world, one still formed concepts that took up into their content something of the spiritual foundations of this outer world. And one's soul felt itself, in its own spirituality, as unified with the spirit of the outer world. In accordance with its own essential being, recent natural scientists must think nature in a purely natural way. Through this, to be sure, it gains the possibility of validating the content of its ideas by observation of nature, but not the existence of these ideas themselves, as something with inner soul being.

[ 27 ] For this reason, precisely the genuine natural-scientific outlook has no foundation if it cannot validate its own existence by anthroposophical observation. With anthroposophy one can fully endorse the natural-scientific outlook; without anthroposophy, one will again and again want to make the vain attempt to discover even the spirit out of the results of natural-scientific observation. The natural-scientific ideas of recent times are in fact the results of the soul's living together with a spiritual world; but only in living spiritual vision can the soul know about its living together with that world.¹⁶ The question could easily arise: Then why does the soul seek to form natural-scientific pictures, if precisely through them it is creating for itself a content that cuts it off from its spiritual foundation? From the standpoint of the beliefs that see the natural-scientific outlook to have been formed in accordance with the way the world does in fact manifest to us, there is no way to find an answer to this question. But an answer is definitely forthcoming if one looks toward the needs of the soul itself. With mental pictures, such as only could have been formed by a pre-natural-scientific age, our soul experience could never have arrived at a full consciousness of itself. In its ideas of nature, which also continued a spiritual element, it would indeed have felt an indefinite connection with the spirit, but it would not have been able to experience the spirit in its own full, independent, and particular nature. Therefore, in the course of mankind's development, our soul element strives to set forth the kind of ideas that do not contain this soul element itself, in order, through them, to know itself as independent of natural existence. The connection with the spirit, however, must then be sought in knowledge not through these ideas of nature but through spiritual vision. The development of modern natural science is a necessary stage in the course of mankind's soul evolution. One understands the basis of this development when one sees how the soul needs it in order to find itself. On the other hand, one recognizes the epistemological implications of this development when one sees how precisely it makes spiritual vision a necessity.¹⁷

[ 28 ] Adolf Exner, whose views are opposed by Brentano's book The Future of Philosophy, confronted a natural science that wishes, it is true, to develop its ideas of nature in purity, but that is not prepared to advance to anthroposophy when it is a matter of grasping the reality of the soul. Exner found “natural-scientific education” to be unfruitful in developing ideas that must work in the way people live together in human society. For solving the questions of social life facing us in the future, therefore, he demands a way of thinking that does not rest on a natural-scientific basis. He finds that the great juridical questions confronting the Romans were solved by them in such a fruitful way because they had little gift for the natural-scientific way of picturing things. And he attempts to show that the eighteenth century, in spite of its attraction to the natural-scientific way of thinking, proved quite inadequate in mastering social questions. Exner directs his gaze upon a natural-scientific outlook that is not striving scientifically to understand its own foundation. It is understandable that he arrived at the views he did when confronted by such an outlook. For, this outlook must develop its ideas in such a way that they bring before the soul what is of nature in all its purity. From such ideas no impulse is gained for thoughts that are fruitful in social life. For, in social life souls confront each other as souls. Such an impulse can arise only when the soul element, in its spiritual nature, is experienced through a knowing vision (erkennendes Schaueri), when the natural-scientific, anthropological view finds its complement in anthroposophy.

Brentano bore ideas in his soul that definitely lead into the anthroposophical realm in spite of the fact that he wished to remain only in the anthropological realm. This is why the arguments he mounts against Exner are so penetrating, even though Brentano does not wish to make the transition to anthroposophy himself. They show how Exner does not speak at all about the real abilities of a natural-scientific outlook that understands itself; they show how he tilted with windmills in his battle against a way of thinking that misunderstands itself. One can read Brentano's book and everywhere feel in it how justified everything is that points through his ideas in one direction or another, without finding that he expresses fully what it is that he is pointing toward.

[ 29 ] With Franz Brentano a personality has left us whose work, when experienced, can mean an immeasurable gain. This gain is completely independent of the degree of intellectual agreement that one brings to this work. For, this gain springs from the manifestations of a human soul that have their source much deeper in the world's reality than that sphere in which in ordinary life, intellectual agreement is to be found. And Brentano is a personality destined to work on in the course of humanity's spiritual development through impulses that are not limited to the extension of the ideas he developed. I can very well imagine someone's total disagreement with what I have presented here as Brentano's relation to anthroposophy; regardless of one's scientific standpoint, however, it seems to me impossible—if one lets work upon oneself the philosophical spirit that breathes through the writings of this man—that one could arrive at anything less than the feelings of high esteem for the value of Brentano's personality that underly the intentions of this essay.

• 1. He later spoke about his setting up of this thesis in the lecture he held in the Vienna Philosophical Society in 1892 (published under the title The Future of Philosophy). What I refer to as Brentano's later reference to his thesis is on page 3.
• 2. Please see the last part of addendum 7, Brentano's Separation of the Soul from What Is External to the Soul.
• 3. Please see addendum 5: The Real Basis of an Intentional Relation.
• 4. Published by Mercury Press, 1990. See pages 132f. Ed.
• 5. Although the following comment is superfluous, lam sure, to many readers, I would still like to add that, by the very nature of the matter, with my comparison of consciousness to a mirror image, I am not referring to the usual practice of calling our world of mental pictures a mirror image of the outer world; I am calling the soul's experiences in ordinary consciousness a mirror image of the genuine soul element.
• 6. Please see addendum 6: The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being.
• 7. The first form of a “seeing cognition”—Imaginative cognition—passes over into the second form, which is called "Inspired cognition" in my books. In addendum 6, The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being, there is a description of how an Imagination that has already passed over into Inspiration actually lives in Brentano's definition of loving and hating.
• 8. Please see addendum 7, Brentano's Separation of the Soul Element from What is External to the Soul.
• 9. This view is expressed in his two books Modern Psychology, Leipzig 1901, and Outline of Psychology, Bad Sachsa 1908.
• 10. A mistaken view about the validity of the assertion that form cannot exist prior to the matter filling it can arise in connection with crystal formation only because there the form seems to emerge directly out of the forces dwelling in the matter. Nevertheless, unbiased thinking cannot do otherwise than situate the formative forces within the material element before the formed matter actually arises. Aristotle's picture becomes completely untenable, however, when we consider the plant, whose formative forces can certainly not be sought in the conditions within the seed alone, but rather in the effects of the outer world that are present long before the formation of the sense-perceptible plant.
• 11. There are thinkers who are repelled by the view that the essential kernel of one's soul is not inherited from its physical ancestors but originates from the spiritual world, because this view demeans the process of human procreation. The philosopher J. Frohschammer is one of these thinkers (see his book The Origin of Human Souls). According to him, we must believe that even children's souls stem from their parents, since "these living human beings do not beget mere bodies or animals" (see also Frohschammer's book on The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas). An objection based on this opinion does not apply to the view we are presenting in this book. For, one need not think that the soul kernel, descending from the spiritual world and uniting itself with what is inherited from the ancestors, is unconnected with the souls of its parents before birth, even though one does not picture this soul kernel as arising through the act of procreation.
• 12. Literally, “rebirth.” Ed.
• 13. See Brentano's Aristotle's Teachings on the Origins of the Human Spirit, 1911.
• 14. Please see addendum 8, An Objection Often Raised against Anthroposophy.
• 15. This picture of a “soul science without soul” also belongs to the realm of the riddles described in this book as existing at the “borderland of our knowing activity”; and if this picture is not experienced in such a way that it is taken as the starting point of a seeing consciousness, it then walls off the entryway to true knowing of the soul, instead of showing a path to such knowing.
• 16. Where the genuine natural-scientific approach leads is convincingly shown in a book by Oskar Hertwig, which is outstanding in many respects, The Development of Organisms, a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance, 1916. Precisely when a work, like that underlying this book, is so exemplary in its application of the natural-scientific method, it can lead to innumerable soul experiences at the “boundaries of our knowing activity.”
• 17. What is expressed here is presented in a detailed way in my book The Riddles of Philosophy. One of the basic thoughts of that book is to show how natural-scientific cognition proves its power in the soul progress of humanity.

[ 1 ] An attempt to derive a general view of world and life from the basis of strict science was undertaken in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). This enterprise, which was presented as a comprehensive world picture in his Cours de Philosophic Positive (6 vols., 1830–42), was sharply antagonistic to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel of the first half of the nineteenth century. It also opposed, although not to the same degree, all those thought structures that were derived from the ideas of evolution along the lines of Lamarck and Darwin. What occupied the central position of all world conception in Hegel, the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, was completely rejected by Comte. He argues: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would actually have to divide into two personalities; it would have to slip outside itself and place itself opposite its own being. Even a psychology that does not confine itself to the mere physiological view but intends to preserve the processes of the mind by themselves is not recognized by Comte. Anything that is to become an object of knowledge must belong to the objective interconnections of facts, must be presented objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. From this position there follows Comte's objection to the attempts of Spencer and other thinkers whose world pictures followed the approach of scientific thinking adapted by Lamarck and Darwin. So far as Comte is concerned, the human species is given as a fixed and unchangeable fact; he refuses to pay any attention to Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent natural laws as physics uses them for its phenomena are ideals of knowledge for him. As long as science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory as knowledge for Comte. He has a mathematical bent of mind. If it cannot be treated clearly and simply like a mathematical problem, he considers it to be not ready for science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that one needs ideas that become increasingly more life-saturated as one rises from the purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher formations of nature and to man. His world conception owed a certain lifeless and rigid quality to this fact. The whole world appears to him like the mechanics of a machine. What escapes Comte everywhere is the element of life; he expels life and spirit from things and explains merely what is mechanical and machinelike. The concrete historical life of man appears in his presentation like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Comte constructed a scale of the sciences. Mathematics represents the lowest stage; it is followed by physics and chemistry and these again by the science of organisms; the last and concluding science in this sequence is sociology, the knowledge of human society. Comte strives to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics. The phenomena with which the individual sciences deal are supposed to be different in every case but the laws are considered to be fundamentally always the same.

The reverberations of the thought of Holbach, Condillac and others are still distinctly perceptible in the lectures on the relation between soul and body (Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de L'homme) that Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) gave in 1797 and 1798 in the medical school founded by the National Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be called the beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in France. They express a distinct awareness of the fact that Condillac's mode of conception for the phenomena of the soul life had been too closely modeled after the conception of the mechanical processes of inorganic nature and their operation. Cabanis investigates the influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's intellectual and emotional disposition. He develops the conception that the physical and the spiritual are not two separated entities that have nothing in common but that they constitute an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his fundamental view but the way in which he elaborates it. His predecessors simply carry into the spiritual the views they have derived from the inorganic world. Cabanis is convinced that if we start by observing the world of the spiritual as open-mindedly as we observe the inorganic, it will reveal its relation to the rest of the natural phenomena.

Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) proceeded in a similar way. He also wanted first to observe the processes of the spirit without bias as they appear when we approach them without philosophical or scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, one is in error if one conceives the soul as a mechanism as Condillac and his followers had done. This mechanistic character cannot be upheld any longer if one honestly observes oneself. We do not find in us an automaton, a being that is directed from without. We always find within us spontaneous activity and an inner self. We should actually not know anything of the effects of the external world if we did not experience a disturbance in our inner life caused by a collision with the external world. We experience our own being. We develop our activity out of ourselves, but as we do this we meet with opposition. We realize not only our own existence but also an external world that resists us.

[ 2 ] Although they started from de Tracy, two thinkers—Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and André-Marie Ampè re (1775–1826) were led by the self-observation of the soul in entirely different directions. Biran is a subtle observer of the human spirit. What in Rousseau seems to emerge as a chaotic mode of thought motivated by an arbitrary mood, we find in Biran in the form of clear and concrete thinking. Two factors of man's inner life are made the objects of observation by Biran who is a profoundly thoughtful psychologist: What man is through the nature of his being, his temperament, and what he makes out of himself through active work, his character. He follows the ramifications and changes of the inner life, and he finds the source of knowledge in man's inner life. The forces of which we learn through introspection are intimately known in our life, and we learn of an external world only insofar as it presents itself as more or less similar and akin to our inner world. What should we know of forces outside in nature if we did not experience within our self-active soul a similar force and consequently could compare this with what corresponds to it in the external world? For this reason, Biran is untiring in his search for the processes in man's soul. He pays special attention to the involuntary and the unconscious element in the inner life processes that exist long before the light of consciousness emerges in the soul. Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him to a peculiar form of mysticism in later years. In the process of deriving the profoundest wisdom from the soul, we come closest to the foundation of existence when we dig down into our own being. The experience of the deepest soul processes then is an immersion in the wellspring of existence, into the God within us.

[ 3 ] The attraction of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He could have found no more appropriate form of presentation than that of a journal intime, a form of diary. The writings of Biran that allow the deepest insight into his thought world were published after his death by E. Naville (compare Naville's book, Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées, 1857, and his edition, Oeuvres inédités de Maine de Biran). As old men, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to a small circle of philosophers; Biran was a younger member among them. Ampè re was among those who were acquainted with Biran's views. As a natural scientist, he became prominent through the extension of Oersted's observation concerning the relation of electricity to magnetism (compare above in Part II Chapter I). Biran's mode of conception is more intimate, that of Ampè re more scientific-methodical. Ampè re follows with interest the interrelationship of sensations and conceptions in the soul, and also the process through which the spirit arrives at a science of the world phenomena with the aid of thinking.

[ 4 ] What is significant in this current of world conception, which chronologically represents the continuation of the teachings of Condillac, is the circumstance that the life of the soul itself is decidedly emphasized, that the self-activity of the inner personality of the human being is brought into the foreground of the investigation, and that all these thinkers are striving nevertheless for knowledge in the strict sense of natural science. Initially, they investigate the spirit with the methods of natural science, but they do not want to treat its phenomena as homogeneous with the other processes of nature. From these more materialistic beginnings there emerges finally a tendency toward a world conception that leans distinctly toward the spirit.

[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792–1867) traveled through Germany several times and thus became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic period. The deepest impression was made on him by Hegel and Goethe. He brought their idealism to France. As a professor at the école normale (1814), and later at the Sorbonne, he was able to do a great deal for this idealism through his powerful and fascinating eloquence that always produced a deep impression. Cousin received from the idealistic life of the spirit the conviction that it is not through the observation of the external world but through that of the human spirit that a satisfactory viewpoint for a world conception can be obtained. He based what he wanted to say on the self observation of the soul. He adopted the view of Hegel that spirit, idea and thought do not merely rule in man's inner life but also outside in nature and in the progress of the historical life, and that reason is contained in reality. Cousin taught that the character of a people of an age was not merely influenced by random happenings, arbitrary decisions of human individuals, but that a real idea is manifested in them and that a great man appears in the world merely as a messenger of a great idea, in order to realize it in the course of history. This produced a profound impression on Cousin's French audience, which in its most recent history had had to comprehend world historical upheavals without precedent, when they heard such a splendid speaker expound the role that reason played in the historical evolution in accordance with some great and fundamental ideas.

[ 6 ] Comte, with energy and resolution, found his place in the development of French philosophy with his principle: only in the method of science, which proceeds from strict mathematical and directly observed truths as in physics and chemistry can the point of departure for a world conception be found. The only approach he considered mature was the one that fought its way through to this view. To arrive at this stage, humanity had to go through two phases of immaturity—one in which it believed in gods, and subsequently, one in which it surrendered to abstract ideas. Comte sees the evolution of mankind in the progression from theological thinking to idealistic thinking, and from there to the scientific world conception. In the first stage, man's thinking projected anthropomorphic gods into the processes of nature, which produce these processes in the same arbitrary manner in which man proceeds in his actions. Later, he replaces the gods with abstract ideas as, for instance, life force, general world reason, world purpose, and so forth. But this phase of development must give way to a higher one in which it must be understood that an explanation of the phenomena of the world can be found only in the method of observation and a strictly mathematical and logical treatment of the facts. For the purpose of a world conception, thinking must merely combine what physics, chemistry and the science of living organisms obtain through their investigation. Thinking must not add anything to the results of the individual sciences as theology had done with its divine beings and the idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Also, the conceptions concerning the course of the evolution of mankind, the social life of men in the state, in society, etc., will become clear only when the attempt is made to find in them laws like those found in the exact natural sciences. The causes that bring families, associations, legal views and state institutions into existence must be investigated in the same way as the causes that make bodies fall to the ground and that allow the digestive organs to operate. The science of human social life, of human development, sociology, is therefore what Comte is especially concerned with, and he tries to give it the exactness that the other sciences have gradually acquired.

In this respect he has a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Saint-Simon had presented the view that man would only learn to guide his own fate completely when he conceived of his own life in the state, in society and in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense, and when he arranged it like a process following a natural law. For awhile, Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon. He parted ways with him when it seemed to him that Saint-Simon's views turned into all sorts of groundless dreams and utopias. Comte continued to work with a rare zeal in his original direction. His Cours de Philosophic Positive is an attempt to elaborate, in a style of spirit-alienation, the scientific accomplishments of his time into a world conception by presenting them merely in a systematized survey, and by developing sociology in the same way without the aid of theological and idealistic thoughts. Comte saw no other task for the philosopher than that of such a mere systematized survey. The philosopher would add nothing of his own to the picture that the sciences have presented as the connection of facts. Comte expressed thereby, in the most pointed manner, his view that the sciences alone, with their methods of observing reality, have a voice in the formulation of a world conception.

[ 7 ] Within German spirit-life Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) appeared as a forceful champion of Comte's thought. This was expressed in 1865 in his Natural Dialectic. As a further exposition, he expounded his views in his book, Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific World Conception and Art of Life (1875), and in numerous other writings in the fields of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, history of science and social economy. All of Dühring's work proceeds, in the strictest sense of the word, from a mathematical and mechanistic mode of thought. Dühring is outstanding in his endeavor to analyze his observations of nature in accordance with mathematical law, but where this kind of thinking is insufficient, he loses all possibility of finding his way through life. It is from this characteristic of his spirit that the arbitrariness and bias is to be explained with which Dühring judges so many things. Where it is necessary to judge the conflicts of life in accordance with higher ideas, he has, therefore, no other criterion than his sympathies and antipathies that have been aroused in him through accidental personal circumstances. This man, with his mathematically objective mind, becomes completely arbitrary when he undertakes to evaluate human accomplishments of the historical past or of the present. His rather unimaginative mathematical mode of conception led him to denounce a personality like Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance consisted, in Dühring's opinion, in a few poetical achievements. It is impossible to surpass Dühring in his under-valuation of everything that lies beyond a drab reality as he does in his book, The Highlights of Modern Literature. In spite of this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most stimulating figures in the development of modern world conception. No one who has penetrated his thought-saturated books can help but confess that he has been profoundly affected by them.

[ 8 ] Dühring uses rude language for all world conceptions that do not proceed from strictly scientific basic views. All such unscientific modes of thought “found themselves in the state of childish immaturity or feverish fits, or in the decadence of senility, no matter whether they infest entire epochs and parts of humanity under these circumstances or just occasionally individual elements or degenerated layers of society, but they always belong to the category of the immature, the pathological or that of over-ripeness that is already decomposed by putrefaction,” (Course of Philosophy). What Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel achieved, Dühring condemns as the outflow of a professorial wisdom of mountebanks; idealism as a world conception is for him a theory of insanity. He means to create a philosophy of reality that is alone adequate to nature because it “does away with all artificial and unnatural fictions, and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions”; reality is conceived in this philosophy “in a manner that excludes all tendencies toward a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited world conception.” (Course of Philosophy)

[ 9 ] One should think like a real expert in mechanics, a real physicist who confines himself to the results of sense perception, of the logical combinations of the intellect and the operations of calculations. Anything that goes beyond this is idle playing with empty concepts. This is Dühring's verdict. Dühring means to raise this form of thinking, however, to its justified position. Whoever depends exclusively on that form of thinking can be sure that it supplies him with insight concerning reality. All brooding over the question of whether or not we actually can penetrate into the mysteries of the world process, all investigations, which, like Kant's, want to limit the faculty of knowledge, are caused by logical distortion. One should not yield to the temptation of a self-sacrificing self-denial of the mind that does not dare to make a positive statement about the world. What we can know is a real and untarnished presentation of the real.

“The totality of things has a systematic order and an inner logically consistent structure. Nature and history have a constitution and a development that correspond to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general qualities and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also be valid for the special case, that its object is the totality of being, together with its chief forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and the main forms of logic must set the standard for all reality and its forms.” (Course of Philosophy)

Reality has produced for itself an organ in human thinking in which it can reproduce itself mentally in the form of thought in an ideal picture. Nature is everywhere ruled by an all-penetrating law that carries its own justification within itself and cannot be criticized. How could there be any meaning in an attempt to criticize the relevance of thinking, the organ of nature? It is mere foolishness to suppose that nature would create an organ through which it would reflect itself only imperfectly or incompletely. Therefore, order and law in this world must correspond to the logical order and law in human thinking. “The ideal system of our thought is the picture of the real system of objective reality; the completed knowledge has, in the form of thoughts, the same structure that the things possess in the form of real existence.”

In spite of this general agreement between thinking and reality, there exists for the former the possibility to go beyond the latter. In the element of the idea, thinking continues the operations that reality has suggested to it. In reality all bodies are divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thinking does not stop at this limit but continues to divide in the realm of the idea. Thought sweeps beyond reality; for thought, the body is divisible into infinity. Accordingly, to thought it consists of infinitely small parts. In reality, this body consists only of a definite, finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality come into existence. From every event we proceed to another event that is its cause; from this cause we go again to the cause of that cause and so forth. As soon as our thinking abandons the firm ground of reality, it sweeps on into a vague infinity. It imagines that for every cause a cause has to be sought in turn so that the world is without a beginning in time. In allotting matter to space, thinking proceeds in a similar way. In transversing the sky it always finds beyond the most distant stars still other stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space as infinite and filled with an infinite number of heavenly bodies. According to Dühring, one ought to realize that all such conceptions of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only occur through the fact that thinking, with the methods that are perfectly appropriate within the realm of reality, rises above this realm and thereby gets lost in the indefinite.

[ 10 ] If in our thinking, however, we remain aware of this separation from reality, we need no longer refrain from applying our concepts borrowed from human action, to nature. Dühring, as he proceeds from such presuppositions, does not even hesitate to attribute to nature in its production an imagination any more than he does to man in his creation. “Imagination extends . . . into nature itself; it has its roots, as does all thinking in general, in the processes that precede the developed consciousness but do not produce any elements of subjective feelings” (Course of Philosophy). The thought upheld by Comte, that all world conception should be confined to a mere rearrangement of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so completely that he projects the faculty of imagination into the external world because he believes that he would simply have to reject it if it occurred merely in the human mind. Proceeding from these conceptions he arrives at other projections of such concepts as are derived from human activities. He thinks, for instance, that not only man could, in his actions, undertake fruitless attempts, which he then gives up because they do not lead to the intended aim, but that such attempts could also be observed in nature.

The character of the tentative in the formations of nature is not at all alien to reality itself, and one cannot see why one should allow only one half of the parallelism between nature outside man and nature in man, just for the sake of pleasing a shallow philosophy. If subjective error of thinking and imagining springs from the relative separation and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or blunder of the objective and non-thinking nature be possibly the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that is not intimidated by common prejudices will finally recognize the perfect parallelism and the all-pervading unity of the constitution in both directions. (Course of Philosophy)

[ 11 ] Dühring is not in the least shy when it is a question of applying the concepts to reality that thinking produces in itself. But since he has, because of his disposition, only a sense for mathematical conceptions, the picture he sketches of the world has a mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the mode of thought that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel and does not understand what motivates them to search for a reason to explain why one being develops from another. The mathematician places the forms of a triangle, square, circle and ellipse side by side; why should one not be satisfied with a similar schematic coordination in nature as well? Dühring does not aim at the genesis of nature but at the fixed formations that nature produces through the combinations of its energies, just as the mathematician studies the definite, strictly delineated forms of space. He finds nothing inappropriate in attributing to nature a purposeful striving toward such definite formations. Dühring does not interpret this purposeful tendency of nature as the conscious activity that develops in man, but he supposes it to be just as distinctly manifested in the operation of nature as every other natural manifestation. In this respect, Dühring's view is, therefore, the opposite pole of the one upheld by Friedrich Albert Lange. Lange declares the higher concepts, especially all those in which imagination has a share, to be justifiable poetic fiction; Dühring rejects all poetic imagination in concepts, but he attributes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. Thus, it seems quite consistent for Lange to separate the foundation of the moral life entirely from all ideas that are rooted in reality (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). It is also consistent if Dühring wants to extend the ideas that he sees as valid in the realm of morality to nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man belongs to the natural events as much as do the inanimate processes. What in human life is right cannot be wrong in nature.

Such considerations contributed to making Dühring an energetic opponent to Darwin's doctrine of the struggle for existence. f the fight of all against all were the condition of perfection in nature, it would have to be the same with man's life:

Such a conception that claims to be scientific is the most immoral thing thinkable. The character of nature is in this way conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is not merely indifferent to the better morality of man but it is actually in agreement and in alliance with the bad moral principles that are followed by scoundrels. (Course of Philosophy)

According to Dühring's life-conception, what man feels as moral impulses must have its origin in nature. It is possible to observe in nature a tendency toward morality. As nature produces various forces that purposefully combine into stable formations, so it also plants into man instincts of sympathy. By them he allows himself to be determined in his social life with his fellow men. In man, the activity of nature is continued on an elevated level. Dühring attributes the faculty to produce sensations automatically out of themselves to the inanimate mechanical forces.

The mechanical causality of the forces of nature becomes, so to peak, subjectified in the fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectification is evidently incapable of any further explanation, for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanism of the world must develop a feeling of itself. (Course of Philosophy)

But when the world arrives at this stage, it is not that a new law begins, a realm of the spirit, but merely a continuation occurs of what had already been there in the unconscious mechanism. This mechanism, to be sure, is unconscious, but it is nevertheless wise, for “the earth with all it produces, as well as all causes of life's maintenance that lie outside, especially in the sun and all influences that come from the whole surrounding world in general—this entire organization and arrangement must be thought of as essentially produced for man, which is to say, in agreement with his well-being.” (Course of Philosophy)

[ 12 ] Dühring ascribes thought and even aims and moral tendencies to nature without admitting that he thereby idealizes nature. But, for an explanation of nature, higher ideas are necessary that transcend the real. According to Dühring, however, there must be nothing like that; he therefore changes their meaning by interpreting them as facts. Something similar happened in the world conception of Julius Hermann von Kirchmann (1802–84), who published his Philosophy of Knowledge in 1864 at about the same time Dühring's Natural Dialectic appeared. Kirchmann proceeds from the supposition that only what is perceived is real. Man is connected with reality through his perception. Everything that he does not derive from perception he must eliminate from his knowledge of reality. He succeeds in doing this if he rejects everything that is contradictory. "Contradiction is not,” is Kirchmann's second principle, which follows his first principle, “The perceived is.”

[ 13 ] Kirchmann admits only feelings and desires as the states of the soul of man that have an existence by themselves.

Knowing forms a contrast to the other two states, to feeling and desire. . . . It is possible that there is in knowing something underlying, perhaps something similar to, pressure and tension, but if it is conceived in this way it cannot be grasped in its essence. As knowing, and it is only as such that it is to be investigated here, it merely makes itself into a mirror of another being. There is no better parable for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is the more perfect the less it shows of itself and the more it reflects another being, so it is also with knowing. Its essence is the pure reflection of a being other than itself, without mixing in its own state of being. (Philosophy of Knowledge, 1864)

One cannot imagine a greater contrast to Hegel's mode of conception than this view of knowledge. While with Hegel the essence of a thing appears in thinking, in the element that the soul adds in spontaneous activity to the percept, Kirchmann's ideal of knowledge consists of a mirror picture of percepts from which all additions by the soul itself have been eliminated.

[ 14 ] To judge Kirchmann's position in the intellectual life correctly, one must consider the great difficulty with which somebody who had the will to erect an independent structure of world conception was met in his time. The results of natural science, which were to produce a profound influence on the development of world conceptions, were still young. They were just sufficient to shake the belief in the classical idealistic world conception that had had to erect its proud structure without the aid of modern natural science. In the face of the wealth of detailed knowledge, it became difficult to reconstruct fundamental philosophical thoughts. The thread that led from the scientific knowledge of facts to a satisfactory total conception of the world was gradually lost in the general consciousness. A certain perplexity took hold of many. An understanding for the lofty flight of thought that had inspired the world conception of Hegel was scarcely to be found anywhere.

Our time can be understood in its spiritual aspect only if it is recognized that external events must be seen as symbols, and that far deeper impulses are at work in the world. These deeper impulses can be difficult to discern and spiritual knowledge alone can enlighten us about them.

I would like to begin by speaking about an interesting personality of the 19th Century, someone who as a thinker is extraordinarily fascinating because he is one of those who, in a characteristic way, reflects what is alive in our time and also what has in a certain sense died out. This interesting thinker known only to a few: African Spir,¹ died in 1890. In the mid 1860s in Leipzig he began to consider how he could best convey his philosophy of life to his fellow men.

African Spir was an original thinker and he gained nothing of significance from his contact with Masonic circles. When we study him, which to begin with can be done through his writings, we find that he was very little influenced by the 19th Century cultural life around him On the contrary there comes to expression in his view of life an inner quality peculiar to himself. The most significant of his writings: “Thinking and Reality” was published in 1873. African Spir came to recognize, intuitively as it were, what thinking actually is. Not an all-embracing recognition perhaps but significant all the same. What interested him was the true nature of thinking. He wanted to discover what actually happens in man while he is thinking. He also wanted to find out how man is related, while he is engaged in thinking, on the one hand to external reality and on the other to his own inner experience.

Thinking can be understood only when it is seen as a power in man which, in its own essential nature, does not belong to the external physical world at all. On the contrary in its own being and nature it belongs to the spiritual world. We already experience the spiritual world, though not consciously, when we really think; i.e., when our thinking is not merely acting as a mirror reflecting external phenomena. When we are engaged in real thinking then we have the possibility to experience ourselves as thinkers. If man becomes conscious of himself within thinking he knows himself to be in a world that exists beyond birth and death. Few people are aware of it, but nothing is more certain than when man thinks, he is then active as a spiritual being.

African Spir was one of the few and he expressed it when he said: “When I form thoughts, particularly the loftiest thoughts of which I am capable, then I feel myself to be in a world of permanence, subject to neither space nor time; a world of eternity.” He enlarged on this observation saying: “When one turns away from the world of thinking as such and contemplates what we experience when the external world acts upon us, then we are dealing with something which is qualitatively utterly different from the thoughts we apply to it. This is the case whether we contemplate external phenomena, man's evolution, his history or his life in society. Thoughts themselves lead me to the recognition that they, as thoughts, are eternal. In the external world everything is transitory; what is earthly comes into being and passes away. That is not true of any thought. Thinking itself tells me that it is absolute reality for it is rooted in eternity.”

For African Spir this was something he simply experienced as a fact. He argued that what we experience as external reality does not agree, does not accord with the reality we experience as thinking. Consequently it cannot be real in the true sense; it is semblance, illusion. Thus, along a path, different to that followed by the ancient Oriental, different also from that followed by certain mystics, African Spir comes to the realization that everything we experience in space and time is fundamentally semblance. In order to confirm this from another aspect he said something like the following: “Man, in fact all living creatures, is subject to pain. However, pain does not reveal its true nature for it contains within itself a power for its overcoming; it wills to be overcome. Pain does not want to exist, therefore it is not true reality. Pain as such must be an aspect of the transitory world of illusion and the reality is the force within it which strives for painlessness. This again shows us that the external world is an illusion, nowhere is it completely free of pain so it cannot be true reality. The real world, the soul-world, is plunged into semblance and pain.”

African Spir felt that man can only reach a view of life that is inwardly satisfying if he becomes conscious, through his own resolve and effort, that he bears within himself an eternal world. He maintains that this eternal world proclaims itself in man's thinking and in the constant striving to overcome pain and reach salvation. Spir insists that the external world is semblance, not because it appears as such to him, but because he is convinced that in thinking he lays hold of true reality. It is because the external world does not conform, is not of like nature, to thinking that he says it is semblance.

If we survey the various world views held by those 19th-century thinkers who lived in the same milieu as Spir, we do not find any of such subtlety as his. So how does Spir come to experience the world the way he did? If we look for an explanation in the light of spiritual knowledge, we must make the following comments: Insofar as we are surrounded by the external material world, by events of history and also by our life in society we live on the physical plane. Whereas in thinking, that is to say, when we really live in thinking, we are no longer on the physical plane. It is only when we think about external material existence that we turn to the physical plane and in so doing we actually deny our own nature. When we become conscious of what really lives in thinking we cannot but feel that within thinking we are in a spiritual world.

Thus when Spir became aware of the real nature of what in man is the most abstract: pure thinking, he felt that there is a definite boundary between the physical and the spiritual world. Basically he asserts that man belongs to two worlds, the physical and the spiritual and that the two are not in agreement. Spir comes to the realization, out of an elemental natural impulse as it were, of the existence of a spiritual world. He does not express it in so many words, but declares that everything around us, be it our natural, historical or social life, is mere semblance. And he finds that this semblance does not agree with the reality given in thinking. So although his experience of the spiritual world is not of direct vision, but an experience within abstract thinking, he nevertheless establishes that these two spheres are divided by a sharp boundary.

Looking closer at the way Spir presented his view of the world one realizes that his 19th-century contemporaries were bound to find it difficult; and it is natural that he was not understood. It could be said that he tried to contract the whole spiritual world into a single point within thinking; draw it together so to speak from a spiritual world otherwise unknown to him. He put the whole emphasis on the fact that, in his experience of thinking, he found proof that the spiritual world exists and that the physical world is semblance. This led him to stress that truth, i.e., reality, could never be found in the external world, for that world is in every aspect untrue and incomplete. According to his own words he was convinced that his discovery was a most significant event in history for it proved once and for all that reality is not to be found in the external world. He met no understanding. He was even driven to the expediency of offering a prize to anyone who could disprove his claim. No one took up the challenge, no one tried to refute him. He suffered all the distress that a thinker can experience from being entirely ignored; killed by silence as the saying goes. He lived for a long time in Tübingen, then in Stuttgart and finally in Lausanne due to lung trouble. He was buried in Geneva in the year 1890. On his grave lies a Bible carved in stone, showing the opening words of St. John's Gospel: “And the Light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not,” followed by “Fiat Lux” (Let there be light) which were his last words before he died.

One could say that Spir's whole philosophy was a kind of premonition. In concerning oneself with such thinkers one comes to recognize that there were many who, in the course of the 19th Century, had a premonition that something like spiritual science must come. These thinkers were prevented from reaching spiritual knowledge themselves by the circumstances and conditions prevailing in that century. African Spir was such a thinker. If we read his writings, without concerning ourselves with his life, we are faced with a riddle: How does a man come to recognize the reality of the spiritual world so decisively merely by means of thinking? How does he come to recognize the spiritual within himself with such certainty? How does he come to know that his inner being is so firmly rooted in true reality that it convinces him the external world is unreal? The explanation lies in Spir's life, in the simple fact that he was born in Russia (1837). His real name was African Alexandrovitch. He was a Russian transplanted into Central Europe, a Russian who, being influenced by Central and Western European views of life, represented a wonderful blend of the latter with Russian characteristics. He did not learn German till he came to Leipzig in the mid 1860s but then wrote all his works in that language.

Let us now remember that within the peoples of Western Europe there has gradually come to expression during the course of mankind's evolution the sentient soul in the Latin peoples of the South, the intellectual or mind soul in the Latin peoples of the West, the consciousness soul in the Anglo-American peoples, the 'I' in people of Central Europe; while the Russian people of Eastern Europe are waiting to Develop the Spirit Self. One could say that in the Russian people the Spirit-Self is still in an embryonic state. Bearing this in mind we realize that African Spir was born with an inner disposition to await the Spirit-Self. This aspect of his soul life was stirring within him but it came to expression colored by the world conceptions prevailing in Western Europe.

The time will come when the Eastern European will have developed his true nature. It will then be an impossibility for him to look upon the external physical world as a world that is real in the true sense. He will experience his own inner being as rooted in true reality. And this he will experience not just in thinking but in the Spirit-Self within the spiritual world. He will know himself to be a citizen of the spiritual world and it will seem sheer nonsense to him to regard man the way the West does: as a being evolved from the animal kingdom. That aspect of man the people of the East will recognize to be merely man's outer covering. The Eastern European, as he develops the Spirit Self, will ascend to the realm of the Hierarchies just as the Western European descends to the kingdom of nature. African Spir knew instinctively that his being was rooted in the spirit. This instinctive sense of living in spiritual reality is to be found today in Eastern Europe, but is as yet not able to come to expression in an appropriate view of life. This will become possible only when spiritual science, developed in Central Europe, becomes absorbed into Eastern European culture. What is as yet experienced only instinctively, in Eastern Europe, as life in spiritual reality, will then find expression.

African Spir was unable to express this instinctive experience in spiritual-scientific terms; instead he clothed it in concepts he took over from Spencer, Locke, Kant, Hegel and Taine. This means that instead of clothing it in images obtained through living thinking he used the kind of abstract concepts which are in reality no more than mental images reflecting the physical world. What in African Spir was leading an embryonic existence had as it were withdrawn from Western culture, but it had left its imprint in which could be recognized what had been there before as a living reality. African Spir is such an interesting figure because he incorporates both past and future. He is also a clear demonstration of the deep truth, continually stressed by spiritual science, i.e. that the European peoples are in reality like a human soul with its members placed side by side. The peoples towards the West constitute the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul placed next to one another. In the Central Europeans the ‘I’ comes to expression and the Eastern Europeans prepare for the Spirit Self.

At present history is dealt with in a most unsatisfactory fashion. However, it can be foreseen how it will be dealt with in the future. At present external facts are always emphasized but they are not the essential. To hold on merely to external facts is comparable to undertaking a study of “Faust” by describing the letters page by page. An understanding of “Faust” is not dependent on the letters but on what is learnt through them. Similarly a time will come when consideration of history will depend as little on external facts as reading a book depends on a description of the letters. Behind the external facts the real history will be discerned, just as the meaning in “Faust” is discerned behind the printed letters. This is radically expressed but it does illustrate the situation. Ordinary history will be seen as a history that describes the symptoms; a man like African Spir will be seen as a symptom of the soul element of Eastern Europe merging with that of Central Europe.

The present age is as yet a long way from studying either history or life in this way. Yet only by bringing things of this nature together, and relating them with a deeper understanding to current events, can one become conscious of what is really happening in the world. The present age has to an unprecedented degree robbed the first half of the 19th Century of its spiritual achievements; this also applies to the second half but to a lesser degree. It is indeed justified to speak about forgotten aspects of spiritual life in relation to the 19th Century; even more than I have done in my book Vom Menschenrätsel. Some day the history of the 19th Century will have to be rewritten. This was felt by Hermann Grimm² when he said: “A time will come when the history of the last decades will be completely rewritten. When this happens those who are now looked upon as great figures will appear rather puny and others, quite different figures, which are now forgotten will emerge as the great ones.” One comes to realize what a “fable convenue” the official history of the 19th Century is when one attempts to study its history as it truly is and can recognize the forces that were at work. The reason I said that our time has robbed the 19th Century of its spiritual achievements is because that century produced many thinkers who, for lack of recognition, were condemned to isolation. African Spir is a characteristic example. In saying this I am not referring to the public in general but to those who, through their vocation, had a duty to be interested in him and his work. When such human beings die and their souls pass into the spiritual world they do not just vanish. They continue to be influential from the spiritual world in ways of which there is usually little inkling.

Can anyone really believe that when a thinker such as African Spir dies he simply disappears as far as the world here is concerned? The spiritual world is no cloud-cuckoo-land; just as our individual bodies are permeated by soul and spirit, so does soul and spirit permeate the whole cosmos. Soul and spirit live all around us like the air. What a man has produced, in a life of strenuous thinking while in a physical body, does not just disappear when he dies and passes into the spiritual world. In such cases something very remarkable happens. A thinker who here on earth has met with much acclaim is in a different position to a solitary neglected thinker like Spir. A thinker, who receives much popular recognition, has as it were finished with his thoughts when he dies. Not so a thinker like Spir, he strives to protect his thoughts—what I am now saying is of the greatest importance—which are present spiritually in the physical world. Such a thinker remains with his thoughts. He protects them for a period lasting decades; during this time they are not accessible to human beings living in physical bodies.

When a thinker like African Spir dies his thoughts stay with him, he as it were protects them so that those who are living have no immediate access to them. This causes an unconscious longing for these thoughts to arise in human beings which they cannot satisfy. In other words there are human beings whose forefathers paid no attention to such a thinker and allowed him to die unrecognized. He had produced thoughts which ought to be developed further, but because he protects them he prevents them being reached by human beings and this causes an undefined longing for these thoughts. Because the longing cannot be satisfied it results in a feeling of deep inner dissatisfaction. In earlier times there were many who experienced such unsatisfied longing. In our time it is present to a particularly high degree because the last third of the 19th Century produced a great number of highly significant thinkers to whom the world paid no attention, thus robbing them of their spiritual achievements.

What should be done? That is a most important question. What one must do is to speak about such forgotten aspects of cultural life. When, in a few strokes, I place before your mind's eye such a thinker as African Spir, it is not for any arbitrary reason or merely to tell you something interesting. It is to draw attention to the fact that we are surrounded by a spiritual world of real thoughts, thoughts which a thinker has preserved and which he now protects. What we must do is to turn with a feeling of reverence to the thinker concerned. He may then give us his thoughts himself, thus enabling our thinking to become creative. That is why in the course of our studies I like to call your attention to such forgotten thinkers. A link of real significance is forged thereby. If I manage to some extent to inscribe in your souls a picture of African Spir, something comes about which acts in a certain sense as a corrective of a wrong, and that is a task of spiritual science.

The spiritual world is not a nebulous pantheistic abstraction. It is as concretely real as the external sense-perceptible phenomena. We come in contact with the spiritual world not by constantly talking about spirit, spirit, spirit, but by pointing to concrete spiritual facts. And one such fact is that especially at the present time we can bring to life in ourselves a connection with forgotten thinkers so that fruits of their thoughts can enter our souls. On their side these souls become released from protecting their thoughts.

We therefore perform a real deed when, with the right feeling and attitude, we speak of these thinkers who in recent times have been victims of spiritual isolation and robbed of the fruits of their work. Our age will thereby receive, at least it may receive, spiritual thoughts which it so sorely needs. A thinking which merely mirrors the external world in the usual pedestrian manner is unfruitful. Thinking which in the customary way is applied to nature, history or social life has finished its task as soon as the external phenomena have been understood. Nowadays so many thinkers are unproductive because all that occupy their thoughts are external or historical events. Thinking is fruitful only when it takes its content from the spiritual world. A thought is like a corpse as long as it only mirrors nature or history. It becomes alive and creative when it is receptive to what the Hierarchies pour down from the spiritual world.

At present there is no inclination to seek union through thinking with the spiritual world. That is something which is positively avoided whereas pride is taken in pursuing “genuine” science. The view is that now at last science has arrived after mankind has remained for so long in a stage of infancy. It must be said though that this science, particularly when it forms the basis for a view of life, has produced some strange results. For one thing it cannot come to grips with what thinking actually is. Natural science dissects man's body and comes to amazing conclusions about the structure of the brain and its function. Thinking itself is disregarded. As a result thinking as such has gradually become a ghostly something of which science is afraid. As a consequence modern science is particularly against thinkers whose lives were steeped in thinking, thinkers like Hegel, Schelling, Jacob Boehme and other mystics whose view of life was built on thoughts. The modern researcher takes the attitude that these people no doubt did think, but thoughts do not lead to certainty. A scientist feels eerie when he must leave the sense world, i.e., the realm which African Spir called a world of semblance and illusion. Yet the scientist cannot establish science if he refuses to think, so he is caught in a dilemma. This dilemma caused one of science's elite, who felt himself especially suited to represent scientific opinion, to utter an aphorism which, when the history of the second half of the 19th century comes to be rewritten, could well be inserted as characteristic of many aspects of this period. At a scientific congress this scientist declared: “We men of medicine have to admit that, like educated folk in general, exact science cannot do completely without thinking.”

Thus in the 19th century, at a serious gathering of scientists it is admitted with regrets that thinking cannot be dispensed with altogether, at least not if one is a medical man or a well educated person. In other words thinking is something very awkward that causes uncertainty the moment one looks at it.

This attitude to thinking causes in people strange feelings when they hear that a spiritual world penetrates the physical world. They are afraid of thinking because they sense that this is where the spiritual world enters, and, as they insist that there is no spiritual world, they will have nothing to do with thinking. You may remember my explaining that what is understood by the word genius will change in the course of evolution. I pointed out that what makes someone a genius can only be understood by assuming that more spirit is active in him than in a non-genius. When the discoveries of a genius happen to be of a mechanical nature he meets great admiration. If his genius takes other forms people are nowadays apt to vent their aversion to such proof of spiritual power on the genius himself. A rather interesting essay has appeared on the subject of genius. After arguing that a genius is someone partly sick, partly mad the essay culminates with this curious sentence: “Let us thank God we are not all geniuses!”

These things must be seen as symptoms of our time, for they are characteristic of a general trend. Yet such things are usually ignored or not taken seriously because their true significance is not recognized. They may even be laughed at and the present miseries are not seen to be related to them. Far from attempting to bring order into the chaos through spiritual insight, man is allowing his contact with the spiritual world to deteriorate. As a consequence he also loses contact with the reality of the external world because without spiritual insight he can reach only its outer shell. In saying this I am pointing to a significant phenomenon of our time: catastrophes occur because thoughts, which ought to relate to external events, do not. As a result the external events take over and go their own way independent of man. They do this even when man has created the events himself. Then the thoughts of man, which may be excellent, often have no effect, they can find no foothold in the external events. It has gradually come about that the individual may have fine ideas but they have a life of their own while external reality also has a life of its own. A dreadful discrepancy exists between what takes place in many heads and what goes on all around them, a disharmony of such proportions as has never before occurred.

When such things are discussed one is invariably accused of exaggeration. But they are not exaggerated and one must speak about them, for they are the truth and must be recognized. There is evidence of these things everywhere but the awareness of them is not great enough to realize their implications. Take the following example which could be multiplied a thousandfold: In the year 1909 in Russia a conversation took place between two men concerning the relation of Russia to Central Europe. This was soon after Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.³ The conversation took place as feelings in Russia were running high, threatening already then to bring about the terrible situation which finally erupted in 1914. That the 1914 war did not break out already in 1909 hung on a thread. It was prevented, but this was not thanks to certain quarters in Russia. These things must be seen as they truly are. The two men, one a Croatian, the other Russian, discussed in particular the relation between Russia and Austria. After they had looked at all existing possibilities for stabilizing relations between Central and Eastern Europe the Russians summed up his own view by saying: “A war between Russia and Austria-Germany would be, not only utterly inhuman, but also completely senseless.” These sensible words, which were by no means based on emotions, summed up well-thought-out, well-considered judgements about the structure of Central and Eastern Europe. When I now mention the name of the Russian who spoke them you will have confirmation of what has just been discussed. The Russian who so vehemently rejected war in 1909 was Lvov.⁴ Five years later in 1914—when he could not after all have changed into someone completely different—we find him as the president of the first revolutionary Russian Government. In other words he was by then the person at the very center of all the events that have led to the present miseries in Europe.

Just imagine the situation: we see external events run their course and we see human beings, active in the midst of these events, who think quite differently. Human beings with sensible ideas are active in these events but are overwhelmed by them. Why are they overwhelmed? Because of the failure to relate concepts and ideas to spiritual reality. Thoughts are powerless unless they are united with the spiritual element of the world. According to the general opinion held nowadays it is a drawback for someone, active in social or political life, to be a thinker. A thinker is regarded as unpractical, incapable of understanding the realities of life. Yet the truth is that those who are usually regarded as practical have only the kind of abstract thoughts which cannot lay hold of reality. One must ask if it really is sensible to select for high political office someone who is more renowned for fly-fishing than his thinking ability? “Fly-fishing” is the title of a book written by Sir Edward Grey⁵ and fly-fishing is what fills his mind. A ministerial colleague once said about him, not without justification: “The reason Grey has such excellent concentration is because he simply repeats what others put into his mind; no thought of his own ever disturbs his concentration.”—That colleague hit the nail on the head. So you see, according to modern opinion, someone who understands fly-fishing must also understand politics for it would be a drawback if he had any real thoughts. However, as I have said, so often it is just such opinions which at present reveal their futility for they have brought about the disastrous conditions we are in.

It is obvious that the capabilities which today are regarded as adequate for political office and statesmanship are in fact inadequate. This is because modern man has no interest in turning his thoughts to anything other than external phenomena. Many years ago I called this condition “fact-fanaticism”; earlier still I called it “the dogma of practical experience.” You can read about it in my books Goethe's Conception of the World and Goethe the Scientist.

We must be clear about the fact that those whose thinking merely reflects natural processes, historical events or external social life, develop thoughts which are purely ahrimanic. That does not necessarily mean that they are wrong or incorrect, but they are ahrimanic. The ahrimanic element must of necessity exist. The whole content of natural science is ahrimanic and will only lose its ahrimanic nature when it becomes imbued with life. This will happen when man's thinking ceases merely to mirror external phenomena in a mechanical way. Thinking must become creative, it must become saturated through and through with spiritual content. Social laws, laws of rights, etc. will be ahrimanic if, when formulating them, one relies solely on that capacity, on that aspect of thinking which mirrors the external events and reflects upon them. When, as in such instances, ahrimanic forces are active in spheres where they do not belong they become destructive. Healing will come to our age when the thoughts and ideas that are applied to social conditions and political life are in living contact with spiritual reality.

Because of the demands it would make upon them there are few people today who are able to accept these facts. When one speaks about the spirit it is noticeable that people are on their guard. What goes on in their consciousness on such occasions is not so important; what goes on in their sub-consciousness is of great importance. What lives there is bad conscience which they experience only subconsciously. Because they are unable to admit to themselves that their thoughts are lifeless and ahrimanic they avoid becoming conscious of the fact. The moment one's thinking attains a living grasp of spiritual reality one can no longer avoid the recognition that thoughts, which merely mirror external phenomena, are ahrimanic. This recognition causes fear. It is fear that holds man back from attaining creative thinking. Creative thinking is only attained when man is inspired—even unconsciously—from the spiritual world.

Thus we see that, apart from all the many other ills that beset mankind, nothing less than a war against the spirit is waged in our time. It is a war which, under the influence of certain circles, will become more and more widespread; and is being promoted in the strongest possible way by what may be termed the spirit of our time.—I have to admit that it is extremely difficult to speak about things belonging to this domain, at the same time it is not enough merely to hint at them or avoid calling them by their proper names. In this world nothing can be said to be absolute good or absolute evil; it always depends on the aspect from which it is viewed. The important thing is to recognize that in their right place at the right time things are good; shifted out of the right place and time they are no longer good. Nowadays people all too readily take things in a dogmatic or absolute sense, which so easily leads to misunderstanding about such matters. There is no question of levelling criticism at the age as such, only of drawing attention to facts.

There is an inclination in our time to turn away from the spirit and towards the ahrimanic—the ahrimanic is also spirit but it is spirit which is dead and reveals only what is material. Life has become immensely differentiated and there is more and more need for discrimination. Many examples could be given of different aspects of social life through which one can become aware of the kind of impulses that are at work in our time. Impulses of which we all partake. I shall mention just two such impulses.

One impulse is noticeable mainly in people who have strong links with the land, with the soil. If we travel eastwards we shall find more and more people of this type. If we go westwards we find more and more conditions of emancipation from the soil. In recent decades the Central European has made rapid strides from attachment to the soil to emancipation from it. Country folk have a close connection with the soil; town folk have emancipated themselves from it. One could say the country type of person is agrarian, the city type industrial. These two terms, agrarian and industrial, have taken on a different meaning in the last decade to what they once meant. It is difficult to explain these things because they tend to be taken in a dogmatic, absolute sense, but that is not what is meant. What is meant is a characterization of general tendencies. They are streams within human evolution and we are all involved in them.

Whatever we do in life we have an inclination towards one or the other of these two tendencies in man. Both are naturally good in themselves but under the influences that exist in our time they deteriorate. In the agrarian the deterioration takes the form of a disinclination to rise to anything spiritual; there is a tendency to let the spirit in man lie fallow, wanting to remain as one is and unite with what is not yet spirit. The industrial type develops an opposite tendency; he loses connection with the spirit active in nature and lives more and more in abstractions. His concepts become ever more rarefied and insubstantial. In our time the agrarian is in danger of suffocation for lack of spirituality. For the industrial the danger is of an opposite kind, he lives in spirit which is too rarefied, his concepts have lost all connection with true reality; he could be compared with someone living in air which is too thin.

These are the shadow-sides, especially in our age, of the two tendencies in man. We see that the agrarian type all too easily develops aversion for the spirit, i.e. for cultural development. One cannot however just stand still and avoid participating in evolution. If one remains at the level of nature by turning away from the spirit one sinks below nature and comes into relationship with demonic beings who make one into a real hater of the spirit. As a consequence a view of life develops based on ahrimanic demonology.

The extreme industrial type on the other hand, living in concepts that are completely abstract, develops an attitude of superiority; he sees himself as a kind of superman—though not in the Nietzschean sense—he comes into the realm of Lucifer. Ahriman hands him over to luciferic powers and he becomes steeped in luciferic concepts and emotions. The tendency in the agrarian is towards brutishness; in the industrial it is towards an abstract recklessness of concepts. These phenomena are very conspicuous in our time. They are also serious matters that bring home the fact that our age cannot be understood without spiritual knowledge. Human beings must live together; to do so they must find common ground of understanding by rubbing off their one-sidedness on each other, and certainly both agrarians and industrials have their place.

Already at the time when the Gospels were written it was foreseen that human beings would become more and more differentiated. St. Luke's Gospel is written more with regard for agrarians, St. Matthew's Gospel more for industrials. However, not only the Gospel of St. Luke or that of St. Matthew should speak to us, but all the Gospels. There are “clever” people who find contradictions between the Gospels; they fail to take into account that the Gospels were written by human beings of different inner dispositions. The soul experiences of the writer of St. Luke's Gospel were akin to those of the agrarian type; whereas those of the writer of St. Matthew's Gospel were akin to the inner disposition of the industrial type. The essential thing is not to remain one-sided but to recognize that things which contradict each other are also complementary.

Unless man seeks to unite with the Universal Spirit, which today can be found only through spiritual knowledge—the Spirit which, though it pervades everything, does not live in any individual entity—the time will come when he will resemble the environment he lives in and identifies with. Eduard von Hartmann⁶ once made the apt remark that, when one goes into a rural district and catches sight of an ox with the peasant beside it, there is no great difference in their physiognomy. That is to express it radically, the remark is also derogatory, but one sees what is meant. In our time, because man turns away from the spirit, an intimate relationship develops between his soul and the environment. When one is able to observe life's more subtle aspect it is obvious that the mental life of the agrarian is influenced by his association with the soil, just as the industrial is influenced by his kind of environment. When either of these two types of people thinks about politics or religion, their thoughts are invariably colored by their particular kind of environment. Man's concepts and ideas are dependent today to an awful extent on his external physical environment; they must be set free by the knowledge and insight spiritual science can provide.

A thinker like African Spir would feel things of this kind very strongly. When he said that everything in the external world is semblance, illusion, it was because he became aware, by observing his own inner life, that man comes to experience his inner being as semblance. Through participating in external semblance he comes to feel his inner self as unreal.—How can one expect healing or solutions to come from the semblance in which man is immersed? His inner life is so entangled in conflicting impulses that it is no wonder external conflicts are rife.

To be a spiritual scientist, not just in name or because of some indefinite feeling, but in the deepest and truest sense, life must be observed with the insight of spiritual knowledge. Life today is not seen as it truly is; people shun the spirit and attempt to shape their life purely on the basis of what is unspiritual. It is useless to harbor spiritual knowledge as an abstract general truth, paying no need to it when trying to understand life. To know that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and 'I' or that Lucifer and Ahriman exist, is not enough. One should be able to apply concepts such as ahrimanic or luciferic scientifically, like a physicist applies the concepts of positive and negative electricity when testing these phenomena.

Agrarian and industrial are concepts which cease to be abstract when we, in looking at life, recognize them as luciferic and ahrimanic tendencies, as we have just done. One takes risks when describing things in this way, for people do not want to hear the truth. Yet the truth has to be faced if mankind is ever to find a cure for all the confusion in the world. Salvation from and the healing of the evils of our time are closely related to understanding human life.

• 1 . African Spir 1837–1890 Philosopher.
• 2 . Herman Grimm 1828–1901 Cultural Historian.
• 3 . Bosnia and Herzegovina were occupied by Austria 1878. They remained Turkish territory until annexed in 1908.
• 4 . Georgi Evegenievich Lvov 1861–1925 Russian politician. Became leader of the first provisional government on March 15, 1917.
• 5 . Sir Edward Grey 1862–1933 English politician 1905–1916 British Foreign Minister.
• 6 . Eduard von Hartmann 1842–1906 Philosopher

These lines vividly illustrate the profound contrast between Goethe's way of thinking and Kant's philosophy. With judgments like: Goethe was not receptive to philosophy and the like, it is not at all dismissed there. The correct thing is that an essentially different philosophy than the Kantian one was inherent in Goethe's way of thinking. Thus it happened that Goethe always misunderstood Kant's statements and when he thought he was speaking of Kantian philosophy, he had something completely different in mind than the latter. It was not his gift for poetry and not his common sense that prevented him, but only that his view of the world is exactly the opposite pole of Kant's.

In the Critique of Judgment, too, it is not Kant's own findings that attract the poet, but rather things that were essential to Goethe's thinking, but which, in the sense of Kantian philosophy, are either insignificant externalities or forced assumptions by Kant. The juxtaposition of aesthetic and teleological judgment in the Critique of Judgment is of the latter kind. What is the principle of all research in Goethe, indeed the principle of all intellectual activity: the inner sufficiency, the self-contained totality of the natural beings under consideration, Kant found it only in a [illegible word] human activity in the aesthetic production and contemplation of a work of art [and] the teleological observation of nature. And that only by breaking – as Hegel already noted – the strict framework of his philosophy and actually founding an aesthetics and teleology in an inconsistent way.

Goethe was not simply dismissive of Fichte. Those familiar with Fichte's philosophy must also admit that Fichte has far more points of contact with Goethe than with Kant. In the Annalen, Goethe is indignant about him:

He was one of the most capable personalities one had ever seen, and there was nothing wrong with his attitudes in a higher regard; but how could he have kept pace with the world that he regarded as his acquired property?

And what he, G., says in 1797 at the gate of the University of Jena: where “the interaction of talented people and fortunate circumstances would be worthy of the most faithful and vivid description,” he first mentions Fichte, who “gave a new presentation of the theory of science in the philosophical journal.” Also significant is what he wrote to Fichte on June 24, 1794, after Fichte had sent him the first sheets of the Theory of Science:

What has been sent contains nothing that I do not understand or at least believe I understand, nothing that does not readily connect with my usual way of thinking.

When Goethe's relationship to Schelling is discussed, it is only Schelling's first philosophical thesis that can be considered. As for the mystical period of Schelling's philosophy, there are neither historical points of contact nor, at least initially, any similarities. Schelling's natural philosophy does contain something of Goethe's way of thinking. The creative principle that Schelling posits as the basis of nature, which permeates all of nature as an active force, is also characteristic of Goethe. It is therefore clear that Goethe's ideas were clarified in his discussions with Schelling, that many of them took on a more definite form. But the German philosopher who understood Goethe best is likely to be Hegel. He not only regarded Goethe's scientific way of thinking as justified, but, if one disregards Hegel's peculiar mental disposition, which above all lacks cases in which everything develops according to the logical side, Hegel's philosophical way of thinking is likely to be closer to Goethe's than to that of any other German philosopher. The Humboldt brothers, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt, also had much in common with Goethean research in their way of thinking. We need only think of the words with which Goethe greeted Alexander von Humboldt's Physiognomy of Plants in 1806: “Now that Linnaeus has developed an alphabet of plant forms and left us a convenient-to-use directory; now that Jussieu has already organized the whole in a more natural way , and ingenious men with and without eyesight continue to define the distinguishing characteristics in great detail, and philosophy promises us a lively unity of a higher view: So here the man, to whom the plant forms distributed over the earth's surface are present in living groups and masses, is already hastening to take the last step and indicating how what has been individually recognized, seen, and observed can be appropriated by the mind in all its splendor and abundance, and how the woodpile that has been piled and smoking for so long can be brought to life by an aesthetic breath into a bright flame."

Goethe was, however, unable to come to terms with another of A. v. Humboldt's views, namely his volcanism. We will have more to say about this later. The extent to which Goethe's thinking was related to that of W. v. Humboldt can be seen from the fact that [text breaks off]