The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Only a few personalities in the second half of the nineteenth century attempted to find a firm foundation for the relation of a conception of the self-conscious ego toward the general world picture by going deeply into Hegel's mode of thought. One of the best thinkers along these lines was Paul Asmus (1842–1876), who died as a young man. In 1873 he published a book entitled, The Ego and the Thing in Itself. In it he shows how it is possible, through Hegel's approach to thinking and the world of ideas, to obtain a relation of man toward the essence of things. He explains in an ingenious way that we have in man's thinking an element that is not alien to reality but full of life and fundamentally real, an element on which we only have to concentrate in order to arrive at the essence of existence. In a most illuminating way he describes the course of the evolution of world conception that began with Kant, who had seen in the “thing in itself” an element that was alien and inaccessible to man, and led to Hegel, who was of the opinion that thought comprised not only itself as an ideal entity but also the “thing in itself.” Voices like this found scarcely a hearing. This became most poignantly clear in the slogan, “Back to Kant,” which became popular in a certain current of philosophical life after Eduard Zeller's speech at the University of Heidelberg, On the Significance and Task of the Theory of Knowledge.

The conceptions, partly conscious and partly unconscious, which led to this slogan, are approximately as follows. Natural science has shaken the confidence in spontaneous thinking that means to penetrate by itself to the highest questions of existence, but we cannot be satisfied with the mere results of natural science for they do not lead beyond the external view of things. There must be grounds of existence concealed behind this external aspect. Even natural science itself has shown that the world of colors, tones, etc., surrounding us is not a reality outside in the objective world but that it is produced through the function of our senses and our brain (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). For this reason, it is necessary to ask these questions: In what respect do the results of natural science point beyond their own limits toward the higher problems: What is the nature of our knowledge? Can this knowledge lead to a solution of that higher task? Kant has asked such questions with great emphasis. In order to find one's own position, one wanted to study how he had approached them. One wanted to think over with the greatest possible precision Kant's line of thought, attempting to avoid his errors and to find in the continuation of his ideas a way that led out of the general perplexity.

[ 2 ] A number of thinkers endeavored to arrive at a tenable goal, starting from Kantian points of departure. The most important among them were Hermann Cohen (1842–1916), Otto Liebmann (1840 – 1912), Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1916), Johannes Volkelt (1842–1930) and Benno Erdmann (1851–1921). Much perspicacity can be found in the writings of these men. A great deal of work was done inquiring into the nature and extent of the human faculty of knowledge. Johannes Volkelt who, insofar as he was active as an epistomologist, lives entirely within this current, also contributed a thorough work on Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1879) in which all problems characterizing this trend of thought are discussed. In 1884 he gave the inaugural address for his professorship in Basel in which he made the statement that all thinking that goes beyond the results of the special empirical sciences of facts must have “the restless character of seeking and searching, of cautious trial, defensive reserve and deliberate admission.” It should be an “advance in which one must partly withdraw again, a yielding in which one nevertheless holds on to a certain degree” (On the Possibility of Metaphysics, Hamburg & Leipzig, 1884).

This new attempt to start from Kant appears in a special light in Otto Liebmann. His writings, Contributions Toward the Analysis of Reality (1876), Thoughts and Facts (1882), Climax of Theories (1884), are veritable models of philosophical criticism. Here a caustic mind ingeniously discovers contradictions in the worlds of thought, reveals as half truths what appear as safe judgments, and shows what unsatisfactory elements the individual sciences contain when their results appear before the highest tribunals of thought. Liebmann enumerates the contradictions of Darwinism. He reveals its insufficiently founded assumptions and its defective thought connections, maintaining that something is needed to fill in the gaps to support the assumptions. On one occasion he ends an exposition he gives of the nature of living organisms with the words:

Plant seeds do not lose their ability to germinate after lying dry for ages, and grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy cases, after having been hermetically sealed and buried for thousands of years, when sowed in a moist soil, thrive excellently. Wheel animalcules (rotatoria) and other infusoria that have been gathered completely dried up from a gutter pipe are newly revived by rain water. Even frogs and fishes that have turned into ice cakes in freezing water revive when carefully thawed out. All these facts are capable of completely opposite interpretations. . . . In short, every form of categorical denial in this matter would be crude dogmatism. Therefore, we discontinue our argument.

This phrase, “We discontinue our argument,” really expresses, even if it does not do so literally, every final thought of Liebmann's reflection. It is, indeed, the final conclusion of many recent followers and elaborators of Kantianism. They do not succeed in doing more than emphasize that they receive the things into their consciousness. Therefore, everything that they see, hear, etc., is not outside in the world but within themselves and they are incapable of deciding anything concerning the outside. A table stands before me, argues the Neo-Kantian, but, really, this only seems to be so. Only a person who is naively concerned with problems of philosophy can say, “Outside myself is a table.” A person who has overcome that naïveté says, “An unknown something produces an impression within my eye; this eye and my brain make out of the impression the sensation brown. As I have this sensation brown not merely at an isolated point but can let my eye run over a plane surface and four columnar forms, so the brownness takes the shape of an object that is this table. When I touch this table, it offers resistance. It makes an impression on my sense of touch, which I express by attributing hardness to the picture that has been produced by the eye. At the suggestion of some “thing in itself” that I do not know, I have therefore created this table out of myself. The table is my mental content. It is only in my consciousness.

Volkelt presents this view at the beginning of his book on Kant's Theory of Knowledge:

The first fundamental condition that the philosopher must clearly realize is the insight that, to begin with, our knowledge extends to nothing more than our conceptions. Our conceptions are the only things that we immediately and directly experience, and for just that reason that we experience them immediately, even the most radical doubt cannot deprive us of the knowledge of them. But the knowledge that goes beyond my faculty of conception is not protected from doubt. (I use this expression here always in its most comprehensive sense so that all physical events are included in the term.) Therefore, all knowledge that goes beyond the conceptions must be marked as doubtful at the outset of the philosophical reflection.

Otto Liebmann also uses this thought to defend the statement: Man can no more know that the things he conceives are not, than he can know positively that they are. “For the very reason that no conceiving subject can escape the sphere of its subjective imagination, because it can never grasp and observe what may exist or not exist outside its subjectivity, leaping thereby over its own consciousness and emancipating itself from itself. For this reason it would also be absurd to maintain that the object does not exist outside the subjective conception” (O. Liebmann, Contributions toward the Analysis of Reality).

[ 3 ] Both Volkelt and Liebmann nevertheless endeavor to prove that man finds something in the world of his conceptions that is not merely observed or perceived, but that is added to the perception by thought—something that at least points toward the essence of things. Volkelt is of the opinion that there is a fact within the conceptual life that points to something that lies outside the life of conception. This fact consists in the logical necessity with which certain conceptions suggest themselves to man. In his book, The Sources of Human Certainty that appeared in 1906, we read Volkelt's view:

If one seeks the basis of the certainty of our knowledge, one finds two points of origin, two sources of certainty. Even if an intimate cooperation of both sources of certainty is necessary if real knowledge is to result, it is nevertheless impossible to reduce one source to the other. The one source of certainty is the self-assurance of consciousness, the awareness of the facts of my consciousness. That I am consciousness is just as true as the fact that my consciousness testifies to the existence of certain processes and states, certain contents and forms. Without this source of certainty there would be no cognitive process; it supplies the material through the elaboration of which all knowledge is produced. The other source of certainty is the necessity of thought, the certainty of logical compulsion, the objective consciousness of necessity. With it something absolutely new is given that cannot possibly be derived from the certainty of our self-awareness in consciousness.

Concerning this second source of certainty, Volkelt expresses himself in his book mentioned above as follows:

The immediate experience allows us to become aware of the fact that certain combinations of concepts show a peculiar form of compulsion to be inherent in them that is essentially different from all other kinds of compulsion that are associated with conceptions. This compulsion forces us to think certain concepts as belonging together, not merely in the conscious process in which we are aware of them but also in a corresponding objective interconnection, independent of the conscious conceptions. Furthermore, this compulsion does not force us in a manner to suggest that we should forfeit our moral satisfaction or our inner happiness, our salvation and so forth, but it contains the suggestion that objective reality would have to annihilate itself in itself, would have to lose its possibility of existence if the opposite of what it prescribes as a necessity were to take place. What distinguishes this compulsion then is that the very thought of the opposite of that necessity forcing itself upon us, would be experienced as a call that reality should revolt against the conditions of its existence. This peculiar, immediately experienced compulsion is generally called logical compulsion or thought necessity. The logically necessary reveals itself directly as an announcement of the object itself. It is the peculiarly meaningful significance, the reason-guided illumination that is contained in everything logical, that bears witness with immediate evidence of the objective, real validity of the logical connections of concepts. (Kant's Theory of Knowledge, pp. 208 ff.)

Otto Liebmann confesses toward the end of his essay, The Climax of Theories, that in his opinion the whole thought structure of human knowledge, from the ground floor of the science of observation up to the most airy regions of the highest hypotheses of world conception, is permeated by thoughts that point beyond perception. “Fragments of percepts must first be supplemented by an extraordinary amount of non-observed elements linked together and connected in a definite order according to certain operations of the mind.” But how can one deny that human thinking has the ability to know something through its own activity as long as it is necessary to resort to this activity even if one merely wants to obtain order among the facts of the observed precepts? Neo-Kantianism is in a curious position. It would like to confine itself within the boundaries of consciousness and within the life of conception, but it is forced to confess that it is impossible to take a step “within” these boundaries that does not lead in all directions beyond those limits. Otto Liebmann ends the second booklet of his Thought and Facts as follows:

If, on the one hand, seen from the viewpoint of natural science, man were nothing but animated dust, then, on the other, all nature, as it appears in space and time, when seen from the only viewpoint that is immediately accessible and given to us, is an anthropocentric phenomenon.

[ 4 ] There are many who hold the view that the world of observation is merely human conception in spite of the fact that it must extinguish itself if it is correctly understood. It is repeated again and again in the course of the last decades in many variations. Ernst Laas (1837–1885) forcefully defended the point of view that only positive facts of perception should be wrought into knowledge. Alois Riehl (1849–1924), proceeding from the same fundamental view, declares that there could be no general world conception at all, and that everything that goes beyond the various special sciences should only be a critique of knowledge. Knowledge is obtained only in the special sciences; philosophy has the task of showing how this knowledge comes about and of taking care that thought should not add any element that can not be justified by the facts. Richard Wahle in his book, The Whole of Philosophy and Its End (1894), eliminates with utmost scrutiny everything that the mind has added to the “occurrences” of the world until finally the mind stands in the ocean of occurrences that stream by, seeing itself in this ocean as one such occurrence, nowhere finding a point capable of providing a meaningful enlightenment concerning them. This mind would have to exert its own energy to produce order in the occurrences. But then it would be the mind itself that had introduced that order into nature. If the mind makes a statement about the essence of the occurrences, it derives this not from the things but from itself. This it could only do if it admitted that in its own activity something essential could go on. The assumption would have to be made that the mind's judgment could have significance also for things. But in its own judgment this confidence is something that, according to Wahle's world conception, the mind is not entitled to have. It must stand idly by and watch what flows past, around and inside itself, and it would only contribute to its own deception if it were to put any credence in a conception that it formed itself about the occurrences.

What final answer could a mind find that looked into the world structure, tossing about within itself problems concerning the nature and purpose of events? As it seemed to occupy a firm stand in opposition to the surrounding world, it has had to experience that it dissolved into a flight of occurrences and flowed together with other occurrences. The mind did no longer “know” the world. It had to admit: I am not certain that there are “knowers,” but there are simply occurrences. They do, to be sure, make their appearance in a manner that the concept of knowledge could emerge prematurely and without justification. . . . and “concepts” emerged and flitted by to bring light into the occurrences, but they were will-o'-the-wisps, specters of wishful thinking, miserable postulates whose evidence meant nothing, empty forms of knowledge. Unknown factors must rule the change. Darkness was spread over nature, occurrences are the veil of the true . . . (The Whole of Philosophy and Its End ).

Wahle closes his book, which is to represent the “gifts” of philosophy to the individual sciences, theology, physiology, esthetics and civic education, with these words, “May the age begin when people will say: once was philosophy.”

[ 5 ] In the above mentioned book by Wahle, as well as in his other books, Historical Survey of the Development of Philosophy (1895) and On the Mechanism of the Mental Life (1906), we have one of the most significant symptoms of the evolution of world conception in the nineteenth century. The lack of confidence with respect to knowledge begins with Kant and leads, finally, as it appears in Wahle, to a complete disbelief in any philosophical world conception.

By means ¹³ of an analysis going back to the fundamental elements of the activity of inner knowing (Erkanntnisakt), the task of this work is to correctly formulate the problem of knowing and to set out the path to its solution. Through a critique of Kant’s thoughts on the roots of the theory of knowing (Erkenntnistheorie), it will be shown that from his standpoint no solution to the problem is possible. In doing so it must be acknowledged that it would have been very difficult to find a solution without Johannes Volkelt's groundbreaking preparatory work with its basic investigation into the concept of experience, with its precise framing of the concept of what preexists for us, with what is just given to us, with what is at hand for us (das Gegeben).¹⁴

Also let us hope that this work lays the foundation for overcoming the subjective nature inherent in Kant's theory of knowing. This has been done beyond doubt by showing that the subjective form in which the world picture presents itself to us in the act of knowing (in cognition), prior to any scientific explanation of it, is merely a necessary transitional stage which is overcome in the very process of knowing.

The so-called experience given to us, which positivism ¹⁵ and neo-Kantianism ¹⁶ would like to present as the only certainty, is in fact the most subjective of all. Showing this establishes objective idealism ¹⁷ as a necessary consequence of a self-understood theory of knowing. It differs from Hegel's metaphysical, absolute idealism ¹⁸ in that the reason for dividing reality into given-to-us and concepts is sought in the subjectivity of knowing, and seeks to resolve this not in an objective world dialectic, ¹⁹ but in the subjective process of knowing itself.

I already outlined this point of view in my 1885 work Outline of Goethe’s Theory of Knowing, with Especial Consideration of Schiller, ²⁰ but my method differed significantly in that work, for it did not analyze the basic elements of the act of knowing.

[ 2 ] The recent literature relevant to these discussions is as follows. Cited is not only what this presentation directly relates to, but also to all those writings that deal with questions that are similar. I have refrained from specifically citing the writings of the actual philosophical classics.

1. R. Avenarius, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftsmaßes, usw.; Leipzig, 1876, Kritik, der reinen Erfahrung, Vol. I, Leipzig, 1888
2. J. F. A. Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt; Vol. I, Leipzig, 1882.
3. J. Baumann, Philosophie als Orientierung über die Welt; Leipzig, 1872.
4. J. S. Beck, Einzig möglicher Standpunkt, aus welchem die kritische Philosophie beurteilt werden muss; Riga, 1796.
5. Friedrich Ed. Benecke, System der Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie, usw.; Berlin, 1839.
6. Julius Bergmann, Sein und Erkennen, usw.; Berlin, 1880.
7. A. E. Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik; 2nd Edition, Berlin, 1884–5, Vol. I, pp. 51–173.
8. H. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung; Berlin, 1871.
9. P. Deussen, Die Elemente der Metaphysik; 2nd Edition, Leipzig, 1890.
10. W. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, usw.; Leipzig, 1883.—Especially the introductory chapters dealing with the interrelation of the theory of cognition and the other sciences.—Further references in works by the same author: Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage von Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht; Sitzungsberichte der Kgl. Preuss. Akademic der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Contributions to the Solution of Our Belief in the Reality of the Outer World and its Justification. Reports of Meetings of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin), Berlin, 1890, p. 977.
11. A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen usw.; Berlin, 1887.
12. E. Dreher, Ueber Wahrnehmung und Denken; Berlin, 1878.
13. G. Engel, Sein und Denken; Berlin, 1889.
14. W. Enoch, Der Begriff der Wahrnehmung; Hamburg, 1890.
15. B. Erdmann, Kants Kriticismus in der ersten und zweiten Auflage seiner Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Leipzig, 1878.
16. F. v. Feldegg, Das Gefühl als Fundament der Weltordnung; Vienna, 1890.
17. E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie; Mainz, 1887
18. K. Fischer, System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre; 2nd Edition, Heidelberg, 1865. Geschichte der neueren Philosophie; Mannheim, 1860, especially the parts concerning Kant.
19. A. Ganser, Die Wahrheit; Graz, 1890.
20. C. Göring, System der kritischen Philosophie; Leipzig, 1874. Über den Begriff der Erfahrung; In Vierteiljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie; Leipzig, 1st Year, 1877, p. 384.
21. E. Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnisproblems, usw.; Leipzig, 1890.
22. F. Grung, Das Problem der Gewissheit; Heidelberg, 1886.
23. R. Hamerling, Die Atomistik des Willens; Hamburg, 1891.
24. F. Harms, Die Philosophie seit Kant; Berlin, 1876.
25. E. v. Hartmann, Kritische Grundlegung des transzendentalen Realismus; 2nd Edition Berlin, 1875. J. H. v. Kirchmanns erkenntnistheoretischer Realismus; Berlin, 1875. Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, usw.; Leipzig, 889. Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart; Leipzig, 1889.
26. H. L. F. v. Helmholtz, Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung; Berlin, 1879.
27. G. Heymans, Die Gesetze und Elemente des wissenschaftlichen Denkens; Leyden, 1890.
28. A. Hölder, Darstellung der Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie; Tübingen, 1874.
29. A. Horwicz, Analyse des Denkens, usw.; Halle, 1875.
30. F. H. Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus; Breslau, 1787.
31. M. Kappes, Der “Common Sense” als Prinzip der Gewissheit in der Philosophie des Schotten Thomas Reid; Munich, 1890.
32. M. Kauffmann, Fundamente der Erkenntnistheorie und Wissenschaftslehre; Leipzig, 1890.
33. B. Kerry, System einer Theorie der Grenzgebiete; Vienna, 1890.
34. J. H. v. Kirchmann, Die Lehre vom Wissen als Einleitung in das Studium philosophischer Werke; Berlin, 1868.
35. E. Laas, Die Kausalitat des Ich (The Causality of the I), Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie; Leipzig, 4th Year, 1880, p. ff., 185ff.,311ff. Idealismus und Positivismus; Berlin, 1879.
36. F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus; Iserlohn, 1873–75.
37. A. v. Leclair, Beiträge zu einer monistischen Erkenntnistheorie; Breslau, 1882. Das kategorische Gepräge des Denkens; Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie; Leipzig, 7th Year, 1883, p. 257 ff.
38. O. Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen; Stuttgart, 1865. Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit; Straßburg, 1880. Gedanken und Tatsachen; Straßburg, 1882. Die Klimax der Theorien; Straßburg, 1884.
39. Th. Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens; Bonn, 1883.
40. H. R. Lotze, System der Philosophie, I Teil: Logik Leipzig, 1874.
41. J. V. Mayer, Vom Erkennen; Freiburg i. Br., 1885.
42. A. Meinong, Hume-Studien; Vienna, 1877.
43. J. St. Mill, System der induktiven und deduktiven Logik; 1843; German translation, Braunschweig, 1849.
44. W Müntz, Die Grundlagen der Kantschen Erkenntnistheorie; 2nd Edition, Breslau, 1885.
45. G. Neudecker, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie; Nordlingen, 1881.
46. F. Paulsen, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kantschen Erkenntnistheorie; Leipzig, 1875.
47. J. Rehmke, Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw.; Berlin, 1880.
48. Th. Reid, Untersuchungen uber den menschlichen Geist nach Prinzipien des gesunden Menschenverstandes; 1764; German translation, Leipzig, 1782.
49. A. Riehl, Der philosophische Kritizismus und seine Bedeutung für die positive Wissenschaft; Leipzig, 1887.
50. J. Rülf, Wissenschaft des Weltgedankens und der Gedankenwelt, System einer neuen Metaphysik; Leipzig, 1888.
51. R. v. Schubert-Soldern, Gund lagen einer Erkenntnistheorie; Leipzig, 1884.
52. G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus, Helmstädt, 1792.
53. W. Schuppe, Zur voraussetzungslosen Erkenntnistheorie; Philosophische Monatschefte; Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, 1882, Vol. XVIII, Nos. 6 and 7.
54. Rud. Seydel, Logik oder Wissenschaft vom Wissen; Leipzig, 1866.
55. Christoph v. Sigwart, Logik; Freiburg i. Br., 1878.
56. A. Stadler, Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantischen Philosophie; Leipzig, 1876.
57. H. Taine, De l'Intelligence, 5th Edition, Paris, 1888.
58. A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen; Leipzig, 1862.
59. F. Ueberweg, System der Logik; 3rd Edition, Bonn, 1882.
60. H. Vaihinger, Hartmann, Dühring, Lange, Iserlohn, 1876.
61. Th. Varnbühler, Widerlegung der Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Leipzig, 1890.
62. J. Volkelt, Immanuel Kants Erkenntnistheorie, usw.; Hamburg, 1879. Erfahrung und Denken; Hamburg, 1886.
63. Richard Wahle, Gehirn und Bewusstsein; Vienna, 1884.
64. W. Windelband, Präluden; Freiburg i. Br., 1884. Die verschiedenen Phasen der Kantschen Lehre vom “Ding an sich”; Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie; Leipzig, 1st Year (1877), p. 229 ff.
65. J. H. Witte, Beiträge zur Verständnis Kants; Berlin, 1874. Vorstudien zur Erkenntnis des unerfahrbaren Seins; Bonn, 1876.
66. H. Wolff, Ueber den Zusammenhang unserer Vorstellungen mit Dingen ausser uns; Leipzig, 1874.
67. Joh. Wolff, Das Bewusstsein und sein Objekt; Berlin, 1889.
68. W. Wundt, Logik (Logic), Vol. I: Erkenntnislehre; Stuttgart, 1880.

For Fichte the following comes into consideration.:

1. F. C. Biedermann, De Genetica philosophandi ratione et methodo, praesertim Fichtii, Schellingii, Hegelii, Dissertationis particula prima, syntheticam Fichtii methodum exhibens, etc., Lipsiae, 1835.
2. F. Frederichs, Der Freiheitsbegriff Kants und Fichtes; Berlin, 1886.
3. O. Gühloff, Der transcendentale Idealismus; Halle, 1888.
4. P. Hensel, Ueber die Beizehung des reinen Ich bei Fichte zur Einheit der Apperception bei Kant; Freiburg i. Br., 1885.
5. G. Schwabe, Fichtes und Schopenhauers Lehre vom Willen mit ihren Consequenzen für Weltbegreifung und Lebensfuhrung; Jena, 1887.

[ 4 ] The numerous writings published on Fichte's anniversary in 1862 are of course not acknowledged here. At most, Trendelenburg's speech; which contains more important theoretical points of view, should be mentioned.

• 13. This chapter marks the beginning of Rudolf Steiner’s doctoral dissertation.
• 14. Johannes Volkelt, Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, Experience and Thinking. Critical Foundation for a Theory of Knowing. Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886.
• 15. t/n In Positivism, something is known by common sense (such as 2+2=4), or by reasoning about our sensory experience. Intuition is rejected.
• 16. t/n Neo-Kantianism, the extension of Kant’s terminology and methods, was dominant in German philosophy until WWI.
• 17. t/n Bishop Berkeley’s and Friedrich Schelling’s objective idealism holds that nothing exists except for what is in the mind of spirits. Everything in the minds of the multitude of spirits also exists is in the mind of God. Modern philosophy often calls this dogmatism. Steiner called it spiritism. Steiner’s objective idealism is slightly different.
• 18. t/n G.W.F. Hegel’s and later Josiah Royce’s absolute idealism holds that there is an identity of a person’s subjective consciousness and what is out there in the world, which is all that is conceivable. Realism, on the other hand, holds that what is manifest in subjective consciousness emerges from what preexists externally in the world.
• 19. t/n Dialectic is a logical attempt to combine two different viewpoints. It is a debate without emotional appeal or unconscious willfulness.
• 20. t/n GA 2, Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller

It must be answered, not to meet a human “need to know” but to meet man's universal need to become fully human. And in just what way one can strive for an answer, in what way the ignorabimus can be overcome to fulfil the demands of human evolution—this shall be the theme of our course of lectures as it proceeds.

To those who demand of a cycle of lectures with a title such as ours that nothing be introduced that might interfere with the objective presentation of ideas, I would like, since today I shall have to mention certain personalities, to say the following. The moment one begins to represent the results of human judgment in their relationship to life, to full human existence, it becomes inevitable that one indicate the personalities with whom the judgments originated. Even in a scientific presentation, one must remain within the sphere in which the judgment arises, within the realm of human struggling and striving toward such a judgment. And especially since the question we want above all to answer is: what can be gleaned from modern scientific theories that can become a vital social thinking able to transform thought into impulses for life?—then one must realize that the series of considerations one undertakes is no longer confined to the study and the lecture halls but Stands rather within the living evolution of humanity.

Behind everything with which I commenced yesterday, the modern striving for a mathematical-mechanical world view and the dissolution of that world view, behind that which came to a climax in 1872 in the famous speech by the physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, concerning the limits of natural science, there stands something even more important. It is something that begins to impress itself upon us the moment we want to begin to speak in a living way about the limits of natural science.

A personality of extraordinary philosophical stature still looks over to us with a certain vitality out of the first half of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Only in the last few years has Hegel begun to be mentioned in the lecture halls and in the philosophical literature with somewhat more respect than in the recent past. In the last third of the nineteenth century the academic world attacked Hegel outright, yet one could demonstrate irrefutably that Eduard von Hartmann had been quite right in claiming that during the 1880s only two university lecturers in all of Germany had actually read him. The academics opposed Hegel but not on philosophical grounds, for as a philosopher they hardly knew him. Yet they knew him in a different way, in a way in which we still know him today. Few know Hegel as he is contained, or perhaps better said, as his world view is contained, in the many volumes that sit in the libraries. Those who know Hegel in this original form so peculiar to him are few indeed. Yet in certain modified forms he has become in a sense the most popular philosopher the world has ever known. Anyone who participates in a workers' meeting today or, even better, anyone who had participated in one during the last few decades and had heard what was discussed there; anyone with any sense for the source of the mode of thinking that had entered into these workers' meetings, who really knew the development of modern thought, could see that this mode of thinking had originated with Hegel and flowed through certain channels out into the broadest masses. And whoever investigated the literature and philosophy of Eastern Europe in this regard would find that the Hegelian mode of thinking had permeated to the farthest reaches of Russian cultural life. One thus could say that, anonymously, as it were, Hegel has become within the last few decades perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in human history. On the other hand, however, when one perceives what has come to be recognized by the broadest spectrum of humanity as Hegelianism, one is reminded of the portrait of a rather ugly man that a kind artist painted in such a way as to please the man's family. As one of the younger sons, who had previously paid little attention to the portrait, grew older and really observed it for the first time, he said: “But father, how you have changed!” And when one sees what has become of Hegel one might well say: “Dear philosopher, how you have changed!” To be sure, something extraordinary has happened regarding this Hegelian world view.

Hardly had Hegel himself departed when his school fell apart. And one could see how this Hegelian school appropriated precisely the form of one of our new parliaments. There was a left wing and a right wing, an extreme left and an extreme right, an ultra-radical wing and an ultra-conservative wing. There were men with radical scientific and social views, who felt themselves to be Hegel's true spiritual heirs, and on the other side there were devout, positive theologians who wanted just as much to base their extreme theological conservatism on Hegel. There was a center for Hegelian studies headed by the amiable philosopher, Karl Rosenkranz, and each of these personalities, every one of them, insisted that he was Hegel's true heir.

What is this remarkable phenomenon in the evolution of human knowledge? What happened was that a philosopher once sought to raise humanity into the highest realms of thought. Even if one is opposed to Hegel, it cannot be denied that he dared attempt to call forth the world within the soul in the purest thought-forms. Hegel raised humanity into ethereal heights of thinking, but strangely enough, humanity then fell right back down out of those heights. It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. In Hegel's philosophy one finds a grand attempt to pursue the scientific method right up into the highest heights. Afterward, however, when his followers sought to work through Hegel's thoughts themselves, they found that one could arrive thereby at the most contrary points of view.

Now, one can argue about world views in the study, one can argue within the academies, and one can even argue in the academic literature, so long as worthless gossip and Barren cliques do not result. These offspring of Hegelian philosophy, however, cannot be carried out of the lecture halls and the study into life as social impulses. One can argue conceptually about contrary world views, but within life itself these contrary world views do not fight so peaceably. One must use just such a paradoxical expression in describing such a phenomenon. And thus there stands before us in the first half of the nineteenth century an alarming factor in the evolution of human cognition, something that has proved itself to be socially useless in the highest degree. With this in mind we must then raise the question: how can we find a mode of thinking that can be useful in social life? In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life.

One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. And thereby arises historical materialism, which is to be for the masses the one world view that can enter into social life. We thus are confronted in the first half of the nineteenth century with the great Idealist, Hegel, who lived only in the Spirit, only in his ideas, and in the second half of the nineteenth century with his student, Karl Marx, who contemplated and recognized the reality of matter alone, who saw in everything ideal only ideology. If one but takes up into one's feeling this turnabout of conceptions of world and life in the course of the nineteenth century, one feels with all one's soul the need to achieve an understanding of nature that will serve as a basis for judgments that are socially viable.

Now, if we turn on the other hand to consider something that is not so obviously descended from Hegel but can be traced back to Hegel nonetheless, we find still within the first half of the nineteenth century, but carrying over into the second half, the “philosopher of the ego,” Max Stirner. While Karl Marx occupies one of the two poles of human experience mentioned yesterday, the pole of matter upon which he bares all his considerations, Stirner, the philosopher of the ego, proceeds from the opposite pole, that of consciousness. And just as the modern world view, gravitating toward the pole of matter, becomes unable to discover consciousness within that element (as we saw yesterday in the example of du Bois-Reymond), a person who gravitates to the opposite pole of consciousness will not be able to find the material world. And so it is with Max Stirner. For Max Stirner, no material universe with natural laws actually exists. Stirner sees the world as populated solely by human egos, by human consciousnesses that want only to indulge themselves to the full. “I have built my thing on nothing”—that is one of Max Stirner's maxims. And on these grounds Stirner opposes even the notion of Providence. He says for example: certain moralists demand that we should not perform any deed out of egoism, but rather that we should perform it because it is pleasing to God. In acting, we should look to God, to that which pleases Him, that which He commands. Why, thinks Max Stirner, should I, who have built only upon the foundation of ego-consciousness, have to admit that God is after all the greater egoist Who can demand of man and the world that all should be performed as it suits Him? I will not surrender my own egoism for the sake of a greater egoism. I will do what pleases me. What do I care for a God when I have myself?

One thus becomes entangled and confused within a consciousness out of which one can no longer find the way. Yesterday I remarked how on the one hand we can arrive at clear ideas by awakening in the experience of ideas when we descend into our consciousness. These dreamlike ideas manifest themselves like drives from which we cannot then escape. One would say that Karl Marx achieved clear ideas—if anything his ideas are too clear. That was the secret of his success. Despite their complexity, Marx's ideas are so clear that, if properly garnished, they remain comprehensible to the widest circles. Here clarity has been the means to popularity. And until it realizes that within such a clarity humanity is lost, humanity, as long as it seeks logical consequences, will not let go of these clear ideas.

If one is inclined by temperament to the other extreme, to the pole of consciousness, one passes over onto Stirner's side of the scale. Then one despises this clarity: one feels that, applied to social thinking, this clarity makes man into a cog in a social order modeled on mathematics or mechanics—but into that only, into a mere cog. And if one does not feel oneself cut out for just that, then the will that is active in the depths of human consciousness revolts. Then one comes radically to oppose all clarity. One mocks all clarity, as Stirner did. One says to oneself: what do I care about anything else? What do I care even about nature? I shall project my own ego out of myself and see what happens. We shall see that the appearance of such extremes in the nineteenth century is in the highest degree characteristic of the whole of recent human evolution, for these extremes are the distant thunder that preceded the storm of social chaos we are now experiencing. One must understand this connection if one wants at all to speak about cognition today.

Yesterday we arrived at an indication of what happens when we begin to correlate our consciousness to an external natural world of the senses. Our consciousness awakens to clear concepts but loses itself. It loses itself to the extent that one can only posit empty concepts such as “matter,” concepts that then become enigmatic. Only by thus losing ourselves, however, can we achieve the clear conceptual thinking we need to become fully human. In a certain sense we must first lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again out of ourselves. Yet now the time has come when we should learn something from these phenomena. And what can one learn from these phenomena? One can learn that, although clarity of conceptual thinking and perspicuity of mental representation can be won by man in his interaction with the world of sense, this clarity of conceptual thinking becomes useless the moment we strive scientifically for something more than a mere empiricism. It becomes useless the moment we try to proceed toward the kind of phenomenalism that Goethe the scientist cultivated, the moment we want something more than natural science, namely Goetheanism.

What does this imply? In establishing a correlation between our inner life and the external physical world of the senses we can use the concepts we form in interaction with nature in such a way that we try not to remain within the natural phenomena but to think on beyond them. We are doing this if we do more than simply say: within the spectrum there appears the color yellow next to the color green, and on the other side the blues. We are doing this if we do not simply interrelate the phenomena with the help of our concepts but seek instead, as it were, to pierce the veil of the senses and construct something more behind it with the aid of our concepts. We are doing this if we say: out of the clear concepts I have achieved I shall construct atoms, molecules—all the movements of matter that are supposed to ex-ist behind natural phenomena. Thereby something extraordinary happens. What happens is that when I as a human being confront the world of nature [see illustration], I use my concepts not only to create for myself a conceptual order within the realm of the senses but also to break through the boundary of sense and construct behind it atoms and the like I cannot bring my lucid thinking to a halt within the realm of the senses. I take my lesson from inert matter, which continues to roll on even when the propulsive force has ceased. My knowledge reaches the world of sense, and I remain inert. I have a certain inertia, and I roll with my concepts on beyond the realm of the senses to construct there a world the existence of which I can begin to doubt when I notice that my thinking has only been borne along by inertia.

It is interesting to note that a great proportion of the philosophy that does not remain within phenomena is actually nothing other than just such an inert rolling-on beyond what really exists within the world. One simply cannot come to a halt. One wants to think ever farther and farther beyond and construct atoms and molecules—under certain circumstances other things as well that philosophers have assembled there. No wonder, then, that this web one has woven in a world created by the inertia of thinking must eventually unravel itself again.

Goethe rebelled against this law of inertia. He did not want to roll onward thus with his thinking but rather to come strictly to a halt at this limit [see illustration: heavy line] and to apply concepts within the realm of the senses. He thus would say to himself: within the spectrum appear to me yellow, blue, red, indigo, violet. If, however, I permeate these appearances of color with my world of concepts while remaining within the phenomena, then the phenomena order themselves of their own accord, and the phenomenon of the spectrum teaches me that when the darker colors or anything dark is placed behind the lighter colors or anything light, there appear the colors which lie toward the blue end of the spectrum. And conversely, if I place light behind dark, there appear the colors which lie toward the red end of the spectrum.

What was it that Goethe was actually seeking to do? Goethe wanted to find simple phenomena within the complex but above all such phenomena as allowed him to remain within this limit [see illustration], by means of which he did not roll on into a realm that one reaches only through a certain mental inertia. Goethe wanted to adhere to a strict phenomenalism. If we remain within phenomena and if we strive with our thinking to come to a halt there rather than allow ourselves to be carried onward by inertia, the old question arises in a new way. What meaning does the phenomenal world have when I consider it thus? What is the meaning of the mechanics and mathematics, of the number, weight, measure, or temporal relation that I import into this world? What is the meaning of this?

You know, perhaps, that the modern world conception has sought to characterize the phenomena of tone, color, warmth, etc. as only subjective, whereas it characterizes the so-called primary qualities, the qualities of weight, space, and time, as something not subjective but objective and inherent in things. This conception can be traced back principally to the English philosopher, John Locke, and it has to a considerable extent determined the philosophical basis of modern scientific thought. But the real question is: what place within our systematic science of nature as a whole do mathematics, do mechanics—these webs we weave within ourselves, or so it seems at first—what place do these occupy? We shall have to return to this question to consider the specific form it takes in Kantianism. Yet without going into the whole history of this development one can nonetheless emphasize our instinctive conviction that measuring or counting or weighing external objects is essentially different from ascribing to them any other qualities.

It certainly cannot be denied that light, tones, colors, and sensations of taste are related to us differently from that which we could represent as subject to mathematical-mechanical laws. For it really is a remarkable fact,a fact worthy of our consideration: you know that honey tastes sweet, but to a man with jaundice it tastes bitter—so we can say that we stand in a curious relationship to the qualities within this realm—while on the other hand we could hardly maintain that any normal man would see a triangle as a triangle, but a man with jaundice would see it as a square! Certain differentiations thus do exist, and one must be cognizant of them; on the other hand, one must not draw absurd conclusions from them. And to this very day philosophical thinking has failed in the most extraordinary way to come to grips with this most fundamental epistemological question. We thus see how a contemporary philosopher, Koppelmann, overtrumps even Kant by saying, for example—you can read this on page 33 of his Philosophical Inquiries [Weltanschauungsfragen]: everything that relates to space and time we must first construct within by means of the understanding, whereas we are able to assimilate colors and tastes directly. We construct the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, etc.: we are able to construct the standard regular solids only because of the organization of our understanding. No wonder, then, claims Koppelmann, that we find in the world only those regular solids we can construct with our understanding. One thus can find Koppelmann saying almost literally that it is impossible for a geologist to come to a geometer with a crystal bounded by seven equilateral triangles precisely because—so Koppelmann claims—such a crystal would have a form that simply would not fit into our heads. That is out-Kanting Kant. And thus he would say that in the realm of the thing-in-itself crystals could exist that are bounded by seven regular triangles, but they cannot enter our head, and thus we pass them by; they do not exist for us.

Such thinkers forget but one thing: they forget—and it is just this that we want to indicate in the course of these lectures with all the forceful proofs we can muster—that the natural order governing the construction of our head also governs the construction of the regular polyhedrons, and it is for just this reason that our head constructs no other polyhedrons than those that actually confront us in the external world. For that, you see, is one of the basic differences between the so-called subjective qualities of tone, color, warmth, as well as the different qualities of touch, and that which confronts us in the mechanical-mathematical view of the world. That is the basic difference: tone and color leave us outside of ourselves; we must first take them in; we must first perceive them. As human beings we stand outside tone, color, warmth, etc. This is not entirely the case as regards warmth—I shall discuss that tomorrow—but to a certain extent this is true even of warmth. These qualities leave us initially outside ourselves, and we must perceive them. In formal, spatial, and temporal relationships and regarding weight this is not the case. We perceive objects in space but stand ourselves within the same space and the same lawfulness as the objects external to us. We stand within time just as do the external objects. Our physical existence begins and ends at a definite point in time. We stand within space and time in such a way that these things permeate us without our first perceiving them. The other things we must first perceive. Regarding weight, well, ladies and gentlemen, you will readily admit that this has little to do with perception, which is somewhat open to arbitrariness: otherwise many people who attain an undesired corpulence would be able to avoid this by perception alone, merely by having the faculty of perception. No, ladies and gentlemen, regarding weight we are bound up with the world entirely objectively, and the organization by means of which we stand within color, tone, warmth, etc. is powerless against that objectivity.

So now we must above all pose the question: how is it that we arrive at any mathematical-mechanical judgment? How do we arrive at a science of mathematics, at a science of mechanics? How is it, then, that this mathematics, this mechanics, is applicable to the external world of nature, and how is it that there is a difference between the mathematical-mechanical qualities of external objects and those that confront us as the so-called subjective qualities of sensation, tone, color, warmth, etc.?

At the one extreme, then, we are confronted with this fundamental question. Tomorrow we shall discuss another such question. Then we shall have two starting-points from which we can proceed to investigate the nature of science. Thence we shall proceed to the other extreme to investigate the formation of social judgments.

Let us first try to bring to mind something that has often been considered in this or that context: that is the relationship of our thoughts, our ideas, to the world. How can we imagine the relationship of our thoughts to the world?

Let us imagine the world as an outer circle and ourselves in relation to it (see diagram on p. 30). At first, it will be clear to us all that we form a picture of the world in our thoughts. We spoke yesterday about how we arrive at conscious thoughts in the physical world. We want to use this circle (small inner circle) to represent what is present in our physical interior through our soul as our thoughts. And I want to say: this circle is intended to represent what we, as the content of our soul with the help of our body, perceive as our thoughts about the world.

Now we know from the various considerations that what we call thoughts actually rest in us on a certain reflection. I have often used the comparison that we are actually also awake outside our physical body, and that the physical body reflects what comes to our consciousness like a mirror. So when we think of ourselves as spiritual beings, we must not actually think of ourselves as being inside there, where – to put it bluntly – our thoughts emerge through our body, but we must think of ourselves as being outside our physical body even when we are awake. So that we actually have to think ourselves into the world with our spiritual-soul nature.

And what is actually mirrored? Well, when thoughts arise in us, something is mirrored in the universe. Let that which lives in the universe and is mirrored in us be indicated by this circle (green). Just as I have the yellow circle here in the human organism as a reflection of something in the universe, I want to indicate something that is mirrored in our thoughts by this green circle in the world itself. And we can say: That which is designated here by this green circle is actually the real thing, the reality, of which our thoughts are only the image, the image reflected back from our body. All this is meant, of course, only schematically.

If we understand in the right sense what actually happens when we confront the world, then we must say that something is generated in us: the whole sum of our ideas is generated in us as a mere image of something that is outside in the world. All that is in our intelligence is an image of something that is outside in the world.

Those who have always known something of the true state of such things in the world have therefore spoken of the truth of the human thought content being spread out in the universe as world thoughts, and that what we have as thought content is just an image of world thoughts. The thoughts of the world are mirrored in us. If our true being were only in our thoughts, then this true being of ours would, of course, be only an image. But from the whole context, it must be clear to us that our true being is not in our head, but that our true being is in the world within us, that we only mirror ourselves in the world thoughts within us. And what we can find in us through the mirroring apparatus of our body is an image of our true reality. All this has already been emphasized in various contexts.

When the physical body dissolves in death, the images that arise in us naturally dissolve as well. What remains of us, our true reality, is basically inscribed in the cosmos throughout our entire life, and it only projects a mirror image of ourselves through our body during our lifetime. Here, you see, lies the difficulty that philosophers continually encounter and cannot overcome with their philosophy, the main difficulty. These philosophers are given, in the first instance, nothing but that which they imagine. But consider that existence is precisely pressed out of the imagination, out of the content of consciousness. It cannot be in it, because what is in consciousness is only a mirror image. Existence cannot be in it. Now philosophers seek existence through consciousness, through ordinary physical consciousness. They cannot find it that way. And it is quite natural that such philosophies had to arise as the Kantian one, for example, which seeks being through consciousness. But because consciousness, quite naturally, can only contain images of being, one can come to no other conclusion than to recognize that one can never approach being with consciousness.

Those who look more deeply then know that of all that is present in consciousness, out there in the world is the true, the real, which is only reflected in consciousness. But what actually happens between the world and consciousness? As a spiritual scientist, one must understand what happens there. Certainly, it is only images that are created by the physical body. The physical body is created out of the universe. It develops during the course of life between birth and death to the point where it can create images, indeed it creates an image of the whole human being that we always encounter when we see ourselves in the mirror of our body. It is only an image, but it is an image. And what is the purpose of this image in the overall cosmic context? Yes, this image must come into being. You see, at the moment when we enter into existence through birth from the spiritual world, an epoch of our existence has actually come to an end in a certain sense. We have entered the spiritual world through a previous death, we carry certain forces into the spiritual world, we live out these forces until what in the fourth mystery drama has been called the midnight hour of existence between 'death and a new birth.

In the second half of life, between death and a new birth, we then gather strength. But where do these forces that we gather want to go? They want to build the new physical body, and when the new physical body is there, the forces that we partake of in the second half between death and a new birth have fulfilled their task. Because they want to represent this new body. They want to come together in the new body. One can say that entire hierarchies are working, struggling, to enable this person to enter into existence through birth from the spiritual universe, as I indicated in the second mystery drama through the words of Capesius. There we see what it evokes in the human mind when man becomes aware of what it means that entire hierarchies of gods are involved in bringing man into the world.

But I would like to say that with these powers, in that they bring about the human being, something very similar happens as it does with the old seeds of a plant: when the new plant has emerged, the old seed has fulfilled its task; it no longer claims to produce a plant. This plant is called upon by the cosmos to produce another seed. Otherwise there would be no further development, and plant life would have had to come to an end with this plant. Thus, if the pictorial consciousness did not arise here, human life would have to end with the renewal of life between birth and death. That which appears as the image of the world is the new germ that now goes through death and, through death, passes over into a new life. And this germ is now really such that it brings over nothing of the old reality, but that it begins at the stage of an image, at nothing, really begins in relation to reality, to outer reality, at nothing.

Please summarize a thought here that is of tremendous importance. Imagine for a moment that you are facing the world. Well, the world is there, you are there too. But you have emerged from the world, the world has created you, you belong to the world. Now life must go on. In that which is in you as reality, which the world has placed in you - this world that you look at within the physical plane - there is nothing that can continue life. But something is added: you look at the world, create an image for yourself, and this image gains the power to carry your existence into further infinite distances. This image becomes the germ of the future.

If you do not consider this, you will never understand that, alongside the sentence “Out of nothing, nothing comes into being,” the other sentence is also fully correct: “In the deepest sense, existence is always generated out of nothing.” Both sentences are fully correct; you just have to apply them in the right place. The continuity of existence does not end with this. If you, let us say, were to wake up in the morning and find that physically nothing at all of you had remained – this is indeed the case when one is approaching a new birth – but only had a full memory of what had happened, thus only the image, you would be quite content. Of course, deeper minds have always felt such things. When Goethe placed the two poems next to each other: “No being can disintegrate into nothingness,” and immediately before it was the poem that means: “Everything must disintegrate into nothingness if it wants to persist in being.” These two poems stand very close to each other in Goethe as an apparent contradiction, immediately one after the other.

But for ordinary philosophy, there is a pitfall here, because it must actually rise to the negation of being.

Now one could again raise the question: What is actually reflected here, if all that is reflected here are only the thoughts of the world? How can one then be certain that there is a reality out there in the world? And here we come to the necessity of recognizing that reality cannot be guaranteed at all through ordinary human consciousness, but that reality can only be guaranteed through that consciousness which arises in us in the regions where the imaginations are, and we get behind the character of the imaginations. Then we find that out there in the world, behind what I have indicated as green, there are not just world thoughts, but that these world thoughts are the expressions of the world beings. But they are veiled by the world thoughts, just as the human inner being is veiled by the content of consciousness. So we look into the world; we think we have the world in our consciousness: there we have nothing, a mere mirror image. That which is mirrored is itself only world thoughts. But these world thoughts belong to real, actual entities, the entities that we know as spiritual-soul entities, as group souls of the lower realms, as human souls, as souls of the higher hierarchies, and so on.

Now you know that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity on Earth falls into two halves. In the older times, there was a kind of dream-like clairvoyance. Through this dream-like clairvoyance, people knew that behind this world, which is ultimately grasped by people in their thoughts, there is a world of real spiritual entities. For in the old dream-like clairvoyance, people did not perceive mere thoughts, just as the newer clairvoyant, who, for example, through the methods of “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” again enters into a relationship with the spiritual world, does not perceive mere thoughts either, but beings of the spiritual world. I have often tried to make this clear, so that I even said in one of the Munich lectures: You put your head into beings the way you would put your head into an anthill: thoughts begin to take on beings and come to life. That was how it was with people in the older days. In their perceiving consciousness, they not only lived in thoughts, but they lived in the beings of the world. But it was necessary - and we know from the various lectures that have been given why it was necessary - that this old clairvoyance, so to speak, dimmed and ceased. For that through which man received his present consciousness, which he needs in order to attain true inner freedom, presupposed that the old clairvoyance slowly dimmed and disappeared. There had to come a time when man was, as it were, dependent on what he, without any clairvoyance, can perceive in the world. He was then naturally cut off, completely cut off from the spiritual world, to put it in extreme terms.

Of course there were always individual spirits who could see into the spiritual world. But while the old clairvoyance was the general, the being cut off from clairvoyance now became, so to speak, the external culture of humanity for a period of time. And we, in turn, are seeking to imprint the consciously attained clairvoyance of this human culture again through our spiritual scientific endeavors. So that we can say: There are two developmental periods of humanity on earth, separated by an intermediate epoch. The first is a period in which dream-like clairvoyance prevailed: people knew that they were connected to a spiritual world, they knew that not only thoughts haunt the universe, but that there are world beings behind the thoughts, beings like ourselves who think these world thoughts. Then a time will come when people will know this again, but through self-achieved clairvoyance. And in between lies the episode where people are cut off. If we take a really close look at what has been said, we have to say that we actually have to expect that at some point in the development of humanity, people will realize that Yes, it makes no sense at all to think that there are thoughts in there in this brain. Because if there were only these thoughts, these images in there, and they did not represent anything, then it would be best to stop all thinking! Because why should one think about a world if this world contains no thoughts in itself?

Of course, in the 19th century people were quite content with the world containing no thoughts, and yet they reflected on the world. But the 19th century simply spread thoughtlessness over the most intimate matters of life. It had the task of bringing this thoughtlessness. But we may still assume that at some point someone may have thought of it in the following way, saying to himself: It only makes sense if we assume that thoughts are not only in there in the brain, but that the whole world is full of thoughts. - If he had now been able to advance to our spiritual science, yes, then he would have said: “Of course, there are thoughts out there in the universe, but there are also beings that harbor these thoughts, just as we harbor our thoughts. They are the beings of the higher hierarchies.

But this time had to come first, so to speak, after humanity had made the deep fall into materialism, that is, into the belief that the world has no thoughts.

One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world. That cannot be what is called Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be, when the tragic moment has come to say: there are thoughts in the world outside, and these thoughts are the real reality, the true, real reality... And where would the time be that had progressed so far that it had drawn the veil over everything spiritual, so to speak, and at the same time said to itself: Thoughts are the real thing in the world, and behind these thoughts there can be no spiritual beings anymore? One did not need to say it out loud, one only needed to feel it unconsciously, so to speak, then one stood there in the world and said to oneself: Yes, there is actually nothing to it with individual life! Individual life has, after all, only a value between birth and death. For that which really lives is not the thoughts of man, but the thoughts of the world, a world intelligence, but a world intelligence without essence. And I believe one could not imagine a greater tragedy than if, say, a Catholic priest had come to this inner realization, so to speak! |

What happens happens out of world necessity. Let us assume that a Catholic priest had come to this conclusion... He could easily have done so, because scholasticism has wonderfully trained the mind, and only if one has thoughtless, untrained thinking can one believe that thoughts are only in the head and not outside in the world. Then, so to speak, this Catholic priest would have undermined himself. For by only acknowledging the world thoughts as eternal, he would have wiped out the whole world, which was prescribed for him to believe through revelation as a spiritual world.

It can truly be said: Whatever can be presupposed through spiritual science also happens in the world. If we have the necessity somewhere to presuppose something as necessary and we have to say: a moment must once have existed in the world when something like this was felt, then that moment must have existed, most certainly. And even if it has passed by completely unnoticed, it has been there.

I would like to point out this moment, this moment when one can see how something that is not yet there, but wants to prepare, wants recognition, recognition of world thoughts, but does not yet want to know about what is behind these world thoughts as the world of the higher hierarchies, comes into a conflict.

In 1769, a pamphlet entitled “Lettres sur l'esprit du siècle” was published in London. It contained allusions to such a mood as I have characterized. And in 1770, another pamphlet appeared in Brussels entitled “Système de la nature. The voice of reason in the age and particularly against that of the other system of nature.” This ‘Autre système de la nature’ was that of Baron Holbach, against which this brochure is directed. This brochure said it wanted to take a stand against what Baron Holbach, as a materialist, advocated in his System of Nature. But the two brochures were hardly read, completely forgotten.

But now the strange thing turned out, that in 1865 a beautiful book appeared in Poitiers, by Professor Beaussire, entitled “Antécédents de Hégélianisme dans la philosophie Française”. This book, which appeared in 1865, was a two-volume work and had been written somewhat earlier than the two brochures mentioned, i.e. around 1760-1770, by the Benedictine monk Leodegar Maria Deschamps, who was born in Rennes in 1733 and died in 1774 as prior of a Benedictine monastery in Poitou. The first volume contained what Deschamps called at the time: “Le vrai système.” It was not published until 1865, together with parts of the second volume. It had been in manuscript form in the Poitiers library for so long. Nobody had paid any attention to it, except during the period in which it was written. What Deschamps – for the two pamphlets I mentioned also originated from him – wanted to express in 1769 and 1770 is now expressed in a strong first volume, which was published a century later by Professor Beaussire. That is what it contains. And the second volume contained a detailed correspondence and a presentation of all the efforts that Deschamps made at the time – let us put ourselves in the time when this was: namely before the outbreak of the French Revolution – described all the efforts that Deschamps made to somehow bring about the breakthrough of his “vrai système”. We learn there that the man really, I would say, stood between two fires: On the one hand, wherever his “vrai système” was discussed, he was warned that if the church found out about the “système”, he would be unconditionally subject to the harshest of punishments as a priest. On the other hand, even the so-called freethinkers showed very little interest in his writing. They were interested, but they did not want to do even the smallest thing that he asked: find a publisher. Rousseau, Robinet, Voltaire, the subtle Abbé Yvon, Barthélemy, even Diderot, they all knew this “vrai système”. It was even read to Diderot in his salon. He did not understand it immediately and therefore wanted to keep it to read through; but the good priest Deschamps was so anxious that he took it back because he did not want to put it into other hands. So he was always torn between these two things: on the one hand, he did not want his “vrai système” to be known; on the other hand, he wanted it to really take hold of humanity.

Now let us take a look at what Deschamps presented as his “vrai système” in his first volume. He really did present what I just spoke of, which was bound to come up at some point. He calls that which is in the head (see drawing on p. 40) by designating it as force, “intelligence”; and he calls that which is out there, what I have drawn here in green, “comprehension”. And the significant thing is that he recognized: Yes, if one now conceives this whole mass of thoughts of the world in the spiritual eye, it is a web of world thoughts. If you look at only the individual object, it actually only has meaning when it is placed in the whole fabric of world thoughts. Fundamentally, it is nothing in itself. That which is something, which is there, is the whole fabric of world thoughts.

And that is why Deschamps distinguishes between “le tout” and “tout.” He calls the whole fabric of world thought “le tout,” and he distinguishes “le tout” from “tout.” The first is the sum of all particulars. A subtle distinction, as you can see. “Le tout” is the whole, the universe, the cosmos; ‘tout’ is everything that is considered a detail. But what is considered a detail is at the same time, as he says, ‘rien’; ‘tout’ is ‘rien’; that is an equation. But ‘le tout’, that means in his sense: the universe of thought.

The more materialistically minded minds, like Robinet and his ilk, could not grasp what he actually meant. And so no one could understand him. It could come to pass, because, so to speak, the materialistic tendency was already there, that the works of this Benedictine prior were left to molder. Because, it is not true that in 1865 a professor published the work – after all, that is nothing special. They always did that, you know, they collected and published such old tomes, regardless of their content.

So the time that was to come, the time of materialism, had passed over what had taken hold in the lonely soul, the lonely spirit of a Benedictine prior.

It is probably difficult for today's humanity to learn to delve deeper into the corresponding expressions, which are truly wonderful expressions, namely through the way in which one is placed after the other here : “tout, rien” he calls at the same time, in that he goes further to describe the world, “etre sensible”; and then he forms the expression “neantisme” also “rienisme”, yes even “neantete” and “rienite”. And now consider the relationship between n&antisme, rienisme, n&antete, rienite, and what we call Maya, and you will see how closely all these things are related, and how, into the age of material ism, I might say, that which instinctively still remained from the earlier consciousness of looking into a spiritual world, of which the last remnant remained: “le tout,” the cosmic world of thought.

Of course, one must also recognize the greatness of such a thinker when he can no longer appeal to us 150 or 160 years later. I am convinced that if, for example, our dear female friends were to obtain these two volumes from some library, and if they were to work their way through the difficult philosophical part of the first half of the first volume and then read the second half of the first volume , they would become quietly furious at the views that Deschamps now develops regarding the position of women, for he has desperately unmodern views on the subject and, in the spirit of Plato, regards women from the point of view of communism. So we must not want to take everything in Deschamps' work at face value. But we must bear in mind what makes him such an interesting personality, especially if we want to consider the progress of the development of humanity. The important thing, however, is that in him we see, as it were, a spiritual view dying out. He is not even read, one could even say not even printed, although the most significant minds of his time knew him. Even a great mind such as Diderot did not even see fit to recommend its publication. All of this has been absorbed by the emerging materialism,

As you can see, we must work vigorously and energetically. For it is, after all, a matter of nothing less than bringing a new impulse to the spiritual development of humanity in the face of what, I might say, has emerged so surely and so strongly that, from a certain point in time, it has trampled to death everything that still reminded people of anything other than a more or less materialistically conceived world view.

And there was indeed tragedy in this personality of Deschamps. For he was, after all, a Benedictine priest. And the strange thing was this: Baron Holbach said in his “System of Nature”: Religion is the most harmful thing that the human race can have, religion is the greatest fraud, and should be eradicated as quickly as possible -; in contrast to this, Deschamps said: No, “le vrai systeme” must be adopted, and when people adopt “le vrai systeme”, then religion will disappear. But it must be preserved until people have accepted “le vrai systeme”. Then, so to speak, all the revealed truths behind it will be dropped, and in their place will be established the fabric of world thoughts. So this priest, who besides had to teach his boarding school boys the catechism and everything that religion had to offer every day, waited until his “vrai système” would become common property and religion would disappear as a result! There is something highly tragic about this.

When we stand today before the outer world, which in many respects believes itself to be beyond materialism, but which is terribly mistaken in this respect, then it is of course primarily a matter of teach people again that what we have as a world of perception within us is a reflection of the truth, and that we are actually always outside of our bodies with our true spiritual-soul nature. I have already discussed this here in another context. I also pointed out at the time that I had presented this from an epistemological, purely philosophical point of view at the last philosophers' congress in Bologna. Unfortunately, however, none of the philosophers at the time understood what was actually meant philosophically. Even the chairman of the congress, the famous philosopher Paul Deußen, is one of them. After my speech, he merely said: Yes, I have heard something about Theosophy. I have read a brochure that Franz Hartmann wrote against Theosophy. That was all Deußen could say about my lecture, Deußen, one of the most well-known and, in the field of Indology, most revered philosophers of the present day.

But we must be clear about the fact that it must really be the first step: to make plausible to the world consciousness of humanity this peculiar relationship of the spiritual and soul to the physical. Then the spirit that is at work in the course of human development will bring it about that people will recognize more than could be recognized in the 18th century, that people will see behind the “entendement” » the hierarchies and know that the «entendement» is that which the hierarchies live out as the thought content of the world, just as we live out the intelligence, «intelligence», through our being.

But some things will necessarily be connected with this change in the spiritual consciousness of humanity, which we have been talking about now and also in these days in a certain context. For what matters most of all for us – and I must keep emphasizing this – is not just to absorb knowledge, but to connect with every fiber of our spiritual and soul being with the results of spiritual research, so that we learn to think, feel and sense in the spirit of spiritual research. Then, wherever we are in life, wherever karma has placed us, whether we have a more material or a more spiritual occupation, we will truly carry into the individual branches of life that which is spiritually felt, felt and thought in us. |

And this must be said: anyone who expects a continuation, a real progress of culture from something other than such a spiritual deepening of humanity will wait in vain if it is left to him. The only thing that will really advance humanity is this spiritual deepening; for the events that otherwise take place can only be brought to a prosperous end if there are as many souls as possible that are able to feel, sense and think spiritually. Spiritual thinking must coincide with what is otherwise happening in the world if there is to be progress in the future of civilization.

What must be lived out as the karma of materialism, you are now experiencing when you look around at what is happening in the world. It is the karma of materialism being lived out. And the one who can look into things will find in all details - even in all details - the karma of materialism being lived out.

We will only find the way into a prosperous future if we find our way through what, I would like to say, under the leadership of Christ, in the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, arises for the soul's perception, if we orient this perception of the soul to the results of spiritual science. And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this intuitive perception and feeling has not to be drawn from spiritual science, and that everything else in the present world is opposed to it, and that we ourselves oppose spiritual science when we do not find ourselves ready to go, so to speak, completely into its spirit. For only spiritual science deals with the human being as such, with the human being as such, in relation to present-day humanity. Everything in present-day humanity is moving towards the goal of denying the human being as such and presenting something other than the human being as that for which one should fight, for which one should work, and of which one should think.

As you know, my dear friends, I have been unable to go into the details of our contemporary phenomena since Christmas for reasons I am sure you can guess. But in general, at least, we must appeal again and again to the intuitive perception of those who want to stand in the realm of spiritual science: the greatest in the newer development contains the germs for what humanity must attain. The greatest thing has been achieved by the fact that, in certain currents of human culture, what can merely be called national culture, what can merely be called national aspiration, has receded. For the true inner impulse is for the national to be overcome by the spiritual in the course of human development. Anything that works towards the unification of world territories from a national point of view works against human progress. Precisely there, in the most beautiful measure, that which leads forward can occasionally develop where a part of a nationality lives, separated from the great mass of the nationality, cut off from an entire massif. How something really significant was achieved by the fact that, in addition to the Germans in the German Empire, there were also Germans in Austria and Germans in Switzerland, separated from the Germans in the German Empire. And it would be contrary not only to the course of what one otherwise thinks, but contrary to the idea of progress, to think that a uniformity under a national idea should unite these three limbs into a single nationality, disregarding precisely the great thing that comes from external political separation. And one cannot imagine how infinitely bitter and sad it is when the national point of view is asserted by certain quarters as the only one for the formation of political contexts, when, from a national point of view, demarcations are sought, separations are sought. One can stand aloof from all politics, but fall into mourning when this idea, which is contrary to all real progressive forces, comes to the fore.

A sad Pentecost, my dear friends, when such words are forced from the soul.

But let us hold fast to the other Pentecost, to which attention was drawn yesterday and the day before, to that Pentecost to which the third part of our saying refers: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.”

Let us hold fast to the awareness that the human soul can find the way into the spiritual worlds, and that in our epoch of development the point has come when it is predetermined in the spiritual world that a new revelation should flow into humanity, a scientific revelation of spiritual knowledge that can take hold of human souls and give them what they need now and for the future.

We may say it, my dear friends: when peaceful times come again in place of the present ones, we will be able to speak quite differently – if not some particularly repulsive karma should prevent it – than we have been able to speak on spiritual-scientific ground up to now. But all this presupposes that spiritual science is not just knowledge about us, but a real, a world-wide gift of Pentecost; that we really do not just unite spiritual science with our minds, but with our hearts. For then, through the union of spiritual science with the power of our hearts, what wants to come down from the spiritual world will gather into the fiery tongues that are the tongues of Pentecost.

What wants to come down from the spiritual world as the gift of Pentecost lures into the human soul, not the intellect, but the heart, the warm heart that can feel with spiritual science, not just know about spiritual science. And the more your heart is warmed by the abstractions of spiritual science, which sometimes seem to chill, even though we almost always try to present only the concrete, the better. And the more we can even unite such a thought, as was expressed just yesterday, with our hearts, the better!

We have said that as materialists we usually perceive only one half of the physical world: what grows, springs up and sprouts. But we must also look at destruction, although we must see that destruction does not impose itself on us as the one who sees destruction as a mere nothingness. In all that is like destruction, we must also see the ascent and rising of the spiritual. We must connect ourselves completely with what we can feel and inwardly experience through the results of spiritual science as the spiritual life, the spiritual. Then we will feel more and more the truth of the saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We will have a scientific trust that we will be awakened to the spiritual world through the power of the spirit. And we will not feel with pride, but in all humility, what is to be brought into the world through spiritual science, but we will feel it especially in our hard time, in our time, which asks so many questions about our feelings that can only be answered when spiritual science can truly assert itself. I do not wish to stir up anyone's pride, but I would like to repeat a word that was once spoken when there was also much talk about what should happen through minds that had received something and were to carry it out. It was said to these minds - not to stir their pride either, but appealing to their humility -: “You are the salt of the earth.”

Let us understand the word for ourselves in the right sense: “You are the salt of the earth.” And let us become aware that precisely when the fruits, the fruits of the blood-soaked earth will be there in the future, these fruits will not flourish without spirituality: that the earth will need salt even more afterwards.

Take these words, imbued with heartfelt passion, into your own heart and soul on this Pentecost, when we want to truly imbue our entire being with the truth in the sense suggested: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Dear attendees!

The German nation is engaged in a tremendously serious struggle. A struggle that shakes and throbs through all of us. A struggle in which a new wave of our nation's destiny is to be formed out of blood and out of acts of arms.

It is a time when, one might say, the furthest extremes of human feeling, human emotion, and human imagination collide, flowing through our hearts. Deep sorrow, which spreads over countless losses, pain and grief, blood – all this provides a kind of foundation, but one that is surmounted by an atmosphere of enthusiasm, an atmosphere of bliss at what the members of the German nation are able to do in order to to maintain and secure, in the face of the iron necessity imposed on them, that position in the world, that position within European culture, which they have inherited as a precious legacy from their fathers, as a precious legacy from the historical development of Europe itself. In such a time, in which a new destiny is being formed out of blood and military deeds: But the most important things of the present, of such a present, are spoken about in different words than those that can be spoken in such a reflection, as it is this evening. The weapons speak, of course in the figurative sense. Courage speaks, the bravery of those who are exposed to the great historical fields of our present events.

But especially in such a time everything must be close to us that is connected with the whole attitude, with all the tasks, with the whole feeling and will of the German people. Therefore, it may well be appropriate for us to devote an hour of reflection to that which can take shape in our soul when we turn our gaze to something that has developed not within the valor of arms, not within the arena of external events, but deep within the innermost being of the soul itself. But we feel, perhaps more than usual, especially in such a time, how – just as blood flows through all parts of the human organism, a blood flows through you – so a power, such an essence flows through all the expressions of life of the people. Therefore, in tonight's meditation, I would like to present as one of the symptoms of the German character what I would call the world view of German idealism.

I would like to present it as it has been incorporated into the various world views of the European peoples. The nations that are fighting with each other in our present time have also been touched in their interrelations by what the content of their worldview, their conception of life, is. And in this struggle of worldviews and conceptions of life, what can be called the worldview of German idealism has emerged. I would not, dear ladies and gentlemen, wish to fall into the tone in which Germany's enemies today fall when they endeavor to describe German thinking and German feeling to their own people. I think it is much more in keeping with the German character to let the facts speak for themselves. Especially in this area, where the most inner and sacred goods of the human soul are at stake. The judgment about the significance of the German people in the development of mankind can only be formed from a calm, serious, objective consideration of the facts of the spiritual development of mankind itself.

If we now consider the interrelationships of those nations with which the German people have come into contact in the course of their more recent struggle for a world view, if we consider these, then a central theme emerges from precisely that point of view which has been taken for years in these lectures, also in this city, from this place, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have been allowed to lecture every winter for years in this city as well.

If one wants to look into the soul of a nation, then it is necessary to first look at the essence of the individual human soul. I cannot discuss today in detail the thoughts that I have often expressed here about this individual human soul; I will only touch on them from the point of view that should lead to our reflection today. Particulars that are to be mentioned today will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture. But by pointing out some of the things I have been allowed to say here over the years, also proving them from the foundations of spiritual science, it may be said that, before the eye of spiritual research, this human soul does not present itself as the vague surge of inner life, as which it so often presents itself to today's soul teaching, which is more influenced by a positivistic - as it were - view. Spiritual science regards this mixing up of all the individual expressions and structures of the soul life, as is often found in the external soul science of today, as just as unscientific and as unfruitful for a true contemplation of life as it would regard the failure to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen in scientific observation when one wishes to consider it in its connection with world phenomena. I have often said, as here, that just as the chemist breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen in order to be able to observe it in its context in the natural world, so the spiritual observer must explore the human soul in its , which is not an arbitrary abstraction, which does not correspond to a mere external judgment, but to a real experience of that which makes up the whole extent of human soul life.

The spiritual researcher must first divide this human soul life into a sum of those processes that he designates with the term sentient soul. This sentient soul is connected with the elementary effects of the human soul, with that which, I might say, is still directly released from the physical, the bodily. The sentient soul is connected with this; with that which still lies partly in our blood; with that which breaks away from our inner feelings to become impulses of our being, without us being able to completely radiate it with the light of our consciousness. The sentient soul is spiritual, but it is the part of the human soul that is most intimately bound to the body of all the human soul parts. But it is also the soul element that causes the human being to direct his soul outwards. It is the soul element that ensouls the senses: the eyes when they look out into the world that is to be observed by the human being; the other senses when they come into contact with the surrounding world.

A soul element that then breaks away more, that is already more permeated by human consciousness, by the inner intentionality of the human soul, that is less bound to the elementary of human physical nature, is the mind or emotional soul. Of course, on the one hand, dear honored attendees, this mind or emotional soul is freer from the outer physical nature than the sentient soul, but it is also poorer for it. All the richness that is poured into our soul life through the elemental impulses of our entire human nature being poured into the sentient soul is no longer present in the intellectual or mind soul. As a mind soul, it is inward, but it is more loosely connected to the whole extent of the outer life of nature.

The soul element in which the human being can best, I would say, fulfill his present task in this life through the activity inherent in him, is then the consciousness soul. It is the soul through which the human being most comprehends himself as a personality, most becomes aware of himself as an individuality in the world. It is the faculty by which man can develop the highest degree of consciousness in himself, by which he can know himself as a self. But it is the soul element that, because it is most inward, shows least how man is connected with all the depths of outer existence. It is the soul member that is most closely connected to the human conscience, to that which is most personal to the human being, and at the same time it is most devoted to what the human being designates and must designate as his useful purposes, which are satisfied in external existence.

Precisely in the same way, to use yet another comparison that shows how spiritual science thinks entirely in terms of natural science, precisely in the same way as there are seven colors in a rainbow, but we can trace them back to three —, just as there are three color shades in a rainbow and the observation of these three nuances does not correspond to some kind of amateurism, but to real science - the reddish-yellow nuance, the greenish nuance, the blue-violet nuance - so the triad of these nuances is present in the life of the soul: the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul. And just as the unified light is expressed through the nuances of the rainbow, so it is through the nuances of the soul, through the three, I could also say modes of activity of the human soul, that which we describe as the actual I, as the reality of the human inner being. Just as light appears through the yellow-reddish, through the green, through the blue-violet, so the I appears through the sentient soul, through the mind or emotional soul, through the consciousness soul.

Now, esteemed attendees, just as we can find this very structure in the individual human soul – as I said, I can only mention this today – so we can only truly get to know the souls of nations if we illuminate them from the point of view that we gain from this view of the human soul itself. We then gain the insight that, insofar as the souls of nations express themselves in the whole of human development, these national souls themselves are nuanced in such a way that one national soul expresses more the character of the sentient soul, another more the character of the mind or emotional soul, and yet another national soul more the character of the consciousness soul. It is really not an arbitrary way of looking at it. It is not, I might say, a forced abstraction when one regards the peoples of Western Europe, the Western and South-Western European peoples, in this way, according to the character of their folk souls. On the contrary: an unbiased study of the way in which the folk soul expresses itself leads to such a conception.

Let us now consider the soul nature of the Italian people from this point of view. Of course, dear readers, the individual stands out from his people when he strives to do so. But that is why there is a national character that bears the nuance of the national soul. There is no need to construct something arbitrarily, but only to go into what – if one has just one guiding thread from the knowledge of the human soul – naturally follows from the nature of the folk soul. Then the following consideration can be described as by no means unfruitful, as it seems to me.

The nuance of human soul nature that is expressed in the Italian soul can be described as the nature of the sentient soul. And if we, esteemed attendees, turn our gaze, our soul's gaze, to the cultural development that has been poured out on the peoples of Europe since the dawn of modern cultural development, since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, we find in it the opportunity to become acquainted with the various soul nuances and their mutual relationships and their mutual forces of influence, I would say, in an unbiased way. We find that in a very special way in the sixteenth century, there emerges that which one can say It is the task that was precisely the task of the Italian national soul, by virtue of the character of its sentient soul. Yes, precisely the greatest thing that came from this side, both from this time and from what immediately preceded this time, testifies to us that it has this character.

Let us take the personality who is so often referred to when speaking of the dawn of the modern world view. Let us take Giordano Bruno; he who fell victim to the fanaticism of the opposing world view of the sixteenth century. When we let the peculiar world-view of this man take effect on us, we feel in this personality the echo of what comes to us from Dante. We feel in it, in the world-view of Giordano Bruno, the echo of what comes to us in colors and in the richness of form from the painting of Raphael or Michelangelo. What do we find in all this? Just when you delve into the way in which Giordano Bruno presents himself to the world, how he presents himself to the world - placing himself in it, surveying the whole universe, breaking through what the medieval world view still saw as an outer boundary - how he breaks through the firmament of the space and pointing out into the infinite, as he could do it through his sensory activity inspired by inner feeling, so we can say to ourselves: He has conjured up this image of the world, which is as much scientific as artistic, out of direct perception, out of the same inner soul activity through which Dante, by virtue of his feelings, conjured that which he felt for the individual members of his people into the mighty image he created of the spiritual worlds into which the soul passes through the gate of death according to his vision. The essential thing – today we can only touch on this – in Giordano Bruno's world view, and also in the world view that his predecessor – from whom he adopted much, Telesius had, and also in the world view that Galileo wove into his world view, we see everywhere that the main emphasis is on directing the human being's attention to what external perceptions [and what] the sensory world gives. To explore this sensual world in such a way that one also uses all the powers of the mind, that is, the powers of the mind or soul, the powers of the consciousness soul, in order to achieve the sensual image in perfection. We see this as a task that opens up for us in this field of the culture of the national soul.

Thus we see a world picture emerging in southwestern Europe, which owes its greatness primarily to the fact that it is focused on external sensuality, and all the other powers of the soul that are not sensuality are used to arouse this sensuality in a pure way. This world view emerges from the elementary powers of the sentient soul.

And if we ascend to the Western peoples of Europe, and consider French culture from this point of view, we find expressed in it - I can only describe these things symptomatically today, by placing individual personalities before you as the living symptoms of historical development. If we look at this culture, we find a man like Cartesius, like Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, shaping into a world picture, I might say, the very essence of this culture. And if we engage with this world view, if we ask ourselves: what forces in the human soul shape this world view, in contrast to the forces of the sentient soul, which have just been cited for the Italian world view? We find that it is the powers of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling. Just as I might say that the Italian conception of the world is supposed to present to the human soul what I might call the purely sensuous nature, so the conception of the world of the scientific intellect, or what we may here call purely rationalistic judgments about the world, is supposed to form a conception of the world. The human mind, which is so directed to the finite in the human conception of the world precisely because it is placed in the finite human being, is cultivated by Cartesius: What are the sources of your certainty? How can you say something certain about that which is true, which is truthful, real? And because he draws from the sources of thought, from the rationality of human beings, Cartesius, Descartes, develops rationalism as - I would say - the characteristic expression of the French national soul. This intellect first of all attaches itself to that which is immediately present: to the human self itself, to the inner personality. It attempts to attain certainty of life and the world from this inner personality, from that power which in turn is most intimately connected with this personality. “I think, therefore I am!” the world-famous saying of Descartes. Man assures himself of his existence by becoming aware of his mind at work within him. He cannot doubt his mind. Therefore, he can find in his mind the sources of certainty that can be given to him.

But a world picture emerges from it, dear honored attendees, over which the whole nature of the mind is poured out. The mind has the peculiarity that it is, so to speak, a self-contained entity in itself and also in its setting in the human personality. It does not go beyond the boundaries of the human personality. I would like to say: Descartes also remains in a sense in thinking. He does not stimulate in himself the other powers of the soul, those powers of the soul through which we can let the whole human being flow into nature and its secrets, in order to feel and sense this nature and to live with it. Descartes remains in thinking, remains in ratio. This characterizes his entire world view. The characterization, which is particularly characterized, dear attendees, by the fact that Cartesius, by only focusing on self-assurance - on what his own thinking assures him of as certain - comes to believe that animals are only living machines. They are not ensouled like humans. The thinking that has become fixed in one's own personality - I would like to say - does not find the way out of itself to submerge lovingly into the outer nature. It does not even reach as far as the soul for the animal world. Soul-less machines, mechanisms, moving machines are the animals. [He penetrates even less to the essence of the other nature. To arrive at certainty, realism withdraws the means by which it could penetrate to the soul of all the rest of nature. One would like to say: This world view wanted to secure human truth; and in this way it secured it, that it renounced a way of living in nature.

Thus we see a world picture over which spreads – I would like to say – that which man finds in himself through his thinking. This world picture then worked through the whole French world-view development. We find it today in a certain sense in Bergson and Boutroux. Everywhere we see how people rely on what is supposed to follow only from human thinking. We see it emerge particularly characteristically at the end of the eighteenth century, [...] where it is expressed in the materialism of French thought as a worldview, which is basically the father of all theoretical materialism, [yes] of all materialistic worldviews of the most recent times; before which Goethe once by confronting it – and thus in the personality in whom the world view of German idealism was most vividly present – faced Goethe, by saying: There the world of moving atoms is presented to us. If we could at least see some reason why these atoms move, and if we could see why our whole beautiful, diverse and magnificent world with all its wonders arises from these moving atoms.

But materialism – so Goethe believes – [...] only lives in some concepts of moving atoms, and does not show – since it has no need to show – how connected that is, which it thus assumes to be behind the phenomena, with the great diversity and beauty of the world's phenomena! We see one of the most German of Germans, Goethe, rebelling against this materialist world view. This world view expresses the entire character of the intellectual soul or mind soul.

And if we look at British culture from this perspective, we find that this British culture, as it begins in more recent times, directly channels the power of the human soul to that which is spread out before human observation. We see how Bacon von Verulam appears - a personality who demands of the human soul in the most incisive way that it purify all that [which leads it away from what it can observe by being in the world, what it can observe with its senses - with the consciousness that is peculiar to us as human beings! Bacon wanted to cleanse the world view of all that man can bring into it through his mere thinking, through a deepening into his inner self.

Just as sensualism is the world view corresponding to the Italian national character; just as rationalism is the world view corresponding to the French national character, so is so-called empiricism, the focus on external reality, which of course initially only has a meaning for the human consciousness soul, for that in which the human being wants to place himself here as an earthly being with his conscious purposes. This outer reality, what is given in empiricism, as it is said, is the object of the outer consciousness soul. That is what one wants to gain when one looks at it in terms of its characteristic properties, the British world view, that is, all the content it can contain. And from the dawn of modern spiritual life up to Darwin and Spencer, up to the present English world view, we find this basic trait everywhere. But we see that in recent times, strangely enough, it has united with that which lives so truly in the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul, as I said earlier, sets out to get to know the human being through the purposes he pursues as an external being on earth in his immediate sensory surroundings. The consciousness soul focuses on these purposes. On what is useful to man. Let us look back at the example of Darwin. And we see from the form that Darwin gave to the theory of the development of the organic how the principle of usefulness is already being considered in the becoming of the beings. The beings arise and perfect themselves in the struggle for existence. How in the struggle for existence? Because the being that is organized in such a way that it is most useful to itself displaces the others.

It is characteristic that the emergence of the so-called pragmatism – this name was coined in England and more recently in America – is the latest form of the world view prevailing there. What is this pragmatism? It asks: Yes, to what extent can a person, who wants to approach truth through thought, arrive at the truth? It was felt quite intensely that one cannot actually educate oneself with one's soul powers through mere thoughts. Yes, but what are mere thoughts? What are thoughts that a person can form when he looks at phenomena? Is there a world of thoughts that one could say are real? Man goes through the world, so they say, he looks at things. He thinks about them. Is there somehow a power that forms the truth in man? So pragmatism asks. - No, man cannot find such an external power. But man forms concepts, and he can then have them. How can he have them? In such a way that they enable him to summarize the phenomena of the world in a purposeful way. This pragmatism does not seek some background of a source of truth, but it seeks to form such a conception that is expedient for summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena, thereby summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena in the best possible way. This is a concept that can be perceived because it serves to summarize the phenomena. There is no other source of truth.

When we speak, for example, of a unity in the human soul's manifestation – we can assume this unity from what has been said – then we can summarize the individual expressions of the human soul in a purposeful way.

When we speak of gravity, we do not do so because of any inner truth. There is nothing else that prompts us to speak of gravity when we form the concept of gravity, other than the fact that it corresponds to the purpose of summarizing many phenomena that we encounter in the world under one unifying concept. Utility pours over the whole human striving for a world view within pragmatism.

I did not in any way attempt to characterize the facts from any point of view of sympathy or antipathy, but I tried to identify the guiding thread of the worldviews of the three nationalities according to the nuance of soul that expresses itself in the corresponding people, in the corresponding culture. One can see that what I have briefly characterized – and this is why it can only appear arbitrary – but precisely if one were to go deeper, all arbitrariness would disappear, it could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the worldviews of the respective peoples could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the world view of the peoples concerned – testifies to us: Italian culture has particularly developed the sentient soul character; French culture the rational mind or mind soul character; British culture the consciousness soul character.

Now let us turn our gaze to the center of Europe. Let us try to let this soul's gaze briefly roam over those phenomena that also present themselves to us within the last period of human development. This new period announces itself in a peculiar way. There we see, I might say, in a world view of beauty, Giordano Bruno creating out of a purified sensualism, in a state of drunken sensuality. But at the same time, there we see in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century in France, Montaigne creating out of the intellectual or emotional soul a world view of pure doubt. Here we see, in Montaigne, I might say, in a different way, less ingeniously, less philosophically than in Descartes, but in him, how one of the most significant signs of this culture is expressed. We see how he is confined to what man alone is capable of thinking, to what is connected with his thinking; but at the same time, he senses that this thinking is limited in its validity as truth by the fact that it dwells only within us. This gives him doubt about the external sense world. That is why Montaigne says: Yes, the external senses provide us with a certain image of the external world. But does it have to be true? We have no means of knowing, for we can only believe our reason. But we have no means in it of proving that something is not revealing itself that is something quite different from what we can suspect behind the sensory phenomena. The sensory phenomena can be deceptive. But can what we have in reason tell us the truth either? We see that we want to prove something in our reason. But soon we come to realize how deceptive this reasoning was in us. Now we have to prove what we have proved all over again. And that presents itself to us immediately, as if from this or that point of view. But it is questionable. We begin to demand a proof of the proof of the proof. The true sage, says Montaigne, is the only one who doubts everything, who goes through the world with a soul that can bear doubt.

And in the field of world view, the Italian's and the Frenchman's contemporary is precisely Bacon, who wants to refer the human soul, as I have characterized it, to that which is purely the object of external utility. This contemporary of his, regardless of what objections one might otherwise have against him, regardless of what point of view one might take: it is characteristic of the development of Central Europe, characteristic of the development of German folk culture, this personality – a contemporary of Giordano Bruno, intoxicated, as it were, with sensuality, of the doubter Montaigne, of Bacon, who referred to mere external empiricism, is Jakob Böhme, the profound German mystic. He – who, while Giordano Bruno wants to connect the drunken mind with the whole world, the outer sensual infinity of the world, who, while Montaigne wants to find man alone wise when he is able to doubt everything, the contemporary of Bacon – is Jakob Böhme, [the contemporary contemporary of just that Bacon] who, when he wants to point man to the truth, points him away from everything he might possibly imagine or develop within himself, and points him to the mere intellectual and conceptual summarization of the phenomena of the consciousness soul. The contemporary of these three, who all point man outward, is Jakob Böhme, who at the same time turned his inner path toward those realms that the human soul can enter when it becomes fully conscious of itself in its deepest inwardness.

And let us turn to this wonderful world picture of Jakob Böhme. We see how this contemporary of Montaigne, the greatest modern doubter, seeks certainties borne inwardly by the deepest soul faculties in a purely spiritual, supersensible world, in a world of human inwardness, which he knows at the same time, because it is human inwardness, to be the inwardness of that which confronts us in the external world, in outer existence. The great affinity of that which man finds when he reaches most deeply into his inner being, with that which man finds when he roams most widely through the whole extent of outer existence, that is what Jakob Böhme wants to show, out of the German soul.

The greatest seeker of certainty – a contemporary of the greatest doubters. The greatest believer in human inwardness, and at the same time the greatest denier of what human inwardness might assert with certainty about any phenomenon in the world. We see emerging at the dawn of the newer development of the world a mind that has arisen out of the culture of the German people and that wants to go to the center of the soul's being and, from the activity of this center, wants to illuminate all that lives in the lives in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul or mind, in the consciousness soul, like light in the color nuances that appear to be externally divided into reddish-yellow, greenish, and bluish-violet. A culture of the I, a culture that finds its way into the human interior, seeks because it is clear that if you dive deep enough into this human interior, you will find in these depths, in the abyss of the human interior, the gateway to what is still behind what the drunken science of Giordano Bruno finds as the exterior. Jakob Böhme knows how to find the inner core of this outer appearance for himself, in accordance with his attitude and the tenor of his world picture, by descending into his own inner being. Thus, in the heart of Europe, at the dawn of the newer evolution of humanity, we find a world picture that mysticism has sensitively characterized.

Even if we consider it imperfect from our present-day point of view, ... we find that it sets the tone for the development of world-view, showing us - as I said, it is not intended to present any dogmatic world-view, only to characterize the development - how the German worldview strives to seek the forces that it is supposed to shape in the human ego, which is aware of immersing itself in the spirit of the universe when it only delves deeply enough, in the human ego, in the intimate, in the innermost nature of the human soul itself. And we find this character, ladies and gentlemen, held throughout the more recent development.

He who stands as it were as the first cornerstone of this newer Central European, this newer spiritual world-view development is much misunderstood: Kant. It often seems to people as if Kant had wanted to put forward a world-view of doubt, a world-view of uncertainty. But in another way, what Kant wanted has also been formed from the depths of the human being's ego nature. And now something very peculiar in the newer development comes to light. As I said, I only want to emphasize the facts, let the developments be characterized by an at least striving - I don't know how far I will achieve it, but at least striving - impartiality towards the facts. One thing in particular comes to us from this German development. That which must inspire man in his innermost being, although it is not directly real, is placed in the focus of the soul: the idea, the ideal.

The most alien thing to the times in which Kant lived and the culture from which Kant emerged would be the British view of today, as expressed in the British world view: that truth should have no other source [than the expediency for which external phenomena are to be summarized]. For absolutely valuable, so that no doubt, nothing that could somehow take away certainty, should approach it, absolutely certain is that which makes human life valuable, although it is not an external sensual reality, that is the idea, that is the ideal. This world view felt that ideas and ideals reach into the human soul and give the human soul the highest value. No matter whether the human soul attains such a high value from nature or from some other source, it attains the highest value through the fact that ideas can be present in it. And now, more or less unconsciously, Kant was already living with the impulse to eliminate everything that did not want to recognize the absolute, unconditional validity of the ideas, their highest value for the human soul. He found that A science has been developed, a world view has emerged that is based on the sensory world. But man cannot, with the powers that come from his soul, grasp this sensual world view in such a way that he can get to its direct sources — if I may use the pedantic word, but it is from Kant himself —, to the “thing in itself”. So Kant tried to get to the bottom of this sensuality, this external reality, as it presents itself to the human senses, to bring clarity to it. He examines the human soul life in his own way. He finds: What presents itself as the sensory world is not the immediate reality. And the human soul is not at all able to penetrate into the immediate reality with the powers it has. Only through those forces that are the forces of the idea, the forces of the ideal, can it experience reality directly within itself. And so we see the remarkable thing about Kant: that he does not, as is often believed, want to present a world view of doubt, of groundlessness, of non-recognition, but that he was seeking a world view that would remove all doubt by making it clear that we cannot know anything about the senses, but because we cannot know anything, we can give all the more to the fact that what projects into our soul life as an idea, as an ideal, has an unconditional value. Sensuality must not disturb us in our contemplation of the absolutely valuable, the idea, the ideal, by the certainty it has. Kant does not present a world view of doubt, but a world view that seeks to eliminate doubt from the world. However, he does come to say that he must fight knowledge. Kant says it in order to make room for faith. At first, he only believes that a kind of faith can unfold for that which enters the human soul in an idealized way; but that is precisely what characterizes him: the ideal, the idea, is so valuable to him that he himself dethrones knowledge for its sake, in order to provide this ideal with the right throne, the right world standing.

And now we see how the individual heroes of the world view of German idealism follow. We see how directly the – I would say – very own national philosopher of the Germans, how directly Johann Gottlieb Fichte, embraces this Kantian world view. Let us look back at rationalism, at the purely intellectual world view of Descartes, which represents the original form of the world view of French popular culture: “I think, therefore I am”. In thinking, something is seen that can be trusted as a source of certainty. But from this thinking one must conclude – but I don't want to get involved in philosophical ravings now or have to come to it by some other means than by conclusion – that this thinking is based on a being, a first being that can be recognized by thinking, that can be looked at, because it proves that it must be there because one thinks. It is there, because one thinks, because thinking emerges from it. All this, if you look at it carefully, is so utterly alien to Fichte's remarkable, magnificent – I would even say heroic, in a world-view sense – soul. Fichte creates a completely different view of the human inner being, of the deepest soul. One that is still extremely difficult to understand today. For Fichte does not want to arrive at the soul, at the ego, by grasping it in its being. Rather, Fichte wants to grasp being [in its being generated] as an act of doing, that is, in order for me to experience my ego as me, I must continually create myself. In the moment when I lose the creative powers in me, when I cannot, out of unknown depths, place myself in a direct existence for my inner being, I am no longer an ego. With that, the thought, the “I think” is submerged in the will. And the inseparable unity of will and thought is made the basis of the human ego. At the same time, the characteristic of the self refers to something that is in a state of constant creation, of constant activity. You are only with yourself if you bring about this state of being with yourself every moment. To the extent that you can and do create yourself, in every moment of your sensual-physical and intellectual existence, you are a self.

What does Fichte, the most national of German philosophers, want? He wants to grasp the center of human existence, and he wants to grasp it in such a way that he does not develop in it a lasting, an actually lasting, [that he seeks a] unchanging being, but a continually active, a never resting. The human being, who is then his own creature. The most wonderful thing about strength, about human capacity, placed at the center of the soul's light, appears to us at the same time as the center of Fichte's world view. And here at this center, Fichte wants to grasp the self-generating I, the I that is endowed not only with the ability to think about its being, but with the ability to continually will itself. Here he wants to grasp at the same time, not in an existence that one wants to seek behind appearances, that one wants to seek here or there through some other science, but in the volition that the ego itself generates, Fichte wants to seek what lives within, in this human volition, in this human inner activity, through which the ego continually generates itself: the idea, the ideal. The I generates itself, and into this stream of self-generation the idea, the ideal, pours itself. Into this stream of self-generation the most intimate coexistence of the divinely high ideal, the divinely pure idea, with what man calls his most intimate inner experience, pours itself directly into it.

And now, I would say, Fichte advances to what is perhaps the boldest – there is, of course, much that is debatable, but still: boldest – thought that a thinking world view, a merely thinking world view, has ever conceived. Fichte looks at this self-creating I, at this I that is in the one moment because it creates itself, but does not merely sustain this being now until the next moment, but also lives through its deeds in the next moment, and in the next moment again, which never rests, always creating itself - Fichte looks at this I, and in it he now finds his reality. True reality must be measured by the standard of this reality. What, as we have just seen, intrudes into this I? As this I creates, ideas and ideals flow into its creative powers. They are the absolute valuable.

But now this I, with the help of the bodily organization, confronts the external sense world. This external sense world is permanent, it is something that cannot create itself, and is therefore less real than the I, which is constantly creating itself. Why then does the I, this absolutely creative I, enter the less real sense world? Because this I, with the ideas, the ideals, with the moral duty - which flows into the ideas, the ideals, into this I - needs a field of activity to live itself out. For Fichte, the world of the senses is not there for its own sake, but, as he says, as a sensitized material for the reception of duty, that is, of ideas and ideals. For Fichte, the world is there because duties, ideas, and ideals are paramount in spiritual life, and because these ideas and ideals need a world of the senses in order to be active. Thus the world of sense must be there as the consequence of ideas and ideals. Today we need not go into what we have on our soul, perhaps against the scope or the fundamental truth of such a world view; we only want to go into the way of the people's striving. We want to go into what strives within the soul power of the people to recognize the truth. We want to trace the character of this popular striving in the time that preceded the one in which the German people created their state, the external structure of their activity, which they must now defend with blood and arms, but which they created because they drew the strength to do so from what preceded this state, but which is rooted in the deepest peculiarity of the German national soul. And from this point of view, let us also direct our gaze to the man who has now continued Fichte in a certain way, who has worked alongside Fichte, after Fichte, the much-tried Schelling.

To focus on that which forms Fichte's basic essence, on a world view that is above all permeated by the ideas and ideals that flow into human beings and that require external sensuality to because the ideas and ideals - to fill out the world view - need an object within which they can operate, building on this Fichtean premise, Schelling also delved into this center, into the human ego. That center, where, according to Fichte's view, this thinking is linked to the soul of the world. But Schelling, he feels differently than Fichte. To him it seems prosaic, it seems abstract to name all of nature with all its diversity, with all that delights our senses, with all that promotes our welfare, our happiness, with all that the mind so gladly, so willingly immerses itself in, from which it draws so draws so much from — that which spreads out in the wide, visible nature —, that only looks at it from the point of view that it is there to give a sensualizing material to the duty, to the spiritual in the world picture, which flows into the ego; Schelling finds this impossible in view of his attitude. He has, I would say, too much German feeling in him.

Fichte's greatness is German willpower. Schelling's greatness is the German mind, which lovingly wants to engage with the smallest and the greatest phenomena of nature, with that which pours gloriously through space, that which spreads out in time. But while he wants to penetrate into every detail with a loving mind, he is also clear about one thing: certainty, security, true reality can only be found where you immerse yourself in yourself, where you can find the union of the human soul with the world soul in your own self. What you seek there and [...] find, you find because you experience it directly, because you experience it in such a way that, by being, you are at the same time with you [...] as that which, as true reality, pulses through life. What you can find in yourself, you will never find in outer nature. Therefore, fill yourself with that within you which can be a reflection of that which is most profound in this external nature as well. And so, what Schelling experienced within grew to such an extent that when he observed nature, he merged with the external existence of nature. Thus, nature itself became soul-like and spiritual to him. So Schelling looks into nature and says to himself: the essence of the human soul rests within it. But when I look out into nature, it is the same essence. I look at the stone: it has something, is connected with something, which is like the essence of the human soul; it only has it enchanted in form, in external nature; it has brought it into forms. And so the plant world in all its diversity. And so the animal world. And so also the outer physical human world. If I want to express myself figuratively: for Schelling it becomes as if - before the human soul entered this physical existence - a world spirit soul deeply related to the human soul... that which the human soul only and feels within itself, had first spread out before itself in forms, so that the human soul can see itself here twice..., and its essence poured out, magically poured out in space and in time, as it lives outside in nature.

But then Schelling says to himself, if that is so, if this nature is an enchanted soul-being, then I must find - when I experience nature by fully putting myself in the place of every single being, in every single form of life - the spirit of nature living out itself everywhere. But I do not find it by looking at nature dull. I must create it. My soul must create out of my soul that which lives most deeply in animal, plant and stone. My soul must put itself in that place and thereby create it. Hence Schelling's bold expression: to comprehend nature is to create nature.

And thirdly, we see the person who most fully developed this world view of German idealism, albeit only in abstract thoughts that are difficult for some to grasp. We see Hegel, the man from Stuttgart, the profound one, the most profound of the three. We can call Fichte the most powerful, the man of the German will, Schelling the man of the German mind, we can call Hegel the man of German reason itself. While Schelling immerses himself in nature, but only by taking the creative power of the ego with him, in order not just to comprehend nature, but to create nature out of the human soul through contemplation, Hegel wants to, as it were, from the soul, from what it is directly, from the universe that it creates for itself according to the Fichtean ego being, from which he wants to penetrate into what the soul is together with the deepest world thoughts. From the individual spirit, from the individual ego, Hegel wants to go to the world spirit, which is connected at one point with the individual spirit of man.

From the human ego to the world ego, Fichte sought a human essence that has within itself the power to continually generate and thus to develop and educate itself. Schelling seeks in the human being the power that can create in the ideal world picture that which is inherent in nature, while Hegel seeks in the human soul that which can receive the divine world spirit in itself, where it can hold a dialogue with this divine world spirit. While Schelling wants to pour the whole human soul into the soul-like nature, Hegel wants to sink all of this human soul-like nature into the essence of the world spirit, into the essence of the world soul. And he is clear about one thing: when the soul looks beyond what is outwardly spreading, when it lives completely with itself, then it communes with the world spirit. Then that which lives in it as concept, as idea, as ideal, is that which the world spirit lets flow into it. And by going from idea to idea, developing the whole organism of ideas that it can develop, the soul does not merely follow itself, no, it is aware that when it withdraws from all externality in this way, it unites with the world spirit. She does not think for herself, the world spirit itself thinks its thoughts in her. I surrender myself to the thinking of the world spirit, to the rule of world reason. As a result, the whole organism of the world idea - the world view of German idealism - spreads in the soul.

We can certainly say, esteemed attendees, that Fichte sought the human ego in its power, in its self-creative activity, but he remained - and because a greatest is boldly striven for, this greatest - I would say — itself the error of its virtue, it has its one-sidedness. Fichte stopped at this self-creative of the ego at something, so that one must say, at the point where he stopped, because the human soul actually creates itself only as a knowing being. It is therefore characteristic that Fichte calls what he has created as philosophy, as a world view, the theory of knowledge. The way Fichte grasps this self-creative I is actually only the knowing human being. But for us it is the path that matters, not a dogma, not an absolute truth, but the search for the German national soul. One would like to say: All that is spread out in this human nature, in that it experiences the whole fullness of the world of feeling, that the whole of outer nature is mirrored in it, all that is formed in the totality of the human inner soul life, with its deep pain, its high bliss and deep suffering, it is not directly explainable in the way in which the self-creative I is active in Fichte. The only thing that can be explained is – I would like to say – the knowing I. If man were to stand in the world as a knower, as a mere recognizer, if man's only task in the world were to have knowledge, then it would be as Fichte thought. But we see a wonderful development of strength in the fact that, on the one hand, all thinking, all research, all reflection is devoted to incorporating this one impulse into the world view of German idealism. Even if Fichte believed that he was answering all the riddles of the world, he did not answer them in their entirety, but he did show the one thing: How does man, as a cognizer, as a knower, as one who investigates the world, stand before himself? And how is he, as a knowing human being, connected to the sources of existence? To place this nuance in the world view of German idealism was, after all, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's task.

In Schelling, we find how the whole of external nature becomes something for him – I would like to say – that stands before his soul as a human physiognomy stands before our soul. We do not merely perceive it by describing individual lines, by characterizing its expression, but we perceive it in such a way that we perceive the soul speaking through it in it, in its inwardness, and allow ourselves to be affected by what is behind the physiognomy as the soul-like. Thus, what is spread out before man in nature, in its wonderfully deep unity, becomes the great physiognomy of the world soul that Schelling tried to decipher. But because he sets out in the strictest sense of the word to create everywhere: by enjoying nature and observing it, he can only create as much as was already revealed by nature according to the character of his time. This general character of human soul-creation, insofar as the soul-like is a reflection of nature's creation, that is what Schelling reveals. But while man stands in relation to nature in such a way that all his deepening of his soul life cannot replace for him the direct experience, the loving engagement with phenomena, insofar as one can observe them, Schelling believes that he can create more from within about nature than the mere predisposition for observation. Once again, with the error of a great spiritual virtue, he grasps a nuance of the world view of German idealism in a one-sided way!

Hegel seeks to experience the ruling world spirit itself in the human soul. He seeks to have such thoughts in the soul, such a developing reason, as if the world spirit itself were made to speak in the soul. But Hegel remains one-sided. For him, this world spirit does not appear as the one [that in all activity, at one time imparts the essence of the activity of the one being and at another time, in another activity, reveals a different essence.] In Hegel this world spirit appears as the great logician, who alone unfolds the details of the world's reason, and the world's reason becomes the only all-existing. But to present this single thing in its characteristic before the world, to incorporate this nuance into the world view of German idealism, this mistake of a great virtue, this one-sidedness, was necessary to grasp the thought in its highest degree: Man, when he plunges into his inner self, can depart from his ego to such an extent that he is so powerfully active in his ego that he extinguishes this ego itself, so that the world spirit may shine forth in him! In order to grasp this thought with the greatest intensity, it had to be grasped in this one-sided way. For in the search for truth, it is the power of comprehension that matters most to us, and not that the world spirit itself be conceived like a mere logician.

But we also see, we also know, honored attendees, how these three nuances in the world view of German idealism are intimately connected with the entire spiritual striving of the German people. For when this world-evolution of the German people was to be shaped into a personality, when the deepest, most intimate and at the same time most comprehensive and most living human and spiritual striving of this people was to be embodied in Goethe, then, I might say, he embodied in synthesis what had emerged with the greatest emphasis of one-sidedness in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But at the same time, by building up thoughts, I might say, with all the inwardness of the human soul and with all the powers of natural existence, living through them in the image of the human striving personality itself in Faust, [by characterizing him in such a way that as Goethe did] depict it, the universality of the human soul's striving for light could only emerge in modern times from [that] folk culture, which seeks the light at the center of the soul's life, while the other modern cultures seek the individual color nuances of the soul. We see, but we see the nature of the human ego as it is always creatively active, as it must intervene in every subsequent moment to create its being anew, to transform itself. We see this distinctly - only in all its broad vitality and in full abundance - I would say - the merely ideal in the human being embodied in Faust, in that Faust whose motto is: “Whoever strives, we can redeem him!” In that Faust, who is indeed presented to us as being in the concrete, in the immediately elementary, striving for what Fichte presents as theory. So that this Faust-I continually creates itself throughout the entire plot of Faust in order to successively insert its I into other spheres, other fields of world existence, in order to become related to other spheres, to other fields of world existence.

And we see how Schelling lives as a nuance, Schelling's view as a nuance in “Faust”. Schelling stands before nature, as before the great magician, and experiences: even if it is an illusion, it is an illusion to ignite a great aspiration; I say not to depict, but to ignite. Schelling stands before nature as if he could create it from within by wanting to understand it. Understanding nature means creating nature – and we see Faust transformed into the living, into the fullness of human existence. Faust, as he wants to reach “all life force and seed”. How he longs with all his might, which itself is magical power, to grasp that which creates and lives in nature, to unite with it, to unite with the spirit of nature. He wants the spirit, the spirit of life, which “swells and ebbs in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” to stand before him. He does not seek to create nature, he seeks to understand, he seeks that which creates in nature, as the world and deed genius.

Schelling sought in an abstract way in his soul the creator in nature. Faust sought the center in nature, where the essence is to be found, which, as the creator, stands in opposition to the created. Like Schelling, he wants to achieve a living force that creates as nature does. Faust, on the other hand, seeks to reveal such a being that flows and surges from one individual being to another in nature and shows us not only what has been enchanted and created, but also what lives in everything created as a creator.

And just as Hegel, as a philosopher, incorporated his nuance of reason, which is supposed to be the conversation of the world spirit itself in the individual human soul, into the world view of German idealism, so we see - and this in turn is implemented in the living so admirably in the whole striving of Faust - we see, as the goal that appears to us, what man can experience in his inmost being when he has always endeavored, when he has become akin to all the self-creative powers that the I continually creates and fathoms, but thereby continually develops, ceaselessly develops. When man has gone through this, when he has knocked at those gates through which nature unlocks its creativity, when he has found the spirit that he addresses as “Exalted Spirit, you gave me everything, everything” - in other words, the spirit that the creator stands vis-a-vis the created – he comes through all possible stages of human development to the one where he is able, when his eyes are closing, when he goes blind, when he is standing directly before death, to unite with the world spirit. Admittedly, Goethe touches here on an inner experience of the union of the human soul with the world spirit, which in its abundance and experiential content infinitely transcends the mere abstraction of Hegel's reasoning world spirit. But the attitude is the same in both cases.

We could cite many more examples, and we would see everywhere the German way of seeking the foundations and sources that underlie ideas and ideals, so as to have the world not merely as a symbol before the external senses, but as a weaving, surging world picture of ideas and ideals. And like this world picture of German idealism, such a shaping of this knowledge demands that it can say: Yes, all external sensuality is such that what stands as the most valuable for the soul life can intervene: the ideas and ideals originating from the divine sources of the world. In this way, in the sense of human striving within German culture, that which strives towards the world view of German idealism places itself within the other world views. And I believe that the German may objectively describe as his striving what has been characterized there, without his being able to believe that the slanderous accusations now made by his enemies have any value. He may say: He does not seek the individual color nuances of the soul; he seeks what - like the light shining through the individual color nuances - shines through and flows through these individual color nuances as the innermost, as the best of the human soul.

And one can indeed say, dear attendees, that when one points to this world view of German idealism, one reveals something that cannot live in every soul. Certainly, it appears that way; but two things must be emphasized. I can only hint at these two things, but they could also be explained further if one goes into the phenomena that were just pointed out. So great, so powerful was the will in this striving for the world view of German idealism, in the time of Germany, which was the most significant time of idealistic struggle – as our present time will undoubtedly appear as the most significant time of real struggle – so this world view of German idealism in Germany's most ideal time seems to present itself to our minds that we can say: What the people who have endeavored to achieve worldviews and the most diverse tasks in the nineteenth century and up to the present day within our culture have done, was to try to penetrate from different points in order to understand these individual representatives of the worldview of German idealism more precisely. Even their opponents were always somehow trying to penetrate this world view from different angles, at least to fight and struggle with it. And whatever world views and attitudes towards life have developed since then, we can feel the pulse of German idealism everywhere, even from opposing points of view. We can feel it to this day. We feel it as something that belongs to the best of the German character, to that which is realized in this German character. We feel it as one of the most characteristic expressions of the German essence. We feel it as that which symptomatically denotes the greatness and power of the German mission, and which may be so designated because there is truly in such a designation a striving that cannot make this designation appear as megalomania, but that the fullest modesty is connected with this characteristic.

Thus we see that we are still standing inside – and to what extent we are standing inside, I will have to elaborate on tomorrow in the lecture – we see how we are standing inside with all our striving in the full revelation of what was struck at that time, what was struck by individuals. That is the one thing I want to emphasize: the greatness of the world view of German idealism. Above all, it is connected with what has been done to this day by those who strove for a conception of the world and of life, and what will be done for those who follow in this sense for a long time to come.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that every impulse of a worldview that enters the worldview initially occurs in a few people. And the way it occurs is not decisive for the way it works. But if one delves into it, not intellectually, but rather in terms of feeling and emotion, not in terms of dogma, but in terms of the will, in terms of the particular orientation that underlies the world view of German idealism, then one finds that there is something in it that can still be lived out, that can still be developed, that one can say: something can arise from it that bears no resemblance to the difficult-to-understand arguments of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, something that can develop in such a way that it can be easily understood by the simplest mind.

Dear attendees! It is only through years of immersing myself in this world view of German idealism that I have come to the full conviction that there is something in it that can be implanted in human nature from childhood on, that there is a trinity to which the human being can be educated, to a feeling of self-creation in the I, which directly gives the human being - I would like to say - in all his striving a religious trait, as was the case with Fichte. Not Fichte's philosophy, but the forces that lived in Fichte's philosophy, to let them take effect on oneself, and to transfer them to general culture, to the simple man, to each individual, that will be possible one day. To become aware that something lives in the human soul that is intimately related to nature, to that which lives in the innermost part of nature, this special attitude towards nature, this life with the mind towards nature, this feeling of oneself in — The tendency of Hegel is that man can descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue there with the world soul itself. Hegel's tendency for man to be able to descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue with the world soul itself, that when he becomes free from the life in the outer natural and sensual world, he can hear his harmony with the world spirit resound spiritually within him, this attitude towards the divinely active, ruling world spirit, that will, without the Hegelian world view with the logical character perhaps even being known, be encouraged in the simplest soul by the person to whom one wants to transfer what I mean.

The world view of German idealism, not as it is dogmatic, but as it has been lived as a goal, as a spiritual impulse, can become popular. And however paradoxical and strange it may sound, the effect that this world view of German idealism can have on a human soul, what it can trigger in a human soul, how it can attune this human soul spiritually, sensually, working, creating in everyday life, is just as possible as the deeper meaning of the Grimm fairy tales becoming part of the human soul. It is no more difficult to live together intimately with the sense of the Grimm fairy tales, with the sense of the German folk tale, the German folk legends, than with the sense of that which lives in the world view of German idealism. But this points us to a development of that to which this world view of German idealism is the root, into far-off futures. And what is destined to develop will develop, however many those circling around Germany, around the German people, those who want to fight against the existence of the German people. The great trust that the German can have in his future can arise from the insight into what he has tied to his most sacred, to his national feeling.

And so, from the feeling that can be absorbed from the world view of German idealism, from what has been striven for and from the fact that these forces that could strive for such things are in the German nation, the great confidence that the German has in his further development, which he may express in the confidence that he may have in all the difficult struggles and the terrible struggles in which he is involved, and could still be involved. In this way, without resorting to sympathy or antipathy, and above all without resorting to antipathy, preconceived notions or hatred for what other national souls have to shape, one can describe the peculiar character of German national striving, as it expresses itself in one of its blossoms, in the world picture of German idealism, and one can say: Those who can understand something like that will understand whether the German people have a mission peculiar to them, to which they must cling, regardless of their nationality. Whether there is much understanding for this world view of German idealism in our time, especially among our enemies, is another question. And again: by speaking about this world view of German idealism, the German can at the same time show that he can speak differently, can speak from the spiritual facts, and that this is different from the way in which many of those who want to dispute the German's existence speak today, who have imposed on him the necessity of a fierce struggle for this existence.

I think, esteemed attendees, that the German need only emphasize in such a way what is most profound in his world view - and in nothing disintegrate those slanders that also encircle Germany, that encircle the German people. Let us see how differently one must speak in the context of the German essence. It is also a simple fact. Esteemed attendees! What, for example, did the inhabitants of Britain have to invent to justify what is expressed in their current struggle? How did the Germans merely have to point out that the necessity of their struggle for existence was imposed on them, whereas the inhabitants of Britain had to point out? They had to point to something that cannot be described as anything other than a mask. Could they point to something about which the German can say: he had to create the German state in the last decades, after the German, out of his nature, had worked towards this state until then? Could the inhabitants of Britain justify the necessity of their existence in the way they created it through the Boer War, in about the same way as the German can justify what the German does today as the consequence of the war of 1870/71? The true reasons had to be masked there. That the struggle for freedom of other nations is not the ideal there, one need only refer to the history of Britain.

The French had to – and this is again not something that arises from some kind of hatred, but from the mere characterization, from the mere objective characterization of the facts – invent a new sophistry through the minds of Bergson and Boutroux, who characterize the German world view by wanting to conclude from the innermost character – as Boutroux wanted in a lecture he gave to his French audience, based on this German world view – that, by its very character, it is a world view that wants to conquer everything in the world, that wants to clash with everything in a warlike manner.

Bergson had to invent his own philosophical sophistry to show how France's struggle against the German essence is a struggle of the spirit against matter, a struggle of civilization against barbarism. We see a completely new sophistry blossoming.

Russia has prepared herself well for what she needed to do in order to prepare in a corresponding way for what now threatens the German essence from there. Russia needs a new term for her old delusion, so as not to point to her mission as a matter of course, as the Germans do, but to point to something that lives as a delusion. Now, again, it is not the intention here to make a characterization from the outside, but because I naturally do not have the time to characterize in detail the extent to which the striving that threatens us from the East is a delusion, I would like to cite another key witness, a spirit who must know this, a spirit who is most deeply rooted in modern Russian intellectual life, the great Soloviev, who is placed in the nineteenth century and who – I would like to say – brings the whole of Russian intellectual life together as if in a philosophical focus for reflection. He speaks of how another spirit of Russia summarizes Russia's world-historical mission in the words: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Danilevsky poses this question. And he says:

“Europe fears us as the new and higher type of culture, called to replace the decrepitude of Romance-Germanic civilization.”

These words express the entire delusion of the East. It should not be denied that the seeds germinating in the East contain magnificent and powerful seeds for the future of humanity. In the way they are now living, I will characterize it by reading Solowjow's, the great Russian's, answer to this characteristic of Danilewski:

“Nevertheless, both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions and those of his like-minded friend”

- meaning a certain Strakhov -

"Europe looks at us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but because its demands are clear and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, defeat Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India.

The great Russian Solowjow characterized the comprehensive Russophobia long before it had been reborn in a new form, long before it had been reborn in the form that it currently poses as a threat from the East. And then he continues:

“And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and lost, how we propose to bless humanity, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we can bring into world evolution, then we must either remain silent or spout senseless phrases.”

I do not want to say this; one of the greatest of Russian minds characterizes what appears to be a Russian delusion from the East, thus.

“And,”

he continues,

“If Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill”

written in the 80s of the nineteenth century,

"then, instead of asking ourselves why Europe does not love us, we should rather be asking ourselves a different, more important question that is closer to us: why and how did we become ill? Russia is still quite physically strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, in the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and of which we are not aware - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness."

Written in the 80s of the nineteenth century!

“As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.”

The question may arise: Is this the Russian patriot who has ignited the present war with the ideals of the madness that Soloviev rejects here, or is it Soloviev who, in this way, vigorously points out what Russia needs and what most certainly could not have led to this war?

Italy, to justify what it has developed from its world conquest plan as its current actions – it would have to be much too detailed, one would come to far too much detail if one wanted to somehow characterize the strange words of d'Annunzio, but I think one will be able to add the whole peculiarity of what sounds like a justification from there to the justification of the opposing states, if one merely points out the one thing: The Italian people were looking for a justification for their current actions, and many, many words were spoken; but one in particular was always mentioned, which indicates that The French need a new sophistry, the English need a new mask, the Russians need their old delusion, and the Italians need – a new saint. Through completely profane means, egoism has been canonized! For the word of “holy egoism” as the justifying essence of that which arises from below is repeatedly heard by us anew.

It can be left to objective judgment to decide whether this – as one may speak of the innermost part of the German, as in the sense of the world view of German idealism – whether this justifies more objectively the mission of the German people or the sophistry, the mask, the delusion there and even the new saint there.

In view of the world view of German idealism, esteemed attendees, as in one of the nuances in the essence of the German national soul, to which the German so intimately wants to and must connect today, in view of the many nuances in this national soul, also precisely on this nuance of German idealism, the world view of German idealism, one may also recognize in it that which I believe, that in all modesty – without being guilty of that which is so slanderously spoken about the German from all sides today – in all modesty the German may say that he recognizes in three ways that which is his duty today. He feels in three ways that it is his duty today. He feels justified in this threefold way before the innermost part of his conscience, his conscience as a human being and as a part of history, knowing that he has no right to speak in a sophistical way about other inferior national spirits, about their barbaric habits. He need only call to mind the most sacred part of his own striving and recognize this most sacred part of his own inner striving as the precious, holy legacy of German prehistory. Then he can feel that the one thing by which he knows how to position himself powerfully in the German present and in the right way - is the love of the German past and of all that German past has been handed down to the German of the present, which he must adhere to, for which he stands up in love because he recognizes it in his innermost being, which makes him happy, which inspires him, which lifts him above pain and suffering. It is the love for the past.

And what sustains him through the difficult duties of the present is his faith in the present of the German spirit, in the power that flows from this German spirit into the present and that must bring about what will maintain the German spirit in its position as firmly as it has been handed down from the bright past. Love for the past and faith in the present join the third, which flows from the other two, and which pours into the soul strength and confidence, which follow from the other two in a living way. They join, the first two, love and faith, to the well-founded hope, flowing from the innermost nature of Germanness - to use this Fichte word - for the future fulfillment of that which the past has inspired for the German, for which the German present strives. Love for the past, faith in the present, hope for the future: these are what hold us together in our hard, but also blissful present, in body, soul, and spirit.

[ 1 ] If the human being were a mere creature of nature and not a creator at the same time, he would not stand questioningly before the phenomena of the world and would also not seek to fathom their essential being and laws. He would satisfy his drive to eat and to propagate in accordance with the inborn laws of his organism and otherwise allow the events of the world to take the course they happen to take. It would not occur to him at all to address a question to nature. Content and happy he would go through life like the rose of which Angelus Silesius says:

The rose has no “wherefore?”; it blooms because it blooms.
It pays itself no mind, asks not if it is seen.

[ 2 ] The rose can just be like this. What it is it is because nature has made it this way. But the human being cannot just be like this. There is a drive within him to add to the world lying before him yet another world that springs forth from him. He does not want to live with his fellowmen in the chance proximity into which nature has placed him; he seeks to regulate the way he lives with others in accordance with his reason. The form in which nature has shaped man and woman does not suffice for him; he creates the ideal¹ figures of Greek sculpture. To the natural course of events in daily life he adds the course of events springing from his imagination as tragedy and comedy. In architecture and music, creations spring from his spirit that are hardly reminiscent at all of anything created by nature. In his sciences he draws up conceptual pictures through which the chaos of world phenomena passing daily before our senses appears to us as a harmoniously governed whole, as a structured organism. In the world of his own deeds, he creates a particular realm—that of historical happenings—which is essentially different from nature's course of events.

[ 3 ] The human being feels that everything he creates is only a continuation of the workings of nature. He also knows that he is called upon to add something higher to what nature can do out of itself. He is conscious of the fact that he gives birth out of himself to another, higher nature in addition to outer nature.

[ 4 ] Thus the human being stands between two worlds; between the world that presses in upon him from outside and the world that he brings forth out of himself. His effort is to bring these two worlds into harmony. For, his whole being aims at harmony. He would like to live like the rose that does not ask about the whys and wherefores but rather blooms because it blooms. Schiller demands this of the human being in the words:

Are you seeking the highest, the greatest?
The plant can teach it to you.
What it is will-lessly, you must be will-fully—that's it!

[ 5 ] The plant can just be what it is. For no new realm springs forth from it, and therefore the fearful longing can also not arise in it: How am I to bring the two realms into harmony with each other?

[ 6 ] The goal for which man has striven throughout all the ages of history is to bring what lies within him into harmony with what nature creates out of itself. The fact that he himself is fruitful becomes the starting point for his coming to terms with nature; this coming to terms forms the content of his spiritual striving.

[ 7 ] There are two ways of coming to terms with nature. The human being either allows outer nature to become master over his inner nature, or he subjects this outer nature to himself. In the first case, he seeks to submit his own willing and existence to the outer course of events. In the second case, he draws the goal and direction of his willing and existence from himself and seeks to deal in some way or other with the events of nature that still go their own way.

[ 8 ] Let us speak about the first case first. It is in accordance with his essential being for man, above and beyond the realm of nature, to create yet another realm that in his sense is a higher one. He can do no other. How he relates to the outer world will depend upon the feelings and emotions he has with respect to this his own realm. Now he can have the same feelings with respect to his own realm as he has with respect to the facts of nature. He then allows the creations of his spirit to approach him in the same way he allows an event of the outer world, wind and weather, for example, to approach him. He perceives no difference in kind between what occurs in the outer world and what occurs within his soul. He therefore believes that they are only one realm, i.e., governed by one kind of law. But he does feel that the creations of his spirit are of a higher sort. He therefore places them above the creations of mere nature. Thus he transfers his own creations into the outer world and lets nature be governed by them. Consequently he knows only an outer world. For he transfers his own inner world outside himself. No wonder then that for him even his own self becomes a subordinate part of this outer world.

[ 9 ] One way man comes to terms with the outer world consists, therefore, in his regarding his inner being as something outer; he sets this inner being, which he has transferred into the outer world, both over nature and over himself as ruler and lawgiver.

[ 10 ] This characterizes the standpoint of the religious person. A divine world order is a creation of the human spirit. But the human being is not clear about the fact that the content of this world order has sprung from his own spirit. He therefore transfers it outside himself and subordinates himself to his own creation.

[ 11 ] The acting human being is not content simply to act. The flower blooms because it blooms. It does not ask about whys and wherefores. The human being relates to what he does. He connects feelings to what he does. He is either satisfied or dissatisfied with what he does. He makes value judgments about his actions. He regards one action as pleasing to him, and another as displeasing. The moment he feels this, the harmony of the world is disturbed for him. He believes that the pleasing action must bring about different consequences than one which evokes his displeasure. Now if he is not clear about the fact that, out of himself, he has attached the value judgments to his actions, he will believe that these values are attached to his actions by some outer power. He believes that an outer power differentiates the happenings of this world into ones that are pleasing and therefore good, and ones that are displeasing and therefore bad, evil. A person who feels this way makes no distinction between the facts of nature and the actions of the human being. He judges both from the same point of view. For him the whole cosmos is one realm, and the laws governing this realm correspond entirely to those which the human spirit brings forth out of itself.

[ 12 ] This way of coming to terms with the world reveals a basic characteristic of human nature. No matter how unclear the human being might be about his relationship to the world, he nevertheless seeks within himself the yardstick by which to measure all things. Out of a kind of unconscious feeling of sovereignty he decides on the absolute value of all happenings. No matter how one studies this, one finds that there are countless people who believe themselves governed by gods; there are none who do not independently, over the heads of the gods, judge what pleases or displeases these gods. The religious person cannot set himself up as the lord of the world; but he does indeed determine, out of his own absolute power, the likes and dislikes of the ruler of the world.

[ 13 ] One need only look at religious natures and one will find my assertions confirmed. What proclaimer of gods has not at the same time determined quite exactly what pleases these gods and what is repugnant to them? Every religion has its wise teachings about the cosmos, and each also asserts that its wisdom stems from one or more gods.

[ 14 ] If one wants to characterize the standpoint of the religious person one must say: He seeks to judge the world out of himself, but he does not have the courage also to ascribe to himself the responsibility for this judgment; therefore he invents beings for himself in the outer world that he can saddle with this responsibility.

[ 15 ] Such considerations seem to me to answer the question:

What is religion? The content of religion springs from the human spirit. But the human spirit does not want to acknowledge this origin to itself. The human being submits himself to his own laws, but he regards these laws as foreign. He establishes himself as ruler over himself. Every religion establishes the human “I” as regent of the world. Religion's being consists precisely in this, that it is not conscious of this fact. It regards as revelation from outside what it actually reveals to itself.

[ 16 ] The human being wishes to stand at the topmost place in the world. But he does not dare to pronounce himself the pinnacle of creation. Therefore he invents gods in his own image and lets the world be ruled by them. When he thinks this way, he is thinking religiously.

[ 17 ] Philosophical thinking replaces religious thinking. Wherever and whenever this occurs, human nature reveals itself to us in a very particular way.

[ 18 ] For the development of Western thinking, the transition from the mythological thinking of the Greeks into philosophical thinking is particularly interesting. I would now like to present three thinkers from that time of transition: Anaximander, Thales, and Parmenides. They represent three stages leading from religion to philosophy.

[ 19 ] It is characteristic of the first stage of this path that divine beings, from whom the content taken from the human “I” supposedly stems, are no longer acknowledged. But from habit one still holds fast to the view that this content stems from the outer world. Anaximander stands at this stage. He no longer speaks of gods as his Greek ancestors did. For him the highest principle, which rules the world, is not a being pictured in man's image. It is an impersonal being, the apeiron, the indefinite. It develops out of itself everything occurring in nature, not in the way a person creates, but rather out of natural necessity. But Anaximander always conceives this natural necessity to be analogous to actions that proceed according to human principles of reason. He pictures to himself, so to speak, a moral, natural lawfulness, a highest being, that treats the world like a human, moral judge without actually being one. For Anaximander, everything in the world occurs just as necessarily as a magnet attracts iron, but does so according to moral, i.e., human laws. Only from this point of view could he say: “Whence things arise, hence must they also pass away, in accordance with justice, for they must do penance and recompense because of unrighteousness in a way corresponding to the order of time.”

[ 20 ] This is the stage at which a thinker begins to judge philosophically. He lets go of the gods. He therefore no longer ascribes to the gods what comes from man. But he actually does nothing more than transfer onto something impersonal the characteristics formerly attributed to divine, i.e., personal beings.

[ 21 ] Thales approaches the world in an entirely free way. Even though he is a few years older than Anaximander, he is philosophically much more mature. His way of thinking is no longer religious at all.

[ 22 ] Within Western thinking Thales is the first to come to terms with the world in the second of the two ways mentioned above. Hegel has so often emphasized that thinking is the trait which distinguishes man from the animal. Thales is the first Western personality who dared to assign to thinking its sovereign position. He no longer bothered about whether gods have arranged the world in accordance with the order of thought or whether an apeiron directs the world in accordance with thinking. He only knew that he thought, and assumed that, because he thought, he also had a right to explain the world to himself in accordance with his thinking. Do not underestimate this standpoint of Thales! It represents an immense disregard for all religious preconceptions. For it was the declaration of the absoluteness of human thinking. Religious people say: The world is arranged the way we think it to be because God exists. And since they conceive of God in the image of man, it is obvious that the order of the world corresponds to the order of the human head. All that is a matter of complete indifference to Thales. He thinks about the world. And by virtue of his thinking he ascribes to himself the power to judge the world. He already has a feeling that thinking is only a human action; and accordingly he undertakes to explain the world with the help of this purely human thinking. With Thales the activity of knowing (das Erkennen) now enters into a completely new stage of its development. It ceases to draw its justification from the fact that it only copies what the gods have already sketched out. It takes from out of itself the right to decide upon the lawfulness of the world. What matters, to begin with, is not at all whether Thales believed water or anything else to be the principle of the world; what matters is that he said to himself: What the principle is, this I will decide by my thinking. He assumed it to be obvious that thinking has the power in such things. And therein lies his greatness.

[ 23 ] Just consider what was accomplished. No less an event than that spiritual power over world phenomena was given to man. Whoever trusts in his thinking says to himself: No matter how violently the waves of life may rage, no matter that the world seems a chaos: I am at peace, for all this mad commotion does not disquiet me, because I comprehend it.

[ 24 ] Heraclitus did not comprehend this divine peacefulness of the thinker who understands himself. He was of the view that all things are in eternal flux. That becoming is the essential beings of things. When I step into a river, it is no longer the same one as in the moment of my deciding to enter it. But Heraclitus overlooks just one thing. Thinking preserves what the river bears along with itself and finds that in the next moment something passes before my senses that is essentially the same as what was already there before.

[ 25 ] Like Thales, with his firm belief in the power of human thinking, Heraclitus is a typical phenomenon in the realm of those personalities who come to terms with the most significant questions of existence. He does not feel within himself the power to master by thinking the eternal flux of sense-perceptible becoming. Heraclitus looks into the world and it dissolves for him into momentary phenomena upon which one has no hold. If Heraclitus were right, then everything in the world would flutter away, and in the general chaos the human personality would also have to disintegrate. I would not be the same today as I was yesterday, and tomorrow I would be different than today. At every moment, the human being would face something totally new and would be powerless. For, it is doubtful that the experiences he has acquired up to a certain day can guide him in dealing with the totally new experiences that the next day will bring.

[ 26 ] Parmenides therefore sets himself in absolute opposition to Heraclitus. With all the one-sidedness possible only to a keen philosophical nature, he rejected all testimony brought by sense perception. For, it is precisely this ever-changing sense world that leads one astray into the view of Heraclitus. Parmenides therefore regarded those revelations as the only source of all truth which well forth from the innermost core of the human personality: the revelations of thinking. In his view the real being of things is not what flows past the senses; it is the thoughts, the ideas, that thinking discovers within this stream and to which it holds fast!

[ 27 ] Like so many things that arise in opposition to a particular one-sidedness, Parmenides's way of thinking also became disastrous. It ruined European thinking for centuries. It undermined man's confidence in his sense perception. Whereas an unprejudiced, naive look at the sense world draws from this world itself the thought-content that satisfies the human drive for knowledge, the philosophical movement developing in the sense of Parmenides believed it had to draw real truth only out of pure, abstract thinking.

[ 28 ] The thoughts we gain in living intercourse with the sense world have an individual character; they have within themselves the warmth of something experienced. We unfold our own personality by extracting ideas from the world. We feel ourselves as conquerors of the sense world when we capture it in the world of thoughts. Abstract, pure thinking has something impersonal and cold about it. We always feel a compulsion when we spin forth ideas out of pure thinking. Our feeling of self cannot be heightened through such thinking. For we must simply submit to the necessities of thought.

[ 29 ] Parmenides did not take into account that thinking is an activity of the human personality. He took it to be impersonal, as the eternal content of existence. What is thought is what exists, he once said.

[ 30 ] In the place of the old gods he thus set a new one. Whereas the older religious way of picturing things had set the whole feeling, willing, and thinking man as God at the pinnacle of the world, Parmenides took one single human activity, one part, out of the human personality and made a divine being out of it.

[ 31 ] In the realm of views about the moral life of man Parmenides is complemented by Socrates. His statement that virtue is teachable is the ethical consequence of Parmenides's view that thinking is equitable with being. If this is true, then human action can claim to have raised itself to something worthily existing only when human action flows from thinking, from that abstract, logical thinking to which man must simply yield himself, i.e., which he has to acquire for himself as learner.

[ 32 ] It is clear that a common thread can be traced through the development of Greek thought. The human being seeks to transfer into the outer world what belongs to him, what springs from his own being, and in this way to subordinate himself to his own being. At first he takes the whole fullness of his nature and sets likenesses of it as gods over himself; then he takes one single human activity, thinking, and sets it over himself as a necessity to which he must yield. That is what is so remarkable in the development of man, that he unfolds his powers, that he fights for the existence and unfolding of these powers in the world, but that he is far from being able to acknowledge these powers as his own.

[ 33 ] One of the greatest philosophers of all time has made this great, human self-deception into a bold and wonderful system. This philosopher is Plato. The ideal world, the inner representations that arise around man within his spirit while his gaze is directed at the multiplicity of outer things, this becomes for Plato a higher world of existence of which that multiplicity is only a copy. “The things of this world which our senses perceive have no true being at all: they are always becoming but never are. They have only a relative existence; they are, in their totality, only in and through their relationship to each other; one can therefore just as well call their whole existence a non-existence. They are consequently also not objects of any actual knowledge. For, only about what is, in and for itself and always in the same way, can there be such knowledge; they, on the other hand, are only the object of what we, through sensation, take them to be. As long as we are limited only to our perception of them, we are like people who sit in a dark cave so firmly bound that they cannot even turn their heads and who see nothing, except, on the wall facing them, by the light of a fire burning behind them, the shadow images of real things which are led across between them and the fire, and who in fact also see of each other, yes each of himself, only the shadows on that wall. Their wisdom, however, would be to predict the sequence of those shadows which they have learned to know from experience.” The tree that I see and touch, whose flowers I smell, is therefore the shadow of the idea of the tree. And this idea is what is truly real. The idea, however, is what lights up within my spirit when I look at the tree. What I perceive with my senses is thus made into a copy of what my spirit shapes through the perception.

[ 34 ] Everything that Plato believes to be present as the world of ideas in the beyond, outside things, is man's inner world. The content of the human spirit, torn out of man and pictured as a world unto itself, as a higher, true world lying in the beyond: that is Platonic philosophy.

[ 35 ] I consider Ralph Waldo Emerson to be right when he says: “Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, ‘Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book.’ These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are the cornerstone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.”² Let me express the last sentence somewhat more exactly in the following form. The way Plato felt about the relationship of the human spirit to the world, this is how the overwhelming majority of people still feel about it today. They feel that the content of the human spirit—human feeling, willing, and thinking—does stand at the top of the ladder of phenomena; but they know what to do with this spiritual content only when they conceive of it as existing outside of man as a divinity or as some other kind of higher being such as a necessary natural order, or as a moral world order—or as any of the other names that man has given to what he himself brings forth.

[ 36 ] One can understand why the human being does this. Sense impressions press in upon him from outside. He sees colors and hears sounds. His feelings and thoughts arise in him as he sees the colors and hears the sounds. These stem from his own nature. He asks himself: How can I, out of myself, add anything to what the world gives me? It seems to him completely arbitrary to draw something out of himself to complement the outer world.

[ 37 ] But the moment he says to himself: What I am feeling and thinking, this I do not bring to the world out of myself; another, higher being has laid this into the world, and I only draw it forth from the world—at this moment he feels relieved. One only has to tell the human being: Your opinions and thoughts do not come from yourself; a god has revealed them to you—then he is reconciled with himself. And if he has divested himself of his belief in God, he then sets in His place the natural order of things, eternal laws. The fact that he cannot find this God, these eternal laws, anywhere outside in the world, that he must rather first create them for the world if they are to be there—this he does not want to admit to himself at first. It is difficult for him to say to himself: The world outside me is not divine; by virtue of my essential being, however, I assume the right to project the divine into the outer world.

[ 38 ] What do the laws of the pendulum that arose in Galileo's spirit as he watched the swinging church lamp matter to the lamp? But man himself cannot exist without establishing a relationship between the outer world and the world of his inner being. His spiritual life is a continuous projecting of his spirit into the sense world. Through his own work, in the course of historical life, there occurs the interpenetration of nature and spirit. The Greek thinkers wanted nothing more than to believe that man was already born into a relationship which actually can come about only through himself. They did not want it to be man who first consummates the marriage of spirit and nature; they wanted to confront this as a marriage already consummated, to regard it as an accomplished fact.

[ 39 ] Aristotle saw what is so contradictory in transferring the ideas—arising in man's spirit from the things of the world—into some supersensible world in the beyond. But even he did not recognize that things first receive their ideal aspect when man confronts them and creatively adds this aspect to them. Rather, he assumed that this ideal element, as entelechy, is itself at work in things as their actual principle. The natural consequence of this basic view of his was that he traced the moral activity of man back to his original, moral, natural potential. The physical drives ennoble themselves in the course of human evolution and then appear as willing guided by reason. Virtue consists in this reasonable willing.

[ 40 ] Taken at face value, this seems to indicate that Aristotle believed that moral activity, at least, has its source in man's own personality, that man himself gives himself the direction and goal of his actions out of his own being and does not allow these to be prescribed for him from outside. But even Aristotle does not dare to stay with this picture of a human being who determines his own destiny for himself. What appears in man as individual, reasonable activity is, after all, only the imprint of a general world reason existing outside of him. This world reason does realize itself within the individual person, but has its own independent, higher existence over and above him. .

[ 41 ] Even Aristotle pushes outside of man what he finds present only within man. The tendency of Greek thinking from Thales to Aristotle is to think that what is encountered within the inner life of man is an independent being existing for itself and to trace the things of the world back to this being.

[ 42 ] Man's knowledge must pay the consequences when he thinks that the mediating of spirit with nature, which he himself is meant to accomplish, is accomplished by outer powers. He should immerse himself in his own inner being and seek there the point of connection between the sense world and the ideal world. If, instead of this, he looks into the outer world to find this point, then, because he cannot find it there, he must necessarily arrive eventually at the doubt in any reconciliation between the two powers. The period of Greek thought that follows Aristotle presents us with this stage of doubt. It announces itself with the Stoics and Epicureans and reaches its high-point with the Skeptics.

[ 43 ] The Stoics and Epicureans feel instinctively that one cannot find the essential being of things along the path taken by their predecessors. They leave this path without bothering very much about finding a new one. For the older philosophers, the main thing was the world as a whole. They wanted to discover the laws of the world and believed that knowledge of man must result all by itself from knowledge of the world, because for them man was a part of the world-whole like all other things. The Stoics and Epicureans made man the main object of their reflections. They wanted to give his life its appropriate content. They thought about how man should live his life. Everything else was only a means to this end. The Stoics considered all philosophy to be worthwhile only to the extent that through it man could know how he is to live his life. They considered the right life for man to be one that is in harmony with nature. In order to realize this harmony with nature in one's own actions, one must first know what is in harmony with nature.

[ 44 ] In the Stoics' teachings there lies an important admission about the human personality. Namely, that the human personality can be its own purpose and goal and that everything else, even knowledge, is there only for the sake of this personality.

[ 45 ] The Epicureans went even further in this direction. Their striving consisted in shaping life in such a way that man would feel as content as possible in it or that it would afford him the greatest possible pleasure. One's own life stood so much in the foreground for them that they practiced knowledge only for the purpose of freeing man from superstitious fear and from the discomfort that befalls him when he does not understand nature.

[ 46 ] A heightened human feeling of oneself runs through the views of the Stoics and Epicureans compared to those of older Greek thinkers.

[ 47 ] This view appears in a finer, more spiritual way in the Skeptics. They said to themselves: When a person is forming ideas about things, he can form them only out of himself. And only out of himself can he draw the conviction that an idea corresponds to some thing. They saw nothing in the outer world that would provide a basis for connecting thing and idea. And they regarded as delusion and combated what anyone before them had said about any such bases.

[ 48 ] The basic characteristic of the Skeptical view is modesty. Its adherents did not dare to deny that there is a connection in the outer world between idea and thing; they merely denied that man could know of any such connection. Therefore they did indeed make man the source of his knowing, but they did not regard this knowing as the expression of true wisdom.

[ 49 ] Basically, Skepticism represents human knowing's declaration of bankruptcy. The human being succumbs to the preconception he has created for himself—that the truth is present outside him in a finished form—through the conviction he has gained that his truth is only an inner one, and therefore cannot be the right one at all.

[ 50 ] Thales begins to reflect upon the world with utter confidence in the power of the human spirit. The doubt—that what human pondering must regard as the ground of the world could not actually be this ground—lay very far from his naive belief in man's cognitive ability. With the Skeptics a complete renunciation of real truth has taken the place of this belief.

[ 51 ] The course of development taken by Greek thinking lies between the two extremes of naive, blissful confidence in man's cognitive ability and absolute lack of confidence in it. One can understand this course of development if one considers how man's mental pictures of the causes of the world have changed. What the oldest Greek philosophers thought these causes to be had sense-perceptible characteristics. Through this, one had a right to transfer these causes into the outer world. Like every other object in the sense world, the primal water of Thales belongs to outer reality. The matter became quite different when Parmenides stated that true existence lies in thinking. For, this thinking, in accordance with its true existence, is to be perceived only within man's inner being. Through Parmenides there first arose the great question: How does thought-existence, spiritual existence, relate to the outer existence that our senses perceive? One was accustomed then to picturing the relationship of the highest existence to that existence which surrounds us in daily life in the same way that Thales had thought the relationship to be between his sense-perceptible primal thing and the things that surround us. It is altogether possible to picture to oneself the emergence of all things out of the water that Thales presents as the primal source of all existence, to picture it as analogous to certain sense-perceptible processes that occur daily before our very eyes. And the urge to picture relations in the world surrounding us in the sense of such an analogy still remained even when, through Parmenides and his followers, pure thinking and its content, the world of ideas, were made into the primal source of all existence. Men were indeed ready to see that the spiritual world is a higher one than the sense world, that the deepest world-content reveals itself within the inner being of man, but they were not ready at the same time to picture the relationship between the sense world and the ideal world as an ideal one. They pictured it as a sense-perceptible relationship, as a factual emergence. If they had thought of it as spiritual, then they could peacefully have acknowledged that the content of the world of ideas is present only in the inner being of man. For then what is higher would not need to precede in time what is derivative. A sense-perceptible thing can reveal a spiritual content, but this content can first be born out of the sense-perceptible thing at the moment of revelation. This content is a later product of evolution than the sense world. But if one pictures the relationship to be one of emergence, then that from which the other emerges must also precede it in time. In this way the child—the spiritual world born of the sense world—was made into the mother of the sense world. This is the psychological reason why the human being transfers his world out into outer reality and declares—with reference to this his possession and product—that it has an objective existence in and for itself, and that he has to subordinate himself to it, or, as the case may be, that he can take possession of it only through revelation or in some other way by which the already finished truth can make its entry into his inner being.

[ 52 ] This interpretation which man gives to his striving for truth, to his activity of knowing, corresponds with a profound inclination of his nature. Goethe characterized this inclination in his Aphorisms in Prose in the following words: “The human being never realizes just how anthropomorphic he is.” And: “Fall and propulsion. To want to declare the movement of the heavenly bodies by these is actually a hidden anthropomorphism; it is the way a walker goes across a field. The lifted foot sinks down, the foot left behind strives forward and falls; and so on continuously from departing until arriving.” All explanation of nature, indeed, consists in the fact that experiences man has of himself are interpreted into the object. Even the simplest phenomena are explained in this way. When we explain the propulsion of one body by another, we do so by picturing to ourselves that the one body exerts upon the other the same effect as we do when we propel a body. In the same way as we do this with something trivial, the religious person does it with his picture of God. He takes human ways of thinking and acting and interprets them into nature; and the philosophers we have presented, from Parmenides to Aristotle, also interpreted human thought-processes into nature. [ 53 ] Max Stirner has this human need in mind when he says: “What haunts the universe and carries on its mysterious, ‘incomprehensible’ doings is, in fact, the arcane ghost that we call the highest being. And fathoming this ghost, understanding it, discovering reality in it (proving the ‘existence of God’)—this is the task men have set themselves for thousands of years; they tormented themselves with the horrible impossibility, with the endless work of the Danaides, of transforming the ghost into a nonghost, the unreal into a real, the spirit into a whole and embodied person. Behind the existing world they sought the ‘thing-in-itself,’ the essential being; they sought the non-thing behind the thing.”

[ 54 ] The last phase of Greek philosophy, Neo-Platonism, offers a splendid proof of how inclined the human spirit is to misconstrue its own being and therefore its relationship to the world. This teaching, whose most significant proponent is Plotin, broke with the tendency to transfer the content of the human spirit into a realm outside the living reality within which man himself stands. The Neo-Platonist seeks within his own soul the place at which the highest object of knowledge is to be found. Through that intensification of cognitive forces which one calls ecstasy, he seeks within himself to behold the essential being of world phenomena. The heightening of the inner powers of perception is meant to lift the human spirit onto a level of life at which he feels directly the revelation of this essential being. This teaching is a kind of mysticism. It is based on a truth that is to be found in every kind of mysticism. Immersion into one's own inner being yields the deepest human wisdom. But man must first prepare himself for this immersion. He must accustom himself to behold a reality that is free of everything the senses communicate to us. People who have brought their powers of knowledge to this height speak of an inner light that has dawned for them. Jakob Böhme, the Christian mystic of the seventeenth century, regarded himself as inwardly illumined in this way. He sees within himself the realm he must designate as the highest one knowable to man. He says: “Within the human heart (Gemüt) there lie the indications (Signatur), quite artfully set forth, of the being of all being.”

[ 55 ] Neo-Platonism sets the contemplation of the human inner world in the place of speculation about an outer world in the beyond. As a result, the highly characteristic phenomenon appears that the Neo-Platonist regards his own inner being as something foreign. One has taken things all the way to knowledge of the place at which the ultimate part of the world is to be sought; but one has wrongly interpreted what is to be found in this place. The Neo-Platonist therefore describes the inner experiences of his ecstasy like Plato describes the being of his supersensible world.

[ 56 ] It is characteristic that Neo-Platonism excludes from the essential being of the inner world precisely that which constitutes its actual core. The state of ecstasy is supposed to occur only when self-consciousness is silent. It was therefore only natural that in Neo-Platonism the human spirit could not behold itself, its own being, in its true light.

[ 57 ] The courses taken by the ideas that form the content of Greek philosophy found their conclusion in this view. They represent the longing of man to recognize, to behold, and to worship his own essential being as something foreign.

[ 58 ] In the normal course of development within the spiritual evolution of the West, the discovery of egoism would have to have followed upon Neo-Platonism. That means, man would have to have recognized as his own being what he had considered to be a foreign being. He would have to have said to himself: The highest thing there is in the world given to man is his individual “I” whose being comes to manifestation within the inner life of the personality.

[ 59 ] This natural course of Western spiritual development was held up by the spread of Christian teachings. Christianity presents, in popular pictures that are almost tangible, what Greek philosophy expressed in the language of sages. When one considers how deeply rooted in human nature the urge is to renounce one's own being, it seems understandable that this teaching has gained such incomparable power over human hearts. A high level of spiritual development is needed to satisfy this urge in a philosophical way. The most naive heart suffices to satisfy this urge in the form of Christian faith. Christianity does not present—as the highest being of the world—a finely spiritual content like Plato's world of ideas, nor an experience streaming forth from an inner light which must first be kindled; instead, it presents processes with attributes of reality that can be grasped by the senses. It goes so far, in fact, as to revere the highest being in a single historical person. The philosophical spirit of Greece could not present us with such palpable mental pictures. Such mental pictures lay in its past, in its folk mythology. Hamann, Herder's predecessor in the realm of theology, commented one time that Plato had never been a philosopher for children. But that it was for childish spirits that “the holy spirit had had the ambition to become a writer.”

[ 60 ] And for centuries this childish form of human self-estrangement has had the greatest conceivable influence upon the philosophical development of thought. Like fog the Christian teachings have hung before the light from which knowledge of man's own being should have gone forth. Through all kinds of philosophical concepts, the church fathers of the first Christian centuries seek to give a form to their popular mental pictures that would make them acceptable also to an educated consciousness. And the later teachers in the church, of whom Saint Augustine is the most significant, continue these efforts in the same spirit. The content of Christian faith had such a fascinating effect that there could be no question of doubt as to its truth, but only of lifting up of this truth into a more spiritual, more ideal sphere. The philosophy of the teachers within the church is a transforming of the content of Christian faith into an edifice of ideas. The general character of this thought-edifice could therefore be no other than that of Christianity: the transferring of man's being out into the world, self-renunciation. Thus it came about that Augustine again arrives at the right place, where the essential being of the world is to be found, and that he again finds something foreign in this place. Within man's own being he seeks the source of all truth; he declares the inner experiences of the soul to be the foundations of knowledge. But the teachings of Christian faith have set an extra-human content at the place where he was seeking. Therefore, at the right place, he found the wrong beings.

[ 61 ] There now follows a centuries-long exertion of human thinking whose sole purpose, by expending all the power of the human spirit, was to bring proof that the content of this spirit is not to be sought within this spirit but rather at that place to which Christian faith has transferred this content. The movement in thought that grew up out of these efforts is called Scholasticism. All the hair-splittings of the Schoolmen can be of no interest in the context of the present essay. For that movement in ideas does not represent in the least a development in the direction of knowledge of the personal “I.”

[ 62 ] The thickness of the fog in which Christianity enshrouded human self-knowledge becomes most evident through the fact that the Western spirit, out of itself, could not take even one step on the path to this self-knowledge. The Western spirit needed a decisive push from outside. It could not find upon the ground of the soul what it had sought so long in the outer world. But it was presented with proof that this outer world could not be constituted in such a way that the human spirit could find there the essential being it sought. This push was given by the blossoming of the natural sciences in the sixteenth century. As long as man had only an imperfect picture of how natural processes are constituted, there was room in the outer world for divine beings and for the working of a personal divine will. But there was no longer a place, in the natural picture of the world sketched out by Copernicus and Kepler, for the Christian picture. And as Galileo laid the foundations for an explanation of natural processes through natural laws, the belief in divine laws had to be shaken.

[ 63 ] Now one had to seek in a new way the being that man recognizes as the highest and that had been pushed out of the external world for him.

[ 64 ] Francis Bacon drew the philosophical conclusions from the presuppositions given by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. His service to the Western world view is basically a negative one. He called upon man in a powerful way to direct his gaze freely and without bias upon reality, upon life. As obvious as this call seems, there is no denying that the development of Western thought has sinned heavily against it for centuries. Man's own “I” also belongs within the category of real things. And does it not almost seem as though man's natural predisposition makes him unable to look at this “I” without bias? Only the development of a completely unbiased sense, directed immediately upon what is real, can lead to self-knowledge. The path of knowledge of nature is also the path of knowledge of the “I.”

[ 65 ] Two streams now entered into the development of Western thought that tended, by different paths, in the direction of the new goals of knowledge necessitated by the natural sciences. One goes back to Jakob Böhme, the other to René Descartes.

[ 66 ] Jakob Böhme and Descartes no longer stood under the influence of Scholasticism. Böhme saw that nowhere in cosmic space was there a place for heaven; he therefore became a mystic. He sought heaven within the inner being of man. Descartes recognized that the adherence of the Schoolmen to Christian teachings was only a matter of centuries-long habituation to these pictures. Therefore he considered it necessary first of all to doubt these habitual pictures and to seek a way of knowledge by which man can arrive at a kind of knowing whose certainty he does not assert out of habit, but which can be guaranteed at every, moment through his own spiritual powers.

[ 67 ] Those are therefore strong initial steps which—both with Böhme and with Descartes—the human “I” takes to know itself. Both were nevertheless overpowered by the old preconceptions in what they brought forth later. It has already been indicated that Jakob Böhme has a certain spiritual kinship with the Neo-Platonists. His knowledge is an entering into his own inner being. But what confronts him within this inner being is not the “I” of man but rather only the Christian God again. He becomes aware that within his own heart (Gemüt) there lies what the person who needs knowledge is craving. Fulfillment of the greatest human longings streams toward him from there. But this does not lead him to the view that the “I,” by intensifying its cognitive powers, is also able out of itself to satisfy its demands. This brings him, rather, to the belief that, on the path of knowledge into the human heart, he had truly found the God whom Christianity had sought upon a false path. Instead of self-knowledge, Jakob Böhme seeks union with God; instead of life with the treasures of his own inner being, he seeks a life in God.

[ 68 ] It is obvious that the way man thinks about his actions, about his moral life, will also depend upon human self-knowledge or self-misapprehension. The realm of morality does in fact establish itself as a kind of upper story above the purely natural processes. Christian belief, which already regards these natural processes as flowing from the divine will, seeks this will all the more within morality. Christian moral teachings show more clearly than almost anything else the distortedness of this world view. No matter how enormous the sophistry is that theology has applied to this realm: questions remain which, from the standpoint of Christianity, show definite features of considerable contradiction. If a primal being like the Christian God is assumed, it is incomprehensible how the sphere of human action can fall into two realms: into that of the good and into that of the evil. For, all human actions would have to flow from the primal being and consequently bear traits homogeneous with their origin. Human actions would in fact have to be divine. Just as little can human responsibility be explained on this basis. Man is after all directed by the divine will. He can therefore give himself up only to this will; he can let happen through him only what God brings about.

[ 69 ] In the views one held about morality, precisely the same thing occurred as in one's views about knowledge. Man followed his inclination to tear his own self out of himself and to set it up as something foreign. And just as in the realm of knowledge no other content could be given to the primal being—regarded as lying outside man—than the content drawn from his own inner being, so no moral aims and impulses for action could be found in this primal being except those belonging to the human soul. What man, in his deepest inner being, was convinced should happen, this he regarded as something willed by the primal being of the world. In this way a duality in the ethical realm was created. Over against the self that one had within oneself and out of which one had to act, one set one's own content as something morally determinative. And through this, moral demands could arise. Man's self was not allowed to follow itself; it had to follow something foreign. Selflessness in one's actions in the moral field corresponds to self-estrangement in the realm of knowledge. Those actions are good in which the “I” follows something foreign; those actions are bad, on the other hand, in which it follows itself. In self-will Christianity sees the source of all evil. That could never have happened if one had seen that everything moral can draw its content only out of one's own self. One can sum up all the Christian moral teachings in one sentence:

If man admits to himself that he can follow only the commandments of his own being and if he acts according to them, then he is evil; if this truth is hidden from him and if he sets—or allows to be set—his own commandments as foreign ones over himself in order to act according to them, then he is good.

[ 70 ] The moral teaching of selflessness is elaborated perhaps more completely than anywhere else in a book from the fourteenth century, German Theology. The author of this book is unknown to us. He carried self-renunciation far enough to be sure that his name did not come down to posterity. In this book it is stated: “That is no true being and has no being which does not exist within the perfect; rather it is by chance or it is a radiance and a shining that is no being or has no being except in the fire from which the radiance flows, or in the sun, or in the light. The Bible speaks of faith and the truth: sin is nothing other than the fact that the creature turns himself away from the unchangeable good and toward the changeable good, which means that he turns from the perfect to the divided and to the imperfect and most of all to himself. Now mark. If the creature assumes something good—such as being, living, knowing, recognizing, capability, and everything in short that one should call good—and believes that he is this good, or that it is his or belongs to him, or that it is of him, no matter how often nor how much results from this, then he is going astray. What else did the devil do or what else was his fall and estrangement than that he assumed that he was also something and something would be his and something would also belong to him? That assumption and his “I” and his “me,” his “for me” and his “mine,” that was his estrangement and his fall. That is how it still is. For, everything that one considers good or should call good belongs to no one, but only to the eternal true good which God is alone, and whoever assumes it of himself acts wrongly and against God.”

[ 71 ] A change in moral views from the old Christian ones is also connected with the turn that Jakob Böhme gave to man's relationship to God. God still works as something higher in the human soul to effect the good, but He does at least work within this self and not from outside upon the self. An internalizing of moral action occurs thereby. The rest of Christianity demanded only an outer obedience to the divine will. With Jakob Böhme the previously separated entities—the really personal and the personal that was made into God—enter into a living relationship. Through this, the source of the moral is indeed now transferred into man's inner being, but the moral principle of selflessness seems to be even more strongly emphasized. If God is regarded as an outer power, then the human self is the one actually acting. It acts either in God's sense or against it. But if God is transferred into man's inner being, then man himself no longer acts, but rather God in him. God expresses himself directly in human life. Man foregoes any life of his own; he makes himself a part of the divine life. He feels himself in God, God in himself; he grows into the primal being; he becomes an organ of it.

[ 72 ] In this German mysticism man has therefore paid for his participation in the divine life with the most complete extinguishing of his personality, of his “I.” Jakob Böhme and the mystics who were of his view did not feel the loss of the personal element. On the contrary: they experienced something particularly uplifting in the thought that they were directly participating in the divine life, that they were members in a divine organism. An organism cannot exist, after all, without its members. The mystic therefore felt himself to be something necessary within the world-whole, as a being that is indispensable to God. Angelus Silesius, the mystic who felt things in the same spirit as Jakob Böhme, expresses this in a beautiful statement:

I know that without me God cannot live an instant,
Came I to naught, he needs must yield the spirit.

And even more characteristically in another one:

Without me God cannot a single worm create;
Do I not co-maintain it, it must at once crack open.

[ 73 ] The human “I” asserts its rights here in the most powerful way vis-à-vis its own image which it has transferred into the outer world. To be sure, the supposed primal being is not yet told that it is man's own being set over against himself, but at least man's own being is considered to be the maintainer of the divine primal ground.

[ 74 ] Descartes had a strong feeling for the fact that man, through his thought-development, had brought himself into a warped relationship with the world. Therefore, to begin with, he met everything that had come forth from this thought-development with doubt. Only when one doubts everything that the centuries have developed as truths can one—in his opinion—gain the necessary objectivity for a new point of departure. It lay in the nature of things that this doubt would lead Descartes to the human “I.” For, the more a person regards everything else as something that he still must seek, the more he will have an intense feeling of his own seeking personality. He can say to himself: Perhaps I am erring on the paths of existence; then the erring one is thrown all the more clearly back upon himself. Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) indicates this. Descartes presses even further. He is aware that the way man arrives at knowledge of himself should be a model for any other knowledge he means to acquire. Clarity and definiteness seem to Descartes to be the most prominent characteristics of self-knowledge. Therefore he also demands these two characteristics of all other knowledge. Whatever man can distinguish just as clearly and definitely as his own existence: only that can stand as certain.

[ 75 ] With this, the absolutely central place of the “I” in the world-whole is at least recognized in the area of cognitive methodology. Man determines the how of his knowledge of the world according to the how of his knowledge of himself, and no longer asks for any outer being to justify this how. Man does not want to think in the way a god prescribes knowing activity to be, but rather in the way he determines this for himself. From now on, with respect to the world, man draws the power of his wisdom from himself.

[ 76 ] In connection with the what, Descartes did not take the same step. He set to work to gain mental pictures about the world, and—in accordance with the cognitive principle just presented—searched through his own inner being for such mental pictures. There he found the mental picture of God. It was of course nothing more than the mental picture of the human “I.” But Descartes did not recognize this. The idea of God as the altogether most perfect being » brought his thinking onto a completely wrong path. This one characteristic, that of the altogether greatest perfection, outshone for him all the other characteristics of the central being. He said to himself: Man, who is himself imperfect, cannot out of himself create the mental picture of an altogether most perfect being. Consequently this altogether most perfect being exists. If Descartes had investigated the true content of his mental picture of God, he would have found that it is exactly the same as the mental picture of the “I,” and that perfection is only a conceptual enhancement of this content. The essential content of an ivory ball is not changed by my thinking of it as infinitely large. Just as little does the mental picture of the “I” become something else through such an enhancement.

[ 77 ] The proof that Descartes brings for the existence of God is therefore again nothing other than a paraphrasing of the human need to make one's own “I,” in the form of a being outside man, into the ground of the world. But here indeed the fact presents itself with full clarity that man can find no content of its own for this primal being existing outside man, but rather can only lend this being the content of his mental picture of the “I” in a form that has not been significantly changed.

[ 78 ] Spinoza took no step forward on the path that must lead to the conquest of the mental picture of the “I”; he took a step backward. For Spinoza has no feeling of the unique position of the human “I.” For him the stream of world processes consists only in a system of natural necessity, just as for the Christian philosophers it consisted only in a system of divine acts of will. Here as there the human “I” is only a part within this system. For the Christian, man is in the hands of God; for Spinoza he is in those of natural world happenings. With Spinoza the Christian God received a different character. A philosopher who has grown up in a time when natural-scientific insights are blooming cannot acknowledge a God who directs the world arbitrarily; he can acknowledge only a primal being who exists because his existence, through itself, is a necessity, and who guides the course of the world according to the unchangeable laws that flow from his own absolutely necessary being. Spinoza has no consciousness of the fact that man takes the image in which he pictures this necessity from his own content. For this reason Spinoza's moral ideal also becomes something impersonal, unindividual. In accordance with his presuppositions he cannot indeed see his ideal to be in the perfecting of the “I,” in the enhancement of man's own powers, but rather in the permeating of the “I” with the divine world content, with the highest knowledge of the objective God. To lose oneself in this God should be the goal of human striving.

[ 79 ] The path Descartes took—to start with the “I” and press forward to world knowledge—is extended from now on by the philosophers of modern times. The Christian theological method, which had no confidence in the power of the human “I” as an organ of knowledge, at least was overcome. One thing was recognized: that the “I” itself must find the highest being. The path from there to the other point—to the insight that the content lying within the “I” is also the highest being—is, to be sure, a long one.

[ 80 ] Less thoughtfully than Descartes did the two English philosophers Locke and Hume approach their investigation of the paths that the human “I” takes to arrive at enlightenment about itself and the world. One thing above all was lacking in both of them: a healthy, free gaze into man's inner being. Therefore they could also gain no mental picture of the great difference that exists between knowledge of outer things and knowledge of the human “I.” Everything they say relates only to the acquisition of outer knowledge. Locke entirely overlooks the fact that man, by enlightening himself about outer things, sheds a light upon them that streams from his own inner being. He believes therefore that all knowledge stems from experience. But what is experience? Galileo sees a swinging church lamp. It leads him to find the laws by which a body swings. He has experienced two things: firstly, through his senses, outer processes; secondly, from out of himself, the mental picture of a law that enlightens him about these processes, that makes them comprehensible. One can now of course call both of these experience. But then one fails to recognize the difference, in fact, that exists between the two parts of this cognitive process. A being that could not draw upon the content of his being could stand eternally before the swinging church lamp: the sense perception would never complement itself with a conceptual law. Locke and all who think like him allow themselves to be deceived by something—namely by the way the content of what is to be known approaches us. It simply rises up, in fact, upon the horizon of our consciousness. Experience consists in what thus arises. But the fact must be recognized that the content of the laws of experience is developed by the “I” in its encounter with experience. Two things reveal themselves in Hume. One is that, as already mentioned, he does not recognize the nature of the “I,” and therefore, exactly like Locke, derives the content of the laws from experience. The other thing is that this content, by being separated from the “I,” loses itself completely in indefiniteness, hangs freely in the air without support or foundation. Hume recognizes that outer experience communicates only unconnected processes, that it does not at the same time, along with these processes, provide the laws by which they are connected. Since Hume knows nothing about the being of the “I,” he also cannot derive from it any justification for connecting the processes. He therefore derives these laws from the vaguest source one could possibly imagine: from habit. A person sees that a certain process always follows upon another; the fall of a stone is followed by the indentation of the ground on which it falls. As a result man habituates himself to thinking of such processes as connected. All knowledge loses its significance if one takes one's start from such presuppositions. The connection between the processes and their laws acquires something of a purely chance nature.

[ 81 ] We see in George Berkeley a person for whom the creative being of the “I” has come fully to consciousness. He had a clear picture of the “I's” own activity in the coming about of all knowledge. When I see an object, he said to himself, I am active. I create my perception for myself. The object of my perception would remain forever beyond my consciousness, it would not be there for me, if I did not continuously enliven its dead existence by my activity. I perceive only my enlivening activity, and not what precedes it objectively as the dead thing. No matter where I look within the sphere of my consciousness: everywhere I see myself as the active one, as the creative one. In Berkeley's thinking, the “I” acquires a universal life. What do I know of any existence of things, if I do not picture this existence?

[ 82 ] For Berkeley the world consists of creative spirits who out of themselves form a world. But at this level of knowledge there again appeared, even with him, the old preconception. He indeed lets the “I” create its world for itself, but he does not give it at the same time the power to create itself out of itself. It must again proffer a mental picture of God. The creative principle in the “I” is God, even for Berkeley.

[ 83 ] But this philosopher does show us one thing. Whoever really immerses himself into the essential being of the creative “I” does not come back out of it again to an outer being except by forcible means. And Berkeley does proceed forcibly. Under no compelling necessity he traces the creativity of the “I” back to God. Earlier philosophers emptied the “I” of its content and through this gained a content for their God. Berkeley does not do this. Therefore he can do nothing other than set, beside the creative spirits, yet one more particular spirit that basically is of exactly the same kind as they and therefore completely unnecessary, after all.

[ 84 ] This is even more striking in the German philosopher Leibniz. He also recognized the creative activity of the “I.” He had a very clear overview of the scope of this activity; he saw that it was inwardly consistent, that it was founded upon itself. The “I” therefore became for him a world in itself, a monad. And everything that has existence can have it only through the fact that it gives itself a self-enclosed content. Only monads, i.e., beings creating out of and within themselves, exist: separate worlds in themselves that do not have to rely on anything outside themselves. Worlds exist, no world. Each person is a world, a monad, in himself. If now these worlds are after all in accord with one another, if they know of each other and think the contents of their knowledge, then this can only stem from the fact that a predestined accord (pre-established harmony) exists. The world, in fact, is arranged in such a way that the one monad creates out of itself something which corresponds to the activity in the others. To bring about this accord Leibniz of course again needs the old God. He has recognized that the “I” is active, creative, within his inner being, that it gives its content to itself; the fact that the “I” itself also brings this content into relationship with the other content of the world remained hidden to him. Therefore he did not free himself from the mental picture of God. Of the two demands that lie in the Goethean statement—“If I know my relationship to myself and to the outer world, then I call it truth”—Leibniz understood only the one.

[ 85 ] This development of European thought manifests a very definite character. Man must draw out of himself the best that he can know. He in fact practices self-knowledge. But he always shrinks back again from the thought of also recognizing that what he has created is in fact self-created. He feels himself to be too weak to carry the world. Therefore he saddles someone else with this burden. And the goals he sets for himself would lose their weight for him if he acknowledged their origin to himself; therefore he burdens his goals with powers that he believes he takes from outside. Man glorifies his child but without wanting to acknowledge his own fatherhood.

[ 86 ] In spite of the currents opposing it, human self-knowledge made steady progress. At the point where this self-knowledge began to threaten man's belief in the beyond, it met Kant. Insight into the nature of human knowing had shaken the power of those proofs which people had thought up to support belief in the beyond. One had gradually gained a picture of real knowledge and therefore saw through the artificiality and tortured nature of the seeming ideas that were supposed to give enlightenment about other-worldly powers. A devout, believing man like Kant could fear that a further development along this path would lead to the disintegration of all faith. This must have seemed to his deeply religious sense like a great, impending misfortune for mankind. Out of his fear of the destruction of religious mental pictures there arose for him the need to investigate thoroughly the relationship of human knowing to matters of faith. How is knowing possible and over what can it extend itself? That is the question Kant posed himself, with the hope, right from the beginning, of being able to gain from his answer the firmest possible support for faith.

[ 87 ] Kant took up two things from his predecessors. Firstly, that there is a knowledge in some areas that is indubitable. The truths of pure mathematics and the general teachings of logic and physics seem to him to be in this category. Secondly, he based himself upon Hume in his assertion that no absolutely sure truths can come from experience. Experience teaches only that we have so and so often observed certain connections; nothing can be determined by experience as to whether these connections are also necessary ones. If there are indubitable, necessary truths and if they cannot stem from experience: then from what do they stem? They must be present in the human soul before experience. Now it becomes a matter of distinguishing between the part of knowledge that stems from experience and the part that cannot be drawn from this source of knowledge. Experience occurs through the fact that I receive impressions. These impressions are given through sensations. The content of these sensations cannot be given us in any other way than through experience. But these sensations, such as light, color, tone, warmth, hardness, etc., would present only a chaotic tangle if they were not brought into certain interconnections. In these interconnections the contents of sensation first constitute the objects of experience. An object is composed of a definitely ordered group of the contents of sensation. In Kant's opinion, the human soul accomplishes the ordering of these contents of sensation into groups. Within the human soul there are certain principles present by which the manifoldness of sensations is brought into objective unities. Such principles are space, time, and certain connections such as cause and effect. The contents of sensation are given me, but not their spatial interrelationships nor temporal sequence. Man first brings these to the contents of sensation. One content of sensation is given and another one also, but not the fact that one is the cause of the other. The intellect first makes this connection. Thus there lie within the human soul, ready once and for all, the ways in which the contents of sensation can be connected. Thus, even though we can take possession of the contents of sensation only through experience, we can, nevertheless, before all experience, set up laws as to how these contents of sensation are to be connected. For, these laws are the ones given us within our own souls.

We have, therefore, necessary kinds of knowledge. But these do not relate to a content, but only to ways of connecting contents. In Kant's opinion, we will therefore never draw knowledge with any content out of the human soul's own laws. The content must come through experience. But the otherworldly objects of faith can never become the object of any experience. Therefore they also cannot be attained through our necessary knowledge. We have a knowledge from experience and another, necessary, experience-free knowledge as to how the contents of experience can be connected. But we have no knowledge that goes beyond experience. The world of objects surrounding us is as it must be in accordance with the laws of connection lying ready in our soul. Aside from these laws we do not know how this world is “in-itself.” The world to which our knowledge relates itself is no such “in-itselfness” but rather is an appearance for us.

[ 88 ] Obvious objections to these Kantian views force themselves upon the unbiased person. The difference in principle between the particulars (the contents of sensation) and the way of connecting these particulars does not consist, with respect to knowledge, in the way we connect things as Kant assumes it to. Even though one element presents itself to us from outside and the other comes forth from our inner being, both elements of knowledge nevertheless form an undivided unity. Only the abstracting intellect can separate light, warmth, hardness, etc., from spatial order, causal relationship, etc. In reality, they document, with respect to every single object, their necessary belonging together. Even the designation of the one element as “content” in contrast to the other element as a merely “connecting” principle is all warped. In truth, the knowledge that something is the cause of something else is a knowledge with just as much content as the knowledge that it is yellow. If the object is composed of two elements, one of which is given from outside and the other from within, it follows that, for our knowing activity, elements which actually belong together are communicated along two different paths. It does not follow, however, that we are dealing with two things that are different from each other and that are artificially coupled together.

Only by forcibly separating what belongs together can Kant therefore support his view. The belonging together of the two elements is most striking in knowledge of the human “I.” Here one element does not come from outside and the other from within; both arise from within. And here both are not only one content but also one completely homogeneous content.

[ 89 ] What mattered to Kant—his heart's wish that guided his thoughts far more than any unbiased observation of the real factors—was to rescue the teachings relative to the beyond. What knowledge had brought about as support for these teachings in the course of long ages had decayed. Kant believed he had now shown that it is anyway not for knowledge to support such teachings, because knowledge has to rely on experience, and the things of faith in the beyond cannot become the object of any experience. Kant believed he had thereby created a free space where knowledge could not get in his way and disrupt him as he built up there a faith in the beyond. And he demands, as a support for moral life, that one believe in the things in the beyond. Out of that realm from which no knowledge comes to us, there sounds the despotic voice of the categorical imperative which demands of us that we do the good. And in order to establish a moral realm we would in fact need all that about which knowledge can tell us nothing. Kant believed he had achieved what he wanted: “I therefore had to set knowledge aside in order to make room for faith.”

[ 90 ] The great philosopher in the development of Western thought who set out in direct pursuit of a knowledge of human self-awareness is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It is characteristic of him that he approaches this knowledge without any presuppositions, with complete lack of bias. He has the clear, sharp awareness of the fact that nowhere in the world is a being to be found from which the “I” could be derived. It can therefore be derived only from itself. Nowhere is a power to be found from which the existence of the “I” flows. Everything the “I” needs, it can acquire only out of itself. Not only does it gain enlightenment about its own being through self-observation; it first posits this being into itself through an absolute, unconditional act. “The ‘I’ posits itself, and it is by virtue of this mere positing of itself; and conversely: The ‘I’ is, and posits its existence, by virtue of its mere existence. It is at the same time the one acting and the product of its action; the active one and what is brought forth by the activity; action and deed are one and the same; and therefore the ‘I am’ is the expression of an active deed.” Completely undisturbed by the fact that earlier philosophers have transferred the entity he is describing outside man, Fichte looks at the “I” naively. Therefore the “I” naturally becomes for him the highest being. “That whose existence (being) merely consists in the fact that it posits itself as existing is the ‘I’ as absolute subject. In the way that it posits itself, it is, and in the way that it is, it posits itself: and the ‘I’ exists accordingly for the ‘I,’ simply and necessarily. What does not exist for itself is no ‘I’ ... One certainly hears the question raised: What was I anyway, before I came to self-awareness? The obvious answer to that is: I was not at all; for I was not I... To posit oneself and to be are, for the ‘I,’ completely the same.” The complete, bright clarity about one's own “I,” the unreserved illumination of one's personal, human entity, becomes thereby the starting point of human thinking. The result of this must be that man, starting here, sets out to conquer the world. The second of the Goethean demands mentioned above, knowledge of my relationship to the world, follows upon the first—knowledge of the relationship that the “I” has to itself. This philosophy, built upon self-knowledge, will speak about both these relationships, and not about the derivation of the world from some primal being. One could now ask: Is man then supposed to set his own being in place of the primal being into which he transferred the world origins? Can man then actually make himself the starting point of the world? With respect to this it must be emphasized that this question as to the world origins stems from a lower sphere. In the sequence of the processes given us by reality, we seek the causes for the events, and then seek still other causes for the causes, and soon. We are now stretching the concept of causation. We are seeking a final cause for the whole world. And in this way the concept of the first, absolute primal being, necessary in itself, fuses for us with the idea of the world cause. But that is a mere conceptual construction. When man sets up such conceptual constructions, they do not necessarily have any justification. The concept of a flying dragon also has none. Fichte takes his start from the “I” as the primal being, and arrives at ideas that present the relationship of this primal being to the rest of the world in an unbiased way, but not under the guise of cause and effect. Starting from the “I,” Fichte now seeks to gain ideas for grasping the rest of the world. Whoever does not want to deceive himself about the nature of what one can call cognition or knowledge can proceed in no other way. Everything that man can say about the being of things is derived from the experiences of his inner being. “The human being never realizes just how anthropomorphic he is.” (Goethe) In the » explanation of the simplest phenomena, in the propulsion of one body by another, for example, there lies an anthropomorphism. The conclusion that the one body propels the other is already anthropomorphic. For, if one wants to go beyond what the senses tell us about the occurrence, one must transfer onto it the experience our body has when it sets a body in the outer world into motion. We transfer our experience of propelling something onto the occurrence in the outer world, and also speak there of propulsion when we roll one ball and as a result see a second ball go rolling. For we can observe only the movements of the two balls, and then in addition think the propulsion in the sense of our own experiences. All physical explanations are anthropomorphisms, attributing human characteristics to nature. But of course it does not follow from this what has so often been concluded from this: that these explanations have no objective significance for the things. A part of the objective content lying within the things, in fact, first appears when we shed that light upon it which we perceive in our own inner being.

[ 91 ] Whoever, in Fichte's sense, bases the being of the “I” entirely upon itself can also find the sources of moral action only within the “I” alone. The “I” cannot seek harmony with some other being, but only with itself. It does not allow its destiny to be prescribed, but rather gives any such destiny to itself. Act according to the basic principle that you can regard your actions as the most worthwhile possible. That is about how one would have to express the highest principle of Fichte's moral teachings. “The essential character of the ‘I,’ in which it distinguishes itself from everything that is outside it, consists in a tendency toward self-activity for the sake of self-activity; and it is this tendency that is thought when the ‘I,’ in and for itself, without any relationship to something outside it, is thought.” An action therefore stands on an ever higher level of moral value, the more purely it flows from the self-activity and self-determination of the “I.”

[ 92 ] In his later life Fichte changed his self-reliant, absolute “I” back into an external God again; he therefore sacrificed true self-knowledge, toward which he had taken so many important steps, to that self-renunciation which stems from human weakness. The last books of Fichte are therefore of no significance for the progress of this self-knowledge.

[ 93 ] The philosophical writings of Schiller, however, are important for this progress. Whereas Fichte expressed the self-reliant independence of the “I” as a general philosophical truth, Schiller was more concerned with answering the question as to how the particular “I” of the simple human individuality could live out this self-activity in the best way within itself.

Kant had expressly demanded the suppression of pleasure as a pre-condition for moral activity. Man should not carry out what brings him satisfaction; but rather what the categorical imperative demands of him. According to his view an action is all the more moral the more it is accomplished with the quelling of all feeling of pleasure, out of mere heed to strict moral law. For Schiller this diminishes human worth. Is man in his desire for pleasure really such a low being that he must first extinguish this base nature of his in order to be virtuous? Schiller criticizes any such degradation of man in the satirical epigram (Xenie):

Gladly I serve all my friends, but do so alas out of liking;
Therefore it rankles me often that I'm not a virtuous man.

No, says Schiller, human instincts are capable of such ennobling that it is a pleasure to do the good. The strict “ought to” transforms itself in the ennobled man into a free “wanting to.” And someone who with pleasure accomplishes what is moral stands higher on the moral world scale than someone who must first do violence to his own being in order to obey the categorical imperative.

[ 94 ] Schiller elaborated this view of his in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race. There hovers before him the picture of a free individuality who can calmly give himself over to his egoistical drives because these drives, out of themselves, want what can be accomplished by the unfree, ignoble personality only when it suppresses its own needs. The human being, as Schiller expressed it, can be unfree in two respects: firstly, if he is able to follow only his blind, lower instincts. Then he acts out of necessity. His drives compel him; he is not free. Secondly, however, that person also acts unfreely who follows only his reason. For, reason sets up principles of behavior according to logical rules. A person who merely follows reason acts unfreely because he subjugates himself to logical necessity. Only that person acts freely out of himself for whom what is reasonable has united so deeply with his individuality , has gone over so fully into his flesh and blood, that he carries out with the greatest pleasure what someone standing morally less high can accomplish only through the most extreme self-renunciation and the strongest compulsion.

[ 95 ] Friedrich Joseph Schelling wanted to extend the path Fichte had taken. Schelling took his start from the unbiased knowledge of the “I” that his predecessor had achieved. The “I” was recognized as a being that draws its existence out of itself. The next task was to bring nature into a relationship with this self-reliant “I.” It is clear: If the “I” is not to transfer the actual higher being of things into the outer world again, then it must be shown that the “I,” out of itself, also creates what we call the laws of nature. The structure of nature must therefore be the material system, outside in space, of what the “I,” within its inner being, creates in a spiritual way. “Nature must be visible spirit, and spirit must be invisible nature. Here, therefore, in the absolute identity of the spirit in us and of nature outside of us, must the problem be solved as to how a nature outside of us is possible.” “The outer world lies open before us, in order for us to find in it again the history of our spirit.”

[ 96 ] Schelling, therefore, sharply illuminates the process that the philosophers have interpreted wrongly for so long. He shows that out of one being the clarifying light must fall upon all the processes of the world; that the “I” can recognize one being in all happenings; but he no longer sets forth this being as something lying outside the “I”; he sees it within the “I.” The “I” finally feels itself to be strong enough to enliven the content of world phenomena from out of itself. The way in which Schelling presented nature in detail as a material development out of the “I” does not need to be discussed here. The important thing in this essay is to show in what way the “I” has reconquered for itself the sphere of influence which, in the course of the development of Western thought, it had ceded to an entity that it had itself created. For this reason Schelling's other writings also do not need to be considered in this context. At best they add only details to the question we are examining. Exactly like Fichte, Schelling abandons clear self-knowledge again, and seeks then to trace the things flowing from the self back to other beings. The later teachings of both thinkers are reversions to views which they had completely overcome in an earlier period of life.

[ 97 ] The philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a further bold attempt to explain the world on the basis of a content lying within the “I.” Hegel sought, comprehensively and thoroughly, to investigate and present the whole content of what Fichte, in incomparable words to be sure, had characterized: the being of the human “I.” For Hegel also regards this being as the actual primal thing, as the “in-itselfness of things.” But Hegel does something peculiar. He divests the “I” of everything individual, personal. In spite of the fact that it is a genuine true “I” which Hegel takes as a basis for world phenomena, this “I” seems impersonal, unindividual, far from an intimate, familiar “I,” almost like a god. In just such an unapproachable, strictly abstract form does Hegel, in his logic, expound upon the content of the in-itselfness of the world. The most personal thinking is presented here in the most impersonal way. According to Hegel, nature is nothing other than the content of the “I” that has been spread out in space and time. Nature is this ideal content in a different state. “Nature is spirit estranged from itself.” Within the individual human spirit Hegel's stance toward the impersonal “I” is personal. Within self-consciousness, the being of the “I” is not an in-itself, it is also for-itself; the human spirit discovers that the highest world content is his own content.

Because Hegel seeks to grasp the being of the “I” at first impersonally, he also does not designate it as “I,” but rather as idea. But Hegel's idea is nothing other than the content of the human “I” freed of all personal character. This abstracting of everything personal manifests most strongly in Hegel's views about the spiritual life, the moral life. It is not the single, personal, individual “I” of man that can decide its own destiny, but rather it is the great, objective, impersonal world “I,” which is abstracted from man's individual “I”; it is the general world reason, the world idea. The individual “I” must submit to this abstraction drawn from its own being. The world idea has instilled the objective spirit into man's legal, state, and moral institutions, into the historical process. Relative to this objective spirit, the individual is inferior, coincidental. Hegel never tires of emphasizing again and again that the chance, individual “I” must incorporate itself into the general order, into the historical course of spiritual evolution. It is the despotism of the spirit over the bearer of this spirit that Hegel demands.

[ 98 ] It is a strange last remnant of the old belief in God and in the beyond that still appears here in Hegel. All the attributes with which the human “I,” turned into an outer ruler of the world, was once endowed have been dropped, and only the attribute of logical generality remains. The Hegelian world idea is the human “I,” and Hegel's teachings recognize this expressly, for at the pinnacle of culture man arrives at the point, according to this teaching, of feeling his full identity with this world “I.” In art, religion, and philosophy man seeks to incorporate into his particular existence what is most general; the individual spirit permeates itself with the general world reason. Hegel portrays the course of world history in the following way: “If we look at the destiny of world-historical individuals, they have had the good fortune to be the managing directors of a purpose that was one stage in the progress of the general spirit. One can call it a trick of world reason for it to use these human tools; for it allows them to carry out their own purposes with all the fury of their passion, and yet remains not only unharmed itself but even brings forth itself. The particular is usually too insignificant compared to the general: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. World history thus presents itself as the battle of individuals, and in the field of this particularization, things take their completely natural course. Just as in animal nature the preservation of life is the purpose and instinct of the individual creature, and just as here, after all, reason, the general, predominates and the individuals fall, thus so do things in the spiritual world also take their course. The passions mutually destroy each other; only reason is awake, pursues its purpose, and prevails.” But for Hegel, the highest level of development of human culture is also not presented in this sacrificing of the particular individuals to the good of general world reason, but rather in the complete interpenetration of the two. In art, religion, and philosophy, the individual works in such a way that his work is at the same time a content of the general world reason. With Hegel, through the factor of generality that he laid into the world “I,” the subordination of the separate human “I” to this world “I” still remained.

[ 99 ] Ludwig Feuerbach sought to put an end to this subordination by stating in powerful terms how man transfers the being of his “I” into the outer world in order then to place himself over against it, acknowledging, obeying, revering it as though it were a God. “God is the revealed inner being, the expressed self, of man; religion is the festive disclosing of the hidden treasures of man, the confessing of his innermost thoughts, the public declaration of his declarations of love.” But even Feuerbach has not yet cleansed the idea of this “I” of the factor of generality. For him the general human “I” is something higher than the individual, single “I.” And even though as a thinker he does not, like Hegel, objectify this general “I” into a cosmic being existing in itself, still, in the moral context, over against the single human being, he does set up the general concept of a generic man, and demands that the individual should raise himself above the limitations of his individuality.

[ 100 ] Max Stirner, in his book The Individual and What Is His (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), published in 1844, demanded of the “I” in a radical way that it finally recognize that all the beings it has set above itself in the course of time were cut by it from its own body and set up in the outer world as idols. Every god, every general world reason, is an image of the “I” and has no characteristics different from the human “I.” And even the concept of the general “I” was extracted from the completely individual “I” of every single person.

[ 101 ] Stirner calls upon man to throw off everything general about himself and to acknowledge to himself that he is an individual. “You are indeed more than a Jew, more than a Christian, etc., but you are also more than a man. Those are all ideas; you, however, are in the flesh. Do you really believe, therefore, that you can ever become ‘man as such’?” “I am man! I do not first have to produce man in myself, because he already belongs to me as all my characteristics do.” “Only I am not an abstraction alone; I am the all in all;... I am no mere thought, but I am at the same time full of thoughts, a thought-world. Hegel condemns what is one's own, what is mine ... ‘Absolute thinking’ is that thinking which forgets that it is my thinking, that I think, and that thinking exists only through me. As ‘I,’ however, I again swallow what is mine, am master over it; it is only my opinion that I can change at every moment, i.e., that I can destroy, that I can take back into myself and can devour.” “The thought is only my own when I can indeed subjugate it, but it can never subjugate me, never fanaticize me and make me the tool of its realization.” All the beings placed over the “I” finally shatter upon the knowledge that they have only been brought into the world by the “I.” “The beginning of my thinking, namely, is not a thought, but rather I, and therefore I am also its goal, just as its whole course is then only the course of my self-enjoyment.”

[ 102 ] In Stirner's sense, one should not want to define the individual “I” by a thought, by an idea. For, ideas are something general; and through any such definition, the individual—at least logically—would thus be subordinated at once to something general. One can define everything else in the world by ideas, but we must experience our own “I” as something individual within us. Everything that is expressed about the individual in thoughts cannot take up his content into itself; it can only point to it. One says: Look into yourself; there is something for which any concept, any idea, is too poor to encompass in all its incarnate wealth, something that brings forth the ideas out of itself, but that itself has an inexhaustible spring within itself whose content is infinitely more extensive than everything this something brings forth. Stirner's response is: “The individual is a word and with a word one would after all have to be able to think something; a word would after all have to have a thought-content. But the individual is a word without thought; it has no thought-content. But what is its content then if not thought? Its content is one that cannot be there a second time and that consequently can also not be expressed, for if it could be expressed, really and entirely expressed, then it would be there a second time, would be there in the ‘expression’... only when nothing of you is spoken out and you are only named, are you recognized as you. As long as something of you is spoken out, you will be recognized only as this something (man, spirit, Christian, etc.).” The individual “I” is therefore that which is everything it is only through itself, which draws the content of its existence out of itself and continuously expands this content from out of itself.

This individual “I” can acknowledge no ethical obligation that it does not lay upon itself. “Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, or inhuman, unliberal, inhumane, I don't ask about that. If it only aims at what I want, if I satisfy only myself in it, then call it whatever you like: it's all the same to me ...” “Perhaps, in the very next moment I will turn against my previous thought; I also might very well change my behavior suddenly; but not because it does not correspond to what is Christian, not because it goes against eternal human rights, not because it hits the idea of mankind, humanity, humaneness in the face, but rather—because I am no longer involved, because I no longer enjoy it fully, because I doubt my earlier thought, or I am no longer happy with my recent behavior.” The way Stirner speaks about love from this point of view is characteristic. “I also love people, not merely some of them but everyone. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy; I love because loving is natural for me, because I like it. I know no ‘commandment of love’ ...” To this sovereign individual, all state, social, and church organizations are fetters. For, all organizations presuppose that the individual must be like this or like that so that it can fit into the community. But the individual will not let it be determined for him by the community how he should be. He wants to make himself into this or that. J. H. Mackay, in his book Max Stirner, His Life and Work, has expressed what matters to Stirner: “The annihilation, in the first place, of those foreign powers which seek in the most varied ways to suppress and destroy the “I”; and in the second place, the presentation of the relationships of our intercourse with each other, how they result from the conflict and harmony of our interests.” The individual cannot fulfill himself in an organized community, but only in free intercourse or association. He acknowledges no societal structure set over the individual as a power. In him everything occurs through the individual. There is nothing fixed within him. What occurs is always to be traced back to the will of the individual. No one and nothing represents a universal will. Stirner does not want society to care for the individual, to protect his rights, to foster his well-being, and so on. When the organization is taken away from people, then their intercourse regulates itself on its own. “I would rather have to rely on people's self-interest than on their ‘service of love,’ their compassion, their pity, etc. Self-interest demands reciprocity (as you are to me, thus I am to you), does nothing ‘for nothing,’ and lets itself be won and—bought.” Let human intercourse have its full freedom and it will unrestrictedly create that reciprocity which you could set up through a community after all, only in a restricted way. “Neither a natural nor a spiritual tie holds a society (Verein) together, and it is no natural nor spiritual association (Bund). It is not blood nor a belief (i.e., spirit) that brings it about. In a natural association—such as a family, a tribe, a nation; yes, even mankind—individuals have value only as specimens of a species or genus; in a spiritual association—such as a community or church—the individual is significant only as a part of the common spirit; in both cases, what you are as an individual must be suppressed. Only in a society can you assert yourself as an individual, because the society does not possess you, but rather you possess it or use it.”

[ 103 ] The path by which Stirner arrived at his view of the individual can be designated as a universal critique of all general powers that suppress the “I.” The churches, the political systems (political liberalism, social liberalism, humanistic liberalism), the philosophies—they have all set such general powers over the individual. Political liberalism establishes the “good citizen”; social liberalism establishes the worker who is like all the others in what they own in common; humanistic liberalism establishes the “human being as human being.” As he destroys all these powers, Stirner sets up in their ruins the sovereignty of the individual. “What all is not supposed to be my cause! Above all the good cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humaneness, of justice; furthermore the cause of my folk, of my prince, of my fatherland; finally, of course, the cause of the spirit and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never supposed to be my cause.—Let us look then at how those people handle their cause for whose cause we are supposed to work, to devote ourselves, and to wax enthusiastic. You know how to proclaim many basic things about God, and for thousands of years have investigated ‘the depths of the Divinity’ and looked into His heart, so that you are very well able to tell us how God Himself conducts ‘the cause of God’ that we are called to serve. And you also do not keep the Lord's conduct secret. What is His cause then? Has He, as is expected of us, made a foreign cause, the cause of truth and love, into His own? Such lack of understanding enrages you and you teach us that God's cause is, to be sure, the cause of truth and love, but that this cause cannot be called foreign to Him because God is Himself, in fact, truth and love; you are enraged by the assumption that God could be like us poor worms in promoting a foreign cause as His own. ‘God is supposed to take on the cause of truth when He is not Himself the truth?’ He takes care only of His cause, but because He is the all in all, everything is also His cause; we, however, we are not the all in all, and our cause is small and contemptible indeed; therefore we must ‘serve a higher cause.’—Now, it is clear that God concerns Himself only with what is His, occupies Himself only with Himself, thinks only about Himself, and has His eye on Himself; woe to anything that is not well pleasing to Him. He serves nothing higher and satisfies only Himself. His cause is a purely egoistical cause. How do matters stand with mankind, whose cause we are supposed to make into our own? Is its cause perhaps that of another, and does mankind serve a higher cause? No, mankind looks only at itself, mankind wants to help only mankind, mankind is itself its cause. In order to develop itself, mankind lets peoples and individuals torment themselves in its service, and when they have accomplished what mankind needs, then, out of gratitude, they are thrown by it onto the manure pile of history. Is the cause of mankind not a purely egoistical cause?” Out of this kind of a critique of everything that man is supposed to make into his cause, there results for Stirner that “God and mankind have founded their cause on nothing but themselves. I will then likewise found my cause upon myself, I, who like God am nothing from anything else, I, who am my all, I who am the single one.”

[ 104 ] That is Stirner's path. One can also take another path to arrive at the nature of the “I.” One can observe the “I” in its cognitive activity. Direct your gaze upon a process of knowledge. Through a thinking contemplation of processes, the “I” seeks to become conscious of what actually underlies these processes. What does one want to achieve by this thinking contemplation? To answer this question we must observe: What would we possess of these processes without this contemplation, and what do we obtain through this contemplation? I must limit myself here to a meager sketch of these fundamental questions about world views, and can point only to the broader expositions in my books Truth and Science (Wahrheit und Wissenschaft) and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Die Philosophie der Freiheit).

[ 105 ] Look at any process you please. I throw a stone in a horizontal direction. It moves in a curved line and falls to earth after a time. I see the stone at successive moments in different places, after it has first cost me a certain amount of effort to throw it. Through my thinking contemplation I gain the following. During its motion the stone is under the influence of several factors. If it were only under the influence of the propulsion I gave it in throwing it, it would go on forever, in a straight line, in fact, without changing its velocity. But now the earth exerts an influence upon it which one calls gravity. If, without propelling it away from me, I had simply let go of it, it would have fallen straight to the ground, and in doing so its velocity would have increased continuously. Out of the reciprocal workings of these two influences there arises what actually happens. Those are all thought-considerations that I bring to what would offer itself to me without any thinking contemplation.

[ 106 ] In this way we have in every cognitive process an element that would present itself to us even without any thinking contemplation, and another element that we can gain only through such thinking contemplation.

When we have then gained both elements, it is clear to us that they belong together. A process runs its course in accordance with the laws that I gain about it through my thinking. The fact that for me the two elements are separated and are joined together by my cognition is my affair. The process does not bother about this separation and joining. From this it follows, however, that the activity of knowing is altogether my affair. Something that I bring about solely for my own sake.

[ 107 ] Yet another factor enters in here now. The things and processes would never, out of themselves, give me what I gain about them through my thinking contemplation. Out of themselves they give me, in fact, what I possess without that contemplation. It has already been stated in this essay that I take out of myself what I see in the things as their deepest being. The thoughts I make for myself about the things, these I produce out of my own inner being. They nevertheless belong to the things, as has been shown. The essential being of the things does not therefore come to me from them, but rather from me. My content is their essential being. I would never come to ask about the essential being of the things at all if I did not find present within me something I designate as this essential being of the things, designate as what belongs to them, but designate as what they do not give me out of themselves, but rather what I can take only out of myself.

Within the cognitive process I receive the essential being of the things from out of myself. I therefore have the essential being of the world within myself. Consequently I also have my own essential being within myself. With other things two factors appear to me: a process without its essential being and the essential being through me. With myself, process and essential being are identical. I draw forth the essential being of all the rest of the world out of myself, and I also draw forth my own essential being from myself.

[ 108 ] Now my action is a part of the general world happening. It therefore has its essential being as much within me as all other happenings. To seek the laws of human action means, therefore, to draw them forth out of the content of the “I.” Just as the believer in God traces the laws of his actions back to the will of his God, so the person who has attained the insight that the essential being of all things lies within the “I” can also find the laws of his action only within the “I.” If the “I” has really penetrated into the essential nature of its action, it then feels itself to be the ruler of this action. As long as we believe in a world-being foreign to us, the laws of our action also stand over against us as foreign. They rule us; what we accomplish stands under the compulsion they exercise over us. If they are transformed from such foreign beings into our “I's” primally own doing, then this compulsion ceases. That which compels has become our own being. The lawfulness no longer rules over us, but rather rules within us over the happenings that issue from our “I.” To bring about a process by virtue of a lawfulness standing outside the doer is an act of inner unfreedom; to do so out of the doer himself is an act of inner freedom. To give oneself the laws of one's actions out of oneself means to act as a free individual. The consideration of the cognitive process shows the human being that he can find the laws of his action only within himself.

[ 109 ] To comprehend the “I” in thinking means to create the basis for founding everything that comes from the “I” also upon the “I” alone. The “I” that understands itself can make itself dependent upon nothing other than itself. And it can be answerable to no one but itself. After these expositions it seems almost superfluous to say that with this “I” only the incarnate real “I” of the individual person is meant and not any general “I” abstracted from it. For any such general “I” can indeed be gained from the real “I” only by abstraction. It is thus dependent upon the real individual. (Benj. R. Tucker and J. H. Mackay also advocate the same direction in thought and view of life out of which my two above-mentioned books have arisen. See Tucker's Instead of a Book and Mackay's The Anarchists.

[ 1110 ] In the eighteenth century and in the greater part of the nineteenth, man's thinking made every effort to win for the “I” its place in the universe. Two thinkers who are already keeping aloof from this direction are Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, who is still vigorously working among us. Neither any longer transfers the full being of our “I,” which we find present in our consciousness, as primal being into the outer world. Schopenhauer regarded one part of this “I,” the will, as the essential being of the world, and Hartmann sees the unconscious to be this being. Common to both of them is this striving to subordinate the “I” to their assumed general world-being. On the other hand, as the last of the strict individualists, Friedrich Nietzsche, taking his start from Schopenhauer, did arrive at views that definitely lead to the path of absolute appreciation of the individual “I.” In his opinion, genuine culture consists in fostering the individual in such a way that he has the strength out of himself to develop everything lying within him. Up until now it was only an accident if an individual was able to develop himself fully out of himself. “This more valuable type has already been there often enough: but as a happy chance, as an exception, never as willed. Rather he was precisely the one feared the most; formerly he was almost the fearful thing;—and out of fear, the opposite type was willed, bred, attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man, the Christian ...” Nietzsche transfigured poetically, as his ideal, his type of man in his Zarathustra. He calls him the Superman (Übermensch). He is man freed from all norms, who no longer wants to be the mere image of God, a being in whom God is well pleased, a good citizen, and so on, but rather who wants to be himself and nothing more—the pure and absolute egoist.

• 1. Throughout this essay, “ideal” usually means “in the form of ideas.” –Ed.
• 2. Second Chapter of Representative Men, “Plato; or the Philosopher”

Today we shall be considering Hegel not from an anthroposophical but from a purely philosophical point of view. This is possible in an anthroposophical circle because, although the object of spiritual science is to be drawn from experiences in the supersensible world, the process of combining these experiences into a comprehensive, systematic world view requires clear and conscientious thinking that is well-trained in every single point. And if even untrained thinking causes quite a lot of harm in external science, in the anthroposophical movement, more harm is caused by this than by incorrect observations, because in many people the interest in supersensible things does not go hand in hand with an equally strong interest in logical thinking. And this purely logical thinking can be particularly trained by a study of the thinking of George William Frederick Hegel. From such a study, a certain light can also be shed on our present time, in which one speaks occasionally of a return to Hegel, but of which one cannot say that the intellectual prerequisites that it has would meet with an understanding of Hegel. Hegel, with his whole system of thought, has outgrown the time when it was the chief concern of philosophy to deduce the foundations of all knowledge and being from certain supreme points of view. It is no mere accident, but a profound necessity, that Hegel should have lived in an age when these supreme foundations were being sought in the most diverse fields.

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart. He entered the Tübingen seminary (1788-1793), which was so important for the development of German intellectual life at that time, as a pupil, where he was a fellow student of Schelling, who towered over him for a long, long time, and Hölderlin, who was deeply predisposed and soon sank into mental derangement, albeit not precisely because of his deep predisposition. They formed a kind of cloverleaf: the deeply intuitive Hölderlin, who sought in mystical chiaroscuro; Schelling, who was endowed with a sharp intellectual energy and an effervescent imagination; and Hegel, who was somewhat ponderous, with thoughts that came hard from the soul. Schelling and Hegel later worked together again at the University of Jena, which was a center of intellectual life at the time. Schelling carried his audience away with the powerful intellectual momentum with which he dealt with the problems of thought; he also carried away those who did not seek to penetrate the questions of existence out of feeling and mind. Schelling pointed out that in human knowledge there is something that goes beyond all thinking, an intellectual intuition, as he called it, which is supposed to be an original faculty for looking into the depths of existence. Hegel was his colleague as a lecturer (1801-1806). Even then, his thinking was still cumbersome because he wanted to shape every thought so that it never included more than it was supposed to mean. And because of this slowly drilling cumbersomeness of thinking, Hegel is not easily understood at first.

Then came the sad time of 1806. It was during this period that Hegel undertook, as he himself expressed it, the actual great voyages of discovery of his mind. It was under the thunder of the guns at Jena that he completed his first work, the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, which arose out of an intensive and tremendously deep concentration of the mind. It is a work that the whole of world literature has no equal. Above all, Hegel wanted to make clear to himself what experiences the soul can have when it ascends from the subordinate points of view, so to speak, to the highest, to what Hegel calls the self-comprehension of the spirit within itself. At first, one lives in a very close connection with the outside world, where every this or that, every tree and every house is something one lives with, every opinion is something one lives in. Only when one reflects on this and that, does perception arise. From perception, we then come through thinking to a sense of self at first, to a dark inkling of the self. Only then do we arrive at the first glimmer of true consciousness. But here the I is still, so to speak, enchanted with its surroundings. It works itself out of this enchantment through the content, which it is supposed to have only from itself, by increasingly leaving out what has to do with the outside world, what is connected with it. This is how self-awareness comes about and with it the interweaving of self-awareness with the spirit. It becomes spirit itself, which comprehends itself, becomes spirit that becomes aware of itself. And when a person now looks back, he recognizes what is comprehending itself as spirit, he recognizes the idea that he has, as it were, taken out of the enchantment of the outside world. He recognizes that he used to be stuck in the contradiction between subject and object, but that now, in the overcoming of subject and object, he grasps what Hegel calls the absolute idea in the idea that grasps itself, which is not only subject and not only object. Thus, through an immense effort of thought, Hegel had arrived at the foundation of so-called absolute idealism.

Hegel's life took many twists and turns after his time as a lecturer in Jena. He worked for a time as a political editor in Bamberg (1807-1808), then as a grammar school teacher and headmaster in Nuremberg (1808-1816), and through manifold external experiences he became the realistically thinking mind with whom we are later confronted. From Nuremberg, Hegel was briefly appointed to the University of Heidelberg, where he published his “Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften” (Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) in 1817. Regarding the reception of the work, Hegel could well have said what legend attributes to him as a saying shortly before his death: “Of all my students, only one understood me, and he misunderstood me.

It is indeed a most remarkable feeling to have sunk something so tremendously deep into the stream of the world and at the same time to see how completely all the preconditions for absorbing the depth were absent. Only from Hegel's standpoint can something like a skeleton be drawn of what this “encyclopedia” should be. But when I now speak in Hegel's sense, I beg not to be looked upon as a Hegelian. For Hegel, it was about implementing the standpoint he had attained in the Phenomenology of Spirit by placing himself beyond subject and object on the standpoint of the idea – and now, if I may say so, to use this standpoint to gain an overview of the full scope of human thought and action.

According to Hegel, the absolute idea must not contain the concepts of subject and object, of knowing and believing, and the like. The idea is beyond all these contradictions. Hegel wants to grasp this idea as if it were being presented in its purity, this idea that does indeed operate in subject and object but goes beyond both. This idea can certainly be found in man, in the external world, in spirit and nature, but it is precisely beyond both, it lies beyond spirit and nature. So in Hegel's sense, one must not grasp the idea in the first instance in the abstract, like an abstract point. Rather, it is a complete entity in itself, which allows a rich content to sprout out of itself as an idea, just as the whole plant with all its individual parts is implicit in the plant germ. Thus, according to Hegel, the idea should allow a content to sprout out of itself that is independent of spirit and nature, and which, when applied, must therefore be applied to both. So before you get involved with the meaning of spirit and nature, you gain a point of view above both and then see a manifestation of the idea in nature and also see the idea being realized in the spiritual. So we have to gain a point of view from which the idea is developed as if the human being were not even there. The human being then abandons himself to the very own process of the world of ideas developing in and out of himself. This point of view results in what can be called the science of logic in Hegel's sense. Here one is not dealing with a subject and object, as in Aristotelian logic, but with the self-movement of the idea that stands above subject and object.

For any thinking that wants to devote itself only to the things of the external world, it is difficult to get used to the strictly closed columns of Hegelian concepts. One feels as if one is being subjected to violence, as if one is being thrust into a system of ideas that has absolutely nothing in common with the usual everyday rational argument. It is the idea that should think, not I: that is the feeling one has. That is why most people do not even try to get into the world of Hegelian ideas. But if you do, well, you might want to correct Hegel here and there – that is especially easy with Hegel – but that is not the point. The point is that by studying Hegel, a person undergoes a tremendous self-discipline of thought, because there is nothing like Hegel's logic to teach you where a system of human concepts, in general, a concept, may occur. A concept can only be recognized in its full scope if it can only be thought at a certain point in a whole fabric of concepts. In order to make this clear, Hegel begins with the most empty concept, the concept of being, which is usually presented without one actually being aware of where it is actually placed. Now, according to Hegel, this concept should be completely empty. So we have to disregard all later content that this concept has acquired, right from the very beginning of Hegel's logic. Thus the concept of being is not actually established by man, but rather it presents itself to man after man has thrown all other concepts out of it.

Now Hegel wants to find the method of developing the concept, that is, one concept must develop from another. Thus, if we look at it correctly, the concept of being must immediately rise above itself. When we apply the abstract concept of being to a thing, it is no longer pure. It then already refers to a this or that. Thus we come to recognize that being is a nothing, mind you, only within the concept. Through the dialectic living in itself, one has thus drawn out of being the concept of nothingness.

If you have disciplined yourself in thinking, you are already educating yourself at this point in Hegelian logic to think in a way that is only ever applied in Hegel's further discussions of being and nothingness as it has just emerged. Being and nothingness now give rise to a third: that is becoming. But in order for us to grasp becoming, it must be brought to a standstill. Thus, in the fourth place, the concept of existence emerges from the concept of becoming. The concept of existence may only be used in this way in Hegel's further logic, as a being that has turned into a nothing, that together with this has produced becoming, which, brought to a standstill, has produced existence. And in this method Hegel goes further. He arrives at the concept of the one and the many, he arrives at the concept of quantity and quality, of measure and so on.

Thus in the first part of Hegel's “Encyklopädie” we have an organism of the idea. Only when we have grasped everything else before that, can we then arrive at the concept of the end, which stands at the end of Hegel's logic. Through such absolute logic, an immense self-discipline of the spirit is indeed achieved, which at least as an ideal must be presented to our time. Through this, one learns to express a concept only when one has its content fully in consciousness. One must then have in one's concepts only what one has at some time in life made clear to oneself as a development of the concept. Within Hegel's logic, the following then emerge as later concepts: subject and object, knowledge, essence, causality, which one now has clearly in consciousness.

Once Hegel had established the complete system of concepts, he was able to show how the concepts reveal themselves, so to speak, in enchantment. The concept cannot only be in the subject, because then all talk about nature would make no sense. Rather, our concepts underlie natural phenomena; they have made them. Thus, it is immaterial to the concept whether it appears outside or inside. To us, it hides itself outside. Nature is the concept or the idea in its otherness, as Hegel says. Anyone who says something different about nature goes beyond what he knows for sure. So a natural philosophy arises, a natural science, that seeks the development of the idea outside, after it has first been sought in itself, in its purer existence, in logic.

The idea first realizes itself in subordinate phenomena, where the concept is most hidden, so that we might be tempted to speak of natural phenomena that are entirely without ideas. This happens in mechanics. But even within mechanical phenomena, Hegel's discipline of thought makes a distinction on two levels. He distinguishes between ordinary mechanics, as it underlies the phenomena of impact, force, and matter, which, as he says, is relative mechanics, and absolute mechanics; that is, he considers it inadmissible to apply the ordinary concepts of relative mechanics to the heavenly bodies. Only when one develops the concept of absolute mechanics does one find the idea that lies in celestial mechanics. But in today's science, nothing is to be found of this distinction. Hence Hegel's polemic against Newton, who has most readily transferred the concepts of relative mechanics to the concepts of absolute mechanics.

From the concept of absolute mechanics, Hegel moves on to the concept of the real organism. He recognizes three members of the organism:

Firstly, the geological organism. In his view, this does not mean that the whole structure of the earth can be understood by extending the laws of a small area to the whole world, as is the case with today's geology. Hegel sees in every mountain range, in every geological form, an organism that has become rigid.

Secondly, the plant organism, in which the concept manifests itself as it were in indifference to the idea, in uniformity for the idea.

Thirdly, the animal organism, which in a certain sense already represents the existence of the idea in the external world.

Thus the appearance of the idea, as it were the enchanted idea, is exhausted in earthly existence. Man now outgrows these enchanted ideas. He must first be understood in terms of his natural characteristics. This is the subject of anthropology. In his perception, man finds himself, as it were, dulled in external existence. But when he comes to consciousness, and from there to self-consciousness, he breaks away from external existence in a certain respect. This is where “phenomenology of the spirit” now enters the picture, following on from anthropology. Within this phenomenology, man finally grasps himself as spirit. In so doing, he recognizes himself as subjective spirit by first breaking free from the enchantment of nature. Gradually, the idea itself appears to him again. What it was in the first, very first concept of being now springs forth. Having recognized the idea in its being-in-itself in logic, in this being-out-of-itself in nature, man now comprehends it where it is in and for itself.

Now this initially subjective spirit becomes objective spirit. The idea reveals what it is in itself in what the spiritual institutions are: marriage, family, law, custom. All this comes together in the state. What emerges in the state as objective spirit, as the realization of the idea, what is found in the interplay from state to state, that is world history. Thus world history is the existence of the idea after its passage through the subjective spirit.

And the question arises: can we ultimately close the circle like a snake biting its own tail, that is, can we come back to the absolute idea, to a realization of the idea where it overcomes subjectively and objectively again? The absolute idea can appear in its absolute reality, initially in a preparatory way, so that it is not enchanted, hidden as in nature, but so that it shines through the appearance. That is the case in art. Beyond world history, Hegel thus creates the first realization of the absolute idea in art. But here it still has something of an objective, external nuance about it. But it can also work in such a way that it no longer has a nuance of the external, but a nuance of the internal. That is the case in religion. It is thus the realization of the absolute idea on the second level.

But the idea can also overcome the nuance of externality, which it still has in art, and the nuance of inwardness, which it still has in religion. It does this in the comprehension of itself, where it captures itself in itself, in philosophy in the Hegelian sense.

And so the circle is complete. In the whole field of history, there is nothing as complete as the Hegelian system.

He later developed some of its individual parts in more detail, such as the philosophy of law (1821), an area in which a strictly disciplined way of thinking has an especially beneficial effect. And in the preface to the “Outlines of the Philosophy of Right” Hegel makes a remarkable statement: When reason grasps the idea, everything must be grasped by seeing the idea, that is, the working of reason in things. Everything real is therefore reasonable in the Hegelian sense. This proposition can, of course, be immediately refuted by the arbitrariness of the usual reasoning, if one does not take into account Hegel's context of thought.

If we sketchily present Hegel's philosophy to ourselves, we have recognized the basic nerve of his philosophy in the most tremendously disciplined thinking.

Hegel then taught this philosophy in Berlin from 1818 to 1831, where he died on November 14, 1831, the anniversary of the death of Leibniz, who had once put forward the completely opposite philosophy. In Hegel's philosophy, the idea, which remains entirely with itself, is at the center. In Leibniz, the idea disperses into the immense sum of monads. But only a single monad, which contains the pre-established harmony, would have to take the path of the Hegelian absolute idea if it develops. Thus, Hegel's system lies in the development of a single monad. Hegel has set up the strictest monistic system, Leibniz the strictest monadological system. As long as we remain within Hegel's trains of thought, we are in a strictly closed cycle of the mind. We go beyond him when we measure Hegel's system against monadology. Indeed, one thinker found that Leibniz's monadology exploded Hegel's monism. This is how Schelling felt.

After remaining silent since 1814, he was appointed to Berlin in 1841, ten years after Hegel's death, and now tried to go beyond Hegel, with whom he had previously worked and co-edited the “Critical Journal of Philosophy” in 1802-03. These were peculiar lectures that he now gave in Berlin.

There is only one way to get beyond Hegel, and that is by drilling a hole from the outside where, in Hegel, the self grasps itself in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. But one also gets stuck in Leibnitz's monad if one does not drill the hole at the same place. If one starts here, one goes beyond the ego, which only grasps itself, and arrives at supersensible experiences that really go beyond what Hegel comprehends in his system. And that is what Schelling did in fact. He began to teach 'theosophy', real 'theosophy', though in an abstract form, and he had the same success that a person would have today who wanted to teach 'theosophy' at a university.

A triplicity of the world ground, a threefold potency, Schelling taught: first, the being-can; secondly, pure being; thirdly, the summary. In this way he foreshadowed what is being sought today in the threefold Logos. And now Schelling sought to recognize the secrets of the ancient mysteries in his 'Philosophy of Mythology'. He sought to teach what we are exploring today, enriched by the possibility of supersensible experiences since then. Schelling then strove to do justice to the Christian mysteries in his Philosophy of Revelation, which attempts to elucidate Christianity in a theosophical sense. Schelling was only able to give these lectures because he had once before stood at a professorship with different views. All the more was the rage against Schelling now. Today, in all the textbooks and other histories of philosophy, this last 'theosophical period' of Schelling is presented with great horror, where he, having already asserted the madness of his 'intellectual view', now went completely mad — so they think.

With this transition from Hegel to Schelling, however, an era had now come of age that lived entirely under the spell of natural science. And since then we have been witnessing a remarkable spectacle, through the observation of which we shall recognize why Theosophy, spiritual science, must be received today as it is received.

No one can marvel more at the results than I do, and yet the following must be said. The discovery of the plant and animal cell by Schwann and Schleiden in the 1830s was a great achievement, but it was followed by little in the way of opinions. There was the doctrine of force and matter, which regarded everything of a spiritual nature as no more than a bubble on the surface of physical processes. The worst result of this school of thought was the rigid system in which Baechner, in his book “Kraft und Stoff” (Force and Matter), conceived theoretical materialism. Of course, Baechner's bold courage remains to be admired. The other researchers simply did not have the courage to think their thoughts through to the end.

But even more refined minds went other ways than Hegel and Schelling under the constraint of natural science, for example, Hermann Helmholtz, who made truly great contributions in the fields of psychophysics, sensory physiology, physiological optics, and phonetics. His discoveries led him, through the nature of the experiments and their suggestive power, not through thinking, to reject Hegel, so that he said: “When I open Hegel and read a few sentences from his ‘Natural Philosophy’, it is pure nonsense.

And again, a fine mind that was also trained in thinking was not understood in his thoughts, Julius Robert Mayer, who discovered the law of conservation of energy. His law did indeed have an enormous physical significance, and this was also appreciated. But Mayer's train of thought on the mechanical equivalent of heat in his paper on “The Organic Movement in its Connection with Metabolism” (1845) was never understood. People preferred to read Helmholtz, who was much easier to understand. So people preferred to read his work “On the Interaction of Natural Forces” (1854), in which he proved the validity of Mayer's Law, starting from the impossibility of perpetual motion.

Then came the achievements of Darwinism, and a bold mind like Haeckel's, who was averse to all intellectual culture and therefore could see nothing in Hegelian philosophy but a tangle of concepts, was thus called upon to expand the scientific facts in the sense of an external, material history of development. Thus he became the founder of the materialistic Darwinism of the sixties and seventies. No school of philosophical thought rose up against it. At that time, the world could no longer be grasped by philosophy; for it there was nothing but an interrelationship between philosophy and natural science.

Thus a thinker as important as Eduard von Hartmann, who in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) dragged materialistic Darwinism, so to speak, before the forum of an intellectual philosophy, was decried as a dilettante who had no idea of natural science. Many refutations appeared, including a highly ingenious anonymous one: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Philosophy and Descent Theory” (1872). Haeckel said of this writing that it was so excellent and so thoroughly demonstrated the errors of Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy that he himself (Haeckel) could have written it, and Oscar Schmidt, the biographer of Darwin, vividly regretted that his esteemed colleague did not emerge from his anonymity. Then a new edition of this writing appeared, and Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author.

Thus philosophy had once provided the most brutal proof of the fact that it can very well understand natural science, even if trained thinking leads it to completely different results than those of materialism. This struggle is not just about sentence against sentence, but about cultural forces that confront each other.

More subtle minds always retained an understanding of both, of philosophy and of natural science. But due to the dominant power of suggestion of natural science, they could only be heard in the narrowest of circles. Thus Vincenz Knauer's extraordinarily fine and comprehensive history of philosophy, 'Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie', could only be understood by a very limited circle. Not even what the narrow Herbartian philosophy put forward against external materialism was able to have an effect. And so it came about that a strictly logical mind, even though schooled in scholasticism, which wanted to build within itself the bridge to the scientific method, could not even do this within itself. This was the case with Franz Brentano, who wanted to combine the scientific method with strictly logical thinking in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Point of View), the first volume of which appeared in 1874. But his mental self-discipline did not prevail; inwardly he was still too much under the sway of natural-scientific materialism. He could not come to terms with himself, and so the second volume, announced for the fall, was not published for some time. And today Brentano lives as an old man in Florence, and the second volume has still not been published.

I myself was a witness to the terrible conflict that this conflict could have on the individual soul. I saw how the methodical in the training of thought almost lost its power through the suggestion of natural science. It was at a solemn session of the Vienna Academy in the 1880s, at which I was present, when Ernst Mach gave a lecture on the economy of natural phenomena. He could not find a way to grasp natural phenomena in his method. In each sentence, it was painfully felt how all method of thinking disappeared, how everything shrank to the principle of the least expenditure of energy in the recognition of nature. Thus, thinking was pushed from the central position it had with Hegel to the lowest conceivable economic significance.

Thus Hegel himself remained, as it were, an enchanted spirit, and even a Kuno Fischer could not release him. The truth of what Rosenkranz had said in the introduction to his Hegel biography proved to be true: we philosophers of the second half of the 19th century are, at best, only the gravediggers of the philosophers of the first half of the 19th century. And by that he meant – biographers.

The works of Otto Liebmann, Zeller and others, which went back to Kant, seemed to bring a new impetus to the method of thinking. Liebmann wrote one of the most ingenious treatises ever written in the field of epistemology. He tried by all means to found a transcendental epistemology, but in the end he arrived at a kind of epistemology that can be roughly described as something akin to a dog running around in circles. He did not get beyond the starting point of his epistemology.

And so the present situation developed. There was the important formulation of the theory of heat by Clausius, which had an effect on the physiology of sense and this finally again on the theory of knowledge. Here also, therefore, a subjection of philosophy under natural science.

Thus, those who spoke in terms of the old way of thinking were not heard. In the 1880s, one researcher did attempt to advance epistemology on the basis of Kant, but he was not listened to. Under the pressure of the circumstances, he left the field entirely and turned to aesthetics. It was only in 1906 that he published another small epistemological work, by Johannes Volkelt, on “The Sources of the Certainty of our Knowledge”. The conditions for a true epistemology were as little present as they were for a true understanding of Hegel.

Our time finds itself far more satisfied with a Spencerian encyclopedia, which goes beyond natural science by very little and very superficially. And when the view of the smallest economic measure, as proposed by Mach, was brought back from the New World in the pragmatism of William James, it was enthusiastically received as something new. However, the strict columns of Hegel's absolute logic and the completely unphilosophical raisonnement of pragmatism make a rather strange combination.

But the good cannot be completely suppressed, it can only be suppressed temporarily. Where a misunderstood Kantianism could not lie like a mildew on the thinking, so to speak, out of the strength of the people, a healthy thinking stirred. Thus the Russian philosopher Solowjow brought in fact new significant methodological approaches by the fact that he based on a young national strength, which, if you want, has not even brought it to a right culture, but not on an old one like Franz Brentano. The Frenchman Boutroux also introduced a new useful concept into the history of development. But such efforts are ignored. Under the ashes, the truth continues to glow, as it were. It can be overgrown by prejudice and impotence, but as a self-discipline of thought it continues to work secretly. And precisely those who believe they have to represent spiritual science must hope that this self-discipline of thought will pave the way for spiritual science. They must find the way to Hegel's strictest logic, for only in this way can they firmly establish on the foundation of thought that which they must often bring down from higher spiritual worlds in loose structures. Thus, in the supersensible realm, if we may be permitted the expression, there is nothing that strictly trained thinking must reject. ke more acute and self-trained mind will find the transition, the bridge that leads from the highest product of the physical plane, thinking, to the supersensible.

My dear venerated friends! It is always difficult when you have a serious scientific conscience to translate the traditional expression of “Logos” into some or other younger language. We usually employ “Word” to translate “Logos” as is commonly found in the Bible. However, when we have the word “Logic” in a sentence we don't use “Word” but rather think about “Thought,” as it operates in the human individual and its laws. Yet when we speak about “philology” we are aware that we are developing a science which is derived from words. I would like to say: what we have today in the word “Logos” is basically in everything which is philosophic. When we speak about “philosophy”, we can, even though defined as experience in relation to the Logos, sense how a reflection of these undetermined experiences are contained in all that we feel in “philosophy”.

Philosophy implies that the words—which no doubt came into question when philosophy was created, that only words were implied—indicate a certain inner personal experience; the word philosophy points to a connection of the Logos to “Sophia”; one could call it a particular, if not personal, general interest. The word philosophy is less directly referred to as possessing a scientific nature but rather an inner relationship to the wisdom filled scientific content. Because our feeling regarding philosophy is not as sure as in those cases when philosophy, on the one hand was included with, I'd rather not call it science, but scientific aims, and on the other hand with something which points to inner human relationships; so we have today an extraordinarily undefined experience when we speak about philosophy or involve ourselves with philosophy. This vague experience is extremely difficult to lift out of the depth of our consciousness if we try to do it through mere dialectical or external definitions, without trying to enter into the personal experience which ran its course in the consequential development. To such an examination the present will produce something special.

If we look back a few decades at people in central Europe, the involvement they were looking for with philosophy was quite a different experience, in central Europe, as it is today in the second decade of the twentieth century, where we basically have lived through so much, not only externally in the physical but also spiritually—one can quietly declare this—than what had been experienced for centuries. When one looks back over the experiences, of—if I may use a pedantic and philistine expression—the philosophic zealot of the fifties, sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, perhaps even later, which the central Europeans could have, it is essentially as follows. Looking at the time of German philosophy's blossoming, you look back at the great philosophic era of the Fichtes, Schellings, and Hegels; surrounding you there had been a world of the educated and the scholars, a world which this philosophic era thoroughly dismisses and which in the rising scientific world view sees what should be taking the place of the earlier philosophic observations. One admires the magnitude of the elevation of thoughts found in a Schelling, one admires the energy and force of Fichte's development of thoughts, one can perhaps also develop a feeling for the pure comprehensive, insightful thoughts of Hegel, but one would more or less consider this classical time of German philosophy as something subdued.

Besides this is the endeavour to develop something out of science which should present a general world view, right from the striving of the “power/force and matter/substance people,” to those who carefully strive to find a philosophic world view out of natural scientific concepts, but who lean towards the former idealistic philosophy. There were all kinds of thoughts and research in this area.

A third kind of thinker appeared in this sphere, who couldn't go along with the purely scientifically based world view but could on the other hand also not dive into solid thought of the Hegel type. For them a big question came about: How can a person create something within his thoughts, which originate in himself, and place this in an objective relationship to the outer world?—There were epistemologists of different nuances who agreed with the call “Back to Kant”, but this way to Kant was aimed in the most varied ways; there were sharp-witted thinkers like Liebman, Volkelt and so on, who basically remained within the epistemological and didn't get to the question: How could someone take the content of his thoughts and imaginative nature from within himself and find a bridge to a trans-subjective reality existing outside human reality?

What I'm sketching for you now as a situation in which the philosophic zealots found themselves in the last third of the nineteenth Century, which didn't lead to any kind of solution. This was to a certain extent in the middle of some or other drama during a time-consuming work of art, to which no finality had been found. These efforts more or less petered out into nothing definite. The efforts ran into a large number of questions and overall, basically failed to acquire the courage to develop a striving for solutions regarding these questions.

Today the situation in the entire world of philosophy is such that one can't sketch it in the same way as I've done for the situation in the last third of the nineteenth century, in its effort to determine reality. Today philosophic viewpoints have appeared which, I might say, have risen out of quite different foundations, and which make it possible for us to characterise it in quite a different way. Today, if we wish to characterise the philosophic situation, our glance which we have homed in the second half of the twentieth century comes clearly before our soul eyes, namely such sharply differentiated philosophic viewpoints of the West, of central Europe and Eastern Europe. Today things appear in quite a different way which not long ago flowed through our experience of the philosophical approach to be found in three names: Herbert Spencer—Hegel—Vladimir Soloviev. By placing these three personalities in front of us we have the representatives who can epitomise our philosophic character of today. Inwardly this had to some extent already been the case for some time, but these characteristics of the philosophic situation only appear today before the eyes of our souls.

Let's look at the West: Herbert Spencer. If I want to be thorough I would have to give an outline of the entire course of philosophic development, how it went from Bacon, Locke over Mill to Spencer, but this can't be my task today. In Herbert Spencer we meet a personality who wanted to base his philosophy on a pure system of concepts, as is determined in natural science. We find in Spencer a personality who totally agrees with science and out of this agreement arrives at a conclusion: ‘This is the way in which all philosophic thought in the world must be won by natural science.’ So we see how Spencer searched in science to determine certain steps to understand concepts, like for example how matter is constantly contracting and expanding, differentiating and consolidating. He saw this for instance in plants, how the leaves spread out and how they drew together in the seed, and he tried to translate such concepts into clear scientific forms with which to create his world view. He even tried to think about the human community, the social organism, only in such a way in which his thoughts would be analogous to the natural organism. Here he suddenly became cornered.

The natural human organism is connected to the confluence of everything relating to it from the surrounding world, through observations, through imagination and so on. Every single organism is bound to what it can develop under the influence of the nervous or sensory system (sensorium). In the human community organism Herbert Spencer couldn't find a sensorium, no kind of centralised nervous system. For this reason, he constructed a kind of community organism, totally based on science, as the crown of his philosophic structure.

What lay ahead for the West with this? It meant that scientific thought could reach its fully entitled, one-sided development. What lay ahead was the finest observational results and experimental talents developing out of folk talents. What came out of it was interest created to observe the world in its outer sensory reality into the smallest detail, without becoming impatient and wanting to rise out of it to some encompassing concepts. What came out of it was also a tendency to remain within this outer sense-world of facts. There was what I could call, a kind of fear of rising up to one encompassing amalgamation. Because they could do nothing else but exist in what the sense world presented to them, simply being pushed directly into the senses here in the West, there appeared the belief that the entire spiritual world should be handed over to the singular faiths of individuals, and that these beliefs should develop free from all scientific influences. Religious content was not to be touched by scientific exploration. So we see with Herbert Spencer, who in his way took up the scientific way of thought consequentially right into sociology, earnestly separated, on the one hand, from science, which would proceed scientifically, and on the other hand with a spiritual content for people who wanted nothing to do with science.

Let's go now from Herbert Spencer to what we meet with Hegel. It doesn't matter that Hegel, who belonged to the first third of the 19th Century, was outwitted during the second third for central European philosophy because what was characteristic for Middle Europe was most meaningful in what exactly had appeared in Hegel. Let's look at Hegel. Already in his, I could call it, emotional predisposition, lies a certain antipathy against this universalist natural scientific way with which to shape the world view as Herbert Spencer had done in the West, but of course had been prepared by predecessors, both by scientific researchers and philosophers as well. We see how Hegel could not stand Newton and was unsympathetic to his unique way by thinking of the world-all as totally mechanical, how he rejected Newton not merely in terms of the colour theory but also in his interpretation of the cosmos. Hegel took the trouble to go back to Kepler's planetary movement formulations, he analysed Kepler's formulations about planetary movements and found out for himself, that Newton had actually not added anything new because Kepler's formulation already contained the laws of gravitation. This he applied from the basis of a scientifically formulated thought, while with Kepler it had resulted more out of a spiritual experience, which he saw as encompassing and that one could try to grasp the outer natural scientific through the spirit. Kepler is for Hegel simply the personality who is capable of penetrating thoughts with the spirit and building a bridge between what is acceptable scientifically, and what simply has to be believed according to the West, and which is also capable of lifting science into the area which for the West is limited to belief.

From this basis Hegel, in tune with Goethe, strongly opposed the Newtonian colour theory. We can see how the Hegelian system had a kind of antipathy against what appeared quite natural in the Newtonian system. For this Hegel had a decisive talent—to live completely in a thought itself. For Hegel Goethe's utterance to Schiller was obvious: “I see my ideas with my eyes.” It appears naive, however, such naivety, when considered correctly, comes out of the deepest philosophic wisdom. Hegel would simply not have understood how one could state that the idea of the triangle is not to be grasped, because Hegel's life went completely—if I might use the expression—according to the plan of thinking. For him there was also a higher world of revelations, a world of higher spirituality, which gradually casts its shadow images on a plane which is filled with thoughts. From up above the spiritual worlds throw their shadow images on the plane of the human soul, on which human thought can develop. Through this the idea of higher spirituality came about for Hegel, that on the plane of the soul it is shadowed as thoughts. Hegel was inclined to experience these thoughts as fully spiritual, and he also experienced natural events not in their elementary present time, but he saw them in mental pictures, thrown on to the plane of the soul.

So it is impossible in Hegel's philosophy to separate, in an outer way, wisdom from belief, which was quite natural in the West. For Hegel his life task was the unification of the spiritual world (which the West wanted to simply refer to as part of the large sphere of belief) with the sensory physical world, into such a world about which one can have knowledge. This means there is no longer knowledge on the one hand and belief on the other; here the human soul faces the great, meaningful problem: How does one find during earthly life the bridge between belief and knowledge, between spirit and nature? To a certain extent it was the tragedy of Hegel that the problem he posed in such a grandiose manner, he wanted to understand actually only on the level of thinking, that he wanted to understand the experience of the inner power, the inner liveliness of thinking, but he could not grasp anything living from the content of thought.

Consider Hegel's logic—he wanted to return repeatedly to the concept of the Logos! He felt that when we actually wanted to attain a true understanding of the Logos, then the Logos must be something which is not merely something thought, but a real activity which floods and works through the world. For him the Logos did not only have an abstract, logical content, but for him it became real world content. If we look at one of the three parts of his philosophy, namely his “logic” we only find abstract concepts! So it is terribly moving for someone who enters on the one side into the Hegelian philosophy, with his whole being, and has the fundamental experience: that which can be grasped through the Logos, must be penetrated with the creative principle of the world. The Logos must be “God before the creation of the world”—to use an expression of Hegel.

This is on the one side. Now how did Hegel develop this idea of the Logos on the other side? He starts with “being” and arrives at “nothing”, goes from “becoming” to “existence.” He arrives at the goal through the causality, to the belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause. One can look at the all the concepts of Hegel's logic and ask oneself: Is that what, “before the beginning of creation as the content of the divine” could have been there? This is abstract logic, the demand of the creative, the logos as postulate, but as a purely human thought postulate! One finds this tragic. This tragedy goes further, for the Hegelian philosophy is deemed as valid. Yet it contains instances where through action new life can germinate. It contains sprouts. Hegel saw his redemption in this: being—nothing—becoming—existence.

When people are presented with Hegel, they say: ‘This is a dark one, we don't need to be lured into it.’ However, when one makes the effort to allow one's inner soul to enter into it, to experience the concept inwardly, as Hegel tried to experience it, then all the ideas of empiricism and rationalism disappears, then thought experiences and the one who is thinking is directly thought of. Whoever goes along with it finds the impetus of loosening the thoughts from the abstraction, and take Hegel's logic as the sprouts which can become something quite different, when they become alive. For me Hegel's logic looks like the seed of a plant in which one can hardly see what it will become and yet still carries the most varied structures possible within it.

For me it appears that when this seed sprouts, when one lovingly cares for it and plants it into the soul's earth through anthroposophical research, then what emerges is that thought can not only be thought but can be experienced as reality. Here we have the central European aspect.

If we now go to the East, we have in Vladimir Soloviev a man who is able like no other philosopher, to become gradually more the content of our own philosophic striving, who must now become so important to us because we allow the particularities of his character to work in on us. We see in Soloviev both the European-eastern way of thinking, which is of course not Oriental-Asiatic. Soloviev absorbed everything which was European, he only developed it in an Eastern fashion. What do we see being developed in terms of human scientific striving? Here we see how actually this method of thinking, found mostly in the West by Herbert Spencer, which Soloviev basically looked down on, is something against which the truth and knowledge he was seeking, could so to speak be illustrated. In comparison, what he actually presents is a full experience of spirituality itself. It appeared in full consciousness to him, it appeared more atavistically, subconsciously, yet it is an experience in spirituality itself. It was more or less a dreamlike attempt to knowingly experience what in the West—here quite consciously—was transposed into the realm of belief. So we find in the East a discussion which can be experienced in an imprecise way, which looks like a one-sided experience which Hegel wanted to use to cross the bridge out of the natural existence to the spiritual world.

If a person delves into the spiritual development of someone from central Europe, like Soloviev, then he will primarily have an extraordinary uncomfortable feeling. He is reminded of an experience of something misty, mystical; an overheated element in the soul life which doesn't arrive at concepts, which can externally leave him empty completely, but which can only be experienced inwardly. He senses the entirely vague mystical experience, but he also finds that Soloviev makes use of conceptual forms and means of expression which we know, from Hegel, Humes, Mills, even those of Spencer, but only as illustrations. Throughout one can say he doesn't remain stuck in the mist but through the way with which he treats religious aspects as scientific, how he searches for it everywhere and unfolds it as philosophy, he can evermore be measured and criticised according to the philosophic conceptual development of the West.

So we find ourselves today in the following situation. In the West comes the striving to formulate a world view scientifically; science is on the one side and the spiritual on the other side and wrestle in the centre with the problem of how to create a bridge to include both, to express it imprecisely, as Hegel said: “Nature is Spirit in its dissimilarity,” “Spirit is the concept of when it has returned again to itself.” In all these stuttering expressions lie the tragedy that Hegel could only care for abstract ideas, which he strived for. Then in the East, with Soloviev we see how it was somewhat still maintained, how well the church fathers wanted to save it in terms of philosophy, before the Council of Nicaea. It places us completely back in the first three post Christian Centuries of the West.

So we have in the East an experience of the spiritual world, which is not able to soar up into self-owned terminological formulations, formulations and concepts used by the West in which they express themselves, and as a result remain in vague, somewhat extraneous, foreign expressions.

So we see how the threefold nature of the philosophic world view unfolded. By our tracing how the threefold philosophic world view was formed through the characteristics and abilities of humanity in the West, the centre and the East, we can see that we are obliged today—because science as something embracing must spread over all of mankind—to find something which can lift it above these various philosophic aspects which basically still provide elements where philosophy is still a human-personal matter. We see today in different ways in the West, central Europe and the East, how they love wisdom. We understand that in ancient times, philosophy could still be an inner condition of the soul. Now however, in recent times, where people are strongly differentiated, this way of loving wisdom expresses itself in a magnitude of ways. Perhaps we could realise due to this, what we have to do ourselves, particularly what we have to do in Central Europe, where the most tragic and intensified problem is raised even if it is not regarded in the same way by all philosophic minds.

If I want to summarise all of what I have brought into a picture, I would like to express it as follows. Regarded philosophically Soloviev speaks like the old priest who lived in higher worlds and who had developed a kind of inner ability to live in these higher worlds: priestly speech translated philosophically is what one encounters all the time with Soloviev. In the West, with Herbert Spencer, speaks the man of the world who wants to enter practical life—as it has come out of Darwinian theory—to expand science in such a way that it becomes the practical basis of life. In the Middle we have neither the man of the world not the priest: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel have no priestly ways like a Soloviev. In the Middle we have the teacher, the educators of the people and it is also here where the German philosophy emerged, for example, from religious deepening; because the priest became the teacher once again. The educated also adheres to the Hegelian philosophy.

We see recently—as with Oswald Külpe—how it has happened that philosophy, when it was already lost, is no more than a summary of the individual sciences. From inorganic science you can ask—what are the concepts? From organic science you can ask—what are the concepts? Likewise with history, with the science of religion, and so on. One collects these concepts and forms a separate abstract unit. I would like to say that the subject of the teaching in the separate sciences should create the totality of teaching. This is what the science in the Middle must basically come to after the entire assessment.

If we look back at what has happened, we see with Herbert Spencer the unconditional belief in science, the belief for the necessity to cling to observation, experiment and a thinking mind, which can be experienced through the observation and experiment; and one is mistaken about the contradiction which appears here, when the acquired concepts can be applied to the social organism and—although these do not have the most important characteristics of a natural organism, the sensorium—they are nevertheless grasped with the same concepts which arise in natural existence. We see the inclination to the natural sciences so strong that some characters—like Newton—became one-sidedly stuck to the mechanistic and even satisfied their soul-striving with it. It is generally known that Newton had tried in a one-sided mystical way to clarify the Apocalypse; besides his scientific world view he had his own mystical needs.

Let's look, for example, at everything which has arisen from natural science and what it gradually in the course of the 19th Century has subconsciously taken over in Central Europe; because in Central Europe science has simply followed the pattern of the Western scientific way of thinking. There is a tendency not to take notice of it, but still all points of view are modelled on the Western pattern. How wild the people become when someone tries to apply Goethe's way of thinking in physics in contrast to them taking shelter under Newton!

How does the development happen in biology? Goethe created an organism for which the integration into its concepts depended on an understanding of a mathematical nature. Time was short to obtain a biology more appropriate to modern thinking than to that of olden times. The progress in the 19th Century in central Europe however brought about not the Goethean biology but Darwinism, which was interspersed with concepts contrary to those of Goethe, like the concepts of the 16th Century opposed to those of the 18th Century. Only in Central Europe did these concepts develop; in the West people remained with those concepts that sufficed for the understanding of nature. So it happened that certain concepts in the West simply were not available and simply got lost because people in Central Europe had adopted western thinking. For example, that a thought, a lively thought, can form a concept of grasping a reality, quite apart from empiricism, as it had happened with Hegel—this is not present in Central Europe; it got lost because the central European thinking was flooded by western thinking.

So we have the task in Central Europe to look at what scientific thinking can be. Anthroposophists resent it when this scientific way of thinking is cared for with as much love as for the researcher himself. Nothing, absolutely nothing will be said by me in opposition to scientific thinking; if someone believes this then it is a misunderstanding. However, I must understand the scientific way of thinking in its purity and then also try to characterise it in its purity. Now these things are presented to those who confront scientific thinking with impartiality—somewhat like a western researcher will present them, like Haeckel in his genial way did it—these results are presented in a western way of research, when they are thus left and not reinterpreted philosophically, not given as solutions, not as answers, but are presented above all as questions. The totality of natural science does not gradually become an answer to a question for the impartial person, because it turns into the great world question itself. This is experienced everywhere: what is now being researched in the most beautiful way by these researchers—for my sake right up to atomic theory, which I don't negate but only want to put it in its correct place—this comes to a question and out of the West a great question is posed to us. Where does this question come from?

When we link our gaze to the outer world and only turn to the observation of the given elements, we don't fathom its complete reality. We are born as human beings in the world, are constituted as such, as we already were before and take part in the reality by looking at ourselves in our own inner being. As we look then at the outer world, the sense perceptible objects—we find that part which is living in us, is missing in reality, as we can only through human struggle connect to the other half-reality, which observes us from the outside. If we look towards the West, so we see the half-reality is researched with particular devotion; however, it only provides a number of questions because it's only a half-reality. So on the one side there appears only one half of reality as a given; if one really looks at it, it raises questions. In Central Europe you discover examples of questions which Western thinking can answer and one tries to push through to thinking. That is the Hegelian philosophy.

In the East one felt that which lives above the thought, which works down into the thought; but one couldn't come as far as awakening it to life, that so to speak the flesh could also sustain a skeleton. Soloviev was able to develop it in flesh, muscles and even blood in his philosophy—but the skeleton was missing. As a result, he took Hegel's concepts, those of Humes and others, and built in a foreign skeletal system. Only when one is in the position of not using a foreign skeletal system then something comes about which can be lived through spiritually. So, however, as it happened with Soloviev, it leads to a shadowed existence because it didn't manifest into a skeletal system which could as a result be descriptive. If one doesn't want to remain with building only an outer skeletal system, but live spiritually and prepare oneself through strong spiritual work, then one develops for oneself an inner skeleton within spiritual experiences; one develops the necessary concepts. For this, various exercises have been given in my writings, “Occult Science” and “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in others. Here one develops what really can become a conceptual organism. This is then the other side of reality, and this side of reality has its seed in the eastern philosophy of Soloviev.

In central Europe there is always the big problem of striking a bridge between nature and the spiritual. For us it has at the same time become a meaningful historical problem: to strike the bridge between West and East, and this task must stand before us in philosophy. This task also directs itself into Anthroposophy. If Anthroposophy becomes capable of inward thought experiences developing into living form, then it may on the other side experience quite materialistic natural phenomena as they are experienced in the West, because then it will not be through abstract concepts but through living scientific circles that the bridge is built between mere belief and knowledge, between knowing and subjective certainty. Then out of philosophy a real Anthroposophy will develop and philosophy can be fructified from both sides by these living sciences. Only then would Hegel's philosophy be awakened to life, when through the anthroposophical experience you let the blood of life be spiritually added to it. Then there won't be a logical base which is so abstract that it can't be “Spirit on the other side of Nature”, as Hegel wanted it, but that it really can be grasped, not as abstraction but as the living spirituality of philosophy.

This gives Anthroposophy the following task. How must we, according to our present viewpoints, which lie decades behind Hegel, strike the bridge between what we call truth on the one side, which must encompass all of reality, and that which we call science on the other side, which also must encompass the entirety of reality? Briefly, the problem must be raised—and that is the most important philosophic problem in Anthroposophy: what is the relationship between truth and science?

This is the problem I wanted to present in the introduction today at the start of our consideration, which I believe you will now understand.

I want, as I've said, to use these days to lay the foundation we will need to bring the right light to bear on the concepts chance, necessity, and providence. But today that will require me to introduce certain preparatory concepts, abstract counterparts, as it were, of the beautiful concrete images we have been considering.¹ And to do the job as thoroughly as we must, a lecture will have to be added on Monday. That will give us today, tomorrow (after the eurythmy performance), and Monday at seven. The performance tomorrow will be at three o'clock, and a further lecture will follow immediately.

For contemporary consciousness as it has come into being and gradually evolved up to the present under the influence of materialistic thought the concepts necessity and chance are indistinguishable. What I am saying is that many a person whose consciousness and mentality have been affected by a materialistic outlook can no longer tell necessity and chance apart.

Now there are a number of facts in relation to which even minds muddled by materialism can still accept the concept of necessity, in a somewhat narrow sense at least. Even individuals limited by materialism still agree that the sun will rise tomorrow out of a certain necessity. In their view, the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is great enough to be tantamount to necessity. Facts of this kind occurring in the relatively great expanse of nature and natural happenings on our planet are allowed by such people to pass as valid cases of Necessity. Conversely, their concepts of necessity narrow when they are confronted with what may be called historical events. And an outstanding example is Fritz Mauthner, whose name has often been mentioned here; he is the author of Critique of Language, written for the purpose of out-Kanting Kant, as well as of a Philosophical Dictionary. An article on history appears in the latter. It is extremely interesting to see how he tries there to figure out what history is. He says, “When the sun rises, I am confronted with a fact.” To take an example, we have been able today, the 28th of August 1915, to witness the fact that the sun has risen. That is a fact. And now he concludes that we can ascribe this rising of the sun to a law, to necessity, only because it happened yesterday and the day before yesterday, and so on, as long as people have been observing the sun. It was not just a case of a single fact, but of a whole sequence of identical or similar facts in outer nature that brought about this recognition of necessity.

But when it comes to history, says Mauthner, Caesar, for example, was here only once, so we can't speak of necessity in his case. It would be possible to speak of necessity in his existence only if such a fact were to be repeated. But historical facts are not repeated, so we can't talk of necessity in relation to them. In other words, all of history has to be looked upon as chance. And Mauthner, as I've said, is an honest man, a really honest man. Unlike other less honest individuals, he is a man who draws the conclusions of his assumptions. So he says of historical “necessity,” for example, “That Napoleon outdid himself and marched to Russia or that I smoked one cigar more than usual in the past hour are two facts that really happened, both necessary, both—as we rightly expect in the case of the most grandiose as well as the most absurdly insignificant historical facts—not without consequences.” To his honest feeling, something that may be termed historical fact, like Napoleon's campaign against Russia (though it could equally well be some other happening) and the reported fact that he smoked an extra cigar, are both necessary facts if we apply the term “necessity” to historical facts at all.

You will be amazed at my citing this particular sentence from Mauthner's article on history. I cite it because we have here an honest man straightforwardly admitting something that his less honest fellows with a modern scientific background refuse to admit. He is admitting that the fact that Caesar lived cannot be distinguished from the fact of Mauthner himself having smoked an extra cigar by calling upon the means available to us and considered valid by contemporary science. No difference can be ascertained by the methods modern science recognizes! Now he takes a positive stand, declaring his refusal to recognize a valid difference, to be so foolish as to represent history as science, when, according to the hypotheses of present-day science, history cannot qualify as a science.

He is really honest; he says with some justification, for example, that Wundt set up a systematic arrangement of the sciences.² History was, of course, listed among them. But no more objective reason for Wundt's doing this can really be discovered than that it had become customary, or, in other words, it happens to be a fact that universities set up history faculties. If a regular faculty were provided to teach the art of riding, asserts Mauthner—and from his standpoint rightly—professors like Wundt would include the art of riding in their system of the sciences, not from any necessity recognized by current scientific insight, but for quite other reasons.

We really have to say that the present has parted ways to a very considerable extent with what we encounter in Goethe's Faust: this can be quite shattering if we take it seriously enough.³ There is much, very much in Faust that points to the profoundest riddles in the human soul. We simply don't take things sufficiently seriously these days. What does Faust say right at the beginning, after he has spoken of how little philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology were able to give him as a student, after expressing himself about these four fields of learning? What science and life in general have given him as nourishment for his soul has brought him to the following conviction:

No dog would endure such a curst existence!
Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,
And thus the bitter task forego
Of saying things I do not know,—
That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more
(Bayard Taylor translation)

What is it Faust wants to know, then? “Germs and productive powers”! Here, the human heart too senses in its depths a questioning about chance and necessity in life.

Necessity! Let us picture a person like Faust confronting the question of necessity in the history of the human race. Such an individual asks, Why am I present at this point in evolution? What brought me here? What necessity, running its course through what we call history, introduced me into historical evolution at just this moment? Faust asks these questions out of the very depths of his soul. And he believes that they can be answered only if he understands “productive powers and germs,” understands, in other words, how outer experience contains a hidden clue to the way the thread of necessity runs through everything that happens.

Now let us imagine a personality like Faust's having, for some reason or other, to make an admission similar to Fritz Mauthner's. Mauthner is, of course, not sufficiently Faustian to sense the consequences Faust would experience if he had to admit one day that he could distinguish no difference between the fact that Caesar occupied his place in history and the fact of having smoked an extra cigar in the past hour. Just imagine transferring into the mind of Faust the reflection on the nature of historical evolution voiced by Mauthner from his particular standpoint. Faust would have had to say, I am as necessary in ongoing world evolution as smoking an extra cigar once was to Fritz Mauthner. Things are simply not given their due weight. If they were, we would realize how significant it is for human life that an individual who embraces the entire scientific conscience of the present admits the impossibility of distinguishing, with the means currently available to science, between the fact that Caesar lived and the fact that Mauthner smoked an extra cigar, in other words, admits that the necessity in the one case is indistinguishable from the necessity in the other.

When the time comes that people sense this with a truly Faustian intensity, they will be mature enough to understand how essential it is to grasp the element of necessity in historical facts, in the way we have tried to do with the aid of spiritual science in the case of many a historical fact. For spiritual science has shown us how the facts relative to the successive historical epochs have been injected, as it were, into the sphere of external reality by advancing spiritual evolution. And what we might state about the necessity of this or that happening at some particular time differs very sharply indeed from the fact of Fritz Mauthner smoking his extra cigar. We have stressed the connection between the Old and the New Testaments, between the time preceding and the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, and stressed too how the various cultures succeeded one another in the post-Atlantean epoch and how the various facts occurring during these cultural periods sprang from spiritual causes.

The angle from which we view things is tremendously important. We should be aware of the consequences of the assumptions presently held to have sole scientific validity.

Days like yesterday, which was Hegel's birthday, and today, which is Goethe's, should be festive occasions for realizing how necessary it is to recall the great will-impulses of earlier times, to recall Hegel's and Goethe's impulses of will, in order to perceive how deeply humanity has become implicated in materialism. There have always been superficial people. The difference between our time and Goethe's and Hegel's is not that there were no superficial people then, but rather that in those days the superficial people could not manage to get their outlook recognized as the only valid one. There was that slight difference in the situation.

Yesterday was Hegel's birthday; he was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. Since it was impossible for him, living at that time, to penetrate into truly spiritual life as we do today with the aid of spiritual science, he sought in his way to lay hold on the spiritual element in ideas and concepts; he made these his spiritual foothold. When we look at the phenomena surrounding us, we seek the spiritual life, the truly living life of the spirit that underlies them, whereas Hegel, since he could go no further, sought the invisible idea, the fabric of ideas, first the fabric of ideas in pure logic, then that behind nature, and finally that underlying everything that happens as a spiritual element. And he approached history too in such a way that he really accomplished much of significance in his historical studies, even if in the abstract form of ideas rather than in the concrete form of the spiritual.

Now what does a person who honestly adopts Fritz Mauthner's standpoint do if, let us say, he sets about describing the evolution of art from Egyptian and Grecian times up to the present? He examines the documented findings, registers them, and then considers himself the more genuinely scientific the less ideas play into the proceedings and the more he keeps—objectively, as he thinks—to the purely external, factual evidence. Hegel based his attempt to write the history of art on a different approach. And he said something, among other things, that we are of course able to express more spiritually today: If we conceive, behind the outer development of art, the flowing, evolving world of the ideal, then and then only will the idea that has, so to speak, been hiding itself, try to issue forth in the material element, to reveal itself mysteriously in the material medium. In other words, the idea will not at first have wholly mastered matter, but expresses itself symbolically in it, a sphinx to be deciphered, as Hegel sees it. Then, in its further development, the idea gains a further mastery over matter, and harmony then exists between the mastering idea and its external, material expression. That is its classic form. When, finally, the idea has worked its way through the material and mastered it completely, the time will come when the overflowing fullness of the world of ideas will run over out of matter, so to speak; the ideal will be paramount.

At the merely symbolic level, the idea cannot as yet wholly take over the material. At the classic stage, it has reached the point of union with matter. When it has achieved romantic expression, it is as though the idea overflowed in its fullness. And now Hegel says that we should look in the surrounding world to see where these concepts are exemplified: the symbolic, sphinx-like form of art in Egypt, the classic form in Greece, the romantic form in modern times. Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution. Then we must rediscover in the outer world what the world spirit first gave to us in thought form.

This, says Hegel, is the way external history too is “constructed.” He looks first for the progressive evolution of ideas, and then confirms it at hand of external events. That is what the Philistines, the superficial people, have never been able to grasp, and it is their reason for reproaching Hegel so bitterly. A person who is superficial despite his belonging to a spiritual scientific movement wants above all to know about his own incarnation, and there were of course people in Hegel's time too who were superficial in their own way. You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world.

Now the superficial critics had of course risen up in arms against this, and Hegel had to make the following comment: “In his many-sided naivete Herr Krug has challenged natural philosophy to perform the sleight of hand of deducing his pen only.” “Deducing” was the term used to denote a rediscovering in the outer world of everything that had first been discovered in the inner world. The person referred to in this remark was Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who was teaching at Leipzig at that time.⁴ Oddly enough, Krug was the predecessor of Mauthner in having written a philosophical dictionary, though he did not succeed in becoming a leading authority in his day. But he said, “If individuals like Hegel search for reality in ideas and then want to show, from the idea's necessity, how external reality coincides with it, then someone like Hegel had better come and demonstrate that he first encountered my pen as an idea.” Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him.

Hegel comments in the passage mentioned above, “It would have been possible to give him the hope of seeing this deed accomplished and his pen glorified if science had progressed so far and so cleared up everything of importance in heaven and on earth in the past and present as to leave nothing of greater importance in doubt” than Herr Krug's pen. But in today's world the mentality characteristic of superficial people is really dominant. And Fritz Mauthner would have to say honestly that there is no possibility of distinguishing between the necessity of Greek art coming into being at a certain time and the necessity involving Herr Krug's pen or his own extra cigar.

Now I have already called your attention to the prime importance of finding the proper angle from which to illuminate these lofty concepts of human life. We need to find the right angles from which to study necessity, chance, and providence.

I suggested that you picture Faust in such relation to the world that he would have to despair of the possibility of discovering any element of necessity. But now let's imagine just the opposite and picture Faust conceiving of himself in relation to a world where nothing but necessity exists, a world where he would have to regard every least thing he did as conditioned by necessity. Then he would indeed have to say that if there were no chance happenings, if everything had to be ruled by necessity, “no dog would endure such a curst existence,” and this not because of what he had been learning but because of the way the world had been arranged. And what would a person amount to if there were truth in Spinoza's dictum that everything we do and experience is every bit as necessitated as the path of a billiard ball which, struck by another, has no choice but to move in a way determined by the particular laws involved?⁵ If that were true, nobody could endure such a world order, and it would be even less bearable for natures aware of “productive powers and germs!”

Necessity and chance exist in the universe in such a way that they correspond to a certain human yearning. We feel that we couldn't get along without both of them. But they have to be properly understood, to be judged from the right angle. To do that in the case of the concept of chance naturally requires abandoning any prejudices or preconceptions we may have on the subject. We will have to examine the concept very closely so that we can replace the cliche that this or that “chanced” to happen—as we are often forced to say—with something more suitable. We will have to search out the fitting angle. And we will find it only if we go a bit further in the study we began yesterday.

You are familiar with the alternating states of sleeping and waking. But we recognize that waking consciousness too has its nuances, and that it is possible to distinguish between varying degrees of awakeness. But we can go further in a study of that state. It is basically true that from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep again, our waking consciousness takes in nothing but objects in the world around us, senses their action, and produces our own images, concepts, and ideas. Sleeping consciousness, which has remained at the level of plant consciousness, then lets us behold ourselves as described yesterday, and, since our consciousness in this state is plantlike, this is a pleasurable absorption in ourselves.

Now if we penetrate fully into the nature of human soul life, we come upon something that fits neither day nor night consciousness. I am referring to distinct memories of past experiences. Consider the fact that sleeping consciousness doesn't involve remembering anything. If you were to sleep continuously, you wouldn't need to remember previous experiences; there would be no such necessity, in any case. We do remember to some extent when we are dreaming, but in the plant consciousness of sleep we remember nothing of the past. It is certainly clear that memory plays no special part in sleep. In the case of ordinary day-waking consciousness we must say that we experience what is around us, but experiencing what we have gone through in the past represents a heightening of waking consciousness. In addition to experience of our present surroundings we experience the past, but now in its reflection in ourselves. So if I draw a horizontal line (see drawing) to represent the level of human consciousness, we may say that we look into ourselves in sleep.

I will write “Looking into ourselves” here; we can call it a subconscious looking. Day-waking consciousness can be set down as “Looking out consciously into the world.” Then a third kind of inner experiencing that doesn't coincide with looking into the world is the conscious “Looking into ourselves in memory.” So we have

The fact is, then, that we have not just two sharply different states of consciousness, but three of them. Remembering is actually a deepened and more concentrated form of waking consciousness. The important thing about remembering is more than just being aware of something; we recapitulate awareness of it. Remembering makes sense only if we are aware of something all over again. Think a moment: if I encounter one of you whom I have seen before, but merely see him without recognizing him, memory isn't really involved. Memory, then, is recognition. And spiritual science teaches us too that whereas our ordinary day-waking consciousness, our consciousness of the world outside us, has reached the very peak of perfection, our remembering is actually only just beginning its evolution; it must go on and on developing. Metaphorically speaking, memory is still a very sleepy attribute of human consciousness. When it has undergone further evolution, another element of experience will be added to our present capacity, namely, the inner experiencing of past incarnations. That experiencing rests upon a heightening of our ability to remember, for no matter what else is involved, we are dealing here with recognition, and it must first travel the path of interiorization. Memory is a soul force just beginning its development./

Now let us ask, “What is the nature of this soul-force, this capacity to remember? What really happens in the remembering process?” Another question must be answered first, and that is, “How do we arrive, at this point in time, at correct concepts?”

You get an idea of what a correct concept is if you are not satisfied with a meager picturing of it; in most cases people have their own opinion of things rather than genuine concepts. Most individuals think they know what a circle is. If someone asks, Well, what is it? they answer, Something like this, and draw a circle. That may be a representation of a circle, but that is not what matters. A person who only knows that this drawing approximates a circle and remains satisfied with that has no concept of what a circle is. Only someone who knows enough to say that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center has a correct concept of a circle. An endless number of points is of course involved, but the circle is inwardly present in conceptual form. That is what Hegel was pointing out: that we must get down to the concept underlying external facts, and then recognize what we are dealing with in outer reality on the basis of our familiarity with the concept.

Let us explore what the difference is between the “half-asleep” status of the mere mental images with which most people are satisfied and the active possession of a concept. A concept is always in a process of inner growth, of inner activity. To have nothing more than the mental image of a table is not to have a concept of it. We have the concept “table” if we can say that it is a supported surface upon which other objects can be supported. Concepts are a form of inner liveliness and activity that can be translated into outer reality.

Nowadays one is tempted to resort to some lively movement to explain matters of this sort to one's contemporaries. One really has an impulse to jump about for the sake of demonstrating how a true concept differs from the sleepy holding onto a mental image. One is strongly prompted to go chasing after concepts as a means of bringing people slightly into motion and enlivening the dreadfully lazy modern holding of mental images that now prevails; one wants to devote one's energies to clarifying the distinction between entertaining ordinary mental images and working one's way into the real heart of a matter. And why is one thus prompted? Because we know from spiritual science that the moment something reaches the level of the concept, the etheric body has to carry out this movement; it is involved in this movement. So we really must not shy away from rousing the etheric body if we intend to construct concepts.

What, then, is memory? What is remembering? If I have learned that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center, and am now to recall this concept, I must again carry out this movement in my etheric body. From the aspect of the etheric body, something becomes a memory when carrying out the movement in question has become habitual there. Memory is habit in the etheric body; we remember a thing when our etheric body has become used to carrying out the corresponding movement. We remember nothing except what the etheric body has taken on in the form of habits. Our etheric bodies must take it upon themselves, under the stimulus of re-approaching an object, being repeatedly brought into motion by us and thus given the opportunity of remembering, to repeat the motion they carried out in first approaching that object. And the more often the experience is repeated, the firmer and more ingrained does the habit become, so that memory gradually strengthens.

Now if we are really thinking instead of merely forming mental images, our etheric bodies take on all sorts of habits. But these etheric bodies are what the physical body is based on. You will notice that a person who wants to clarify a concept often tries to make illustrative gestures, even as he is talking about it. Of course we all have our own individual gestures anyway. Differences between people are seen in their characteristic gestures, that is, if we conceive the term “gesture” broadly enough. A person with a feeling for gesture learns a good deal about others from observing their gestures and seeing, for example, how they set their feet down as they walk. And the way we think when remembering something is thus really a habit of the etheric body. This etheric body is a lifelong trainer of the physical body—or perhaps I had better say that it tries to train the latter, but not entirely successfully. We can say, then, that the physical body, for example, the hand, is here:

When we think, we constantly try to send into the etheric body what then becomes habit there. But the physical body presents a barrier. Our etheric bodies can't manage to get everything into the physical body, and they therefore save up the forces thus prevented from entering the physical body. They are saved up and carried through the entire period of life between death and rebirth. The way we think and the way we imprint our memories upon the etheric body then comes to the fore in our next incarnation as our instinctive play of gesture. And when we see a person exhibiting habitual gestures from childhood on, we can attribute them to the fact that in his previous incarnation his thinking imprinted certain quite distinct mannerisms on his etheric body. If, in other words, I study a person's inborn gestures, they can become clues to the way he managed his thinking in past incarnations. But just think what this means! It means that thoughts so impress themselves upon us that they resurface as the next incarnation's gestures. We get an insight here into the way the thinking element evolves into external manifestation: what began as the inwardness of thought becomes the outwardness of gesture.

Modern science, in its ignorance of what distinguishes necessity from chance, looks upon history as happenstance. In a list of words dating back to 1482, which Mauthner refers to, we read the words, “geschicht oder geschehcn ding, historia res gesta.” “Res gesta” is what history used to be called. All that is left of this today is the abstract remnant “regeste.” When notes are taken on some happening, they are called the “register.” Why is this? The word is based on the same root as “gesture.” The genius of speech responsible for the creation of these words was still aware that we have to see something brought over from the past in historical events. If what we observe in individual gesture is to be understood as the residue of past lives on earth, born with the individual into an incarnation, surely it is not complete nonsense to assume something like gestures in what we encounter in the facts of history. A series of facts surfaces in the way we walk, and these are the gestures of our thinking in past incarnations.

Where, then, must we look for the facts underlying history? That is the question now confronting us. In the case of individual lives we have to look for the thoughts underlying gesture. If we regard historical events as gestures, where must we look for the thoughts behind them? We will take up the study of this matter tomorrow.

• 1. This lecture was preceded by a eurythmy performance of the final scenes of Goethe's Faust, II.
• 2. Wilhelm Wundt, 1832–1907, German philosopher and philologist. See also Mauthner's article “History” in his Dictionary of Philosophy.
• 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, playwright, and novelist. Faust, dramatic poem. The quotations from Faust in this book are all taken from the translation by Bayard Taylor.
• 4. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, 1770–1842, German philosopher, influenced by Kant.
• 5. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677, Dutch philosopher.

Even when we reflect on current events, as we are doing now, reflections that we then want to expand into certain perspectives, perspectives that can only be achieved through spiritual science, even when we reflect in this way, we must always bear in mind that we have arrived at the age of the consciousness soul in the developmental stream of humanity, and that it is precisely the task of the human being in the present to follow things from the point of view of entering into the consciousness soul. The basic impulse of our time will be such that only those who want to seek out of the most recent and further past understanding for the forces that prevail in the present, only those who will have the good will for understanding, can grow to meet the demands that the difficult present and future will make of people. For even if many conditions are such that the forces are thrown into confusion, that chaotic conditions arise – oh, much more chaotic conditions could arise than there are – in the chaos live nevertheless the continuations of those forces that were already there. And only he will understand chaos who understands the forces that were already there and that continue, perhaps very masked, but that continue from earlier times. But also the demands that are made on humanity must be understood to a much greater extent than many people today imagine.

Yesterday I pointed out that an understanding will have to be acquired for the truth that reigns in things. It is quite certain that very many people today have no conception at all of the truth that reigns in things. That truth or untruth prevails in things themselves, in the events, and that one can devote oneself to one or the other, is still not believed by many people today, because they only have the abstraction in mind, that truth is the subjective agreement of what one imagines with something that is going on outside. But in events, especially as they affect human life, truth or untruth itself prevails, and it is quite unimportant whether a person knows or not about some untruths, because the worst untruths very often pulsate precisely in human life as subconscious forces, not reaching up into human consciousness at all. But especially in the present time one must get to know these subconscious forces, one must bring them up into consciousness. This is extremely difficult for many people, and to deal with the immediate future can make the task easier; to deal with the coming events in such a way that they can, as it were, teach something, that is important. But it is not so very easy, because it is not quite comfortable either way. In recent years, we have heard various judgments — I have already mentioned this — judgments from this or that point of view. From a certain superficial point of view, of course, neither the one nor the other point of view could be blamed. It was only regrettable that so little investigation was made into the deeper issues at work in these tremendous catastrophic events; and it is also regrettable that people have repeatedly fallen back into their old complacency, judging by appearances, or I would not say by catchwords, but by catchwords, by catchphrases. Even when events have called for quite different judgments, people have continued to judge according to the old ways of thinking, and even today, instead of really focusing on the big questions that arise every day, they still judge in many ways according to the old ways of thinking.

Particularly with regard to what I suggested at the beginning of yesterday's reflections, namely to immerse oneself in the truth of the facts, it is important to now set our sights on something. Regarding many things, there is only a beginning, but regarding some things, something decisive has occurred. What has happened is perhaps not exactly what the victorious powers of the present day had imagined, in a different way, would be the fate of the Central Powers after victory. At least not after four and a half years. But there is something connected with these decisions, which should be clear to the scholar, if he judges the situation quite objectively. There has not been a war for a long time, and what people still imagine, that peace could be made in the next few weeks, or, I don't know when, will of course look just like the curious peace of Brest-Litovsk and everything that is currently called peace. It is only an old habit to still believe that catastrophic events can end with an ordinary peace agreement, just as it is an old habit to believe that the war has remained a war, which it has not been for a long time; because what was ruling behind it can be seen in more abbreviated manifestations through minor details, I might say.

You see today that the so-called German Revolution, the revolution in the former German Reich, has taken on a strange form. Probably most people, in Germany and outside of Germany, did not imagine that things would take on such a form. They have taken on such a form because the historical symptoms – I have indeed spoken to you for a long time about historical symptoms – point only to something deeper, and ultimately a symptom could play out in one way or another. Finally, what is happening now is all just a consequence of the fact that a certain party within Germany wanted to play one last trump card, which wanted to maintain this Germany, one last gamble: the fleet, which had not yet been activated or at least only in minor ways, was to be induced to carry out one last attack, one last action. The sailors did not go along with this, and so it was precisely the sailors who staged the form – only the form, of course – of the revolution that then came.

I have not spoken to you about historical symptomatology for nothing, so that what should be the case with you at least can at least be the case with people of the present and the future: the assessment of what is happening from the symptoms, which are not to be taken as in ancient history, but precisely as symptoms, as revelations of realities that stand behind these symptoms, so that one must evaluate and weigh these symptoms. But the way these decisions, these provisional decisions, are now presented, they are the starting point of things that, after so much has been wrongly evaluated for so long, should now be more correctly evaluated by at least some people.

You see, everything that has been done wrong by the central powers, if I may use the term, everything that the various rulers in power have sinned against, and all the untruthfulness that has been at the root of the events, will come to light. Events have developed in such a way that the world will learn in the most minute details in the relatively not-so-distant future all the sins committed by the Central European rulers. And I myself will communicate what I know of the events – and I can only say that karma has also given me the opportunity to know quite a lot about the crucial things in this case – and, if my life is sufficient for that, I will do everything to ensure that truth takes the place of what has been presented to the world so far. But on the other hand, the events are such that this does not seem to lead to it. Of course, you should know from the very things that have been discussed here over the years that no less untruth has prevailed on the other side. Do you think that this will also be presented to the people in detail? Not even the documents for the judgment are there for that! Not even the intellectual documents for the judgment are there, but all the documents are there to ensure that the truth remains hidden.

If I compare the mood with which the events of August, September, October and November 1914 were judged in neutral and enemy countries with regard to the actions of the Central Powers, and compare it with the benevolence with which the outrageously cruel armistice conditions for the Central Powers, with the general, strange silence with which the fact that these armistice conditions, as they were and as they will remain even after they have been mitigated, are a veritable death sentence, is passed over in silence, then I notice a difference, a very enormous difference in the will to judge. For this difference in the will to judge is also based on the fact that there was no will to judge in August, September, October, November 1914 and so on. Perhaps I can only go into some of this hypothetically, which, as I said, will already be known to the world, whereas now, in order to come to a judgment, it is not at all necessary to do anything other than read paragraph by paragraph. I know that I am speaking to deaf ears even with this, speaking to deaf ears in many directions, but why should I not, when one has the obligation to speak the truth without sympathy or antipathy, purely in its objectivity, even at this moment when it may not be very welcome in this direction, why should the truth not be spoken, since I cannot know how much longer it will be permitted to speak even such truths. I speak these things truly not to express any sympathy or antipathy, but to express a bloodily won realization dutifully. In the age of the consciousness soul, it is necessary to approach things knowingly and to make knowledge the impulse of one's actions and especially the impulse of insight. And insight is necessary – I have emphasized this again and again in recent days – insight will be necessary for the people of the age of consciousness.

It will become clear to the world that all the talk that has prevailed for the past four and a half years with regard to the so-called question of guilt was, in fact, quite superficial talk. What has taken place is much more tragic in a higher sense than one can speak of guilt, because one cannot speak of guilt when, for example, inability plays a large part in a series of events. Of course, inability, as I have shown you, played an enormous role in the central powers, for example, in the decisive positions, but precisely the absolute intellectual inability, also the inability in the assessment of the circumstances, in the power of judgment and the like. It will be necessary to consider some realities. I will point out just one.

It is true that out of passion one can judge, condemn, misjudge and so on a great many things. Yes, the person who speaks on the basis of the facts, who knows the facts, must answer many questions, which are extremely important historical questions, in sharp contours. You see, of course things always look different from different points of view. There are various reasons that can be given for why in August 1914 a war also came about from Germany to France. I have already pointed out some of them. One can say: Only those who really have the will to speak accurately can express things correctly under these circumstances. It was a matter of a hair's breadth, one can say, so in August 1914 there would have been no war on two fronts at all, but the inevitable war against Russia. I am now speaking from the point of view of the Central Powers; the matter looks different from the other side, of course. It was a matter of a hair's breadth. What was it? What is this 'hair's breadth'? Well, you see, the gentleman who is now supposed to be in Holland and whom foreign countries in particular took so tremendously seriously, which was a great injustice done to the German people, he was, as you can see from my account a few days ago, an extraordinarily indiscreet man. Not true, when - as I told you - he was offered an alliance by Russia and France over the years, so that an alliance between Russia, France and Germany against England would have come about, In 1908, in the famous Daily Telegraph affair, he boasted that he had immediately informed his grandmother of the Russian and French request and that he had thereby rendered a great service to the British Empire. You could ask the relevant authorities what actually happened with the invasion of Belgium. After all, this gentleman, whom I am referring to, was the supreme commander and could decide. The gentleman in question - please do not object that many people in Europe already knew this - but the gentleman in question did not know that Belgium would be invaded until July 29, 1914. And why? Because it couldn't be told to him, because if it had been told to him today, the whole world would have known about it tomorrow, when all those people, like Sven Hedin and so on, who admired him so much, came to him. What kind of anomaly is it when a war plan has to be strategically worked out for certain reasons that are based on strategy, and the supreme commander must not know the most important point, the starting point at all! Is something supposed to come of it that can then be judged in the usual way?

Now the situation was such that, due to the European constellation, well, that is, due to the very, very innocent Entente Powers – they are, after all, in their opinion, quite innocent, aren't they, of the outbreak of this war – that due to these very innocent Entente Powers, the opinion has arisen in Germany for a long time, since the 1890s, perhaps even earlier: You have to fight a war on two fronts, a war on the left and on the right. I don't know what the situation is like in other countries, whether war plans are made there in a week! In Germany it was not so. Making such a war plan takes a very long time. You change it in individual, very subordinate parts, but it takes a very long time. This war plan had been worked on for decades, certainly the details had been changed, but in terms of its main point it had been worked on for decades and was ready in every detail. You must not forget that you have to look at the matter purely from a military point of view; now it will be possible to look at it a little more objectively, now that the military point of view seems to have been overcome in the world! If you judge the matter purely from a military point of view, you will judge it more objectively. Every single train and everything that has to be loaded must be specified; the departure of each individual train from there and there, the rush of each individual soldier is specified in such a war plan.

Now, events took a turn for the worse. I will not give a full account now, but just a sample; perhaps the opportunity will arise to present the full account in detail before the World Forum. The circumstances that led to this dreadful catastrophe became so urgent that within Germany in the last days of July the question actually arose from all sides: Should war be waged against France or not? Will it become necessary to wage war against France, will it not be necessary from a military, rather than a political point of view, to wage war against France?” The supreme commander, who was perhaps able to decide on something else every half hour, had repeatedly made the serious decision not to let the army march to the west at all, but only to the east. And it was hanging by a thread in the behavior of the British government, so something strange would have happened, but it would have been a matter of placing a certain judgment, I mean, on a curious basis. Among the contradictory things, it had already been ordered not to march to the west at all, but only to the east. There was a definite objection to that, and from what was against it, you can see, if you consider it properly, how strangely things are in the world. There was an objection to the fact that the German general staff had drawn up a war plan that envisaged a war on two fronts, but no war plan that envisaged a war on only one front, because such a thing could not be strategically foreseen from the European situation. And the supreme commander once replied: Yes, we can't do that at all, because if we are supposed to march only to the east, we have an unruly, wild, chaotic crowd. Our war plan is based on two fronts; we can't help but march to the west. Well, order must be maintained, but if you can give such an answer to a question, you really can't say that there was some mischievous thought of instigating this or that, but something quite different. And it is still not clear whether, if there had been time, a war plan could have been made in such a way that the move to the west would not have been the prerequisite for the entire war plan, and then all the events would have happened without the move to the west. I am not touching on the question of whether this would not have been a huge world-historical escalation, because I myself never believe that if the German army had marched east, the French would have remained calm. But I am telling facts and not conjectures and not hypotheses; facts that are likely to give the judgment an appropriate, realistic direction.

I would like to give an idea of how incredibly reckless it is to talk about the question of guilt one way or the other, especially after the confusing red and blue and yellow and flash blue books that have been scrapped and that can be scrapped in any direction, from which you can make anything. You may be inclined to suspect something deeper behind the whole sequence of facts, which you see more as symptoms, than what can be judged in such a superficial way, as has often happened in recent years. You must take this into account, as I have only hinted at it to you now on a trial basis. The things that underlie this catastrophic world event are, after all, incredible. They must be known as facts if one is to base a judgment on them. And it is no different in the so-called Entente countries.

But now, out of what mankind has called war and from which it has cherished the idea that it will be replaced by peace, something has developed that is only just beginning. I said here at a certain point: one should look at the things that are happening in Russia, and one has something much more important when considering future issues than what people in recent times have still very illusory spoken of as a war and a peace that should follow.

Much has been unleashed. But at least this should be understood: there is hardly anything in literary or writing history that has had such a tremendous impact as Karl Marx's work. In 1848, he published the so-called “Communist Manifesto,” which briefly summarized the main impulses of the Social Democratic view of life. It ended with the words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” The book on “Political Economy” and the book “Das Kapital” were written by the same Karl Marx, with the support of his friend Engels. What underlies these books as principles has indeed become the knowledge and world view of the leading proletariat across the globe. The leading proletariat has dealt with what Marxism is in the most penetrating way.

Even on the surface – but this superficiality is perhaps the most important internal aspect – Karl Marx and his achievements are something that, I would say, was born out of the civilized world of Europe and in turn had a profound effect on the proletarian world, the proletarian part of the civilized world. Karl Marx's personality and work are not that simple. First of all, it has a very specific basic structure. This is an innate acumen, extraordinary acumen, which always has a certain effect. Isn't it true that this effect can be illustrated by something that seems far removed, but which can illustrate the matter? You see, the most bourgeois, the most philistine, the actual philosopher of the philistines, Kant, Immanuel Kant – he is the basic philosopher for the academic philistines – why is he actually considered to be so particularly witty? Well, I have never met a university professor who understood Hegel or Schelling, but I have met many—even university professors—who have at least come close to understanding Kant. Now, they think: I am a clever man – such a gentleman thinks, of course – and since it takes me such an effort to understand Kant and I have finally understood him after all, Kant is also a clever man, and since it has taken me, as a man of such exquisite taste, such an effort to understand him, Kant must be the most exquisite man. This is roughly the impression these people have. It is the impression of the philistine, which then passes over to the academic philistines and their followers, their journalistic and other followers. Something similar also worked on the proletariat in the understanding of Karl Marx, who was a very astute man. One has some difficulties in understanding. The proletarian tries harder than many an average philistine, I should say average bourgeois, is inclined to try, even when reading proletarian books. The proletarian tries harder to understand his Karl Marx; he also appreciates what takes effort. It truly takes more effort to absorb the impulses of the proletarian world in the books of Karl Marx than it may have taken the bourgeoisie to understand their economists. But very few people do that. Instead, a number of particularly well-fed bourgeois have also been content to get to know proletarian life from Hauptmann's “Webern”. So you can combine pleasure, you know, with learning, and the like. That's the first thing about Karl Marx: a certain innate perspicacity.

But then it cannot be denied that Karl Marx's dialectic is a great one. This dialectic, this ability to work with concepts, which most people today lack completely – our entire official science lacks this dialectic – this art of working with concepts as realities, Karl Marx had from Hegel, because in this respect he was a disciple of Hegel. So that one can say: Karl Marx had his dialectic, the art of working with concepts, from German folklore. He had the socialist impetus from his Frenchness, where Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc in particular had a great influence on him, so that he combined what the German Hegelian developed in finely crafted, plastic, sharply contoured concepts with the revolutionary impulse, the revolutionary impetus of a Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc. And this in turn, what was in him, could only express itself in the way it did, with Karl Marx going to London, to England, and there, through the study of economic conditions, he thoroughly studied this whole way of thinking and this way of feeling – the one from the Germans, the other from the French – in terms of English conditions, whereby he applied the whole thing only to material economic conditions. Thus, what is born as I have described it to you: the proletarian out of the industrial and machine age, out of the mechanism, which therefore could only be observed at its source in England, because it first came to expression only there until 1848, that was grasped by Karl Marx with Hegelian dialectic. And that which has been grasped with Hegelian dialectics, in that, I would say, the entire revolutionary impetus of a Louis Blanc or a Saint-Simon prevails. So you see: From components that are German, French, English, on the basis of the astute Semitism that was in the blood of Karl Marx, because he was Jewish – this is of course meant only very objectively – so from four ingredients together, what this Karl Marx has delivered to the proletariat as the most effective weapon – because it is a spiritual weapon – is composed of that spiritual-chemical. Hence the penetrating effect, the unlimited effect. Of course, this has been further disseminated in numerous popular writings. All circumstances have been judged from this point of view.

Yes, of course, what has been prepared in this way over the decades can only really be weighed by, for example, let us say, acquiring knowledge of how some professor in bourgeois circles spoke about Lessing and then how proletarian circles spoke about Lessing in a Marxist way. Both things are really quite different from each other.

You see, the impact of this Marxism is by no means exhausted. This Marxism contains very important things. Through this Marxism—which arose from the fact that a German, well educated in Hegel, came to London through the circumstances of France and there applied what lay in his thinking from Hegel's school and what lay in his feeling from Louis Blanc and Saint-Simon to the external, purely material conditions of the modern world – through him, what is most modern in the British state – not in the British people, but in the state, the state structure, the social order – has indeed found its way into the world. It is only the beginning of this introduction. The first phase of this introduction is already Marxism. You must not forget: over and above this there is the best English tradition in many fields. We must distinguish clearly between what is English tradition and what is the British Empire, that monster which has been formed not only on the basis of British nationality but also of the geographical and historical conditions of modern times. Marxism is the first emanation, as it were. These radiations will continue. Because all kinds of future perspectives will arise from what now lies there as a basis. Above all, the following must be considered today.

You see, the role of the German element in modern civilization is fundamentally quite different from that of other ethnic elements. You can see this in the details. The world has become accustomed to identifying the Germans with the Central Powers. But what do these Germans as Germans have to do with one or the other empire? What do the Germans of Austria have to do with the Habsburg monarchy? The Germans of Austria would never have been the most hated people in Italy if the Germans of Austria had not been treated exactly the same by the House of Habsburg as the small proportion of Italians who were under the House of Habsburg. The Germans have suffered just as much from the House of Habsburg as any Italian has suffered, only that the Germans now have the tragedy of being hated by those with whom they have suffered the same. And so it is throughout. There is a lack of understanding of the completely un-national character of the Germans, who were the leaven of Europe but never had any national character or anything aggressively national at all. This is not part of the basic German character; it has been grafted on from various sides. This German element had nothing special to do with either the House of Habsburg, by which it was subjugated, or with the other ruling house, and it is no reason to confuse the German essence with it. But that is what happens in the world, and it happens, one might say, with a certain delight. It also happens to peoples for whom there is truly no obstacle to feeling a unity, perhaps only with the exception of a few splinters that have been snatched from them. But one should not forget the main thing: what is German as a people has never really been predisposed to form any kind of unity. The very best qualities would be lost if the Germans wanted to live in such a way that they would form an abstract unity, a unity of peoples. Of course, under the influence of certain European impulses, certain aspirations towards unity, such as were to be found in Italy, have also been felt by the German people, although not in an unorganized way. They were strong from 1848 into the 1850s and 1860s. But this always went hand in hand with the German character's longing to merge with the world. And that has indeed been achieved to a very special extent. Consider that you will hardly find such understanding of other nations in literary works as can be found in German literature. There is, for example, a beautiful book that does real justice to the most beautiful and most significant impulses that have been at work in the French character from the Revolution to the second Napoleon. The author of this book is called Heinrich von Treitschke. The book was written between 1865 and 1871. It is a complete appreciation of Frenchness and Italian nature in this book by Heinrich von Treitschke: “The French State Form and Bonapartism”. I could give you all sorts of interesting details from which you would see all sorts of truths that people are not inclined to listen to in the world. There has certainly never been such an insightful discussion of English and American nature by a foreign people as that which Herman Grimm unfolds about the Americans and the English.

Of course, we must not forget that all sorts of other things that are not part of German folklore have also been incorporated. I will not go into the absurdity that confuses Germanness with something that is as un-German as possible, with Pan-Germanism, as it has been called. Well, it is just absurd to want to measure German character against Pan-Germanism. There is no other way to put it. But if, at some point, efforts were made to achieve something like German unity, which would not have lasted very long anyway – yes, just study the history from 1866 to 1870, what was said in France at the time about the desired German unity! They could not be tolerated, they were not wanted under any circumstances.

These are things that raise the question: Why is there so much grumbling about the German character? And there is a source of untruthfulness in the world that is quite terrible and will be the starting point for effective untruth. But what the German essence is and what has been structured in a certain inorganic way since 1871 will have its task in the world, even if today it is an abomination for many people to speak of the task of the German essence. It must have its task in the world. If you have asked a reasonable person so far – I will cite Heinrich Heine, for example, among these reasonable people who have spoken out particularly clearly on the matter – then two poles have been cited, from which two completely different basic directions of human thinking have emerged for a long time. We will have to go into this in more detail. I once told a lady who, when I was last here in 1917, had asked me what the mission of Judaism in the world was: “That will come too, that I have to talk about it.

Heinrich Heine indicated these two poles, from which, so to speak, all the impulses that exist in humanity from a certain point of view are nourished: Heinrich Heine indicated Judaism on the one hand and Greek culture on the other. Now, Judaism has always had to prove itself as the Great Seal-bearer for the human capacity for abstraction, for the human capacity to unify the way of thinking, the world view. Greekship has always had the task of bringing to the world that which lives in pictoriality, in imaginative elements. The world view, the outlook on life of the modern proletariat has absorbed everything from Judaism, but nothing yet from Greekship, because it completely lacks the imaginative element. It will still have to receive that. In the course of the future, the third will then come, because all things consist of a trinity, and to Judaism and Greekness will come Teutonism in the course of time - that will be the trinity - when that materialism will have eaten strongly at the modern world in the age of the consciousness soul, which has taken its beginning with that phase that radiated into the world with Marxism from the British Empire.

This materialism, which will radiate out from the British Empire and America and flood the world, has indeed laid its foundations; let us not forget, the foundations have been solidly laid. And such things must be taken into consideration, for example, that immediately before the war England, and at that time Russia as well – but that no longer comes into question – France, Belgium and Portugal together had 23% million English square miles of colonial possessions with 470 million people living on these colonial possessions. Germany and the United States together had only 1 million English square miles of colonial possessions with 23 million people; it will be different now, won't it, the English-speaking population is now united. So: England, France, Portugal, Belgium, and then, with something that comes into it only marginally, Russia: 23¾ million square miles with 470 million people; in contrast, Germany and the United States — who have now redeemed the world — with 1 million square miles of English colonial possessions and 23 million people. The ground is well prepared. For this reason, materialistic and ever more materialistic culture will develop, because it only goes into economic conditions. That culture, whose first emphasis, whose first nuance, has come about precisely because it is already rooted in the starting point. Just compare Lassalle with Karl Marx, Lassalle, who only has certain similarities with Karl Marx: natural acumen and Hegelianism, but he did not go through the French and English experience that Karl Marx did. Therefore, he has a certain dialectical and also a certain astute conception of the modern labor movement, but not the effective one that lay in the Marxist system. This Marxist system arose in such a way that the dialectic of the German character drew its content from the material culture, from the pure material culture of the British society, of the British context, not of nationality, but of the context of the empire, of the developing empire.

Well, things have an after-effect. What has happened will almost completely eliminate French culture from future currents; it will have little significance. French culture also belongs to the defeated. It is absolutely certain that in the future perspective – and I will talk to you in more detail about this tomorrow – French nationality will be eliminated by the constellation of events for future influence in the world. World domination passes to the English-speaking empires.

But if the first pole was created by Karl Marx using a certain dialectic that he had learned at the Hegelian school to place himself in the material circumstances of the British Empire, the future will bring something else into play. Today, it can be discarded as a matter of course in a variety of directions, and one can say that what I am saying is only the continuation – well, I don't know what other nonsense there is in the world – of German plans for world conquest or something like that. And yet it must be said, which is a truth that is just as firmly established in perspective as other truths: Just as the German Hegelian Marx went to England, to material England, in order to absorb from there the first phase of material culture, so when this material culture, which will of course have an ascending and a descending curve and will destroy a certain kind of spirituality, when this material will have produced the counter-movement in its own English people, when those of whom I have already spoken, who rebel, for example, against the most terrible principle of the doctrine of utility: “The greatest good of men consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” which is already being remonstrated against today, precisely from the occultist side, will be heard, when the material culture of the British Empire, spreading over the earth as a world power in the age of the consciousness soul, scorches and exterminates the spiritual. When that has spread, then the opposition will arise from within the British people itself. They will feel the need to turn to what remains of Goetheanism, rooted in German national culture, in order to seek from it the impulse for how the world can be healed. They will turn to the third element. Just as people studied Jewish impulses long after Judaism had fallen as a political power, just as all of modern education is based on Greek culture after the Romans destroyed Greek culture, so the recovery of the world will one day be based on what is taken from German Goetheanism. A monument should be erected for this. Even if this monument itself experiences this or that fate, the important thing is the decision: that the decision has been made.